Managing the Labour Party

Jeremy Corbyn may be the starry-eyed idealist that he often presents himself to be: in which case he is too good for practical politics, and certainly the last person to control nuclear weapons. Yet there is a good chance that the incompetence of the Tories, and the egomaniacal economic illiteracy of Boris Johnson in particular, could hand him the control of Downing Street.

It is therefore particularly important to note that he - or his manipulators - has prevented the Labour Party Conference from expressing a view [let alone, declaring a policy] on the dominant issue of the day: what does Brexit mean?

On one aspect of the matter his view is entirely sensible: this country needs a fundamental economic restructuring, with a significant implementation of mixed economy policies. This could well include the resumption of state ownership of natural monopolies - the railways, electricity, gas and water supply. It is also fundamental that a country with advanced manufacturing industries, which need to be fostered and developed into a new era of high productivity, retains the fundamental capability to produce steel. Corbyn has rightly said that the EU rules on 'state aid' to business would make it virtually impossible to take the necessary measures; but he has conceded that it is plausible to envisage a model in which the UK can be free to make industrial policy and still have a close customs agreement with the EU.

Given Corbyn's popularity with the new party faithful, and the anxiety of older loyalists to remain in favour, it is likely that he could win a vote on Brexit in the conference, and vindicate his stance: but he had declined to do that. This is pure Stalinist politics; the avoidance of any risk that he-who-must-be-obeyed is to experience challenge.

Also in the conference, John McDonnell is to make a major issue of the mass indebtedness that has beset the United Kingdom since the 2007 credit crisis compounded the economic disablement that Thatcherism brought upon the population of the ex-mining and formerly-industrial regions. His 'solution', to make it impossible for lenders to charge more than twice the amount borrowed, in fees and interest during the length of a loan, looks wonderful: but is utterly impractical. While it could apply to specific hire-purchase type agreements of individual items, most debt is not susceptible to a cap of that kind. Car loans are usually cut short when the car is changed: the debt outstanding on the loan is settled usually by manipulation of the used-car's and the new car's 'prices': it would be impossible to compute what would be twice the amount of the loan, in any simple terms. Even more complex is the question of credit cards, which are by definition a flexible rolling loan covering a complex of debts that are entered into and resolved in myriad individual agreements. It would be impossible to compute how much interest and service charge was imposed in respect of any item within the card's compass. To set a maximum APR would make the system non-viable for the banks, even though they would be constrained by circumstances to charge the set maximum all the time for everybody: and the system might still be non-viable. If the credit card system collapsed, a lot of people would be disadvantaged. But it is odds-on the McDonnell's proposal will be accepted with rapturous applause. This will demonstrate another Stalinist 'truth', that the practicality of a policy is unimportant: it is the principle and the intention that count in an authoritarian regime.

There is always somebody to blame when a policy fails; and McDonnell has spent the last quarter century blaming the bankers, for the much evil they have done and the many things they could not help. Thus the world rolls on, and the left changes as little as do the Tories. Time for the Liberals to re-invent themselves again?

The Uses of University

The principal social purpose of universities today is to keep around 44% of the age group 18-22 out of the jobs market and [in the main] in a life of sufficient social indulgence to keep them from radicalisation in support of any real or imagined cause. In England [which forms the bulk of the population] the cost of achieving this objective has been shunted from the state budget into a La-la-Land where it appears as a debt owed by the graduate community; which no one believes will be repaid in full, or even in half. The fact that the interest that is added to the accumulated debt has now increased to more than 6% - compound - makes the dream of repayment even more laughable.

It is still argued in some quarters that the universities have an economic purpose, to train the inventors of the future and to nurture some of the best researchers as teachers in the universities who combine their pedagogic work with the selection of the best students to join their research teams who will thus extend and perpetuate their work. This happens, on a depressingly small scale in comparison to the massive size of the university sector overall. Some buildings that were provided by the state in the nineteen sixties and seventies for university schools of science - especially of applied science and engineering - have been 're-purposed' to take some of the expansion in social studies: especially business and media. Where applied science capacity has been maintained, since the mid-seventies it has been occupied by an increasing proportion of overseas students [at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels] who mostly take their skills to competitor countries after graduating. Around the best scientific, medical and engineering departments have been gathered spin-off companies, which have developed innovations formed in the academic context into potentially successful businesses. Where these grow into conspicuous successes, the probability of them being taken over and developed by aliens, rather than by British capitalists, is overwhelming.

It is also worth noting that much of the best spun-off development has been in business parks funded by richly-endowed colleges, especially in Cambridge; which have been better resourced that spin-offs from Manchester or Sheffield Universities. Bullshit about the Northern Powerhouse has drawn heavily on the resources of the universities in the region for its rhetoric: but the Oxbridge endowments have not been matched by state funding for spin-offs from the multiple universities in Leeds or Birmingham.

The chief function of the universities is indeed to maintain intelligent young people in suspense over a period of years in which they have a good chance of being softened by drink, drugs, sex and idleness, or of being diverted into sports and hobbies that absorb their attention in ways that are not economically or politically disruptive. The school results that determine which university and course [if any] pupils in England, Wales and Northern Ireland will take up are being announced today, and the universities are competing vigorously to attract the best talent [insofar as it is revealed by A-level results]. The short-term motives for this are to be able to claim a 'high quality' of intake to keep a flow of good applicants coming to the university, and to get their fees through the university's books. The longer-term objective is to be a survivor when the inevitable cull of the over-bloated higher education system is begun. Economic and social usefulness will then be asserted as the criteria for selection as to which institutions should be culled and which retained: but the objectivity and validity of those criteria will be subject to challenge. The outcome, as to the size, shape and orientation of the higher education system cannot now be predicted.

There still are great scholars and sensible researchers in the British higher educational system. One such has just challenged the increasing optimism of government and the media about the extent of the oil and gas supplies that can be gained by fracking shale. He has gently suggested that the shales that are to be found in the UK are mostly too new [in Geological terms] to yield much that is economically useful. So another bubble may be about to burst: which shows how important it is - and always has been - to develop and retain the applied sciences: they can provide counterbalance to the fantasies that emerge from the Econocracy, which currently corrupt far too great a proportion of the university population.

High-Speed Idiocy: and Some Sense

Today will see another series of announcements on the scheme to build a completely new high-speed railway between London and Birmingham, with branches to Manchester and Leeds.

I am one of the many who deplores the London to Birmingham venture. The existing line from Euston takes only 70 minutes, non-stop. The need on that route is for more capacity to take stopping trains that can bring commuters more effectively into London from towns and cities on the route, and on feeder routes to that line. The environmental damage that it will inflict is immense, and the cost will be added to the effective national debt [from Britain to aliens, largely Chinese state-owned enterprises] even though it is to be wrapped up as corporate lending. That borrowing will have to be paid for: so if British people decide they cannot afford the prices that will be slapped onto tickets to travel on HS2, the cost of the daft first-stage enterprise will either be offloaded onto the prices of rail tickets nationwide, or onto taxes.

The so-say second stage: or, at least, investment in the improvement of main rail routes for travel across the north midlands and the south of northern England, is absolutely essential. Direct trains from Sheffield to London have been improved, and thus times on the route via Chesterfield, Derby and Leicester, with a sideline to Nottingham, are acceptable. The fast trains on the west-coast mainline that bypass Birmingham on the way to Edinburgh and Glasgow do not serve any major city in northern England: and they are slowed down by stopping at some selection from the list of Crewe, Warrington, Wigan, Preston, Lancaster and Carlisle. The history of railway company formation, and the consequential construction of lines, means that there are various cities and towns to be served in Yorkshire, causing there to be barely-adequate services to York, Leeds, Bradford, Wakefield, Halifax, Huddersfield and Hull from the metropolis: only after Northallerton is there a clear principal route via Darlington, Durham, Newcastle and the north: and this all leaves Sunderland and Middlesborough at the edges of the map. Huge expenditure is needed on that infrastructure to bring it up to the level that is common on the European continent. Half a century has been spent closing railways and parts of routes and despoiling the railways of the land that could have been sold to provide the cash to fund updating of the system. While the Osbornian HS2N plan may not be feasible, the investment is necessary: and it should come from a state-led infrastructure pool to which crowd-funding from the British people should be added. It is not necessary to add to the public external debt of the nation to improve this infrastructure: the state should lead, the people can follow, and the spending that will be generated by the construction work and then the operation of the lines will help to revive the economy. It is necessary to build not just 'strategic' main lines, but the ensure that all the 'bypassed' towns - even Darwen and Accrington - are effectively linked in to the new system.

Before one gets too depressed at the present state of the British railways, one should look at the home of capitalism, the United States of America: and at its financial capital, New York. There the railways are in a state of extreme dereliction: with collapsing bridges, five-mile-an-hour speed limits, frequent derailments at the major stations and [literally] century-old wiring providing power to some routes. President Trump trumpeted his intention to change all this, with massive investment in infrastructure, including in his home city: but so far he has cut down on the Obama-era commitment of federal investment.

Thought must be given to the effects of economic thinking, both in the neo-Keynesian era and in the more recent period when 'rational markets' theory has predominated, on the real structure and infrastructure of human life in the urban environment. It is Economics that got us down into this mess: economic dogma will not help us out of it.

 

Paying for University

A few lucky people have enough 'family money' behind them to be able to pay their university fees and their living costs while at university. For the rest of the university population - the vast majority - the option is to borrow the money to pay the fees; and additionally to borrow most of the money with which the student's living costs are met. Some families are able to subsidise the student to some degree, mitigating the total that is borrowed by a percentage but leaving most of the cost of the higher education experience to be paid for from earnings when the salary earned by the graduate exceeds £21,000 a year. Until that salary point is reached, no repayment is demanded but the debt accrues [from the student's first day in higher education] at 6% interest.

Under this regime, there has been a vast expansion in the student population, which conveniently keeps that number of individuals off the jobs market and therefore makes them ineligible for inclusion in the statistics of the unemployed.

The extent to which students are 'employed' is a matter of some contention. Many students in subjects other than engineering and 'hard science' [which require significant time to be spent in workshops and laboratories, where proper standards for health and safety must rigorously be maintained] have 'contact' with a teacher for only a few hours a week. The contact may include a lecture to a few hundred individuals gathered together [or, at the extreme, a requirement to watch a video that is to be seen by hundreds of thousands of students in many institutions]; or it may be a one-to-one tutorial; or many variants between the two. For a typical History student the 'load' might be three mass lectures, two or three small-group lectures and two smaller-group tutorials [3 to 5] students: making the contact hours 8 a week. Some of the teaching may be done by internationally respected academics - in person - but some may be done by postgraduate students, research fellows or junior lecturers 'borrowed' from another institution. I do not know the current situation, but I do know that a decade ago some individuals were giving the same short courses in four or more universities in major cities [especially London] due to a shortage of people holding certain skills in areas like business studies.

Despite the patchy nature of teaching in different parts of different institutions, most are fully subscribed. Most non-laboratory students have a maximum load of a dozen contact hours a week, for between twenty and thirty weeks a year, with the requirement to write essays for tutorials a few times each term. The phrase continues to be used, "what are you reading?" to denote "what subject are you studying?" but very few students use the vast resources of an historic library as students did until about the millennium. Most of the newer universities do not have large libraries, and many older universities have redesignated their libraries as 'resource centres' or equivalent terms, and have reduced book purchases dramatically. Many institutions have 'slimmed down' their libraries; and the massive Stacks, often below ground, that used to be open for research by students have been downgraded or even closed down. Students now do most of their 'reading' on-line, in a highly selective manner as is common in this era of downloadable gobbits. Essays and dissertations are on offer on-line at very modest prices, because in most subjects there are topics that must be included and only a modest range of questions need be dreamed up by tutors to show that students have mastered the essentials. For several years. sophisticated programmes have been available to universities to check [as far as possible] that students are answering those questions in their own words: hence, many students acquire skills in paraphrasing standard answers to satisfy the requirements.

For the rest of their time, students can pursue the activities that appeal to them: including sport, sex, and earning some money by part-time work to buy booze and drugs. Some students from caring, modest homes assiduously do their work, and use their earnings from part-time work to mitigate the amount that they need to borrow for their maintenance costs; but they are conspicuously a minority. An increasing proportion, almost certainly the majority, leave universities with degrees in subjects that are not directly useful in the jobs market. It is now common for graduates to be forced to recognise that they are stuck with a 'worthless' degree, and they have to take jobs alongside people who left school at sixteen. Such people are at least freed from the burden of graduate debt: the notional interest that they owe continues to accrue but as they will never earn the threshold salary of £21,000 [or the equivalent, once inflation is back in the picture] they will never be required to repay. It is generally accepted that at least 60% of the total of outstanding student debt will never be repaid, so it will fall to the state to write it off.

I am moved to write this piece because I heard a BBC correspondent say on the early News this morning that female graduates a few years after graduation 'earn' three times as much as non-graduates: this is rubbish. Some graduates, such as those who go into City law firms or the research departments of City finance houses, can indeed earn three times the average graduate salary after three years; but these are an exiguous minority. For the vast majority of graduates, no such recompense is on offer. Scientists and Engineers are special cases, which must be addressed on another occasion. People with unusual talents in such fields as music and literature would mostly be able to make their good livings without degrees, and they too must be lifted out of the general group. Most graduates now face an unsustainable situation of debt; combined with a humdrum job and a place at the back of the queue for housing.

This situation, like so many others in the United Kingdom, is unsustainable.

Democratic Deficit

One of the discredited Rating Agencies has downgraded Belgian government debt: apparently on the grounds that they have not had an established government for well over a year. The cause of the bickering between political parties arises from an excess of democracy, that pretty well ensures that there is never a predominant party with a parliamentary majority. Belgium's policy options are restricted by the fact that the state is a member both of the European Union and of the euro: the national capital, Brussels is overshadowed by a few buildings within that city from which the EU is run and by Frankfort where the European Central Bank is located. Every opinion and brand of Flemish nationalism is represented in the Belgian Parliament; as are all the factions and aspirations of the French-speaking Walloons. This wonderfully democratic outcome is impotent: the politicians can't agree formally how to share out ministerial posts, so they have just shuffled the pack and carried on from week to week as 'caretaker' ministers; and operationally it doesn't matter. But cosmetically it looks untidy, so Standard & Poors have chosen to give Belgium a kick by reducing their rating from AA+ to AA: this will license market traders to have a whirl at making a bit more money by selling Belgian debt short: a great game for the insiders, and a worry for ordinary folk, who know that policy on trade and industry is made by the EU, and well understand that the euro is completely beyond influence from any Belgian government.

A Belgian is President of the EU Council of Ministers, but he has no power: he can merely try to co-ordinate 27 heads of state and heads of government. The EU Parliament remunerates it members exceptionally well, in the combination of salary [related to the local parliamentary salary in the members' home countries] and EU expenses; but they have no real power. The Commissioners are nominated by the governments of the member states without any convincing pretence of democratic consent. Britain's Commissioner is a Labour Party hack who has never held national elected office, was totally unknown to the public on her appointment [made in haste when the sitting Commissioner was recalled to serve in Brown's despairing government], and whose rare appearances on the British TV News cause a surge of national embarrassment.The democratic deficit on the EU probably exceeds 100%.

The new Italian and Greek Prime Ministers are described as 'technocrats'. The 'technology' that they are supposed to understand is Economics, the discredited subject whose practitioners sanctioned and applauded all the excesses that have created the crises in business and in personal and in governmental debt; that none of the 'Atlantic economies' has yet begun to addressed effectively for the long term. They personally applied their Economics in bringing their countries into the tissue of lies and false hopes that enabled a very disparate group of countries to create the euro. They went on to occupy cushy roles in the unaudited EU mechanism and now have been set up as proconsuls for their cronies. They are part of the problem, not of any radical solution.

Germany has a carefully drafted democratic constitution, with a special court to protect it and a Chancellor who grew up as a subject of a militarily occupied satellite state. She is committed to democratic principles  and is accutely aware of the fraud that was committed by the founders of the euro. She is reported to be viscerally unwilling to legitimate the lunacy that has created the state debts of those eurozone countries that have systematically [and knowingly] lived beyond their means by 'monetising' those obligations under a German guarantee. So she is pressing for something like a democratic structure to be created, within which at least part of the eurozone can move close to fiscal union [a united tax and budgetary system]. Ms Merkel is not prepared to guarantee past follies and frauds in the mean time.

The EU has never been even slightly democratic: the 'European project' is the imposition of an elite who have drawn on the widespread fear of European wars to justify their own job-creation machine. Any currency zone that adopts Merkel's principles will certainly be smaller that the eurozone of seventeen states that is just about surviving into another week. A German-led outcome may be a eurozone shorn of the weaker bretheren, or it may be a Neumark zone comprising Germany, Austria, Croatia, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Slovakia, Finland and Estonia, probably Belgium, and possibly France, Poland, Latvia and Lithuania. The Czech Republic, Hungary and the Scandinavian EU members would probably be welcome to apply to join once the system were up and running. The 'Club Med' countries would not be considered for candidacy until their devalued euro - or their separate currencies - had well stabilised and their balance of payments was restored.

Britain's desperate imbalance of payments and its structural budget deficit would become even more conspicuous when it drew comparison with the Neumark bloc. It would become clearer that party politicians cannot solve the problems, and the yaa-boo antics of the House of Commons and in the TV  'question' programmes would move from being a national joke to become recognised as evidence of the failure of the entire political structure. The British situation is worse than that of the EU: it is worse than a democratic deficit: it is an advanced case of defective democracy. This tragedy has been developing for several decades: in Can Britain Survive? [1971] Ken Watkins and I wrote:
"...there is a kind of auction of popular programmes carried on by the major parties, in which the highest bidder tends to win the lot. Since the parties do not wish to commit political suicide they are, willy-nilly, compelled to act accordingly. The fact that this inhibits them from tackling the fundamental structural weaknesses in the in the economy can be seen from the study of the elections since the end of the Second World War."
The same political auction game has continued unabated for forty more years! The deep defects of democracy, British-style, will not easily be corrected; and yet only when that correction has taken place can a rational economic strategy be formulated: then implemented over several decades. If the democratic defect is not corrected by completely fresh democratic means; a less democratic solution is quite likely to intervene.

The oldest current Constitution in the world, that of the USA, is not directly under threat. But American commentators from all segments of the political spectrum are worried about a failure of their institutions to provide clear policy in a very grave national crisis. Franklin D Roosevelt was - in effect - given exceptional powers to lead the economy out of depression, and he continued to exercise exceptional powers, sanctioned by Congress and unimpeded by the Supreme Court, for the Second World War. Harry S Truman had barely begun the process of surrendering the special powers when the emergence of the Cold War brought the Marshall Plan. Then came the Korean War, then the long stalemate of the nuclear confrontation. After 1991 the US was the unique superpower and the Clinton presidency was the first 'normal' incumbency since the mid-nineteen-thirties. It led to impeachment proceedings and a reassertion of party politics over constitutional propriety. George W Bush was continuing with the diminished role when 9/11 created a crisis and led to two overseas wars. The role of the Commander-in-Chief was once again unquestioned, and guided by the Vice-President and Secretary of Defence it transcended constitutional propriety. The limits to US global power were challenged and the end of hegemony was slowly acknowledged. Obama came into office in a diminished power and he has faced the full force of a resurgent, if uncomfortable, congressional democracy. His fluency became his greatest failing: he was unable to listen to and to interpret the diverse dialogues that had been unleashed by the collapse of the financial system and the weakening of the military-industrial complex. The attempts at bold initiatives to deal with the human consequences of the crisis that he has promoted seem to be based on the European welfare state from the nineteen-fifties: which the Europeans themselves are having to abandon under the burden of debt with which it saddled them. The result is that the USA has its own, very specific demcratic deficit: it is a real and urgent stress-point, that has been confronted by a dialogue of the deaf in a polarised Congress that exactly mirrors the depth of division in the country. Meanwhile, the prophets of economic Armageddon are having a bonanza.

Gift of the Gab?

The few students in my generation who learned some German were intrigued to find that Gift in German means poison in English. It is the sort of arcane fact that occurs to one in later life when someone who has made a reputation by oratory overexposes their acquired facility to a degree that becomes damaging. The most conspicuous case in recent British history is Neil Kinnoch who talked Labour out of credibility in the high Thatcher years and then lost the election that followed the fall of the Iron Lady in a single inarticulate wail at a premature celebration rally in Sheffield. In explaining the Tories' surprise victory academic analysts emphasised the fresh simple honest image projected by the new Conservative leader, John Major [hard to believe that now, is it not?]; and the refusal of the Labour shadow  Chancellor, John Smith, to answer any direct question as to what taxes he would impose if he was in a position to do so. Analysts in the saloon bar had not doubt that the 'Welsh windbag' had simply got his cum-uppance. He was rewarded with a role as an EU Commissioner and a peerage, after which he was paid to pose as an elder statesman.

The most remarkable windbag - or oratorical genius, depending on the commentator's point of view - now active in the global political system is the current President of the United States. Obama appeared from nowhere to serve two years on the US Senate and went straight into the race for the Democrat presidential nomination. He talked himself into it, and into the White House, where he has continued to talk with remarkable facility. His many enemies claim that he was not born in the USA, that no school friends have been identified, that his income in significant periods of his life has not been attributable and that his university grades seem to be inaccssible: these and many even more far-fetched accusations have been brushed aside. He talks on: about anything and everything. The less impact his admonitions and assertions have, the more assertively he talks on. Meanwhile the United States has marched steadily towards an economic precipice as the public debt [just of the Federal Government] has reached $15 trillion: fifteen thousand billion. The Democrats have cheered Obama on as his adherents have brought in massively costly schemes for universal medical care and have maintained social welfare spending at the same time as they have approved massive spending plans for infrastructure investments designed to stimulate economic growth. The Republicans have become increasingly intransigent in opposing the government's plans.

American politics have reached a stalemate that is potentially ruinous in the current world context. The European crisis is apparently worsening. The dominance of the west is widely proclaimed. The west is patently incapable of addressing its problems with efficiency and intelligence: and the great stumbling block is democracy. The US Constitution and the people it has placed in office have combined to make a complete impasse. The ambiguities of the Treaties that bind the European Union, and the fudges and half-truths by which they have been implemented, have created a morass through which no known path exists. The USA and Western Europe have proclaimed the advantages of democracy as a universal exemplar for the rest of the world: and it has produced the toxic combination of economic disaster and political impotence. When the causes of this fiasco are analysed it becomes clear that is has obviously been accumulating for at least forty years. The shining success of Canada and Australia is not sufficient to justify democratic economic policy to a sceptical world that is doing better with different political structures.

The reasonably articulate Prime Minister of the United Kingdom made his excuse for his own incomprehension of the surrounding reality at the Confederation of British Industry conference yesterday. He declared that nobody had foreseen in 2010 how bad the economic situation would be in 2011. This was his excuse for the fact that his government could not now meet its schedule for reducing the rate of annual aggregation of national debt. The carefully chosen gang of Economists who staff the shiny new Office of Budget Responsibility predicted that the situation was to be eased by economic growth that is patently not happening. They predicted that the private sector would quickly offset the loss of jobs in the public sector, which has not occurred. Cameron and Osborne [the Chancellor of the Exchequer] have spent a year and a half bumptiously parroting those failed predictions. Their opponents in the Labour Party have also seen 'growth' as the panacea, arguing the absurd might-have-been that more growth would have happened if the government had not made the modest reduction that it has implemented in borrowing. It is more likely that higher borrowing by the British state would have brought forward the date when it has to offer a higher interest rate on its borrowing. Cameron's admission that the economy is not delivering the hoped-for growth is a belated recognition of the cor-blimey-obvious that the people who spend less that they used to in the saloon bar have been saying throughout the wasted year of coalition fudge.

Cameron is wrong to say that the better-informed counter-view to the official line was not available when he came into office. I am an outlier in having made the point in my small corner for more than forty years; but I have never been alone and will soon be in the majority. None of us wants to gloat over the abject national failure that democracy has brought upon us. Democracy is still the least-bad form of government;  but is now in the painful situation that extra-democratic measures may be necessary to address the economic crisis: and that could put the future of the free society in unprecedented danger.