Malcolm Blair-Robinson's Blog, page 115

Labour Court Ruling: Who Gains?

This blog does not  claim knowledge of Labour’s Rule Book nor the workings of the NEC. It takes an outsider’s view of the spat over who can vote in the current leadership election. It just seems peculiar that people who joined recently and have paid their membership fee on the expectation that they would get a vote, are denied one.

The claim from the Corbyn camp that these people have given their money to Labour only to have it used to deny them a vote has resonance, makes common sense and will stick. Moreover it plays to the whole conversation that something is wrong with the core of our democracy and that people in power ignore the interests and wishes of the people who have given it to them. So this decision will probably help Corbyn’s electoral chances, as it will drive more votes his way, than it will help Smith. But like everything else in these political times, we really do not know.

What we do know is that the original judge ruled in favour of the members, on the simple grounds the Law of Contract having supremacy over party rules. The Court of Appeal reversed that ruling. In the wider sense this blog finds that rather disquieting.

GMB Backs Smith: Well Maybe

At first splash this looks good news for Smith and a setback for Corbyn. But when you look at the figures it is almost at the level of a stunt. There are some 641000 members of this Union. Just short of 44000 took part in the ballot. That is less than 7% of the membership. Of this tiny sample 60% backed Smith. That is  26400 or 4% of the total membership. I am not sure if this can be called an endorsement, but if it can, it is certainly not a ringing one.

New Quantitative Easing: A Hitch?

The message here is short and sweet. The B of E could not buy enough of yesterday’s quota of government bonds because there were not enough sellers. Bond yields have gone negative. We have said before and will say again the critical management of the economy is the political responsibility of the government and not the central bank, which has done its best and has gone as far as it can.

All eyes are now no longer on Threadneedle Street but Downing Street. The new Chancellor must emerge very soon from Number 11 and if not show his hand, at least declare what game he intends to play. The commercial and business community, as well as consumers and households, cannot be left drifting clueless until November. Or not without such damage as to make repair yet another intractable problem piling up in the in tray of a government seemingly of talk but no action.

Labour Movement v PLP

The disconnect between the PLP (and the outgoing National Executive) and the the Labour Movement,  which is by far the largest political force in the country, is now all but unbridgeable, whoever is leader. This latest appeal against a common sense judgement in order to deny votes to legitimate members over a later change of date rules, is petty, extravagant and so far away from the problems in the North East or other forgotten areas of the former industrial super-power, as to amount to a declaration that New Labour has lost the plot entirely. Talk of Trotskyite infiltration is such balderdash that people who utter it reveal they simply have no idea where real politics, which matter to real people, now are.

Wherever Jeremy Corbyn goes he is greeted by cheering crowds, not energized like this for a generation. The chances of Owen Smith winning are slim but in politics anything is possible. What is not possible in the modern world is a bunch of researcher turned MPs, without a dirty fingernail between them, acting as ‘we know best’ representatives of a new kind of politics of which they have no comprehension. The first thing the new leader will have to do is solve that conundrum. No guesses for the easy way to do that.

Meanwhile there is a big clue in the  Brexit vote. It contained 3 million Leave voters who had either never voted before or not done so for years, part of the 5 million cohort that New Labour dumped on its way to celebrity and spin. The other clue is that very many of the new members backing Corbyn are young, ambitious, well educated and determined to change the direction of travel of the most unfair economic settlement seen for more than a century. You can work the rest out.

Russian Paralympic Ban: Right Sentiment, Wrong Method

Like everybody else this blog is fiercely hostile to doping in sport and favours severe censure of those who engage in it; not just the competitors, but the dopers who feed them and the systems which allow it to happen. But it is not right to punish the innocent because some, even most, are guilty. That it not rough justice, it is not justice at all and it is most certainly an abuse of human rights in the broad sense.

When it comes to Paralympic sport the issue is even more sensitive. Nothing has done more to repair the self- esteem of people with disabilities and to re-include them into normal active life (how short a time ago they were just labeled a cripple!) than the wonderful spectacle of the Paralympic games. They have been wonderful for all those whose bodies are not perfect and wonderful for all those whose bodies are, who who now hold these new heroes and heroines in the highest honour and admiration.

To a Paralympic athlete competing at all is a double triumph of will over adversity and to be excluded through no fault is mean and wrong. The IPC did not intend it that way; its frustrations and anger are justified and its intentions are good. Above all it has to support all the clean athletes who are by far the majority, so that they are not unfairly beaten in competition by cheats. But some of the Russian athletes are clean and to compete means more to them and is perhaps more of a personal triumph than with any other national team. To deny them is to be cruel without purpose, because it is upon these clean competitors that modern Russia will have to rebuild its sporting structures in a quite different format to its Soviet heritage.

The IPC showed decisive authority but in so doing exposed a lack of judgement. This is a great pity. Another way to upbraid Russia should be found.

 

The Judge Goes: Why?

The shock resignation of Judge Dame Lowell Goddard, the New Zealander heading up the vast Child Abuse Inquiry seems hard to fathom. But she is the third Chair of this inquiry which has hardly begun its public hearings to go. That tells us more about the inquiry than its chair perhaps.

At the time of her appointment I was flabbergasted, not because she seemed unworthy but because the Home Office went to the other side of the world to recruit her. And now she has packed her bags and gone home, having had enough. But enough of what exactly?

It surely must be clear to the Home Office, admittedly not one of the world’s fast learners, that the structure of our public inquires, where we put a judge in charge and name the whole thing after them, do not really work. They bite off more than they can chew, take years to come forward with findings and then mostly, but not always get forgotten, This inquiry is critically important and cannot be allowed to fail. Michael Mansfield has expressed himself ready and willing. The victims back him. Why not the government?

Perhaps it fears he may get to the truth.

The Bank Has Acted : So Must The Government

The uncertainty about where this country is headed is now very damaging. The new government, having made a promising start, has gone very quiet, not only over where we are going, but solutions to local frustrations like Southern Rail. It is summer we know, but the people did not call the referendum, the government did. Cameron promised that he would stay and take the country out if that was what it voted for; a promise he broke within minutes of the result. We thought the arrival of another strong woman at the helm would bring a new sense of urgency to a rudderless muddle. But has it?

It is not in order for the new Chancellor to sit on his hands and meditate until his Autumn Statement in November. The Bank of England can manage the financial system but not the wider economy now in crisis. Political decisions are demanded by events and cannot be docked until a moment of convenience. The Chancellor must as a matter of urgency paint the big picture, point the direction of travel or however you want to put it, and he must do that now or admit he is clueless and not up to the challenge. The details can then be fleshed out in the Autumn Statement.

He argues that time is needed. Maybe. But time is not on his side.

 

Bank Of England : Action At Last

It is a very good thing that the bank of England has at last acted, more especially because a contracting economy worries about a government that does not seem to know what to do. So any action is better than no action. Well, is it?

This Blog has a view which is expressed often. Here it is again. Assets are too inflated, profits can be made by doing nothing, too much money is available in the financial sector which is top heavy, personal borrowing is far too high, productivity is at an all time low. The base of the economy has too little money circulating and is forced to borrow to cope at interest rates way above prime. There are too few decent jobs paying good wages. The return on savings is very poor.

Seen under that analysis the last thing we need is a cut in interest rates which are tantamount to zero anyway, more lending stimulus or more QE from the Bank. What we need is the biggest investment stimulus in infrastructure and industry from the Government since the end of WWII, of which Dynamic Quantitative Easing should play a key part. What are required are political decisions. The stimulus of this misshapen economy is way beyond the remit of the central bank. Theresa May will have to make her cowardly Ministers step forward with a real plan. A bit of handbagging would be just the thing.

Brexit Negotiations

This might be a moment to stop and consider why it was that from the very beginning Britain was always the outsider inside the Common Market, then the EEC and finally the EU.

It is an island, yes, but that cannot be all. One of the reasons British psychology is different is that it is a nation which has evolved gradually over 1500 years since the departure of the Romans without a single seismic event other than the invasion of the Normans. Since then the crown has passed, not always without a fight, sometimes with rather tenuous links to the claim, from one to another, as the system of government has evolved from absolute monarchy to a democracy using the structures and powers of monarchy as if owned by parliament, which some constitutional authorities would argue they are. There is no formal constitution, it is tweaked and tinkered with all the time, often without any formal approval. The outcome is a nation in a state of continuous and quiet evolution which is at once traditional and modern, advanced and backward, adventurous and pragmatic. It is unique.

Every other nation in Europe has a written constitution and has been through periodic occupations, triumphs and disasters, changes in structures, boundaries and governance, together engaged in a common story into which Britain has often been called to take a part, but has never truly shared. While France is on its Fifth Republic since the French Revolution and Germany, only a single country since the 1870s, has fallen and risen three times, Britain has been crowning its Kings and Queens in the same Abbey since the Norman conquest. One was a Mr Silly and had his head cut off, but the country soon tired of the republic idea, put his son back on the throne and carried on as if nothing had happened.

Yet as it meanders its way through the meadows of history like a lazy river in no hurry, Britain has managed to become the power behind the political consequences of the Reformation, to inaugurate and drive the industrial revolution, build the largest empire the world had ever seen spanning the globe upon which the sun never set, give it up with barely a murmur and very little bloodshed, put together the coalition of powers which defeated Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler, split the atom before anybody else and loads of other stuff besides. It has now enshrined in law one of the most advanced interpretations of equality of sexes, genders religions, cultures, orientations, rights and customs to be found anywhere, in which the welfare of the individual can legally trump the priorities of the State.

Interesting when you think about it. We may be fools to leave the EU, but history tells us without any doubt, they will be even bigger fools to let us go.

Re-Booting the Post Brexit Economy

     QE in various forms is now very much part of the economic conversation, especially in following Brexit and the fall in the value of the £. Dynamic Quantitative Easing (also called Peoples Quantitative Easing) remains under government, not bank, control and targets specific investment projects without borrowing, interest or repayments. It can reboot the economy, boost manufacturing and exports and enable sustained growth of real national wealth shared by all, rather than just asset inflation which is the downside of ordinary QE. It is ideal for financing mega projects like Hinkley Point without the need to involve foreign governments in strategic infrastructure.  If you want to find out more you can enjoy a lucid explanation of the original idea from the link below.

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