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Tuesday, 31 March, 2009 
Guido Fawkes and Nicky Campbell had a run in on Radio 5 Live this morning. Guido (the real name is Paul Staines) runs a website (www.order-order.com.), which though very entertaining does have a bit of choice language. Nicky Campell introduced Guido as a ‘right wing website’ to which Guido said it ‘was nice to be on the left wing BBC’. Nicky Campbell then called Guido a ‘fascist’ for which he has since apologised. Fascist is the oft-repeated phrase used by some people to attack those who disagree with them. It is intended to draw upon our collective memory of the 1930’s and is used, although technically incorrectly, interchangeably with Nazi as a form of insult. Any Tory who has been out canvassing for the last twenty years or so, as I have, will have been accused of being a fascist many times. It is an insult mainly used by the left, although to be fair its use has spread to wider circles. The most striking fact I have always found is that people who actually exhibit the actual fascist tendencies often use the term they accuse others of.
A few years ago an excellent book was published called ‘The Anatomy of Fascism’ by Robert Paxton that looked at the various political movements over the 20th century and tried to define fascism. The key points that define fascism I would say are:
1. The third way – neither socialism nor the free market
2. Perceived constant activity by a ‘strong leader’
3. Central control and databases to record and direct activities and restrict freedom
4. A controlled way of thinking or political behaviour – i.e. an attempt to make everyone think and behave in a certain way
5. Some kind of crisis which requires radical solutions
6. The absence of democracy, or it’s sidelining
Let’s apply this list to the Labour Government:
1. New Labour - Tony Blair himself used the phrase ‘third way’, quangos have grown, alongside the public sector throughout Labours time in office. Does Labour understand and believe in the free market?
2. Hyperactivity and constant headline seeking, more laws and edicts than ever before are the hallmarks of this Government
3. The target culture, ID Cards, a lack of democratic accountability, extending the detention without charge limit, and limiting free speech for some whilst allowing it for others.
4. For example, being labelled a ‘racist' if you are concerned about the level of immigration, a ‘denier’ if you are sceptical about climate change being wholly caused by man, ‘reactionary’ if you oppose change. Some of the activities being promoted by Councils and public sector bodies such as banning the use of the term Christmas and political correctness at it’s worse.
5. Gordon Brown is constantly saying this is an ‘unprecedented crisis’ requiring ‘unprecedented solutions’, and only he is the man with the answer.
6. The EU Constitution referendum – promised but never held
And to Conservatives:
1. We believe in the free market, no buts or ifs, we will cut quangos and free our economy from excessive red tape and bureaucracy.
2. David Cameron has said he will not measure his Government by how many laws it passes, admittedly he is very active, but that is because we are in opposition heading towards an election. I think the Conservatives have shown we are prepared to deal with bad headlines when necessary, for example our decision to oppose the VAT cut and further fiscal stimulus, which has proved to be the right decision.
3. We will scrap ID cards, unnecessary targets, and push real power down to communities, abolish regional quangos, free schools through radical reform, install elected police chiefs and reform Local Government (See Control Shift – our Local government proposals)
4. We believe in free speech, within the rule of the law, one law for all and do not consider healthy debate a threat that needs to be marginalised by name-calling.
5. We say this problem is a monetary phenomenon, caused by over borrowing and a lack of regulation. You shouldn’t throw away the rule book and all common sense to deal with the current problems.
6. We will have a referendum on the EU Treaty.
Of course, the final point about democracy is the key fact. Fascists didn’t do elections, and the very fact that all our main parties are committed to democracy means none can really be accused of fascism; it is really just a rather cheap and silly insult.
But which one above do you think exhibits fascistic tendencies?
Wednesday, 25 March, 2009
Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England had this to say at the Treasury Select Committee on Tuesday: "I'm sure the government will want to be cautious in this respect. There is no doubt we are facing very large fiscal deficits over the next 2-3 years.
"Given how big those deficits are, I think it would be sensible to be cautious about going further in using discretionary measures to expand the size of those deficits.
"The level of the fiscal position in the UK is not one that would say: 'Well, why don't we just engage in another significant round of fiscal expansion?'"
Does Gordon Brown need any more advice that his policies are leading this country to disaster?
It is a strange event that this has happened on the same day that David Cameron has made a speech about restoring ’law and order’ to the financial markets. One of the Conservative proposals is to put the Bank of England, and therefore Mervyn King, in charge of monitoring overall debt levels, so saying this kind of thing would be his job.
Will Gordon Brown heed this advice from Britain’s Bank manager?
Daniel Hannon (Conservative MEP) serves up some home truths in reply to Gordon Brown’s address to the European Parliament on 24th March 2009
Tuesday, 24 March, 2009
Monday, 23 March, 2009
Last weekend I attended the annual North West Conservatives Conference in Bolton. The conference featured speeches from George Osborne (Shadow Chancellor), William Hague (Shadow Foreign Secretary) and Eric Pickles (Party Chairman). Barrow got a big mention by George as he told everyone about his recent visit to see the ‘Astute’ and how it was a good example of world class manufacturing here in the North West. I was pleased to speak after him and explain a little about the campaign here on the ground.
Eric Pickles explained that Cumbria and Lancashire are the two target councils in the forthcoming local elections so we will all are working very hard to achieve victory.
Thursday, 19 March, 2009
Michael Howard, the former leader of the Conservative Party made the following contribution to the economy debate on 18th March 2009. "It seems to me that we cannot arrive at the right prescription for the future of our economy unless we gain a clear view of why we are where we are. We cannot expect to be led out of our current crisis by a Prime Minister who puts his head in the sand. Before prescription, however, there must be diagnosis, and it is in that spirit that I offer my remarks this afternoon.
Of course it is true—we can all agree on this—that we are in the throes of an international recession, or something worse. Of course it is true that almost every other country is affected in one way or another, to a greater or lesser extent, but we are almost uniquely vulnerable. We are almost uniquely ill equipped to deal with the calamity that has befallen the world, and we need to consider the reasons for that.
They are not too difficult to identify.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron), the Leader of the Opposition, was quite right, last Friday, to accept responsibility for the things that we got wrong. We certainly failed to anticipate that the crisis we now face was anything like as serious as it has proved to be, but there are two main reasons for our present plight. Both of them were directly the responsibility of the Prime Minister, and, in respect of both of them, we certainly warned of the consequences. I have looked at the record, and I am in a position to answer the question posed from a sedentary position by the Exchequer Secretary earlier, when she asked, “Where were you?” I shall do my best to answer that question during the course of my observations.
The first of the main reasons for our present plight that I, at least, have identified was the ill-advised decision, taken by the Prime Minister in 1997, to transfer supervision of the banking sector from the Bank of England to the Financial Services Authority. The Bank of England had hundreds of years of experience and expertise in supervising the banking sector of our economy. The Financial Services Authority was new. It had none of that experience and none of that expertise, and, as we know, it has since admitted that it fell down on the job.
It has been suggested that the Conservatives criticised the transfer to the Financial Services Authority only with the benefit of hindsight, but that is simply not the case. When that catastrophic decision was taken, my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) was shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. In the debate on the Second Reading of the Bank of England Bill on 11 November 1997, he said:
“With the removal of banking control to the Financial Services Authority...it is difficult to see how and whether the Bank remains, as it surely must, responsible for ensuring the liquidity of the banking system and preventing systemic collapse.”
He went on to say:
“The coverage of the FSA will be huge; its objectives will be many, and potentially in conflict with one another. The range of its activities will be so diverse that no one person in it will understand them all.”
That, at least, is one of the answers to the question posed by the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable) a few moments ago. My right hon. Friend also said that he feared
“that the Government may, almost casually, have bitten off more than they can chew. The process of setting up the FSA may cause regulators to take their eye off the ball, while spivs and crooks have a field day.”—[ Official Report, 11 November 1997; Vol. 300, c. 731-32.]
That was what my right hon. Friend said in 1997. The warning was there; it was clear; it was on the record; and it has, alas, proved to be absolutely prescient.
The second main reason for our current plight is the level of indebtedness that we as a country, collectively through our Government and as individuals, have incurred. Here, too, there were warnings, and they, too, are on the record; I am afraid that some of them came from me. I drew attention on 9 July 2002 when I was shadow Chancellor to the savings ratio, which was then at an all-time low; it has hit many more all-time lows since. On 30 July 2003, I warned that savings had halved under Labour, that the Government were borrowing more and that families were getting deeper in debt. On 17 March 2004, replying to the Budget, I said that it was
“a credit-card Budget from a credit-card Chancellor”—[ Official Report, 17 March 2004; Vol. 419, c. 337.]
When I proposed at the 2005 election that a Conservative Government would make £12 billion of savings, I said that £8 billion of them would go not to cut taxes but to reduce Government borrowing, which was far too high.
Of course, I was not always thanked—I suppose I did not expect to be—for my pains. Anatole Kaletsky in The Times, for example, complained that throughout my tenure as shadow Chancellor, I had been issuing dire warnings about the economic and financial outlook. I had said, he complained, that Labour economic policies were doomed to failure, that overtaxed consumers were living in a fool’s paradise of unsustainable borrowing and that the British economy and the Government’s popularity were kept afloat artificially by a bubble of house prices and mortgage debt. He said that if the Tories started thinking along those lines, we would be making a big mistake. Well, of course, in terms of the outcome of the 2005 election, he was absolutely right, but was he right in the wider sweep of history? I simply set what I said on the record and leave others to decide who it was that was making the big mistake.
Throughout all this time, of course, the Prime Minister was proclaiming that he had put an end to boom and bust—and you know, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I do not think he was trying to deceive us; I think he genuinely believed it. Perhaps the worst thing he did was deceive himself. It was because he was genuinely convinced that he had ended the economic cycle that he did not fix the roof while the sun was shining. After all, if we think that the sun is never going to stop shining, why on earth would we bother to fix the roof? As we know, the Prime Minister is still in a state of denial. That is not the least of the reasons why he is incapable of leading the country out of the mess we are undoubtedly in. It is, I am afraid, a very big mess indeed.
A good deal of the comment on the current crisis seems to revolve around the question: how long will it last? It seems to me that another question is at least as important: what will come after it? The suggestion that is often implicit in the first of those two questions is that next year or the year after, we shall return to the world that we knew two or three years ago. That notion seems to me to be completely misplaced. We will be in a new world, a different world, with challenges every bit as formidable as those we face at the moment. We will be able to overcome those challenges only if we have leadership that is prepared, in the words of the excellent speech made the week before last by my hon. Friend the shadow Chancellor,
“to confront some uncomfortable truths and tell people what they may not want to hear.”
The mess that my right hon. Friends will have to clear up after the next election will present them with a very difficult task, but I am sure that they will not be daunted. They will, after all, simply be discharging the age-old and historical responsibility of the Conservative party to clear up the mess that Labour has left behind. That is something that we have done before, time after time. It is, in essence, what the Conservative party is for. It is what we exist to do: to clear up the mess that Labour always leaves behind.
The sooner we have that election, and the sooner my right hon. Friends can get on with discharging that historical responsibility, the better it will be for everyone in our country."
We have all heard of examples of phrases used by politicians, and sympathetic commentators, to describe something in a way which doesn’t make it sound so bad, or is intended to hide the reality of a situation. For example, according to the BBC, we are in a ‘downturn’ not a recession. I’ll tell that to a friend who has just lost his job as a welder.
The Nazi’s of course where past masters at using bureaucratic language to disguise their true intent. Jews were ‘resettled’ or ‘transferred east’ in cattle trucks. When they arrived at the camps, they went through a ‘selection’ process after which the old, pregnant women, children and ill were sent for ‘special treatment’.
I especially like this gem from Janet Napolitano, Barack Obama’s new Homeland Security Secretary, who made a speech in which she referred to ‘man-made disasters’. What ‘man-made disasters’ was she referring to, was it deforestation, pollution or something like this?
No, believe it or not she was referring to Islamic Terrorists.
So the 3,000 odd people who were murdered by Islamic Terrorists on 9/11 were killed by a ‘man-made disaster’ were they? or the 52 people murdered on 7/7 or how about the 2 soldiers and a police man killed by IRA Terrorists last week.
I call them Terrorists, murderers, killers, scum of the earth or worse; I do not call them ‘man-made disasters’.
Tuesday, 17 March, 2009
Friday, 13 March, 2009
Further news has emerged this week that John Hutton says that he can’t be blamed for the order being moved from Barrow. He says that it was a commercial decision made by BAe and not one he could influence as Defence Secretary (Evening Mail 10th March 2009). I think Mr. Hutton has some explaining to do.
If it was always a decision that ultimately rested with BAe then why didn’t Mr. Hutton make this clear when the order was placed with Barrow in the first place
Labour were happy to jump on the bandwagon when the order was placed and trumpeted it as evidence of their support for the Yard. I have repeatedly warned that this order was not secure and that the yard’s future was not safe under this Government, I am sorry that, in this case, I have been proved right.
Mr. Hutton is just copying his boss in trying to blame everyone else and I hope the people of Barrow remember this when the time comes to decide on the future of Mr. Hutton.
Wednesday, 11 March, 2009
Yesterday a small group of Islamic extremists staged a demonstration at a home coming parade for soldiers from the Royal Anglican Regiment in Luton. The banners they held aloft said the soldiers were: “‘Butchers of Basra”, “war criminals”, “murderers”, “terrorists” and “baby killers". The group were confronted by angry people who had come out to welcome the troops and had to be protected by a cordon of police, a job I’m sure the police did not relish.
It should also be noted that this protest has been widely condemned, including by Inayat Bunglawala, of the Muslim Council of Britain who told the Daily Express “This was a very offensive protest by a tiny number of known extremists who should not be allowed to tarnish the reputation of Luton’s Muslim community."
So should it have been allowed?
On the one hand, you could argue that these people had right to protest, and as long as they did it peacefully and without inciting hatred, then it should be allowed. Following this line of argument, the Dutch MP, Geert Wilders, who was refused entry to Britain to show a film that, was perceived to be against Islam should also have been allowed in and allowed to show his film. Groups like the BNP should also be allowed freedom to operate and should not have to face attempts to shut down their protests other legitimate campaigning activities.
On the other hand you could argue that this was offensive and should they should have been banned and that the placards would incite hatred amongst different ethnic groups. Follow this line of argument and society, or rather the authorities, would ban anything that is outside of agreed norm.
What we actually see in practice are neither of the above, Islamist Groups seem to be able to protest with impunity but others are not allowed to protest against them. Offence is allowed against British soldiers, but any action that may be deemed by some as offensive to Islam is banned; insulting Christianity is allowed, but insulting Islam is not.
This is simple double standards; it does nothing to help racial harmony and gives fuel to the belief that the indigenous population is being biased against. It looks like the values, traditions, support and pride in British institutions is discriminated against and the values and traditions of other cultures put before our common values and traditions.
I believe that all protests should be allowed by all groups, that is called free speech, but that this right should be exercised in the right place at the right time. A political activity, such as a protest march, or standing for election is one thing and should be allowed within the rules of not inciting hatred etc. So Geert Wilders should have been allowed to speak in the UK and Islamists should be allowed to protest.
However, a homecoming parade is not a political activity, it is a community activity. It is where a community gives thanks for the safe return of their affiliated regiment, where some may wish to give thanks for the troops carrying out an important job, but others may wish to use the event to remember and mourn the fallen. It is an event outside of politics, like Remembrance Day, where people of all political views can join together a show a level of politeness to each other, attend for different reasons, all stand together and mark a day in history which we have all shared in. They can do this and also not accuse the returning troops, who were not party to the decision to go to war.
That is why I believe that this protest yesterday should have been removed and the troops allowed to parade without the chants and banners of demented extremists.
Tuesday, 10 March, 2009
Before I start this piece I should stress that this piece is not about individuals but about countries in today's 'global market'. It was prompted by the fact that next month at the G20 summit in London, one of the many items for discussion will be that 'borrower' countries will encourage 'saver' countries to spend more. This will allow 'borrower' countries to save more and encourage recovery from this recession. What do I mean about borrower and saver countries?
For the last decade or so, certainly since 2000, we have seen a system grow where different countries have adopted different roles in the global market. Britain (like the USA) became a spender and borrower, others like China, became producers and savers.
In the 'borrower' countries, people, businesses and Government started spending which led to a rise in demand for things to buy. This demand was met in two ways: in some cases by greater imports of consumer goods and of course imported labour through immigration, but it also led to inflation in cases where the supply couldn't increase, such as houses. For homeowners they saw the value of their assets (houses) rise and so this gave them more security to borrow more. UK Banks, which up until the end of the centaury (2000) had always approximately lent the same amount to people in the UK as they rose in deposits from people in the UK, needed to respond. So they started borrowing money from overseas sources and then lending this to UK borrowers. Borrowers kept spending, using the rising price of their houses as an asset to borrow even more, and lenders kept pumping money into the system.
Meanwhile other countries, the 'savers', built economies to meet this demand for consumer goods. China industrialised at an incredibly rapid pace throughout this period, building an economy on cheap labour driven by exports. As they earned money from these exports, it was recycled back to consumers in the form of buying up debt from Banks and also through complex financial trading. All of this was to encourage the borrowers to buy more, keep the pace of growth going and so allow the savers to produce more.
It was, and indeed to an extent still is, a virtuous circle, with everyone benefiting from this cycle. But it is also capable of getting out of control, which is what has happened, and the debt levels got just too high. As this tipping point was reached, and as bad debts crept into the system, confidence burst that led to more bad debts and falling asset prices.
As an aside, some people see this as proof that capitalism has failed, that more Government intervention is required to control the markets. This misses some key points about what has happened. First, markets do not exist outside of society; they are part of society and are a means to an end, not the end itself. Societies, through Governments can regulate markets to help prevent this or the markets will eventually control it in their own way. What we are seeing now is a 'correction' from the markets, far from proving capitalism doesn't work, they prove it does. For far too long the UK Government was not prepared to call time of debt and borrowing, the Government was not prepared to bring about a more ordered correction, it is because of this that the market is now making these long overdue adjustments. It is a failure of regulation not of markets that led to this debt bubble and consequent collapse. Second, it is easy for people to blame unscrupulous bankers for lending too much, but they were responding to demand from people. No body forced anyone to do the borrowing, people chose to do it, so it's a little rich to blame bankers for all of this mess, bankers and borrowers are both to blame. Let me give you an example, I have a visa card with a £8,000 limit, this means that tomorrow I could buy myself a whole new wardrobe, have a very good holiday, buy a new Plasma TV and generally have a very nice time for a month. However next month, the bill will arrive and I would have to start paying it off. If I spent my money this way, who's fault is it that I did, mine, for reckless spending or the bank for giving me a credit card in the first place?
But back to the question posed at the top of this entry, who is better off in a recession, borrower countries or saver countries?
In a sense neither, both need each other and rely on each other. Borrowers need a source of cheap consumer goods and finance and, savers need the borrowers to keep buying. For the borrowers, as they cut spending and increase saving then they will consume less, but borrow less. For the savers they will have to spend some of the money in developing their own consumer markets to take up the slack of production now not destined for the borrower countries. Both will progress to a more balanced economy with lower debts in one side being offset by increased spending in the other.
Progressing to this more balanced economy must be the priority but we would do well to remember that this was a failure in regulation, that the bubble could have been slowly deflated if Government had had the foresight and courage to do so and that in the future monitoring overall debt must be a key part of economic policy, as the Conservatives propose.
This essential fact is not one I feel this Government have grasped, they think they can reflate the merry go round and get back to the pre recession days with spend and borrow, to do this would merely lay the foundations of the next recession.
Sunday, 08 March, 2009
Thursday, 05 March, 2009
The Miners strike started 25 years ago today and became a battle of attrition between the Government and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). At the time I had just started Sixth Form College, studying my A levels, in Teesside. This wasn’t a mining area but it was surrounded by pits to the North, along the North East coast (where Billy Elliot is set) and to the South by pits in Yorkshire. Despite this fact, there was a great deal of support in the local area for the miners and this included my economic tutor at college. I remember one day during the strike, we had been talking about how in a free market economy, competition leads to the lowest cost production through something called ‘marginal costing’. He used examples from the, then, new world of computers to explain this and show how it worked in practice. I asked him if the same principles should apply to mining, that if it was cheaper to get the coal from elsewhere then shouldn’t this happen and the more costly pits in the UK close?
He had some problems with this idea, because despite being an economics teacher and having the facts in front of him he couldn’t quite bring himself to admit that the same logic should apply. This was at the heart of the strike because the NUM wanted to keep pits open even when it cost more than to buy the coal from elsewhere.
But he said, if you close the pit then you will have people on the dole with all the associated social costs, so it was better to keep the pits open. I retorted by saying wouldn’t be better to spend the money on new jobs in new industries than propping up old ones, and the communities would re-invent themselves over time.
Time has shown that both of us were right in this last point. Many communities have rebuilt themselves over time, the pit villages along the North East coast for example are doing quite nicely. However there are localised pockets where unemployment and welfare dependency has become inter generational. To an extent those of us who believed that the rising prosperity of the country would help lift these communities up have been proved wrong. We underestimated the pernicious effect of a dependency culture and the way it is passed from generation to generation, and that is why welfare reform will be a priority for the next Conservative Government.
Arthur Scargill set out to try and defeat the Government; he said that there was no such thing as an uneconomic pit, which is palpably not true. He used the miners as foot soldiers in his Marxist crusade, he broke his own union rules and he refused to condemn people who broke the law and in one case actually killed a working miner. He tried to over rule the democratically elected Government, it was right that he was defeated.
Difficult as it was for the mining communities the closure and modernisation programme was right. Sometimes, some industries have had their day and it’s time to move on, and maybe the huge dependence on financial services we have had for the last decade is today’s example of this. Maybe it’s time to move on to new industries and new ways of working.
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