The End is Nigher than it was:-
Liz Truss was appointed PM by the Queen on Tuesday 6th September. Two days later, on Thursday 8th, the Queen died. Ten days later, on the Monday (19th Sept 2022) was the very grand farewell. Charles is King; Liz is PM. What she has promised to do reads as more extreme than what Boris was proposing, so the summer spent in hustings has done nothing to cement the Tory party to anything of centrist beliefs. Unfortunately, the general trend in Britain always works to bring the Tories back to power so the best we can hope for is a period of the second party, Labour. The Labour party (that's the reds, not the blues) could make moves at their imminent national conference so as to not only get into power but to aim to stay there. But, in order to do that they too need to change, need to find clever people prepared to lead and need to change our politics for the markedly better.
We have obvious corruption within parliament. Not only are votes effectively bought with leverage but ears are bent in unequal amounts and government contracts are rife with favouritism. These things could be readily fixed, but for the attitude within the House. Those in power work in a system that succeeds in returning to the position as it was; suspect at best.
We have huge need for spending on many fronts. What is going to happen, I fear, is that Trussian economics is going to make the rich very much richer and affect the poor hardly at all. Given the raging inflation and crippling costs of energy on their way as winter approaches it is likely that, whatever is decided, it is the poor who will end up paying the bills. The Tories in power seem hell-bent on not having any sort of wealth tax, nor windfall profits tax. This means that however money is found to delay the hit of increased energy, that bill will be paid (with interest) by those already most likely to be hit where it hurts. I fear that money will be thrown in the direction of the problem (big bills) so that the winter is not as bad as it could be, but the underlying problems will not even be given any attention, let alone any moves toward mitigation. Which of course means that the problems of increasing costs of energy and bad insulation levels in domestic housing are left as they were – so the next winter gives us the same raw deal. Of course borrowing (and it is a huge amount, about equivalent to a year of the NHS) means interest is paid to someone, probably the very rich and the offshore bankers. One could wish that the gov't would actually indicate that one might fund the poor by buying the bonds that will defer this problem, which just might be done in ways to dilute the pain and achieve a little of the levelling-up which is not going to occur.
And the 'not going to occur' part is what we wait to observe, really. We have had all sorts of so-called promises without hearing any caveats – much as we do in any election period. Already we have a string of manifesto promises broken and discarded (I could list them if I tried) and one suspects that there are more to come. If the party grandees are awake they must see that the next election will be lost, though Labour are well capable of fumbling this into another failure into power. What I think bothers me most is that however short a time Labour might have at the helm, the Conservatives will be back soon and any good moves will be undone with speed. So we need, I suspect a big win for Labour followed by a weak win, so that going too far is moderated. But realistically what we need is an utterly different attitude, one in which we are told what we need to know not what we think we want to hear (worse, what a politician thinks we want to hear). Brexit was a bad mistake and it may well be that we cannot put that genie back in the box, since the Europe we might apply to join in the 2030s will not be what we thought we left in January 2020, though the referendum was 2016 and article 50 invoked March 2017. The idiocy here lay in allowing a small majority to cause a huge change.
I think we are committed to the sidelines for the next century and what we need to do is rediscover a role in the world. To me, that means we need to rethink very many institutions and do what is best for us as a nation, not what is good for those with advantage and the ear of the Conservatives. Which might mean that what we need is to change our politics wholesale. In turn that makes me wonder how bad things have to become before the sensible people are allowed to act. If one could leave, one would. I suspect that we're headed over a cliff.
We fiddle at the edges; our energy from renewables is around a half, but we could be actively trying to make that far more and be looking at ways to use nuclear only to cover problem weather (and coal and gas not at all). We could be tailoring our economy to reflect such a grand change (towards a target we can understand, some framing of independence). Clearly we need to trade, but we ought to be using our inventiveness to benefit the nation, rather than what we do, export the inventors to where they can earn vast sums we lose the benefit of. We fail a huge proportion of our people all of the time and what I see is a decaying nation that refuses to see what has occurred and has no idea what to do – because all the advantage lies with those in whose interests the status quo preserves those advantages.
All of which is really a repetition of previous rants, but it makes me feel a little better for having pounded a keyboard forcefully.
Found on Facebook, the suggestion that the Post Office, which used to be called the Royal Mail, is to be renamed the Charles the Third Post Office, which will of course have a logo that says C3PO. An expert in languages, decorum and diplomacy. Meanwhile, of course our own 2020s version of Star Wars looms.
This WAS on the header page.
The most significant features occurred in the first full week of September, where we gained yet another prime minister and lost the Queen. Queen Elizabeth knew 15 prime ministers, from Churchill to Truss. Now we have King Charles III. By Christmas we'll know the extent to which these two events have caused us to stall even more significantly in that list of very important things we have to get moving.
In late September we begin to see if the Truss version of Conservatism is anything that in general we want to engage with. It is observed that she is good at switching allegiances but the early signs say that she is more extreme (and a lot less amusing) than Boris. This could get an awful lot worse before it gets even marginally better. The party conference season may well give no hope at all.
Jonathan Pie gets very close to my own attitude. If the link fails, search for Pie and 'Statement of Intent'. He's good in person, too, without noticeably using any of these videos.
Trickle-down economics says that if I see a beggar, I take a note out of my wallet and put it through the letter-box of the most expensive house I can find. Mind, in Blackpool, we're told to ask any street person (begging is not allowed) where their cashless paypoint is – so that any money given goes to the charities they're supposed to be using, not into alcohol or other drugs of choice.
Indeed, for a summary of what's been going on in Britain, Pie does an extremely good job here too. 'Welcome to Britain. Everything is Terrible.'
_________ and then we get yet another PM _______________
A few weeks later Trussonomics is consigned, we hope, forever to footnotes in economics texts. Rishi Sunak is PM. Kwarteng was replaced by Jeremy Hunt as Chancellor just before Truss herself gave up and was replaced by Sunak on 25th October. 6th Sept to 25th Oct might be 49 days, from which ten were mourning the Queen and at least seven were idling while the next nit was chosen. Her rule was so short we can argue about how few days she was actually in office.
This month yet another new Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak. The Conservatives may well be on target to lose the next election, even with the tacit support at all times of the right-leaning media (and the ever-increasing false media, them what thrive on completely ignoring evidence, on which more elsewhere). Interesting argument from Paul Whiteley (Conversation, undated) gives several statistical predictions, that I'd have discussed with an A-level class. The predictions include that the next election will be May 24 2024. This is 19 months away, so the correct thing to do is look at all (21) previous predictions 19 months before their corresponding election. Thus we get a prediction of 196 seats for the blues, a loss of 169 seats and a catastrophe. This is the size of the party's problem, to somehow persuade the electorate that the adults are back in command and all is safe. I don't agree; the MPs representing the ERG remain, and remain determined to have what they want irrespective of what might be good for the nation. But then I disagree, increasingly, with what that might be, too. Economic short-term gains are of no use at all if the plant is being systematically screwed by the human infestation. We need something radically different that looks further ahead than mere weeks. I'd have liked a very much longer exploration of the possibilities.
One important factor is to not look at voting percentages, which are not reflected in seats held, as the Lib Dems have shown repeatedly, but to look at seats gained., This is far more connected to who ends up in power. I read other articles from Paul Whiteley. sample 20220712, which might be the background to the Conversational piece. Poll results in the past are strongly correlated with current poll results. [..] There are some interesting features in the chart. Unsurprisingly, the two-year out correlations are much weaker than one-month out correlations. That said, there is still a sizeable relationship between the current polls and those in an election two years into the future. A second feature is that the Conservative vote share consistently appears to be more predictable than the Labour vote share, although it is important not to exaggerate this difference. It means that Labour support is more volatile than Conservative support over this period of three quarters of a century. A third point is that, surprisingly, it looks like the one-year out polling is almost as accurate as the three-months out polling. In the case of the Conservatives, the one-year out correlation is actually stronger than the three-month out figure, which means that we can learn a lot from polling next year about a general election in the summer of 2024. Relevant here is the leap in approval for the Tories when Major took over from Thatcher in late 1990, resulting in winning the next election, 1992.
The Seats-votes model follows a cube rule: the proportion of seats won by the victorious party varies as the cube of the proportion of votes cast for that party over the country as a whole.’ (Kendall and Stuart, 1950: 183). You can download the whole paper here. The modelling (which looks to me to be using the normal distribution and nothing to do with cubes) assumes a trend towards the historical mean, so that is a party is above its norm then on polling day the result will tend to shift back towards the mean; thus people are observed to shift back to some sort of cultural preference when actually voting - which may mean that there are very much fewer genuinely floating voters than one might think. One of the significant issues for the forecaster is the clear vagueness of people's declarations (of intent) and any applicability of that. The figures are gross averages and the media find it hard to show us vagueness, when any figure looks to me to belong in a space between 5 and 6% of the vote total. Which means that the minor parties have a huge possibility of swing and that most elections are indeed 'too close to call'. The only occasions where both major parties under-perform (gaining fewer votes than the predictions suggest) are when the electorate casts their vote elsewhere (UKIP, Green, SNP).
___________and then we had the long-awaited Autumn Statement, Thursday 20221117________________
...on which I shall write when it has occurred. I'm expecting leaps in taxation for the masses but I'd like to see the income tax threshold rise to the poverty level while super-tax level to lower. I'd like a wealth tax. I'd like a windfall tax. I'd like gas and electricity unoupled in pricing. I'd like NOT to see council income reduced, so perhaps councils will be allowed to raise their collection significantly - in which case I want the basis of that to change from 1991 house valuation. I want to hear promises that giant international corporations are taxed locally, and that internet business is taxed. But then I want a load of money natters sorted and an Autumn Statement won't address them at all. I want to see no downward movement in money to councils, NHS, education and the military. I want HS2 scrapped entirely but other infrastructurre (Northern rail sort-out, for example) expedited.
I don't think that'll happen. I think what will occur is even further shrinkage of the state when we're already, I think, falling apart and simply moving the work into private unaccountable hands. I expect public sector pay to freeze (disaster). I expect to be told that more austerity is needed when it is a political choice and i expect the media to meekly toe the line. This is appalling.
20221118 The Autumn Statement came out yesterday. The presentation and the comment are satisfyingly different. There is no getting away from the fact that the same party has been in power throughout these last dozen years and the size of their majority has meant that they must hold responsibility for much of what has occurred. Yes, the Ukraine business has caused a leap in energy prices, but it was the right wing of the party that caused Brexit to occur (from demanding the referendum to the campaign and the result, to which I'd add having no coherent plan for the consequences beyond, apparently, lining pockets of selves and cronies. Which is a jaundiced view, I admit. I'm please with most of the action. Yet, when looking hard at what was said, many of the issues that could and should have been addressed have simply been kicked down the same road that Mrs May ended up kicking cans along. Far too much is shoved into the future so that it takes effect after the next parliament, Which means that if Labour gets in, they inherit all these same problems and, if somehow the Tories pull a rabbit out of a hat and stay in power, they have another five years to play favours in much the same way as we have become accustomed. The prospects for standard of living is dire and, while there are gestures towards the not well off, the group that Mrs May was admired in referring to, the just-about-coping, are, as far as I can tell, going to be hit where it hurts. We have expensive expansive gestures but most are delayed by long enough to provide wriggle room for anyone flexible enough to dodge. Not least, my understanding of what was announced says that councils are very little affected; council tax will rise but by less than inflation (5% maximum, when I think we need more like 20%), so the real cost result is further reduction in the obligations that each council can deliver, when what we need is the opposite. Increases in funding to the NHS, the military, education and infrastructure will probably simply vanish into meeting the same basic need, meeting the rising cost of living caused by inflation.I conclude that the conservative determination to have small government, low tax and low spend is a policy with which I disagree. I find myself more in agreement with the attitudes of the Labour party but at the very same time their extremes of opinion practically guarantee I'll never vote for them. Yet, if they were to indicate that, if in power, PR would be on the table, I'd swallow those reservations in hope.
Jeremy Hunt yesterday talked about causing regional mayors to occur, including in Cornwall and 'part of' the North-East. He then called this devolution. But this is not true, in the sense that this 'devolution' of central power is not in parity with the devolved nations. More, by creating mayorships (without a local referendum) he practically (on behalf of the party, who will vote on the content) guarantees that further devolution cannot occur. I see this as a potential disaster. What would rescue this (my view) would be for a subsequent government to move a lot more responsibility to the regions, along with significant central government funding, so that the councils within a region have the opportunity to band together (as a region, in practice) to cause the perceived and recognised local problems to be addressed. But that in turn, really requires there to be an equivalent to the Barnet formula to guarantee the size of the devolved funds. This would, if done well, cause levelling-up to occur in ways that address each region's issues.
Personally, I think we're barely affected. The pension rise and renewed additional winter ebnergy payment more than cover the energy increase. Other inflation will hit but our income is in significant surplus over expenditure and we can (could) reduce spending very easily by eating entirely at home (with conversational loss for me, to which I now put a value). Replacing the car(s) will simply be delayed more years. Repair and maintenance of the house continues as necessary, which I view as supporting my local economy. About a quarter of what the boss earns is needed to fund her half of our joint expenditure - we live cheaply, the house is cold, we have no borrowing at all, we don't call upon savings. Actually, I think we could spend more in efforts to keep local businesses going.
I like the comment I found several times among the vsrious writers: This is a political choice rather than one based on economics. I have hope that this will serve to act against the political charm offensive and cause people in general to recognise what is spin, what is choice and where choices have been made.
DJS 20221118