On Wednesday, David Cameron received a bit of a beasting at the hands of a group of rebel Tory MPs.
Our Dave is scheduled to attend an EU budget conference in the not-too-distant future. The stance he had leaked in advance of the upcoming budget negotiations was that he intended to be tough but proactive; demanding any rise in the budget be restricted to a real terms increase, and promising to exercise the UK's veto if the Eurocrats insisted on sticking to their proposed six or seven per cent increase.
Making common cause with the Labour Opposition, the Tory rebels, on the other hand, insisted that the only change to the EU budget should be in a downward direction. Not unreasonably, they opined that the Eurocrats should endure the same pain and austerity that most of Europe has been living through for the last couple of years.
Much to the horror of the Government, the rebels and their cohorts won the day. The reaction of the Parliamentary Press corps tells you much about what is wrong with this country and its politics;and more particularly the traditionally supine attitude our political elites adopt in any negotiations with Europe.
Far from hailing the no vote as a triumph for Parliamentary democracy, they almost universally characterised it as a defeat for the Prime Minister. Instead of celebrating the supremacy of Parliament, they wrung their collective, little hands, with worry at the reaction of Frau Merkel and her cohorts and placemen. Apparently, they were correct. Our beloved Fuhrerin has let it be known that she is deeply unhappy at the prospect of any veto - parliamentary democracy notwithstanding - and will not look kindly on our Dave if any more vetoes are thrown into the ring. You can almost hear the scrabbling sound as our leader and his advisors attempt to retain the moral high ground bestowed by the Parliamentary vote, even as they rapidly retreat to the familiar territory of fudge and compromise.
There they will be greeted with open arms by Nick Clegg. Sensing that the national mood has swung emphatically against the EU, but not quite able yet to admit just how deeply the loathing has penetrated the national psyche, Clegg has described the move to renegotiate our position and reclaim powers from the EU as "a false promise wrapped in a Union Jack".
In Clegg's worldview, we are safe only as long as we cling to Frau Merkel's apron strings. If we insist on reclaiming important elements of our sovereignty, we could face the ultimate sanction; expulsion from the European Union.
For Clegg, and indeed for most Europhiles, Great Britain is a small, slightly worn and grubby island anchored off the west coast of Europe whose only chance of future prosperity and influence comes from remaining part of Greater Europe. Our departure from the EU would be the first step onto the national equivalent of the Liverpool Care Pathway. Starved of the nourishment provided by the communal teat we would eventually wither on the vine and simply fade away. In the scenario most frequently used to frighten the children, we would be banned from trade agreements, ignored by the great supranational companies that drive world trade and our people, goods and services would be ostracised and ignored.
Naturally, companies like VAG, Ford, BASF would be only too happy to obey Merkel, Baroso or whoever and withdraw from one of the world's major developed markets, one that represents billions of dollars in revenue to them. Equally, the rest of the world would also sit on its hands. No American, Canadian, Australian, South African, Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Russian or Brazilian would rush to fill the void and their corporate pockets should such an unlikely scenario be played out. Members of the Commonwealth, which with 54 countries and 2 billion inhabitants, is getting on for three times the size of the EU, would also be bound to ignore what is still the mother country for most of them. That, by the way, is the same Commonwealth with a current growth rate of around 7% GDP annually compared with the EU's less than stellar zero per cent.
So, if Frau Merkel and the rest decide that they really don't want us to contribute billions to their club any more, we can happily go our own way knowing that we have a ready-made market waiting for us. A market whose citizens, for the most part, speak our language, whose legal and administrative systems are a mirror of our own and whose undoubted good will is confirmed by their electing to join and remain within the Commonwealth sixty years after we first began the process of dismantling the old British Empire.
Friday, 2 November 2012
Tuesday, 25 September 2012
Defence merger - conspiracy or coincidence?
Should Britain allow its Defence Industries to be foreign-owned?
It's a question that, not so long ago, would have elicited a robust response involving two fingers accompanied by two words, the second of which would have been OFF.
That was in the days before successive governments sat back as key utilities such as water and power slipped into foreign ownership. Currently, UK utilities are owned by Australian, US French and German companies to name just a few.
Is this important? After all, the conventional wisdom is that the only way for Great Britain to "punch above its weight" ( has their ever been a more fatuous and patronising expression, by the way?) is to accept and embrace foreign ownership as an inevitable result of Globalisation; which, as we are all constantly told, is never less than a force for good and a sovereign boon to Mankind.
Hmmmm. EDF (Electricite de France)is one of our largest energy suppliers. Its majority shareholder is, and will always be, the French Government. If you believe that is not significant try comparing EDF electricity prices in France and Great Britain. Alternatively, look what happened to gas prices here, compared to Germany, when the Russians threatened to turn off the taps a couple of years ago.
History demonstrates that once British companies are foreign-owned, whether through takeover or - the preferred term - merger, and the owners are forced to cut jobs or investment because of a fall-off in demand, they invariably choose to make them somewhere other than their home market.
Which brings us, albeit circuitously, to the proposed merger of Bae and the Franco-Germa-Iberian company EADS, perhaps better known as Airbus.
There has been plenty of Press reaction to this proposed tie-up, most of it split along the usual partisan lines. Generally-speaking, the anti EU Mail, Telegraph and Express were against the idea while the Europhile Independent and the Guardian were, equally predictably, not so against it. No surprises there.
Just before news of this proposed merger ( we get 40% and they get 60% but, somehow, this still constitutes a merger?) broke and dominated the headlines, slightly less ink was expended reporting a meeting of many of the EU's leading and lesser lights at which one of the topics discussed was, Taddah!!!, the future of the European Defence Industry and, ancillary to this, the development of a fully-fledged EU Army which would become the main beneficiary of the output of said European Defence Industry. Both of these developments, by the way, would also underpin the rapid growth of the EU Foreign Office ( for want of a better expression) under Baroness Ashton which is rapidly usurping or challenging UK embassies in key parts of the world. And, as Manuel Barosso, the totally un-elected President of the bits of the EU that Van Rompuy doesn't lay claim to be President of, said, it would accelerate the whole process of Federal integration which every body - except the British , Dutch, German, Swedish, Greek and Czech electorates - is gagging to see happen as soon as possible.
Now, back to the original question: is the fact that this Conference on this topic was rapidly followed by the Bae/EADS merger proposal a coincidence?
If not, is it simply the next step in the propaganda process whereby politicians and officials seek to convince the British public that integration into Greater Europe is so inevitable that it is pointless thinking of trying to succeed in the great big world without the security and comfort of the EU blanket wrapped around us?
It's a question that, not so long ago, would have elicited a robust response involving two fingers accompanied by two words, the second of which would have been OFF.
That was in the days before successive governments sat back as key utilities such as water and power slipped into foreign ownership. Currently, UK utilities are owned by Australian, US French and German companies to name just a few.
Is this important? After all, the conventional wisdom is that the only way for Great Britain to "punch above its weight" ( has their ever been a more fatuous and patronising expression, by the way?) is to accept and embrace foreign ownership as an inevitable result of Globalisation; which, as we are all constantly told, is never less than a force for good and a sovereign boon to Mankind.
Hmmmm. EDF (Electricite de France)is one of our largest energy suppliers. Its majority shareholder is, and will always be, the French Government. If you believe that is not significant try comparing EDF electricity prices in France and Great Britain. Alternatively, look what happened to gas prices here, compared to Germany, when the Russians threatened to turn off the taps a couple of years ago.
History demonstrates that once British companies are foreign-owned, whether through takeover or - the preferred term - merger, and the owners are forced to cut jobs or investment because of a fall-off in demand, they invariably choose to make them somewhere other than their home market.
Which brings us, albeit circuitously, to the proposed merger of Bae and the Franco-Germa-Iberian company EADS, perhaps better known as Airbus.
There has been plenty of Press reaction to this proposed tie-up, most of it split along the usual partisan lines. Generally-speaking, the anti EU Mail, Telegraph and Express were against the idea while the Europhile Independent and the Guardian were, equally predictably, not so against it. No surprises there.
Just before news of this proposed merger ( we get 40% and they get 60% but, somehow, this still constitutes a merger?) broke and dominated the headlines, slightly less ink was expended reporting a meeting of many of the EU's leading and lesser lights at which one of the topics discussed was, Taddah!!!, the future of the European Defence Industry and, ancillary to this, the development of a fully-fledged EU Army which would become the main beneficiary of the output of said European Defence Industry. Both of these developments, by the way, would also underpin the rapid growth of the EU Foreign Office ( for want of a better expression) under Baroness Ashton which is rapidly usurping or challenging UK embassies in key parts of the world. And, as Manuel Barosso, the totally un-elected President of the bits of the EU that Van Rompuy doesn't lay claim to be President of, said, it would accelerate the whole process of Federal integration which every body - except the British , Dutch, German, Swedish, Greek and Czech electorates - is gagging to see happen as soon as possible.
Now, back to the original question: is the fact that this Conference on this topic was rapidly followed by the Bae/EADS merger proposal a coincidence?
If not, is it simply the next step in the propaganda process whereby politicians and officials seek to convince the British public that integration into Greater Europe is so inevitable that it is pointless thinking of trying to succeed in the great big world without the security and comfort of the EU blanket wrapped around us?
Thursday, 11 August 2011
Multi-culturalism
Here we go again.
As the flames begin to die down, the chancers and political opportunists are emerging from the woodwork.
Following the example of Ken Livingstone, Mad Hattie Harman was on the telly last nigh explaining why thousands of young hooligans - some barely out of nappies - forsook the ersatz violence of their GameBoys and PlayStations for the real world excitement of rioting and disorder.
According to Miss Harman, it was their way of articulating anger at the rise in University Tuition fees and the cancellation of the Educational Maintenance Allowance which has been used since 2004 to encourage (or bribe) some 16-18 yearolds to stay in school. Oh, and don't let us forget the wicked Tory cuts while we are at it.
Right, Hattie.
Most of those who took to the streets go to school only when they need to keep out of the rain or establish an alibi. The concept of anyone willingly subjecting themselves to an additional three to four years of academic toil, let alone being prepared to pay for the privilege, would be totally alien to them.
To be fair, that their lawlessness could have been prompted by the Wicked Tory Cuts, might filter into their consciousness - or be suggested by a sharp defence lawyer - when they are having to excuse their activities in front of a magistrate. I doubt suppose it figured much in their thinking at the precise moment that they were legging it down Tottenham High Road clutching a 42" plasma screen TV.
No doubt, there is need for a huge debate in the country about how we educate our children, what disciplinary powers we give teachers and what rights ordinary citizens have to step in when confronted by lawlessness.
But, all of this will be so much hot air until we confront the main elephant in the drawing room, Multiculturalism.
Over the last two decades, but particularly during the 13 years of Blair/Brown, this country, for reasons best known to a small but powerful elite, set out to recast itself as a multicultural society.
Not only did we allow people to flock here in their millions but, unlike other large centres of immigration such as The US or Australia, we also encouraged them to import and nurture their own traditions and customs, frequently at the expense of the indigenous version. To make them feel as comfortable as possible, we even gave up teaching anything about our own history or traditions in school.
Nowhere has this been more apparent than in England in general and the south of England in particlular. Large pockets of our capital city have now become ghettoised, with the encouragement and approval of the previous government. Ghetto is such an ugly and emotionally-charged word, of course, that we are encouraged not to use it. Instead, people have desperately cast around for other descriptions; the favourite being the much cosier and less-threatening, Community.
Populated for the most part by people linked by family or geographical ties, these communities are self-contained and self-sustaining. However, since they are defined by the majority ethnic grouping or religion, they also tend to be exclusive, and in some cases, reclusive. They do not welcome outsiders into their midst.
Thus, when threatened by the rioters, Sikhs in Southall, Muslims in Birmingham and Turkish shopkeepers in Tottenham were able to mobilise resistance very rapidly. Armed with sticks, swords and knives they made a very public show of being prepared to protect their neighbourhoods and their businesses against all comers. The media reaction to this display of togetherness was one of unreserved approval and admiration.
Christine Odone in the the Telegraph, for instance, has written admiringly of their fierce commitment to their neighbourhoods and questioned why there wasn't the same degree of defiance and organisation in white communities.
Perhaps, she should look no further than Enfield for the answer. Here, white people did decide to band together for the same purpose, to protect their streets, businesses and homes. But, the official response to this display of community spirit has been markedly different. Where there was what appeared to be tacit approval of the stand taken by the Turks, the Sikhs an Muslim groups -tellingly, there were no calls for them to lay down their weapons and trust the duly appointed authorities to defend them - the same is not true in Enfield.
The problem seems to be that the residents marshalling their forces in that particular borough are predominantly white and number amongst them several men sporting closely cropped hair and tattoos. There has been no implied or tacit approval of their self-defence initiative. On the contrary, the man currently dubbed Britain's most senior policeman, Acting Met Police Commissioner, Tim Godwin, appears to belive that they have added a "violent racial element" to an already fraught situation.
Adding a violent racial element? What on earth does he think has been going on in London these last few days? A peaceful, mulitcultural picnic?
When black youths are texting each other to target Turkish and Asian-owned businesses, forcing their owners to arm themselves and stand guard, he doesn't think that is violent or racially-inspired?
While the Sikhs and Turks have been treated as local heroes, their white British counterparts have been dubbed "vigilantes", another word carrying a lot of emotional baggage, conjuring up visions of lynch mobs exacting their own brand of summary justice.
Commissioner Godwin has warned the "vigilantes" that the Met Police will crack down on them as hard as it does on the actual looters and rioters, if they try to take the law into their own hands. The irony of this double-standard - let alone its implicit racism - has obviously failed to penetrate Godwin's thick, helmeted head.
What this situation has demonstrated is the need for colour-blind policing on our streets, where victims and crminals alike are dealt with according to the severity of the crime. That is why the statue of Justice topping the Old Bailey is blind-folded. Because Justice must always be impartial.
As the flames begin to die down, the chancers and political opportunists are emerging from the woodwork.
Following the example of Ken Livingstone, Mad Hattie Harman was on the telly last nigh explaining why thousands of young hooligans - some barely out of nappies - forsook the ersatz violence of their GameBoys and PlayStations for the real world excitement of rioting and disorder.
According to Miss Harman, it was their way of articulating anger at the rise in University Tuition fees and the cancellation of the Educational Maintenance Allowance which has been used since 2004 to encourage (or bribe) some 16-18 yearolds to stay in school. Oh, and don't let us forget the wicked Tory cuts while we are at it.
Right, Hattie.
Most of those who took to the streets go to school only when they need to keep out of the rain or establish an alibi. The concept of anyone willingly subjecting themselves to an additional three to four years of academic toil, let alone being prepared to pay for the privilege, would be totally alien to them.
To be fair, that their lawlessness could have been prompted by the Wicked Tory Cuts, might filter into their consciousness - or be suggested by a sharp defence lawyer - when they are having to excuse their activities in front of a magistrate. I doubt suppose it figured much in their thinking at the precise moment that they were legging it down Tottenham High Road clutching a 42" plasma screen TV.
No doubt, there is need for a huge debate in the country about how we educate our children, what disciplinary powers we give teachers and what rights ordinary citizens have to step in when confronted by lawlessness.
But, all of this will be so much hot air until we confront the main elephant in the drawing room, Multiculturalism.
Over the last two decades, but particularly during the 13 years of Blair/Brown, this country, for reasons best known to a small but powerful elite, set out to recast itself as a multicultural society.
Not only did we allow people to flock here in their millions but, unlike other large centres of immigration such as The US or Australia, we also encouraged them to import and nurture their own traditions and customs, frequently at the expense of the indigenous version. To make them feel as comfortable as possible, we even gave up teaching anything about our own history or traditions in school.
Nowhere has this been more apparent than in England in general and the south of England in particlular. Large pockets of our capital city have now become ghettoised, with the encouragement and approval of the previous government. Ghetto is such an ugly and emotionally-charged word, of course, that we are encouraged not to use it. Instead, people have desperately cast around for other descriptions; the favourite being the much cosier and less-threatening, Community.
Populated for the most part by people linked by family or geographical ties, these communities are self-contained and self-sustaining. However, since they are defined by the majority ethnic grouping or religion, they also tend to be exclusive, and in some cases, reclusive. They do not welcome outsiders into their midst.
Thus, when threatened by the rioters, Sikhs in Southall, Muslims in Birmingham and Turkish shopkeepers in Tottenham were able to mobilise resistance very rapidly. Armed with sticks, swords and knives they made a very public show of being prepared to protect their neighbourhoods and their businesses against all comers. The media reaction to this display of togetherness was one of unreserved approval and admiration.
Christine Odone in the the Telegraph, for instance, has written admiringly of their fierce commitment to their neighbourhoods and questioned why there wasn't the same degree of defiance and organisation in white communities.
Perhaps, she should look no further than Enfield for the answer. Here, white people did decide to band together for the same purpose, to protect their streets, businesses and homes. But, the official response to this display of community spirit has been markedly different. Where there was what appeared to be tacit approval of the stand taken by the Turks, the Sikhs an Muslim groups -tellingly, there were no calls for them to lay down their weapons and trust the duly appointed authorities to defend them - the same is not true in Enfield.
The problem seems to be that the residents marshalling their forces in that particular borough are predominantly white and number amongst them several men sporting closely cropped hair and tattoos. There has been no implied or tacit approval of their self-defence initiative. On the contrary, the man currently dubbed Britain's most senior policeman, Acting Met Police Commissioner, Tim Godwin, appears to belive that they have added a "violent racial element" to an already fraught situation.
Adding a violent racial element? What on earth does he think has been going on in London these last few days? A peaceful, mulitcultural picnic?
When black youths are texting each other to target Turkish and Asian-owned businesses, forcing their owners to arm themselves and stand guard, he doesn't think that is violent or racially-inspired?
While the Sikhs and Turks have been treated as local heroes, their white British counterparts have been dubbed "vigilantes", another word carrying a lot of emotional baggage, conjuring up visions of lynch mobs exacting their own brand of summary justice.
Commissioner Godwin has warned the "vigilantes" that the Met Police will crack down on them as hard as it does on the actual looters and rioters, if they try to take the law into their own hands. The irony of this double-standard - let alone its implicit racism - has obviously failed to penetrate Godwin's thick, helmeted head.
What this situation has demonstrated is the need for colour-blind policing on our streets, where victims and crminals alike are dealt with according to the severity of the crime. That is why the statue of Justice topping the Old Bailey is blind-folded. Because Justice must always be impartial.
Monday, 8 August 2011
How to define deprivation
In case you hadn't noticed, large areas of North London went up in flames over the weekend. Scenes reminiscent of the blitz filled tv screens and pages of the national dailies.
Various police officers made a belated appearance to explain what had happened and why they had been unable to stop the mobs turning significant area of our capital city into a passable imitation of a Beirut or Basra.
If as many had turned up to deal with the violence, perhaps fewer buildings would have been razed and fewer people forced to cower like prisoners behind their own locked and bolted doors.
Of course, the usual suspects have already started using the riots for their own ends. Ken Livingstone, never one to let anything as trivial as a moral consideration block an opportunity to score a cheap political point, has already laid the blame for the riots at the door of the Coalition.
Deprivation was the driver according to our Ken, stopping just short of drawing parallels with the Hunger marches of the Thirties. It was the Tory Cuts was that forced otherwise blameless people into desperate measures like setting fire to shops. Never mind that ordinaryt people, equally affected by the cuts, lived in the flats above those shops and were forced to flee in night clothes and with whatever few possessions they were able to grab before they were consumed by the flames.
In fairness to Ken, the deprivation was hard to miss .
People arrived in Tottenham, summoned by urgent messages pleading for their support, carried by bare-footed youngsters whose ragged clothes flapped around their frail, under-nourished bodies as they ran through the dank, malodorous streets of North London..
Actually, I made that bit up.
For the most part, people were lured to Tottenham and other parts of North London, with messages like, " I gonna roll on Tottenham, get some loot" carried not by semi-naked waifs, but posted on Twitter and FaceBook to be viewed on Blackberries, I-Phones and other smart gadgets.
Some, the genuinely deprived, had to make do with mobiles with no smart capabilities at all. But, still they joined the movement, spreading the word via humble text messaging and, in some cases, basic voice communications. And, in response, others came to join them; the tired, the poor, the dispossessed.
It was probably this group, the most deprived of all, who led the brave raids on the Halls of Capitalism in Tottenham Hale. Some, the more audacious and adventurous, made it as far as Wood Green where they battered down the barricades of privilege and helped themselves and their brothers and sisters in want to vital supplies from Currys, JJB Sports and CarPhone Warehouse.
By daylight on Sunday, sated but not necessarily satisfied, they had calmed down sufficiently to form orderly queues outside the best shops, and as an expression of solidarity in need, sharing their loot and their opportunities with those even less fortunate than themselves.
It must have warmed the cockles of old Ken's heart to see such generosity of spirit triumph in the face of the deprivation caused by those wicked, wicked, Tories at County Hall and Westminster.
Various police officers made a belated appearance to explain what had happened and why they had been unable to stop the mobs turning significant area of our capital city into a passable imitation of a Beirut or Basra.
If as many had turned up to deal with the violence, perhaps fewer buildings would have been razed and fewer people forced to cower like prisoners behind their own locked and bolted doors.
Of course, the usual suspects have already started using the riots for their own ends. Ken Livingstone, never one to let anything as trivial as a moral consideration block an opportunity to score a cheap political point, has already laid the blame for the riots at the door of the Coalition.
Deprivation was the driver according to our Ken, stopping just short of drawing parallels with the Hunger marches of the Thirties. It was the Tory Cuts was that forced otherwise blameless people into desperate measures like setting fire to shops. Never mind that ordinaryt people, equally affected by the cuts, lived in the flats above those shops and were forced to flee in night clothes and with whatever few possessions they were able to grab before they were consumed by the flames.
In fairness to Ken, the deprivation was hard to miss .
People arrived in Tottenham, summoned by urgent messages pleading for their support, carried by bare-footed youngsters whose ragged clothes flapped around their frail, under-nourished bodies as they ran through the dank, malodorous streets of North London..
Actually, I made that bit up.
For the most part, people were lured to Tottenham and other parts of North London, with messages like, " I gonna roll on Tottenham, get some loot" carried not by semi-naked waifs, but posted on Twitter and FaceBook to be viewed on Blackberries, I-Phones and other smart gadgets.
Some, the genuinely deprived, had to make do with mobiles with no smart capabilities at all. But, still they joined the movement, spreading the word via humble text messaging and, in some cases, basic voice communications. And, in response, others came to join them; the tired, the poor, the dispossessed.
It was probably this group, the most deprived of all, who led the brave raids on the Halls of Capitalism in Tottenham Hale. Some, the more audacious and adventurous, made it as far as Wood Green where they battered down the barricades of privilege and helped themselves and their brothers and sisters in want to vital supplies from Currys, JJB Sports and CarPhone Warehouse.
By daylight on Sunday, sated but not necessarily satisfied, they had calmed down sufficiently to form orderly queues outside the best shops, and as an expression of solidarity in need, sharing their loot and their opportunities with those even less fortunate than themselves.
It must have warmed the cockles of old Ken's heart to see such generosity of spirit triumph in the face of the deprivation caused by those wicked, wicked, Tories at County Hall and Westminster.
Tuesday, 19 July 2011
There is a service industry - but service is not a business
One of the less appealing legacies of the Thatcher era, magnified throughout the Blair/Brown continuum, is the contention that all Public services will perform more efficiently if they were run like businesses.
This wrong-headed philosophy has landed us with a Post Office which is no longer capable of making twice-daily deliveries and whose employees routinely lie to their customers; national and local transport systems which, despite their nominally private ownership, are as heavily subsidised as they were when all transport was publicly owned; water companies who, after twenty years of trying, still cannot plug the leaks in their networks let alone guarantee continuity of supply; energy companies who exist solely to enrich their foreign owners and crucial health and social services that cannot even provide clean, safe accommodation for their sick and elderly customer base.
Many from these sectors report to or liaise with local and national Government agencies who slavishly follow the dictates of assorted lobbies, pressure groups and the EU rather than the people who elect or appoint them.
What they share with each other is the mistaken belief that services and service businesses are synonymous. The fastest growing sector in the UK economy for the last two decades has been the Service sector. Ergo, all we have to do to achieve the same levels of productivity and efficiency in our public services is to mimic those successful private service industries.
Wrong. Wrong and wrong again.
Despite the Service tag , these businesses exist for one reason only; to make money. They do this by making a profit. If, to achieve this, they need to close facilities, sack people, reduce working hours, relocate staff, slash benefits and even selectively shed customers, that is what they will do.
Public services exist for a very different reason; to provide vital services. That means running buses in rural areas where demand is intermittent, delivering letters to out of the way locations, manning fire and police stations in sparsely populated areas, emptying bins when the local populace wants them emptied; making sure that hospital and care staff follow basic hygiene routines to prevent infections. And accepting that to achieve these aims it will sometimes be necessary to subsidise some aspects of the service.
There is nothing remotely similar between balancing a budget to create value for shareholders, placate the bank manager and reward employees, and ensuring that bins are emptied, streets are cleaned, pot holes are filled, pensioners and other vulnerable people in the community are cared for and the police, fire and ambulance services are both local and respond rapidly when they are needed.
The problem is, of course, that "learning from business" has become the conventional wisdom. Councils, the Civil Service, the Police and Fire Brigades all routinely send their brightest and best to colleges where they rub shoulders with genuine business people. What they bring back from these courses - apart from an unhealthy addiction to management speak - is a mind set that makes no distinction between cost and value.
So, faced with a choice between maintaining a police station in a rural community or taking care of things from a central station twenty miles away, the new Police manager will opt for the latter. As long as he still ticks the right boxes, his decision Will be judged the correct one by his political masters. They, and he for that matter, are unlikely to live in the community thus affected.
The people on the ground might take a somewhat different view. Once the police are no longer in situ, they are no longer local. No glossy brochure can reassure like a blue light over a police station in the centre of town. No matter how artfully presented, all the statistics, pie charts, spreadsheets and matrices in the world will not convince the community that a mad twenty mile dash is as effective a deterrent as a large, uniformed bobby strolling down the High Street.
Does one provide better "value for money" than the other? It depends on your definition of value. If all of your assumptions are based on cost efficiency, then there can be no argument. (Unless, of course, the policies of our latest, mad Energy Minister drive fuel costs so high that a forty mile round-trip becomes as expensive as a month's rent and council tax.)
If, however, you evaluate the service on the basis of its value to the community, then the argument takes on a different complexion altogether. Only a business-man would choose the first option. Someone with the service of the public as his principal obsession would, unhesitatingly, opt for the latter.
Until and unless our political masters and their acolytes learn that lesson, our Public services will continue to decline to the point where, as is the case with the Post Office, it will be hard to make a sensible argument for their continued existence.
This wrong-headed philosophy has landed us with a Post Office which is no longer capable of making twice-daily deliveries and whose employees routinely lie to their customers; national and local transport systems which, despite their nominally private ownership, are as heavily subsidised as they were when all transport was publicly owned; water companies who, after twenty years of trying, still cannot plug the leaks in their networks let alone guarantee continuity of supply; energy companies who exist solely to enrich their foreign owners and crucial health and social services that cannot even provide clean, safe accommodation for their sick and elderly customer base.
Many from these sectors report to or liaise with local and national Government agencies who slavishly follow the dictates of assorted lobbies, pressure groups and the EU rather than the people who elect or appoint them.
What they share with each other is the mistaken belief that services and service businesses are synonymous. The fastest growing sector in the UK economy for the last two decades has been the Service sector. Ergo, all we have to do to achieve the same levels of productivity and efficiency in our public services is to mimic those successful private service industries.
Wrong. Wrong and wrong again.
Despite the Service tag , these businesses exist for one reason only; to make money. They do this by making a profit. If, to achieve this, they need to close facilities, sack people, reduce working hours, relocate staff, slash benefits and even selectively shed customers, that is what they will do.
Public services exist for a very different reason; to provide vital services. That means running buses in rural areas where demand is intermittent, delivering letters to out of the way locations, manning fire and police stations in sparsely populated areas, emptying bins when the local populace wants them emptied; making sure that hospital and care staff follow basic hygiene routines to prevent infections. And accepting that to achieve these aims it will sometimes be necessary to subsidise some aspects of the service.
There is nothing remotely similar between balancing a budget to create value for shareholders, placate the bank manager and reward employees, and ensuring that bins are emptied, streets are cleaned, pot holes are filled, pensioners and other vulnerable people in the community are cared for and the police, fire and ambulance services are both local and respond rapidly when they are needed.
The problem is, of course, that "learning from business" has become the conventional wisdom. Councils, the Civil Service, the Police and Fire Brigades all routinely send their brightest and best to colleges where they rub shoulders with genuine business people. What they bring back from these courses - apart from an unhealthy addiction to management speak - is a mind set that makes no distinction between cost and value.
So, faced with a choice between maintaining a police station in a rural community or taking care of things from a central station twenty miles away, the new Police manager will opt for the latter. As long as he still ticks the right boxes, his decision Will be judged the correct one by his political masters. They, and he for that matter, are unlikely to live in the community thus affected.
The people on the ground might take a somewhat different view. Once the police are no longer in situ, they are no longer local. No glossy brochure can reassure like a blue light over a police station in the centre of town. No matter how artfully presented, all the statistics, pie charts, spreadsheets and matrices in the world will not convince the community that a mad twenty mile dash is as effective a deterrent as a large, uniformed bobby strolling down the High Street.
Does one provide better "value for money" than the other? It depends on your definition of value. If all of your assumptions are based on cost efficiency, then there can be no argument. (Unless, of course, the policies of our latest, mad Energy Minister drive fuel costs so high that a forty mile round-trip becomes as expensive as a month's rent and council tax.)
If, however, you evaluate the service on the basis of its value to the community, then the argument takes on a different complexion altogether. Only a business-man would choose the first option. Someone with the service of the public as his principal obsession would, unhesitatingly, opt for the latter.
Until and unless our political masters and their acolytes learn that lesson, our Public services will continue to decline to the point where, as is the case with the Post Office, it will be hard to make a sensible argument for their continued existence.
Thursday, 14 July 2011
Bully boy Brown
Methinks the News of the Screws hacking row has now passed the point where there is anything new or useful left to say.
Granted, the NoW and News International mined a very large seam of filth with their hacking of Millie Dowler's Voicemail and the mobiles of the families of dead soldiers.
All involved should already have been hauled before a beak. That includes assorted Murdochs, the unlovely Rebekah ( where did she get that spelling?) Wade/Brooks, Andy Coulson and any and all of the police officers who took money for information. No new legislation is needed to make this happen. Everything is covered by laws already in existence, ranging from those governing illegal interception of telephonic communications to the 2006 Companies Act which makes it clear that a company is considerd an individual when it comes to criminal activity - and the officers of that company are responsible for its actions,jointly and severally.
Given this fact, it is sickening to see an assortment of chancers, self-seeking publicity hounds and creeps baying on the BBC and in Parliament for heads to roll, enquiries to be launched, the Press to be neutered and, generally demanding that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE, when they all know that the remedies already exist.
Yesterday, it was Gordon Brown's turn to try to snatch the moral low ground away from the likes of Blair, Peter Mandelson, David Mellor, Hugh Grant, David Cameron and Alastair Cambell.
There he was in the Commons, making his first appearance since before the flood, one huge bundle of resentment and thwarted ambition.
Sullen with anger, and seeking sympathy for the way that Rebeka and her friends had stalked the Brown family at the time of a terrible tragedy, he failed to mention the times subsequent to this terrible harassment when he and Sarah had the fragrant Rebeka, Mrs Murdoch Junior and Elizabeth Murdoch to stay and play with them at Chequers. Or that the Browns, en famille, had been guests of the same Rebeka when she married the old-Etonian, Charlie Brooks and became a close neighbour and chum of David Cameron.
No. any outrage our Gordie felt in those times was carefully disguised as affection and respect for all things Murdoch and News International.
It's only now, when the Murdoch connection is getting a right old kicking, that big, brave Gordon decides it's safe to put his own boot in.
So very typical of the man. A terrible bully and coward in office and a cowardly bully out of it.
Granted, the NoW and News International mined a very large seam of filth with their hacking of Millie Dowler's Voicemail and the mobiles of the families of dead soldiers.
All involved should already have been hauled before a beak. That includes assorted Murdochs, the unlovely Rebekah ( where did she get that spelling?) Wade/Brooks, Andy Coulson and any and all of the police officers who took money for information. No new legislation is needed to make this happen. Everything is covered by laws already in existence, ranging from those governing illegal interception of telephonic communications to the 2006 Companies Act which makes it clear that a company is considerd an individual when it comes to criminal activity - and the officers of that company are responsible for its actions,jointly and severally.
Given this fact, it is sickening to see an assortment of chancers, self-seeking publicity hounds and creeps baying on the BBC and in Parliament for heads to roll, enquiries to be launched, the Press to be neutered and, generally demanding that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE, when they all know that the remedies already exist.
Yesterday, it was Gordon Brown's turn to try to snatch the moral low ground away from the likes of Blair, Peter Mandelson, David Mellor, Hugh Grant, David Cameron and Alastair Cambell.
There he was in the Commons, making his first appearance since before the flood, one huge bundle of resentment and thwarted ambition.
Sullen with anger, and seeking sympathy for the way that Rebeka and her friends had stalked the Brown family at the time of a terrible tragedy, he failed to mention the times subsequent to this terrible harassment when he and Sarah had the fragrant Rebeka, Mrs Murdoch Junior and Elizabeth Murdoch to stay and play with them at Chequers. Or that the Browns, en famille, had been guests of the same Rebeka when she married the old-Etonian, Charlie Brooks and became a close neighbour and chum of David Cameron.
No. any outrage our Gordie felt in those times was carefully disguised as affection and respect for all things Murdoch and News International.
It's only now, when the Murdoch connection is getting a right old kicking, that big, brave Gordon decides it's safe to put his own boot in.
So very typical of the man. A terrible bully and coward in office and a cowardly bully out of it.
Friday, 1 July 2011
Pension potty
Retirement. There's an emotive word for you. So emotive, multitudes of teachers, filing clerks and other assorted Civil Servants have thrown off their cardigans and taken to the streets of London to protest against plans to make them work until at least 65 like the great mass of the population.
In the old days, Civil Servants used to justify their generous retirement packages by comparing their salaries with what they would earn in the Private Sector. N.B. For Private Sector read The City of London; none of them ever really considered bashing metal or flipping burgers for a living. Not for them the continuous lusting after wealth and privilege. What drove them was nobility of purpose and an unselfish desire to burn themselves out in the service of the Nation (even if the salaries on offer were pitiful.) All they asked in return was the right to retire at 60 - or even earlier - on an index-linked, final salary pension.
Even though they now, with the odd exceptions, make 7% more on average than their equivalents in the private sector they are still playing the same old song. While the rest of us are having to accept the need to work until 67, or 68 or whatever figure the next right wing Think Tank arrives at, they demand the right to call it a day at 60.
Now, I remember when I first returned to the UK having lived in the US for a number of years, the newspapers were full of stories about how much the EU - or at least various of its member states - wanted to get their claws into British private pensions; rightly regarded at the time as the gold standard. A significant proportion of the workforce was the beneficiary of final salary pensions. Encouraged by government, not a few of them fattened their pots with AVCs (additional voluntary contributions). The future looked, if not rosy, at least predictable and relatively safe.
Then Gordon Brown, encouraged by that beacon of economic literacy, Ed Balls, ended the tax relief private pension schemes had traditionally enjoyed. This garnered him lots of extra dosh to lavish on his favoured client groups. What it also did was explode a grenade under the whole edifice of private pensions and, at a stroke, destroyed the retirement plans of millions who, up to that point, were quietly confident that they had everything covered.
14 years later, apart from the CEOs and CFOs of large corporations for whom a feater-bedded pension is an essential element in any contract negotitations, few in the private sector will enjoy the type of index-linked final salary pension scheme that was common prior to 1997. The only people guaranteed an index-linked pension when they eventually hit retirement are those in the public sector
Here, I have to put my hand up and say that I am one of the fortunate few. I will receive a private pension based on my final salary built up over the 14 years I have worked for my current employer. In fact, don't tell anybody but it was the principal reason I stayed with them for so long. In itself not particularly munificent, it is still considerably better than other pension schemes I have subscribed to at various times in my working life.
Now approaching retirement, I have started to review my options and, quite frankly, they are not that uplifting. Having paid income taxes and National Insurance contributions for 48 years I will recieve a State pension of around £5000 p.a. Munificent!
Of course, I have my work pension but 14 years is not that long when it comes to building a pension pot.
What of the other years, you ask. Were you in prison, hospitalised or simply bone idle?None of the above.
I was self-employed. In fact, I ran a small business and thus also provided a number of other people with gainful employement. During these years, encouraged and incentivised by various governments, I paid fairly large sums into a private pension plan. At the time, interest rates in the UK were in the high teens and the returns the pension company were promising conjured up visions of a retirement spent travelling between a house on the South Coast and a villa in the South of France in a stretch limo.
Once I moved to the States , I no longer paidUK tax and had to leave my pension scheme.
When I returned I tried without success to resurrect the scheme. It was disallowed because one of the perks of my new job was a generous pension provision . So, my private pension went back into a state of suspended animation. As I am rapidly approaching retirement, I have been showing more interest in its health in recent years.
The scheme grew rapidly in the early stages, fuelled by interest rates of 12% and more per annum. At that time, anyone could grow money simply by sticking it in a Post Office savings account. However, when the markets tightened and then the recession bit, the people managing the funds had to work reallyhard and intellligently to keep the pot bubbling. This they signally failed to do . In fact, so comprehensive was their failure that not a single farthing has been added to my pot for the last seven years.
Villas and stretch limousines are now out of the question. What my cherished scheme will provide is so reduced that it will struggle to pay the fuel bill for a small house and car.
At least that sheme did show some growth. Another occupational pension that I had almost forgotten about I subscribed to in my twenties, forty years ago, When I left the company I also left the scheme. Nonetheless, after forty years I thought it might be worth enquiring about. After all, forty years on, inflation should have grown the admittedly pitiful sum I invested quite considerably. The pension company was very helpful. They had my policy and confirmed that they would be paying a pension. Then they sent me a lavish pack, full of images of sailing boats on sun-dappled lakes and hearty elderly people cycling, mountaineering and gorging themselves on nouvelle cuisine and detailed instructions on how to apply for my rightful share of this cornucopia.
Excitedly, I turned to the last page of the pack, to the illustration of benefits. £478. I looked again. £478 a month would come in useful, no doubt.
One drawback. The £478 wasn't a monthly amount. It was an annual payment. Since the company I had worked for had not set the plan up on a With-Profits basis, the funds had not grown at all. . The pension company might just as well have put the money under a mattress for all the good they had done in the intervening forty-odd years.
So, there you have it. I followed government advice, made what I thought would be adeqaute provison for my old age and a combination of ideological economic chicanery, financial ineptitude and sheer highway robbery has blown all my plans apart.
Anyone who joined the Civil Service at the same time as I started work, has probably already been retired for the last four years. Unlike me, they are enjoying an index-linked pension dependent not on the vagaries of the money markets or the whims of inefficient fund managers but guaranteed by the British Government and paid for out of the taxes taken from me for nearly half a century.
In the old days, Civil Servants used to justify their generous retirement packages by comparing their salaries with what they would earn in the Private Sector. N.B. For Private Sector read The City of London; none of them ever really considered bashing metal or flipping burgers for a living. Not for them the continuous lusting after wealth and privilege. What drove them was nobility of purpose and an unselfish desire to burn themselves out in the service of the Nation (even if the salaries on offer were pitiful.) All they asked in return was the right to retire at 60 - or even earlier - on an index-linked, final salary pension.
Even though they now, with the odd exceptions, make 7% more on average than their equivalents in the private sector they are still playing the same old song. While the rest of us are having to accept the need to work until 67, or 68 or whatever figure the next right wing Think Tank arrives at, they demand the right to call it a day at 60.
Now, I remember when I first returned to the UK having lived in the US for a number of years, the newspapers were full of stories about how much the EU - or at least various of its member states - wanted to get their claws into British private pensions; rightly regarded at the time as the gold standard. A significant proportion of the workforce was the beneficiary of final salary pensions. Encouraged by government, not a few of them fattened their pots with AVCs (additional voluntary contributions). The future looked, if not rosy, at least predictable and relatively safe.
Then Gordon Brown, encouraged by that beacon of economic literacy, Ed Balls, ended the tax relief private pension schemes had traditionally enjoyed. This garnered him lots of extra dosh to lavish on his favoured client groups. What it also did was explode a grenade under the whole edifice of private pensions and, at a stroke, destroyed the retirement plans of millions who, up to that point, were quietly confident that they had everything covered.
14 years later, apart from the CEOs and CFOs of large corporations for whom a feater-bedded pension is an essential element in any contract negotitations, few in the private sector will enjoy the type of index-linked final salary pension scheme that was common prior to 1997. The only people guaranteed an index-linked pension when they eventually hit retirement are those in the public sector
Here, I have to put my hand up and say that I am one of the fortunate few. I will receive a private pension based on my final salary built up over the 14 years I have worked for my current employer. In fact, don't tell anybody but it was the principal reason I stayed with them for so long. In itself not particularly munificent, it is still considerably better than other pension schemes I have subscribed to at various times in my working life.
Now approaching retirement, I have started to review my options and, quite frankly, they are not that uplifting. Having paid income taxes and National Insurance contributions for 48 years I will recieve a State pension of around £5000 p.a. Munificent!
Of course, I have my work pension but 14 years is not that long when it comes to building a pension pot.
What of the other years, you ask. Were you in prison, hospitalised or simply bone idle?None of the above.
I was self-employed. In fact, I ran a small business and thus also provided a number of other people with gainful employement. During these years, encouraged and incentivised by various governments, I paid fairly large sums into a private pension plan. At the time, interest rates in the UK were in the high teens and the returns the pension company were promising conjured up visions of a retirement spent travelling between a house on the South Coast and a villa in the South of France in a stretch limo.
Once I moved to the States , I no longer paidUK tax and had to leave my pension scheme.
When I returned I tried without success to resurrect the scheme. It was disallowed because one of the perks of my new job was a generous pension provision . So, my private pension went back into a state of suspended animation. As I am rapidly approaching retirement, I have been showing more interest in its health in recent years.
The scheme grew rapidly in the early stages, fuelled by interest rates of 12% and more per annum. At that time, anyone could grow money simply by sticking it in a Post Office savings account. However, when the markets tightened and then the recession bit, the people managing the funds had to work reallyhard and intellligently to keep the pot bubbling. This they signally failed to do . In fact, so comprehensive was their failure that not a single farthing has been added to my pot for the last seven years.
Villas and stretch limousines are now out of the question. What my cherished scheme will provide is so reduced that it will struggle to pay the fuel bill for a small house and car.
At least that sheme did show some growth. Another occupational pension that I had almost forgotten about I subscribed to in my twenties, forty years ago, When I left the company I also left the scheme. Nonetheless, after forty years I thought it might be worth enquiring about. After all, forty years on, inflation should have grown the admittedly pitiful sum I invested quite considerably. The pension company was very helpful. They had my policy and confirmed that they would be paying a pension. Then they sent me a lavish pack, full of images of sailing boats on sun-dappled lakes and hearty elderly people cycling, mountaineering and gorging themselves on nouvelle cuisine and detailed instructions on how to apply for my rightful share of this cornucopia.
Excitedly, I turned to the last page of the pack, to the illustration of benefits. £478. I looked again. £478 a month would come in useful, no doubt.
One drawback. The £478 wasn't a monthly amount. It was an annual payment. Since the company I had worked for had not set the plan up on a With-Profits basis, the funds had not grown at all. . The pension company might just as well have put the money under a mattress for all the good they had done in the intervening forty-odd years.
So, there you have it. I followed government advice, made what I thought would be adeqaute provison for my old age and a combination of ideological economic chicanery, financial ineptitude and sheer highway robbery has blown all my plans apart.
Anyone who joined the Civil Service at the same time as I started work, has probably already been retired for the last four years. Unlike me, they are enjoying an index-linked pension dependent not on the vagaries of the money markets or the whims of inefficient fund managers but guaranteed by the British Government and paid for out of the taxes taken from me for nearly half a century.
Friday, 11 February 2011
What is a democracy?
How interesting it is to watch self-professed Liberals tie themselves in knots.
Faced, on the one hand, with the prospect of President Mubarak's demise and democratic rule for Egypt, they can scarcely contain their glee. On the other, the decision of the elected House of Commons to overrule the (unelected) European Court of Human Rights on the subject of voting rights for prisoners has them twisting their hankies in outrage and anger.
Patently, for them, Democracy is a multi-faceted philosophy.
In a Middle Eastern country deemed to have been in thrall to the US for twenty odd years, it means one thing. While, in the country that virtually invented the idea of Universal Suffrage in the first place, it means something completely different.
As far as regime change in Egypt is concerned, nothing could be more exciting or invigorating to our liberal elites.
If they are to be believed, once Mubarak is consigned to the dustbin of history, the crowds thronging Tahir Square will form orderly queues, head for the ballot boxes and vote into office a new, suitably soft-Left government, with no special dispensations for the Moslem Brotherhood, American presidents or other pressure groups. It will enthusiastically embrace equal rights for women, atheists, Coptic Christians, Jews and Zoroastroans and adopt a stance of compete neutrality towards other Arab states.
And squadrons of pink porkers will fly the length of the Nile in celebration, just as they have when other nations have thrown off the shackles of colonial rule. Think Iran, Sudan, Algeria, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Yemen.......
The reality of Parliamentary Democracy in action, on the other hand, has the opposite effect on our gilded liberals.
When our elected rParliament overrules the subjective musings of 16 totally unelected judges from countries with very little in the way of democratic tradition, they regard democracy as deeply flawed.
Obviously, therefore, Democracy a little like the Curate's Egg to our Liberal elite - Good in parts. But only if it makes the right decisions.
Faced, on the one hand, with the prospect of President Mubarak's demise and democratic rule for Egypt, they can scarcely contain their glee. On the other, the decision of the elected House of Commons to overrule the (unelected) European Court of Human Rights on the subject of voting rights for prisoners has them twisting their hankies in outrage and anger.
Patently, for them, Democracy is a multi-faceted philosophy.
In a Middle Eastern country deemed to have been in thrall to the US for twenty odd years, it means one thing. While, in the country that virtually invented the idea of Universal Suffrage in the first place, it means something completely different.
As far as regime change in Egypt is concerned, nothing could be more exciting or invigorating to our liberal elites.
If they are to be believed, once Mubarak is consigned to the dustbin of history, the crowds thronging Tahir Square will form orderly queues, head for the ballot boxes and vote into office a new, suitably soft-Left government, with no special dispensations for the Moslem Brotherhood, American presidents or other pressure groups. It will enthusiastically embrace equal rights for women, atheists, Coptic Christians, Jews and Zoroastroans and adopt a stance of compete neutrality towards other Arab states.
And squadrons of pink porkers will fly the length of the Nile in celebration, just as they have when other nations have thrown off the shackles of colonial rule. Think Iran, Sudan, Algeria, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Yemen.......
The reality of Parliamentary Democracy in action, on the other hand, has the opposite effect on our gilded liberals.
When our elected rParliament overrules the subjective musings of 16 totally unelected judges from countries with very little in the way of democratic tradition, they regard democracy as deeply flawed.
Obviously, therefore, Democracy a little like the Curate's Egg to our Liberal elite - Good in parts. But only if it makes the right decisions.
Thursday, 27 January 2011
Scrapping - it's the new saving
Despite this apparently being the start of a new era of austerity, there have been very few clear signals from our leaders on what measures we should be taking to help us cope.
Things were a lot different during the War. Posters exhorted the population to Dig for Victory. Roadside verges were ploughed up to grow vegetables. There were clear signs everywhere that things were tough and everyone would have to be even tougher to survive.
In the absence of anything approaching even a suggestion of a coping strategy from numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street, those of us anxious to do our bit can only do as our leaders do.
That is why I am adopting one of the strategies formulated during last year's Strategic Defence Review; one, its proponents claim, that should save the country millions of pounds over the coming years.
Of course, mine is a much scaled-down version but I believe it follows essentially the same principles as those used by the MOD.
Step i: I decide to build a new house, commission the best architects and settle on the most expensive building contractors in the Yellow Pages. My agreed budget for the build is £500,000.
Step 2: With design changes, upgrades to incorporate new technology as it becomes available and the cost-overruns common to large projects, the cost spirals to around £2 million. More pertinently, build-time goes out from the original estimate of 12 months to around five years.
Step 3: Seven years after signing the contract, the new house is declared ready for occupation.
Step 4: Snagging all the faults and arguments about who is responsible for the cost, delays my moving into the house by a further 12 months.
Step 5: At last the house is ready for occupation, having cost around five times the original estimate.
Step 6: The economy has taken a turn for the worst. I estimate it will cost £20,000 per annum to maintain and decorate the house. In order to save this money, I decide to demolish the house without ever using it, writing off the £2.5 million it finally cost to build .
Step 7: My wife has me committed on the very reasonable grounds that I have completely lost my marbles.
If this scenario is unfamiliar, simply substitute Nimrod for house and multiply all of the costs by the largest number your mind can cope with.
Now, how do we go about getting George Osborne committed?
Things were a lot different during the War. Posters exhorted the population to Dig for Victory. Roadside verges were ploughed up to grow vegetables. There were clear signs everywhere that things were tough and everyone would have to be even tougher to survive.
In the absence of anything approaching even a suggestion of a coping strategy from numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street, those of us anxious to do our bit can only do as our leaders do.
That is why I am adopting one of the strategies formulated during last year's Strategic Defence Review; one, its proponents claim, that should save the country millions of pounds over the coming years.
Of course, mine is a much scaled-down version but I believe it follows essentially the same principles as those used by the MOD.
Step i: I decide to build a new house, commission the best architects and settle on the most expensive building contractors in the Yellow Pages. My agreed budget for the build is £500,000.
Step 2: With design changes, upgrades to incorporate new technology as it becomes available and the cost-overruns common to large projects, the cost spirals to around £2 million. More pertinently, build-time goes out from the original estimate of 12 months to around five years.
Step 3: Seven years after signing the contract, the new house is declared ready for occupation.
Step 4: Snagging all the faults and arguments about who is responsible for the cost, delays my moving into the house by a further 12 months.
Step 5: At last the house is ready for occupation, having cost around five times the original estimate.
Step 6: The economy has taken a turn for the worst. I estimate it will cost £20,000 per annum to maintain and decorate the house. In order to save this money, I decide to demolish the house without ever using it, writing off the £2.5 million it finally cost to build .
Step 7: My wife has me committed on the very reasonable grounds that I have completely lost my marbles.
If this scenario is unfamiliar, simply substitute Nimrod for house and multiply all of the costs by the largest number your mind can cope with.
Now, how do we go about getting George Osborne committed?
Monday, 24 January 2011
Unable to value the woods for the trees
At some time over the last decade a million pounds turned into chickenfeed in the money mill we call our public finances.
Where once the thought of a publically-financed project going millions of pounds over budget would have elicited a collective, horrified intake of breath from the UK population, these days it would only merit a sigh of relief that the amount involved was so small.
How did this happen? What were we all doing that so important that we didn't notice someone changing the m for a b at the beginning of the word?
When did we become so blase about the cost of running our country that politicians could talk, quite cheerfully, about projects costing "only" a couple of billion, without eliciting howls of outrage from the people from whose pockets these enormous sums are extracted in direct and indirect taxes?
After all, a billion is a BIG number. Even allowing for the fact that we are dealing, as so often in modern life, with the American version of a billion, it is still one million multiplied by a thousand. That's 1 followed by nine noughts. According to Google, 1 million US dollars laid ened to end would be almost one hundred miles long, so 1 billion would stretch almost 100,000 miles. None of which is relevant except to emphasise the fact that a billion is a very BIG number.
Is it the sheer scale of the number that shocks us into silence, in the same way that an enormous sky or impossibly high mountain can reduce us to a state of numbed awe.
As a country, we are in debt to the tune of £952 billion. Actually, that isn't quite correct because that figure doesn't include the Private Finance Initiatives that Gordon and Ed(Balls) cooked up as a way of keeping almost £300 billion more of public spending off the official scorecard. ( all of which is another story in itself now that Balls has become the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer.) So, we actually owe somewhere close to 1.3 trillion. A trillion is a million multiplied by another million, which anyone over the age of 50 will recognise as an old-fashioned British billion, so perhaps we should thank our lucky stars that we are now dealing with US billions rather than the real thing! So, 1.3 trillion is, actually, 1300 billion. That not only makes your eyes water, it's enough to make you want to cross your legs, too.
The point of all of this, long and meandering though it might have been, is to bring us to a discussion of the merit or otherwise of the Forestry Commission and DEFRA between them taking it upon themselves - at the Government's behest - to sell off our forests and woodlands to private investors. Actually, when I say OUR, that only applies to anyone reading this who considers themselves English rather than British. As is frequently the way in our heavily devolved Island, the woods that will be offered for sale are all in England; the Welsh and the Scots having, very wisely, decided to keep ownership of theirs in the public domain.
As justification for the sale, various estimates have been made for how much it will raise. The highest, so far, is around £300 million.
£300 million? Not even a third of a billion ( US Style) Not even 300th of a Trillion (US) or billion (old style UK)?
In modern money terms we are talking proverbial peanuts. This is the sort of money a Government department might possibly scrape together simply by digging down the back of a few couches. Yet, the very same politicians who cheerfully bandy billions around when discussing their pet projects want us to leap with joy at the prospect of raising a paltry £300 million.
£300 million won't even cover the cost of the yet-to-be-finished Olympics stadium in Stratford let alone Spurs demolishing it, building a new stadium and renovating the old Crystal palace running track for UK Athletics. I
It is less than 1/10th the amount that is being saved by scapping the Nimrod fleet. 300 lower-order Golman Sachs investment bankers could buy the whole lot simply by pooling their annual bonuses.
£300 million is sufficient to pay no more than two or three days' interest on the UK National Debt.
In other words, it is chickenfeed.
And it is for this handful of small change that the Government is prepared to sell off woodlands that belong to the whole country; without discussion, without a by your leave and, apparently, without a toss for what the rest of us think.
They have placed a monetary value on the land itself without a thought for its amenity value - which in the crowded place that England has become, is almost priceless.
It does not augur well for the Big Society of Cameron's PR man's dreams.
More to the point, as I have said before, when the sell-off process begins and our interests are being represented by politicians the corporate boys will take them to the same old cleaners and we, the great English Public, will find ourselves short-changed once again.
Where once the thought of a publically-financed project going millions of pounds over budget would have elicited a collective, horrified intake of breath from the UK population, these days it would only merit a sigh of relief that the amount involved was so small.
How did this happen? What were we all doing that so important that we didn't notice someone changing the m for a b at the beginning of the word?
When did we become so blase about the cost of running our country that politicians could talk, quite cheerfully, about projects costing "only" a couple of billion, without eliciting howls of outrage from the people from whose pockets these enormous sums are extracted in direct and indirect taxes?
After all, a billion is a BIG number. Even allowing for the fact that we are dealing, as so often in modern life, with the American version of a billion, it is still one million multiplied by a thousand. That's 1 followed by nine noughts. According to Google, 1 million US dollars laid ened to end would be almost one hundred miles long, so 1 billion would stretch almost 100,000 miles. None of which is relevant except to emphasise the fact that a billion is a very BIG number.
Is it the sheer scale of the number that shocks us into silence, in the same way that an enormous sky or impossibly high mountain can reduce us to a state of numbed awe.
As a country, we are in debt to the tune of £952 billion. Actually, that isn't quite correct because that figure doesn't include the Private Finance Initiatives that Gordon and Ed(Balls) cooked up as a way of keeping almost £300 billion more of public spending off the official scorecard. ( all of which is another story in itself now that Balls has become the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer.) So, we actually owe somewhere close to 1.3 trillion. A trillion is a million multiplied by another million, which anyone over the age of 50 will recognise as an old-fashioned British billion, so perhaps we should thank our lucky stars that we are now dealing with US billions rather than the real thing! So, 1.3 trillion is, actually, 1300 billion. That not only makes your eyes water, it's enough to make you want to cross your legs, too.
The point of all of this, long and meandering though it might have been, is to bring us to a discussion of the merit or otherwise of the Forestry Commission and DEFRA between them taking it upon themselves - at the Government's behest - to sell off our forests and woodlands to private investors. Actually, when I say OUR, that only applies to anyone reading this who considers themselves English rather than British. As is frequently the way in our heavily devolved Island, the woods that will be offered for sale are all in England; the Welsh and the Scots having, very wisely, decided to keep ownership of theirs in the public domain.
As justification for the sale, various estimates have been made for how much it will raise. The highest, so far, is around £300 million.
£300 million? Not even a third of a billion ( US Style) Not even 300th of a Trillion (US) or billion (old style UK)?
In modern money terms we are talking proverbial peanuts. This is the sort of money a Government department might possibly scrape together simply by digging down the back of a few couches. Yet, the very same politicians who cheerfully bandy billions around when discussing their pet projects want us to leap with joy at the prospect of raising a paltry £300 million.
£300 million won't even cover the cost of the yet-to-be-finished Olympics stadium in Stratford let alone Spurs demolishing it, building a new stadium and renovating the old Crystal palace running track for UK Athletics. I
It is less than 1/10th the amount that is being saved by scapping the Nimrod fleet. 300 lower-order Golman Sachs investment bankers could buy the whole lot simply by pooling their annual bonuses.
£300 million is sufficient to pay no more than two or three days' interest on the UK National Debt.
In other words, it is chickenfeed.
And it is for this handful of small change that the Government is prepared to sell off woodlands that belong to the whole country; without discussion, without a by your leave and, apparently, without a toss for what the rest of us think.
They have placed a monetary value on the land itself without a thought for its amenity value - which in the crowded place that England has become, is almost priceless.
It does not augur well for the Big Society of Cameron's PR man's dreams.
More to the point, as I have said before, when the sell-off process begins and our interests are being represented by politicians the corporate boys will take them to the same old cleaners and we, the great English Public, will find ourselves short-changed once again.
Tuesday, 14 December 2010
Politicians and other useful idiots.
Politicians, Civil Servants and others of that ilk justify the high salaries they enjoy by relating them to what is on offer in the private sector.
Apart from those that fall into the category of what Lenin liked to call Useful Idiots, most of them would be virtually unemployable outside the Public Sector.. For the purposes of this particular argument, a useful idiot would be someone responsible for or close to the decision making processes in a major Ministry like the MOD. Into this category fall several erstwhile Prime Ministers, Health Secretaries and assorted Sir Humphreys and retired generals who are able to parlay their contacts and presumed insider knowledge into a consultancy role or a seat on the board of a defence contractor or energy supplier.
For the remainder, the residue who have enjoyed neither power nor any especial influence, the best they can hope for in the real world is occasional, low-level consultancy work.
Not to beat about the bush,politicians are useless at business.
Even back in the Thatcher era, when the cabinet was supposedly stuffed with first class business brains, officladom always got taken to the cleaners by the private sector. Take the trains. Once upon a time we had a national rail network and one train operator, British Rail. Since they provided a national service, they were paid from the national purse. However, this monopoly, we were told, could not provide the transport service required by a 20th Century nation. It was sclerotic, inefficient and did not deliver value for money.
Privatising the whole shooting match, we were assured, would enable us to get rid of subsidies, save stacks of money, lead to major improvements in service and give the country a rail network that would be the envy of the world. A few decades later, instead of a single national monopoly,what we actually have is a number of regional private monopolies operating their own services on discrete routes. Maintaining the tracks all of these companies rely on is the responsibility of a semi-nationalised company that does all the grunt work and which, despite privatisation, sucks in virtually the same levels of subsidy as when we, the nation, owned the whole shooting match.
There is a similar story when it comes to our major utilities. Where once we had national and local providers of gas, electricity, water and sewage whose assets were owned by their customers - that would be you and me - we now have a multiplicity of providers, many foreign owned, who operate effective monopolies in their geographic regions and use the profits generated by their UK operations to shield consumers in their home markets in France and Germany from rising energy prices.
In more recent times, the Blair adminsitration managed to enrich any number of foreign companies, civil servants and assorted advisors every time it sold another important national asset. This was ever so slightly at odds with the avowed inetntion which was, in each case, to realise asset values for the greater good and enrichment of the nation at large. Of these deals, the most lucrative for the purchasers, if not for us, has to have been the sale of DERA; the erstwhile Defence Research Agency. Dubbed the James Bond agency by the popular Press, thanks to its work on exotic weaponry, DERA in fact was the repository of some of the best and most valuable research in the world. I read somewhere that it held more patents on advanced materials and technology than any other body.
To cut a long story short, DERA`was sold to a US company and we were assured that the price was a true reflection of the company's market value. A couple of the senior Civil Servants who had been involved in the negotiationswere suddenly transmogrified into high-flying directors and pocketed huge salaries and bonuses when, 18 months after the sale, Quinetic as the new entity had become, was laucnhed on the UK stock market, achieving a launch valuation many millions higher than the original purchase price. This was one of several deals overseen by Gordon Brown, the man whose first venture into capitalism was to sell our gold reserves at jumble sale prices - and he was reckoned to be one of the more astute negotiators in the cabinet of the time.
Another of the deals whose consequences we are suffering even as I write was the sale of the, previously nationalised, British Airporsts Authority (BAA) to Ferrovia, a building and construction company from that repository of aviation history and knowledge, Spain.
To be fair, what attracted Ferrovia to the company was the giant shoping mall that we know as Heathrow Airport. The fact that it had two runways tacked onto the side and is the main conduit for trade into and out of UK and much of Europe was a minor consideration in the purchase. What really counted was the captive, albeit transitory, stream of shoppers that made its way into the collective maw of its shops and restaurants.
Which is why all of their focus was on maximising the returns from the retail side of the operation at the expense of the airport activities. Consequently, when snow fell on Heathrow, it was under-eqipped and under-staffed and failed to cope with the resulting chaos that ensued. Chaos that was transmitted via satellite to the tvs of every country in the world. What these images told the rest of the world was that our nation is inefficient, ill-equipped and, not to put too fine a point on it, incompetents. One message they did not convey is that the UK is open and eager for business..
Unfortunately, as we discover time after time, our politicians struggle to muster even half a brain between them when it comes to business Thus, Heathrow and other important airports were allowed to pass into foreign owership with no apparent strings attached in terms of expected levels of efficiency or performance and no sanctions agreed should performance fail to reach those standards
The parent company of BAA will bank around £1 billion in profits from its UK operation. Good fro them and their investors, not so good for the rest of us. Our global status has been undermined Many of the passengers forced to endure mediaeval conditions at Heathrow will think twice before flying. to the UK again. Some, understandably, will never return, preferring the certaities procided by competitive airports such as Schipol. Apparently, the official regulator has no powers to force BAA to make reparations for what has happened or to force it to equip itself properly against future adverse weather conditions. The best we can hope for is that passengers will group together to force the airport into paying compensation.
What should happen, as a matter of urgency, is that the Minister for Transport, Phillip Hammond, reads BAA the riot act, gives them a list of demands that they must comply with if they are to be given licence to continue running Heathrow, with the threat of re-nationalisation as the ultimate sanction.
What will proably happen is quite the opposite. The furore will melt away with the snow. The politicians and Civil Servants will breathe a sigh of relief and then get ready to be stitched up again when we come sell the Search and Rescue Services to a French-American consortium.
Apart from those that fall into the category of what Lenin liked to call Useful Idiots, most of them would be virtually unemployable outside the Public Sector.. For the purposes of this particular argument, a useful idiot would be someone responsible for or close to the decision making processes in a major Ministry like the MOD. Into this category fall several erstwhile Prime Ministers, Health Secretaries and assorted Sir Humphreys and retired generals who are able to parlay their contacts and presumed insider knowledge into a consultancy role or a seat on the board of a defence contractor or energy supplier.
For the remainder, the residue who have enjoyed neither power nor any especial influence, the best they can hope for in the real world is occasional, low-level consultancy work.
Not to beat about the bush,politicians are useless at business.
Even back in the Thatcher era, when the cabinet was supposedly stuffed with first class business brains, officladom always got taken to the cleaners by the private sector. Take the trains. Once upon a time we had a national rail network and one train operator, British Rail. Since they provided a national service, they were paid from the national purse. However, this monopoly, we were told, could not provide the transport service required by a 20th Century nation. It was sclerotic, inefficient and did not deliver value for money.
Privatising the whole shooting match, we were assured, would enable us to get rid of subsidies, save stacks of money, lead to major improvements in service and give the country a rail network that would be the envy of the world. A few decades later, instead of a single national monopoly,what we actually have is a number of regional private monopolies operating their own services on discrete routes. Maintaining the tracks all of these companies rely on is the responsibility of a semi-nationalised company that does all the grunt work and which, despite privatisation, sucks in virtually the same levels of subsidy as when we, the nation, owned the whole shooting match.
There is a similar story when it comes to our major utilities. Where once we had national and local providers of gas, electricity, water and sewage whose assets were owned by their customers - that would be you and me - we now have a multiplicity of providers, many foreign owned, who operate effective monopolies in their geographic regions and use the profits generated by their UK operations to shield consumers in their home markets in France and Germany from rising energy prices.
In more recent times, the Blair adminsitration managed to enrich any number of foreign companies, civil servants and assorted advisors every time it sold another important national asset. This was ever so slightly at odds with the avowed inetntion which was, in each case, to realise asset values for the greater good and enrichment of the nation at large. Of these deals, the most lucrative for the purchasers, if not for us, has to have been the sale of DERA; the erstwhile Defence Research Agency. Dubbed the James Bond agency by the popular Press, thanks to its work on exotic weaponry, DERA in fact was the repository of some of the best and most valuable research in the world. I read somewhere that it held more patents on advanced materials and technology than any other body.
To cut a long story short, DERA`was sold to a US company and we were assured that the price was a true reflection of the company's market value. A couple of the senior Civil Servants who had been involved in the negotiationswere suddenly transmogrified into high-flying directors and pocketed huge salaries and bonuses when, 18 months after the sale, Quinetic as the new entity had become, was laucnhed on the UK stock market, achieving a launch valuation many millions higher than the original purchase price. This was one of several deals overseen by Gordon Brown, the man whose first venture into capitalism was to sell our gold reserves at jumble sale prices - and he was reckoned to be one of the more astute negotiators in the cabinet of the time.
Another of the deals whose consequences we are suffering even as I write was the sale of the, previously nationalised, British Airporsts Authority (BAA) to Ferrovia, a building and construction company from that repository of aviation history and knowledge, Spain.
To be fair, what attracted Ferrovia to the company was the giant shoping mall that we know as Heathrow Airport. The fact that it had two runways tacked onto the side and is the main conduit for trade into and out of UK and much of Europe was a minor consideration in the purchase. What really counted was the captive, albeit transitory, stream of shoppers that made its way into the collective maw of its shops and restaurants.
Which is why all of their focus was on maximising the returns from the retail side of the operation at the expense of the airport activities. Consequently, when snow fell on Heathrow, it was under-eqipped and under-staffed and failed to cope with the resulting chaos that ensued. Chaos that was transmitted via satellite to the tvs of every country in the world. What these images told the rest of the world was that our nation is inefficient, ill-equipped and, not to put too fine a point on it, incompetents. One message they did not convey is that the UK is open and eager for business..
Unfortunately, as we discover time after time, our politicians struggle to muster even half a brain between them when it comes to business Thus, Heathrow and other important airports were allowed to pass into foreign owership with no apparent strings attached in terms of expected levels of efficiency or performance and no sanctions agreed should performance fail to reach those standards
The parent company of BAA will bank around £1 billion in profits from its UK operation. Good fro them and their investors, not so good for the rest of us. Our global status has been undermined Many of the passengers forced to endure mediaeval conditions at Heathrow will think twice before flying. to the UK again. Some, understandably, will never return, preferring the certaities procided by competitive airports such as Schipol. Apparently, the official regulator has no powers to force BAA to make reparations for what has happened or to force it to equip itself properly against future adverse weather conditions. The best we can hope for is that passengers will group together to force the airport into paying compensation.
What should happen, as a matter of urgency, is that the Minister for Transport, Phillip Hammond, reads BAA the riot act, gives them a list of demands that they must comply with if they are to be given licence to continue running Heathrow, with the threat of re-nationalisation as the ultimate sanction.
What will proably happen is quite the opposite. The furore will melt away with the snow. The politicians and Civil Servants will breathe a sigh of relief and then get ready to be stitched up again when we come sell the Search and Rescue Services to a French-American consortium.
Wednesday, 8 December 2010
Real world politics
Members of our political elite operate on a completely different plane to the rest of us.
For the most part, we are preoccupied by the mundanities of life, such as feeding, clothing and housing ourselves. Any spare time we have, we devote to sports, hobbies, music and other pastimes. While so occupied we, perhaps naively, take it as read that our political and civil service masters will concern themselves with more serious matters such as the security and defence of our country and our collective health, education and.wealth. We regard it not merely as their job but, to use a somewhat devalued word, their duty. There exists, or should exist, a simple compact between us: we vote them into office and they place the welfare of this country and its people above all other considerations.
So, it's disconcerting to discover that compact is so one-sided. The things that concern the average person in this country are not necessarily highest on the to-do list of any aspiring modern politician. Our concerns are, predominantly, local. Theirs, for a variety of reasons not the least of which is personal vanity and ambition, are almost exclusively global. When they turn their attention to national issues they invariably do solely to silence local dissent, to placate some special interest group or lobby; or to burnish their own reputation .
Today, tribalism trumps national interest at every turn.
Consequently, it is a particular ideology or party line that governs their actions rather than any heightened awareness of the common national good.
Thus,at a time when Russia has been, correctly, labelled a gangster state and Putin is starting to rattle actual and metaphorical sabres; when Argentina is showing renewed interest in staking a claim on the Falklands thanks to the prospect of huge oil and gas reserves, the coalition has decided to scrap our only major aircraft carrier and the Harriers that fly from its decks.
Just as we learn that English schoolchildren are now among the most obese in the developed world, Michael Gove decides to cut funding for school sports.
And, despite almost daily warnings of the business challenges we face now and well into the future from China, India, Brazil and the rest of the emerging nations, the Government decides now is precisely the right time to increase University tuition fees.T
The potential savings provided by these economies are, by modern standards, pitiful, calculated in millions rather than billions.
Meanwhile, in sunny Cancun, Energy minister, Chris Huhne, and a cast of hundreds eanestly global warming while the rest of us endure one of the coldest starts to winter on record. So moved have they been by the undoubted seriousness of the situation that Huhne has, apparently, committed the UK to contributing £1.5 billion to help combat global warming in the Third World. Wow, and we thought that all the scrimping and saving we are being forced to do was to prevent the country going bust.
At home, beset by ice, sleet and snow, while the Cancun conference generates carbon emissions equivalent to those of a small African country, Lord Hutton has restated the commitment to invest in more wind turbines to meet our future energy needs. The last time I looked at the figures for this programme of energetic lunacy, the annual cost was projected to be between £20 to £30 billion. This despite the fact that all the evidence points to wind turbines being the biggest potential white elephants since the Sinclair C5 electric car..
Should Hutton require a change of profession, he would do worse than consider that of a professional mourner. His ability to keep a straight face while extolling the very dubious benefits of wind power would make him a priceless asset to any ambitious funeral parlour. The claims he makes for wind turbines fly in the face not just of logic but what is actually happening in the real world.
Here we are freezing our proverbials off. Every business and household faces their highest ever energy bills and Hutton is seriously suggesting that what we need are more windmills! Hasn't anyone in his team pointed out that, during the current freeze, the existing wind turbines have been as much use as tits on a bull?
What they need is neither breathy zephyrs nor gales but steady regular wind. What we have had over the last month has either been hurricane force winds during which the turbines have to be locked down, or no wind at all, in which case they remain static. In fact, some installations have had to draw power from the national grid to keep their blades turning and prevent them from freezing. None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who has spent more than a few winters in this country. Generally speaking, we get the steadiest winds in the summer and Autumn months. Winter winds are either raging gales or non-existent. No matter, Hutton and his henchpeople want to bet the house - or at least £30 billion per year of our money - on wind turbine technology as the answer to our energy needs.
He backs his spurious claims regarding the efficacy of wind turbines with even more misinformed drivel regarding the business and employment opportunities the new wind age will open up for the UK. Again, this flies very firmly in the face of logic.
The most technologically advanced countries in the world when it comes to wind energy are Scandinavian; more particularly Denmark and Sweden. They have been using wind energy for close to thirty years. Ergo, they have a thirty year lead over everybody else when it comes to designing and manufacturing wind turbine machines.
That is why 80% of the equipment used to build theThanet offshore wind farm that was opened in September was designed and built in Scandinavia. Even the cable that connects the wind farm to the national grid was laid by an Italian company. In fact, the whole installation has created a grand total of 22 permanent jobs for people in that area of Kent. These have been bought at an enormous cost, thanks to the £1.2 billions in subsidies pledged to the renewable energy companies over the anticipated 20 year life of the field.
Like any true modern politician, Hutton is never one to let anything as awkward as the truth intrude on his version of reality. According to him, wind turbines will not only give us unprecedented levels of virtually free energy, they will create a cornucopia of high tech opportunities for British industry.
While we wait for this bounty to fall into our laps, we have to endure energy costs that will rise, year on year, way above ordinary inflation levels; perfectly serviceable coal-fired power stations being closed in order to meet some spurious EU mandated reductions in carbon emissions and the uplifting prospect of new nuclear capacity being created by French contractors because our own nuclear design and engineering skills were deemed to be redundant by a previous group of clueless politicians.
There is an upside to all of this, of course. Both Huhne and Hutton will earn some very valuable Brownie points with some influential Green lobbyists and pressure groups. And, with a fair wind so to speak, could parlay their energetic activities into valuable consultancy work or directorships once they have completed their respective stints at the trough of public service.
For the most part, we are preoccupied by the mundanities of life, such as feeding, clothing and housing ourselves. Any spare time we have, we devote to sports, hobbies, music and other pastimes. While so occupied we, perhaps naively, take it as read that our political and civil service masters will concern themselves with more serious matters such as the security and defence of our country and our collective health, education and.wealth. We regard it not merely as their job but, to use a somewhat devalued word, their duty. There exists, or should exist, a simple compact between us: we vote them into office and they place the welfare of this country and its people above all other considerations.
So, it's disconcerting to discover that compact is so one-sided. The things that concern the average person in this country are not necessarily highest on the to-do list of any aspiring modern politician. Our concerns are, predominantly, local. Theirs, for a variety of reasons not the least of which is personal vanity and ambition, are almost exclusively global. When they turn their attention to national issues they invariably do solely to silence local dissent, to placate some special interest group or lobby; or to burnish their own reputation .
Today, tribalism trumps national interest at every turn.
Consequently, it is a particular ideology or party line that governs their actions rather than any heightened awareness of the common national good.
Thus,at a time when Russia has been, correctly, labelled a gangster state and Putin is starting to rattle actual and metaphorical sabres; when Argentina is showing renewed interest in staking a claim on the Falklands thanks to the prospect of huge oil and gas reserves, the coalition has decided to scrap our only major aircraft carrier and the Harriers that fly from its decks.
Just as we learn that English schoolchildren are now among the most obese in the developed world, Michael Gove decides to cut funding for school sports.
And, despite almost daily warnings of the business challenges we face now and well into the future from China, India, Brazil and the rest of the emerging nations, the Government decides now is precisely the right time to increase University tuition fees.T
The potential savings provided by these economies are, by modern standards, pitiful, calculated in millions rather than billions.
Meanwhile, in sunny Cancun, Energy minister, Chris Huhne, and a cast of hundreds eanestly global warming while the rest of us endure one of the coldest starts to winter on record. So moved have they been by the undoubted seriousness of the situation that Huhne has, apparently, committed the UK to contributing £1.5 billion to help combat global warming in the Third World. Wow, and we thought that all the scrimping and saving we are being forced to do was to prevent the country going bust.
At home, beset by ice, sleet and snow, while the Cancun conference generates carbon emissions equivalent to those of a small African country, Lord Hutton has restated the commitment to invest in more wind turbines to meet our future energy needs. The last time I looked at the figures for this programme of energetic lunacy, the annual cost was projected to be between £20 to £30 billion. This despite the fact that all the evidence points to wind turbines being the biggest potential white elephants since the Sinclair C5 electric car..
Should Hutton require a change of profession, he would do worse than consider that of a professional mourner. His ability to keep a straight face while extolling the very dubious benefits of wind power would make him a priceless asset to any ambitious funeral parlour. The claims he makes for wind turbines fly in the face not just of logic but what is actually happening in the real world.
Here we are freezing our proverbials off. Every business and household faces their highest ever energy bills and Hutton is seriously suggesting that what we need are more windmills! Hasn't anyone in his team pointed out that, during the current freeze, the existing wind turbines have been as much use as tits on a bull?
What they need is neither breathy zephyrs nor gales but steady regular wind. What we have had over the last month has either been hurricane force winds during which the turbines have to be locked down, or no wind at all, in which case they remain static. In fact, some installations have had to draw power from the national grid to keep their blades turning and prevent them from freezing. None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who has spent more than a few winters in this country. Generally speaking, we get the steadiest winds in the summer and Autumn months. Winter winds are either raging gales or non-existent. No matter, Hutton and his henchpeople want to bet the house - or at least £30 billion per year of our money - on wind turbine technology as the answer to our energy needs.
He backs his spurious claims regarding the efficacy of wind turbines with even more misinformed drivel regarding the business and employment opportunities the new wind age will open up for the UK. Again, this flies very firmly in the face of logic.
The most technologically advanced countries in the world when it comes to wind energy are Scandinavian; more particularly Denmark and Sweden. They have been using wind energy for close to thirty years. Ergo, they have a thirty year lead over everybody else when it comes to designing and manufacturing wind turbine machines.
That is why 80% of the equipment used to build theThanet offshore wind farm that was opened in September was designed and built in Scandinavia. Even the cable that connects the wind farm to the national grid was laid by an Italian company. In fact, the whole installation has created a grand total of 22 permanent jobs for people in that area of Kent. These have been bought at an enormous cost, thanks to the £1.2 billions in subsidies pledged to the renewable energy companies over the anticipated 20 year life of the field.
Like any true modern politician, Hutton is never one to let anything as awkward as the truth intrude on his version of reality. According to him, wind turbines will not only give us unprecedented levels of virtually free energy, they will create a cornucopia of high tech opportunities for British industry.
While we wait for this bounty to fall into our laps, we have to endure energy costs that will rise, year on year, way above ordinary inflation levels; perfectly serviceable coal-fired power stations being closed in order to meet some spurious EU mandated reductions in carbon emissions and the uplifting prospect of new nuclear capacity being created by French contractors because our own nuclear design and engineering skills were deemed to be redundant by a previous group of clueless politicians.
There is an upside to all of this, of course. Both Huhne and Hutton will earn some very valuable Brownie points with some influential Green lobbyists and pressure groups. And, with a fair wind so to speak, could parlay their energetic activities into valuable consultancy work or directorships once they have completed their respective stints at the trough of public service.
Tuesday, 30 November 2010
Conned and lied to.
Are all politicians naturally venal?
Given the performance thus far of the main players in the new government, it looks very much as if they are.
Getting rid of Gordon Brown and his Labour cronies provided the same sense of relief as a good burp. It released unwanted and debilitating flatulence and thus cleared the way for something we hoped would be altogether more edifying. That sense of a new beginning lasted what, a couple of months? It has dissipated as rapidly as the main election pledges made by the Conservatives and their allies in the new Lib Con alliance. Notice I refer to an alliance rather than a coalition. The only noticeable coalescing so far seems to have occurred between Dave and Nick. The rest of the motley crew involved in governing us seem to be paddling their own canoes up creeks of their own choosing. Thus, there seems to be a much more natural affinity between Dave and Nick than between, let's say, Dave and Kenneth Clarke or either of those two and Ian Duncan Smith. On the LibDem side, Nick Clegg looks much more comfortable with Dave than, say, Vince Cable.
Not that it's unusual in any team - whether sporting or managerial - to find disparate personalities with little in common with each other outside of their work. It would just be so much more reassuring to feel that those charged with running the country were looking at the same hymn book, let alone singing from it.
Naturally, there has to be some give and take to make the alliance work. The problem is, all of this compromising is being done without any reference to the people that matter - the electorate. So far, the Conservatives have reneged on pledges relating to Europe, immigration, crime ( and suitable punishment) and repeal of the Human Rights Act; basically all of the key points they based their campaign on. For their part, the LbDems have backtracked on Tuition fees, softened their die-hard commitment to Europe and accepted the need for some hardening of attitudes to welfare and benefits. If you believe in the essential goodness of human nature, you might excuse this all as the kind of pragmatic compromise needed to enable them to focus on the real problem, the economy. That won't wash either, though. Not now that George Osborne has committed us to lending 7 billion Euros or more to Ireland - thus wiping out any potential savings accrued by way of his austerity measures - simply to please and appease his masters in Brussels.
Basically, what we have wished upon ourselves is another coven of self-serving chancers whose only real interest is the pursuit of power for its own sake and who, quite clearly, are just as prepared as their Labour predecessors to lie and cheat to attain and retain it,
Given the performance thus far of the main players in the new government, it looks very much as if they are.
Getting rid of Gordon Brown and his Labour cronies provided the same sense of relief as a good burp. It released unwanted and debilitating flatulence and thus cleared the way for something we hoped would be altogether more edifying. That sense of a new beginning lasted what, a couple of months? It has dissipated as rapidly as the main election pledges made by the Conservatives and their allies in the new Lib Con alliance. Notice I refer to an alliance rather than a coalition. The only noticeable coalescing so far seems to have occurred between Dave and Nick. The rest of the motley crew involved in governing us seem to be paddling their own canoes up creeks of their own choosing. Thus, there seems to be a much more natural affinity between Dave and Nick than between, let's say, Dave and Kenneth Clarke or either of those two and Ian Duncan Smith. On the LibDem side, Nick Clegg looks much more comfortable with Dave than, say, Vince Cable.
Not that it's unusual in any team - whether sporting or managerial - to find disparate personalities with little in common with each other outside of their work. It would just be so much more reassuring to feel that those charged with running the country were looking at the same hymn book, let alone singing from it.
Naturally, there has to be some give and take to make the alliance work. The problem is, all of this compromising is being done without any reference to the people that matter - the electorate. So far, the Conservatives have reneged on pledges relating to Europe, immigration, crime ( and suitable punishment) and repeal of the Human Rights Act; basically all of the key points they based their campaign on. For their part, the LbDems have backtracked on Tuition fees, softened their die-hard commitment to Europe and accepted the need for some hardening of attitudes to welfare and benefits. If you believe in the essential goodness of human nature, you might excuse this all as the kind of pragmatic compromise needed to enable them to focus on the real problem, the economy. That won't wash either, though. Not now that George Osborne has committed us to lending 7 billion Euros or more to Ireland - thus wiping out any potential savings accrued by way of his austerity measures - simply to please and appease his masters in Brussels.
Basically, what we have wished upon ourselves is another coven of self-serving chancers whose only real interest is the pursuit of power for its own sake and who, quite clearly, are just as prepared as their Labour predecessors to lie and cheat to attain and retain it,
Monday, 22 November 2010
Back to the future
It's a long time since I could raise enough energy or interest to face writing this blog. Apparently, an overwhelming interest in politicians ands their antics can do that to you.
Overwhelm you, that is.
The political landscape of Great Britain has changed in the intervening months. Labour has been replaced by a curious hybrid called ConLibDem. Much like the changing of the guard, although the personnel may differ, the replacements seem to be wearing exactly the same uniforms and performing precisely the same drills.
David Cameron, once if not Eurosceptic at least Eurowary, has obviously been guided into the same inner sanctum where his immediate immediate predecessors were first made to see the Euro light. Like them, he is already making lots of noise about "fighting" to protect British interests while appending his signature to any and all documents placed before him with little apparent resistance. Thus, he flies into Brussels on the wings of a stern pledge to hold the EU to zero increase in its bloated budgets. Then pronounces a great victory in restricting them to a mere 2.9%. Thanks Dave. It will certainly help stave off national bankruptcy, having to donate a few extra billion or so a year to the Eurocoffers.
Next, despite the fact that he has been in power for such a short period he has barely had time to learn the names of his LibDem cabinet colleagues, he has managed to strike up such a cosy relationship with Sarkozy that, very chummily, we have agreed to share one of our yet-to-be-built aircraft carriers with them. Oh yes, and also agreed that a French dockyard can have the contract for maintaining them once they are built and in service.
Not that this arrangement in any way furthers the plans for a joint Euro Army/Navy/Air Force at all. Oh No, this is just a couple of long term allies simply deciding to share assets, much as we did at Agincourt, Crecy and Waterloo. Justin a slightly different way.
Amazing what can be organized via a couple of friendly texts, isn't it?
Promises to protect Civil and individual liberties have gone much the same way. Theresa May has, with little pomp and absolutely no consultation either in Parliament or with the public, committed us even further to the reality of a Pan-European police force and Judiciary, reinforcing the reach and scope of foreign governments to track down and arrest British citizens without the intervention of the British courts. All we need to hear from Saint Theresa now is Labour's favourite old saw. You know the one: it goes something like: If you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.
Across the water, the Irish tragedy is unfolding. It is truly ironic that a country that fought tooth and nail for independence from the British Empire looks as if it is about to meekly surrender and allow itself to be sucked into the ever-widening maw of the new, Greater German Empire. If you hear a lot of thunder over the next week or so, it will be the sound of the old Teutonic gods of war laughing themselves silly. All the years, all the men killed and blood shed by successive Reichs to bring first Europe and then the world under German domination and now matronly Angele Merkel is achieving that very objective without a shot being fired in anger. Greece was first. Now it's Ireland's turn. Next it will be Portugal, Spain and Italy. And, if little George Osborne continues to put our money into the pot for each bail-out, despite the fact that we are not part of the Euro Zone, then it will, inevitably, be the turn of what was once Great Britain.
It's good to be back.
Overwhelm you, that is.
The political landscape of Great Britain has changed in the intervening months. Labour has been replaced by a curious hybrid called ConLibDem. Much like the changing of the guard, although the personnel may differ, the replacements seem to be wearing exactly the same uniforms and performing precisely the same drills.
David Cameron, once if not Eurosceptic at least Eurowary, has obviously been guided into the same inner sanctum where his immediate immediate predecessors were first made to see the Euro light. Like them, he is already making lots of noise about "fighting" to protect British interests while appending his signature to any and all documents placed before him with little apparent resistance. Thus, he flies into Brussels on the wings of a stern pledge to hold the EU to zero increase in its bloated budgets. Then pronounces a great victory in restricting them to a mere 2.9%. Thanks Dave. It will certainly help stave off national bankruptcy, having to donate a few extra billion or so a year to the Eurocoffers.
Next, despite the fact that he has been in power for such a short period he has barely had time to learn the names of his LibDem cabinet colleagues, he has managed to strike up such a cosy relationship with Sarkozy that, very chummily, we have agreed to share one of our yet-to-be-built aircraft carriers with them. Oh yes, and also agreed that a French dockyard can have the contract for maintaining them once they are built and in service.
Not that this arrangement in any way furthers the plans for a joint Euro Army/Navy/Air Force at all. Oh No, this is just a couple of long term allies simply deciding to share assets, much as we did at Agincourt, Crecy and Waterloo. Justin a slightly different way.
Amazing what can be organized via a couple of friendly texts, isn't it?
Promises to protect Civil and individual liberties have gone much the same way. Theresa May has, with little pomp and absolutely no consultation either in Parliament or with the public, committed us even further to the reality of a Pan-European police force and Judiciary, reinforcing the reach and scope of foreign governments to track down and arrest British citizens without the intervention of the British courts. All we need to hear from Saint Theresa now is Labour's favourite old saw. You know the one: it goes something like: If you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.
Across the water, the Irish tragedy is unfolding. It is truly ironic that a country that fought tooth and nail for independence from the British Empire looks as if it is about to meekly surrender and allow itself to be sucked into the ever-widening maw of the new, Greater German Empire. If you hear a lot of thunder over the next week or so, it will be the sound of the old Teutonic gods of war laughing themselves silly. All the years, all the men killed and blood shed by successive Reichs to bring first Europe and then the world under German domination and now matronly Angele Merkel is achieving that very objective without a shot being fired in anger. Greece was first. Now it's Ireland's turn. Next it will be Portugal, Spain and Italy. And, if little George Osborne continues to put our money into the pot for each bail-out, despite the fact that we are not part of the Euro Zone, then it will, inevitably, be the turn of what was once Great Britain.
It's good to be back.
Wednesday, 31 March 2010
It's a free country - part 2
Shawn Holes is an American who, like a lot of Americans , happens to be a practising Christian. In his case it is a particularly muscular brand of Christianity that he practises, involving street preaching and proselytising.
Unfortunately, nobody told Shawn that, in today's United Kingdom, such activities can get you into an awful lot of trouble.
Around two weeks ago, Shawn was in Glasgow with a group of fellow evangelists when he was arrested under one of the plethora of hate laws introduced since 1997. His crime? He was preaching to a crowd in a Glasgow street and quoted from St Luke's Gospel to answer a query about the biblical attitude to homosexuality. This is how he describes what happened:
Unfortunately, nobody told Shawn that, in today's United Kingdom, such activities can get you into an awful lot of trouble.
Around two weeks ago, Shawn was in Glasgow with a group of fellow evangelists when he was arrested under one of the plethora of hate laws introduced since 1997. His crime? He was preaching to a crowd in a Glasgow street and quoted from St Luke's Gospel to answer a query about the biblical attitude to homosexuality. This is how he describes what happened:
"On March 18Th I was arrested while preaching the
Gospel in downtown Glasgow Scotland. I spent a horrible night in jail and
all I can say is that it was just miserable. Too many details from this
specific incident occurred for me to list here. I will say however that
what it came down to was that two people were supposedly offended when I said
that homosexuality is a sin against Jesus, therefore the arrest. I was given two options:
1- plead guilty to some really trumped up charges and
possibly pay a small fine of hopefully only 50 pounds or so and go home by
Monday as planned or
2- plead not guilty and have to spend up to 8 weeks
waiting for the trial NOT being allowed to leave the country with no guarentee (sic)
of winning the case.
I chose option number one. Big bummer though. The
fine was 1000 pounds. Thats (sic)1600 US dollars."As far as the police were concerned, Shawn's mistake was in asserting that homosexuality is a sin. They were wrong. Shawn's real mistake was in assuming that, because freedom of expression had been central to our existence for at least the last couple of centuries, that this still held good today. Whatever the cause of this misapprehension, it cost both him and us dear. Shawn is financially and spiritually out of pocket. But, we have taken another significant step along the road to moral bankruptcy.
The bunch of fascistic pygmies who currently hold sway over us has made it its business to silence anyone who regards homosexuality as anything other than a completely natural state of being. Actually, what they have done and continue to do, thanks to Harriet Harman's upcoming equality bill, is create a whole raft of lifestyles and belief systems that are protected from comment or opinion, or at least any comment or opinion that does not conform to their narrow world view. They are unable - or unwilling - to understand that suppressing and criminalising opinions is more discriminatory and prejudicial than anything that Shawn and his ilk could ever do or say.
The professional atheist, Richard Dawkins, has a whole website dedicated to promulgating his beliefs. Every day he mocks anyone who believes in God, whatever form that God or belief might take. He does the same in print, on the radio and television and in public and invites his readers and listeners to share his dislike. In its own way, Dawkin's atheism has much in common with the religious fervour of the more extreme religious proselytisers.
As far as I know, he has yet to be arrested for preaching hatred. Which is as it should be. Every opinion is valid and every belief system has some merit, for the simple reason that there is always someone capable of testing or disputing their veracity. 20 years ago, had anyone proposed a law under which a completely innocent, law-abiding visitor to the UK could be threatened with gaol simply for expressing an opinion they would, rightly, have been laughed out of court by the liberal establishment.
Orchestrating the laughter would have been the likes of Jack Straw, Gordon Brown, Tony and Cherie Blair and Harriet Harman - the same bunch of chancers that has done so much to undermine our democracy and create a country completely alien to people raised on the ideal of a free society.
Friday, 26 March 2010
The great turkey vote
Conservatives are puzzled, and with good reason. For the last few years, polls have shown their share of the vote climbing to and staying steady at around 40% - enough to guarantee them victory and a decent majority in any General Election.
Given the litany of disasters that have assailed Labour for the last two years, they should be in a position where they would be pushed to get an offer of coalition from the Raving Loony Party, let alone the LibDems.
And yet, weirdly and almost inexplicably, Brown and his cohorts are not dead and buried. The most recent polls put the two main parties neck and neck. With Labour suffering from so many self-inflicted wounds why have the Tories consistently failed to finish them off?
Perhaps the answer lies in the latest employment statistics .
According to the Office for National Statistics, employment rose in the final quarter of 2009. Hosanna, Good News shout the pundits. Well, perhaps. The problem is that the 7000 new jobs created were all in the Public Sector. The picture was somewhat different in the Private Sector, where 61,000unfortunates were thrown out of work.
Consequently, as of the beginning of this year, although the total number of people in work was 28.86 million, almost a quarter of them, 6.1 million people, work for government in one form or another.
So, let's imagine a scenario in which someone whose salary is around 7% higher than the private sector equivalent, with a final salary pension inflation-proofed and guaranteed by the Government, is considering his options at the forthcoming General Election. On the one hand, he has Messrs Darling and Brown saying that to make wholesale cuts to public services would stall the recovery, feeble as it is, so their approach will be gently, gently. On the other, he has George Osborne promising to take an axe to public expenditure and, by definition, public jobs at the first available opportunity. All other things being equal, which of these is likely to represent the most attractive proposition to the ou Public Sector worker?
Now, from the gainfully employed, let's turn to the gainfully unemployed; in other words the multitude of those of working age who are, in official terminology, Inactive. There are 8.16 million of them, to be precise. Of that number, 2.31 million are students who are not in the labour market. 2.5 million are officially unemployed and drawing benefits of some kind. Many of these are desperately unhappy to be in that predicament and will do almost anything to get back to paid work of some kind or another.
But, unfortunately, a large number are not. There are whole areas of the UK where lack of a job is a fact of life, where several generations subsist entirely on benefits. In these areas, some of the shrewder ones realised long ago that it is more rewarding to be officially incapable of work through disability than to bother with unemployment and job seekers' allowance. There are nearly 3 millions claiming Disability benefit. Of that number, a surprising proportion, as many as 1/2 million apparently, are under the age of 25.
Given that this group will be a target for some serious pruning, it is difficult to see any incentive for them to vote Conservative at the next election.
The UK allows any EU citizen who is permanently resident here to vote in ALL elections. By contrast, a UK citizen resident in Ireland is allowed to vote in local and European elections there but not at a General election or in any national referenda. The same is true of most other EU countries.
That means that Poles and other newly-minted EU citizens from eastern Europe who have settled here in the last three to four years are all entitled to vote in the coming General Election. This new constituency of potential Labour voters was one of the planned benefits of Labour's drive for multiculturalism when it came to office. As we are all now well aware, the assumption was that these newcomers would not only be grateful to their Labour hosts but register their gratitude in the most practical way possible, by endorsing the Party at the General Election. Suitably galvanised, this group could easily swell the Labour vote by several hundred thousand come the day
Do not be surprised to see a concerted government campaign to persuade these newcomers to exercise their newly-acquired right to vote over the coming six to eight weeks; purely in the interests of Democracy, of course.
Take all of these groups together and what you get is a significant proportion of the population for whom the current administration is the principal source of income. Asking them to elect the Tories is akin to expecting turkeys to vote for Christmas.
Given the litany of disasters that have assailed Labour for the last two years, they should be in a position where they would be pushed to get an offer of coalition from the Raving Loony Party, let alone the LibDems.
And yet, weirdly and almost inexplicably, Brown and his cohorts are not dead and buried. The most recent polls put the two main parties neck and neck. With Labour suffering from so many self-inflicted wounds why have the Tories consistently failed to finish them off?
Perhaps the answer lies in the latest employment statistics .
According to the Office for National Statistics, employment rose in the final quarter of 2009. Hosanna, Good News shout the pundits. Well, perhaps. The problem is that the 7000 new jobs created were all in the Public Sector. The picture was somewhat different in the Private Sector, where 61,000unfortunates were thrown out of work.
Consequently, as of the beginning of this year, although the total number of people in work was 28.86 million, almost a quarter of them, 6.1 million people, work for government in one form or another.
So, let's imagine a scenario in which someone whose salary is around 7% higher than the private sector equivalent, with a final salary pension inflation-proofed and guaranteed by the Government, is considering his options at the forthcoming General Election. On the one hand, he has Messrs Darling and Brown saying that to make wholesale cuts to public services would stall the recovery, feeble as it is, so their approach will be gently, gently. On the other, he has George Osborne promising to take an axe to public expenditure and, by definition, public jobs at the first available opportunity. All other things being equal, which of these is likely to represent the most attractive proposition to the ou Public Sector worker?
Now, from the gainfully employed, let's turn to the gainfully unemployed; in other words the multitude of those of working age who are, in official terminology, Inactive. There are 8.16 million of them, to be precise. Of that number, 2.31 million are students who are not in the labour market. 2.5 million are officially unemployed and drawing benefits of some kind. Many of these are desperately unhappy to be in that predicament and will do almost anything to get back to paid work of some kind or another.
But, unfortunately, a large number are not. There are whole areas of the UK where lack of a job is a fact of life, where several generations subsist entirely on benefits. In these areas, some of the shrewder ones realised long ago that it is more rewarding to be officially incapable of work through disability than to bother with unemployment and job seekers' allowance. There are nearly 3 millions claiming Disability benefit. Of that number, a surprising proportion, as many as 1/2 million apparently, are under the age of 25.
Given that this group will be a target for some serious pruning, it is difficult to see any incentive for them to vote Conservative at the next election.
The UK allows any EU citizen who is permanently resident here to vote in ALL elections. By contrast, a UK citizen resident in Ireland is allowed to vote in local and European elections there but not at a General election or in any national referenda. The same is true of most other EU countries.
That means that Poles and other newly-minted EU citizens from eastern Europe who have settled here in the last three to four years are all entitled to vote in the coming General Election. This new constituency of potential Labour voters was one of the planned benefits of Labour's drive for multiculturalism when it came to office. As we are all now well aware, the assumption was that these newcomers would not only be grateful to their Labour hosts but register their gratitude in the most practical way possible, by endorsing the Party at the General Election. Suitably galvanised, this group could easily swell the Labour vote by several hundred thousand come the day
Do not be surprised to see a concerted government campaign to persuade these newcomers to exercise their newly-acquired right to vote over the coming six to eight weeks; purely in the interests of Democracy, of course.
Take all of these groups together and what you get is a significant proportion of the population for whom the current administration is the principal source of income. Asking them to elect the Tories is akin to expecting turkeys to vote for Christmas.
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