Archive for September, 2015

Osborne in China

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2015

The UK might be forgiven for thinking it had two Prime Ministers. George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer and (this is important) First Secretary of State, has already emerged as the power in the first majority Tory Government in five elections. His incisive style, precise purpose and clear explanations are entirely different to the avuncular waffle of the official PM. Cameron never answers a question and is forever ‘doing the right thing.’ But nobody is sure what the thing is, let alone whether it is right.

Osborne’s visit to China is momentous because it shifts the emphasis from quarrelsome Europe to a new dynamic with the world’s second biggest economy, soon to be the biggest. The timing is perfect. China is trying to achieve a shift from an export driven economy to one in which domestic consumption plays a bigger role and where overseas investment, already strong in Asia, extends its global reach. Osborne declared that Britain aimed to become ‘China’s best partner in the West’. He said this at the Shanghai Stock Exchange while announcing that plans are afoot to link the Shanghai and London stock exchanges in an epoch changing development of flexible trading. He had already announced inducements to encourage wide ranging Chinese investment in the UK including nuclear power and railways.

Coming upon the recent thaw, albeit a slow drip, in relations with Moscow to make common cause against IS, there begins to emerge after years of muddle, a coherent strategic direction for the UK. It is to be on good terms with each of the three Superpowers. The US is the military partner, Russia will slowly emerge as the strategic political partner in Europe and the Middle East and China will be the business partner. Among them all the UK will be the only one buddies with all three. So far this may be more by accident than design and the foreign office has an uncanny ability to screw up.

Unfortunately for Osborne all this is not matched by a coherent domestic economic policy, wedded ideologically to cuts, in which bad news is piling up in small doses. Wages up is good. Unemployment up, falling industrial production, a bigger budget deficit than in August 2014 and exports falling are not. Perhaps China will have some suggestions.

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Tuesday, September 22nd, 2015

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Politics: The Centre Ground

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2015

As the conference seasons gets into its stride, we hear a lot from politicians and commentators about the centre ground of politics.There is a class of politician which sees it not just as the safest place to be, but the point from which all political wisdom flows. They see the right and left wings as extremities to which nutters journey without hope of ever seeing power. And to centrists power is everything.

There is another way of looking at things and one favoured by this blog. This holds that there is no power in the centre at all. It is all in the wings. You cannot have a political centre without wings any more than you can have a town centre without a town. In a capitalist democracy there are two competing engines of power. Capital and labour. For the society to work fairly and for the economy to prosper at all levels, the two must be approximately balanced in terms of the energy they can bring to bear. Either can exercise power, depending on the choice  of voters, but whichever does, is held back from excess by the opposing power of the other.

The Left promotes the interests of labour. By that we mean all those who earn a living in a job vital to the running of a civilized state which can never make them rich. A nurse, a teacher, a bin man, a care worker, a train driver, a power engineer; the list goes on and on.

The Right promotes the interests of capital. Capital includes those with property and wealth but above all represents those whose incomes have no glass ceiling, because what they do has less connection to the public good and more to do with individual achievement. It may involve financial risk and includes the fabled entrepreneurs. They always class themselves as the wealth creators. They are but they are not alone because labour creates by its toil far more, but it shares it out among the many. Capital organises itself so that as much wealth as possible is held in the hands of just a few.

Politicians, good ones, spring from either of these two wings, disciplines or convictions, call them what you will. Dull and uninspiring politicians who come without any conviction, other than the advancement of their own careers to wield power, prefer the centre. That is why they should be left there and ignored.

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Monday, September 21st, 2015

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Refugee Crisis

Monday, September 21st, 2015

As previously posted, this blog is of the view that the EU is doing itself no favours by the absolute confusion over its policy towards the greatest diaspora of modern times and its apparent lack of urgency in trying to reach one. Meanwhile the flow of hopeful multitudes continues, all but overwhelming the resources of a growing list of EU members to the south and east. More drownings have been reported. There are, however, hopeful signs.

There is evidence that Hungary’s hard line position has softened but that Croatia’s warm welcome has buckled under the strain of vast numbers. Reality has forced something of a coordinated process to transit everyone to Germany with the minimum formality. This makes more sense than trying to set up sophisticated bureaucratic procedures in fields and tiny border crossings. But Germany, alone willing to take realistic numbers, will itself begin to creak both logistically and politically, as the hundreds of thousands turn into millions.

The best news is that a serious diplomatic effort is now in hand involving the US and Russia, backed by Iran and the UK, to end the war in Syria and establish a durable government which can operate a good deal better than the fiasco in Libya, the disaster in Iraq and the tragedy in Afghanistan where the Taliban is becoming, as predicted by the blog time and again, ever more powerful. Military defeat of the IS is impossible short of genocide, as you cannot invade a religious ideology. What the joint powers can achieve by military means is a containment which tells IS it cannot win. If this new effort gets that far, somebody will then have to talk to IS. At least there is a map of where to go, even if the road is hard. Only when peace is restored will the flow of millions ease.

This four power initiative has taken most of the world by surprise. There are four main drivers. The first is that IS is the common enemy of all the players. Second, although tactically the American led air strikes on IS targets has frustrated its advance and helped drive it back here and there, it is still gaining territory and followers and expanding into Libya. Third, the abject failure of the Pentagon plan (which was always a pipe dream, never a plan) to train moderate fighters to oppose Assad has failed completely with the net total of recruits in the filed amounting to an embarrassing five in total. This is because there are no fighters now opposing Assad except IS, Al Qaeda and the Al Nusra front, all extreme Islamists of militant anti-western intent. America now understands that its own troops would do more harm than good. Fourth, Russia remembers Afghanistan undermined the Soviet Union so that later pressures brought it down.

But another dark cloud caused the phone lines between the capitals to buzz. The flood of refugees threatens to destabilize Europe, whose rickety system of multi headed governance cannot even manage its currency properly, let alone an influx of millions which everybody feels duty bound to welcome but who in reality nobody wants. Any destabilising of European unity is something on nobody’s wish list, America, Russia and Britain most of all. Because they have been called in to clean up too often before.

Syria : An Historic Moment

Saturday, September 19th, 2015

As this blog has repeatedly declared in post after post over the years, there can be no solution to the troubles in the Middle East, especially IS and Syria, without Russia and Iran. Recent improvements in relations with Iran was a good sign but what is now going on is a game changer. Russia and the US are talking about joint military actions which will enable IS to be rolled back from Syria through a combination of re-armed and re-equipped (by Russia) Assad forces on the ground and co-ordinated US and Allied air strikes. Russia has stopped insisting that Assad stays; only that the Syrian government must be supported and the terrorists defeated. The UK backs the US position. This would be the first time that the three WWII allies work together in unison for a common purpose. Their combined military strength is several times greater than the rest of the world put together.

Russia now accepts that Assad will have to go as part of a peace settlement, but wants him to have a soft landing after regaining control of a viable part of his country. The UK and US will go with that as long as Assad goes sometime. Meanwhile in Ukraine there is evidence of a fresh effort to find a political solution built on the Minsk agreement. Again and again this blog has explained that nothing can be resolved anywhere unless the West and Russia work together. Although on the margin Russia is, and has been since Napoleonic times, a Western power with an Eastern hinterland.

While Europe quarrels about how to handle refugees and exhibits a dysfunctionality at variance with the word Union, perhaps because of it, there is now beginning to shine a ray of hope that an end is in sight of one of the greatest human tragedies of our time, as common interest at last informs the critical thinking in Washington, London and Moscow. When they march together, everybody else has to fall in line.

Weekend Reading: Downfall In Downing Street

Saturday, September 19th, 2015

Set in the mid nineteen nineties, this fast moving thriller lifts the curtain on sex, sleaze and corruption in high places as the long reign of the government totters to an end, following the ousting of the iconic Margaret Thatcher. The novel catches the mood of those times with a host of fictional characters who engage in political intrigue, sex, money laundering and murder, pursued by an Irish investigative journalist and his girlfriend, the daughter of a cabinet minister found dead in a hotel room after bondage sex.

KINDLE OR PAPERBACK     UK    US

Liberal Democrats: Where Now?

Saturday, September 19th, 2015

They were slaughtered at the general election for three reasons. The first was that the young could not forgive them for breaking their solemn pledge not to increase tuition fees. The second was that their former Labour supporters who voted Lib Dem in 2010 could not forgive them for joining up with the Tories. Finally the Tories said to their people ‘ you will get us anyway so why not vote for the real thing?’

Since WWII the  Liberals have struggled to break through. They began to advance when Tory voters, who felt their party  had imploded in the post Thatcher era, could not bring themselves to vote for Blair. In 2005 they reached their high water mark of 62 seats because many left wing Labour voters stopped voting  for Blair, having seen that New Labour was little more than pink Thatcherism. The number of potential voters who believe in ‘Liberalism’ has not for decades been sufficient to get even the reinvigorated party anywhere on its own. It needs at least defections from one or the other of the two main parties, preferably from both, together with a favourable voting distribution.

The challenge is made the more daunting with the unstoppable rise of the SNP, the improving image of Plaid Cymru, the shift of the centre to the left and of the Tories to the centre, UKIP and the Greens and what looks like a re-energised Labour movement under Corbyn. Their feisty new leader, Tim Fallon, will fire them up to go, but exactly where may have to wait upon events.

The biggest problem of all, but also the biggest opportunity, lies in the disconnect between seats and votes for a third party. Here are the voting figures for the last ten elections and the seats won.

1974   5,346704  13       1979   4,313804    11       1983   7,780949    23      1987   7,341651   22

1992   5,999606  20       1997   5,242947    46      2001  4,814321     52     2005   5,985454  62

2010   6,836198  57       2015   2,415888      8

Study the figures and you will see how the party can increase seats and lose votes at the same time. It is all in the distribution. Between 1983 and 2005 the Lib Dems (starting as the SDP/Liberal Alliance) lost 2 million votes but increased their seats from 23 to 62. Their 2015 tally was the lowest Liberal vote since 1970, when they won six seats. Wishful thinking will lead them to hope for defections from Corbyn’s Labour in parliament. It is unlikely to happen but when it did in the Foot era, almost all of them lost their seats. Dissident New Labour MPs would be better advised to cross to the Tories, with whom they have much if not most in common,  especially if they want to advance their careers.

For Tim Farron this is an opportunity to shine. It can only get better, since if it get’s worse there will be nothing.

Voting Patterns.

Friday, September 18th, 2015

A recent survey discovered that of those who thought of voting Labour in 2015 and then did not, the majority turned away because they found the party too centrist and not left enough. This echoes the conclusion of this blog posted months ago.

The same survey found that people voted Tory because they thought Labour useless on the economy. There is a subtle point here often missed. Those who vote regularly out of habit and custom always vote at elections and generally stay close to the centre. However those who vote out of the conviction they want to change things, vote for the left. but they do not vote at all if they are not convinced there is real prospect of change. Thus the SNP victory in Scotland was gained on a much higher turnout that the Tory victory in England.

For Labour to win it must attract not from the centre, but from the non-voting left. In other words if it had attracted back the 5 million votes it lost since the invention of New Labour, it would have had about 14 million in total. The Tories won on a low turnout with just 11 million. The mountain is not impossible to climb if you know which one to go for. 15 million registered voters stayed at home in May 2015.

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Friday, September 18th, 2015

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