OMG! (Osborne must go).

 

The most important job in the UK at this time is Chancellor of the Exchequer. He has to deal with the most complex of financial, fiscal, economic and political issues during the most difficult of times since the1970’s.

 

So who is the intellectual giant minding the shop?

 

Step forward Gideon aka George Osborne, MP and First Lord of the Treasury. And what do we know of him?

 

Well, he’s a public school, Oxford-educated, wealthy Irish aristocrat.

 

He has a 2.1 in History, a mediocrity’s result. His practical work experience was 1 week folding towels at Selfridges. Thereafter, it has been only politics, first as a Tory researcher and then, at 30 an MP, Shadow Chancellor 4 years later, and Chancellor at 39.

 

So can anybody tell me what single qualification this young chap has for the most demanding of political appointments?

 

Not unexpectedly, he is turning out to be a one-man train crash.

 

His budgets have been met with something approaching derision, witness the ‘pasty’ tax. His reduction targets on both debt and revenue budgets have been missed. He has had some distasteful publicity over ‘yacht-gate’, flipping, and train fares.

 

His approach to financial retrenchment has been completely mishandled.

 

Whether you are Chancellor or Clerk to the Parish Council, public finance operates on two distinct budget lines, revenue and capital. If you cut the revenue budget, you must make savings on recurrent expenditure - staff, service levels, and (most importantly) sheer waste. If you cut the capital budget, you must cut investment in major works such as new airports, roads, schools, hospitals, and infrastructure generally.

 

George has made a big effort in cutting the revenue budget. In many of the wrong places.

 

Defence is the most important, the first duty of Government being the defence of the realm.  He has mutilated the armed forces to the extent that our navy is at its lowest ebb since Henry VIII. For the first time ever we have no capital ship in home waters. The army is at its smallest since the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

 

And he has increased the foreign aid budget by 37%.

 

But he has also been slashing capital expenditure, with disastrous effects on the construction and manufacturing industries, on employment, and on the economy generally.

 

He regards the Treasury as a part-time job, taking second-place to his role of Tory party election tsar.

 

We now learn from Peter Oborne that he is indulging in plotting and briefing against Ian Duncan-Smith, arguably the most successful Work & Pensions Secretary.

 

He plans to reduce the welfare budget by £10 billion. Fair enough, but he disdained to tell IDS about it, and it is not a targeted reduction against benefit cheats but a below-inflation cap on the deserving also.

 

He tried to get IDS fired in the last reshuffle, to be replaced with his own understrapper. He briefed his pal the Executive Editor of the Times, to rubbish IDS on ‘Newsnight’.

 

And what of IDS himself?

 

Educated at HMS Conway, devout Roman Catholic, son of a Battle of Britain Station Commander, 6 years in the Scots Guards, a spell on benefit after becoming unemployed on leaving the army, then to board level in business before becoming an MP 20 years ago. All his money comes from his own efforts, but he is not wealthy in today’s terms. He has always been a fierce Eurosceptic and opponent of the Afghan war.

 

In Opposition, he founded the Centre for Social Justice, and, together with the equally admirable Frank Field, probably knows more about welfare than anyone in Britain.

 

Here is what Oborne says about him:

‘A committed Christian, he ultimately understands his task in terms of human redemption. He does not believe that people are out of work because of their own fault. He believes that the vast majority are victims of a cruel system, partly created by Gordon Brown, which creates perverse incentives that encourage men and women to stay away from the job market. Mr Duncan Smith believes it is his life’s work to end this monumental tragedy, and to provide the best environment for the unemployed to find work and obtain the human dignity that a job brings with it.

Who would you prefer to remain in the Cabinet?

Another American gun-loony........

You may have read that the National Rifle Association's chairman, Wayne LaPierre, has finally revealed their solution to the string of public shoot-ups that we are enduring. He wants more guns and he wants them in the hands of people who are competent and trained in their use so that when the next shooter appears, one of these armed and licensed marksmen will be on hand to kill the shooter.

 

La Pierre also wants every school in America guarded by armed security people. I fully expect that should this happen, students, faculty and visitors would be obliged to pass through a scanning machine with belts and shoes off.

 

 

I would really like to sell America to our friends in the UK and Europe, but my country will not give me the opportunity to do so.

 

And about 30,000 Americns are demanding that Piers Moron should be deported back to England for attacking the NRA.

 

That would be regarded in the UK as an unfriendly act.

 

 

Brixit: the ins and outs of 'in or out?'

There is no doubt about it.

 

We are living through what promises to be one of the most momentous events of the 21^st Century; Brixit is gathering an unstoppable momentum, and hopefully Dave is sufficiently shrewd to realise that he can either go with it or be crushed by it.

 

The change in the weather has been breath-taking. Until very recently, Europhobia was the ‘crime that dare not speak its name’. An ambitious Tory MP would not dare to express other than undiluted admiration for all that Brussels stands for. After tearing itself apart over Europe post-Thatcher, the Tory party expunged it from the agenda.

 

All that has been turned upside down. If a Tory MP so much as hints that he is all in favour of Brussels, not only will he commit himself to a life on the back-benches but his constituency members will turn him into hamburger, such is the level of antipathy.

 

It is said that over 260 Tory MPs are for total withdrawal. There must be others who are for renegotiation.

 

Out there in the real world, the latest YouGov poll gives 49% in favour of ‘out’ and 32% in favour of ‘in’.

 

So what’s it all about? Tricky, because it is vastly more complex than the Daily Wail would have you believe.

 

For starters, I reckon that there are three options, not two, which are ‘in’, ‘out’, and ‘renegotiate’, but a referendum will almost certainly not introduce the third  and if it did it would be read as ‘stay’. But there is a place for the third option, which I will set out later. And at this point let’s dismiss Cameron’s cynical outpourings about being ‘no better than Norway or Switzerland’. He is again showing his patrician contempt for the ordinary voter.

 

These have the highest GDP per person  in the whole of Europe, and both export proportionally more to the EU than does the UK. And in terms of quality of life the UN reckons that Norway is #1 in the world.

 

So let’s examine the pros and cons of each of the options.

 

In.

British farmers would lose £27 billion in CAP subsidy.

 

The motor industry could be seriously affected. Component manufactures and supply chains could be affected in both directions. Ford and GM might be at risk because both supply components for assembly in Germany (this might kill off GM in Germany because it is the sick man of the company). JLR would be little affected as it has only a small EU market share.

 

Most of the Japanese cars made in England are exported to the EU.

 

British Aerospace, the world’s second largest outside the US, might lose business to France.

 

Labour mobility might suffer, upon which our high-tech business is very dependent.

 

The financial services industry could be badly affected if access to Europe became more difficult.

 

Out.

First up is cost. It is said that our gross contribution to the EU budget is above £14,000,000, but I believe that the net cost is in the region of £8 million*, still higher than Osborne’s first round of cuts. That would be a total saving in the event of withdrawal.

 

The annual cost of EU regulations is more than the benefits of the single market by perhaps £1 billion.

 

By not having the Common Agricultural Policy, surely the first amongst EU money-wasting  scams, there would be a very large reduction in our food bills.

 

We would no longer have the obscenity of dead fish being thrown overboard to suit EU quotas that are routinely ignored by other countries – have you seen the price of fish lately? We would resume authority over fishing up to the 200 mile limit or the median, which would give us a majority stake in the North Sea. And we would be in total command of our own agricultural policies.

 

The Working Time Directive, which limits work to48 hours a week and has caused chaos in the NHS and elsewhere, would be one of the first regulations to go.

 

The UK could set less onerous ‘green power’ targets, leading to cheaper power.

 

The regulation on the insurance industry, which will cost women up to 30% on their car insurance and increase their annuity premiums, all in the name of misplaced ‘equality’, would be scrapped.

 

We would be100% empowered to pass our own laws without EU meddling. We don’t actually know how much of our legislation emanates from Brussels but in Germany it is over 80%. Neither would we suffer interference from the ECJ. We would no longer be subject to the appalling European Arrest Warrant and the risk of being hauled off to some corrupt Eastern European  hell-hole at the behest of a bent magistrate.

 

We would be free to negotiate our own trade agreements with other countries. As Cameron is belatedly beginning to recognise, much of our economic destiny lies with the Commonwealth, as if history is beginning to re-wind.

 

My take.

The ‘out’ case is based on reasonable certainties. The ‘in’ case is largely based on possibilities, not probabilities. It is too much ‘might’ and not enough ‘will’. Much of it is speculative and based on a rather incoherent fear of ‘isolation’.

 

I am unconvinced by the supposed impact on manufacturing industry. It is correct that Honda, Nissan and Toyota came to England as a springboard into the EU. They are not going to decamp suddenly to France or Germany. If there is any major shift at all, which I doubt, it will take decades for any real effect to be felt. In any case, I believe import duties are only 4%, hardly cataclysmic.

 

I doubt whether the EU would be able to impose punitive tariffs on the UK partly because such issues are subject to global conventions through the WTO, and partly because two can play at that game.

 

I set little store on the BAe argument. GKN is the only firm in the world capable of the high tech manufacture of carbon fibre wing spars, and the outcome of severing of ties with Aerospatiale would likely to be the revival of the Boeing tie-up, blocked because of US mistrust of France.

 

Continuation of the single market would be in the interests of Europe as a whole. The UK has run a balance of trade deficit since joining the ECM. The Europeans are not about to sacrifice that lucrative trading position out of pique. It is said – by Dave amongst others – that Europe takes 50% of our exports. This is not true. We export more to non-EU countries; this is not necessarily because they have increased but more because our exports to EU have fallen off due to the dire state of the Euroland economies.

 

Currently, we are tied to a moribund, over-regulated and stagnant European economy.

 

Renegotiation.

I would keep this off the agenda at this time for tactical reasons.

 

Here is how it might play.

 

When (not if - he has a tiger by the tail now) Dave holds the referendum and there is an ‘in’ majority, that would be the end of the uncertainty, but Dave would still be expected to negotiate on issues such as the repatriation of 100 crime and policing laws before the opt-out closes, the exemption from new  financial regulation as the EU progresses towards banking union, and limiting UK financial support to the poorer states only.

 

If there is a Brixit majority, it  will take a period of maybe three years to completely effect withdrawal; it’s not just a case of ‘flag down and cheerio’, because the whole wretched edifice must be dismantled brick-by-brick.

 

During this time the UK  will have the opportunity to negotiate from a position of strength, because if the EU does not concede our reasonable demands, such as a reversion to the status quo ante Maastricht then its ‘goodbye’.

 

There would then be a second referendum to accept or reject the deal.

 

Reversion to a ‘Common Market’ would be heavily supported by the British people. Only 26% would favour ‘out’ if this were to happen.

 

But an ‘out’ decision would have a consequence that to many people might outweigh the financial and economic considerations.

 

We would no longer be shackled to an anti-democratic, bureaucratic, meddling and corrupt monster.

 

*I have scoured the EU financial reports for up-to-date figures. It’s a hopeless task. Transparency is unknown in Brussels.

 

 

 

US gun control? Dream on!

Since the mindless shooting spree at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut last week, there has been a lot of predictable banter over America's infatuation with guns and the need for more control over them.

 

I say banter because gun control discussion is predictably heightened whenever there is a shooting. To date, nothing meaningful has been done and I seriously doubt the Sandy Hook incident will result in positive and enforceable legislation.

 

Like everything else in American life, gun control is a highly politicized issue that roughly breaks down between the libertarian attitudes of the right and the anal retentive viewpoint of the left. The former constantly make the inane statement that guns don't kill people; people do.

 

 

The left's position is, like everything else bearing their fingerprints, to control the hell out guns. To date, the only palpable result of this debate has been a tremendous surge in the purchase of guns and ammunition,.

 

The left dreadfully misses the point about the use of weapons in America. This misfire is seen in their popular analysis consolidated in the notion that a hunter does not need a sub-machine gun to shoot game.

 

 

One value of this viewpoint is that it acts to define the scope of what the left wants in terms of gun control. Namely, to honor American's constitutional right to bear arms while restricting such arms to weapons normally used by a hunter, e.g. shotgun of whatever bore suits and a single-shot, pump, bolt or lever action high caliber game rifle. In addition, non-automatic pistols are also allowed for target shooting and for self defense.

 

Neither the left nor the right acknowledges our dirty little secret concerning why we want to arm ourselves to the teeth.  Creating personal arsenals has little or nothing to do with target practice or the gentleman's sport of game hunting. It has everything to do with defending ourselves, our homes and our families from intruders. Moreover, such intruders are not so much the odd vagrant, but rather the United States Government.

 

Growing numbers of disaggregated groups and individuals are convinced the government is their enemy and will one day soon dominate the population through military force. Militias of various orientations dominate these groups which number about 900 and boast a population of up to 60,000 or more.

 

 

There are militias in every state with some states having several different ones. Indiana has the most numbering 13 while Texas has five known militias. Their predominant ideology is one of fiercely protected individual rights coupled with a fear of government controls bordering on paranoia.

 

 

Membership consists largely of rural men many of whom served in the military. They generally set up camp in remote areas where they live and train year round or on a periodic basis.

 

Individuals claiming the need to protect Americans from martial domination by the government are less easily enumerated owing largely to varying degrees of activity, conviction, scope and paranoia. Their civil status ranges from wealthy businessmen to red neck drifters.

 

 

Many believe that Armageddon is just around the corner and may descend upon us as a result of massive earthquakes, alien invasion, a meteor strike, global warming, atomic warfare, pervasive urban riots extending into the interior, gang warfare and military intervention. The latter may well come about by the forceful disarming of individual citizens by the US military.

 

 

This scenario is not very far fetched when one considers that legislation banning the ownership of assault weapons may include measures to forcefully remove these weapons from individuals and their homes.

 

There is now an American  television program about families who have decided to prepare themselves for the complete breakdown of society by stocking up on food, water, guns and ammunition. Some have prepared underground shelters complete with solar power, water filters and, of course, an armory.

 

 

These people are sometimes referred to as 'preparers'. One example is the mother of Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter who was reportedly convinced that Armageddon was perilously close.

 

The militias and the individual survivalists make the odd deer hunter look like a lad shooting sparrows with a catapult. They are deadly serious, committed to their ideas, ideologies and misconceptions, and are prepared to back up their need for reclusion with their life. They are not, however, organized and any effort to do so would be akin to herding cats.

 

Our leaders in Washington seeking to control the use of guns without violating our constitutional rights are confronted with a monumental task. There is no way they would even attempt to eliminate the possession of assault weapons. This objective is virtually unachievable.

 

 

Legislation is currently being drafted, and has been passed in previous years, that criminalizes the purchase, possession and use of certain weapons. Past legislation on this subject has either lapsed, as in the case of the Assault Weapons Act, or has not been enforced.

 

 

The Assault Weapons Act, or more correctly, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 sought to eliminate the manufacture of assault weapons from 1994 onwards. The act was not renewed.

 

The Brady Handgun Violence Protection Act of 1993 mandated that background checks be conducted on anyone seeking to purchase a gun of any description. This act illustrates the lack of foresight of our legislators. While background checks were conducted at federally registered retail gun shops, weapons could be procured without any background check at gun shows, of which there are many. Moreover, guns are freely and openly bought and sold by individuals. Most newspapers have columns for the sale of guns in their want ad section.

 

We have a long way to go and it is doubtful the USA will ever effectively restrict gun ownership to sporting uses. A major lobby in Washington seeking to ensure this never happening is the National Rifle Association.

 

 

More than any other group, the NRA is adamant about the manufacture, marketing and sale of almost any type of weapon including assault weapons. Members proudly display their NRA badge on their hunting jackets and on the windscreens of their pickup trucks. Loyalty to NRA ideals is extreme and heaven help the person who talks against the NRA in front of committed members.

 

 

To its advocates, the NRA is a sacred cow and will not be neutered through legislation on gun control. One poignant example of its status is the image of Charlton Heston who, as a past Chairman of the NRA, gave a speech at one of its annual national conventions shortly before he died. The photograph depicts Heston lifting a rifle above his head with the caption defiantly stating, 'come and get it'.

 

To be sure, America is gung ho on guns and is not about to be dictated to by this, or any other congress. Any effort to enforce the restriction of weapons to sporting types only will be met with violence throughout the country.

 

 

Let us see what our legislators will come up with this time around.

 

 

 

Happy New Year: welcome to 1984!

‘1984’ was arguably one of the most controversial novels of the 20^th Century, and I have a clear recollection of the chilling BBC TV production starring Peter Cushing nearly 60 years ago.

 

We regarded it as dystopian fiction; it could never really happen.

 

But it could and it has. Let’s get started.

 

Perpetual war.

The background is perpetual war between Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia.

 

Well, you might say, that has never happened.

 

But it has, except that it is a perpetual economic war between the Anglosphere, the EU, and the BRICS. The most hopeful outcome, which I share, is that there will be no losers.

 

Big Brother.

He is certainly watching you, and me and everyone in the UK. We are told that there are more surveillance cameras per capita in the UK than any nation on earth; this includes the most repressive regimes. Kitten Heels May has recently been knocked back in her efforts to legislate for the authorities to be able to monitor every single electronic message that we send – e-mails, phone calls, social media, the full Monty. She lost this time round, but she will be back. And, of course, we have Leveson pontificating about legal sanctions on blogs, tweets and any other form of electronic publication.

 

Thought crime.

We have Blair to thank for introducing this in his public order legislation, whereby you can be convicted of a hate crime simply because the person on the receiving end thinks that it was such. There is much more within the 3,600 new laws introduced during the Blair regime (amongst them, it is now an imprisonable offence to allow an unlicensed concert to take place in a church hall. You can go to prison if your child fails to attend school, or if you smoke in a public place, or if you fail to obtain a passport for your pet donkey or if you are a child caught in possession of a firework at any time other than on or around November 5 or New Year's Day).

Newspeak.

We have this in spades; it’s called political correctness. We can now be convicted for what we say, as well as for what we do. Mere vulgar abuse, a British characteristic, is a crime, as is asking a cop if his horse is gay. In addition you can be arrested for taking photographs, like the man who was nicked for snapping a police car driving the wrong way down a one-way street.

 

The cult of personality.

Contemporary politics is driven by it, not by policies or principles. The whole of the media and the entertainment industry is besotted with it. We have people pulling down enormous money for being ‘personalities, ‘celebrities’ and nothing more.

 

Double-think.

This is holding two mutually contradictory beliefs at the same time. It is an essential qualification for politicians, for the BBC and for much of the media.

 

Orwellian.

This has entered our language and means official deception, secret surveillance and manipulation of the past. Need I say more?

 

Is there any good news? Up to a point; the recent UN conference on communications broke up without agreement after the Russians, Chinese, and several Middle East states attempted to get resolutions enabling government to control and censor internet and social media content, and were smartly told to get lost.

 

But they’ll be back.

 

Happy New Year!

 

 

A Golden Age: things were never better!

I am indebted to the Editor of the Speccie for his piece putting our current woes into context.

 

Here is what he says.

 

‘It may not feel like it, but 2012 has been the greatest year in the history of the world. That sounds like an extravagant claim, but it is borne out by evidence. Never has there been less hunger, less disease or more prosperity. The West remains in the economic doldrums, but most developing countries are charging ahead, and people are being lifted out of poverty at the fastest rate ever recorded. The death toll inflicted by war and natural disasters is also mercifully low. We are living in a golden age’.

 

So let’s have a look at this.

 

First up, health.

 

We forget that until penicillin came along TB was endemic and for much of the previous times it was epidemic.

 

In the late 40’s my brother was stricken with TB-meningitis, which had previously been almost always fatal. He was one of the first patients to be treated with streptomycin.  He was in hospital for two years but emerged completely clear. For many years now it has been almost an extinct disease (although there are alarming signs of a resurgence from the third world of an antibiotics resistant variety).

 

I was smitten with polio in 1960, fortunately with no permanent paralysis. It is now unknown in the developed world. Smallpox is extinct, when once it was a major scourge. The old child killers, whooping cough, measles and chicken pox have been virtually eradicated.

 

The incidence of AIDS has been falling for the last 8 years, as has an even bigger scourge, malaria

 

At the turn of the 19^th C life expectancy was 48. It is now approaching 81.

 

The biggest killer in the last century has been war. The total dead in WW1and 2 must amount to hundreds of millions. We of our age lived through WW2, 40 years of the constant danger of being incinerated by nuclear warfare. We used to debate whether it was a good thing to have children in that atmosphere. But there have been fewer war deaths in the last decade than at any time in the last century.

 

Poverty? The Millennium Goals were reached in 2008, 7 years ahead of schedule (there was no official announcement of this; it would not have suited Dave’s aid agenda). Many millions of people have been lifted out of poverty in the past 20 years. But not by foreign aid programmes which have little to show for the trillions spent in the last 40 years. It was globalization.

 

The environment? The Greens will tell you that we cannot go on as we are without ruining the planet. But a 6% growth in rich world economies has also seen a 4% decrease in the consumption of fossil fuels, not because of wind farms and other expensive frauds but because of the development of more –fuel-efficient vehicles.

 

Energy? Again we are constantly told that we are going to run out of oil, gas etc. sometime soon. New ways of recovering fossil fuels, such as fracking, means that we are entering an age of energy abundance accompanied by falling prices (the Americans already pay only on-third of what we pay for gas).

 

So have a cheerful New Year in the certain knowledge that things have never been better.

 

 

 

US: over the cliff?

The USA is playing brinkmanship as we edge closer to the monster fiscal cliff. We are so near the precipice that our leaders are beginning to say that falling off would not be the worst thing in the world. We could even survive the fall. It sounds to me like we are being prepared for slaughter.

 

The media informs us that our government is creating over 100 jobs a day. We are up sizing an already overstuffed bureaucracy. I am constantly reminded of the third-world practice of using their civil services as an employment agency with vast numbers of new recruits brought in after every election or change of government.

 

We cannot afford all this up sizing and uncontrolled spending but nobody within the administration seems to care. Also, the prospect advanced by some economists that we can spend our way out of our economic doldrums is blatantly wrong. We have gone too far in the red ink to legislate anything short of massive spending cuts. The problem is, such legislation will not see the light of day owing to the numeric strength of a misguided opposition.

 

The deadline for legislating any compromise before Fiscal Cliff day has passed. Some limited legislative measures may still make it, such as the proposal to shield our middle class from the effects of the looming curtailment of the Bush tax cuts. They, more than anything else, are the bone of contention between the liberals and conservatives.

 

So here we sit wondering whether Christmas dinner will be turkey or leftovers.

 

We intend to beat the system and serve pad Thai.