Life, Expectancy

No, the state pension was not just supposed to top up private provision, as if occupational and private pensions had been the norm in 1908 or in 1946. Life expectancy in 1946 is irrelevant to the present debate, since what were then the recent figures had been warped by the Second World War. £13,000 per annum is a pitiful pension by international standards, we already pay it later than many other countries, and you will soon have to wait until beyond average male life expectancy. Why is dignity in retirement unaffordable only here? But the triple lock puts money in the pockets of the people who spent it, thereby injecting it into the consumer economy, and thus employing the young. Yet if it took you over the income tax threshold, then you should have to pay tax on it until that threshold had been increased for everyone.

Speaking of tax thresholds, abolishing inheritance tax, or at least massively raising the threshold, is the perennial Conservative crowd-pleaser to rally the activist base. Labour’s used to be VAT on school fees, but it has now done that, so what will it promise the next time that it needed some easy applause? Kemi Badenoch and Andrew Griffith need to think on. And speaking of 1946, there has been a trade union leader on the Court of Directors of the Bank of England for 80 years. As one of nine non-executive directors, Paul Nowak succeeds Frances O’Grady, who succeeded Dave Prentis, who succeeded Brendan Barber, who succeeded Bill Morris, who succeeded Gavin Laird, who was appointed in 1986, under Margaret Thatcher. On back it goes, for another 40 years. For all the difference that it has made, but even so. O’Grady was appointed when Robert Jenrick was a Treasury Minister.

Over half of the unions affiliated to the TUC have never been affiliated to the Labour Party, and membership of the TUC General Council has always been a bar to membership of Labour’s National Executive Committee. Add to that the decidedly blue collar character of the affiliated unions and the decidedly non-blue collar character of the Labour electorate, with the latter reflected in the Parliamentary Labour Party. The relationship is not what most people think that it is. On Tuesday, in his second go at being Business Secretary, the fake solicitor Jonathan Reynolds said that, “I would like the steel industry to be in private hands. That is my preference.” On the Today programme, he refused to assure Sharon Graham that publicly funded infrastructure projects would be required to buy British steel. Trade union money is the only financial contribution to a British political party that buys absolutely nothing at best, and worse than nothing a lot of time.

In any case, the Court of Directors is not the Monetary Policy Committee. Without a manifesto commitment, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown immediately surrendered democratic political control of monetary policy. The Liberal Democrats forced the creation of the Office for Budget Responsibility. The Conservatives created the short-lived Economic Advisory Council out of thin air, and Rachel Reeves reconstituted a Council of Economic Advisers with at least one of the same people on it. Yet on none of those occasions have the salaries of the First Lord of the Treasury, of all other Treasury Ministers, and of all senior Treasury civil servants been halved, as they should have been.

Thatcher must never have seen a banknote, since she thought that the State had no money of its own. Yet in reality, the issuing of currency is an act of the State, which is literally the creator of all money. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, the United Kingdom has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control. The responsibility of the Government is to ensure the supply of goods and services to be purchased in that currency.

It is impossible for the currency-issuing State to run out of money. Money “lent” to the Treasury by the Bank of England is money “lent” to the State by the State; such “debt” will never be called in, much less will bailiffs be sent round. Call this “the Magic Money Tree” if you will. There is no comparison between running the economy and managing a household budget, or even a business. There is no “national credit card” to “max out”. “Fiscal headroom” is only the gap between the Government’s tax and spending plans and what would be allowed under the fiscal rules that it sets for itself and changes frequently.

That is what both fiscal policy and monetary policy are for: to give the currency its value by controlling inflation to a politically chosen extent while discouraging certain politically chosen forms of behaviour, and while encouraging others, including economic equality, which is fundamental to social cohesion and thus to patriotism. If there were “no such thing as society”, and Thatcher really did say that, then there could be no such thing as the society that was the family, or the society that was the nation. But there is no debt. It is an accounting trick. The Treasury, which is the State, has mostly issued bonds to the Bank of England, which is the State. Even when those bonds were held by the big scary “bond markets”, then the State could simply issue itself with enough of its own free-floating, fiat currency to redeem them. Say it again that there is no debt. There is no debt. There is no debt.

The money can always be found for wars. But taxation is not where the State’s money comes from. Nothing is “unaffordable”, every recession is discretionary on the part of the Government, and there is no such thing as “taxpayers’ money”. Within and under that understanding, a tax of one to two per cent on assets above £10 million could make up the abolition of the two-child benefit cap 17 times over, while merely taxing each of Britain’s 173 billionaires down to one billion pounds per head would raise £1.1 trillion, an entire year’s tax take. And so on. With the Gulf looking a lot less attractive, the tiny numbers of people directly affected would not get a better deal anywhere that they might ever wish to live. Even the putative Iranian nuclear cloud has a silver lining.

For a quarter of a century, they have been telling us to wait for their war against Iran, and we have been telling them that Iran would win. Here we are. The great Representative Thomas Massie has filed eight articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth. They will not pass, but they are still correct. No angels though they are, the Houthis, who are not Iran’s proxies but its allies, are on the cusp of winning against the Saudi puppets in Yemen, or rather in Saudi Arabia while purporting to be the Government of Yemen. British Officers have been in the control room from which, over 12 years, Yemen has been turned into the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world. British bases and intelligence were crucial to the double-tapping of the girls’ school in Minab, which the UN has called a war crime, just as British arms and intelligence were crucial to the IDF’s killing of James Kirby, James Henderson and John Chapman while those British veterans were unarmed and delivering humanitarian aid, bombing them three times to make sure that they were dead, which Britain is too cowardly to call a war crime.

But the poorest Arabs are about to beat the richest, the nerve centre of Islamist terrorism all the way back to 9/11 and beyond. The Saudi alliance with Turkey and Pakistan has failed its first test, the allegation that Mecca and Medina were about to be bombed has been dismissed out of hand by an Islamic world that would have exploded if anyone had believed it, Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, Ansar Allah controls the Bab al-Mandab, and we either make peace with those facts, or we shiver and starve. This is called defeat, a common consequence of either backing the wrong side or interfering in matters that did not concern one. Never again let the trade unions or anyone else be accused of the latter when we involved ourselves in foreign policy. From the petrol pump to the pumping of blood, we pay the price.

There are mass protests about the price of fuel in Syria, which our lords and masters rejoiced to see handed over to an old second-in-command both of al-Qaeda and of the so-called Islamic State. That does give some perspective to the brouhaha around the Archbishop of Canterbury’s presentation of an award to a Pakistani Islamist, who must have been recommended for it by the Church of Pakistan (look it up), where Christians will suffer far more as a result of its withdrawal. And so what that his wife wears a niqab? I do not like the niqab, but banning it would trap in their homes the women who wore it, and who would not go over to dressing like the members of Katseye.

Donald Trump is preparing for war even in Outer Space, and Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris would have been doing the same. As to the ones already in progress, Boris Johnson has had another of his well-timed near-death experiences, this time in Ukraine, but this time few people noticed and nobody cared, while Israel is cultivating ties to the Austrian Freedom Party, on which happy Googling. Outfits like that are all ferociously pro-Israeli. What do they like so much about it? Their answers to that are perfectly frank. Maybe it’s you, Bibi? In fact, Bibi, it is you. You are Lale Andersen with worse politics.

Donald Tusk ought not to worry, since Radek Sikorski has said that Poland could defeat Russia from the air alone in five minutes flat. But the conviction of Illia Bilyk has brought up again the most peculiar matter of Keir Starmer’s Ukrainian arsonist rent boys on the streets of London, while the conviction and the 25-year sentence handed down to the 58-year-old Hashim Thaçi ought to be the death knell of the reputations of everyone who had ever so much as cheered on any war of liberal intervention from the 1990s onwards. As radio stations begin to ban Ed Sheeran, he should consider that there were radio stations that to this day refused to play the band formerly known as the Dixie Chicks because of their opposition to the Iraq War.

Yet it is for the present and future wars that we have moved in half a decade from staying at home to protect our elders, to wishing them dead through what could logically be nothing less than the abolition of the state pension. How the world turns, that it was Thatcher who linked it to prices rather than to earnings on the assumption that that would always be far cheaper, while the pro-war Green Party wants only a double lock, with the 2.5 per cent rule abolished. On behalf of the whole country, as is always integral to any parliamentary election, Holborn and St Pancras should return George Galloway.