Unpopulism has led to Populism - a fine article by Larry Elliott

From time to time I draw your attention to the superb work of Larry Elliott in the Guardian, one of the features of that newspaper most worth reading. 

 

Today he offers a cogent explanation of the origins of the 'populism' that so many liberals decry, and which conservatives, official and unofficial (especially enthusiasts for Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher)  don't seem to really understand. What has happened is that capitalism has begun to operate pretty much as crudely as the wildest Marxists long claimed it did. But of course this does't turn most people into Marxists, because most people have a healthy and justified suspicion that they owe the tyranny of bad schools, mass migration,  crumbling law and order, thought control, and the destruction of the married family, to Marxists. 

In the absence of any kind of coherent old-fashioned conservatism, it turns them into Trumpists, or their equivalent. Larry Elliott describes the economic behaviour of the western elites as it as 'unpopulism', an economic policy which has systematically driven down the rewards and living standards of what were once called the working classes, in reality the most conservative section of society. 

 

Oddly enough, my Trotskyist faction more or less grasped the nature of the coming change back in the 1970s, and hoped to gain trade union supporters for Bolshevism (heaven knows what an International Socialist government would have done to the workers, but never mind),  by explaining and attacking what it called 'The Employers' Offensive', a programme designed to drive down real wages and increase productivity. Productivity is a tricky word, which often makes job losses sound like increased efficiency.  But as so often, we didn't know the half of it. The globalist wave that was coming would hugely amplify this force.Larry Elliott explains it here 

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/mar/26/populism-is-the-result-of-global-economic-failure

 

Here's a sample : 'Much head-scratching has resulted as leaders seek to work out why large chunks of their electorates are so cross.

The answer seems pretty simple. Populism is the result of economic failure. The 10 years since the financial crisis have shown that the system of economic governance which has held sway for the past four decades is broken. Some call this approach neoliberalism Perhaps a better description would be unpopulism.

Unpopulism meant tilting the balance of power in the workplace in favour of management and treating people like wage slaves. Unpopulism was rigged to ensure that the fruits of growth went to the few not to the many. Unpopulism decreed that those responsible for the global financial crisis got away with it while those who were innocent bore the brunt of austerity.

Anybody seeking to understand why Trump won the US presidential election should take a look at what has been happening to the division of the economic spoils. The share of national income that went to the bottom 90% of the population held steady at around 66% from 1950 to 1980. It then began a steep decline, falling to just over 50% when the financial crisis broke in 2007.'

Old rules about the minimum wage (that the bigger it was, the more it drove down employment) no longer apply. And the Brown government began a crazy and unsustainable policy of subsidizing low wage employers by giving their employees taxpayers' cash. No doubt many people are glad of this money, which once upon a time they might have earned for themselves. But once begun, this can't be stopped. But how can we afford it indefinitely and why should taxpayers subsidise low-wage employers anyway?'

 

I urge you to read the whole thing. 

 

 

An Interview with PH, on Donald Trump, the EU and Emigration

This interview resulted from a chance meeting on the London Underground. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knd81qhbRiQ&feature=youtu.be&a

 

Sticking to my Guns: The inevitable fall of Sterling, Referendum or no Referendum

I return briefly to the topic of the Pound Sterling. Some people derided my article on how it would have fallen anyway, on the basis that I’m not an economist, a FOREX trader or a financial journalist.

Well, I’d only say that journalists working in this area, like traders and economists, are not immune from fashion or politics. I’d also point out that Sterling did in fact fall very sharply on the 4^th August, following the Bank of England’s announcement of another bout of Quantitative Easing ('QE', creating funny money out of thin air) and a cut in interest rates. Nothing to do with the EU.

Historically, before the QE era and George Osborne’s long and disastrous reign, it was falling in December 2008 (the ‘Economist’ said in that month that it was ‘plumbing new depths’) and suffered an even greater drop in the final months of 2009, leading ‘The Daily Telegraph’ to record in March 2010

‘Fears about Britain's public finances mean the pound has lost about a third of its value against the euro and a fifth against the US dollar during the past three years, creating misery for holidaymakers, retired expats and those with property abroad.

But last week the pace of this decline accelerated, prompting fears of a sterling crisis. By midweek the pound was worth just $1.50, its lowest level for 10 months. It also lost value against the euro – which has been struggling itself in recent months. This volatility has resulted in the pound dropping to €1.11 in a matter of weeks.’

Nothing to do with the EU. All to do with the underlying weakness of our economy, which still persists and is now worse than then.

The bizarre decision of almost all commentators to rally round George Osborne in May 2010, and pretend he was succeeding in curbing spending when he wasn’t, while he inflated a housing bubble as a substitute for real growth, may explain the relatively calm years since. Few of those commentators had much to say when the May government swiftly buried Mr Osborne's failed policies in July. 

The great avalanche of June was slowly building up on the higher slopes for years,  billions of baseless funny money,  the rape of savings by destroying interest rates, a terrible trade gap. No longer bridged by invisibles as the oil and gas reserves run down, more and more public and private debt, and higher and higher ratio of foreign debt to GDP (This is the ‘Current Account Deficit’. If the economy were a nuclear power station, this is the gauge you’d watch most closely for signs of meltdown. Britain’s has never been so bad in peacetime).

 

Then, the thunderclap of the referendum set it moving, as it was bound to do sooner or later under its own weight. It is said that when a the wise man points at the moon, the fool looks at his finger. This is a case of the wise man seeing that the avalanche was caused by the snow, and merely triggered by the bang.

 

 

By the way, the Bank of England has in the past spent huge sums of hard currency to prop up the Pound Sterling on behalf of the British government. This was a feature of my younger years, and reached its apogee in the ERM crisis of 1992, misnamed ‘Black Wednesday’ when the government hurled billions of pounds into the sea in a useless effort to save Sterling from a 15% devaluation it badly needed.(Years of prosperity and growth followed until Messrs Blair and Brown came along and went wild with the national Amex Card).

But I can find no trace or report of any such effort by the Bank last June. If the fall was not fundamentally just, in economic terms as well as being, in many ways,  necessary and beneficial, why not? On the contrary, the bank’s actions in August caused a further fall.

Finally, I draws readers’ attention to this excellent article in the Guardian by that fine writer, Larry Elliott, in ‘The Guardian’ :

 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/oct/16/let-the-pound-fall-and-the-economy-rise

He disagrees with me about the timing of the inevitable fall in the Pound (how can we possibly resolve this?) but read this passage especially (my emphasis) :

 

‘Britain has discovered a way of living beyond its means. Assets are sold to overseas buyers bringing capital into the country to offset the balance of payments deficit. It is the equivalent of a once well-to-do household that has fallen on hard times pawning the silver to keep up appearances. At some point, referendum or no referendum, the financial markets were going to say enough is enough and it is delusional to think otherwise.

'Running permanent balance of payment deficits amounts to borrowing growth from the future. Sooner or later, it has to be paid back and Brexit means it will be sooner. A weaker pound works by making exports cheaper and imports dearer. The effect, as after all the other devaluations and depreciations of the past 100 years – 1931, 1949, 1967, 1976, 1992 and 2007 – will make the economy less dependent on consumers and more reliant on producers. Lord Mervyn King, a former governor of the Bank of England, thinks the latest fall in sterling is a good thing and he is right.’

PETER HITCHENS: The falling pound is NOTHING to do with your freedom

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column 

The pound sterling would have fallen hard and fast if we had voted to stay in the EU. I am amazed it did not do so long before. More than three years ago, before the referendum was called, I advised you to keep an eye on the value of sterling as a true measure of our huge economic difficulties.

Since then they’ve grown worse – enormous state debts, enormous private debts, a disastrous balance of trade and a devastating current account deficit, which measures how much we owe abroad.

Add to that the £435billion of funny money pumped into the economy by the Bank of England since 2009 in so-called ‘quantitative easing’, the smooth modern way of printing cash which is backed by thin air.

 

If you do these things, the currency must shrink in value, as surely as water will wet you, and as surely as fire will burn.

And now it has. I suspect it will get quite a lot worse, and the day when the dollar is worth more than the pound is now in sight. But currency markets like to wait for their opportunity. My guess is that, on the eve of the referendum, quite a few currency dealers bet heavily on a victory for the Remain campaign (as others did) and bought sterling in the belief that it would rise on the news. But others, more cunning or better informed, wagered the other way.

The resulting turmoil of rapid selling set off the avalanche which followed.

If the vote had gone the other way, then roughly the same thing would have happened by now, perhaps on the announcement of bad economic figures (there are so many, if you’re paying attention).

Everyone who understands the issue knows this. So they should stop saying – and you should stop believing – that the fall of sterling is your fault for voting for national independence.

This decision will have its costs – nothing worth having comes free – but a weaker pound isn’t one of them.

****

Thanks to a 1950s childhood I like my gravy thick, salty and dark brown, best mixed to a background of Two-Way Family Favourites on the Light Programme. So I’m sorry to see the decline of Bisto and Oxo sales, which fell in September supposedly because of hot weather. They’ll be blaming global warming next.

Of course, the real problem is that nuclear families eating meaty meals around tables, such as the one portrayed by Lynda Bellingham in the famous old Oxo commercials, are disappearing faster than hedgehogs. I doubt anything can save them.
But there’s something a bit wet and defeatist about the new Oxo TV advertisements, in which a horribly correct modern family (the man looks terrified) are shown cringing to some ghastly female bully brought home for a meal by their daughter. The creepy interloper shows her approval of her meatballs not by eating them but by taking a photograph of them.

Advertising is such a slave of trends. Someone called Helen Warren-Piper, a marketing director for Oxo’s parent company, has actually said: ‘Those advertising scripts where the mum is literally tied to an oven just don’t work any more. It’s clear advertisers need to think beyond mum and do a better job at representing the whole of the modern family or consumers will reject them.’

Ah, yes, you’ll remember those days when mothers were literally tied to the oven, then briefly released to gulp down some gravy before being chained to the kitchen sink. It happened to Lynda Bellingham all the time. No it didn’t. What is she talking about?

And yet this rubbish dominates the world of business and commerce, which now peddle ideas once found only in seething, enraged ultra-feminist magazines.

****

My favourite ghost stories, by the genius M. R. James, usually involve someone being a little too curious, and so releasing from its hole or tomb a nasty force he wishes he could put back but can’t.

Pornography is like this. In my wild 1960s days I thought it would be clever to read Last Exit To Brooklyn (which had just escaped prosecution) as a gesture of support for freedom of expression. It poisoned and polluted my imagination, irrevocably. To this day, I wish I hadn’t read it.

The best thing to do with pornography is to keep it out of reach by the forces of shame and law. The claim that legalising it would be a great liberation has turned out to be one of the greatest lies of our time. It has enslaved millions.

It is not a passive, dead thing that can be examined in a classroom. It reaches out and leaps into your mind. Jenni Murray could not be more wrong in saying that children should study it.

****

What a pity that Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson, a man of great historical knowledge, blessed with a sense of proportion, has become a Russophobic warmonger madly suggesting that we start a conflict with Moscow in Syria.

Mr Johnson knows perfectly well that fighting Islamist fanatics in densely populated cities is hard, especially when they hold the population hostage, as the Al Qaeda affiliate Al Nusra is doing in east Aleppo now.
The West and its allies had similar difficulties last Christmas in Ramadi, where the RAF (among other forces) dropped bombs in and around that city to defeat ISIS. I suppose it’s possible that no civilians died, but I somehow doubt it.

The difference is that, unlike their close cousins in the Al Nusra front in Aleppo, the Islamic State fanatics in Ramadi don’t have access to a slick PR operation in the West, skilled at producing emotive, perfectly composed atrocity pictures of wounded children, and in manipulating Western news organisations who (for the most part) have no actual staff reporters or photographers on the scene.

So almost all the things you hear about east Aleppo are one-sided, carefully controlled propaganda, not news. One way of dealing with one-sided propaganda is to check it against the stuff put out by the other side.

In a rare moment of balance, the BBC recently transmitted this, from Fares al-Shehabi, who represents Aleppo in Syria’s ‘People’s Council’.

He said: ‘More than half of the city is occupied by Islamists, many of them foreigners…

‘Just go and check for yourself who is ruling eastern Aleppo, who is really issuing the laws there, it’s Islamic courts, it’s exactly like Kandahar and Kabul before the coalition intervened to get rid of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, it’s exactly the same thing, they don’t have any democracy, they don’t have any civil rule, they only have people with long beards with fundamentalist ideology running the show, and a lot of foreigners.’

If this is even partly true, what on earth are we doing rushing to the aid of these hairy-faced fanatics and infiltrators? Or are we, as we did so regrettably in Libya, once again backing the worse against the bad?

I am happy to help Mr Johnson on this, and respectfully remind him that my team beat his when we clashed on University Challenge. He’s not the only know-all in London.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens' blog, click on Comments and scroll down

Don't Blame Sliding Sterling on the Referendum

My prophecy department has suggested that I should write about the fall in the Pound Sterling. I feel very much entitled to do so as  have been standing on the platform with my watch in my hand, drumming my fingers and waiting for this particular long-expected event to come steaming in, for some time now.  

Rather more than three years ago, I wrote the following:

‘..One of the things which constantly strikes me about modern Britain is that there must be many people who would actually quietly like to see the collapse , or at least the shrinkage, of the currency. They cannot hope to pay off their debts in any other way .The same is true of the government, which has no idea how it will manage its deficit, and borrows more each day, an action no less stupid than Weimar Germany’s incessant printing of worthless money. How convenient a large inflation would be for them.

‘Could anyone do such a thing deliberately? Possibly. The book (‘When Money Dies’, which I was reviewing at the time) quotes but does not endorse suggestions that both the Bolsheviks and some of the Warsaw Pact states deliberately used hyperinflation to destroy the hierarchies, the certainties  and the middle classes which stood in their way. I have seen no proof of this, but it is not incredible, and we all know John Maynard Keynes’s attribution to Lenin of the (justified) belief that if you wish to destroy a nation, you first debauch its currency.  It is also a  very good way of destroying the power and influence of the independent middle class, who are the mainstay of any truly free and law-governed society, and the reliable regiments of conservatism.

‘But of course those who are in charge of all these things are not Bolsheviks.

‘They are ordinary politicians, far too stupid to be so well-organised or directed. It is just an accident, a bungle, an unintended consequence by people too dim and short-sighted to understand that bills have, in the end, to be paid somehow. I am not sure whether that makes it any better, though. The results will still be very bad.’

For full article see http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/05/when-money-dies-the-horrors-of-inflation.html

…

And also this :’ It looks to me as if the government has now decided to inflate its way out of the crisis. The new Governor of the ‘independent’ Bank of England has been given the nod that he may carry on with more ‘quantitative easing’, and the Budget seems to be offering help with mortgages to people who can’t really afford mortgages, which will create a new bubble of unrepayable borrowed money, possibly in return for a short-term boost to the economy. Everyone knows this is a bad idea, after what happened in the USA when they lent mortgages to people who couldn’t repay them. It is not even a kindness.  Why do they do it?

It’s all pretty desperate, as one might expect from a  government which never had any ideas in the first place.  As far as I can find out , Vladimir Ilyich Lenin didn’t actually say ‘The surest way to destroy a nation is to debauch its currency’. Maynard Keynes rather hesitantly attributed it to the old monster. But it’s true,  whoever said it. Since Gold-backed currencies gave way to paper, man has had to have faith in banknotes – so much faith that perhaps he hasn’t had the strength to have faith at the same time in God, who is considerably more credible than the average Cabinet or Central Bank.

He has to believe absolutely that the pretty blue, green or pink beer-token in his wallet is worth the goods which he purchases with it, and so does the shopkeeper who accepts it in return for those goods. He has to believe with all his heart that the columns of figures in his bank account stand for real value, along with the price he thinks he can get for his house if he sells it.

Once he ceases to do so, then money dies.

For full article see here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/03/inflation-the-gods-of-the-copybook-headings-speak.html

Well, this is coming to pass, and it is most provoking to be told that it is ‘caused’ by the referendum vote to leave the EU. No doubt this event was the trigger for the rapid slide of Sterling. But that was because the markets were waiting for such a trigger, and no doubt a lot of currency dealers, by gambling on a ‘Leave’ vote, did well in the money markets by betting on a post-referendum drop.

Sop now it has become established wisdom, and it may even be that, because the media are used by the markets to bring about little jumps and falls in the ratings of stocks or currencies, we will now see a constant link between the two, with each stumble and shudder along the road to exit being followed or accompanied by a lurch in the currency.

But this is correlation, not causation. Those with savings have known for years that inflation has been eating into their carefully hoarded stores of wealth, pensions included,  thanks to the virtual abolition of interest and the repeated raids on pension schemes by Labour and Tory chancellors, which have nearly killed off what was once quite a solid sector of the economy, and left a lot of people wondering if they’ll die before the money runs out, or the other way round. . The message from investment advisers has been ‘put your money in something risky if you want to earn anything’. The old idea, that you could make a steady if modest income by just leaving the money on a reasonably safe deposit, is gone, I think for good.

But now those without savings, those living from hand-to-mouth and those (almost everyone under 60) with non-mortgage debts, must experience it too. For them it is a much more mixed experience. Their debts will visibly shrink, which they (and the government, whose debts will also shrivel visibly) will enjoy. But a lot of prices will rise, because we now import so much, and foreign holidays, which so many now regard almost as a right, will become swiftly costlier (perhaps it is time for British holidaymakers to sample the cheaper joys of the Crimea) . Our few export industries will be delighted. Those which rely on imported goods for their raw materials and fuel will not be. My guess, on the basis of what I think I know about our economy, is that a lower pound will hurt us more than it helps us.

Having experienced Harold Wilson’s famous 1967 devaluation (from $2-80 to £2-40) I am trained to laugh at political claims that it won’t hurt the money in your pocket. But in those days the government took direct responsibility for it, and was blamed for it.  I wasn’t born in  September 1949, when the Attlee government devalued from $4-03 to $2-80, it was a much more savage loss. But the country was well aware ( as it isn’t now) that it had run out of money and credit, and the humiliation just had to be absorbed. Fear of an even more humiliating repeat forced the Tories to abandon the Suez adventure seven years later.

Almost exactly 18 years before, in September 1931,  Britain had come off the Gold Standard, Winston Churchill’s disastrous equivalent to the ERM crisis, unsustainable because we were broke and in debt, which we had not been in 1914 when he had helped get us into the Great War that ruined us financially. At that time the Pound sold for $4-87, roughly the same as the just under Five Dollars standard before 1914 (it is amusing to recall that transatlantic travellers reckoned in those days that the old English shilling was the exact equivalent of the American Quarter, which it also closely resembled in size and weight). During the US Civil War, in 1864, the Pound brought in almost ten dollars, peaking at $9-97. That’s war for you, so it is surprising that during World War One, while Britain was piling up a huge unrepayable (and still unrepaid) debt to the USA, the rate did not sink below $4-76, and fell only to $4-43 when hostilities ended, reaching $3-66 in 1920 before being dragged up again by the return to the Gold Standard.  

During the 1930s the dollar-pound rate fluctuated between about 3-15 to above 5-00, but in 1940 was fixed at just above four dollars for the rest of the war.

These figures, like the old rate between Sterling and the abolished Deutschemark, always seem to me to give a true idea of how we were really doing against comparable economies in these periods. The answer is, increasingly badly. But the current account deficit, not the same as the trade deficit or the Treasury deficit, is now about as bad as it has ever been, and I can think of no peacetime circumstances when the fundamental features of the economy have ever been so bad, and had so little hope of sustained recovery. To blame the pound’s fall on the referendum is absurd.

'Dyslexia' - a pernicious myth exploded,

The following articles. published in the Mail on Sunday on 2nd March and 3rd June 2007, are for some reason not easily found in the archives of this blog. As I'm currently running into various people who still think this imaginary complaint exists, I thought I would revive them and post them here.

 

Dyslexia is not a disease. It is an excuse for bad teachers By: Peter Hitchens I DOUBT there has ever been a society so easily fooled by pseudo-science and quackery as ours is. Millions of healthy people take happy pills that do them obvious harm, and are increasingly correlated with inexplicable suicide and worse. Legions of healthy children are drugged into numbness because they fidget during boring lessons, and countless people are persuaded that they or their children suffer from a supposed disease called 'dyslexia', even though there is no evidence at all that it exists. A few weeks ago I rejoiced at the first major cracks in this great towering dam of lies. Dr Richard Saul brought out his courageous and overdue book, ADHD Does Not Exist. I also urge everyone to read James Davies's book Cracked, on the inflated claims of psychiatry since it sold its soul to the pill-makers. Now comes The Dyslexia Debate, published yesterday, a rigorous study of this alleged ailment by two distinguished academics - Professor Julian Elliott of Durham University, and Professor Elena Grigorenko of Yale University. Their book makes several points. There is no clear definition of what 'dyslexia' is. There is no objective diagnosis of it. Nobody can agree on how many people suffer from it. The widespread belief that it is linked with high intelligence does not stand up to analysis. And, as Parliament's Select Committee on Science and Technology said in 2009: 'There is no convincing evidence that if a child with dyslexia is not labelled as dyslexic, but receives full support for his or her reading difficulty, that the child will do any worse than a child who is labelled dyslexic and then receives special help.' THIS is because both are given exactly the same treatment. But as the book's authors say: 'Being labelled dyslexic can be perceived as desirable for many reasons.' These include extra resources and extra time in exams. And then there's the hope that it will 'reduce the shame and embarrassment that are often the consequence of literacy difficulties. It may help exculpate the child, parents and teachers from any perceived sense of responsibility'. I think that last point is the decisive one and the reason for the beetroot-faced fury that greets any critic of 'dyslexia' (and will probably greet this book and article). If it's really a disease, it's nobody's fault. But it is somebody's fault. For the book also describes the furious resistance, among teachers, to proven methods of teaching children to read. Such methods have been advocated by experts since Rudolf Flesch wrote his devastating book Why Johnny Can't Read almost 60 years ago. There may well be a small number of children who have physical problems that stop them learning to read. The invention of 'dyslexia' does nothing to help them. It means they are uselessly lumped in with millions of others who have simply been badly taught. It also does nothing for that great majority of poor readers. They are robbed of one of life's great pleasures and essential skills. What they need, what we all need, is proper old-fashioned teaching, and who cares if the silly teachers think it is 'authoritarian'? That's what teaching is.

DYSLEXIA? A FANTASY TO EXCUSE THE LIBERAL WRECKERS By: PETER HITCHENS DONNING my stab proof vest and my anti-slime suit, I'd like to praise Professor Julian Elliott of Durham University for daring to state the truth. Dyslexia is a fantasy. This is especially important in the exam season. A bewildering number of students claim extra time, demand differently coloured question papers or are issued with equipment worth up to £10,000 – at our expense – on the grounds that they are sufferers from this fictional complaint. Those who take their exams without these things are, with reason, growing more and more resentful about this special treatment. Like its equally suspect cousin 'ADHD', dyslexia is a symptom of a society in trouble and an education system wrecked by liberals. Rather than admit their policies are wrong, the liberals pretend millions of perfectly healthy, intelligent young people are in some way disabled. Their really clever move is to persuade the victims of this trick to rejoice in their victimhood. The enraged letters and emails I shall now get, claiming to be 'insulted', will come from healthy, intelligent people who actually want to believe they have 'dyslexia', or from their parents. Perhaps a small minority of them really do have something physically wrong with them. If so, their cases are completely different from the majority, and shouldn't be bracketed with them. Most alleged dyslexics have simply never been taught to read properly, thanks to some of the worst schools in the rich world and the dogmatic refusal of many teachers to use the one tried, effective method – synthetic phonics. Instead, even now, many persist in the 'mixture of methods' which confuses pupils. It often also confuses parents who are assured that synthetic phonics are part of this mixture. But phonics must be taught exclusively to work. Meanwhile, TV and computer games have displaced books in most children's lives. Few now read regularly for pleasure. Without Harry Potter there would be fewer still. Professor Elliott, an educational psychologist, points out that there is no clear diagnosis of dyslexia.There are at least 28 different definitions of it. Yet parents, alleged sufferers and teachers actively welcome the classification – as it relieves them of responsibility for the trouble. But in countries where this fad is not indulged, the schools still teach reading properly. And these countries are our rivals in a world where a growing contest for scarce energy means Britain's days of wealthy security may be numbered – and will be numbered if we don't stop making excuses for ourselves.

You voted for a revolution... you got a Blair robot

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

So 17 million people voted for a revolutionary change in the way we are governed, and the result is going to be Theresa May. These ignored multitudes were not, I think, hoping for yet another Blairite robot, a living symbol of everything that is wrong with our political system. But this is what they are going to get.
I am sure Mrs May is a perfectly nice person and an ideal neighbour. But this is not the point. She is completely unfitted to answer the national demand for change.
She is a conventional Left-wing liberal. She wanted, for heaven’s sake, to stay in the EU, though she lacked the nerve to campaign actively for this. Given the growing campaign to overturn the referendum by guile and fear, can she be trusted not to fudge us back in?
Look at her. Trevor Phillips, when he was boss of the HQ of Political Correctness, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said in 2011 that Mrs May was ‘just as aggressive as Harriet Harman was on women’s equality’.
She is keenly politically correct. She mysteriously converted from opposition to all-women shortlists for parliamentary selections, to support for them. As Home Secretary she has done little to reduce or control the mass immigration which worries so many.
She also prefers not to mention in reference books that she went to a girls’ grammar school, strange behaviour for someone now alleged to support such schools. She is even quieter about having attended a private school.
Her most important political act was her speech in October 2002 in which she described the Tories she now seeks to lead as ‘the nasty party’.
Incidentally, in the same speech, she specifically endorsed Anthony Blair’s Iraq War policy, perhaps the single stupidest act in modern politics. Her only criticism of Mr Blair was about his ability to deliver on policies she supported.
Crucially she demanded that the Tory Party should adapt itself to Blairism. ‘Twice we went to the country unchanged, unrepentant, just plain unattractive. And twice we got slaughtered. Soldiering on to the next Election without radical, fundamental change is simply not an option.’
The Blairite insider Steve Richards has written about this era, saying that, in the 2001 Election(NB: I originally referred,erroneously, to a non-existent 2002 election. My apologies for the mistake.), the Blair entourage were often in an exasperated fury. ‘You don’t get it,’ they would occasionally scream. ‘The Election is a historic referendum on a Right-wing Conservative Party. If we win a second landslide, we would kill off Right-wing Conservatism for good.’
To do that, a Blairite fifth column was needed inside the Tory Party – ably aided, as Blairites always are, by media allies.
This first ran the putsch against Iain Duncan Smith. Then it arranged the amazingly prolonged leadership election which allowed the unknown Blair clone David Cameron to defeat the far better qualified David Davis.
You know the rest, in all its ghastly detail. Now it’s going to continue. The Tory Party will be shored up once again by billionaire cash and broadcasting rules which give it airtime worth many millions of pounds and deny it to any rival.
Oh, and if you thought Michael Gove was any better, never let it be forgotten that in 2003, under the headline ‘I can’t fight my feelings any more: I love Tony’, this supposedly ‘Right-wing’ great hope garlanded the grinning Blair creature with words such as ‘right and brave’, ‘impressive’ and ‘resolute’.
Having dug our way out of the dungeon, we find we have merely reached another dungeon, just as deep and just as dark.

***

I will not join in the gang attack on the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. I disagree with much of what he says, but any free Englishman ought to defend, fiercely, his liberty to say it.

This is partly because of my pre-revolutionary schooling, in which I was taught to admire lone figures who stood against overwhelming force. We used to recite Macaulay’s wonderful poem about ‘How well Horatius kept the bridge in the brave days of old’ –  one man defying thousands to save Rome. ‘How can man die better’, it asks, ‘than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods?’ A good question, I always thought and still do.

But it is partly because of a growing fury against the whimpering, snivelling legions who won’t accept votes and seek to overturn them.

In this case they are the same people, the Blairites. Not only are they seeking to undo the referendum. They are trying to bypass the awkward fact that the Labour Party, according to its own rules, elected Jeremy Corbyn as its leader by a large majority.

In actions plainly co-ordinated with media allies, Mr Corbyn’s enemies have tried to scare their foe into quitting. I very much hope he doesn’t, and that he beats them because this is now a matter of honour.

These people deserve to be in the fix they are in. They clubbed the Tory Party into becoming just like them. Now that it is, they have no purpose left. If the Tories won’t have them, there’s a vacancy for another futile ‘centre’ party, now that the Liberal Democrats are all washed up. They can fill that.

******

Any fool can break a taboo, and it’s gone forever. In the same way, any fool can cut down a tree that has taken three centuries to grow. Later we find out what we have lost.

And I continue to wonder why there’s so little concern about the  breach of the old taboo against public swearing. The singer Adele Adkins swore repeatedly on live TV, as she performed at Glastonbury last week. What effect will this have?

Those of us who have already lived long enough to see the country transformed, and know that nothing which seems permanent will necessarily survive, are perhaps better able to imagine how far things might go.

Those who are relaxed about this might wonder how they will feel when they start hearing teachers using the f-word in class, nurses using four-letter words to patients, see the strongest words used without asterisks in newspaper headlines, or politicians using them in major speeches. This will happen. I wouldn’t be surprised if some future Archbishop didn’t decide to pander to the spirit of the age by swearing from his or her pulpit.

Some may say they wouldn’t care. But that’s half the point. A thick-skinned society is also a callous society.

******

It is now clear the referendum result is being used as a pretext or cover for many things which would have happened anyway.  Sterling was bound to fall - especially after all that ‘quantitative easing’ inflated our economy. George Osborne’s dropping of his 2020 budget surplus target was simply a recognition of his total failure to control spending, concealed for too long by his many media toadies. There’ll be more. Don’t be scared by it.

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Why We Need a General Election by mid-September

Out of the froth and fog of the last few days, something is beginning to emerge. I’m not surprised at all by the unlovely shape of it. You may not like the look of it. But first I thought I’d make a brief tour of some of the more interesting (and perhaps unexpected) commentary in this morning’s newspapers.

Let us start with this fascinating and (in my experience) wholly accurate article about the state of modern England – betting shops, payday loans, mobility scooters and all - from The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/27/liverpool-london-brexit-leave-eu-referendum, a good piece of left-wing journalism in the tradition of Orwell’s ‘Road to Wigan Pier' and Priestley’s ‘English Journey’. The closeness of this devastation and demoralised despair to London itself will surprise many, who think it is confined to the West Midlands and the North. I fear it will surprise a lot more who have no idea that it exists anywhere. I think the destruction it records can be blamed on many other things as well as the thatcher era. But BBC Remain types need to read this, by one of their own(though perhaps he’s one of Jeremy Corbyn’s, I don’t know) .

They may then begin to grasp what happened last week, and even start to sympathise with it.

Next, from the same paper, is this typically perceptive analysis by Larry Elliott:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/26/brexit-is-the-rejection-of-globalisation

He correctly notes that Britain’s self-image as an economic success story is batty self-delusion, saying:’ To be sure, not all Britain’s problems are the result of its EU membership. It is not the European commission’s fault that productivity is so weak or that the trains don’t run on time. The deep-seated failings that were there when Britain voted in the referendum last Thursday were still there when the country woke up to the result on Friday. Evidence of just how unbalanced the economy is will be provided when the latest figures for Britain’s current account are released later this week. These show whether the country’s trade and investment income are in the black or the red. At the last count, in the final three months of 2015, the UK was running a record peacetime deficit of 7% of GDP.’

Then  he points out that the EU (the same is true of the post NAFTA USA) has failed to protect its working population from the ferocious downward pressures of globalisation: ‘In the shiny new world created when former communist countries were integrated into the global model, Europe was supposed to be big and powerful enough to protect its citizens against the worst excesses of the market. Nation states had previously been the guarantor of full employment and welfare. The controls they imposed on the free movement of capital and people ensured that trade unions could bargain for higher pay without the threat of work being off-shored, or cheaper labour being brought into the country.’

He adds : ‘Europe has failed to fulfil the historic role allocated to it. Jobs, living standards and welfare states were all better protected in the heyday of nation states in the 1950s and 1960s than they have been in the age of globalisation. Unemployment across the eurozone is more than 10%. Italy’s economy is barely any bigger now than it was when the euro was created. Greece’s economy has shrunk by almost a third. Austerity has eroded welfare provision. Labour market protections have been stripped away.’

He is very good on the implications of this for left-wing parties which have blithely backed open-doors immigration policies.

Many people, once they understand what free trade really means, are beginning to wonder whether protection is really quite such a bad idea as the modish economists keep telling them.

Finally there is this from the distinguished and original-minded Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the ‘Daily Telegraph’

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/06/26/parliament-must-decide-what-brexit-means-in-the-interests-of-the/

The shape of a compromise, miles from what many in the ‘Leave’ campaign want, but acceptable to the current Parliament, is here very accurately and credibly set out. Something of this kind may very well happen. Just as we are not now fully in the EU, but pretend we are,  we could end with a position where we are not fully out of it, but pretend we are.

This is why anyone who seriously wants a thorough break with the EU that will restore our control of our borders needs to realise that a referendum was never going to be enough to achieve this.

Something – perhaps yet another petition – needs to be done to encourage and record public support (if there is any now people are beginning to realise what's at stake) for a swift general election,  held to cement and confirm the decision of the referendum. In my view, the referendum cannot possibly take full effect( and will have been waste of time) unless the composition and the balance of forces is irrevocably altered now in the Commons.

If an election is held soon enough (certainly before October) then all candidates can reasonably be asked to state without equivocation whether they support or oppose the verdict of the referendum, and how they will vote on the matter if elected. This must then be more important than their party allegiances. It will compel local alliances which could make almost all ‘safe’ seats unsafe. And it would also compel the elected members in such a Parliament to seek new allegiances, refusing the old Labour or Tory whips. It could be the first step towards the complete realignment our political system so badly needs. If it does not happen, then some sort of Norwegian arrangement under which we remain in the Single Market and lack full control of our borders, will be what we will get. It will resolve almost none of the problems described above.  Good luck with that.

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America isn't our special friend. It ruined our Navy, Empire and future

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Now will we grasp that the United States is not our friend, but a foreign country whose interests are often different from ours?

President Obama’s blatant intervention in our internal affairs is not a sudden breach of a soppy ‘special relationship’. The USA’s only real special relationship is with Saudi Arabia, a 70-year-old hard pact of oil, money and power, welded together with such cynicism it ought to make us gasp.

Barack Obama’s open desire for us to stay inside the EU is by no means the first or worst example of White House meddling here in these islands. Bill Clinton forced us to cave in to the Provisional IRA in 1998 and his successor, George W. Bush, continued the policy by making us do Sinn Fein’s bidding afterwards.

Washington came close to scuppering our recapture of the F
alklands in 1982. And with the current state of our Armed Forces, which can nowadays do nothing without American support, I often wonder how the White House and the Pentagon would behave if Argentina once again seized Port Stanley.

If anyone thinks Hillary Clinton is a great friend of Britain, they’re in for a big surprise.

But surely the Americans fought with us shoulder to shoulder against the Kaiser and Hitler? Not exactly. The USA (quite rightly) fought for its own interest in both great wars, not for us.

When we ran out of money after the First World War, Washington seized the chance to force us to limit our Navy, and so began to overtake us as the world’s major naval power. We had feared Germany would do this. It is one of the great ironies of history that it was the USA that ended British sea power.

In the blackest months of the Second World War, just after the fall of France, the US Congress demanded almost every penny we owned before it would authorise the famous Lend- Lease programme.

Secret convoys of Royal Navy warships carried our reserves of gold bullion (estimated to have been worth £26 billion in today’s values) across the Atlantic – mostly never to return. Billions in negotiable securities went the same way, and British assets in the USA were sold off at absurdly low prices.

I don’t blame the Americans for this. In 1934, Britain had defaulted on her giant First World War debt to the USA. This is now worth up to £225 billion in today’s money, depending on how you calculate inflation.

We still haven’t paid it off, and never will, though it’s not considered polite to discuss it and it’s one of those facts so grotesque that most people refuse to believe it when first told of it.

During the Hitler war, the USA gave us enough aid to stay in the fight, but not enough to recover our former economic strength. The eventual peace was made on American terms, and Soviet terms, with us as onlookers. And after the war, Marshall Aid came with strings – open up the British Empire to outside trade, and then begin to dismantle it.

Not wanting to get embroiled in any more European wars, the USA also put a lot of effort into creating a permanently united Europe. Documents came to light in the 1990s, probably by accident, showing detailed CIA involvement in the European Movement.

I regard America’s behaviour as perfectly reasonable. It’s the sort of thing we used to do when we were top nation, and had more sense than to squander our wealth on idealistic foreign wars.

I like America and Americans, lived there happily for two fascinating years, and wish them well. But I never forget that the USA is another country, not a friend or even a cousin. Nor should you.

BRILLIANT HELEN IN THE FRONT LINE OF AN IMMORAL WAR

Best film of the year so far is Eye In The Sky in which Helen Mirren, in beautifully tailored camouflage, plays a British Army colonel trying to decide whether to launch a deadly drone strike on a terrorist safe house in Africa.

The late and much lamented Alan Rickman, in his last on-screen role, plays a red-tabbed general who has to deal with the politicians and their dithering.

The target house is crammed with front-rank terrorist commanders. But just outside it sits an innocent little girl, selling loaves of bread.

What do you do?

I won’t tell you what they do, but I am surprised we’re not much more worried about this form of warfare. Victims of ordinary bombing from the air are famously angered and frustrated by being subjected to an attack to which there is no defence. But this is much more alarming.

A woman at a desk in Nevada, by squeezing a trigger, can (without any risk to herself) obliterate or dismember another human being thousands of miles away, tearing them to shreds or dissolving them in a lake of fire.

An older generation than mine would have mumbled in mild tones ‘That’s not cricket!’ But today’s ruthless anti-terror macho man will reply: ‘We’re dealing with terrorists. The rules have changed. You can’t use chivalry when fighting with such people.’

Bystanders will see these attacks for themselves, or may be scorched or wounded by them. It is more than possible, for it happened to a wedding party in Yemen in December 2013, that entirely innocent people will be vaporised by mistake. Will their relatives be more or less likely to turn against us, once they have witnessed such events?

Precisely because it is so risk-free to us, it is outrageous and infuriating to those who see it on their own streets, who will feel as if we are treating them as insects to be casually swatted.

No doubt it will allow us to kill, by remote control, all kinds of people we don’t like. But is this moral? Would we send someone to walk up to them in the street and shoot them without warning or any kind of judicial process?

And would we accept it if a foreign power launched such attacks on our soil? I find it especially interesting that governments (such as ours) which sniffily refuse to execute convicted murderers, and so defend us from armed violence, are content to support this form of warfare.

How can arbitrary killing from the sky be right, and execution after a fair trial be wrong?

 

*******

Glad as I am to see the long-delayed decision to support some of what’s left of our steel industry, I grind my teeth in fury that nothing was done to help the honest, hard-working steelmen of Redcar, who now miserably face the loss of their homes as their murdered town sinks into enforced idleness.

Here’s a solution. Most members of our Government seem to regard the industrial areas of Britain as a foreign country. Fine. Then let them admit it openly, and so include Redcar and the rest in the swollen, uncuttable foreign aid budget. Simple, eh?

 

*******

Graffiti attacking the regime has begun to appear in North  Korea. This is the beginning of the end. Nothing so undermines authority, stability and order as the appearance of these hideous scribbles.

While visiting the decrepit, bankrupt Hermit Kingdom a few years ago, I concluded (after observing several citizens prone and unconscious in the street) that its people survived mainly by drinking too much rice wine. Perhaps they have now run out of that, too.

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She's done the bank scandal... maybe Margot Robbie can explain the Great Happy Pills Delusion

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday Column

The biggest scandals go on for years because they are so huge that nobody notices them. We stand and watch outrageous things going on, thinking that everything is all right because nobody else is making a fuss.

The new film about the 2008 bank collapse, The Big Short, makes this point perfectly. Anyone who wanted to could see the great lending boom was based on garbage, worthless loans that would never be repaid.

But most people didn’t want to. And even now we shy away from the blatant truth. The film’s makers, realising how easily our attention wanders, hired the Australian actress Margot Robbie to sit in a bathtub, naked except for a few thousand symbolic bubbles, to explain sub-prime mortgages in simple (and very crude) English.

The Big Short’s makers, realising how easily our attention wanders, hired the Australian actress Margot Robbie to sit in a bathtub, naked except for a few thousand symbolic bubbles, to explain sub-prime mortgages in simple (and very crude) English

How I wish I could afford to hire her to explain the equally shocking truth about the vast ‘antidepressant’ scandal that goes on all around us.

But, just as banks and investors were willing – if blinkered – accomplices in the mad folly that ripped the West’s economy to bits eight years ago, many doctors and decent men and women are complicit in the Great Happy Pills Delusion.

Doctors can get plenty of rewards from drug companies for promoting their pills. Invitations to conferences at five-star hotels, with diving, golf and fishing laid on are not unknown. Others are paid to write apparently unbiased articles in medical journals praising a company’s drugs.

But even those who don’t accept this are often relieved to have something, anything, to prescribe to the dozens of unhappy patients who seek their help. If they and the patient believe these pills work, then, in a way, they will. So would inert pills made of chalk, as it happens.

If only Margot Robbie could be hired tp explain the equally shocking truth about the vast ‘antidepressant’ scandal that goes on all around us, in which many decent men and women are complicit

And so the patients, too, are recruited into the ‘antidepressants saved me from misery’ campaign. There’ll be some in every street and workplace, given that more than 53 million prescriptions for these drugs are dispensed in the UK to about four million people every year.

The trouble is that rigorous science, in which they are tested against sugar pills, increasingly doubts that they do work. And, worse still, there is worrying evidence that the side effects of some of these drugs may be very serious indeed.

Now, in the respected pages of the British Medical Journal, comes a stinging report, carefully analysing 70 trials of ‘antidepressants’, which found that some common drugs of this kind actually double the risk of suicide and aggressive behaviour in under-18s.

This, by the way, does not mean that adults are unaffected. The drug companies’ research repeatedly under-reported deaths and episodes of self-harm by tested patients.

A drug that does not really work is one thing. A drug whose users harm themselves (or others) is another.

The vast extent of this problem and the huge sums of NHS money spent on it may make media and politicians think it must be all right. But they thought the same about sub-prime mortgages. And it was not all right. Nor is this.

Those who voted Tory in 2010 to ‘get Gordon Brown out’ might ponder George Osborne’s relentless Brown-style raids on private pension funds

Our crazy war on savers

In Japan now they are starting to charge people for keeping healthy credit balances in the bank. It is called ‘negative interest’ and is part of a vicious war on savers under way all over the world. It’s pretty intensive here too. Those who voted Tory in 2010 to ‘get Gordon Brown out’ might ponder George Osborne’s relentless Brown-style raids on private pension funds, punishing and robbing dedicated savers with extra taxes, to subsidise Google’s tax breaks.

The same goes for ‘quantitative easing’, designed to push small investors into putting their cash into risky places to get any return at all. Those who refuse have their interest-free bank balances slowly drained by inflation (which is supposed to have disappeared, but hasn’t). How long before there’s ‘negative interest’ too? Destroying the savings and hopes of the middle classes is what, in the end, led to Germany’s gruesome descent into fanatical madness in the 1930s.

It helped put Vladimir Putin in power in Moscow. It is deeply irresponsible politics as well as deeply irresponsible economics.

I think I could just about bear it, even so, if people didn’t keep telling me what a great and righteous Chancellor George Osborne is. It is, once again, a lie so huge that they get away with it.

So now all of us must live in the knowledge that a double murderer, with severe psychiatric problems, is living secretly among us. I defy anyone to say with total assurance that it is safe to let him out. His crime is said to have been horrific. But he has been released into the ‘community’. He is in his 40s, but we cannot know his new name, or his old one, or where he is or what he does.

This is thanks to our ‘Supreme Court’ (the name is itself a lie, for it is not supreme at all, but subject to Parliament and also the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg).

These exalted personages overruled four wiser judges, and common sense. If they have made a terrible mistake, how will they be made to pay for it?

Last week I finally underwent root canal dentistry, the lurking ill-defined horror that lies in wait for the middle-aged. Well, I am here to report that it was nothing like as bad as most of the things I have heard it compared to. And it was far less gruelling, protracted and demoralising than trying to extract an apology for wrongdoing from the BBC, or a Left-wing newspaper, or from a railway company – all activities I have been engaged in during the past few weeks.

Not all Gas and Gaiters

The Archbishop of Canterbury has had a nasty surprise. It follows the Church of England’s decision to publicise, in national media, an unproven claim of child abuse against the long-dead Bishop George Bell, one of the C of E’s few genuinely great men.

 

Now Justin Welby has had a stonking letter from Bishop Bell’s niece, Barbara Whitley, telling him off.  Mrs Whitley,91 and with a mind as sharp as a guillotine, wrote to the Prelate: ‘My uncle was an extremely holy, private man. A deep thinker with many engagements and a loving, helpful wife. I am convinced he would not have done any such thing’.

This must have come as something of a surprise, since the C of E’s  bureaucrats had assumed George Bell had no living relatives.  

You would have thought Mrs Whitley, herself the daughter of a Bishop, deserved a swift and personal reply. But Archbishop Welby passed the matter to a subordinate.  Mrs Whitley has written to him again, protesting that her Uncle’s name is being smeared. I do hope he writes back himself, this time.

 

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