A Liberal future

I am fascinated by what the Coalition means for the future of the Liberal Democrats. Here is one possibility:

There is a significant anti-Labour majority in this country but it is split between the Tories and the Lib Dems. This allows Labour to form a government sometimes even though two thirds of the population are opposed. The question is why would anyone vote for the Lib Dems when there has been no possibility before now of their forming a government and I am guessing that these are anti-Labour voters who cannot bring themselves to vote Conservative because of what they see as the harshness of the Thatcher years.

The Coalition means that the Lib Dem supporters have effectively voted Conservative without having to admit it. I suspect that they will be pleasantly surprised and will recognise that their best course of action is to throw their lot in with the Conservatives and keep Labour permanently out of office. I suspect that the Coalition will therefore mean the end of three-party politics and the re-emergence of a two party system in which the Tories represent around two-thirds of the population and the Labour Party the remaining third.

Homer, this one is for you - largely because you are the only person who reads this thing.

I note your comment that we "might not agree, politically". You may be right but it is difficult to tell across the two bodies politic. It would be a mistake to equate the American Republican party with the British Conservative party or the American Democrats with the British Labour party. The histories and traditions are completely different and the positions of the parties don't really coincide.

The British Conservative party was acutely uncomfortable with the Bush administration, for example, whereas the Labour party was closely aligned with it over Iraq and Afghanistan. But more generally, the Conservative party is socially liberal in a way that would appall modern Republicans. Alan Duncan, an openly gay Conservative, pushed through the Civil Partnerships Act ("Gay marriage") during the last Parliament and the Conservatives have more openly gay politicians in Parliament than does the Labour party. The welfare state, including the National Health Service was conceived under Winston Churchill during the second world war - he described it as "a net below which none may fall but above which all may be free to rise". It has become a net below which none may fall but above which all may become entangled, but that is another story.

The Conservatives also have no particular religious bent and certainly no ideological position on abortion. Where they do overlap with the Republicans is their belief in Freedom as an ideal and their preference for private enterprise over state intervention where possible.

The Labour party was born during the revolutionary days of the early twentieth century and was committed to the replacement of capitalism by socialism which they saw as requiring the seizure of the means of production by the workers. Until Tony Blair modernised the party it was still bound by Clause 4 of its constitution: To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service. This was undoubtedly an anti-capitalist, anti-free-enterprise ideal that would never have been allowed to take root in America. During much of my life, the Labour party has acted according to this ideal -by nationalising such companies as BP, British Airways, the Railways, the Steel industry and the telephone companies. The last truly socialist Labour government in the 1970s even tried to manufacture cars!

So for much of my life the choice has been between the Conservatives - a coalition of everyone who believed in a broadly free-enterprise society in which people could succeed according to their efforts and an authoritarian socialist party that believed in enforcing equality on the population by the central control of the means of production. Within that Conservative coalition you would find people who would be comfortable in the American Republican party and people who would be comfortable as Democrats. They were united by a belief in freedom of the individual and the right of people to live their own lives as they wished, without the State telling them what to do.

Blair did change that. He revoked Clause 4 and replaced it with the much blander: The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create for each of us the means to realise our true potential and for all of us a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few, where the rights we enjoy reflect the duties we owe, and where we live together, freely, in a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and respect. But the instincts of the Labour party have not really changed. They reach for the State at every opportunity where the Conservatives prefer individual freedom.

So there you have it. I would say that the British Conservatives are a much broader coalition than the American Republicans without some of the nutty religious and social overlay. It may be that you and I would be on opposite sides if we shared the same environment, but it may also be that we would not.

Dunkirk

It is seventy years today since the miracle at Dunkirk. A story that makes every Englishman and woman who thinks about these things stand tall with pride and gratitude.

Half a million allied troops, cornered in North West France. The German Panzers moving in from all directions and the Luftwaffe overhead. Behind, just the sea. The Royal Navy standing impotently off-shore, unable to navigate the shallow waters of Dunkirk. The Free World holding its breath and thirty miles away, the people of Britain watch in horror and disbelief at what is about to happen. Then the miracle began.

From every river, from every creek, from every beach on the East Coast of England came the little ships. Young boys in sailing dinghies; old men in fishing boats; women in rowing boats. Luxury cruisers and old ferries; boats that had never seen more than a local lake and boats that had spent their years at sea. Rafts and barges. Anything and everything that could float or be made to float and that could move. Onward they came across the cruel North Sea. Past the mighty warships and into the hell of Dunkirk. They had come for their husbands, their fathers, their sons and their friends. And under the guns of the Third Reich at its most terrible they pulled three hundred and fifty thousand men to safety.

A defeat, of course. But a defeat that showed the Nazis and the world that this was no ordinary people and no ordinary country. This was one that would never stop fighting until the victory was won.

Forgive me for getting emotional on these anniversaries.

Hugh

The Euro

The Euro has failed. Many of us in this country thought that it was doomed from the start but I, for one, had begun to doubt my own judgement over the past few years when the Single Currency seemed to go from strengh to strength. But now the thing we predicted has happened.

The reality is clear. You cannot have a currency union without a political union. The Right in England saw this clearly several years ago. The Left denied it. Now we know.

There are only two ways to escape the crisis - forward or backwards. Either the Eurozone moves forward to full politcal union ("The United States of Europe") or backward to separate currencies. Nothing else will work. But the European Union is determined to try neither of these things. Instead, it wants to bolster the weak countries until they become strong. The result will be to bankrupt the most successful country in Europe - Germany. The Germans, and to a lesser extent the French, will pump in billions and trillions to ungrateful and uncomprehending Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain and nothing will change. Eventually, they will abandon the attempt and retire, seriously wounded, to convalesce.

Thank heavens that Britain stood apart from this madness.

So which route will the continent eventualy take? Here is my prediction. It won't move forward to political union because the peoples and the vested interests in Europe won't stand for that. Even the Thirteen Colonies in America, sharing a common language and heritage, only united reluctantly (Rhode Island very reluctantly) in the face of a common threat. In the absence of such an external impetus, Union is not on the table. So the only way out is to revert to separate currencies. But not until the Germans and the French have exhausted themselves in their attempt to hold the line.

And once that has happened, the desire for greater union will recede and we will eventually move to what we should always have intended - a Free Trade Zone.

Decision time

After examining the alternatives with, I believe, a more open mind than I have ever done before, I have decided to revert to type and vote Conservative next Thursday.

If you are interested (and I quite forgive you if you are not), here are my reasons:

During the past decade the Labour government has achieved some notable things. It has abolished the hereditary principle in the House of Lords (Two hundred years late, but at least it has happened now), it has given a large degree of autonomy to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and, in the latter case, has succeeded in ending bloodshed that had blighted these islands for generations. All this is excellent. Personally, I would go further and include the Queen in my reforms (thank you, ma’am, you can retire now – we’ll take it from here democratically) but that is not going to happen in my lifetime as most of my fellow citizens still adore the idea of a Monarch. Labour has also taken us into more wars than any recent government. Sierra Leone is generally considered a success, as is Kosovo and all those Balkan bits I don’t really understand. Iraq was predicated on a lie. We (the British Public) were told as absolute fact that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that could reach our bases in Cyprus and be deployed within forty five minutes. I believed that and supported the invasion. We now know that there was never any convincing evidence of this and that Tony Blair had made up his mind on personal grounds to commit British lives and treasure with absolutely no foundation in fact or Law. And we have Afghanistan, on which the jury is still out. At the time we all felt huge sympathy for the USA after 9/11 and wanted to do whatever we could to help. I certainly supported our intervention. As the bodies continue to pour back in ever greater numbers I find my resolve wavering. It is no longer clear to me why we are there.

But the big issue for me is the economy. Labour claims, rightly, to have lifted large numbers of people out of poverty and to have raised spending on healthcare, education and many other laudable things. But there is one problem. They never paid for it. They never had the guts to impose the tax increases necessary to cover this spending or to increase the productive capacity of the economy so that tax revenues rose sufficiently. They borrowed the difference because it was easier and less unpopular. So they created the illusion of rapidly rising living standards. But that illusion is now shattered. We now see that the Labour Decade has been the lowest growth decade since the War. (The War here is wwII – everything else is just a war.) It looked good for a while but now it has all reversed.

Here is my (depressing) analysis of where we are and what needs to be done. Britain has been living beyond its means. We have been borrowing huge sums from the International Markets and spending these on public services that might make us feel good but that are not tradable with other countries. So we have been borrowing huge sums to spend on people who have been using their wages to buy Panasonic from Japan, BMW from Germany and, dare I say it, software from America. Public spending now accounts for close to half of our economy, which means that roughly half our people are working in ways that may or may not be useful (and in many cases will not be useful) but that do not produce anything that either can be sold abroad or used locally in place of things that are made abroad. To me, it seems that we must rebalance the economy. We must move people out of public service and into the private sector where they can make things or offer services that the rest of the world wants to buy or that reduce our dependence on the rest of the world. And I don’t see how this can be done painlessly. The analogy in my mind is that of the Heroin addict. At first, the Heroin makes the addict feel good. But after a while the addict discovers the terrible price: his/her health and wellbeing are collapsing but to get off the drug is more terrible than to stay on it. Eventually the addict dies or goes through hell to recover. In our economy, because of our historic creditworthiness (we are, even today, Triple A rated) the Labour Government found it easy to borrow. The things they spent money on made us feel good and got them re elected three times. But now there is a terrible price to pay. The only way, it seems to me, that we can rebalance the economy is to make draconian cuts in public expenditure. These WILL throw large numbers of public employees out of work. Furthermore, the reduction in government spending generally will hurt millions of small businesses, including mine, causing further unemployment. So the price to pay for Labour’s glory years will be massive, possibly unprecedented, unemployment and a grotesque increase in poverty and hardship. This will last for several years. Eventually the Private Sector, less encumbered by high taxes and heavy regulation, will start to recover. The weak demand at home will force it to look overseas, probably to the East for markets and we will, very slowly, start to rebalance ourselves as a productive, export orientated country, rather as Germany did after its near-total destruction in 1945. This period will be the equivalent of the withdrawal symptoms experienced by our poor addict. It will be terrible. But eventually we will emerge as a strong trading nation again and then we can once again start to spend on “good” things but please, let’s use our own money this time.

Labour today are in total denial about all of this. They are still talking about maintaining public spending in order “not to threaten the recovery” If they are returned on Thursday then we are heading for Greece. The Tories may understand what is happening but are pretending they don’t. They are talking about saving on paperclips and government buildings when they should be admitting that carnage lies ahead. However, they are the only party that might, just might, grasp the nettle. Oh, Mrs Thatcher, where are you now that we REALLY need you?

So, like a turkey voting for Christmas, I shall put my cross next to the Tory candidate next Thursday.


Hugh