10th May 2015

Tendring Topics…….on line

The Day of Reckoning (2)

            I can’t even say, ‘I told you so!’, because I didn’t!  Like almost everyone else, I believed that the outcome of the General Election would be a hung parliament. Either David Cameron or Ed Miliband would have to form a coalition, or at least come to an understanding with one of the smaller parties in order to produce a workable government.  Most of the press feared an understanding between Ed Miliband and the SNP.  I would have welcomed it because I thought that Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader was far more impressive than any of the other party leaders. She might prevent a Miliband premiership from becoming a pale imitation of a Tory one.  Perhaps that’s just what the press lords feared!

            My own worst possible outcome was of a coalition between the Conservatives and the Ukippers which I felt could easily develop into a right-wing dictatorship.

            In this blog I did at least consider the possibility that, despite the predictions of the opinion polls, one or other of the two main parties might achieve an overall majority and  manage to form an effective government without seeking the support of any other party.  I said that if that happened I could confidently predict that the final outcome would not be as good as supporters of the majority party were hoping, but was unlikely to be as awful as their opponents feared.  I still stand by the first part of that prophecy – but am a little less confident of the second.

            I did correctly foretell the humiliating defeat of the Lib.Dems but really didn’t expect Ukip to lose one of the two seats it held prior to the election, thus making Douglas Carswell, our own MP for Clacton-on-Sea, the sole Ukipper in the House of Commons.  Ukip gained a lot of votes but they were spread fairly evenly over England.  As a result, our first-past-the-post electoral system prevented those votes being translated into parliamentary seats.  It has been quite educational to observe Mr Carswell’s sudden conversion to the idea of proportional representation. I quite expected the SNP to triumph in Scotland but was astonished by their almost complete demolition of the previously dominant Labour Party there.  

            Ed Miliband’s defeat was, I think, at least partly due to the constant drip, drip, drip of denigrating and scare headlines principally in the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, about his weakness as a leader and the probability that he would be subjugated by the wicked witch from the north (Nicola Sturgeon).  Several people interviewed after the tv debates said they were quite surprised to discover that the Ed Miliband they had seen on tv didn’t match those headlines.

            The Sun is part of the Rupert Murdoch press empire, the Daily Mail is owned by Lord Rothermere, and the Daily Express by Richard Leonard, who also owns the ‘adult’ tv channels Television X and Red Hot TV   (No, I haven’t tried to access either of them but their names suggest their nature).  Oh yes, and Richard Leonard has recently donated over a million pounds to Ukip.

            Do you find it as extraordinary and shaming as I do that three very wealthy individuals – a foreigner with no ties of loyalty to the UK, a ‘non-dom’, and a purveyor of soft porn, should own and control the means of influencing the British electorate?

            The Conservative Government will have only a very small majority over all other parties in the House of Commons. I don’t think they’ll find their task to be an easy one, especially bearing in mind the fact that the opposition, with its Scottish, Welsh and English MPs, is much more representative of all the people of the still-united United Kingdom than the members of David Cameron’s government.

…….and the Green Party?

            I have never made any secret of the fact that I voted for the Green Party in the General Election and am now a member of that Party.  On the face of it they failed dismally.  They gained not a single extra member in the House of Commons.

            Look a little deeper though and it will be clear that they are a Party on the way up, not down.  Their candidates obtained a total of over a million votes throughout the UK.  Remember too, that for every voter who puts a cross against the name of a Green candidate there are probably at least two others who would be supporters, but because they live in a strongly Tory or Labour area, or like me, in the heart of Ukipland, imagine that a vote for the Greens is a wasted one.   I knew perfectly well that Chris Howell the Green Candidate in my area hadn’t a hope of being elected, but he did get twice as many votes as he did in the by-election only a few months ago.  Caroline Lucas, our one MP, retained her Brighton seat in Parliament with a substantially increased majority, and the Green candidate came second in four constituencies.  The Green Party now has more actual members than either the Lib.Dems. or Ukip.  

            No, I don’t consider that my vote was a wasted one.

Some sage advice

          Did you see that some has-been Labour politicians have been commenting on Ed Miliband’s lack of success in the election.  Some say that he should have made a greater effort to reach the ‘aspirational’ voter.  Lord Mendelson (he’s an architect of New Labour who has ‘no problem with billionaires!) says that Ed Miliband took the Labour Party too far to the left.  Too far to the left!  We’re talking about the chap who apologised for Labour’s original opposition to ‘right to buy’, who, if he had been elected would have carried on with austerity, and who supported the renewal of the wildly expensive and utterly useless Trident submarines!

            Hasn’t anyone noticed that Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish National Party swept away New Labour in Scotland with policies well to the left of anything that any Labour leader in England has ever dared to suggest?

            If the electorate want Conservative policies, they’ll vote Conservative – not New Labour!

30th April 2015

Tendring Topics…….on line

The Day of Reckoning

          When this blog is published the General Election will be only a few days away.   It is possible that by the time I prepare another blog we will know the composition of the next government.   Do you remember the situation just before last year’s Scottish referendum?  Scottish public opinion polls showed the YES and NO campaigns to be very close. There was a distinct possibility that the YES vote would triumph.  That, decided the leaders of the three main political parties, had to be prevented at all costs.  In a rare spirit of co-operation they published  a joint promise that if the NO voters comprised a majority the Scots would be offered virtually everything they asked for short of complete independence and the break-up of the United Kingdom.   And of course, the NO campaign was successful.

            I think that we have reached a similar point in the General Election campaign. Opinion polls show that the Labour and Conservative Parties are neck and neck and the leaders are resorting to desperate measures to attract voters.   David Cameron has promised that if a Conservative Government is elected, there will be no increase in either the standard or the higher rate of income tax, or in the rate of VAT, or in National Insurance contributions (three principal sources of Government finance) for the government’s period of office – the next five years.  To make certain that that promise is honoured the government will introduce a bill to Parliament giving that promise the force of law.  The only possible reason why a government should introduce and support a law limiting its own powers must surely be that top politicians now realize the electorate doesn’t believe a word that any of them say.   David Cameron imagines that enshrining it in law will assure electors that that particular promise will be kept.  It still may not be, of course.  Parliament can pass a law and parliament can repeal that same law if it wishes to do so.  I have no doubt that if circumstances demanded, the government would break that promise quickly enough, as it has others.

            This generosity of the government to those of us fortunate enough to be liable for income tax will be funded by further cuts in government grants to local authorities and to welfare and public services.   David Cameron and George Osborne have so far declined to tell us who will suffer.  I am always amused when David Cameron speaks of the wealthy having worked hard and saved to acquire their millions for the purchase of their yachts, their British football teams and their stately homes.  Can you imagine Russian oligarchs, made rich by President Yeltzin generosity to his pals, carefully putting their roubles into a saving bank until they had saved up enough to go to England and buy a thoroughly modernised castle and a professional football team?   I reckon that most, if not all, of Britain’s growing army of billionaires should put OBE (Other B………..s’ Efforts) after their names.

            The current big worry of English politicians is the intentions of the Scottish Nationalist MPs.  To their consternation the SNP didn’t wither and die when they lost that famous referendum.  On the contrary they grew in both membership and supporters so that, although the Liberal Democrats are regarded as the third ‘major party’ in UK politics, their place has in reality been taken by the SNP, despite the fact that their appeal is only to one region of the United Kingdom.  Their former leader Alex Salmond is now leader of the SNP members of the Westminster Parliament while his place as Leader of the party has been taken by Nicola Sturgeon – in my opinion the most articulate, confident and charismatic political leader in the United Kingdom today. 

            In Scotland the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Ukippers barely have a foothold.   It is expected that the SNP will take the place of Labour in dominating the Scottish political scene.  It is by no means impossible that there will be sufficient SNP MPs elected to prop up a minority Labour Government.  It’s a possibility that terrifies all the other party leaders including Ed Miliband, who has repeatedly declared that he would not enter into any kind of coalition or other voting pact with Alex Salmond and his merry men – and women!  A columnist in The Sun declared that a Labour pact with the SNP would be the first step on the path to a Communist Dictatorship! Goodness, I thought that I’d better check on what the SNP really does stand for - beyond independence for Scotland.  I have always found the web’s Wikipedia a very reliable source of information.  Here’s what they have to say about the SNP’s policies

The SNP's policy base is mostly in the mainstream European social democratic tradition. Among its policies are commitments to same-sex marriage, reducing the voting age to 16, unilateral nuclear disarmament,progressive personal taxation, the eradication of poverty, the building of affordable social housing, free higher education, opposition to the building of new nuclear power plants, investment in renewable energy, the abolition of Air Passenger Duty, and a pay increase for nurses

Apart from ‘same sex marriage and reducing the voting age to 16’ (public opinion has changed a great deal in the past seventy years!) those are much the same policies that I, and thousands of other ex-servicemen returning from World War II, thought we were voting for when we rejected the Conservatives and elected the Attlee Government in 1945.   I find it quite refreshing that the Scots have retained – or perhaps rediscovered – the idealism of the old Labour Party.  There’s certainly no sign of a communist dictatorship there.  I think that an alliance between the SNP and Labour would do nothing but good.

Much more sinister and – sadly – I think rather more likely, is the possibility of an alliance between the Conservative Party and UKIP to form a coalition government of Tories and Ukippers.  A great many well-to-the-right-of-the-party Conservative MPs are crypto-Ukippers and have refrained from taking the same path as Clacton’s turn-coat MP Douglas Carswell either from loyalty or after weighing up where their personal advantage lay.  I think that they would find Nigel Farage a much more charismatic and confident leader than David Cameron, and that it wouldn’t be long before the two parties merged with Farage on top!  Then I think we really would be on the way to a right-wing dictatorship, supported ideologically by the Murdoch press and financially by reactionary Republican supporters from across the Atlantic.

Possibly all this speculation about coalitions is pointless and either the Conservatives or Labour will get an overall majority of MPs.   I do urge every blog reader with a vote to use it on Thursday. If you are fed up with both the Tories and the Labourites –  remember that UKIP is not the only, or the best, alternative.  There is, I think, a Green Candidate in every constituency!

24th November 2014

Tendring Topics…..on Line

Bankers Bonuses

          The previous Governor of the Bank of England said publicly on several occasions that the financial crisis in the UK and world-wide was not due, as Messrs. Osborne and Cameron would have us believe, to the policies of the previous government, over-generous welfare benefits, nor even the activities of immigrants and the machinations of ‘Brussels’.  Fairly and squarely to blame were the activities and incompetence of ‘the Bankers’, obviously not the management and staff of your local Barclays, Lloyds or what-have-you (they’re as much victims as we are), but the ‘super-brains’ at the top – and the Governor of the Bank of England really should know.

   Mind you, I think that a considerable measure of blame does lie with the previous New Labour government – not because they were too eager to spend money on social services, but because, blinded by billionaires, they were just as keen to seek the favour of the bankers, the money lenders and the financial fiddlers as the present lot at Westminster.   They should have spotted what was happening and curbed it.  I don’t recall that the present Bank of England Governor has ever publicly blamed the banking fraternity as had his predecessor – but then he has never suggested that his predecessor was wrong.

            What is particularly infuriating to the ordinary British citizen – the ordinary voter – is that throughout the period of recession top bankers have shed a few hundred junior staff; carried out mergers; effectively reduced the value of savings (including mine!) by paying savers an interest rate below the rate of inflation - and have continued to draw eye-wateringly high salaries for just turning up at their offices.   For actually doing their best at the job for which they are paid those enormous salaries, they expect to receive even more gargantuan bonuses!

            Quite apart from causing the world-wide financial crisis there have more recently been the muck-ups and illegal fiddles in which some of them have been involved.  Millions of pounds had to be repaid to bank customers who had wrongly been sold insurance.  For weeks I had regular phone calls from ‘ambulance chasing’ lawyers assuring me that they’d get my money back for me despite my assurances that, as far as I knew, none of my money had been involved!   Then there was the fiddle with interest rates that led to huge fines – all passed on to customers I have little doubt.  Yesterday we learned that one of the biggest banking groups had been heavily fined for having a faulty IT system that resulted in customers being unable to access their own money for several days.    Rents, mortgage repayments and direct debit payments were not paid!  No doubt this was the fault of someone well down the line in the banking hierarchy – but the top people claim the credit for success, so they should also be prepared to accept the blame for disaster.

            Something should really be done to cut those huge salaries and abolish those enormous bonuses  but, so we are assured, market forces demand that we offer those rewards if we want the ‘best’ brains.  If we don’t they’ll just go elsewhere.  Well, we’ve seen the disasters that ‘the best brains’ can cause.  Who knows?  The ‘second best’ might be less successful – or they might just be less disastrous!

            One way that ‘the best brains’ could be discouraged from migrating in pursuit of a few extra millions would be to limit or reduce the number of places to which they could migrate.   The European Union probably had this in mind when they decided to put a legal limit on Bankers Bonuses.  Throughout the EU, they suggested, no banker should receive a bonus in excess of his or her annual salary.  They then added a rider to the effect that the bonus could be up to double the recipient’s annual salary if the Bank’s shareholders agreed.

            It doesn’t take a financial genius to see how utterly feeble that is.  It means that a banker with an annual salary of £500,000 (common enough among top bankers though at least ten times more than a salary that most of us would consider very high) he would be able to receive another £500,000 as a bonus.  He’d be receiving a million pounds for his year’s work!   But that’s not all.   If he could persuade a majority of the bank’s shareholders to agree, that bonus of £500,000 could be doubled, making his total pay for the year  £1.5 million. That’s nearly £29,000 a week!  You could hire quite a few doctors and nurses for that.

            Would you believe it? – pathetic as the EU’s decision is, Cameron and Osborne were determined to  oppose any limit to bankers’ bonuses on the grounds that it would only lead to their being offered even higher salaries!   I understand that they have now withdrawn their opposition, having been told they haven’t a leg to stand on.

            No wonder the UK electorate is sick of all the existing political parties!

UKIP triumphant?

          I concluded my comments about Bankers’ bonuses by saying that the UK electorate is sick of all existing political parties.  Their members in Kent demonstrated that distrust last week when they followed the ‘Clacton example’ and, in a by-election in Rochester, returned another defecting former Conservative  to the House of Commons as a Ukipper.

         Once again I see parallels between the situation in the UK today and that in Germany in the late 1920s, early 1930s.  In Germany too a dynamic and charismatic leader, first thought of as ‘a bit of a joke’, transformed a struggling political party into a dynamic, powerful and all-conquering force that struggled into shared power and then became a ‘cuckoo in the nest’, turning out members of all other parties and establishing the Nazi one-party state. ‘One People, One United Kingdom, one Leader!’  I can just imagine Nigel Farage acknowledging that Nazi acclamation when he and his party finally acquire the power they covet!

             A month or two ago, during the run-up to the Scottish referendum, I wrote in this blog that the worst-case possibility in the event of there being a majority YES vote, could be the creation of a Conservative/UKIP coalition government after the May 2015 general election; a coalition that the more ruthless and determined Ukippers would quickly dominate.   Well, there was a NO vote majority and the United Kingdom remains united.

            I now think though that, despite that NO vote, Ukips’s continuing success means that a very dangerous Conservative/UKIP coalition could emerge from the general election (I can’t tell you how fervently I hope that I am wrong!) and that Ukip members, with their vigour and ruthlessness  could dominate the coalition, so that the situation could end with Nigel Farage as a 21^st century Oliver Cromwell.  Conservatives proclaim that a vote for any party other than the Conservatives makes it possible that Ed Miliband will be the next Prime Minister.  I very much fear that a vote either for the Conservatives or Ukip will make it possible that, sooner or later, our government will be headed by Nigel Farage.

            However, another – to me more cheering – future seems possible.  An  unexpected result of the Scottish NO vote has been the increasing popularity of the Scottish National Party that has, since the referendum, more than doubled its membership.  Alex Salmond, a dynamic and charismatic leader  has retired and has been followed by a forthright and politically experienced still-young woman who promises to be a worthy successor. She has taken his place both as Party Leader and as Scotland’s First Minister.

            Conservatives and Lib Dems. have been all but eliminated from the Scottish scene.   Ukip has never gained a foothold there – and the machinations of New Labour have little appeal.  It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Scotland, still part of the UK thanks to that No vote, returns a solid block of Scottish National Party MPs in the new Westminster Parliament.   It is possible that they might make common cause with MPs from Wales and Northern Ireland and join with Labour to create a formidable coalition that could well outnumber the combined Conservative and Ukip forces.  Who knows – the fervour of the Scots might inspire Ed Miliband at least to attempt to narrow that yawning gap (no, not the deficit) between the wealthy and the poor and induce the wealthy to carry their fair share of the burden of taxation.

            There's another quite different matter about the Rochester and Clacton by-elections that’s worth bearing in mind. In both by-elections (and in the earlier European Parliament elections) the Green Party Candidates received more votes than the Lib-Dems.   Nick Clegg in his urge to become Deputy Prime Minister has effectively finished off his once-great Liberal Party.  Gladstone and Lloyd-George must be turning in their graves.  Yet the BBC and other  tv channels are still inviting Nick Clegg, and not the leader of the Green Party, to take part in televised debates before the General Election.  The only conclusion that I can come to is that the BBC and whoever funds the independent tv channels doesn’t want Green Party policies to be considered by the public because the Greens are the only party working towards real change.  He who pays the piper calls the tune.