Author: johnredwood

There are over 10,000 foreign prisoners in UK jails. In a recent poll more that 80% of those polled wanted serious offenders deported, including 80% of Lib Dem and Labour. voters with a higher percentage of Conservative and reform.

It us expensive to keep prisoners in jails. It is very dear to build extra orisons to keep up with surging demand. Successive government have been returning modest numbers and this government is now talking if sending some out of the country earlier in their sentence.

Why not take tge public advice and send more out of the country more quickly after conviction. Why do  taxpayers have to pay  more than £50,000 a year per prisoner, or over £500m a year to keep these people? Building new  places for them is £600,000 per place or £6 bn to provide for 10,000.

The Foreign secretary tells us China is a threat. He tells us the government is increasing its spending on Intelligence by £600 m. Like the US the UK seeks to keep China out of crucial defence and digital systems.

Meanwhile the PM will not confirm he sees China as a threat. With the Chancellor he wants friendly enough relations to promote more trade and investment.

China is running rings round US, EU and UK in producing much cheaper battery cars, based on a big home market assisted by subsidies and other encouragements. The US has placed a very high tariff on them to keep them out, followed by high tariffs from the EU. The UK has imposed no new high tariff, inviting in many more Chinese vehicles. The UK is also very reliant on imported solar panels and wind turbines for its big drive to net zero.

Has the UK become too dependent on China? Is China a threat? Should trade and investment with China be encouraged?

The government faces 123 of its own MPs refusing to support important parts of its welfare reform. They seem to be making some important points. It was a pity yesterday that the BBC Today programme hectored and overrode the Chair of the DWP Committee who wanted to set out problems with the welfare reforms . The BBC agenda was to paint her and the opponents as destructive rebels not interested in getting welfare bills down.

As she said, many of the 123  and  Conservatives and Reform MPs do think there needs to be welfare reform. They do think too many people are not in work, and see helping more people into work as a win win. The individuals will be better off and there will be substantial welfare savings.

The issues which need exposing are

1. Are too many people granted a sicknote for life who will be able to return to work?

2. Is it sufficiently worthwhile to take a job given the way benefits are removed and the tax/ benefit system hits people on lower incomes?

3 Can’t some more people with mental health issues receive help whilst having a job? Isn’t  work itself with the purpose and company it brings sometimes a good part of therapy?

4. If the UK cut migration levels more wouldn’t that make it easier for local unemployed to find a job?

5. Shouldn’t vocational education and training be strengthened to work with young people who will otherwise be on benefits?

6. What conditionality should be linked to benefits? What actions should someone take to get a job? How many jobs can they turn down whilst still

There needs to be a more  effective  and faster acting set of policies to get more into work and to make work more worthwhile.

President Trump was elected on a No more foreign wars ticket. He has let Israel wage war on Iran, just allowing one bombing flight if US planes to damage nuclear facilities Israel could not reach.

Trump supporters argue this was legal as there is a threat to the US – and allies- if Iran is about to make a nuclear  bomb. Years  of pretending Iran is a normal state  we can negotiate settlements with has  meant turning  a blind eye to Iran terrorist supported activity throughout the Middle East. The West has had to overlook Iran’s progress to producing weapons grade uranium. The idea is one  raid to force Iran  to negotiate from a position of weakness.

The Europeans worry about the legality of the action. They are concerned about Iranian retaliation. Some Maga supporters think this is a needless foreign diversion from the domestic  agenda. What say you?

On Thursday I travelled to Braintree and back by train to give a speech there. The announcement system kept shouting at me that if I saw something that didn’t look right I should report it to a member of staff. Ever obedient to other peoples rules I spotted several things that were wrong, but there was no available member of staff on either train to report to. So today I report here and will send a copy  to  the railway.

Things that went well

The Greater Anglian trains both left on time and arrived on time. The outbound train had been cleaned. The return train had litter on floors from recent passengers and was not cleaned. The on board train information system was clear and updated as we progressed.

What was not right

Passenger discomfort

The seats like many modern trains were unacceptably hard with a rigid and painful back angle. I had bad back and thigh pains for most of the journey which I do not experience on normal chairs.

The day was pleasantly hot. The fierce air  conditioning  made the train like a chill counter continuously blasting  cold air. I was cold for the whole  journey and was delighted to get off to warm up.

The perpetual loud announcements were over the top and ear piercing. The automatic doors kept opening and closing in stations with loud bleeps.

The state of the track

The worst part of the experience was the nationalised part visible through the windows . Practically every trackside structure was defaced with ugly graffiti, showing a failure to stop people getting trackside and an unwillingness to clean and  maintain structures.

There were weeds and vegetation growing out of older track and encroaching on the operational property. There were abandoned bits of rusting track . building supplies and sleepers left lying around. It looked as if no one managed it properly, left supplies hanging around and did not care about the assets.

Fare collection and enforcement

As a heavily overtaxed taxpayer I was worried to see the poor usage and likely losses from running the 20.08 from Braintree where only around 6% of the seats were taken and where only around 20 of us went all the way to Liverpool Street. The 16.35 outbound appeared to have more than half the  seats empty.

Tickets were checked on departing  Liverpool Street but not on arriving at Braintree or on train. Tickets on the return were only checked at Liverpool Street.

So I saw it and said it. I bet nothing gets sorted.

There are 3 ways to pay for lots of new infrastructure. You can leave it to the market as we largely did with broadband. That went pretty well with most people now having access to it. You can leave it to regulated  monopolies to do it. That worked badly with water where the Regulator often said No and the companies spent a lot on debt and equity. It worked better for gas and electricity. You can leave it to the government  to do on borrowed money. That was a disaster with the HS 2 new railway line and the new Horizon computer system for the Post Office.

The government wants to do more joint ventures and partnership funding, It talks of public financial institutional capacity. It thinks the last government had established £97 bn of that and the new one has added £40 bn. The bulk of it was UK export finance. Now there will  be National Wealth fund, Great British Energy and housing money to add in.

The use of nationalised business banks, wealth funds that can borrow and public companies that can partner and borrow conjures a world where the taxpayer could  be on the hook for losses and write offs. Where are all these good investments the private sector cannot finance? How does the state avoid getting the ones the private sector does not want?

Review of newly published book: PANDERING TO POPULISM? JOURNALISM AND POLITICS IN A POST-TRUTH AGE

Bite-Sized Books (www.bite-sizedbooks.com) have taken on the crucial issues of the role of the traditional media in a social media world and in a world of radical new political movements and parties. Pandering to Populism? (Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/y25vtpta) contains some excellent essays by people wrestling as journalists and academics with these problems. The editors see the growing strength of the new parties and the ways traditional parties have to change their views and preoccupations to stay in the national conversations. They mainly see the rise of in terms of Trump, Farage and Brexit, though they see the bigger picture with many radical party challengers of left as well as right in many EU states.

They date the phenomenon to the poor economic performance of Europe since the banking crash of 2008, though US performance has been considerably better with US living standards and productivity growth far outpacing the feeble European pace. They see that people have come to be anti-net zero, anti-migration, anti-EU and anti wokery, and often attribute this to dissatisfaction with the poor economic performance of the last 17 years.

John Curtice charts the collapse of support for the Conservatives in the 2024 election, and the poor result for Labour which still translated into a landslide of seats. He points to low levels of turnout as well as unprecedented numbers voting for parties other than the traditional main three. Trevor Phillips in an elegant Foreword shows how the growing anti-establishment movement today is left as well as right. He sees it as a strong condemnation of two main UK parties that have not listened to what the public want, and who have failed to see growing resentment at the changing of national culture through migration. Maybe in the case of some Conservative Ministers it was not so much not listening as failing to get the system to do what people wanted. On migration a succession of Home Secretaries struggled to stop the boats and cut the numbers, only to face opposition not just from government bodies but from the courts.

Stephen Cushion from his academic studies of the media thinks the answer to the rise of populism is to get broadcast journalists to fact check more things. He praises BBC Verify for challenging the Leave claim in the referendum that the UK would save £350 m a week of contributions to the EU once we had left. Yet this is what we are now enjoying, with an EU putting up contributions by more than we thought and the UK at last free of all such payments. He is pleased the BBC also “called out” Rishi Sunak in the 2024 election for claiming the next Labour government would raise taxes by £2000 per family. There was no attempt to call out the Labour claim they would not increase any of the big three taxes. Once in office they imposed a large National Insurance rise on the self-employed and employers. Labour has already put through a £40 bn tax hike with more likely to come in the next budget. With 20 million families in the UK £40 bn looks a bit like Rishi’s £2000 per family, as families and individuals end up paying the extra National Insurance through price rises and lost jobs.

Stephen Cushion has missed one of the main points made by the Populists. The so-called facts used by the establishment are often wrong or simply are lies. Take the Remain campaign, as he is so worried about Brexit. They used the Treasury and Bank of England in a political campaign to say if we voted to leave GDP would fall, unemployment would rise and jobs would be lost. After the vote the opposite happened, with GDP increasing, employment increasing and unemployment falling. What would Remain have said if the Bank and Treasury had backed the Leave campaign claims? Doubtless they would have told the Bank and Treasury to stay out of politics. The Remain campaign put out a bizarre forecast that over the next 15 years GDP would be 4% less than if we had not left the EU. This often was misrepresented as a 4% fall in GDP from current levels. This is now regularly repeated as a fact of Brexit when we have not reached the 15-year mark and when there is no evidence of any such fall owing to Brexit. Our service sector trade has grown rapidly since 2016 including to the EU and is the dominant part of our exports.

Stephen Cushion could have asked why there is no fact checking of the Bank of England, constantly claiming inflation will return to the 2% target when it does not? Why did he not call them out for forecasting 2% inflation for 2022 when it hit 11%? How wrong can you be without being accused of promoting a fictional reality you would like to see? Why no fact checking of the current government’s claim they would smash the gangs, as we see illegal migration up by more than a third this year?

My favourite mini essay in this selection is that of Tor Clark. The delicious caricature of establishment attitudes is wicked in its accuracy. He mourns the lack of effective challenge to Brexit, glossing over the concerted efforts of the combined civil service, legal and Opposition party establishment to prevent Brexit happening and to block any Brexit wins after the vote. He thinks immigration is all positive, filling vacancies that need filling, without pausing to ask how we house and provide for all those people coming to low-income jobs or to stay in a hotel with no work. He says, “GB News is driving a coach and horses through previously established hard rules on balance and impartiality”. Yet every GB News programme has a left-wing critic on to provide balance sadly lacking on the BBC. GB News will run big stories on illegal migration, rape gangs and other difficult topics which the main media refuses to cover or covers by just offering the establishment view.

Tor Clark’s fear that a crisis of confidence in the legitimacy of news journalism could become a crisis of confidence in the legitimacy of the state misses the point of populism. Populists think the state is letting them down and failing society. They see mainstream media as part of the same problem. More fact checking will not hack it. The two sides do not agree the facts or choose to use different facts to illustrate their arguments. Rigged fact checking to expose exaggerations by Populists need to be balanced by exposing the outright lies of an establishment that has failed to control the borders, failed to deliver strong economic growth and could not even keep inflation under control.

Do get a copy of Pandering to Populism? It reveals a lot about why we are in a mess.

The government stunt before the local elections of taking powers to override the Chinese owners and the managers of British Steel at Scunthorpe failed to save Labour from electoral loss. We now need to be told how much all this will cost UK taxpayers. It has the makings  of a financial disaster resulting in   the loss of many jobs.

There is first the need to sort out the ownership. The Chinese owners will contest their liability for costs and losses since the government took over issuing the orders. Company law  will be in conflict with the imprecise statements in the emergency law to “save” the blast furnaces and jobs. The government clearly wants the owners out as there is such a big disagreement over the future of the plant.

The second is to find a new owner/ manager to take over the responsibility for the business, with agreed levels of subsidy which will be needed and could be high to keep open the present plant.

The third is to return to the US trade talks and negotiate the freedom from super tariffs on our steel exports as the government originally claimed.

The fourth is to agree a plan with the new management over the likely life of the current blast furnaces and any necessary investment into them .

If the government is unable to find a new owner/ manager and has to nationalise, all of the above need to be done through a new nationalised Head of British Steel. Taxpayers will then have to take all the risks and pay all the bills, instead of limiting exposure to an agreed level of subsidy.

If nationalised all the capital spending as well as the losses have to be included in public spending. Those who argue for nationalisation fail to tell us how much all this costs. They also imply it will save all the jobs and gives eternal life to two very old blast furnaces. I do not believe them.  At current energy prices in the UK a blast furnace will not be internationally competitive.