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The Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, is due to speak about his position at 3:30 pm today (about an hour from when I am now writing this). There is a high chance he will resign in disgrace, rather than risk the even greater ignomy of being forced out by a vote of no-confidence from MPs. It appears that even fellow Scot Gordon Brown will not explicitly back him. The scandals over the outrageous arrest of Tory MP Damian Green, and now the relentless series of stories of MPs abusing expenses for things like mortgages on second homes, has damaged confidence in Parliament so badly that fringe parties such as UKIP and the British National Party – a party of hard-left economic views, let it be noted – may do relatively well in the upcoming June European Union elections.
This whole saga demonstrates the truth of the thesis that politicians increasingly have come to regard their own interests as set apart from the country as a whole. It adds to the notion, put forward by Sean Gabb, of an “Enemy Class” that is quite consciously at odds with the more conservative (small – c) values of the country. Of course, there has always been an element of this – it is naive to imagine that Parliament ever quite met some Greek ideal – but it is now in a particularly bad way.
Let’s hope Mr Martin sees sense and takes the proverbial bottle of whisky and the loaded revolver into his study. He will be the first Speaker to be ejected from his role in more than 300 years. Not a record to be proud of.
As an aside, it surprises me still how little this whole saga is registering in the foreign media. Anyone got any examples of US, French, German etc coverage of this? It might be nice if even Instapundit mentioned it.
Outside the Westminster Bubble of bent MPs and Brownite thugs, other political developments take place. And few of them are likely to be more important for the state of the world than the Indian polls, now concluded. This report says the Congress party, the party of Nehru and Gandhi, has won. Congress, if my memory is accurate, was associated for a long time with a centre-leftist sort of nationalism. However, it may have moved on a bit from that – India certainly has. Despite the 2008 stock market crash, the ascent of the Indian economy, due in large part to some of the deregulation that has taken place, has been one of the bright spots of the world economy over the past decade or more. It is arguably more sustainable over the long term than in the case of China. Britain, with its post-Empire connections to India, should certainly pay close attention. And given India’s proximity to Pakistan, a nuclear power now in a deadly confrontation with the Taliban, it cannot be emphasised often enough how this “Anglosphere” power matters. India should, for example, be taking a lead role in helping to suppress piracy in the Indian Ocean, a subject about which I have written from time to time.
So these elections matter. It is not all about the Chicago Community Organiser or the One-Eyed Nutter With the Stutter, otherwise known as the UK prime minister. Let’s remember that.
Update: Guido seems very enthused by the result. The Indian stock market has rallied strongly today.
Thomas E Woods – whom I mentioned the other day – hits back most satisfyingly at Matthew Yglesias. The latter had some sniffy thoughts about Mr Woods’ recent book on the financial crisis. For the sin of looking at the crisis through the perspective of Austrian economics, with its specific way of looking at the economic cycle and the role of banking, Mr Woods incurs a certain amount of sneering from Mr Yglesias.
Mr Woods gets the distinct impression that Yglesias has not read his book. I have no idea whether he has or not; but there does seem to be a recent pattern of leftists trashing the likes of FA Hayek, or whomever, in a way that suggests that they haven’t the faintest idea of what or who they are talking about. You can just picture the thought process that goes through Mr Yglesias’s mind: “Ah, these central Europeans with their funny names and their think tanks – who are they to question the great Keynes and his sensible ideas on demand management”.
But I detect a sign that perhaps, just perhaps, the Yglesiases of this world are losing some of their Olympian self-confidence. At a City event the other night, listening to people talking about the economy, I did not get the impression from all the associated financial types that the idea of using the printing press to cure problems caused by underpriced credit was regarded as very brilliant. In fact quite a few folk are mentioning inflation as the issue that could hit Real Soon Now.
Thomas E. Woods is great value. Check out his website.
A US stealth aircraft, photographed while breaking the sound barrier. I don’t know why, given that Man has achieved the feat of breaking Mach 1 for more than half a century since the great Chuck Yeager officially did it first, but stuff like this still gives me a buzz.
Norman – now Lord – Tebbit, famously the scourge of trade union militants and who also survived a murder attempt by the IRA in the mid-1980s (an ex-RAF fighter pilot by the way), is urging voters not to vote for the main political parties in the European elections. Instead, the implication is that folk should vote for UKIP. Well, that is Guido’s take on the matter.
Suddenly, the Tory Party does not look in quite such bouncy shape this morning. I guess when you have MPs trousering taxpayers’ money on a fairly impressive scale, it dents the brand somewhat. Like I said yesterday, though, the central problem of UK political life is not fiddling expenses. No, the problem is a continuing failure to push for a major rollback of the state, including removal of this nation from the clutches of an European federal state. Compared with how much money is wasted on quangos, or ID cards, or the rest of it, an MP’s claim for swimming pool maintenance is small beer.
It is a sign of how old this stuff makes me feel that I remember when Prince Charles delivered That Speech when he denounced plans for the extension to the National Gallery off London’s Trafalgar Square. I remember the stir that this speech caused, and how it prompted some people to suggest that Prince Chuck had no business opining on such matters and should shut up and focus on trying to make Princess Di happy, etc. But for all its flaws, the speech did highlight the frustrations that many folk felt, and still feel, at the sheer ugliness of some – not all – modern buildings. Being an ardent free marketeer, I object to state – not private – planning laws to enforce a notion of beauty, which after all is in the eye of the beholder; but unlike perhaps some classical liberals, I do get the point that a lot of modern, or even supposedly traditional buildings, are insensitively designed, ugly, and in many cases, they don’t actually function as buildings very well. My worry is that the “cure” of planning laws and listed building rules can be sometimes often worse than the disease. A listed building law can prevent a crumbling building from being intelligently refurbished, for example. And it is worth observing that left to itself, urban landscapes can develop, without planning of many kinds, a kind of “spontaneous order” (a la Hayek) that while it may not have the top-down planned elegance of some cities, has its own beauty and vigor. As I say, this stuff is subjective.
My thoughts on these matters were prompted by watching the BBC news this morning. A very angry, bearded guy who apparently speaks for the modern architecture profession is denouncing the Prince for his views, for apparently frightening off architects, for pandering to “public opinion”, etc. (I have no idea who this character is, nor greatly care). Even if this guy has a point, every time I watch an obnoxious performance like this, it is easy to see why Prince Charles’ views on architecture get so much attention. We live in an ugly world – is it no surprise that so many people would like something a bit nicer?
Related thoughts by Roger Scruton.
As a book it has its flaws – it does not pay enough heed to the role of Web 2.0 media – but in the light of recent events about politicians’ use of taxpayers’ money, Peter Oborne’s study of UK politics reads better than ever.
A question worth asking, in the light of all this, is whether a less corrupt political class would be better, or worse, at reining in public spending? In the 18th Century, for instance, the UK parliamentary system was deeply corrupt; there was a vast network of jobs and sinecures doled out to enforce political loyalty. And yet despite the drawbacks, the UK managed to forge an Industrial Revolution, build a large and effective navy and help to defeat Bonaparte and all those supposedly more efficient Frenchmen. The central point that needs to be remembered is that the corruption and venality of the UK political class of today coincides with a point in our history when about 80 per cent of the laws and regulations affecting we great unwashed are not written in Westminster, but in the EU; and further, that the state exerts a vastly greater degree of control over our lives now than was the case in the era of Pitt, Burke and Fox. So this stuff is both a sign of the unseriousness of our political class on the one hand, and also a sign of how much more the state and its functionaries matter, on the other. Cleaning up politics will not address the central problem that the state plays far too big a role in our lives in the first place. Take away the jam, and the flies will not be such a pest.
This report says that the debut of the latest Star Trek movie has set box office records. I am not a big ST fan – I prefer series such as Babylon 5, Battlestar G., Firefly and so on, but the trailer for the new film looks pretty good.
I have not written about the subject of the Chrysler bailout so far since, not being close to the action in the US, I did not feel I had much to say that was not already voiced by the US blogs. But it does occur to me that there is a general problem right now in the way that the US administration – and arguably the UK one as well – has been acting in respect of bailouts of certain industries, such as carmakers as well as banks. What do I mean? Well, this report (H/T: Instapundit) suggests there is real fear about the “Nixonian” tactics employed by Mr Obama’s administration against bond-holders who have been angered by the expropriation of their capital via the Chrysler bailout.
For those who have not been following this story, bond-holders have been pushed to the back of the queue, as far as potential recovery of capital is concerned, with the auto union membership getting preferential treatment. Maybe Mr Obama figures that investors can be rained on right now because it is more important to get the votes and support of traditionally Democrat-leaning car workers. With mid-term Congressional elections a couple of years away, he will have his sly, Chicago machine-politics mind working out how to garner important support in the event that the US economy is still sluggish by that time. But pissing off investors – such as, let it be noted, pension funds – is not smart. The US requires large amounts of capital for any economic recovery that may take place. Ask yourself one of the most basic questions any investor should ask: can I get my money back if I need to? If the answer is no or only maybe, and if there is the threat of governments robbing investors, then less investment occurs. The problems of such behaviour explain why, for example, Africa has been such a bad investment bet for so many years.
It is an ugly business. Part of the trouble with the automakers is that even if they had been put into a Chapter 11 bankruptcy process, with the banks and bondholders put on a more even footing for any recovery of assets, there is still the issue of what to do about the enormous unfunded pension obligations that these heavy industrial companies have. It is the same with airlines and steel. I have heard it said of British Airways – to take a UK example – that is is a pension scheme that happens to have a lot of aircraft. The pension tail can wag the corporate dog. And that is a hideous issue to deal with against the background of an ageing population. So in fairness to US policymakers, running down Chrysler involves dealing with a lot of tricky contractual issues.
Even so, it strikes me that the Obama administration is showing a level of political ruthlessness and “bugger-the-investor” attitude that is hardly going to endear people towards investing in that economy. My fear is that Mr Obama is making the cynical calculation that memories will fade; after all, how many investors in the UK remember how the Blair government, in the form of the charmless Stephen Byers, the-then industry minister, shafted investors in Railtrack?
Like I said, an ugly business.
Regulars may have already come across this article, but if not, click on the link as this is a good item showing that the “Austrian” school of economics, in particular, did predict the credit crunch and the problems associated with it. It is just no good for folk to prattle that “no-one saw this coming” yadda yadda. (H/T: Adam Smith Institute Blog).
As an aside, the award-winning FT journalist, Gillian Tett, whom I once met many years ago, has a book out about making the argument that modern financial engineering has to bear much of the blame for the crisis. I have not seen many reviews of it – is it any good? My worry is that no analysis of the crunch makes sense if you ignore the broader issues of how financial systems become deranged in a world of fiat money in which central bankers start to believe in their own myths and where the rules create perverse incentives. Blaming derivatives for the crunch is a case of shooting the messenger, methinks. Even so, I’d be interested to see what Tett has to say. She holds a doctorate in anthropology, by the way, which gives her a bit of an insight into things like crowd behaviour – a very useful insight indeed.
On the day that the UK starts to roll out its planned and useless ID card project, in Manchester, there are pictures all over the web of the Prime Minister. The background seems appropriate. I mean, it was obviously not deliberate but how the f**k did Brown grin away in that ghastly way of his and not realise what was in the background? We have to face the rather sad fact, in my view, that the PM has lost it.
I bet the Private Eye picture editor is working hard to come up with a nifty headline and quotes for its next edition.
I guess it was inevitable. Football, like other aspects of life, has been hit by the credit crunch. In the case of Southampton, a team that once graced the top flight of the English league and has boasted some notable cup wins – famously winning the FA Cup in the 1970s – it has suffered terribly. It is now in danger of extinction. My own team, Ipswich Town FC, was in administration a few years ago although it has been since taken over by Marcus Evans, the man who owns the eponymous conference organising company. Ipswich also has appointed former Manchester Utd and Ireland international player Roy Keane as its manager (gulp, nervous laughter).
Henry Winter, one of the main football scribes in the print press, believes Southampton’s local council should buy the team. He argues that the council and the lucky taxpayers of the south coast will be getting a bargain. Maybe. But it is not the business of councils to be spending money on what has been the money pit of professional sports, particularly when a place such as Southampton has many competing demands for public funds, such as policing, garbage collection, road maintenance and so on. As I said, when my club was in financial dire circumstances, no doubt some people would have been happy to see the Suffolk taxpayer foot the bill to put The Blues back on top. But wiser heads prevailed.
The sad fact is that football clubs can die if the finances run out. We have seen teams like Leeds Utd hit by unsustaintable debts in far happier economic conditions. Even mighty Man Utd has heavy debts stemming from the leveraged buyout by the Glazers, while Chelsea is kept in the lifestyle to which it is accustomed due to Abramovich’s huge Russian oil wealth. The economics of sports clubs are a murky affair at the best of times. So my message to Southampton fans is that it is better for a hard-nosed private investor to sort out the club than a bunch of politicians. If Southampton really is a bargain, why are public funds needed – surely a canny entrepreneur will spot the opportunity? I hope someone does.
I sometimes wonder why as, a football fan, I put myself through all this heartache. My wife shakes her head in wonderment.
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