RIP

I heard of Margaret Thatcher's death through Tom Paine's post at The Last Ditch.

Sadly, he first heard from a jubilant lefty:

My tour of my local brewery is rather spoiled by our tour guide punching the air with glee at the news of Margaret Thatcher's end. What kind of human glories in another's death?

I felt compelled to reply:

To be fair, I probably would have celebrated the deaths of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin.

The real question is how people can possibly view Thatcher that way.

The sad fact is that far too many of my compatriots are misguided or downright malevolent. Blinded by tribalism, indoctrination or self-interest, they can't see all the good that Thatcher did for Britain.

To my surprise, and to their credit, the BBC's documentary 'Margaret Thatcher: Prime Minister' was really quite respectful.

DK's brief obituary is worth quoting in full, as it nicely sums up my own view:

No, Mrs Thatcher was not a libertarian. But she at least understood that the money that governments' spend is sweated from the toil of the individuals who earn it.

And no, Mrs Thatcher was no infallible goddess. But compared to what came before and (most especially) after, she may as well have been.

And no, Mrs Thatcher did not do everything right: but she had a vision that rose above that of merely lining her own pockets, and she had the balls to see it through.

Time to give up?

Over at The Last Ditch, Tom Paine is in a despairing mood:

the British public frankly deserves servitude because it does not value freedom. I am now bitterly convinced that nothing but the crushing misery of totalitarianism will wake them. Provided that their freedoms continue to be removed slowly, slice by salami slice, they will probably claim even then that the state is their friend.

Schadenfreude is not my bag, but I would find it hard not to smile at the thought of them in some future gulag, were I not likely to be sharing their cell. They are a sad shaming remnant of a once great nation.

When I started this blog from Russia, I was angry with British politicians and felt sorry for the British people, thinking them ill-served. Now that I live amongst them again, my views have reversed. The British masses are a shiftless, ignorant, nastily-envious bunch who believe above all in the arboricultural nature of money, the desirability of the free lunch and the infallibility of the state. I now feel sorry for those few politicians who would like to do right, but are restrained by their electorate's vile inclinations.

Though I haven't yet accumulated Tom's wealth of experience, what he says here rings true.

Even so, I'm not quite ready to give up.

I'm conscious that I don't meet a representative sample of the British population in my daily life, nor do I see the British public accurately reflected by the media. The views of vocal minorities are given undue prominence, and the 'ordinary people' selected for display by the BBC are anything but.

Our electoral system was always vulnerable to what we have seen - a gradual slide to the left, with a small number of voters in marginal seats deciding the course of each election.

But there is some hope. Norman Tebbit often writes about the millions of voters who have gone missing. Unimpressed by the options on offer, they simply stay at home.

We need politicians who will unapologetically set out a radically different alternative, as Thatcher once did. Sometimes people need to be led. Speak plainly and honestly, and the public may yet awake from their social democratic slumber.

Today I think UKIP are our best hope. We'll see in 2014 and 2015. Losing Scotland would probably help too, though I doubt they'll have the courage to go it alone.

All the same

More good commentary from Charles Moore:

A quarter of a century ago, when people used to complain in pubs that “they’re all the same”, I used to argue back: it seemed to me patently false. Today, I stay quiet. Nigel Farage says that we have three social democrat parties now. There is a bit of truth in that, but I would put it differently. It is not so much that they all think the same thing. It is more that they are all the same sort of people. They all belong to a political elite whose attitudes and careers are pretty different from those of the rest of us. The credit crunch has now lasted as long as the Second World War, but it has not seriously dented their way of life. This disconnect is made even more marked by the rising power of the EU – Nick Clegg is our first party leader to have started his politics in Brussels not Britain.

Moore is a Conservative, not a libertarian, but I suspect I'd be much more comfortable in his ideal Britain than the Britain of today.

Political football

Football is a great game. I played it for years as a child and teenager, and I should really take it up again. But I just can't bring myself to watch professional football. All those prancing thugs, alternately violent and whimpering, shouting at the referees and then feigning injury - it is a rotten game.

From what I've seen, the old adage is true enough: soccer is a gentleman’s game played by hooligans; rugby is a hooligan’s game played by gentlemen.

With its vast, corrupt bureaucracy, the last thing football needs is more politics. And yet this is what our Coalition seems poised to deliver:

English football has been told it must introduce reforms within a year or the government will impose changes.

The ultimatum appears in a new report from the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee.

Trillions of pounds in debt and sinking deeper every day, the last thing this country needs is a Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee!

Mencken on government

Two quotes from H.L. Mencken featured in the latest issue of Edelweiss Journal:

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

Of sheep and swans*

A few days ago at Blenheim Palace I saw an unusual creature ...



There's a copy of Nassim Taleb's Black Swan sitting on one of my bookshelves, along with several other interesting books I haven't yet found time for. His thesis will be familiar to most readers. It's neatly summarised up in an essay for the May/June 2011 edition of Foreign Affairs - "The Black Swan of Cairo" (PDF):

Complex systems that have artificially suppressed volatility tend to become extremely fragile, while at the same time exhibiting no visible risks. In fact, they tend to be too calm and exhibit minimal variability as silent risks accumulate beneath the surface. Although the stated intention of political leaders and economic policymakers is to stabilize the system by inhibiting fluctuations, the result tends to be the opposite. These artificially constrained systems become prone to “Black Swans” — that is, they become extremely vulnerable to large-scale events that lie far from the statistical norm and were largely unpredictable to a given set of observers.

It makes sense to me, and Taleb seems like a generally sound chap. So I was surprised to read that he has the ear of David Cameron. Back in February 2010, the Royal Society uploaded this video of Our Leader in conversation with the best-selling author:


A quick search turned up a 2009 Guardian article that described Taleb as David Cameron's new intellectual guru, while a corresponding blog post asked "How much does association with Taleb damage Cameron?".

More recently, on the 12th of March, the BBC asked whether Taleb is "Downing Street's favourite adviser":

"I like going to 10 Downing," says Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the Lebanese-American thinker and former Wall Street trader, "seeing the offices and the most powerful person in his T-shirt and jeans".

The powerful person he is referring to is British Prime Minister David Cameron, whom he has been invited to meet several times - including at the official residence he refers to affectionately as "10 Downing".

The admiration is reciprocated. Taleb has described the prime minister as "extraordinary" and "the best thing we have left on this planet".

The striking closeness between this once obscure writer and the British leader encapsulates how Nassim Taleb's thinking has captivated senior British Conservatives.

But as Will Bancroft notes, there's not much to show for this supposed captivation.

Over on the other side of the pond, Taleb has given his support to the black sheep of American politcs - a man with rather more credibility than our buttered new potato:

I watched the election and realised that there's something wrong that's going on ... only one candidate, Ron Paul, seems to have grasped the issues, and is offering the right remedies

(It's a distractingly stuttery interview, but worth watching)

From where I'm standing, Cameron and Paul couldn't be more different. Does Taleb know something we don't? I doubt it. What little hope I had has long since evaporated.

* title inspired by Tom Paine

30s redux?

You know things are bad when even the thoroughly statist FT runs articles like this:

there remains considerable faith – even, or perhaps especially, among people who hate bankers – that a financial solution, involving firewalls, bazookas, leverage and improbable amounts of money, can “solve” the euro crisis. It can do no such thing. It can buy time, as the European Central Banks’s deftly enormous interventions are doing by flooding the banking system with cash – but the purchase of time is not costless.

Schlichter on cash

Another superb article from Detlev Schlichter:

Decent citizens don’t use cash. Cash is used by tax-cheats, terrorists, drug-dealers and child pornographers. Once this is established it will be a short step to severely restricting or even banning the withdrawal of cash from bank accounts. As all banks will soon anyway be mere branches of the ever-expanding central bank, which prints the money to keep the nominally private banks alive, all transactions will then be just electronic bookkeeping adjustments at the state central bank. All financial transactions will then be entirely transparent to the authorities. “Irrational” behaviour can be identified early and – eliminated.

Whatever you may think of Julian Assange’s Wikileaks, it is deeply troubling how quickly and easily this organization was crippled by Visa and Mastercard cutting it off from its donors. This gives you a taste for where we are going.

Read the whole article.

Hannan on capitalism and ethics

Another good article from Daniel Hannan:

In an open market based on property rights and free contract, you become wealthy by offering an honest service to others. I am typing these words on a machine developed by the late Steve Jobs. He gained from the exchange (adding fractionally to his net wealth) and so did I (adding to my convenience).

Under the various forms of corporatism tried by fascist and socialist regimes, by contrast, someone else – generally a state official – gets to allocate the goodies, guaranteeing favouritism and corruption.

That’s not to say, of course, that malpractice is unknown in capitalism. Man is fallen and, under any system, some will give in to temptation. It’s just that in a state-run economy, corruption is systemic and semi-legal. Indeed, the most egregious forms of wrongdoing in our existing Western economies tend to be the ones that involve governments: lobbying for improper favours, securing taxpayer bailouts and the like.

He goes on to consider the moralistic hypocrisy of the Left, epitomised by their generosity with other people's money:

I have told the story before of how MEPs reacted to the Indian Ocean tsunami. Speaker after speaker rose to propose gazillions in aid. But when one old boy, a sweet-natured Italian Catholic, rose to suggest that we make a personal gesture by donating a single day’s attendance allowance, the warmth drained from the room. Those who had been promising vast sums on behalf of their constituents glowered sullenly at the poor fellow. His proposal was icily dismissed and the meeting moved on.

Nor does this double-standard apply only to governments. It is equally true of ‘corporate social responsibility’. When you boil it down, this too means being generous with someone else’s money. Businessmen get to feel good about themselves while loading the costs on to their shareholders, their clients and their suppliers. Wouldn’t it be far better if they openly set out to maximise their profits, and then chose, as individuals, to give a chunk away?

It can’t be repeated too often: when you give to good causes, you are making a moral choice. When the government takes an equivalent sum from you in taxation and spends it on your behalf, you are not. This is not to say that all taxation is wrong: some things need to be paid for collectively. But the argument for state involvement is a practical, not an ethical, one.

I recommend the whole article.

Obama to shrink government?

BBC News reports

US President Barack Obama has laid down the gauntlet to Republicans by asking Congress for the power to shrink the federal government.

He told business leaders that he wants to close the US commerce department and merge six agencies.

The White House said the plan would save $3bn (£2bn) over 10 years and cut 1,000 to 2,000 jobs through attrition.

The proposal is seen as an attempt to counter Republican criticisms that Mr Obama is a big-government liberal.

Let's put that in context. $3bn over 10 years is $300 million a year. That's a lot of money to you and me, and I'm sure it would be a good idea for those savings to be made. But every year American government agencies spend $6 trillion (6000 billion; 6 million million).

What's 300 next to 6 million? The proposed savings amount to 0.005% of total expenditure. Is this really newsworthy? If it's truly an attempt "to counter Republican criticisms that Mr Obama is a big-government liberal", is it anything but laughable? Can the insignificance of this proposal really be lost on the journalists and editors at the BBC?


Some of that spending is out of Obama's control, but the federal government burns through over half of the total: $3.52 trillion in 2009:

300 out of 3.52 million is still utterly insignficant: less than 0.01%. In failing to point this out, BBC News is either grossly incompetent, or staggeringly disingenuous.

Let's have a look at US public spending in a historical context :


The various levels of government in the US spend over 5 times as much today, in real terms, as they did in 1965.

Federal government spending leapt from 523.18 billion 2005$ in 1960 to $3193.90 billion 2005$ in 2011 — a 6-fold increase in real terms.


Anyone who was truly serious about cutting the size of the federal government would be talking about trillions, not billions or millions.

Public or private downgrade

According to BBC News,

The cut in the so-called sovereign ratings of governments is likely to lead to most other borrowers domiciled in the same countries - including banks and companies - being downgraded.

Although the move has been widely expected, it is still likely to make it somewhat more difficult and expensive for borrowers from those countries to raise money, including for the governments themselves.

Is this true? And if so, how does it work?

Why should the creditworthiness of individuals and private companies be connected to that of governments?

I can only assume that it's a feature of our corrupt caricature of capitalism. If the government struggles to borrow, it will struggle to spend, which may impact company profits and personal incomes. And in extremis, a government that struggles to borrow will have a harder time bailing people out.

I can imagine something similar happening in the private sector. If the economy in a certain town is heavily reliant on a single company or industry, the prosperity of the residents, and their creditworthiness, is tied up with the viability of the dominant employer. If the industry goes pop, a thriving community may turn into a ghost town, with various bankruptcies and foreclosures along the way.

The problem, then, is twofold:

1. All sectors of our economy - household, corporate, and government - are overly reliant on credit
2. Governments, over the course of the last century, have become the biggest of big players.

If we are to achieve stability and prosperity, we need to kick our addiction to cheap credit and government pork.

UPDATE

It occurs to me that there may be another factor at work: psychological inertia. The long-standing wisdom has been that government debt is safer than other forms. Why risk your money with competing entrepreneurs, when you can invest in an organisation that confiscates the profits of the winners? What's happening with these downgrades is an overdue recognition that government debt isn't as safe as previously thought. But it could be that investors haven't yet re-evaluated their standing rule that government debts are safer than private debts. Or perhaps some have, but they are basing their choices on the path of the herd.

France downgraded

Long expected, finally delivered:


To be sure, France is in trouble, but fundamentally it is not in much worse shape than your average western welfare state.

Quite why anyone puts stock in the word of these agencies, who famously failed to predict the recent crash, I'm not sure. I expect it has something to do with one of the few sensible points made by John Maynard Keynes:

“It is not a case of choosing those [faces] that, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those that average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.” (Keynes, General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, 1936).

No sane investor can trust the word of S&P, but it seems that enough believe that other investors believe in the worth of their ratings.

How our grandchildren will look back, and laugh.

HS2 pushed ahead - cui bono?

I last blogged about HS2 in November.

On the 5th, the FT quoted Westminster's most promising MP:

The maths doesn’t add up; this is just sinking capital into a lossmaking project. If you’re going to use the power of the state to do that, then you shouldn’t be surprised that this country is getting poorer.

On the 7th, James Delingpole blogged:

I don't think anyone would dispute that our infrastructure is woeful. But I also think you'd be hard-pushed to argue that Britain's most pressing infrastructure problem right now is the inability of rich commuters to get from Birmingham to London half an hour earlier than they would otherwise have done.

On the 10th, Jonathan Isaby had his say in The Telegraph

So, the worst-kept secret in Westminster is finally out: after days of leaks and briefing to the press, the Government has announced that it intends to spend £32 billion of our money (that’s their estimate at this stage, at any rate) on the High Speed Rail link between London and the North of England. And it won’t be completed for – wait for it – more than twenty years (again, that’s the timescale they’re estimating. For now).

By anyone’s standards, £32 billion is an eye-watering amount of cash – and all the more so at a time when families and government alike are having to look for savings. It works out at well over £1,000 for every single family up and down the United Kingdom, and large numbers of us remain unconvinced that this will be money well spent.

The project doesn't make sense. Taxpayers don't want it. For whose sake is it being built?

Divide and rule

Dianne Abbott's "divide and rule" tweet instantly struck me as ironic, for it is grievance-mongers and tribalists like the Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington who contribute to social division. And Abbott is right that people are easier to manipulate and subdue when they are divided.

In the course of some recent searching [1], I came across the following excerpt from John Stuart Mill's On Representative Government:

Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist. The influences which form opinions and decide political acts are different in the different sections of the country. An altogether different set of leaders have the confidence of one part of the country and of another. The same books, newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, do not reach them. One section does not know what opinions, or what instigations, are circulating in another. The same incidents, the same acts, the same system of government, affect them in different ways; and each fears more injury to itself from the other nationalities than from the common arbiter, the state. Their mutual antipathies are generally much stronger than jealousy of the government. That any one of them feels aggrieved by the policy of the common ruler is sufficient to determine another to support that policy. Even if all are aggrieved, none feel that they can rely on the others for fidelity in a joint resistance; the strength of none is sufficient to resist alone, and each may reasonably think that it consults its own advantage most by bidding for the favour of the government against the rest.

This is where we find ourselves: short on fellow-feeling, divided into so many groups of "us" and "them", bidding for the favour of the government against the rest. Many races. Many cultures. Union v management. Rich v poor. Town v country. Labour v Conservative. Smoker v non-smoker. English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish — and that's just the UK. In the EU, we have an empire whose fragmentation rivals that of the Habsburgs.


But at the risk of sounding conspiratorial, the problem is broader. The loudly and proudly expressed animosity between American and European politicians is largely synthetic. They have more in common with each other than they do with us.

You don't have to be a tinfoil hatter to recognise that there is a ruling class, and that it has been going global. Will the ordinary people wake up, and recognise their true, common enemy. Not any time soon, it would seem.

[1] This article, discovered in the course of writing this blog post.

Andrew Marr on repression and coercion

Reading one of Sean Gabb's articles linked from my previous post, I discovered an interesting Guardian article from 1999 by Andrew Marr. Topically, it was written "post-Lawrence inquiry", and considered what the "elite liberal establishment" should do to stamp out racism.

Though partially tongue-in-cheek, and slightly self-deprecating, the article leaves no doubt about where Marr sees himself in our society. They may occasionally be hypocritical, but Marr and his fellow Übermensch have a right and duty to mould the lower classes according to their vision for society.

What then can be done? (Apart, of course, from widespread and vigorous miscegenation, which is the best answer, but perhaps tricky to arrange as public policy.) First, we need to raise still more taxes to help regenerate inner-city ghettos and to employ more young people, white and black. ...

The next answer was given by Doreen Lawrence, welcoming the report's emphasis on education: 'I truly believe in education our history, our background, is what separates us.' But, though teachers are the most effective anti-racist campaigners in the country, this means more than education in other religions it means a form of political education. Only people who understand the economic forces changing their world, threatening them but also creating new opportunities, have a chance of being immune to the old tribal chants.

And the final answer, frankly, is the vigorous use of state power to coerce and repress. It may be my Presbyterian background, but I firmly believe that repression can be a great, civilising instrument for good. Stamp hard on certain 'natural' beliefs for long enough and you can almost kill them off. The police are first in line to be burdened further, but a new Race Relations Act will impose the will of the state on millions of other lives too.

Lovely.

What's half a trillion between friends?

Daniel Hannan writes:

I'm not sure people have grasped the magnitude of what has just happened. The European Central Bank firehosed €489,190,000,000 at the eurozone banking system. Five-hundred-and-twenty-three banks snatched greedily at the cheap cash.
...
the ECB is hoping that banks will buy government debt with it – as, indeed, they are more or less obliged to do under the Basel III rules. So eurozone governments are borrowing money to lend to private banks to lend to, er, eurozone governments.

It's a collosal sum, especially for an ostensibly conservative central bank.

Detlev Schlichter has more:

The pathetic state of the global financial system was again on display this week. Stocks around the world go up when a major central bank pumps money into the financial system. They go down when the flow of money slows and when the intoxicating influence of the latest money injection wears off. Can anybody really take this seriously?

On Tuesday, the prospect of another gigantic cash infusion from the ECB’s printing press into Europe’s banking sector, which is in large part terminally ill but institutionally protected from dying, was enough to trigger the established Pavlovian reflexes among portfolio managers and traders.

None of this has anything to do with capitalism properly understood.

Quite.

Gabb: Free Yourself from the Lefty Ghetto

I just caught up with Sean Gabb's recent letter to The Guardian. It's worth reproducing in full:

Lefties, as a rule, only read other lefties. This seems to be the case with George Monbiot. His attack on libertarianism (This bastardised libertarianism makes 'freedom' an instrument of oppression, 19 December) is the usual mix of unwillingness and inability to understand anything outside the intellectual ghettoes of the left.

He claims to have asked: "Do you accept that some people's freedoms intrude upon other people's freedoms?" – as if that were some knock-down refutation never made before. Of course we do. Our difference with him isn't that we are against courts and the other modes of dispute resolution. What we deny is that social peace requires an enlarged and omnicompetent state run by his friends.

He claims we "pretend … that only the state intrudes on our liberties. [We] ignore … the role of banks, corporations and the rich in making us less free." Not quite. We do believe that the state is the foremost violator of our right to life, liberty and property. But we also observe that banks are licensed and regulated creatures of the state, and that big business in general is only big because of state-granted privileges like limited liability, infrastructure subsidies, and tax and regulatory systems that cartellise costs and flatten competition from outside the magic circle. There is a difference between believing in free markets and supporting actually existing capitalism.

You could have published an attack on libertarianism that didn't border on misrepresentation. Or perhaps not. That would have meant exposing your readers to genuine libertarian positions. And that might, in a few cases, have opened the gates of their intellectual ghetto.

Olympic overspend

BBC News reports

The 2012 Olympic Games could overshoot its £9.3bn budget unless "rigorous action" is taken to curb costs, the Whitehall spending watchdog has warned.

The National Audit Office said a doubling in estimated security costs meant there was a "real risk" more taxpayer funding would be needed.

You have to read further down to find the true horror:

How 2012 budget has changed

• 2003: Consultants Arup put total cost of building and staging the Games at £1.796bn
• 2003: Tessa Jowell launches bid in May telling MPs it will cost £2.375bn - including a 50% contingency
• 2005: Bid succeeds in July with "prudent" estimate of preparing for games of £2.4bn
• 2007: Total budget, including a £2.75bn contingency, reaches £9.325bn
• 2010: In May the new government cuts the budget to £9.298bn and the contingency falls to £1.27bn
• 2011: In December the NAO says after the government's "assessed risks" are met £36m is left in contingency money

David Craig dedicates a chapter to the London Olympics in his 2008 book, Squandered. He concludes:

Why hold the Olympics in London or anywhere else? The Olympics started in Greece. In 2004, Athens did quite a creditable job with their Games, which they are still paying for. If the Olympics were only held in Athens in the future, the Greeks would find some use for all the expensive facilities they have already built and many tens of billions of pounds could be saved.

Makes sense to me.

Clegg: treaty change does not require referendum

From this morning's Andrew Marr Show ...

ANDREW MARR:

Angela Merkel is right, isn't she, when she says that there has to be fiscal union if the Eurozone is going to hold together? ... Which in turn will mean a treaty change.
...

ANDREW MARR:

It would also trigger a referendum in this country about our relationship with Europe, so my next question is: Could the coalition survive a referendum on our relationship with Europe?

NICK CLEGG:

Well I don't think there needs to be a referendum for the simple reason that the change …

ANDREW MARR:

(over) The Prime Minister's promised one. If there is a treaty change, he's promised a referendum.

NICK CLEGG:

No, the referendum will only take place if there is an additional surrender of sovereignty from us to the European Union, to Brussels.

ANDREW MARR:

(over) I thought any substantial treaty change will trigger a referendum. That's what David Cameron said.

NICK CLEGG:

(over) No, no, no. Let me be very clear. The test, which we've legislated on, is if we, the United Kingdom, give up more sovereignty in a big way to the European Union …

The truth, of course, is that any moves to eurozone integration would fundamentally alter the nature of the European Union. As Lord Tebbit noted recently, "the eurozone group can always outvote the remaining member states".

In an article for the Mail on Sunday, Daniel Hannan wonders why we would pass up this golden opportunity to extricate ourselves from a declining regional trading block:

Is it, perhaps, that the Coalition is determined to avoid a referendum? Sources around the Prime Minister are briefing to this effect but I hope they are wrong: few things are as degrading as the sight of an administration that distrusts its own electorate.

Or maybe it is fear of being left out of a Franco-German plan. In truth, though, a regulated Continental bloc offers us huge opportunities. We would be the offshore haven, Hong Kong to their China.

This was the model that Winston Churchill proposed at the outset. In 1946, he called for a United States of Europe comprising France, Germany and their satellite countries.

The full text of that speech, given in Zurich on the 19th of September, is available from the Council of Europe.

Personally, I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea of an anti-democratic Franco-German union on our doorstep, but I don't think today's ordinary Frenchmen and Germans want war any more than ordinary British people do, and the EU doesn't afford any protection beyond what we already enjoy through NATO.

Equally, to the extent that it may be in our national interest to undermine continental moves to full political union, I'm not convinced that our politicians are committed to this goal, nor that the task is easier within in the EU.

We should get out, wish them well, and watch vigilantly.

Heath: Media is failing public in many ways

Another excellent article from Allister Heath:

As the ComRes/Institute of Economic Affairs poll points out, the public has got completely the wrong idea about what will be happening to the national debt over the next few years. Because the coalition will be only gradually reducing the budget deficit, the national debt will continue to soar in cash terms and as a share of GDP. An extra £350bn or so will be added to the national debt before the next general election, if all goes according to plan. So far, so self-evident, you may think. Yet the public – primarily because of the way this story has been reported in print, online and in the broadcast media, together with Britain’s appallingly low level of financial literacy – has no idea whatsoever about this. It wrongly thinks that the coalition is planning to “repay our debt” – and fails to grasp the key conceptual difference between the annual deficit (or extra debt) and the outstanding total national debt (a stock which keeps on growing as long as there is a deficit).

The poll asked whether the coalition would be keeping the national debt the same over the next four years, increasing it by £350bn or cutting it by £350bn. Just nine per cent got it right – 21 per cent thought it would be staying the same and an astonishing 70 per cent thought the national debt would be cut by £350bn. This is an extraordinarily depressing finding and first and foremost a massive failure of journalism. It is also a failure of political communication and of education. Given such catastrophic levels of misunderstanding about what will be happening to the economy over the next few years, how can the public possibly come to a sensible decision about spending choices? It is a bitter blow for democracy and robs the UK of the ability to conduct a sensible, grown-up discussion about what should be done to tax and spend.

It is all the more tragic, seeing as we have a tax-funded broadcaster that claims to offer 'public value':

While commercial broadcasters aim to return value to their shareholders or owners, the BBC exists to create public value. In other words, it aims to serve its audiences not just as consumers, but as members of a wider society, with programmes and services which, while seeking to inform,

educate and entertain audiences, also serve wider public purposes. Public value is a measure of the BBC’s contribution to the quality of life in the UK.

The BBC creates public value in five main ways ...

And the very first of these?

Democratic value: the BBC supports civic life and national debate by providing trusted and impartial news and information that helps citizens make sense of the world and encourages them to engage with it.

EPIC FAIL.