The MP for Rushcliffe [Nottingham] had agreed to stand down from the House of Commons, had the general election that cost Mrs May her majority not been held. If the last parliament had run to its full term, he would have retired with a good grace.
As things are, Ken Clarke ran again in the recent snap election, and is thus able to take a prominent part in the Brexit debate. As he emphasised in the Commons yesterday he has consistently supported the Tory party's pro-EU stance 'for the fifty years while I have been a member'. The Conservative Party was firmly in favour of remaining in the Union up to and during the referendum. Then Cameron ran away; and the party in a shuffling, sullen way declared that it was bound by the referendum result that almost none of them had expected.
As most of the party wallowed in stunned stupefaction, the tiny minority of Tory MPs who I call the headbanging Brexiteers stepped forward with the fantasy that the referendum vote obliges the UK to leave not only 'the European Union' but also the EEC and the European Economic Area. That this course of action would ruin the country - quickly - has not been considered by the loony right.The thousands of lorries that bring components to British factories from other factories located elsewhere in the common market, and take components the other way, are essential to the continuity of most of profitable UK industry, would be stopped dead in the event of a 'hard Brexit'. This would be calamitous: yet Mrs May is pressured to let it happen [largely, by letting David Davis spin out the sham negotiations until there is no time for rational argument to triumph].
Ken Clarke could be a powerful voice for commonsense; but instead he hankers after the Edward Heath vision of a Britain absorbed into Europe [thus removing the Irish question, as I mentioned the other day].
Britain must leave the corrupt sham democracy of the EU: that was the referendum result. But the economic benefits of the European Economic Area can be salvaged. It is tragic that Kenneth Clarke's obsession with a lost dream prevents such a competent political figure from pulling his weight at this crucial time.
Showing posts with label Tory Party. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tory Party. Show all posts
Wednesday, 15 November 2017
Friday, 13 October 2017
Mrs May's Brexit: from Chaos to Catastrophe
Mrs May and Mr Hammond - her Finance Minister - are represented by various sections of the media as being in a serious conflict about making provision for a 'no deal' outcome from the current negotiation between the UK and the EU. The Chancellor [who is wedded, as tightly as if he were welded] to the concept of 'austerity' has told a Commons committee that he has contingency plans, but does not want to release any funds until the very last moment. He could not make that statement if staff time and some expenses [notably consultancy] had not been applied to the planning: so what he obviously means is that he is reluctant to release funds on implementing such a plan until that should appear to be the [utterly disastrous] inevitability.
Mrs May seems to be saying the same things, when she indicates that £250 million has been set aside for implementing a 'hard Brexit'. Yet the press, notably the Daily Mail, has become hysterical about the 'dispute' and the 'disloyalty' - even 'sabotage' - attributed to the Chancellor.
This stupid scenario shows that the minority of extreme Brexiteers are dragging the Tory party to its destruction; which would be no bad thing [in view of the appalling inadequacy that is apparent right across the government] if there was an opposition that combined honesty and competence over the board. But that is not the case. Labour is led by an unreconstructed Marxist who is as good as the late Comrade Suslov [the chief exponent of Leninist-Stalinist orthodoxy as the USSR was heading for destruction] at avoiding direct or evidence-based questions. The Momentum group show a dangerous revival of the 'entryism' that undermined the Labour government in the nineteen seventies, and thus opened up the way for Thatcherism and the dissipation of all that remained of the legacy of the first industrial revolution.
If May or Hammond was serious about managing a really 'hard' Brexit their first decision - however covertly it was taken - would be the abandonment of 'austerity'. Government spending far in excess of £250 billion would be needed to install a full customs border with the EU. The recruitment and training of hundreds of thousands of officials would need to begin now: somehow, the IT systems would have to be provided - almost instantly - despite the fact that even modest government schemes for computerisation are always over-cost and excessively delayed in implementation [to the extent that they often have to be abandoned].
British firms that still make things - there are many, often high-tech companies developed or reconstructed since 2008 - are almost all integrated into just-in-time Europe-wide supply chains [both in getting their necessary inputs and in selling components to EU companies]. Such businesses are making contingency plans that would require them at least to double the manpower and computer availability just to manage the 'paperwork' that would be involved in trying to maintain the flow of business after a default Brexit. Many such firms are already finding that their European customers are looking elsewhere for contingent supplies. Furthermore, insuring trade and the goods traded in a crash-Brexit situation will become massively more complex and thus expensive.
The clowns on the Tory right, with their airy assertions that all will be well 'under WTO Rules' [which they certainly do not understand:cf my many references to point protectionism], are driving an amazingly weak Cabinet towards the destruction of the national economy.
There must a popular movement, of Leavers and Remainers united, to avoid national economic destruction.
Mrs May seems to be saying the same things, when she indicates that £250 million has been set aside for implementing a 'hard Brexit'. Yet the press, notably the Daily Mail, has become hysterical about the 'dispute' and the 'disloyalty' - even 'sabotage' - attributed to the Chancellor.
This stupid scenario shows that the minority of extreme Brexiteers are dragging the Tory party to its destruction; which would be no bad thing [in view of the appalling inadequacy that is apparent right across the government] if there was an opposition that combined honesty and competence over the board. But that is not the case. Labour is led by an unreconstructed Marxist who is as good as the late Comrade Suslov [the chief exponent of Leninist-Stalinist orthodoxy as the USSR was heading for destruction] at avoiding direct or evidence-based questions. The Momentum group show a dangerous revival of the 'entryism' that undermined the Labour government in the nineteen seventies, and thus opened up the way for Thatcherism and the dissipation of all that remained of the legacy of the first industrial revolution.
If May or Hammond was serious about managing a really 'hard' Brexit their first decision - however covertly it was taken - would be the abandonment of 'austerity'. Government spending far in excess of £250 billion would be needed to install a full customs border with the EU. The recruitment and training of hundreds of thousands of officials would need to begin now: somehow, the IT systems would have to be provided - almost instantly - despite the fact that even modest government schemes for computerisation are always over-cost and excessively delayed in implementation [to the extent that they often have to be abandoned].
British firms that still make things - there are many, often high-tech companies developed or reconstructed since 2008 - are almost all integrated into just-in-time Europe-wide supply chains [both in getting their necessary inputs and in selling components to EU companies]. Such businesses are making contingency plans that would require them at least to double the manpower and computer availability just to manage the 'paperwork' that would be involved in trying to maintain the flow of business after a default Brexit. Many such firms are already finding that their European customers are looking elsewhere for contingent supplies. Furthermore, insuring trade and the goods traded in a crash-Brexit situation will become massively more complex and thus expensive.
The clowns on the Tory right, with their airy assertions that all will be well 'under WTO Rules' [which they certainly do not understand:cf my many references to point protectionism], are driving an amazingly weak Cabinet towards the destruction of the national economy.
There must a popular movement, of Leavers and Remainers united, to avoid national economic destruction.
Saturday, 30 June 2012
Banking Shock?
It is astonishing that anyone could be surprised by the latest major scandal to be published about the bankers. Of course they manipulated the London Market Offered Rate of interest: LIBOR. Of course they sold completely inappropriate derivatives to small businesses. They have run the financial system on the basis of blatant veniality for the last few decades.
The Rating Agencies are paid by the firms whose stock they rate: and by 2010 they had completely blown away their wholly spurious reputation of earlier years, when the uselessness of their ratings of billions of dollarsworth of badly-cobbled 'securities' and other instruments was made clear. It is incredible that five years on from the crunch of 2007 they remain recognised [by regulators, actuaries and accountants] as holders of the magic means by which stocks, shares and gambling slips issued by other firms are regarded as possessing 'value' in financial markets.
This suspension of disbelief in respect of the Agencies' ratings of company stocks helps to explain how the banks have continued to get away with a similar - and even more obviously corruptible - standard and measure of 'value' in the banking sector. Nobody has had any excuse for believing that any valid standard of competence or integrity has been attached to the daily announcement of libor [and of other median rates of interest] in the London Market. These figures, which are used as numeraires in millions of transactions worldwide every day, are based on data that are submitted by employees of the regulated UK banks. Since the nineteen eighties these same institutions have been deeply embroiled in the business of the London Market on their own account, as well as in the role of agents for other investors.
After two years of investigation by the regulatory authorities, during which the libor has been produced on the accepted basis, it has been admitted publicly that Barclays:
First, both in the good times pre-2007 and during the consequential crunch, massaged the data that they submitted for inclusion in the libor computation to support "the sneaking arts of underling tradesmen". The supposed data that the bank submitted were adjusted to support the day-to-day convenience of their trading counterparties and their chums. They supported their own market positions by influencing the rates that were authoritative in the Market.
Subsequently, after the extent of the crunch had begun to become clear, Barclays continued wantonly to mis-state the data better to facilitate their traders taking up and winding-down borrowings.
There is no reason to believe that the other banks that contributed data were significantly immune to the temptation to use the libor methodology to their advantage. More confessions will be made; and trivial fines [without criminal charges against offenders] are expected to be imposed on the other banks. Thus the whole of the UK's regulated home-based banking business have massively more undermined than had already been done by the crunch itself.
In the same week, just past, the RBS.group remained unable to rectify a disastrous, inept and incompetent 'upgrade' to its retail software that kept millions of customers from effecting transactions. This was reputationally at least as bad among less sophisticated customers as was the damage to 'wholesale' banking in the credit crunch that they could not understand. Then it was announced that thousands of firms had been invited to buy betting slips that had cost them heavily when interest rates had fallen: some of the 'invitations' had been presented as conditions that must be accepted by the client firm as a term for being granted some other facility by the bank. Many firms were ruined and many more suffered serious difficulty in finding the cash that was necessary to keep going through the slump.
The pathetic politicians have mouthed what their puerile advisers have recommended they should say in response to the multilayered revelations. They have demanded - or promised to establish - 'inquiries' informed by 'independent' 'experts' selected from the usual gang of lawyers and quangocrats who have drawn fees from the system that has promoted the decline of the once-robust economy..
Ordinary white British folk already know all too well what happened. Since 1980 successive governments of both parties have grovelled to accommodate the demands of the most pushy segments of the finance sector of the economy, because they were declaring expanding turnover and creating jobs and paying taxes that partially made up for the politicians' systematic destruction of the 'real economy'. They never were and never will be capable of self-regulation in any particular. They never were and never will be capable of making objective statements about the 'value' of anything that they conjure into existence. The delusion that the empowerment of market participants will endow them with responsibility towards society or to the body politic was most powerfully asserted by Margaret Thatcher and her sycophants; and was maintained by Major, Blair and Brown. David Cameron has neither the intellectual capacity nor the will to understand the consequences of this ruinous litany; and sneering Osborne has every interest in letting Cameron founder, in the hope that he will become the leader of a dying Tory Party.
It is certain that within the current political structure the government will not respond adequately or in good time to the next phases of the crisis that the political class has fostered; that the bankers will continue on their exploitative progress; and that the economy will continue to decline. Nobody can seriously claim to be surprised by any of it!
The Rating Agencies are paid by the firms whose stock they rate: and by 2010 they had completely blown away their wholly spurious reputation of earlier years, when the uselessness of their ratings of billions of dollarsworth of badly-cobbled 'securities' and other instruments was made clear. It is incredible that five years on from the crunch of 2007 they remain recognised [by regulators, actuaries and accountants] as holders of the magic means by which stocks, shares and gambling slips issued by other firms are regarded as possessing 'value' in financial markets.
This suspension of disbelief in respect of the Agencies' ratings of company stocks helps to explain how the banks have continued to get away with a similar - and even more obviously corruptible - standard and measure of 'value' in the banking sector. Nobody has had any excuse for believing that any valid standard of competence or integrity has been attached to the daily announcement of libor [and of other median rates of interest] in the London Market. These figures, which are used as numeraires in millions of transactions worldwide every day, are based on data that are submitted by employees of the regulated UK banks. Since the nineteen eighties these same institutions have been deeply embroiled in the business of the London Market on their own account, as well as in the role of agents for other investors.
After two years of investigation by the regulatory authorities, during which the libor has been produced on the accepted basis, it has been admitted publicly that Barclays:
First, both in the good times pre-2007 and during the consequential crunch, massaged the data that they submitted for inclusion in the libor computation to support "the sneaking arts of underling tradesmen". The supposed data that the bank submitted were adjusted to support the day-to-day convenience of their trading counterparties and their chums. They supported their own market positions by influencing the rates that were authoritative in the Market.
Subsequently, after the extent of the crunch had begun to become clear, Barclays continued wantonly to mis-state the data better to facilitate their traders taking up and winding-down borrowings.
There is no reason to believe that the other banks that contributed data were significantly immune to the temptation to use the libor methodology to their advantage. More confessions will be made; and trivial fines [without criminal charges against offenders] are expected to be imposed on the other banks. Thus the whole of the UK's regulated home-based banking business have massively more undermined than had already been done by the crunch itself.
In the same week, just past, the RBS.group remained unable to rectify a disastrous, inept and incompetent 'upgrade' to its retail software that kept millions of customers from effecting transactions. This was reputationally at least as bad among less sophisticated customers as was the damage to 'wholesale' banking in the credit crunch that they could not understand. Then it was announced that thousands of firms had been invited to buy betting slips that had cost them heavily when interest rates had fallen: some of the 'invitations' had been presented as conditions that must be accepted by the client firm as a term for being granted some other facility by the bank. Many firms were ruined and many more suffered serious difficulty in finding the cash that was necessary to keep going through the slump.
The pathetic politicians have mouthed what their puerile advisers have recommended they should say in response to the multilayered revelations. They have demanded - or promised to establish - 'inquiries' informed by 'independent' 'experts' selected from the usual gang of lawyers and quangocrats who have drawn fees from the system that has promoted the decline of the once-robust economy..
Ordinary white British folk already know all too well what happened. Since 1980 successive governments of both parties have grovelled to accommodate the demands of the most pushy segments of the finance sector of the economy, because they were declaring expanding turnover and creating jobs and paying taxes that partially made up for the politicians' systematic destruction of the 'real economy'. They never were and never will be capable of self-regulation in any particular. They never were and never will be capable of making objective statements about the 'value' of anything that they conjure into existence. The delusion that the empowerment of market participants will endow them with responsibility towards society or to the body politic was most powerfully asserted by Margaret Thatcher and her sycophants; and was maintained by Major, Blair and Brown. David Cameron has neither the intellectual capacity nor the will to understand the consequences of this ruinous litany; and sneering Osborne has every interest in letting Cameron founder, in the hope that he will become the leader of a dying Tory Party.
It is certain that within the current political structure the government will not respond adequately or in good time to the next phases of the crisis that the political class has fostered; that the bankers will continue on their exploitative progress; and that the economy will continue to decline. Nobody can seriously claim to be surprised by any of it!
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