Tuesday, 19 November 2024

An easy mistake

 

Seen one seaside town, seen them all. OK, Barry might be a little smaller than Blackpool, but for a rare visitor to either, it might be easy to confuse them. Just like confusing Miami with Clacton would be for anyone who is a rare visitor to either. And one grumpy old man is much the same as another grumpy old man, so it’s understandable that someone might have difficulty distinguishing between a grumpy old American billionaire convict and a grumpy old English pensioner. Nigel Farage getting confused as to whether his job in parliament is to represent a billionaire American convict living in Miami or a few poverty-stricken pensioners living in Clacton is therefore perhaps explicable; it’s an easy enough mistake to make. Isn’t it?

Monday, 11 November 2024

Displaying weakness

 

The Labour government apparently believe that they are ready for Trump, having gamed a number of different scenarios. That sounds a bit complacent to me: the one thing that is absolutely predictable about Trump is his utter unpredictability. The probability that the UK government can have foreseen all possibilities is remote. It seems increasingly as though the team Trump is assembling around him do indeed have some sort of coherent – albeit deeply unpleasant – programme, but whether they will be able to keep him to it is likely to remain unclear for some time to come. I find myself wondering who exactly the ‘useful idiot’ in all this is. Are his team Trump’s useful idiots, or is he theirs? Him not being the idiot might seem unlikely, but it might still be the better scenario.

Whether he will go ahead with his scheme to impose 10% tariffs on all goods entering the US is yet to be seen. He really does seem to believe that the countries and companies sending those goods will pay the tariff with no impact on the prices paid by American consumers. It’s the stuff of make believe. It is certainly likely to disrupt trade relations and is likely to be counter to World Trade Organisation rules. That latter won’t worry him, not least because he knows that WTO rules and processes mean that it will be years before the WTO can co-ordinate its response, and he will no longer be president by then (assuming that he doesn’t also somehow manage to abolish the two-term limit on presidents – or even abolish elections – in the meantime). There are only two countries or trading blocs big enough and powerful enough to take meaningful retaliatory action, and they are China and the EU.

The UK’s response so far – trying to persuade Trump to exempt the UK from an otherwise universal tariff – assumes that the so-called special relationship is something more than an outdated form of words. But such special pleading is not only not helpful to rebuilding relationships with the EU, it also looks like weakness. Trump might well like to see weakness and supplication before him, but the idea that he will respond otherwise than by taking advantage of any weakness is completely at odds with his nature and history. Starmer’s obsession with not challenging any of the consequences of Brexit, and his willingness to bend the knee to Trump look likely only to compound those consequences.

Friday, 1 November 2024

Vigilantes and gamblers

 

The Guardian carried a story the day before the budget, wondering whether ‘bond vigilantes’ would punish Rachel Reeves with a Truss-style market meltdown. Curious word, vigilante, with at least three different connotations that I can think of. The first – showing my age – takes me back to watching Mr Pastry on the TV as a child on a Saturday afternoon. There was one episode where, misunderstanding everything as usual, he wanted to become a village aunty. It has a warm, cosy feel to it – the idea that kindly people are looking out for others. A more dystopian version is where gangs of vigilantes roam the streets imposing their own version of the law, by force if necessary, meting out punishment to those who refuse to comply with their rules. Somewhere in between the two lies the concept of people acting together to assist the enforcement agencies in upholding the law.

The ’bond vigilantes’ referred to by the Guardian don’t fit any of those categories. These are people who are looking to turn a penny by trading bonds, in massive quantities, with the intention of leveraging the odd few pennies here and there – multiplied, of course, by the millions of bonds involved. They are more akin to gamblers and speculators than law enforcement officers. They claim to be using their judgement on financial events, such as the budget, to guess as to whether rates of return will go up or down as a result. In truth, they aren’t really even doing that – they’re actually guessing about whether other traders will guess that rates will go up or down and placing their bets accordingly.

Bond market speculation isn’t like betting on the geegees though. When it comes to horses, the number and size of bets placed may affect the odds that the bookies will give you, but they don’t make the horses run any faster. In the financial markets, the bets placed directly affect the outcome as well. If enough people buy and sell bonds in a way which anticipates a rise in the rate of return, then the rate of return will rise, and vice versa. The sad part is that the neoliberal governments, of whichever party, with which we have been saddled for decades believe that things have to be this way, and they have no choice but to follow the dictats of the markets. Their power is constrained mostly by their own lack of imagination.

Wednesday, 30 October 2024

"They should be paying us"

 

Not to be out-done by Starmer’s display of his imperialist credentials, one of the would-be leaders of the Tories went even further yesterday  by saying that former colonies do not only not deserve any compensation for the exploitation of their resources and the enslavement of their peoples, but they should actually be grateful for having been colonised in the first place. Ever willing to add comedy to arrogance, Sirjake added that “they should be paying us”. Perhaps it isn’t completely surprising that people who believe that taking a substantial economic hit in order to gain the illusory ‘freedoms’ of Brexit should also believe that having their resources and people systematically extracted and exploited is a small price to pay for the delights of an English-based law system and the imposition of Christian values.

The thing is, though, it’s not for ‘us’ to decide whether it was a good bargain or not. The only people who can decide whether what they got outweighs what was taken from them are the peoples who were colonised. It’s possible, of course, that some of them really do believe that they got the best end of the deal – one could argue that the earliest English colony of all, Wales, contains plenty who think that there are net benefits from being ruled from elsewhere. It is, however, clearly not the perception of most of the former colonies, and no amount of criticising their ingratitude is going to change that.

And even if it were to be true that, by some sudden strange Damascene conversion, all the former colonies were to agree with the proposition that colonisation had been a good thing, it doesn’t alter the fact that any benefits from colonisation were more accidental than intentional. Colonisation took place with the express intent of gaining access, by force, to resources, and as a process, it made some of the colonisers very rich indeed. Much of the wealth of the UK’s biggest cities came from the exploitation of colonial possessions. It really doesn’t matter how enlightened some (but certainly not all) of the colonisers were or whether the legacy they left was good or bad: nothing can alter the underlying intention of accumulation of wealth by expropriation of resources. The people seeking to rewrite history here are those who seek to deny that basic truth.

Tuesday, 29 October 2024

Labour's anti-colonialist delusionists

 

A few Labour MPs have criticised their leader in the past few days for his imperialist stance on the question of reparations for slavery. To listen to them speak, one might think that the Labour Party is a bastion of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism. They’re deluded – the Labour Party is as much an English imperialist-minded party as the Tories. That’s how we are allowed to have elections in the UK: by ensuring that nothing changes very much. If it wasn’t obvious to the ‘rebels’ previously, surely the half-hearted handover of only part of the Chagos Islands whilst retaining the UK’s ‘right’ to Diego GarcĂ­a ought to have opened their eyes at least a little.

It isn’t only in relation to reparations that the imperialist mindset operates; it also underlies the nonsense that the UK is a major world power which can threaten (or maybe create) adversaries across the globe. To say nothing, of course, about the continued possession of nuclear weapons. Starmer has been at it again this week, telling Iran that it must not respond to Israel’s ‘retaliation’, and that Iran and the Palestinians must allow Israel to have the last word – or last airstrike, more accurately – in the current tit-for-tat round of violence. Why either should listen to a state which is the former colonial ruler of Palestine and which has a history of using force to secure the economic interests of its capitalists in Iran (and which itself therefore bears no small historical responsibility for the situation in the Middle East) is a question which only a died-in-the-wool imperialist wouldn’t even think to ask. That we need a ceasefire and proper peace talks with the serious intention of seeking a just settlement goes without saying; that the conflict can be ended by the historical school yard bullies telling one side to desist is as delusional as believing Labour to be inherently anti-colonial.

Monday, 21 October 2024

Bankers and fairies

 

The headline in yesterday's Business and Money section of the Sunday Times proclaimed that “City tells Reeves: we can lend you £80bn”. It’s an example of the way that the basic facts aren’t always presented in a neutral fashion, because the headline could equally have read, “City tells Reeves: We have £80bn that we want to save with the government”. In the preferred version, the banks and financial institutions are doing us (through the government) a favour by lending us money; in the alternative version, the banks and financial institutions are asking us (through the government) to do them a favour by accepting large deposits of ‘spare’ cash.

They both represent different aspects of the ‘truth’, underlining the way that what looks like a debt to one person will always look like an investment to another. But which is actually the best representation of the underlying truth? Imagine that ‘the City’ is a single corporation here, and that the Chief Financial Officer is talking to the collective board. Is (s)he going to say, “Look chaps, the government has got itself into a bit of difficulty, but I reckon that we can probably divert around £80bn from other places to lend them in order to help them out”, or is (s)he going to say, “Look chaps, there’s something of a dearth of safe and profitable investment opportunities at the moment, and the best thing that we can do would be to deposit £80bn in government funds”? When deciding how best to manage their money financial institutions are always looking for a balance between risk and reward, placing some of their money in high risk, high reward investments and some into lower risk, lower reward investments, such as government bonds. To put the question another way, when they are deciding on that balance, do we believe that they operate on the basis of a community-friendly altruism, or do we believe that they decide on the basis of what’s best for their shareholders?

Those who believe in altruistic bankers might like to come and meet the fairies at the bottom of my garden.

Friday, 18 October 2024

Anti-homeopathy: could it be fatal?

 

It could simply be that I haven’t properly comprehended it, but my understanding of homeopathy is that a substance known to be harmful is added to water and then repeatedly diluted until there’s no trace of it left, at which point the water somehow retains a memory of the substance, and that memory, by being drunk, cures the original problem. It would be fair to say that opinions differ as to its efficacy. Science has, to date at least, been unable to explain how water retains a memory of a substance, let alone how that memory can then cure anything. Others swear by it.

The UK Labour government seems to be adopting a form of reverse homeopathy, whereby repeatedly strengthening the dose of the poison is deemed to be a cure. They are committed, for instance, to getting rid of the blight of child poverty, but their approach so far has been to increase the number of children in poverty by retaining the two-child cap on benefits, and now talking about withholding benefits from people deemed able to work, whether work is actually available to them or not. They are also opposed to pensioner poverty, and are tackling it firmly by deliberately reducing pensioner income. The scientific basis for the assumption that increasing poverty is the route to reducing it is even less clear than that for homeopathy, but at least drinking water, with or without a memory, isn’t actively harmful in itself.

The belief in what we might call ‘anti-homeopathy’ isn’t restricted to the governing party. The current main opposition party is suffering from its own version of the same affliction. In their minds, the best way to cure the problem of people not voting for them is to double down on all the reasons why people rejected them. The dose of ideological fervour on offer from Sunak simply wasn’t strong enough, apparently. There were reports yesterday that an opinion poll conducted by Electoral Calculus showed that a Conservative Party led by Robert Jenrick would win rather more seats than one led by Kemi Badenoch. Some foolish commentators have interpreted this as a boost for Jenrick, but they are not taking account of the anti-homeopathy which is currently rife amongst the dwindling number of party members. If what he has to offer might increase the likelihood of people voting for his party, then the dose he’s offering isn’t strong enough. It will surely be Badenoch’s chances which were boosted yesterday.

As to the real cure for this strange affliction currently infecting both parties, it appears there isn’t one. It will just have to work its way through the bodies of both parties until it reaches its conclusion. If we’re lucky, it might even turn out to be fatal.

Wednesday, 16 October 2024

Chasing savings from benefit payments

 

As of today, none of us know what will be in the UK Budget later this month; it’s doubtful if even the Chancellor knows yet, given that work on the detail is continuing. There have been plenty of hints and rumours, though: enough to fuel endless speculation and debate about whether a particular rumoured change does or does not breach a manifesto commitment. One fairly consistent rumour, backed up in a way by today’s suggestion that weight-loss drugs will be prescribed for overweight people who are economically inactive, is that the benefits budget will be one of the targets. It’s not the most lucrative of possible clampdowns – all the evidence suggests that more government expenditure is lost to tax evasion and fraudulent accounting than on paying benefits to those not entitled to them. Choosing to go after benefits is just following an agenda set by the Tories and their media friends. Having said that, it is true to say that there is a saving to be had if benefits can be restricted to those who meet the criteria; the political question is about whether that’s the most productive target.

It raises a question about chickens and eggs. Is the saving being sought a result of a programme to assist people to find suitable employment, or is it intended to use benefit cuts to force people into work, however suitable that work might be for the circumstances of the individual? It was pretty clear under the Tories that it was the latter of the two: cutting benefits would allegedly create an economic incentive which would effectively starve people into taking low-paid (and sometimes multiple) jobs. In relation to those who see living off benefits as a lifestyle choice, there might even be an argument for such an approach, but that group is much smaller in number than anyone reading the tabloids might think, and one of the problems with it is that it can end up causing a lot of collateral damage, especially to children whose life chances are already poor. Those hit aren’t only the tiny number of workshy. There is a huge difference between that approach and an approach which looks at individual circumstances and provides appropriate help and support.

The provision of drugs to help weight loss is potentially a positive step in general terms, although there are some serious questions about potential side-effects, and whether it is merely treating symptoms rather than causes. But even leaving those reservations to one side, directing support to people who are economically inactive is a major corruption of the ethos of the NHS, which is supposed to be about the provision of health care based on assessed medical need. That’s rather a different proposition. It underlines the way in which what used to be the ‘party of the working classes’ increasingly sees people purely in terms of their economic value. There is a political philosophy based on such a belief, but it isn’t the one Labour traditionally promoted. It’s unclear whether the party intends this medication to be mandatory or voluntary, but even voluntary medication of a specific group of people based on criteria other than health needs would be something that ought to worry us. It also plays to, and reinforces, a stereotype of benefit claimants as fat layabouts, encouraging further stigmatisation of a large group whose needs are complex and varied on the basis of a prejudice about a small subset of that group.

It’s not entirely clear which approach Labour favours on either of these issues, although the signs to date are not good. A party which claims it wants to eliminate child poverty hasn’t hesitated to add to that poverty to date, and has been singularly unapologetic about doing so. There is no reason to assume that they won’t continue in the same vein.

Tuesday, 15 October 2024

Power still lies where it always did

 

The UK Transport Secretary got herself into a little bit of trouble over the weekend. As far as I can see, her sin was to repeat in government what she – to say nothing of her party leader – had been saying whilst in opposition, somehow forgetting that the whole point of being in government is to do the opposite of what they said in opposition. The ultimate owner of P&O threw a brief wobbly, threatening not to invest its £1 billion in the UK unless Starmer did a bit of grovelling, and he duly obliged.

To the enormous surprise of almost nobody, the company then decided that making the substantial profit which they expect to earn on their investment was more important to them than some very slightly hurt feelings and agreed to go ahead with the investment after all. Some important lessons have been learned, though. The first is that politicians may huff and puff when companies treat their staff in an appalling way, but they won’t bite, and there will be no repercussions for such behaviour. Short term huffing and puffing headlines are an end in themselves. The second is that the interests of capital will always prevail over those of labour, even under a self-styled ‘Labour’ government. Humiliating Starmer into buckling down and acknowledging that publicly is just a bonus, to say nothing of a marker for what we should expect over the next five years.

Thursday, 10 October 2024

Waiting for the next bus?

 

It's tempting to see the result of the latest ballot among Tory MPs to choose a new temporary leader as being just another display of the inherent duplicity of the species. But, whilst there certainly is an element of that involved, it seems that the reality on this occasion is that it’s an even bigger demonstration of their incompetence. Their complete absence of trust in each other has meant that they couldn’t even stich up an election where the electorate is only 120 strong. The ‘explanation’ for the result is apparently that some supporters of James Cleverly – the walking, talking demonstration of the inapplicability of the theory of nominative determinism – were so confident that he was going to be in the last two that, instead of voting for him, they voted for the one that they thought he'd best be able to beat.

They think that they’re such a clever and sophisticated electorate that holding multiple ballots eliminating one candidate each time enables them to use all the low cunning which they possess to game the system so that the final run-off is between the one they want to win and the one that (s)he stands the best chance of beating. But here’s the thing: if we look at the very first round of voting back at the beginning of September, the order in which four were eliminated precisely matches the result achieved just over a month ago. And if they’d used the first-past-the-post system, which they insist is the only democratic way of voting, to select the final two they would have ended up with the same two that they’ve actually got. A month of political manoeuvring, Machiavellianism and dissimulation has got them exactly where they could have been a month ago.

It's hard to say whether the use of STV would have produced a different result. I suspect that having to rank six candidates in order of preference might have been too big an intellectual ask of many of them, but it would certainly have been much harder to game. Maybe the result would have been the same anyway, just achieved a lot more quickly. What is clear is that, whether by accident or design, an overwhelming majority of Tory MPs have opted for a final contest to select the candidate who can do the most to wreck what remains of a once-formidable election-winning organisation. And all the signs are that the aging, white, wealthy, south-east England based membership will enthusiastically assist in that aim. But Tory leadership campaigns are like buses: there’ll be another one along shortly.