We already knew that despite the proven success and huge popularity of the public operation of the East Coast mail line, the operation is to be handed back to the private sector. We knew also that regardless of public opposition, Royal Mail has been sold at a give-away price. Now we know that in fact there are to be more bargain basement sales of public assets despite more than two thirds of the population wanting to see (re)nationalisation of railway operators and power suppliers, not to mention the water industry.
The privatisation policy has failed and will continue to fail because you cannot ‘regulate’ privateers. In fact the opposite of regulation is the case. In a modern version of the days of the Spanish Main, successful privateers receive honours and safe havens now mean tax havens.
Not even a mixed industry is acceptable to this government. It is sometimes asserted by vested interests and their allies in parliament that competition from a state owned enterprise, or one that was operated by what remains of Local Government, would be unfair to the rest. But as the continued ruthless exploitation of consumers demonstrates, an effect on the rest is precisely what is needed.
The banks - the financial barrow boys who plundered the public, misled the country and dragged down the economy and who have since had exposed one shameful practice after another - are not alone. This so-called ‘industry’ is just one example of the unprincipled way in which numerous private sector outfits now operate. Effective action – not simply cosmetic – needs to be taken if the interests of ordinary people are to be brought back into the picture. Promises, half-baked gestures and procrastination by government until anger over the latest private sector failure or outrage subsides simply will not do.
‘Competition’ has come to mean competition for the extraction of huge profits by whatever means. These include orchestrated and unjustified price hikes, misusing the loyalty of long-standing customers, overcharging gullible governments and the use of complex charging schemes designed to confuse and exploit the public. Trumpeted ‘free market’ activity has become freebooting and corsair cartels have replaced public service.
Ministers in this rightist, ideologically driven government, not wanting to upset their important political donors, do as little as they think they can get away with (and then complain about ‘apathy’ and low turnouts in elections). Unmitigated ‘competition’, meaning little more these days than an economic free-for-all with endless degradation of working conditions, is well past its sell-by date.
Regulation by placemen and erstwhile associates always fails. But short of nationalisation there may be a way of making banks, fuel, power, water and other industries heed the public interest and behave with a measure of integrity and respect for the population. If each of these sectors had a publicly owned firm within it acting as an exemplar, treating people in a decent, honest and straightforward fashion rather than merely as profit fodder this would introduce a form of competition that could prove to be of some value to society as a whole. It would offer reassurance, security and fairness to ordinary people, presently suffering relentless abuse by commercial predators.
We are seeing some small and tentative steps in terms of municipal power generation and purchasing and I hope that this will not be prevented from gathering pace. And there are plenty of other opportunities such as the recreation of Municipal Banks – in so far as the Government would still allow fully-fledged Municipal Banks to operate in a meaningful way.
Once the success of these developments was demonstrated, we could then move on to other areas at a national level starting with the railways. In such ways buccaneer businesses would have to earn their booty and there could be a gradual move to substantial direct public sector involvement rather than nationalisation at a stroke and an end to the predations of the privateer sector.
Saturday 7 December 2013
Thursday 28 November 2013
Don’t give up on the Co-op!
…whatever you do - and do persevere with the use of other co-operatives, mutuals and non profit making organisations and continue to support mutuality for the services that you need. This is especially important at a time when a partisan government and other self-interested groups and individuals are throwing as much mud as they can find at anything that’s not motivated by private profit.
Yes, bad things have come to light, particularly at the top of the Co-op, and with disgraceful behaviour by an individual and management forgetting the principles that should be deeply embedded in mutuality. In some respects they showed a degree of recklessness and incompetence that many thought was the preserve of the commercial banks and the private sector organisations that have been awarded massive bailouts from the public purse and government contracts to deliver (or not) at whatever price and quality, services formerly provided by the public sector.
So where might this disappointing and uncharacteristic behaviour (in the Co-op bank particularly) have come from? Could it just possibly be copycat conduct or an infection caught from the casino bankers and their like in the profit making sector?
I refer to those who pay their chief executives scandalous amounts of money, those who have sought to drive small businesses to the wall to increase their own profits, those who have fiddled measures like the formerly internationally respected Libor rate and those who have ‘mis-sold’ ‘insurance’ to name but a few. This is where the real scandals lie and will continue to do so in one form or another.
The persistence of faith in these outfits by the London-based financial correspondents amazes me. Statements I’ve read recently included phrases such as ‘I’m shocked that XYZ bank seems to have learnt nothing…’ and ‘It beggars belief that XYZ bank has…’ Well, it doesn’t beggar belief any more than the discovery that the leopard’s spots are not superficial. Who could seriously have expected these morality-free characters to learn? If you are looking for world-class bad behaviour this is where to find it.
This rank dishonesty and anti-social conduct will carry on as long as cheats continue to be allowed to prosper and bankroll their favourite party in government.
Amongst many other things, what is needed is a return of respect for ordinary people, a sense of fairness and equity and more self confidence in ‘the mutual way’. There would be a real social dividend here – which brings me back to the co-op from which I have just returned with the shopping. Hope to see you there!
Yes, bad things have come to light, particularly at the top of the Co-op, and with disgraceful behaviour by an individual and management forgetting the principles that should be deeply embedded in mutuality. In some respects they showed a degree of recklessness and incompetence that many thought was the preserve of the commercial banks and the private sector organisations that have been awarded massive bailouts from the public purse and government contracts to deliver (or not) at whatever price and quality, services formerly provided by the public sector.
So where might this disappointing and uncharacteristic behaviour (in the Co-op bank particularly) have come from? Could it just possibly be copycat conduct or an infection caught from the casino bankers and their like in the profit making sector?
I refer to those who pay their chief executives scandalous amounts of money, those who have sought to drive small businesses to the wall to increase their own profits, those who have fiddled measures like the formerly internationally respected Libor rate and those who have ‘mis-sold’ ‘insurance’ to name but a few. This is where the real scandals lie and will continue to do so in one form or another.
The persistence of faith in these outfits by the London-based financial correspondents amazes me. Statements I’ve read recently included phrases such as ‘I’m shocked that XYZ bank seems to have learnt nothing…’ and ‘It beggars belief that XYZ bank has…’ Well, it doesn’t beggar belief any more than the discovery that the leopard’s spots are not superficial. Who could seriously have expected these morality-free characters to learn? If you are looking for world-class bad behaviour this is where to find it.
This rank dishonesty and anti-social conduct will carry on as long as cheats continue to be allowed to prosper and bankroll their favourite party in government.
Amongst many other things, what is needed is a return of respect for ordinary people, a sense of fairness and equity and more self confidence in ‘the mutual way’. There would be a real social dividend here – which brings me back to the co-op from which I have just returned with the shopping. Hope to see you there!
Thursday 21 November 2013
Hinterland
Possibly the title of a forthcoming post-apocalyptic film? No, but certainly getting there in terms of austerity, inequality, and a thoroughly disdainful backdrop. Rather, the hinterland I have in mind refers to the centrally neglected, indeed despised, greater part of England outside of London and the South East.
As far as governments are concerned, the majority of England is merely a remainder - the capital’s hinterland – an attitude that the ‘national’ press adopts too. Yet this hinterland is the land in which we live and which for centuries was the basis of the nation’s wealth until its assets were sold off, squandered and jobs and livelihoods discarded by corporate nest-featherers and the politicians that they finance. Still, we do have the London banks.
I use the word ‘despised’ not simply to describe the malevolent attitude of the overwhelmingly right wing press in London, appallingly lazy and ignorant though that is, but also to the attitude exemplified by a typical Westminster type with a ‘nimby’ opposition to the high speed rail project who recently said ‘Who wants to go to Birmingham anyway?’
In fact I can think of few better destinations but many better, quicker and more productive ways than HS2 to invest £40 – 80 billion of national resources and get some proper connectedness too. But if the HS2 project doesn’t go ahead you can be sure of one thing - there will be little or nothing invested in transportation infrastructure outside of the southeast. And it wouldn’t matter how angry you got about the misallocation of national resources.
Ours is just about the most over-centralised country among western democracies with local government diminished and downgraded and, despite a highly productive municipal history, held in a ruthless vice and treated with the same contempt as the cities, towns and areas that they represent.
And quite soon London, not content to be part of the .uk internet domain will be getting its own .London domain. There are times when I think that London should be separated out from the rest of the United Kingdom or even leave it altogether and allow the rest of us to focus our own resources and energies on the development, culture and common good of our own regions. Make it Mercia mark two – not to mention Northumberland!
Unrealistic no doubt, but this release of identity has happened elsewhere. Consider the ‘velvet divorce’ of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. And in terms of an over-blown metropolis, the city-state of Singapore used to be part of Malaysia until it went its own way. And Hong Kong remains at least a semi-detached part of China and of course there are many classical and medieval examples of city-states. Perhaps its time to revisit these structures and put behind us the humiliations of the hinterland.
As far as governments are concerned, the majority of England is merely a remainder - the capital’s hinterland – an attitude that the ‘national’ press adopts too. Yet this hinterland is the land in which we live and which for centuries was the basis of the nation’s wealth until its assets were sold off, squandered and jobs and livelihoods discarded by corporate nest-featherers and the politicians that they finance. Still, we do have the London banks.
I use the word ‘despised’ not simply to describe the malevolent attitude of the overwhelmingly right wing press in London, appallingly lazy and ignorant though that is, but also to the attitude exemplified by a typical Westminster type with a ‘nimby’ opposition to the high speed rail project who recently said ‘Who wants to go to Birmingham anyway?’
In fact I can think of few better destinations but many better, quicker and more productive ways than HS2 to invest £40 – 80 billion of national resources and get some proper connectedness too. But if the HS2 project doesn’t go ahead you can be sure of one thing - there will be little or nothing invested in transportation infrastructure outside of the southeast. And it wouldn’t matter how angry you got about the misallocation of national resources.
Ours is just about the most over-centralised country among western democracies with local government diminished and downgraded and, despite a highly productive municipal history, held in a ruthless vice and treated with the same contempt as the cities, towns and areas that they represent.
And quite soon London, not content to be part of the .uk internet domain will be getting its own .London domain. There are times when I think that London should be separated out from the rest of the United Kingdom or even leave it altogether and allow the rest of us to focus our own resources and energies on the development, culture and common good of our own regions. Make it Mercia mark two – not to mention Northumberland!
Unrealistic no doubt, but this release of identity has happened elsewhere. Consider the ‘velvet divorce’ of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. And in terms of an over-blown metropolis, the city-state of Singapore used to be part of Malaysia until it went its own way. And Hong Kong remains at least a semi-detached part of China and of course there are many classical and medieval examples of city-states. Perhaps its time to revisit these structures and put behind us the humiliations of the hinterland.
Saturday 16 November 2013
Kleptonomics
It’s high time that we expanded our economic and managerial vocabulary to describe the way that big business and grossly overpaid executives profit in unlimited and immoral ways at the expense of ordinary citizens. Perhaps the following suggestions have already been put forward, but I think that we should definitely add the terms Kleptonomics, Kleptonomy and Kleptopoly to describe the way that capitalism operates in this country today.
And time to retire Adam Smith too – well past his use-by date. We’ve heard more than enough about what wonderful and faultless things markets and self-interest are. The only ‘invisible hand’ that most people are aware of is the malign one from our beloved privatised utilities, banks and the likes lightening our purses and wallets year in and year out. And, no surprise here, the beneficiary of self interest is a few wealthy selves with a few crumbs dropping off the table to pay those whose labour is used to produce the gain.
We read about economics syllabi slowly being reformed to recognise that markets are not perfect and expectations are not rational. The purveyors of theories that have preached Kleptonomy and pushed globalisation have almost as much explaining to do as the fat cats that have profited from it.
The refrain ‘Got to pick a pocket or two’ should no longer be attached to the reluctant and impoverished urchins of Bill Sykes but to the rapacious executives, hedge funds and major shareholders of the robber baron corporations who now dominate our lives.
They fulfil the definition of kleptomania – they cannot or will not control their desire to take things from other people. Money of course – we see that on a vast scale in so many services that used to be run fairly and in many lesser things such as reduced sizes, reduced quality, no spare wheel on cars etc. And also of course jobs, destroyed or exported under the globalisation frenzy with the pretext that ‘they’re all doing it’.
And so they are, as the copycat wheeze towards gargantuan profits spreads like a virulent disease through the corporate system with the chill being felt by the powerless majority. As does the taking from societies in which they operate through contriving to pay practically nothing in tax while benefiting from a workforce educated at public expense, a road system, the NHS (though the corporate execs will dodge the queue and go private), defence and everything else that is publicly funded including intellectual property legislation.
Having seemingly captured most of the political elite in this country mainly due to unreformed funding of political parties, these corporations, many having been passed over into foreign ownership, are pretty much free to extract as much lucre from the general population as they like with government leaders merely expressing ‘disappointment’.
Then these outfits such as energy suppliers have the brass neck to ‘explain’ the price hikes and profiteering to shivering consumers. Still, the government tells us we can keep on switching amongst the Kleptopolists as if they were different from each other. But I fear the switch that will be used most this winter is the ‘off’ switch for heating in low-income households.
The very same governments refuse to reform political funding and leave tax loopholes unplugged, deliberately I would argue to attract more tax-dodging companies, while merely getting in the odd ‘disappointed’ sound-bite and hoping that the fuss will blow over yet again. Well it won’t, not this time.
And time to retire Adam Smith too – well past his use-by date. We’ve heard more than enough about what wonderful and faultless things markets and self-interest are. The only ‘invisible hand’ that most people are aware of is the malign one from our beloved privatised utilities, banks and the likes lightening our purses and wallets year in and year out. And, no surprise here, the beneficiary of self interest is a few wealthy selves with a few crumbs dropping off the table to pay those whose labour is used to produce the gain.
We read about economics syllabi slowly being reformed to recognise that markets are not perfect and expectations are not rational. The purveyors of theories that have preached Kleptonomy and pushed globalisation have almost as much explaining to do as the fat cats that have profited from it.
The refrain ‘Got to pick a pocket or two’ should no longer be attached to the reluctant and impoverished urchins of Bill Sykes but to the rapacious executives, hedge funds and major shareholders of the robber baron corporations who now dominate our lives.
They fulfil the definition of kleptomania – they cannot or will not control their desire to take things from other people. Money of course – we see that on a vast scale in so many services that used to be run fairly and in many lesser things such as reduced sizes, reduced quality, no spare wheel on cars etc. And also of course jobs, destroyed or exported under the globalisation frenzy with the pretext that ‘they’re all doing it’.
And so they are, as the copycat wheeze towards gargantuan profits spreads like a virulent disease through the corporate system with the chill being felt by the powerless majority. As does the taking from societies in which they operate through contriving to pay practically nothing in tax while benefiting from a workforce educated at public expense, a road system, the NHS (though the corporate execs will dodge the queue and go private), defence and everything else that is publicly funded including intellectual property legislation.
Having seemingly captured most of the political elite in this country mainly due to unreformed funding of political parties, these corporations, many having been passed over into foreign ownership, are pretty much free to extract as much lucre from the general population as they like with government leaders merely expressing ‘disappointment’.
Then these outfits such as energy suppliers have the brass neck to ‘explain’ the price hikes and profiteering to shivering consumers. Still, the government tells us we can keep on switching amongst the Kleptopolists as if they were different from each other. But I fear the switch that will be used most this winter is the ‘off’ switch for heating in low-income households.
The very same governments refuse to reform political funding and leave tax loopholes unplugged, deliberately I would argue to attract more tax-dodging companies, while merely getting in the odd ‘disappointed’ sound-bite and hoping that the fuss will blow over yet again. Well it won’t, not this time.
Sunday 10 November 2013
The Lunar Men
The performance took as its theme the post-dinner deliberations of members of the Lunar Society in 1780 meeting in Matthew Boulton’s house in Birmingham when this great city was at the forefront of the industrial revolution.
All the characters were in period costume and there were extensive props on stage (including a working Van de Graaff generator - perhaps this was a very early prototype!).
Most of the performance consisted of considerable speeches by Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley, Josiah Wedgwood, James Watt and Matthew Boulton explaining with great enthusiasm their work and ideas.
There was a well-produced and informative parallel Keynote presentation alongside the performance with text, images and animations to add to what was said by the main characters. The group may reprise the playlet for a wider audience (including historical societies) and our present Lunar Society in the New Year. Well worth attending if you get the chance.
Wednesday 6 November 2013
Keeping Warm in a Cold Climate
I’m not just referring to the weather here. Some years ago when I was very active in the local community I produced and distributed to those who might need it a leaflet about keeping warm in winter. I stopped doing this a decade ago as there no longer seemed to be the same level of concern and it could be seen as patronising - although I’d put up with being charged with this if even a few vulnerable people were helped.
How times have changed! Here we are again - and almost certainly worse - with austerity imposed on those who can least afford it, rapacious privatised fuel and energy companies and a robber baron corporate culture.
These cold-hearted graspers will make people suffer if they know they can get away with it and it leads to yet more profit for themselves. This added to the couldn’t care less government indifference and cuts such as in winter fuel payments. So much for the common good.
So if you know of an elderly or disadvantaged person who is struggling because of all this, there may be one or two tips here from the last century that might still make a bit of a difference.
Help to keep the rooms that you use warm by ensuring that doors, windows and letterboxes are closed.
Drawing the curtains earlier cuts down the warmth escaping through windows.
Well-lined curtains and draught excluders can be effective.
Hang a thick curtain over the front door. This keeps the hall warmer.
Draw the upstairs curtains too – and close the doors there as well to stop draughts from coming down the stairs.
Wear woollens as much as you can – and you can keep them on in bed if you need to! And if you can afford it, thermal underwear is very warming too.
To save heat and keep it circulating, don’t let curtains cover radiators or have furniture in front of radiators.
If your bathroom is cold, wash quickly, keeping warm is more important.
Several layers of light clothing are better than one heavy layer. They keep you warmer and are better for circulation. Make sure the top layer is waterproof if you’re going out.
If you do get wet, change to dry clothes as soon as you get home.
When it’s windy, the cold is more penetrating – so wrap up extra well.
If you can afford it, warm the bedroom for at least an hour before you go to bed.
Spare blankets will help keep you warm when you’re sleeping.
An electric blanket helps if you have one. An over-blanket that can be kept on all night is not as expensive to run.
Use hot water bottles in a cover. Make sure they’re not perished and for safety don’t use a hot water bottle as well as an electric blanket.
Have a dressing gown ready to put on as soon as you get out of bed.
Wear a woolly hat in bed. A lot of heat is lost through the top of your head. Bed socks can help too.
Your bed is a warm place that you could use in the day if you need to.
Put your bed or chair on an inside wall in your room - rather than near to a window or outside wall.
Eat as well as you can afford to. Your body is a good heater if you eat what you need. Eat more often in winter even if you have a bit less each meal.
If you don’t feel like eating, why not have a warm milk drink instead?
Have at least one hot meal a day. If you fancy a snack, consider hot soup as well if you can afford it. Baked potatoes are warming, nourishing and good value.
Stock up with soup just in case the weather turns nasty. Eggs, milk drinks, hot cereal - or the good old traditional fry-up. All these are all good for energy and warmth.
If a power cut seems possible, you could keep a flask of hot soup or Bovril ready - but don’t forget to drink it anyway – on the same day.
Don’t drink alcohol when you are cold. It might feel warming, but it makes your skin even colder.
Keep active. This can be just walking around the room, rubbing your hands together or stamping your feet. This will keep you warmer and also helps with your circulation.
Always keep one room warm. If it’s very cold, you could use that room in the day and sleep there at night.
Don’t leave heating on too long in a room you aren’t using. The cost reduction could help you to keep other rooms warmer.
If you’ve an eiderdown, put it next to the top sheet then the blanket on top to keep the warmth next to you. Fleecy under-blankets are good too.
For safety’s sake, don’t have fires or heaters close to the bed and, if you still smoke, for safety’s sake don’t do so in bed.
A screen round the back of chairs can help to keep the warmth in.
Small shelves just above radiators will deflect warm air into the room.
Kitchen foil fitted just above radiators on outside walls helps to keep the heat in. Have the shiny side facing into the room.
A foil lining on the back of any cupboards on outside walls can help too. Your loft insulation should be four inches thick.
Switch off your TV before you go to bed. Leaving the set on ‘standby’ wastes electricity.
Halls are less draughty if you fit a letterbox flap or even a keyhole cover!
Only boil as much water as you need. Now could be a good time for a nice cup of tea!
Remember the warmth that friendship brings. Keep in touch with your neighbours, friends and relatives. See someone regularly.
Don’t forget that your doctor is there to help you and don’t be afraid to use 999 if you need help quickly.
How times have changed! Here we are again - and almost certainly worse - with austerity imposed on those who can least afford it, rapacious privatised fuel and energy companies and a robber baron corporate culture.
These cold-hearted graspers will make people suffer if they know they can get away with it and it leads to yet more profit for themselves. This added to the couldn’t care less government indifference and cuts such as in winter fuel payments. So much for the common good.
So if you know of an elderly or disadvantaged person who is struggling because of all this, there may be one or two tips here from the last century that might still make a bit of a difference.
Help to keep the rooms that you use warm by ensuring that doors, windows and letterboxes are closed.
Drawing the curtains earlier cuts down the warmth escaping through windows.
Well-lined curtains and draught excluders can be effective.
Hang a thick curtain over the front door. This keeps the hall warmer.
Draw the upstairs curtains too – and close the doors there as well to stop draughts from coming down the stairs.
Wear woollens as much as you can – and you can keep them on in bed if you need to! And if you can afford it, thermal underwear is very warming too.
To save heat and keep it circulating, don’t let curtains cover radiators or have furniture in front of radiators.
If your bathroom is cold, wash quickly, keeping warm is more important.
Several layers of light clothing are better than one heavy layer. They keep you warmer and are better for circulation. Make sure the top layer is waterproof if you’re going out.
If you do get wet, change to dry clothes as soon as you get home.
When it’s windy, the cold is more penetrating – so wrap up extra well.
If you can afford it, warm the bedroom for at least an hour before you go to bed.
Spare blankets will help keep you warm when you’re sleeping.
An electric blanket helps if you have one. An over-blanket that can be kept on all night is not as expensive to run.
Use hot water bottles in a cover. Make sure they’re not perished and for safety don’t use a hot water bottle as well as an electric blanket.
Have a dressing gown ready to put on as soon as you get out of bed.
Wear a woolly hat in bed. A lot of heat is lost through the top of your head. Bed socks can help too.
Your bed is a warm place that you could use in the day if you need to.
Put your bed or chair on an inside wall in your room - rather than near to a window or outside wall.
Eat as well as you can afford to. Your body is a good heater if you eat what you need. Eat more often in winter even if you have a bit less each meal.
If you don’t feel like eating, why not have a warm milk drink instead?
Have at least one hot meal a day. If you fancy a snack, consider hot soup as well if you can afford it. Baked potatoes are warming, nourishing and good value.
Stock up with soup just in case the weather turns nasty. Eggs, milk drinks, hot cereal - or the good old traditional fry-up. All these are all good for energy and warmth.
If a power cut seems possible, you could keep a flask of hot soup or Bovril ready - but don’t forget to drink it anyway – on the same day.
Don’t drink alcohol when you are cold. It might feel warming, but it makes your skin even colder.
Keep active. This can be just walking around the room, rubbing your hands together or stamping your feet. This will keep you warmer and also helps with your circulation.
Always keep one room warm. If it’s very cold, you could use that room in the day and sleep there at night.
Don’t leave heating on too long in a room you aren’t using. The cost reduction could help you to keep other rooms warmer.
If you’ve an eiderdown, put it next to the top sheet then the blanket on top to keep the warmth next to you. Fleecy under-blankets are good too.
For safety’s sake, don’t have fires or heaters close to the bed and, if you still smoke, for safety’s sake don’t do so in bed.
A screen round the back of chairs can help to keep the warmth in.
Small shelves just above radiators will deflect warm air into the room.
Kitchen foil fitted just above radiators on outside walls helps to keep the heat in. Have the shiny side facing into the room.
A foil lining on the back of any cupboards on outside walls can help too. Your loft insulation should be four inches thick.
Switch off your TV before you go to bed. Leaving the set on ‘standby’ wastes electricity.
Halls are less draughty if you fit a letterbox flap or even a keyhole cover!
Only boil as much water as you need. Now could be a good time for a nice cup of tea!
Remember the warmth that friendship brings. Keep in touch with your neighbours, friends and relatives. See someone regularly.
Don’t forget that your doctor is there to help you and don’t be afraid to use 999 if you need help quickly.
Saturday 2 November 2013
Return of the Dark Side
In the title of this posting I’m not referring to the government’s views on social policy, surveillance or how to manage the economy nor the coming of Darth Vader (although I sense a connection here). No, this is my annual rant – or rather considered argument - on the question of British Summer Time (BST) ending and Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) beginning.
The clocks have been put back and each year the end of October marks the transition to the ‘dark nights’. This is always somewhat depressing and is a change that is unwanted by 70% of the population who have long been opposed to being plunged into dark evenings. Nationwide, there’s a large majority for the retention of BST for the whole year.
In my personal opinion we should go further and have the clocks set two hours rather than one hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time in the summer and one hour ahead of GMT in the winter months. Furthermore, the changes should be made on the first Sunday in November and the first Sunday in March so shaving a month off the then not quite so dark nights.
It is an established fact that simply keeping BST all year would save lives in traffic accidents – estimated as 80 lives currently lost due to the darker evenings. Gloomier mornings are not so bad as drivers are fresh. Lighter evenings would also be better for sport and outdoor activities in general.
Retaining summer time would also reduce the prevalence of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) as people, on the whole, would experience significantly more daylight. And, as is also well known, it would save energy too. Anything we can do to stop as much money as possible going to the fuel and power cartel must have serious merit.
So why isn’t the apparently good idea of keeping BST throughout the year brought in? It is reported that some people in very high places don’t like getting up in the dark, but I find it hard to take this seriously. Our farmers may grumble - and indeed they’ve much to complain about as undervalued contributors to the productive part of our economy - but I imagine that livestock go by other perceptions of time rather than how we choose to set the nominal dials on our timepieces.
In England there is even stronger support (three out of four people) for keeping British Summer Time for the whole year, a fact confirmed by surveys year after year. But I understand that Scotland wants to keep the present system of reverting to GMT in the winter months so that is apparently that. In my view Scotland should be allowed to determine its own clock settings, going their own way in this regard as in other matters, and we can have EST.
All in all we do need more illumination in our daily lives - not to mention in our national affairs - and I suspect few people would disagree with that! But there’s little chance that the Government will see the light anytime soon – at least you can’t fault them for consistency. So, unlike the clocks, no change there then!
The clocks have been put back and each year the end of October marks the transition to the ‘dark nights’. This is always somewhat depressing and is a change that is unwanted by 70% of the population who have long been opposed to being plunged into dark evenings. Nationwide, there’s a large majority for the retention of BST for the whole year.
In my personal opinion we should go further and have the clocks set two hours rather than one hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time in the summer and one hour ahead of GMT in the winter months. Furthermore, the changes should be made on the first Sunday in November and the first Sunday in March so shaving a month off the then not quite so dark nights.
It is an established fact that simply keeping BST all year would save lives in traffic accidents – estimated as 80 lives currently lost due to the darker evenings. Gloomier mornings are not so bad as drivers are fresh. Lighter evenings would also be better for sport and outdoor activities in general.
Retaining summer time would also reduce the prevalence of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) as people, on the whole, would experience significantly more daylight. And, as is also well known, it would save energy too. Anything we can do to stop as much money as possible going to the fuel and power cartel must have serious merit.
So why isn’t the apparently good idea of keeping BST throughout the year brought in? It is reported that some people in very high places don’t like getting up in the dark, but I find it hard to take this seriously. Our farmers may grumble - and indeed they’ve much to complain about as undervalued contributors to the productive part of our economy - but I imagine that livestock go by other perceptions of time rather than how we choose to set the nominal dials on our timepieces.
In England there is even stronger support (three out of four people) for keeping British Summer Time for the whole year, a fact confirmed by surveys year after year. But I understand that Scotland wants to keep the present system of reverting to GMT in the winter months so that is apparently that. In my view Scotland should be allowed to determine its own clock settings, going their own way in this regard as in other matters, and we can have EST.
All in all we do need more illumination in our daily lives - not to mention in our national affairs - and I suspect few people would disagree with that! But there’s little chance that the Government will see the light anytime soon – at least you can’t fault them for consistency. So, unlike the clocks, no change there then!
Wednesday 30 October 2013
Keeping the fires burning
The major energy suppliers are getting the very bad press they thoroughly deserve and are being shouted at by mid-level politicians, although Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne are merely ‘disappointed’ at the latest round of the year after year across the board unwarranted price hikes. Jacked up prices that are deliberately made to extract even more profit from ordinary consumers, much of the lucre avoiding tax and going overseas, and which make it impossible for many people to keep their heating on and the home fires burning.
But why on earth would Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne be ‘disappointed’? What other sort of behaviour did they expect from these captains of industry (captains in the sense of Costa Concordia that is) – kindness of heart and concern for the common good?
Perhaps the kind of ‘free market’ fundamentalist economics books that the PM and the Chancellor have evidently skimmed don’t choose to cover the subject of oligopoly – an ugly word to cover an ugly situation where an industry is dominated by a few large firms.
One step down from pure monopoly, oligopolies come very close to the rank exploitative behaviour of an untrammelled private monopolist by behaving as a cartel. A cartel is where a market is rigged either through profit sharing (very rare) or price fixing (very common, as we know to our cost).
There doesn’t need to be a written agreement – in fact this is one of the few anti-social corporate behaviours that are actually illegal. But who needs to write it down? It’s so simple and a nod is as good as a wink. It’s as plain as a pikestaff. They all ratchet up prices by similar percentages without justification and take it in turns to go first.
I’d love to know if GCHQ has been monitoring the phones of the chief executives or finance officers of fuel and power companies and if so why they’ve done nothing to protect people from this evident threat. And I wonder if these executives are members of the same clubs or play on the same golf courses. These appalling excuses for companies then have the nerve to write obsequious letters to consumers to ‘explain’ the price ‘changes’. Their lack of morality is as bad as the banks and they deserve to be held in the same public contempt.
All of this is obvious to anyone outside government and there’s something else that is obvious too but which is rarely mentioned – privatisation is a catastrophic flop, is against the public interest and should be put into reverse. I hope that some of the MPs who are shouting will have the courage to draw this obvious conclusion and press for public companies in the public interest. But I doubt that many will. Perhaps some of them are more angry at their re-election chances being ruined than at hard pressed consumers being ruined or passing away with hypothermia.
But there are signs at last that the opposition (and even some figures from within government parties) is finding its courage. Let’s hope this is a trend that gathers pace and brings initial positive results before the depths of winter. The power companies hope that the sound and fury will die down, but these are fires that also need to be kept burning.
But why on earth would Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne be ‘disappointed’? What other sort of behaviour did they expect from these captains of industry (captains in the sense of Costa Concordia that is) – kindness of heart and concern for the common good?
Perhaps the kind of ‘free market’ fundamentalist economics books that the PM and the Chancellor have evidently skimmed don’t choose to cover the subject of oligopoly – an ugly word to cover an ugly situation where an industry is dominated by a few large firms.
One step down from pure monopoly, oligopolies come very close to the rank exploitative behaviour of an untrammelled private monopolist by behaving as a cartel. A cartel is where a market is rigged either through profit sharing (very rare) or price fixing (very common, as we know to our cost).
There doesn’t need to be a written agreement – in fact this is one of the few anti-social corporate behaviours that are actually illegal. But who needs to write it down? It’s so simple and a nod is as good as a wink. It’s as plain as a pikestaff. They all ratchet up prices by similar percentages without justification and take it in turns to go first.
I’d love to know if GCHQ has been monitoring the phones of the chief executives or finance officers of fuel and power companies and if so why they’ve done nothing to protect people from this evident threat. And I wonder if these executives are members of the same clubs or play on the same golf courses. These appalling excuses for companies then have the nerve to write obsequious letters to consumers to ‘explain’ the price ‘changes’. Their lack of morality is as bad as the banks and they deserve to be held in the same public contempt.
All of this is obvious to anyone outside government and there’s something else that is obvious too but which is rarely mentioned – privatisation is a catastrophic flop, is against the public interest and should be put into reverse. I hope that some of the MPs who are shouting will have the courage to draw this obvious conclusion and press for public companies in the public interest. But I doubt that many will. Perhaps some of them are more angry at their re-election chances being ruined than at hard pressed consumers being ruined or passing away with hypothermia.
But there are signs at last that the opposition (and even some figures from within government parties) is finding its courage. Let’s hope this is a trend that gathers pace and brings initial positive results before the depths of winter. The power companies hope that the sound and fury will die down, but these are fires that also need to be kept burning.
Tuesday 29 October 2013
The Sky at Night
If you signed the petition, thank you and well done. From February 2014 the programme will be broadcast in a new monthly half hour slot on BBC 4 with repeats on BBC 2.
This is a great result and it’s very encouraging to see a national organisation responding positively to a widely supported public campaign. Let’s give the Beeb our support too as it continues to come under partisan political threat.
Wednesday 23 October 2013
Capital Economics (Part 3)
Money is the root of all evil, so the saying goes. Though I don’t use the word ‘evil’ myself due to its superstitious associations, the saying does have a ring to it and conveys a useful message about capital-ism in this country today.
Whether it’s the overblown share of the economy held by casino bankers and acolyte ‘services’, the foreign money poured in by speculators to London property, the corporate profits funnelled through tax havens, the spurious loans at exorbitant rates from foreign branches to make profits look less here, the all-too-real loans at exorbitant rates extorted by usurers from desperate people, the rise of the pawnbroker and the unredeemed and sickening excesses of profligate executive pay, the bonus culture, the evisceration of industry and jobs in pursuit of profit, tax cuts for the rich and penury for the poor, the cartelisation of utilities, the privatisation of profits and the nationalisation of debt, the flogging off of the last of the national silver at knock down prices, and so it goes on.
You’ll get my drift, and you can add many further examples no doubt. All of this permitted, protected, encouraged or implemented by the government in the capital.
And I’d also like to single out the lure of lucre that has pulled so many talented young people, faced with the threat of debt, away from useful careers such as in real engineering into crash and burn financial engineering.
With the export of jobs and the abandonment of real apprenticeships we have lost so many skills at a workshop level and we seem also to have lost not only the ability but also the desire to do big engineering for ourselves. So without a care for consistency the government brings in foreign publicly owned companies at breathtaking prices to build, manage and finance nuclear power stations. The French and the Chinese will be laughing all the way to their own banks having secured a huge base price and incredible index linking for 35 years!
And the mayor of the capital saw nothing ironic in the proposal by a Chinese group to reconstruct the Crystal Palace, the original of which showed to all the world the power and scale of our industry and engineering in an age when these things were valued.
Oh, but aren’t I forgetting about HS2? Certainly I’d like to forget vanity projects with incredible projections when the colossal sums involved (one of the few credible projections) could be invested in really productive transport and industrial projects. Still at least the government won’t have to invest public money in the Co-operative bank now that it will be falling into the no doubt benign and ethical control of American hedge funds.
So what’s good about capital-ism in this country today? Good question! Answers on-line please (whoops, forgot about the tax dodging).
Whether it’s the overblown share of the economy held by casino bankers and acolyte ‘services’, the foreign money poured in by speculators to London property, the corporate profits funnelled through tax havens, the spurious loans at exorbitant rates from foreign branches to make profits look less here, the all-too-real loans at exorbitant rates extorted by usurers from desperate people, the rise of the pawnbroker and the unredeemed and sickening excesses of profligate executive pay, the bonus culture, the evisceration of industry and jobs in pursuit of profit, tax cuts for the rich and penury for the poor, the cartelisation of utilities, the privatisation of profits and the nationalisation of debt, the flogging off of the last of the national silver at knock down prices, and so it goes on.
You’ll get my drift, and you can add many further examples no doubt. All of this permitted, protected, encouraged or implemented by the government in the capital.
And I’d also like to single out the lure of lucre that has pulled so many talented young people, faced with the threat of debt, away from useful careers such as in real engineering into crash and burn financial engineering.
With the export of jobs and the abandonment of real apprenticeships we have lost so many skills at a workshop level and we seem also to have lost not only the ability but also the desire to do big engineering for ourselves. So without a care for consistency the government brings in foreign publicly owned companies at breathtaking prices to build, manage and finance nuclear power stations. The French and the Chinese will be laughing all the way to their own banks having secured a huge base price and incredible index linking for 35 years!
And the mayor of the capital saw nothing ironic in the proposal by a Chinese group to reconstruct the Crystal Palace, the original of which showed to all the world the power and scale of our industry and engineering in an age when these things were valued.
Oh, but aren’t I forgetting about HS2? Certainly I’d like to forget vanity projects with incredible projections when the colossal sums involved (one of the few credible projections) could be invested in really productive transport and industrial projects. Still at least the government won’t have to invest public money in the Co-operative bank now that it will be falling into the no doubt benign and ethical control of American hedge funds.
So what’s good about capital-ism in this country today? Good question! Answers on-line please (whoops, forgot about the tax dodging).
Saturday 12 October 2013
Capital Economics (Part 2)
Amidst the government cuts and pressures on the National Health Service and the even deeper cuts that are eviscerating local government there seemed to be an encouraging moment recently when it was announced that Mr Osborne was fighting for something!
But wait – it was to protect bankers’ bonuses against the predations of those dastardly Europeans. I suppose that at least this has an awful consistency with the equally determined fight against a financial transactions tax that would have taken some of the casino out of capitalism and helped to pay down the debt by less punitive and partisan means.
But more importantly for ministers, along with any bonus reductions it would also have taken out some of the major financial contributions to conservative party coffers. Could there be a connection here? If ever a case was being made for reform of political party funding it is here. But are we likely to see it? Which will come first, putting country before party or a signal from extraterrestials? My money’s on ET!
Still on the fantasy front we come to HS2. What a colossal expenditure for so modest a gain. An acquaintance who was a senior executive in the rail transport field told me that the claims for jobs generated were totally incredible. What would all those people be doing? There are many regional rail transport improvement schemes (including at least two in Birmingham) that would make a huge and very real difference to local economies cut down on traffic pollution and reduce commuting times for many more people.
And finally in this second of three related pieces I note the excellent performance of the one rail franchise in public ownership. This was taken back after the private operator gave up, having failed to make a go of it. The result? Substantial profit to the public purse and highly satisfied passengers. The government view? Needs to be re-privatised as soon as possible!
When practical experience and good sense conflict with right wing doctrine, guess which prevails. It doesn’t matter what the public sector does; it will never be good enough. Such are the irrational strictures of capital economics.
But wait – it was to protect bankers’ bonuses against the predations of those dastardly Europeans. I suppose that at least this has an awful consistency with the equally determined fight against a financial transactions tax that would have taken some of the casino out of capitalism and helped to pay down the debt by less punitive and partisan means.
But more importantly for ministers, along with any bonus reductions it would also have taken out some of the major financial contributions to conservative party coffers. Could there be a connection here? If ever a case was being made for reform of political party funding it is here. But are we likely to see it? Which will come first, putting country before party or a signal from extraterrestials? My money’s on ET!
Still on the fantasy front we come to HS2. What a colossal expenditure for so modest a gain. An acquaintance who was a senior executive in the rail transport field told me that the claims for jobs generated were totally incredible. What would all those people be doing? There are many regional rail transport improvement schemes (including at least two in Birmingham) that would make a huge and very real difference to local economies cut down on traffic pollution and reduce commuting times for many more people.
And finally in this second of three related pieces I note the excellent performance of the one rail franchise in public ownership. This was taken back after the private operator gave up, having failed to make a go of it. The result? Substantial profit to the public purse and highly satisfied passengers. The government view? Needs to be re-privatised as soon as possible!
When practical experience and good sense conflict with right wing doctrine, guess which prevails. It doesn’t matter what the public sector does; it will never be good enough. Such are the irrational strictures of capital economics.
Wednesday 9 October 2013
Capital Economics (Part 1)
Ministerial pronouncements in the last week or two have made it doubly clear that even if the government does not exactly live on another planet then it certainly lives in a different land – Londonland – to the rest of the country.
Mr Osborne’s boasts about GDP getting up off the floor at long last, government policy notwithstanding, have no real substance.
And that is precisely the worry about GDP itself with declining living standards for all but the rich and worse working conditions – ditto. Growth itself puffs up on the back of consumer spending (much of it on imports) and the start of a housing boom, mostly in London timed, I imagine, to last around two years to the other side of the general election. Where have we seen this before?
We already knew that Business investment was down and we now learn that industrial production also fell in August with the biggest decline for nearly a year. Industrial output fell by over 1%. The major factor in this decline was a substantial fall in manufacturing output, 1.2% down on July - the biggest fall since September last year.
So do we have a re-balanced economy and a broad-based, sustainable recovery? Not outside London and not outside the fantasy world of capital economics.
Mr Osborne’s boasts about GDP getting up off the floor at long last, government policy notwithstanding, have no real substance.
And that is precisely the worry about GDP itself with declining living standards for all but the rich and worse working conditions – ditto. Growth itself puffs up on the back of consumer spending (much of it on imports) and the start of a housing boom, mostly in London timed, I imagine, to last around two years to the other side of the general election. Where have we seen this before?
We already knew that Business investment was down and we now learn that industrial production also fell in August with the biggest decline for nearly a year. Industrial output fell by over 1%. The major factor in this decline was a substantial fall in manufacturing output, 1.2% down on July - the biggest fall since September last year.
So do we have a re-balanced economy and a broad-based, sustainable recovery? Not outside London and not outside the fantasy world of capital economics.
Friday 27 September 2013
The BBC and The Sky at Night
For all its travails and the political pressure it comes under there is nothing to match the BBC in the world of broadcasting and more widely the gathering and presentation of information in as near neutral way as is possible. True, there has been money wasted on executive pay-offs but the private sector ideologues are in top of the draw greenhouses throwing stones – except that they have the added luxury of having installed unbreakable glass.The BBC World Service is one of the few ways open to this country to project its influence in the world – a benign influence earned from impartial, complete and trustworthy information. But it too has faced narrow minded and ill-motivated cuts.
Many of the BBC’s self inflicted executive financial wounds stem from the dire culture of managerialism that was introduced under a government of similar ilk to the one we endure now. Hopefully, much of this worthless bossing around is now being reconsidered, with the savings invested in high quality programmes.
But the BBC is not perfect and it has made real blunders when it comes to Birmingham with the disinvestment in studios and programmes made here and the cancelling of Carl Chinn’s programme as examples.
Alas, the BBC is now on the verge of another programming miss-step by threatening to axe The Sky at Night. Few programmes would have survived the loss of an inspiring and dedicated presenter such as Patrick Moore but the new presenters have been doing very well in my view.
The BBC, as a public service broadcaster, has a remit to provide educational programming. It is on this basis that they collect the licence fee and no programme can claim to fill this remit more strongly than The Sky at Night. Many of today’s scientists and academics state that their enthusiasm for their subject was inspired by this programme and many more ‘armchair’ enthusiasts such as myself have gained much from it over half a century. What other programmes can boast that?
If you agree that The Sky at Night should be saved, please sign the petition at www.change.org
Saturday 14 September 2013
In Place of Greed
Some readers of this blog may recall an unsuccessful government policy that was attempted back in the 1960s called ‘In Place of Strife’. This was drawn up at a time when industrial relations and trades union activity in various forms were seen by some of the establishment as the major problems facing the economy.
In the 21st century of course the position is altogether different. Some of the principal issues facing ordinary people and which diminish the economic quality of life in this country and much of the western world are the damaging aspects of globalisation on domestic industry, the activities of disreputable banks and usurious money lenders, commercial avarice, exploitation of those with little power, corporate disloyalty to community and nation, deception of the consumer and gross and increasing inequality - to name but a few.
These are amongst the principal malfunctions of today’s discriminatory economic system, with rank greed and selfishness, particularly corporate, being at the root of most of the ills aided, abetted and frequently amplified by ideology driven government economic policies.
So it is that this country in particular, ever the zealot when it comes to capitalist ‘purity’, desperately needs a new economic and societal strategy, one that might well be entitled ‘In place of greed’, and one that is accompanied by essential reforms in the body politic.
Years of experience show that it is futile to tinker at the edges with ineffectual to non-existent ‘regulation’, messing about with money, fiscal or monetary, and ad hoc steps to remedy ‘market failure’. And to make matters worse the government always casts the solution in terms of ‘the market’ anyway.
By way of a computing analogy, when the operating system has reached a comparable point of dysfunctionality and instability, the very least that is needed is a system reboot. Better still would be the installation of a fundamentally different operating system – and I do not mean the typical, profit motivated cosmetic ‘sidegrade’. But what essential features would such a system have?
In the longer term, if we want to bring an end to needlessly harsh and counter productive austerity, exploitation, grossly unequal incomes and diminished national esteem, then I believe that policies such as those set out in earlier posts on this blog need to be implemented. These constructive changes would shape the development of a better and fairer future society. They are needed to enable the rebuilding of industry, national morale, and the personal and mutual respect and security that contribute to the Common Good.
Governments are often derided – quite understandably – but high quality and capable governance is in fact desperately needed, as is starkly evident almost every day. Positive engagement by government in implementing constructive policy is essential in aiding the achievement of widely supported goals. Government should set aside partisan doctrine, release itself from the nefarious influences providing its political funding and involve itself proactively in the process of building a wider and lasting prosperity.
The re-establishment of respect for ordinary citizens throughout commercial and institutional life is essential. This should be accompanied by a desire to seek the Common Good that should become second nature at both corporate and individual levels.
An economic system is not an independently existing abstract entity to be served and revered. Rather, the system should be at the service of society and it is what we choose to make it.
Furthermore, the Common Good can be enhanced with or without endless increases in the technical measurements of GDP - should we decide to do so. Perspectives can be changed, commerce can be reformed and productive industry can be re-established. Government can be engaged and publicly owned exemplar institutions with a genuine service ethos can be established.
Perseverance and patience would be required in good measure, but at least the journey this time would be towards the Common Good rather than away from it. The people deserve no less.
In the 21st century of course the position is altogether different. Some of the principal issues facing ordinary people and which diminish the economic quality of life in this country and much of the western world are the damaging aspects of globalisation on domestic industry, the activities of disreputable banks and usurious money lenders, commercial avarice, exploitation of those with little power, corporate disloyalty to community and nation, deception of the consumer and gross and increasing inequality - to name but a few.
These are amongst the principal malfunctions of today’s discriminatory economic system, with rank greed and selfishness, particularly corporate, being at the root of most of the ills aided, abetted and frequently amplified by ideology driven government economic policies.
So it is that this country in particular, ever the zealot when it comes to capitalist ‘purity’, desperately needs a new economic and societal strategy, one that might well be entitled ‘In place of greed’, and one that is accompanied by essential reforms in the body politic.
Years of experience show that it is futile to tinker at the edges with ineffectual to non-existent ‘regulation’, messing about with money, fiscal or monetary, and ad hoc steps to remedy ‘market failure’. And to make matters worse the government always casts the solution in terms of ‘the market’ anyway.
By way of a computing analogy, when the operating system has reached a comparable point of dysfunctionality and instability, the very least that is needed is a system reboot. Better still would be the installation of a fundamentally different operating system – and I do not mean the typical, profit motivated cosmetic ‘sidegrade’. But what essential features would such a system have?
In the longer term, if we want to bring an end to needlessly harsh and counter productive austerity, exploitation, grossly unequal incomes and diminished national esteem, then I believe that policies such as those set out in earlier posts on this blog need to be implemented. These constructive changes would shape the development of a better and fairer future society. They are needed to enable the rebuilding of industry, national morale, and the personal and mutual respect and security that contribute to the Common Good.
Governments are often derided – quite understandably – but high quality and capable governance is in fact desperately needed, as is starkly evident almost every day. Positive engagement by government in implementing constructive policy is essential in aiding the achievement of widely supported goals. Government should set aside partisan doctrine, release itself from the nefarious influences providing its political funding and involve itself proactively in the process of building a wider and lasting prosperity.
The re-establishment of respect for ordinary citizens throughout commercial and institutional life is essential. This should be accompanied by a desire to seek the Common Good that should become second nature at both corporate and individual levels.
An economic system is not an independently existing abstract entity to be served and revered. Rather, the system should be at the service of society and it is what we choose to make it.
Furthermore, the Common Good can be enhanced with or without endless increases in the technical measurements of GDP - should we decide to do so. Perspectives can be changed, commerce can be reformed and productive industry can be re-established. Government can be engaged and publicly owned exemplar institutions with a genuine service ethos can be established.
Perseverance and patience would be required in good measure, but at least the journey this time would be towards the Common Good rather than away from it. The people deserve no less.
Wednesday 11 September 2013
Very Expensive Credit
We hear much about the corporate usurers still being allowed to issue payday loans at unbelievable interest rates and we have also heard much of late from George Osborne about how he deserves the credit for the recent economic uptick. Very expensive credit if you ask me. Utterly unbelievable – and grossly unfair to boot!
This is because a couple of months ago I stood on my head in the corner and said ‘gobbledegook’ three times and that’s obviously what caused the economic improvement! The two things have clearly gone together and if Mr O hadn’t messed things up with his wretched austerity policy, I’m sure that my ‘topsy-turvy gobbledegook’ method would have produced even better growth!
I would agree with Mr Osborne on one thing if no other - that the debate on whether his policy works or not is settled. In fact it was settled at the outset – his upside down economics have made things much worse and cost the country dear.
As corroborating evidence compare our performance with countries that have adopted more reasonable policies. The result of such a study is that our GDP growth is 3 percentage points down on what it otherwise would have been – and perhaps the recovery would have been founded on something more substantial than a consumer credit surge and an election geared housing boom.
I have recently been reading a very interesting book called ‘The Victorian City’ about London in the time of Dickens. Perhaps Mr Osborne and his friend ‘The Quiet Man’ have been reading this too, no doubt admiring the medicine of the time and the century before and the conditions of the less well off in Dickensian society.
Mr Osborne perhaps noted that some patients in Victorian times who had been bled and leeched sometimes got better. Obviously draining the lifeblood out of the patient works! Go leeches! Of course, we won’t concern ourselves with how the sickly individuals would have got on without the bleeding and leeching? A good three percentage points better I think.
We’ve got the best part of two more years of the government’s flawless logic and all the misery and bias that follows from it, but then perhaps we’ll see an end to it. One can but hope that they’ll pay the price of that expensive credit on election day.
This is because a couple of months ago I stood on my head in the corner and said ‘gobbledegook’ three times and that’s obviously what caused the economic improvement! The two things have clearly gone together and if Mr O hadn’t messed things up with his wretched austerity policy, I’m sure that my ‘topsy-turvy gobbledegook’ method would have produced even better growth!
I would agree with Mr Osborne on one thing if no other - that the debate on whether his policy works or not is settled. In fact it was settled at the outset – his upside down economics have made things much worse and cost the country dear.
As corroborating evidence compare our performance with countries that have adopted more reasonable policies. The result of such a study is that our GDP growth is 3 percentage points down on what it otherwise would have been – and perhaps the recovery would have been founded on something more substantial than a consumer credit surge and an election geared housing boom.
I have recently been reading a very interesting book called ‘The Victorian City’ about London in the time of Dickens. Perhaps Mr Osborne and his friend ‘The Quiet Man’ have been reading this too, no doubt admiring the medicine of the time and the century before and the conditions of the less well off in Dickensian society.
Mr Osborne perhaps noted that some patients in Victorian times who had been bled and leeched sometimes got better. Obviously draining the lifeblood out of the patient works! Go leeches! Of course, we won’t concern ourselves with how the sickly individuals would have got on without the bleeding and leeching? A good three percentage points better I think.
We’ve got the best part of two more years of the government’s flawless logic and all the misery and bias that follows from it, but then perhaps we’ll see an end to it. One can but hope that they’ll pay the price of that expensive credit on election day.
Saturday 7 September 2013
No such thing as a free polity
‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’. So goes the dictum of the late Milton Friedman, not one of my favourite economists but he was right on this if not much else. The same adage applies to the funding of parties in democratic political systems.
Government on the cheap through political parties that take large sums from wealthy organisations or individuals, serves the people ill and has a high but hidden price. Good government unreliant on sectional interests is not a free good, it comes at a modest cost but it is a price that is well worth paying.
So I was pleased to see reports that an incoming government formed by the current opposition would substantially increase the public funding of political parties and introduce a cap on individual donations.
I hope that these reports are true and that other political parties will accept this policy – by in one case insisting on what they originally stood for and in another by changing tack and putting the public interest before their own.
Inducement to put private or sectional interests before the public interest is what most major donations to political parties are all about. This of course will always be denied, but you’d have to be pretty credulous to believe that kindness of heart, self-denial or a generous concern for the common good were the true motivations. There are undocumented but effective understandings between donor and recipient.
What the country in fact gets is policy bias, more than a little something in return, which will also, of course, be denied. This bias in government policy that can cost many, many times more than increased public funding up front and it can also lead to an overcrowded House of Lords and so yet more policy bias in the future.
Our friends the lawyers and the more self-serving politicians will no doubt attempt to weasel their way round any such regulations limiting the size of contributions (witness the political action committees in the US).
But the system that results from enhanced public financial support and donations capped to four figures is still going to be far better than the deeply flawed one that we have had to put up with, and bear the cost of, for so many years.
Government on the cheap through political parties that take large sums from wealthy organisations or individuals, serves the people ill and has a high but hidden price. Good government unreliant on sectional interests is not a free good, it comes at a modest cost but it is a price that is well worth paying.
So I was pleased to see reports that an incoming government formed by the current opposition would substantially increase the public funding of political parties and introduce a cap on individual donations.
I hope that these reports are true and that other political parties will accept this policy – by in one case insisting on what they originally stood for and in another by changing tack and putting the public interest before their own.
Inducement to put private or sectional interests before the public interest is what most major donations to political parties are all about. This of course will always be denied, but you’d have to be pretty credulous to believe that kindness of heart, self-denial or a generous concern for the common good were the true motivations. There are undocumented but effective understandings between donor and recipient.
What the country in fact gets is policy bias, more than a little something in return, which will also, of course, be denied. This bias in government policy that can cost many, many times more than increased public funding up front and it can also lead to an overcrowded House of Lords and so yet more policy bias in the future.
Our friends the lawyers and the more self-serving politicians will no doubt attempt to weasel their way round any such regulations limiting the size of contributions (witness the political action committees in the US).
But the system that results from enhanced public financial support and donations capped to four figures is still going to be far better than the deeply flawed one that we have had to put up with, and bear the cost of, for so many years.
Sunday 18 August 2013
What should the next government do?
In the Ukraine there is a large section of the population that is known as ‘the disappointed’ – people who have no confidence in either their country’s government or the opposition. I hope that the proportion of ‘disappointed’ citizens will not continue to rise in this country as well, but I have my doubts.
It is not so-called apathy that keeps people away from the ballot box – this term is insulting to people most of whom continue to care – rather it is deep disappointment with the closely similar, austere and uninspiring fare that is on offer.
Unless the opposition brings forward a plan that has real vision, is fundamentally different from the others and which will improve the character of our society and the quality of life and work for those who have been hardest hit, I fear that the number of ‘disappointed’ will continue to increase.
Recent newspaper correspondence and a few thoughts of my own voiced in earlier articles on this blog prompted me to draw together a (partial) list of policies and objectives that would refresh the political process and inject some positivity. Here they are, along with ideas for taxation and savings to pay for them:
Policies
Recognise that the public sector can deliver public services in ways that prioritise benefit to the public rather than private sector profits. Start by renationalising the railways. Guarantee no further privatisations, jettison PFI and put an end to existing contracts wherever possible.
Make payment of the living wage mandatory, outlaw zero-hours contracts and unpaid work.
Phase in a reversal of the benefit cuts.
Stop the interminable messing around with the NHS and stop the government’s disguised health service cuts.
Impose effective regulation on those utilities not renationalised, introducing effective penalties, capping prices and restricting or windfall-taxing profits.
Get to grips with fuel poverty and undertake a big drive on insulation to reduce energy usage.
Get a grip on the banks, support an international financial transactions tax and facilitate local authorities in re-establishing municipal banks.
While interest rates are being held at historic lows introduce a scheme to pay decent interest on the first £10k of savings. Stop forcing government backed savings and investment schemes to parrot the private sector.
Crack down on payday lenders and other usurers.
Roll back increases in tuition fees.
Invest in a consistent and effective low carbon energy strategy including a tidal barrage.
Encourage domestic agriculture and the local sourcing of foods.
Prioritise manufacturing and ensure government purchases of British rather than foreign produced goods.
Support fair trade and gather support to roll back globalisation.
Stop ruining Local Government, reverse most of the cuts, devolve something other than cuts and costs and help with the millstone of unfunded equal pay legislation.
Increase the public funding of political parties to remove malign influence, policy bias and other favouritism associated with big financial donors.
Outlaw lobbying.
Implement Leveson.
Taxation
Apart from a new financial transactions tax noted above, increased revenue to support the listed policies could be gained from:
The increased tax revenue from the higher level of economic activity that would result from implementation of these proposals.
Ensuring that rich individuals and companies actually pay taxes. This will in part require international collaboration on abolition of tax havens and the introduction of a globalised tax regime.
Make National Insurance contributions flat rate. Something like 7% on incomes without upper limit would bring in as much as the present system which favours the rich. A higher rate would bring in considerably more.
Restore the 50% top rate of tax.
Make more frequent use of windfall taxes on excessive profits.
Allow local authorities to introduce two extra bands of council tax.
Savings
Major saving would follow from reduction in the number of Trident submarines.
Cancel HS2, spend half (i.e. £21.3bn (official), £36.5bn (Treasury internal) or £40bn (external experts) depending on which guesstimate you take) of the saving on improvements to existing lines and local rail schemes and use the remainder to support capital elements of the above proposals.
Take an axe to the use of private sector consultants by national government.
It is not so-called apathy that keeps people away from the ballot box – this term is insulting to people most of whom continue to care – rather it is deep disappointment with the closely similar, austere and uninspiring fare that is on offer.
Unless the opposition brings forward a plan that has real vision, is fundamentally different from the others and which will improve the character of our society and the quality of life and work for those who have been hardest hit, I fear that the number of ‘disappointed’ will continue to increase.
Recent newspaper correspondence and a few thoughts of my own voiced in earlier articles on this blog prompted me to draw together a (partial) list of policies and objectives that would refresh the political process and inject some positivity. Here they are, along with ideas for taxation and savings to pay for them:
Policies
Recognise that the public sector can deliver public services in ways that prioritise benefit to the public rather than private sector profits. Start by renationalising the railways. Guarantee no further privatisations, jettison PFI and put an end to existing contracts wherever possible.
Make payment of the living wage mandatory, outlaw zero-hours contracts and unpaid work.
Phase in a reversal of the benefit cuts.
Stop the interminable messing around with the NHS and stop the government’s disguised health service cuts.
Impose effective regulation on those utilities not renationalised, introducing effective penalties, capping prices and restricting or windfall-taxing profits.
Get to grips with fuel poverty and undertake a big drive on insulation to reduce energy usage.
Get a grip on the banks, support an international financial transactions tax and facilitate local authorities in re-establishing municipal banks.
While interest rates are being held at historic lows introduce a scheme to pay decent interest on the first £10k of savings. Stop forcing government backed savings and investment schemes to parrot the private sector.
Crack down on payday lenders and other usurers.
Roll back increases in tuition fees.
Invest in a consistent and effective low carbon energy strategy including a tidal barrage.
Encourage domestic agriculture and the local sourcing of foods.
Prioritise manufacturing and ensure government purchases of British rather than foreign produced goods.
Support fair trade and gather support to roll back globalisation.
Stop ruining Local Government, reverse most of the cuts, devolve something other than cuts and costs and help with the millstone of unfunded equal pay legislation.
Increase the public funding of political parties to remove malign influence, policy bias and other favouritism associated with big financial donors.
Outlaw lobbying.
Implement Leveson.
Taxation
Apart from a new financial transactions tax noted above, increased revenue to support the listed policies could be gained from:
The increased tax revenue from the higher level of economic activity that would result from implementation of these proposals.
Ensuring that rich individuals and companies actually pay taxes. This will in part require international collaboration on abolition of tax havens and the introduction of a globalised tax regime.
Make National Insurance contributions flat rate. Something like 7% on incomes without upper limit would bring in as much as the present system which favours the rich. A higher rate would bring in considerably more.
Restore the 50% top rate of tax.
Make more frequent use of windfall taxes on excessive profits.
Allow local authorities to introduce two extra bands of council tax.
Savings
Major saving would follow from reduction in the number of Trident submarines.
Cancel HS2, spend half (i.e. £21.3bn (official), £36.5bn (Treasury internal) or £40bn (external experts) depending on which guesstimate you take) of the saving on improvements to existing lines and local rail schemes and use the remainder to support capital elements of the above proposals.
Take an axe to the use of private sector consultants by national government.
Friday 9 August 2013
Let’s get rid of one-dimensional Globalisation
We hear far, far too much about the supposed necessity of ‘embracing globalisation’ but for some the embrace is much closer than others and clings with a deathly chill. I refer to those workers whose jobs have been stolen and shipped abroad by the owners and managers of multinational (i.e. mostly US dominated or with fealty to no nation) corporations and, alas, many companies still headquartered in this country if no longer in British ownership.
The receiving enterprises in the Eastern world, especially the far east including China and Bangladesh have working and environmental conditions ranging from outright exploitative through dire to lethal - as those multinational companies who profit the most from this trade have known for years. Each new ‘discovery’ of appalling working conditions, death trap buildings, cancer clusters, suicides and child labour of course comes as another ‘surprise’ to the profiteers.
There is no need for any of this. Trade, like politics, is what we make it. It is what governments allow it to be. These same governments do not allow their citizens to run amok in terms of crime (other than financial) nor should they in terms of the consequences of so-called ‘free trade’. Trade which is free in the sense that multinational profiteers are free to spend their gotten gains as they wish and the displaced workers or those younger people who will now not get a proper job are free to take a zero hours contract. In these ways, we’re all in it together.
The globalised companies take full advantage of slack or absent regulation and their ability to play one country off against another through lack of international co-ordination and covertly compliant governments. One company starts off-shoring jobs and the others, equally devoid of conscience but not of greed, follow suit with their erstwhile employees herded to the edge of the cliff like lemmings.
Ideally globalisation should be unwound – as I have argued in other posts on this blog. Globalisation didn’t arise overnight nor can it be got rid of quickly, but for western governments to plead powerlessness in the longer term is both defeatist and false. They may be thinking more of their campaign contributions.
But if we are stuck with globalisation, let us at least make it two-dimensional. This second dimension is an effective international tax regime to net the multinational tax dodgers, force them to pay a reasonable rate of tax and get rid of the parasite tax havens that facilitate them. In addition, a worldwide financial transactions tax would raise substantial revenue from a sector that can well afford to pay. Needless to say, the British Government is opposed to it but other countries may yet make a start.
And in future, when politicians and business big shots urge the embracing of globalisation let them embrace the two dimensional version in which they show some decency, social responsibility and some awareness of a common good beyond themselves.
The receiving enterprises in the Eastern world, especially the far east including China and Bangladesh have working and environmental conditions ranging from outright exploitative through dire to lethal - as those multinational companies who profit the most from this trade have known for years. Each new ‘discovery’ of appalling working conditions, death trap buildings, cancer clusters, suicides and child labour of course comes as another ‘surprise’ to the profiteers.
There is no need for any of this. Trade, like politics, is what we make it. It is what governments allow it to be. These same governments do not allow their citizens to run amok in terms of crime (other than financial) nor should they in terms of the consequences of so-called ‘free trade’. Trade which is free in the sense that multinational profiteers are free to spend their gotten gains as they wish and the displaced workers or those younger people who will now not get a proper job are free to take a zero hours contract. In these ways, we’re all in it together.
The globalised companies take full advantage of slack or absent regulation and their ability to play one country off against another through lack of international co-ordination and covertly compliant governments. One company starts off-shoring jobs and the others, equally devoid of conscience but not of greed, follow suit with their erstwhile employees herded to the edge of the cliff like lemmings.
Ideally globalisation should be unwound – as I have argued in other posts on this blog. Globalisation didn’t arise overnight nor can it be got rid of quickly, but for western governments to plead powerlessness in the longer term is both defeatist and false. They may be thinking more of their campaign contributions.
But if we are stuck with globalisation, let us at least make it two-dimensional. This second dimension is an effective international tax regime to net the multinational tax dodgers, force them to pay a reasonable rate of tax and get rid of the parasite tax havens that facilitate them. In addition, a worldwide financial transactions tax would raise substantial revenue from a sector that can well afford to pay. Needless to say, the British Government is opposed to it but other countries may yet make a start.
And in future, when politicians and business big shots urge the embracing of globalisation let them embrace the two dimensional version in which they show some decency, social responsibility and some awareness of a common good beyond themselves.
Monday 5 August 2013
Zero tolerance for Zero hours!
I was disgusted, though not entirely surprised, to learn that the extent of the use of zero hours contracts in business was far more widespread than officially acknowledged. And it turns out that organisations that should know better, such as some charities, are also exploiting people in this appalling way.
Someone on one of these zero hours ‘contracts’ has no guarantee of the number of hours of work that will be available to them in an upcoming week. There is also often no sick pay or holiday entitlement and they may be denied permission to get extra work elsewhere. They may also be expected, at short notice, to work far from home.
Doesn’t this all tell a dreadful story about the scandalous state of commercial morality today – zero hours at the bottom and big bonuses at the top. It also says much about the credibility of official employment figures as many of those unfortunates on zero hours contracts are taken to be fully employed. It is also one more reason to account for the huge profits made by usurers such as Wonga.
One national newspaper carried the headline ‘Why stop at Zero hours? Why not revive child labour?’ But this is, of course, exactly what is happening except that child labour is outsourced, along with the original jobs, to the Far East.
The apologists for these outrages need not trumpet that it is part of commercial reality and inevitable globalisation. Both are what we make them. And we should start re-making them immediately. There should be zero tolerance for zero hours.
Someone on one of these zero hours ‘contracts’ has no guarantee of the number of hours of work that will be available to them in an upcoming week. There is also often no sick pay or holiday entitlement and they may be denied permission to get extra work elsewhere. They may also be expected, at short notice, to work far from home.
Doesn’t this all tell a dreadful story about the scandalous state of commercial morality today – zero hours at the bottom and big bonuses at the top. It also says much about the credibility of official employment figures as many of those unfortunates on zero hours contracts are taken to be fully employed. It is also one more reason to account for the huge profits made by usurers such as Wonga.
One national newspaper carried the headline ‘Why stop at Zero hours? Why not revive child labour?’ But this is, of course, exactly what is happening except that child labour is outsourced, along with the original jobs, to the Far East.
The apologists for these outrages need not trumpet that it is part of commercial reality and inevitable globalisation. Both are what we make them. And we should start re-making them immediately. There should be zero tolerance for zero hours.
Saturday 27 July 2013
Not much of a Premium
National Savings and Investments (NS&I) has announced that the number of prizes awarded to holders of premium bonds will be cut from the 1st of August. The effective interest rate is being cut from an already miserable 1.5% to 1.3%.
This is very disappointing and more bad news for those people who are still attempting to save and is counter to what government related financial agencies could and should be doing. The excuse offered by NS&I was that it set the prize fund in a way that ‘balanced’ the interests of savers, taxpayers and the ‘broader financial services sector’.
My goodness, who would want to see the financial services sector experience any challenge or discomfort? How do those bankers manage to exist on their incomes anyway?
Taxpayers? Sounds reasonable at first but of course savers are usually taxpayers and so of course are many borrowers. But borrowers have gained hugely from the protracted artificial suppression of interest rates – except of course those in the grip of financial sector firms such as Wonga and its appalling ilk – but then this class of borrowers hardly registers with government.
If any sector of the economy needed shaking up and presenting with a serious challenge it is the banks, pseudo banks (which is what most ‘building societies’ seem to have become judging by the way they behave) and the multifarious money lenders and financial gamblers that riddle what’s left of our economy.
It is no use waiting for such a challenge to come from within the private sector – it will never happen when extracting profit from hapless punters is the driving motive. This financial fracking has got to be stopped. The only way this will come about is if the public sector takes distinctive action and stops running with the private sector wolves.
NS&I should do its own thing and give savers a break. If there’s an inrush of money this would nudge up private sector savings rates too. But even better of course would be a genuine public sector bank - or several of them in the form of the municipal banks for which I have campaigned on this blog and elsewhere.
I hope that the Church of England initiative against payday lenders gets into gear once they have disentangled themselves from their embarrassing indirect investments. Why are they not more careful about this sort of thing?
But while they get most of the headlines it is not just hard-pressed borrowers that need protection and support it is the equally hard-pressed savers. Maybe it will happen, but it is a bit like waiting for Godot for either Westminster or Whitehall to get their heads out of the clouds and put the interests of ordinary people, savers included, first.
This is very disappointing and more bad news for those people who are still attempting to save and is counter to what government related financial agencies could and should be doing. The excuse offered by NS&I was that it set the prize fund in a way that ‘balanced’ the interests of savers, taxpayers and the ‘broader financial services sector’.
My goodness, who would want to see the financial services sector experience any challenge or discomfort? How do those bankers manage to exist on their incomes anyway?
Taxpayers? Sounds reasonable at first but of course savers are usually taxpayers and so of course are many borrowers. But borrowers have gained hugely from the protracted artificial suppression of interest rates – except of course those in the grip of financial sector firms such as Wonga and its appalling ilk – but then this class of borrowers hardly registers with government.
If any sector of the economy needed shaking up and presenting with a serious challenge it is the banks, pseudo banks (which is what most ‘building societies’ seem to have become judging by the way they behave) and the multifarious money lenders and financial gamblers that riddle what’s left of our economy.
It is no use waiting for such a challenge to come from within the private sector – it will never happen when extracting profit from hapless punters is the driving motive. This financial fracking has got to be stopped. The only way this will come about is if the public sector takes distinctive action and stops running with the private sector wolves.
NS&I should do its own thing and give savers a break. If there’s an inrush of money this would nudge up private sector savings rates too. But even better of course would be a genuine public sector bank - or several of them in the form of the municipal banks for which I have campaigned on this blog and elsewhere.
I hope that the Church of England initiative against payday lenders gets into gear once they have disentangled themselves from their embarrassing indirect investments. Why are they not more careful about this sort of thing?
But while they get most of the headlines it is not just hard-pressed borrowers that need protection and support it is the equally hard-pressed savers. Maybe it will happen, but it is a bit like waiting for Godot for either Westminster or Whitehall to get their heads out of the clouds and put the interests of ordinary people, savers included, first.
Friday 19 July 2013
Parliament Must Pardon Alan Turing
There followed his subsequent cruel, legally imposed, physical mistreatment (chemical castration) and persecution that led to his death from cyanide poisoning – which was then officially classified as suicide.
A 21st Century Parliamentary pardon for Alan Turing is the very least the politicians should do. In fact they should also strike a medal and commission a statue – ideal for the plinth in Trafalgar Square that has seen so much rubbish displayed.
The Government that refused calls for a full pardon in 2012 has now said it would not stand in the way of the bill, but this dismal passivity may not be enough to guarantee the bill’s passage. The Government needs to give it their full backing.
Alan Turing was pre-eminent in the team at Bletchley Park that cracked the Enigma code, a breakthrough critical to the allied war effort. He is now universally recognised as a leading computing pioneer and a highly original scientific thinker in mathematics, computing and indeed other fields.
But at the time of his death he was virtually unknown to the general public, as his work at Bletchley Park was kept secret until 1974. His work to crack the Enigma code probably turned the course of the Battle of the Atlantic, shortened World War II by two years and may have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
The country would have faced starvation - and some of us may not have been alive today - if Turing and his team had not cracked the codes that showed where U-boats were intercepting vital supplies from the United States. You may owe him your life. The country certainly owes an enormous debt to Alan Turing and debts should be repaid - as the Chancellor of the Exchequer is constantly reminding us.
In 2009 the Prime Minister at the time, Gordon Brown, did issue an apology for Alan Turing’s appalling treatment at official hands, but campaigns for a full pardon for Alan Turing have not so far been successful.
The prime ministerial apology, though welcome, is not nearly enough. The fundamental concern is not about putting legal technicalities first; rather it is about much higher things - atonement, justice, recognition and indebtedness to Alan Turing.
After the war, Alan Turing went on to help create the world's first modern computer, the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine – pioneering work that was built upon by the mathematician John von Neumann in the United States. Alan Turing also devised the famous Turing Test for the detection of artificial intelligence, which is still widely referred to in the literature.
Many of Britain's leading scientists, including Professor Stephen Hawking, have called on the Government to grant Alan Turing a posthumous pardon. The Government should respond to this call and rapidly revise its position and take the lead in expressing gratitude to Alan Turing and according him, after 61 years, the full public recognition and standing that he so richly deserves.
Tuesday 16 July 2013
A Privatisation for Ideologues
I expect that this one third includes most government supporters, funders and lobbyists, so the rest of us can just lump it. In terms of strength of feeling only one person in 25 strongly supports the disposal of yet another public service. I wonder if these are the tiny minority who have their chequebooks at the ready to buy shares before selling them at a profit to absolutely anyone just as happened with earlier privatisations.
There is massive public support for the re-nationalisation of the railways and well over twice as many people believe that former publicly owned utilities such as energy and water should be in the public sector as believe they should remain private. And of course ‘private’ does not mean ‘British’.
The aforementioned utilities have introduced deliberately confusing price structures and rip off consumers more or less as they please – sorry, with the approval of regulators. Furthermore, those of us who do not dodge our taxes contribute to a three times greater subsidy for private railways than British Rail required. Digging deep into the public purse is par for the course be it for G4S, A4e or PFI not to mention the Banks.
Given the positive feelings towards the Royal Mail and the sorry saga of privatisation just touched on above, the opposition to privatisation of the Royal Mail should be no surprise. If not immediately, the Royal Mail will fall into the hands of foreign owners, possibly German or Chinese. Prices will go up even more and services will be degraded - hardly in the interest of the common good.
It’s not just a case of nation-wide coverage that may, for the time being at least, be reluctantly continued under private ownership. There are many other ways to lessen the service – for example no weekend collections or deliveries of letters (and maybe not even every weekday) and maybe you’ll have to install a mailbox at the end of your drive US style.
The Royal Mail is not in Government ownership – it’s ours. And that’s the way it should stay.
Wednesday 10 July 2013
Why the Royal Mail?
The Government is unconcerned about who will end up buying the bulk of the shares - hedge funds, other city speculators, institutional ‘investors’ or anyone else who sees an opportunity to cash in. We’ve seen to our cost the consequences of privatisation before and we don't want to see the results again.
This is a tragic decision, the Royal Mail is no ordinary business, it is part of our national inheritance. But if this wretched government gets its way, the Royal Mail is about to be ripped from the heart of our communities and put into the hands of private profit makers.There's money in the millions to be made also by the bankers (mostly in foreign ownership) and lawyers who will be called in to 'advise' on the sell-off.
Centuries of history are being discarded for a paltry £2-3bn that could be raised in other ways - for example by withdrawing the government’s recent tax cut to the very rich.
Having already had prices for letters and parcels hiked up massively to make the Royal Mail more saleable; prices will certainly be jacked up again, year after year as we have seen with other former publicly owned services.
Long gone are the days when the Royal Mail was overstaffed, inefficient and loss-making. Many changes have been made under public ownership. Last year, Royal Mail delivered over £600 million in profits back to taxpayers and is set to do so again this year even after the disgusting payments to the chief executive. With profits already on this scale what more ‘commercial freedom’ is needed?
The Royal Mail is a public service not a means of making more money, just as is the NHS and, tax dodgers apart, that’s what we pay our taxes for. There has to be some national infrastructure that is retained in public ownership with a service ethos and that is not subject to the greed, dishonesty and tax-dodging of today’s profiteering companies and super rich individuals.
If this process isn’t stopped and the Royal Mail falls into ruthless hands, if I were HMQ I would insist that 'Royal' be rescinded. Why should this prestigious seal of approval for a public service be carried over to enhance the profits of any old money maker?
But protests, petitions and the wishes of the people count for very little and the government will almost certainly make the disposal regardless of public opposition. This is just one more example showing that the country desperately needs to have a political movement that will undo some of the damage that is being done and which will seek to promote he common good. But if this comes at all it will not be in time to save the Royal Mail.
Friday 21 June 2013
Time for some real changes
We
live in diminished and threatening times. The original source of much
of the damage to our economy, the public well-being and our national
standing was of course the greed and reckless incompetence of the
banks – still largely unreformed – and that is how they are
likely to remain given the totally undue influence that the financial
sector continues to have both in terms of national policy and
contribution to party political funds.
This
has been and will continue to be compounded by the 'austerity for
some' policies of this government and those of our economic and
geographical neighbours. Then there is
glorious globalisation (if I hear the word
'embrace' once more in this context I'll explode) driven either by
the public spirited and 'all in it together' captains of industry or
by the avarice of individuals high up the corporate ladders and in
hedge funds operating in a patriotism-free zone allied to their
political placemen – I'll leave you to guess which.
There
is a perverse competitive force at work here that belongs more to
Catastrophe Theory than the ‘dismal science’ - an old nickname
for economics that's more apt than ever in these benighted days –
and the self-serving and lemming-like mentality of large scale
businesses: "the others have made a killing out of
'shutdown-and-offshore' so we deserve to have this extra lucre
too".
Thus it was that our real industry, especially manufacturing and engineering, was eviscerated along with other productive sectors such as mining - and agriculture has had its standing much reduced. We sometimes hear convenient rationalisation about a ‘post industrial society’. But you cannot have a post-industrial economy with a fair and decent standard of living in a country much larger than the Cayman Islands, Bermuda or other disreputable havens for tax-dodging, disloyal, avaricious and morality-free capitalists.
I have said for many years that when the United States Government came to see that the 'globalisation' (often meaning little more than 'send the workers' jobs to China and points east') trumpeted by self interested executives and stockholders was not working for the country they would stop singing along with the shrill brass. There is evidence that this is now the case in Democratic circles – but not of course in those associated with the likes of the Tea Party and Bain Capital. It remains to see what becomes of this however, given the weight of money and influence.
‘Free trade’ is a hypothetical, bookish concept that is never realised in practice. In theory it might work to the mutual benefit of some sections of societies when practiced by responsible agents between countries with similar values. But here in contrast I am refering to the real world and fundamental moral concerns such as pre-Victorian working conditions, lethal factory buildings, child labour, befouled environments and corporations that knew full well for years what has been going on.
‘Free trade’ - is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. Its merit depends on the conditions and principles under which it operates. A bit like America’s constitutional right to bear arms - one thing in the birth of a nation phase, quite another today. What can produce benefit of sorts in one set of conditions can be malignant in another.
And trade is not the only thing that should be assessed as to its ‘freedom’. The people producing the goods to be traded should be free too. Unless they are, we do not know that the export / import imbalance in their societies is what the people would choose to have. And national currencies should have their relative levels set in comparable and consistent fashions. These conditions do not exist for many major participants in global trade. Fair trade amongst free peoples should be the goal. What we have now is far from fair and there has been too much cheating for many years.
There is another critical factor - the distribution of power and choice in overseas countries and regions used - I choose this term deliberately - by globalised corporations to make their vast profits. Used and abused with fatal consequences and then ignored in the ruthless quest for ever greater ‘shareholder value’ and executive bonuses.
The domestic consequence here has been the demise of great swathes of the Midlands and the North of England and also the Midwest of the United States. The production of industrial wastelands and ruined, demoralised communities at home is as corrosive a by-product of global profiteering as is the effluent recklessly discharged in countries to which jobs and production have been sent.
An essential context for free trade to work fairly and in the interests of the common good is morality and social conscience. We’ve seen the lack of principle (which resulted in the lack of principal) in the banking sector and the disregard for the fate of communities shown by those entrusted with the power to manufacture.
Executives should not be able to act regardless of scruple (nor should they want to - a change essential for a long run solution) any more than they should be free to ignore safety or chemical pollution. Corporations should be trusts, not in the sense of being monopolies (although they are often effectively these anyway) but in the sense of holding the livelihoods of individuals, the life of communities and the self respect of nations in their hands. We need to see due diligence here rather than just in takeover bids.
The timescale required for such changes could be a generation – the spots run deep. We’ve seen the resistance to social pressure to reform disgusting bonus cultures and the continuation of contempt for people seen as ‘punters’ and profit fodder in banks and other ‘services’. There needs to be a comprehensive re-education of our corporate and political leadership. They should stop moaning about the education of youth and concentrate on their own re-education. And to get the policy right, the funding of political parties desperately needs to be freed up from the unseemly and unseen influence of all big donors – we should see more than just tribal attacks from one party on another. In fact we need our own cultural revolution.
Nicknames apart, the original name for economics was ‘political economy’. What is needed now is a ‘virtuous economy’ where concern for the human consequences of decisions is embedded in the mindset of corporate bosses and national leaders - as should be a sense of responsibility to the society that gave big business the opportunities that they so frequently now abuse.
Some genuine competition in the provision of goods and services might not be a bad idea too, rather than the spurious competition (such as in banking, communications, power and fuel supply and a good chunk of retailing) that is little more than informal cartelisation designed to exploit consumers and produce huge and unwarranted profits.
Thus it was that our real industry, especially manufacturing and engineering, was eviscerated along with other productive sectors such as mining - and agriculture has had its standing much reduced. We sometimes hear convenient rationalisation about a ‘post industrial society’. But you cannot have a post-industrial economy with a fair and decent standard of living in a country much larger than the Cayman Islands, Bermuda or other disreputable havens for tax-dodging, disloyal, avaricious and morality-free capitalists.
I have said for many years that when the United States Government came to see that the 'globalisation' (often meaning little more than 'send the workers' jobs to China and points east') trumpeted by self interested executives and stockholders was not working for the country they would stop singing along with the shrill brass. There is evidence that this is now the case in Democratic circles – but not of course in those associated with the likes of the Tea Party and Bain Capital. It remains to see what becomes of this however, given the weight of money and influence.
‘Free trade’ is a hypothetical, bookish concept that is never realised in practice. In theory it might work to the mutual benefit of some sections of societies when practiced by responsible agents between countries with similar values. But here in contrast I am refering to the real world and fundamental moral concerns such as pre-Victorian working conditions, lethal factory buildings, child labour, befouled environments and corporations that knew full well for years what has been going on.
‘Free trade’ - is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. Its merit depends on the conditions and principles under which it operates. A bit like America’s constitutional right to bear arms - one thing in the birth of a nation phase, quite another today. What can produce benefit of sorts in one set of conditions can be malignant in another.
And trade is not the only thing that should be assessed as to its ‘freedom’. The people producing the goods to be traded should be free too. Unless they are, we do not know that the export / import imbalance in their societies is what the people would choose to have. And national currencies should have their relative levels set in comparable and consistent fashions. These conditions do not exist for many major participants in global trade. Fair trade amongst free peoples should be the goal. What we have now is far from fair and there has been too much cheating for many years.
There is another critical factor - the distribution of power and choice in overseas countries and regions used - I choose this term deliberately - by globalised corporations to make their vast profits. Used and abused with fatal consequences and then ignored in the ruthless quest for ever greater ‘shareholder value’ and executive bonuses.
The domestic consequence here has been the demise of great swathes of the Midlands and the North of England and also the Midwest of the United States. The production of industrial wastelands and ruined, demoralised communities at home is as corrosive a by-product of global profiteering as is the effluent recklessly discharged in countries to which jobs and production have been sent.
An essential context for free trade to work fairly and in the interests of the common good is morality and social conscience. We’ve seen the lack of principle (which resulted in the lack of principal) in the banking sector and the disregard for the fate of communities shown by those entrusted with the power to manufacture.
Executives should not be able to act regardless of scruple (nor should they want to - a change essential for a long run solution) any more than they should be free to ignore safety or chemical pollution. Corporations should be trusts, not in the sense of being monopolies (although they are often effectively these anyway) but in the sense of holding the livelihoods of individuals, the life of communities and the self respect of nations in their hands. We need to see due diligence here rather than just in takeover bids.
The timescale required for such changes could be a generation – the spots run deep. We’ve seen the resistance to social pressure to reform disgusting bonus cultures and the continuation of contempt for people seen as ‘punters’ and profit fodder in banks and other ‘services’. There needs to be a comprehensive re-education of our corporate and political leadership. They should stop moaning about the education of youth and concentrate on their own re-education. And to get the policy right, the funding of political parties desperately needs to be freed up from the unseemly and unseen influence of all big donors – we should see more than just tribal attacks from one party on another. In fact we need our own cultural revolution.
Nicknames apart, the original name for economics was ‘political economy’. What is needed now is a ‘virtuous economy’ where concern for the human consequences of decisions is embedded in the mindset of corporate bosses and national leaders - as should be a sense of responsibility to the society that gave big business the opportunities that they so frequently now abuse.
Some genuine competition in the provision of goods and services might not be a bad idea too, rather than the spurious competition (such as in banking, communications, power and fuel supply and a good chunk of retailing) that is little more than informal cartelisation designed to exploit consumers and produce huge and unwarranted profits.
Included
too should be the politicians who have so often seen their primary
role as the reinforcers of, and apologisers for, this dire
mis-managerial capitalism. Democracy is not a free good – we pay
for it one way or another – so much better to have public funding
than costly biased
policies.
International economic discussions should have an infusion of social, moral and environmental responsibility and develop a global taxation framework – what is good enough for the workers jobs should be good enough for the owners' profits too. If profits are reaped abroad so should be taxation.
Failure to get a grip on the greed and disloyalty of a 'jobs only' globalisation, the culture of cheating, deceiving and tax dodging, the disregard for people's lives as well as livelihoods, sustainable limits to growth and the lack of morality that produced these and other undesirables will show us what a post-industrial society in the Western world would really be like. Trust me, we do not want to see this!
International economic discussions should have an infusion of social, moral and environmental responsibility and develop a global taxation framework – what is good enough for the workers jobs should be good enough for the owners' profits too. If profits are reaped abroad so should be taxation.
Failure to get a grip on the greed and disloyalty of a 'jobs only' globalisation, the culture of cheating, deceiving and tax dodging, the disregard for people's lives as well as livelihoods, sustainable limits to growth and the lack of morality that produced these and other undesirables will show us what a post-industrial society in the Western world would really be like. Trust me, we do not want to see this!
Wednesday 12 June 2013
Spot the Difference!
A vital ingredient of any political system fit for purpose is having a significant amount of policy difference between major parties so that the options placed before the electorate are clearly distinct and represent important alternative choices that would lead to different trajectories and outcomes for society.
But these days I’m reminded of those games in newspapers where you get drawings that look the same in major respects but have some very minor differences of detail. Just like politics today! You can hardly get a tissue paper between the policies of the three main parties. For example, in terms of economic strategy none will contradict the cutting and austerity approach inflicted on the country – mainly on the less well-off parts of it - even though this policy plainly and demonstrably does not work even on the government’s previously stated terms. At least two of the main parties actually believe in austerity as an economic policy. The third believes that the idea of cutting has been sold to the general public and they are now afraid to gainsay this and come forward with genuine alternative basically Keynesian policies.
There is thus effectively an informal political cartel forever looking over their shoulders and using the same focus group approach equally devoid of insight, vision, courage or even an awareness of economic history. As one commentator so vividly expressed it one can imagine a modern variant of martin Luther King’s speech: “I have a dream – a dream to do pretty much what the other lot have been doing…”. No wonder electoral participation rates have been going down and hence also the rise of a fourth party threatening the upper political class in Westminster that at least is different but in the wrong ways.
This last aside, what does it really matter who gets elected nowadays if the policy choices are austerity, austerity or austerity? And of course it will continue not to work. Austerity pushes the domestic economy down and as other countries, being each other's export markets, also pile on the misery it is no use looking abroad for salvation. That only works if other economies with whom you do much trade have different, more sensible and effective policies on which a free ride can be taken - as for example with Canada some time ago when the US was booming. That isn't the case now, as European economies all want domestic cutbacks and export led recoveries.
So we have national and international economic prescriptions equivalent to the 18th century medical 'cures' of leeches and bleeding. If the patient isn't recovering then bleed some more – as we shall see in the upcoming spending review. And if the patient does perk up a bit that is, of course, due to your policies.
The big worry is that short of a catastrophic upheaval here and elsewhere there is no evident solution to all of this - not even in the medium term. Elections need to matter, the common good should be to the fore, a basic financial morality should prevail and loyalty to community and country should permeate our economic and business activities as well as our social life.
That is the essential change that we need to see - along with an unwinding of globalisation a stop to the evisceration of our industries and the re-creation of jobs.
And yes, this could be done if the will was there in major western economies. The mutation of economic and political processes that appeal to the contemporary elite has taken deep hold, but both are human creations not laws of nature as Smith, Marx and various toxic ideologues would have us believe. The economic, social and political worlds are what we choose to make them - and we can make a different and much more attractive picture if enough of us choose to do so.
But these days I’m reminded of those games in newspapers where you get drawings that look the same in major respects but have some very minor differences of detail. Just like politics today! You can hardly get a tissue paper between the policies of the three main parties. For example, in terms of economic strategy none will contradict the cutting and austerity approach inflicted on the country – mainly on the less well-off parts of it - even though this policy plainly and demonstrably does not work even on the government’s previously stated terms. At least two of the main parties actually believe in austerity as an economic policy. The third believes that the idea of cutting has been sold to the general public and they are now afraid to gainsay this and come forward with genuine alternative basically Keynesian policies.
There is thus effectively an informal political cartel forever looking over their shoulders and using the same focus group approach equally devoid of insight, vision, courage or even an awareness of economic history. As one commentator so vividly expressed it one can imagine a modern variant of martin Luther King’s speech: “I have a dream – a dream to do pretty much what the other lot have been doing…”. No wonder electoral participation rates have been going down and hence also the rise of a fourth party threatening the upper political class in Westminster that at least is different but in the wrong ways.
This last aside, what does it really matter who gets elected nowadays if the policy choices are austerity, austerity or austerity? And of course it will continue not to work. Austerity pushes the domestic economy down and as other countries, being each other's export markets, also pile on the misery it is no use looking abroad for salvation. That only works if other economies with whom you do much trade have different, more sensible and effective policies on which a free ride can be taken - as for example with Canada some time ago when the US was booming. That isn't the case now, as European economies all want domestic cutbacks and export led recoveries.
So we have national and international economic prescriptions equivalent to the 18th century medical 'cures' of leeches and bleeding. If the patient isn't recovering then bleed some more – as we shall see in the upcoming spending review. And if the patient does perk up a bit that is, of course, due to your policies.
The big worry is that short of a catastrophic upheaval here and elsewhere there is no evident solution to all of this - not even in the medium term. Elections need to matter, the common good should be to the fore, a basic financial morality should prevail and loyalty to community and country should permeate our economic and business activities as well as our social life.
That is the essential change that we need to see - along with an unwinding of globalisation a stop to the evisceration of our industries and the re-creation of jobs.
And yes, this could be done if the will was there in major western economies. The mutation of economic and political processes that appeal to the contemporary elite has taken deep hold, but both are human creations not laws of nature as Smith, Marx and various toxic ideologues would have us believe. The economic, social and political worlds are what we choose to make them - and we can make a different and much more attractive picture if enough of us choose to do so.
Sunday 9 June 2013
The Generation Game
The increasingly frequent and disparaging comments in the right wing press about the older generation are now infecting worthwhile newspapers of the centre-left. They peddle the austerity-based argument that older people are scarcely touched by the recession and are becoming an increasing burden on other generations.
Having given the impression before the general election of being on the side of pensioners, the coalition parties are now looking for ways to minimise this clear commitment and maximise clawback. Witness the attempted redefining of the retail price index to give lower values and consequent lower upratings despite the fact that generally the effective rate of inflation for pensioners is well above the average figure. Furthermore, there is the talk about cutting winter fuel allowances, travel passes and free television licenses (for the very elderly) for supposedly ‘better off’ pensioners.
All this as if current and soon-to-be pensioners were not contributing substantially already. All pensioners with savings – so most of this generation - have been severely hit by the artificially cut and sustained minuscule interest rates losing hundreds or thousands of pounds in interest income every year. And annuity values for those coming up for retirement have also tanked as another consequence of the nailing down of interest rates and the policy of ‘quantitative easing’.
There is also the practice of the financial cartel that I’m afraid also includes many building societies as well as the banks of slicing away even further at interest rates on ISAs so that there’s now hardly any benefit from the tax-free nature of these investments. This along with the miserly rates deliberately applied when bonds mature which is another example of the punishment of loyalty. So another big thank-you to our wonderful financial services ‘industry’.
All of this represents a massive transfer from the older generation to those much younger people (and many not so young) who have mortgages and also to those who have run up debts either just to survive (both these cases understandable) or because of ‘must have’ profligacy (not acceptable).
How much longer the pensioner generation can continue supporting the deeply indebted generations to this considerable extent is unclear, but no doubt this patient generation who raised families and did things by the book will soldier on and reflect on all that was built up by them prior to the modern curses of globalisation, privatisation, corporate greed and tax dodging, exploitative pricing and the thoroughly discredited economics of austerity.
Despite these many adverse factors this is not to say that nothing can ever be touched. For example I for one would support the idea of winter fuel payments being taxable so that those eking out small pensions would continue to get the full amount. Similarly, bus passes and television licenses for the very elderly could remain free for those on low incomes and be counted as income in kind and incur a tax liability at graduated rates for those who have been able better to provided for themselves.
This would be all the more palatable if the feral rich were made to pay their fair share in ways that I have indicated in earlier postings. Then for goodness sake let’s invest the money so generated in public works to get things moving again and provide jobs for the young – so much better than financial devices that get siphoned off by the banks.
Leaving aside this wretched government's blatant favouritism towards the outrageously wealthy, big business and those that fund their politics, there is still a sense in which most of us are in this together right across the generations. Taking the long view also involves a look at the past and the near present - especially the last few years - as well as projected futures.
So let’s have an end to spiteful comments about the older generation and understand that we have, over the years, built up a mutually supportive society – something that’s going to be needed as the age of austerity is dragged on by the misconceived policies of this government and now apparently to be followed by the next.
Having given the impression before the general election of being on the side of pensioners, the coalition parties are now looking for ways to minimise this clear commitment and maximise clawback. Witness the attempted redefining of the retail price index to give lower values and consequent lower upratings despite the fact that generally the effective rate of inflation for pensioners is well above the average figure. Furthermore, there is the talk about cutting winter fuel allowances, travel passes and free television licenses (for the very elderly) for supposedly ‘better off’ pensioners.
All this as if current and soon-to-be pensioners were not contributing substantially already. All pensioners with savings – so most of this generation - have been severely hit by the artificially cut and sustained minuscule interest rates losing hundreds or thousands of pounds in interest income every year. And annuity values for those coming up for retirement have also tanked as another consequence of the nailing down of interest rates and the policy of ‘quantitative easing’.
There is also the practice of the financial cartel that I’m afraid also includes many building societies as well as the banks of slicing away even further at interest rates on ISAs so that there’s now hardly any benefit from the tax-free nature of these investments. This along with the miserly rates deliberately applied when bonds mature which is another example of the punishment of loyalty. So another big thank-you to our wonderful financial services ‘industry’.
All of this represents a massive transfer from the older generation to those much younger people (and many not so young) who have mortgages and also to those who have run up debts either just to survive (both these cases understandable) or because of ‘must have’ profligacy (not acceptable).
How much longer the pensioner generation can continue supporting the deeply indebted generations to this considerable extent is unclear, but no doubt this patient generation who raised families and did things by the book will soldier on and reflect on all that was built up by them prior to the modern curses of globalisation, privatisation, corporate greed and tax dodging, exploitative pricing and the thoroughly discredited economics of austerity.
Despite these many adverse factors this is not to say that nothing can ever be touched. For example I for one would support the idea of winter fuel payments being taxable so that those eking out small pensions would continue to get the full amount. Similarly, bus passes and television licenses for the very elderly could remain free for those on low incomes and be counted as income in kind and incur a tax liability at graduated rates for those who have been able better to provided for themselves.
This would be all the more palatable if the feral rich were made to pay their fair share in ways that I have indicated in earlier postings. Then for goodness sake let’s invest the money so generated in public works to get things moving again and provide jobs for the young – so much better than financial devices that get siphoned off by the banks.
Leaving aside this wretched government's blatant favouritism towards the outrageously wealthy, big business and those that fund their politics, there is still a sense in which most of us are in this together right across the generations. Taking the long view also involves a look at the past and the near present - especially the last few years - as well as projected futures.
So let’s have an end to spiteful comments about the older generation and understand that we have, over the years, built up a mutually supportive society – something that’s going to be needed as the age of austerity is dragged on by the misconceived policies of this government and now apparently to be followed by the next.
Thursday 6 June 2013
The Darling Buds of May?
The economic news for the month of May looks modestly encouraging – we certainly needed something to cheer us up both weather-wise and economy-wise.
It is to be hoped that these modest improvements will continue. I use the word ‘hope’ because there is no guarantee of continuing pick-up and of course nothing by way of Government policy to ensure this.
But doesn’t it mean that Mr Osborne’s austerity policies are working despite the discovery that their academic underpinning was shown to be riddled with errors? Not a bit of it – the improvement comes despite the Government’s policies – there can be no positive correlation assumed.
Back in the 18th century some of the sick people who were bled and had leeches applied did in fact get better. It’s much the same with our economy today – and there are more rounds of cuts to come both in the near future and for 2015/16. Talk about nipping things in the bud!
We shall be hearing more news of the government’s next round of cutbacks in Mr Osborne’s upcoming spending review. One thing we can be sure about is that the rich will not be hammered and the ever-increasing inequality in wealth and incomes will continue.
So it was doubly depressing to hear the Shadow Chancellor bind himself to the coalition’s austere plans for 2015/16. Why are parties these days so frit to be different? Where’s the vision and inspiration? Look what the Atlee government achieved against a far worse background. And thinking of the NHS, thank goodness for it and stop the constant messing about and the cuts by another name. And let’s see a bit of nurturing for those darling buds!
It is to be hoped that these modest improvements will continue. I use the word ‘hope’ because there is no guarantee of continuing pick-up and of course nothing by way of Government policy to ensure this.
But doesn’t it mean that Mr Osborne’s austerity policies are working despite the discovery that their academic underpinning was shown to be riddled with errors? Not a bit of it – the improvement comes despite the Government’s policies – there can be no positive correlation assumed.
Back in the 18th century some of the sick people who were bled and had leeches applied did in fact get better. It’s much the same with our economy today – and there are more rounds of cuts to come both in the near future and for 2015/16. Talk about nipping things in the bud!
We shall be hearing more news of the government’s next round of cutbacks in Mr Osborne’s upcoming spending review. One thing we can be sure about is that the rich will not be hammered and the ever-increasing inequality in wealth and incomes will continue.
So it was doubly depressing to hear the Shadow Chancellor bind himself to the coalition’s austere plans for 2015/16. Why are parties these days so frit to be different? Where’s the vision and inspiration? Look what the Atlee government achieved against a far worse background. And thinking of the NHS, thank goodness for it and stop the constant messing about and the cuts by another name. And let’s see a bit of nurturing for those darling buds!
Tuesday 14 May 2013
A Farewell to Middle-earth
The festival honours the life and work of JRR Tolkien within the area that inspired him during his early childhood. The weekend is planned and organised by volunteers with support from the City Park Rangers, The Shire Country Park Friends, The Tolkien Society, Harper-Collins Publishers, the Wildlife Trust for Birmingham and the Black Country and Birmingham City Council.
Volunteers, of whom many are needed over the weekend itself and also during the year in the detailed preparation, deserve full recognition - especially the dedicated prime movers Vivienne Wilkes and Stevie Prior. They have added so much to our cultural inheritance, the character of our area and our quality of life.
Alas, time marches on and as in so many areas volunteers get older and fewer and in these difficult times funds are also much harder to raise. So while the spirit of Tolkien’s Middle-earth will last for centuries to come, the 2013 Middle-earth Weekend will be the last of its kind. But there will also be many happy memories for individuals and families, a huge photographic record and many who were introduced to a lifelong love of Tolkien’s work.
Our heartfelt thanks once again to Viv, Stevie and the volunteers.
Wednesday 8 May 2013
Economics of The Village
Austerity – that self-serving, miserable misconception of basic economics is predictably a dismal failure, producing a bleakness for the vast majority of people that would appeal to the creators of the woebegone TV series ‘The Village’.
The selves that austerity serves are the rich, the powerful and the influential - and of course their acolytes, sponsors and hirelings who, knowing that their lords and masters itch to get their doctrinaire knives into benefits for the less well off, will readily tell them that savage cuts for some are the way to produce growth.
The chancellor and his cronies also suffer a selective historical amnesia that blanks out the record of the national and international experience of the 1930s, which malign forgetfulness dooms all but the privileged few to relive it, in part or in whole. It also blanks out the policies that would put the country on the road to recovery as developed by John Maynard Keynes.
We’ve heard much about the government’s wish to re-do school syllabi yet again regardless of educational merit. But one thing that has become abundantly clear is that there is a strong case for teaching economic history in schools – and in induction programmes for chancellors.
We’ve also heard a former chancellor saying that the country should leave the EU. Of course this couldn’t be anything to do with his friends in the banks - perish the thought. I look forward to hearing what the leaders of productive industry say to this in view of the loss of their markets and because the only banks that are serving the community today are the food banks.
I understand that amazingly there is to be a second series of ‘The Village’ which to be true to its cheerless and despairing tone should miss out the more upbeat 1920s and go straight to the depressed 1930s. Perhaps the people who are writing this stuff are the same ones producing the government’s economic policy – the effects are pretty much the same.
New scriptwriters needed all round!
The selves that austerity serves are the rich, the powerful and the influential - and of course their acolytes, sponsors and hirelings who, knowing that their lords and masters itch to get their doctrinaire knives into benefits for the less well off, will readily tell them that savage cuts for some are the way to produce growth.
The chancellor and his cronies also suffer a selective historical amnesia that blanks out the record of the national and international experience of the 1930s, which malign forgetfulness dooms all but the privileged few to relive it, in part or in whole. It also blanks out the policies that would put the country on the road to recovery as developed by John Maynard Keynes.
We’ve heard much about the government’s wish to re-do school syllabi yet again regardless of educational merit. But one thing that has become abundantly clear is that there is a strong case for teaching economic history in schools – and in induction programmes for chancellors.
We’ve also heard a former chancellor saying that the country should leave the EU. Of course this couldn’t be anything to do with his friends in the banks - perish the thought. I look forward to hearing what the leaders of productive industry say to this in view of the loss of their markets and because the only banks that are serving the community today are the food banks.
I understand that amazingly there is to be a second series of ‘The Village’ which to be true to its cheerless and despairing tone should miss out the more upbeat 1920s and go straight to the depressed 1930s. Perhaps the people who are writing this stuff are the same ones producing the government’s economic policy – the effects are pretty much the same.
New scriptwriters needed all round!
Saturday 4 May 2013
Getting away from the Dark Side
What alternatives are there to the depressing drag and the dark forces of austerity? The fact that there are likely to be no more well nigh useless tax cuts does not mean that all sensible options are closed. The negative economics of Darth Vader need not prevail!
But it is evident to almost everyone in this country - except of course the government - that more does need to be done urgently to save the economy. The alternative is continuing to bump along the bottom in the face of the widespread imposition of the Vaderian austerity that has spread like bird flu amongst gullible and subservient governments.
In the first place, no matter what LEPs say about enabling and agitating etc in yet more strategies supposed to produce growth, what is actually needed is real resources. These, and a government that is committed to providing them, rather than contradicting itself. It should be positive and get involved directly in projects that improve transport infrastructure, power generation and housing (but not just housing alone) to name but a few. But short of a booming directive from the sky this will not be happening with the present dark forces in Westminster. But there are other things that could be done if the will and the sense were there.
Returning to the positive power of a Keynesian position, I would like to draw attention once more to the concept of the ‘balanced budget multiplier’. This is where, in a broadly neutral overall financial context, spending power is moved towards those with a higher propensity to consume. In other words smaller deductions from the pay packets of lower income earners and higher taxes for the rich - and here I mean the seriously well-off - not the loyal, tax-paying middle classes picking up the bills again.
One way to achieve this would be to smooth out National Insurance contributions, making them a flat percentage of earnings with no limit on the range. Also, to achieve financial balance, the top rate of tax should go up from the recently reduced 45% rate back to where it was at 50%. Alongside this, the 10p rate could be reinstated.
If the flat rate of National Insurance contributions was set at a level that brought in a greater total this would free resources for increased support for manufacturing industry and public works projects. This would come out as around 7% so that the marginal take from the richest group would be 57%. This is less than the 60% that the wealthy were overjoyed to receive from Sir Geoffrey Howe and would be at the same level as in Sweden which has an enviable social market economy.
I doubt if there is a local Authority in the country that does not have ready to go engineering schemes especially after the impact of the prolonged winter on the roads that are thwarted by savage budget cuts and ever-increasing demands on the social care front. Two additional bands to council tax would add to the possibilities for investment without increasing borrowing.
And there are other fiscally neutral measures that could be taken both at local and national level. Here I refer to the procurement of goods and services. The Government must ensure that as much of its purchasing goes to domestic producers - from major defence or construction projects to the cars provided for ministers. Government departments must be made to see the bigger picture, with the negative impact of placing orders abroad far outweighing any saving on departmental budgets.
And there are ways of framing conditions for bids that would not contravene the letter of Euro legislation that can help domestic producers. You can be sure that certain other European countries do this - and more - already. The same goes for contracts from Local Authorities. There is a ‘multiplier’ of around 4, so that when a contract for, say, £250k is awarded to a local business, there is a total benefit of around £1m to the area as that firm and its employees spend and the beneficiaries of that spend also spend and so on.
So there is considerable policy latitude remaining – and I have not even mentioned the recreation of Municipal Banks! Perhaps it is just another forlorn hope, but maybe an element or two of this kind of effective and stimulating Keynesian thinking aligned with the force rather than the dark side of austerity will filter its way through even the Westminster bubble as the next general election approaches.
But it is evident to almost everyone in this country - except of course the government - that more does need to be done urgently to save the economy. The alternative is continuing to bump along the bottom in the face of the widespread imposition of the Vaderian austerity that has spread like bird flu amongst gullible and subservient governments.
In the first place, no matter what LEPs say about enabling and agitating etc in yet more strategies supposed to produce growth, what is actually needed is real resources. These, and a government that is committed to providing them, rather than contradicting itself. It should be positive and get involved directly in projects that improve transport infrastructure, power generation and housing (but not just housing alone) to name but a few. But short of a booming directive from the sky this will not be happening with the present dark forces in Westminster. But there are other things that could be done if the will and the sense were there.
Returning to the positive power of a Keynesian position, I would like to draw attention once more to the concept of the ‘balanced budget multiplier’. This is where, in a broadly neutral overall financial context, spending power is moved towards those with a higher propensity to consume. In other words smaller deductions from the pay packets of lower income earners and higher taxes for the rich - and here I mean the seriously well-off - not the loyal, tax-paying middle classes picking up the bills again.
One way to achieve this would be to smooth out National Insurance contributions, making them a flat percentage of earnings with no limit on the range. Also, to achieve financial balance, the top rate of tax should go up from the recently reduced 45% rate back to where it was at 50%. Alongside this, the 10p rate could be reinstated.
If the flat rate of National Insurance contributions was set at a level that brought in a greater total this would free resources for increased support for manufacturing industry and public works projects. This would come out as around 7% so that the marginal take from the richest group would be 57%. This is less than the 60% that the wealthy were overjoyed to receive from Sir Geoffrey Howe and would be at the same level as in Sweden which has an enviable social market economy.
I doubt if there is a local Authority in the country that does not have ready to go engineering schemes especially after the impact of the prolonged winter on the roads that are thwarted by savage budget cuts and ever-increasing demands on the social care front. Two additional bands to council tax would add to the possibilities for investment without increasing borrowing.
And there are other fiscally neutral measures that could be taken both at local and national level. Here I refer to the procurement of goods and services. The Government must ensure that as much of its purchasing goes to domestic producers - from major defence or construction projects to the cars provided for ministers. Government departments must be made to see the bigger picture, with the negative impact of placing orders abroad far outweighing any saving on departmental budgets.
And there are ways of framing conditions for bids that would not contravene the letter of Euro legislation that can help domestic producers. You can be sure that certain other European countries do this - and more - already. The same goes for contracts from Local Authorities. There is a ‘multiplier’ of around 4, so that when a contract for, say, £250k is awarded to a local business, there is a total benefit of around £1m to the area as that firm and its employees spend and the beneficiaries of that spend also spend and so on.
So there is considerable policy latitude remaining – and I have not even mentioned the recreation of Municipal Banks! Perhaps it is just another forlorn hope, but maybe an element or two of this kind of effective and stimulating Keynesian thinking aligned with the force rather than the dark side of austerity will filter its way through even the Westminster bubble as the next general election approaches.
Wednesday 1 May 2013
Still Bumping Along the Bottom
So the first estimate of the country’s Gross Domestic Product change in the first quarter of this year turned out to be an increase of 0.3%. While this result is better than the 0.3% decline in GDP seen in the previous quarter, it merely brings us back to where we were six months ago - and indeed to about where the economy was 18 months ago. Flatlining or bumping along the bottom however you choose to put it.
But this small measure of growth is actually quite an achievement for the struggling economy (subject to any later revisions of this initial estimate) given the suffocating austerity imposed by the Government and the senseless policy that it undertook of cutting back on public investment. But what exactly is it that’s been growing? This is the question that I and others kept asking, to no avail, during the pre bust years, and we know how that turned out.
Mostly some kinds of ‘services’ fluffing up again I suspect - with a much more modest performance from manufacturing and other useful industry. There’s a limit to how much of each other’s washing we can keep taking in, or pay day loans that can be issued, or imported goods that can be moved through shops. So much for re-balancing the economy.
I trust that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is a reader of the Financial Times – a newspaper that’s not renowned for its left-of-centre credentials. In the recent weekend edition of the FT Mr Osborne would have seen articles with headlines such as: “Spending cuts hold back US growth”, “Spain – another year of recession” “US – the cuts begin to bite” and of course “United Kingdom – bumping along the bottom”.
Will the Chancellor take heed of these informed views on how real world rather than right wing textbook economies respond to cuts in hard times? I doubt it. But perhaps the impending visitation from the International Monetary Fund, that not-so-radical crew who recently downgraded their forecasts for UK economic growth for both this year and next will be more influential.
And if not the IMF, then perhaps Mr Osborne will feel obliged to take heed of the electorate’s views as reflected in the results of Thursday’s County and Unitary Council elections with a couple of mayoral contests and a parliamentary by-election to boot.
But I strongly suspect that any adverse outcomes in the realm of the much-despised Local Government will be rationalised away and the only views that count will be those of his political confederates. An increasing number of these chums seem to be getting impatient with their own likely electoral fortunes that are also, not surprisingly, still bumping along the bottom.
Such, alas, is the nature of what matters to government in Britain today with the consequences that all but the richest individuals and tax-dodging companies are experiencing.
But this small measure of growth is actually quite an achievement for the struggling economy (subject to any later revisions of this initial estimate) given the suffocating austerity imposed by the Government and the senseless policy that it undertook of cutting back on public investment. But what exactly is it that’s been growing? This is the question that I and others kept asking, to no avail, during the pre bust years, and we know how that turned out.
Mostly some kinds of ‘services’ fluffing up again I suspect - with a much more modest performance from manufacturing and other useful industry. There’s a limit to how much of each other’s washing we can keep taking in, or pay day loans that can be issued, or imported goods that can be moved through shops. So much for re-balancing the economy.
I trust that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is a reader of the Financial Times – a newspaper that’s not renowned for its left-of-centre credentials. In the recent weekend edition of the FT Mr Osborne would have seen articles with headlines such as: “Spending cuts hold back US growth”, “Spain – another year of recession” “US – the cuts begin to bite” and of course “United Kingdom – bumping along the bottom”.
Will the Chancellor take heed of these informed views on how real world rather than right wing textbook economies respond to cuts in hard times? I doubt it. But perhaps the impending visitation from the International Monetary Fund, that not-so-radical crew who recently downgraded their forecasts for UK economic growth for both this year and next will be more influential.
And if not the IMF, then perhaps Mr Osborne will feel obliged to take heed of the electorate’s views as reflected in the results of Thursday’s County and Unitary Council elections with a couple of mayoral contests and a parliamentary by-election to boot.
But I strongly suspect that any adverse outcomes in the realm of the much-despised Local Government will be rationalised away and the only views that count will be those of his political confederates. An increasing number of these chums seem to be getting impatient with their own likely electoral fortunes that are also, not surprisingly, still bumping along the bottom.
Such, alas, is the nature of what matters to government in Britain today with the consequences that all but the richest individuals and tax-dodging companies are experiencing.
Monday 29 April 2013
The First Book
I was very pleased to see that the first book to be placed on the shelves of the new Library of Birmingham will be The Hobbit. A symbolic act, but one that will be much appreciated by all those who feel that JRR Tolkien’s very close relationship with Birmingham is not sufficiently recognised. For more details on the book shelving see Theonering.net website at Theonering.net
Whatever your opinion of the appearance of the new Library it is a significant development in these threadbare times. I suspect that those who like the appearance of Selfridges will also like the look of the Library of Birmingham that will open to the public on September 3rd. And it has to be better than the ugly and dysfunctional monstrosity that it replaces.
Way back on this blog I noted that in the United States the City of Boston’s Civic Centre is a ‘brutalist’ construct of the same ilk (they too are trying to get rid of this). Recently some Canadian friends visiting from Alberta mentioned that Edmonton is also saddled with a building of this design – if ‘design’ it can be said to be. The 60’s and 70’s have a lot to answer for in terms of the aesthetic character of our towns and cities and the destruction of architectural heritage. So what we are seeing is genuine progress.
I hope that this sense of change for the better will also see Tolkien’s legacy better recognised here at home and not leave it all to New Zealand! Meanwhile, this year’s volunteer-led Middle-earth Weekend at Sarehole Mill approaches. This unique event to be held on May 11th and 12th should again be really special and for more information visit the MEWE website at The Middle-earth Weekend
Way back on this blog I noted that in the United States the City of Boston’s Civic Centre is a ‘brutalist’ construct of the same ilk (they too are trying to get rid of this). Recently some Canadian friends visiting from Alberta mentioned that Edmonton is also saddled with a building of this design – if ‘design’ it can be said to be. The 60’s and 70’s have a lot to answer for in terms of the aesthetic character of our towns and cities and the destruction of architectural heritage. So what we are seeing is genuine progress.
I hope that this sense of change for the better will also see Tolkien’s legacy better recognised here at home and not leave it all to New Zealand! Meanwhile, this year’s volunteer-led Middle-earth Weekend at Sarehole Mill approaches. This unique event to be held on May 11th and 12th should again be really special and for more information visit the MEWE website at The Middle-earth Weekend
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