Month: April 2010

Dear Shareholder,

I have been a bit busy preparing for the Board elections. I did run rings round our competitor Conco by keeping them waiting before letting everyone know when the polls are going to be. When I heard that Conco’s CEO was planning to fly everywhere I came up with the great idea of telling everyone there was some ash flying around which meant all planes had to be grounded. They all bought the idea, even though there was nothing to see or smell as you gazed skywards. What a move! It had the added advantage of keeping more people in the country so they could watch me last night when I won the debate against those who want to take over UK PLC. (No – that’s just my little joke – it was a real problem which we tackled manfully as you would expect us to. )

In case you hadn’t noticed, I just wanted to point out that I have been following a poison pill defence against predators for our great company in the last couple of years. That’s one of the reasons we have been signing up so many future costs and liabilities,why we bought the bank shares and why we decided to go for broke on the borrowings. Now I’ve got the printing presses fixed, it’s all fine of course. If we by any chance win the Board elections we can just dust them down again and print our way out of trouble.

Did you see me last night? It was a great show, don’t you think? How could anyone want a different CEO. I have got better at smiling, as well as knowing how to spend, borrow and waste on an unprecedented scale.

You must realise that Conco wouldn’t have as many of you on the payroll or be as understanding as we are when you need a duvet day or three. It’s a breeze when it’s all on tick. Can’t see why you would want to stop it. We can always invite more employees in to help do what work does have to be done.

Those who say we will end up like Greece don’t get it. They don’t have their own printing presses any more, now they are in the Euro. I am so glad I kept our previous CEO away from joining up, as it would be sackcloth and ashes for us too now if we had. Instead it’s just ashes in the clouds for us , which keeps the competitors on the ground.

Come to think of it, I can’t see how we can lose. So spend and be merry – there’s only a few more days to go before your Board gets what they want. Then they might not be in such a good mood over spending.

Yours

the CEO

Promoted by Christine Hill on behalf of John Redwood, both of 30 Rose Street Wokingham RG40 1XU

So by general agreement Nick won. He certainly suprised me. He took my breath away: he was clearly the most highly spun and the most misleading.

His pitch was “Trust me, I am the only honest one. I am different”. So let’s have a look at one of his crucial answers to establish trust. His reply on MPs expenses was all too carefully worded. The impression he wished to give was mendacious – unlike the other two parties he implied the Lib Dems had been well behaved. Let’s leave aside the expensive rocking chairs and trouser presses, Lib Dem misjudgements well within the lax rules and standards of the day and no different from misjudgements by many Conservative and Labour MPs. Let’s ask Mr Clegg a thing or two about the Dolphin Square mob.

Several Lib Dem MPs rented nice mansion flats in Westminster near to the Commons. Nothing wrong with that. The landlord wished to change the terms of the leases in his favour, so he offered substantial sums to tenants to agree to alterations in their terms.

Four Lib Dem MPs , the Dolphin Square four, accepted and banked substantial sums for private profit in return for allowing the landlord to put the rents up. The taxpayer was paying the rent in their cases. So why didn’t Nick Clegg tell those Lib Dems that was wrong and demand that they paid the money to the taxpayer? David Cameron made various Conservative MPs repay money for lesser misjudgements. The Parliamentary authorities investigated the Lib Dem cases, found against the MPs and made them pay back sums. Does Mr Clegg now agree these MPs behaved badly? Why didn’t he think so at the time?

In such circumstances Mr Clegg’s approach last night was wrong. Mr Cameron made another fulsome apology including himself and his party in it. Mr Brown used strong language to condemn some MPs, including Labour ones.

Worse than his approach to expenses is his approach to his manifesto. He goes round offering a tax cut, yet he also proposes £17 billion of tax increases. £5 billion of these take the form of closing unspecified tax “loopholes” – in other words a tax increase to be worked out and announced later. He claims his manifesto is “fully costed” and everything can be paid for, yet analysis has shown there are big gaps in the figures.

Of course last night he was able to exploit the position of the third party, escaping analysis and criticism for his programme whilst acting as detached critic of the other two. Meanwhile our country drifts towards a debt and deficit crisis with levels of borrowing similar to those of Greece. That is what we need to debate and tackle urgently. If we do not we will lose jobs, growth and prosperity.

Promoted by Christine Hill on behalf of John Redwood, both of 30 Rose Street Wokingham RG40 1XU

I predict the debate will be dull thanks to the format agreed,with each spokesman avoiding major error. I am not expecting much difference as a result.
What matters is what each party intends to do – there is more to be teased out of each manifesto.

Promotoed by Christine Hill on behalf of John Redwood, both of 30 Rose Street Wokingham RG40 1XU

All the parties are reporting large numbers of people canvassed who say they don’t know or have not made up their minds. The polls are also wobbling about a bit, implying some people are changing their minds.

In recent years I have found it more difficult to canvass accurately than it used to be. I suspect those who say “I haven’t made up my mind ” or “I don’t know” could belong to several different camps.

Some probably have decided exactly who they want to vote for, but do not intend to tell the other party canvassers – or even their chosen party – how they are going to vote. It avoids further discussion on the doorstep. They may think it avoids further contacts, but of course it may not as parties these days have “strategies” for following up on “Don’t knows”.

Some of the Don’t knows will not vote. Very few people tell canvassers they will not vote, though to do so would probably guarantee them peace for the rest of the campaign. A typical canvass suggests less than 5% will fail to vote, yet in recent General Elections it has been more than a third come the day.

Some of the Don’t knows will be people who are genuinely undecided, people who do want to hear the campaigns and even read some literature. They seem to be a minority of the “Don’t knows”, as relatively few want to talk on the doorstep, or have a doubt or an issue they wish to think through before deciding.

Many of the “Haven’t made my mind ups” are Lib Dems, as most of their voters, leaving aside the activists, are reluctant to admit to voting for them.

It would be strange if everyone already knew how they are going to vote. What would be the point of three weeks more campaign if everyone already knew. The parties should in a way be glad there are people who say they have not made up their minds. It means not all the next three weeks of door knocking, leaflet dropping and media performances will be in vain. Some people seem to me to be waiting for something more substantial or earth shaking than they have been offered so far by the main party debates.

Promoted by Christine Hill on behalf of John Redwood, both of 30 Rose Street Wokingham RG40 1XU

Mr Cable and his friends keep saying he saw the dangers of too much credit in 2004-7. So did the Conservative party and so did many of us watching the build up of the bubble. He was not unique.

What matters is the response to the crash of 2007-8, when Mr Cable failed to forsee the way public intervention and bank nationalisation would make things worse and damage the future recovery. There should have been earlier and private intervention with banks short of cash, and use of lender of last resort, not share purchase. He has not spoken out against boom and bust regulation, nor does he seem to understand the way tightening the regulations at the bottom of the cycle has made things worse.

Promoted by Christine Hill on behalf of John Redwood, both of 30 Rose Street Wokingham RG40 1XU

Nulabour was Tony Blair’s way of distancing Labour from some of the Marxist thinking that enthused many of its older members and some of its past. The theatrical moment he invented was the one when he struck out Clause 4 from the party’s constitution, removing the promise or threat to nationalise the means of production. We now know his successor did not mean that move, being happy to renationalise the railways and to buy up a couple of banks.

Many people saw old Labour as a mixed economy version of communism. The Communist Party Manifesto of Karl Marx was a very influential document, which set a programme for more than a century which many countries followed wholly, and some in the west followed in part. The second half of the twentieth century in the UK when I was growing up was heavily influenced by Marxist thinking. When I first read Marx I knew I wanted to oppose its surveillance society, its attack on private property, its dislike of freedom and choice. What surprised me was how many members of the British establishment I came across as teachers, lecturers, civil serrvants and Labour politicians bought into much of the Marxist analysis and some of the Marxist policies. They were armchair class warriors. I didn’t want to fight the class war. I wanted to abolish it by helping create conditions in which all could have a good lifestyle and come to own property.

There were ten main proposals in The Communist Manifesto:

1.The abolition of private property and land ownership
2.A heavy progressive income tax
3 The abolition of all right of inheritance
4.Confiscation of all property of emigrants and rebels
5.Centralisation of credit through the state, through nationalised banking
6.Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state
7.More nationalised factories and means of production
8. Equal treatment of all labour and establishment of industrial armies(direction of labour)
9.Erosion of the distinction between town and country
10.Free education for all in public schools and abolition of child factory labour.

Number 10 is a good thing, and is accepted wisdom on all parts of the political spectrum in the UK. The rest are bad for prosperity, freedom and the quality of life.

Labour in office in the past got a long way with implementing chunks of this programme. They introduced land legislation to direct development and take the gains for the state. They put Income Tax up to a top rate of 98%, and put in place penal Death duties.
They nationalised or kept in the state sector telephones, post, the main airline, roads, waterways, airports, docks, National Freight, railways and buses. They acquired state ownership of a big part of the car industry,aerospace, oil, gas, electricity,coal, steel, and shipbuilding.

New Labour lived with Conservative tax rates for a time, and did even cut CGT and the standard rate of Income Tax in their more popular days. Now Gordon Brown is going back to the old agenda, with the hike in Income Tax to a 50% top rate. He has nationalised part of the banking industry and promised to control the rest more tightly by regulation. He has pursued an agenda which favours the town more than the countryside.

So what is the antidote? It is the agenda of popular capitalism , with its ten point programme to free people more and to pass the means of production and the land to the people to own, enjoy and improve through private ownership.

1. The broadening of ownership of land and commercial enterprises – everyman (and woman) an owner
2. Taxation reform to lower rates
3.Land reform, breaking up large state owned estates and encouraging family ownership instead (Council house sales etc)
4. Encouraging private pension saving on top of basic state pension and National Insurance
5.Abolition of exchange controls and reduction of state debt and borrowing
6.Denationalisation – rolling back the frontiers of state enterprise
7. Brreaking monopolies and introducing competition and choice
8. Debt swap programmes and debt reduction for heavily indebted coutnries
9. Encouraging the private and voluntary sectors in areas formerly dominated by the state
10. Definign the state’s role in maintaining law and order, defending the country and in welfare.

This programme which I published in the 1980s and took into Eastern Europe is still relevant today. The language and attitudes have moved on, but the main point remains the same. The Conservative manifesto takes on the task of involving people more in the ownership and direction of public services, one of the next stages of the wider ownership movement.

Promoted by Christine Hill on behalf of John Redwood, both of 30 Rose Street Wokingham RG40 1XU

Lib Dems want to spend today telling us the poorest would be taken out of Income Tax under their plans. They are less keen to talk about how they propose paying for that. Their tax policies include:

Higher Capital Gains Tax, at rates up to 50%
A £5 billion tax on pensions savings
A tax on more valuable homes
An aviation tax – the Lib Dems holiday tax
and £5 billion of unspecified tax rises by closing so-called loopholes which they do not name

If you enjoy it Lib Dems will probably want to tax it. Their lethal cocktail is anti enterprise, anti success, anti investment and anti jobs. Far from helping the poorest, Lib Dem policies would make it more difficult for them to get a job to get out of low incomes, because their tax ideas would damage job creating savings and businesses.

Promoted by Christine Hill on behalf of John Redwood, both of 30 Rose Street Wokingham RG40 1XU

Sometimes it is back to the future. This week brought a strange coincidence to my life. There on the same desk was the Conservative manifesto seeking much wider participation and ownership for all in the life of our country, and there was a request from a Cambridge researcher to expalin the intellectual origins of the books I wrote and the policies I promoted under the last Conservative government which I called “Popular capitalism” at the time.

The idea behind both sets of policies is the same. The passage of time changes the language and some of the details, but not the underlying vision. What I have always sought is to help create a country where many more people have a stake in the wealth of the economy. Wider ownership means more home owners, more people with pensions savings, more owners of small businesses, more employees owning shares under an employee share scheme, more people owning shares in other people’s companies as part of their ISAs or other savings.

Why do I want this? Because I see the long march of everyman and woman to enfranchisement, to having a role and a position in a democratic soceity, as the British story. The nineteenth century brought the working man the vote. The early twentieth century brought votes for women.The second half of the twentieth century brought majority home ownership and some progress with pensions and share investments. The twenty first century should be about spreading ownership ever more widely, so almost all come to have a stake in our society.

My answer to the researcher as to the origins of my ideas of Popular Captialism was not one an intellectual historian wanted. There was no book I read or pamphlet I picked up which inspired me. It was years of practical experience in business,and years of talking to people on doorsteps that persuaded me that wider ownership would make for a fairer, happier and more prosperous society. This was a view which visits to communist countries reinforced, when I saw how freedom and good living standards had been extinguished with the eclipse of most private property.

As I struggled to explain this pragmatic origin of Popular capitalism, I then recalled that there was an important intellectual influence on it all in my mind. The main influence was Karl Marx. I read Marx as a young man and was so repelled by what I read – and by the pale distillation of his class warfare and state power thought in some of my teachers and their books – that I did in the end set about writing the antidote. I took the Communist Party Manifesto and its ten points and wrote “The Popular Capitalist Manifesto” with a very different ten points. Whilst it has not been such a good seller as Marx’s original, the ideas of the Popular Capitalist Manifesto are now much more common around the world in modern governments than Marxist ideas. I will reproduce the ten points tomorrow – a successful recipe for economic progress and democratic success.

Promoted by Christine Hill on behalf of John Redwood, both of 30 Rose Street Wokingham RG40 1XU

The Conservative manifesto today points us in a better direction – towards smaller government, towards a world where government is more the servant of the people and less the master.

Under it people will be able to set up their own school with public money diverted from state schools, vote for a Police Chief of their choice, run parts of the public sector as co-ops or employee led private companies, get a share in the state owned banks, vote on the level of Council Tax, see their Council freed from much of the Whitehall regulation that currently controls it, and exercise more choice over access to public services. It offers some lower taxes to create more jobs. It wants to help more people own a home, participate directly in the business or servcie area they work for and to save for the future.

There will be a Bill to cut regulation and abolish some busybody quangos. Many people want to see an end to too much political correctness, some reversal of the surveillance society, and deployment of the thought police to more useful tasks.

Promoted by Christine Hill on behalf of John Redwood, both of 30 Rose Street Wokingham RG40 1XU