Bucket Time

We're not coming out

Last night we had to throw a bucket of water over the Major. He was about to combust.

"How dare they! How dare they!!! A coalition of losers? Two-faced Clegg doing a squalid deal with Mandelson. Listen, we in England voted for a Conservative government - no doubt about it*. But now we're getting yet another socialist government rammed down our throats by the Jocks. That Salmon bastard coming down here and selling his MPs - MPs he shouldn't even have, mark you - selling them to keep Labour in power. We end up giving even more to the Scots, the Welsh  and the Irish, just so Labour can cling on. And with yet another unelected Marxist Prime Minister! Can you believe it!?!!"

"Well, Major," I began, "that's democracy..."

"Democracy!?? Democracy!!! Listen, this is no more democratic than Stalin. And at least he didn't pretend to be anything other than an autocratic genocidal maniac."

"Actually, Major, I think you'll find..."

"This will not stand! This will not stand!! All bets are off. We must fight. Fight! Fight! Bastards! Yellow bastards! Round them up!! String them up! Bastard yellow scum bastards! Bastards! Bastards!"

*****

The one good thing about all this is that it's showing us with jaw-dropping clarity how PR and its never-ending coalitions would actually work in the real world. Minority parties would constantly extort all manner of expensive goodies from the rest of us. We'd all be held to ransom.

As we've already blogged, England has voted convincingly for a Tory government. Scotland, Wales and N Ireland do not want one. And let's face it, why would they? Given that they are all big beneficiaries of England's taxes. This election gives a huge boost to the campaign for an English Parliament, with English taxes for English people.

As for the Lib Dems, the sight of them pontificating about the national interest while at the same time secretly stitching up their grubby backroom deal with Mandy will have cost them awful lot of votes round our way. Vote yellow get red is a message that will resonate right across Southern England. They will pay a big price at the ballot box.

So why haven't the markets tanked?

Well, for one thing, the markets have been focused on the Greek problem, and their attention span is limited.

Second, they are still giving us the benefit of the doubt, based on the belief that unlike the PIGS, we've always managed to pull the fat out of the fire in the past.

And third, markets don't walk in straight lines. They operate instead on the following well-established principles:

"Dum-di-dum-di-dum... everything's fine.

Dum-di-dum-di-dum... everything's fine.

Everything's fine.

Everything's fine.

OH MY GOD! We've just noticed everything's NOT fine!

HELP! Where's the exit?! Let me out!"

Unfortunately, nobody knows when that moment of horrible realisation will come. All we know is that it hasn't come yet.

Perhaps it will come tonight. Perhaps it will come next week. Perhaps it will never come.

Feel lucky?


*Footnote In England the Tories got 40% of the votes and 55% of the seats.

PS Tyler's Polish patio-layer tells of an old Polish expression re changing governments - "same trough, new pigs".

PPS Just for future reference:

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: 2010 Election, electoral reform

Your £25bn Gift To The PIGS

Heading South

As you will have heard, Darling's last act as Chancellor has been to give £15bn of your hard-earned cash to prop up the PIGS.

Well, according to him, it's only £8bn, and he hasn't "given" it per se. He's simply provided an open-ended loan - the kind of "loan" the Bank of Mummy and Daddy might make to keep their card-maxxing offspring out of jail. Either way, the £8bn is in addition to our existing £7bn commitment, and we can kiss all of it goodbye.

Worse, it sounds like he had no choice. Under the terms of the Lisbon Treaty, the Reich Chancellery the European Commission was able to invoke the "exceptional occurrences" clause that stripped Britain of its veto. So we're stuffed.

And don't overlook the fact that the IMF is providing another £191bn, 5% of which is effectively down to us via our membership share. Call it £10bn, taking our total contribution to £25bn.

(Yes, I know, IMF loans have always come with tough conditions and repayment is sort of expected. But right now the IMF is headed by a French Euro-socialist, so don't hold your breath.)

At least we're not as stuffed as those seething German taxpayers. They've been forced to sign a blank cheque of unknown final magnitude. And they don't like it.

Which is why yesterday they punched Angela Merkel on the nose. Her party's defeat in regional elections means her coalition loses its majority in Germany's upper house, and makes it much harder for her to keep the show on the road.

You see, because she runs a coalition government it's very hard to hold things together when times are tough. Unpopular measures are not something any politico likes, especially when they are minority members in a coalition government. Poor Wolfgang Schaüble, the German Finance Minister, got so stressed he had to be rushed to a Brussels hospital before yesterday's EU meeting.

Oh, I've just remembered something. Haven't the BBC/Grun been telling us that coalition governments are good? Don't they reckon Germany's system is far better than our own first-past-the-post system?

It will be fascinating to hear how they explain the political mayhem that is about to explode over there.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: debt, electoral reform, eu

Unfairness In The Electoral System

The Major hopes he isn't paying for this crew

With the electoral chips up in the air, the BBC/Grun line is that the current arrangements for electing our government are grossly unfair. They reckon the electors are overwhelmingly anti-Tory, but are denied their voice by the grotesque anti-democratic distortion of first-past-the-post.

Which is one view. But round our way, the anti-democratic distortion getting most airtime is the one that has endless socialist governments foisted on us by state dependencies hundreds of miles away.

We've blogged these issues many times, but let's just consider the current election result in the Greater South East (GSE - everything inside an arc from the Wash to the Solent).

There, the Tories were clear winners, with 44% of the vote, against just 24% each for Labour and Lib Dems. And the Tories took 155 of the GSE's 214 seats.

Yet despite that, the GSE's voters are having to swallow the prospect of a coalition government with the Lib Dems. They watched helplessly as their Tory votes got swamped by socialist votes from Scotland and other dependencies. Just like happened last time. And the time before that.

Which is really rather upsetting.

Because as everyone surely knows by now, it's the GSE's taxpayers who have to pay for all the state largesse doled out to those faraway dependencies.

We haven't got time right now to crunch the very latest numbers, but in 2006-07, Oxford Economics estimated that the GSE contributed nearly £40bn to the rest of the country (ie tax payments less public spending received by the GSE). Or getting on for £2000 per capita.

Here's their picture (the GSE comprises Eastern, Greater London, and South East regions, and note that in this analysis all North Sea taxes have been attributed to Scotland):

Bottom line?

If we're going to open the issue of electoral reform, we need a proper look at the entire shooting match. As well as PR, we need to look at the structure of government. A separately elected English Parliament is clearly on the agenda, but we also need to return fiscal power to local communities.

The people round our way are sick of getting outvoted by the beneficiaries of socialist fantasies elsewhere in the country. It just ain't fair.

PS Why hasn't Tyler left the country yet? Well, because he reckons there will be another election in 6 months or so, hopefully delivering the real result.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: electoral reform

Public Sector Jobs As Welfare

Enough pyramids already

How many of our 6m public sector jobs are just another form of welfare?

The reason I ask is that listening to today's BBC coverage of the continuing debate over National Insurance Contributions (NICs), the question didn't get a mention.

The BBC naturally began the day by giving prominence to Labour claims that the Tory plan will cost jobs because of the associated spending cuts. But as the day progressed , it gradually dawned on them that all parties are planning to cut spending, so all parties will cut jobs. And that's A Very Bad Thing.

And on one level of course, it is a bad thing. Nobody likes to see people losing their jobs.

But the trouble is public sector jobs cost money. And right now, we don't have any money. So unless we cut spending on public sector pay, we'll have to find the money by some other means - like increasing NICs, which will cost up to half a million private sector jobs.

However, even setting aside that point, how many of these jobs are producing valuable output - stuff the rest of us actually want?

Suppose for a moment we weren't under the money cosh. Suppose we had fiscal flexibility to employ all our current public employees and maybe some more on top. Would that make sense?

Consider this famous quote from John Maynard Keynes:

"If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with bank-notes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal-mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is."

Which is more or less the current Labour argument - keep all our public employees in jobs because, although many of them are doing the public sector equivalent of burying bank notes and digging them up again, at least they're in employment, which must be a good thing.

Keynes went on to extol the benefits of ancient Egyptian culture:

"Ancient Egypt was doubly fortunate, and doubtless owed to this its fabled wealth, in that it possessed two activities, namely, pyramid-building as well as the search for the precious metals, the fruits of which, since they could not serve the needs of man by being consumed, did not stale with abundance. The Middle Ages built cathedrals and sang dirges. Two pyramids, two masses for the dead, are twice as good as one; but not so two railways from London to York."

What he's saying in essence is that there's a mass of people who for whatever reason cannot produce anything that other people want to buy. So the best thing to do is employ them on public projects. Projects that don't compete with the stuff other people are producing , by reason of the fact that these projects don't produce anything of any actual value to anyone (other than the producers themselves and the high priests/commissars).

This is public employment as welfare. And when we look at the high dependence on public sector jobs in the depressed regions of Britain today, we can see it's more than an empty slogan.

The one slight snagette is that welfare employees still need paying (even the Egyptian slaves still needed feeding). Which means that someone else has to part with the fruits of his own labour in order to provide the wherewithal. And all he'll get in exchange is the sight of another new pyramid, or if he's lucky, a government promise to repay the loan in some distant future, probably in debased coinage.

Getting low skill, low productivity, welfare dependents into work is going to be one of the very toughest challenges facing Cam's government. Given the catastrophic fiscal legacy, leaving them on the public payrolls will not be an option.

PS Interesting article here about the ancient Egyptian economy. It was essentially a command economy, with high levels of taxation and slavery. Life expectancy was 24. Keynes was a towering genius who shed huge light on the way economies work. But he was also a member of the Bloomsbury group of champagne socialists, who had little faith either in the market's ability to invest rationally, or to provide jobs for all. He believed in the existence of noble commissars, such as his good self, who could plan and organise things much more scientifically. Not a lot of people know that. Or at least, they choose not to remember it.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: electoral reform, productivity, public sector employment

Please Tell Me

"Can you please tell me who will stop this happening and I will vote for them."

So says Mr Tony Nicholls in a comment under Christopher Booker's latest ST column today.

Booker (along with Richard North) has made another valiant attempt to unravel just how much of our tax money is being flushed down the bog of the global warming industry. It's not easy, as regular BOM readers will recall from our own attempts. Indeed, there is every indication that government departments deliberately mislead us.

For example, Booker describes how Defra paid £1,436,000 to fund the international working group that produced the last IPCC report - the one that included such lies as the melting Himalayas. Yet they later claimed in a report to Parliament that the cost was only £543,816 - only around one-third of the true cost.

Indeed, as Booker points out, when it comes to tax funding for the increasingly discredited global warming industry, official behaviour bears all the classic hallmarks of money laundering:

"Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs... lists 26 "suspicious indications" which should attract attention to the possibility that a financial transaction might need investigating. These range from "checking identity is proving difficult" or "reluctance to provide information requested" to "unnecessary routing of funds through third parties" and "transactions having no purpose" or "which seem to involve unnecessary complexity".

It's clearly outrageous, and not at all what any of us want. But as Mr Nicholls' comment highlights, we don't seem to have much choice. All three of the mainstream Westminster parties are committed warmists, pledged to go on with Operation Barbarossa however bonkers it may be, and whatever the catastophic impact on our prosperity.

Which brings us to the conversation Tyler is having with increasing frequency round the leafy glades of Surrey. It goes like this:

The Major (or Mr Scott, or Mrs Fitzgerald): "But why should I vote Tory when they're going to be just the same as Labour? Why shouldn't I stay at home to show what I think of them all?"

Tyler: "Well, because if you do that, the LibDems will get in all round here, and we'll either end up with Brown scraping back or a hung parliament. And if that happens, the markets will tank within weeks, there'll be the emergency budget to end all emergency budgets, taxes will go through the roof, and you'll end up in an even worse situation than now. Is that what you want?"

The Major (or Mr Scott, or Mrs Fitzgerald): "No of course not, but it may be we just have to go through it. I mean we never got Maggie until Heath had gone down and the country had experienced some serious pain. Right now we seem to be wandering around in a daze... nobody seems to understand what a grave situation we face, and Cameron isn't prepared to stick his head above the parapet to tell us. And even if he gets in, do you seriously imagine he'll get a grip? He'll be just like Heath... drifting along until we hit the rocks."

Tyler: "Hmm... well... Cam and Osborne are bright boys. They must know what happened back in the 70s, and they won't want to preside over a replay. Once they're in - assuming they can get a majority, that is - they'll have 5 years to sort things out. And whatever they say or don't say ahead of the election, they know they'll have to get a grip right away in order to give the economy the best possible chance of returning to growth by 2015. They're not dumb."

The Major (or Mr Scott, or Mrs Fitzgerald): "You think so, huh? And do you believe in fairies as well? Frankly, it isn't just the economy that worries us about Cameron, it's the whole deal - from hugging hoodies right through to this global warming nonsense. I mean, whatever happened to the traditional Tory party? Whatever happened to Tory values?"

Mr Farage (rudely butting in): "They all went off and joined UKIP."

*****

It's very difficult all this, isn't it. The horrible fact is, there isn't actually anyone we can vote for who will stop this happening. Sure, there are people we can vote for who will promise to stop it, but that's a different thing - under our grotesquely unfair first-past-the-post Westminster system of government, such people will never get the chance to actually implement their promises. Tyler's constitutional reform package includes separation of the powers and a directly elected President, but absent that, our real world choices are indeed very limited.

Which is why we will be out campaigning for the Tories again this time. They sure ain't perfect, and we share many of the Major's concerns, but in terms of forming a government to replace Brown's disaster, they're all we've got.

And what we can say is that from Tyler's personal knowledge, a good number of the new Tory candidates who will hopefully become MPs in May do share our belief in small government. Yes, they are all susceptible to the murky compromises that condemned souls make for power, but they are at least starting out on our side.

What we must do - all we can do - is to carry on campaigning outside of Westminster for the things we believe in. Believing that one day, when the tide of public opinion has turned far enough, our once and future king/queen will again step forward to wrench that sword from the stone.

It may not be much, but right now my friends, I'm very much afraid it's all we've got.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: 2010 Election, eco wibble, electoral reform, politicos

Dictatorship By The Minority

I'm sure you will already know this, but further to recent posts, and just for my own interest, I've looked out the voting figures for general elections since WW2.

The blunt truth is that no post-War government has ever had majority support.

Not the famous 1945 landslide Labour government.

Not Thatcher at the height of her power.

Not A-New-Day-Has-Dawned-Has-It-Not Bliar.

Not a single one.

And yet we have somehow conferred on all of them the powers of that famous elected dictatorship - even the current shower, who have less popular support than any of their predecessors.

Why?

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: electoral reform, parliament