Entries Tagged 'Politics (general)' ↓

Ben Gummer is making political hay on the issue of tax funding of union positions.  The actual point he’s making, that the public shouldn’t be funding the unions, is an open and shut case and it’s all a bit too easy to go on about this.

However within that article we have defending the union’s rights to take council tax money a certain “Graham White” a man who seems to revel in the fact that although we pay all his wages he “now only spends about half a day each week in the classroom”.  Now where have we heard from him before?

It was when he was comparing the politically motivated violence with the democratically enacted public sector cuts, saying that violence was by far superior.   It is the sort of rhetoric that Mussolini used, and it’s not isolated to Graham White.  It’s not surprising that he loves a bloated state sector when he’s one of the main beneficiaries.

But just remember this, when your street lights have to be cut back that Graham White is getting a senior teacher’s salary for a 10% teaching load.  It is why Labour love a big state, so many of them get paid to do so little.

It may be great to be plugged in to the Suffolk Labour machine, but this looting of our council tax money for the benefit of a tiny, unrepresentative and incestuous elite has to stop.  And it has to stop now.

Ipswich Spy have a heart wrenching – and fundamentally wrong – piece on housing benefit reforms.  I’m not going to speculate on their motives, although they really need to be examined on this.  Essentially they are saying that benefits claimants should maintain their advantage in the privately rented sector over those who work.

There is currently a massive problem that is affecting people getting on to the ladder of work, and the coalition have not been very good at articulating this. Put simply many private landlords have to be either very generous or very stupid to rent to a person or a couple who hold down a job. As my aunt, who’s a letting agent in another part of the country, puts it – the government pays more money than private tenants will, will never try to negotiate a landlord down on rent and is never going to have cash flow problems. To be fair there is a far greater chance that the property will get trashed, but you are likely to (eventually) get the money back. So for many people they will be at a significant disadvantage if they try to rent a place. There is a constant artificial ratchet of rental prices upwards and this is not seen by people on benefits but it is seen by the working class and lower middle class young families who find that rent is taking up to half their after tax income and who at the same time are finding that they cannot compete on the housing market with buy to let landlords. We have to get people back to work, and that means making it more attractive to be in work, at any level, than on benefits.

There is in politics something that could be called the “high-low pincer”, that is that those at the top end and those at the bottom end may share an interest which gravely hurts the squeezed middle.  So for example an employer may want cheaper semi-skilled labour that they can pay off the books and below the minimum wage, many people from overseas are rightly keen to better their lives – so we have unchecked immigration that benefits employers and immigrants but really hurts those who are seeing their wages cut in real terms, their services slashed and the price of a family home go out of reach. 

This is a similar situation.  Buy to let landlords are at or near the top of the economic heap, housing benefit claimants near the bottom.  This policy helps both ends (although the landlords far, far more)  but the fall guys are the families who are constantly finding themselves outbid by the government when looking for housing, all the while paying for this through their taxes.

The one thing that joins the Labour Party of 1980 and today is that it has been hijacked by state supported white collar workers.  They resent the “Daily Mail reading” privately employed middle class as being too money oriented while despising the indigenous working class for having a supposedly outdated set of social values and a lack of respect for education.  This is a majority of the population, which the Labour Party knows it needs to win back but can not instinctively fathom (as seen by their suicidal reaction to the “de facto” treaty veto).  The Conservative Party has also proved itself largely incapable of articulating these aspirations, but unlike Labour there is nothing in their DNA to stop them doing so – as the Republicans have in America.

On housing benefit, as on crime, immigration, heating bills, Europe, pensions, family and a whole host of other issues, the Conservative Party needs to stop apologising for articulating the needs of the middle.  Yes we do need to be consistent with a free market economic policy and we also needs to be compassionate rather than spiteful, but we should not stop at leveling the playing field for the working and lower middle classes – we should be actively tilting it in their favour.

Unitl I started this article, I didn’t know what Christopher Hitchens thought about Princess Diana’s death or the country’s reaction to it.  For the record he regarded it  as “frightful binging and gorging of sentimentality” and her as a “hyperactive debutante”.  Now this is not to question the judgement, but just the judgement of all the people who treat his death as if it’s the wittering class’s  equivalent of Diana passing.  People like a local MP.

I’d like to say that he would have been embarassed by all the adulation, but he never showed a lack of self regard.

As a writer he was very witty, but he had repudiated the somewhat painful honesty that ran in his family – that is still evident in his brother Peter’s writing (for which he gets brickbats).  For example Christopher Hitchens accused Martin Luther King of “not being a Christian in a real sense”.  No evidence, it’s just that this professional village atheist rather disliked a popular and clearly Christian leader – a man who was a pastor for most of his life something that most of us would regard as a clue.  There was also a funny, but 180 degree dishonest episode around a supposed icon of Stalin that Hitchens used to try to make out that the Russian Orthodox Church was now venerating Stalin.  Of course Stalin was as atheist as Mao and Trotsky, the last one of whom was not only a genocidal murderer in the Russian Civil War but also an object for Hitchens of near religious adoration even while Hitchens was supporting the bombing of Iraq.

Even better, the left never called him out on his sometimes pathological dishonesty, so much so that Nick Clegg said of him “I worked as an intern for him years ago. My job was to fact check his articles. Since he had a photographic memory and an encyclopaedic mind it was the easiest job I’ve ever done”.  I really hope that Nick Clegg is being nice about a dead friend, and that he wasn’t that incompetent.

There was also the dishonest hatchet job on Mother Theresa, something that is still celebrated across the left.  I’ll leave the last word to one of Hitchen’s erstwhile colleagues, the radical journalist Alexander Cockburn.  “If you were sitting in rags in a gutter in Bombay, who would be more likely to give you a bowl of soup? You’d get one from Mother Teresa.  Hitchens was always tight with beggars, just like the snotty Fabians who used to deprecate charity.”

What is it with Labour councillors and setting up straw men?  A straw man is a characterisation of another person’s argument that (a) isn’t actually espoused by the other side and (b) quite easy to refute.  It’s usually the sign of a weak argument on one’s own side.

So we have Alastair Ross’s piece (well comment)  in Ipswich Spy where he says “Watching BBC News last week – the Thatcher myth was exposed – she signed away more to Europe than any other PM – Tories trying to re write history.”  Of course we can ask whether that means he approves of Thatcher or Eurosceptacism, but he’d probably need time to get the right groupthink.

I’m not sure what myths Labour believe in, but most Tories who know any history are quite aware that Thatcher campaigned in 1975 to keep us in the EEC and signed the Single European Act in 1985.  To be fair she actually admitted she got that last one wrong – and I can’t think of anything apart from the Millenium Dome that either of the last two ex-Prime Ministers admitted to getting wrong.

But this was at a time when the country was having trouble economically reforming itself as well as having to help keep Western Europe together in the Cold War.  Thatcher managed to reform the country and the Soviet Union imploded.  By 1989 circumstances had changed – and so resistance to the European integration rose to such a point that Margaret Thatcher was overthrown in a coup very largely led by true Federalist believers – including Ben Gummer’s dad.

That’s why Thatcher was in favour of supporting the European project up until the late 1980s and why she changed afterwards.  She may have been (with hindsight she was) wrong, but she had a perfectly coherant viewpoint.  There was also the fact that at least in the 1970s the European project was less ambitious – at least in public.

So deal all you like with myths, Councillor Ross, I prefer to deal in facts.

Clearly I’m glad that we haven’t signed up for a new treaty with even more powers being taken away and the French getting even more of a hand on City regulation (and they’ve grabbed plenty already).  But there are reasons not to be cheerful:

• The European Union is still regulating the bus service on Wherstead Road and other pointless activities which have no impact on cross border trade.  So this is not a step back from the abyss, more a step sideways.
• This settlement is enormously unstable.  Just one point, the Irish have to vote on this.  The Euro has beggared them, so we may be back to the status quo ante.  And we still don’t know how the system will deal with a default the size of Italy or Spain.  We will be back at the negotiating table in six months time and they will be asking for more.
• We really need the dust to clear on this whole Euro mess.  It’s failed, as people on both the right and left said it would. When Boris Johnson said that it was saving the cancer to kill the patient it was insensitive but essentially true.  Europe is economically dying and will not get better until the Euro is killed.
• Although a Euro-coup as with Italy and Greece is unlikely it’s no longer impossible.  We have a coalition government and the Lib Dems aren’t happy.  Even if they don’t switch to Labour, they could bring down the government and force an election.

However I must admit that I underestimated David Cameron, I really thought that his threat to veto the treaty was bluster.  The fact that he had essentially cut down his demands to stop further degradation of the City meant that it looked like he was going to settle for very little. 

It will be interesting if the Labour Party, which have been picking at Tory divisions by posing as Eurosceptic can keep this Euroscepticism up.  I suspect that the patriotic Labour Party of the 1930s to 1970s has been well and truly slayed by the anyone-but-Britain Labour Party of the 1980s.

It was part of an otherwise good article explaining why we are stuck with the wine rack on the Waterfront. But there was one article that got itself a bit confused:

With no completed flats selling at their hoped for price and many yet to be finished, the developers could not pay their interest bill and soon went bust. The banks quickly followed. So to prevent a collapse of the entire Irish banking sector, the Irish government backed their banks, which nearly sunk the country itself until we and the EU stepped in to help.

As an historian with a very good degree you would expect Mr Gummer to get his cause and effect in the right order.

You see the Irish went into a serious austerity programme a couple of years ago and it was showing results. What then happened was that they decided to back up their banks – with no creditors losing money. At the time the then Prime Minister explained that this was done as part of its duty as Europeans. Of course this was closely linked to the German banks that had invested enormous sums in the Irish bank bubble. So not just privatising gains and socialising losses, but Germanising gains and Hibernising losses.

This proved to be disastrous. In one stroke Ireland suddenly went from a rapidly falling deficit to one that ballooned to around a third of its national income. The whole place, on the back of an avoidable, European pressured, stupid mistake.

So Ben is wrong to give the credit to “we and the EU”. The EU created this mess and kept Ireland afloat in order to keep paying German banks. If Ireland had been allowed to cauterise its oversized banks – as places as far apart as Dubai and Iceland had – then it would be a success story by now. Instead it’s a basket case.

I hate to say that the Germans are right, but they are right and our Prime Minister is wrong when Cameron is calling for the ECB to print Euros in order to buy debt.  He’s wrong morally, legally and economically.

But that’s not the point, the point is are we all a bit too worried about what happens if the Euro collapses?  There are two reasons for thinking so.  Firstly when monetary unions collapse they rarely visit as much carnage as you’d expect.  It’s perhaps too much to expect the (accidental) boom that we witnessed when we left the Exchange Rate Mechanism, but clearly Europe was not as integrated as the USSR was when the rouble was replaced in the non-Russian republics.  The chances are that if there is any short term negative effect it will be short lived and more than made up by the medium and long term boost to the economies who leave the Eurozone.

The other point is that we believe that we can stop the Euro collapsing, so that’s why we need to bring in Zimbabwe style money printing and Meditaranean coups.  It’s looking increasingly likely that we can’t stop the Euro collapsing.  The Arab spring shows us that sordid little Meditaranean dictatorships can’t last forever (and Greece, Portugal and Italy are going to be far more robust than the Egyptians and Tunisians).  What happens then?  Do we put the Ruhr under martial law until the Germans pay out to the less productive areas.

The Euro will collapse and there will be far less carnage than we are currently worrying about.  It’s a shame that our political class seem to be preparing to make themselves very unpopular for the sake of saving a project that will almost certainly collapse anyway.  Yes, our banks will be in trouble – again – but let’s deal with that as it comes.

There are real things to worry about with the economy, so let’s stop jumping at a shadow.

He may be wrong on Europe, but Ben Gummer did get one thing right – he stood up to the whips on the ridiculous section 5 of the Public Order Act.  This is the section that says that people can be prosecuted not for being threatening, but merely for being “insulting” which can apply to a wide range of political (and particularly religious) activity.

It als means that you can’t insult Ben Gummer in the street.  And that would really be a shameful denial of our rights as free born Englishmen.

I think that everyone can agree that the government handled the EU referendum issue poorly.  They didn’t have a clue that there would be a revolt among back benchers that would outweigh anything that had been seen on Europe before, meaning that the lack of a free vote meant that Cameron looked out of tune with his party on the issue.  They had no idea that the Liberal Democrats would prove so intransigent that even the most anodyne of a wrecking amendment would be objected to, leaving Downing Street stranded.  They weren’t even positioned to take advantage of Ed Miliband’s supine bending forward for the cause of Europe – something even John Major could manage in the midst of far more threatening rebellions.

It seems to have been a total failure to foresee that a petition that marked the majority view on Europe, and was backed by a major national newspaper, would get debate time in Parliament.

Well there’s a chance to redeem.  Gavin Maclure has pointed out a petition called “No to 70 million” which calls for no overall increase in the population from immigration (sign it here) is fast reaching the 100,000 threshold.  It does seem to be the sort of safety valve issue that the petitions were designed for as the number of people that we will be hosting in this country has never really been an issue for debate at the General Election.

Hopefully the government has opened up channels of communication with the Liberal Democrats to concoct a line that takes into account the feelings of the signatories and is (albeit reluctantly) acceptable to the Lib Dems.  Hopefully there won’t need to be a revolt where the government is seen firmly on the side of the vested interests against the people.  Hopefully Labour will be forced by a well thought through government line to disavow its Blairite heritage of betraying the interests of unskilled and semi skilled workers in favour of the interests of gang masters and brothel keepers.

Who knows?  This is a test to see if common sense can prevail.  If the price of the coalition is that the Conservative Party gives up its claim to the party of common sense to UKIP, is that a price worth paying?

So it looks like the Greek Prime Minister has succumbed to a Euro inspired coup, for daring to put a prolonged period of austerity to a vote of the people.  Now there’s going to be an “emergency coalition” led by the head of the Central Bank.  I know PASOK are a nasty bunch of socialist crooks, but they were a democratically elected bunch of nasty socialist crooks.

At least the colonels were honest about their contempt of the people.

Oh well.  At least no one from Ipswich called for anything like a German inspired coup in Eastern Europe.  That would be a Euro-fanaticism too far.

Oh wait, just read an old Tweet from our MP:

Your house is on fire. Your neighbours offer to help you fetch buckets of water. You take 2 months to vote on their offer. House burns down.

It’s a shame that the usually sensible Kevin Algar retweeted this tripe.  I hope Kevin sees the error of his ways now that we can see in plain light that Europe can replace a democratically elected government.