Category Archives: Politics

Britain, European Union, Government, Politics, Society

(In Brief) What are the UK’s Brexit Options?

BREXIT

The Chequers Plan – The Prime Minister has made clear that her July 2018 blueprint remains Britain’s negotiating position and expects her ministers in Cabinet to promote it.

But officials at No 10 know that if the EU continues to stonewall, the internal Tory Party voices who have never liked the deal will only get louder. The agreement would see the UK collect tariffs on behalf of the EU and follow a “common rulebook” for goods but not services.

Canada – Canada’s free trade deal with the EU came into force last October, following seven years of negotiation.

It grants preferential access to the single market without signing up to the EU’s four fundamental freedoms – goods, services, capital and labour.

It removes 99 per cent of customs duties and trade tariffs, but it would not give British financial services the access to the EU market they currently enjoy and does not solve the Northern Ireland border question.

Norway – Under the Norway model, the UK would sit alongside Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein as part of the European Economic Area (EEA).

It would give Britain the freedom to strike trade deals with countries around the world. But free movement of people would continue, which would be unacceptable to many Tory Eurosceptics.

No Deal – The nuclear option. But the Prime Minister has repeated her pledge in the last few days that “no deal is better than a bad deal”.

Britain would make a clean break from the EU and fall back on its membership of the World Trade Organisation. It could also save Britain paying the £39 billion “divorce bill”.

Blind Brexit – This would involve a vague November statement on future trade in a bid to finalise the divorce payment and transition deal. The details of the future trading relationship would be sorted out at an unspecified later date.

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Britain, Economic, Financial Markets, Government, Politics, Society

The real crisis of capitalism

ECONOMIC

THE past week has been a time for recalling the events of September 2008, their long shadow over the economics and politics of the past ten years and for drawing the right lessons for the future.

In particular, did the financial crisis prove that capitalism is fundamentally unstable and that a new model involving greater control and a much bigger role for the state, as favoured by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, is a better one? Or, the fact that the guilty men and women mainly got away with it, meant that public anger over the crisis was never assuaged?

We should understand that the financial crisis did not begin on the weekend of September 13-14, 2008, which saw frantic but unsuccessful efforts to save Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street investment bank. The crisis had been simmering for well over a year, a period that saw the run on Northern Rock and the start of Britain’s deepest recession in the post-war period.

The bankruptcy of Lehman, announced on September 15, turned a smouldering crisis into a ravaging forest fire that spread rapidly around the world. Banks were bailed-out by free-market governments using public funds. Alongside near-zero interest rates, central banks including the Bank of England did things they never would have contemplated in normal circumstances, most notably quantitative easing (or the printing of free money). Governments spent vast sums of money that ran into the billions boosting their economies to ease the impact of the crisis, but on the basis that they would cut back later. Austerity, on a scale and duration not seen in this country since the Geddes axe of the 1920s, was the course chosen by the coalition government in 2010.

 

MOST of what people think they know about the past decade is wrong. The danger in 2008 was of a prolonged period of deflation – falling prices and economic depression, a modern version of the 1930s. The reality is that both were avoided. After the shock of the crisis the economy grew more slowly than had been the norm, but it grew. All advanced economies were afflicted by weaker growth.

Income inequality in Britain has fallen since the crisis, not least because the burden of tax faced by the highest earners has increased. This financial year, 2018-19, the top 1% will pay almost 28% of all income tax, compared with just over 24% in 2007-08, paying £12bn a year more in tax than before the near meltdown. The top 10% accounts for 59.7% of all income tax revenues, up from 54.3%.

Austerity, as practised by the coalition led by David Cameron and now by a Tory minority government under Theresa May, was never about shrinking the size of the state for ideological reasons. The coalition’s mantra before the crisis was that after the spending splurge under Gordon Brown, the “proceeds of growth” would in future be shared between tax cuts and increased public spending.

Even faced with the task of reducing an out-of-control budget deficit, Mr Cameron ring-fenced NHS spending and imposed a target of spending 0.7% of gross national income on foreign aid. A better criticism of Tory austerity is that too much of it involved cuts to government investment and that the process has dragged on for too long, partly because it was leavened with tax cuts, mostly for working people.

 

THE financial crisis and its aftermath were painful but too many Tories seem to have been cowed by it from making a robust case for capitalism. This leaves the way open for Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, Labour’s anti-capitalist chancellor. When a privatised rail company messes up, or a housebuilding boss is awarded a bonus running into tens of millions of pounds, there is rightly an outcry. The crisis itself was the product, yes, of many greedy bankers and a few in handcuffs might have satisfied public opinion, but it was also the consequence of regulators whose job it was to stop them failing. In many cases, including the recent collapse of Carillion, many of these problems arise at the interface between the public and private sector.

Of course, we all want to return to a time when living standards are rising at a decent pace. That will be achieved only when productivity growth also returns to something approaching past norms. Capitalism in Britain has, since the crisis, delivered something like seven times the number of new jobs as those cut by the public sector. Unemployment is at its lowest since the mid-1970s. It is the private sector, not failed prescriptions of anti-capitalism, that will deliver prosperity in the future.

 

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Britain, European Union, Government, Politics, Society

Brexit: The last chance to restore trust

BREXIT BRITAIN

HAROLD WILSON once said a week was a long time in politics. In the present political climate, weeks must feel like eternities. Brexit has changed people’s views as the debate has raged on. For some, who were once moderate party members, have turned into hardened rebels; others who initially supported the Government’s approach now have real concerns about its direction.

Yet, the key conversation we should be having – one that has really been absent for too long – is what the next 15 or 20 years will look like; what we should actually do now, beyond the platitudinous slush, to ensure that the children of today and tomorrow can have a better life than us.

Deep down, our politicians must know that there is something amiss in the body politic of today. Populations are restless. People feel left out and ignored. The traditional levers to improve the world are malfunctioning – there is slower growth, foreign policy chaos and domestic budget stricture. The status quo appears brittle and worn. Where is the clarity about what to replace it with? The world is turning, and, for many, it appears to be turning away from them.

Underneath that sense of foreboding are two existential issues. The first is technology. In the lifetime of those born in the 1960s have seen the advent of the home computer, the internet and the mobile phone. Millions of jobs have been created by a medium that was invisible a generation ago and which, most likely, will have changed beyond recognition by the next.

Yet, even in normal times, politicians’ answer to technology is to either ignore it or grandstand on it. Take the tech giants and their questionable data practices. The elite have gone to town on them in recent months. CEOs have been chastened. Companies run warm adverts saying things like ‘we’ve changed’ without proper public consideration of what, over the long-term, we all need to change to.

The country’s focus on Brexit has meant we’ve missed the underlying, hard questions. Are they platforms or publishers? Are they monopolists or innovators? How do individual nation states regulate cross-border activity? The amount of time that politicians spend in legislatures debating the philosophical, economic and social impacts of artificial intelligence, big data and the loss of privacy is inversely proportional to their coming impacts.

There are many in parliament who are evangelical about technology and its ability to change lives. But surely, we have to ready citizens to take advantage of those opportunities through skills, flexibility and attitude. It is inevitable that there are huge potential changes coming, ones which will reshape our economy and our labour market. If these issues are not properly talked about, by preparing people to deal with them, we will be storing up tremendous problems for the future. We have to do much better.

This can all be reasonably predicted because it has happened before. The European Economic Community that Britain joined in 1973 was a very different beast to the EU we have part of since its expansion. Few people expected then that an economic union would also become a political one. Nor were most people aware or able to predict how fundamentally globalisation would reshape our economy and our communities. A lack of public consultation that forced through such massive changes had achieved a bipartisan consensus in Westminster. And it is this which brings us to the second existential issue for British politics: trust.

Those citizens who have borne the brunt of these radical changes feel ignored and patronised. Their security has been undermined and their way of life transformed. The years since the financial crash have been especially hard for many – to say nothing of the toxic cacophony of expenses scandals, dodgy dossiers, spin and the obscuring of hard choices. It seems to many that the system is now not only untrustworthy but also fundamentally rotten.

Against that backdrop, Brexit was an opportunity to restore that trust with a large section of society. By granting the referendum, our political class seemed to have recognised the need for a new democratic input – for some kind of check from the people of Britain on the consensus MPs had established. “The Government will implement what you decide,” said the booklet that dropped through every household letterbox, and many millions of voters believed it. Their decision was close but clear: Britain must leave the EU. The definition of that result was politically distilled, and the departure from the single market and the customs union has been cemented. In the general election of 2017, 85 per cent of people agreed.

Distrust and disengagement have now been replaced by curiosity. People hesitantly dared to hope that the political class was actually going to do something they requested.

Then along came Chequers. At a stroke, that emerging engagement with politics was dashed. Government spin proclaims that we are taking back control. The reality is that we are ceding it, at least on trade, in perpetuity. The document is a clever, legalistic, splitting-the-difference tome; the product of a process driven by a civil service never fully reconciled to leaving and, ultimately, not wanting to grasp the nettle.

Whatever we may think about the referendum, and whatever our own personal views on Chequers are, the key measure is one of trust. Does this proposal properly embody the decision of the British people in 2016? How is it sold to the disengaged or the exasperated? And, when this offer is salami-sliced away into irrelevance by the EU, what should the British people be told? That we gave it our best effort but came up short? That Brussels was right? That our political masters know best?

If Brexit directly leads to the jobs of truck drivers and call-centre workers being automated away without consultation or compensation, politicians here will not be forgiven. And if, after years of globalisation and European integration, MPs do not honour the pledge on which they hung their entire credibility, and implement the orders they had been given, politicians will lose the trust of the electorate for a generation.

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