Back to Blogging: Barnier and Boris

I have begun to draft a prolonged 'Thinkpiece', and am already thinking that it is probably going to be too wordy for the normal blog format. I'll press on with it for a few days, but in the meantime I intend to carry on blogging most days in simple, short dollops. It seems to suit my temperament.

This morning, the radio brought me the shocking early gossip that David Davis - the Brexit Secretary who has made such heavy weather of a simple job, so far - has suggested that in the summer of 2019 he will retire and leave to Boris Johnson the task of implementing whatever Brexit deal the UK ends up with at the March deadline. The one reassuring thought to which this gives rise is that it is probably Johnson's destiny to lead the Tory party to a defeat of greater proportions than that of 1945.

The prospect of two dangerous Marxists leading a cosmetically-rational Labour majority in the Commons down a road to ruin is not enough to scare anybody sensible into voting for Boris, who seems anxious to display his complete failure to understand either the crazy orthodox Economics of the 'free market' school or the realities of economic existence. I have not heard his comment on the scandal of the botched roll-out of the Single Benefit, and suspect that he has not made one. I don't suppose that he would understand even as little as does the Prime Minister of the situation of people who are faced with the prospect of having no income for an average period of six weeks. Most Conservative MPs seem mollified by the assurance that these desperate individuals can get a loan of half the level of benefit that they can expect ultimately to get, on strict payback terms. So little do most recipients trust the system to treat them fairly that they suspect that if they took up the offer of the loan they would be under even more intense scrutiny than they already have been. The disconnect between the 'hard Brexiteer' minority in the Commons and the grassroots of the electorate - including traditional Tory voters - has become greater than one could have forecast even a year ago.

In the 2017 General Election Mrs May got a greater Conservative vote than did her predecessor in either 2010 or 2015: but that did not translate into a majority of Commons seats: just as happened when Hillary Clinton's three million vote lead in the election failed to translate into Electoral College votes in the USA. Mrs May's largely zombie-like performance since her wining defeat is comprehensible, but it is desperately bad for the country. Her most egregious error was to hire a hall in Florence in which to make a statement to some of her ministers and to the British press [and a handful of local Italian politicians] that she should have made in more precise terms to the House of Commons six months earlier. That would have obviated the 'need' for any election in the UK, and made it possible for M Barnier to say: "Ah, now I begin to understand where she is coming from: let's start the serious talking."

Mrs May could, possibly, have been a competent prime minister: had she possessed the one essential quality that she conspicuously lacks: confidence in her own instincts. This seems increasingly to be derived from the circumstances of her upbringing an early career. A nice home in the home counties, a nice school in the home counties, an easy passage into an easy degree at a top university, a comfortable partnership with a slightly younger man, a job in the Bank of England and an easy passage to a safe parliamentary seat. There has been no need in that life to struggle: no hardship; not even experience of work in a competitive business: and how all that now shows!

The same goes for Boris, of course; his troubles have come from his lies and his lusts. Jeremy Corbyn's origins in the family manor house and his career on the champagne socialist circuit have kept him carefully isolated from the harsh realities of life. Here we have three of a kind; and there are more of their kind all around.

It is good to have practical builders like Philip Hammond and successful competitive investment managers like the egregious Mr Mogg to bring balance to our political life!

Labour Luddites and a Prime Minister as a Poodle

Jeremy Corbyn has gained a new measure of popularity in recent months, largely because he has become popular. He has changed from being a crabby, obsessed 'leftie' to being an almost-charismatic emblem of popular disgust with boring, respectable politicians. In his speech yesterday his main task was to transmit some of the enthusiasm that was being shown - to excess - in the hall at the Labour Party Conference to the wider population; while combining it with a measure of responsible policy that can be presented to the electorate. Much of what he has recently advocated has my strong endorsement , based on half a century of intensive study of the history and effectiveness [or, as usual, ineffectiveness] of economic policy: especially when derived from economic theory. A modern country needs a mixed economy, with a large amount of state investment and public ownership of natural monopolies [which must, of course, be at least as well managed by the public sector as the private sector: which would be hard to achieve, but is doable].

One aspect of his speech, however, verged on the cretinous. That was his apparent Luddism in suggesting that action should be taken - including punitive taxation - to prevent human beings' jobs being taken over by robots; presumably at the behest of wicked capitalists. Virtually every forecast for the medium term future of the economy envisage huge benefits [not least, massive gains in productivity and in the range of products and experiences that will be available] due to innovations where human ideas are made into products and experiences to be enjoyed by everyone by the combined action of people and machines drawing on intensified robotics and enhanced artificial intelligence [AI].

The origin of the term Luddism comes from the mythical character Ned Ludd, the supposed organiser of the gangs of handicraft workers who broke into premises and smashed machines that were capable of replacing old-established crafts [because they greatly enhanced productivity] in the new factories, particularly in textile manufacture in the period 1790-1820. Individual employers were ruined by the Luddites, and a few workmen were penalised when they were caught in the act [or betrayed by colleagues]; but over a couple of decades the machines prevailed, and employment increased [though this often included child exploitation, until that was banned by laws that were enforced by inspectors who actually entered the employers' premises]. The ban on child labour, the ban on womens' night work, bans on the use of dangerous chemicals and processes need to be enforced in a civilised society: the state must be active in the economy to promote and preserve human rights and humans' health. One result of recent laissez-faire attitudes in society at the start of this millennium is the rise of 'modern slavery' [though I cannot detect anything notably modern about it]. The government's obsessive austerity has reduced the numbers of police officers, while terrorist threats have reoriented the work of many officers: with the result that offences like internationally-traded forced prostitution and domestic service have grown almost uninterrupted.

This is the background against which - so it is promised - Mrs May is to utter a peon of praise to the 'free market' as the central point of her speech to the Conservative Conference which opens today. This will be contrasted by the press [which is predominantly pro-Conservative] with the backward-looking old socialism and Luddism of the Corbyn effort yesterday. Mrs May will utter this claptrap in between calls to the US president asking for his intervention in a trade war with the US over the fate of the Bombardier aircraft factory in Belfast [and three other plant in Northern Ireland, as described yesterday in this blog]: a prime example of point protectionism which makes nonsense of the hard Brexiteers' vision of the future. Mrs May has to press this case, in defence of free trade ideology, despite the fact that her parliamentary majority depends upon taking a chauvinistic stance on the Bombardier issue. She lost the recent general election, and clings on to power with the votes of the Democratic Unionists. All the Bombardier plants are in constituencies held by the DUP: and the Bombardier jobs are of such importance to Catholic as well as Protestant workers that Sinn Fein's leader has signed a joint letter with the DUP leader to send to the US Vice-President. Hostilities at Stormont have been transcended by this issue; and Mrs May is compelled to make a nonsense of her free market rhetoric even as she utters it. Nevertheless, as a poodle of the Northern Ireland politicians she has no option but to demonstrate in the clearest way that her rhetoric is claptrap. Thus the Tories will be diminished by the inconsistency and infighting that will be in full view in the coming days: yet they all know they must hang on to office, or Corbyn will have the chance of his lifetime.

Labour, Brexit and an Alt-Econocrat

There is no more pressing issue in British politics than that of the future relationship of the UK to the European Union, and therefore no apology is required on returning to the subject.

The Labour Party has taken a huge step towards rationality on that matter over this Bank Holiday weekend by making a new and very different statement on its policy. Under the new Shadow Secretary of State for exit, Sir Keir Starmer, they now accept that it would be essential for there to be significant transition period during which the UK would continue to enjoy the comfort of being within the European Economic Area [though out of the political Union, in deference to the referendum resut]. This would be at the  expense of keeping the country under the jurisdiction of the European Court, and obliged to accept the free movement of people with the EU. Starmer can claim to be far more traditionally Labour than the public schoolboy Jeremy Corbyn, because his working parents named him in honour of Keir Hardie: an early Labour leader. If discussions during the transition can include the resolution of the two difficult issues of free movement and the extent of the powers of the European Court, Labour holds out the prospect that the 'transitional' could become the permanent basis for the relationship of Britain to the EU: while the country would be able to make additional pacts on trade with other countries provided the conditions for retaining membership of the European Economic Area are maintained.

This presents a package on which Labour can make a strong bid for the 'middle ground' of politics, and knocks any idea of the LibDems forming the core of a strong new 'Centre Party' right out of the picture. Corbyn's caricature student-leftery can virtually be ignored if the party continues to promote rational 'moderates' [with good political credentials] to shadow posts. Pro-EU Tory MPs - who formed the vast majority at the time of the referendum, and who have been largely ignored since Mrs May's 'conversion' to hard Brexitry - should be really scared, to the extent that they should now make clear their reservations about the tone of Cabinet policy, in view of the fact that Labor has displayed a capacity for rationality.

Also in recent days, Professor Patrick Minford has obtained publicity for his view that a 'hard Brexit' would be beneficial for the United Kingdom. According to his ultra-Econocratic model of the economy, Britain would gain massively by being completely outside the European Union [including all aspects of the European Economic Area], with a GDP at least 6.5% higher than is being achieved within the union. This rests on the assumption that the country could trade on a completely level playing field with all economic entities in the world; according to his model of a market economy whose participants operate on the basis of 'rational expectations' of each others' actions conforming to the psychological assumptions that are implicit in the model. Professor Minford achieved prominence when he supported extreme Thatcherism against the majority of the then-still-NeoKeynesian 'economics profession' in 1981. For a while he had the Prime Minster's favour, though he was eventually palmed-off with a CBE.

The fruits of Thatcherism are here for him to see, and to input into his model [which is now even more comprehensively Econocratic]: desperately low productivity, nil productiveness, a massive deficit on public spending, a constant deficit on the balance of payments, over-dependence of the economy on the service sector and on consumers spending borrowed money. To that catalogue of the achievements that are ascribable to the policies that he recommended to the Thatcher government, we can be sure that after a hard Brexit the UK would find that there was no permanently level patch on the playing field of global trade. Point protectionism [as mentioned several times in this blog], combined with long-term protectionism of favoured sectors in virtually every economy on the planet will ensure that a naked Britain, alone in the wicked world - which still remembers the slights from the British Empire of the past - would be nothing like the heroic entity in the professor's model, and the irrational prejudice which is more common in global statecraft than anything like Minford's 'rationality' would ensure that the model could not work. The limit to the Econocrats' world view is seen in the fact that real people have not vanished from the villages that surrounded the closed coal mines: they stay as second and third generation malcontents whose habits undermine their health, while they survive on a combination of low wages from non-productive jobs, state benefits and borrowing.

Keit Starmer is well on the way to producing a rational and humane model of Brexit for the Labour Party. Patrick Minford is trying to power the nutty Tory Brexiteers along a path that would enable
them massively to intensify the range and extent of the problems that already confront the real-world population of this benighted country.

Sugar, Hunger Bonds and a Sour Thought

British  Sugar has undertaken a survey of the nation, which shows that two-thirds of us do not know that sugar is grown in the UK. It is also noted that during the emergence of the 'obesity pandemic' the UK's consumption of sugar has gone down by 1.5%, notwithstanding the growing population. It is far too simplistic to blame 'sugar' for the obscene sights that now infest our streets.

Goldman Sachs, the 'vampire squid' of Wall Street, has recently bought a very large tranche of Venezuelan state bonds at approximately one-third of their face value. Although the bank did not buy the bonds directly from the Venezuelan authorities, this purchase has bolstered the whole market in such bonds and thus has eased the situation of the violent and incompetent 'socialist' government. Within Venezuela there are shortages of food and medicines, and the government is increasingly dependent on the security services as it ignores election results which have produced a 'dissident' parliamentary majority. At least sixty demonstrators have been killed this year. Given the already awful reputation of the bank in humanitarian circles, the description of this asset as 'hunger bonds' has elicited a great deal of adverse comment. Whether it can have any impact on the future behaviour of the giant squid is problematical.

And now to the main point, the 'sour comments'. Theresa May rushed back to Downing Street after the London Bridge/Borough Market terror event, to appear 'prime ministerial' at the lectern on Downing Street. Over six years as Home Secretary she cheerfully administered the full measure of cuts in the police service that was required by the Osborne austerity programme. She presided over the control of spending on information gathering on and surveillance of 'radicalised' suspects. Now she recognises that some flexibility needs to be given to increase the capability of the police and security agencies; but she apparently intendeds to go ahead with damaging cuts in the armed services.

Donald Trump recognises that jihadist groups must be rooted-out of the middle east, as far as is feasible, even though that raises the prospect of retaliatory measures being brought to Europe and the US; with Europe more obviously in the firing line than the US. If Britain does not have armed forces sufficient - and sufficiently well equipped - to take part in external operations, that will not protect the UK from the 'vengeance' of jihadically-inclined people who are already living comfortably as UK citizens. Britain is firmly lodged in its 'special relationship' with the USA, and this includes taking a share of the comeback for American interventions in Islamic states.

Islamist groups described the children killed in the Manchester suicide bombing as 'crusaders'. The demonology that has been formulated among these people is deeply rooted, and platitudinous verbiage about 'British values' and 'our way of life' will have no mileage at all with the zealots. Mrs May's grand words have no weight, because she has no back-up to offer within the context of her policy horizons.

Jeremy Corbyn has a shameful record of giving aid and comfort to virtually any terrorist group that has emerged in the past thirty years. He has opposed almost all measures to contain terrorists, on the clever but indefensible pretext that such measures are 'administrative' devices which do not create a judicial process that would enable the would-be terrorist to legitimate his [or her] status. His personal standing in such matters is deeply in the mire; but he and his party have a more rational proposal now for dealing with the terrorist threat. They are proposing a significant enhancement of the resources for police and security, and they oppose the cuts to the armed services. Labour does this in the context of policies to expand the economy, and thus the country's capability to pay for the forces. The fact that much of the investment would be undertaken by the state, using borrowed funds, is no exception to the long history of policy that enabled the country to finance two world wars and the equip for the cold war.

The Conservatives stand against historical experience, while Labour is concordant with it. That is not their popular image, but it is the contemporary fact.