Political Economy

On the 5th May we in England will have our first opportunity, ever, to vote on the voting system that is used to elect MPs.

Let me say that again. “we in England will have our first opportunity, ever, to vote on the voting system that is used to elect MPs.”

Notice that I am not including the Scots or Welsh in this since they have already had a choice to vote in matters like this. It is only the English that will have this opportunity for the first time. The English who, remember, invented the parliamentary system and representative democracy are, at last, being allowed to vote on something that is of reasonable constitutional importance.

Perish the thought that we might actually vote ‘Yes’. Were we to do so we might get ideas above our station, ideas that we can actually change things, dangerous ideas that there are perhaps other things that we should change!

It is interesting therefore to review the ‘No’ vote campaign’s leaflet to see how they intend to steer us away from this dangerous action.

First off they claim that AV is not fair because some people will have their vote counted five or six times. Well I have some news  for the ‘No’ campaign. My vote hasn’t counted for 20 years. There are some people whose vote has never counted over 50 or 60 years – assuming that they still bother to vote. The fact is that the current system is undemocratic and broken. The ‘No’ campaign state that  the ‘First Past the Post’ system has served us well for hundreds of years whereas in reality the system has been failing increasingly since the introduction of universal suffrage in the last century.

The ‘No’ campaign have an equally dodgy approach to finance and budgets. They claim that machines will have to be used and that these will be very costly. Well so they might, in the first year. The next time and the time after that and after that, they will cost nothing because the machines will already have been purchased! And of course the greater speed of machines could mean that there will be savings in manpower, not just at the count, but also in the broadcasting organisations. It might be that the cost of a general election would actually go down.

But not only do the ‘No’ campaign begrudge the cost of machines to bring our vote counting practices into the 21st century, they also begrudge the cost of democracy, and hence democracy itself. Apparently the cost of holding referendums, and hence referendums themselves, is something we should not be countenancing.

I will not go into the advertising campaign claiming that the referendum is causing the deaths of babies and soldiers. Such deceit is a hallmark of the abysmal level to which public standards have fallen and which we the people must battle to raise.

All-in-all the ‘no’ campaign is hostile to democracy, solidly behind the hold that the two major parties have over parliamentary seats, indulges in deceitful financial analysis and is an example of the appallingly low standards which pass for good practice in public life today.

Vote ‘No’ if you must, but do not complain over what it will cost you in the future.

Mr Cameron will be the second leader of an EU country to say that multiculturalism is dead. The first was Angela Merkel.

Why is that? After all it has been the bedrock of government policy for 30 years. The reasons are simple and straightforward.

First, multi-culturalism means that for political purposes no culture is any better than any other. Whilst this may be true to an anthropologist it has never been true in political terms. A country that cannot point unequivocally to the values, history and beliefs that are the values, history and beliefs that guide it, is no country at all, merely a collection of disparate cultures.

In a society that collects cultures everyone will assume that the most important culture  is their own private culture and act accordingly. This means teenage white boys wearing an England shirt will be excluded from the corner store when they want to by sweets, as happens in parts of Luton. It means that arrogance holds sway and some groups will speak and act disrespectively about the host culture whilst reacting violently against similar action against their own.

In such societies no one know what is the correct action to take and this has led to tragedies in certain child protection cases. It has also led to the drugging, abduction, abuse and rape of, mainly, white girls because these girls come from a different culture to theirs, a culture that the men carrying out the attacks neither respect nor value.

But there are other problems. Without a clear distinction between public and private cultures public bodies spend endlessly on useless actions employing people in posts such as “Diversity Coordinator” or “Equalities Coordinator” or engaging in programmes such a “Luton in Harmony” – to name but one. None of these expenditures are worthwhile because they are aimed at propping up the indefensible and broken polemic of multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism has caused divisions in England where there should have been none. They have stopped all sorts of groups as being identified as English, which is how they should be identified after all these years. It means that the natural description of the people of England is still, wrongly, an ethnically based one with only one ethnicity being banned – English! It has led to a great deal of dissatisfaction as the English culture has been systematically downgraded, insulted and abused, despite the fact English culture, not Scottish or Welsh or Irish or British, is responsible for parliamentary democracy, the rule of law, toleration and (still) respect for peoples’ private lives and beliefs. It has led to the misallocation of large amounts of public money and the acceptance of many violent crimes, because to point them out would somehow insult a culture and that the many people physically and mentally harmed by this attitude are just going to have to suck it up and the rule of law be dammed. Notably the values of Political Correctness  means that this acceptance does not apply to the English culture

How then we should handle the errors and problems that multiple cultures bring? Well, very simply, by adopting a policy of multiple cultures. That is to say that the everyone must adhere to and accept the public culture of England, which is the English culture, in their public life. What they do in their private life, provided it does not break any law, is up to them. This immediately simplifies decision making, public expenditure, public services such as education, the maintenance of law and order and the emotional and political life of England.

We should remember that the flag of England is Norman and the patron saint of England is Palestinian. England has been handling multiple cultures successfully for a thousand years! It should be allowed to get on with doing so now.

Secondly, getting rid of multiculturalism is insufficient. We also need to get rid of large swathes of political correctness or PC. PC is borne of a natural desire to be polite and considerate to people. Unfortunately the blindness of its supporters  has led to many unnatural practices carried out in its name. Chief of these came to light in the cases of rape referred to above.

Many years ago in North Hertfordshire one of the local papers carried the story of a father and son team who, possessing a van, had the bright idea to park this outside a secondary school and proposition the young female students as they came out at the end of the school day. No time was wasted on PC. The perpetrators were identified as white by the paper and as a result parents, schools and the students themselves were alerted. Had this not been done there would have been, within a few years, queues of white vans with father and son teams outside every secondary school in Hertfordshire. Instead the story is now an inconspicuous item of local history.

Apparently the northern rapes had been going on for decades. Five years ago when the MP Ann Cryer tried to get the local communities to take the lead to stop them they refused, because they saw no particular reason to stop such flagrant breeches of the law. After all did not these girls came from a corrupt culture and deserve no better? When she went public she was viciously accused of racism by the PC brigade. She is no longer in politics. Had these attacks been publicised 30 years ago with the same  lack of PC as was shown in Hertfordshire the local communities would have ensured that they stopped and these activities too would now, also, be only a minor footnote of local history.

Instead PC has ensured that an important English community has been shamed in such a way and for such outlandish breaches of the law that, sadly, it is likely that it will always be a part of English national history.

Let us at least take some good out of this sad case by learning how damaging to society PC is and by getting rid of it forever. Alternatively we could throw the whole lot of the PC brigade into court and prosecute them for what they really did – actions that led to the cover up and aid the commission of  a series of vicious crimes!

And a final message to Cameron:

THE NATIONAL IDENTITY OF ENGLAND IS ENGLISH, STUPID!

Stop stressing and get on with it!

By now all local authorities will have chosen between the two modes of governance allowed them. Either the democratically elected mayor or the “North Korean” style strong council leader.

There is little difference between the two in terms of costs or powers. There are however major differences when it comes down to local democracy.

The strong leader will be voted in by the council. In fact of course they will be elected by the majority party. Well not really. The majority party will caucus to choose their candidate and in most cases this will be on the advice of the party leadership, perhaps three or four people. Should the “North Korean”leader  start doing things against party policy because in his or her view they are in the best interests of the electorate then he will be promptly sacked by the majority party and a new leader elected.

Contrast this with the elected Mayor. He or she will require possibly 20,000 votes to be elected and will have to publish a programme they will follow. They cannot be sacked by the council, only by the voters.

Which do you thing your local authority councilors have chosen?

Does this make a difference?

According to the Financial Times it does. Doncaster had a very poor, and tragic, history  of bad governance until an English Democrats Party Mayor was elected in 2010. To begin with he had to put up with all sorts of childish and destructive behaviour from the local councilors until he called time on them by bringing in the commisioners who have assigned rules of conduct and mentors to the councilors.

Now all is changing. As the FT recorded that Doncaster was creating jobs faster than the national average they reported Daniel Fell, the policy director of the Doncaster chamber of commerce, as saying “An elected mayor helps too, allowing for greater focus on strategic business issues”.

Elected Mayors are not beholden to their party or anyone else except the electorate. They are free to do what is best for the people in their authority.

Wouldn’t you rather have one?

Michael Gove has decided that that there will be a new qualification. The English Bac, awarded to students with good passes in English, maths, science, a language, and history or geography.

Why this choice of subjects? Where is the Latin or Ancient Greek I hear you asking? After all there has been a lot of support for these subjects as the true core of a real education!

What will the history be about? Will it bang the drum for England and its achievements? Or perhaps ancient history, the study of ancient Greece and Rome, is a safer bet?

And why are there only five subjects in it? Why cannot RE  be included, or psychology or sociology or technology or art or music?

I tried to get my head around the Scottish system to see what they did but its jargon, innumerable levels and differences in terminolgy totally defeated me. Proof I supose of the superiority of the Scottish system.

There is the Middle Years programme (ages 11 – 16) of the International Baccalaureate which is an easily understood programme that aims to develop students academically, socially and emotionally and practically. Surely that could improve English education? Most probably it would, but it would also cost money to implement. Why did Gove not choose the Middle Years IB?

So have you spotted the real reason for Gove’s English Bac yet? It certainly has no academic or pedagogical foundation. It will not distinguish good teaching or good schools from bad. It is quite simply a measure that guarantees to show, at no cost, two things:

1. That private schools are better than state schools!
2. That Gove’s programmes of education have given rise to a huge improvement in standards in English state schools by the time of the next election!

Of course in reality it will show neither of these two things.  So how does it work?

Some years ago the Labour government made modern languages no longer compulsory. As a result in many state schools students have voted with their feet and the proportion of students taking a modern foreign language has dropped significantly. State schools will therefore automatically have poor English Bac results. Of course those students choosing their GCSE options to start this September for examination in May/June 2013 will find that languages are again, for large number of more able students, back on the subject list. So in 2013 results will be better.

Will Mr Gove be starting his measurements in 2013? Not at all. He has already started by publishing English Bac results for 2010! This is a full three years before the new system can possibly start to give results. As one would expect these 2013 figures will show two things:

1. That private schools still have much better results at the English Bac and are still “somehow better”
2. That state school results in 2013 will be much better than in 2010, the last year Labour had an influence on schools, so showing that conservative policies are much more successful than those of Labour!

Will either of these two assertions be true? No!

Private schools will, by and large, be selecting their students from amongst the brightest 16% in the nation. That is to say from those with a CAT score of 110 or better. The local comprehensive will have the whole range of student ability from a CAT score of between 70 and 130. If they are lucky the brightest students, those with a score of 110 or more, will make up 10% of their intake (the rest of the bright students will be in private schools) compared to the 100% for the private school. The private school result should therefore be 10 times better, shouldn’t it? The fact that they are never any where near that good attests to the good quality of much of state education.

Denbigh High School in Luton is led by one of the regions most outstanding head teachers, Dame Yasmin Bevan DBE Hon DEd BSc (Econ) BA MA. Are Denbigh’s English Bac results for 2010 better than poor? Probably not. Will they be better in 2013? Certainly they will. Will that have anything to do with Gove’s policies? Of course not! It will happen simply because more Denbigh students will be taking a modern foreign language.

Will the coalition government claim the improvement is because of Gove’s policies? Almost certainly!

What will it actually prove? You decide!

My Last question to you is this. Do we not deserve better government than this shoddy mixture of trickery and deceit?

The battle is raging  fiercely. The usual tools of generalisation, casuistics, feeble and sometimes misleading statistics, are being brought into play.

Riding in to help the beleaguered coalition is, believe it or not, the Guardian newspaper! Simon Jenkins has pointed out that if George Osborne gets what he wants total public spending, in real terms, will be £640bn in 2015 compared to £665bn today. Even more telling is that after New Labour’s first term on office it was only £449bn.

The out of control spending tendencies of Gordon Brown are certainly evident. One has to wonder how New Labour politicians were ever able to mistake his incompetent handling of the economy for ‘genius’. Perhaps I should have titled this piece “Clothes! What Clothes?”.

Also exposed is the blustering of the trade unions, most of whose members enjoy feather-bedded public appointments where they earn on average, including pensions, some £136 a week more than the private sector.

Whilst in the past few years he private sector has suffered job losses of 884,000  the public sector has actually added 194,000 jobs! Were just the new, and unneeded, 194,000 jobs to go the loss of the union dues that these people pay would seriously damage the pay and bonuses of the union bosses. And therin lies, I feel, the main driver for all this harrumping.

Even in good times, with the full blast of tax revenues, stealthy or not, New Labour excesses would now be fueling a deficit in excess of £90bn. Had Gordon Brown run a budget, balanced over the economic cycle as he claimed, Britain would have had spare borrowing capacity of hundreds of £bn, easily enough to deal with the problem created by Gordo’s inadequate regulation of the banks and other financial organisations.

In other words this recession was completely avoidable. The private sector has sufferred enourmously as a result. It is now time for the bloated public sector to do the same.

James Boxall reported in the 1st October 2010 Kindle edition of the Financial times that the CBI has said that the new rules restricting foreign workers from outside the EU must be reviewed. Why?

Put simply it is because the CBI’s members do not want to invest in English workers. In other words these CBI members are lazy and lacking either in vision or a desire to improve matters in England.

To do so would mean more support for English higher education, post-graduate and graduate students.

It would mean more support for local colleges and a greater investment in apprenticeships and in-house training for the English people.

It would mean funding more initiatives with our more challenged English schools.

And most importantly it would mean an open and collaborative approach to their strategic manpower planning exercises, with all their English stakeholders.

And finally these imported workers will expect the full use of the English welfare state, without them or their family having paid a penny for it.

So, yes, I do agree that the rules need to be changed to protect English workers from the lazy and greedy employers. My prescription is as follows:

1. Before making an application  to employ a foreign worker the organisation must show that it has tried really hard to develop home-grown English talent by carrying out all of the above activities for a minimum of five years. Surprisingly there will be some companies that already pass this test.
2. They must give an undertaking that they intend to continue at least this level of educational activity for the next 10 years.
3. They must show that the job requirement has a level of education (at least post-graduate from a university certified to have the same standards as an English Russell Group university), or significant experience (success at an international standard of achievement for at least five years in the same field as the job) is unobtainable from within England
4. They must deposit a sum of money with the government that will be sufficient to cover all the education and welfare costs of the worker, and their family, for his or her period of residence in the UK.
5. The worker must be paid a salary in the top 10% of national salary range for the job and must get exactly the same bonuses and benefits at other employees in a similar position.
6. Permits will be issued for a maximum of four years, renewable only once, and at the end of that period the worker and their family must leave and return to the country of origin of the foreign worker. There will be no possibility of acquiring British citizenship or of staying beyond that time.

Some might argue that this is not necessary because businesses and their employees pay taxes to the government to carry out all these duties. These are of course the same businesses that complain about the high level of taxation and about “big” government. On the other hand a 3% tax on their revenue might just possibly give enough tax revenue to solve the problem of lack of skill in the local workforce without these companies and their managers having to get out of their seats at all!

This demand from the CBI is just a big whinge, the epitome of the “moaning Pom”. It smells of greed and laziness and the people of England deserve a lot better than this shoddy mob.

With an approach like the one above the people of England would at least have the knowledge that the businessmen of England not only had their interests at heart but were working hard to improve them.

Now wouldn’t that be a change?