Nothing Cryptic About It

If North Korea is an unelectrified joke, then how could it have a nuclear weapons programme, why should we be frightened of a few thousand of its troops in Kursk, and how could it have taken down Binance, the name of which had four more letters than it needed? The speculative value of cryptocurrencies is hurtling towards their intrinsic value of zero. A suspicious number of those who decry us sceptics of the cashless society also claim that we are under constant threat of cyberattacks, and a surprising number of those who are forthright against the cashless society are enthusiasts for cryptocurrencies, about which the clue is in the name. In the cashless economy, every penny that we spent would be tracked. Cryptocurrencies are beyond democratic political control. The combination of the two would be, and increasingly is, that level of tracking by those who were thus unaccountable. If the North Koreans have paused or halted that process, then they have done the world a favour.

Bankrolled by Christopher Harborne, Reform UK proposes a Sovereign Bitcoin Reserve Fund. How is that looking now? Instead, as Jackdaw is opened up and as we hope for Rosebank, the talk is of a proper sovereign wealth fund. That is opposed only by those who cannot accept that Margaret Thatcher did anything wrong, not even when she lost this country a trillion pounds by not creating a Norwegian-style sovereign wealth fund with the profits from North Sea oil, and by those who cannot accept that any good idea was ever had by Tony Benn, who in fact founded the National Enterprise Board, which invested in Acorn Computing, which in turn helped to develop the ARM Processors that are found in all iPhones, so that all iPhones are Bennite.

Even without the sovereign wealth fund to buy it, the case for the renationalisation of water has been made yet again by the sacking, or whatever you preferred to call it, of Nicola Shaw. Water privatisation has indisputably failed, and the shares in the companies are monetarily worthless (what would you pay for them?), so bring on lock, stock and barrel renationalisation, leading to the National Grid that was promised by Labour in 1979. Just do it. Now. The Parliament of the United Kingdom may legislate over and above any devolved body, and the people of Scotland and Wales would love this arrangement once they had it. Nothing has weakened the Union, and democratic national and parliamentary sovereignty, more than privatisation. While there are grey areas, if something would obviously have to be rescued by the State rather than allowed to go bust, then it belongs in public ownership, just as if something obviously would not, then it does not. Corner shops? Obviously not. But water? Obviously.

Likewise, it is obviously welcome both economically and strategically that the Ministry of Defence should buy British wherever possible and require offsets wherever it had to do otherwise. As with the zero rating of VAT on dometic power, it is a clear Brexit benefit that it should be free to do so. But let that be only the start. BAE Systems should be renationalised as the monopoly supplier to our own Armed Forces, with a ban on all sale of arms abroad, and with a comprehensive programme of diversification in the spirit of the Lucas Plan. And instead of Trident, an extra £70 billion should be given to each of the Royal Navy, the British Army, and the Royal Air Force. That would not entail depriving anything else of funding. 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 the fiscal and monetary means to control inflation, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control in both cases.