Planning on the basis of blind faith

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The establishment of the Office for Budget Responsibility by George Osborne in 2010 was a cunning plan to embed orthodox neoliberal economic thinking into the UK economy; to guarantee, in effect, that no non-Conservative government (for which, read Labour) could ever try to follow a different path. He never intended that it would trip up a Conservative government but, in fairness, who could honestly have foreseen Liz Truss? When the inevitable happened, and a Tory Party riven by Brexit, broken by lies, and displaying utter incompetence eventually gave way to a Labour government, the plan worked like a dream. Lacking in sufficient imagination to realise that she could just abolish the OBR (other countries manage without one), appoint different people to run it, or simply change its remit, all of which are in the power of the government, Reeves has chosen instead to do exactly what Osborne planned, and treat its conclusions as though they were written on tablets of stone handed down from on high.

She wanted to count her benefit cuts as saving £5 billion, but the OBR calculated that they would only save £3.4 billion, so off she dutifully went to lop another £1.6 billion off future spending plans. Experience tells us one clear truth – both her original estimate and that of the OBR are wrong. We don’t know by how much (or even in which direction), but planning on the basis that either one is correct five years in advance would be stupidity of the highest order (and therefore, apparently, a basic tenet of government financial planning). As JK Galbraith so succinctly put it, “The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable”.

It’s interesting to note, though, that Reeves’ faith in the power of economic forecasting is selective. When a forecast produced by the OBR ‘forces’ her to do what she wants to do anyway (and anyone who believes that she really doesn’t want to cut benefits needs to get out more), it’s an immutable law of economics; when another forecast by her own government tells her that the result of her actions will be to push 250,000 more people (including 50,000 children) into poverty, she demurs, and claims that they’ve got it wrong because her benefit cuts will miraculously result in more people being in work. The forecast almost certainly is wrong, of course (back to Galbraith), but by how much and in which direction we won’t know for some time to come. What we do know, without having to wait any time at all, is that we have a Labour government which is remarkably relaxed about putting more people into poverty when it’s entirely within their own control not to do so.

Minds don't need to be particularly great to think alike

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Apologists for Britain’s colonial past invariably point to what they see as the ‘good’ outcomes of imperial conquest for the conquered, usually expressed in terms of systems of government, the rule of law, Christianity, cricket, and the English language. Whether these are actually ‘good’ things or not depends on perspective; the assumption that they are is itself a product of the imperialist mindset, revolving as it does around some concept of cultural superiority. Leaving that aside and assuming, for the sake of argument, that these are indeed good things, none of them actually formed any part of the original intention of conquest. That was always about access to resources, and the opportunity to use the power of the imperial state to extract wealth which could be accumulated by individuals, and much of which was repatriated to the shores of the imperial power. That wealth, taken by force from the conquered peoples, was the basis of the great wealth of the cities of the imperial powers, including, of course, Britain. In return, the natives got Shakespeare, a bargain for which they should, apparently, be eternally grateful.

Sometimes, people confuse imperialism with colonialism; but not every country added to the empire was actually heavily colonised. Some were, of course – the territories currently known as the USA being one of them. From a British point of view, the other territories most heavily colonised were places such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. They’re not known as the ‘white commonwealth’ without reason. The USA (a former colony in the true sense of the word) and its constitution were founded on a number of ideas, one of which was the rejection of colonialism and imperialism, and the idea of ‘freedom’ (a word which has many different meanings). Watching that former colony lapse into its own form of imperialism ought to be surprising but is somehow not.

The methods are different in the twenty-first century; although Trump hasn’t ruled out direct military conquest, he has a clear preference for economic domination, even if his grasp of economics leaves more than a little to be desired. But his motivation – control of resources, and the transfer of wealth from other countries to the US – is a direct match for the motivation which led to the empires of the past. And blatantly so. Having got Ukraine to agree to allow half of its mineral wealth to be expropriated on the basis of a lie that aid provided was a loan rather than a gift, he has done as all bullies do when the bullied bow down before them. His conclusion from the willingness of Ukraine to give up 50% is that he didn’t ask for enough, so he’s doubled his demand. He now wants control of all of it. Along with a veto on Ukrainian policy.

His motivation for taking Greenland, although presented in terms of ‘security’ is much the same. He wants access to its resources, and his promise that Greenlanders will become rich if they allow it is as valid as his promise that US citizens would become richer by electing him; it’s a promise which is only ever intended to apply to a tiny minority. Yesterday, Putin declared that he thinks Trump is serious about taking Greenland, but thinks that it's what he described as “an issue that concerns two states and has nothing to do with us”. It’s an open invitation to Trump to view Russia’s intentions in relation to Ukraine in the same terms. The two presidents are clearly thinking along similar lines. And the opinions of others count for nothing, with either of them.

Uninvited guests

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Relative to the size of its population, Greenland must surely be about to become the most-visited country by US dignitaries in the period since Trump was elected for the second time. His son, Donald Junior, undertook an entirely ‘private’ visit before his father was even installed in the White House, turning up in a discreet fashion giant Trump-branded jet and spending the day there, during which homeless people were invited in off the street to enjoy a free lunch wearing MAGA hats (which the ‘tourists’ had coincidentally brought with them) for the benefit of the photographers (who had also conveniently tagged along for this ‘private’ visit).

Next up, originally scheduled for Thursday to Saturday, was another ‘private’ visit by the Vice President’s wife to ‘watch a dog-sled competition’, which the VP himself rather impulsively decided to join. After all, what sort of VP is so busy that he can’t suddenly drop his semi-public planning of bombing raids to take a three-day trip to the Arctic to watch a few dog sleds racing? Coincidentally, the National Security Advisor (assuming he’s still in post tomorrow) and the Energy Secretary are also joining the group in order to visit the US base on the island before they were planning for themselves to become part of the assembled audience for the dog sledding. Until, that is, there was some pushback, as a result of which the dog watching has been cancelled, and the group will confine themselves to a one-day visit to the US base, whilst the armoured cars which had already been delivered to transport them around the island were sent back to the US. Pity that – it rather spoiled the punch line about half the US government literally going to the dogs.

According to Trump (a form of words which is enough in itself to tells us that whatever follows will be a lie), the delegation on this ‘private’ visit had been ‘invited’ by unnamed Greenlandic officials, although no-one in the Greenlandic government seems to know anything about any invitation. It was probably issued by the new officials whose appointment to run the island Trump has not yet announced. It’s certainly in line with Trump’s equally specious claim that Greenlanders ‘want’ to become part of the USA despite (presumably ‘fake’) opinion poll findings to the contrary. It’s not a Trump original playbook, of course: Putin also ‘knew’ that Crimeans were aching to become part of Russia before he seized the territory in 2014. Even longer ago, a certain European dictator ‘knew’ that Austrians wanted to be German deep down, even if they didn’t know it themselves. As both that dictator and Putin knew, it’s far better to hold a referendum on the issue after taking control, when the voting and the counting of the votes can be ‘properly supervised’ than to accept the verdict of polls taken in advance.

But, to continue the parallel with Crimea, how long will it be before the US equivalent of ‘little green men’ start mysteriously appearing on the streets of Nuuk?

Avoiding the question

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Pensions are a complicated business, and the UK State Pension is particularly so, given that the rules, amounts and eligibility criteria for the different rates keep changing. But in looking at the history of the triple lock, we need to go back to the Thatcher years. For some years prior to 1980, the uprating of pensions was based on a combination of average earnings and the Retail Price Index, but Thatcher’s legislation in 1980 ended the link with average earnings. Over the long term (even if it doesn’t always feel that way!), wages tend to rise faster than prices, which is why people generally feel better off over time and enjoy a rising standard of living. But an income linked only to prices will inevitably do no more than maintain a standard of living, and the extent to which it even does that will depend on which prices are included in the calculation and the extent to which the things purchased by an individual match that selected ‘basket’. Those on lower incomes (such as those dependent on the state pension) often find that their more personal rate of inflation is higher than the overall average, meaning that they slip backwards.

The triple lock was intended to reverse that decline and bring the state pension back to the effective relationship it had with earnings prior to 1980. On that basis, Steve Webb (the Minister who introduced the policy) was surely right when he said recently that "there will come a point when it's done its job". Whether merely ‘restoring’ that relationship to its pre-Thatcher level is the right target or not is a matter of opinion; there has been remarkably little debate about what the ‘right’ relationship between earnings and pensions should be. 30%? 50%? 80%? 100%? Parking that issue, the question in considering whether the triple lock has done its job or not should be an assessment of whether the percentage is or is not back to the 1980 level. At that point, and assuming some sort of agreement on the ‘right’ percentage of average earnings, a single lock (with average earnings) is all that is needed, and would also align the incomes of pensioners and employed people in the same relationship with price inflation. But making that assessment isn’t straightforward because of other changes to pensions (including the move from the old married couple pension to individual pensions, for example), but if any of those arguing for the abolition of the triple lock truly felt that they could make a good case for having restored the 1980 value of pensions, we can be certain that they’d be shouting it from the rooftops. The rooftops are looking and sounding conspicuously quiet.

They don’t, of course, put it in these terms, but anyone arguing for abolition of the triple lock (and Labour seems to have its share of them as well as the Tories) is effectively arguing for an arrangement which, at best, locks the rate of pensions at its existing relationship with average earnings. It’s easy enough to see why they avoid putting it that way – it’s not an argument that I’d want to make given the comparatively low level of the UK state pension. Those arguing that better off pensioners (those with savings and investments or good occupational or private pensions) don’t ‘need’ the full state pension and should be paid a lower amount are being disingenuous at best, and avoiding the real point at worst. Pensions, of necessity, require long term decision-making, and many people will have planned for their retirement on the basis of assuming that the ‘deal’ that they thought they were getting when they started work – paying NI in return for pensions in later life – would be honoured in due course. Had they known in advance that that particular income source would then be means-tested, they may well have taken different decisions, but they can’t go back and do something different. There is another way, though. Those on higher incomes – whether through pensions, interest payments, dividends, rents or wages – could be asked to pay more in tax. The source of that income ought to be irrelevant: the clue is in the name, it’s an income tax. The talk about reducing the state pension for some recipients is really about avoiding that issue. Labour, just like the Tories, is reluctant to tax more heavily those who can best afford to pay it. Talk of ‘need’ or ‘means tests’ is just a distraction from that reluctance to in any way reduce the disposable income of the group in society which they represent and serve - the most well-off.

Helping the medicine go down a different throat

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As I remember childhood, being given a spoonful of sugar with, or immediately after taking, some particularly unpleasant medication was a common practice. Today’s health experts probably wouldn’t approve of giving a child a spoonful of pure sugar in any circumstances, but then medicines tend not to be so foul-tasting these days, and have largely been replaced by bland taste-free pills of one sort or another anyway. I’m aware of no circumstances, though, under which the spoonful of sugar would have been given to a completely different child instead of the one who was suffering from whatever disease was being treated.

But then I’m not Chancellor of the Exchequer, so what would I know? According to modern economic theory of the Reevesian kind, spending £2 billion to build 18,000 affordable homes for one group of people will sweeten the pill represented by the £5 billion in benefits being removed from an entirely different and much larger group of people. It’s an ‘interesting’, if somewhat unscientific, proposition, but it would never survive the sort of thorough testing required for the acceptance of any new approach to medical treatment, with its concomitant stress on empirical data. It also looks unlikely to survive the rather less thorough (and completely untested) implementation which is about to happen. It makes sense only as an exercise in dividing people into groups and encouraging them to blame other groups for any problems they might have.

Cutting in the right place isn't as easy as it sounds

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Many years ago, when I was working as a Systems Analyst designing computer systems, I ended up talking to an administrator in one department and looking at all the information she collected and collated into reports. One report was particularly complex, and was going to pose problems in ensuring that all the data was available in the right place and format to produce it; as things stood it was taking her a week or so every month to locate and compile the information. I asked what happened to the report when she had produced it and she pointed to the cabinet where it was filed. In response to the follow up question about who looked at it afterwards, the reply I got was along the lines of “No-one. But the Director asked for it once a few years ago and we didn’t have it. So now we make sure we’ve always got it.”

It's a small example of the way in which large organisations can accumulate tasks and activities which serve little purpose, but the people performing them don’t have the authority to stop them, and those who do have the authority usually don’t even know they’re happening. And it’s one of the reasons why there is almost always scope, in any large organisation, to eliminate certain activities (and the people performing them) with zero impact on the overall performance. So when someone – like for example, the Chancellor – claims that there are too many people in the civil service and that the number can be easily reduced, part of my reaction is to think that she’s probably right. In principle. What she does not (and cannot) know, however, is how many are surplus to requirements and which ones they are. One of the consequences of that is that an arbitrarily imposed top-down target almost invariably ends up removing at least some of the ‘wrong’ people, whilst those busily engaged in preparing obscure reports ‘just in case’ carry on regardless.

The ‘savings’ aren’t easy to quantify either, and depend at least partly on the method used to identify those who will get the chop. If the reduction is achieved by removing some of the oldest people, then in a hierarchical organisation like the civil service they may well turn out to be both the most senior and the most highly-paid, for whom a redundancy package and early retirement may look attractive. And since both the redundancy payments and the pensions come out of different pots, the ‘savings’ can appear to be quite high. But whatever the Chancellor may say about targeting ‘back office’ functions rather than front line operations, that isn’t the way arbitrary targets work out in practice, and the total savings at a macro level may well be considerably less than they appear looking at a single budget line.

In essence, her thinking doesn’t seem to be that different from that of Musk, even if not so scattergun an approach or so deep a level of cuts. But both of them start from the assumption that public spending adds no value, and is an ‘overhead’ on the rest of the economy. The US administration is even thinking in terms of redefining GDP itself to exclude government expenditure, which is a somewhat drastic approach. It's neo-liberal economic claptrap, of course. The public sector contributes a great deal to the well-being of citizens. Once upon a time, a Labour government would have seen that as a good thing.

If the problem is a moral one, we need a response based on morality as well

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Labour ministers have been trying to present their proposals on reducing the cost of benefits by presenting the issue as one of morality. On Wednesday, Sir Starmer attempted to explain why he thinks that cutting benefits, or making them hard to access, is a moral issue. As he put it:

“I think one in eight young people not in employment, training or education, that’s a million young people, I think that’s a moral issue. Because all the evidence suggests that someone in that situation, at that stage of their life, is going to find it incredibly difficult ever to get out of that level of dependency.”

Taken in isolation, it’s a reasonable argument. It is indeed a moral issue that, as a society, we are letting down young people to such an extent. The problem isn’t so much with what he had to say about that, but with the response he proposes to deal with it, which is to ensure that those people are never allowed to get into a dependency on benefits because he's making those benefits inaccessible. Addressing the problem might well be driven by a sense of morality; leaving people with lower incomes is definitely not a moral response. What they are doing is pretending that a solution based on withholding access to funds is the answer to an entirely different problem. It’s based on assumptions (not always clearly stated) that: (a) the only validation of worth in society is through paid employment or preparation for paid employment, (b) that anyone not in work has deliberately chosen to put himself or herself into that position, and (c) that keeping people in poverty somehow magically changes their situation and enables them to find employment.

As an exposition of the underlying ideology of rampant twenty-first century capitalism, it’s hard to fault. As an exposition of traditional Labour values, not so much. Young people are facing real challenges, and the UK is wasting a lot of talent and ability, and that is indeed a moral issue – those statements are unarguable. The leap, though, from accepting that to implementing reductions in income for some or all of the people in that group is not only not a moral position, it’s a complete non-sequitur. The paucity of government thinking on the underlying causes and how to address them ought to be shocking, but sadly is not. Like the Tories that they’ve replaced in the corridors of Whitehall, Labour ministers seem to be incapable of looking beyond the pounds and pennies to the real people they are supposed to be representing.

We really don't need medieval ritual

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“Of all the issues, in all the parliaments, in all the world, they chose this one.”  It’s not exactly Bogie-level rhetoric, but then neither does it reach the elevated level one might expect in a gin-bar. It is though, an issue which some Members of the Senedd, particularly the Tories, are attempting to turn into some sort of scandal. I’m referring, of course, to the swearing (or, rather, non-swearing) of oaths by those giving evidence to the Senedd’s Covid Committee.

Whether swearing an oath makes any difference to the truthfulness and honesty of a witness is, to be kind, an open question. Maybe in some rather more god-fearing past the fear of divine retribution made people more fearful of lying, although if someone’s life depended on not telling the truth it’s hard to believe that a mere oath would make a difference. Besides, we live in a more secular society these days, and fear of divine retribution is greatly reduced. In any event, people increasingly choose to affirm rather than swear on a holy book anyway, and the potential spiritual consequences of breaking an affirmation are undefined. (As an interesting aside, affirmation wasn’t originally introduced to accommodate atheists as many believe, but to accommodate Quakers who devoutly followed the biblical teaching of Jesus in the sermon on the mount in which he told his followers never to swear any oaths on the basis that they were duty bound to be honest anyway.)

Giving Members of the Senedd, even the Tory leader, the benefit of the doubt, I’m not convinced that they really believe that taking an oath before giving evidence will add much to the probability of truthfulness. I assume that they (yes, even Millar) have a bit more intelligence than that. I suspect it’s rather more to do with status, or perceived status. ‘Proper’ inquiries require an oath, so anything which doesn’t require one is perceived as having a lower status. But where does that ‘properness’ requirement come from, if not the arcane processes of Westminster? Wales really doesn’t need to emulate the antiquated customs of the English system: the purpose of having a parliament of our own is to forge our own future based on our own values and judgements. Getting hung up on obscure, obsolete and irrelevant medieval rituals doesn’t exactly help that.

Politically defined insanity

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When you ‘know’ that one political ideology, or one system of government, or even just one political leader is so perfect as to be beyond any rational criticism, it’s easy to see that any opposition must be based on some sort of insanity. That was close to being the official doctrine of the former Soviet Union, in which the science of psychiatry was misused to institutionalise anyone mad enough to dissent. On the other hand, maybe the Soviet authorities had a point – it isn’t wholly unreasonable to regard anyone dissenting from the government line in a society where justice is both arbitrary and violent as possibly being a little mad.

There was news yesterday that Republican law-makers in Minnesota have introduced a new bill proposing that ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ be officially classified as a mental illness. The reports don’t tell us what treatment is proposed for this new illness, but it’s doubtful that they have any intention of extending the already limited US healthcare system to include medication for a disease which may afflict up to half the population. The prisons probably don’t have enough spaces either.

It couldn’t happen here of course. In the UK, government politicians are more interested in abolishing categories of mental illness than inventing new ones. It does remind us, though, that politicians deciding what is or isn’t a mental illness is a very poor approach to a serious issue.

What about the responsibility of the individuals?

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In the latest example of deliberate lawlessness, it seems that the Trump administration has wilfully ignored a judge’s order to turn back flights carrying deportees to El Salvador, even to the extent that another flight took off after the judge had issued his ruling. The legal arguments about written vs verbal orders and the limits of judicial competence, to say nothing of the use of wartime powers in peacetime, will continue to play out in the US courts. Those of us without legal expertise are not well-placed to forecast the eventual outcome, although Trump’s record of losing court cases is impressive. The actions of his administration are unusual, in that the normal response to a court ruling in any country where the rule of law is held to be important is to obey the ruling whilst appealing it, rather than make up excuses to ignore it.

In an unrelated incident last week, Musk posted an ill-conceived tweet in which he argued that Hitler, Stalin and Mao killed no-one – the killings were all carried out by public servants. It appears to have been some sort of attempt to justify mass sackings of civil servants, although ‘insensitive’ is a wholly inadequate word to describe that. Technically, however, Musk was correct – the physical killings were carried out by those given the orders rather than by those issuing the orders. The Nuremberg trials fairly comprehensively demolished the argument that ‘only following orders’ was an acceptable excuse, and found that those executing the orders also bore individual responsibility for their actions.

That brings me back to those deportation flights. The orders may have come from the White House, but the actual deportations were carried out by individual public officials and law enforcement officers. Maybe the pilots and airport staff who facilitated the flights also bear some responsibility. They are, of course, effectively immune from prosecution whilst His Orangeness reigns in the White House, but such immunity may not live for long after that. Perhaps they assume – as Trump increasingly seems to be doing – that the regime will never come to an end: cancelling elections starts to look like a mere misdemeanour rather than a felony after his actions so far. But I do wonder how much thought they’ve given to the potential consequences of their own actions should democracy and the rule of law ever be restored in the US. But then, I suppose that another lesson from Nuremberg was about how easy it is for ordinary people to get caught up in a belief that what they are doing is normal. And with Labour's continuing assault on the most vulnerable in society, it might not only be the US forgetting that particular lesson.

Some things are best left to doctors

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It is inarguable that the number of people with a mental health diagnosis has increased. It doesn’t follow from that, however, that Wes Streeting is right to claim that there is ‘over-diagnosis’. There are a number of reasons for the increase in the number of people with a diagnosis, including a reduction in stigma for those seeking help as well as a better medical understanding of some conditions. It doesn’t matter whether a health problem is down to physical issues or mental issues (and there's an argument that many mental health issues have underlying physical causes anyway): as a general rule, identifying more sufferers and providing them with the right treatment and support is surely a good thing rather than a bad one. That some people will be misdiagnosed or wrongly diagnosed is inevitable. It happens with all sorts of illnesses, always has and always will. When cases are numbered in the millions, achieving 100% accuracy is an impossible target.

That doesn’t seem to be the understanding of the English Health Secretary, though. He seems to have in mind that there is a ‘right’ number of diagnoses, and that that number is lower than the actual number currently being recorded. His basis for making that assumption is unclear. Maybe he can explain it clearly and succinctly, but he hasn’t done so thus far. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that his main driver for making the assertion has more to do with the costs than health – both the direct costs of treatment and the indirect costs of lost productivity from people who aren’t working. It isn’t just him: there seems to be an underlying attitude amongst Sir Starmer and his ministers that many of those who are not working due to poor health are lazy lead-swingers who need to be forced into work regardless of the consequences for their health. I doubt that anyone would argue that there are no people at all in that latter category, but there is no evidence of which I’m aware that the problem is anything like as widespread as the government seem to be assuming. By concentrating his attention on mental health issues, Streeting is in danger of reviving the stigma which has taken decades of work to reduce.

He is, of course, only responsible for the English NHS, and his approach doesn’t necessarily have to be replicated here in Wales, although if Labour MPs are dragooned into going along with him, neither is it certain that the approach will not be more widely applied. But any cuts to benefits or to mental health services implemented on the back of dodgy assumptions certainly will affect people here. His wish to eliminate duplication and waste in the NHS is understandable, but saving money by having sweeping diagnoses made by bean counters and politicians rather than by doctors is surely a step too far.

Avoiding accidents

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During the cold war there were rather more ‘near misses’ than most of us knew about at the time. Whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that we didn’t know about some of them is debateable. I tend to the view that it might have hardened opinion against nuclear weapons, but others will take a different view.

The one incident which does stick in the memory – at least for those of us old enough to have been around at the time – was the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The ostensible cause was the deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba, although apologists for ‘the west’ often choose to overlook the fact that that deployment was itself, at least in part, a response to US deployment of nuclear weapons in Italy and Türkiye. The roots of such events are always more complex than is obvious, and invariably oversimplified to meet the propaganda needs of one party or the other, but establishing the accurate detail is not relevant to the point here. The point is that both sides sought to deploy their armaments within close proximity of ‘the enemy’.

For a state which wishes to be able to launch a nuclear attack on another state with the minimum of warning, thereby restricting the ability of the other side to respond, locating weapons close to the borders offers obvious advantages. But the party thus threatened then finds itself with less time to think about a possible threat, and reduced thinking time increases the possibility of a mistaken reaction to, say, a flock of birds, to pick just one of the near misses of the past. Whilst the appeal to the military mind (which tends to assume that war is inevitable anyway) might be obvious, from the point of view of those who’d rather like human life to continue for a while longer, siting nuclear weapons as close as possible to their potential targets is a really bad idea.

Yet that is exactly what the Polish president has proposed this week. It’s easy to get into a ‘who started it argument’, given that Russia has already moved nuclear weapons into Belarus, but that doesn’t make responding in kind a rational choice. Ratcheting the spiral ever upwards is a dangerous choice when what is needed is a mutual de-escalation. NATO states choose to believe that Russia is just waiting for an opportunity to send its armies rampaging across the whole of Europe to impose its will on us. For reasons discussed previously, it’s an unlikely and wholly impractical scenario. On the other hand, Russia fears that NATO wants to obliterate and subdue it. For similar reasons, it’s also an impractical scenario. But paranoia feeds on itself, with every move analysed from the point of view of those pre-existing prejudices and suspicions.

Rebuilding trust and assurance once it’s been lost is no easy task, and the folly of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made it even harder. But every journey has to start with the first step, and if the best time to start was a decade or two ago, the second best time is always going to be ‘now’. Ramping up the perceived threat level by deploying US nuclear weapons closer to Russia’s borders will add to the problem rather than forming a basis for a solution - and increase the possibility of an accidental attack by one side or the other. It's not a view which Sir Sabre-rattler Starmer seems able or willing to understand.

Tabloid headlines are no basis for policy-making

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In their attempts to justify their planned reductions in the bill for welfare payments, Sir Starmer and his government have increasingly taken to describing their demand that anyone who can work should work as some sort of moral crusade. The underlying argument, albeit not always expressed in clear terms, seems to be that there is some sort of contract between the state and its citizens, as part of which the state agrees to protect vulnerable citizens whilst citizens agree to contribute by getting themselves gainfully employed. There’s a lot to unpick there.

It treats the state and its citizens as two different parties to said contract. Yet, in theory at least, the state is claimed to be nothing more than the way in which citizens act collectively. But if the state and the citizens are really one and the same, it’s an odd sort of contract. In the way that Labour increasingly talk about the relationship between citizens (or workers, to use their preferred term, which treats anyone not making an economic contribution as a second-class citizen) and the state, it seems as though they are closer to the Marxist understanding of the bourgeois state as an arm of the bourgeoisie to which others sell their labour – with Labour placing itself firmly on the bourgeoisie side of that equation. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, though, and assume that it’s just clumsy wording on their behalf, and that what they really mean is that membership of society confers both rights for its members and responsibilities to other members, and that the state is the way in which that relationship is managed and maintained.

I suspect that most of us (even if not all of us) would agree that we want to live in a society which provides a decent living for people who are young, or old, or sick, or disabled as well as those who work. By and large, we’d extend that protection to people who are temporarily out of work. Labour’s target seems to be twofold: firstly, people who can work but choose not to, and secondly tightening the definition of those who can’t work, particularly as it relates to the sick and disabled. Both are problematic. Whilst there is no doubt that there are some people who see a life on benefits as a valid life-style choice, the number is actually not as large as some tabloid headlines would suggest, and neither is the lifestyle as generous or luxurious as said tabloids would have us believe. Similarly, whilst there is no doubt that some of those who are sick or disabled could do some sort of work, the approach to assessing fitness for work – which has been largely outsourced to private providers, frequently with no medical qualifications or experience, who have performance targets to reduce the numbers – has often been heartless and cruel, to say nothing of unfair and stressful. And the sort of work which the individuals theoretically could do isn’t always available anyway. More generally, even if the number of people unemployed matches the number of vacancies, it doesn’t follow that they’re in the right places or that there’s a skills match. A carpenter in Ceredigion can’t simply become a brain surgeon in Banff.

Accepting all those caveats and exceptions, there are undoubtedly a number of people who could be gainfully employed but aren’t, even if the numbers (and therefore the potential resulting financial savings) of those who could actually be matched with suitable vacancies are very much lower that the government likes to claim. Arguably, there is a group of people who are not meeting their side of the contract with their fellow citizens. The issue of what should be done is, however, a great deal more complicated than the simple mathematics used to calculate benefits savings might suggest. Cutting the level of benefits payments is a blunt instrument, even if it could be precisely targeted (perhaps in the age of Sir Starmer, we should say ‘laser-focussed’ which seems to be his in-word) only at that small number of people, because it doesn’t only affect individuals, it also hits their families. Reducing their income can have other consequences such as homelessness which lead to other costs and problems. Even if – and it’s a very, very big if – we, as a society, want to make that group of people suffer, to starve them into accepting whatever work might be available even if not suitable, do we really want to push their children into poverty and homelessness? That’s not a consequence which sits well alongside other alleged government priorities.

At the heart of the issue is a really simple question: how does a society enforce the obligations of membership as well as protecting the rights? The question is simple enough, but the same cannot be said about the answer. Just about the only certainty is that sanctions for non-compliance aren’t the right answer when it comes to benefits, although they seem to be the only ones that Sir Starmer and his crew are considering. A political agenda driven by tabloid headlines and prejudices causes more problems than it solves.

Following the money

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Trump’s attitude to the stock markets varies. When the US stock markets are riding high, Trump is quick to claim it as a vindication of his brilliant economic policies. When they take a dive (as they have done a few times recently, usually in response to wildly fluctuating tariff policies), he claims that he doesn’t pay any attention to what the markets are doing. If his chosen indicator doesn’t show the result he wants, then (like Groucho Marx with principles) he has others.

Whether a stock market movement in a particular direction is a good thing or a bad thing depends on one’s perspective, but it really isn't a very good measure of economic success. For those whose wealth is measured largely in terms of the value of shareholdings – such as, to pick names almost entirely at random, Elon Musk or Donald Trump – a fall in share prices can suddenly make you look a lot poorer, whilst a rise can make you look a lot richer. So: from that perspective, rising share prices good, falling share prices bad. On the other hand, for a wealthy person who wants to acquire more wealth, falling share prices creates good opportunities to buy up assets cheaply, especially if you know, or have reason to believe, that any fall (such as that induced by an on-off tariff policy sending prices yo-yoing) will be followed by a rise. And that’s true, even if there is no insider trading happening.

It underlines one of the issues with a casino-style stock market. Traditional economic theory suggests that the stock market is a means of matching available capital with investment opportunities, but it’s long since become divorced from that (which is why the government’s floated suggestions of replacing cash ISAs with stocks and shares ISAs do not achieve the aim of getting people to invest in businesses). In a casino stock market, share prices no longer bear any clear relationship to the value of the underlying assets. For some investors, there is at least a partial relationship with expected future profit flows in the form of dividends, but day to day share prices depend mostly on expectations of the way those prices will move, with the gamblers and speculators more interested in making money from large and frequent trades on small marginal changes in share price than in the future prospects or dividends of the company whose shares are being traded.

The result is that there are a small number of people making a great deal of money out of Trump’s capriciousness. By what I’m sure is nothing more than complete coincidence, many of them will be among Trump’s donors and supporters. Who’d have thought it?

Great men and historical forces

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It’s a gross oversimplification, I know, but in general terms the political ‘right’ tends to see history in terms of the doings of ‘great men’ – and they are almost all men – whilst the political ‘left’ sees things more in terms of wider historical forces resulting from the context of the times. To make it more specific, the traditional ‘right’ has a tendency to see Hitler as uniquely evil (even if the more modern right suffers from a degree of revisionism on the question) and Churchill as the great hero who fought him off, whereas the ‘left’ would tend to see both as being the product of their times. In more recent history, the elimination of the leaders of Hamas by Israel, or of Islamic State by the US, strongly implies that both of those powers believe that the problem they are trying to address lies with the individuals, not with their followers or the populations more generally. The ability of such movements to regroup after the loss of a leader might lead some to say that it’s a strategy that has been shown not to work, but there seems little sign of any realisation of that fact in Israel or the US.

In one sense, it doesn’t hugely matter; the events were the same, regardless of which interpretation one adheres to. But there is another sense in which it matters greatly. If, shall we say, Hitler had been assassinated (or had merely fallen under a bus) in the early 1930s, would that have avoided the holocaust and the second world war, or would the nature of German politics at the time simply have thrown up another character to perform a similar role, with maybe a few minor differences? We only live history once, so can never be certain, but the difficulty with believing that it’s all down to individuals is that the ‘elimination’ of those individuals can become morally acceptable – or even a moral imperative, for some – if it saves vastly more lives than it costs. Indeed, that is the justification used, even if not always expressed so clearly, by successive US administrations for some of their actions and decisions.

That brings me to the modern-day phenomenon which is Trump. He may indeed be uniquely stupid in his understanding of geography, economics, and science, to name just three important areas of policy. His one obvious ability, somewhat surprisingly given his mangling of language, syntax, and meaning (to say nothing of his propensity for outright untruths) is that he communicates effectively with, and appeals to, a large section of the US electorate. That statement may say more about that section of the electorate than about Trump himself, but that doesn’t alter the truth of the statement. Looking at the people around him, all the evidence suggests that if he were to fall under a bus – or merely suffer the consequences of his increasing age – any replacement would be just as bad. Or, maybe, even worse – some of them might even be able to articulate a rationale of sorts for the actions being taken.

It's easy to fall into the trap of seeing an individual as the problem: remove the individual and the problem goes away. But the real problem is that 77 million US citizens voted for him. Historical forces rather than individuals. No-one can really say that they didn’t know what they were voting for; he was clear about that, even if some people chose to assume that he didn’t mean much of it. Eliminating the man at the top, or simply hoping that demographic trends will do that in a more natural way, doesn’t address the fact that those 77 million supported him. There is no reason to suppose that a strategy of ‘decapitation’ would work any better in a supposed democracy than it does for a ‘terrorist’ organisation.

The situation in the UK isn’t yet as stark, but some of the same trends can be seen. People, in increasing numbers, are turning their backs on the values of the Enlightenment, on the findings of science, and on the idea of objective truth. I don’t know what the answer is, or even if there is one. I’m pretty certain, though, that it isn’t doing what seems to be happening, which is trying to appeal to that same group of people, sometimes even labelling their concerns ‘legitimate’. Upholding truth and science in the face of growing ignorance and an increase in wild conspiracy theories requires rather more than that.

A tale of two Keirs

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As a general rule, ethics sounds like a good thing to possess. Politicians, in particular, would rather like us to believe that they are a particularly ethical breed of person, although there is a certain amount of objective evidence to suggest that it isn’t exactly the first profession to which one might turn in search of an ethical person. Attempts to base policy on ethics haven’t always been entirely successful. Robin Cook had a stab at an ‘ethical foreign policy’ back in 1997, but it didn’t stand the test of time, and any limited ethical basis that was introduced didn’t outlast his tenure. Business as usual returned us to a policy based rather more on naked economic interest.

Some businesses and investment companies have also tried to base their activities on an ethical approach, with varying degrees of success. The biggest problem, in politics and business alike, is that ethics, like beauty, tend to reside in the eye of the beholder. What one person considers to be ethical might be considered to be quite the opposite by another, and people can find some sort of ethical justification for just about anything. A fine-sounding word turns out to have, at best, a somewhat flexible meaning. Somehow, it usually seems to be the case that the most ethical thing to do is that from which the self-styled ethical person derives most benefit, or which best fits with his or her own priors.

There was a classic example yesterday, when a group of Labour politicians demanded that spending on armaments should be redesignated from unethical to ethical. It seems that investors who want their money to be used ‘ethically’ are shunning the idea of putting their cash into death and destruction, and the ‘solution’ according to an astonishing number of Labour politicians, is to recategorize death and destruction as being an entirely ‘ethical’ receptacle for investment.

There is, of course, a debate to be had about whether spending on armaments might be ‘necessary’ at times; and the balance of that debate will vary according to the circumstances, to say nothing of the personal views of individuals. But the idea that using the Earth’s necessarily finite resources to deliver death and destruction rather than health and prosperity can ever be designated an inherently ethical thing to do is a strange one, which strips the word of all common sense meaning. It’s another example of how far the Labour Party has travelled from the principles of one Keir to another.

What does Putin really want?

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The Secretary General of NATO has warned Europeans that the alternative to spending more on defence is to learn Russian or migrate to New Zealand. The assumption behind it is that, without a huge increase in spending on armaments, Russia will simply over-run the whole of Europe and turn us all into subjects of its empire. There are a number of problems with that as an idea, not the least of which is revealed by a little simple mathematics.

I’m not sure how practical it is to arrange a mass migration to New Zealand, but I can’t see the New Zealanders (population around 5.25 million) being ecstatic about welcoming around 560 million Europeans to their shores, which throws most of us back on the alternative of learning Russian. It is immediately obvious that the pool of available Russian teachers is never going to be up to the task. A country of 143 million is never going to be able to impose its language on another 560 million in the twenty first century. The English government, with a population of almost twenty times that of Wales has taken 500 years to partially impose its language on us, and there is still resistance. And the numbers aren’t only problematic in terms of language teaching. I don’t know how many occupation troops would be necessary to control an additional population of 560 million, but the chances that a country of only 143 million could find enough are vanishingly small.

It would, of course, be a simple enough task for a Russian Trump; just invent some new numbers for the respective populations and claim that the problem has been solved. But if we assume that Putin might just possibly be a little more numerate than Trump (a not wholly unreasonable proposition), it follows that he would realise that military domination of the whole continent is not an achievable outcome, even if we believe that he really desires it. It is dangerous to assume that he is entirely rational, but probably less so than assuming the complete opposite, which is where most European politicians seem to be at present. Perhaps the safest assumption is that he is mostly rational most of the time, which leads naturally to the question ‘what does he really want?’.

Personal kudos and recognition – very probably. There’s no reason to assume that narcissism should be restricted to the US. He knows that he won’t be around forever, and he’d probably like to be remembered favourably by Russian historians. Personal wealth – possibly. But he already has a great deal of that, and statistics suggest he won’t be around for long enough to enjoy what he has, let alone much more. On the other hand, that is not a consideration which has ever prevented others from accumulating ever greater wealth. Land and resources – maybe, maybe not. His distorted view of history and Russia’s place in it suggests a desire to emulate the Russian empire at its height, but his experience so far in Ukraine will have taught even only a partially rational person something about the cost of that. Security – almost certainly. It is far from irrational for him to suppose that ‘the west’ really might be out to do Russia (and Putin) down. It’s not a fear which requires its sufferer to be diagnosably paranoid. The desire for security guarantees isn’t limited to Ukraine.

The bigger question is about what ‘the west’ is doing to ascertain what he truly wants and whether actions taken are likely to reduce or increase the insecurity he feels. It really doesn’t matter whether his insecurity is based on an accurate assessment of others’ intentions or not – the effect on his actions is the same either way. I cannot believe that an accommodation cannot be reached which involves reassurance and disarmament rather than threat and rearmament. Unless, that is, it’s not something which ‘the west’ actually desires.

Whose wealth would we be protecting?

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It is often repeated as though it were indisputable fact that the first duty of any government is the defence of the realm, or some other form of words meaning much the same thing. It’s used as a justification for ever-greater spending on weaponry, but it’s rarely challenged because the assumption is that we all accept it. But is it really true?

In seeking to increase the funding for weapons without breaking its own wholly arbitrary fiscal rule, the UK government has already targeted the ‘easy’ option of foreign aid, and there is increasing talk of targeting welfare payments and the pensions triple lock as well. There is, of course, nothing wrong with reducing the total spending on welfare payments if it is the result of getting more people into work, but cutting the payments first and assuming that that will ‘force’ people into work, even if suitable employment doesn’t exist, has repeatedly been shown not to work. It just makes people poorer, not to say increasing child poverty in the process. When it comes to pensions, the argument goes that not all pensioners ‘need’ the extra money guaranteed by the triple lock (or the winter fuel payment). Multi-millionaires do not ‘need’ extra millions either, but reducing the living standards of pensioners is, apparently, preferable to taxing the richest. There is, implicit in the argument, the idea that somehow the ‘needs’ of pensioners are less, or of less importance, than the needs of others, and that those in receipt of the state pension should be prepared to accept a lower standard of living as a result.

It seems to be true that some pensioners, at least, have been putting their hands up to say that they don’t mind a little bit of deprivation if it keeps us ‘safe’ from those horrid Russians, but I’m not sure how widespread that feeling is. Is it really the case that people who are struggling to fund both food and warmth would be happy to make themselves a little poorer to ‘deter’ the non-existent threat of an invasion which might leave them struggling to fund both warmth and food?

Assuming that someone (it doesn’t have to be Putin, although that’s the threat usually waved at us) really wants to take over the UK by violent means, what would be their objective? There are only two conceivable reasons: the first is to remove any threat that ‘we’ might want to attack ‘them’, and the second is to seize assets and wealth. And who owns those assets and that wealth? It certainly isn’t the pensioners and those on benefits, the ones who are being compelled to make a sacrifice to protect those assets. No, the wealth is owned by the wealthy – by definition. What those who want to pay for armaments out of reduced welfare and pensions are arguing, in effect, is that the many who own little should be prepared to make a sacrifice for the benefit of the few who own a great deal.

Maybe, instead of elevating ‘defence of the realm’ above all else, we should define the first duty of any government in terms of ensuring that all citizens have a good and improving standard of living, and can afford food, heating, and decent housing as a minimum. None of that will be achieved by diverting ever more funding into armaments, especially if that funding comes at the expense of the poorest and most vulnerable.

There are always some who profit from war

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It is said that Keir Hardie died of a broken heart in 1915, having been a lifelong pacifist who failed to stop the first world war. As the maker of a film about the war put it, Hardie “...saw it as a profiteering exercise as well as a loss of men”. The idea of a conflict between spending on weapons of war and spending on food or welfare (‘guns vs butter’, as it is known) is nothing new – and it has historically not been the exclusive preserve of ‘the left’. In a major speech in 1953, then-President Dwight Eisenhower, hardly a socialist icon, declared that, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed”. It was a powerful speech, with a powerful message. In some ways, it was echoed by one Margaret Thatcher who said in 1976, “The Soviets put guns over butter, but we put almost everything over guns”. Their words might almost be an expression of some of those famous western values which we’re supposed to uphold.

And then we come to the man named after Hardie, the UK’s current prime minister, who said yesterday, after announcing that more would be spent on weaponry, that the defence sector offers: “the next generation of good, secure, well-paid jobs”. I somehow don’t believe that the man after whom he was named would have been overly impressed. There is no doubt that war is good for business in the eyes of some companies; it’s no coincidence that the share price of defence companies has soared in recent days. It was ever thus: the soldiers sent to their deaths come predominantly from the working class whilst the capitalists benefit. Profiteering, as Hardie would have put it. It’s also interesting to note that Sir Starmer talks about the increase in defence spending boosting economic growth, after having told us for months that public spending needs to be cut in order to boost growth. Things he wants to spend money on magically have the opposite economic effect to things on which he does not wish to spend. Strange, that.

A small price to pay

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It’s entirely understandable that so many people are clamouring for the invitation to Trump for a state visit to the UK to be withdrawn, given what happened in the 24 hours after issuing it. It’s less clear what would be achieved by withdrawing it. There is a mismatch between the expectations of the inviter (that it would happen next year) and those of the invitee (that it would happen this year). Whether it’s best to get it over with quickly or keep it hanging for a while – there is always a potential for ‘diary’ issues to create a delay if necessary – depends on one’s assessment of how Trump will be likely to react to either. That is, essentially, unknowable. The thought that the red carpet and a great deal of obsequiousness will be rolled out for the man who sought to demean and humiliate the leader of a country resisting an invasion by a larger neighbour is unpleasant to say the least. That doesn’t mean that there is no chance of it helping.

The bottom line is that, whether we like it or not (and an awful lot of us don’t), Trump is right about two things, even if his way of expressing them is repugnant. Firstly, it is not a war between equals, and in the absence of any willingness by other countries to commit forces to support of Ukraine, Ukraine will ultimately lose. The cost in money and lives to both sides will be enormous, but the trajectory is clear. The second thing about which he is right, which flows from the first, is that the immediate priority has to be to stop the death and destruction through some sort of ceasefire, and that inevitably means accepting that boundaries, for the time being at least, reflect the territorial gains made. That’s neither fair nor just for the country which has been invaded, but it does mirror most of the other borders in Europe and beyond, which are where they are because that’s where they were when the fighting stopped. It’s uncomfortable for any Welsh independentista to see a country which so recently gained its independence being dismembered by an invading force, but it takes more than hope, sympathy and an endless supply of armaments to get out of the current situation.

Trump’s approach to achieving that ceasefire, by allying himself with one party and attempting to do a deal over the head of the other, looks ham-fisted and has angered many, but how much worse it is than simply supplying ever-increasing amounts of armaments which do little more than slow Russian progress is debateable. For the long term, European security needs to be established on the basis of de-escalation and demilitarisation rather than on competing to see who can build the biggest stick. That must include an assumption that the US will no longer play a role in Europe. In the short term, the alternative facing Ukraine is some sort of accommodation with Russia or a long grinding war in which the eventual outcome will probably be worse than freezing things where they are.

The question is whether a state visit, with all its flattery and fawning over His Orangeness, will help or hinder in either the short term or the long term. It’s a question to which I don’t have an answer, and neither, I suspect, does anyone else, given the quintessential unpredictability with which the world is dealing. What is likely to be a sick-inducing spectacle for many is a small price to pay compared to that being paid daily in Ukrainian lives, and might still be better than the impact of withdrawing a rather hastily issued invitation. It could hardly make things any worse, whereas withdrawing the invitation might do just that.

Deliberate or merely incompetent?

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A lot of people are seeing the bust-up in the White House last week as having been deliberately planned in advance by Trump and Vance, with the intention of humiliating Zelensky. I’m not so sure; that would require a degree of planning and forethought which is certainly beyond Trump – this is a man who can’t stick to a script when it’s written out in front of him, let alone when he has to remember it – or Vance, whose general ignorance of history and geography seems to be matched only by his innate nastiness.

Even if they had fully intended to find a way of delivering a humiliation, did they really intend that the outcome would be a total breakdown of the relationship, or did they simply assume that Zelensky would cave in and show his subservience? One of the attributes of bullies is that they invariably assume that people will do as they are told, and are always surprised – not to say angered – when they don’t. And Zelensky’s quiet attempts to push back certainly escalated Trump’s anger. The one thing that I do believe is that Trump really wanted that deal on minerals. He may not care about Zelensky or Ukraine, but he really does care about money and about further enriching US billionaires. It's increasingly clear that Trump and Vance – the latter possibly even more than the former – believe that the US has the right to do as it wishes and that lesser states (everyone except Russia, apparently) should bow down before them. They don’t care whether people like them or not, only whether they are obeyed.

Putin has produced a range of ‘justifications’ for his invasion, and amongst them is the idea that the Ukrainian regime was a client state of the US and that the regime in Ukraine was a puppet installed and operated somehow by the CIA. The behaviour of Trump and Vance suggests that they have, in a sense, bought in to that narrative, and genuinely believed that they could dictate to Ukraine. Their belief in their own absolute power to dictate what happens outside their own borders received a nasty jolt on Friday, and a man who holds grudges (and Trump’s grudge against Zelensky for not digging up dirt on the Bidens is probably a significant part of the cause of last week’s events) is likely to become even more unpredictable as a result.

The question is what happens next. No matter how much we admire the way Zelensky stood up to the bully, to say nothing of Ukrainian courage and resistance, no lover of peace, and no true friend of Ukraine, should seriously be urging them to fight to the last Ukrainian against a numerically superior force. If Trump really does ‘turn off the tap’ of supplies of armaments, it’s hard to see how the European states can make up the resulting shortfall. We might wish it were otherwise, but Trump is actually right in saying that Ukraine is in a bad place right now. Unless other countries are going to come directly to its aid militarily – which seems as unlikely as it is undesirable – then a peace deal of some sort has to be negotiated. Trump is clearly the wrong person to broker such an agreement, but who and where is the right one? Even if Sir Starmer and Macron can devise a peace plan, will Trump accept anything that doesn’t give him what he wants?