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Boris Johnson’s evitable inevitable downfall

· Arts & Entertainment · UK affairs

My paper paper and the online version of the Times have different headlines this morning. Royalty fills the paper, but online the focus has returned to the Commons:

Politics live: Boris Johnson faces confidence vote tonight

  • Sir Graham Brady announces confidence vote in PM to be held at 6pm
  • Rebels fear they do not have 180 votes to oust Johnson
  • Memo from backbench MPs brands PM ‘Conservative Corbyn’
  • PM booed outside St Paul’s thanksgiving service for Queen

    Boris Johnson faces a vote of confidence in his leadership today after the threshold of Tory MPs calling for him to go was reached.

    In a statement Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the Conservative backbench 1922 Committee, revealed that 54 MPs — amounting to a 15 per cent of the parliamentary party — had now lost faith in Johnson’s leadership and want to oust him.

    The vote will take place between 6pm and 8pm tonight with an announcement of the result to follow shortly afterwards.

    • Perhaps I should mention for foreign readers that this is an internal Party vote of Conservative MPs, not a vote of the House of Commons as a whole.

    Though the prime minister will – probably – win the vote, to be facing it at the hands of his own party relatively soon after winning a huge Parliamentary majority is an embarrassment. He has lost his magic, and for what? There might have been a sort of glamour about a prime minister throwing it all away to sport with Cytheris, but Boris threw it all away to sport with Secret Santa.

    I am fascinated by the question of whether his troubles were inevitable or not.

    At the start, of course, they were more evitable than Eva Duarte. Boris Johnson, like Agustin Magaldi in the musical, could have evaded all this bother simply by saying “No” to the offer of some illegal fun that probably wasn’t all that much fun anyway. But he said “Yes”. Repeatedly. Involving hundreds of people, all of whom had these new “mobile phone” thingies that have cameras.

    What an idiot! Could he not have foreseen that it was inevitable that someone would blab?

    Well, yes and no. In the end someone did, but it took long enough. The Ur-party took place in May 2020, but the first “Partygate” stories only appeared in the press in late November 2021. Am I the only person who is oddly impressed by this?

    June 6th, 2022 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)

    Yes, price incentives do work

    · Economics, Business & Globalization

    A few years ago, Tom Bergin, a journalist for Reuters, wrote a book challenging several ideas, such as supply-side economics.

    In a nutshell, the book criticised the idea that people respond to economic incentives in a linear fashion. It does not dismiss the role of incentives entirely but does generally poo-pooh the idea. Bergin appears to have a generally left-liberal political bent. For all that, the book is well worth reading because he attempts to back up his claims with a lot of figures, although it is worth noting that there are studies that don’t support his case. See an example also here.

    And in a new article from the Wall Street Journal, the paper notes how the exodus of US citizens from high-tax states to low-tax states is now so pronounced that suggesting that people don’t respond to incentives is not just wrong, but a case of intellectual evasion:

    Each year the IRS publishes data on the migration of taxpayers and aggregate adjusted gross income between states. Its latest release for 2020 shows that migration from high- to low-tax states surged amid pandemic lockdowns and a shift to remote work.

    Yes, that is what I am seeing.

    The biggest winners were Florida ($23.7 billion), Texas ($6.3 billion), Arizona ($4.8 billion), North Carolina ($3.8 billion), South Carolina ($3.6 billion), Tennessee ($2.6 billion), Nevada ($2.6 billion), Colorado ($2.3 billion), Idaho ($2.1 billion) and Utah ($1.3 billion). Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Florida and South Carolina gained the most as a share of their 2019 income.

    The biggest losers: New York (-$19.5 billion), California (-$17.8 billion), Illinois (-$8.5 billion), Massachusetts (-$2.6 billion), New Jersey (-$2.3 billion), Maryland (-$1.9 billion), Ohio (-$1.4 billion), Minnesota (-$1.2 billion), Pennsylvania (-$1.2 billion) and Virginia (-$1.1 billion). New York, Illinois, Alaska, California and North Dakota lost the most as a share of 2019 income.

    Notably, four of the 10 states that gained the most income in 2020 don’t impose an income tax (Florida, Texas, Tennessee and Nevada). The others have generally low tax burdens. States losing the most income generally have high income and property taxes. Taxes aren’t the only factor in migration. Schools, quality of life and cost of living also matter.

    Yet high-tax states don’t provide better public services and often have worse schools and public works despite spending more.

    Another example that I hear about as a barometer are U-Haul rates. It cost a lot more to go from California to, say, Tennessee than the other way around. If I order a U-Haul from San Francisco to Nashville, TN, on 8 July, the price I am quoted is $3,587. To go from Nashville back to what has been dubbed “San Fransicko”, and on the same date, it is $1,913. Okay, I hear you cry, there may be other factors. Well, there may be reasons why people are so much keener to pay to go to the Smoky Mountain State from California, and that talking about taxes is so much evil neo-liberal ideology. But I am betting that taxes, which are after a cost, do have a bearing.

    June 5th, 2022 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)

    1989.06.04

    · Chinese affairs · Health & medical · Historical views

    BBC Archive: Chinese troops fire on protesters in Tiananmen Square

    First broadcast 4 June 1989.

    Chinese troops opened fire on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on Saturday evening. The collection of students and labourers had been occupying the site for several weeks. Despite the outbreak of “unremitting gunfire”, the protesters refused to leave. The BBC’s Kate Adie reports from the scene.

    Also watch this interview with a soldier of the People’s Liberation Army from ABC News (Australia). That interview is from 2019. I doubt if it could be made in 2022.

    2019 was also the last time that the massacre was commemorated by a public ceremony in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park. This year, as it was in 2020 and 2021, the park has been blocked off by police and anyone lingering there threatened with prosecution. The reason given for forbidding the demonstration was coronavirus. I have a premonition that in Hong Kong the Covid-19 pandemic will go on forever.

    June 4th, 2022 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)

    Samizdata quote of the day

    · Economics, Business & Globalization · Slogans & Quotations

    It’s absolutely fine to increase the supply of money if the quantity of goods and services in your economy has increased too. Indeed, you have to do so in order to make it possible to buy and sell those extra goods and services. It all goes hideously wrong if you start increasing the money supply when the goods and services haven’t increased or even worse when they’ve actually diminished.

    Sound familiar? Got it in one. In 2020, the British Government, like many other governments, enacted a whole series of measures that started reducing the availability of goods and services and then started printing money (‘quantitative easing’) to compensate for the goods and services that weren’t being made. That meant more money standing for less in the way of goods and services. And it wasn’t alone – all over the world other governments dived headfirst into the abyss. We are nowhere near 1923, but we have certainly started down that road.

    – Guy de la Bédoyère

    June 3rd, 2022 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)

    In order to save freedom of expression it became necessary to destroy it

    · How very odd! · Media & Journalism · Opinions on liberty · Sexuality · Social media nonsense · Totalitarianism · UK affairs

    “Protect women from chilling effect of misogyny, Ofcom urges tech firms”, the Times reports:

    Ofcom has told social media companies to stamp out misogyny, arguing that it is having a “chilling effect” on women’s freedom of expression online.

    Emphasis added.

    The media regulator, which is preparing to police tech firms under powers granted by the Online Safety Bill, said that companies have a duty to protect women from harmful content.

    Ofcom spoke to 6,000 people for its Online Nation study, and found that over the past month women were more likely than men to have seen content that “objectifies, demeans or otherwise negatively portrays” their gender.

    Of the women surveyed, 43 per cent said they were likely to be distressed by harmful content, compared with 33 per cent of men. Some 60 per cent of women highlighted trolling as being particularly concerning, whereas only 25 per cent of men were anxious about online abuse.

    Ofcom said that women spent more time online than men, but felt less able to express an opinion or be themselves on social media platforms.

    June 2nd, 2022 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)

    Samizdata quote of the day

    · Political Economy · UK affairs

    “To tackle big problems, we need more freedom, not less. Only world-leading entrepreneurs and businesses can stimulate the new discoveries and technologies that will enable us to deal with super-castropic risks. It is not collective sacrifice but a new wave of radical individualism that fuses classical ideals of liberty with a renewed sense of personal responsibility (not least when it comes to health) that will make our country more resilient.”

    – Sherelle Jacobs, Daily Telegraph (£)

    June 1st, 2022 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
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