Good Old Ken

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.

Remembrance

Yesterday and today the British commemorate the people killed and injured in military campaigns: the official ceremonies are usually focused on those who were serving the crown in the armed forces and the police, fire and ambulance services [as in the London bliz and in Northern Ireland], but allied and associated units are also remembered as thought appropriate. In Australia and New Zealand 11 November stands coequal with Anzac Day, when those two countries recall the carnage wrought upon the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps [hence, the Anzacs] under incompetent British generalship at the invasion, siege and retreat from Gallipoli in the First World War. That tragedy is regarded as the episode that made both Antipodean countries aware that being loyal to the British crown - or even to the British Empire - was not the permanent best bet for the future of their peoples. So far they have stuck with the monarchy, but it is very widely anticipated that on the death of the Queen both countries will take the opportunity to review their constitutional position.

It is absolutely incredible that the Queen still reigns in Australia and New Zealand - obviously, under total constitutional restraint - 101 years after the disaster of the Dardanelles became apparent. It is incredible that Britain and Northern Ireland settled down in 1919 to live under a constitutional settlement that was temporarily patched up until the Irish Free State could be set up in the 'twenties without full-scale war between the Republican/Fenians and the Ulster protestants: a conflict in which the British army, navy and newly-minted Royal Air Force would have been of ambiguous loyalty.

I have mentioned in recent days that the headbanging Brexiteers will not have their way because the Irish question will prove intractable. Peace in Ireland can only be maintained - 99 years on from the first Armistice Day - by keeping the Good Friday Agreement and all that stems from it. Edward Heath combined his failed attempt at peace in Ireland [epitomised in the Sunningdale Agreement] with Britain and Ireland joining the European Common Market together in the expectation that the two would eventually surrender their statehood to the 'ever-closer Union'. John Major led huge steps towards peace in Ireland based on keeping the UK tightly within the Union [as it had become with the agreement - however completely understood - by Mrs Thatcher]. Then the apparently fresh, young Tony Blair was able to bring the process to a very satisfactory conclusion entirely within the EU context. Ireland has always been a major constraint on British policy, and anyone who dismisses that issue as unimportant in the run-up to 'serious' Brexit negotiations is in for a very major shock.

Returning to the main point of today, we can note that the monarchies which had obviously been defeated in the war - the many sovereign German princes, the Empire of Austria and Kingdom of Hungary, and [in effect] Russia - were wiped out; and red revolutions were attempted in Vienna, Budapest, Munich and Berlin. Soldiers with their weapons in hand put down the risings in central Europe, while the navy and the army mostly sided with the workers in Russia to permit Lenin to grab power.

But in Belgium, where much of the country had been devastated by the war, the king returned as a national hero. In Britain during the war there had been rumblings about the king being a German - which, in ancestral terms, he was - leading to the proclamation of Windsor as the royal family surname. The king loyally supported his ministers, while intervening to keep crass generals - first French, then Haig - in supreme command even though their stupidity could not be concealed. Haig accepted assurances that the third major assault on the Somme, known as the Battle of Paschendael, would succeed because such an efficient artillery barrage would be launched before troops were sent 'over the top' that all the barbed wire in front of them would be destroyed and 'not even a rat' would be able to survive the gunfire. The men went over the top, the barbed wire was in place; and as soon as the artillery barrage was lifted the Germans restored their machine-guns to be ready to slaughter the British, Canadian and Indian infantry who were sent forward. Then came the rain, and the churned-up ground turned to deep mud; but Haig sent more and more troops forward for four months, until the Canadians' capture of a small ridge of land enabled the idiots at HQ to proclaim the battle a 'success'. That was just one of the most conspicuous, crass, wastes of human lives that went on from Mons in 1914 until November 11, 1918.

Almost every street and every extended family in the United Kingdom - including, then, Ireland - suffered casualties. Yet the regime, the politicians, the generals and the king were exonerated from blame: individual generals were the subject of loathing from conscripts whose companions had been killed, injured and deprived of their reason as a result of the commanders' stupidity and arrogance, but the regime was not seriously challenged on the mainland of Britain. However, the losses of the war - in men, industrial output wasted, foreign debts incurred and international power - could not be ignored. So a huge propaganda effort, such as had never before been seen, was launched: with massive effect. A temporary 'Cenotaph' - a tall plinth for a coffin - was erected in Whitehall for the first anniversary of Armistice Day, and 'the Glorious Dead' were honoured as national heroes. A couple of years later the 'unknown soldier' was disinterred from a war grave in France and moved to Westminster Abbey, so that every bereaved mother could imagine that her son would ever after be honoured by kings, princes and politicians. That could only continue if kings and princes were kept in place; and so the regime was more deeply cemented in national sentiment than ever before.

This is a spectacular achievement, adopted throughout the Empire and the United States; and with a similar set of events in France and Belgium. Its force in maintaining the socio-economic order is rarely recognised: but the Irish dimension is again being exposed.

Economic Ignorance and Ignorant Economists

For the past few years, the self-styled 'Economics profession' has faced a direct challenge from the students who formed the Post-Crash Economics Society in Manchester. Their network is growing and spreading worldwide. Several years before that society emerged from classroom frustration at the real-world irrelevance of much that the professors asserted, George Soros - the man largely responsible for Britain having to crash out of the European Exchange Mechanism [ERM: forerunner to the euro] when John Major was the prime minister - funded an institute for new economic thinking which has dissipated the founder's concept by engaging Economists who have released no significant alternative thought. In recent days a well-funded group of recognised Economists [including a couple of holders of the pseudo-Nobel prize] has been set up in recognition of the fact that Economics as taught by the Econocracy does not offer even a sensible explanation of how modern mass poverty has occurred. There might be a slight hope that this group may provide some new insight that is of practical utility; but the experience of similar initiatives is not encouraging.

There is a widely-recognised perception among the general public and much of the commentariat, that formal Economics does not address the issues of living humans in the real world; but that has not led to mass resignations by professors who have become ashamed to draw salaries for preaching irrelevant dogma. Nor have the professors gone into purdah to think anew and recast their propositions: no, they continue to assert them with absolute confidence in the 'scientific rigour' of their abstractions. There is a widespread assumption that groups like Soros' institute and the new 'commission' might just add something to the existing corpus of Economics that will enable the professors and their students to carry on teaching and learning the same stuff; to which a new wrinkle will be added that vindicates the mass of the subject and resolves the outstanding issues without anybody having to eat humble pie.

That will not happen.

Meanwhile, practical politics is bedeviled by the impact of Economics upon it. The rise of 'populism' in the USA, in Europe and in other parts of the world is largely associated with the failure of economic policies based on established formulas that have been formed with the participation of the Econocracy. It has been manifest in the USA for almost three decades that redundant steel workers in the rustbelt states do not mutate into migrants who mystically acquire the skills to gain employment in silicone valley that pays them all enough to get new houses [at Californian prices] and live a west-coast lifestyle. That is what the professors say should happen in a fully-fledged free-trading economy; but it does not happen. People have families and associations and familiar landmarks in the places where they [or their parents] have been settled since when times were good: so they mostly stay there. The brightest graduates, the prettiest girls and other identifiable groups who have characteristics that support social mobility may move on in significant numbers, but they are a minority; and the core population will be left in misery awaiting a saviour: who appeared in the US  rustbelt in the highly improbable shape of Donald Trump. Trump will fail, as both Bushes and Obama and even Clinton failed, to turn round the march of economic events and the persistence of people in refusing to behave as textbook specimens.

In the UK the practical irrelevance of Economics has become acute, as the head-banging Brexiteers [mostly in the Conservative party] cite the views of extreme Econocrats: such as Patrick Minford, a Thatcher guru who has suddenly returned to prominence with his confident assertions about how good the world will be for the UK if we leave the European Union with no deal. Minford and his little friends have claimed that the British economy could grow by some 7% if all the restraints [and advantages] of membership of the Union were simple sloughed-off. People who try to form a mature and balanced view of the probable impact of Brexit see summaries of these assertions, and the fact that their advocate is Professor Minford: and they wonder whether they should just dismiss his propositions; might he be right? Might the UK be passing-up a great opportunity if we try to stay close to the European Free Trade Area?

The answer is, of course, on the ground all over the UK. The factories and mines and dockyards that were abandoned at the behest of the Thatcherites may have been prettified into tourism sites like the Titanic area of Belfast; but even there a significant proportion of the consumer-facing staff on minimum wages are immigrants who came to the UK prepared to do such work [and they are mostly better at it that taciturn under-educated Brits]. There is no well-paid long-term highly-productive employment for the rising generation in any of the despoiled regions that were once world-leading hives of industry. The formula didn't work in the nineteen-eighties or the 'nineties: and it is even less likely to apply to the real world now. if the headbangers win, mass misery is the only probable outcome: and the growth in new, longer-term non-employment will be well over 7% per year for several years.

Neither Econocrats Nor Brexiteers Understand Productiveness

The Archbishop of Canterbury had significant business experience in a major company before he was ordained, and can therefore speak on economic matters with at least equal authority to most Members of the House of Commons. As a member of a commission whose interim report has just been published, he has issued his own statement that declares the British model of managing the economy to be 'broken'. Living standards for the mass of the population have been static [on the average] and declining [for many] since the financial crisis ten years ago; and this is noted to be the longest period of stagnant earnings since the 'great depression' around 1870.

The interim report highlights the fact that has frequently been referred to in this blog: this issue of productiveness. It is well understood that productivity in British companies is some 20% below the more advanced European economies, and a greater productivity gap exists between the UK and the USA. Successive government members have wailed about it, and promised to do something about it; and they have not done so. The more important fact about productiveness has been ignored: and it is brilliantly summed up in the commission interim report. The British economy as a whole is recording more depreciation of productive resources than investment in new plant and equipment: if you tot up the notional 'value' of the  amount of equipment that is abandoned or accepted as becoming obsolescent [and thus recorded in company and government accounts], that total exceeds the total spend on new equipment.

In real terms, in its capacity to support living material human beings, the British economy is shrinking: FACT!

But the government asserts that there is constant economic growth. Only a couple of years ago Britain's reported growth was boasted to be the fastest in the group of advanced economies. This blog pointed out that what is recorded in these figures is the fact that more money is spent on more transactions, at higher prices; and an increasing majority of these transactions that include a material component in the goods traded are handling imported commodities. Thus the balance of payments deficit increases.

Confronting the evidence accumulated by the commission, Treasury spokespersons affirm the growth rate, the fact that on the basis of national income figures the UK still is the 'fifth largest economy in the world', and the assertion that 'inequality' between socio-economic groups is reducing. You can claim anything with statistics, of course: but the issues of productivity and productiveness are fundamentals to an understanding of the economic system: which is certainly failing in Britain.

Two groups of people who ignore the concept of productiveness are the Econocracy - the professors of Economics, as characterised by a group of dissident students - and the 'hard Brexiteers' who lurk within the Conservative Party. These are they who encourage each other to believe that the economy will automatically grow much faster if Britain is freed from the constraints of the European Economic Area.They are utterly wrong. The world does not conform to Economists' models: all countries and communities are heavily protectionist when it suits them, not least in their protection of agriculture. All the evidence of real-world activity by human animals, as opposed to the specious models that can be produced from statistics of turnover in a UK economy whose money supply has massively been inflated by a decade of Quantitative Easing, is of dereliction, decay and decline.

Regrettably, this truth has to take a major part in the blog. One could hope that things were different: but they aren't.

Brexit and Ireland

At least since the time when the only English pope 'asked' King Henry II of England to take full possession of his Lordship of Ireland, there has been an endless and fascinating sequence of tense relations between the rulers based in Westminster and the people of Ireland. Several times, kings and the Cromwellian republic tried to settle conformable populations of Scots and English in Ireland, and between 1670 and 1690 the great Sir William Petty wrote extensively about his plan to resettle half the Irish population on the island of Britain and/or in British colonies elsewhere, replacing them in Ireland with Brits, so that a short period of interbreeding could eradicate the difficult characteristics of the native Irish. Often, British policy in Ireland has been highly revealing about the actual character of British government and the real intentions of British policy.

Thus the publication yesterday of a less-than-half-baked paper on the future of the Irish border under Brexit is in that revealing context. As I have commented previously in this blog, the present UK government can not possibly give effect to any sort of Brexit that involves leaving the European Economic Area whilst retaining the policy of austerity. Actually to erect realistic customs borders and controls on the passage of people all around the UK - which would be necessary before Britain could begin to trade with anybody under the rules of the World Trade Organisation, outside the EU - is totally incompatible with austerity.

Yesterday's UK government paper on the Irish border rejects any hegemonic physical line, either on the land border between the Republic and Northern Ireland or enforced by frigates in the middle of the Irish Sea. One radio commentator summed up the potential control methods as "an iPad in every truck's cab". Interestingly, this looks as if it would put the primary cost of compliance with any new system of "technological" border and customs control onto the private sector; but, of course, billions of pounds would have to be spent for the government to acquire the equipment and train up and pay the skilled people [who probably do not exist anyway] who would be needed to create and maintain the records that would be needed of the passage of people and goods over the borders. The notion implicit in yesterday's paper is simply potty.

Both the British and Irish government are adamant that there cannot be a hard border in Ireland: not just prosperity, but also peace is dependent on free movement of people, goods and arguments.

Ireland will prove to be a sticking-point: the first - and probably the most fundamental - of all. Any genuine Brexit is not affordable to the British state, even if Osbornian austerity were relaxed. Corbyn will not understand this; but, more importantly the headbanging Tory Brexiteers - on whom Mrs May relies for her parliamentary survival - will not understand it: some because they do not want to, and some because their intellectual capabilities do not stretch that far.

The Irish Question will again be a determining factor in British history: and [as Sellars and Yeatman said, in their inimitable 1066 and All that] the English will never solve the Irish Question because whenever they come up with an answer, the Irish change the question. This is certainly the present situation, where the new Irish Prime Minister has set new terms for the discussion of the border: and we can be sure that the great bulk of the European Union will back him to the hilt. Nigel Farage and the 'hard Brexiteers' will claim that the electorate is being betrayed as a 'transition period' mutates into continuing membership of the European Economic Area [but without membership of the Brussels political set-up]. The 'betrayal' will come from the incomprehension and incompetence of the political class: against which a majority of the nation voted on 23 June 2016. Hence, the political class - the very people who are least trusted by the nation - froth and posture about 'taking back control'. They don't know how to do it, because there is no affordable way to achieve it within their mental universe.

Interesting times indeed.

Vince to Rescue the Mail?

Yesterday's Mail on Sunday had a feature that I so little expected to appear that I went out to acquire a copy to verify with my own eyes the account that I had heard on the radio. Sure enough, the LibDem leader, Vince Cable had produced an article which they published. Sadly, the headline [doubtless chosen by some minion of the Mail] was misleading. It suggested that the MPs who are pressing for a 'hard Brexit' are "masochists": when the reality is that they are aiming to torment the British nation with lower living standards. These individuals might - just - share to some degree in the pain if there is a 'hard Brexit', but they will remain relatively privileged compared to the mass of the population.

It is understood that 'the Brexiteers' are pushing their influence to the limit, as it becomes obvious that more and more of the Leave voters are recognising the idiocy of the extreme Brexiteers' position. It is taken for granted that the referendum result will be respected, and Britain will cease to use the EU flag, will cease to provide members of the Commission and the Parliament and the Court, and will open a new era of sovereign diplomatic policy. But to leave the European Economic Area would be madness. To quit Euratom would be seriously dangerous. Even to think that the UK could have most-favoured-nation status with the USA - to the exclusion of the EU and Mexico - would be a demonstration of insanity. Yet these issues are now becoming apparent: and it is reported that some members of the Cabinet, perhaps including the Brexit ministers, are on the side of the tormentors.

The Mail group of papers was among the advocates of 'Leave', for very good reasons. Now it is allowing alternative opinions to be aired on where Brexit should aim to end up, as shown by yesterday's LibDem article. But much more significant is the opinion piece that is set alongside Cable's, which recognises the finding of serious researchers, that some Conservative 'Leavers' failed to vote Conservative in the recent general election - and some voted LibDem or Labour - in despair at the crazy determination of some Conservative to press for a 'hard Brexit'. Provided some compromise can be achieved on the migration of people within the area, the Mail wants to UK to be within the European Economic Area. The dawn of sense, in a very significant influencer of Middle Britain!

It is highly improbable that a person with such a bad dress-sense as Mrs May has very much commonsense. It is questionable what contact she has ever had with 'ordinary people' except as her father's parishioners, and subsequently as shop assistants, college and parliamentary servants, the layers of Bank of England minions who have recently been on strike; and others whose role is to serve. She may, however, continue to be presented with a digest of the media every day, as her predecessors have been: in which case whoever edits it should have marked this twist of the Mail's tale with a big, black exclamation mark. It means that hundreds of thousands of Mail readers are already forming the sort of opinion that the paper presented yesterday. It explains why Mrs May 'lost' the election, and why the Conservative Party will plummet lower and lower in the polls unless the 'hard Brexiteers' are pushed aside now.

As Cable says - and it might even be in his own words - "The cliff edge draws closer. For the Brexit martyrs, paradise beckons. No longer Project Fear but Project Near. After that it will be Project Here."

Cable has helped the Mail to signal a major shift in the opinion of middle Britain: let us hope that it is in time!

Lambing Time in Cloud Cuckoo Land

All the major organisations that represent farmers in the United Kingdom have come together to express their acute concern that the government has not given any of them a hint as to what sort of economic structure there will be surrounding the farmers after Brexit. There is a broad and vague promise that the existing level of EU payments to farmers will be paid from 1 April 2019 until the end of the present EU budgeting period in 2022: and, after that, nothing

This is almost certainly because nobody in government has the faintest idea what sort of regime they can fund, or organise, or administer. Mrs May is just obsessed with the idea that we MUST be in full control of immigration to the UK from the date of Brexit, and [as far as she seems to be concerned] all else is swept aside from serious thought or planning. Self-styled 'Brexiteers' in her government are running around, with one breath promising us free-trade agreements with the half of the world economy that has any serious economic clout; and with the next breath saying that it is too early to say if we will be expected to watch British farms go bust as consumers [with ever-more-quickly declining incomes] are steered towards buying hormone-fattened beef and chlorinated chicken from the USA.

The government has become a conspiracy of silence against any valid information being presented to the nation: and behind that lies abysmal ignorance of the implications of any action upon which the cabinet decides.

So let us take an absolutely basic example. Most members of the government, and even a sizable proportion of the civil service [and, just possibly, some Econocrats] know that due to the ecology of the sheep-farming regions of the UK it is only feasible for our sheep to produce their offspring in the spring. Some parts of the country have earlier and milder spring weather than other parts, thus they can arrange for the lambs to arrive early in the calendar year; while the areas with a more robust climate arrange for the lambs to arrive at the end of the winter. Thus, later in the year, lambs are ready for slaughter over a period of several months. The amount of lamb that is produced in Britain in those months is more than British restaurants and households are able to use: so prime British lamb, in season, goes to Europe and other destinations. Over 40% of the annual production of lamb from the UK goes to the other EU countries, currently without tariffs or other hindrances.

In the parts of the year when there are few lambs ready for slaughter from UK farms, the New Zealand, Australian and other southern-hemisphere farms can supply the EU [including Britain] with lamb: so the UK exports 40%+ of the lamb that is raised here, and imports about the same proportion of the lamb that is consumed over the whole year. This is an entirely sustainable and sensible process; and common sense indicates that we should stick with it. This would work, if Britain has the basic good sense to think straight and act accordingly.

Sadly, it appears that Mrs May has placed fantasists in key positions: so as she dreams of making a niche in history by closing our borders to immigrants to rectify her 'failure' to reduce net immigration below 100,000 when she was Home Secretary; reckless of the long-term economic damage that a 'hard Brexit' would cause, other ministers have been freed to pursue their own fantasies.

I would like to think that this characterisation  of the current situation is an alarmist fantasy of my own: but in the absence of any evidence of rational policy-making, one is licensed to expect the worst.