Do they really Care

[mal]

None of the main parties are fit to govern. Today (update on the wind farm) we've had a leaflet from Labour claiming their campaign to stop everything to build 34 400ft turbines has worked and plans put on hold. Funnily, a week or so ago, we had a leaflet from the Conservatives crowing about how their campaign had stopped it! At least until the right bung is achieved no doubt. It's just point scoring to see who can fool the most people long enough to blag a nice little job.
Perhaps we should form a DTL Party and show them what ordinary, decent people can do!

[Stig]

Mal, absolutely in agreement about the disgrace that killed our coal industry in the 80s. ALL our industry in fact!

Not sure what I meant at all, now I reconsider! I had a discussion with a lady I met on a training course about renewable energy, & possibly was thinking about that while posting. We were talking about clean coal & carbon sequestration. When I suggested that it could mean a return to mining in UK she shuddered & told me her father had been a miner & his health had suffered dreadfully. She also pointed out that today's generation have different aspirations, and few would be interested in hard physical labour underground.

I think she was right - but the way things are is because of what Thatch did in the 80s. Possibly mining would have developed into a safe, clean industry had it continued to the present day. We'll never know, and as you say, we have to depend on imported fuel to keep the lights on. Most of our power generation fleet is also under foreign ownership. We, the taxpayer, used to own it y'know!

[mal]

My mum's family were miners and my Grandad died because of it as did my uncle. My Brother in law is also an ex miner and suffers from "miners' lung." So I can appreciate the reluctance of people to see the return of large scale mining.
I firmly believe that there are "strategic industries" that need to be kept going, or at least to have the option, to re-open them. These include steel, mining, power, water and transport. If I may paraphrase Adam Smith, the "Gandfather of Conservatism."
There are certain institutions and edifices that should never be allowed to fall into private hands.
In modern terms, these are the industries above, along with education and health. What has happened is that we have allowed them not only to fall into private, but foreign hands. We were gulled into it by the Thatcher government talking us into believing we'd all win out by privatisation and the self centred society her views created.
We now see poor old Gordon Brown as the destroyer of the UK economy but this is unfair. The rot began back in the GB of Thatcherism and Yuppie culture. As a social and economic history student, I learnt that it is impossible to prevent the cycle of bust and boom within an economy. The best you can do is to shuffle the peaks along a bit or mask them by starting a nice little war, preferably a long way off, to "stimulate the economy" and hopefully move the peak along so the slump doesn't happen on your watch!
I also believe that we needed the collapse in property prices that seems to be the main effect of the slump. We can't carry on increasing these indefinitely until housing is beyond the reach of most of the population.
One thing I can't understand. We keep being told about all these wonderful low interest rates. Where are they? My savings are down to 0.something% as is my mortgage, but that's the only things that are. I have a bank loan at 5.9% which is nearly paid up and I keep getting letters from the bank asking me if I'd like to extend it at 8.9 or more! No wonder they're getting back into profit! They STILL don't really care!!

[saint-spoon]

My mum's family were miners and my Grandad died because of it as did my uncle. My Brother in law is also an ex miner and suffers from "miners' lung." So I can appreciate the reluctance of people to see the return of large scale mining.
I firmly believe that there are "strategic industries" that need to be kept going, or at least to have the option, to re-open them. These include steel, mining, power, water and transport. If I may paraphrase Adam Smith, the "Gandfather of Conservatism."
There are certain institutions and edifices that should never be allowed to fall into private hands.
In modern terms, these are the industries above, along with education and health. What has happened is that we have allowed them not only to fall into private, but foreign hands. We were gulled into it by the Thatcher government talking us into believing we'd all win out by privatisation and the self centred society her views created.
We now see poor old Gordon Brown as the destroyer of the UK economy but this is unfair. The rot began back in the GB of Thatcherism and Yuppie culture. As a social and economic history student, I learnt that it is impossible to prevent the cycle of bust and boom within an economy. The best you can do is to shuffle the peaks along a bit or mask them by starting a nice little war, preferably a long way off, to "stimulate the economy" and hopefully move the peak along so the slump doesn't happen on your watch!
I also believe that we needed the collapse in property prices that seems to be the main effect of the slump. We can't carry on increasing these indefinitely until housing is beyond the reach of most of the population.
One thing I can't understand. We keep being told about all these wonderful low interest rates. Where are they? My savings are down to 0.something% as is my mortgage, but that's the only things that are. I have a bank loan at 5.9% which is nearly paid up and I keep getting letters from the bank asking me if I'd like to extend it at 8.9 or more! No wonder they're getting back into profit! They STILL don't really care!!

Can we safely assume that you don’t vote for the conservative party, nor are you likely to at any point in the future? You have made me smile by placing the blame of our current economic strife on a party that hasn’t been in power for three terms of government, a very reasonable argument in my mind.

[Stig]

Risky, talking politics among friends! I see myself as un-party political these days, as I feel this labour government have let old supporters, like me, down.

Thatch changed Britain from a manufacturing, "things" economy, for one of finance and professional services.. If the service economy grows disproportinately in comparison with the "things" economy then wealth has effectively been created from nothing - it's a house of cards. Thatch had a big hand in making this transformation. But then Gordon Brown did nothing to restore the balance, and made his name off it in the boom years in fact. I'm not sure his handling of the bust has been particularly brilliant. His failure to rein in the financial sector is quite telling I reckon.

Thatch's govt also chose to close non-profitable industry rather than try to modernise & make them pay. They sold off state-owned businesses because they were inefficient, instead of just making them efficient. These things can't be undone so easily, and will continue to effect all of us for a very long time.

In the case of public transport and energy, I think privatisation was a grave mistake. Our railways are in need of colossal investment, and most of our energy business is now in foreign ownership. All the profit made by electricity companies could be in state hands today, had we taken a different path. The means to address our aging fleet of power stations, or tackle global warming even, would be in our own hands - not private French corporate ones.

[saint-spoon]

A fair comment about talking politics amongst friends, in many cases rightly so. I feel that this is actually a thoughtful debate and I do value the opinions of folk with differing ones to my own; we are after all trading opinions based around our own understanding of the facts.
It is of course easy to Blame Margaret Thatcher (the milk snatcher) for the destruction of industry, for failing to modernise the unprofitable and closing our coal mines. I remember the three day weeks, alternate days of gas and electric strikes and rubbish building up on the streets because of union actions. When Mrs Thatcher came into power there aren’t many people (whatever side of the divide they stand) who could put forward a valid argument to say that the labour government had done an admirable job running the country and had left us in a good social and financial state. We were broke and running an unsustainable regime of spending more than we were earning. MT had to sort it all out and in doing so had to destroy the excessive power wielded by the unions or else we were going nowhere fast. I am actually very pro-union but I don’t believe that they should be entering the political arena as we have seen too many times in the past. I don’t agree with a lot of what MT did but the fact remains that when they were voted out of government, a process where sleaze was the main issue and Tone made many empty promises (schooling reforms, sort out the NHS etc), the country as a whole was in a far better state than when they’d taken it on. Tone managed to live the life of exulted leader doing just about what he wanted (and in many cases disregarding the promises he’d made to get into power for so long until, IMO he decided that the bubble had burst and he was quitting whilst ahead. Two great terms in power until the legacy had run out. We then have a PM who against the rules of the constitution was never actually voted in but ascended the throne by rite (or so it seems as there is no other way to describe it). The country is on its knees, we have the highest ever tax levels since record began, higher even than those we had to pay for two world wars, but the services where I live have steadily decreased; replaced by bureaucrats and subsidies to other countries. We are now giving up the hard won concessions in contributions to the EU which according to the news will cost every tax payer over £200 next year.
The Tories had a recession but they came out of it with the country in a good financial position, now we have under GB a national debt beyond what our grand children can reasonable pay and countries such as Chile are berating us for not saving when the going was good.

I would like to hear your take on what have just said, I will entertain anyone’s ideas and if they prove reasonable I’ll change my opinion. Incidentally I’m not staunch tory even if the post looks like it, I just like a reasoned debate.

[mal]

I have very little regard for any political party. As far as I’m concerned, party politics has caused almost as much trouble as organised religion and both should be outlawed!! My argument really has little to do with party politics other than it was a Conservative government that started the rot. To be honest, it isn’t even fair to call it a “Conservative government” it was a “Thatcherite” government. The fact that subsequent governments did nothing to redress the balance makes them equally culpable. Thatcher’s aim in privatisation was not just the rationalisation of inefficient industries but the denationalisation of all industries. Her masterstroke in this was making Joe Public believe he was getting something out of it when he could buy shares in what was already his, at a knockdown price. The shares were still too cheap when Sid sold them on to pay for a holiday to Spain or his (irreplaceable) council house he could now buy at a fire sale price, or to help heat it now fuel would be 17.5% more expensive. Saint Spoon, I’m glad I’ve made you smile but I don’t find it an unreasonable assumption to equate Thatcherite policies, practices and changes to society of that period with the current economic state. Thatcher represents a watershed of attitudes in the UK and of course her ideas, no matter how much we dislike them, still affect us.

My main argument is that an economy is not a moment or an event but a process, each move within it is a reaction to what has gone before, and that no matter what the powers that be do, they can’t eliminate the cycle of boom and bust. Whether you use laissez faire or interventionist or centrally planned tactics it just doesn’t work, you can shift the troughs along but you can’t get rid of them.
We can’t all get rich selling insurance to each other or plundering each others pension funds! We need a manufacturing base to build an economy on. If I can paraphrase Adam Smith again,
The real value of an article (he uses pins) lies in the man hours that go into its’ production, the mining and smelting of the ore and the fuel to smelt it with, as well as the crafting of the article itself. The proportion of this value taken up by the entrepreneur (in terms of money provider) is out of all proportion to their input into the article.
Though writing a long time ago, Smith is still valid and still worth reading today, and is as much about the need for equality in the work place and society as it is about capitalism.
In modern terms this equates to the manufacturer moving production from a local workforce with high expectations of lifestyle, possession etc. and so wage, to an outside workforce with low expectations and therefore wage. This gives another economic cycle, a sort of economic drift. We’ve all watched the rise of Japan, then, as their workforce became too skilled and valuable, that of Korea, Singapore, Malaya, China and India in turn. The same thing is happening in Europe and the UK with manufacturing being shifted ever eastward towards the cheap formerly centrally planned economies, or importing labour from those countries. There’s no way to end these cycles without completely doing away with a global economy.
Unfortunately, like waves, these cycles are not regular, but face us now and again with a 7th wave or Tsunami. My comment about poor old GB getting the blame was nothing to do with any regard for the man or his policies, because I don’t have any, simply that he was the one left holding the parcel when the music stopped and all he could do was watch the politicians of other persuasions digging each other in the ribs and chuckling in glee and relief that it wasn’t them this time!
As far as sleaze is concerned, a lot more is covered up than we know. Does anyone remember a certain GH, a bearded Tory MP who had a same s.ex affair with a young researcher about the time the last Conservative government ended? Try googling him and see how little it says about it!
We don’t have any reasonable choice of party in Britain. Remember when David Davis the MP for Howden, a solid Conservative seat, resigned and went for re-election as a protest? Labour refused to put up a candidate as it didn’t want the Tories crowing about hanging onto a safe seat. Mr Davis duly held onto his seat and the Tories duly crowed about what a great victory they’d won. Despite winning with a terribly low turnout and a reduced majority without a Lab candidate and The Monster Raving Loonies increasing their vote in 3rd place!! Is it any wonder the country is going down the pan?

[saint-spoon]

Interesting post, obviously well informed. You didn’t however touch on the extortionate tax levels or where the money is being squandered. We will always have boom and bust and our manufacturing industries are dead due to manpower costs but I fail to see why this can be pinned entirely on MT when the country was in such a state when she took over; surely unions reducing productivity by going on strike every week over imagined slights and overzealous pay demands has done as much damage to industry. A Scar-Gill wanted one thing and that was to destabilise the elected government because they weren’t who he wanted in power, to that end he was willing to fight with the last drop of the miner’s blood to achieve his own aim. Shockingly I feel that had he succeeded we would now be without elections as the ruling junta enforced their will upon us whilst enjoying great luxury themselves; the extreme left doesn’t have a particularly good track record when it come to the follow on from seizing power.
As my tax loading spirals the services provided shrink, in my town our hospital has closed, the police station has become a daytime centre only with a skeleton night crew(despite increasing crime levels), there aren’t any NHS dentist places and bins are down to every second week (and when they do come rubbish litters the street because it’s a private company which are not contracted to pick litter from the streets even if they’ve dropped it.)
When labour came to power my councils tax was just over £300 per year, now it’s over £2,000, the yearly increase is between 10% and 27% except when it’s an election year when it drops down to 3 or 4 %. Annoyingly the majority goes directly to the central fund to be distributed around labour voting areas. Fuel duty has gone up three times in nine months, more tax.

[mal]

As I said, MT marked the start of the rot and that no one since has done anything to redress the balance. My point is that whoever is in power, there is no difference! Party politics aren't based on "what we can do" but on "what the other side won't do!"
The Unions that MT tried so hard to suppress have played a vital role in the development of our society and have, in the main been a force for the good. Yes, they had their faults, but without them we'd still have had work houses and kiddies down the pits. Yes, they had their little Hitlers who’d call a strike at the drop of a hat for no worthwhile reason, but in the main, they were doing their level best for the people in their care that government didn’t give a damn about and simkply tried to get them a fair deal. The miners strike was about resources more than wages and the trouble with the strike wasn't the reasons it started but the appallingly bad timing and tactics of it. Thatcher couldn't have brought the country to it's knees any better if she'd been working for the KGB. Not just hospitals closed down, but whole communities destroyed.
I doubt if politics has ever been as polarised as it was then. There was only one "loony left" and unfortunately she was the one left in charge!
I've not bothered with taxes etc. Since then because we all know about them. How whoever is in power puts them up either by direct or indirect methods and it's always the poorer elements of society that lose out. Fuel duty always goes up. It just shows that the people who are supposed to understand economics don't have a clue!
Since then, the bright boys in politics seem to have thought, “Hang on, let’s all do the same! Let’s all stick to the same old same old! We’re doing very nicely out of it so why rock the boat?” That’s what I mean when I say it makes no difference who’s in charge. Unfortunately it looks like this situation will continue.
We are at a turning point in history where we have 2 choices. We can either change our whole politico/economic model and survive or we can stay the way we are and become just another victim of our own greed. I don’t mean as individuals or a nation, but as a race! The people who make all the decisions, tell us what we can or can’t do, who is allowed to thrive and who isn’t. In some cases who is allowed to live and who isn’t, don’t care! Why should they? They have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

Shockingly I feel that had he succeeded we would now be without elections as the ruling junta enforced their will upon us whilst enjoying great luxury themselves; the extreme left doesn’t have a particularly good track record when it come to the follow on from seizing power.

If you don’t mind me extending what you say, if the miners and the combed over one had won, we’d be living in a one party state with the fat cats on top and everyone else ground under heel in some sort of Stalinist dictatorship. So what’s new? How much choice do we have now? How many of us in our great democratic state actually have representation? We all have the illusion of choice, but once we’ve made our cross on the voting slip that’s where it ends. From there on in, our glorious representative, who the majority of us haven’t voted for anyway, can do exactly as his mates tell him! At least dictatorships are honest about it!

As you say the extreme left does have a bad record when achieving power, but look at the societies where it happened! Societies where the work force have been kept in grinding poverty whilst the “masters” lived in unbelievable luxury. Look at the role models those revolutionaries had! Why wouldn’t they think that once in power they could be the same? Much of what we see as evil in communism isn’t so much inherent in communism as in the Russian social system it was forced from theory into practice in. Marx wrote Das Capital in Britain, with the people of industrialized and fairly well educated Britain and Germany in mind, not the ignorant, superstitious down trodden and cowed proletariat and peasants of Russia and he probably drew as many of his ideas from Adam Smith as MT did.

I’d love to think there was an alternative to the politico/economic model we have. I’d dearly love to think that my grand-daughter will have a decent society in a decent, habitable world to live in, Unfortunately I feel it is highly unlikely to happen because the sea change in our “world order,” set probably over 2,500 years ago, will never come. Profit, acquisition of wealth, possession and power for a few will damn us all because giving them up is unacceptable. They are too ingrained in our society.

[secret squirrel]

The trouble is that Governments `tow the line ` to Brussels.
Lorna