Category Archives: Government

Britain, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

Labour will be judged on deeds not words

LABOUR PARTY

THE CHANCELLOR, Rachel Reeves, with a rictus smile glued to her face at the Labour Party conference this week has sought to change the government’s central message from one of unremitting gloom to one of hope.

After weeks of relentless negativity over alleged black holes, broken Britain and “tough decisions” ahead, the Chancellor has laid out her vision for the promised land to come.

No one could argue with most of it. Who wouldn’t want a fairer society, great public services, better schools, higher growth, and a strong economy? However, Ms Reeves offered no discernible strategy for achieving these admirable goals. Nor did she touch on the price we will all have to pay.

Many will be surprised to hear her say there would be “no return to austerity”.

For millions of pensioners stripped of their winter fuel allowance it has already arrived and the Budget on October 30 is expected to be an assault on the finances of middle Britain.

The Chancellor claims she will not raise taxes on “working people” but what does that mean? Does she include those who have worked all their lives but are now retired? Those whose efforts and talents put them in the higher tax brackets? Entrepreneurs? Savers?

More likely she will deliver selective austerity, in which the private sector will be fleeced to ratchet up the pay and pensions of state employees.

The process has already begun with inflation-busting wage increases across the public sector which, incidentally, account for around half of the £22billion black hole supposedly left by the previous Tory government.

There will be a crackdown on welfare, fraud, and worklessness. The Government has said it will make special provisions in law for the most vulnerable.

The Trade Unions, far from being grateful, are ravenous for more. RMT chief Mick Lynch is demanding nothing less than “the complete organisation of the UK economy by trade unions”.

Mr Lynch wants to sweep away the Thatcher reforms and make it easier to shutdown workplaces and even entire industries if employers fail to meet demands on pay and conditions. Welcome back to the 1970s.

Other unions are coming in hard and fast. The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) said the recent 5.5 per cent pay award for nurses in England was not enough and must be improved.

By giving train drivers 15 per cent and junior doctors south of the Border 22 per cent, Ms Reeves has begun a wage spiral which could strangle any hope of economic growth.

Hardened by years of industrial trench warfare with the Tories, union barons are not about to bow down to a weak and inexperienced Labour government. On the contrary, they believe they can control it.

The constant talking down of the economy is having baleful effects. It is now hard fact that UK businesses are freezing both vital investment and the hiring of staff ahead of the Budget. There is an alarming collapse in business confidence.

Ms Reeves has said this would be “the most pro-business government we have ever seen”. But with the constant negativity and parlous state of the UK economy why would anyone invest in a country when its Chancellor has been saying for weeks that it is effectively a basket case?

This speech was an attempt to inject some positivity into the Labour narrative, but she will be judged by her deeds, not her words.

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Britain, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

Starmer needs to recalibrate the mood

LABOUR PARTY

ELECTED to office less than three months ago, the Labour Party has begun its annual conference – this year in Liverpool – already weighed down by incumbency: rows over gifts from wealthy party donors and tickets to football games as well as rifts about Keir Starmer’s chief of staff’s pay are feeding into the public disquiet. These come amidst the burden of government in difficult economic circumstances. Coupled with the low public trust and the needless surplus of gloom, the political honeymoon period for Labour is well and truly over. We knew change was high up on the political agenda for Labour, but since day one of government it has set out with the explicit objective of dampening expectations of how soon change might come. The gloom is palpable.

There is a degree of urgency for Starmer to recalibrate the mood with a sense of optimism and purpose. He needs to give the country reasons to be glad of a Labour government in ways that go beyond relief at no longer being governed by Tory rule. New governments often come to power blaming the last for what it has inherited. The PM has given the nation an unvarnished account of the dismal legacy left for Labour; a bleak audit that covers a record of political and financial maladministration.

Conservative ministers, driven by ideological fanaticism and self-serving cynicism, squandered energy and vital resources on ill-conceived, unworkable policies. Public services were starved of the means by which they could effectively operate. With that in mind, it is easy to see that Sir Keir has a difficult job because the country is in a dire mess. Putting things right will take time. Nevertheless, that morose message has been bitterly soured by a performance of fiscal discipline, delivered without a hint of uplifting accompaniment.

The prime minister says things will get worse before they get better. His chancellor, Rachel Reeves, cites “black holes” in the budget, withdraws winter fuel payments for all but the poorest pensioners, and continually pledges that there is more pain to come. Ms Reeves’ argument is that government departments under the Conservatives overspent by £22bn in the budget and that deep cuts are needed to compensate. This is a self-imposed restriction that stems from ill-advised fiscal rules. The force of that constraint, and the zeal with which it is applied as austerity across Whitehall, is also a matter of political choice.

The government’s strategists argue that adherence to Tory spending limits was a “non-negotiable” condition of persuading the public that Labour could be trusted on the economy. Possibly, possibly not. There is no way to test the counterfactual scenario, where Ms Reeves could have fought the election with a wider range of tax-raising options still open. However, the decision to lean into unpopularity so hard, so fast, and without a countervailing narrative of hope looks like very poor strategic judgment.

Labour’s election manifesto contained plenty of reasons to expect a substantial departure from a grim status quo. A marked progressive shift was promised in the areas of workers’ rights, a robust commitment to net zero, improved relations with the rest of Europe and, perhaps most significantly, readiness to embrace a more interventionist model of economic management, including public ownership of utility companies.

The Starmerite script contains rather too much fiscal conservatism, but the hope on the left of the party is that there is a social democratic framework at its core. That would express the opposite of the Tory conviction that government’s main function is to facilitate market supremacy and then get out of the way. Many Labour MPs, activists, and Labour supporting people in the country will feel unsure which of the two strands – cringing continuity or bold departure – will dominate. Keir Starmer’s task is to answer in terms that give hope of meaningful change to come.

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Government, History, Intelligence, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, Technology

Hezbollah’s indignant fury

MIDDLE EAST

THE terrifying attacks this week on thousands of pagers operated by Hezbollah across Lebanon is being perceived as the Pearl Harbour of the 21st century.

When the Japanese Navy Air Service bombed Pearl Harbour in 1941, their aim was to knock out America’s air power in the Pacific and prevent the US from joining the Second World War.

But, as history shows, they achieved precisely the opposite. Roused to indignant anger, the American public were instantly committed to the Allied cause – and Japan found itself facing a new and mighty enemy.

The operation carried out against Hezbollah and the Lebanese was spectacular on its own merits (despite the wickedness of the attacks) – with at least nine fatalities and more than 3,000 seriously injured.

Yet its wider significance is certain to resonate in the months and years to come.

If Israel, like Imperial Japan before it, thought this massive attack would serve to dissuade Hezbollah’s fighters from entering a full-scale war with the Jewish state, many should fear they will be disappointed.

Already the Islamists will be plotting their revenge – and Israeli PM Benyamin Netanyahu has been locked in talks at his defence ministry’s HQ in Tel Aviv over how to respond to a potential escalation.

Critically, however, many will be asking how did Israel actually achieve this?

There are several competing theories. The Israelis could have planted old-fashioned booby traps in the thousands of pagers – which are said to have been delivered to Hezbollah fighters only in recent days.

More likely, is that the pagers were pre-loaded with a sophisticated computer virus that caused them to deliberately overheat, resulting in their lithium batteries catching fire.

This is a known risk of the batteries used in many electronic devices – and is part of the reason why airlines refuse to let passengers carry laptops in their checked luggage.

In whatever way Israel carried out the operation, it’s ironic that Hezbollah’s militants only recently swapped mobile phones for pagers in the belief that they were more secure.

Famously, mobiles carry GPS software that allows the devices – and therefore their users – to be tracked anywhere in the world.

A few weeks ago, Hamas’s political chief Ismail Haniyeh was hunted to a guesthouse in the Iranian capital of Tehran – and eliminated. Experts believe his assassination was possible only because his phone was being tracked.

The truth is that Israel excels at precisely this kind of warfare. Decades of facing down hostile neighbours that vastly outnumber its own citizens has led to the embattled Middle East developing a fearsome array of sophisticated military tools, from nuclear missiles and tanks to cyber-weapons.

Combined with this is the ruthlessness of its famed secret intelligence agency, Mossad, in tracking down and eliminating its enemies, from the perpetrators of the Munich Olympics massacre onwards. As we have seen, Mossad always gets its man – or men – in the end.

So, what comes next? If reports are right, and one in 30 of Hezbollah’s fighters have indeed been put out of action due to the pager attack, that will present a severe impediment to the group’s operational capability. The leadership will also be asking questions about how to communicate securely with its fighters in future.

With Hezbollah’s military organisation disrupted, the Israelis might decide to invade a portion of southern Lebanon to create a “buffer zone” that could protect civilians in northern Israel from rocket attacks.

Some experts will have concerns about this “contained” approach. For all the brutal ingeniousness of the pager attack, the consequences for regional security could be dire.

Instead, the pager operation is far more likely to be the prelude to another all-out Israel-Lebanon War – with grim consequences for world peace and stability.

Hezbollah’s allies, Iran and Syria, will inevitably be anxious and worried that Israeli intelligence could do the same to them. But even those Arab countries with diplomatic relations with Israel, such as Egypt and Jordan, must now be asking themselves how safe they really are – and whether or not their communication networks are secure. This will weaken Israel’s ability to build friendships in the region.

And there could be consequences for us, too. Western democracies will already be assessing what this novel form of warfare means for them – and how they might be able to copy Israel’s methods.

History teaches us that no new military technique remains a monopoly of its inventor for long. How long before Putin or Xi Jinping works out how to make millions of iPhones around the world burst into flames in the pockets of their foes?

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