THE UNITED KINGDOM

A vision for the future
Electoral reform
International Terms
Europe
The CAP
Our Fisheries
Immigration Into The UK

 

As a country, we need to properly understand our position and status in the World, both economically and politically. For many years, people with very different political objectives, both inside and outside our country, have chosen to illustrate their own narrow political points by denigrating The United Kingdom to fourth, fifth, seventh, or even tenth place in the World hierarchy. They presume to do this by utilising some obscure method of measuring economic activity which ignores the reality of real asset values and our real heritage.

 

A vision for the future or a continuing nightmare – 29/3/2010

Chancellor Darling and the Labour Party have delivered their budget, and many are calling it their last one, but I am not so sure.

 Quite obviously, it was a very difficult budget for any politician to produce, because of the pending General Election and it’s inevitable effect on votes, and because of the dire state of the economy.

 Indeed, as I have said myself in other parts of this website, the current recession is resolvable by one of or, more preferably, a combination of three different solutions. The essence of the problem is simple, but the application of the solution, or solutions, to the problem is fraught with difficulty for any politician or political party if they are also faced with the need to secure votes at a General Election. 

 However, the economic problem itself is actually a simple matter of housekeeping on a national scale.

 The fact is that as a country, we are currently spending considerably more on our Public Services than that which we are producing in tax revenues.

 The solutions -

 1)      Reduce expenditure, which means cutting Public Services, and will probably lose the votes of any public servants, who collectively represent 20%, or one in every five, of the entire working population.

 2)      Increase taxation, which by definition will affect everybody, but mostly those who are providing the wealth and the employment for the rest of us, in which case many of them will then cease to do so.

 3)      Boost the economy by spending lots of money, which they say we do not have, and hope that the economy grows back to previous levels, and taxation revenues catch up with that which we are already spending in expenditure.

 Of course, as with any problem, the final solution will inevitably be a mixture of all three of the available solutions, and will probably be mixed in with a bit of inflation over the years ahead as well.

 However, the politician, and his political party, hoping for election to Government, is terrified of picking up on any of these solutions for fear of antagonising the voters who may be affected by that particular action.

 The statesman, the hero, the honest politician for whom we all search, would by now have made it perfectly clear that the only way forward is in fact a mixture of all three solutions.

 The first solution is reducing expenditure, and it really is not the problem that we envisage. At least, it is not a problem for those who perform a useful and effective function for their salary. We certainly do not need to go through our Public Services with a machete, creating huge arbitrary redundancies and therefore even bigger economic problems for ourselves. However, we do need to manage the economy efficiently and properly, and that means seeking out all the vast and truly massive inefficiencies, wastes and wasters of public money, and all those who choose to rip off the system in which they work, for the billions of pounds that they currently do.

 The old routines and systems of working practices, huge numbers of which are incredibly expensive, inefficient and even dysfunctional, must be brought up to date. Any overstaffing will then find it’s own true level, and even that will need to be done without massive pay offs, and indeed without fictional early retirements. None of this can be achieved by any particular Government of the day, by simply cutting off or restricting the money supply to those services. It cannot be achieved by simply reducing expenditure and then just hoping that the managers of those services will act like efficient managers rather than lining their own pockets, and those of their colleagues.

 In short, as far as expenditure cuts are concerned, we have got to have proper efficient management passed down from Government in the form of specific instructions, rather than simply turning on and, in this case, turning off the money tap. If, as has been the case in the past, that is all that any Government does, then as before, the managers will not act in the best long term interests of their function. Their first instinct will be to take the easiest route, the line of least resistance, and their second instinct will be self-preservation of their own salaries and benefits.

 The second solution is increasing taxation, and that may well have to happen to some degree. However, one of the biggest problems created in taking more and more money off people is simply that they do not understand where it is going, and how it is being spent. They are then left to read the papers and listen to the journalists who find the latest scandal, or revelation to pin it all on. Be it MPs expenses, the fact that the MOD is 23 billion overspent, or simply the fact that they saw a policeman doing “naff all” whilst planning his “bad back” early retirement, the fact is that these are the issues that stick in peoples minds, and these are the types of the myriad issues that need facing and resolving by our politicians.

 People don’t necessarily mind their money being taken off them in taxation, provided that they can see precisely where it is going and why it is being spent.

 For example -

• If people knew that their car tax, petrol and road tax was spent purely on motoring and roads issues,
• if people new that their national insurance was the only thing being used for the national health service and their state pensions,
• if people knew that their income tax was being used solely for central Government and national issues,
• if people knew that the local council taxes were being used purely for local issues and local services,
• if people knew that purchase tax, or VAT if you prefer, was only being used for regulatory issues,

 then people could see, understand and argue the issues, in clarity and knowledge, of precisely how much it is costing them, and why.

 Of course, to take an entirely fictitious example, this may well mean that the pre-tax personal allowance becomes £15,000 and it may be that the national insurance rate becomes 15% with income tax being a flat 20%, and with a higher rate tax band of 40%. However, the people would then know precisely what money is being taken off them, and they would also know precisely why. They would then be able to argue the particular and specific issues, rather than getting exercised about which political party is better than another at managing the current mish-mash chaos that we mistakenly call an economy.

 The third and final solution is how to finance the economy by spending more money, which we are told we do not have. Well, we do have more such money, and it is already in the hands of those people who are very much the best judge on precisely how to spend it. There is £billions and £billions of it.

 Since 1978 the Government has allowed people to transfer their State Earnings Related Pensions (SERPS or S2P) benefits out of the state pension system and into their company or their private pension schemes. For many people this has amounted to between £1,500 and £2,500 transferred out of the state pension system each year. These sums are very rarely producing anything much in pension benefits for the individual person concerned. If everybody was given a fully index linked state pension, of the order of £200 per week, from age 65, in exchange for those sums that have been transferred from the State and into their private and company pensions, I do not believe that  there would be many objectors.

 The effect would be instant – on £200 per week,  per person, regardless of male or female, state pensioners would no longer be living in poverty,

• they would no longer a burden on the state,
• their health care needs would be massively reduced,
• they would no longer need complex and myriad additional state and local benefits,
• hospitals could charge a reasonable sum for overnight stays,

 and most critically important, their new state pension money would flow back into the local economy,

• the retail high street would be revived,
• services would be bought and paid for by the pensioners rather than dispensed by expensive civil servants,

 and all the problems surrounding early or late retirement would disappear overnight.

 So, to go back to the beginning of this piece …

why am I not so sure that these are the last dying days of this Labour Government?

 Simply because they are all the same, be they Conservative, Labour, Lib Dem or any of the other dysfunctional political parties that we have acquired in this Country.

 None of them have a proper business plan, other than to cut expenditure somehow, and increase taxation generally.

 There is no vision, there is no ethic, and there is no statesmanlike intention beyond securing power for themselves.

 Quite frankly, you can vote for whichever one you want, but all you will be doing is picking between, what you hope will be, the best of a very bad bunch.

 Visionary politics, and statesmanlike leadership is rare these days, but boy oh boy do we need it now.

 

Electoral reform – 10/5/2010

• If the Conservatives had secured just an extra 16,000 votes across the seats which they most narrowly lost – they would have won a majority in the House Of Commons.
• Out of all the Independent Candidates who stood for election, and I personally met more than 100 of them, only one solitary Independent Candidate was elected.
• Out of the entire voting public in the United Kingdom, two in every three people did use their vote, but one in every three people stayed at home and did not vote at all …. that is truly terrible.
• There were a very large number of Conservative voters in Rutland & Melton who refused to vote for Alan Duncan, and they gave a variety of very good reasons for that view.
• In the end, the majority of those who did vote Conservative in Rutland & Melton, simply did so because they could not stand the prospect of another five years under Gordon Brown.
• Across the entire Country, most of the people who actually bothered to vote, simply voted for the party of their choice, even if it meant voting for an individual who they disliked and/or distrusted intensely. 

Perhaps a cry for “Proportional Representation” is a natural reaction to the many strange effects thrown up in the results of this General Election.

There is certainly a cry for electoral reform, and I think most of us can heartily agree with that view. However, we do need to be extremely careful, especially where “Proportional Representation” is concerned.

It definitely does not feel appropriate that the voting public should be forced to vote for a candidate whose morals they despise, and whose honesty and integrity has been proven to be absent – and I would say, shame on those who did so, as they are perpetuating the problem for others to resolve after them.

However, the danger now is that the clamour for electoral reform could easily usher in something that would be even worse.

At first glance, “Proportional Representation” does look and sound rather good, but the more you think about it, the more the implications become absolutely horrendous.

• “Proportional representation” will mean that people in many areas of the country will find that they have lost any form of immediate contact or empathy with their local MP.
• Indeed, in some cases they will also find that they have an MP from a completely different political party to the one that secured the majority vote in their area.
• And who is going to dish out the seats to the individual MPs, once the proportion of the vote is ascertained? On what basis are they going to dish them out? Oh, and are these people, who are doing the dishing out, the very same people who cannot keep their fingers out of till because they do not understand a very straight forward set of house rules?
• If you think that there is confusion now after this election, when we only have three major political parties to contend with, what on earth do you think is going to happen when we have twenty three different parties?

Well, if you really want to know the answer to the last question, look no further than Italy, which is a democratic political basket case.

I think if electoral reform is going to deal with some of the basic and more realistic issues, then I would heartily agree. However, please do not smash up a system that has taken hundreds of years to evolve, is the envy of most of the developing world, and simply needs cleaning up.

 For instance -

1)      How do we get people to use their vote? Give them a £40 tax refund.

2)      How do we reduce the effect of party politics on the candidates and the voters? Restrict the amount of money that can be spent on each candidate and make it centrally funded.

3)      How do we restrict the effect of financial conflicts of interests from party political donors? Ban them, and make party politics centrally funded.

4)      How do we restrict the effect of outside financial interests on our MPs? Pay them properly and take away their expense accounts completely.

5)      How do we stop the party political machine parachuting their handpicked cronies into our areas and forcing them on us as MPs? Make it compulsory that they live in the area for at least five years before they stand for election.

These and one or two other sensible adjustments would be very welcome indeed.

We really do NOT need to smash the whole thing up just yet.

Most of it works, it is just that certain greedy people in positions of responsibility, who also lie to you habitually, have different agendas to the ordinary folks like you and me.

 

The Historical facts

 

In terms of our industrial and commercial assets, and jointly owned businesses, we are an enormous and diverse economy on the World stage. All of this was created through the economic success of our Victorian ancestors during the industrial revolution and the creation of the British Empire, or The Commonwealth as we know it today. A hundred or so years ago, The Commonwealth in its’ original form actually covered 2/3rds of the entire World land surface, and therefore it can be easily understood why we now have massive commercial interests overseas, and a political influence in World affairs that is second to none, including the USA. In fact, when you look around the World today you will find many of the major and predominant institutions, especially in the areas of government, finance and banking, were created by the British, and specifically on the British model, to the point that they often still have British names.

 

The Size Of The UK Economy

 

The only realistic way of measuring an economy is by a valuation, in hard monetary terms, of its’ businesses, their ability to make profit, and the assets that they own. It is not realistic or accurate to have these businesses and their assets valued any other way, and particularly not by some obscure Government agency or pressure group that probably has entirely different motivations. Rather like your house, no matter what valuation the agent puts on it, you will ultimately get precisely what it is worth, and that is precisely what someone else will pay for it. Likewise, economies and the businesses within those economies are valued all around the world by real people who are buying and selling real shares in those businesses on a daily basis on the stock markets concerned. If you capitalise all the shares on a particular stock market (i.e. multiply the total number of shares in existence by the prices at which they are currently trading) you will indisputably arrive at a reasonably accurate valuation for that publicly accessible economy. The fact of the matter is that the USA is the largest economy in the World, and the United Kingdom is the second largest economy in the World. A long way further down the scale is the third largest economy, which is Japan, and the fourth largest economy, France or Germany, is not even near the valuation for Japan.

 

Our Unique International Relationships

 

The political structures and democracies of most Commonwealth Countries have very similar systems of government to our own, with two political houses and two to four major political parties. Obviously, we have little or no direct control of these overseas political institutions these days, and quite rightly so, as they are countries in their own right, and masters of their own destinies. However, it is important to note that their freedoms, self-determination, equalities and beliefs in society, community and their human rights, emanate from the mother of all democracies, namely The United Kingdom. Furthermore, in many instances, English is still the predominant language and the English culture is still the predominant culture for their day-to-day life and society as a whole. As a matter of hard fact, many of these countries still look to the United Kingdom for sanction and confirmation of their international policies. As a simple example, using the most powerful military country in the World, it would have been very difficult indeed, if not impossible, for the USA to have attacked Iraq without the acceptance, and the participation of, The United Kingdom.

 

Continental Europe Is Different, and why the Euro would be bad for us

 

The major and most obvious exception to all of this is the entire European Continent. By comparison, we have nothing in common with these countries at all. They have a different culture, they speak very different languages, and their political systems are often born out of socialism, or in extreme cases out of communism. Economically, they often have little or no desire to create profit, and shares in their companies generally do not pay dividends to their shareholders. Therefore their public do not generally invest in their own businesses through share-ownership. Their financial institutions are small in comparison to our own, and often the national pastime is to work the “black economy” without paying tax, rather than working legally, paying the due tax, and creating wealth through investment.

Continental European Countries themselves often have an infuriating habit of ignoring treaties and the rules contained within them, when it suits their purposes to do so. A classic example of this, involving one of the more cultured European nations, was just a few years ago when France completely failed to adhere to the agreed economic rules for financial convergence. These rules had been agreed by all EEC states, including the UK, in order to make it easier for countries to converge their financial systems and eventually become part of a single European currency, if they wanted to do so, at some time in the future. It was particularly important that France adhered to those rules, as they were one of the most powerful advocates of, and are now a principle member of, the single currency system (Euro), along with Germany. Indeed, economic convergence was so important to the future stability of the Euro that the financial penalties for failing to adhere to the agreed rules were quite draconian. France failed in three successive years to meet the rules of economic convergence and yet at no time have they been obliged to pay the prescribed penalty. In fact, as far as I am aware, they have not paid a single Euro in financial penalty. More to the point their totally dismissive attitude is such that they obviously have absolutely no intention of doing so. The Germans support France in its’ refusal to pay, simply because if they don’t, and France was obliged to meet its’ dues, their economy would be severely affected, and the Euro would probably collapse.

Political development in continental Europe has been largely developed through Socialism and Communism, in fact like France, many are in fact Democratic Republics. Whether it is for this, or some other reason, is probably an arguable point, however, what is incontestable is the fact that their social security systems are massively generous to the point of being foolhardy, with the result that their social security systems are fundamentally bankrupt, and represent an enormous drain on their economies, through extraordinarily high taxation. The result is that there are dual economies – the real one on which people pay very high levels of personal taxation, and the other one in which they are paid cash, far more so than in the UK.

A good example of their profligate social security systems is that the German, French, Italian and Spanish state pensions are several times larger than our own. These European state pensions are probably unsustainable and, at some point in the future, they may well result in substantial increases in their domestic inflation, and subsequently their interest rates. Their preferred way of softening the blow to their own economies, and their already overburdened taxpayers, is to mix in another economy, far stronger than their own, and preferably get all of them to adopt a single currency. In this way, their own massive generosity to themselves, in state pension benefits etc, is ultimately paid for in part by other much stronger economies through inflation and interest rates. I do not believe that we should be that saviour economy.

However, it is also very true to say that, at home, we desperately need to increase our own state pension benefits, but it must be done to a degree and in a way that is totally sustainable, and does not result in an impossible liability for future generations. We can afford it, if we are careful and prioritise our national expenditure. However, we simply cannot afford to bail out the European state pension systems at the same time, by joining their single currency (Euro), even if we wanted to. Once again they need us more than we need them…. by a very wide margin indeed.

 

For Example – The British Rock Of Gibraltar and the British Falkland Islands

 

Gibraltar has been British for 300 years and, some years ago, the people voted overwhelmingly to remain British.

Contrary to European law, Spain periodically illegally closes the border between themselves and Gibraltar. They even object to us using our own port in Gibraltar to park one of our nuclear submarines. They have tried, on a number of occasions, to influence which government official we can send to Gibraltar, and for which national event or celebration. Of course, there is a time for diplomacy, but there is also a time for being precise and decisive. Personally I would have sent the Queen on a flotilla of Royal Navy warships. However, I would also have invited the Spanish to the Gibraltar celebrations, as guests of honour. It is difficult to imagine them refusing such an invitation, and it would subsequently be difficult to imagine them continuing with their obscure claim over Gibraltar and their impertinent attempts to influence who we should allow to go to what part of our own country, and when.

It is now a known and a well accepted fact that if a similar attitude had been displayed by the United Kingdom concerning the Falkland Islands, the 1982 war with Argentina would probably not have happened. The Argentinean Government genuinely believed that they were being invited into the Falklands through our lack of serious protest or objection. As a direct result of that diplomatic disaster, we are now left with an Argentinean population who are taught in their schools that the islands are actually called The Malvinas, and that they really do belong to them, whereas before 1982 the biggest majority of the Argentinean population did not even know they existed.

Immigration Into The UK

 

The European Treaties are quite clear about illegal immigration and asylum seekers. They should be returned to the European country in which they first set foot, as that is the only country in which they are eligible to claim asylum.

Continental Europe has space to build houses for these people. We do not. If you are not sure, book a flight over Continental Europe and you will see very large open green spaces between their towns and villages. By comparison with our own islands, there are enormous quantities of spare land in Continental Europe and virtually none in our own country. It must surely be economic lunacy to allow further emigration into the UK. Purely based on a simple physical assessment, we simply have not got the room to build houses for them.

On a mathematical basis it is not cost effective to allow further people to come here and live on our Social Security System, when we have one of the most expensive “costs of living” in the World. Every penny we pay to these people to live on Social Security here, in our extremely expensive UK, is another penny that we cannot pay to our own state pensioners. It would be better for prospective immigrants, better for their own country, and cheaper for us in the UK, to fund them through overseas aid, provided that they stay where they are.

We must encourage people to stay in their own country and help build the security and benefits that are inherent within their own economy, rather than become a drain on ours.

Of course, in common with the rest of the developed World, if people really do want to emigrate to the UK, and we actually want them because they have skills to offer and a job to come to, whereby they are contributing to our tax system, then that would be most welcome.

 

Our Fishing Rights

 

In the early 1970s the Conservative Government, under Sir Edward Heath, gave away our fishing rights to the Continental Europeans in exchange for EEC Membership. He did this without telling the general public for fear of losing the referendum at that time. So, Sir Edward achieved his place in history, and in so doing, he committed the UK to an international trading partnership in Europe.

I have no issues with a trading partnership, if only that was all that it was. After all, another trading partnership could be a very good thing.  However, along the way, and without telling the public of this Country, they gave away £ billions and £ billions of pounds of our fishing rights, a national asset that was probably the most prolific and profitable fishery in the World. Furthermore, we were obliged to sever many of our very valuable business relationships with Commonwealth countries. Just try talking to New Zealand about the damage that we did to their sheep and lamb farming by joining the EEC in the 1970s.

We knighted Sir Edward for losing at least one entire industry (fishing) and giving away a supremely important asset (our fishing grounds), something that even two World Wars had failed to achieve.

After the catastrophic Heath Government of the 1970s, the European Community insisted that we reduce our fishing fleet to its’ current lamentable levels, a shadow of its’ former self, and at the same time, with their own fishing fleets, they have plundered and decimated our fish stocks, all within just 30 years.

I believe that there are clauses within the Treaty, which charge the European Community with managing the fish stocks to all our benefits. They have patently obviously failed, and therefore the treaty is broken, or certainly that part of it is. We must move very rapidly indeed in order to save something out of this ecological disaster. Our fishing grounds must be repossessed, under international law, and then allowed to recover. Once our fisheries have recovered, they can then be successfully harvested once more, and it won’t be harvested by anyone other than our own fishermen.

 

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)

 

A similar mess has been made out of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). I know of no logic to explain why we pay huge sums of money into the European CAP, only for them to spread it around European farmers, including our own, in return for not growing crops on all of the available land. If you add in the fact that only five or six hours flying time from our shores there are little brown babies dying in the streets from starvation and disease, then the whole issue becomes an absolute obscenity.

Don’t think that the poor people in foreign lands do not know what we are doing either. They have radios and they even have televisions. Ask yourself not how people can commit themselves to a martyr’s death under some religious fundamentalist twaddle, when we have everything and they have absolutely nothing, in some cases not even food to live on. We can find a way to grow food on this “spare” land, and we can find a way to ship it to them (drop it on them if you want).

Of course, we will then have to deal with their own lack of security in old age (no state pensions), and therefore their resultant instinct to breed their own pensions by having large numbers of children. However, for the sake of human decency, let us at least make a start by feeding them, rather than watching them die.

The World is undoubtedly becoming full to the brim with humanity, but perhaps we can curb their need to breed a “child-pension” by offering them real pensions funded from and managed in the UK. After all, it won’t cost much because they are already living on virtually nothing even now.

Far better that we try and assist with their development into a sustainable social security system and a national state pension, rather than offering some expensive and obscure building project, most of the money for which gets siphoned off into the Swiss bank accounts of some local warlord or despot.

We Europeans, and especially those of us in the United Kingdom, have a responsibility to the underdeveloped World, which we ignore at our peril, and which has already made 9/11 the beginning of international terrorism rather than the end of it. The Common Agricultural Policy, and its’ effects of keeping many parts of the World poor and starving, is a very substantial sop to international terrorism, and we need re-visit it as soon as possible.