Britain, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

Budget 2024: Reasonably competent but lacking in spark

BRITAIN

HAD the Conservative Party been 20 points ahead in the opinion polls, this week’s Budget by the UK Government would have seemed a sound and steady-as-she-goes statement.

Some of the measures it contained will help many of Britain’s hard-pressed families and businesses. A 2p cut in National Insurance contributions, the second in just four months, means the average worker will be £900 better off. The Conservatives insist they will abolish NI altogether – in effect, a second income tax by another name – as soon as possible.

There were tax breaks for second homeowners, a rise in the amount small firms and the self-employed can earn before having to pay VAT, and incentives for our booming creative industries.

The budget also cunningly shot two of Labour’s most cherished foxes.

The Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, tightened restrictions on “non-dom” status for wealthy foreigners living here and extended the windfall tax on oil and gas firms largely because of the protracted war in Ukraine. Labour had planned to pour the money raised from these measures into the bottomless pit of the unreformed public sector and into recklessly accelerating net zero targets. Mr Hunt has used it instead to fund tax cuts for the workers – a commendable move.

If elected, Labour would now have to finance its schemes by either reversing the NI cut, raising other taxes, or saddling the country with even more debt.

By raising the ceiling at which higher earning parents begin to lose child benefit from £50,000 to £60,000, he is saving half a million families an average of £1,300 a year.

A laudable budget, but will it be enough to turn around Tory fortunes? Politically, they are stuck in the trenches and more probably needs to be done to get them back on the offensive.

Despite the budget’s reasonable competence, Mr Hunt’s budget lacked spark. There were troubling omissions: no help for the young to get on the housing ladder; no extra cash for our beleaguered military; no scrapping of the perverse tourist tax; and, most discouragingly, no income tax cut.

There was plenty of rhetoric about the virtues of a low-tax economy. Yet, we remain more heavily taxed than at any time since the 1940s. Freezing allowances has been the worst culprit, dragging millions of people into higher tax brackets, but there is no sign of a thaw. Work must be seen to pay.

Since lockdown, productivity has crashed, especially in the public sector. Although the Treasury has pledged to tackle this culture of sluggishness, we have yet to be told how.

The macroeconomic predictions for this year are good for the Government. Growth, though still low, is forecast to rise, banishing fears of any lasting recession, and inflation to fall below 2 per cent, driving interest rates down and the cost of borrowing.

The Conservatives could yet sail into a general election on a wave of optimism. There may even be time for a genuinely bold tax-cutting mini-Budget in the autumn.

This was a redistributive budget that has helped many, but by no means a sure-fire election winner. For the Conservative Party to win this year’s general election, more still has to be done.

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Britain, Government, Middle East, Palestine, Politics, Society

Guarding our freedoms in the battle against extremism

BRITAIN

HISTORY AND EXPERIENCE shows that where there is an increase in tension in the Middle East is often followed by an increase in terrorist activity in the West.

It should come as no surprise, then, that our intelligence agencies are warning of an increase in “chatter” on the communication networks used by Islamist fanatics.

The analysis suggests that the situation is as bad now as at any time since the terror outrage of 9/11, 2001.

This is a worrying indication of a rising temperature, and Westerners would do well to heed it. You do not even have to take sides on the long-running Israel-Palestine dispute to recognise that events in Gaza are causing immense distress throughout the Arab and Muslim world – angst which violent zealots will be happy to exploit for their own ends.

Such people swim in the murky waters of extremism, so when there is more extremism, they are safer and stronger.

We must add to this the appalling increase of anti-Semitism in Britain over recent months, including the open support for Hamas expressed by some participants in repeated demonstrations in London and elsewhere.

Enter now the maverick George Galloway, whose undoubted victory in the Rochdale by-election, will be disturbing for many. Mr Galloway’s political win arises directly out of the failure of Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party to sort out its deep internal contradictions on anti-Semitism in its ranks.

Sir Keir seemed tough enough on this nasty form of bigotry when it flourished among hard-left supporters of the deposed leader Jeremy Corbyn. But as the behaviour of Labour’s now-disowned official Rochdale candidate, Azhar Ali, showed, Labour’s past wooing of the Muslim vote had made it less vigilant about anti-Semitism in such places. And so, Sir Keir had to abandon his own standard-bearer in what is being perceived as one of the most important by-elections, pre general election.

For the Labour leader, this is a question of competence, leadership, and principle. He claims to have changed his party so often that it is tempting to wonder whether he isn’t all that sure he has done so. Anti-Semitism in the Labour Party remains rampant and rife.

For the nation, however, the election of Mr Galloway is a warning that the civilised majority among all faiths must work a great deal harder to resist the siren calls of militancy and extremism.

The vote for Mr Galloway is understandable, but for voters elsewhere in the country not really excusable in anyone who values civilised debate. The attitude of his Workers Party of Great Britain to Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel places him far from the civilised limits of our political discourse.

There is much in Britain that brings citizens together, whatever our faith and background. But as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has rightly warned: “There are forces here at home trying to tear us apart.” So, how do we beat these forces?

There are Government initiatives, such as the Prevent programme, which try to identify the problem of radicalisation early and to counter it with education.

There is simple vigilance and awareness, though the Government must be careful before imposing any more of the travel restrictions and surveillance that followed 9/11. The long-suffering public have had their liberties and freedoms more than constrained in recent years.

There is the public condemnation of repellent views – and at the very limit, there can be the prosecution of people for bigoted incitements.

Britons should never forget that our nation is founded on freedom. We will not save that freedom by restricting it out of existence.

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Arts, Books, History, Maritime

Book Review: A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks

LITERARY REVIEW

STARING across the Solent in 1545, Henry VIII was appalled when he witnessed the sinking of his warship, the Mary Rose.

The Holy Roman Emperor’s ambassador of Charles V wrote: “Through misfortune and carelessness… the ship foundered, and all hands-on-board, to the number of about 500, were drowned, with the exception of about five and twenty or thirty servants, sailors and the like.”

More than 400 years later, the Mary Rose was raised from the seas. Its resurrection is one of the most significant achievements of maritime archaeology that is celebrated in this engrossing book by David Gibbins.

Gibbins is the ideal person to tell the story of shipwrecks. He is a distinguished underwater archaeologist, veteran of thousands of dives, and a best-selling novelist whose narrative skills are more harnessed to fact rather than fiction.

His earliest wreck is the Bronze Age boat discovered in 1992, its timbers miraculously preserved in the oxygen-free mud at the bed of the river that ran through Dover in prehistoric times. The Dover Boat was probably constructed some time between 1575 and 1520 BC. It would have been able to cross the Channel and make extended coastal journeys, possibly as far as the Baltic Sea northwards and the Bay of Biscay to the south.

The most recent wreck is the SS Gairsoppa, sunk by a U-boat during the Battle of the Atlantic in 1941. It had been carrying 17 tons of silver bullion. Some of this was recovered and the Royal Mint garnered some 20,000 coins from it.

Between the Dover Boat and the Gairsoppa, Gibbins highlights ten other wrecks. The Bronze Age ship found off the Turkish coast in 1982 was carrying an “astonishing diversity” of goods, from pottery to weaponry. It also had enough metal on board to make 5,000 swords. Another, more unorthodox find, was a folding writing tablet which some history scholars have described as “the world’s oldest book”.

A Greek ship from the 5th century BC, also located off the coast of Turkey, had a cargo that consisted mainly of wine. Letters stamped on the amphoras, huge jars, showed that it came from Erythrae, a place renowned for drink.

A scalpel handle found on a 2nd century AD Roman wreck revealed the probable presence of a skilled eye surgeon on board. It was most likely used in cataract operations.

What wrecks often show are patterns of trade. The discovery of a 9th century ship off an Indonesian island provided evidence of goods passing between Tang dynasty China and Persia. The huge cargo included more than 50,000 bowls, candlesticks, incense burners, and mirrors.  One of the items was already an antique when it sank beneath the waves.

More recently discovered wrecks have shed light on British and global history of the past 300 years. The Royal Anne Galley went down off the Cornish coast in 1721. Only three out of the 210 individuals on board survived.

Among those drowned was Lord Belhaven, sailing to Barbados to serve as the colony’s governor. Reportedly, the day before its departure, he was warned of his fate by “a mysterious woman in a mantle and hood”, but misguidedly chose to ignore her. Had the ship made it to the West Indies, it would have ben used to hunt down the buccaneer “Black Bart Roberts”.

Gibbins is a careful and sensitive narrator; he never loses sight of the reality that wrecks represent the tragic loss of human lives. However, he also knows they can open up “many fascinating byways of history to those willing to be fully immersed”.

– A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks by David Gibbins is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 304pp

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