Author: johnredwood

There is a delicious irony in Gordon Brown saying Labour needs a credible economic policy from its new Leader to be able to win an election. It was his boom and bust policy towards bank regulation which lost them two elections in a row, so I am not sure his judgement of what a credible economic policy would look like can be relied on.

I am meeting representatives of the BBC at their request following my submission that the review of the BBC considers their services to England.
I will not of course be meeting BBC England. After much prodding there is now a webpage on England, but there is still no BBC England with England’s news and other programmes in the way there is a BBC Scotland or BBC Wales. The BBC still seeks to implement a regionalisation agenda for England, breaking us up into regions that encourage little loyalty or even recognition.
My first question to the BBC is Why do you insist on trying to balkanise England when you do not do the same for Scotland? The Highlands and islands are very different from the lowlands, the borders are different from the central belt, yet you allow Scotland to be a single entity. Why is my part of England called the South of England? Why is Wokingham lumped with Dorset and the Isle of Wight, but not with neighbouring Surrey or west London?
My second question is why are you so embarrassed by England? The answer appears on your short profile of England which you have now published on the BBC website. In a revealing passage the BBC states

“Scottish and Welsh nationalist movements have long been part of the political mainstream, and are seen as champions of legitimate historical identities. English nationalism…has often been portrayed as a reaction to non white immigration and is seen as largely the province of the far right. But there is a constitutional nationalist movement that focuses on the English Parliament issue”

So England cannot have a BBC England because a few nasty people have pursued extreme nationalism, whereas in the case of other nationalist movements we look at the majority law abiding membership of those movements and not the criminal fringes. It is interesting that they seem to equate proper national coverage for the nations of the UK with nationalisms. Why can’t they just give sensible national coverage for England within the UK? Many English people want their country recognised and loved without wanting to break up the UK.

They are also hung up on devolution. Apparently you cannot have national feelings withouth a government. Their dismissive attitude to England is unpleasant. ” The kingdom of England had a distinct identity until it was subsumed into the UK in 1707″ – not you note 1603 and the union of crowns. “The establishment of devolved parliaments in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales after 1997 gave those constituent parts of the UK their own political identity, leaving England the only part directly run by the British government”.

England is a country with no England government. It has officially recognised symbols including its flag which is flown from Churches, sports stadia, and official buildings as appropriate. You are allowed to have the English flag on your number plates. Yet the BBC claims that “Markers of specific identity such as the flag of St George tend to be unofficial, while similar signs of Scottish and Welsh nationhood are sanctioned by the separate institutions of those countries.”

So when they ask me what my issue is, I will say simply stop denying England’s flag and national feelings, stop trying to break England up, and stop judging England by the minority tendency of its criminal extremists.

There have been two fundamental decisions taken by UK governments in my lifetime that have haunted politics ever since they happened. The first was the decision by Mr Heath and then the British people to join and stay in the EEC. The second was Labour’s decision to drive various commercial banks into financial difficulty, only to then put large sums of taxpayers money into them as new share capital.

This second decision overshadows current public debate. It has made possible the Corbyn challenge, seemingly offering free money to spend on public sector projects by printing cash to pay the bills. Regimes that have tried this elsewhere have usually found it ends in very high inflation, high debts and a crash.

The crash and bail outs of 2007-8 has led to a general dislike of the banks, when flourishing trusted banks are an essential component of any successful free enterprise economy.The bank manager may rarely be liked or loved, but does need to be respected and listened to. Every individual, family and business needs a bank account to settle bills, a savings account if they have a surplus, or an overdraft or mortgage if they need to spend more than they earn for sensible reasons like buying assets.

It has spawned a rash of policies to show different parties are tough on banks – with higher taxes, larger fines, bigger penalties, more regulations. Of course any bank executive or bank breaking the law should be prosecuted and punished appropriately, but turning banks into a cash cow for the government just delays the rebuilding of their balance sheets and limits their capacity to lend more to finance recovery. If taken to extremes it could also lead to their exit from the Uk altogether, with the loss of employment and tax revenue that would bring.

I fully share the popular distaste for taxpayers money being pumped into large businesses that have been and will be rich again.I can’t defend large share subsidies to RBS when the bank carried on paying very large salaries and bonuses to staff at a time when there was an obvious need to control public spending. This single act has encouraged a cynicism about politics.People hear the political attacks on banks and bankers but see the political action of the Labour government pumping in collosal sums without demanding fundamental reform of pay, bonuses and activities as the price of equity support.

At the time I urged the Bank of England to use its normal facilities to lend against security to keep the banks out of grave financial trouble. The Bank instead gave us all a lecture on moral hazard and set its mind against lending. With the FSA the Bank failed to demand that the commercial banks reined in excessive lending early enough. Once it had occurred they then demanded it be sorted out more quickly than was possible, and made their worries public to make runs on the weakest banks likely. The crisis was not just bad commercial banking but also dreadful Central banking.

Once the publicity created the crash, the government then caved in and gave large sums in new capital. Instead they should have gone for controlled liquidation, propping and supporting the deposit base and the general commercial activities that were crucial with loans, and demanding the sale of the more exotic and overseas assets to help slim the groups and pay some of the bills. Shareholders and bondholders should have taken the hit, not taxpayers.

Allowing competing private sector companies subsidised capital without demanding reform was a moral and political disaster. It has led directly to a feeling that different laws apply to the banks and to an attitude which thinks that one bad policy mistake justifies more such mistakes. It has led directly to some assuming that money printing is now acceptable and could work on a larger scale for wider purposes. It has also led to a new hostility between the many voters and one of the nation’s leading economic activities which still pays a lot of the bills. I will look at its consequences for the two main parties in a future post.

Mr Tsipras has changed from firebrand advocate of change in the Euro and opponent of austerity into EU establishment poster boy accepting every term of a bad deal. His willingness to sign up for everything he once opposed is a far from reassuring sight. He says he is taking a painful but responsible approach. I see nothing responsible in what he is visiting on both Greece and the Eurozone.

Whilst Mr Tsipras and the zone have been at war over the deal the Greek economy must have suffered further substantial damage from bank closures, loss of tourist revenue, and the inability of Greek companies to pay overseas suppliers. The creditors will probably discover the Greek accounts are in a worse shape today than they have forecast for the new loan.

Germany says the IMF must be part of the new deal, but the IMF says there has to be Greek debt retirement or easing of terms which Germany thinks undesirable and unnecessary. Let us assume this is another gulf which can be bridged by compromise and ambiguous words. It still leaves Greece with more debt than it can repay anytime soon, and still leaves Greece struggling to get its fiscal deficit down. It will also leave a very unhappy German electorate blaming Mrs Merkel for giving ground.

The truth is the responsible course would be for the zone to admit now that if Greece is to continue in the Euro Germany and the other richer parts of the zone have to send grants to Greece to assist it. If they do not wish to do that, it would be best for Greece to leave the zone in a planned and orderly way, creating her own currency again and writing off some of the debt she owes to the EU, Euro area and IMF. For Germany an exit settlement might be cheaper now than at the end of another failed bail out plan.

The probability that Greece will hit the privatisation and deficit reduction targets, resume good growth and get back to her pre crisis levels of income is very low. This Greek saga is unfortunately far from over. This country is suffering from too little demand, too little money in circulation, badly damaged banks and a poorly managed and expensive public sector that has to make cuts. It now has the problem that the public voted for a different policy when they voted for Syriza, then voted again for it in the referendum, and have ended up with a worse version of what they opposed. They are in part the architects of their own crisis, because they want to stay in the Euro but don’t accept its rules, disciplines and lack of transfers from the richer areas.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry as I heard Jack Straw trying to explain why Mr Corbyn was wrong in arguing for People’s QE to build faster broadband networks and more homes. The problem for Mr Straw – and many others – is how do you persuade people that buying gilts with newly created money is just fine, but buying something else of more potential economic value is not?

My position on QE was I wanted other solutions to the UK’s banking and monetary crisis. I had after all warned of the impending crunch and suggested ways of avoiding it. I had urged the Bank and the government to offer more short term loans to the commercial banks against security to see them through the crunch once the authorities had created it. After the crunch I urged them to recapitalise the banks more quickly – not with taxpayers money but with asset sales and private equity with possible secured Bank of England loans, as I was always sure we could only have a decent recovery once we had banks capable of lending again to finance it.

Those who argued for QE and imposed it assumed it would do the following
1. Drive longer term interest rates down and keep them low – which it did
2. Force investors to buy riskier assets, driving up their price – which it did
3. Allow banks to sell their gilts so they would have more cash – which it did

Some also assumed it would boost lending. There was no obvious reason why it should do that, as at the same time the banks were forced to raise their capital to loans ratios, thereby preventing them taking advantage of the lower interest rates and possible increased demand for loans by offering more loans.

Some argued it would boost demand. It was never going to do much of that. Buying bonds from pension funds did not boost demand, as they were unable to pass on the rise in the value of their gilt holdings in the form of lower contributions, allowing people more spending money. Instead owing to the way pension funds are valued the lower interest rates increased the apparent deficits leading if anything to higher contributions! Allowing banks to sell gilts at a premium did not tackle their capital adequacy problem sufficiently and much of it was taxed back in fines and higher taxes. Some rich people maybe sold gilts at a better profit but overall this would not have boosted demand much.

The QE programme arguably made it easier to finance the large government deficit which both Labour and the Coalition allowed to run at high levels when demand was especially weak. It also probably added to the downward pressure on the pound, which increased inflation, cut living standards a bit more but may have helped some price sensitive exports.

The reason why all QE is usually wrong is very simple. It is pure inflation, if all other things are equal. IF you have functioning banks and reasonable use of resources in the economy and print a lot more money, you will find most of the printing just boosts the price of everything. Inflation is theft. You only get away with QE if the banking system is badly impaired and unable to lend all the newly created money on. QE to expand state spending is best left to Zimbabwe and Venezuela. Countries which try it on any scale usually end up with inflation, high debt and recession.

Deciding who can become a citizen of a country and who cannot, and deciding who is welcome as a visitor and who is not, is fundamental to that country’s sovereignty. Most UK voters wish to live in a democratic country where the government they elect and influence decides the policy on migration, asylum seeking and visitors, and enforces it at the borders.

In an age of mass migration on a large scale across and between continents, the UK has a great geographical strength from being one main island and one shared island off the north west coast of mainland Europe. This makes controlling our borders so much easier. Remaining out of the Schengen common frontiers arrangements made sense and reinforces this natural advantage we have.

The UK needs to agree with its partners in the EU that the opt out we enjoy from the Schengen arrangements extends sufficiently to allow us to make our own decisions about all matters relating to visitors and citizenship. If we cannot control our borders inside the EU then it is another good reason why we should leave. The UK should immediately take action to ensure

1. People coming to the UK illegally as economic migrants are returned to their country of origin on arrival.
2. Airlines and ferries should not accept passengers to the UK from safe countries without proper documentation for legal entry.
3. People seeking asylum who come from countries where people’s lives are at risk should be treated with respect and their cases examined fairly. If they are at personal risk of harm they should be granted asylum. If they are judged not to be they should be assisted to leave the country.
There is everything to be gained by speeding up consideration of asylum applications. If the person is a genuine case they need to given entry as soon as possible and allowed to settle and work here. If they have lied, committed crimes to get here, have come from a safe country and are making a false claim they should be asked to leave promptly. We should not be putting people in camps for long periods, or delaying in sorting out their futures.

Conservatives for Britain have now launched the website. Those interested in offering support can register on www.ConservativesforBritain.org.