Liberal Democrats: the contradictions of populism
Posted on Monday 19 September, 2011
Filed Under Liberal Democrats |
13 Comments
MUCH of the rhetoric emanating from the International Convention Centre in Birmingham over the last couple of days is marked by a degree of ostensible radicalism well beyond anything heard in ministerial speeches under New Labour.
Where business secretary John Hutton proclaimed that huge salaries were something to celebrate, his successor Vince Cable attacks ‘pay outs for failure’ and calls for workers and shareholders to have an input into deciding executive pay.
Where Gordon Brown shamefully scrapped the 10p tax band – a move that left up to five million of the poorest people in Britain worse off – Nick Clegg entirely correctly advocates taking the low paid out of the income tax system altogether.
Treasury secretary Danny Alexander is hiring 2,500 additional inspectors to snoop into the tax returns of the super-rich and warning them that ‘we will find your money’. There is even talk of a mansions tax in the offing.
UBS: rogue trading is intrinsic into the system
Posted on Thursday 15 September, 2011
Filed Under Economics |
9 Comments
SUBEDITORS on some national newspaper websites should note that busted City Boy Kweku Adoboli is not a ‘rogue trader’ unless and until a court of law finds him guilty of the fraud charges on which he is currently on remand. This blog makes no presumption either way.
But what we do know for sure is that UBS, one of the world’s biggest financial institutions, has this morning confirmed the loss of $2bn on account of unauthorised dealing by one or more of its staff.
Bear in mind here the important moral difference between what is called rogue trading and fraud in the standard sense of the word. The miscreants are not pocketing the proceeds of crime personally; their offence is simply to screw up while doing what their employers put them under enormous pressure to do in the first place.
Basically, traders take bets on which way the market will move. The hope is that they will be right more often than they are wrong, and pocket a large bonus as a result. But markets are unpredictable in nature, and inevitably, sometimesthey fluff it.
At this stage, the temptation is to go double or quits with somebody else’s money. Pull it off, and you are applauded for being in possession of balls of steel, and pocket a larger bonus still.
But if – like Nick Leeson or Jérôme Kerviel – you still don’t get a line of three cherries, it is the bank that takes the hit. At the end of the day, the difference between a trading floor superstar and a spell in the slammer is to some extent down to luck.
In effect, a dynamic towards rogue trading is inherent in financial markets as currently constituted, and the system itself encourages promiscuous risk taking. UBS won’t be the last to find that out the hard way.
Trades Union Congress: talking the talk
Posted on Wednesday 14 September, 2011
Filed Under Trade Unions |
55 Comments
THE Trades Union Congress doesn’t need to hire Blackpool Winter Gardens anymore. Nowadays it is a small scale event with just 300 delegates, all of whom fit comfortably into the basement of the organisation’s London headquarters.
Time was when there were usually that many people selling Trot newspapers outside, and everybody seriously interested in politics would watch the entire proceedings broadcast live on BBC Two, sometimes even knocking test cricket off the schedule.
Nevertheless, the newspaper that predicted an upsurge in union militancy and a return to the Winter of Discontent in 2008, 2009 and 2010 is – guess what? – predicting an upsurge in union militancy and a return to the Winter of Discontent in 2011.
Yes, the Daily Telegraph has ‘learned of details of a secret plan for rolling regional and national strikes’ kicking off in late November and extending into next year. While it would be unprofessional of me to belittle another journalist’s scoop, the suspicion has to be that this is the same secret plan that union leaders have been publicly discussing for several months now.
This could be the year when the old maxim about stopped clocks kicks in. The depth of the impending attack on the public sector, public sector pensions in particular, is such that any response short of sustained and co-ordinated industrial action would virtually constitute an admission that trade unionism in Britain no longer has any particular point.
Sure, it’s good to talk. But seasoned observers will know that hearing a general secretary ratchet up the rhetoric a notch or two does not necessarily equate to any particular determination to wage a determined fight. While I was encouraged to read the quotes the Torygraph attributes to Dave Prentis, Gail Cartmel and Mark Serwotka, it still falls to what’s left of the left to make sure they live up to their words.
Julius Malema: killing them softly with his song
Posted on Monday 12 September, 2011
Filed Under International |
26 Comments
‘KILL the boer, kill the farmer’ is obviously not a very nice song. Then again, neither is ‘Build a bonfire, build a bonfire, put the teachers on the top’.
Today Julius Malema, president of the African National Congress Youth League, has been found guilty of hate speech for public renditions of the controversial anti-Afrikaner chant. Indeed, the ditty has become something of a signature tune for a man seen by many as the future leader of South Africa.
Just how inflammatory this practice is, I will leave for those living in that country to call. But what I do know is that some 17 years after the end of white minority rule, the vast majority of blacks still live in poverty, and many have little hope of employment.
Unsurprisingly, Malema’s calls for the nationalisation of the mining industry and the seizure of white-owned farms find a ready audience. That he personally is a demagogic populist who lives a lavish lifestyle, and under investigation for fraud and corruption, hardly detracts from the pertinence of what he has to say.
How Grant Shapps is ‘tackling homelessness’
Posted on Friday 9 September, 2011
Filed Under Conservative Party, Politics |
25 Comments
‘TACKLING homelessness and rough sleeping is what first got me into politics,’ Conservative housing minister Grant Shapps emphasised in a Department of Communities and Local Government press release just over a week ago.
I’m glad to hear it, and it is obviously not for me to doubt the sincerity of a man who famously once spent Christmas Eve in a sleeping bag on the streets outside Victoria station in order to highlight the plight of homeless children.
Shapps’ attitude marks a refreshing change from that evinced by his Old Etonian predecessor Sir George Samuel Knatchbull Young, 6th Baronet, who contemptously remarked in 1991 that one couldn’t even leave the opera without stepping over a rough sleeper. When housing ministers say things like that, you know your housing policy is deeply mired in something undesirable.
So now that Shapps has been running the government’s housing show for the last year and a bit, it cannot be unfair to look at the relevant statistics, and ponder how much headway he is making in vanquishing the problem that has for all these years provided him with political inspiration.
50p tax rate? Nowhere near enough
Posted on Wednesday 7 September, 2011
Filed Under Economics |
53 Comments
THE idea that the rest of us suffer because the super rich are subject to a nominal tax rate of 50p – and that’s the claim that 20 leading economists advance in the Financial Times this morning – is special pleading at its worst. What’s more, it is entirely intellectually spurious, too.
For a start, in the real world most of them don’t pay anywhere near what the 50p figure suggests. As one private equity chief admitted a few years back, many of them are able to arrange their fiscal affairs to ensure that they shell out proportionately less to the Inland Revenue than do their cleaning ladies. That loophole may have since closed, but plenty of others remain very much open.
While working stiffs on PAYE hand over their 22%, and better-off employees like Yours Truly are clobbered for 40% every month, those at the top can readily slice and dice things so that they are subject to an effective tax rate in single figures.
Guest post: the death agony of Scottish Unionism
Posted on Monday 5 September, 2011
Filed Under Conservative Party, Scottish National Party, Scottish Socialist Party |
25 Comments
This is a guest post by Eddie Truman, an Edinburgh-based activist in the Scottish Socialist Party.
THE news, when it came, was scarcely believable; ‘Scottish Conservative Party set to disband’, said the Telegraph.
A sensationalist headline perhaps – things are a little more complex than that – but with the Telegraph’s Scottish editor Alan Cochrane’s byline on the story, it had substance.
A faction of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party has indeed openly come out in favour of dissolving the party and founding a new one without formal links to Cameron’s Tories in England.
They have shown their hand by standing Mid Scotland and Fife regional MSP Murdo Fraser in the leadership contest following the resignation of former leader Annabel Goldie after two elections, Westminster 2010 and Holyrood 2011, in which Scotland’s Tories were a total irrelevance.
So why aren’t there any Arabs in the Israel Philharmonic?
Posted on Friday 2 September, 2011
Filed Under Israel |
123 Comments
ONE out of every five people that live in Israeli is an Arab. Yet the same surely cannot be said of the 230 or more musicians and managers that work for the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.
Not only are we talking basic lack of proportionality here, but I have even read claims that not one single person on the payroll is an Arab. I am unaware of any refutations or denials, although I am willing to be corrected on the point.
Supporters counter merely that the IPO is ‘open to’ Arab musicians. That might well be true, in the same sense that Eton is ‘open to’ council estate kids, or that the British National Party is ‘open to’ black recruits. Even Rangers sign Catholics these days.
But in the circumstances, it hardly seems enough. At the very least, a de facto policy of racial segregation stands as a rebuke to the orchestra as an institution.
While I am critical of those who refer to Israel as an ‘apartheid state’, the IPO can fairly be branded an apartheid orchestra. Saying that, a South African colleague informs me that the Cape Town Symphony was accepting blacks by the 1980s.
I do not normally endorse those who disrupt artistic performances for whatever end. But I do have a question for those who have been quick to condemn the actions of Palestine Solidarity Campaign activists at the Proms last night; if the Hallé for some reason was refusing to recruit from the Jewish community of Manchester, wouldn’t they be tempted to adopt a similar tactics? And wouldn’t they be right to do so?
Marxist economics: not there to guide capitalists
Posted on Thursday 1 September, 2011
Filed Under Economics |
17 Comments
LIKE a fourteen year old schoolgirl using the F-word in front of her parents or anyone expressing mild aversion to opera at a north London dinner party, certain capitalist commentators revel in the shock value of adducing Marx in support of their macroeconomic prescriptions.
In recent weeks, we have seen George Magnus, senior economic advisor to Swiss banking giant UBS, urge Bloomberg terminal users to ‘Give Karl Marx a chance to save the world economy’. Meanwhile, Nouriel Roubini – the academic economist nicknamed Dr Doom – insisted in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that Marx was right to assert that capitalism has the capacity to destroy itself. Both gentlemen have subsequently been taken to task by Financial Times columnist Samuel Brittan.
All of them present a simplified summary of Marx’s economic thinking, or at least the underconsumptionist reading thereof. Given that they are writing newspaper opinion pieces for a mainstream audience, that is entirely understandable. At a stretch, what they say can even be seen as valid, in as far as it goes; in the final analysis, all capitalist crises are crises of underconsumption.
2011 versus 1968
Posted on Wednesday 31 August, 2011
Filed Under International, Politics |
21 Comments
I WAS not old enough to be politically engaged in 1968. Yet even though I was only eight at the time, I can nevertheless recollect some of the dramatic events of that year, including footage of Vietnam and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
After reading numerous books on the period and talking to lefties born only a little while before I was, I am well aware that for numerous middle-aged activists proudly define themselves as soixante huitards.
Not uncommonly, they insist that the well documented revolts across the planet – accompanied by a classic rock soundtrack, of course – provided enough of a glimpse of what revolution looked like enough to instil lifelong socialist convictions.
We still cannot know the long term impact of 2011, of course. But what we have witnessed so far in many countries is capital H History on a scale at least on a par with the dramatic occurrences of five decades ago.
