Looking back over the past decade and more the United Kingdom seems now to be emerging from a period of temporary insanity. Perhaps the rot started with Thatcher and the Greed Is Good mentality but it really took off when New Labour gave up on substance and focused entirely on appearances. Blair, Mandelson and Brown. The sultans of spin.
These days the whole bullshit Britain edifice seems to be collapsing. First it was the bankers who were exposed as incompetent and greedy charlatans. Then the MPs were found to be seedy little fraudsters fiddling their expenses. Now we find that the press have been routinely breaking the law and the police have been colluding with them! In a way it was obvious. Both the press and the police use private investigators and for the same reason: To employ illegal methods without getting their hands dirty. Now we just need proof that the monarchy orchestrated the killing of Princess Dianne and the whole of the British establishment can be considered corrupt. To put it another way we just need a Queen for a full house – baboom. Oh, please yourselves.
Ed Milliband is getting good press for his stance on News International and his calls for new media ownership rules but, once again, Mr. Milliband is behaving like a hypocritical chancer without conviction or a coherent strategy.
In December 2010 Ofcom was considering the attempt by News International to buy outright British Sky Broadcasting (BskyB) and the Business Secretary, Vince Cable, was caught off guard saying that he had “declared war on Mr Murdoch”.
There were calls for Mr. Cable to resign and Mr. Milliband joined in saying “David Cameron has made the wrong judgment and he has kept Vince Cable on, not because of the national interest but because his Conservative-led Government needs the prop which Vince Cable provides.”
Yet now Mr. Milliband appears to have declared war on Mr. Murdoch himself. The BBC quotes an interview for the Observer in which Mr. Milliband says:
“I think that we’ve got to look at the situation whereby one person can own more than 20% of the newspaper market, the Sky platform and Sky News. I think it’s unhealthy because that amount of power in one person’s hands has clearly led to abuses of power within his organisation. If you want to minimise the abuses of power then that kind of concentration of power is frankly quite dangerous.”
Pity Mr. Miliband didn’t have the courage to condemn News International before Rupert Murdoch’s fall from grace but I suspect he didn’t have the balls. Talking of which we haven’t heard a squeak from Ed Balls for a while.
So, Wikileaks has been in the news this week. The media would have us believe that Wikileaks are releasing thousands of massive secrets which will undermine security for the whole world. However, the drivel that has dribbled out so far is hardly Earth shattering. Russia is corrupt, Angela Merkel is risk averse, Berlusconi is on the take. Yawn yawn yawn. We know all this. The yanks think that Cameron is a lightweight. Ho hum.
What the media seem not to be taking into account is that these are just a lot of internal memos. U.S. Policy is not that Merkel is cautious and Berlusconi corrupt. These are just opinions expressed by diplomats and the opinions are very diplomatic. Prior to the details emerging the media would have had us believe that we were in for a deluge of state secrets. If the leaks show anything they show that the Americans are fairly straight and fairly astute in their judgement.
Normally I am in favour of complete transparency. Publish everything. Certainly the United Kingdom keeps too much information secret and the recent MPs expenses scandal shows that secrecy feeds corruption.
However, the information currently being leaked by Wikileaks is nothing specific. It is just a lot of emails. If the Emails released shed light on some government fraud or illegal activity then there would be some point in releasing it but just embarrassing diplomats because they expressed opinions that were critical provides no benefit to anyone and damages the cause of transparency and freedom of information.
Having said that, it seems odd that just as Wikileaks really hits the news the Swedish government issue an arrest warrant for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange for alleged “sex crimes”. Probably the real story is that the Swedish government, whether unwittingly or not, are colluding in a stitch up
I saw a cartoon in The Independent yesterday which implied that The Tory/Lib Dem coalition are using scare tactics to introduce spending cuts. I’ve also heard the Labour cabinet condemning all the cuts but giving no guide as to how the deficit (and the debt) which New Labour ran up should be brought under control. For those not steeped in financial jargon the debt is how much we owe and the deficit is the shortfall in our annual spending. So by running a deficit we increase the national debt. The talk by the new coalition government so far has concentrated on getting the deficit under control but bare in mind that Gordon Brown ran a deficit even during the boom years as the UK was spending more than the government gained in taxes!
Depressingly but, perhaps predictably, all we hear from everyone who has been asked to make cuts is justification for why their particular budget should not be cut. There was an education official on the radio recently “explaining” that the national debt is not like a credit card and that we can simply roll over the debt. Easy! We’re in debt, no problem, borrow more. It is this daft logic that has lead to the UK national debt of nearly 70% of GDP in 2009.
During the 18th and 19th centuries the United Kingdom became wealthy through empire and the industrial revolution and used that wealth to provide comfy lives for the British elite. Note that the majority of the British people had lives worse than many of those in India or elsewhere in the Empire mainly because of the cold British climate and the appalling working conditions during the industrial revolution. The British elite, however, did very well.
During the two world wars the European powers smashed each other to bits and America and the USSR stepped in as world leaders. The U.S. had ensured that the UK paid for aid during the war but the Marshall Plan got the UK and Western Europe back on their feat. The UK then hung on to it’s place in the world for a while. Our industry and trained workforce gave us “comparative advantage” compared to “developing countries” and so the UK and other European countries remained fairly wealthy and fairly secure. Sure Japan, Taiwan and others developed their own industry but most of the world remained pre-industrial.
Post World War 2 a Labour government came to power and, dazzled by the apparent success of Socialism in the USSR, started looking after the working class. For the first time ordinary people gained access to clean water, health care and pensions.
We developed a world view roughly as follows: The West leads the world, developing technology and operating industry, the far east copies the West and and performs some production and the “third world” supplies the raw materials but remains poor and dependent on aid.
But the UK was complacent., we became convinced that all our wealth was a natural state of affairs and that it could all be paid for by creative accounting. While we were naval gazing the Soviet Union collapsed, open markets became the vogue, China joined the World Trade Organisation and the rest of the world adopted capitalism and found that they were pretty good at it. Not only were they good at it they were unencumbered by a mature democracy or legislation to protect workers.
Global leadership, industry and power is now shifting from the democratic Western nations to nations who are either dictatorships or corrupt token democracies. As a quick preamble to my next bit of ranting I should explain, for the uninitiated, that the a common measure of a countries wealth is Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This is a measure of the total value of goods and services produced by a country. Because countries vary in populations another common measure is to divide GDP by the population and derive a figure known as GDP per capita. This gives a measure of how much each person, on average, produces.
Time for some figures.
UK GDP is sixth in the world, just above Brazil at 8 and India at 11 and below China at 3.
National debt is at 68% of GDP, higher than Ghana at 67.5% or Uganda at 19.3%
The UK’s budget deficit (how much more we spend than we earn) is at 14.2% of GDP, above Sierra Leone at 12.35% and Vietnam at 9.3%
And yet
The UK’s defence budget is 2.5% of GDP, that’s more than above China at 2% and Germany at 1.3%.
The UK’s Education spending is the same as South Africa and Mexico at 5.3% of GDP. That’s above Bhutan at 5.2% but below Fiji at 5.6% and Bolivia at 6.3% and Yemen at 9.5%!
It’s also worth considering that other countries do not have debt, they have surplus! They have saved money and built up substantial wealth in Sovereign Wealth Funds. For example:
United Arab Emirates 627 $Billion
Norway 443 $Billion
China 288.8 $Billion
The UK still has some cards up it sleeve. In 2008 we were the sixth biggest manufacturer after Italy but Russia was at 7 and Brazil at 8.
In recent history the UK has relied on North Sea oil to top up our income. I cannot find any figures on what percentage of our GDP is made up from Oil and Gas but I recall reading that the tax take on Oil and Gas was the largest contributor to the British exchequer followed by Finance. I believe that was before the financial crisis.
All this is not to say that the United Kingdom is doomed, just that the world is changing and we can’t rely on the UK remaining wealthy by default. British policies today dictate the future of this country and if we continue to run up a debt our nation will decline. It not rocket science. There are younger and fitter countries in the world.
Just today I heard a British politician talking about maintaining British leadership. Our political elite have not yet caught up with the 21st century. Why should Brazil, Taiwan or China be interested in being lead by a mid size debtor nation on the other side of the world?
No nation or empire lasts for ever. Nations and Empires rise and fall. The British Empire has fallen and one day the UK will fall and I suggest that, if we are not careful, people will look back and see that the obvious start was the 21st century due to complacency, vested interests and the inability of a people to make tough decisions..
We are no longer one of the few great industrialised powers in a world populated by uneducated and illiterate farmers. The UK is now just one of many educated and industrialised countries. It is true that we have a more mature system of law and democracy but undemocratic and corrupt governments around the world see this as an encumbrance and not as something to emulate.
We are in massive debt, the oil money is running out. New Labour’s policies of spend and hope have failed. I support the current government’s prescription of large scale cuts but this should be supplemented by informed strategic planning.
We should also reconsider our commitment to allowing foreign entities to buy British assets and industry. Sovereign Wealth Funds referred to above often buy industry and assets from the developed world and this is acceptable if everyone plays by the same rules. However some of the largest of these funds are owned by nations who play by very few rules. Specifically we should be wary of allowing SWFs of single party dictatorships or corrupt regimes owning large stakes in the UK.
Globalisation is all very well while the foreign money is pouring in and funding industry and jobs but once these foreign owners have their feet under the table they often find that it is more efficient to centralise production and transfer the industry abroad. This would be fair enough were it possible for British companies to buy up industry in China, Germany or Japan in the same way but other countries are not as open as the UK.
Last Sunday night there was a TV program enthusing about one industry in the UK which remains cutting edge and world leading. This was British Aerospace and it’s production of Rolls Royce Trent aircraft engines in Derby.
The company was very impressive. What is less impressive are rumours that in order to gain access to the larger and more lucrative U.S. military business British Aerospace is trying to morph into a United States company. Once this is achieved how long will it be able to justify dispersing it’s business over two continents?
While in America I had hired a car. Americans seem to ride more than drive and when the traffic stops they leave vast spaces between each car. They seem more tolerant of poor driving but this may be because they lack lane discipline. Cars weave between lanes without warning.
In Nigeria the driving style was to never give an inch to any other driver. I remember a journey crawling along a narrow street in Lagos approaching a crossroads. Once we reached the intersection every car was revving their engine madly and pushing forward to gradually edge past the other cars which were all doing the same thing. Normally, in Nigeria, I had a driver but one Christmas I had to drive myself and determined to show Nigerians how it should be done. My plan was doomed from the start. I waited forlornly for someone to let me out into the moving traffic but if I had not abandoned my stupid idea and pushed my way out I would be waiting there to this day.
It is the same with the Nigerian corruption. It is all very well claiming moral superiority and deciding that you will pay no bribes but you will achieve nothing. One cannot eradicate corruption by example any more than one can force lane discipline on Americans by example. This is a lesson I believe should be understood by armchair stay at homes who lecture multinational companies on their behaviour in the developing world.
On occasions a Nigerian would become so frustrated by the lack of progress that he would emerge from his car and start directing traffic himself until his own driver was able to navigate the intersection at which point he would re-enter his car and leave the whole tangled mess behind him. I did this myself on several occasions and it gave one a great feeling of elation as one finally gained the open road and sped away into the hot night.
Another boon to Nigerian traffic control were the disabled. I vividly recall a one legged man who would stand on the podium provided for the permanently absent traffic police and direct the traffic with his crutch. As the traffic passed the drivers would sling him a handful of Naira.
bangkok traffic
A few years ago I drove across Bangkok in the rush hour. Starting around 5pm, I reached my destination by 9pm but on the wrong side of the road which was divided by a concrete barrier. I continued and, noticing that U-turns were prohibited, I turned left and then left again into a car park where I re-emerged and turned right back onto the correct side of the road. A traffic cop stopped me and accused me of making a U-turn. He explained that although I had not actually made a U-turn I had achieved the same result and had therefore broken the law. Unlike the British police he seemed to enforce the spirit of the law if not the letter of the law.
Back in the UK this morning I drove north on the M23 and, as the lanes merged into the A23, I indicated left but the other driver refused to let me in. My initial reaction was that the driver was an anally retentive moron but then I saw the driver was a woman. It is a fact that women do not let you in. I once knew a salesman who said that he never let cars pull out from side streets as it was a “a sign of weakness”. I don’t believe that the reason that women do not let you in is driven by this same insecurity but by a preoccupation with following the rules. If you have right of way, why should give it up?
Men (excluding salesmen) appear more cooperative when they drive. At the meeting of Woodean Drive and Dyke Road Avenue in Brighton each morning cars take turns to join the main road. This admirable cooperation is interrupted only by women and, presumably, salesmen. Perhaps this is related to Enoch Powell’s comment that women are not “clubable”.
I have heard that a study was carried out in the United States to test the effectiveness of the process for launching Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICMBs) and that the test provided that the launch technicians believed that they were initiating a real nuclear missile launch. It was found that women would always launch the missiles as they had been instructed but that a percentage of men would refuse. The men would fall back on their own reasoning and decide that since all they could achieve was wholesale murder there was no point in proceeding. I have heard that more women in the UK support the introduction of capital punishment than men.
It is interesting that my reaction on seeing that the driver who failed to let me in was a woman was to dismiss the incident whereas I would have continued to feel aggravated if the driver had been a man. I guess this is related to some kind of male competition.
Continuing on from my musings on narrative, identity and myth I often think that the British version of World War 2 is a beautiful myth. The myth is that brave little Britain fought off the vast might the evil Nazis. To some extent this may be true but on the other hand in 1939 Britain ran the largest Empire the world had ever seen and maintained this empire the way all empires are maintained: state sanctioned violence.
The United States also has a myth. Theirs is that they are a freedom loving nation keen to help foreign people defy their oppressors. Yet even at the height of the cultural rebellion of peace and love in 1967 the United States was propping up oppressive dictators all over the world.
I guess the lesson is that leaders have a tendency to arrogance and disconnection from the people over which they hold power and therefore strong democratic institutions are required and this brings me to another topic that has been in the news recently: The European Union.
Leaders Love Power
I have been in two minds about the idea of greater integration of the states of the EU. I am quite attracted to the idea yet I can see that the EU is not democratic and is, to a great extent, corrupt. The fact that auditors have not been able to sign off the EU accounts should ring major alarms bells yet politicians such as Neil Kinnock have dismissed this as unimportant.
To my mind democratic rights and institutions are won from those in power by bitter struggle and it is far easier to give them up than it is to regain them. For this reason I am becoming more sceptical about the EU. The people’s of the EU were given the chance to vote on a constitution and they rejected it. This constitution was itself a nonsense as it was far too long and complicated. Citizens of the EU cannot be expected to understand this kind of bureaucratic waffle. A constitution should be more akin the The United States Bill of Rights. Short and simple. Something that the common people can understand and support.
The peoples of the EU rejected the constitution but this was not accepted by the leaders who rewrote the constitution as a treaty and tried to push again. This is corruption. This is the leaders of the EU forcing their views on the people. If they are willing to do this kind of thing then how can we trust them?
Were the EU to democratise then perhaps the EU could be trusted but the problems with making the EU more democratic is the vested interests of the existing governments. British Eurosceptic MPs may criticise the EU for it’s lack of democracy but they make no efforts to democratise the EU because this would mean a dilution of their own power.
We’re back to the same themes.
Leaders love power and cannot be trusted
The control for this is strong democratic institutions
Strong democratic institutions are difficult to build but easy to destroy
The EU does not have strong democratic institutions
I have been mulling over the expenses scandal currently bubbling away in the British press and it seems to me that this is the straw that broke the camels back. The expenses scandle is the last in a long stream of betrayals by our leaders and specifically by New Labour. It is time for a general election. (See petition information below).
New Labour came to power promising an end to the sleaze that defined the fag end of the last Tory government. Tony Blair portrayed himself as embracing an innovative vision of The United Kingdom and promulgated a bold modern vision of the future of the UK.
MPs who tried to stop you seeing their expenses
However, it quickly became apparent that the cardinal attribute of New Labour was not vision but spin. One after another New Labour ministers proved themselves corrupt and were dismissed from office only to be brought back in once the fuss had died down.
New Labour policies turned out to be the wholesale adoption of Thatcherism but, as with all converts, the policies were embraced as a doctrine and without understanding or judgement. Privatisations continued and New Labour became the bitch of big business.
Tony Blair began hobnobbing with the super rich and power went to his head. At the frenzied height of New Labour devotion to hyper-capitalism he tried to introduce super casinos. That a Labour government should consider the massive expansion of gambling in this country when the only people calling for it were greedy American business men beggars belief but by this time he was so far gone he could not see further than the Gordon Brown’s balance sheet.
When George Bush decided to go to war with Iraq Blair’s dragged us in too. The Islamist terrorism unleashed the Big Brother tendency that is never far from the minds of any Labour government. New laws were introduced to detain people without trial, CCTV became almost ubiquitous
The credit crunch brought claims from our leaders that this was a global phenomena that had little to do with their policies ignoring the frequent articles in newspapers such as The Economist describing the dangerous asset price bubble which was being fueled by cheap money and would eventually burst.
When ordinary people protested against the bankers in London the police responded with highly questionable tactics such as kettling and casual violence which may have left one man dead. Yet our leaders supported the outrageous tactics and trotted out the usual platitudes about violent demonstrators.
Luckily the widespread use of video technology by the general public revealed that the violence was mainly perpetrated by the police.
Now we learn that those we trust with the leadership of our country are fiddling their expenses like so many seedy second hand car salesmen.
On The BBC, Radio 4 program Any Questions this week it was suggested that the British people use the upcoming European elections to withhold votes from the major parties. Our leadership on the panel showed the depth of their depravity once again by attempting to scare the public with the spectre of racism and erroneously implying that this meant a vote for the BNP.
Lord Falkner went on to complain that it was a tragedy that New Labour would be judged on the expenses story and that this was a distraction when more important issues were at stake.
Lord Falkner is Talking Bollocks!
There can be no more important issue than whether our leaders are trustworthy. Their policies and promises mean nothing if the are prepared to waive aside their probity and obligations for a few thousand pounds.
While preaching prudence our leaders have led us into the worst economic crisis for decades. They led us into an illegal war that caused the deaths of thousands and severely damaged Britain’s reputation abroad. They continue to introduce ever more draconian laws which erode our civil liberties and they encourage the police to suppress protest using methods not dissimilar to those found in Zimbabwe.
Now we hear that they have been fiddling their expenses.
During the Any Questions program Susan Kramer, MP, suggested that we need a general election. She is right. The British people must be given the chance to decide whether their representatives deserve the confidence and the responsibility with which they are entrusted.
Photography
Wikileaks undermines the case for transparency
Tags: Angela Merkel, Cameron, complete transparency, corruption, emails, expenses scandal, freedom of information, Julian Assange, memos, Russia, sec crimes, secrets, Silvio Berlusconi, stitch up, Swedish government, Wikileaks, wikileaks founder
Berlusconi corrupt? With his reputation?
So, Wikileaks has been in the news this week. The media would have us believe that Wikileaks are releasing thousands of massive secrets which will undermine security for the whole world. However, the drivel that has dribbled out so far is hardly Earth shattering. Russia is corrupt, Angela Merkel is risk averse, Berlusconi is on the take. Yawn yawn yawn. We know all this. The yanks think that Cameron is a lightweight. Ho hum.
What the media seem not to be taking into account is that these are just a lot of internal memos. U.S. Policy is not that Merkel is cautious and Berlusconi corrupt. These are just opinions expressed by diplomats and the opinions are very diplomatic. Prior to the details emerging the media would have had us believe that we were in for a deluge of state secrets. If the leaks show anything they show that the Americans are fairly straight and fairly astute in their judgement.
Normally I am in favour of complete transparency. Publish everything. Certainly the United Kingdom keeps too much information secret and the recent MPs expenses scandal shows that secrecy feeds corruption.
However, the information currently being leaked by Wikileaks is nothing specific. It is just a lot of emails. If the Emails released shed light on some government fraud or illegal activity then there would be some point in releasing it but just embarrassing diplomats because they expressed opinions that were critical provides no benefit to anyone and damages the cause of transparency and freedom of information.
Having said that, it seems odd that just as Wikileaks really hits the news the Swedish government issue an arrest warrant for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange for alleged “sex crimes”. Probably the real story is that the Swedish government, whether unwittingly or not, are colluding in a stitch up