Nasty Labour

 

 

It is 13 years now since Theresa May warned the Conservative Party not to become “the nasty party.”  She then went on to ignore her own advice  by, as Home Secretary,  introducing her hostile environment, most vividly remembered by vans circulating in areas where immigrants had settled, bearing posters warning those who weren’t convinced of their right to be here to “Go home – or else.! “ Even Nigel Farage thought it was unpleasant.

 Although the vans were rapidly discontinued in the face of a public outcry the hostile environment continues to thrive, though we now have a government by a party which used to claim to believe in the international brotherhood (and sisterhood) of man (and women) and only just over a year ago promised  “change”  if it won the election.

Instead we have the  the proposed introduction of Digital IDs, not for the various conveniences that such measures are alleged to bring (more of which later) but to make it more difficult for immigrants to obtain employment.

There is something bizarre or maybe Kafkaesque (or both) in a party called Labour (the clue is in the name) on the one hand pulling out all the stops to bully disabled people into work, and at the same time trying to prevent largely young, energetic  and enterprising people who want to work from doing so.

And it’s not, as a Liberal Democrat spokesperson has pointed out, all that clear how the measure will deter unorthodox immigration via small boats.  Surely the worries at the forefront of such aspiring migrants’ minds  will be the costs and dangers of crossing the Channel, not the ease or otherwise of getting a job.when they get there. They’ll cross the bridge of getting a job should they be lucky enough to make it.

Be that as it may, there can be no doubt that once non-compulsory  IDs for employment purposes are introduced  there will be “mission creep” to extend them to  include a right to rent, a right to use the NHS, right to welfare, right to vote, and, by hook or by crook, eventually, a right to be here at all for everybody, born here or not.

Labour under Tony Blair tried to introduce ID cards.  A coalition led by Liberals fought them off.  We must do so again.  

 At present our government exists with our permission.  Under our inadequate electoral system that permission is rather grudging. Only a third of those who voted actually voted for it and, since the turnout was low, that represents only about 25% of those entitled to vote.  The permission would be more convincing if we had PR and the government could claim the support of a majority, but that’s where we are and Labour lacks the gumption to change it  (I’ve read somewhere that Andy Burnham, who appears to be manoeuvring to challenge Sir Keir Starmer, believes that a “Progressive Majority” comprising Labour, Liberals, Greens and perhaps some Nationalist would have more authority and more courage.  I am sure he is right)

 

With compulsory  ID cards the roles are reversed: we exist  by permission of the state – and no prizes for guessing which minorities would be the more pestered by the agents of authority  to prove they had that permission.

“Papers, please" has never been part of the British peacetime tradition and Labour should not be allowed to drive a wedge towards authoritarianism on the bogus precept that they will deter migarants. 

Rather we need some positive assertions of the valuable contribution immigrants have made and are making to the quality of our lives.

Attending the London meeting of leaders for Global Progressive Action last Friday, Iceland’s prime minister  M/s Kristrún Frostadóttir (the world’s youngest) was asked on the BBC how she had achieved  a Social Democratic victory in a world dominated by far-right populism.  She replied by being positive and telling the truth, not by attacking and criticising her opponents, but by saying what her party believed in and what they would do.

Our leaders  should take a leaf out of the Icelandic book, applaud and promote the values of which we can be proud,  and not resort to feeble and failing attempts to outflank Farage.

High technology: yet more outsourcing

The pay-off for last week's embarrassing grovelling to President Trump is apparently £150bn of American high-technology investment in the UK.  Even spread over ten years that's a lot of investment. 

 I suppose investment from anywhere is to be welcomed, but foreign investment  of this kind has two disadvantages:

 1.  If it is successful (which is dearly to be hoped)  it leads to a flow of profits out of the country on the "invisible" part of the balance of external payments.  We hear little of the balance of payments these but the persistent deficit on it dominated politics for the first 40 post-war years and is a far more serious  problem for "future generations" than the much publicised government sending deficit of today.    The last time I looked the balance of payments deficit was about 6% of GDP - way above what is healthy.  This £150bn will give short-term relief  but a long term additional burden.

2.  The "investment" remains under the control of foreigners, in this case the US tech giants.  When push comes to shove they will make decisions in the interest of their own economies, not ours.  In a worse-case scenario, if retrenchment becomes necessary they will close our enterprises, not their domestic ones.  Even more seriously, since much of this latest technology concerns AI and communications we are outsourcing the rules and safeguards necessary for our freedoms, probably in ways we do not yet fully understand.

3.  An article in last Friday's Guardian by a Matt Davies  (The A! deal sounds great.  Until it doesn't , 19 September.) points our that our "international peers" such as the EU and Brazil "have charted  alternative paths  to bolster sovereign capabilities and create the conditions  for domestic tech firms, small and medium sized enterprises and truly public alternatives, to flourish."   Instead "[e]ntrenching reliance on US tech at the most lucrative  parts of the AI value chain would leave British firms to fight over the leftovers."  Nick Clegg, who knows a thing or two after his stint with Meta, described the deal more vividly as "sloppy seconds from Silicon Valley."

I this as in so many other spheres we are continuing to rely on what former Bank of England governor Mark Carney described as "the kindness of strangers."  We really have to try to "stand on our own feet" rather than rely on others to bale us out. If our investors are more interested in gambling on the money  markets that on real investment, maybe we should release , or encourage, out pension funds to fill the gap, as  Will Hutton has advocated recently in an Observer article.

 

Fragile Democracy

 

 

Yesterday, 15^th September, was apparently the UN’s World Democracy Day, though if any of our media mentioned it I didn’t notice.

 The post 1945 new world order seems to have assumed that democracy is the preferred flavour of the future and leading democracies, including the UK and the US,  have taken the view that all we need to do is establish elections for the governments of countries, by force if necessary, and, behold, a democracy has been created.

But there’s more to it than that. 

Yes, governments need to be chosen by” the people,” but the elections  need to be free and fair, and in addition there needs to be a whole infrastructure to include:

The rule of law

Fair (and prompt!) trials for infringements of the law

Independent judges

Separate law making and executive powers

Free and balanced information

Freedom of speech

Freedom to assemble and promote or protest about a point of view

Respect for minorities

A measure of equality.

For most of my life both the UK and the US have gradually moved towards the ideal in the above categories, but, alarmingly, for the past decade, both countries have moved in the opposite directions, both to rig or discredit the judiciary (openly biased appointments in the US, “enemies of the people” in the UK),curb the right to vote (gerrymandering in the US, unequal  ID requirements in the UK) . . . .  .and lots more.

But to my mind the most serious problem is the lack of access to balanced and accurate information.  That is why I have included a “measure of equality” in the list above.  Some people have so much wealth that they can distort the availability of information.  Elton Musk’s  address by video-link to the right wing demonstration in London over the weekend is only the latest, and not necessarily the most blatant, example.  And the advent of artificial intelligence will probably make it even more difficult to discern what is true and what isn’t.

How else can we explain the absurdities that electorates have been persuaded to believe, or, if not believe, at least to vote for - the  £350m per week for the NHS in the UK’s Brexit Referendum, that tariffs in the US will bring back jobs the Rust Belt, that the UK can have Scandinavian-quality public  services without paying the taxes to finance them?

Why do the charlatans, (Johnson, Trump, Farage, to name but three) flourish?

The answer is partly by possessing effective communication skills, which all three of the above have in spades and poor Sir Keir Starmer lacks (and Sir Ed Davey compensates for by doing silly things). 

But more generally we need to know who is financing their distortions.

To restore and imporve our democracy I believe we need to:

Diversify the ownership of the media:

State clearly who owns each organ

Require the owner(s) to pay taxes in the county the medium operates

Forbid multi or cross-media ownership.

Require public broadcasters, when quoting think-tanks and similar sources,  to report who owns them or what particular interest they represent

Operate the same rules of identification on the internet and social media as operate in the press (name and address supplied if there is some valid reason not to give it)

Strictly limit the size of individual or corporate donations to political parties.

Apart from restoring the second choice vote in the elections for mayors and crime commissioners and requiring an over-all majority, there is as yet little interest by our present Labour government in any of the above.  Rather the reverse. 

That is why we need Liberals in government.

Raynergate

 

 

The past two weeks have exposed British politics as squalid and dysfunctional.

 Having probed for over a year without much success the right-wing press have at last exposed a chink in the armour of the Labour Party’s  deputy leader and cabinet minister, Angela Rayner. She has been found to have failed to pay sufficient stamp duty, something in the region of £40 000, when she bought a flat in Hove, has admitted culpability and resigned.

The Conservative Party leader, Kemi Badenoch, has joined the witch-hunt,  having declared that Ms Rayner’s continuance in office would have been “untenable.”  That’s a bit of a cheek, to put it mildly, given that the Conservatives, their friends and paymasters, have been ripping off the country for fourteen years (actually much longer if you go back to Mrs Thatcher) for sums involving  millions if not billions of pounds.  

 There’s a strong case  for claiming that the very continuance of the Conservative party is untenable and if they had any sense of decency they would dissolve themselves, though I supposed that would make things even easier for Nigel Farage (be careful what you wish for.)

Although a small fortune in the eyes of most families, M/s Rayner’s £40 000 is peanuts by comparison by comparison with the Tory record (and earlier abuses by MPs of all parties)  However, it is important for politicians to set an example and live by the rules that they make, so the Advisor on Ministerial Standards, Sir Laurie Magnus, was justified in ruling that she had broken the ministerial code, and she herself has decided that she "has to go" (before she's pushed?)

The UK has a whole industry of accountants and the like who advise the wealthy on how to minimise their monetary duty to the state that protects their wealth.  “Evading” tax  is illegal and you might get your hand smacked if you try it, but tax “avoidance”  (they call lit “tax efficiency” - it sounds nicer) is perfectly legal. So there’s a wide range of methods -  putting money into trusts, (M/s Rayner had done that in order to ensure an income for her disabled son), holding it in tax havens abroad, calling your income “profit”, setting yourself up as a company, and probably many more schemes which reduce the subscription one pays to be a member of civilised society.  Users of these services presumably sail  as close to the wind as they think they can get away with.  How many wouldn’t, given the chance?

Sir Laurie Magnus is a 3^rd Baronet (perhaps his father knew Lloyd George) and was educated at Eton and )Oxford.  I can’t help thinking that if M/s Rayner's case had been tried by a jury of her peers (or should that be peeresses?) they would have found her not guilty, especially if the jury had contained a couple of working-class teenage mothers and an Ed Davey-type who was also the parent of a disabled child.

Be that as it may, I’m pretty sure Angela Rayner will be a feature on our political scene lag after Mrs Badenoch is forgotten.

While our media and politicians have been fully absorbed in dramatising this relatively trivial affair the Israeli Defence Force continues to murder children, women and men in their homeland of Gaza, Putin's armed forces continue to bombard Ukraine and President Trump continues to pull at the threads of American democracy trash the World’s trading system and make war rather than peace.

 In the UK for the time being the upshot of the chaos is that the Cabinet has been reshuffled. The  Home Secretary has become the Foreign Secretary, the Justice Secretary the Home Secretary and the Foreign Secretary the Deputy Prime Minister and nothing much else.  Each  of these have been in their original jobs for  just over a year – hardly long enough to get the hang of whatever they’re supposed to do. Now they “move on” probably to fail again in their new posts. 

Has Sir Keir Starmer not read the books by informed commentators* which suggest that this “churn” is one of the main reasons why the British state is failing?

 

*Especially Ian Dunt: “How Westminster Works . . .and why it doesn’t” 

and

Sam Freedman: “Failed State, Why Britain doesn’t Work and How we Fix it.”