Monday 27 October 2014

Keeping the Liberal Democrats on the straight and narrow





Last week I had occasion to send the following letter to our Prospective Parliamentary Candidate (PPC) in a nearby constituency
                                                                                                20th  October, 2014
Dear Liberal Democrat PPC,

A friend of mine, a confirmed Labour Party supporter, attended one of your meetings recently – I believe it was a meeting of your MP and all the PPCs  -  and has told me he was very impressed by you, but that you pushed the usual line of the Coalition’s “clearing up the economic mess left by Labour.”

I know this is the line currently adopted by our leaders and particularly Danny Alexander, but it is a gross misrepresentation of the facts.  Briefly:

  • Gordon Brown was quite “prudent” for most of his time as Chancellor, running a budget surplus for several years and, before the crash, bringing the Debt/GDP ratio down to some 40% (well below the “respectable “ level of 60%).  Indeed the Debt/GDP ratio in 2007, before the crash, was lower than that inherited from the Conservatives when Labour took office in 1997 after umpteen years of Tory rule. *
  • The economic “mess” was caused by irresponsible behaviour by the financial sector made possible by the policy of deregulation introduced by the Tories, who would have undoubtedly ridiculed any attempts to tighten regulation  in the period up to 2008.  In fact, they (and we) haven’t done much since;
  • Gordon Brown may not have saved the world, but his prompt action  through the G8 in 2017/8 most certainly helped avoid an even more serious crisis  and is much praised in the rest of the developed world, and  especially in the US;
  • As a result of Alistair Darling’s mildly expansionary budgets the British economy was actually growing and the current deficit falling when Labour lost office and the Coalition took over;
  • George Osborne’s first and subsequent budgets halted this growth, and produced several years of stagnation from which the economy is only now showing hesitant signs of recovery.  Neither of Osborne’s declared aims, of retaining our AAA rating and eliminating the current deficit within the parliament, have been achieved.

A friend and fellow Liberal/Liberal Democrat over half a century has spelt out the true nature of the economic situation and the effects of the policy of “austerity” in the enclosed booklet,** which I hope you will read. You may also like to look at my blog keynesianliberal.blogspot.com and my article in Liberator 365.

For more authoritative confirmation of these views you could read the articles of Bill Keegan in the Observer, Larry Elliott in the Guardian and Simon Wren-Lewis’s blog, mainly macro.

The Conservatives excellent PR machine has successfully sold the fallacy of Labour’s responsibility for the economic situation and even the pretence that the Coalition’s economic policy is a success.  You may feel that there are short term advantages in jumping on this dishonest bandwagon, but I believe that we shall not restore respect for our democratic system unless and until we are prepared to treat the electorate as adults and tell the truth.

Before the last election Nick Clegg campaigned on the promise of greater honesty in politics.  We should hold him to it and campaign accordingly.

With best wishes for a successful, and honest, campaign,

Peter Wrigley.


*Not in the original letter but added at the suggestion of John Cole

** You can receive an E-copy  of this pamphlet by Emailing john.cole6744@gmail.com

Friday 17 October 2014

Package "pilgrimage" to the Battlefields


For the past eighteen months or so I've been helping a former colleague and former pupil compile a record of the Old Boys of the school we all attended who fell in the First World  War.  The bulk of the work has been done by the former pupil who, as an ex Chief Detective Inspector at Scotland Yard, has considerable investigative skills, so the finished compilation contains an astonishing amount of fascinating detail.

As a "post script" to our efforts the former colleague and I decided to go on a  Battlefields coach tour, which lasted five days and from which we've just returned.  Unfortunately the ratio of travelling time  to time on the battlefields was exceptionally high- two full days of travelling to get there and back, and at least half the time spent on the coach on the two  "battlefields" days, since it was  an hour's  drive from our hotel, in Zeebrugge, to Ypres and Passchendaele on the first day, and a two hours' drive to the site of the Somme battles on the second day.  The third  day was spent on touring unrelated to the battles, but included an obligatory visit to a chocolate factory.

 I strongly advise anyone planning a similar trip to check that their hotel is central to the things they wish to see, and not, as I suspect may be the case on this occasion, the result of a good deal offered by the hotel to the tour company.

I've visited War Cemeteries several times before, normally alone, and found the experience very moving.  Perhaps because of the Centenary of the start of the War there were in this week many school parties.  I'm not convinced of the value of this.  Youngsters  are adept at turning whatever they do into a "fun" experience, and who can blame them?  The more appropriate reverence and contemplation are not highly developed skills in adolescence, especially in large groups with mates to impress.  Surely small family groups would be more appropriate.  And surely primary school children are far too young to gain any real benefit.

Allan Bennett has, I believe, some trenchant things to say about touristic voyeurism on the sites of the concentration camps.  I suspect the commercialisation of the battlefields similarly degrades the memory of the victims.

We passed between France and Belgium several times but I never noticed the frontier.  This is what all Europe should be like: a merged Union with different customs and languages*  and free passage from one area to another.  The nonsense of passport checks, carried out by the British Border Agency officials in their  sinister all-back uniforms before being allowed to re-enter the UK, marks us out as the Neanderthals of the Union.

I wonder how many of the two-thirds of our electorate  who failed to vote in the recent EU election, or the third of those who did but voted for the party that wants to leave, realise that the founding purpose of the Union is that their children and grandchildren will not lie under grave stones in a beautifully-kept military cemetery, or have their names inscribed among the missing but "known unto God" on a future  Menin Gate or Thiepval Memorial?

Both Conservative and Labour parties should challenge UKIP not by adopting its policies but by putting forward the positive case for Europe and peace.

*Both Zeebrugge and Bruges are aggressively Flemish.  Having spent much of the last decade trying to improve my French I'd have appreciated some Canadian-style insistence on bilingualism on all signes and descriptions. 

Post Script (added 18/10/14)

The following is a footnote, part of the poem In Parenthesis , the experiences of a serving soldier, by David Jones.  It seems to confirm  my unease about "battlefield tourism."



Cook’s Tourist to the Devastated Areas –

This may appear to be an anachronism, but I remember in 1917 discussing with a friend the possibilities of tourist activity if peace ever came.  I remember we went into details and wondered if the unexploded projectile lying near us would go up under a holiday-maker, and how people would stand to be photographed on our parapets.  I recall feeling very angry about this, as you do if you think of strangers ever occupying a house you live in, and which has, for you, particular associations.







Wednesday 8 October 2014

Clegg shows courage, but not enough.


On Sunday Andrew Marr challenged Nick Clegg with the question:  "Surely that means you'll have to raise taxes?"

"Yes, of course!" was Nick's prompt response: no hesitation, prevarication, evasions or avoidance - and he went on to list some of the taxes Liberal Democrats would like to increase  (capital gains tax for one, reduction in pension tax relief for another.)  In this and other interviews Nick showed himself to be direct, honest, brave, informed, unflappable and personable.

This morning a BBC presenter on Radio 4's "Today" programme stated, without any qualification, that everyone acknowledges  further cuts in government expenditure will be necessary after the election, whoever wins.  I sincerely wish that Nick's courage would extend to challenging this unquestioning acceptance of Tory perception management.

In an earlier post I've outlined how the two mildly expansionary Keynesian-style budgets introduced by the previous government actually had the predictable effect of both reducing the government deficit  and generating economic growth, and how George Osborne's "austerity " equally predictably placed this recovery into reverse.

A friend, by no stretch of the imagination a Liberal Democrat, has drawn my attention to this further evidence, from Australia, that Keynesian stimulus of the economy still works.This quotation is directly form an article by Aditya Chakrabortty in September 2013:

Australia is now enjoying its 22nd year of growth: during the Great Recession , the country managed to avoid any recession at all.  How?  By warding off a global downturn with what Nobel prize-winning  economist Joseph Stiglitz described as "probably the best designed   stimulus package of any. . .advanced industrial country, both in size and in design. . . .

Using the cry of "go early, go hard and go households" Rudd [Australia's prime minister at the time] chucked a total of A$52bn (£30bn) into the housing market, into refurbishing schools and roiling out broadband and other public works.  He even dolled out money, in the spring of 2009 giving the typical single worker A$900. . .The result is an economy in enviable nick,(my emphasis - pun accidental but very convenient) especially compared with other rich economies.

So Nick, along with much needed tax rises for those at the top of the tree, and modest tax cuts for those fortunate enough to pay income tax, lets have some cuts that will help everybody (how about VAT back to 15%, which will really stimulate demand) and a public works package which will generate jobs and incomes, increase tax receipts and so reduce the deficit whilst at the same time enabling us to to continue to provide a civilised social security safety-net.

You've shown yourself a man of courage.  Now have the courage of our party's historic convictions.

Wednesday 1 October 2014

Render unto Caesar - and prove it


Apparently from today we no longer need to display a colourful tax disc on our car windscreens to demonstrate that we've paid our road tax.  The excuse is that it will save money  (possibly enough to buy a few more Cruise missiles) and the police have mysterious ways of knowing whether or not the tax has been paid.  This happens, presumably, only when the car is stopped by them for some other reason.

I believe the government is still advertising on television to persuade us to dobb in our neighbours if we think they're cheating on benefits. This, I fee,l is disgraceful, (as well as being very un-British - all the best public  school stories denigrate "sneaks") but the tax disc is a well accepted system and I see no harm in enabling our neighbours, and any casual passer-by, to to spot that we're tax-cheats if we display only an outdated disc, or none at all.

Indeed, I'd go further and adopt the French system, which requires vehicles to display not only a tax disc, but also proof of being insured - it's a small square and goes on the other side of the windscreen.  I suspect there are many more uninsured vehicles in Britain than there are untaxed ones, purely because a tax disc has until now to be displayed. And uninsured drivers tax the rest of us by imposing higher premiums on the payers in order to make up for their deficiencies.

On a topic that's only slightly related, it is mooted that the non-payment of the TV licence is to cease to be a criminal offence.  Tories in particular show a sudden and touching concern for the welfare of their fellow citizens too poor to pay their whack - whilst at the same time  voting enthusiastically to cut their social security payments even further.  Decriminalisation of non-payment is obviously a ploy to attack the BBC, who estimate that the change would cost them a £200m a year.

If the government is desperate to cut expenditure on the BBC then they could reasonably stop giving free licences to75+  year-olds such as me who could well afford to pay for one.  This would not involve means-testing:  just don't allocate free licences to those whose pensions or other incomes are sufficient for them to have to pay income-tax.  The same rule could apply to the winter fuel allowance, which one of my friends  refers to as his "winter wine" allowance