How could they tell?

Run out of money? Just print some more! “Quantitive easing” is scarcely new, even if now done electronically rather than with ink and paper. In current economic circumstances the obvious economic effect – inflation – is likely to be muted. I have never seen deflation before and few alive in the UK have. Stagflation, yes. Enough quantitive easing and we can eventually get back to stagflation. Meantime, thanks to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown for bringing us a new experience.

But while the inflationary effect is likely to be overwhelmed by deflation, the redistributive effect of quantitive easing will be alive and kicking. By inventing more money, there is an effect – not as simple as it sounds but very real – of reducing the value of existing money, to the detriment of those who have some, and redistributing value to those who get the new money.

This is the Zimbabwe solution, where Mugabe’s regime prints ever more zeros denominated notes, which of course go massively disproportionately to the military and regime members. They have the additional advantages of being able to change them at a hugely advantageous “official” excahnge rate open only to them.

And in Brown’s Zimbabwe solution, who are the equivalent of the regime members, those who benefit from the game at the expense of you and me? Why, exactly the same beneficiaries who have already received over £15,000 from every man, woman and child in the country in various rescue measures and guarantees – the banks!

Yes folks, the 75 billion, and perhaps 150 biilion, of newly invented money is to go to the banks, in return for some pretty worthless bonds, in the hope that somehow the banks will lend it out responsibly to businesses and “Kickstart” the economy. As opposed to pay it out in massive bonuses to themselves, use it to hide their incredible bundles of “toxic debt” and invest it in dubous financial instruments, which is how they have wasted all the huge amounts of taxpayer cash they have been fed so far.

Brown’s blind faith in the baking system which he deregulated and allowed to go rotten, is the modern “trickledown economics”. The government hopes if they pump enough money into the banks, it will trickle out again and do something useful. The main useful thing they hope it will do is reinflate the bubble of our ludicrously inflated property market. In fact that would not be useful at all. If you have been the victim of a pyramid scam, it is not a good idea to try to repair your finances by joining another one.

Brown’s fawning Washington trip attempted to show him leading the World in economic recovery. In fact there are big differences between Brown’s plans – under which 95% of “economic rescue” financing is pumped straight to fatcat bankers – and Obama’s $719 billion rescue package which involves a great deal of direct job creation by old fashioned Keynsian public works. The “pork barrel” elements of tacking on pet projects to get Obama’s bill through Congress was not especially unhelpful in this instance.

It would be far, far better to let the UK banks go bust. Firstly the bastards deserved it. A system where the fatcats take the profits and you and I fund their losses is completely unacceptable. It is worth noting that even in the Royal Bank of Scotland the UK retail banking operation was highly profitable as a stand alone operation, so these elements could be rescued.

It would have cost the government less to give everyone their bank deposits back than it has cost to try to save the rotten corrupt structures.

Instead, a family of four now has a national debt share of £140,000, and increasing by £5,000 a month. Yet the only jobs saved have been those of City – not retail, they were profitable anyway – City bankers, plus their lap dancers and cocaine suppliers. Meanwhile ordinary people are starting to lose their jobs by the drove.

In Dundee, the twelve employees of Prisme Packaging were told this week they were immediately redundant, and there was no cash to pay statutory redundancy payments. Gordon Brown and the Bank of England strangely didn’t offer to print any money for them.

David Mills has been given a jail sentence in Italy for corruption, though sadly he will probably escape jail as the rich and well connected normally do.

Tessa Jowell actively participated in the laundering of the corrupt payments from Silvio Berlusconi, given to her husband David Mills in return for false testimony in court to cover up some of Berlusconi’s endless crooked dealings. Tessa Jowell participated as a full partner in the three time remortgaging of her home, paying off the mortgage with cash and then remortgaging. She has stated that there was “Nothing unusual” in this.

Most people would think it was very unusual to be able to pay off a large mortgage with cash at all. To do it twice and remortgage again each time would strike most of us as very weird indeed.

Which illustrates the gap between the hierarchy of “New Labour” and the “Hard working families” who are Gordon Brown’s favourite soundbite. This is illustrated by Mills’ description of £500,000 as “not very much”.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/feb/17/david-mills-berlusconi-trial-letter

This is of a piece with Jacqui Smith’s ripping off the taxpayer of £150,000 by pretending her sister’s home is her main residence, then wondering what the fuss is about. That would be ten year’s salary for the British soldier killed today in Afghanistan.

Nobody who reads Mills’ letter to his accountant (above link) can doubt that he is a crook. This particular Berlusconi deal was just one part of his bent practice, which included the financial arrangements for organised crime in Italy to sell on infected and condemned human blood from the USA into transfusion services in Europe. Tessa Jowell lived off these criminal earnings for decades and actively participated in laundering the cash.

Either Jowell did not notice she was living with a major criminal – in which case she is far too stupid to be a minister – or she was complicit – in which case she is far too corrupt to be a minister.

No ifs or buts are possible.

Only when Mills was exposed to the media did Jowell abandon her husband – sacrificing her marriage for her political career. If she had remained loyal to him it would have at least been some slight saving grace. In fact the woman is a total disgrace.

There is no doubt that New Labour gives not a fig for individual liberty, so the banning by the money-grabbing Jacqui Smith of Geert Wilders is run-of-the-mill – but it is still both wrong and dangerous, and has whipped up precisely the kind of frenzy about his Melanie Phillips like gibberings which Smith claimed to be trying to avoid.

It was equally wrong to ban Yusuf al-Qaradawi. I just heard the BBC World Service conduct some unusually good interviews with political figures, where those who opposed the banning of Wilders (eg Baroness Cox) supported the banning of al-Qaradwi, while those who opposed the banning of al-Qaradwi (eg Ken Livingstone) supported the banning of Wilders. Both sides argue, equally unconvincingly, that the man they dislike may incite to violence.

The BBC appeared unable to find any supporter of the principle of freedon of expression.

There was no reason to suppose that either Wilders or al-Qaradwi planned any unlawful activity in the UK, and had they done so they might properly have been arrested. But the gut instincts of New Labour are viciously authoritarian. Those of all views who value liberty should unite to resist them. The problem is, the number of people who really do believe in liberty for those with whom they disagree, appears to have grown exceedingly small.

The nauseating smugness of the Davos gathering is sickening enough at the best of times. In these very bad times, it is unbearable. The idea that we just need to recover confidence and get credit moving again, was precisely what the promoters of the South Seas and Darien schemes said when those schemes collapsed. The Church of England were quite right to characterise New Labour’s proposed remedies as “An addict returning to his drug”.

Brown’s extraordinary reliance on paid advisers from the merchant banks themselves to devise the way forward is laughable – not to mention the hideously unpleasant Baroness Vedera, one of the endless stream of democratically unaccountable Brown cronies parachuted into the Lords as ministers. And if one more penny of public money gets put into the banks without all bank bosses and staff being put on civil service pay rates, I am organising a tax strike.

Am in the middle of moving house, so no more from me until the end of the week.

The disgusting Lord Taylor of Blackburn, who together with Justice Secretary Jack Straw forms the chief parliamentary support for the stinkingly corrupt BAE arms company, has been caught out demanding £120,000 to peddle his New Labour influence in the House of Lords.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/labour/4339198/Labour-Lords-how-peer-allegedly-offered-to-bend-the-rules-for-120000-fee.html

As ever, this blog was there first – eighteen months ago. We have in fact been all over Lord Scumbag like a rash. These are essential reading as background to the current scandal:

http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2007/08/theres_good_mon.html#comments

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/08/more_lord_scumb.html

I think this passage I wrote in 2007 has been roundly vindicated:

Straw’s links with BAE are partly conducted through Lord Taylor of Blackburn, the former leader of the Blackburn with Darwen Council that includes Straw’s Blackburn constituency. Lord Taylor, an archetypal New Labour apparatchik from Straw’s constituency machine, has lived off the taxpayer in Labour Party appointed posts all his life. He is now chiefly known as the second highest claimer of expenses in the House of Lords. In 2005 Lord Taylor claimed over ‘57,000 of tax-free expenses, over three times the average claim of under ‘19,000. he spoke 15 times in the year.

But he doesn’t really need that public money anymore, as the grasping creep Taylor is the primary conduit between the defence industry and New Labour. He has been a highly paid “Consultant” to BAE for over a decade. He also has used some of that money to make major contributions to Jack Straw’s election expenses in his Blackburn constituency, declared by Straw in the Register of Member’s interests. Lord Taylor also regularly makes large contributions to fund Blackburn New Labour. When I stood against Straw in Blackburn at the last election, Taylor was present with Straw at a black tie event hosted by BAE in the constituency said to be “unrelated to the election”.

Interestingly, this year in the House of Lords’ Register of Members’ interests, BAE has disappeared from Taylor’s list of eleven paid consultancies and two paid directorships. It might be interesting to dig for links between these companies and BAE. Some are certainly arms firms – including the highly sinister Electronic Data Systems.

EDS is another of the arms companies that has made many billions from the Iraq war. Among their many current defence contracts is a $12 billion project on electronic systems for the US armed forces. Presumably a well-plugged in New Labour apparatchik like Lord Taylor was of no hindrance to EDS in March 2005 when they landed a ‘2.5 billion contract from the UK MOD for a similar project. Indeed, if Lord Taylor cannot help swing that kind of contract, why are EDS paying him?

I do not have power of words sufficiently to condemn the institutional sleaze of a system where a scumbag like Lord Taylor can be put, unelected, by Labour into a seat for life in the national legislature. There, while a legislator, he can act as a well paid and highly connected lobbyist for the arms industry. As someone who has been deeply patriotic, I must now say that I find myself unable to have any pride in my own country any longer.

I do hope the old war profiteer finally gets put away behind bars. But with his long term partner Jack Straw as so-called Minister of Justice…

Allowing influence to party hacks like Taylor is of course exactly why New Labour is 100% against democratic reform of the House of Lords. Now your essay question: examine the facts about Lord Taylor in the light of the analysis of the control of policy by specific interests by J A Hobson in the blog entry below.

One of the purposes of this blog is to reconnect my readers with our heritage of British radical thought. These ideas were very much part of the intellectual mainstream, but in my lifetime that mainstream has been drastically narrowed by the control of media and of education by the very interests and methods that will be described in this entry.

Since I posted this extract two years ago the readership of this blog has expanded greatly, and those who were with me two years ago will benefit from a refresh. This is an extract from Imperialism: A Study (written in 1901) by the great and sadly neglected Liberal economist J A Hobson. Since my teens he has been one of the most profound influences on my own thinking.

Those who have read The Catholic Orangemen will understand that a consistent Hobsonian analysis underpinned my actions in Africa regarding both mercenary and British military and financial involvement there.

More fundamentally, Hobson’s profound and clear analysis is simply applied to Cheney and Halliburton, BAE and most of the other evils against which we are still struggling today.

Seeing that the Imperialism of the last three decades is clearly condemned as a business policy, in that at enormous expense it has procured a small, bad, unsafe increase of markets, and has jeopardised the entire wealth of the nation in rousing the strong resentment of other nations, we may ask, “How is the British nation induced to embark upon such unsound business?” The only possible answer is that the business interests of the nation as a whole are subordinated to those of certain sectional interests that usurp control of the national resources and use them for their private gain. This is no strange or monstrous charge to bring; it is the commonest disease of all forms of government. The famous words of Sir Thomas More are as true now as when he wrote them: “Everywhere do I perceive a certain conspiracy of rich men seeking their own advantage under the name and pretext of the commonwealth.”

I.IV.1

Although the new Imperialism has been bad business for the nation, it has been good business for certain classes and certain trades within the nation. The vast expenditure on armaments, the costly wars, the grave risks and embarrassments of foreign policy, the stoppage of political and social reforms within Great Britain, though fraught with great injury to the nation, have served well the present business interests of certain industries and professions.

I.IV.2

It is idle to meddle with politics unless we clearly recognise this central fact and understand what these sectional interests are which are the enemies of national safety and the commonwealth. We must put aside the merely sentimental diagnosis which explains wars or other national blunders by outbursts of patriotic animosity or errors of statecraft. Doubtless at every outbreak of war not only the man in the street but the man at the helm is often duped by the cunning with which aggressive motives and greedy purposes dress themselves in defensive clothing. There is, it may be safely asserted, no war within memory, however nakedly aggressive it may seem to the dispassionate historian, which has not been presented to the people who were called upon to fight as a necessary defensive policy, in which the honour, perhaps the very existence, of the State was involved.

I.IV.3

The disastrous folly of these wars, the material and moral damage inflicted even on the victor, appear so plain to the disinterested spectator that he is apt to despair of any State attaining years of discretion, and inclines to regard these natural cataclysms as implying some ultimate irrationalism in politics. But careful analysis of the existing relations between business and politics shows that the aggressive Imperialism which we seek to understand is not in the main the product of blind passions of races or of the mixed folly and ambition of politicians. It is far more rational than at first sight appears. Irrational from the standpoint of the whole nation, it is rational enough from the standpoint of certain classes in the nation. A completely socialist State which kept good books and presented regular balance-sheets of expenditure and assets would soon discard Imperialism; an intelligent laissez-faire democracy which gave duly proportionate weight in its policy to all economic interests alike would do the same. But a State in which certain well-organised business interests are able to outweigh the weak, diffused interest of the community is bound to pursue a policy which accords with the pressure of the former interests.

I.IV.4

In order to explain Imperialism on this hypothesis we have to answer two questions. Do we find in Great Britain to-day any well-organised group of special commercial and social interests which stand to gain by aggressive Imperialism and the militarism it involves? If such a combination of interests exists, has it the power to work its will in the arena of politics?

I.IV.5

What is the direct economic outcome of Imperialism? A great expenditure of public money upon ships, guns, military and naval equipment and stores, growing and productive of enormous profits when a war, or an alarm of war, occurs; new public loans and important fluctuations in the home and foreign Bourses; more posts for soldiers and sailors and in the diplomatic and consular services; improvement of foreign investments by the substitution of the British flag for a foreign flag; acquisition of markets for certain classes of exports, and some protection and assistance for trades representing British houses in these manufactures; employment for engineers, missionaries, speculative miners, ranchers and other emigrants.

I.IV.6

Certain definite business and professional interests feeding upon imperialistic expenditure, or upon the results of that expenditure, are thus set up in opposition to the common good, and, instinctively feeling their way to one another, are found united in strong sympathy to support every new imperialist exploit.

How do they do it?

In view of the part which the non-economic factors of patriotism, adventure, military enterprise, political ambition, and philanthropy play in imperial expansion, it may appear that to impute to financiers so much power is to take a too narrowly economic view of history. And it is true that the motor-power of Imperialism is not chiefly financial: finance is rather the governor of the imperial engine, directing the energy and determining its work: it does not constitute the fuel of the engine, nor does it directly generate the power. Finance manipulates the patriotic forces which politicians, soldiers, philanthropists, and traders generate; the enthusiasm for expansion which issues from these sources, though strong and genuine, is irregular and blind; the financial interest has those qualities of concentration and clear-sighted calculation which are needed to set Imperialism to work. An ambitious statesman, a frontier soldier, an overzealous missionary, a pushing trader, may suggest or even initiate a step of imperial expansion, may assist in educating patriotic public opinion to the urgent need of some fresh advance, but the final determination rests with the financial power. The direct influence exercised by great financial houses in “high politics” is supported by the control which they exercise over the body of public opinion through the Press, which, in every “civilised” country, is becoming more and more their obedient instrument. While the specifically financial newspaper imposes “facts” and “opinions” on the business classes, the general body of the Press comes more and more under the conscious or unconscious domination of financiers. The case of the South African Press, whose agents and correspondents fanned the martial flames in this country, was one of open ownership on the part of South African financiers, and this policy of owning newspapers for the sake of manufacturing public opinion is common in the great European cities. In Berlin, Vienna, and Paris many of the influential newspapers are held by financial houses, which use them, not primarily to make direct profits out of them, but in order to put into the public mind beliefs and sentiments which will influence public policy and thus affect the money market. In Great Britain this policy has not gone so far, but the alliance with finance grows closer every year, either by financiers purchasing a controlling share of newspapers, or by newspaper proprietors being tempted into finance. Apart from the financial Press, and financial ownership of the general Press, the City notoriously exercises a subtle and abiding influence upon leading London newspapers, and through them upon the body of the provincial Press, while the entire dependence of the Press for its business profits upon its advertising columns involves a peculiar reluctance to oppose the organised financial classes with whom rests the control of so much advertising business. Add to this the natural sympathy with a sensational policy which a cheap Press always manifests, and it becomes evident that the Press is strongly biassed towards Imperialism, and lends itself with great facility to the suggestion of financial or political Imperialists who desire to work up patriotism for some new piece of expansion.

I.IV.40

Such is the array of distinctively economic forces making for Imperialism, a large loose group of trades and professions seeking profitable business and lucrative employment from the expansion of military and civil services, from the expenditure on military operations, the opening up of new tracts of territory and trade with the same, and the provision of new capital which these operations require, all these finding their central guiding and directing force in the power of the general financier.

I.IV.41

The play of these forces does not openly appear. They are essentially parasites upon patriotism, and they adapt themselves to its protecting colours. In the mouths of their representatives are noble phrase, expressive of their desire to extend the area of civilisation, to establish good government, promote Christianity, extirpate slavery, and elevate the lower races. Some of the business men who hold such language may entertain a genuine, though usually a vague, desire to accomplish these ends, but they are primarily engaged in business, and they are not unaware of the utility of the more unselfish forces in furthering their ends. Their true attitude of mind is expressed by Mr. Rhodes in his famous description of “Her Majesty’s Flag” as “the greatest commercial asset in the world.”*20

The entire book is available online.

http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Hobson/hbsnImp.html

It is deeply saddening to me how much of the great heritage of Liberal thought is now neglected. I do hope you will take a look and see just how little we have learnt in the ensuing 100 years.