Brown's Cronies Still Delusional

A serious Labour politician

The sound of son of a butcher and former schoolteacher Paul "Lord" Myners on the Today programme this morning was all the reminding I needed of how utterly delusional members of the previous government remain, particularly in the area of their economic (mis)management. He seemed to be saying that what the coalition government is doing in announcing what amount to, in reality, pretty modest savings in the short term, designed merely to halt the speed of expansion of the national debt by slowing down government spending rather than slashing it, is putting some kind of Labourist-inspired 'recovery' at risk. I kid you not.

He and his ilk still seem to think that the last months of Brown, where spending was allowed to run out of control not as part of any genuine attempt to kick start the economy through some kind of novel notion (which even Keynes never proposed) that you can spend your way out of recession while servicing gigantic levels of borrowing, but as part of a calculated effort to save nothing more and nothing less than Brown's political career by bribing Labour's heartlands and key marginals, is actually defensible. It's not, epsecially because it worked, predictably, in the North East, North West and, to a slightly lesser degree, Yorkshire, hence there was no Labour wipeout even if it didn't save Brown (nothing could), but it didn't work in the marginals, hence the coalition.

The point is, let us hear no more from the likes of Myners pretending that there was no political calculation involved with the reckless spending levels following the crash, or, indeed, that Labour had nothing to do with causing that crash with its disastrous system of banking regulation or deliberate stoking-up of cheap credit into a gargantuan property bubble. Even without the credit crunch (which did start in America) there would have been a crash in Britain inevitably, and a pretty big one at that.

Additionally, Myners completed his flight from reality by claiming that the latest G20 meeting was pointless and lacked the substance of the London summit in 2009, presumably because Cameron was there making the case for deficit reduction in the UK, rather than arrogantly lecturing the rest of the world about how to manage their own economies. I suppose Myners was so dismissive about the event because there was no really big chunk of money to boast about at the end. I think it was a mere one trillion dollars at the London event wasn't it? Well, of 'promised' money that is, of course, although hardly any of it ever materialised and hardly any of that which did had any effect on the forces of nature driving the economic cycle anyway. But socialists don't understand that, see? Sometimes the right thing to do strategically is nothing. Well, it matters not for the likes of Myners or Brown or, come to think of it, Alistair "Apologise To Me!" Darling any more. All they can do from now on is nothing. That, at least, should mean that they can do no more damage, thank God.

One last thing I thought worth mentioning: at the end of that programme we also had the annoying, schoolboy voice of Nick Robinson putting the sneering BBC spin on the Cameron G20 performance by referring to a picture of him with his head in his hands as the utterly outclassed, out-thought and luckless England team went 4-1 down to the dreaded Germans and musing, rather lamely I thought, as to whether this "new leader on the world stage" (he's not that new) would end up "hapless" and ignored by the others. I wondered to myself at that point, seeing as it was apparently the day to make sweepingly dismissive statements, whether the performance of this England team, rather than somehow reflecting a "hapless" David Cameron, at least in mind of the Robinson talking head, had far more symbolic force as representing the end of the era of expensive under-performers who nevertheless walk away with a fortune despite having been kicked out of the tournament. That's not England, thought I, that's New Labour! Funny how the two eras, the "Golden Generation" and the gilt-edged years of plenty under New Labour, seem to parallel one another. But, of course, the reality check in the Merchant of Venice (Act 2, Scene 7) says it all:
All that glitters is not gold/Often have you heard that told/Many a man has his soul sold...

Less money (unless deserved), more passion (motivation) and more graft (productivity): that's what we need not only from England's footballers, but from the British population generally. Less bling and more sting; more passion - and less fashion. The superficiality of England's performance almost perfectly parallels the intellectual and moral vacuum at the heart of New Labour. Over-rated and all mouth, costing a fortune, but when the going gets tough they crumble and the results become disastrous. In England's case, Germany showed them up for what they really are, in New Labour's, it was the crash. The only difference is, of course, that England were beaten by superior opponents, which is fair enough, but Myners is trying to defend Gordon Brown, the team captain who made all the wrong moves, chose all the wrong tactics and managed to defeat himself, taking the country with him. And that was after the credit crunch began. That was merely his Germany in the economic tournament. The moment Brown was really tested, the whole economic kingdom of debt that he created crumbled, and so did New Labour.

Myners and others who choose their own narrative on this lamentable passage in British history according to their political orientation are naturally welcome to do so. It might even be a coherent, even persuasive, story for the gullible, but it will never make it right.

As for the BBC, well, I assume there will come a time when the Conservative party finally has its bellyful of the licence fee-funded, left wing dominated organisation's constant breaching of its charter and either disinfects it once and for all or breaks it up into little pieces, some commercial (the ones that are already, that is!) and some taxpayer-funded, with no licence fee. Then the left will have to go away and infect some other institution, if there are any remaining in the United Kingdom, which I doubt.

PS: Actually, Myners' performance on this morning's show was all the more bizarre when you consider that speech he made torpedoing current Labour politicians' arguments against Tory plans. As Wiki says of the speech:

On 8 June 2010, Myners made headlines with a speech he made in the Lords. He said, "We clearly need a policy of fiscal caution. It was right to support the economy during the global recession but there now needs to be fiscal adjustment, as evidenced by the last Government in the Fiscal Responsibility Act. There is nothing progressive about a Government who consistently spend more than they can raise in taxation, and certainly nothing progressive that endows generations to come with the liabilities incurred by the current generation."

Well, my feeling is now that he made that speech certainly not for the benefit of the Tories but to influence the Labour leadership race, possibly in favour of Ed Balls. Conclusive proof, if you'll forgive the straw man, that Labour is only talking to itself. Long may that continue.

Let's Talk About Debt

Who would have thought it? After years of denial Brown finally admits, sort of, responsibility for the banking collapse by deregulating them 'in the nineties', thus proving, incidentally, that the Tory banking regulatory checks and balances worked perfectly. If it ain't broke, Brown fixes it. Now Britain's broke.

Speaking of which, I am hoping tonight that Cameron nails Brown on the scale of the debt crisis this country faces and that his policies caused. The fact that the mainstream media can't seem to grasp this, nor most of the bizarre economic 'expert' commentariat of this country (the Anatole Kaletsky-types), should not frighten the Tory leader. He must make it plain to all that we really can't go on like this. Brown can't blame the banks for making him cave in on deregulation 'in the nineties'. And, as Dan Hannan I think said yesterday, if the banks' advice about deregulation was wrong - and Brown shouldn't have listened to it - why did he decide to listen to the same bankers over the public, trillion-pound bailout? Fool me once and all that. Two wrongs don't make a right.

Debt. Cameron's got to talk about it, not just to demolish Brown, but to be straight with the electorate about the scale of the challenge Brown's scorched earth policies have left for a Conservative government to repair and for future generations to pay off. We are, indeed, all in this together. Everyone. So what is there to be done?

Well, the first thing to do is to face up to reality. The other two parties can't do this because they are wedded to a particular ideology of big state interventionism, so the Conservatives, as always, will have to do it on their own - with a little help from the population. The reality is that public spending is bankrupting the country. I'm not saying that Cameron should be specific about where the axe will fall, but fall it must - hard and often. He's got to level with people, but in a positive way: a little pain now; pleasure later. Reform everything, abolish waste, get more bang for your buck and fix the public finances, starting with Labour's nightmarish overspending, currently putting us at a humiliating 20% bankruptcy risk (five times higher than France, Germany or the USA).

Labour's all about pleasure, pleasure, pleasure -now, now, now - until there's simply no money left to pay for it. That's just infantile.

If the infants are returned, therefore, with "economy killer" Brown at the helm, this country will effectively be bankrupt within a few years.

As it is we already face a period of Labournomic, fake growth (where every £1 of expansion in the economy actually costs the taxpayer £2 in 'stimulus' money. Hey, that's just what the figures say.) As it is we already face a period of stagflation. As it is we already face what could be another lost decade, just like the last time Labour was in charge.

Anyway, those are the sorts of things Cameron needs to talk about, along with all the optimistic stuff, obviously. People want an effective leader, not just a charming one.

Brown is neither. Cameron could be both.

Carbon Junk Bonds

Carbon is universally ubiquitous. It is the fourth most abundant element in the cosmos and the fifteenth most common on this planet. It's the basis of all life as we know it. Yet it seems that this elegant combination of abundance and vital significance will not stop human beings, in their endless pursuit of ever greater levels of folly, from basing an entire new economic model on "trading" the stuff. It reminds me of the Golgafrinchans in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where, having crash-landed on a primeval Planet Earth, decide to use tree leaves as currency, only to discover soon afterwards that they had a serious inflation problem. Their solution? Why, burn down the trees, of course.

So you would think that this comedy science fiction is just that, comedy science fiction. It could never happen in real life, could it? Well, yes, it could. Anthropogenic climate change hysteria (it was anthropogenic global warming, but since the warming abruptly ground to a halt a decade ago, the goalposts were conveniently moved) drummed-up by discredited, numbskull scientists and then exploited mercilessly by leftwing misanthropists and 'financial engineers' alike in pursut of their own agendas, is producing its own version of leaf-trading. Both groups have something in common: while their ultimate goals might be different, they both really don't give a toss about the environment. All the traders really care about is money and all the loony Trots really care about is power. About people in general, they both care nothing.

Leaving the Trots to their own devices for a moment, in Private Eye's latest edition is an interesting article on the father of derivatives trading (junk bonds to you and me), Richard Sander. For those that don't know, derivatives, in their many various forms, are the things that brought the global economy crashing down a couple of years ago, (beginning, interestingly, with Northern Rock in Britain (it didn't 'start in America', as such, you see)). Just to put things in some kind of perspective, the entire market, if memory serves, was worth an wapping $500Tn in 2007, while the real villain of the piece, the CDS (Credit Default Swap), which was a trading invention that effectively rewarded the trader who held them with a payout should there be a default over a set period of time on a 'bundle' of mortgages, which were sold as a package, was $50Tn dollars before the sub-prime crisis went off like a nuclear bomb and plunged half the world into depression.

Well, Sander's at it again. This expert in magicking money out of thin air by trading in worthless assets is the main mover behind all the new bit of 'financial engineering' currently known as 'carbon trading'. Private Eye has done what passes in that magazine for an expose on him, though its typically MSM-style, schizoid editorial stance on all-things climate change means that it doesn't seem to be able to reach any solid conclusions about where this latest global financial scam will take us. Anyway, click on the image to read the article, or on the link above:

Whatever the ins and outs of how this thing's mechanisms are expected to work, a few things stand out in particular. First, the usual suspects are involved (RBS etc). Second, it stinks. What CNBC's Federal Reserve expert, Steve Leisman, called in late 2008, at the height of the crisis, a decade of 'fake growth' amounting to $40Tn, is about to happen all over again. A worthless commodity, in this case a commodity that doesn't actually exist - these are bets designed to offset the 'production' of carbon, or, more accurately, carbon dioxide - (at least with sub-prime, there was a real house lying somewhere at the bottom of it all), will be traded furiously in a market that some are saying will be worth $100Tn (Christopher Booker for instance) before this decade is out. And they are not wrong: one decade was all it took in the case of sub-prime junk bonds, once Alan Greenspan and Bill Clinton (and Gordon Brown in Britain, of course) had created the CDS bonanza for their banking buddies. Lehman et al over there; Royal Bank of Scotland, Bank of Scotland, Northern Rock et al over here. So long as the tax rolled in, no one in government cared. They certainly did not have clue-one about the forces they had unleashed with their vandalism of carefully created regulatory systems. Brown certainly didn't, hence the biggest exposure was in Britain. Within a decade, that market had jumped from a few hundred million in the mid-nineties to trillions by the time of what I consequently like to call 'Brown's bust'.

It's happening all over again, beginning this year. And there is nothing anyone with any political power will do to stop it. Why? Because of the propaganda that is fuelling the scheme's growth and the amount of egg on collective faces there would be should someone decide to hold his hand up and simply say, "Hang on a minute, do we really want to go down this road again?" So it isn't carbon capture we should be worrying about, it's media capture. It isn't money men like Sander we should be worrying about - he's just doing what he does best. It's the crooks in our own government.

It isn't climate change we should be worried about, it's the vast scale of the next bust, which will be inevitable if (or when) these immoral, undemocratic and economically retarded transnational carbon trading schemes are permitted to gain a grip on the world.

We do need alternative energy production systems, of course, and we must work harder to conserve and preserve the planet's ecosystem and protect it from humanity's impact (some would say that that is a human duty). What we certainly don't need is, first, insane, pseudo-scientific thought diseases that will result in real envoronmental damage (as has been seen already), and second, to pour hundreds of billions of pounds of wealth into the stratosphere based on that lie, wealth that could and should be used to modernise the world's infrastructure today.

It is time for people the world over, the vast majority of whom don't believe the climate lies any more in any case, to start shouting out loud: not in my name!