The "Glib Dems" - from spineless collaborators to willing collaborators?

Despite being on holiday this past week, the fact that we stayed in the UK meant that I was exposed to more of the Liberal Democrat conference than I'd have liked to. As far as I could tell (which is mainly from Channel 4 news bulletins), the mood of the conference was rather different in 2011 than 2010. Last year there were significant rebellions against coalition policy - particularly on free schools. This year, a threatened rebellion against the NHS privatisation bill didn't get off the ground (the motion to hold a debate on the bill got more than 50% of delegate votes but didn't get the two-thirds it needed to pass).

There appears to have been a shift in how most of the Lib Dems are perceiving and positioning themselves. Last year, they were a sell-out and a prop for the Tories and they knew it. The squirming embarrassment of Vince Cable over tuition fees was the foremost example of this. The party looked to be heading for some kind of collective brain seizure.

But now... it's rather different. Sure, Huhne and Cable's speeches hit out tokenistically at the extreme right of the Tory party but overall there was suprisingly little criticism of the Tories. Instead, all the most stinging criticism was reserved for Labour. Clegg was particularly scathing - something that Ed Miliband will welcome, I think. After all, the experience of the AV referendum shows that these days the public normally does the exact opposite of what Nick Clegg says.

Last year I had pigeonholed the Lib Dems as spineless collaborators, unable to speak up for their progressive instincts because they had signed a Faustian pact with those bastard Tories. But now... they're still collaborators, but for the most part, WILLING collaborators. They actually BELIEVE in the shit policies they are foisting on the public.

Even Vince Cable - who give a similar cardboard cut-out "radical" speech to last year - is pursuing an extreme right deregulatory agenda at BIS. And Vince is certainly the extreme left wing edge of Lib Dems in government. The others are much worse.

Are the activists swallowing this shit? I think, by and large, they are. There is disquiet (as the NHS vote showed) but not enough to upset the applecart (again, as the NHS vote showed). The Social Liberal Forum - which is the social democratic fringe of the Lib Dems - doesn't have the numbers or the parliamentary leadership to challenge Clegg, and seems reluctant to split off from the rest of the party. There is probably also a sample selection effect going on here; many of the Lib Dems who were pissed off with the decision to go in with the Tories left in May 2010 or soon after, to join Labour or the Greens. Likewise, the Lib Dems claimed that thousands of new members signed up in the wake of the coalition deal... these will have been right-wingers, almost certainly. (I don't know what's happened to Lib Dem membership recently... some people said the conference hall looked a bit sparsely attended but that could have been because they'd hired a bigger venue than previous years? I don't know).

So basically, this is becoming (or has become) a right-wing party indistinguishable from the Tory mainstream except for a few issues: Europe, civil liberties, and maybe crime and national security.

Which means, more or less, that the advent of the "ConDems" has moved us from a political system with one right-wing party and two centre-left wing parties to a system with one left-wing party(at least in theory) and two right-wing parties. (Plus the Greens, UKIP and the Nationalists, of course). Under first past the post, it seems to me that Labour is the likely beneficiary of this shift. The Lib Dems will find it very hard next time round to take any votes off Labour from the left of the spectrum, as Charles Kennedy did with some success in 2005. Nor will they easily be able to rely on the more nebulous "new politics" schtick which produced the Cleggmania bubble of 2015. Instead, they will be out there at stage right, fighting to make the Tories look as reactionary as possible while copying their economic arguments and anti-Labour rhetoric...

So, from "Fib Dems" to "Glib Dems" it is, then. The Lib Dems have made their choice... it's a right-of-centre party from now on. They have gambled on shifting the political centre of gravity so far to the right that there will be room for two right-wing parties to co-exist successfully in future elections. Can this strategy work? The polls at the moment suggest there's no way in hell (and that's without boundary changes, of which more another time). But there is still a long way to go before 2015, and my new prediction is that the coalition will last until then... because many of the people in the Lib Dems who could take it down have already left.

On holiday - like the Lib Dems' collective brain

Having a nice time up in west Norfolk - a great area of the country for foodies and beach walkers, for sure. This keeps me away from mischievous activities like watching the Fib Dem conference - although not from Twitter, where I have been enjoying regular dialogue and argument with left and right.

The most amusing aspect of the current Fib Dem exercise in mass self-delusion is the feeling that somehow they have turned the corner - despite the fact that their YouGov opinion poll rating is around 9%, unchanged from where it was in January - and Nick Clegg is still enjoying staggeringly low ratings with the electorate. And so the party faithful (those that haven't walked away in disgust) console themselves in a fantasy.

The set piece speeches are a cross between George Orwell and Monty Python: Tim Farron telling the members to "stop complaining" - i.e. be happy with your lot, acting as as appendage to the Tory Party. Simon Hughes - who gave a good speech at the Compass conference back in June, to be fair - saying that the Lib Dems were reining in "extremist" Tories. Strange then, Simon, that key Tory policies like savage spending cuts - and even key Tory policies that weren't in their manifesto, like NHS privatisation - are being nodded through. And the ministers - Clegg, Teather, Alexander - are even worse than that. We will no doubt see the standard left-wing football rattle speech from Vincent Cable later in the week - at the same time that he is attempting to dismantle the employment regulation structure of Britain. And all along, these bastards will be claiming that they have "taken poor people out of tax" when in fact they have slapped a 2.5% VAT increase on the poorest in society, cut benefits for the poorest in society, and only a tiny proportion of their £17bn income tax personal allowance increase actually helps the poor. Not for nothing do they carry the tag "Fib Dems".

But I don't hate all Lib Dems - and that differentiates me from some of the more tribal Labour Party types in the blogosphere. For example, I think Evan Harris is a fine upstanding left-wing secular rationalist who should be the party leader. Sadly, he lost in 2010 - mainly because he was a shit constituency MP and pissed off too many people. That was an idiotic mistake to make; but his profile is nonetheless very high, and if he walked out - perhaps to start a new left wing party (the Progressive Liberals? The Social Liberals? Plenty of possible names out there), possibly to join Labour or the Greens - he could take a lot of people with him. There is a thing called the Social Liberal Forum who are trying to take back the Lib Dem party from the Orange Book right wing nutters who have taken it over. We have already seen a fightback against right wing extremism in the Labour party, in the shape of Ed Miliband (although the process is still incomplete) and it is possible that Social Liberal Forum could pull off the same trick in the Lib Dems. What they lack at the moment is a high profile leader - it seems that all the potential Lib Dem leadership contenders, even the more left wing ones, are biding their time. Or maybe there just aren't any left wing Lib Dem MPs any more.

But I am in regular contact with several fine upstanding left-wingers in the Lib Dems - and my friendly message to these people is, GET OUT NOW. You are doing the Tories' dirty work for them, destroying an honourable political party, and tarnishing your own reputations. PULL THE FUCKING PLUG, form a new party (or join one of the others) and start living the real deal rather than a lie. The country will thank you for it, and you'll feel much better.

After the five year mission

I checked back to the start of this blog and it turns out that Giroscope was 5 years old last week - we started off with an inauspicious post on 7 September 2006 about the Chappel Beer Festival. (I didn't go to Chappel this year because I didn't have time).

While Bill Shatner and crew retired after only 3 years of the original 5-year mission (being brought back for special occasions and toupee fittings once in a while), this blog is more like the Next Generation (or indeed Ed Miliband's "New Generation") - a "continuing mission" with no fixed end point.

As a special treat I'll be returning to the blogs from "Hal's Friday evening blog review" which was an early feature back in the 2006 days, to see what has happened to them in the last 5 years - or if, indeed, they still exist. I'll also be seeking out some new random blogs for extra comedy.

October should see the redevelopment of the Golf Ball and perhaps even some new activity on Groscope - certainly grew plenty of stuff this year, so time to write about it.

Keep it real, people.

Wisdom from beyond the ages....

Now writing, albeit far too infrequently from New York City, my sojourn here has led me to study in somewhat more depth the History of this influential country, perhaps with a view to understanding more of the roots of the massive issues facing it and by extension the entire world. Whilst reasonably familiar with US history, at least up to the end of the Napoleonic wars and during the Civil War, the remainder of the period up to the end of World War I remained something of a murky one. I was inspired by a picture of president Obama working at a desk. The history of this desk, The Resolute desk, was that it was given to arguably one of the least well-known presidents (at least for British audiences) Rutherford B. Hayes , the 19th President of that country, by Queen Victoria during a period of gradual closening of relations between the two countries, carved from the hull of a ship, H.M.S Resolute which had been lost in the Arctic Circle and recovered by the USA.

Studying Hayes, a Republican from the 19th Century, I was struck by how sensible he seemed, and how this speech could provide a wake -up call both for Tea Party extremists who claim to represent the 'authentic' Spirit of the US, and Left wing extremists who think that any 'DWEM' 'Dead White European Male' (Hayes would be classifed as European on the grounds of being White) has nothing to tell us:


"In church it occurred to me that it is time for the public to hear that the giant evil and danger in this country, the danger which transcends all others, is the vast wealth owned or controlled by a few persons. Money is power. In Congress, in state legislatures, in city councils, in the courts, in the political conventions, in the press, in the pulpit, in the circles of the educated and the talented, its influence is growing greater and greater. Excessive wealth in the hands of the few means extreme poverty, ignorance, vice, and wretchedness as the lot of the many. It is not yet time to debate about the remedy. The previous question is as to the danger—the evil. Let the people be fully informed and convinced as to the evil. Let them earnestly seek the remedy and it will be found. Fully to know the evil is the first step towards reaching its eradication. Some are strong when they portray the rottenness of the present system. We are, to say the least, not yet ready for this remedy. We may reach and remove the difficulty by changes in the laws regulating corporations, descents of property, wills, trusts, taxation, and a host of other important interests, not omitting lands and other property'

Food for thought , certainly..

Darling vs Brown

Been incredibly busy recently so not much time to blog, but I just wanted to say something about Alastair Darling's forthcoming and much-trailed memoirs in which he reveals sordid details of his life at Number 11 Downing St when Gordon Brown was at Number 10 - by all accounts, a very difficult three years.

Of course, we know already - primarily from Andrew Rawnsley's excellent The End of The Party - that Brown was a notorious bully, extremely difficult to work with, often chronically indecisive, and finally unable to present the kind of decisive break from the Blair years which might have enabled Labour to win a fourth term in 2010. In personality terms, my sympathies have to be with Darling - by all accounts a likeable and easy-to-work-with guy who had been a close friend of Brown for years, but found himself a target of the most appalling dirty tricks operation from the Brown henchmen when he dared to confide to the Guardian that the economic situation really was very bad indeed. Brown's insistence at the time that the financial crisis would blow over in 6 months now looks totally ludicrous (although to be fair to Brown, in summer 2008 when Darling observed that things were the worst they'd been for 70 years, most expert opinion didn't really believe things were that bad. The realisation came in autumn 2008, when the world banking system suddenly began to unravel completely.)

And yet... there's blame on both sides here. Having suddenly become the saviour of the global financial system (with able assistance from Darling) in autumn 2008, for my money Brown showed more political nous in 2009 than did Darling, but was ultimately done in by the fact that most of his cabinet hated him and didn't believe in him anymore. One of the reasons James Purnell resigned from the cabinet in Summer 2009 was that Brown refused to talk about the dreaded "c-word"... cuts. But I think the reason Brown didn't talk about "cuts" until autumn 2009 was that he realised that it would be pretty much impossible for Labour to win an election promising a slightly moderated version of a cuts agenda dictated by George Osborne and the Tory party. Brown realised that the economic battle has to be about Labour investment versus Tory cuts in order for Labour to have a cat in hell's chance of winning. The plan that Darling and the Treasury delivered going into the 2010 election was for cuts almost as bad as what the Tories were promising - this made it EXTREMELY hard for Labour to develop a coherent economic narrative in the 2010 election, a fact that Darling has acknowledged himself in interviews this weekend. Labour was left looking like an ersatz version of the Tories (which is, by the way, what the idiots in the Labour Right want Ed Miliband to do in 2015, and it'll have about as much success.) It was also patently clear during the election that Brown didn't believe his own economic narrative.

So in the end it is Alastair Darling that is partially responsible for Labour getting 29% of the vote in 2010. Only partially, because the other main reason for Labour's failure is because Gordon Brown was the hardest of hard sells by then. An exhausted, unlikeable and tragic figure on the doorstep, who should surely have been knifed hard by one of his senior cabinet members in 2008 or 2009. And this is the other reason why Darling takes his fair share of the blame for Labour's failure... because, along with Miliband, Johnson, Straw and all the other potential alternative leaders, he didn't have the balls to twist the knife in. There is one guy in British politics who has had the guts to take down a political frontrunner in an open contest... that guy is Ed Miliband, lest we forget. And anyone on the Labour right sniping about Ed needs to remember that Ed would probably never have become leader if any of the people in a position to oust Brown before the election had actually done it... at the end of the day, you have to put up or shut up. And while I have immense sympathy for Darling's plight at the hands of Gordon in 2007-10, both of these guys are just an irritating distraction at a point when the ConDems are trying to destroy the country. And really I should be blogging about the collapsing economy, or the death of the NHS, and I will do... it's just that I'm a junkie for a political spat, sad man that I am.

Reminding myself how good "War on Terror" is

Not the concept as copyrighted by Dubya Bush (obviously)... the board game.

I was doing a session with Burning Lodge last weekend (next month I really must reactivate Brother Typewriter's Golf Ball - lots of music-making and equipment to discuss) and after recording some fine tracks we ended up playing "War On Terror", which I was bought several years ago as a present when leaving my previous job.

It's an all time classic, it really is. One of the good things about the game is that you're almost hoping you're going to be crap at the start and go bankrupt or be stopped from expanding your empire by dastardly other players, so that you can become a terrorist. Playing the terrorist is a lot more fun than being a "normal" player.

I want to get the follow-up game from Terror Bull Games - "Crunch" - soon. It's billed as "the game for complete and utter bankers" and apparently contains "the collapse of capitalism (more fun than it sounds)" [hard to see how that would be possible, as the collapse of capitalism is what most of us are waiting for at the moment, but there you go].

Expect more breaks from politics in some of the future posts, as I need to broaden out the variety a bit... taking a break before the conference season (or possibly during it!)

Once more unto the breach, dear Friends....

Have been kept, somewhat embarrassingly away from the mundanities of blogging by having to take care of administration on my new abode on the other side of the Atlantic,so have been on 'silent running' for a couple of weeks. however, despite a backlog of about seven posts (events never stop in the real world) a story from the UK necessitates comment. Several months back I referred to Labour's mayoral candidate, Ken Livingstone as the Jason Voorhees/Freddy Krueger of British Politics for his tasteless comparison of opponent Boris johnson's Chief of Staff, Eddie Lister, to Bosnian Serb commander and suspected war criminal, Rlatko Mladic. In this stunningly hamfisted interview in Total Politics, he goes one better than that by equating the coming mayoral struggle with the fight between Churchill and Hitler in World War Two.

The blog entry by the controversist, Toby Young, author of How to lose Friends and alienate people posits that Livingstone, through a combination of frustration and possibly premature senility has become unhinged, and several commentators on the post take him to task for not realising that what was said was Ken 'being drole' or making an attempt at humour. Whilst I would also agree this could be an interpretation, the problem for him is that, of arguably any politician in the last 30 years, Livingstone is a master of taking vicarious offence on behalf of the many 'minorities' (women, non-caucasians, homosexuals, LGBT, even famously the Irish in the height of the troubles) that comprise his 'rainbow' coalition. To illustrate the point, can one imagine the reaction of the Labour Left, the Guardian, Independent and the BBC (funded by a £155 stipend on every TV watching household in the country) had Johnson made the quite accurate remark that the election were 'reminscent of Korea and Vietnam'? - a statement which given Livingstone's quite self -evident links with both the Northern parts of those two countries' proxy allies during the conflicts in question is really quite unobjectionable to anyone without a vested interest in this man's election.

The issue is ,when you take an innocent remark out of context and, even though not part of the 'minority' in question, call for people to resign or apologise, it is rank hypocrisy to expect others to turn the cheek to the most odious and outrageous calumnies,even if they are said in jest. Having fallen foul of this with a tactless comment comparing a Jewish Evening Standard reporter to a concentration camp guard, I'd have thought Livingstone would have known better.

The sadly departed from the Telegraph, Simon Heffer, summed up the position quite admirably following the furore over Cameron's rather crass remarks to Labour shadow Minister, Angela Eagle. The Left's very 'thin skin' and the basic paucity of many of their arguments mean that the reflex weapon of howling 'racist' or 'sexist' or 'homophobe' is often the only weapon in their armoury. however, unless one wishes to fall foul of Livingstone's rather curious 'sense of humour', I would strongly urge anyone reading this who is able to vote for Johnson next year, lest you find yourself tagged as a member of the Waffen SS and subject to 'denazification' or 'war crimes trials' (just joking on the latter of course, Christ, don't you people have a sense of humour?)

Meanwhile in America...

Quick update on Van Patten's posts from a few weeks back about the likely Republican challengers for 2012. It now turns out that Rick Perry is definitely running, while Tim Pawlenty has dropped out after a poor showing in the very weird Iowa "straw poll".

It's probably going to be one of Perry, Bachmann or Romney for the GOP nomination to take on Barack Obama's "GOP-lite" ticket in 2012. That's assuming of course that Obama can get re-nominated, but I'd be surprised if it didn't happen. Michael Moore is apparently backing Matt Damon for President - I must admit I've never actually seen any of Damon's films, but I've seen several of Moore's. I still think an independent left-wing challenger to Obama is more likely than a successful primary challenge within the Democrats. Still holding out hope that Bernie Sanders will step up to the plate.

In terms of Obama's chances, running on his "GOP-lite" policy platform will be a huge demotivation to the voting base which handed him the election in 2008. My prediction is that if the Republicans nominate Bachmann, Obama will win, but if they nominate Romney or Perry, he'll lose. This despite the fact that Perry's platform is likely to be closer to Bachmann's than Romney's: I think Perry has more cross-over appeal to non-Tea Party Republicans than Bachmann does, and that will make the difference. A Romney presidency will be pretty much indistinguishable from Obama; a Perry presidency will be the end of US democracy as we know it. Four years ago I compared Mike Huckabee (a comedy version of Rick Perry in many ways) with Stillson from The Dead Zone: with Perry, the comparison seems even more apt.

Future historians (if we survive that long as a species) will look back and wonder how, after the euphoria of November 2008, the USA managed to get itself in just such a mess. I blame the fact that the entire US political process is controlled by Wall Street. Politicians with guts could still stand up to multinational corporate power... but they are in short supply, seemingly everywhere.

Into another abyss...

I'm writing this a bit dazed, frankly, after three nights of terrible and escalating violence on the streets of London, and now Birmingham, Bristol and Liverpool. It turns out that, even as stock markets around the world continue to tank, the main story making headlines in the UK hasn't been that. It's been the riots.

The whole thing seems to have got very out of hand almost by accident on Saturday in Tottenham... a peaceful demonstration demanding answers from the police over the death of a local resident, Mark Duggan, earlier in the week was followed by a wave of violence directed against property in the Tottenham area, which the police were slow to respond to. The perpetrators of the violence seem to have discovered two inconvenient truths: (1) looting shops, once you've broken down the shutters/windows/etc. is very easy; (2) with only 1400 police immediately deployable in London (that is a figure from a recent interview with London Deputy Mayor Kit Malthouse), the more disturbances there are, the less the police are able to keep order at each one (although reinforcements have been drafted in from other areas). What we've seen on Sunday and now Monday night, with escalating violence over a wider range of target areas, is opportunistic exploitation of thinly stretched police resources.

Some points on this:

Firstly, while the Metropolitan police have tried hard to change the image of a force described as "institutionally racist" in the MacPherson report of 1999, and there has been some progress, it's clearly not enough. A delegation of family and friends who had gone to Tottenham police station after reading in the local newspaper that Duggan died as a result of a police bullet were stonewalled and kept waiting by police for hours; it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that police decided that they weren't worth bothering with because they were black, or working class, or both. The Met's stock is pretty low anyway at the moment after revelations that officers were in cahoots with News International in the phone hacking scandal, and also the absurdly heavy-handed policing of the student demos last November and the Fortnum & Mason occupation this March. As this excellent article from Stafford Scott points out, given the Met's poor record on interfacing with so many citizens, it's hard to be surprised when something like this happens.

But at the same time, none of that excuses looting or violence against shops and other businesses which are employing people in extremely deprived areas. A Lewisham councillor sent out a tweet last night that said something like "please don't riot because our budget is being cut by 30%, which means if you smash Lewisham up we don't have the money to put it back together again". Spot on, that man. This is violence against communities who were already very hard up against it, suffering disproportionately from the ConDem cuts and now suffering a hell of a lot more because people - many of them, it seems, operating in well-organised criminal gangs - decided it would be a good idea to raid high streets and shopping centres for TVs and trainers. Now, Ken Livingstone and John McDonnell are right to point out that our current brand of turbo-capitalism sets a really bad example, and the bankers are engaged in looting of their own, but at the end of the day smashing up working class neighbourhoods does nothing to change society. Political activism (perhaps in the Green Party, the only political party opposing the cuts at present) is the way forward for the people who are losing out from the ConDem cuts.

Thirdly, the cuts aren't purely responsible for this situation because (a) we're only in year 1 of a 4-year cuts programme, and (2) even at pre-2010 staffing levels, the police wouldn't have been able to cope. However, the cost of the clean-up from these riots shows the folly of making deep cuts in police numbers or in other community services. The cuts could end up costing much, much more than we save. Conversely, it may be that by increasing public spending in some areas we can actually *save* money.

Fourthly, people calling for the army to be sent in need to remember Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland in 1972. Personally I have no wish to head towards a "death squad" model of society where people are shot without trial. Tom Watson MP's suggestion that the army be used as backup and escorts for emergency services workers (e.g. protecting firefighters and ambulances, etc., freeing up the police for frontline duties) seems like a good one.

That's all for now. If you are living in London or one of the other affected cities then I hope you are safe and well... all my thoughts are with you.

The edge of the abyss?

As I write this it appears that Stage two of the Global crisis is already under way, and indeed appears to be gathering pace. The FTSE has been sent tumbling by more than 550 points, it's third worst fall in history. The Dow Jones' slump has been partially arrested by some surprising 'good news' on the jobs front, but it seems highly likely this is a 'dead man's bounce', Hal Berstram is already advising people to stockpile tinned food, and this seems pretty good advice. The trigger for the crisis appears to have been, once again issues with the Eurozone (the subject of several earlier and one stillborn post - the phrase 'Greek tragedy' is just too good to resist)

It appears the contagion evident in Portugal, Ireland, Greece (and also little Cyprus) has now spread to Italy and Spain. The ECB seems unwilling (or perhaps unable to intervene) and it is revealed that the EFSF (European Financial Stability Fund) is expected to be increased to £440 billion to anticipate issues in those much larger economies. In the meantime, hang on to your hats, as the chickens are definitely coming home to roost. More on this later - but in the meantime, invest in John West and Princes, if you want to put your money anywhere!

Mad, bad and dangerous to know

Following this blog's originator onto Twitter , I was intrigued by the admittedly entertaining 'Moronwatch', evidently someone of leftist thinking, he does however seem admirably open minded, including Islamic extremists and members of the extreme Left on his list of 'following'. This became all the more alarming when this piece by the dreadful Polly Toynbee appeared on the airwaves in the wake of the admittedly contentious 'agreement' on the US budget deficit ,decried as yet another 'sellout' to Radical Republicans, basically the culmination of a 3 year retreat before the fissiparous 'Tea Party' and its acolytes since those heady days of November 2008.

However, the piece's significance is perhaps part of a greater struggle from the Left, a struggle which followers of American 'Higher education' will be familiar with from the Early 1990's and 1980's when the movement for Political correctness reached its apogee in US academe. Whole rafts of European authors were effectively removed from circulation or became 'samizdat' across many institutions, due to their alleged racist, sexist or homophobic viewpoints(part of the 'amputation of the time dimension from our culture' to quote Sir Ernst Gombrich). Authors such as Shakespeare, Milton, Plato, Aristotle and Mill (to mention just five) were shoehorned into the category of 'DWEM' (Dead White European Male) and two decades of college students in departments such as English and especially the Social Sciences were in effect given a narrow, hardline marxist view of the world that anyone with the slightest nous (or indeed critically experience of the real world outside academia)could see was utter nonsense.

To the creditof academics in the UK, outside a few niche disciplines such as 'Women's studies' or 'Race studies' these views never gained much currency in the UK, and it perhaps testament to the relatively benign state of race relations comared with the US that such vicious thinking never did really make its way into the mainstream, save for a few extremist Labour politicians (The famous racist Lee Japser for example) on the left, and the motley crew of the National Front and latterly the BNP and EDL on the extreme right.

However, the left has always sought to control the debate, hence its stranglehold (despite 18 years of Tory government) on the education system. that's whay the Toynbee article, though vaguely ludicrous is perhaops an indicator of how the Left is looking to use the 'Phone hacking' scandal to circumscribe the terms of the debate. The article starts by offering the Tories a backhanded compliment, applauding them (probably very politely!) over their refusal to drift as far right as the 'Tea Party'. It then launches into two paragraphs regarding 'Climate change deniers' that make me ask whether the author's sanity should be questioned. The term 'Denier' is in itself grotesque, designed to elicit comparison with those who would deny the holocaust . the shockingly lazy formulation comes forth:

'for some reason they (referring to commentators in the Mail and Telegraph) seem to consider 'the warmists' a left wing conspiracy'


Whatever could have persuaded them of that? Is it that, almost without exception, environmentalists, many of whom are retread socialists, are in favour of: Greater government intervention, more regulation, more restrictions on people's activities, higher taxes, less freedom of movement, and the list goes on. Whatever would make me believe that such people are left wing? As for the ludicrous assertion that a 'scientific consensus' exists. Such 'consensuses' were used to prove the 'inferiority' of certain races less than two centuries ago, and when the implications for policy are so critical, I would have to examine the background and vested interests of anyone proposing such wide ranging changes as, for example, the Green Party as indeed they no doubt examine closely the links with certain Oil companies or other 'polluters' of the Climate Change sceptics. I note with some interest that Toynbee is a regular contributor and keynote speaker at various Compass conferences. Is this a taste of what's to come under 'Mr.Ed' - people's opinions being silenced by 'consensus' on Global warming/Climate Change?(note the lingustic shift from 'warming' in response to declining temperatures in certain areas during part of the last decade) What next to be judged 'subject to consensus' and no longer worthy of debate? - Immigration/The EU? I for one hope we don't have to find out.

Bernie Sanders for President

And so the disastrous US debt ceiling deal passed - fairly easily in the end - with most House Republicans voting in favour, while the Democrats were split down the middle. I think Paul Krugman is right: the deal conceded far too much to the Republicans, and it's time for the Democrats to start playing much more hardline. If that leads to dysfunctionality and default - then, as so often, Han Solo is my political hero. "Bring it on! I'd prefer a straight fight to all this fooling around."

Basically, Democrats - who control the Presidency (if we can still classify Obama as a Democrat - that is doubtful) and the Senate - should have said, no debt deal with less than a 50/50 balance between tax rises and spending cuts is going to pass. It's no good talking tough after the event, like Joe Biden. He said that the Tea Party were "behaving like terrorists" - yes they have, but the Democrats have tamely capitulated to that terrorism. Which gives the Tea Party an incentive to behave even worse the next time... simply terrible political strategy from the Dems on every level.

Anyway, having thought about it for a couple of days, a key question I want to address in this post is: should there be a presidential challenge to Obama from the left? I think yes, there should be, and it should come from outside the Democratic primary system, not inside it.

Obama's move to a mainstream Republican position in recent months has meant that next year's presidential election will most likely be fought between a mainstream Republican (in all but name) and a Tea Party right winger - leaving a huge vaccuum on the left. Remember that, like the UK, the US uses the idiotic "First Past the Post" system for its elections. For the presidency, an electoral college operates whereby the votes in each state are tallied and then the electoral college votes in each state (which are roughly weighted by the number of voters in each state) are awarded to the winner. This means that in a three person contest it is not necessary to have anything like 50% of the votes to win a state: if your opponents' vote is evenly split you can win with a lot less. This is the reason that (for example) Caroline Lucas won in Brighton Pavilion in the UK in 2010 despite only having 32% of the vote.

A convincing left-wing challenger could hoover up most of the votes on the left of the US political spectrum, leaving the real Republican and fake Republican (Obama) candidates fighting it out for the right. Remember Bill Clinton in 1992? He won with only 43% of the vote because 20% of the vote went to the independent candiate, Ross Perot. What we could be looking at in 2012 is something very similar.

So who should run as that left-wing independent? Sadly, my ideal candidate - Hunter S Thompson - is dead. This is a real shame, because Hunter would have been a natural for this gig. He almost pulled off something very similar at town level when he was running for Sheriff of Aspen, Colorado, in 1970 with a shaved head on the "Freak Power" ticket. The only reason he was beaten was because the GOP candidate stopped campaigning and told people to vote for the Democrat to stop Thompson getting in.

The rebirth of Freak Power in 2012 would have been an all-time highlight of American politics, but Hunter shot himself in 2005, so in his place I'm going to suggest Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, an independent "democratic socialist". Bernie is a fantastic speaker (see this speech on economic civil war in the US, for example - absolute classic, telling it like it is) and would absolutely kill both Obama and whatever moron the Tea Party nominates in the televised debates.

Fundraising would of course be a problem, but my guess is that, given that Obama has sold out so comprehensively to the right, the Obama fundraising tactic of huge numbers of small donations, which worked so well in 2008, could now be co-opted for a Bernie Sanders campaign. There must be millions - tens of millions - of people in the US who are so fed up with the path the country has taken over the last 30 years that there is a huge well of pent-up frustration and anger to draw on. A Google search for "Bernie Sanders for President 2012" produces some very interesting material - for example this post on the Irregular Times, where Sanders is closer to majority polling in the US on a number of key issues than either the new Republican incarnation of Obama, or the Tea Party.

So really, if it were to happen, there seems a very good chance that a Sanders bid for the presidency would be successful. Now of course, if Bernie did win it, he wouldn't be able to do that much except veto all GOP measures. But that in itself would be a huge advance on Barack Obama, who is the man who capitulates to the GOP. So the question for Bernie Sanders and the US left is: are you prepared to sit back idly while your country is destroyed? Or are you going to do something about it?

I will be sending a link to this blogpost to Bernie Sanders's office and I'll let you know if I get a reply.

US political crisis: the case for an "anti-tea party"

As I write this it's still not clear whether there has been agreement between Barack Obama and both houses of Congress to raise the debt ceiling to enable the US Government to go on paying its bills after 2nd August.

But if an agreement is hammered out, it seems quite clear that in the course of reaching it, Obama will have given so much ground to the Republicans - and indeed the hard-right Tea Party faction - on the spending cuts vs tax increases mix, that it is unclear how his presidency in any way still reflects the priorities of the Democratic party.

The US budget deficit is caused by three policies in particular, two of which are the fault of the previous administration led by the election thief and war criminal George W Bush, and one of which is a bi-partisan failure over several decades. The bi-partisan failure is the decision by successive presidents and congresses to cultivate an unstable and unsustainable economy built on "junk" finance, which imploded twice in the 2000s: first in the "dot com" crash of 2000-01 and then (much more seriously) in the financial near-collapse of 2008. As Richard Wolff notes on CiF, no part of the US economy (save corporate profits) has recovered to any meaningful extent since 2009. The best that can be said for Obama's inadequate stimulus package of 2009 is that it stopped things getting any worse; but that is winding down now, and consequently the US economy is sinking deeper into a hole.

The fiscal crisis is exacerbated by two policies which were the mainstay of the Bush presidency: (1) huge tax cuts for the wealthiest few percent of the population, and (2) a vast increase in military spending to pursue the "war on terror".

As a clear election winner in 2008 (unlike Bush in his two election "victories"), Obama had a golden opportunity to reverse policy on all three of these fronts. Sadly, he has failed completely on all three. His only domestic policy success was on healthcare reform - admittedly an area where all his predecessors had failed - but even there, the reform which emerged fell well short of what is needed.

What he has managed to do, instead, is to preside over the birth of a movement, the "Tea Party", extreme even by the standards of the US right which takes some doing, which is systematically trying to destroy American democracy by creating the conditions for a coup by big business interests. This was last attempted during the Roosevelt administration of the 1930s by a number of industrialists sympathetic to fascism who believed the US could be reconstructed along the lines of Nazi Germany. It failed then, but it might succeed now; it is increasingly likely that China will be the model for a 21st century "Tea Party-esque" US, with elections suspended (probably on the grounds of saving money) and the Republican party installed as the de facto equivalent of the Chinese Communist Party. (In passing, I note that it is ironic that Van Patten claims that the 'left' in US politics - Bill Clinton, etc - are the "Chinese agents" when in fact what the Tea Party want to do is far closer to current Chinese political practice than anything you will find among the Democrats).

Barack Obama's reponse to the Tea Party threat - and the Republican challenge generally - has been to compromise so far with it that he has managed to completely alienate his own supporters. I would imagine that not since the dog days of the Carter administration in 1979/80 has the Democratic base been so demoralised and let down. And there is a severe danger for Obama that the result of the 2012 Presidential election will be very similar to the 1980 election. I still maintain, whatever the bullshit the right will try to feed you, that Ronald Reagan was a relatively weak Republican candidate who would have lost to any Democratic incumbent with a basic level of nous and competence; the tragedy for Jimmy Carter - probably the most thoroughly decent man to hold the Presidency since 1945 - was that, in 1980, he appeared to possess neither nous nor competence.

Barack Obama also appears to lack competence and nous, but in a different way from Carter. Obama seems to want to be the bipartisan statesman in an era where bipartisanship is impossible; there is pretty much no common ground between the Tea Party and your average liberal Democrat. By failing to stand up for a deficit reduction package which includes at least (say) a 50/50 mix between tax increases and spending cuts, Obama is making it more likely that the GOP will demand more and more crazy right-wing policy concessions - because he lacks the backbone to turn round and tell them to take a hike. If you're a hard right Republican congressperson, what is the downside to taking an extreme right wing policy stance? None, because the President will meet you half-way (or in fact 90% of the way) whatever you say. As of now, I expect a deal to be done on the debt ceiling at the 11th hour - and it will be disastrous for the Democrats.

Even so, it is quite possible that Barack Obama could still win re-election in 2012 - but only against an out-and-out wacko candidate, most obviously Bachmann. I think if the Republicans nominate Perry or Romney, Obama is toast. I'd love to be proved wrong on that, but - allowing for the temporary bounce from the announcement that bin Laden had been killed - Obama's poll ratings have been in freefall for 2 years now. And there is simply no sign of the economic bounce that might help him recover.

Bizarrely enough though, all is not lost for the Democrats at Congressional level if they can fight fire with fire - essentially by becoming the "anti-Tea Party". There is clear evidence from opinion polling that huge numbers of US citizens think that the Us political system has now broken down, and the country is now being run in the interests of a few wealthy bankers and industrialists. The Tea Party channelled anger at the banking bailout - which was viewed (to a large extent rightly) as a huge transfer of resources away from ordinary working people to a gang of exploitative and reckless overlords) - into a right-wing populism. The antidote to that - and the way to expose the Tea Party as a shameless "astroturf" operation funded by oligarchs like the Koch brothers - must be a left-wing populism.

The best way forward for the Democratic party would be if the 2012 Congressional elections threw up the biggest bunch of hard-left socialist Democratic candidates seen in America in modern times - pro-union, anti-Wall Street and anti big business. They would be extremely well-placed to ride a wave of anti-establishment - and indeed anti-Obama - feeling as the spending cuts bite and the economy continues to flatline.

If Obama does manage to get re-elected, an "anti-Tea Party" Democratic bloc in Congress could be a very useful mechanism for pushing him leftwards - particularly if the Democrats can recapture the House of Representatives. Conversely, if a Republican wins the presidency, it will be vital for the Democrats to provide a counterweight to the Tea Party which will undoubtedly be pushing even harder for extremist policies. Either way, the last thing the US needs is a "centrist" (read: hard-right) Democratic party following their President as he sleepwalks into whatever the next disaster is.

Jam today, Jam tomorrow.. (Part one)

Time for a summary of events on what is for me, this side of the Atlantic, but for most readers the other side. At the moment the world is watching as the prospect of the United States defaulting on its debt for the first time in its history next Tuesday (2nd August). As I write this, the two sides are currently engaged in negotiations which seem by turns to break down or involve competing plans all of which seem to be rejected by the hardliners on both sides. As Telegraph business columnist Ambrose Evans- Pritchard puts it:

'I adamantly refuse to take sides in this dispute. Both parties have played their part over the past 50 years in bringing America to this pass. A plague on both their houses'


The sides, such as they are basically comprise President Obama (and the US treasury department), hero of the British Left and the Guardian/BBC/Compass contributors whose influence seems to be at its apogee following the 'phone hacking' scandal and the Republicans in Congress, whose Leader, John Boehner (pronounced Bay - ner rather oddly) is arguably less familiar than the 44th president to British readers, although sufficiently well studied for the co-contributor on this blog to style him and the GOP 'evil and incompetent' on Twitter. Basically the 'News' such as it is stateside, and very much dependent on your perspective (if you watch Fox you won't really get much blame attached to the Republicans - on most of the other networks, the blame is all theirs) consists of attempts at compromise from both sides being pretty much furloughed by extremists, more, I have to say, on the Republican side than the Democratic. Even Boehner's latest plan, hardcore though it is, is being stymied by Tea Party supported Representatives arguing it does not go far enough. Thus the politicians continue to bicker as a potential 'financial armageddon' looms, with surely greater impact for the world beyond the USA.

In a thoughtful article yesterday in the New York Times (The US equivalent to the Guardian) economist/columnist Thomas L. Friedman points out the defects in both sides of the argument, and its this article which has relevance for the UK. As I pointed out, somewhat uncomfortably for supporters of 'UK uncut' and others opposed to the Coalition's plans, Public spending continues to rise under this government although Local authorities are, admittedly choosing to cut items like Libraries and services for the elderly rather than look at the renumeration of Senior executives - in that sense I have some sympathy for the 'anti Cuts' protestors. Thus the UK's own moment of truth cannot long be delayed, especially as this government has continued the baleful legacy of the last one, in refusing to place items such as PFI spending on to the balance sheet. It's worth, therefore looking at the Friedman article, as it's perhaps a more thought-provoking assault on the need for cuts than one from a movement featuring Chinese agent Bob Crow (living in a Council House despite a seven figure income) as a poster boy.

His five prescriptions are summarised in the paragraph below:

'Yes, we have developed such a formula over the course of American history, and it is built on five pillars, educating the workforce up to and beyond whatever technology demands; building the world's best infrastructure of ports, roads and telecommunications; attracting the world's most dynamic and High- IQ immigrants to enrich our universities and start new businesses, putting together the best regulations to incentivise risk-taking while curbing recklessness, and then let American innovators and Venture Capitalists pick off the most promising ideas for new businesses.'

which I would take as good advice for any sovereign nation, including the UK, although I might quibble with some of these suggestions at least in the details, let's look at their prospects under the 'pantomime horse' of the Coalition, or the genuine government by Talking horse should the unthinkable happen and opposition Leader Miliband E prevails in the next election.

1/ 'educating the workforce up to and beyond whatever technology demands'

This would seem, on the face of it to be an unarguable point - we need to better equip the young people of today for a future which is likely to be somewhat technologically different than now. However, before we do that, we have to recognise, I believe that the goal of putting 50% of young people through higher education is, at the minute, unaffordable. Nor have the Willetts reforms on Higher Education had the desired effect. Despite the advantage of having 'Two Brains' these appear to have come from an acephalous being - their net upshot being that such centres of scholarly excellence as Central Lancashire and Leeds Metropolitan University have taken to charging £9000 for some courses. In the meantime, we have a situation where approximately 50% of the workforce in an industry such as construction or 33% in Retail Distribution (in the South East) are imported, primarily from the former COMECON countries. These people (and I speak from personal experience here) are, with some exceptions significantly better educated, more motivated and, crucially able to be paid much less than people from the UK with a similar level of qualification. It is hard to overstate how much London's prosperity has been dependent on this since 2004. In the case of the largest country to join the EC from that region, Poland, the emigration boom has also helped solve some potential social problems
back in that country . Based on my own now fairly numerous Polish friends, whether they will all be content to continue doing relatively low paid work is open to question.

However, even assuming the desirability of the goal, whether the British education system is capable of equipping the workforce to meet the challenges of the 21st century is open to serious question. I recalled it will be August in less than a week so shortly we will be subject to the ritual pantomime, played out annually wherein the publication both of GCSE and 'A' Level results will show an inexorable rise in the number of Top Grades handed out. This has become as intrinsic a part of the British summer as 'The Last night of the proms'. On both sides of the divide, Educationalists will point to superior teaching, whilst columinsts such as Melanie Phillips and rentaquote Max Hastings (to use only two examples), neither of whom have been to a classroom in the better part of several decades will point to the 'exams getting easier', and declining standards'. Both are wrong or oversimplifying the issue.

The truth is exams now cover a much narrower frame of reference, with the result that students perform better in tests but their breadth of knowledge is much less. This is attributed to the dominance of the annual League tables, which is again true but only tells half the story. League tables were introduced to try and subvert the Hard Left Teaching Unions who were using education as a 'political football'. These people, sadly , haven't gone away and are normally seen at the annual Teachers conferences prading their idiocy to general applause. I have never understood why a teacher is legally barred from being a member of a far-right group such as the BNP and EDL yet is able to act as effectively an 'unconscious fifth columnist' through membership of such groups as the Revolutionary Communist Party or Socialist Worker's Party, all of which had links with the USSR and are believed to have current links, even if only as 'Useful Idiots' with both the PR China and in some cases the DPR Korea. Surely neither is an especially desirable association?

Thus we have the quandary, a number of elements within the teaching profession (and I speak here again from personal experience) have no interest in improving the educational standards of poorer children. the reason behind this is two fold - firstly, to Educate such people might 'deprive the proletariat of Leaders in the coming class struggle' - this from people whose own offpsring I might add, are usuaally educated in the finest state schools or privately (Diane Abbott, Harriet Harperson, Anthony Blair esq) and secondly the entire raison d'etre of Compass/ Labour is the profusion of ever greater state largesse, which requires a continuing stream of state supplicants, else the entire apparatus of the welfare state has no justification beyond providing continuing employment for its workforce. Hence if you educate poorer people, the odds are they may start their own business or at the very least be able to see the desirability, from a social perspective of paid employment rather than subsistence on welfare. this would pull the rug from under the Labour party's base, and can on no account be allowed to happen.

So, either way, the education system seems likely to be churning out a workforce that is, oddly , significantly inferior to those of even the Korea DPR in terms of literacy and numeracy, let alone the PR China. Again, why these countries should have so much less trouble in their schools is perhaps explained by a more authoritarian tradition, but nevertheless, the argument that cuts need to be avoided for fear of jeopardising our ability to educate the future workforce is somewhat blunted by the evidence that ever increasing expenditure on education in the UK has had a deleterious effect on standards, at least according to surveys conducted amongst business Leaders from the CBI and FSB.

2/ 'building the world's best infrastructure of ports, roads and telecommunications'

Again this would seem an unarguable goal - and indeed is central to the 'Anti Cuts' lobby's message - that to reverse the growing possibility of a 'Double Dip recession' we need to invest in infrastructure, specifically relating to transport, although encompassing wider fields of housing and public services. I would again argue that this might be useful, if we had the necessary workforce. As already mentioned, much of the Labour involved in construction has to be imported from abroad, due to school Leavers being unable to hold down even Labouring jobs due to poor attitude and attendance. Again I speak as someone with experience ( mostly lacking from Labour supporters I find!) of environments in the Construction, Retail and Production industries. Jobs in such spheres, whilst not especially intellectual do require a level of discipline and a willingness to endure sometimes less than ideal conditions which is beyond the remit, in many cases, of products of the English state education, especially those with lower qualifications.





Thus we are again facing the issue of how we obtain the workforce for these projects. Also, (and more on this later in Part 2 of the post) even were we to put these projects into place, much current expenditure would be on such frivolities as 'Climate Change co-ordinators' , 'LBGT strategy directors', 'Lesbian outreach Equality workers' and suchlike - I doubt these people are likely to be putting scaffolding up or laying bricks, even had they the skills to do so. Moreover, Labour's policies of encouraging unlimited immigration for political reasons (to 'rub the right's nose in diversity') has meant the south East is now the most densely populated area in Europe. Whilst I, like many other commuters, present or former, bemoan the length of time taken on roadworks or the issues caused by Overground maintenance or works on the Tube, I have some sympathy for the Project Directors of such maintenance. Because of the volume of passengers (check out the Eastern end of the JLE or Southern end of the Northern line for a graphic illustration) any work has to be carred out in a two day weekend window. (thus putting Labour costs up by 50% immediately)Furthermore, the sheer density of the housing means you struggle to work overnight due to potential disturbance to the number of residents nearby! (this even on the M25!) The coalition's failure to repeal the Human Rights Act and put limits on immigration as a matter of some urgency have not helped stem the flow in. Furthermore, 2012 sees the ghastly spectre of the most evil man in British Politics, Ken Livingstone (Hal Berstram's favourite - don't notice you keen on moving back to London, though, Hal) coming back from the political dead like some scene from a Hammer horror movie - last time he called for 2 million more people in the city. Who knows what four years out of office have done to this most devious of minds? Given his relations with Network Rail and London Underground in his previous adminstrations, getting increased spending on infrastructure to actually yield anything other than cost overruns is likely to be tricky.


In short, though I would not question that expenditure on infrastructure is desirable, I would question the current administration's ability to deliver it, let alone Miliband E's. Also, it in no way precludes an examination of significant amount of current expenditure, especially relating to fields of political correctness.


I had originally intended a much shorter post - but this is now becoming so long, I'll need to return to it later......

Is Osborne deliberately undermining UK growth?

The 2011q2 GDP figures came out yesterday and showed 0.2% growth. That's almost no growth at all, and is on the face of it, a disaster for George Osborne and the Tories (and indeed for their Lib Dem collaborators, whatever Vince Cable's protestations). Certainly the Telegraph - normally a loyal Tory supporting paper - ran a headline today that the Dave Cameron team was starting to get a bit jumpy with Osborne and had basically told him to "boost growth or else." I frankly don't believe that story - I'd be surprised if Cameron and Osborne weren't still best buddies - but there is no doubt that some of the Right, and their supporters, are starting to worry a bit. The conventional wisdom is that if a party screws up on economic policy it's very hard to win a general election, and conversely, if the economy's going well, it's very hard to lose. There are undoubted exceptions to this rule - the Tories won in 1992 in a recession, and lost in 1997 in a boom - but most of the other UK election outcomes since 1959 or so would bear out the hypothesis, in my view.

But is George Osborne that worried? I want to discuss two possible reasons why he might not be. One is my own theory, and the other comes courtesy of a Twitter discussion with my friend Chris Brooke of the Virtual Stoa.

My theory is that Osborne won't be that worried about slow growth for the next 2 years or so and he might actually be secretly pleased - provided that he does get strong growth after 2013 (at least until the election). This is based on my hunch that voters are more worried about the second derivative of output (i.e. whether growth is increasing or decreasing) than the first derivative (whether growth is high or low) or indeed the level itself (whether output is high or low). If Osborne has a choice between a scenario steady but anaemic growth from 2011 through to 2015 - at say 2 percent a year - and poor growth (or no growth at all) for 2 years followed by strengthening recovery for the next 2 years, by which time the economy might be roaring at 3 percent or more, my guess is he will take the second option. Why? Because the second option makes it MUCH easier to sell the story that "the pain is over and things are looking up" to the electorate. This was the trick the Tories pulled off in 1983, for example. The average growth rate in the 1979-83 Thatcher government was abysmal. But by 1983 there was a strong recovery in place and the narrative that the mess had been sorted out (admittedly combined with a severely divided opposition) enabled the Tories to romp home that year.

This is why the spending cuts have been "front-loaded" with the biggest reductions in 2011 and 2012 and it's also why Osborne has aimed to eliminate the structural budget deficit by 2014/15 rather than 2015/16 - to give himself an extra year of headroom to announce tax cuts. So Osborne is trying to "back-load" extra growth for 2014 and 2015 by depressing growth in 2011 and 2012. Cynical and manipulative? Of course. This is the Tories we're talking about here.

My personal view is that this won't work - at least not particularly well - because the hit to the economy from the austerity measures (which have still barely started yet) will be such a drag on growth - indeed, possibly turning it negative for a while - that it will completely derail Osborne's fiscal consolidation plans, probably increasing the size of the structural deficit and making tax cuts quite difficult without offsetting tax increases elsewhere. And if Osborne IS getting worried, it's probably because the (limited) fiscal consolidation so far has had such a negative effect on growth that he's genuinely terrified that more of the same will simply spend Britain spiralling into depression.

But now I want to examine Chris's alternative theory, which is that Osborne welcomes an extended period of low growth because it serves an important political purpose; in his view, it will convince the voters that tax-and-spend social democratic politics is simply unaffordable because the economy can't generate the tax revenues to make it work. And hence the small-state neoliberalism that Osborne wants will be the only game in town - so you'd better get used to it, suckers.

I can certainly see the argument for this - and it would fit with the narrative that the New Labour tax-and-spend approach was essentially a failure because it was fuelled by a horrendous and unsustainable rise in debt - first household debt (up to 2007), and then ballooning government debt (2008 and beyond). If the UK has - for some reason - hit some kind of plateau of permanently low growth, then obviously public spending, in the long run, would only be able to grow much slower than it did during the New Labour years. And Osborne's aim is to convince the voters that the only people who can be trusted to run an economy with low public spending growth are the Tories.

It's an intriguing hypothesis, and I'd go along with it to the extent that if growth does turn out to be paltry over the next five years, then Osborne and the Tories might try to turn a weakness into a strength by criticising Labour as unaffordable. There are echoes of the 1992 Tory election strategy - a surprise victory during a recession, remember - in this approach.

Having said that, I think this is a fall-back option for Osborne, not his first choice, for several reasons First, "this is the best we can do and we're the only people who can manage the economy in this situation of low growth" is harder to sell to the electorate than "things were in a mess and we've sorted it out - don't let the other guys ruin it again". Because of the implosion of Nick Clegg's "Fib Dems" - still flatlining at about 10% on YouGov - the Tories badly need voter converts, not just to maintain the 36% of voters they got last time. if the Lib Dems don't recover - or even if they recover, but only a bit - 36% is not going to cut it for the Tories. Unless they can pull off a true miracle of gerrymandering as part of the boundary changes and seat reductions, if the Tories get 36% next time and Labour gets 40 - or even, say, 38% - Labour's going to win. I don't think the defensive "social democracy is unaffordable" strategy will win many people over. A "V-shaped" recovery and 1983-style triumphalism stands a much better chance.

Second, Osborne stood up at the Budget earlier this year and gave us a load of guff about the economic recovery being "carried aloft on the march of the makers" or some such swaddle. At which point, according to q2 growth statistics, manufacturing promptly bombed, with all the q2 growth being accounted for by services. If you say you've got the policies to restore growth and then growth doesn't happen, after a while people cease to believe in you. Certainly Osborne has been parcelling out blame to almost anyone or anything he can find: global economic turbulence, trade unions, bankers, snow, hot weather, Kate'n'Wills, Nick Clegg, Internet Explorer 6, the guy with the grille on his head from ST:TNG, etc. But people look abroad and see that Germany is growing about 6 times faster than us and France 4 times faster, and they'll say "why the hell aren't the govt sorting it out?" which may well eventually lead to the possible further thought, "maybe they're just incompetent - and Labour could do better." So I think if George goes on blaming everyone except himself he just winds up looking ridiculous. Certainly on the Guardian front page this morning, Ed Balls is having a field day, and once Labour actually gets some policy together on the economy (come on guys, get on with it), I expect their economic competency rating to overtake Osborne's at some point before the next election.

Thirdly, a lot of the ConDem policy platform is based on "removing barriers to growth" - hence the rationale for tearing up the planning system, destroying employment rights, privatising most of our public services, etc. There's not much evidence that any of these changes will actually boost growth - although they will boost profits for the big private sector firms who fund the Tories. Actually, removing planning restrictions probably will boost growth in retailing due to economies of scale - but at the expense of killing traditional high streets and surrendering more of the countryside to huge "big box" buildings such as the Bedford Amazon depot. That could well produce growth in the Gross Domestic Product at the same time as a decline in overall well-being. But once again it's evidence of an attempt at a pro-growth strategy (admittedly from a very right-wing perspective), NOT a chancellor who doesn't care whether he gets growth or not. Otherwise why bother doing things like planning reform which (like the attempted forests sell-off) have the potential to severely alienate Tory voters in rural areas?

So overall, I think Osborne would very much like growth to happen - at least in the second half of the parliament - even though his macroeconomic policy is making it much less likely that it will happen. The reason for the contradiction between wanting growth and pursuing a macro strategy that undermines growth is simple: Osborne believes right-wing "voodoo economics". And in the end, that will probably sink him.

Now on top of this there is a very interesting long-run debate about whether growth at the post-war average (about 2 - 2.5 percent a year in real terms) is going to be possible in future, particularly given environmental constraints, and what that means for politics in the medium-to-long run. That's a very important issue but will need a blog post all of its own - and hopefully it will get one soon... bye for now.

Something rotten in paradise.....

Coming back from another entanglement with US bureacracy, I turned on the news Friday only to see it dominated by a country which is very rarely in the news, and then normally only in the travel section, the Republic of Norway. According to the latest rolling news coverage, a gunman had opened fire on a camp being attended by members of the youth organisation of the ruling Labour Party. I must admit to almost thinking I had been watching an episode of Fringe and had missed out some of the details. This kind of thing simply does not happen over there. Indeed Norway is often used by a variety of Guardian and Independent journos as almost a counteraction to the contention that their policies will lead to the excesses of Zimbabwe, Cuba or North Korea. Usually in conjunction with it's fellow Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Finland, and to a lesser degree in recent years, Sweden, Norway is seen as proof that the Ed Miliband/Compass model of high taxes, ever higher public expenditure, and squeezing the private sector to pay for 'better public services' can work. As I often say to such people, this area seems to be almost the only part of the World where such a philosophy works. (very much including the UK!)You could include Canada and possibly New Zealand but I'd argue particularly in the latter, the relative liberalisation of agriculture in the 1980's presided over a much greater liberalisation subsequently in other sectors.

Nevertheless, a challenge even if made by people with records as chequered as many Compass supporters and Guardian writers remains a valid one. What is the secret of Norway's success? My first encounter with the country came in the realms of Sport. In 1982, then manager of the England football team, the late Ron Greenwood emerged from one of the most, if not the most bizarre qualifying group ever, to qualify for the World Cup finals of that summer in Spain. Comprising England, Hungary, Switzerland, Romania and Norway, the group featured most of the sides beating each other. England lost in Basel and Bucharest (Romania have not lost to England as of now for 41 years) but co-favourites Hungary were vanquished convincingly in Budapest. Perhaps the most notorious result was the defeat by the unheralded Norwegians in Oslo 2-1, a match immortalised by the commentary of the late Bjorge Lillelien , to then Prime Minister Thatcher that 'your boys took a hell of a beating' Subsequently, Graham Taylor's misfortune at the hands of the Norwegians some 12 years later, and that team's Manager, Egil Olsen's foray into Premiership management with Wimbledon further intrigued me. Norway was considered something of a backwater, albeit one with a very high quality of life. Visitors of my acquaintance had reported tales of beer being more than 7 pounds a pint (indeed a group of Norwegians with whom I worked insisted on a pub crawl in the less than salubrious environs of Basildon, Essex due to the beer being 'so cheap'!) and despite the economic illiteracy of every Chancellor of the Exchequer regarding smoking for the last 30 years, even our own legislators have not been as virulently anti-smoking as the Norwegians - tales of 8 pounds (now more than 11!!) for a pack of cigarettes again fairly legion.





So, what was the secret? Well, the discovery of North Sea Oil was a boon for the two countries under whose waters it was found, that being Norway and the UK. However, unlike the UK, Norway chose to reinvest its massive windfall into World Stock markets, establishing one of the first (indeed possibly the only) 'Sovereign Wealth fund' in Europe, currently the world's second largest. It is estimated that the country has sufficient founds already established to pay policing costs for the next five centuries, the army for the next 1000 years and other such statistics. It's Gini coefficient marking the disparity between the lowest paid and highest paid is also the lowest in the world. Foreign Policy magazine ranks Norway last of all on its 'Failed states' index, citing it as the most stable country in the World. Norway ranks high on every quality of life indicator one cares to mention. Indeed it was slightly jarring to find the Freedom House listing the country in its 'Human Rights' report at all, let alone making its listings incongruously alphabetic (think which country comes before it in the alphabet?) For those arguing that Norway acts as a model for the UK, however, bear in mind, it's significantly smaller population, much greater degree of racial hegemony and the fact it is not in the EU.( for me the crucial reason for its prosperity)

Hence it was strange to find tales of a gunman going crazy - immediately tabloid and press speculation abounded that the atrocity might have been the work of Al Qaeda, a supposition which turned out to be totally false, satirised quite aptly in yesterday's Guardian. It turns out, the killer, Anders Behring Breivik, was a far right extremist, whose 'manifesto' turns out to have been a bizarre collection of conspiracy theories, with much of its commentary plagiarised from a similarly slightly deranged figure from the Early 1990s in the States, the Unabomber . This has been seized on by supporters of multiculturalism and the end of the nation state as evidence that 'Nationalism' is arguably superior to Radical Islam as a clear and present danger to Western Society. It's worth looking at the tone of the Guardian article from Charlie Brooker. It almost relishes the fact that the wide supposition that the Norway tragedy was the work of Islamic extremists was off the mark. However, misguided the comments might have been, based on similar atrocities in Bali, Madrid and London, there was every reason to suppose it might well have been Islamic extremists who committed the crime. the fact they didn't is no reason to suppose the next time it might not be. As the admittedly controversial American writer Mark Steyn points out continually, according to any number of Jihadist websites, the West are 'all infidels'(and thus legitimate targets for Jihad) and whilst these extremists, I would agree constitute a minority of Muslims, they nevertheless pose a real threat to the West's stability.

The problem with this point is that it veers, at least for the Leftist dominated media, including the BBC (funded by a stipend from every household owning a TV in the land) and Guardian, dangerously close to racism. It is this failure to discuss the issue of whether unlimited immigration is desirable or even manageable which leads to the kind of unfocused rage which bred atrocities like Friday's. If a society such as Norway, on every measurable indicator wealthier, more stable and prosperous than the UK struggles to contain the pressures, what chance do we stand?

The picture has become murkier still, with a number of intrepid commentators pointing out that Breivik had links to arguably the sole remaining functional Far right organisation in Britain that comprises more than about 100 people, the English Defence League. This collection of beings, arguably appearing to comprise football hooligans with a vague political ideology is rightly opposed wherever it appears, invariably with the opposition coordinated through an organisation called 'Hope not Hate' which as the moniker says, is committed to 'celebrating Britain's diversity', and opposing extremists. All quite admirable, except that the organisation appears unwilling to countenance any extremism other than from the 'Political right' - look at its links to 'Hate groups' - only two: the EDL and the BNP. (nearly bankrupt and down to a rump of councillors)Any attempt to ask the organisation about its attitude to Muslim extremists merely produces the allegation that the person asking the question is a 'White extremist'. Sadly, until societies across Western Europe begin to examine whether it is desirable to have significant minorities who are wholly opposed to the concepts of Liberal democracies and indeed even a secular society, I fear that the Brevik tragedy will only be the first of many. To quote the late W.B Yeates:

' The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?'

Replace Bethlehem with Bradford, Burnley, Blackburn or Birmingham, and that's my fear for the UK. In the meantime, my sincerest condolences to the people of Norway, steadfast friends for many centuries to the UK. And Glenn Beck is a moron......

Stop bugging me man - I'll kick your F**%ing teeth in...

Or so said the character Nick Curran (played by Michael Douglas) in the Paul Verhoeven film from 1992, Basic Instinct. Thus bugging or hacking into phones for the purposes of providing journalistic exposes has become one of the most momentous (to paraphrase Hal Berstram) events in the country's recent political history. The rapid collapse and closure of the country's largest selling newspaper, the News of the World in a desperate attempt to forestall further fallout was truly stunning. Indeed it appears that the scandal continues to claim victims, with Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson following News International Senior executive Rebekah Brooks in resigning.

Over at 'Comment is free' they appear, to paraphrase Agent Albert Rosenfield from Twin Peaks:

'to have been snacking for too long on the local mushrooms'

and we see the frenzy in full force. What does it portend for the future of British democracy? A trip through the Guardian's comment pages appears to be reminscent of a trip through one of Star Trek's parallel universes. David Cameron's political obituaries have been written by various ex-Soviet sympathisers and veteran fellow travellers, and opposition Leader 'Miliband E' or 'Mr Ed' (named after a 60's American show involving a talking horse) is suddenly touted as a 'man of courage' for his sudden conversion (after being part of two administrations who shamelessly courted News International for the previous three elections) to greater transparency on media ownership. Prize chameleon Nick Clegg adds to his reputation for principle and veracity by shamelessly exploiting the scandal to try and shore up his collapsing vote. All we need now is something from Chris Huhne and the confusion will be complete.

So, is the Coalition finished and more importantly, is the phone hacking affair the figurative 'end' for Cameron? I think not but would agree that I had reservations about using as tarnished a figure as Andy Coulson in any kind of advisory capacity, especially given that the phone hacking scandal has been running in 'Private Eye' for at least the past eight years. Whilst I wouldn't want to see public policy dictated by Ian Heslop and co (they probably would be less than enthusiastic than I am) even a cursory glance at this journal would have raised (or should have raised) serious question marks about his suitability. Nevertheless, Coulson is no longer in position. The question becomes whether Cameron knew that he was involved in phone hacking when he hired him - at the moment that doesn't seem the case and I do not see how the pro Sino Guardian can have any indication otherwise.

The alleged phone hacking incidents took place during the period between 2004 and 2008, which unless I am very much mistaken, saw a Labour government in power. (and one of the worst ever seen in the country's history, of which 'Mr.Ed' was a key part) Thus the nauseous eruptions from Mr G.Brown esquire, returning to the Commons after a year's sabbatical rank as some of the most hypocritical ever put on the record in Hansard, as in deference to the Guardian's staff some of them have recognised.

Is the scandal damaging to Cameron, and by extension, the coalition? for sure, but a quick read through 'Comment is free' or indeed the BBC website will reveal the real significance of the scandal. Neither the Guardian nor the BBC have ever been enamoured of the greater circulation and currency of the News International publications. This is seen as an ideal opportunity to circumscribe the debate and significantly narrow the range of right wing viewpoints available to people. In a wider context, I'd argue the significance is in fact far greater, potentially in the US, where the New York Times (which I read most days over here)and, by extension the Obama White House, are sharpening the knives for Murdoch's Fox News channel. If, as has been speculated, there was hacking of 9/11 victims, then the consequences could be even more far -reaching than they currently are. However, in a UK context, let us not delude ourselves this is more than an aberration, and not an opportunity to limit political discourse to amicable discussion between acolytes of the Guardian and BBC.

apologies for continued outages

Hello punters,

very pleased to see a stream of articles by Van Patten on here because I have had Zero Time (to quote Tonto's Expanding Head Band) to do any posts longer than a couple of sentences the last fortnight or so. Which is a shame, because momentous things are going on in British politics, which I would like to comment on... but it will have to wait until Thursday or Friday this coming week, at least.

In the meantime... enjoy the Murdoch bonfire.

There is no F**king coke......

Or so says the character Dean Keaton in the Bryan Singer film ,'the Usual Suspects' played by Gabriel Byrne. Whenever I see someone from UK uncut on the TV, I feel like saying:

'There are - NO f***ing cuts'

As the excellent Christopher Booker points out:
in fact public expenditure has risen, continues to rise and this despite it having increased by more than 100% since 1997. Nevertheless, as Giroscoper suggests, David Cameron is facing an uphill struggle in convincing the electorate that his government is heading for anything other than being ignominiously turned out of office, despite the almost laughably inept Labour leader, Microblair II's attempts to alienate floating middle class voters by accompanying recent rioting protesters attacking BHS and Santander stores in Central London.

Perhaps the key to understanding why this is to reflect on the profound changes which have taken place in society and in electoral terms since 1997. For starters, since then nearly 1.2 million people have come into the country from across the globe, a policy deliberately encouraged by the previous administration for the express purpose of 'engineering a multicultural society' and 'rubbing the Right's nose in diversity', at least according to Speech Writer Andrew Neather. As a rule, immigrants are more likely to vote for Labour (although there are exceptions - the Ugandan Asians who fled Idi Amin in the 1970's tended to have seen real socialism in action, and didn't much like it)

Secondly, the constituencies were redrawn to give Labour a significant electoral advantage. Both Wales and Scotland, despite diminishing populations retained their representations, and as a rule smaller Northern constituencies were retained and the South East's got much bigger.

Thirdly, the public sector expanded by over a million people, providing Labour with a client state from which to draw support and which would also reward Loyal Labour supporters with salaries and pensions out of the reach of many working in the non-financial part of the private sector.

Postal voting was also made simpler, and with it resultant fraud has increased significantly. Two enormous scams were uncovered in the West Midlands. the judge commenting said that the practises were what might be 'expected in a banana republic'

All in all, it amounted to a significant uphill struggle for Cameron. The BBC (funded by a stipend from every TV watching household in the country) poured out incessant vitriol against the Conservatives and their supporters practically daily from May 2nd 1997. Even the Tories heavy defeats in 1997 and 2001 did little to stop the scorn. Of course hard left controlled state educators also clung to a narrowly left wing view of the world and woe betide anyone who challenged it. (I speak here from personal experience) In short, a number of commentators wondered if the Conservatives could ever win again. That Cameron managed to achieve the results he did last time round deserves some credit. Had David Davis won the race for the Leadership back in 2005 (and I backed him) it remains questionable if they would have been able to achieve even 307 seats.

Yet, as Giroscoper posits, the coalition seems to have hit the buffers, and is under fire both from the Left, and the right of the Tory party. What then, can he do?

1/ I'd abandon the attempts to reform the voting system to AV. Whilst as a UKIP supporter, the AV system would arguably benefit my party the most, what we need to look at is Franchise reform. Arguably not really tackled in over 65 years, what we need to look at is a way of ensuring that the left is never able to again build a coalition of government paid supporters to engineer a permanantly left wing regime again. Thus, we need to go back to potentially plural votes for those in the Private sector. They create the wealth, and thus should not be able to have an admittedly brilliantly created coalition of state supplicants deprive them of it. There would of course be exceptions for front line workers, but for the most part this would go a long way to stifling Labour's base.

2/ Cameron needs to take a harder line with the EU, and in this regard would have enormous support. It is telling that the next Treaty is unlikely to have even a single country put it to a referendum. Ireland having been told in no uncertain terms that for the next Treaty, the EC cannot risk having to rerun yet another referendum. UKIP seems certain to top the poll at the 2014 Euro elections, especially in the wake of UK funding for bailouts in Greece, and, as seems likely Portugal

3/ Cameron needs to address, as a matter of some urgency, the continuing anomalies of the 'West Lothian' question whereby, Scotland (and to a lesser degree Wales) continue to act as de facto independent states whilst continuing to provide nearly 40% of Labour manpower within the Commons. Recent revelations that Per Capita income in The north of Scoltand was below Slovenia and in West Wales, below Tianjin, arguably due to more than 60% of employment/income in both areas being dependent on the state makes this and Point 1/ even more pressing. In short, we have to consider whether the UK, and in particular the South West and South East of the country can continue to keep funding the less productive regions.

4/ Stop attempting to curry favour with the likes of Polly Toynbee, Gary Younge or other attendees of 'Compass' (sadly not the catering company - thos people I might cultivate!) conferences. These people despise the Conservative (nearly always renamed Tory in their writings) Party and everything it stands for. you aren't going to get them reconciled with your viewpoint, so your best bet is to ignore them, and if they go on the rampage, clamp down hard. It worked for Lady Thatcher in the 1980's.

P.S This post was originally written in April of this year, and as part of a 'house clearing exercise concomitant with sorting out my new abode on the other side of the Atlantic, I decided given the amount of original text already in the post it probably merited publication. A slightly more nuanced post on postulating why the apparent disjunction between, on the one hand 'savage cuts in public expenditure' and an ever increasing overall bill for public expenditure will await completion of my 'backlog' of posts

Requiem for a Heavyweight.....

Final part of the trilogy on the Republican challengers for 2012. This is almost a 'wishful thinking' post, as all of these personalities might, by some reckoning have a strong chance of defeating Obama given the continuing economic woes in the US. Originally about four candidates, the latest from the Huffington Post has forced a fifth name into the reckoning, not least because the other four have declared (in one case categorically) that they are definitely not in the running.

The candidate who has not ruled himself out at some point over the last 18 months is Rick Perry, current Governor of Texas, (successor to George W Bush in the role) although it should be emphasised that he is not even at the stage of an exploratory committee as yet, so would have some major catching up to do were he to run. Perry's politics fit very much into the Southern Republican mould - he is strongly religious, and an advocate of smaller government. He is on record as mentioning he might look to repeal the 16th amendment to the Constitution. This enables the Government to raise Income taxes without distributing the proceeds evenly amongst the states. As is pretty much mandatory within Texan politics, Perry favours Capital punishment, and is on the record as challenging the legitmacy of 'anthropogenic Global Warming'. So far, so relatively predictable, but unlike his predecessor in the role as Texas gubernator, Perry lacked the familial connections, and is thus somewhat more intellectual than W (admittedly hardly the most pre-eminent of minds to hold the US' highest office) I don't think Perry would win in an election against Obama but he would be a more credible candidate than many that have thrown their hat in the ring. Texas alone carries now 38 electoral college votes (an increase of four to reflect population trends since 2008), second only to California and Perry, although not the candidate of choice for the Tea Party and some of the Christian right, is likely to be more popular with that base than say, Romney or Huntsman. He would certainly prompt the Democrats to sharpen their activity up, if nothing else.

A candidate who should be familiar to veterans of cuts protests and anti war marches (amongst other fellow travellers) is 'Jeb' Bushbrother of the former president and former governor of Florida. Could we see a third Bush in the White House. Leftists of all hues will be aghast at the prospect and surely, it would be pointed out that the somewhat chequered record of his brother would count as an insurmountable problem for him. Fortunately for those anti war veterans who considered the 43rd President a less desirable visitor to the UK than Nicolae Ceaucescu and Robert Mugabe the elder Bush has closed the door on the possibility of a 2012 run. Jeb's politics do differ somewhat from the Younger 'W''s and for many in the Us political scene he would pose far more of a challenge than him in terms of an opponent. He was the first Republican ever to win re-election to ther governorship of Florida, and his standing amongst Cuban exiles is likely to play well in other states with quite high Hispanic populations. Undoubtedly, the Left would rail against the coming of another Bush but I think even his detractors would argue he posed a serious threat to a second term.

Less well known to UK readers will be Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin congressman who has led the opposition to the Debt cutting plans of Obama in the House of Representatives, and trailed the 'Republican alternative' to Obama's plans, 'the Path to prosperity'. As with Jeb Bush, Ryan has ruled himself out of the running for 2012, but he has the advantage of relative youth (only 41) and being the 'Public face' of the opposition to Obama within the legislature. His position on social issues is relatively unmapped, although his Catholic faith might not play well with some of the 'Tea Party' fringe. The proposals he co-authored drew heavy flak from Liberal economists, foremost amongst them, Giroscoper's sage, Paul Krugman, as being uncosted and unworkable. Nevertheless, Ryan's Northern roots in what is a relatively Liberal state (Wisconsin) might have given him a more general appeal than the hotch potch of candidates who have declared.


The fourth candidate, and arguably one who would be second most dangerous to Obama is Chris Christie, current governor of New Jersey. Described as looking like Tony Soprano from the HBO series, Christie's success in winning the 'Garden state' has Democratic strategists worrying that his message is arguably the one most likely to resonate with the widest voter pool. Christie is of part Irish, part italian ancestry which should make him formidable in the Eastern states which are traditional locks for the Democrats. His governorship has been marked by cuts to Public spending and a refusal to raise state taxes. Nevertheless, unlike some of the more extreme candidates, Christie is relatively speaking, socially Liberal, and thus would make a dangerous opponent for Obama. Nevertheless, at this time, he has ruled himself out of the running.

The candidate who is described is the Republican 'Luke Skywalker' and arguably on ethnic grounds poses the greatest challenge is Florida Senator Marco Rubio. Winning his seat in 2010 by a margin of 19 points, Rubio is hailed as the 'counter- Obama' although he has stated categorically that he will not run in 2012. Rubio is only 40 years old and his Hispanic roots would go a long way to mobilising support in what is the fastest growing constituency in the United states. One issue with those who perhaps get a little 'over excited' at the prospect of a Rubio presidential run, is that unlike 'African - Americans', Hispanic voters do not tend to vote 'en bloc' (Obama carried 95% of the Black vote in 2008) As a relatively recent entrant to the Senate, his political positions are evolving although he is socially Conservative. Nevertheless, were he able to unite the Hispanic vote along the same lines as Obama managed in 2008 with the Black vote, then he would most likely take 124 electoral College votes (California @ 55, Texas @ 38 and New York @ 31) which would, given the innate conservatism of many of the smaller states, make the winning post for the Democrats an insurmountable obstacle.