Category Archives: Politics

Posts about politics and politicians

Vive la Paix

18th November 2015Ethics, PoliticsJim Gunther

Francois Hollande’s headstrong language of war echoes earlier comments by George W Bush. Look where that got us. At least Barak Obama seems to have learnt the lessons of the recent past with more balanced, statesmanlike comments so far.

With whatever it takes to overcome the psychopathic, murderously intolerant ideas of Salafist ideology, we must never forget one thing. Our ultimate goal must continue to be to build a world of peace, toleration and mutual respect. Hard to imagine right now, but we, civilised, humans must just keep on trying. We will stumble and deviate many times on the way. But together we must continue to search for a path to a better future. Our children and grandchildren deserve no less of us.

Long live peace.

Buying Power

26th October 2015Ethics, PoliticsJim Gunther

In a recent blog post, Cat and Mouse, I discussed the frustrations of buying gas and electricity in the pseudo-market of 21^st century Britain. In this post, I am looking at buying power of a different type: political power.

UK Government cabinet — Policies for sale here

The recent ludicrous vanity project by billionaire Michael Ashcroft, his unauthorised “biography” Call Me Dave, made tabloid headlines. These highlighted some ridiculous uncorroborated claim about Cameron and a pig. Like the subject of the biography, I treat the story with the contempt it deserves.

But most newspapers seemed to have missed the most shocking aspect of this story: the casual assumption by Ashcroft that, by donating vast sums to the Tory party, this assured him of a key role in Cameron’s government. The unremarked assumption that money buys political power went largely unchallenged.

From fundraising dinners during the Conservative Party Conference, through the notorious Black and White Ball each February, to the Donor Clubs on their own party website, the Tories make it clear they’re up for sale. And of course, there’s that perennial unreformed bastion of patronage, the House of Lords, where party donations and seats are often “coincidentally” linked.

So when a politician next makes the claim that Britain’s political system is one of the least corrupt in the world, think carefully before you accept their reassurances.

Nasty, Indeed

25th October 2015Ethics, PoliticsJim Gunther

It’s ironic that it was Theresa May who reminded us, at their party conference, that the Conservatives are the Nasty Party. It was the same Theresa May who, a decade earlier, had issued a warning to her party that they were in danger of being so branded.

The overall tone of her speech, presumably part of the jockeying for leadership after Cameron stands down, was very ill-judged indeed. Even the Telegraph agrees! There are enough bigots, racists, xenophobes and worse in the country without the Home Secretary of the day feeding their prejudices. It was also unforgiveable to include a downright lie that immigrants do not bring economic benefits to the country, contradicting a whole range of well-researched reports on the subject.

When it comes to immigration, the Tories, of course, have form:

On the last point, I did some simple maths based upon Cameron’s cynically calibrated offer to take 4000 (of the 6 million) Syrian refugees a year. The local authority area where I live has a population of 160,000 and 76 state schools. If we took our fair share of these refugees, we would need to take just 11 Syrians a year into our population. Assuming one in four is of school age, we would need to find just one extra school place per 25 schools in the area. Hardly a threat to social cohesion!

If May is so bothered by threats to social cohesion, she might like to ponder the medium-term effects of making 3 million of our lowest paid working families £1300 a year worse off through reductions to tax credits.

Nasty, indeed.

Not Above the Law

23rd October 2015Ethics, PoliticsJim Gunther

Last week, the government sneaked* out, with no publicity, a change to the ministerial code of conduct. A bit boring, don’t you think? But read on…

The specific change relates to a requirement for ministers to comply with the law: the phrase deleted states “including international law and treaty obligations and to uphold the administration of justice”. Senior legal academics and the shadow lord chancellor have described the change as “shocking”, ”staggering” and “a slap to Magna Carta”.

A Cabinet Office spokesman shrugged off the change as a simplification which changes nothing. However, a Tory party policy document had promised a rewriting of the code “to remove any ambiguity … about the duty of ministers to follow the will of Parliament in the UK”.

Following Tory proposals to opt out of the European Convention on Human Rights currently under consideration in the Ministry of Justice, this paints a seriously worrying picture of a government which does not wish to be bound by the standards of international law. This is made worse given that the ECHR has British – and Conservative – fingerprints all over its conception and drafting. Winston Churchill was an early proponent of the Convention, a former Conservative Home Secretary and lawyer, David Maxwell-Fyfe, was chair of the drafting committee.

The same “Britain is special” thinking applies in the continuing demand for British exceptionalism in the rules applying to member countries of the EU. When the going gets tough at home, there’s nothing David Cameron likes better than to lecture foreigners on how they should run their countries. Banging on about so-called “British Values” is part of the same mindset.

What is it about this present bunch of government ministers that makes them think Britain is so special that the rules only apply to everyone else?

I suppose if you’ve benefited from an education which instils an attitude of entitlement to boss everyone else around, this type of thinking comes all too easily. Our wonderful unwritten constitution, where the government of the day can make up the rules as it goes along, is also a contributory factor. A good recent example is Cameron adding a load of Tory peers to the House of Lords, swelling its ranks to record numbers – after stating previously there were too many members in the Lords. This was based on a new “rule” he’d just made up stating that the Lords should better reflect the composition of the Commons.

But the price paid for our government’s attitude, in terms of loss of goodwill and of any moral standing that Britain may have in the world, is huge – and very hard to win back, once lost.

Coupled with the sycophancy shown to the Chinese government, with its appalling human rights record, we can only expect to see Britain being vilified, ridiculed and simply ignored on the world stage. So much for the government’s claim about making Britain “Great”!

*It sneaked past the government’s own Attorney General, who was obviously unaware of the change at a speech he gave at an International Law Conference later the same day!

I Am a Dalek! Exterminate!

1st October 2015Politics, Satire and SillyJim Gunther

In last Saturday’s episode of Doctor Who, the Doctor’s sidekick Clara was trapped inside the metal shell of a dalek. Whenever she tried to tell her friends it was really her inside, the dalek voice said “I am a dalek!” Whenever she tried to say she was a friend, or some similar phrase of non-aggression, the voice said “Exterminate!”

Immediately after Jeremy Corbyn’s speech at the Labour Party conference, Justice Secretary Michael Gove was quoted as saying: “Labour have confirmed that it is a threat to our national security, our economic security and to the security of every family in Britain”. Which reminded me of something…

On the day Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour Party leadership, Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said: “Labour is now a serious risk to our nation’s security, our economy’s security and your family’s security.” A few days before that, David Cameron had said that Labour “pose a clear threat to the financial security of every family in Britain“.

Beginning to sound familiar?

For months after the 2010 election, coalition ministers repeated over and over the lying mantra that Labour was responsible for the global financial collapse in 2007-8. Two years later, an opinion poll showed that 60% of the British public agreed with this lie.

I do hope that the Labour Party, its sympathisers and any who care about the truth will not let the Tories get away with this trick for the second time.

Add to this the fact that every Treasury policy announcement from Osborne since the last election – and several before – seems to be aimed at one thing. They all seem to be based not on what would be good for the British economy, but on how we can lay a political trap for our opponents. The aim is to destroy totally the credibility of any dissenting voices, extending the Conservatives’ “entitlement” to rule for ever.

Or, to put it more simply: “I am a dalek! Exterminate!”

Inequality Damages Your Wealth

26th September 2015Politics, The economyJim Gunther

One of the assertions made by free market fundamentalists is the “trickle-down effect”: making rich people richer by cutting their taxes benefits everyone, as their extra wealth trickles down to the rest of us. I have long doubted this; a recent IMF report provides further evidence that this is not so.

To quote from the report:

“If the income share of the top 20 percent increases by 1 percentage point, GDP growth is actually 0.08 percentage point lower in the following five years, suggesting that the benefits do not trickle down. Instead, a similar increase in the income share of the bottom 20 percent (the poor) is associated with 0.38 percentage point higher growth.”

The report goes on to say that the positive effect on growth holds true also for increasing the share of income for the middle classes – it’s only when the richest get more that we’re all worse off overall. This is hardly surprising. The poor tend to spend more of their income, not least on the basic necessities of life. The rich are more likely to save theirs – and, for the richest, often tuck it away in some offshore tax haven!

Spirit Level

In their 2009 book The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett demonstrated that more unequal societies had worse performance over a range of social outcomes:

Community life and social outcomes
Mental health and drug use
Physical health and life expectancy
Obesity
Educational performance
Teenage births
Violence
Imprisonment and punishment
Social mobility

The book goes on to state a plausible mechanism to explain why inequality has an adverse effect on each of these outcomes. If growing inequality does indeed cause all these societal problems, it’s not hard to imagine that the overall growth in the economy is reduced as well.

Concentrating Wealth

Britain does worse than most comparable countries when it comes to wealth inequality – and we’re getting more unequal faster than them. The graphs from the IMF report illustrate this, showing the proportion of all wealth owned by the top 1% and the bottom 90% of the population, for 1980 and 2010.

In the UK, the top 1% own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90% of the population. Only the USA has greater inequality and the gap between the blue (1980) and green (2010) bars is biggest for the UK. Sweden, by comparison, although getting worse, shows that it doesn’t have to be this unequal.

Cat and Mouse

23rd September 2015Politics, The economyJim Gunther

I don’t want to live in a society where I have to shop around every few months for my energy supply to stop me being ripped off by my current supplier.

Since our former public monopoly gas and electricity suppliers were privatised by the Thatcher government in the 1980s, the private companies that replaced them have been playing a game of cat and mouse on two fronts:

with the regulator, Ofgem;
with their customers.

With Ofgem, this has mainly taken the form of a bewildering mix of different tariffs, designed to make it as difficult as possible to compare prices.

The game with customers mainly focussed on winning market share in an oligopolistic market. The consequence is to offer discounts and/or more attractive tariff packages to new customers, whilst pushing up prices to existing ones. In other words, customer loyalty is penalised and everyone has to play the game of shopping around.

The energy companies didn’t invent this practice: the insurance industry led the way, as they institutionalised greed and treating their customers as a cash cow. The phone companies have also jumped onto this bandwagon.

Natural Monopolies

Even at the time the companies were privatised, I felt the idea was wrong. Gas and electricity retailing is a natural monopoly: it’s the same gas and electricity coming down the pipes and wires regardless of whom your contract is with. These industries do not form a natural market: such competition as exists is on the periphery of the service – billing and customer service – and not on the core offer.

Matters were made worse when the wholesale supply and distribution business was privatised a few years later. These industries require long-term investment, for example, in new power stations. Also, there are major externalities, such as climate change and air pollution, which should be factored in at a strategic level. Similarly, security of supply is paramount, given how much of modern life is dependent on these supplies always being there. Short-term focussed, profit-maximizing competing companies don’t match these needs.

Consumer Benefits?

Have consumers benefited from cheaper prices or better services? I doubt it, at least in the longer term. There may have been some price cutting to benefit consumers in the early days, but prices have risen faster in recent years and I am convinced we’re paying more now than we would have done under public ownership. Like the petrol retailers, gas and electricity companies are quick to raise the retail price when the wholesale price rises, and very slow to lower it when the wholesale price falls. Furthermore, the various comparison websites will quickly tell you how patchy customer service is.

Dogma Rules

What got us into this sorry mess is the mindless application of the dogma I described as “free market fundamentalism” in my earlier post Some Are More Equal. If you have a basic universal need for energy like gas and electricity, what’s wrong with it being met by an organisation driven from top to bottom by a commitment to public service principles?

A House Is Not a Home

19th September 2015Politics, Social and Relationships, The economyJim Gunther

… when it’s an investment.

The rot started before Thatcher: she merely picked up on a changing public mood.

We’ve been talking about houses as investments for many years now and it distorts completely any rational discussion about Britain’s housing needs. The idea of “an Englishman’s home is his castle” has been around for centuries. But then people started seeing houses as more than the place where you put down your roots, live your life, bring up a family, socialize with friends and become part of your community.

For most goods and services, a price rise is generally seen as a bad thing, reducing people’s disposable income and risking a rise in inflation. Not so with housing, where a reverse logic applies. This upside-down view comes naturally for richer politicians, economists and journalists who are on the (capital) gaining side of the equation.

Housing Divides Us

But the practical result is that, as Britain becomes a more and more divided society, one of the stark distinctions between the “haves” and the “have-nots” is the ability to afford a home of your own. Those lucky enough to be homeowners already have been able to use their unearned capital gains in a variety of ways. But would-be first time buyers are being put in an ever more desperate position. The maps below show the contrast in housing affordability over the past 20 years, based upon average* incomes and average house prices, area by area.

With blue the most affordable and red the least, the change is dramatic. In 1995, an average earner would need to spend between 3.2 and 4.4 times their salary to buy an average-priced house in their area. In 2014, the corresponding figures are between 6.1 and 12.2 times salary. In both years, unsurprisingly, the highest ratios are for London. Here, average earners now stand no chance of getting onto the housing ladder without the help of rich parents or some other equivalent advantage.

Too Few New Houses

How we came to this ridiculous state of affairs is easy to see when you look at the graph below, showing UK house building over the past 45 years. From an annual figure of around 300,000 new homes in the 1970s, often higher, the rate drops sharply following the oil price shock of the mid-1970s. After a small rally in the early 1980s, it falls to 180,000 at the end of the Thatcher and Major governments. A steady but modest rise occurs in the housebuilding rate in the New Labour period prior to the 2008 financial crisis. The crash resulted in new lows of fewer than 150,000 new homes a year, a rate which failed to recover under the 2010-15 coalition. Housing experts state that we need 200-250,000 new homes a year to keep up with demand.

The Rise of the Private Landlord

Matters have been made worse by a huge rise in the buy-to-let market. A significant proportion of former council properties, sold off after Thatcher’s “Right to Buy” policy, have eventually ended up on the buy-to-let market. The graph below shows trends over a 10 year period to 2012.

During this period, the total housing stock has risen from 25.6 million homes in 2001-2 to 27.8 million ten years later. The proportion of public sector homes fell from 21% to 18% as new public sector house building failed to keep pace with the loss through council house sales. A more dramatic drop in owner-occupied properties, from 69% to 64% demonstrates the increasing problem for first time buyers to enter the market. The slack, as can clearly be seen, has been taken up by the private rented market. Its share of the housing stock has nearly doubled, from just under 10% to 18%.

Increasing Benefits Bill

The insufficiency of house building over a long period, together with a major swing to the private rented sector has driven up housing costs dramatically, even more for those renting than for owner-occupiers. The consequential rising cost of housing benefit is one of the two major causes of the rise in social security costs over the last decade or two. (The other is our ageing population, whose pensions have been protected.) The extra public spending has gone to private landlords.

Conclusion

It does not need much mental effort to conclude that:

The UK housing market is dysfunctional
Those suffering most are those least able to afford decent housing
Benefit caps pile more suffering on those same people
Osborne’s plan to sell off the more desirable Housing Association stock simply makes the problem worse:
- It will shift more housing from public to private rented
- It will drive up average rents
Jeremy Corbyn’s “People’s Quantitative Easing” to pay for more public housing looks quite sensible:
- It will increase the supply of genuinely affordable housing
- It will reduce the benefits bill.

And all because we’ve been conditioned into seeing houses as financial investments instead of homes!

*median figures used throughout

Acknowledgements to: theguardian.com (03/09/2015), Channel 4 and the Office of National Statistics for source data

Dirge

16th September 2015PoliticsJim Gunther

Shame on you, Jeremy Corbyn, for agreeing to sing the words of the national anthem in future!

Corbyn not singing — Jeremy Corbyn at the Battle of Britain commemoration

You will not catch me singing the words any time soon, and here’s the reason why: I don’t agree with them.

God	As a rationalist and humanist, I believe God does not exist.
Save	So a non-existent God can’t save anything. Presumably, “save” means “from death”: I have not the slightest personal ill-will towards the present head of state. But why should I wish this particular individual, whom I’ve never met, a long life, rather than anyone / everyone else?
Our	Nothing to do with me: I had no choice in her appointment!
Gracious	My dictionary defines this word as “courteous, kind and pleasant”. I have no reason to doubt these attributes could be applied to Little Betty W, at least most of the time. But this epithet was applied to all her predecessors during their reigns, regardless of their various personalities. It would be an extraordinary coincidence if they all deserved the term. So that makes it propaganda, not praise.
Queen	As a republican, I want an elected head of state, not a monarchy.
Long live our noble Queen	See “save” above.
God save the Queen	See all above
Send her victorious	Over whom, exactly?
Happy and glorious	See “gracious” above
God save the Queen	Repetition! It wouldn’t do in “Just a Minute”!

After that… which of us would be comfortable with verse two? O Lord our God arise, Scatter her enemies, And make them fall: Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish* tricks, On Thee our hopes we fix: God save us all.

*”knavish” used to be “popish” – ah for the days when religious intolerance was official policy!!

When I attend church events like weddings and funerals, I adopt a respectful approach to those around me. This means not drawing attention to my dissenting views: I stand up and sit down at the same time as everyone else. During hymns and prayers, I stand or sit silently as a mark of respect. It would be hypocritical to join in.

This was exactly the approach Jeremy Corbyn adopted at the Battle of Britain ceremony – an honest, respectful and tolerant approach. The real or manufactured anger of his critics simply shows them to be intolerant of those whose views differ from their own. It’s not hard to work out whose attitude I prefer.

Passion and Cool Heads

12th September 2015PoliticsJim Gunther

I watched Jeremy Corbyn’s victory speech live. I agree with every word he said.

Britain desperately needs an effective opposition to the bunch of incompetents currently making such a mess of running the country. (The economic so-called “recovery” is built on sand and excludes most of us.) There is now a glimmer of hope that the Labour Party will meet that need for a different vision for the country.

The first task is to begin to shift the centre of gravity of the political discourse back to the genuine centre ground. For over thirty years, we have been part of an extremist economic experiment – one which failed seven years ago: a pity that the present government hasn’t noticed yet. The real centre ground in public attitudes lies closer to Jeremy’s views than any other prominent UK politician.

I wish Jeremy and the Labour Party well in their endeavours. They will need an appealing mixture of passion and cool heads to succeed.

Passion

We saw plenty of passion from Jeremy in his speech – the sort of passion that comes from compassion. The energy and enthusiasm of newly joined members – and some returning ones – needs to be turned into an effective campaigning force ready to take on the government. A clear call for inclusiveness and a more consultative style came through also. What a welcome contrast to the various “I speak your weight” measured-soundbite politicians we normally see.

Cool Heads

But there is a need for clear heads as well – for two reasons.

Firstly, cool heads will be needed to deflect the torrent of abuse and misinformation that will now hit the Labour team. The usual hate-filled suspects in the media will already have a drawer-full of “loony-left dangerous comments” made over the past thirty years to throw back at Corbyn – presumably with the usual level of distortion. Tory ministers will make similar claims. Defence Secretary Fallon has already started with a hyperbolic and ludicrous outburst. (If he continues to cry wolf, Fallon will lose any credibility he has with the British public and his foreign counterparts. That won’t do a lot for Britain’s standing in the world.) Expect some very dirty tricks indeed.

Secondly, cool heads will be needed from suitably qualified experts to help flesh out an economic policy to give voters a credible alternative to the failed current austerity dogma. There is a credible alternative path to take – I just haven’t seen it fully worked through yet.

Tom Watson has shown himself to be grounded, resourceful and brave and will be a useful Deputy Leader with complementary strengths to his new leader.

I’m feeling optimistic right now. Time will tell. Good luck! – we need some hope for the future.

Human Eyes

Thoughts on Humanizing 21st Century Britain…