Six of the Best 564

"When he became leader of the Opposition, Corbyn was an unknown, even to his own side. Really, he was not of the Labour Party at all. He’s hardly followed the Labour whip, he disagreed with large amounts of what the party did when last in government, and he’s spent most of his time surrounded by a small coterie of like-minded outsiders." Jay Elwes on the takeover of Labour by a strange tribe.

Gordon Lishman writes writes about an economics motion the Social Liberal Forum will be submitting to the Liberal Democrat Conference.

You will find a good podcast about Labour's troubles on Political Betting.

"It almost seems as if the Chancellor doesn’t feel that improving house prices is possible. His range of policies set out in the Budget and Spending Review this year all point to him focussing on using public funds to ‘help’ people buy homes rather than improving market conditions. And, unsurprisingly, the problem is most acute in London." Joe Sarling explains how public funds are inflating the bubble in the capital's property prices.

Jim Holt reviews a new book on Sir Thomas Browne.

Footprints of London visits Churchill’s secret wartime facility at the former Down Street Underground station,

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Five news stories you don't get any more

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As you get older the world changes and fashion changes.

So, based on my childhood and teenage perceptions from the 1960s and 1970s, let me present my Five News Stories You Don't Get Any More.

1. Air disasters

Back in the 1970s the loss of a passenger jet with horrific casualties seemed to be a monthly occurrence. Today you hardly hear of them.

The figures in this CNN report suggest that this perception is correct.

2. Formula 1 drivers being killed

Again in the 1960s it seemed to be taken granted that several leading Formula 1 drivers would die each season.

Today that seems unthinkable. When Ayrton Senna died the shock went around the world.

This Wikipedia list of fatalities suggests my memory is a little exaggerated, but the pattern is clear.

3. Balance of payments crisis

When I first became old enough to watch or listen to the news and understand it, Britain's balance of payments crisis was a near permanent story.

By the time I came to study A level Economics we had discovered 'invisible exports' and were less worried.

Today you never hear the balance of payments mentioned.

4. Ever younger children swimming the English Channel

Once skinny little figures shivering in goose grease appeared regularly in the news. Today you never see them.

It turns out that the Channel Swimming Association imposed a minimum age of 16 years in 2000, which means that the record is likely to stay with Thomas Gregory, who made the crossing in 1988 aged 11 years and 336 days.

5. Japanese soldiers emerging from the jungle not knowing World War II was over

This was another popular story. I was surprised to find that two elderly Japanese soldiers were found hiding out on a Philippine island as recently as 2005.

Who knows? There may still be more out there.

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How Thatcherites and Blairites buggered up Britain between them

I have a soft spot for The Age of Insecurity, a 1998 book by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson.

In part this is because, having bought a copy and sat down to read it, I found that I was quoted in it.

Since you ask, that quote runs:

In a letter to the Guardian on 15 September 1997, Jonathan Calder wrote: "Labour is effectively recasting unemployment as a form of individual delinquency."

So I can claim to have identified early on a trend that has continued right up to Iain Duncan Smith and his Work Capability Assessments.

The other reason I like the books is that it central analysis still seems spot on.

Elliott and Atkinson argue that the supposed rise of freedom in the two decades before they wrote was only for freedom of a particular sort.

Money had certainly been set free by measures such as the abolition of exchange controls, but people actually enjoyed less freedom. That freedom had been eroded both by the Thatcherite war on unions and job security and by New Labour's enthusiasm for policing private life.

As they wrote:

The citizen now fears not only the P45 and the UB40, but the knock on the door from the child welfare inspector.

Again, that analysis seems prophetic today in a world where money travels the globe in microseconds and refugees die in the attempt to cross national borders.

I thought of The Age of Insecurity today when I read a post on the always excellent Stumbling and Mumbling blog: Workplace Coercion.

In it Chris Dillow ("Rutland's leading economic thinker"), who writes the blog, quotes the Guardian report of working conditions at Sports Direct:

All warehouse workers are kept onsite at the end of each shift in order to undergo a compulsory search by Sports Direct security staff, with the experience of the Guardian reporters suggesting this typically adds another hour and 15 minutes to the working week – which is unpaid.

He then asks why right-wing lovers of freedom are never heard criticising such arrangements.

Is it that they believe the labour markets function as the economic textbooks say they should? Is it that they fear any intervention in those markets will make things worse?

Or is it - and my money's on this one - that they care only about freedom for bosses, and not freedom for all.

The way that New Labour has contribute to the insecurity of the average Briton was also discussed in a Guardian article today by Tom Clark.

Clark argues that successful prime ministers - and he gives Attlee and Thatcher as examples - first argue against the conventional wisdom, then establish a new consensus and finally frame laws and institutions that cement it for years after they have stood down.

He goes on:

Now think of the apologetic nervousness with which New Labour did great things. Within a few years of passing the Human Rights Act, Jack Straw found it expedient to begin rubbishing it – so today Conservatives can now sound respectable in proposing to rip it up. 

Gordon Brown goaded the Tories into voting for the abolition of child poverty, but because nobody outside of Westminster was engaged in that argument, the Tories can today move the goalposts by redefining a poverty measure just before the poverty rate surges. 

New Labour’s tax credits dressed redistribution up as a tax cut. At the same time, the party indulged suspicions about welfare cheats with endless headlines about dedicated hotlines to dob in neighbours for swinging the lead, or lie detectors in jobcentres.

He concludes:

as Labour in parliament looks on in bewilderment at a voluntary party that appears to have lost all appetite for office, it should give some thought to the doctrine of power at any price, and the transient nature of its legacy.

That is unfair to Labour activists, most of who very much want power even if they have opted for a wrongheaded strategy of winning it.

But Clark is right that New Labour ducked arguments and tried to do good while sounding as though it was being nasty to people.

I think New Labour saw this as a way of keeping the middle classes happy, but its effect has been to bolster just those strands in working-class and lower middle-class thinking that make people unwilling to vote Labour.

But then me and Larry and Dan could have told you that almost 20 years ago.

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Alistair Darling: From Black Dwarf to Morgan Stanley

Photo: Scottish Republican Socialist Movement

From BBC News:

Morgan Stanley has said former Chancellor Alistair Darling will join the bank's board of directors. 

Mr Darling, who served as the Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2007 to 2010, will take up the role in January ... 

Morgan Stanley's chief executive James Gorman said the US bank would "greatly benefit from his experience." 

"He brings strong leadership experience, as well as insight into both the global economy and the global financial system," said Mr Gorman. 

In 2014 members of Morgan Stanley's board of directors received $75,000 (£49,960) a year plus an additional $10,000 to $30,000 for leading or joining a committee within the board. Each board member also received $250,000 in stock awards.

All of which gives me an excuse to wheel out this blog's favourite quote from George Galloway.

Here he is reminiscing in the Daily Record in March 2008:

When I first met him 35 years ago Darling was pressing Trotskyite tracts on bewildered railwaymen at Waverley Station in Edinburgh. He was a supporter of the International Marxist Group, whose publication was entitled the Black Dwarf. 

Later, in preparation for his current role he became the treasurer of what was always termed the rebel Lothian Regional Council. Faced with swinging government spending cuts which would have decimated the council services or electorally ruinous increases in the rates, Alistair came up with a creative wheeze. 

The council, he said, should refuse to set a rate or even agree a budget at all, plunging the local authority into illegality and a vortex of creative accounting leading to bankruptcy. 

Surprisingly, this strategy had some celebrated friends. There was "Red Ted" Knight, the leader of Lambeth council, in London, and Red Ken Livingstone newly elected leader of Greater London Council. Red Ally and his friends around the Black Dwarf were for a time a colourful part of the Scottish left. 

The late Ron Brown, Red Ronnie as he was known, was Alistair's bosom buddy. He was thrown out of Parliament for placing a placard saying hands off Lothian Region on Mrs Thatcher's despatch box while she was addressing the House. And Darling loved it at the time. 

The former Scottish trade union leader Bill Speirs and I were dispatched by the Scottish Labour Party to try and talk Alistair Darling down from the ledge of this kamikaze strategy, pointing out that thousands of workers from home helps to headteachers would lose their jobs as a result and that the council leaders - including him - would be sequestrated, bankrupted and possibly incarcerated. How different things might have been. 

Anyway, I well remember Red Ally's denunciation of myself as a "reformist", then just about the unkindest cut I could have imagined.

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Jersey is "heading towards bankruptcy"

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Oliver Bullough writes in the Guardian today:

Jersey looks rich – but it is heading towards bankruptcy. 

In April, officials announced that the budget would be short £125m a year by 2019. “What went wrong?” asked the Jersey Evening Post. And that was just the start of it. By June, the annual deficit – now known on the island as the “black hole” – had been revised upwards to £145m, more than £1 in every five that the government spends. 

“The black hole is so big,” according to Connect, a Jersey business magazine, that “filling it will take the equivalent of shutting down every school in the island, laying off every teacher, letting the parks turn into overgrown jungles and having our roads literally fall apart.” 

That is quite a hole, and the question is, how can Jersey fill it? The solutions are not pretty: voluntary redundancies, compulsory redundancies, new taxes, fewer public services. 

Jersey bet its future on finance, allowing its other industries to shrivel, in the belief that it could live well in perpetuity from moving other people’s money around. If that belief was false, then does its fate await another island off the coast of France – one that has also pledged its future to finance? 

In short, is Jersey’s worrying present Britain’s bleak future?

It is also worth quoting a Telegraph article by Gordon Rayner that appeared during the abortive investigation of child abuse on the island:

One more disturbing question presents itself in the light of the child abuse scandal: just why, on a such a small and supposedly idyllic island, did so many hundreds of children end up in care homes? 

The answer lies in another little-publicised fact about Jersey - its unexpectedly high level of poverty, which brings with it the sort of social problems that lead to children being taken into care. 

Although Jersey, with its £250 billion financial industry, has the second-highest gross domestic product per capita in Europe, the island's wealth is largely held by the privileged few. Some 13,000 people - more than one in seven - live in social rental properties, Jersey's equivalent of council houses, and half of all households suffer from one or more of the internationally recognised measures for relative poverty. 

The crumbling 1960s council estates of St Helier are testament to the years of neglect. Rusting cars rot on rubbish-strewn drives, windows have bedsheets for curtains and the paint is peeling off walls and doorframes. "This place is run by the finance industry for the finance industry," says one resident. "Anyone else just doesn't count."

And if the finance industry fails, what will become of the islanders then?

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Six of the Best 555

"The key to reducing the risk of more floods like those in Carlisle is to realise that conventional 'flood defence' can never provide security against the ever more extreme weather events that global warming will bring. We must embrace natural solutions to holding back flood waters: more trees; and bring back the beavers!" Oliver Tickell is right.

Dawud Islam looks at the lessons of Oldham West: "All of us from Tim downwards need to hasten the roll out of our new direction and messages. Only when we finally give people something to vote for will the strains of the ‘lost deposits’ songs start to fade into the distance."

Ben Schiller explains how Finland's basic income scheme will work.

"To understand the complexities of the ongoing eurozone crisis, we need to analyze culture, since culture and history shape how policies are accepted, rejected, or modified," says Séamus Power looking at Ireland.

The inventor of Blue Peter has been forgotten because of the glorious, if tyrannical reign of Biddy Baxter. Andrew Martin introduces us to John Hunter Blair.

A London Inheritance goes in search of Park Row - a lost Knightsbridge street.

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John Lanchester on the London housing crisis

John Lanchester is the author of the novel Capital, which is currently being dramatised on BBC One.

Here he is interviewed about London's housing crisis, its social impacts and its consequences for ordinary citizens who can no longer afford to live in their capital city.

Whoops!, Lanchester's nonfiction account of the financial crash, is well worth reading.

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Tim Farron sounds the right note on economics

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Tim Farron gave a major speech on economics at the Institute for Public Policy Research in London on Thursday.

He set out three principles which he said will govern Liberal Democrat economic policy for the next five years:

• Invest now in infrastructure 
• Back enterprise 
• Take the long view

His take on the second principle is particularly good:

The fact is that the Tories aren’t really pro-free market capitalism at all. They are pro-corporate capitalism. 

They are there to fight not for entrepreneurs, not for innovators who oil the wheels of the market, but for the status quo. 

Don’t believe me? Look, not at what they say, but what they do. 

An opportunity to cut taxes on business? Go for corporation tax to benefit the very largest of companies, not help small start-ups to grow. 

An opportunity to diversify the energy sector? Withdraw the subsidies for renewables that would give small start-ups the opportunity to challenge the big six energy companies. 

An opportunity to change banking as the major shareholder in RBS? 

Rather than use the chance to create a real, diverse, regional banking sector, sell the stake at a loss and keep the bank intact as yet another too-big-to-fail institution, ill-equipped to finance small businesses.

This manages to sound anti-Conservative without sounding soggy or socialist or corporatist.

At the same time, it poses a challenge to economic liberals in our party.

For economic liberalism should be a radical creed. It should involve the breaking up of monopolies and the introduction of competition of markets that are dominated by a few big players.

Too often, however, they make it sound like a slightly exasperated defence of the status quo. They give the impression that they resent any questioning existing concentrations of power in the economy.

Tim's speech points a way forward for all Liberal Democrats. I hope the party will unite around it.

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