Category: The work begins

Illogical crisis

I have been stunned. The right decisions were made, doing what the public demanded, and it is suddenly the worst, most unpopular thing ever. Deeper issues are behind this.

The fortnight has calmed down a bit, the markets are up, but the mocking continues. What did Liz Truss do wrong? That would take some unpicking.

Plenty are out to get her, and this time not just Keir Kneeler – picking a government only of those who supporter her bid for leadership and casting out able, experienced ministers would always cause rebellion from her own side – throwing out a whole establishment has been the end of many a ruler, as the shades of half a dozen mediaeval kings could tell, and the dynamics of the House of Commons are like a mediaeval court.

Then there are the establishment experts, who really needed to be cleared out, but the market was spooked, and that was a deathly blow.

The markets have been recovering. The pound is up a bit – Europe is still crashing, as you expect, but British viewers will not see that – we only look at our own. This is no time for faltering – Liz must hurry to achieve a transformation before the looming General Election.

One would have thought, logically, that all would realise that taxes are far too high, stifling the growth that has been trying to reassert itself since we were released from lockdown. The spending however, the excess spending, on a relentless ratchet – too many are sucking at the teats of the Treasury to let go easily, and they know, like any baby, that the more they suck, the more milk is produced. Spending must come down, dramatically; the budget deficit must be slashed, ideally to zero. Let those who live of the taxpayers’ largesse start complaining about their cost of living crisis, but let those of us who work for a living to create value have the money we have earned.

Then again, as taxes are reduced, the money is swallowed up in inflation and mortgage interest.  The average household will not make a distinction between money lost to tax and money lost to price rises and interest payments – it is all money taken out of their pocket. Then there is a contradiction: instruct the Bank of England to stop hiking mortgage rates, and the market gets spooked again, but leave them unsupervised and th rates shoot up.  I always thought that interest rates were increased to tackle inflation because this stops high spending  and so the demand in supply-and-demand, but now there is not enough spending, and the inflation is caused by energy prices and high taxes. Is the Bank so one-dimensional? Possibly.

Cut taxes, and re-educate the Bank of England if you can, but cut taxes or we really will crash

It is almost as if there were a conspiracy. Conspiracies are usually nonsense, but here you wonder: the high-tax low-growth economy is unsustainable, but plenty have come to expect and to rely on it. If the teats run dry, they have a great deal to lose – they might have to get proper jobs for a start. There is too much self-interest in all this.

It appears that Liz Trus was right: it is not just a question of adjusting rates and spending, but of breaking the ratchet, the system of baked-in decline and recasting the government machine into something more (what’s the word?  Ah yes -) Conservative.

Also, taxes are not all that matter – the 2019 manifesto is still there waiting to be honoured.  It is a good manifesto apart for a couple of really bad points on social and housing policy – so get that done and let the nation see it is being done.  There is little time, so speed up.  Cast out the Blair-age laws against freedom; sack the wokery and outlaw their practices from the state, making Starmer a clear danger as he threatens the opposite. Drive back the boats and cancel the abused right of asylum. Aye, and cut taxes again and again.

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Tax shot through the foot

It does not work, and they know it does not work. Raising tax does not raise money: at these levels at least, it reduces the Government’s income. Don’t take my word for it: listen to Rishi Sunak. He said repeatedly in the Commons that there is a limit beyond which no more comes in, and we have reached it.

No one was fooled by making it a rise in National Insurance: it is a tax, and we all know it.  The voters know it, which is why the Conservative poll ratings plunged at that moment. It will take a lot to win the trust back.

There is a window to rescue the position, on 27 October. The budget is being worked on, and it could (without going back on the National Insurance hike) reduce taxes that hit us all.

The temptation for any tax reduction is the old tick of raising allowances to take more people out of income tax entirely. This is a mistake. It has minimal effect on most, and those apparently benefited most will only have brief gratitude. We need people to feel personal engagement in the taxation process, and that means not taking them out of tax, but so they see a reduction. To be out of tax is to be told you are poor and failing. As soon as a working man is paying no tax, he loses interest: he might as well vote Labour for all it matters (and yes, he would be hurt mightily by the economy tanking if Labour get in, but if he feels no skin in the immediate game, then this future risk will not be a burden on the attention).

Voters in the North voted Conservative for the first time, as the low-tax, pro-enterprise party. Why did they bother? There is no sign of that party now, and no sign that the Conservatives have honoured the trust reposed in them, if the most cast-iron, attractive manifesto pledge has been dumped with barely a thought.

There is a need for a fight-back to win back the hope the voters once had. It will not come in the middle ground, for if Conservatives sit there, what makes them any different?  It can only work if there is a reason to vote Conservative.

The reasons to vote Conservative, bluntly, are:

  • Low tax
  • Patriotism
  • Reduced bureaucratic interference
  • Getting rid of the nonsense that has been filling the state
  • Being actively on the side of the ordinary man and woman.

There has been little sign of these. Tax has not sunk by a penny, and now has gone up. Maybe someone saw an extra Union Jack somewhere. Government bureaucrats still interfere where there are not wanted nor useful, just to keep their jobs, bullying health and safety directives are multiplying even outside the sphere of the COVID state, and there is no sign whatsoever of cutting the bloated mass of government down. It must have become addictive: even Dominic Cummings could not make his Hard Rain fall.

In the everyday, it has not escaped voters’ attention that Woke nonsense has increased inexorably over the last decade, in all of which Conservatives have been in power, or at least in office: they seem to have no power in the matter at all. A few speeches about protecting statues has not stopped voters losing their jobs to the social justice warriors embedded in the multitudinous layers of the state. The police (once a bastion of Conservative values) are even more ready to leap upon innocent men over ephemeral words in social media posts, apparently finding it easier than to do the dirty business of tackling actual criminals.

What is the point in voting Conservative?

Tax is the immediate battlefield, but the rest is tied in. Make actual, dramatic cuts in the bloated state, and in its largesse to parasites that feed on it, then cut income tax rates dramatically and loudly. That is the Conservative way, and the road to winning trust.

Books

Now for LGAxit

Local government will feature in the Queen’s Speech, but is there hope of actual change? The messages are contradictory: more powers for councils, as long as they all obey central directives; more protection for the environment, but new towns must built on it.

A more fundamental change is needed: repeal the Local Government Act 1972.

Like many bands from the 1970s, the Act is a creaking parody of itself. It had an ill-starred birth, it was passed just after the Act that sent us into the European Communities.  It was knocked together hurriedly when Ted Heath was facing an election: he had unexpectedly won the 1970 election on a promise not to abolish the counties but he went on effectively to do just that. The Act was both a reaction to the Redcliffe-Maud Report, and an implementation of it. The Report was itself a reaction to changes in the 1960s. What we have today as the governing structure of modern local government is a 1970s act that was old hat even then.

The scheme of the 1972 Act did not last; before it came into effect it had to be changed, then 10 years letter Margaret Thatcher threw out one of its key planks, and ten years after that, many of its assumptions were reversed. There have been amendments and corrections, exceptions and provisos every other year since it was passed, but the 1972 Act limped on as the foundation on which stands a structure bearing almost no relation to the assumptions built into that Act.

The scheme of the Local Government Act 1972 is based on a series of assumptions including: universal two-tier government (now rare); a committee system (again, a rarity); strictly defined competences (no longer applicable); discrete employed council staff; and all to be done with paper and face-to-face meetings. On top of this have been added changes which have to be looked up in a scattering of other Acts and Regulations, joint authorities, devolved powers, mayors (whose powers have to be conferred using legal fictions because the Act does not contemplate them) and other bits held together with chewing gum and string none of which did Ted Heath’s text anticipate. It simply does not fit any more.

Even though the Act’s assumptions are all abandoned, Parliament is still forced to follow the 1970s terminology in the Act, and treat every exception to its scheme as an exception, even though there are now more exceptions than conformity.

If there is to be a radical devolution agenda, it simply does not fit the rickety frame of the 1970s.

Maybe this leftover from the age of corduroy flairs and soft-rock has been kept just because it is too complicated to work out what goes where, afraid of ‘ch-ch-changes’, but if we cannot see where the rules are, they must go.

Ted Heath’s legacy must go: the European Communities Act 1972 has been repealed by Boris, and now the Local Government Act 1972 should follow it into the bin.

A new Local Government Structure Act is needed quickly, to reflect the actual structure of local administration and to provide a framework for building anew.

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Books

Up the Monkey Hangers!

Never mind if I have sneaked back in round here, up in County Durham, Hartlepool, Peter Mandelson’s old seat, has elected a Conservative MP, Jill Mortimer, from whom I hope we will be hearing a great deal over the next few years. She may be a Yorkshire lass, but they can be forgiving of such faults these days.

The big forgotten middle, the industrial and ex-industrial towns of Durham, Lancashire, Yorkshire and Derbyshire, now have a visible presence on the government benches of the Commons. I would like to think they were never forgotten places, never abandoned. They were never discarded for their political choices as that would be corrupt. However a psychological block can arise if the only voices heard from those towns is a whine of blame and condemnation and demands for more money, despite the open evidence that it just goes down the drain or makes things worse. It stops any practical engagement.

A string of ex-Red Wall towns with Conservative voices speaking for them can make a difference. MPs are the first to speak for their towns and deserve an open ear, whatever party they are from. What they say though makes a difference in whether they are heard. Socialism has been a disaster for the industrial towns and a voice begging for more socialism or for money to be paid to client groups with no positive outcome has to be dismissed, and then the town has no sensible voice, so it will miss out. When Labour are in power, a socialist MP is still whining for money and then may be heard with more sympathy, but he can still do no good. A town in trouble needs a constructive voice with ideas that work, and Hartlepool’s new voice it that.

The North has the key to the welfare of the whole land. If commercial investment is constrained in the crowded south, the north atrophies, and the whole country has lost half of its wealth-creating potential. More money in the north means more customers.

It could easily be messed up. The southern counties are not rich because the government has done something for them, but because it has left them alone and entrepreneurs have built their empires. Constructive ideas, based on the realities of the towns and their hinterlands, that would allow enterprise to thrive and the towns with them – that is what is expected of the new Blue Wall MPs . If they succeed, maybe their work will not be appreciated, but the big forgotten middle towns, not just those with newly blue MPs but all of them, will blossom.

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Books

Have we started to win?

The new, revamped Board of Trade has a star name – Tony Abbott no less, former Prime Minister of Australia. His appointment was widely welcomed and his technical nationality was never an issue: the Old Commonwealth is a block of peoples not only not foreign to each other but seeming somewhat bewildered to be considered separate nations, and it outlines that Australians, Canadians and New Zealanders as as home here as on the shores where they grew to manhood. Mr Abbott will do well in his new role.

His position was threatened by a blast from the left which in past years has proven deadly to any candidate for office. The left-wing attack-mob did not get their scalp this time.  Once they get their hooks into you, you’re a dead pigeon, so we have been led to believe, but not this time.  Boris has proven more robust in protecting his appointments from the mob. That is an encouraging development. Theresa May threw Toby Young and even Sir Roger Scruton to the dogs at the whiff of a Twitterstorm in displays of contemptible weakness: Boris Johnson (who has himself been the focus of many such attacks) has started to turn the tide.

Interestingly, the artificial fuss over Tony Abbott distracted attention from the other appointments of advisers to the Board of Trade, from an international field, and so protected those who are less inured to such attacks.

The New Zealand government has privately expressed frustration at the inexperience of the British negotiators trying to create a free trade agreement with New Zealand, and that is no surprise as before Brexit there was no need to develop the talent and experience. Now there is now a team lined up who have that experience and they are to be unleashed upon the world. Who’s on first I cannot say, but Abbot’s name is the most prominent and the best at opening doors.

It is an impressive line-up. The Remoaners would have had a fit at Daniel Hannan being there, had they not been involved in dirty tactics against Tony Abbot, but as Mr Hannan is the founding President of the  Initiative for Free Trade, he has the contacts to bring to bear on the enemy. In fact apart from the ex officio ministers, they are all heavyweights. It would not have happened if Boris Johnson had given way.

We may be winning then, or making the first steps.

The Culture War is not about culture at heart: it is about power. As Hobbes observed, in the first place, I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power. The left-wingers, cultural Marxists, Wokeists, call them what you will, have hitherto enjoyed power. Elections and Parliament mean nothing if feigned outrage and feigned offence force the government to your will, and by the time Mrs May’s ministry had run its course, they were in undisputed control, removing public servants from office at a whim. Then there was the election in December 2019, and it might not have made any difference to the structure of power, and no election for an age has done. Something changed though. The was cultural divide in the nation was made, by Brexit into a yawning chasm, and the revenge of the spurned was seen in the fall of the Red Wall. This was a mandate for change. Boris returned to Number 10 with Dominic Cummings at his side, now with the mandate and majority and manpower to make changes.

The new extremism amongst Cultural Marxists is to be expected; they are outraged that their power has been challenged. The counter-revolution against them is underway.

There has been no change in the Twittermob. People are still persecuted and sacked for transgressing the rules set by extremists. The police still make political distinctions between different groups of rioters, shops still make customers feel unwelcome with lurid rainbow flag displays, and television reporters have still not realised that “far right” does not mean what they have been telling people it does. However that all now though seems to stop at the doors of Whitehall. There is pressure on the Civil Service to align with the programme, and there is even a Tory as Director General of the BBC. There is now open talk of a push back, of fighting the Culture War. How, has not been explained. On our side, the culturally conservative side, we play with a straight bat out of principle, and to avoid accusations of tyranny – the irony is not lost. There are lessons to learn from Hobbes about all this: mankind has not changed in four hundred years, nor indeed in forty thousand.

For now, there is robustness in Whitehall. This may spread. The momentum cannot stop though, because the other side will not stop. The success in giving Tony Abbott the position he has, not as a political gesture but because he is a bonzer pick to do the job, is a good sign for the future.

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Books