Scotland's figures just don't add up

Dodgy statistics dog the Scottish independence debate. How will an independent nation survive without North Sea oil revenue if the wells run dry? Can it survive financially even with the oil money?

I’ve had a look at some of the figures and all I can say is it’s no wonder the politicians on either side of the great divide can’t agree on anything.
For instance, HMRC has tried to split up its revenue by country.

On the basis of HMRC’s sums, Scotland delivered tax receipts of £42 billion in 2012-13, nine per cent of all UK tax revenues, if you include North Sea oil revenue (£37.8 billion, or 8.2 per cent, if you don’t).

But the BBC says Scottish revenue was £53 billion in the same year.

Curiously or not, this is the sum the Scottish Government also says the country raised in the same financial year.

There is, therefore, a huge gap between the supposed income from taxes in Scotland claimed by its Government and the sum claimed by HMRC.

SNP leader Alex Salmond says Scotland generated tax revenues, in 2012-13, £800 higher per head than the UK as a whole.

‘For every one of the last 33 years, tax receipts have been higher in Scotland than the UK,’ he said.

That’s questionable. What is less debatable is that Scotland’s public sector spends more than the rest of the UK per head. Again the figures vary wildly but one version puts the figures at £10,125 per head in Scotland compared with £8,788 in England.

Another has it at £12,300 for Scotland, £11,000 for the UK as a whole.

The UK Treasury says Scotland gets 14-16 per cent of Government spending; the Scottish Government puts it at 10-12 per cent.

What is less in dispute is that Scotland spent £65.2 billion in 2012-13. That’s a deficit of £12.1 billion (or considerably more depending on where you start from).

Still, the UK is overspending too, so what does it matter?

Well, Scotland’s deficit, even if you give the Scots all the oil money, represents 9.3 per cent of the UK national debt. Yet its population is only 8.3 per cent of the population.

That means the country is earning less and spending more than the nation as a whole. The UK overspent in 2012-13 by £2,031 per head; Scotland overspent by £2,285 per head.

It’s not a yawning chasm but it means Scotland is about 12 per cent more profligate than the UK as a whole even if you hand the country all the oil revenue.
If the oil dries up, it will have to borrow more money to balance the books – or it will have to impose the sort of spending cuts Mr Salmond rules out at every opportunity.

The Treasury’s Office for Budgetary Responsibility reckons North Sea oil revenue will fall from £5.581 billion in 2012-13 to between £3.6 billion and £3.2 billion over the next few years to 2019.

Luckily the Scottish Government has the answer.

The Scottish Government has decided its oil revenues won’t decline at all, or only by a small amount. Its statistics claim oil money will come in at between £4.8 billion (a fall of £900 million) and £8 billion (an increase of £2.5 billion).

Of course if we could predict future oil prices we’d all be millionaires. But as the Scots seem interested only in short-term pain or gain, it’s a pity, if not an impending national tragedy, that the numbers vary so wildly.

It is no wonder the two sides of the independence argument can’t agree on anything.

The quantitative mercy is definitely strained

I’m still exercised by the £375 billion the Bank of England conjured out of thin air, called quantitative easing, and used allegedly to prop up our ailing economy after the crash of 2007-8.

This money was supposed to go to British businesses to encourage investment in new ventures. It hasn’t done that. So what has happened to it?
Some went to prop up the balance sheets of our appalling banks, whose bosses should not enjoy multi-million pound bonuses and pay-offs but should instead be in jail.

That may explain away the whole lot. But here’s another answer. A lot of it has gone to blow up a housing bubble which is still inflating.

This is Chancellor George Osborne’s master-plan for winning the next General Election. All home-buyers (mostly Tory voters, after all) like rising house prices.
We can sell at a profit, we can borrow against our rising equity, we love all this unearned wealth sloshing around us, especially if we live in London.

What’s not to like? Well, apart from the fact that every bubble bursts eventually. And rising prices mean young people are condemned to rent for years to come unless they have rich mummies and daddies. And it creates a totally artificial impression of the true state of the economy.

While we are certainly better off than our Eurozone neighbours, manufacturing is now in decline again and exports are stalled – mainly because of the recession in said Eurozone. They will be dumping goods here while we can’t sell anything across the English Channel because no-one apart from the Germans has any money.

QE has been squandered on house price rises because, as houses are classed as assets, they do not count towards the rate of inflation. That means they can inflate away at 25 per cent a year and officially, according to the august experts at the Bank of England, the rate of inflation remains unchanged (apart from some small adjustments).

This is why we had rampant house price inflation, ridiculous lending decisions and low interest rates before the crash. And why they have come back to haunt us, fuelled by the Bank’s artificial, made-up, fictional £375 billion of printed paper.

I have reached this conclusion by looking at the figures for lending put out by the Council of Mortgage Lenders. These show that in the 12 months between July last year and this June, home loans totalled £198,149,000,000 (call it £198 billion).

In the depths of the recession, mortgage lending slumped. In 2007, just before we all fell off the bank-made cliff, loans totalled £362 billion. They were as much as £253 billion the following year.

By 2009 they had slumped to £143 billion and fallen to £135 billion in 2010, when the Coalition Government was first elected.

Since then lending has risen every year: £141 billion in 2011, £145 billion in 2012, £176 billion in 2013.

If we take £135 billion as the base line, it means lending over that figure has risen by £6 billion + £10 billion + £41 billion + (by the end of this year an estimated minimum of) £45 billion. That comes to £102 billion.

At a time when financial institutions are supposedly strapped for cash, where have all these billions come from? The answer has to be QE.

Of course some additional lending would have taken place anyway and it is not running at the kind of level we saw a decade ago. So you could argue this is just the natural pattern for an economic recovery.

That doesn’t seem terribly likely, however. For banks and buyers, house-price rises are still seen as the safe haven and sure bet they were for such a long time before it all went horribly wrong. And it’s true things never went as horribly wrong in Britain as they did in Ireland or the United States, for instance.

But rampant house-price inflation is not an acceptable way to create the illusion of economic recovery. It cannot last unless the Bank of England prints more money for mortgage-lenders to burn.

If the economy were really recovering, the Bank would have increased interest rates by now. That they haven’t done so has little or nothing to do with the official rate of inflation (which itself has no relationship with reality). It’s all about creating an illusion of well-being ahead of the next General Election.

If the bubble doesn’t burst and interest rates don’t rise (or even if they do by a quarter of a per cent or so), George Osborne will get the credit for rescuing the economy and the Tories might actually win the election.

The truth is, as usual, that they are just deferring the evil day when the QE money runs out and house prices have to return to some sort of normality. At which point, no doubt, the Bank will invent a few more tens of billions to keep the whole tottering edifice from crashing down.

• For more on how QE might affect the country, why not check out my novel ‘Murder on the Brussels Express’ where this distinctly unsexy subject plays a significant role in the plot?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Murder-Brussels-Express-Nigel-Hastilow-ebook/dp/B00HLQL1KY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409737382&sr=8-1&keywords=murder+on+the+brussels+express

The EU or The Killers?

Stunning revelation of the day – the EU’s health and safety rules almost cost me my brand new MP3 player. I lost one and bought a tiny ScanDisk replacement but it was so quiet it couldn’t be heard on a train or in the car. So, greatly disappointed, I decided to junk it and see about buying something more expensive (this one cost about £35 and I decided it was my own fault for trying to get one on the cheap). In passing I read some reviews of it on Amazon and one of them announced that because of EU health and safety regulations, it was set to play so quietly as to be almost inaudible. The advice was to re-set it to North America rather than Europe. I did that and, voila, it works pretty well. Pleased though I am to have found a simple solution to the problem, I am still gobsmacked that EU rules mean the thing was set in such a way that it couldn’t actually perform the task it was designed for. There are plenty of better reasons for despising Brussels and all its works, no doubt, but as I write this listening to The Killers at a reasonable volume, I can’t think of one.

UKIP - sticking two fingers up to Big Brother

The problem for the political establishment is that whenever it rubbishes UKIP or one of its candidates, Nigel Farage’s party remains more or less unaffected. It may even benefit from the attack.

While the BBC and its chums queue up to accuse UKIP of racism, sexism, homophobia or whatever, the voters actually react not against the party but against its critics.

The ‘thoughcrime’ accusations are calculated to encourage people to say ‘to hell with it, these UKIP people are only saying what plenty of us think privately but are forced to suppress’.

A vote for UKIT has therefore been turned into a vote against politically-correct thoughcrime. Voters are fed up of being told what they may and may not think and say. So a vote for UKIP becomes a vote for freedom of speech.

Of course, that freedom will be portrayed by the serried ranks of the political establishment as the freedom to be racist, homophobic or sexist and therefore described as unacceptable.

But most people don’t like being told what to do. We still, mistakenly in many ways, think of this as a free country. We may modify our views over a period of time but we don’t take kindly to being ordered to think and speak in certain ways.

So we rather like the idea that a political party can champion a politically-incorrect outlook – even when we don’t agree with what an individual may have said.

Discussion and debate are fine; people shouldn’t be shouted down and silenced simply for expressing an opinion which may be regarded these days as outlandish but which was received wisdom only a generation ago.

None of this has much to do with the European Union or with UKIP’s policies. It’s a revolt against the dictatorship of the establishment. It’s sticking up two fingers up at Big Brother. And it serves him right.

 

 

 

It's all a fix

Which is the more truly democratic - the European Union or the Eurovision Song Contest?

You kip if you want to; UKIP's not for turning

I’ve just had an email from David Cameron, along with trillions of others who haven’t managed to ditch his spam, insisting the Tories are the only party we can trust to deliver a referendum on the EU.
He has, not unreasonably, taken advantage of Ed Miliband’s announcement that a referendum would be unlikely under a Labour Government.
Miliband's decision is disappointing and somewhat perverse.
But now, with the Lib Dems led by a fully paid-up Citizen of Europe, you might think Dave’s pledge might be of some importance.
But after reneging on his ‘cast iron’ promise to hold a referendum following the signing away of more sovereignty in the Lisbon Treaty, surely any pledge has to be worthless.
He has seen the Referendum Bill thrown out in the Lords and shows no sign of trying to give it another chance. And anyway he decided to leave it to a backbench MP to push through rather than giving it the impetus of Government.
He has no idea of what ‘renegotiation’ he might achieve before putting it to a referendum (incidentally if there ever were a plebiscite we know with absolute certainty that he and his party would combine with Labour and the Lib-Dems to skew the question and campaign to keep Britain in Europe).
Cameron has also rejected the chance to hold a referendum before 2017 . There is no good reason why it couldn’t be held this year but the few brave souls in the Tory party who suggested it were comprehensively rubbished by their own colleagues.
The odds are slowly and deliberately being stacked against anyone who might campaign for withdrawal from the EU. But the chances of ever getting one are minimal.
There is only one party which could demolish this cosy consensus and force a referendum on the Europhile triumvirate taking it in turns to run this country under orders from Brussels and that’s UKIP.
Nigel Farage’s party may have its drawbacks – more than a few loose cannons, little money and even less organisation – but only UKIP would deliver a referendum.
The Conservatives have been a massive disappointment. Even William Hague seems to have gone native since his elevation to the Foreign Office.
You can argue about electoral tactics. A vote for UKIP may, in some places, be a vote for Labour. But that doesn’t matter any more because a Miliband Government will be scarcely any different from a Cameron-Clegg one anyway; certainly not in relation to the EU and that means in relation to everything from purchase taxes (VAT) to prisoners' rights.
Cameron is Blair by other means (only Gordon Brown, let’s not forget, stood between us and the Euro). But an overwhelming vote against the tripartite status quo would force at least two of the losers – Labour and Conservatives – into a reappraisal of their Europhile policies.
I still think UKIP should not fight every Westminster seat. It should enter into a constituency-by-constituency non-aggression pact with those MPs, whatever their colour, who pledge to support a referendum at the earliest possible date.
Complete withdrawal from the EU may be the aim but the first step is to secure a referendum. The bigger the UKIP vote – at Euro elections and at the General Election – the greater the pressure there will be on mainstream politicians to offer us a chance to escape the evil empire.
You kip if you want to; UKIP's not for turning.

EU rattles its sabres

The evil empire of the European Union is creating a confrontation with Russia over the Ukraine.
Step back and look at it from an historical perspective and you will see this is just another stage in the endless conflict between Germany and France on the one hand and Russia on the other.
Napoleon and Hitler tried to conquer Russia with force. Now their natural successor, the EU, is trying to do the same with economic power and crowd-pleasing diplomacy.
The Ukraine has never really been an independent, self-governing state and it does represent Russia’s bulwark against aggression from Western Europe.
No wonder it is suspicious of the EU’s intentions.
The protestors in the Ukraine are being used as pawns in an historic power-struggle. The EU is adopting its traditional approach to the struggle with the Russian bear, rattling its sanctions sabre and marshalling the big battalions of self-righteous “democracy”.
As if the EU knew anything about democracy and the will of the people - just look at Italy which has just installed its third unelected Prime Minister since Brussels decided trampling on the rights of the citizens was justifiable if it meant saving the Euro.
The EU should avoid any further involvement in Ukraine’s internal difficulties and give its people no cause to believe they would be happier or better off run from Brussels instead of Moscow.
It’s hard to imagine that 100 years on we could be heading for the kind of confrontation we thought had gone out of fashion after the demise of Kaiser Bill and the Tsar.

Tap turns on the water see the money flow

Just got this egregious little note from our Glorious Leader David Cameron and there are a few questions I’d ask if I had the chance. They include

·         As the people of Sunthorpe pointed out on Question Time, how come nobody noticed the floods until they affected the Home Counties?

·         Why is it only now that £5,000 repair grants have been made available? What’s so special about the Home Counties? Why not offer grants to everyone who has been flooded in the past 100 years?

·         Why are sandbags considered a solution? They are more or less useless under all circumstances.

·         Why are there more cuts on the way for the Environment Agency and why is Chris Smith still in charge of it?

·         And when things dry out a bit will all these promises about spending “whatever it takes” be forgotten – just as they were when we were flooded in 2007?

This is Dave’s missive, for what it’s worth:

This has been a tough week for Britain.

The wettest winter in two and a half centuries, some of the worst flooding in decades, and more severe weather on the way this weekend.

We're doing everything we can to help:

• Delivering extra pumps and sandbags
• Deploying the military wherever needed
• Providing additional support for local emergency services

We will do what is necessary to help families and communities get through this very difficult time - more information is available on the Environment Agency website if you are affected.

We will also help people rebuild their lives and get back on their feet after the flooding, with repair grants of up to £5,000 for homeowners and businesses affected by the floods, and further support for businesses and farms that have suffered.

Amidst all of this, as is so often the case, in the toughest of times we are seeing the best of Britain.

Visiting the affected areas this week, I saw the incredible hard work and dedication of our emergency services, the Environment Agency, local authority workers, councils and armed forces.

I also saw the most inspiring community spirit amongst the many volunteers who are rolling up their sleeves and helping out those in need.

Everyone involved in the relief effort deserves our heartfelt thanks. Please join me by leaving a message of support on Facebook.

It will take time, but together we will deal with these floods, get our country back on its feet and build a more resilient country for the future.

Please take a minute to say thanks to everyone who is working so hard to make that happen.

Nere is the newts: Sink or swim, you're on your own

In 2007 the Environment Agency pledged swift action to reduce the risk of further flood damage in the area of Broadway, Worcestershire, after that summer’s inundation.
They even held a road show and made glorious promises of all the money and effort they would be putting into their scheme.Seven years later, they have done next to nothing. Their website promises a scheme in March this year. That, we can reasonably assume, will bring further consultations and risk assessments about the potential damage to local flora and fauna.
The EA couldn’t even drain bathwater safely. So I am not surprised people in Somerset and elsewhere are beside themselves with fury at the agency’s ineptitude.

PS Since writing this I have looked at various EA reports on flood alleviation in this area.
The good news is that several 'tailored ecology surveys' have been carried out into the habitat for otters, water voles and white-clawed crayfish.
And even better is the news that 'an amphibian survey is also being carried out to identify the presence of great crested newts'.
The bad news is that the money earmarked actually to carry out a flood alleviation scheme in the area has now disappeared, dried up, gone down the plug-hole and otherwise evaporated. Unlike the water.

A song for Europe

As Britain prepares for this year’s Euro-elections, a new novel looks into the murky, secret origins of the European super-state.

With its origins in the chaos of Europe after the Second World War, the EU’s founding fathers were determined such devastation must never happen again.

But when it came to propaganda and brainwashing, did they learn from the Nazis?

Ex-MP Acton Trussell investigates the apparently straightforward murder of the country’s most famous headmasters.

It quickly becomes clear the murder was not the result of a burglary-gone-wrong.

As he delves into the secret past of the man

who was responsible for the education of no fewer than three Prime Ministers, he discovers more than he bargained for.
The story follows Trussell’s investigations to London, Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris and – finally – to Avignon.
He is only kept alive by the good offices of a “friend” but even then his life is increasingly in danger as he stumbles on a conspiracy to destroy the Bank of England, rob Britain of its independence and hand the profits to Russian gangsters.
Meanwhile his daughter is trying to win the Eurovision Song Contest for England.
Author Nigel Hastilow says: ‘With elections to the European Parliament taking place in 2014, it is worth asking ourselves how the powers-that-be managed to create what is now more or less a single super-state.
‘It may have developed by accident but the more you consider the EU’s slow, determined and inexorable progress towards “ever-closer union”, the more likely it seems we have allowed a super-state to be created by stealth.
‘Is it possible that a group of determined people, with the single goal of accumulating most of Europe’s power and wealth, could really have succeeded where tanks and bombs failed?
‘This novel considers these possibilities as its hero, Acton Trussell, tries to prove the innocence of a man convicted of murder.
‘My novel “Murder on the Brussels Express” is a political thriller. But you can tell it’s fiction because it also includes an English band which thinks it is in with a reasonable chance of winning the Eurovision Song Contest and we all know that’s never going to happen again.’

 

Murder on the Brussels Express is available in paperback edition (£9.95) from Halesowen Press, or Kindle edition (£5.00) on www.amazon.com.

For more information, e-mail halesowenpress@talktalk.net
or go to www.murderonthebrusselsexpress.co.uk

HS2 - blinding us with rocket science

This is what the Government is using to prove HS2 will bring health, wealth and happiness to the provinces. Can Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin or any of his civil servants actually decipher this and explain it to the rest of us?

London - a capital crime

Deutsche Bank describes Britain as “two nations” – an island of wealth within the M25 and a hinterland of poverty everywhere else.
This is the latest in a long line of pronouncements. The London Standard recently described London as “a world class city state attached to an Eastern European economy”.
Much of this is London-centric provincialism of the worst sort but, in so far as it’s true, it’s because the Great Wen is the seat of power and Londoners are so blind to life north of Watford they keep all the wealth and jobs for themselves.
Oliver Harvey, a Deutsche Bank economist, says economic output per person employed in London is roughly double the UK average; from 1997-2008 the difference in gross value added per person between London and the rest of the UK exploded from £10,000 to £18,000 and has remained roughly constant since then.
The biggest change, apparently, is that London is increasingly detached from the fortunes of the old industrial heartlands. The evidence also suggests that not only does London suffer less from recessions than the rest of the UK, it now tends to bounce back more quickly.
I'm not sure it's as bad as it appears. There are several reasons for this including the question of how you define London and, for that matter, a London business.
If KPMG does work in Germany, is the revenue generated allocated to London specifically or the UK in general? The answer is London because the Head Office is there but it is debatable if it should be credited to the London GVA account.
The fact is that London and the provinces are interdependent and it is misleading to suggest one could prosper without the other. 
More to the point, London may be doing well but much of its personal wealth is built on a wholly artificial house-price spiral which will one day kick people in the teeth (maybe when the Russians go broke); it's living costs are therefore exorbitant forcing up pay rates but resulting in lower standards of living; it is heavily dependent on migrant labour at exploitative, rock-bottom pay rates which create a downward spiral of poverty amid all this prosperity; and as the seat of Government, the centre for the media and the location of head offices, it is guilty of a self-congratulatory, self-justifying financial conspiracy against the rest of the country (no wonder the Scots want to escape). 
The answer is devolution of power, closure of most Government offices in London and their move to the provinces, no matter how much the civil servants kick and scream as did the BBC luvvies forced to move to Manchester.  
An example of the State bias towards London can be seen in the recent debate about arts funding. You will find London gets a vastly excessive subsidy at the expense of the provinces largely because the decision-makers prefer to go to the Opera in London than in Buxton.
The truth is that London-centric policies are denying the rest of the country an opportunity to compete.
A CBI study a few years ago showed State spending on rail transport in London was ten times per head the rate of spending in the provinces.
This simply reinforces the disparity between the capital and the rest, helping to create the vicious circle where it is perceived that the best facilities are in London and therefore sucking into the city all the talented people who would be happier, wealthier and wiser if they stayed well away from the M25.
We may be doomed to get HS2 but that is almost entirely for London's benefit – rich Londoners will be able to pay royal visits to Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds and still be back home in time to see the latest subsidised play at the laughably-named "national" theatre in London.
HS2 will also benefit London by spreading the commuter belt even further, allowing more poor saps to travel daily to the capital from the provinces to get to work.
It will suck more life out of reasonably prosperous cities like Birmingham but the CBI, city council etc short-sightedly think HS2 is a good idea because they would like the building work, the repair shops etc that it will bring.
Meanwhile the line is to arrive into Euston, that monstrous sixties carbuncle which is already jam-packed, instead of to St Pancras where you could easily change trains for Eurostar.
There is still no direct rail connection between the provinces and the Channel Tunnel even though we were promised such a thing long before the route was opened. Why is it assumed that provincials have no business heading to France or Belgium (and vice-versa)?
Meanwhile look at the scandal over a new "London airport". No doubt it will end up at Heathrow or, if not, at Boris Island.
Why is there any need for another London airport at all when the regional airports (Manchester, Birmingham, East Midlands, even Luton) could be expanded to deal with any genuine capacity demand perfectly easily?
This would spread prosperity around the country, it would be cheaper to achieve and less disruptive for Londoners. Yet the attitude seems to be – as always – that if it isn't in London it doesn't really exist.
London is guilty of creating a brain drain from the provinces as a result of this vicious circle. All major investment is London-centric (hell, even the blasted Olympics went to London; when Birmingham bid for them a few years ago, nobody outside the region had a good word to say for it – why? For that matter, why is the national football stadium in London?).
All this investment in London encourages businesses to headquarter there. That sucks in talented people. That, in turn, requires more state investment and so it goes on.
The regions' death spiral has to be broken but that would cost London money, jobs etc and as all the decision-makers are in London, it will never happen. Look at how little money Michael Heseltine has managed to wring out of the treasury for the Local Enterprise Partnerships as an example of the way London dominates and refuses to release any of the reins of power.
There is a chance that in the near future the Palace of Westminster will have to close for refurbishment and MPs will be obliged to meet elsewhere. It would be instructive to force them to meet in the provinces, away from London, and take the civil service with them. If that happened, you would suddenly see a boost in state spending in the area chosen as the seat of parliament because suddenly the people in power would be forced to look at the world from a different perspective.
The poverty in many old towns and cities, the joblessness, the lack of economic growth and the drain on the State that this represents (through benefits etc) are almost entirely due to the London-centric attitude of too many influential people in this country (petty London provincialism, even among exiled Scots, Brummies, Scousers etc).
A balanced economy requires a balanced attitude to London but that would require a massive withdrawal of public investment in the capital. This would be politically unacceptable in London because the place is so crowded already the voters would not put up with it.
Yet it is all an illusion: the City creates money out of thin air and, when it disappears, the provincial taxpayer has to bail out the banks while Londoners continue to receive their eye-watering bonuses while house prices are utterly absurd because London is now the money-laundering capital of the world, welcoming Russian crooks with suitcases full of cash stolen from a country which is in irreversible financial decline.
Pay rates may be lower in the provinces but if you judged the question by standard of living and one of Dave's happiness indexes, I suspect you would find a different answer.

 

A song for Europe

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One day soon there will be a decent website at www.murderonthebrusselsexpress.co.uk

 

Brussels' useful idiots

Do the BBC and the CBI seriously think free trade between Britain and the European Union would cease if this country withdrew from the super-state?

This week Britain’s bosses’ organisation has been issuing dire warnings about the (completely invented) number of jobs that would disappear if we voted to leave the EU.
Then the BBC treated us to the not-unreasonable comments of Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn saying the company would have to “reconsider” its investments in Britain if we left the EU.
All he said was: "If anything has to change, we [would] need to reconsider our strategy and our investments for the future."
Of course they would.
That does not mean they would close down, shut up shop and move to Hungary as the BBC implies.
What Mr Ghosn and any other sensible industrialist would need to know is that Britain’s trade links with Europe were unharmed.
They may discover they have been improved, which would, we must assume, lead to a reconsideration leading to extra investment not less.
What the propagandists for the EU are trying to do – and not without success – is terrify us into believing that withdrawal would lead to the shut-down of UK plc as a trading nation.
It’s complete nonsense.
This country runs an estimated £70 billion-a-year trade deficit with the EU (and a £13 billion surplus with the rest of the world). That means we import from other European countries a whole lot more than we sell to them.
There is absolutely no chance that they would seek to impose some sort of trade barriers on the UK when they would have more to lose than we would.
Withdrawal from the EU does not mean an end to free trade. Nobody in their right mind wants that. If some sort of trade war were to ensure, the EU would be the biggest loser. So it’s just not going to happen.
The CBI, the BBC and all the other outlets for Brussels propaganda really should acknowledge this as a fact rather than trying to frighten people into submission.

Scottish independence - give us a vote

Now we are paying to keep Scotland in the UK with English jobs in Portsmouth, abandoning centuries of ship-building, I have signed the Downing Street petition calling for a UK-wide referendum on Scottish independence. We all have a right to vote on such a basic question. https://submissions.epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/53916

Murder on the Brussels Express

Coming soon:  Murder, greed, betrayal, politics – and the Eurovision Song Contest.

A famous headmaster murdered. A petty criminal convicted.

Retired MP Acton Trussell is attacked, poisoned and kidnapped as he tries to uncover the truth behind the murder of the man who educated three Prime Ministers.

Spies. Russian Gangsters. Financial collapse. Quantitative easing. EU bureaucrats. Murder on the high-speed train to the European super-state.

And A Song For Europe – which England might actually win.

 

 

Playing politics with people's jobs

The man who should be most relieved the Grangemouth dispute has ended reasonably happily is the MP who was responsible for the whole fiasco – Tom Watson.

In the game of chicken between Unite and Ineos over the future of Grangemouth petrochemical plant, the trade union blinked first.

It’s caved in and the plant will stay open, preserving 800 jobs (for the time being at least).

What seems to have escaped notice is that the roots of all the trouble were not so much industrial as political – and at the centre of it all is Tom Watson, Labour MP for West Bromwich East.

Grangemouth is in the Falkirk Parliamentary constituency. Mr Watson was at the centre of Unite’s attempt to fix the process for the selection of a new Labour candidate for the seat in advance of the 2015 General Election.

In his capacity as the Labour Party’s General Election co-ordinator, Mr Watson was trying to engineer the selection of Karie Murphy.

Ms Murphy worked for Mr Watson.

Not only that but she is friends with, and he is a former flat-mate of, Len McCluskey, General Secretary of Unite.

Things fell apart when Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, complained of Mr McCluskey: “Instead of defending what happened in Falkirk, Len McCluskey should be facing up to his responsibilities. He should not be defending the machine politics involving bad practice and malpractice that went on there, he should be facing up to it.”

Mr Watson quit as Labour election supremo and Ms Murphy stood down as a potential candidate even though a subsequent internal inquiry cleared her of wrong-doing.

What has all this to do with Grangemouth? The answer is that the chairman of the Falkirk constituency party at the time of the scandal was Stevie Deans.

Mr Deans was also the Unite convener at Grangemouth. He was accused of signing up Unite members at Grangemouth to the local Falkirk Labour Party to secure Ms Murphy’s selection.

He may have been cleared by the Labour Party’s internal inquiry but Ineos mounted its own investigation into his “alleged inappropriate use of company resources”.

The union reacted with fury, called a strike ballot which won 80 per cent support and the row escalated into a bosses-versus-unions conflict which led to the announcement of Grangemouth’s closure.

The union’s action was described as “the stupidest of strikes for the most idiotic of reasons” by Eric Joyce, the sitting MP for Falkirk who is quitting at the next election after attacking three MPs during a drunken brawl.

Mr Watson has been vocal in his condemnation of Ineos and its boss Jim Ratcliffe, who he described as "billionaire hedge-fund manager [who] was on his yacht in the Mediterranean" at the time, conducting talks via intermediaries.

"Tax avoidance disguises the profitability of this site," Mr Watson added, calling on the government to take action.

He has also said: “Too often it feels like it’s always the little guys that get steamrolled by powerful corporates. Even as an MP I feel powerless to act.”

And he complains that, in disputes such as this, “the little guy always loses”.

The truth is, though, that if Mr Watson had not tried to fix the Falkirk selection process in favour of his, and his union’s, favoured candidate, it’s quite likely none of this would have happened.

If he had allowed plain, ordinary, decent democracy to run its course, who knows, his chum Ms Murphy might have got the job anyway?

Sadly for Mr Watson, as a conspirator his record is not impressive. He it was who led the failed 2006 “curry-house coup” plotted in Wolverhampton and aimed at replacing Prime Minister Tony Blair with Gordon Brown.

It didn’t go according to plan, won no support and cost Mr Watson his job – until a grateful Mr Brown later became PM and rewarded his party disloyalty with a job as a Cabinet Office Minister.

These days the fat blogger – Mr Watson is 18 stone and keen on issuing propaganda via the internet – regards himself as the scourge of the media after he cross-questioned News International boss Rupert Murdoch.

He is one of those wanting to impose state control of the press. No doubt if and when he succeeds in this aim he will silence anyone who suggests that his serial chicanery is not quite as noble and altruistic as the likes to think it is.

At one point in his Commons interrogation of Mr Murdoch, he accused the publisher of being like a Mafia boss. To which we can only conclude: It takes one to know one.

The original swivel-eyed loon

Amazing how people see what they want to see. Last night I watched Alastair Campbell perform in his usual, obnoxious, rude, aggressive and vile way on Newsnight.
He had a go at the deputy editor of the Daily Mail, Jon Steafel, in the row over whether Ed Miliband’s Communist father “hated” Britain and damned editor Paul Dacre.
Steafel was calmness itself. Polite, tolerant, intelligent, measured. Campbell – with no sense of irony – accused the paper of “bullying”.
Yet this spat is now being reported as “Alastair Campbell Demolishes Daily Mail's Jon Steafel” (Huffington Post).
Isn’t Tony Blair’s former spin doctor now thoroughly discredited? Why is he trotted out by his thoroughly intimidated victims in the BBC at every opportunity? How can anyone see his abominable rant as anything other than the splenetic late splutterings of an extinct volcano?
If anyone is not sure which side to choose in the war of Ed’s dad then Campbell’s ravings are enough to drive most of us into the arms of the newspaper.

Frying tonight

Have you ever seen a more pathetic rant than Stephen Fry's attack on a Daily Telegraph journalist?
http://stephen-fry-me.tumblr.com/post/61754597917/some-weasel-of-a-telegraph-journo-wants-me-to-give-up

The great exploding housing bubble

As we inflate another house-price bubble, which is bound to burst eventually, the Bank of England has taken its eye firmly off the ball.

Mark Carney, the Bank’s new governor, has said interest rates won’t go up until unemployment falls to seven per cent – unless the outlook for inflation is that it will be above 2.5 per cent in 18 months’ time.

This is a cop-out because the Bank’s “fan chart” for future inflation will cover every eventuality from 0.1 per cent to 10 per cent.

More worrying, though, is that the Bank’s target of two per cent is based on the Consumer Prices Index, a measurement of inflation which completely ignores house prices.

In an economy so dependent on home-ownership, house price inflation is very significant.

Not only does it tell us how fast house prices are rising, it is used to measure the country’s GDP and, therefore, it has a significant impact on consumer confidence.

The faster house prices rise, the more liberal people are with their money, the more they are likely to borrow and the quicker the economy grows.

This is, in many respects, all to the good. But – and it is a massive but – because the Bank doesn’t take any of this into account when setting interest rates because none of it affects CPI, the end result is that its policy ignores the elephant in the room.

If house price inflation were included in the calculation of general inflation, it is highly likely interest rates would have been higher in the mid-2000s. That would have slowed the housing market, led banks to lend less and would not have encouraged people to borrow more than they could afford, thus reducing the house-price spiral which ended up strangling the life out of the entire economy.

I am told there is no such thing as an inflation measure which includes house prices. This is because inflation measurements are based on an international standard.

But in this country the economy is much more heavily dependent on a buoyant private housing market than it is in many other European nations, where the renting your home is more prevalent.

The other reason we don’t include house prices is because statisticians regard houses as capital investments not day-to-day spending. That’s a fair point but it fails to take into account the impact – psychological as well as economic – of house-price inflation.

Mr Carney is already guilty of abandoning the remit of the monetary policy committee and prioritising unemployment – not part of his remit – above inflation.

That’s bad enough. It is made worse because, as long as the Bank fails to account for rising house prices, the inflation statistics it uses are meaningless. They have only have a passing resemblance to the real economy.

The credit crunch and the worst recession in living memory were caused by rampant house-price inflation which was allowed to go unchecked by the Bank because it was aiming at the wrong target. It seems nobody has learned from this terrible mistake.