Last Post

The author of this blog has decided to call it a day and this post and the one below shall be my final utterances from these pages . I feel that it has been a long time coming, it has been increasingly difficult to keep 'in character' and also write about the various issues of the day- social, political, theological etc- without slipping into my own personal view. Therefore, despite the fact that this has been a jolly  good show, myself and Lord Lavendon have decided to go back to the country club, where he and I shall content ourselves with a good old brandy, cigar and the occasional bit of grouse shooting, fox hunting, fishing and all the other wonderful country pursuits that the previous socialist government banned. Cherry pip, tally hoe  and pleased be advised that your are all welcome to come and visit a new site, here, in which the author of this blog writes as himself.

Best regards all readers and thank you for reading over the past couple of years.

hacked off

My brief musings on the phone hacking scandal (I trust readers will be able to search the Internet on the back ground on what this is about ) :

• State-imposed censorship is wrong, but so are the actions of the NOW, who have clearly been sticking two fingers up to the law for some time and have brought not just themselves into the gutter but also all the good journalists, who do act with integrity.

• Brookes should go because as Truman once said "the buck stops here". There is no excuse to claim that she was on holiday when apparently the hacking of some of the people happened and therefore attempt to get off by placing the blame of all these serious allegations,on minions (who could presumably do what they  allegedly wanted?).

• The takeover of BskyB must now be halted as at present I cannot see that News International are "fit and proper" to run a flower stall, let along a listed corporation. The culture secretary is hiding behind rules and regulations, but if they really wanted to stop this, then I am sure that they would find a legal way to do so (just as Labour, flouting competition rules, found a way to merge Lloyds and Halifax to a mega bank in 2008).

• The police also have a lot of questions to answer and this will lead to the same drop in reputation as journalists, although it is worse for the police because they are supposed to be the authority of the law. For every honest copper has now been tarnished by the actions of the greedy and corrupt.

• Finally, Cameron must be wondering what made him hire Andy Coulson as his spin doctor and then director of the Downing Street spin machine (before he was pushed out). How many more errors of judgement has our prime minister made (that we don't yet know about) that will come back to haunt him and the conservative party?

Wow to that ocean of debt!

So the politicians have until 2 August to agree to terms which will allow for an increase in the amount of money that the US government can borrow or if not the government will default on its obligations, be unable to pay its civil service -in effect a  shut down & (even worse a repayment crisis) with the usual doomsayers predicting a financial meltdown if that occurs.

There  are negotiations and horse trading in return for agreement on increasing this limit between the political parties, the congress and the white house, which is turning into a bun fight about cutting spending,  raising taxes and the rest .

[ I cannot quite grasp the point of this, given that it took half a year to get the 2010-2011 budget agreed and it was a compromise agreement anyway, as one would assume that when this was voted upon Senators and Congressmen  might have had  an inkling that the debt ceiling would be breached during the year- which it did 1 month after the budget was finally passed- it is not as if the Congress does not have its own non-partisan budget office, but perhaps some-one else would like to explain this to me, as I really am at a loss about it].

The problem with the US debate (as it is in the UK ) is that I  would suggest that the politics has gotten into this debate a bit too much  or  perhaps the wrong type of politics,because the difference between the two parties (as in the UK) are relatively trivial when you have a $14,400 billion debt to repay. For example, the 2011-2012  budget debates have started in earnest, but from what I can gather the difference between Democrat and Republican spending plans is $200 billion; i.e. Democrats  (more accurately Obama) want $200 billion more, Republicans $200 billion less. $200 billion is a colossal amount to me and to the reader, but note - the US is borrowing $150 billion a MONTH adding to that already high overall figure previously mentioned-so $200 billion in this context is  little ink blot  in the sea of red  which is the US government debt.

One final thought on this- even if the debt ceiling is increased , there will be a time when the bond market will simply not be able to buy the vast amounts of bonds which are being used to fund the US government or becomes convinced that there is simply no way that the US will ever, ever pay back what it has borrowed, because of the refusal of the political elite to grasp economic fundamentals- a failure to  understand that even an economy as vast as the US cannot borrow $ + 1,000 billion a year forever. This hasn't been a problem so far because of the QE programme, but even that will not and can not be sustained for much longer.

Lunacy of the strikes

Today many teachers and other public servants are striking. But this time it is not about wages or indeed redundancy threats, but about pensions. Personally I would have more sympathy if these strikes were about potential loss of jobs, but they are not. They are about pensions and about how the public sector wishes to maintain their own lucrative arrangements at a time when the private sector has had to agree to abandon such schemes- called final salary schemes- in favour of contributory only pensions.

Final salary schemes are not sustainable and will end up leading to state bankruptcy as the population is living longer- hence why the retirement age is being lifted for the state pension, but unfortunately such basic mathematics is beyond the comprehension people striking today. Furthermore, the new arrangement for the public sector (written by a former Labour Cabinet member) are actually still quite generous and still more generous that private sector offerings. I would also like to add that these strikers should be grateful that they still have a job given that there are many,many millions unemployed and who are desperate just to earn a basic living and will find the sight of well paid middle class teachers striking over not being able to retire in their 50s to be a bad joke. So public sector, stop moaning and get on with the job, go back and continue the negotiations with the government and be thankful that tomorrow you will still have a job to go to.

Greek Tragedy rumbles on

So after  all the hype and the terrible scenes of rioting on the streets of Athens , the Greek Parliament has decided 155-138 to pass the latest austerity package in order to be given more bailout money. This is not the end of the whole issue, though, and the vote merely delays what is to come for a few more months. I doubt that the package itself will work, for various reasons, but the obvious one is that much of the new measures involve privatization of state assets. But who, please tell me, is going to buy these state assets when it is entirely possible that Greece could leave the Euro at any stage, resulting in large looses on whoever is going to buy these state assets (which may or may not be of any real value anyway). It is far easier for any potential buyer of these assets to "wait and see" what happens and then make a potential killing if Greece devalued and went back to the drachma.

I therefore suspect that in a few months time we well all be writing and talking about bailout III, by which time I think we will either be writing about the creation of an EU treasury and common debt market or the abandonment of the Euro by the Greeks and then other club med states.  This will happen sooner rather than later, so today is just a holding action, until one of these scenarios is played out. The key matter for British policymakers is not to wax lyrical about 'saving the euro' or whatever, but to plot out how Britain can gain maximum advantage in either event. Sounds harsh, but that is the job of  the politicians we elect to represent us.

Also, given that the world is more interconnected than ever, we may also have the added problem of a US dollar -debt crisis, if  a resolution on the sealing of US debt and budget agreements cannot be reached by the Congress/Executive.  I would not be surprised if we saw another bout of   "quantitative easing" (which will push up commodity prices and having little effect) given that fiscal policy is likely to be deadlocked  (I could imagine Obama, in desperation to be re-elected, ordering Bernanke to start putting those printed dollars directly into citizen's checking accounts).

Troubled times ahead and one feels like putting cash to gold and having it put in a vault somewhere safe....

Back to the Greeks

I cannot believe that that last time I put a post on here it was March. Well, I have be been on a little break and in my absence much news has passed under the bridge of the 24 hour news media - the wonderful  Royal Wedding, followed by the welcome news of the death of terrorist Bin Laden (who was right 'bin bagged', whatever the liberal/left media might say about human rights), the welcome defeat of the AV referendum and the justly deserved punishment of the liberal democrats at the polls; the so-called 'Arab spring' and Libyian intervention. So having gone away for a few months and having returned there seems to have been much change in the political world, except of course one matter. That of the crisis in the Eurozone, a situation quite ironic given that this was the subject of my last post.

The subject of the Greek bailout and whether or not its government can push more austerity through their Parliament has been the subject of many a newspaper column in the past few days .Here we go again. The first bailout was cobbled together at the last minute and low and behold it hasn't worked so, we need a new bailout. This to me seems to be prolonging the agony, not just of the Greek people themselves, but also of the people  of the other nations of Europe, perhaps the world. For the simple fact is that no matter how much the Greeks cut (or for that matter Ireland or Portugal) the Greek government simply cannot pay back what it origionally borrowed and is also  having to borrow up to 10% of GDP every year, just to make up for the difference between recepits and expenditure this year.

This is not a good situation, but it is clear that the bailout II is not going to work either, for whilst many of the austerity measures might be simple pragmatisim (e.g. changing the retirement age from 50 or attempting to stop tax fraud or some measures of privitisation on state owned enterprises), these measures by themselves are not enough. In a usual situation the IMF would indeed press for the kind of package that the Greeks are having to implement , but with the key difference of a massive devaluation of the bailout nation's currency (by 20-30%),  in order to boost exports and to take up the slack of the cuts imposed,something which the Greeks, under a currency better suited to Germany, cannot do. So the Greeks are having to implement cuts and the like, without this key element of recovery, whilst the rest of the Eurozone bickers about what to do, although  it is clear that no-one involved in the Euro project wants the Greeks to seperate themselves from the Euro and adopt their own currency again.

The most logical course of action would be to allow for a devaluation of the Euro, to help the Greeks (and the rest of the "club med") governments, but this would and is opposed by Germany and the other wealthy north european states. The alternatives are therefore a return to the Drachma (the old Greek currency) or 'more of the same'.

This may be anathema to the Eurocracy in Brussels, who always want more Europe as a response to problems (Euro-treasury, Euro-treasury bonds)  who will doubtless do everything they can to stop this ,with good reason, for the European Central Bank would go bust - and with it  the Europhile dreams-if a Greek default happened given the billions they have lent to Greek banks, the security for which was, erm, Greek government debt.

'More of the same' is clearly not working and will only make the situation in Greece worse. Therefore, the only logical  and fair option is for an orderly transition for the Greeks to go back to the Drachma and sort its own finances out in the usual IMF way.  This may lead to another Lehmans or not. But it is better in the long term that such action is undertaken now. For the current bailout is only postponeing the day in which the Euro collapses, in an uncontrolled way, which would have dangerous consequences for the continent of Europe and the rest of the world.

Another Euro crisis

This will be interesting, the Portuguese government is going to try today and get an austerity budget through their Parliament, although this is doubtful given that the current government is a minority one- the opposition is committed to opposing the cuts, thus triggering a general election and more widely another Euro crisis. But will the EU overlords and Germany take any notice or change, if the people of Portugal return a government opposed to the EU enforced cuts,which are really there to save German, British and other Northern European banks?.

Don't hold your breath...

What I'd like to see in the budget

The budget has basically been splashed out in many of the papers today (before its even been presented), so one must wonder what the point is of the Chancellor of the Exchequer actually making his speech in front of Parliament today. 

Putting that aside, we all have our wish list as to what we would do if in charge. I think I would like to see :

1. The abolition of the national insurance tax (given that there is no real national insurance fund and the whole thing is a giant fraud)  and a simple tax on income at, say, 30% . Note -the income tax alone you pay is either 20%, 40% or 50%, add at least an extra 10-12% for national insurance onto each bracket and you see how much tax you pay. (this will help both working families and business- who will be free of having to pay national insurance contributions).

2. Threshold of income tax to be £15,000  (thus helping the people on lower wages).

3. Abolish tax on pensions (thus helping the poor pensioner).

4.Reduction in corporation taxes (thus stimulating business) .

5. A cut or at least freeze in the fuel duty (thus helping everyone).

You may ask me where are we going to get the money from to "pay" for these cuts? The simple answer is that they will pay for themselves, as it has been demonstrated before that the less the state taxes you, the more revenue the state actually picks up. In any case we need to get business to start employing people again and the best way of doing this is to reduce the costs - i.e. their national insurance contributions and the reduction in corporate taxes.

Quite simple really.

"Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities"

I must admit that I thought that the leader of the free world was directing the Libyan war from some secret bunker underneath the White House or in the Cheyenne mountains or NORAD .

But in fact, he is directing it from a hotel in Brazil. Never fear, however, because the President is doing so in the comfort of a "Sensitive Compartmented Information Faciliy" or to everyone else a glorified "war tent" as the BBC is calling it, although this is a very special  tent as it is apparently impregnable to hacking and eavesdropping, although if you want one of these yourself, it costs upwards of $5,000 per square foot...

£400 million a year for Libya intervention

OK, I got this figure from watching SKY News, but this is apparently the latest estimate of the economic cost of our little brush war against said north African country. Yet again, I am asking myself, where are we getting the money from? And how? I thought we had to embrace the austerity measures because "there is no alternative" other than national bankruptcy. 

When people are loosing their jobs, employment is difficult to find and the economy could go into a double dip, all our Prime Minister seems to care about is some military intervention, in which millions are being poured down the drain;  he seems out of touch with reality and I can see why the British people did not totally endorse Cameron, even when faced with an opponent like Brown in the general election.

I had hoped that with a new government - especially one with the liberals in it- would be wary  of going on any more campaigns and would have learned lessons from the divisions Iraq caused and would focus on domestic recovery.

If only....

Cameron's military adventure or general insanity

OK, I admit I called it wrong when I previously suggested that no-one was listening to Cameron over the Libyan no-fly zone. He's got a UN resolution of sorts and this is now being touted as a British diplomatic victory and some bloggers are calling Cameron a 'statesman'.  Yes, well, I beg to differ and I hope that Ghadaffi loses his nerve and the whole episode ends without us having to fire a shot. If, however, it does come to military conflict, I would just like to put down my  reasons for opposing this silly military adventure, which may make me look like a left wing fruit cake, but I believe them to be thoroughly conservative and pragmatic  in reasoning :

1. Cost- we are continually being told by the Tory high command that our country is near bankrupt, which is why we have had to cut the public finances to their greatest extent ever, including, strangely enough our Defence forces. Yet, how is it, when we are living through these spending cuts and the military cuts have meant we  have ditched our harriers, nimrods, aircraft carriers and plan to reduce the army to under 100,000 people (even though were are already in one hot war), we can suddenly find the cash to pay for this Cameron -poll boosting attempt.

2. How and with What?- see point 1 above, given that UK military effectiveness is as about as great as Belgium (a country, without a government for nearly a year) thanks to our coalition cuts, please tell me how military intervention is going to succeed if it ends up as a ground invasion. I appreciate that the UK is not going to do this alone, and Cameron will doubtless throw as much of what is left of the military into this, but the whole bit about Cameroonian statesmanship is a bit laughable given that overall  it will be the US 6th fleet's  carriers who have the biggest bombs and planes and do most of the work; plus a bit of support from the French, who do have a slight advantage over us now, as they have  1 aircraft carrier(!).

3. Will it work? - Iraq was under the cosh of a no-fly zone for nearly a decade and yet it did not defeat Saddam (a ground war was needed for that) or stop him from brutalising his people.

4. Why Libya ? - A question I would really liked to be answered is that if this intervention is on "moral" grounds, because the leadership of Libya is attacking crushing their own people,  then why is Cameron not wanting to strike at Bahrain, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, Ivory Coast, the Republic of Congo, Somalia, North Korea  and Sudan/Darfur? I could go on with this list, but you see the point I am making here?

5. Another Iraq- self explanatory really, but what happens if  the west gets rid of Ghadaffi and the chaos as seen in Iraq ends in a greater bloodshed. What happens if those who have been misruled by the current regime turn on the west  and begin a campaign against any military force in the country?

6. Where is the national interest ? - It was apparently in the UK national interest to release the Lockabie bomber. Now it is in the national interest to get rid of the same guy whom we did a deal with; I would understand if this were about a part of Britain, in the way the Falklands is, but it is not. Nothing of course to do with the oil contracts the UK was hoping to get by releasing the Lockabie bomber.

7. Blair is Back-Yep, the Blair doctrine of  'Liberal Imperialism' is back or as it is called in America the "Neo-Cons"; that is military intervention on apparent moral grounds, in which the UK, sometimes lead  by or sometimes pleading with  the US (and occasionally the French) go round the world getting rid of  "the mad dictator regime" and attempt to replace it with democracy. Except of course, it only applies when the "mad dictator" is sitting on vast oil reserves or is in Europe (which to my mind explains point 4) .

Japan Thought Thread

Having watched the terrible scenes and events from the safety of my own armchair, I feel that it would be wrong of me not to post about the recent tragic events in Japan. This is therefore an open post for people to put their own thoughts and prayers to the people of Japan during this terrible hour for Japan and her people.

The strange death of liberal democrat England

For students of British political history you will already appreciate that I have taken the title of my post today, from George Dangerfield's "the strange death of liberal England", a book which attempts to explain why the liberal party became the third party after the First World War and  is one of those texts which you have to read if you study the subject at degree level.  It is clearly ironic that after almost a hundred years not being in government the successor to the liberal party, the liberal democrats, having finally achieved a place in government are now being totally smashed viz polling support,crashing to 9% in recent polls; the conservatives by contrast are at least holding steady at 30-35% or their core vote, labour benefiting very well from the current government troubles. 

One of the big questions not being asked at present is not that this current government is unpopular (it would always be so) , but why has the liberal democrat vote imploded in such a short space of time. Remember this time last year "cleggmania" was giving the liberal democrats 30% plus in the polls. Now at 9%, they are doing about as well as the liberal party in the 1960s. Why is this so? Is it because the liberal democrats are really the party of protest and have thus been shrunk to their own core support, now that they have to make difficult choices? Is it because their support of the conservative party ? Or something else?

As an aside, why is it that the liberals are taking the brunt of the wave of unpopularity over the cuts? As Cameron might say "we're all in this together", except that the liberal seem to be taking more of "this" than the conservatives.

Answers on a postcard please...

Under the counter with the ciggies

Right, the government's plans to force shop keepers to sell fags (cigarettes) under the counter is just taking state control too far and is not what a conservative/liberal  government should be about. Three simple questions to the state is all powerful morons who run this country, if I may :

1. How is this going to stop anyone from quitting?

2. If smoking is so evil terrible, then why not just put it on parr with  illegal drugs and given every smoker a month's supply of nicotine patches?(the answer will have nothing ,of course, to do with the massive  tax revenue!).

3. Adult magazines are displayed on the shelves of most shops, yet cigs will be banned from view? Why can't we have the porn mags taken off the shelves and put "under the counter"?

As an aside I would say whatever the rights and wrongs of smoking tobacco, given that in the UK at least you have to be 18 to purchase cigs, then surely it is up to the discerning individual to decide whether he/she wants to smoke/purchases cigs and not have it decided for them by some patronising, incompetent government official?

As a second aside, under UK law,  at 16 you can marry, join the army, have consensual intercourse- straight or gay, get a full time job, but you  cannot drink or smoke. I would suggest all those things that I've mentioned  are adult matters in some way, in the sense that they bring with them great responsibilities and require a certain maturity, a maturity which, personally I think is on the same personal choice or level as drinking alcohol responsibly or indeed smoking. It is strange that one can volunteer to potentially give one's life up at 16, but you cannot smoke 'em if you've got 'em  or enjoy a well earned tipple after thrashing the Taliban until 2 years later. Very strange, perhaps this is something that we as a society need to revisit. Do raise the bar across the board to 18, or lower this to 16?

As for this latest government scheme, personally I cannot see how a socially liberal, but economically conservative government could possibly have come up with this plan, which in the end only gives greater power to the state and takes it away from the adult  individual, who in the final analysis should be free to purchase cigarettes above the counter, not under it, as if what was being purchased is illegal and making a the purchaser feeling like they are bargaining on some black market stall.

BPM, Cameron and the Military

Judging from many a newspaper headline last week, one would have thought that Britain was still the largest military power in the world, the great superpower who could send out the gunboats to enforce their will on the natives; in this particular instance Libya. The newspapers were of course referring to Cameron's plan for a no fly zone against Libya, whilst also calling for Gadaffi to go. The trouble with this plan is that the Americans did not approve and since they are actually the only country capable of enforcing a no-fly zone, the plan has disappeared without a trace. What is of concern, however, is that Cameron has quickly got the BPM (British Prime Ministers) illness and quite early on in his term of office.

The BPM, for those unfamiliar with the term, is the effects of the practical dictatorial powers a British Prime Minister has, to the extent you rapidly age during your term (e.g. Blair, Major,Brown) and more worryingly you become increasingly detached from reality when it comes to the actual real power that Britain has, the illness becomes even more pitiful because every British Prime Minister allows for cuts to their armed forces and then expects them to do the same, if not more, than before.

This first Cameron intervention with regards to an international crisis is all well and good, but when will he realise that Britain is quite incapable of playing an independent role in world affairs or even a supporting role, whilst he, like his predecessors are hastily slashing the cash allocated to the Navy, Army and Airforce. Or perhaps will this early onset, the gap between reality and illusion will get even worse?