The headlines are screaming that Britain is isolated and the Labour opposition are blaming the Prime Minister David Cameron. The leader of the opposition, Ed Miliband has tweeted that Cameron vetoing the EU treaty change was a sign of “weakness” – Yawn.
This whole furore is ridiculous. Like all EU countries Britain will act in it’s own interests. Britain is not in the Euro area and so her interests are dissimilar from Euro-zone countries. The root of this is that Britain is not a member of the Euro zone and that was a decision taken under Labour so blaming Cameron is absurd.
Does Mr. Miliband really believe that he would have handled the situation any better? If Britain had a Labour government Mr. Miliband would have found that it was he who had to walk the line between the rival mobs of pro and anti European Brits. He would have had to make the best judgement call he could.
Britain has always been half hearted about Europe. We don’t want a two speed Europe because we don’t want a diminution of Britain’s power in Europe but, at the same time, we are not in favour of the greater integration which is the goal of many other countries.
Britain is a problem for Europe but now that push, has come to shove, Britain has been forced to decide: in or out of the central core. Cameron has chosen out and, given the current state of the Euro, I doubt that Mr. Milliband would have decided differently.
The hysteria of Mr. Milliband’s comments are indicative of Labour’s continuing media focused leadership. Just last week he was pontificating on the comments of Jeremy Clarkson on a TV chat show. We should get this in perspective. Mr. Clarkson is the presenter of a car program. Like him or loath him CLARKSON DOES NOT MATTER. I do not elect and pay politicians to commentate on popular TV shows.
New Labour’s current performance are evidence that they still have not understood that 13 years of spin was a failure. They need to get serious and start identifying solid policy differences between themselves and the Conservatives. And a dose of sincerity would not go amiss.
A front page article in the Financial Times (FT) on the 21st November reported that a bunch of “leading economists” had written a letter to the British Chancellor, George Osbourne, urging him to rethink his plans to curb immigration. Mr. Osbourne is planning to limit economic migrants entering the UK from outside the EU and the economists believe that this would be “deeply damaging to the competitiveness of our science and research sectors and the wider economy”.
The UK had 13 years of New Labour during which immigration was used to provide cheap skilled workers to business mitigating the need to properly educate the indigenous workforce. This is obviously not a sustainable policy and will merely store up trouble for the future as British people sit on their arses and let Johnny Foreigner do all the work.
The restrictions to be brought in are for non-EU citizens so British business would still have the entire population of the EU from which to draw its workers. That means the economists believe that the educated percentage of a total population of around 500 million people is not sufficient for the British economy!
What utter tosh!
If 500 million are not enough then why should we believe that a world of 7 billion people is? Perhaps, if we looked hard, we could find an even dafter set of economists who believe that UK business needs the educated population of 10 Earth size planets.
The truth is that large corporations are driven by the need for profit and this means limiting costs. Land and labour are major costs and so it is most efficient for corporations to build mega office complexes and have the entire planet as a pool of potential employees. It’s even more profitable if the workforce are educated at someone else’s expense.
I’m sure the economists are all clever gentlemen but my experience is that bean counters only count beans. By this I mean they only count that which can be counted. However, some resources cannot be quantified and the top of my list is housing. House prices in London have more than tripled in 14 years and are still way over priced as discussed in an article in The Economist in 26th November.
Since a basic tenet of capitalism is that increased demand and fixed supply drives up the price of an asset. The deliberate importing of people into the UK may support corporate profits but it will also provide upward pressure on housing.
Corporations push the idea that capitalism creates wealth for the population and this can sometimes be true. At the moment, in China, capitalism is helping raise many people out of poverty. But read a book like The People Of The Abyss by Jack London and you realise that, at the height of the British Empire, which was powered by capitalism, the lives of the people living in the east end of London were worse than Australian aboriginals on the other side of the world living as hunter-gatherers.
The People Of The Abys shows capitalism at its rawest, un-tempered by socialism or the fears of socialism. It shows that the welfare of a population is not directly related to the profits of business.
Over the past decade or so, while businesses earned fat profits, ordinary people had to endure costs which did not appear on the balance sheets of any businessmen or politician. Unaffordable housing is just one example but the ordinary worker must also endure standing like tinned sardines on Bakerloo Line trains from London Bridge on a Saturday evening. We must sit in traffic jams. We must stand in rush hour queues, not to get on the train, not to get on the platform, not to get on to the escalator but to get into the bloody station!
All this boils down to supply of land and it is possible to argue that the UK should release more land for building to ease congestion and prices. This would be fine were the UK the size of the United States. It isn’t. Open up Google Earth and have a fly over the UK. Most of the land is either farm land or already built upon. There are very few patches of wilderness. Scotland is more thinly populated and we could just shrug and decide that we will give over the entire UK to human needs. The UK could become the first concrete country.
In 1951 Isaac Asimov published the first of his Foundation series of Science Fiction novels which portrayed a world known as Trantor which was completely covered in metal. The whole planet had been taken up by humans for homes or factories or offices. Food and raw materials were shipped in from other worlds.
I don’t want to live in a country without wilderness. I do not want to live on Trantor!
The pro-immigration lobby scoff and say that it will be centuries before we even approach a situation resembling the planet Trantor. True but then can they give us an indication of when we are going to stop building?
A couple of hundred years ago England was covered in forest and someone argued that we should chop down just this little bit more wilderness and give it over to some landowner to farm. They probably said “…but England is covered in forest, it will be centuries before it is all chopped down….”. They were right; it did take centuries.
But HELLO! here we are centuries later and the forests are gone.
On the 24 November 2011 the BBC reported that annual net migration to the UK hit a record high in 2010 at 252,000 though the figure may have now fallen to something more like 245,000. Growth is often expressed as a percentage but a more enlightening indicator of growth is “doubling period”. i.e. The time it takes for a population to double in size? The UK’s current population stands at about 62 million. If the current population carried on at replacement level and if the population only grew by the current immigration rate then the population would double in about 255 years.
That’s about nine generations if we take a generation as 28 years. By 2265 the UK would have a population of 124,500,000 and our descendants (that’s the grandchildren of our grandchildren’s grandchildren) will look back and wonder what the hell we thought we were doing.
One by one the trees are cut down. Little by little our forests were destroyed. Little by little forest becomes farm. Little by little farms become houses and offices. Little by little we accept smaller seats on buses and no leg room on trains. Little by little we trade space for gadgets. Little by little we are squeezed into chickens runs and little by little the UK becomes grossly overpopulated.
I’m sure that it’s true that adding 10% more workers to London and letting them live like factory hens would make London’s corporations more profitable. Londoners may even acquire more tablet computers and smart phones. Yet our lives would be worse! Already the definition of a kitchen in a flat in Hackney is a line of cupboards down the side of the living room. Just how many times can they divide up these beautiful old houses into smaller and smaller boxes?
The mistake that these economists make is to become totally business centric. Their analysis stops at the profits of business and they fail to follow the process through to ensure that it benefits the population as a whole.
It is notable that the venerable economists who wrote the letter to Mr. Osbourne uttered not a squeak about the corporate profits which are being filched away overseas to avoid paying tax as was reported in the same edition of the FT. Surely that too is “deeply damaging to the competitiveness of our science and research sectors and the wider economy”.
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.
I just watched Ed Balls on Channel 4 News calling for VAT cuts. Labour’s argument is that they agree that they need to bring the deficit down but not so fast. Recently I heard Labour talking about the National Health service. Once again they agree that change is needed but not the change that the government are pursuing.
It’s easy being in opposition. All you have to do is disagree with the government. I don’t think many of us have enough understanding to know whether the governments fast track to deficit reduction is better than Labour’s ideas for going more slowly.
We do know that the opposition are bound to disagree with the government. The truth is that Labour have no alternative and so they are forced to criticise the speed of the process rather than the process itself. This is not surprising since the Labour leadership are a bunch of nobodies.
Both Millibands and Balls have never had proper jobs. They all worked as media monkeys for New Labour before being shoe horned into safe seats. They perform so lamely in opposition because they have no policy ideas of their own. They only know is how to present ideas, know how to play the media. Remember that idiotic attack on Ken Clark a few weeks ago? Any sensible person who listened to Clark’s arguments could not have believed that he meant to make light of rape yet Ed Milliband picked it up and was banging on about it during PMQs the very same day. This was nothing but spin.
I have heard several times in the news that Ed Balls is a “considerable intellect” and that he is generally well clued up on the economy. Last week The Telegraph released transcripts of some of Mr. Balls documents from when he was working for Gordon Brown. I read the document entitled Project Volvo where Mr. Balls lays out his ideas for getting Gordon Brown elected.
Not much evidence of a great intellect there.
In fact, project Volvo was no more than an off the shelf marketing campaign which could have been put together by any marketing graduate. The same approach could have been used to sell magazines or margarine.
I realise that this marketing stuff works and therefore political parties are forced to hire marketing staff. I guess this took off in the UK when Margaret Thatcher hired Saatchi and Saatchi but Thatcher was never so stupid as to confuse marketing staff with politicians. Labour’s mistake was to allow the marketing men to run the party.
You have to be suspicious when you hear that Labour want to cut taxes. So when I heard, this evening, that Ed Balls wanted to cut VAT I did not think that this was part of a well thought out economic strategy. I thought that he was TALKING BOLLOCKS! Balls knows that reputable bodies such as the IMF and the EU do not agree with him and he knows that the government will ignore his calls. But that is not the point.
Mr. Balls does not expect the government to follow his advise. His call for a VAT cut is merely headline grabbing fluff to cast the Tories in a bad light. More spin. More marketing.
Under Tony Blair the marketing men worked too closely with the leadership. In today’s Labour party the marketing men ARE the leadership. I am even starting to hear of yet another rebranding attempt, this time to be entitled “Blue Labour”.
In marketing terms Labour is now a tainted brand and repairing a brand is a very big job requiring going back to honesty and principles. The product itself must have intrinsic value.
While Labour remain a party led by nobodies like Ed Balls even Saatchi and Saatchi couldn’t repair it.
Ed Milliband’s hysterical demands for ken Clark’s resignation yesterday seemed a little opportunistic. The story had only just hit the media yet Milliband managed to work it into his performance within hours and even The Independent declared that it is Milliband who should be ashamed of himself. This disingenuous and scurrilous misrepresentation of Clark’s words reminds me of the old bullshit days when Labour called themselves “new” and Blair could talk for hours without saying a thing. I now wonder whether Mandelson may be crouching behind the Labour benches with his hand up Milliband’s arse. “Ooh Mrs! - That’s the way to do it!” It seems to me that Labour are devoid of any ideas of how to get the country out of the mess they made and are resorting to rabble rousing.
Janet Street Porter had a go at Talking Bollocks in yesterday’s Independent. She termed it “Official Bollocks”and correctly identified the New Labour charlatans as a primary cause of this phenomena. Lately it seems to me that the one tangible thing that New Labour left behind is an ocean of bullshit. Talking Bollocks is one manifestation of this but lately I have started to realise it goes further. The weird consultancy led bollocks speak has led to miles of official documentation which achieves nothing. Targets, standards, policies, procedures – you name it, under New Labour business was taught that it was vital if they were to become “World Class’ (another bit of bullshit). Vision statements, frameworks and roadmaps were duly created. But all this bollocks requires people who are extraordinarily boring and unimaginative to write it and tart it up to look smart. Who could we possibly get to do it? Of course, Tony’s old friends the business consultants. So in they came, charged everyone an arm and a leg to create this mind numbing garbage and off they went with a bag full of cash. The written bollocks was then stored on a file server somewhere never to be accessed again.
Over the past couple of days the media seem to be making a big deal over the fact that David Milliband did not clap when his brother said that Britain taking part in the Iraq invasion was a mistake. The supposed division between Ed and David is now the main themes in any discussion of the Labour leadership. The media are talking bollocks! David and Ed may be brothers but they are not clones. They will have different opinions. This is good. It would be far worse to return to the old days when Tony Blair filled his cabinet with yes men.
And speaking of Mr. Blair, when in power he attempted to ingratiate himself with ordinary people by imitating “estuary English”. This is an accent used by people who live along the Thames estuary and is characterised by “Glottal replacement” where a consonant, in this case a “T”, is replaced by a glotal stop To you and me this means dropping your T’s.
Dropping your T’s has long been a feature of working class accents in England but it took a real nob head like Tony Blair to attempt an accent by picking just this one feature. Consequently Mr. Blair became the only man on Earth to speak in a middle class English access with a glottal stop instead of a T. The effect was risible and made worse by inconsistency. Presumably he only put it on when appealing to the masses.
In opposition Labour look set for a rerun of the old power battle between Blair and Brown but this time staring the Brothers Milliband. As each brother struggles to differentiate himself, I find one interesting commonality: They both have that weird middle class accent with the inconsistent glotal stop – Just like Mr. Blair.
Photography
overcrowded Britain
Tags: balance sheet, Business, Capitalism, cheap labour, competitiveness, corporate profits, economists, EU, Financial Times, forests, Foundation, George Osbourne, house prices, housing, immigration, immigration. economic migrants, Isaac Asimov, Lack London, london, new labour, overcrowding, overpopulated, overpopulation, People Of The Abyss, Trantor, Unaffordable housing
What passes for a kitchen in Hackney
A front page article in the Financial Times (FT) on the 21st November reported that a bunch of “leading economists” had written a letter to the British Chancellor, George Osbourne, urging him to rethink his plans to curb immigration. Mr. Osbourne is planning to limit economic migrants entering the UK from outside the EU and the economists believe that this would be “deeply damaging to the competitiveness of our science and research sectors and the wider economy”.
The UK had 13 years of New Labour during which immigration was used to provide cheap skilled workers to business mitigating the need to properly educate the indigenous workforce. This is obviously not a sustainable policy and will merely store up trouble for the future as British people sit on their arses and let Johnny Foreigner do all the work.
The restrictions to be brought in are for non-EU citizens so British business would still have the entire population of the EU from which to draw its workers. That means the economists believe that the educated percentage of a total population of around 500 million people is not sufficient for the British economy!
What utter tosh!
If 500 million are not enough then why should we believe that a world of 7 billion people is? Perhaps, if we looked hard, we could find an even dafter set of economists who believe that UK business needs the educated population of 10 Earth size planets.
The truth is that large corporations are driven by the need for profit and this means limiting costs. Land and labour are major costs and so it is most efficient for corporations to build mega office complexes and have the entire planet as a pool of potential employees. It’s even more profitable if the workforce are educated at someone else’s expense.
I’m sure the economists are all clever gentlemen but my experience is that bean counters only count beans. By this I mean they only count that which can be counted. However, some resources cannot be quantified and the top of my list is housing. House prices in London have more than tripled in 14 years and are still way over priced as discussed in an article in The Economist in 26th November.
Since a basic tenet of capitalism is that increased demand and fixed supply drives up the price of an asset. The deliberate importing of people into the UK may support corporate profits but it will also provide upward pressure on housing.
Corporations push the idea that capitalism creates wealth for the population and this can sometimes be true. At the moment, in China, capitalism is helping raise many people out of poverty. But read a book like The People Of The Abyss by Jack London and you realise that, at the height of the British Empire, which was powered by capitalism, the lives of the people living in the east end of London were worse than Australian aboriginals on the other side of the world living as hunter-gatherers.
The People Of The Abys shows capitalism at its rawest, un-tempered by socialism or the fears of socialism. It shows that the welfare of a population is not directly related to the profits of business.
Over the past decade or so, while businesses earned fat profits, ordinary people had to endure costs which did not appear on the balance sheets of any businessmen or politician. Unaffordable housing is just one example but the ordinary worker must also endure standing like tinned sardines on Bakerloo Line trains from London Bridge on a Saturday evening. We must sit in traffic jams. We must stand in rush hour queues, not to get on the train, not to get on the platform, not to get on to the escalator but to get into the bloody station!
All this boils down to supply of land and it is possible to argue that the UK should release more land for building to ease congestion and prices. This would be fine were the UK the size of the United States. It isn’t. Open up Google Earth and have a fly over the UK. Most of the land is either farm land or already built upon. There are very few patches of wilderness. Scotland is more thinly populated and we could just shrug and decide that we will give over the entire UK to human needs. The UK could become the first concrete country.
In 1951 Isaac Asimov published the first of his Foundation series of Science Fiction novels which portrayed a world known as Trantor which was completely covered in metal. The whole planet had been taken up by humans for homes or factories or offices. Food and raw materials were shipped in from other worlds.
I don’t want to live in a country without wilderness. I do not want to live on Trantor!
The pro-immigration lobby scoff and say that it will be centuries before we even approach a situation resembling the planet Trantor. True but then can they give us an indication of when we are going to stop building?
A couple of hundred years ago England was covered in forest and someone argued that we should chop down just this little bit more wilderness and give it over to some landowner to farm. They probably said “…but England is covered in forest, it will be centuries before it is all chopped down….”. They were right; it did take centuries.
But HELLO! here we are centuries later and the forests are gone.
On the 24 November 2011 the BBC reported that annual net migration to the UK hit a record high in 2010 at 252,000 though the figure may have now fallen to something more like 245,000. Growth is often expressed as a percentage but a more enlightening indicator of growth is “doubling period”. i.e. The time it takes for a population to double in size? The UK’s current population stands at about 62 million. If the current population carried on at replacement level and if the population only grew by the current immigration rate then the population would double in about 255 years.
That’s about nine generations if we take a generation as 28 years. By 2265 the UK would have a population of 124,500,000 and our descendants (that’s the grandchildren of our grandchildren’s grandchildren) will look back and wonder what the hell we thought we were doing.
One by one the trees are cut down. Little by little our forests were destroyed. Little by little forest becomes farm. Little by little farms become houses and offices. Little by little we accept smaller seats on buses and no leg room on trains. Little by little we trade space for gadgets. Little by little we are squeezed into chickens runs and little by little the UK becomes grossly overpopulated.
I’m sure that it’s true that adding 10% more workers to London and letting them live like factory hens would make London’s corporations more profitable. Londoners may even acquire more tablet computers and smart phones. Yet our lives would be worse! Already the definition of a kitchen in a flat in Hackney is a line of cupboards down the side of the living room. Just how many times can they divide up these beautiful old houses into smaller and smaller boxes?
The mistake that these economists make is to become totally business centric. Their analysis stops at the profits of business and they fail to follow the process through to ensure that it benefits the population as a whole.
It is notable that the venerable economists who wrote the letter to Mr. Osbourne uttered not a squeak about the corporate profits which are being filched away overseas to avoid paying tax as was reported in the same edition of the FT. Surely that too is “deeply damaging to the competitiveness of our science and research sectors and the wider economy”.
Poppies