Month: May 2014

 

I have been asked to comment on the results. They show Labour in  top place, winning 1764 seats with 31% of the vote (controlling 76 Councils), and the Conservatives in second place with 1216 seats and 29% of the vote (controlling 30 Councils) . In third place come the Lib Dems with 399 seats, controlling just 6 Councils. Some here also want to know about the fourth placed party, UKIP. Their vote share  fell compared with the last local elections, to 17%, giving them just 155 seats and no Councils.

The biggest losers on the night were the Lib Dems. Labour made some good gains, but many pundits think they should have been winning much more to put them in a good position to win the General Election in 2015.

 

My most confident voting prediction about Europe 2014 was that   a majority of UK voters would  decide not to vote. According to polls this is what  has happened. This is not a political  earthquake but a large yawn by the majority of voters.

This is an  interesting  decision in a country fabled as the mother of representative democracy, the main pioneer of the idea that everyone should have a vote and opposition should hold government to account.

People used to be able to claim that the EU did not do  much of any importance, so why bother? The long list of powers surrendered in recent Treaties should alert people to the fact this is no longer true. So should the lengthening list of areas from immigration and  expulsion of criminals through energy prices to fish and farming where  the EU is clearly in charge or very influential.

People could also claim there was no point in voting in European Parliament elections, because even where the EU did have power, the Parliament did not. The arrival of co decision making by Parliament and Council of Ministers, and the wish of the Commission to strengthen the Parliament at the expense of the member states should change all that. In a very wide range of legislative areas the Parliament does have an important vote and voice over new measures. It is also the only way we have of trying to hold Commissioners to account, with powers to dismiss them all if they cease to please.

So why then did people still not vote?  In a recent study of declining voter participation in European elections, which has occurred as the importance of the Parliament has risen, they point to the fact that the two main MEP blocs, the socialists and the Christian Democrats, vote together 75% of the time. This means there is no effective Europe wide opposition to the proposals of European government, and for all those voting for candidates who wish to join one or other of these blocs there is much less choice in practice than in a national election.

It is true that a majority of UK voters may have decided  to vote for parties other than the two who are part of these blocs.  The combined poll rating  of more than 50%  for the two leading parties in the UK  who oppose the federalism of both the major blocs (Conservatives and UKIP) points to the fact that many UK electors do seem to understand the tendency of the federalist parties to vote together to extend EU power, and do not like it.

The election was not an opportunity to leave the EU. MEPs from an individual country have no power or ability to remove their countries from the organisation, a power which does still reside with national Parliaments. The MEPs we do elect do have some power to influence and help decide on whether to have  new EU laws or not, and if so what form they should take. There was too little media debate in the UK  over  what our MEP candidates think of the current EU  legislative programme, or how they will go about trying to stop the excesses of too much EU legislation, or how they will encourage EU legislation they do like if they are  federalists. Those who campaigned as if the election were an In/Out referendum on the EU, or as if it were about domestic political issues, did not address the matters that can be resolved by this election. Such conduct adds to the frustration of voters who do understand how we are governed, and to the disenchantment of those who are not very interested in the first place. They feel “nothing will change” whoever they vote for in the EU elections, so why bother?

My local Liberal democrat candidate wrote to me to tell me the election was “all about the UK leaving Europe or staying in. If we are going to protect our jobs we must stay In.” That was two massive lies as the basis for her campaign.

The local Labour candidates wrote to me telling me what a Labour government might do if elected in 2015. There was  little in the leaflet about what Labour MEPs would do about the burning issues of European law and government.

No wonder people asked if it is w0rthwhile voting, when many of those with a chance of winning could not  be bothered to engage with the job or what they would do if they did get it. UKIP  as well said little about how they would amend, tone down or defeat more EU laws, which is the one useful thing MEPs can do.

Assuming a majority have voted for the Conservatives, UKIP and other parties wanting out of the EU altogether in line with published polls, the election does at least show that a majority of the minority who bother to vote are hostile to all or most of the EU project of economic, monetary and political union. If UKIP persists in claiming Conservative voters are not Eurosceptic enough, then they also have to accept that once again they have failed to persuade a majority of those voting to vote against the EU. The Conservative voters I met  voted for MEPs who will seek to limit or tone down EU laws, who have a record of seeking to limit EU power and for a party which will give us the In/Out referendum we want if we win in 2015. Most  Conservative voters do not like the current relationship and think it has to change substantially so we can govern ourselves as we used to before the centralising Treaties.

 

 

I have just been sent an odd story that appeared on the Express website. It says ” Senior Tories on the Right of the party, including former Minister John Redwood are understood to have met Mr Cameron this week and agreed that loyalty and unity are the priorities over the next twelve months”.

This is entirely untrue. There was no meeting  with the Prime Minister last week or this. MPs on the so called “Right” did not  see the need to hold a meeting with the PM to discuss inward looking matters like party unity when we were in the middle of important election campaigns and did not do so. If the Express had bothered to check this with me I could have helped them avoid such an embarrassment.

 

Some things like cheaper energy would be good for the whole of the UK and would assist an industrial recovery. In order to support and improve the current faster rate of growth in the wider metropolis there needs to be further major investment. More people means the need for more schools, hospitals surgeries, roads, trains, bridges, power supply, water and the rest. Much of this can be wholly or partially privately financed, but some will be public capital.

The main need which the government has to provide is road space. 86% of all travel is by road transport, though the morning and evening peaks in greater London  sees a much higher railway percentage than the average 6%.  In inner London when you take into account  the tube trains, rail can represent  a  majority of the travel at busy times. This unusual balance has led to higher railway investment in the centre of London, with crossrail and some tube improvement. London will need extra tube lines like Hackney-Chelsea and further capacity on short haul commuter lines into and out of central London. In a very busy large city centre you have enough people to be able to run a frequent train service which meets many people’s travel needs.

In the wider area it is roadspace which has been held back in the last 15 years despite rapid growth of population. There needs to be more capacity on the main existing motorways from the M25 in every direction. There needs to be a better A34 haul road from Oxford and the Midlands to Southampton, a bigger A 14 and A 12 to Felixstowe, more capacity on the A2 into fast growing north Kent, a south c0ast dual carriageway highway linking the M27 to the other bits of dual carriageway so far built, extra capacity on the M 27, and into Heathrow. There is a need for parts of an M37.5, a ring beyond the M25 using roads like the A404, the A322, the A329M, the A331,A 264, and the  A 21 with better links between them.

Local routes often need more bridges crossing railway lines and rivers. The bottleneck caused by small bridges or too few bridges are a major part of the morning and evening jams which so tire  people trying to get home after a long day at the factory or office. We need safer junctions with fewer conflicts between pedestrians and vehicles, and faster flows at junctions to avoid delay and driver impatience.

There needs to be expanded airport capacity as soon as possible. This metropolis will need more energy,more broadband capacity and much else which the private sector will supply naturally without government involvement.

I understand some readers just want better controls on immigration. We need anyway to cater better from all of us who live here already, and we have talked a lot about what is and is not possible on migration. I will be shortly posting details of the latest changes under the new Immigration Act.

 

 

 

Some people still define London narrowly. On a visit to Richmond I was asked when I would be returning to London. They see it as the old cities of London and Westminster, with a cluster of inner London boroughs.

More today see London as the Mayor’s territory, or see it as all that area inside the M25. The large motorway ring around the city has for some defined it geographically with this large physical barrier.

In practice  today the economic metropolis of London stretches well beyond the M25. Whilst crossing from Staines to Egham entails  crossing the motorway and leaving political London, nothing else much changes at that border. The same is true travelling from Chevening to Sevenoaks or from Caterham to Redhill or from Rickmansworth to Amersham. Economic London extends its reach.

If you define an economic area by its network of contacts, by the similarities of its jobs markets and  the ability and willingness of people to travel around to get jobs or contracts, then the London metropolis stretches much more widely. You can make a case to say that all the area bounded by Cambridge, Milton Keynes, Oxford, Reading, and Basingstoke   shares common characteristics. Significant numbers of  people do travel to London for full time jobs from all those places.  Many more businesses and institutions within that area have regular contacts and transactions with central London. People will get up and travel in search of work or opportunity within this wider zone.

The total area is an area of high skills, high value added, and relatively good incomes by UK and world standards. It contains five major universities of world renown (Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, LSE and UCL) and several other good Russell Group universities. It contains much of the financial service, legal and management services and consultancy expertise that the UK sells abroad, several brilliant retail centres, many important cultural centres and a strong diversified industrial and commercial base. It also accounts for the majority  of the value of UK commercial and residential property.

Some elsewhere think this part of the world attracts too much public sector investment, as it has recently enjoyed the Crossrail project. Yet relative to the size of its population and success of its economy, investment in transport has been poor in recent years. Tomorrow we will look at what this large city region needs if it is to carry on growing.

 

Successive parties in government in recent decades have wanted to see more growth and development in the west, the Midlands and the north, and less in London, the south and the east. They have tried similar policies to promote this – regional subsidies, strong state intervention, development agencies and Boards, restrictions on planning and development in many parts of London and the south east – and some different emphases with Enterprise Zones, Development Corporations and local government led plans vying for political attention. Nothing has worked overall. Under successive governments London in particular, and the areas around London as well, have outgrown the rest very consistently. Today London is 22% of the UK economy, and the rest of the South East and eastern region double this percentage to make the south eastern corner of our country more than 40% of the income and output. .

This poses any government with a dilemma. Should it reinforce success, stop fighting the market, and allow more and more people to live and work in the crowded south and  east? Should it spend more on infrastructure in London to support the fast growing population and output? Or does it have to restrain these fast growing areas, to try to direct more people and business elsewhere? In practice the Coalition government, like the Labour government before it, does a bit of both.

Current policy contains a strange ambiguity. Coalition Minsters are desperate to build more  homes in London and the south east. After all, they reason, demand is strong, house prices too high, so more should  be built. At the same time the official economic policy is to build and grow many new  industries outside London and the south east, which if successful would mean people buying up the empty and cheaper homes in the rest of the country and then needing more new homes there.

The tensions in the policy under market pressures are obvious. The government supports the idea of a pharmaceutical technology cluster around Cambridge, and supports Astra moving its facilities to Cambridge from the Manchester region, the very opposite to the preferred policy of building up higher value added industries in the north. The government is not trying to get Pfizer to reverse this decision in their bid approach,  but to endorse it. These types of decisions mean continuing house price and availability pressures on southern property, and surplus capacity in the  north.

Do you broadly favour removing restrictions in the way of more south and east development, or do you think there are government policies which could ensure that future growth was faster in all the other parts of the UK than in the London  centred south east? I invite your thoughts on how the economy can be rebalanced, and how the cheaper and often better housing of the  north can be used more .

 

Over the last two days we have examined the rift between sceptical scientists on global warming, and the scientific establishment. The sceptics point out that observed data is more complex than the simple theory that increasing human CO2 will always produce rising temperatures would suggest. Climate models have been wrong in the past, and need further complex computing to get them to cope with the many variables affecting average temperatures – factors like water vapour, cloud cover, wind speeds and direction, ocean currents, natural CO2 , other greenhouse gases, the warming of the deep ocean and the patterns of solar energy to name a few which they try to quantify.

The scientists on the establishment side tell us  they need bigger computers and more complex models. They agree they cannot predict average temperatures for next year or for the next decade. They go so far as to suggest it might be 50 years of low or  no warming before they question their underlying thesis of a defined relationship which is quantifiable between extra human produced CO2 and average world temperatures. They agree there is still a lot they do not understand fully or cannot accurately model, which is why their forecast of warming from manmade CO2 may be wrong for a  decade or more. Cloud cover and water vapour are two such variables. They see the role of water vapour as an accelerant of global warming  by asserting that it mainly  changes in response to CO2.

So what are we to make of it? I merely conclude two things. The first is the science is not settled. The fact that most of the funding and the people are on one side does not mean the sceptics and critics from within the climate academy are necessarily wrong on all counts. The bad way they are treated makes some of  the lay public suspicious. The second is that the scientists themselves in their honest and enquiring moments agree there is  more they need to understand before they can produce a model which does predict average temperatures decade by decade or year by year.

As a specialist in economics and politics I use other arguments and take into account other matters when considering what response we should make to possible changes to the climate. I have never ruled out the possibility that average temperatures may start to rise again soon, and of course accept  there is a greenhouse effect. Indeed some of that is crucial   to life on earth as we need to avoid extreme cold. Sufficient  carbon dioxide is also central to plant life which in turn supports all of us. Mankind needs to study and watch the weather and the longer term trends which they  call climate, and adapt our way of life and our physical surroundings as necessary.

I have been an advocate of the UK putting in more fresh water capacity for some time, to deal with the rising population and any dry periods we might face. I have also been working with the government. Environment Agency and others on projects to handle excess surface water during periods of heavy rain, which are made  more necessary by increased building to accommodate a rising population. I would like to see the government start work on a plan for a second Thames barrier, further downstream, to protect the people and large investment in  eastern London.