The Clergy Challenge: Day 965

I invite each and every bishop, priest and deacon of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if he thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me.

Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know. The current total is zero.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 965

As already stated on the day after my release: "The instant that Labour lost control of Durham County Council, then I was granted an unsolicited tag for more than 10 weeks of future good behaviour. I invite each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council, each and every member of Durham County Council, and each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know." The current total is zero.

Since Lanchester is be moved into North Durham by the boundary changes,  I invite each and every other candidate for that parliamentary seat to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. In this case, names most certainly will be published, including as part of my election literature. The current total is zero. If that remained the case when the next General Election was called, then my literature would state that each and all of my opponents, by name, did not think that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. At least in that event, then I challenge Oliver Kamm to contest this seat.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Now Canada Is Euthanising Autistic People

Kevin Yuill writes:

Imagine one day you discover that your adult daughter, who still lives with you, wants to be euthanised. As far as you are aware, she is healthy. She suffers from autism and ADHD, but no physical illnesses or disabilities that you know of. You know that she has faced many difficulties in her life, but you love her and desperately want to prevent her death. You are left fighting against her doctors, who encourage her decision and are perfectly happy to help her go through with this. To make this nightmare even worse, no one will even tell you why your daughter has been approved to die.

This is the awful reality facing one father in Alberta, Canada. A judge issued a ruling this week that clears the way for a 27-year-old woman, known to the court only as MV, to be accepted into Canada’s medical assistance in dying (MAID) programme. Despite the attempts by her father – known as WV – to prevent this, there was really very little that could have been done. Under Canadian law, the court had no choice but to allow his daughter to be killed. According to the twisted logic of assisted-dying campaigners, this is the ‘compassionate’ option.

To be eligible for MAID, a patient needs to have a ‘grievous and irredeemable’ medical condition. In court, MV did not need to identify which medical condition she is supposed to be suffering from. She was not required to provide information about her symptoms or explain how they cause her to suffer. All her parents have seen is the evidence that she followed the correct procedures to access MAID, and that her eligibility was approved by two doctors.

WV argues that the doctors were wrong to conclude that his daughter met the MAID criteria. He told the courts that she was diagnosed in 2016 with autism-spectrum disorder. She also has a long history of seeking medical diagnoses for physical ailments. But, to her father’s knowledge, no diagnosis was ever made. He said it is unclear to him whether she suffers from any physical condition at all. He speculated that she may suffer from psychological conditions that ‘caus[e] her to believe that she suffers from physiological symptoms’.

MV’s case gives a disturbing insight into just how easy it can be to access MAID. Patients can simply shop around for doctors who are willing to give their approval. Her first application was turned down, because one of the two doctors she consulted said she did not meet the criteria (it is not known when she made this application). She made a second application in 2023. Again, one doctor determined her to be eligible and the other did not. The Alberta Health Services then allowed her to obtain a third assessment (a ‘tie-break’). However, the doctor selected to break the tie was the same doctor who had already agreed with MV’s first MAID application. Who was responsible for this decision? We will probably never know.

The court agreed that MV had no obligation to answer any of her parents’ questions about her medical condition or the MAID process. The judge declared that ‘the court cannot review a MAID applicant’s decision-making or the clinical judgement of the doctors and nurse practitioners’. Because of medical-privacy laws, her parents can never know why two doctors felt it was acceptable for the state to euthanise their daughter. Life and death decisions are being made in secret, by unaccountable figures.

Assisted-dying campaigners often claim that they are on the side of compassion. But stopping a father from saving his daughter’s life is surely the cruellest outcome possible. Anyone who still believes that euthanasia prevents suffering needs to seriously think again.

Thames Water Proves Privatisation Has Failed

Although he cannot resist an ill-placed dig at the unions, Ross Clark writes:

Why do the Conservatives find it so difficult to admit that the privatisation of public utilities has in many cases been a disaster? It was supposed to bring heaps of finance into public services, protect taxpayers from financial risk and bring prices down through competition.

Yet we have ended up with energy prices fixed by Ofcom, a rail industry which is swallowing vastly more subsidy in real terms than British Rail ever did – with unions bidding up pay to astronomical levels and taxpayers forced to cough up to fund those rises. Royal Mail has flogged off valuable city centre development sites while it jacks up the price of stamps and tries to wriggle out of its obligation to deliver post six days a week. And now we have Thames Water tottering under its enormous debts, its shareholders refusing to put in more money and water customers likely to be forced to bail it out.

The people who run our privatised utilities are ardent capitalists when it comes to rewarding themselves when things are going well. But then they turn remarkably socialist when things are going badly and they start looking to the government for help. Customers, needless to say, won’t have any choice because there is no competition for retail water consumers.

Is there any sign that private finance has enriched our water infrastructure? London has gained a new ring main water distribution system under Thames Water. Yet sewage is being dumped in rivers across the country at an ever greater rate (conveniently blamed on that great get-out clause, climate change), and water is frequently being rationed through hosepipe bans. Almost all the impressive infrastructure – great dams, pumping stations, sewers – was built when water companies were public corporations. All that seems to have happened under privatisation is that those inherited assets have been sweated, and in some cases sold off to developers. Private equity owners of these companies have taken out billions and piled on debt.

This isn’t capitalism. If it was, Thames Water would be allowed to go bust and vultures left to pick through its assets. But of course that isn’t going to be allowed to happen because Thames Water owns the only water supply London has. Utility companies have become complex hybrid structures which straddle the public and private sectors, with taxpayers generally the losers.

This would be my test as to whether or not an industry should be privatised: ministers must ask themselves what should happen if the privatised company gets into trouble. Can the government allow it simply to go bust or will it have to be bailed out in some way? If it is the latter, it shouldn’t be privatised.

Polls have been showing for years that there is strong support for the renationalisation of public utilities, with one recent survey showing 69 per cent in favour and only eight per cent against. But in spite of the party’s voter base having shifted to former red wall seats where voters are generally very favourable to public-run services, the party seems strangely reluctant to tap into this political gain. Privatisation is just too much tied up with fabled memories of the glory days of the Thatcher government.

There are, of course, good arguments against wholesale renationalisation of utilities: would taxpayers really appreciate having to shell out billions to buy out private shareholders? Then again, when you have a company which seems to be sinking, like Thames Water, or the rail companies which would be desperate to offload their franchises were it not for being feather-bedded by soaring public subsidies, why don’t ministers try sitting on their hands, letting capitalism do its usual, punishing work against poorly-run companies – and then pick up their assets, on the cheap, for the public good? Meanwhile, they should show some humility and admit that the privatisation of public utilities wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. The Conservatives might find themselves a bit more popular for once.

We Are The Pirates Now

Yesterday’s sixtieth anniversary of Radio Caroline’s first broadcast has brought out the usual guff. Now, don’t get me wrong. Although it rarely comes up on here, I am a serious lover of popular music, with, though I say so myself, some knowledge of the subject. Just never ask me to sing or play anything.

But for all its alleged left-wingery, and its ability to annoy the forces of conservatism no end, rock’n’roll was made up of common or garden proto-Thatcherites, often tax exiles. The only notable exceptions were David Bowie and Eric Clapton, way out on the Far Right, at least performatively in Bowie’s case.

The Sixties Swingers hated with a burning passion the Labour Government of 1964 to 1970. The pirate radio stations were their revolt against its and the BBC’s deal with the Musicians’ Union to protect the livelihoods of that union’s members. Hence the Marine Offences Act 1967, which outlawed broadcasting from a boat off the British mainland. The Minister responsible was Tony Benn. Of course.

Behind this union-busting criminality was Oliver Smedley, who was later to be a key figure behind the Institute of Economic Affairs, an engine room of Thatcherism. Viewers of The Boat That Rocked, once a mainstay of late night television, should consider that the Postmaster General so mercilessly ridiculed in it was in fact Benn, and that the Prime Minister who legislated against pirate radio was Harold Wilson. Those Swingers used the lowering of the voting age to put what they thought were the Selsdon Tories into office in 1970.

They went on to entrench their moral, social and cultural decadence and libertinism, first in the economic sphere during the 1980s, when the pirate radio stations were entirely frank and accurate about their own impeccably Thatcherite credentials, and then also in the constitutional sphere under Tony Blair. David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss accepted uncritically the whole package: moral, social, cultural, economic, and constitutional. Indeed, they embodied it.

Rishi Sunak wants to do so, and he would if he were given an overall majority this year. Keir Starmer already does, even in Opposition. The Liberal Democrats were founded to defend the moral, social, cultural and economic aspects against unsympathetic sections of both main parties, while bringing about the constitutional ones on the same basis. They pursued that mission vigorously in office, as they would again. Whether or not it was immediately apparent in the 1960s, and there were a few who did see it, the anti-industrial Malthusianism of the Greens has always been fundamental to the entire project.

But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair’s Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

I have no plan to join the Workers Party of Britain, although nor would I expect to stand against it. If, however, it did not contest North Durham, then I would. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not. We have made a start.

Water Works

At the point of privatisation, the water companies were debt free, as befitted the monopoly suppliers of something that everyone had to have, and the raw material of which fell out of the sky for free.

The money that those companies pay out in dividends would easily cover any infrastructure costs. Yet leakage is out of control, and raw sewage is being pumped into our rivers, our lakes and our seas. In 2022, Thames Water, typically of the sector, declared a billion pound profit in order to pay dividends, despite being £12 billion in debt.

So we are all expected to bail it out, at whatever rate happened to be demanded by the shareholders, themselves largely foreign states as such, which are allowed to own our vital infrastructure but not two small circulation newspapers and a tiny circulation magazine. They should be told to forget it. Those shares are worth what anyone else would now pay for them. How much is that?

More broadly, since dividends are supposed to reward investment, then they should be limited by the Statute Law to the Bank Rate plus risk on the capital provided by the original share issue, with customers awarded shares for all capital converted from their payments.

None of the Conservative Party, the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats or the SNP would ever do that on their own or only with each other, just as they would never renationalise England's water, even though that is what the huge majority of people in England wants.

But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair’s Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

I have no plan to join the Workers Party of Britain, although nor would I expect to stand against it. If, however, it did not contest North Durham, then I would. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not. We have made a start.

Sting

Throughout the Corbyn years, the entire Labour Party agreed about one thing, and that was WASPI. Blairite ultras asked Prime Minister's Questions about it, and held rallies in their constituencies to which they invited, by post, every woman in the age range. They were of one mind with a Corbynite activist base that, being largely one or more of young, male and working-class, was by no means sympathetic to the entitlement that can often characterise middle-class, female Boomers.

The Liberal Democrats, the SNP, the Workers Party, the Greens, the Alba Party, Plaid Cymru, the SDLP, the Alliance Party and the DUP are all going into the General Election with that commitment intact. If neither Labour nor the Conservatives did so, then bet your house on a hung Parliament. Now, in coalition negotiations, the first things to go are the things that would cost the most. But the point is that such negotiations would be necessary.

In any case, this very day, the Government is expecting us all to dance in the streets that it has sent yet another $1.5 billion, and that is pointedly how it is phrased, to Ukraine. Over two years, Test and Trace cost £37 billion. And so on, and on, and on, and on, and on. Is there no money, or nowhere enough as would be just? For the victims of contaminated blood, who have to come first? For the victims of Orgreave, Grenfell Tower, the Windrush scandal and the Post Office scandal, who have to come next? For the WASPI women? For anyone? No money? No money? No money?

A tax of one to two per cent on assets above £10 million could abolish 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. Labour was always wrong to make the £28 billion about the Green stuff. It should have said that that was an industrial strategy, much of which happened to be Green. "Without an industrial strategy, then why have a Labour Government?" Why, indeed? £28 billion for investment? This Government has borrowed £1.7 trillion for nothing. £28 billion could easily be raised by taxing dividends and capital gains at the same rate as wages, as was the case under Labour's once again beloved Margaret Thatcher.

Put those together with other things, including the massively popular renationalisation of the utilities, and in the right hands there would be no question of rivers running with sewage, or of doubling the pay of the boss of British Gas to £8.2 million, or of withholding NHS Covid bonuses from agency staff until they had been on strike, or of Mel Stride's plan to order DWP staff to take an arbitrary 150,000 people off sickness and disability benefits as if that would cure them or find them jobs, or of Liz Kendall's even more hateful scheme in the same vein.

A sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency 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 require to be under democratic political control. The responsibility of the Government is to ensure the supply of goods and services to be purchased with that currency. There is no debt. It is an accounting trick. The Treasury, which is the State, has issued bonds to the Bank of England, which is the State. Even if those bonds were held by anyone else, then the State could simply issue itself with enough of its own free floating, fiat currency to redeem them. There is no debt. There is no debt. There is no debt.

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". Terms such as "taxpayers' money" are extremely and intentionally misleading. "Fiscal headroom" is nothing other than 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.

Giving up democratic political control of monetary policy has been a disaster. Without a manifesto commitment, Labour farmed out monetary policy. The Lib Dems forced the creation of the Office for Budget Responsibility. The Conservatives have created the Economic Advisory Council out of thin air. 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 in each of those cases they should have been.

If there is an Economic Advisory Council, then what is the Treasury for? And look who is on it. Imperial protectorates and Indian princely states had British advisers whose advice had to be taken, and our nominally sovereign little colony of BlackRock and JP Morgan is in much the same position. Rupert Harrison was George Osborne's long-time Chief of Staff and then Evening Standard employee, while Osborne, Philip Hammond and Sajid Javid are also all advising Hunt. Harrison has been selected as the Conservative candidate for Bicester and Woodstock. Yet whom would you have instead? Rachel Reeves? Even if Harrison were a sitting Conservative MP, then would Reeves remove him from the Economic Advisory Council? Merely to ask that question answers it.

But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

I have no plan to join the Workers Party of Britain, although nor would I expect to stand against it. If, however, it did not contest North Durham, then I would. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not. We have made a start.