Labour forgetting their roots. Again.

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In the late nineteenth century, around the time that Marx was busily writing his most famous work, the average length of a working week was around 62 hours, with the working day often as long as 12 hours and child labour commonplace, although from 1870 children aged 8-13 were allowed to work only half time in order to fit in the required 10 hours a week of education. The steady reduction in the number of hours which people have been required to work each day/week has been a long battle reflecting the power struggle between capital and labour.

The roots of the British Labour Party lie deep in the conflict between capital and labour over working hours, wages, and working conditions, but it’s a background whose shadow is almost imperceptible in today’s Labour Party. Take today’s broadside by ‘Labour’ minister Steve Reed against local authorities which are moving towards a four day working week. Councils which do not shackle their staff to their desks for seven and a half hours per day five days per week could be classified by him as ‘failing authorities’ if he perceives that the staff are doing “part-time work for full-time pay”. It’s an attitude which assumes that there is a ‘right’ number of hours to justify a full time salary. It ignores the fact that reducing hours without reducing pay has been a core element of the aspirations of workers for generations. And, even though he’s talking about the public sector here, it’s an attitude which puts him firmly in the camp of the capitalist class, which has always resisted any reduction in working hours. His party’s founders must truly be rotating at speed wherever they lie.

Is there any alternative to spluttering from the sidelines?

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For a while, it looked as though Trump’s designs on Greenland had been placed on a back burner somewhere, but in need of a diversion from other stories, he’s returned to the issue today, and appointed a special envoy to Greenland, who sees his job – presumably briefed to that effect by Trump – as being “to serve you in this volunteer position to make Greenland a part of the US”. Maybe people shouldn’t read too much into it beyond diverting attention from Epstein, and the ‘volunteer’ nature of the post suggests that the governor of Louisiana – almost as far as one can get from Greenland, other than Hawaii, and still be in the US – might not be spending a lot of his time on the issue.

The government of the kingdom of Denmark is upset, or at least pretending to be to the extent that they can do so without angering His Orangeness, and has quite rightly made it clear that the future of Greenland is a matter, first and foremost for Greenlanders. Their argument that “National borders and the sovereignty of states are rooted in international law”, and “You cannot annex another country” is more than a little weak though. After all, hasn’t Putin proved, fairly conclusively, that you can indeed annex another country or part thereof, and if you have so much military might that no-one is prepared to stop you, then you can get away with it. And if you can get the leader of the biggest and most powerful country on side with what you are doing, it’s even easier.

If Trump were to decide that his need for a diversion had become so great that it was time to invade Greenland, then who or what is going to stop him? Not Denmark for sure, and even if Trump is turning against NATO, it doesn’t mean that NATO would use force to resist him. And not Russia, for whom a US annexation of Greenland would echo Putin's own rationale for invading Ukraine. We like to believe that we live in some sort of rules-based international order, but we don’t. Putin and Trump have already ripped up the rules. The question is how the rest of the world reacts to that. Denmark seems determined to join the UK in spluttering helplessly from the sidelines.

Stumbling onto a big question by accident

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Tory leader Kemi Badenoch talked on Thursday of her concern that young people will not fight for the UK if all it can offer them is unemployment. It’s a statement which is wrong on so many levels. Firstly, it isn’t just young people who are likely to be reluctant to get involved in a war; whilst young people have historically done most of the fighting (sometimes as a result of warmongering propaganda, sometimes merely out of a preference for taking their chances of being shot by the ‘enemy’ rather than the certainty of being shot by their own side, but mostly by being conscripted and obeying authority), all out war of the sort for which she and others are trying to prepare us depends on a much wider response than that. There is no evidence that older people are any more willing to face the sort of catastrophe which she and so many others seem to desire. Secondly, the word ‘fight’ is something of a euphemism in the way she uses it: what she really means is being prepared to kill complete strangers or be killed by those same strangers, a proposition which people are increasingly less likely to embrace. Even if much of the ‘information’ to which we are exposed is dubious, the availability of alternative views and perspectives is greater now than at any time in history: blind loyalty is correspondingly less common. We are no longer living in jingoistic imperial times, although many of our political leaders seem not to understand that.

Badenoch is also utterly wrong on the question of unemployment deterring volunteering for the military: for decades unemployment has been one of the main drivers of military recruitment. It’s no accident that military recruiters target their school and community visits on those areas with the most deprivation and highest levels of unemployment. For many of those being targeted, it is precisely the lack of any better opportunity which makes armed service an attractive option. The elimination of unemployment would actually make military recruitment harder, not easier, because we can be certain that the ‘young people’ she wants to do the killing and dying aren’t the ones from her social class, who land well-paid jobs though their connections and families, and buy homes using the bank of mam and dad.

And yet. We’ve had almost five decades of being told, under governments of both parties, that it’s not the job of the state to provide housing or employment, that individuals must do more for themselves, and that anyone not working is a burden on everyone else. The state, which was never an impartial observer or neutral referee, has facilitated, by deliberate choice, a huge growth in inequality in which the benefits of economic growth have trickled upwards from the many to the few. Living standards have been deliberately constrained for most of us, whilst a tiny minority has accumulated ever more wealth. Whole communities have been abandoned and left behind. In such a context, why would anyone feel loyalty to, and volunteer to be killed for, a state which primarily serves the interests of those who have benefited from that situation?

That is the underlying question which Badenoch is raising, and it’s a hugely significant question. I’m sure that she doesn’t realise what she is really asking – and would probably be horrified if she did, because it challenges everything she and her party have been saying for the last half century. It’s a neat demonstration of how it is possible to be completely wrong on the detail, yet somehow stumble by accident upon one of the biggest and most important questions facing us. The chances of her accidentally stumbling on any sort of answer are zero – she’s certainly not going to propose a reversal of the policies pursued over the last five decades. There’s a rather different challenge for the rest of us though – whatever it is which is deterring people from signing up for military service, do we really want a return to the days of ‘my country, right or wrong’ anyway?

War is a choice, not an inevitability

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One of the policies which seems to be increasingly common ground between the Tories and Reform Ltd is opposition to the target of becoming carbon neutral, or reaching net zero in terms of carbon emissions. It’s a policy platform which seems to be implicitly underpinned by two very curious beliefs.

The first is that expenditure on achieving neutrality is in some way consuming wealth whilst continued exploitation of fossil fuels is generating wealth. It is, of course, complete and utter piffle. If we measure wealth in terms of GDP (or GVA), what money is spent on is irrelevant. It is the act of spending it which adds to GDP; money spent in insulating properties adds as much to GDP as the same amount of money spent on drilling for oil – and that’s true whether the spending is in the public sector or the private sector. There might be an argument that multiplier effects mean that spending on X rather than Y ultimately generates more GDP per £ spent. I actually don’t know the answer in this specific case, but it’s interesting to note that it’s not an argument they are trying to make. I rather suspect that they are conflating two different kinds of wealth – national wealth as represented by GDP and private wealth as reflected in the bank balances of individuals and companies. I’m sure, though, that this conflation has nothing to do with the fact that both parties rely heavily on donations from established players in established sectors, such as oil and gas. Not.

The second curious belief is that if nothing gets spent on achieving net zero, the whole amount of any projected expenditure becomes a net saving, and makes money available for other things. Their favourite other things are tax cuts for the wealthy and/or channelling expenditure into donor companies, such as those in the armaments industry. Badenoch’s statement today is a classic of the genre. I suppose that, if they really believe that climate change is not happening at all, then it would be a reasonable belief, although that would be flying in the face of overwhelming scientific opinion. I’m not sure that they really do believe that, though; reading some of what they say, it seems more likely that they believe that we can and will somehow adapt to climate change. The costs of that, they simply ignore – a problem for another day.

Badenoch would clearly prefer war to addressing climate change, which I suppose puts her on the same page as Farage and Starmer. There is, though, more to the cost of war than diverting the finite resources of planet Earth into weapons of destruction. There is the obvious cost of loss of human lives (although they would probably all prefer to see that as a loss of a productive labour force). There’s also the lost opportunities which such diversion of resources would entail – the opportunity to provide a decent standard of living for all, for instance. Badenoch is making it clear that she thinks that austerity (obviously not for her section of society) is a price worth paying in order to prepare for all out war with Russia. And then there’s probably the biggest cost of all: in the event of surviving such a war, the cost of reconstruction would be enormous.

There is one point about which she is right. Governments face choices. Whether the constraint on what governments can do is the availability of money (as she, Starmer and Farage all insist that they believe) or the availability of physical resources (as economic reality dictates), governments still have to choose between options for using that money or those resources. Badenoch is making her choice clear – war. And she’s being aided and abetted by politicians and military types urging the same choice on an almost daily basis. There is an alternative, though: we really don’t have to allow them to make that choice.

Do capitalists understand capitalism?

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The criterion for determining whether or not a capitalist enterprise is viable or not is, in essence, very simple. To be viable, an enterprise needs to be able to sell its wares for a price which enables it to cover all the costs of production (labour, materials, etc), to pay all applicable taxes, to comply with all relevant laws and regulations, and to make a reasonable level of profit. In a rational world, the definition would be extended to add an environmental sustainability requirement, but that’s for another day. The corollary is that any enterprise which fails to meet that criterion is not viable in the market in which it is operating.

It probably shouldn’t surprise me, although it does, that so many capitalists seem not to understand the criterion at all. Some claim that taxation is a problem; others that minimum wage legislation stops them making a profit; yet others say that regulation and what they like to call ‘red tape’ prevent them making a profit. But, provided that all the rules and costs apply equally to all, a company which can’t afford to pay a living wage to its employees, or which needs exemptions from taxation, or which can only work if it doesn’t have to abide by environmental or health and safety legislation is a company which is, bluntly, not viable in the market in which it operates. If a company really can’t increase its prices when its costs increase, then one of two things must be true: either there is more supply than demand in the market at a price which makes the business viable, or else its competitors are operating more efficiently. Either way, according to strict capitalist rules, it is not viable as a business and should close.

Now, I’m not really advocating that hundreds of businesses across Wales should close down – but then, I’m not a huge fan of untrammelled capitalist markets either. I’m merely pointing out that capitalism, left to its own devices, requires that non-viable businesses fail. It’s a feature, not a bug, of the system. In the real world, there are all sorts of reasons why government authorities might want to keep some enterprises operating, using subsidies and exemptions in the process. It’s a valid role for government to perform. What we should not do, though, is pretend that the companies being thus supported are successful capitalist enterprises, let alone allow their owners to extract profits and dividends on the back of a subsidised existence. Yet, in industry after industry, that is precisely what we do. Interestingly, some of those who benefit from such government intervention are also the people bleating about the cost of benefits, pensions etc. It seems as though state largesse is only a bad thing when it goes to other people.

But what are they doing?

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For reasons which escape me, cutting the number of civil servants generally seems to be a popular policy. And there is no doubt that the simplistic impact of reducing the number of civil servants would be a reduction in the bill for salaries – even Reform Ltd can do simple sums like multiplying the number of people sacked by the salary they are being paid and calculating a ‘saving’. What they haven’t told us, though, is which civil servants are being sacked, and what they are actually doing at present. If they are doing nothing at all, and if they all find alternative jobs rapidly, then the projected savings are not unreasonable. Those are big ifs, though.

The reality is more complex: some of those 68,000 will join the ranks of the unemployed; that might cost less than paying them a salary, but it’s not a zero cost. Others will take their pension early, bringing forward government expenditure which might not have been expected to kick in for a few more years. Based on past experience, it would not be at all surprising if some ended up providing consultancy services to the civil service, to compensate for the lost expertise which had just been paid to walk out of the door, which would probably cost more than their salaries.

The biggest cost would be in undertaking the activities which they are currently performing. Assuming that at least some of them are actually performing a useful function, that function would still need to be performed. Maybe it would be contracted out to the private sector, enabling Farage’s mates to turn a profit. It would show as a cut in the salaries bill, but with a consequent increase in the bill for external service providers. Maybe the government would no longer provide the relevant services at all, leaving those who use them to pay private contractors directly – that would cut the government’s bills, but the end users would be worse off; instead of sharing the costs of those services across all citizens, they’d fall onto a smaller number of shoulders.

The point is that only on a very narrow view do wholesale arbitrary civil service cuts result in savings, and those savings are restricted to a single budget line. On any holistic view, those savings will be at least partly offset by increased costs elsewhere – how much and by whom they are paid is as unclear as it is indisputable. The approach seems to owe much to Elon Musk’s DOGE in the US, but the more we know about that, the more likely it is that the savings are largely imaginary, and that the exercise may even have increased costs. Cutting the number of civil servants may prove to be a popular policy with many (particularly those seduced by the false notion that only private sector activity creates wealth whilst public sector activity consumes that wealth) up to the point at which it impacts on themselves or their families. And it will. It is utterly dishonest, but then that’s only what most of us would expect from Farageists.

Is Russia the only enemy?

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The politicians and generals keep telling us that we must prepare for war with Russia – some are even claiming that we are already at war, in the light of Russia launching a variety of provocations including the use of drones for surveillance and cyber attacks on Western organisations. In order to justify diverting ever more resources into the profits of companies in the defence sector the purchase of armaments, some play up the danger of an actual physical attack, using armour and troops. It is, though, hard to believe that Putin doesn’t realise that such an attack would be certain to lead to a much wider war which, without resorting to nuclear weapons - in which case, everyone else also loses - he would be likely to lose.

That’s not to say that Putin doesn’t have malicious intent; just that the conquest, occupation, and Russification of countries with 500 million inhabitants by a country with only 145 million inhabitants is never going to be achievable, and Putin isn’t stupid enough to believe otherwise. He does, after all, have the experience of years of fighting over a much smaller country and all the losses Russia has incurred. It’s pretty clear, though, what his aims for any conflict would be – the breakup of NATO and the EU, regime change across Europe, replacing what pass for liberal democracies with authoritarian governments, and freedom for Russian oligarchs and kleptocrats to further enrich themselves. He doesn’t need to invade anyone to achieve that; indeed, invasion would destroy a lot of the resources which he and his pals covet. Misinformation, election interference, dirty money, cyber crime – all these are more effective weapons at his disposal. And no amount of expenditure on tanks, guns or conscription of the sort which the politicians and generals are demanding across Europe will prevent that.

By a curious coincidence, Putin isn’t the only one who seeks the destruction of the EU, wholesale European regime change, and more freedom for oligarchs and kleptocrats. The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy, published last week, is remarkably explicit in calling for much the same thing, with direct interference in elections in favour of Trumpian policies and Trump-aligned parties now an official and public part of US strategy. Those who think that we are already at war with Russia because of Russian interference in European politics seem incapable of recognising that, applying similar criteria, the US could also be considered to be at war with us. European countries are caught in a pincer movement, with larger neighbours to both the east and the west intent on ripping out liberal, tolerant democracies (or semi-democracies, such as the UK) and replacing them with authoritarian white nationalist regimes which persecute and harass minorities and opponents and pay homage to Moscow / Washington.

That doesn’t mean to suggest that Russia and the US are in cahoots (although they may well be moving that way), merely that their rulers’ perceptions of their own geopolitical interests in Europe increasingly coincide in a way which is much broader than a mutual desire to carve up Ukraine. A response which consists of diverting ever more resources into armaments not only does nothing to address the problem (would we really get into a shooting war with either Russia or the US, let alone both of them at the same time?), it actively makes it worse by holding down living standards in a way which creates the discontent on which politicians pursuing the Putin-Trump agenda feed. Improving the welfare and living standards of the population would be a much better way of demonstrating European values and keeping the barbarians at bay, but our politicians seem keener on facilitating barbarianism than protecting values and civilisation.

A seasonal budget pantomime

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There is something quite seasonal about the Labour-Plaid deal over the Senedd budget. It is, after all, that time of the year when pantomimes proliferate. In the case of the budget, the Finance Minister knew that he could not get a budget supported only by Labour through the Senedd, so he presented a budget with £380 million unallocated to allow him some space to bargain. He knew what he wanted to do with that money – and he also knew that his priorities just happened to largely coincide with the demands which Plaid would make. So a little bit of negotiation and some changes around the detail, and hey presto – the reserved money gets put back into a budget which ends up looking remarkably like it would probably have looked in the first place, but now supported by a majority. Labour claim a win, Plaid claim a win, and the rest can only proclaim in unison, “Oh no it isn’t”.

Like all good pantos, superficially it’s largely performative. But, again like all good pantos, there’s a serious side to the slapstick as well. In a legislature elected partly on a proportional basis – and which, from next year, will be elected on a wholly proportional basis – no party can expect to have a majority in the chamber unless they attract at least 50% of the vote and, in the currently fragmented political world, that looks vanishingly unlikely in future. Harsh reality says that negotiation and agreement should be the norm; responsible parties need to be willing to compromise in order to ensure effective government. The alternative to the agreement which has been reached was a degree of chaos and the potential loss of large sums of money to the Senedd – reaching an agreement is sound and responsible politics, even if some would quibble with some of the detail.

It's a pity, though, that it requires such dramatics to get there. Maybe, over time, as coalition / pragmatic agreement becomes ever more normal, we can get to the same place faster without cliff-hangers; maybe, if the UK ever adopts a more proportional electoral system for Westminster, Wales won’t look so different from the accepted UK ‘winner takes all’ norm and compromise will come to be more accepted. Then again, maybe not. Perhaps the driver of achieving perceived political ‘victory’ in negotiations will always be a requisite of any agreement in order to try and demonstrate the absence of any type of sellout. But concentrating criticism on whether something is or is not a sellout avoids discussion about the detail. And is wholly in line with the Tory/Reform approach to political debate.

Should we demand the abolition of the USA?

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Annoyed at being fined for failing to comply with EU regulations, Elon Musk has demanded that: “The EU should be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries”. Perhaps the EU should respond with the counter-demand that: “The US should be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual states”. Actually, Musk might even agree with that in principle, if he had any principles – but it looks as though his real beef is about any state, or co-ordinated alliance of states, being big enough and strong enough to stand up to what he regards as the natural order of things: rule by billionaire. The difference, though, is that the US federal government has already been captured by the billionaires, and doesn’t need to be broken up to facilitate their rule.

There are, and always have been, questions over how much sovereignty (and in what fields) the EU’s member states should exercise individually and how much they should share; but acting jointly on some issues and agreeing rules which all members must follow is undoubtedly advantageous in a world where some corporations and individuals wield excessive power. It’s easy to understand why monopolists would prefer to deal with a host of weaker individual states on which they can impose their power. The real issue, though, and it’s not one which the EU seems minded even to consider, let alone tackle, is about how we collectively free ourselves from the increasingly oppressive rule of kleptocrats and billionaires. There is nothing natural or inevitable about the accumulation of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands; it happens because the laws and rules under which the economy operates have been written to allow and facilitate it. But those laws and rules are made by humans, and humans acting collectively could change them. If enough of us wanted to do so.

Keeping us safe from threats

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Last week, a retired general told us that the UK is 10 years away from being ready for a war with Russia, a war which the political and military leaders of the UK seem increasingly determined to fight. The general’s views were inevitably reported as though it was a bad thing to be so unready for a war which would in the best case destroy much of Europe and in the worst case end human civilization. The military mind always sees an unreadiness to fight a war as being a bad thing, but what if that unreadiness is actually a good thing?

An attempt by Russia to conquer and subdue the entire continent of Europe (which is what a pre-meditated attack on a Nato country implies) would be madness, even if Russia hadn’t already proved how incapable it is of subduing one country right on its borders. It is possible, of course, that Putin really is mad, but his actions to date appear to be due more to miscalculation than insanity. He will surely have learnt something from his misadventures in Ukraine. The only anywhere near rational reason for a decision to attack the whole of NATO would be if he became completely convinced that it was necessary to pre-empt an attack by NATO on Russia. Getting his retaliation in first, in other words.

Now I don’t actually believe that NATO countries want to start a war with Russia (which isn’t the same thing as saying that there are no individual military men or politicians who do), but I’m not sitting in the Kremlin looking at the world through Russian eyes with an intense awareness of Russian history. He might be wrong to conclude that NATO is preparing to attack his country but, listening to the generals and war-mongers, it’s not an entirely unreasonable conclusion for him to reach. So if the biggest danger for us lies in reinforcing his fears, which keeps us safer: stepping up preparedness for war or being so unready that he feels no immediate need to act?

One of the lessons of history is that militarisation and arms races almost invariably lead to war, and can even do so almost by accident. Deliberately choosing not to prepare for all-out war with Russia stands traditional policy on its head, but it also allows us to make policy choices which improve the living standards of people in the UK rather than diverting resources into essentially wasteful weapons of destruction; policy choices which the politicians tell us are impossible. The warmongers tell us that the first duty of any government is to keep its citizens safe, but they don’t encourage debate about the question of ‘safe from what?’ Cutting lives short through war is an obvious danger, but lives are also shortened by poverty, ill health, and poor education. The former is a future danger (the remoteness of which is hard to judge), the latter is happening here and now. There’s a lot more nuance to ‘keeping citizens safe’ than preparing to kill Russians.

Volatility and spooking aren't exactly the same thing

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Last week, just before the Budget, the Guardian published this article about the ‘power’ of the bond markets over governments. Whether it entirely supports the contention that the government must at all costs avoid ‘spooking’ the markets is another question. Indeed, one trader made it clear that “What you really crave in this industry is movement, volatility”. It’s the opposite of what the government wants, but speculative traders thrive on it. Volatility, of the sort which is described as ‘spooking’, is what helps the speculators to turn small margins on huge trades into profits for themselves. Those speculators actually want the government to surprise them, in the hope that they are better placed to react than their competitors and make a killing – stability is boring and largely unprofitable.

As with so many aspects of the financial markets, the underlying issue is that markets created to fill valid social needs have been captured by people who are driven by a culture of greed and gambling. The government takes in peoples savings in return for bonds on which it offers savers a fixed long term interest rate; large institutional investors hold those bonds as part of pension funds and life insurance funds. For all of those players, market stability is a definite plus, enabling them to plan with confidence. But the gamblers and speculators who use those markets for their own purposes want no such thing; they want the sort of volatility in which they are each trying to second guess each other and from which some make a profit and some make a loss by making multiple large trades in rapid succession. Far from being ‘spooked’, they are actually delighted by what they see as opportunity.

The question we should be asking is not about how we limit what governments can or should do to keep the markets stable, but about what we need to do to control and manage markets in a way that they serve social needs rather than constrain policy options. To date, humanity has not found a better way of matching buyers and sellers than using markets, and markets perform a useful social function. There is, though, no such thing as a ‘free’ market: all markets work under a set of rules. The issue is who sets those rules and in whose interests they operate, and to what extent those markets should be allowed to become the playthings of gamblers and speculators rather than performing the socially useful function of facilitating exchange. What Reeves and Starmer have decided – like all the other Tories in the recent past – is that they are happy for those markets to be captured by selfish interests, and for those interests then to have a veto on what government policies are, or are not, acceptable. The argument that there is no alternative is merely an excuse to justify what their ideological perspective tells them to do anyway.

Buying shares isn't the same as investing

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For most people, the reduction announced in the budget yesterday to the limit on cash ISA’s, from £20,000 to £12,000 per annum, is an academic question. There can’t be many on an average salary who have even £12,000 available to save, let alone £20,000. The tax-free status of interest on such accounts is effectively a subsidy to those who do have that sort of money to put aside. As ever, the taxation system in the UK works to promote the flow of money from those who have less to those who have more. Who ever said that Conservative politicians – of whatever stripe – don’t believe in redistribution? They do – just in the wrong direction.

The argument for that subsidy was always that ‘saving’ was a ‘good thing’ for people to do, and should be encouraged. Reeves has effectively being saying for some time that ‘saving’ isn’t such a good idea after all – what we really need is investment. She’s right in principle, but utterly wrong in the implementation. She is arguing that those who are in a position to put aside the full £20,000 must put the remaining £8,000 into stocks and shares, but defining that as ‘investment’ is just plain wrong. Certainly, if someone buys shares in a start-up, that is an investment: the money goes into the company and is used to pay the initial costs. In return for that, the investor owns a chunk of the company in the form of shares and can expect dividends paid out of profits if the company is a success. But when they sell those shares, even if the person buying them pays two or three times as much for them, not one penny of the payment for those second-hand shares goes into the company for further investment. That doesn’t mean that the new owner doesn’t own a chunk of the company, nor that (s)he won’t receive dividends, merely that the transaction doesn’t represent a new investment in anything. It creates no added value at all.

It might, though, lead to an inflated share price. If Reeves’ approach leads to more ISA monies being used to purchase existing stocks and shares, the price (and therefore the apparent value) of those stocks and shares will increase, in line with the basic rules of supply and demand. That in turn has two effects: firstly, it increases the disparity between the ‘value’ of the shares and the underlying value of the company and its assets, and secondly it makes it more likely that those shareholders will lose some of their apparent wealth if the shares crash. And the greater the disparity, the more likely it is that there will be a crash, or at least a ‘market correction’ at some point, probably as the result of an external shock. Reeves is not only trying to force more people to risk their capital by saving in ways where the price can go down as well as up, she’s also increasing the level of that risk. All because of a dodgy definition of investment.

She’s right, though, in saying that the UK needs more investment. But if we define investment as being the creation of new assets – for instance, new companies, new equipment, new infrastructure – there are better ways of doing it than persuading people to put their money in the hands of market speculators and gamblers. Public sector investment in infrastructure is one of those, but you wouldn’t know that from listening to the Chancellor.

What about the digestives?

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A Labour MP has produced a short video which has gone viral in an attempt to explain the so-called government debt crisis in terms of the ratio between bourbon biscuits (debt) and custard creams (GDP). I’m not sure whether he’s fully thought through the possibility that, for those of us (count me in) who prefer bourbons, this might make the idea of bigger debts more attractive. More worryingly, it made me wonder whether the budget to be announced by the Chancellor later today might itself be based on biscuit mathematics rather than economics, although that might help to explain the odd choices she seems determined to make. One thing that was clear, as the MP piled up his biscuits, was that there was a remarkable lack of crumbs. I suppose that might well be another accurate budget prediction.

What biscuit-based economics skates over, however, is that underlying it is the same set of assumptions as are used by government and opposition alike in their own money-based economics. Treating the amount of money which savers queue up to place on deposit with the government as though it’s a serious debt problem, pretending that the UK has a maxed-out credit card, and ignoring the fact that a goodly chunk of the interest payments being made by the government are actually paid to, er, the government itself so that that element of expenditure immediately also becomes income, are all signs of a commitment to the ridiculous household analogy for government finances. Doing the accounts in biscuits might be mildly entertaining, but it is still economic nonsense.

The number of custard creams and bourbons isn’t actually the limiting factor on what we can do. As Keynes would probably have said, if he’d decided to base his major works on biscuits, if the biscuit factory has the capacity to produce more biscuits, if the materials are available, if there are enough available workers, and if the environmental impact of making biscuits can be met, then we can make as many biscuits as we want. Although, speaking personally, I’d opt for a nice chocolate digestive.

There's nothing just about Trump's plan - or even Europe's

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In response to the ‘Trump’ plan for peace in Ukraine (which according to some was actually drawn up by Russia rather than Trump, although its precise provenance remains in some doubt), Keir Starmer has said it needs more work in order to turn it into a “just and lasting peace”. Fine words, but whether they’re any more meaningful than a standard Trump word salad is open to question. To be ‘lasting’, it has to provide cast iron guarantees of no future aggression against Ukraine, and the version published to date offers no more than wishy-washy words.

But the bigger issue is defining a “just” peace. If we’re seriously talking about ‘justice’, then any agreement has to include a return to the internationally-recognised boundaries prior to the seizure of parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea, an agreement on reparations for damage caused by an illegal invasion, a system of trials for war crimes committed, and agreement that any future changes to boundaries will be negotiated, not imposed by force. Such a ‘just’ outcome, realistically, isn’t going to be on the table – it could only ever be an option if other countries were willing to use their own military forces to impose such an outcome. What Starmer is talking about is not whether the outcome is ‘just’ or not, but whether the degree of injustice is acceptable to Ukraine and to those countries providing Kyiv with armaments and other support. He's just not honest enough to say so.

The question for the UK becomes one of deciding just how much injustice it should ask Ukraine to accept in the cause of peace. A ceasefire along the current lines of control whilst negotiations on the longer term continue (but without formally recognising the occupied territories as Russian) is a big ask for Ukraine (and utterly unjust), but without external military support it’s probably as good as it gets. But given how much ground Trump has already conceded to Putin, he may already have made even that an impossible outcome. Since Putin knows (not least because Trump appears to have told him so) that Trump will support him in asking for much more than that, it’s hard to see why Putin would back down significantly on what he thinks Trump has already agreed, namely the handover of even more of Ukraine, the formal recognition of Russian sovereignty over the occupied territory, the forgiveness of all Russian war crimes and the reintegration of Russia into a US-led global kleptocracy.

Starmer is doing his best to look like some sort of global statesman from an age where the UK’s opinion counted for something, but it really doesn’t. The truth is that, if they jointly so decide, the two dictators, Trump and Putin, have the power to impose their will. I don’t like that, but me not liking something doesn’t make it untrue. The biggest obstacle to a Trump-Putin accord is not a gang of European middle-ranking powers pleading with Trump, it is that Trump doesn’t actually know what he wants from one day to the next. He certainly loves being flattered, and it’s easy to see why so many have concluded that flattery might be the best way to influence him, but how long that influence lasts after they’ve left his presence is a different matter.

Assuming that the world order will return to what was previously regarded as ‘normal’ once Trump goes is a dangerous starting point, not least because we don’t know when he will go or what will follow him. It’s an unstated assumption, though, which seems to underpin Starmer’s stance – which means that there is no planning going on for the new world in which we may be living for some time to come.

Where do you want to be shot?

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When ‘news’ papers have a space to fill, one common response is to report the results of some survey or other listing the world’s favourite **** (insert item of your choice here). The extent to which the findings are meaningful is an open question. Passing through Heathrow a few weeks ago, I spotted this advert urging people to vote for Heathrow as their favourite airport.

And there was a similar message (for a different airport, obviously) at the destination. Respondents are self-selecting (none of this demographic weighting stuff), and are not required to have actually visited any other airports – or, even, the one for which they are voting. And the appeal of the message is a clear one – vote for ‘your’ airport. More of a loyalty test than a scientific survey. It's a reminder that we should always be questioning the context and methods used in any survey, even professionally conducted opinion polls, before blindly accepting the headline summary.

Which brings me to a report in yesterday’s Sunday Times about a More in Common opinion poll which suggested that 67% would prefer the Chancellor’s budget this week to fill the fiscal black hole by cutting spending rather than increasing taxes on working people. It’s hardly a surprising result – as a general rule, people seem to naively believe that spending cuts somehow affect ‘other people’ whereas tax cuts impact them directly. But, in reality, it’s a bit like an assassin asking whether you’d prefer to be shot in the head or in the heart: it avoids the much more important question about whether you really want to be shot at all. The existence of Rachel Reeves’ black hole isn’t questioned, and nor is the need to fill it by balancing the budget. In effect, the reporting of a simple opinion poll (which I’m sure was conducted professionally in terms of its methodology) manages to confirm and reinforce the Overton window for debate around government finances, confining it to the assumptions made by the UK’s three right-wing parties (Tories, Reform and Labour), all of which are signed up to the ridiculous household analogy for government finances.

For all the leaks, briefings and speculation, we don’t yet know what Reeves will announce this week, but whether she opts for spending cuts, tax rises, or some combination of the two, the effect will be much the same: she will be reducing the purchasing power (and therefore the standard of living) of millions of people in pursuit of an ideological position which imposes upon her an entirely arbitrary set of rules which she herself has designed. And the post-budget debate will revolve around whether the totals she’s arrived at are correct and whether there’s a better combination to achieve the same outcome. But who will be asking whether we really want to be shot at all?

What sort of Wales?

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In a curiously contradictory article on Nation.Cymru yesterday, Labour MS Mike Hedges started off asserting very strongly that Wales is neither too small nor too poor to be independent before launching into a list of reasons why we can’t afford it. We're too poor and we can't afford it sound remarkably similar propositions to me. Those reasons are all based, naturally, on a set of assumptions that most independentistas would challenge, but his underlying point that those supporting independence should produce some sort of budget showing how independence would work is not entirely without merit. Working out what it actually means, though, is a lot more complex: as is usual from those making such a demand, it seems to start from an assumption that independence would happen tomorrow and people should understand the implications of that before voting.

In truth, of course, independence will not happen tomorrow. There will be no referendum on the question unless and until there is a majority in the Senedd in favour of holding one (and, as Scotland has shown, even that doesn’t guarantee one). None of the polls for next May’s Senedd election suggest such an outcome, and even if they did, the largest party in favour has, rather strangely, already ruled out holding one for at least four years. So, the earliest that a Welsh government will even start a process of trying to hold a referendum is 2030, and the earliest date for a referendum is perhaps a year or two after securing agreement – optimistically around 2032. Assuming a positive vote, there would then need to be a period during which negotiations on the details take place – not just with the government of the soon to be ex-UK, but also with international organisations. There would also need to be a period during which the organisations, institutions and processes of an independent Welsh government were created – tax collectors, for instance. Some will see this as unduly pessimistic on my part, but I can see that interim period lasting for perhaps 5 years, meaning that independence would be in or around 2037. But a vote for independence is a vote for a different future, and the reality is that change will take some time even after that. So, while Hedges has a point in saying that people voting (in say 2032) should know what they are voting for, what they need is not an independence budget for 2026, it’s a budget for an independent Wales in around 2042. And for the sake of a decent comparison of alternatives, they need to be able to compare that directly with a budget for continued participation in the UK in 2042.

The problems in providing that comparison are large and obvious; both sets of figures would be based on a huge range of assumptions, all of which would be challenged by the ‘other’ side. It is, of course, possible for any independentista to produce something of an indicative budget for a future independent Wales without specifying to which year it would apply. It would take an amount of work and would be subject to the same caveats around the assumptions made. It would not, though, be a budget for ‘independence’; it would be a budget for the sort of independence favoured by those drawing up the budget. As one obvious example, some independentistas favour continuing to use sterling; others favour a new Welsh currency. The difference between the two in terms of the implications for decisions by the Welsh government is enormous.

The point is that what makes the difference isn’t independence as such. Independence isn’t the magic bullet that some supporters would like it to be, nor is it the millstone which opponents claim it would be; it’s merely an enabler which can be used in a variety of ways. When looking at the finances of a future Wales, what matters is what sort of Wales we want to see. Instead of making impossible demands for clarity and precision from those who support independence, opponents should be setting out how the union will solve, rather than perpetuate, Wales poor economic performance. Given their abject failure to date, it’s easy to understand why they don’t do that.

Assuming honourableness isn't always wise

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Once upon a time, I found myself managing part of a large outsourcing contract, with a customer who turned out to be, shall we say, a little difficult. The approach to anything they didn’t like was a combination of shouting and threats, and there was a lot they didn’t like and on which the contract was either silent or vague. In an internal meeting, I asked the guy who had negotiated the contract how on earth we’d got ourselves into such a situation where there was so little clarity on the detail, and his response was along the lines of, “We thought we were dealing with honourable people”. An interesting, if less than entirely helpful response.

I wonder if the framers of the 22^nd Amendment to the US Constitution may have been suffering from a similar degree of trust in the integrity of individuals. It seems to me to be crystal-clear that Trump is ineligible to stand again, yet he repeatedly holds out the prospect of serving a third term. But what’s not clear from the amendment itself is the actual mechanism for preventing him from standing. Can the US equivalent of the Returning Officer refuse to accept his nomination? Can the Chief Justice refuse to swear him in? Or was it just assumed that making his ineligibility clear was enough in itself? The issue would probably end up before multiple judges at some point. It’s probably academic, though. I don’t think that Trump has any intention of fighting another presidential election, even if the ravages of time (he’s not a young man and is clearly deteriorating both physically and mentally) throw at least a degree of doubt on whether he will be able to. He was quite taken with what Zelensky told him some months ago about not holding elections during a period of martial law – his preference is likely to be for a third term without the bother of an election.

The framers of the 25^th Amendment may have suffered from a similarly touching degree of faith in the integrity of individuals. Whilst they wisely foresaw the possibility that a president might need to be removed from office if he was no longer able to discharge the duties, including by reason of insanity, they don’t seem to have allowed for the possibility that those given the responsibility for deciding that the president was insane might be even madder, just better at completing an occasional sentence. Those US citizens – to say nothing of the rest of the world – resting their hopes on Vance and the Cabinet eventually deciding that enough is enough should be careful what they wish for. There is absolutely no reason for anyone to believe that the removal of Trump would end the nightmare.

The whole approach of governments the world over, including Starmer in the UK, seems to be predicated on an assumption that there will be an end to Trumpism in a defined electoral timescale. They need to be preparing a Plan B.

Peas in a pod

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Yesterday, the owner and proprietor of Reform 2025 Ltd revealed that he thinks the national minimum wage is too high for younger people and should be cut.  He has also previously talked about cutting benefits. With their shared determination to reduce the income and spending power of those on the lowest income in society, in purely economic terms Reform, Labour and the Tories are increasingly looking like peas in a pod. There is another thing they all share as well – a belief that the answer to everything is economic growth. How they reconcile that desire with the desire to reduce the purchasing power of millions of people is one of life’s great mysteries. Because here’s the thing – if you want consumption-led growth, people have to be able to consume, and that means having the wherewithal to buy goods and services.

Instead, they share a strange belief that enabling employers to reduce wage costs and freeing them from regulatory concerns will enable them to cut prices, thus making their goods and services more affordable. They simply don’t understand that making the lives of more people more precarious is a restraint on growth. They also seem to be blind to the experience that shows that employers reducing costs are more likely to simply declare larger profits than to cut prices.

It goes to the heart of one of the big contradictions of capitalism itself. Whilst individual capitalists want to keep their labour costs as low as possible to maximise their own profits, they also need other employers to keep wages as high as possible so that people can buy those things from which the cost-cutting capitalists wish to extract their profit. The idea, which seems to be deeply imprinted into the capitalist brain, that workers and consumers are two entirely separate groups and that impoverishing one of those groups has no impact on the other is sheer madness. It’s also what drives UK economic policy.

Poverty - a price worth paying?

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The military mind, to the extent to which that phrase is not an oxymoron, is a strange beast. It sees threats on all sides from people who want to invade and conquer, and the solution is always the same – more military hardware and personnel. To dismiss the conclusions of that strange beast is not the same as denying that there is any threat, it’s more that the threats aren’t the ones they want us to believe in. It’s true, of course, that some dictators actually want to expand the territories over which they rule – Russia’s dictator probably has eyes on more of his neighbours, although he’s almost certainly not mad enough to have learnt nothing from his costly behaviour in Ukraine. The USA’s dictator probably is mad enough to learn nothing from anything he does, and he too has designs on neighbouring territories.

There is, though, no serious threat from anywhere to invade the UK, and there is no country in the world which has enough resources to carry out a successful invasion and then to control and rule the territory afterwards. That particular threat is completely illusory – and it’s worth noting that there is little in the UK’s current military posture which is actually geared to prevent or resist a land invasion anyway. The threats are more subtle than that, and more guns and bombs will do little to prevent them. The question we should always be asking is why, exactly, would anyone want to attack the UK, and the only rational answer to that question is that they might be led to believe that the UK might otherwise attack them. Defence, in that context, implies an understanding of what might look to others like a threat and considering how to avoid that perception. As Simon Jenkins put it in the Guardian this morning in relation to China, soft power is more important than military power and “It is therefore absurd that the British government is planning to splurge billions more on defending Britain from a purely notional third world war [while] slashing the budget of its overseas cultural institution”.

There is another question which we should be asking ourselves, which was provoked by, even if it wasn’t quite the intention, the words of a retired general who said this week that we should reduce welfare spending to devote more resources to the military; and that question is very simple – who or what is it we are trying to defend? Reducing the spending power of the poorest in society to spend more on weaponry – clearly the implication of his words – means that he sees keeping some people in poverty as a price worth paying to defend us against his imagined threats. It illustrates clearly a dramatic difference in priorities. The problem we face is that most of our politicians seem to agree with him in principle – it’s guns before butter all over again.

Carts, horses, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer

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One central element of the Chancellor’s economic strategy is the pursuit of growth, as measured by GDP or GVA. Growth is good, according to her. But is that necessarily true – can some types of growth be more valuable than others – and can some types even be a bad thing? One element of her pursuit of growth is the suggestion that pubs, clubs and restaurants should be able to remain open until the early hours. It doesn’t necessarily follow that she is arguing that more drunkenness is a good thing from a health perspective (health professionals have certainly expressed their concerns), but she is certainly arguing that it is a good thing from an economic perspective. More spending on alcohol boosts GDP – that’s inarguable (although a more rounded view might just query whether there might be an impact on productivity and absenteeism). It’s the sort of position which someone gets into by looking only at narrow economic considerations.

There’s another sense in which it takes only a narrow view as well. Implicit in the proposal (which has clearly been inspired and promoted by the ‘hospitality’ sector) is the assumption that people have the financial ability to spend more money on food and drink, and the only thing preventing them from doing so is restricted licensing hours. That is simply not the reality for many: more money spent on meals and drinks out means less money to spend on other things. When money is tight, people make choices, and the result – in economic terms – is that an apparent boost in GDP in one sector leads to a drop in GDP somewhere else. Households aren’t like governments – they can’t simply expand the supply of money to purchase the available resources of food and drink.

Whether extended opening hours are a good thing or not is a separate question. The idea of restricted hours is an echo of a more puritan past, and if extended hours cause no problems for local residents and if proprietors can make them financially viable, then why not allow them to do so? But believing that creating more opportunities for people to spend is the solution to growth is putting the cart before the horse. For people to spend more money they first need to have more money: consumer-led growth depends on people’s financial resources. Yet much of Reeves’ programme seems to be directed at reducing those resources rather than increasing them.

Backdating laws is a dangerous precedent to set

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It seems unlikely that Katie Lam, who is, apparently, a ‘rising star’ in the Conservative Party, gave even a millisecond’s thought to Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland when she called for deportation on a scale which would restore a sufficient degree of ‘cultural coherence’ to the UK. It’s hard to interpret ‘cultural coherence’ as meaning anything other than ‘white, English-speaking’ though. It’s racist through and through, but then perhaps what gives her that rising star status is an ability to find new words to express racism without explicitly referring to race. It’s pretty clear that any minority which doesn’t fit her definition must be kept as small as possible, and can never be truly ‘British’, even if she really means English.

One aspect of what she had to say is particularly concerning, in her call for people who followed all the rules, and have been living in the UK entirely legally, to be deported on the grounds that the rules were wrong at the time. The immediate impact would be felt by large numbers of families which would be torn apart if one member were to be deported – unless, of course, she’s also planning to deport UK citizens who were born and raised here along with one or both of their parents. The secondary impact would be the loss of productive workers across a number of sectors of the UK economy, including in particular (although not limited to) health and care.

There is also a third implication of her proposed approach. If it were ever to be implemented, it would mean that none of us could any longer be certain that what we did legally 10, 20 or even 30 years ago is not retrospectively considered to be a criminal act. Changing immigration rules retrospectively might well appeal to those of a racist bent, but it’s a dangerous precedent to set. That it is official Tory policy to backdate rule changes by decades underlines just how far that party has moved from its traditional respect for the rule of law.

The danger hasn't gone away

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As the dust settles in Caerffili, there is widespread relief that the threatened victory for Reform Ltd didn’t happen, despite what some of the polls suggested. But whether it really signifies a victory for ‘progressive’ views over conservative ones is rather harder to determine. One simplistic analysis I’ve seen suggests that adding the Plaid, Green, Labour, and Lib Dem vote percentages together and comparing that with the total of Reform Ltd, Tories and UKIP gives a ratio of 61% to 38%, a very comfortable margin. (It’s not entirely clear where Gwlad fits in this analysis, but at 0.3% of the vote, it’s hardly a significant factor. Where the Lib Dems sit is another variable, it may depend on who you speak to and whether there’s an ‘R’ in the month, but again, at 1.5% it’s not a huge factor.)

Everything depends, though, on whether those who voted for the Labour candidate can really be seen as ‘progressively minded’ voters. On matters such as immigration, climate change and economics, Sir Starmer’s Labour is moving ever closer to the Reform/Tory position; in policy terms they don’t deserve to be included on the same side of the balance as Plaid/ Green. If their 11% gets moved from one column into the other, the result looks very different. Plaid and Green on 48.9% compared to Reform/Tory/UKIP/Labour on 49.2% is no longer a victory of any sort, let alone a sweeping one.

We don’t know what exactly happened to Labour’s traditional vote, but we can assume that some stayed at home, rather than voting at all. Of the rest, the more ‘progressive’ elements may well have switched to Plaid as a block on Reform Ltd. But we also know that there has been movement from Labour to Reform across the UK; there’s no good reason to assume that some of that didn’t happen in Caerffili. Not all Labour voters are as ‘progressive’ as myth and wishful thinking might suggest. Those who were left are probably Labour’s hard core – ‘My party, right or wrong’ – and are, at the least, generally content to go along with Starmer. That gives no reason to place them in the ‘progressive’ column.

There is a danger of complacency – because Caerffili sent Reform Ltd packing, maybe they’re not the threat many feared. But that complacency is based on an outdated and romantic view of the average Welsh voter as inherently ‘left’ of the average English voter. The views of Reform Ltd, whether expressed directly by them, or by the Tory and Labour parties rushing to ape them, have taken root more than we might care to admit. The danger hasn’t gone away.

Sucking money out of the economy

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We won’t know exactly how much money Rachel Reeves is planning to suck out of the UK economy until she stands up and delivers her budget on 26 November. There is a sense in which the actual number matters little – the underlying principles remain the same. One of the big ‘ideas’, a term which can only be used loosely, is to cut spending on benefits. It is true, of course, that, if the government spends less on benefits, then the gap between spending and income will reduce, and (assuming that to be a ‘good thing’, which seems to be the position of both government and opposition), the overall government finances will look ‘better’ as a result. But the thinking of those looking at government finances – whether Reeves or the Tories – seems to stop at that point, as though government finances can be considered in isolation. In reality they can’t.

Reducing benefits reduces the spending power of some of the poorest in society, which – in economic terms – reduces overall demand in the economy. (To those not glued irrevocably to economic mantras, it also impacts people’s lives, health and welfare, but I don’t really expect either Reeves or the Tories to worry unduly about that.) One of the key differences between the Tories and Labour on this is that the Tories seem committed to ‘giving away’ part of the money saved in the form of tax cuts, whilst Labour seem more committed to larger reductions in the current account deficit. Superficially, in overall economic terms, reducing taxes decreases the size of the hit to the economy of that reduced demand, but that ignores the way in which the costs and benefits are distributed. Reducing the spending power of the poorest (which is what benefit cuts do) whilst increasing the spending power of the richest (which is what tax cuts do) means that inequality continues to rise. It’s where simplistic economic analysis starts to break down – the total numbers tell us one simplistic story about the overall impact, but the detail tells us that there are winners and losers. That detail is important. Well, to most of us it probably is. But most of us includes neither Reeves and Starmer nor the Tories.

Nose-holding might not always be entirely dishonourable

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The deliberations of the committee awarding the Nobel Peace Prize are secret. It’s just as well; it’s easy enough to imagine how much hilarity Trump’s hyped-up claims to have solved several wars (some of which the ‘participants’ didn’t even know had happened) would have caused the members. It’s also easy to imagine the extent to which Trumpian anger would have boiled over had that hilarity become publicly known rather than merely widely assumed.

It's probably reasonable to assume that his blatant campaigning for the prize might just have rubbed a few people up the wrong way as well: it’s not the way things are usually done. It’s hard to believe that a man who renamed the Department of Defence as the Department of War; whose government demands a stronger warrior culture and the abandonment of any rules of engagement which might prevent US forces from unleashing fear and intimidation; who is determined to unleash maximum lethal force on the streets of his own country; and who has taken to random extra-judicial killings of people in boats in international waters might not have struggled a little to be seen as a ‘man of peace’.

He might, though, have just the tiniest bit of justification in his jealousy about how Obama got the award so early in his presidency. What exactly had Obama done at that point to justify the award other than having learned to string a sentence together and avoid being called George Bush? Neither of those two things are entirely inconsequential, but they’re not exactly epoch-making either. Brokering a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel is no mean feat, although since it appears to have happened only because Trump effectively ordered Netanyahu to stop the bombing there are questions about whether it could have been done earlier. His expectation that he could announce the ceasefire one day and pick up the prize the next was always a long way short of realistic.

If the ceasefire holds and turns into a lasting peace, then maybe next year or the year after he might actually deserve some sort of recognition even while continuing to attract condemnation for many of the other things he does. He doesn’t understand the connectedness and maybe we shouldn't even expect him to; for him, the self-styled great deal-maker, every deal should be judged in complete isolation. It’s part of his natural transactionalism. There may even be a sense in which holding out the possibility of the prize which he clearly covets so much might encourage him to stick with the Israel-Palestine peace process for longer than his usual gnat’s length attention span. The probability of that happening currently looks very low, but if a nod-and-a-wink now made such an outcome more likely, might not a bit of collective nose-holding be worthwhile?

What is racism if not judging on skin colour?

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When I look at current leaders of the Tory Party, I don’t see a single white face. It’s a stupid, racist comment to make, of course. But is it really more racist than Jenrick’s comment that he didn’t see another white face on a visit to an area of Birmingham? How many people did he see, and in how big an area, over that fateful 90 minutes? Without such statistical context, it’s impossible to draw any meaningful conclusions about what it means for integration. How much bigger was his sample than the sample of one in the first sentence above? It’s worse than that, though. Suppose all the faces had been white, but they’d all been Poles or Romanians? How would he have known? And why would that have been more acceptable to him?

Both Jenrick and his party leader claim that his remarks weren’t racist, but leaping to a conclusion about the extent to which people are, or can be, ‘integrated’ into UK society (whatever that means – and other than dispersing them more widely geographically, it’s not at all clear that Jenrick knows what it means either) based purely on one visible characteristic, skin colour, is about as close to a textbook definition of racism as one can get. Maybe he really, genuinely isn’t a racist himself, but he knows that more than a few voters are, and he knows how to appeal to their prejudices.

By a curious coincidence (?), Handsworth, the part of Birmingham dishonoured by Jenrick’s presence, just happens to be next door to Smethwick, scene of an infamous electoral battle in 1964 which the Tories won on the basis of a campaign based on the number of non-white faces in the area. The Tory candidate that time round denied being racist too. It’s probably being excessively charitable to suggest that Jenrick might simply be too young to remember how well that worked for his party.

Would Trump really bomb Tel Aviv?

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A few days ago, Trump gave Qatar an astonishing guarantee of security, promising that he would view any armed attack on the tiny energy-rich nation as a threat to the United States itself and be ready to take military action in defence of Qatar. Given that, in a way that I don’t pretend to fully understand, the ‘right to self-defence’ has somehow morphed in recent years into a right to mount a wholly disproportionate retaliatory attack, the pact must surely mean that anyone attacking Qatar should expect a massive response from the US military. And which country is most likely to launch a military attack on Qatar? Based on recent events, the most obvious answer is Israel.

Maybe Netanyahu has given Trump some sort of promise that he won’t do it again, so Trump doesn’t think the question will arise. But neither of them are exactly famous for keeping their word. A Trump promise to Qatar based on a Netanyahu promise to Trump doesn’t immediately strike me as a reliable basis for the security of anyone. In normal times, a $400 million bribe in the form of a free aeroplane might be enough to get something in return; but then again, in normal times, the idea of the President of the USA accepting a $400 million bribe would be unthinkable. One wonders what else Trump has extracted from Qatar in his latest protection racket payment for the defence pact. After all, the first bribe didn’t stop the US allowing Israel to bomb Doha (and even if Trump is personally and unprecedentedly telling the truth when he says that ‘he’ had no advance knowledge, the idea that the largest US base in the region wasn’t warned in advance is for the birds). There must surely be something else involved. Another golf course or hotel perhaps?

There is another aspect to Trump’s promise as well. If an attack on Qatar is treated the same as an attack on the US itself, does the NATO guarantee of mutual assistance extend to that circumstance as well? Has Trump effectively promised that the whole of NATO would attack Israel if another bomb were dropped on Doha? No, I don’t seriously believe that he has – although that doesn’t necessarily mean that he doesn’t think that he has. Whatever the Qataris have given Trump in exchange for this latest guarantee, they would be very foolish to depend on it ever being honoured.

Where's the ideological response to Tory nonsense?

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Accusing the ‘Welsh’ Tories of possessing principles of any sort would be a foul calumny, but lacking any basic principles isn’t the same as lacking certain fundamental ideological beliefs. One of those is that tax cuts are axiomatically a good thing, and they are at it again today in the Senedd, calling for a cut in income tax and the abolition of business rates for small businesses. These changes, they claim, will put more money in peoples’ pockets and boost economic growth.

The Welsh government (and the Welsh budget) are fundamentally different creatures from the UK versions, and don’t have the same freedoms. It’s a consequence of the difference between devolution and independence: an independent government in control of its own currency and with debt mostly denominated in that currency can spend as much as it wants to as long as the physical resources are available, and that spending isn’t constrained by the availability of money through taxation. The Welsh government has no such freedom: it’s budget, and its ability to borrow or transfer money between financial years are limited by external dictat, and over a period, it must balance the books. It means, in essence, that whilst it’s not true that a UK tax cut must be balanced by spending cuts, it is very definitely the case that a Welsh tax cut must be balanced by spending cuts. And the Tories know it, even if they didn’t spell it out.

What that translates to in practice is that, whilst the tax cuts proposed by the Tories may make individuals and small businesses feel better off initially, they will either have fewer (or worse) services delivered by the Welsh government (and by the local authorities who receive large transfers from the government in Cardiff), or find that they have to pay more for the same services out of the ‘extra’ money they gained from the tax cuts. More people will end up paying for private health care, or private tuition, for example. There will be those who argue that that is a ‘good’ thing, and that those services can be provided better or more cheaply by private providers. Whether that is true or not (and I’m not at all convinced by the arguments) is irrelevant to the economics here – a subject for another day. The point is that those who gain most from the tax cuts will be better able to afford such things than those who gain least – and that is especially so for those who earn so little that they pay little or no income tax already.

Whenever a tax cut is proposed which leads to cuts in what the government can do, it necessarily promotes a further disparity between those who can afford to bridge some or all of the gap and those who cannot. Some won’t be able to do so at all and will suffer as a result; others will see all the gains from their tax cuts swallowed up by extra costs; and the luckiest few will end up banking the difference. It goes to the heart of the argument for funding some basic services in society collectively, through taxation and public bodies, as opposed to leaving individuals to find the money to pay themselves or go without. Concentrating primarily on the financial effect on the Welsh government and its budget – which seems to be Labour’s response – is to miss the underlying ideological point. For too long, the argument about collective provision rather than individual provision has gone largely unmade, an omission from the debate which helps only the Tories.