It’s the stupid economy

It’s high time I expanded on my hints about Britain living in the worst of both worlds politically, socially and economically.  I previously mentioned it when discussing drugs (everything is theoretically illegal, but the negligible risk of punishment for dealers is greatly outweighed by the financial opportunities, so organised crime flourishes) and the railways (nationalised risk, privatised reward).  But it occurred to me that the idea is much more widely applicable: consider almost any major area of policy, and I dare you not to conclude that we would be better off with a truly conservative, socialist, libertarian, or liberal system – rather than the unpopular populism of the Third Way.

We have an enormous, wasteful public sector, mazes of bureaucracy, high income taxes that are exclusively used to fund a huge welfare state – and huge, growing inequality and declining social mobility.  Why not take the bottom fifth or so out of tax altogether, and scrap the Byzantine tax credits system?  Bankers take reckless risks safe in the knowledge the state will bail them out if it comes to that, which it has: the meltdown wouldn’t have happened under either a properly regulated or a properly laissez faire system, but was the logical consequence, again, of private reward and public risk.  We send more people to prison than any other European country, but generally let them out after a stretch just long enough to teach our legions of petty neds the rudiments of real crime: better to reverse this situation and keep the prisons free for serious and violent offenders to spend the rest of their lives in; this government has been tough neither on crime – beyond headline-grabbing gimmicks – nor its causes.  We’re happy to start wars, but fight them on the cheap: as Cicero said, “There is nothing proper about what you are doing, soldier, but do try to kill me properly.”  We invite the huddled masses to flock to our shores and prop up our economy while five million adults in Britain sit at home, then offer immigrants every incentive not to work and integrate.  The rich can still buy a good education for their children, but the war on academic selection – in the name of social justice – leaves the bright poor at the bottom forever.  And we have a state-funded broadcaster, which insists on competing with commercial outlets in a ratings race to the bottom.

On each of these issues, Britain exists in a sorry state of compromise between left and right, where either alternative would be preferable: the legacy of Thatcher choosing to fight on economic grounds and abandon social matters to the liberal left.  The political, media and business elite thrives in this corrupt space.  The middle classes – and that vanishing breed, the respectable, aspirational working class – pay for the fecklessness of the overclass and the underclass, both of which behave with utter selfishness, both safe in their status quo under New Labour.  Surely no-one who is either progressive or conservative can be happy with our current mess.  Does anyone else out there wish we could just settle on one coherent philosophy or the other – or at least elect politicians with the ability and decency to pluck the best aspects from both?

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Every Labour government runs out of power in the end

It’s one thing MPs getting caught with their pants down.  It’s quite another when they’re all getting caught with their willies in the till too.

Headlines as hilarious as this, coupled with the impending failure of Brown’s last gamble at the G20, all make a Tory victory more certain by the day.  No-one wants Labour to lose more than I do.  But there is one set of circumstances under which I would consider voting for them: to prevent a Tory landslide.

Look at the state of them now: led by a sociopath who (I can’t work out which) is either a reckless gambler betting everything on somehow bucking the recession, the markets and the rest of the world’s governments, or a saboteur deliberately wrecking the public finances to force the Tories into huge spending cuts.  He is surrounded by a cast of knaves who have, quite rationally, realised that they will be out of a job, and in many cases out of a seat, in a year and are focused on milking the public purse for all its worth while they can.  New Labour is morally, intellectually and electorally finished.  They are the economic inheritors of Thatcher, but twice as authoritarian.  Anyone who wants to see a strong centre-left in Britain should hope, if anything, for an immediate election to put them out of their misery.  Old Labour collapsed after being captured by one set of special interests (the doomed miners), and New Labour after various others (the City, the neocons, and the more bloated parts of the public sector).  It is best for everyone concerned if Labour has a short civil war and a long spell in opposition, and it will probably take eight or ten years for them to come up with a coherent set of ideas appealing enough to undo what they have squandered up to now.  For years the Tories wished they’d lost in 1992.

I am prepared to give David Cameron the benefit of the doubt: although it’s still not easy to divine specific policies, his apparent views on fiscal responsibility, the environment, education and civil liberties make him more appealing to me than any of Brown’s possible successors within Labour.  But I wonder, beneath the smooth brand management, whether his is still a (not the) nasty party.

The blogosphere, as a barometer of grassroots opinion, suggests they might be.  As new social media developed under a Labour government, it was natural that conservatives, in opposition, would make better use of its opportunities (taking their cue from the US, where the right dominated the internet, at least until Obama’s campaign, as a response to a supposedly liberal traditional media).  Most political blogs, with the exception of Political Betting, are depressingly partisan.  And although some right-wing bloggers, like Guido Fawkes, are an entertaining and sometimes informative alternative to newspapers bound by the developed world’s most restrictive libel laws, most of his commentors turn out to have predictable views on climate change, capital punishment, gays, etc.  It may be that it’s simply easier to be abusive and inflammatory when hiding behind the anonymity of the internet, and perhaps the Young Turks are still outnumbered by retrograde but fairly harmless Blue Rinsers, but we should judge a party by its base as much as its leadership.  A small Tory majority, or better still a Tory-Liberal deal in a hung parliament, held to account by a Labour opposition rediscovering some long-dormant decency, seems the least bad outcome.  One of these seems likeliest at the moment, and (given the systemic bias against the Tories) things will still have to get quite a lot worse (if that’s possible) for a landslide to be on the cards, and therefore for me to hold my nose and perversely vote Labour.

I suppose, though, that at least a rampant Tory right wouldn’t come up with anything like this.  What a perfect summary of this government’s philistinism and neophilia in one policy.  As if school leavers aren’t historically illiterate enough.  As if their attention spans aren’t short enough.  As if we don’t already have a surfeit of unemployable communications graduates.  What, having learned nothing at school, will these twits of tomorrow tweet about?  Jade Goody?

As if to prove the point, your faithful but bog standard comprehensive-educated correspondent has again ended up blogging about… blogs.

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Don’t get high on your own monetary supply

I see the hacks at the Economist have realised that any more doommongering stories about the state of the global economy will start to cause a decline in their readership as business folk leap to their deaths from office windows, and so have this week instead run a leader calling for the legalisation of all drugs.

I’m basically convinced by the argument that decriminalisation would remove the criminal element, which is the worst aspect of our drugs problem.  I generally take the classical liberal line that grown-ups should be allowed to do what they want to themselves, as long as it doesn’t harm others.  Of course, consuming drugs does harm others, whether or not it harms you, because of the method by which it travels from a field in Colombia or Afghanistan to your nose / arm.

However, I’m not convinced that prohibition has failed, because we only halfheartedly enforce it.  It’s not exactly difficult to buy coke or crack in central London of an evening, and if the police catch you you’re unlikely to get more than a ticking-off (a clip round the ear, of course, is not allowed these days, although for some reason seven bullets to the head is).  I suspect that if we followed the line of countries that punish drugs users we would find we had less of a drugs problem.  My first memory of my first visit to Singapore was of a warning in bold red letters on the boarding card on the plane: ‘MANDATORY DEATH SENTENCE FOR DRUG TRAFFICKERS UNDER SINGAPORE LAW’.  (I’m going there again in a couple of weeks, so had better remember not to traffic any drugs.)  As usual under New Labour, we have the worst of both worlds: drugs are illegal, leaving the market open to gangsters, but their use isn’t punished, so demand remains high.

Perhaps we could have the least bad of both worlds?  I suggest legalising everything and introducing regulation and light taxation, allowing the state a monopoly over drug supply and focusing on harm reduction, but at the same time bringing in severe punishments (mandatory life sentences?) for freelance dealers and anyone who sells to children.

About this “quantitative easing”.  Why are savers being punished so much (by printing money and raising inflation well above interest rates, so devaluing their savings) when they are the only section of society not at fault in all of this?  There is a widespread misconception that saving is bad for the economy because it is an alternative to spending: actually, if money isn’t spent it’s invested (assuming, perhaps rashly these days, it’s in a bank).  Higher interest rates would mean more incentive for saving, less incentive to lend and borrow recklessly, more investment in viable businesses, and would allow house prices to return to a sensible level – surely more sensible than trying to reinflate the boom in asset prices and consumer crap.  It’s probably not very often I agree with the Tennessee Republican Party (and I doubt they share my views on drugs), but -

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For Satan finds some mischief still for idle factories to do

I’ve just finished reading The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock, a very entertaining and frightening book about energy, the environment and climate change.  He reaches some interesting conclusions: that the world can’t sustainably support more than about a billion people; that more than a quarter of a million wind farms would be needed to supply Britain’s energy needs and that we should instead invest in more nuclear fission power plants (whose risks, he claims, have been hugely overstated) until nuclear fusion power becomes available; that even well-meaning ‘sustainable development’ is too little, too late; and that we have very nearly reached the tipping point of 500 ppm of CO2 at which the poles will melt, the seas will be too warm and acidic for algae and clouds to form, and the rainforests will retreat into desert and shrub as the water they receive evaporates too quickly.

Many of us will probably have assumed that there would be one upside to the downturn: a temporary reduction in CO2 emissions and so a slowing down of global warming, buying us some time to come up with a cornucopian fix or an adjustment in our lifestyles.  However:

“Industrial civilisation has released into the atmosphere, in addition to greenhouse gases, a huge quantity of aerosol particles, and these tiny floating motes reflect incoming sunlight back to space and cause global cooling.  On large areas of the Earth’s surface the aerosol haze reflects sunlight back to space sufficiently to offset global warming.  By themselves they cause a global cooling of 2 to 3°C.  Back in the 1960s, when we knew much less about the Earth and its atmosphere, a few scientists even speculated that continued economic growth would increase the density of the aerosol and lead to global cooling and even precipitate the next glaciation.  The present extent of aerosol cooling is real and seriously worrying.  It may have allowed us to continue our business as usual, not noticing how much we had changed the Earth nor realising that we would have to pay back the borrowed time.  Aerosol particles stay only a brief time in the atmosphere: within weeks they settle to the ground.  This means that any large economic downturn, or a planned reduction in fossil-fuel usage, or unwise legislation to stop sulphur emissions, as the Europeans are now enacting to stop acid rain, will allow the immediate expression of greenhouse warming.”

Ach.

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