The English cricket  win in India was great. The Captain batted brilliantly and gave good leadership to his team. Alastair Cook now has a Test batting record that puts him amongst the all time greats at such an early age, with many more years to add to his runs tally. In this four match series he made 562 runs himself at an average of 80.

     Pietersen, Bell and Trott all proved their worth as world class batsmen again, with good averages and some great innings. Prior also batted with distinction and did his job behind the stumps. Swann, Panesar and Anderson bowled so well, taking 49 wickets between them. In this series Stuart Broad did not have such  a good time, but his past performances tell us he does have what it takes to perform well at Test level. Time will tell if England now have found  the second opening batsman and the Number 6 they need to once again be the top team in the world.

    This was another sporting triumph for our country under a new Captain who proved his worth and led from the front.

          In 2012 the Post Office decided on a massive price rise in postage. The second class stamp for letters and cards in the UK soared from 36p to 50p, an increase of 39%. Many people bought stamps in advance of the price rise which will cushion the blow, but you would expect volume to decline on the back of such a large price rise.

          In the UK people have traditionally sent many more Christas cards than other types of cards and letters during the year. It will be interesting to see what impact the new high rates of postage have on card volumes. Some may still be working their way through the stamps they bought at the old prices this year, but by next year that effect will have disappeared.

         At exactly the same time that the Post Office embarked on its high price strategy the principal rival, the electronic card, was making inroads into the market anyway. I am finding this year that many institutions and companies that used to send a card now send out an e card instead. It can represent a substantial saving if you have a large mailing list.

          I like sending and receiving Christmas cards. MPs will  doubtless be amongst the last groups of people to carry on sending out cards, honouring the tradition.

           There are two types of card which I have not be so pleased to accept in the past. The one is the cards from organisations that use the Christmas  card to lobby and make political points. This seems to me to be a distortion of the true purpose of the card, to wish people well and to keep in touch in a friendly way. A lobby mail out discussing the issues when needed  would seem to me to be a better and more honest use of the lobby group’s money, than a hard hitting or phoney card.

          The second are cards from public sector bodies where no-one sending them out troubles to sign them or personalise them in any way. I wonder why they do that, and why someone authorises spending public money on them  if they cannot be bothered to say who they are from, and or why someone has sent them. 

         I would be interested in your experiences of  sending and receiving cards. I expect the volumes to be down this year. I am hand delivering more cards where I can, as I do think the current price of postage is too high for all the cards people  would like to send.

          Do you like ecards? Will they take over? Is the high cost of postage killing the festive spirit and damaging the card business? Should public bodies spend taxpayer money on sending out cards? If so, who should receive them?

I have come across this letter from Dr Roy Spendlove to his opposite number in the Foreign Office, Marc Notte

Dear Marc,

              In my capacity as Head of Special Projects I find developing and preserving good relations with our partners in the EU is fundamental to the work we do. As you will appreciate, we so often need EU permission to go ahead with projects. We may need consent to suspend state aid rules, we may need a waiver on EU competition rules, we may need understanding over changes to specially designated EU planning zones, we may need access to EU money and we may need to co-operate with other countries and EU companies to bring our task to fruition. The EU does now lay down  much of our environmental, industrial , trade and energy policies, as well as of course maintaining its lead role in fishing and farming. We should keep stressing how crucial EU trade is to our wellbeing.

               I am finding in recent months that it is more difficult now to gain consent and to preserve the necessary friendly relations with continental colleagues, owing to the new aggressive Eurosceptic tone coming from some parts of the government. We look to the Foriegn Office to do more to stress to Ministers the need to preserve and foster good relations. We do not wish to lose our reputation as a better European, which was much cultivated by the previous government. Their approach of going along with most of the EU plans for new laws and further integration helped a great deal. Their realism over open borders, over the Treaties of Nice, Amsterdam and Lisbon, and their welcome for EU  legislation in areas a diverse as the environment and the finance sector got over some of the damage done to our relationships by the rows over the Euro after Maastricht.

                Today my opposite numbers in France and Germany express concern that the UK has for the first time refused to join in a new Treaty at all,  preventing the rest of the EU from using the EU framework for the Fiscal Treaty they are planning. Whilst they can get round this problem, it is a legal nuisance for them that they have not faced before. They are unhappy about the way the UK government places the concerns of the City of London above the need for better centralised banking controls through the ECB and the European Banking Agency. They are particularly unhappy about the UK’s refusal to assist with the new bail out funds needed by the  poorer EU countries. The Germans have some more sympathy with the UK’s refusal to counteance any increase in the EU budget, but this is causing considerable antagonism amongst the majority of member states. There are worries now that the UK is moving away from proper observance of the EU climate and energy policies with its new emphasis on carbon based gas. There is relief that the UK is still accepting the common borders, a crucial part of the whole move towards greater union.

             I am writing to make sure you are aware of this rising tide of discontent with the UK in the EU. We look to the FCO to steady the position. Could you perhaps get Foreign Office Ministers to make speeches reaffirming the importance of our EU membership, and mitigating the attacks upon the EU position that some see in recent decisions and positions adopted by the Coalition government? I appreciate that the Foreign Secretary always used to confirm that membership of the EU is in the UK’s national interest. Today the Prime Minister has changed this position to the much more alarming statement that the UK needs a new relationship with the EU. It is most important to make sure the FCO does not seek a major renegotiation before the next General Election. This would be especially destabilising, threatening to destroy the good work we have all put in over the last decade to build new bridges to Europe and to become good Europeans. Whilst we of course remain strictly neutral on political matters, we do need to plan for the possible return of a Labour government as UKIP claims to  be able to stop the Conservatives getting a majority. It is important that such a  replacement government reverses the policy of seeking a new relationship and abandons ideas of   opting  out and loosening ties. Current Labour policy is more committed to our European membership.

Yours ever

Roy

I tend to favour more freedom and less government. My critics favour more government, because they think that people, if left to their own devices, will behave badly and create misery and injustice.

Those of us who believe in freedom do need to answer questions about what should happen when people perform evil deeds, when society is marred by evil features. I am not a freedom lover as a result of having a starry eyed view of the moral good of all men and women left to their own devices. I have read enough history to know that evil stalks the planet and has often disfigured the past. I have had enough encounters with unpleasant people to know that we cannot rely all the time on the assumption that left to themselves people will always do the decent and correct thing.

That same combination of reading history and reflecting on personal experience has also taught me that we cannot rely on government, on the exercise of state power, to correct and prevent all the wrongs that people may wish to do. Sometimes government is well intentioned, but ineffective. Large extra quantities of banking regulation did not prevent or lessen the crisis of 2007-8. Gun controls in Norway and the UK have not prevented some mass murders by people using weapons. Sometimes government itself attracts people who wish to use its power for bad ends. Governments can be corrupted by power and by evil officials and politicians. The Nazi state and the Stalinist Soviet state were just the most public dreadful examples of how much harm a rotten state can do if it puts its mind to it. Better intentioned democratic states can make errors of judgement or employ evil people who commit crimes under cover of the state whilst breaking its rules.

It sounds as if the USA in the wake of the recent tragedy will embark on a new debate around gun control. I am not going to intrude in their argument. It is for US democracy to settle the issue. The natural reaction after such an event is to recoil in horror, and to demand that the state does something to stop it happening again. The US will decide what, if anything, that something should be. I can understand those who say they must try gun control, because it might remove some evil people from access to guns. I can understand others saying mass murderers may get a gun permit before they murder, or they might buy illicit guns.

The problem most of us have is we cannot understand why someone would want to shoot so many people. We do not know how to identify people likely to carry out such a deed. We respond either by condemning them as pure evil, or by saying they are mentally ill and in need of restraint and treatment. Usually the authorities are spared the question of what to do with them, as they kill themselves at the scene of their crimes. In Norway a mass murderer was imprisoned. In jurisdictions with the death penalty if one survived he or she would probably be executed.

The truth is a free society is open to abuse and worse by the bad and the mad. All agree we need a rule of law. The bad break those laws. We actively debate how much law we need, and how free we can leave people to do as they will. Deterrence is the better part of enforcement. Some people by their evil or their madness put themselves beyond the power of the state to deter or to punish. That is what makes it so hard to understand, so hard for the grieving families to bear, and so hard for the rest of us to respond.

I have been asked to write about homelessness in the run up to Christmas. It goes to the heart of the all consuming and worrying issue of poverty. It is not just a property problem.

Some think the issue is that homes are too dear in the UK.  In parts of the country, especially London, they are very dear, but there is plenty of demand for these expensive homes. Many of  the dearest ones now are there for rich foreign migrants into London, but much of the rest of the housing stock in the prosperous areas  stays at high price levels because there are tax paying locals  who can afford it.

In other parts of the country home prices  are much lower, and have fallen further since the Credit Crunch. Here there are often more empty properties, and more propeties on agents books awaiting buyers. Lower prices would eventually clear this market. Current prices can be sustained if more jobs and higher incomes can be generated in these locations to underwrite and sustain the property market. Policies for economic recovery and for growth outside London are part of the answer.

The government is trying to address the issue of expensive land prices that are part of the pricing in the dear areas. They are issuing a large number of new planning permissions which they hope will drive the land prices down, and lead to more development. So far this has been offset by broken banks and regulatory pressures against more lending. The authorities have also come up with Funding for lending and Quantitative Easing to try to tackle the mortgage famine.

One way to cut homelessness is to reduce inward migration. Migration has been one of the big pressures on housing, and some of the worst housed people are recent arrivals on low wages, and especially illegals on no regular and legal  wages.

Some homeless come from former members of our armed forces who find adjustment to civilian life difficult. I have proposed a scheme to encourage housebuying for people in the forces so they are not homeless on exit. When I checked last week the government told me they were  still working on this important issue and recognise the need to do more.

Some homeless have serious drug or alcohol problems. The government is intensifying its response to these difficulties, seeking to get people onto rehabilitation programmes.

There is a general shift to buying your first home at an older age. Most young people are not homeless, but they form their own household at an older age than previous generations. This is partially owing to high house prices compared to their starter incomes.  Here improving the supply of new properties, and reducing the demand from others  in sensbile ways may bring about a price adjustment to price more young people into this market. I am a strong supporter of home ownership. I also think young people should have the option of forming their own household in their twenties and buying a property where they have a normal job. More needs to be done to get back to this position.

           I have been asked to comment on the rapprochement across the Atlantic between the US and the Uk authorities over how to handle future bank crises.

           They are proposing a new regime where banks in trouble are put into controlled adminsitration effectively. Shareholders and bondholders would be at risk. Bondholders of various kinds would be converted into shareholders if the bank can no longer meet all its obligations, so the bank automatically has to pay less interest on its capital  and has more equity capital at risk to absorb the lossses. The taxpayer would be less at risk, the capital providers more at risk.

           The new regime would allow orderly disposal of the peripheral activities with value. It would allow continuation of the core functions of money transmission and settlement , and allow deposit protection schemes to support depositors to stave off a run.

             I do think it is a big advance on conduct in 2007-8. I then wanted them to place highly stressed banks into controlled administration, to protect depositors, but to make shareholders and bondholders take the pain, and sell off the assets that had some value to help pay the bills and slim down the mega banks in trouble.  It will still need intelligent bank regulation and Central banking to avoid such accidents in the first place, which is a better answer still than this approach to trouble once trouble has hit.

       The Governor elect of the Bank of England has caused a stir through his latest speech as Governor of the Bank of Canada. Whilst the speech comes from the CFA Society of Toronto and is researched and put out by the Bank of Canada, inevitably British audiences are applying its message immediately to UK conditions.

         Mr Carney argues that when a Central Bank is running a very low interest rate policy to stimulate a weak economy, it may also need to manage expectations to encourage faster growth. He endorses Canadian and US past  actions where the Central Banks have announced the maintenance of low interest rates for a lengthy period, to reassure markets and foster an expansion of money and credit. In Canada the promise of low interest rates was conditional, with a statement that if inflation rose too much they would increase rates anyway. For more severe cases  of income and output loss Mr Carney favours an outright promise of low interest rates regardless of the inflation rate.

         He went further. He said that when an economy has lost a lot of output (like the UK, which he did not mention) the Central Bank and the government may need to shift from an inflation target to a  nominal GDP target. This would allow the Bank to run very low interest rates even after inflation had picked up, if output was still below where the authorities wished it to be.

          This is an interesting and challenging new path. As it does not seem to apply to current conditions in Canada, naturally people ask if that is what he is hinting the UK needs. Will he ask the Chancellor to change the target? Will he be willing to turn a blind eye to higher UK inflation in the hope that this could allow more output growth?

          The problem with this approach is obvious. Last year the Bank’s inability or unwillingness to control inflation led to a sharp spike in price rises. This meant a cut in people’s living standards, which further depressed real demand. The danger with Mr Carney’s suggestion, if  it is aimed at the UK,  is twofold. Would higher inflation do too much damage to demand again if  allowed? Would shifting targets as fundamentally as this help to undermine confidence in longer bonds, leading to higher longer term interest rates? It is easy to lose confidence, more difficult to restore it. There would be dangers in signalling that the Bank under  new management no longer wished to even  pretend to curb inflation, in an economy which can be inflation prone.

          Meanwhile, on cue, the Fed has stated it intends to create a lot more money, and does not intend to put interest rates up for a long time, until unemployment has fallen substantially, whatever happens to inflation.

        One figure stared out of Mr Davey’s Statement about the Doha Climate Change Conference. He reported that the “countries taking part in the second Kyoto period (2013 to 2020) account only for around 14% of world emissions (of CO2) – by 2020 this could be less than 10% of global emissions”.

          Mr Davey sagely concluded that “This underscores the need for the future climate regime from 2020 to involve action by all”. In effect just the EU and Australia agreed Kyoto II. China, India, the USA and even Japan are not in or no longer part of the Kyoto targets.

          The EU has signed up to cutting emissions by 20% compared to 1990 by 2020, with an option to make that a 30% cut. It has confirmed its promise of Euro 7.2bn of aid for climate change payments to developing countries  in the period 2010-12, followed by maintaining the average level of support from that period in future years.

            This will be a disappointing outcome for all who believe in Global Warming theory. Surely if the theory is right the emissions of the whole world have to be cut, not just 14% of the emissions coming from the EU? As the EU deindustrialises and Asia and other faster growing economies go through their own industrial revolutions, they will generate an ever higher proportion of the CO2. The EU needs to negotiate multilateral reductions, not just unliateral reductions in its own contribution to the world totals.

          Those who do not believe the theory will wonder why the EU is imposing this expensive burden on itself. They will also question the wisdom of accepting the moral obligation to compensate other countries for past CO2 emissions in the EU, and wonder how well spent is  the current fasttrack climate change aid.

             Mr Monti has decided he can no longer survive as unelected Prime Minister of Italy, without a working majority in the Parliament. It was always an odd idea that an unelected “expert” could parachute into the job of Prime Minister without having taken the precaution of building a majority party and winning a General  Election first. Now it appears that MPs in the Italian Parliament are no longer willing to go along with what he wants to do.

             It will be interesting to see if the Italian General Election will bring to the fore important debates about the future of the Euro scheme and its impact on  the Italian economy. Will Italy vote for more of the same? Will they vote for remaining in the Euro and applying more of the austerity medicine that goes with the current version of the currency?  Will anyone campaign for withdrawal from the Euro? Will anyone say that the current budget and banking policies being followed within the Euro scheme are combining to throttle the Italian economy?

              The issue before the Italian electors is in essence a simple one. Will they continue to do whatever the EU demands, as the price of Euro membership? Are they happy with the current results of these policies, measured in many lost jobs and falling output?  Or do they think the current Euro sceheme is not working? Do they want Germany to contribute more by way of transfer payments? Do they want the ECB to print more money? Do they want cross guarantees to support all Italian banks? Should Germany inflate more to help correct the lack of competitiveness in the south?

              I suspect they will choose another government which signs up to the full Euro scheme for fear of worse. Now is their opportunity to have the debate they need to have over why the current Euro scheme is not working economically for them or the other southern states. Their current levels of youth unemployment are worryingly high. Many forecasters now expect another two years of Italian recession.

I attended a very interesting private meeting  recently on the Scottish Question. A couple of  learned Scots told us that Scottish nationalism was  defined by dislike of the English in general, and the dislike of English Tories in particular. Scottish nationalists do not like London making decisions for them. They like it even less if it is English Tories calling the shots there, instead of Scottish Labour MPs.

None of this is suprising. The success of the Scottish Nationalist party has been brought on by Labour’s anti Tory  campaigns for devolution. Their failure to secure enough votes for devolution in the 1970s, when Scotland was still reluctant to tread this path, led to a long sulk and a revitalised and successful attempt to put it through on return to office in 1997.  Labour consistently claimed that a Conservative “English” government of the UK should not govern Scotland. They saw nothing wrong with a Labour UK governing Northern Ireland with no Labour MPs, or governing England with a majority of Conservative MPs, but they did think a Conservative majority government at Westminster lacked authority to govern Scotland if the Conservatives had few seats for Scottish constituencies.

Labour’s dislike of the Tories, their insistence on using the legitimacy argument against the Conservatives, and their determination to polarise opinion on devolution, helped the SNP establish its position as a credible force in Scottish politics. The SNP had lively internal debates about whether it was a true independence movement, as the purists wanted, or a party of Scottish government seeking more devolved powers within the UK. Mr Salmond has often come across as  a devo max man rather than a true independence fighter. He after all wanted devo max on the ballot paper for the referendum.

The stated position of the current SNP is not to seek Scottish independence, but to seek a new kind of dependence, with some more things being settled by a devolved Scottish government. It is difficult to argue that a country is independent if it does not have its own currency and central Bank, yet Mr Salmond wants to stay with the pound and a monetary policy and interest rates fixed by the Bank of England. Mr Salmon also wants Scotland to be a member of the EU, with all that that implies for loss of sovereignty. The SNP wishes to share a Queen with England, rather than have a new Republic with a Scottish President.  The SNP are just better at devolved politics than Labour, and have used Labour’s anti Tory and anti Union rhetoric of past years to gain themselves devolved office. Now they wish to press for devo max, calling it Independence. In practice what they seek woukld  leave their new  Scotland  controlled financially by a monetary union where they  no longer have a seat at the Cabinet table or in the Central Bank, and leave Scotland under an avalanche of new EU controls without the current UK opt outs.