All Hope Is Not Yet Lost

Michael Meacher writes:

Arnaud Montebourg, France’s economy minister who has just resigned, is quite right. He denounced austerity policies as “absurd” because they had brought about “the most destructive crisis in Europe since 1929″.

He rightly attacked the Eurozone’s fiscal stance as “the cause of the unnecessary prolongation of the economic crisis and the suffering of the European population”, and he correctly demanded a major change of policy away from “the extreme orthodoxy of the German right”.

Montebourg is not the only one who has been railing against the absurdity of counter-productive policies which are relentlessly dragging down the Eurozone into deflation.

Renzi, the young Italian prime minister, has rightly been demanding an easing of over-tight fiscal policies and a longer timescale to generate the growth to enable his country to overcome its excessive indebtedness.

Italy, like Japan before it, has now endured nearly two decades of falling living standards and in the absence of growth will soon find maintaining its interest payments unsustainable.

Merkel’s policy of endless austerity is wrong, wrong, wrong. Worse than that, it is ruthlessly selfish.

The German position, ostensibly coloured by their experience of hyperinflation in 1923, is that any monetary expansion in the Eurozone must be resisted like the devil.

Their real motive is that enforcing austerity is an effective weapon for achieving German economic dominance throughout Europe by relegating France and Italy, let alone the southern European rim, to the sidelines as subordinate partners.

However, all hope is not yet lost. According to the latest quarterly figures Germany suffered a reduction in its GDP of 0.2%.

This is not good news in principle, but the only thing that will chasten the German government out of their arrogant smugness is when Germany itself begins to suffer a serious downturn.

Germany’s over-dependence on manufactured exports may now begin to tell against it, and its obsessive fetish with an excessive tight fiscal stance may slowly become untenable.

It might be thought that the woes of the Eurozone have little to do with the UK, though half our exports still depend on Eurozone growth.

With UK growth forecast to be 3% this year Britain, as the Tories will endlessly tell us, is doing well, indeed a model for other countries.

But arrogance is not just a German problem, it’s Osborne’s too. The signs of cracks in Osborne’s economic facade are already beginning to appear.

The official tax receipt figures for July turned out not to be the £50m surplus expected, but a £234m deficit, which takes some explaining if growth is really 3%.

Moreover the so-called recovery is heavily weighted in favour of services (predominantly the City of London) and not in manufacturing or construction (the rest of the country).

As the recovery steadily implodes next year for lack of demand, the UK will need to learn the lessons of the Eurozone and to stimulate demand either by QE targeted directly on industrial projects, not the banks, or by printing money and a helicopter drop (metaphorically speaking) of a large cheque to all families throughout the UK below the top quartile.

In Undiluted Form

Owen Jones writes:

Poor old David Cameron, returning from pointing at fish on his Cornish holiday – to be greeted with a media warning him of “double trouble”.

Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage declaring their parliamentary candidacies could hardly have been more predictable, but both bring the Tory leader’s plight into sharp relief.

Despite a much-vaunted “economic recovery” that is utterly meaningless in the lives of most Britons, Labour retains a consistent lead, thanks to the ex-Lib Dems who fled Nick Clegg’s fold in disgust.

Cameron failed to redraw the electoral boundaries in his favour; his quest to defy history and increase the Tory share of the vote looks all but hopeless.

Farage’s purple army are chewing into the Conservative base, and the Ukip surge has not evaporated as expected after the European elections.

And so Johnson circles like a vulture, waiting for the Cameron project to become a carcass so he can swoop in and feast.

But – seriously – what a depressing spectacle, and what an indictment of British democracy. Both Farage and Johnson are portrayed as the ultimate mavericks, the politicians who dare to deviate from the script and – in the case of Ukip’s leader – as an anti-establishment insurgent.

Let’s just park their shared backgrounds (over which they have no control) as public school educated white men. These great “mavericks” share the same basic underlying assumptions as much of the rest of the political and media elite.

Both want to privatise public assets and hand them over to profiteers: including, say, the NHS, with Ukip having called for privatisation exceeding even the current government’s plans. Both want to slash taxes on the rich: both call for the top rate of tax to be lowered to 40%.

Both champion the City, where Farage used to work as a commodities broker. Both want to curtail the remaining rights British workers still have: in Johnson’s case, to subject trade unions to a turnout threshold which, if applied to the London mayoralty, would render his 2012 election illegitimate.

Both encourage popular anger to be directed anywhere but at the wealthy few who actually run the show: notably, immigrants. Both are the establishment in human form, the fighters for the interests of the richest people in Britain who have doubled their wealth in just five years.

The audacity of both is striking, even as it is facilitated by the mainstream media. Johnson (or “Boris”, as we are encouraged to chummily call him) is a fantastic branding exercise for hard-nosed, old-fashioned defend-the-rich Toryism.

Any other politician snapped flapping around on a zipwire would be crucified – think bacon sandwich gate by a factor of a thousand – but for Johnson, it’s a triumph!

His wacky turn of phrase (being reincarnated as an olive – LOL!), his bumbling demeanour – all foster the image of an outsider, the only politician who passes the “want to have a pint with and not simply to pour it all over his head” test.

And yet here is the man who launches crusades to stop the “vilification” of bankers, as though it is the financial elite who plunged Britain into economic calamity who are routinely demonised, rather than unemployed people, immigrants, trade unions and public sector workers.

Farage is arguably even more masterful. Ukip is a party led by uber-neoliberals, and yet its voters are – on economic issues – generally strongly left-of-centre.

That is all down to Ukip’s skilful manipulation of the idea that immigrants – rather than, say, bankers, tax-dodgers or poverty-paying bosses – are responsible for the nation’s ills.

In doing so, Farage presents himself as the man who will stick it to the establishment, when in fact he is one of its greatest shields.

And so Farage and Johnson say all too much about the state of British democracy.

The confines of acceptable political opinion are narrow and zealously guarded, and those presented as outsiders are actually the establishment in undiluted form.

It must surely be a source of great private amusement for both.

Uxbridge Entrant?

As far out of London as you can go without leaving it. But not actually outside London. And a safe seat.

Boris Johnson is so popular, isn't he?

Spot The Asian

Keith Joseph, Rhodes Boyson, Michael Havers, Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris, Laurens van der Post, Cyril Smith, Peter Righton, Peter Morrison, or their dear friend, protectress, and in Joseph's case even protégée, Margaret Thatcher.

I'll give you a clue. It's a trick question.

Most of the victims in Rotherham were not Asian, either. If the view of the social workers was that it was culturally normal and acceptable for them to be engaging in "consensual" sex from the age of 11, then that was not because these children's culture was Asian, or Muslim, or what have you. It was not. Today's report makes it clear that it would have been culturally impossible for any more than a handful of Asian or Muslim girls to have been victimised in this way.

Regular readers of this site, and readers of the more recent of my books to date, will have known for some years that it was long routine, not least in the Thatcher period, for training in such professions to include induction into the view that at least post-pubescent childhood sexual activity with adults was normal, natural, and beneficial to both or all parties.

The 1970s Radical Right was as keen on the abolition of the age of consent as it was on the repeal of the drug laws, among other legislation for public protection such as rent controls, or the rights of trade unions, or the pre-1986 restrictions on the City of London, or the powers of local government, or the public ownership of key amenities.

Or, indeed, the immigration controls to all of which Boris Johnson is so opposed, and which used to be exercised by the requirement of a union card for employment.

That hostility was all of a piece. It still is. Now as then, nothing can justify any part of it that cannot logically justify and require any and all of the others.

Sovereign Will

Alex Salmond is a man very, very, very used to his own way. When he says "the Sovereign Will of the Scottish People," he means "the Sovereign Will of Alex Salmond."

But while either might obtain in Scotland, neither has any force anywhere else.

It may or may not be either the sovereign will of the Scottish people or the sovereign will of Alex Salmond that there be a currency union (as which merely using someone else's currency is not at all the same thing) with the state that would undoubtedly still be called the United Kingdom.

But so what?

That would certainly not be the sovereign will of the Parliament, people or anything else of the United Kingdom. Opposition in Wales would be particularly pronounced, and would carry the weight of loyalty. The areas that would be most opposed would be the most strongly Labour areas.

The answer would be No.

Scotland can become Panama, of all the places the names of which might resonate from her history. But if she wants a currency union, then she already has one. On 18th September, she will vote on whether or not to remain in it.

Virtute et Armis...

...We Dare To Defend Our Rights.

If Britain were a United State of America, then she would be the second poorest, between Alabama and Mississippi.

Inner London may be the richest area in Northern Europe, but we have nowhere else in the Top 10, although we do have nine of the 10 poorest. We have 11 areas that are poorer than Eastern Europe.

There ought to be a weekly news magazine, similar in format to The Spectator or the New Statesman, featuring a columnist from each of those areas.

As well as a column by each of the signatories here and here, together with one nominee of each in the United Kingdom, and one anywhere else in the world, with the possible exception of the United States, of and from which we already hear a great deal.

But I am not holding my breath.

And The Air Is Warm

Although his conclusion is wrong, Simon Jenkins writes:

I blame the British class system.

Yesterday’s August bank holiday was the coldest on record, with an average 30mm of rain. Carnivals in Notting Hill and elsewhere were drenched. Snow fell in Scotland. It was reportedly warmer in Siberia.

On my Welsh beach, hardy souls in puffer jackets and scarves walked their dogs while children bleakly trailed buckets and spades across sodden wastes. Cafes echoed to huddled masses cursing staycation publicists.

Britons are expected to take their holidays in August, weeks after the warmer and sunnier June/July period, because it once suited agricultural practice.

It was related to reaping and fruit-picking, to the movement of migrant labour and the start of the shooting and stalking seasons.

When ordinary people began being able to flee for a week to the Mediterranean, the authorities did not react by moving bank holidays from the start of August back into real summer.

In 1964 they pandered to the domestic tourist industry and moved it later, to the end of the month. By then, days are shortening, temperatures falling and rainfall rising.

Records show that roughly half these later bank holidays have been wet, cold or otherwise miserable. Blazing sunshine is rare. The change was a cruel mistake.

British holidays are bedevilled by a simple fact. Those that fix them holiday abroad. They can pay to chase the sun, afford private cottages or take their leisure when they choose.

But time moves on. Over a third of employees now work on bank holidays in service industries.

The concept of a single “day off” is an anachronism. Bank holidays should stop and an individual’s time off be folded into a general holiday entitlement.

This annual festival of misery should end.

At the very least, the powers that be should allow Britons a break when the sun is high and the air is warm. That is not the end of August.

In Britain, with our pointless celebrations of the mere fact that the banks are on holiday, public holidays do not apply to people who are too public in anything other than the schooling sense of the word.

Nowhere else on earth is like that, because everywhere else has proper holidays, celebrating specific things that really matter. Keep Christmas and Easter. And New Year (or Heathmas, as it sometimes called), if you must, although the Epiphany would be better.

Bring back the real Whit Monday, making an even stronger case for abolishing Heathmas by also having abolished Wilsontide, and making it easier to get on with reading and teaching Philip Larkin without having to explain what the title of his best collection means.

Get rid of all of the others and replace them with Saint George's Day, Saint Andrew's Day, Saint David's Day and Saint Patrick's Day. A heavy concentration in this Islands' incomparable Spring and early Summer. 

Something distinctive about each of them: Guinness, leeks, haggis, whatever, although I admit that it is difficult to think what the English one might be.

A self-interested basis for popular Unionism in perpetuity.

One on 30th November, before which nothing related to Christmas would intrude, just as it does not before Thanksgiving in the United States.

And no excuse for making the common people work on these days anyway because, after all, they do not really mean anything. Each of these really would mean something.