Category: Uncategorized

Queen Mary College London conducted a large sample neutrally worded poll to find out if people want international lawyers, Agreements and institutions to play a bigger role or if they want a UK government  to be in charge. Asking about 20 big areas of decision the average score  was 60% wanting the UK to control things and just 7% wanting a UK government to  be bound by international rules and institutions. People could  also vote for a UK government deciding after seeking international agreement voluntarily, or for Don’t  Know.

In every area the most votes were cast for UK independent decision. In 17 out of 20 that commanded more than 50% with 83% thinking we should set our own VAT. AI Regulation was at 47% for independence but only saw 10% want it settled internationally. Trade  rules decided by the UK stood   at 44% compared  to 7% wanting it imposed, with some wanting it negotiated by agreement. Data Protection saw 46% want it set by UK with 16% favouring international.

All this goes to show people do not think Brexit was wrong. They are angry because Brexit has not been used by the UK government to control our borders or promote growth. The government is now  busy trying to lock us back into the EU.They are misreading the mood. The public wants UK government to be in charge of all 20 of these areas where the EU used to have important powers.

We want this because we want a better policy with better outcomes. EU trade policy gave us a huge  trade deficit with the EU and big barriers against rest of the world imports. It charged us a lot, insisted on VAT and Customs duties, allowed many migrants to enter the UK and stopped us doing trade deals with friendly  countries . The present government who wish to recreate much of this through an EU re set misunderstand the public’s wishes.

I am not letting you off the arguments about nationalisation, as they are central to getting out of the financial mess the government is in. Most of you agree government is spending and borrowing too much.  Many commentators openly worry about how the government goes  on borrowing so much, and official sources talk of more tax rises to come. I have talked before about migration control and benefit changes to  help curb spending.

Your wish to reduce spending and borrowing makes it odd  that many of you want more nationalisation. Nationalisation means more public spending and borrowing . Heavy loss makers like the Bank of England and the railways  send huge bills to government who have to borrow more  to pay  these bills. Profitable  nationalised industries usually need access to state borrowing to pay for their large investment programmes.

Privatisation cuts public spending and borrowing in two main ways. There is a capital receipt, accounted as negative public spending. There is the removal of all the costs of capital investment and any losses from public accounts.

I agreed with the current government selling the remaining Nat West shares. It was an obvious way to cut spending and borrowing I had long recommended. If there is no follow on asset or share sale this year the spend and borrowing level goes up to adjust for this on top of all the planned spending increases. Tomorrow I will look at the high costs and financial risks of the growing nationalised portfolio.

Border Force has a large day to day budget with more than 10,000 staff and capital investment this year of £154 m. It has a fleet of 11 vessels, 5 cutters and 6 coastal protection vessels.  Its prime tasks are to prevent illegal smuggling of people and goods across our borders.

At least 1 cutter and 2 coastal protection vessels are in continuous use to pick up people on overcrowded illegal small boats in the Channel, and 1 cutter is provided for the EU’s search and rescue missions in the  Med under Frontex. This leaves Border Force short of vessels for the 12,000  miles  of exposed UK coast not close to France and the small boat routes.

Border Force helps Customs enforce against goods smuggling as well as acting against illegal entrants to the UK. The difficult thing to understand is why they do not do more to smash the gangs and implement stated government policy to stop the small boats.

When the last government needed to stop lorries bringing illegals into the UK, often endangering their lives, it took strong action. Even if the lorry driver and truck owner knew nothing about the illegal person hiding themselves in or on some part of the truck, the driver/ company was accused of a crime and fined. When Border  Force or some other safe boat  service brings illegal migrants in they are not treated as helping the criminal gangs that offer a trip to the UK for profit.  The illegal migrant often relies on the pick up mid Channel and the profiteer probably tips them off on how to contact Border Force to give them a free ride.

This is a very unpopular way of spending taxpayer cash, and clearly a way to boost numbers of migrants, not a way to reduce them. The last government legislated  to make it impossible for an illegal migrant to be granted asylum, and to send people to Rwanda. This government scrapped those ideas. Its substitute of  spending  more on Border  Force is not working. To break the business model of the gangs, the governments  stated policy, it needs to change the operating guidance to Border Force.

The Home Secretary thinks putting through an explicit offence of advertising illegal migrant boat services could cut the numbers crossing. She will find most of the adverts are outside UK jurisdiction, Meanwhile let  me remind her how many potential offences go unprosecuted in so many cases.

1 Everyone entering the UK illegally is breaking the law. They could be prosecuted for illegal entry.

2. Many of the illegal travellers have knowingly paid money to people traffickers and dodgy boat services. That is financing crime and aiding money laundering.

3. Some make fraudulent claims for asylum based on lies about their identity, past and origins.

4.Some undertake work whilst their claim is being considered which is against the law.

5. Some knowingly work without paying tax or National Insurance

6. Some work for less than the living wage, and some work in illegal activities.

All this shows there is a big enforcement issue for current laws. Why are many illegal migrants exempted from law enforcement?

On arrival illegal migrants should be asked who organised their trip, who they paid, how much and by what means. Their mobile phones should be examined to find answers and to trace where they have come from.

The great twentieth century nationalisations of steel,coal, rail, electricity, telecoms, gas, and vehicle manufacture were meant to modernise these industries, invest large sums of public capital and loans,  and make a profit for the state. They were meant to be better employers. Instead together they sent huge bills to taxpayers, spent investment money on plenty of projects that went wrong, had many bad strikes. Most of them sacked many employees, ran up big losses for taxpayers to pay and offered a bad deal to customers.

Steel for example were treated to major new steel works capable of producing    more steel than they could ever sell. Years under both Labour and Conservative governments were spent driving through closures.

The government portfolio of the 1970 s and early 1980 s was vast and very costly. The government needed to prevent the nationalised industries taking too much money which would have out more of a squeeze on the NHS, benefits, pensions and schools.

Given shortage of money the government felt forced to allocate more  cash to the loss making   parts of the portfolio than to the potential fast growing areas. Steel absorbed huge sums to pay losses and to try to slow the pace  of plant closures and job losses. The railways  losing passenger numbers and market share every year needed ever bigger subsidies to keep running loss making and underused trains. That left telecoms struggling with old technology and limited capacity when telecoms was taking off to handle more data as well as calls. The state gave more money to decline and failure and starved their growth businesses of new money to expand. The state was a dreadful investor, trying to reverse the momentum of the market and changing demands.

If you were the employee of a nationalised industry you were likely to face tge sack,given the large redundancy and closure programmes. If you were a customer you faced high and rising  prices for poor service, often linked to rationing. As a taxpayer you were sent huge bills to pay for losses and “ investment”

Given the enthusiasm of some here I ask why are you in love with nationalisation?

Is it the way the nationalised Post Office  treated many of its key staff, sending them to prison on false charges?

Is it the way nationalised HS2 has not  controlled costs, extended its delays and more than halved the amount of  railway  it will deliver?

Is it the way the Bank of England ( Nationalised 1946) has run its activities to send a bill to taxpayers for an OBR forecast of  £257 bn for losses on bonds from end 2022 to final liquidation of the portfolio?

Is it the way the state has paid remuneration packages  of more than  £500,000 a year to the Heads of HS 2, Post Office and Bank for all their losses  and mistakes?

Is it the way Network Rail and the Transport department have run timetables, created delays and cancellations  and regulated fares for  the last two decades of nationalised Network Rail?

Is it the way the Highways Authority handled allowing motorway hard shoulder use as a new lane and their repairs schedules with slow running and lane closures?

Is it the way a nationalised Scunthorpe steel works will probably close both blast furnaces and sack a lot of staff?

Is it the way the government road monopoly keeps us short of road space and delights in restricting its use?

I have given up on BBC tv news. I do still sometimes  listen to BBC radio to keep in touch with all  the latest wokery and distortions of the economic, environmental and migration debates they go in for. Here is my take on their current leftish establishment propaganda which is losing them a big chunk of potential audience.

They believe most of what the Climate Change Committee puts out and undertake daily pieties in their net zero religion. They refuse to interview people who point out the world continues to use more fossil fuel, the UK is being deindustrialised by idiotic net zero policies, the UK  has very dear energy thanks to renewables and the need for a duplicate back up system, and current heat pumps and battery cars are not the answer for most people.  They buy the myth  that the UK has dear energy because it prices electricity from gas.

They refuse to criticise the huge losses and bad inflation record this decade of the Bank of England. They believe the Bank is independent when it has needed Chancellor sign off and Treasury indemnity for its main monetary policies of QE and QT. They believe the lie that the Ukraine  war caused our inflation when it reached 3 times target before the invasion.

They under report the mass migration and large number of illegals coming into our country, and decline to examine independently the impact that is having on public spending, housing, planning and utility provision. They seem more interested in any extremist infiltration of peaceful protests against illegal migration than in the good reasons people have to be angry about government failure.

They give plenty of interviews to pro EU people but rarely to anyone who thinks Brexit is a success and wants to use more Brexit freedoms. They buy the government’s line that we need  to be closer to the EU that has a lower GDP per head  than us and grows slowly, rather than closer to US policy which is delivering much higher GDP per head and faster growth. They give  plenty of airtime to the 4% loss  of GDP fallacy re Brexit.

The interviewers often  seem to think there is a government  answer to every problem. They usually fall for the idea that more public money solves problems and we only have bad public services owing to under funding. All my life UK public spending has gone up in cash and real terms ( save the Labour IMF year)  and all the time the BBC reports cuts. They will not interview people who could explain why there has been a productivity collapse in the public sector and what should be done about it.

They do not promote one party, but they are far more critical of so called right wing parties whilst treating Green, Lib Dems, SNP, US Democrats  and Labour better. They do not cover EU and continental problems very much at all, and never as critically as they treat Republican USA.Their audiences are left in the dark about the borrowings, cuts, slow growth, low GDP per head,high tariffs and non tariff barriers of the EU.

The IMF expects the EU to carry on underperforming the  US by a big margin, as it has done all this century to date. It expects the UK despite the bad budget, the high taxes and the net zero madness to grow a little  faster than the Eurozone and to beat Germany, France and Italy this year.

The pro EU cheer leaders in the UK wrongly projected a recession, rising unemployment and falling house prices to follow immediately we had voted to leave. The opposite happened.

They then claimed our growth over the first fifteen years of Brexit would be 4% less, or 0.25% lower . They based this on the bizarre assumptions that productivity growth would slow as we lost trade activity with the EU.

They said you can only trade successfully with nearby countries, ignoring the surge in EU and UK trade with  China and India and the fact that the US is our largest national export market.

There is another obvious fallacy in their spin. Our trade with the EU is in heavy deficit. Imports do not add to GDP, and are subtracted in the accounting to work out  GDP. Importing more from the EU will not help us grow or be better off. If instead we embarked on import substitution, growing and making more of the things we need and importing less from the EU, that would boost our GDP well.

The UK  thanks to its crazy net zero policies is busily de industrialising so we have fewer goods to sell. We are however very good at services and are boosting our exports rapidly. These mainly  go to non EU English speaking  and common law countries. We are now signing trade deals which help promote this trade, thanks to Brexit.

Environmental puritans tell us water is scarce and we should ration its use. They should take a look at their local lakes, ponds, streams and rivers. Have  they ever been to the seaside? Have they watched nature deliver  free water onto gardens and fields as rain ? Water is about  the  most common substance on the planet.

It is true some human intervention is needed to store water in convenient places and to clean it up if we want to drink it. Water is not  destroyed by use but returned to the water cycle, often in a dirtier form than before we used it from the tap.

Companies can offer us more water from rivers, from desalinating sea water, from underground water in acquifers  and from collecting more rainwater.We could each collect more of our own as rain from our roof.

If the monopoly was lifted there could be more innovation. Do we need all water to our house to be high drinking water quality? Could there be cheaper less processed water to flush loos and clean cars? Industry often has to take the additives placed  in monopoly drinking water out before using the water for their processes.They might like additive free water.

Would companies intensify  marketing home  systems for collecting and using rainwater for non drinking purposes?

I have accepted the strictures of the water hair shirt environmentalists as they have helped block bigger and growing  water supplies. I would like to be able to buy a sprinkler for my grass , use the hosepipe on my shrubs and wash my car more  often but do not  do so given the ridiculous  restrictions on supply.

What a nonsense that a leading  industry has to lecture its customers to use less of its product when it is all around us. Now there are problems  speeding digital investment in data centres given water shortages limiting potential supply to them. Why does the government of our country not want  us to be better off?

When I first made the case to  Margaret Thatcher in the 1970 s she argued “they won’t let me do that.” She was right that there was  public opposition to privatising a big utility, whipped up by Unions, management, civil servants and academics. They said a privatised BT would close all the street phone boxes still in use, would fail to invest enough, and put the prices up.
In 1982 she started to work on BT and in 1983 she invited me into Downing Street to make the case from the inside and to solve the practical and technical issues. We guaranteed the future of phone boxes , put in a price control requiring price cuts every year and licensed a new competitor who promised a big expansion of business based capacity. This got us through whilst the true answer of competition was gradually introduced.

There were immediate wins.

1. The investment spend of BT was removed from public spending for  good, Investment went up a lot with no cost to taxpayers.

2 The state got a large receipt for sale. As BT grew faster so the state got lots more tax revenue from taxing its profits.  This helped bring the deficit and taxes down whilst supporting higher spend on health and education

3.BT set about narrowing the gap with the more innovative and advanced US telecoms. BT adopted electronic switching in place of its old fashioned electromechanical system.

4. BT and Cable and Wireless  put  in large  capacity increases to power the big City expansion and service sector expansion. Public budgets would have restricted that.

5 When mobiles, then broadband arrived the private sector threw huge sums  at these exciting new products which a nationalised BT would not  have been able to do.

6.Competition brought many different phone and data service providers, often added a new cable connection to each home and greatly increased and modernised capacity.