Morning music
On this day a year ago
UK approaching strategic economic decline
Interesting analysis.
“It fits the definition of madness to propose more austerity. But that, along with higher interest rates, is what’s coming.
Here’s the current state of the nation. The economy is going backwards. National output is lower than it was at the start of the pandemic. Property prices have started to fall. Households have started to increase the amount they save in anticipation of hard times ahead. Living standards are falling because wages are not keeping up with prices. Despite the government’s price cap, average energy bills are double what they were a year ago. Officials are “war-gaming” the possibility of week-long energy blackouts this winter. NHS England has more than 7 million people on its waiting lists. Food bank usage is soaring.
And what’s the response to this? Well, the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee is about to raise interest rates for an eighth meeting in a row, because it is worried that high inflation will set off a wage-price spiral. The City expects a 0.75 percentage-point increase to 3%, and a signal from Threadneedle Street of more to come. The Bank knows what it is doing will cause pain, but says that’s better than even more pain later.
If there was really such a thing as a fiscal black hole, it might be a good idea to fill it, but the idea that Britain is about to sucked into a vortex because it is running a budget deficit is a fairytale.
David Blanchflower, a member of the MPC during the global financial crisis, says the UK looks set to repeat the policy mistakes made back then – and his warning is timely. In September 2008, a month before Royal Bank of Scotland came within hours of running out of cash, the Bank was considering raising interest rates because it feared inflation would become embedded. The real threat, as Blanchflower pointed out at the time, was of a monster recession. Within months, official borrowing costs had been cut from 5% to a then record low of 0.5%.
The Treasury is living proof of the notion that insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result. In 2010, just as the economy was starting to recover from the crash, George Osborne decided that the time was right to start hacking away at the budget deficit. Just as today, tax increases and spending cuts were deemed vital to keep the financial markets sweet.
An early critique of Osbornomics came from Ed Balls in August 2010, when he was pitching to become leader of the Labour party. Yes, Balls said, there needed to be a credible plan to reduce the budget deficit and the national debt, but only when the economy had fully recovered. By doing too much too soon, the coalition government was “undermining the very goals of market stability and deficit reduction which their policies are designed to achieve.”
Balls was making a straightforward Keynesian argument. JM Keynes did not believe in permanent budget deficits, and thought in good times that the state’s income should exceed its spending. But he was adamant that it was self-defeating to tighten policy during a downturn, as happened during the Great Depression. Doing so would make matters worse in every respect: slower growth, higher unemployment and a bigger deficit.
The same applies now, only more so. Things are worse than in 2010 because then, the Bank of England kept borrowing costs at rock-bottom levels while the Treasury imposed its austerity programme. Currently, both the Bank and the Treasury are tightening policy at the same time: a policy stance guaranteed to make the recession deeper and longer.
It is not just that unemployment and poverty will rise. Cuts to capital spending will mean more productivity-sapping delays on the country’s creaking infrastructure. The ill health that explains some of the absence of the over-50s from the labour force calls for more spending on the NHS. There is a case for lower taxes to stimulate investment, targeted at small and medium-sized businesses.
But even though it should be obvious that more austerity will make structural economic problems worse, the UK is firmly in the grip of a technocratic, economic orthodoxy that insists budgets must be balanced, inflation tamed and markets kept sweet. The consensus among the commentariat is that there is no real alternative to what the Bank and the Treasury are doing. Credibility is the priority.
This argument has been deployed before. It was used in 1925, when the consensus agreed there was no alternative to putting the pound back on the gold standard. It was used in 1990, when the consensus was that there was no alternative to joining the exchange rate mechanism. Eventually, the “no gain without pain” approach was seen to lack credibility, and abandoned. But only after immense damage was done.“
[The Guardian]
I thought it worthwhile to copy/paste quite a lot of that Guardian analysis partly because the simplistic Mrs. Thatcher-style “housewife’s shopping basket” kind of economic discussion is all too widespread, both in the mass media and amid the public— State funds (and overall money in the country) thought of as gold coins in a large chest kept at the Treasury (no doubt monitored by “the King in his counting-house“, in the words of the nursery rhyme).
I have little time for Ed Balls as a politician (and still less for his ghastly wife, Yvette Cooper) but, as a trained economist, he was right a decade or so ago. The part-Jew George Osborne mortally wounded the UK’s economy via the 2010-2015 (really 2010-2020) “austerity” nonsense. The economy is still declining.
It is more than slightly interesting to see msm political commentators noting that, behind the removal of Liz Truss and woolly-head Kwarteng, and behind the Rishi Sunak government, George Osborne has been both active and influential.
Still, politically, and from the standpoint of social-nationalism, the conditions likely to be engendered by these crazy policies may promote an upsurge which might turn into a real national revolution. It’s getting to the point where the UK desperately needs one.
The writer of the Guardian analysis above is one Larry Elliott [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Elliott], who also wrote, recently, this: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/oct/30/twitter-deal-may-signal-turning-point-when-the-everything-bubble-bursts. Also worth reading.
Migration-invasion
I saw another piece in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/nov/02/home-office-leaves-asylum-seekers-from-manston-stranded-in-central-london.
What struck me was that the 11 “stranded asylum-seekers” (migrant-invaders and/or illegal economic migrants) were not only released from actual Home Office/Border Force custody and taken to London, where “volunteers” from some charity spent £450 on clothing for them, but were then picked up by taxi at Home Office expense, driven all the way to Norwich (!) and checked into some hotel! Again, of course, at Home Office (Government/taxpayers’) expense.
I wonder what would happen were I to be (as I very nearly have been a few times in my life) homeless and penniless on the streets of London tomorrow. Would I be fitted-out at once by a charity? Would I then be driven across country in a taxi, before being placed in a Norwich hotel, at State expense? The very idea is ludicrous.
The migration invasion must be stopped and the invaders repatriated, expelled, got rid of…whatever. As to “our” government and the whole present system, it works against our interests and future… and should be toppled.
More on the migration-invasion
“Heroes kicked OUT so migrants can be let IN: Lifeboat crew on training course are thrown out of three-star hotel to make way for asylum seekers… as ‘thousands of migrants are put up in FIVE-STAR hotels, with one in four resorts block-booked for MONTHS’“
[Daily Mail]
Britain needs a real social-national government, and a real —British version of the— SS.
— England in 1971: not a black or brown face seen in that TV series, which I recall watching at the time. Not one Albanian. Not one Arab. Not one Jew, even. Britain in 1971 may have had problems but, all the same, and in that sense, and some others, bliss… (I remember 1971 well, having been 14-15 then).
Incidentally:
Also: the High Court judge mentioned in that Daily Mail report, Mr. Justice Linden, was a barrister at Matrix Chambers, the set-up he himself founded, together with others including Cherie Blair, Jessica Simor etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_Chambers; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Linden.
Tweets seen
Sunak’s effigy can be immolated next year…
Of course, the problem is that (perhaps orchestrated on some level behind the scenes), the present “Conservative” chaos may lead in turn to a Labour Party “elected dictatorship” with new dictatorial legislation preventing discussion of anything racial or ethno-cultural, or of Jewish behavioural traits. There may even be “holocaust” “denial” laws, bearing in mind that Keir Starmer is married to a Jewish woman, that their children are being brought up as if fully-Jewish, and that Starmer is a fervent member of Labour Friends of Israel, as are all members of the present Shadow Cabinet.
If that happens, there may be only one way to fight the encroaching tyranny.
More tweets seen
Not “banned“, exactly…
Byeee…
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_Powell].
Maybe change that tweet of Neil’s to “time to punish corrupt System MPs and newspaper scribblers“?
As blogged previously, if I were to return to Twitter (having been expelled at the instigation of a pack of Jews in 2018), I would only do so in order to promote the blog, but in that event might pay the ~£6 a month and get the blue tick just to annoy that same Jew-Zionist pack.
Lunatics, who applaud the invaders who, with millions of others and the offspring of the same, will turn this country into a black/brown hellhole unless stopped.
“Without accommodation or assistance“? What kind of post-Kafka nightmare is this, where illegal migrant-invaders demand —and usually get, as these did in the end— taxis, hotels, food, and pocket-money, but the British poor are left to struggle for shelter, or for food in unheated homes?
What nightmare is this?
When the British people work that out, watch out…
Comment unnecessary, I think…
Capital punishment
I have always been opposed to capital punishment, perhaps influenced by Dostoyevsky’s famous novel Crime and Punishment, in which the murderer, Raskolnikov, eventually admits his crime, and is sentenced to long years (I think 20 years) of imprisonment with hard labour in Siberia, ultimately emerging as a better man or, as Dostoyevsky either writes or implies, “redeemed“.
Maybe Dostoyevsky knew about such things, having been himself a prisoner, sentenced to death for plotting to kill the Tsar (he was eventually pardoned, though not before a mock execution had been carried out). I wonder though, whether even Dostoyevsky ever encountered the kind of evil depravity shown in a trial that finished today: see https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11386701/Mother-bodybuilder-partner-jailed-39-years-murder-15-year-old-son.html.
A thin small boy, tortured mercilessly by a bullying man and by his own mother.
Even 39 years minimum seems inadequate as punishment for such monstrous and seemingly inhuman (or subhuman) individuals, particularly when served in English prisons, some of which are unpleasant or even horrible but some not so bad; that last particularly applies to the women’s prison(s) where the depraved mother will be held. In brief, they will probably not suffer enough, especially the woman.
It is a big thing for me to say that perhaps, in some cases, the death penalty might be appropriate, after many many years of trying to argue for mercy —life— for persons convicted or murder (not in court— I was never much of a criminal practitioner, and was never on that level of criminal defence, though I nearly got one murder in the early 1990s).
I once argued, at dinner in Lincoln’s Inn, against capital punishment. Seated at table next to me, Lord Justice Parker took the opposite view. He seemed a rather unpleasant man, but he may have been at least partly right.
I wonder whether, in a rare case of the above sort, the death penalty might be appropriate. Not some semi-medicalized type such as the American lethal injection or gas, but something carried out in public, and with some element of movement in it— hanging, beheading by axe, or the guillotine.
Those awaiting such a fate would have to be given a little time to contemplate the awfulness of what would be about to happen to them; and, as said, the execution(s) should be in public.
Not nice thoughts. I think that I shall park such thoughts there and move on to something else. All the same, the murdered boy cries out for justice, and the murderers are not, as yet, punished according to the full measure of their deeds.
Late tweets
The charitable sector has been trashed over the years by several factors: the government subsidies paid to many charities; the tendency for the top few staff to be paid inordinate amounts, in some cases several hundred thousand pounds per year; the infiltration into important positions by “woke” or “politically correct” activists.
Ha. Yes, except that “holocaust” should always be lower case and in quotation marks if used in reference to the Jews and WW2.
This is what she tweeted:
I have already noted the “shuffling-off” of that person [see blog, earlier today].
Presumably, Rose (like the Bank of England) wants to choke off demand in order to suppress inflation. The danger, of course, is that, after the harsh medicine, you control inflation, yes, have sound money, yes, a “sound pound” if you like, but also have a pretty dead economy, high unemployment, and continuing recession. You might even get the recession as well as high inflation (“stagflation”).
The Home Office is already well and truly “invaded” in the lower ranks, and under (((control))) in the higher echelons…
Late music
[above
Ian Robert Millard 