Political Economy

Got you! Now I wouldn’t want you to think that this is some form of political protest on my part. No! The reason why I can’t vote is they won’t let me.

I have lived in England for nearly 36 years and I am married to an Englishman. I have worked and paid tax for nearly 25 years. My big problem is that I am not an English subject. In order to become one I need to take a ‘Test of Britishness” (I took at cost of £35- and fortunately passed 1st time) and then pay nearly £700 and complete a massive form to allow me to participate in a citizenship ceremony thus allowing me to apply for a passport, (£140) and then I can vote.

England has a special relationship with America but it is not that special. When I came to live in England as a young bride I was making my home and future here. I am ethnically English and can trace my ancestry to well before the Act of Union in 1707. Living in England felt right. I loved tea and cricket.

I didn’t really give it much more thought than that. I was busy bringing up three sons and working as a teacher; first in leafy suburbs and then in a tough ‘inner city’ school. I even did voluntary work when I was a young Mum working in Community Health as a Chair and then moving on to Chairing a Strategic Health Authority Ethics Committee. I did my bit to contribute. (and still do)

As I became interested in local issues I was sure that as a tax-paying resident I would be allowed to vote. No way! However if I had been Irish then it would have been no problem. Explain that to me please?

The irony is that if I had married a Frenchman and/or lived in France I could have had my passport immediately. I could even have had my identity altered to make me completely French. And of course as a taxpayer and resident I would have been eligible for a vote. (even if I was not French!) Great to see that our Gallic neighbours understand the rights of people living in a democracy.

So although I won’t be voting at the General Election in May it won’t be because I don’t want to but because narrow minded politicians give citizenship to anyone who can pay and fail to understand the maxim: No Taxation Without Representation! Seems to me that was an issue before; haven’t they learned anything in 200+ years?

So I feel very upset that

Surprisingly this is one of the questions that divides those who want a Parliament for England. And yet, as a look at the arithmetic od representation shows, the answer is very simple and one on which all sides of this question can agree.

The key here are the number of elected representatives associated with national government rather than local government.  The situation will be as follows after the next election. The House of Commons will have 650 seats.

England            533 seats    82%

Scotland             59 seats       9%

Wales                 40 seats       6%

N.I.                      18 seats      3%

If we are to continue to have an Upper Chamber then the House of Lords will have to go, to be replaced by an elected chamber. A government can then choose its cabinet, ministers and so on from both elected chambers.

The task then is to decide how many MPs will be needed to carry out the much reduced level of government expenditure that will result from devolving much of the work to the English Parliament.

Wading through the statistics of government expenditure is not much fun, nor very easy but it seems safe to make the assumption that about half of the expenditure of the government is associated with devolved matters. Another requirement is that currently a governing party has to be able to provide between 140 and 150 Secretaries of States, Ministers and so on to run the business of government.  To give a reasonable choice, since not all elected MPs will be suitable, the governing party currently needs around 300 members. If this is just sufficient for a majority then there needs to be around 600 members in the House. Around half of these posts will move with devolved matters to the English Parliament. These numbers indicate that the House of Commons can reduce to half its size or 300 – 325 without causing problems. In the USA Congress and the Senate have, in total,  535 members for a voting population of around 216 million. Compare this to the 45 million voters in the UK. This would equate to a House of Commons and Upper Chamber of 112, a vastly smaller number.

It seems then that if we had a harder working Parliament we would need no more than 300 members split 200 MPs to the House of Commons and 100 Senators to the elected Upper Chamber.

How big would the English Parliament have to be? There are around 38 million voters in England. The largest constituency has around 110,000 voters. Bearing in mind that English voters would have representation through their MP and Senator it seems that an English Parliament constituency could be sized between 100,00 up to  150,000 in size. This would indicate that there could be as many as 380 constituencies or as few as 250. Given that to provide the 70 or so Ministers and parliamentary secretaries required by an English Government the majority party would need around 140 MEPs (Member of the English Parliament, sorry but the other lot wil have to rename themselves, MEuPs perhaps!)  The English Parliament would have to be at least 280 in size. On this basis a total of 300 constituencies seems generous.

The question of where these various bodies would sit is now clear. They could continue to sit at Westminster. One debating chamber could be allocated to the English Parliament whilst the other would be shared by the Commons and Senate. Since much of the work of PArliament is done in committees there is no reason why, when one house is using the committee rooms the other cannot be using the debating chamber.

Such a proposal would show a savings of 100% of the current direct costs (members expenses, staff and other costs) of  the House of Lords of around £50 million. In addition with a total of 600 MEPs, MPs and Senators there would be the saving of the current direct costs of 50 MPs and some savings of salaries if MEPs are going to be paid less than an MP as are MSP at the moment. Say a saving of another £10 million or £60 million in total. Finally the House of Lords overflow offices at 1, Millbank will no longer be required. This building could be rented, sold or converted into accommodation for members. The same conversion could be done to part of one or other of the buildings currently also used for office space, Portcullis House and the Norman Shaw Buildings

We started with 650 elected MPs and over 700 members of the House of Lords, of whom, on average, around 400 attend daily. We have ended up with 600 elected reresentatives, with more than enough space to do their work and a not unreasonable level of cost savings.

Having lived in England for nearly 36 years I feel at last able to comment on politics. It’s not that I have never been involved or taken an interest in politics(more of that later) but as a Yank I have always been aware that even the natives of these islands are not always aware of what is going on. Let me explain.

To an American British Politics have always seemed quirky. I admire the power given to call elections and all the other posturing that goes with it. Much better that the brash, in your face, American political machine,where everyone fits into a category (nice-eh?) and campaigning goes on for so long that it becomes more like background music. Somehow it all seems to fit with other British institutions like cricket test matches and Bank Holidays. However British is not a word I would use these days. These are largely English institutions. And as the English as a people awake and grasp their identity, my question is: Have they left it too late?

As I watch the politicians on the box doing their bit to ’sell’ their wares to us I want to shout at them: ‘You just don’t get it!’ I believe that they have not really understood the mind of England. Lack of choice offered by the politicians as they compete to sell us their wares or disparage their opponents wares stops them from hearing our real questions. ‘Why are the English denied their country?’ Why are the ’suits’ in Europe telling us what to do? Why are we not allowed to hear any views apart from the main ‘approved’ political voices? All they really want to do is tell us how great their ‘big idea’ is compared to their opponents’.

Don’t get me wrong, I am impressed that anyone can stand for Parliament provided they have £500 to waste. What they don’t get is an equal platform for the ideas that they bring (however different) to be heard. Big is heard; small is not. Oh unless you have a controversial platform that just manages to not be legally proscribed like the BNP. Or you are a ’single issue’ party like UKIP.

In America only folk with access to a good political machine stand for high office. And access to that machine brings much needed cash to pay for all the endless advertising that is required to make a dent on voters’ consciousness. Come on, if you are putting out ads during prime time you have to compete with all the various life changing products on offer. I want a politician who can at least offer me the same thrill as an end to wrinkles or instant weight loss.

So my question is: What has this to do with Democracy? Is it just mindless posturing by a controlling elite who are just slickly manoevring the voters into a pre-determined selection. I am not surprised that so many people don’t bother to vote. The whole thing feels like manipulation and I sympathise with voters who don’t want to be part of it. If Democracy is brought into disrepute then the only alternative for the people is revolution! Something the Yankees know a thing or two about!

Imagine that you are getting to the end of a not very good meal at your local restaurant. The dessert menu has arrived and you see that only ice cream is still available. Worse still there are only three flavours, vanilla, chocolate and strawberry. You have tried all of them before and found some fault with each. However you are still hungry so you decide to choose, somewhat peversily,  your least favourite flavour, strawberry, in the hope that this time it might be more appealing.

As your ice cream arrives you notice that another table of three is getting quite different flavours, passion fruit and mango, mint chocolate chip and rum and raisin. You complain to the waiter who tells you that he has decided to offer only the three largest sellers as this makes his job easier. To get the others you have to know to ask.

You would quite rightly be upset and probably make a complaint. But this sort of thing is happening all the time at election hustings up and down the country. Only the three largest parties are allowed on the panel and the smaller parties have to make do with submitting their responses in written form for later publication in the hope that some voters may read them.

The silly thing is that with the planned televised debates you are going to hear what these three main parties think. Even worse is the fact that these are the parties who have run parliament for decades and are the primary architects of the mess we are in.  Limiting the panel in this way ensures that the innovative solutions that the smaller parties are espousing may not see the light of day. It is also constraining the democratic process in a way that will increase the likelihood of an adverse outcome for the country.

People are likely to vote for what they hear, or not vote at all. Worse still if there is a hung parliament it will consist of the three larger parties fighting it out to get their old fashioned and out of date ideas accepted. Any negotiation is likely to be along the lines of “You accept this stale policy of ours and we will accept one of your stale policies”. Melding one stale idea with another has little chance of creating one new idea. Or to put it another way. If you have one thousand monkeys typing stale ideas out for a million years the chance they will create one new idea is small.

It will be as though you complained to the waiter and all he could offer as compensation was Neapolitan ice cream with layers of  vanilla-chocolate-strawberry. The fact that you like not one of the flavours makes no difference.

Now you might remark that as the English Democrats Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Stevenage that I would say all of that wouldn’t I? But the fact remains that the English Democrats party does have an important contribution to make.  First we are an English nationalist party in the same way that the SNP are a Scottish nationalist party or Plaid Cymru are a Welsh nationalist party. We will put England first just as the SNP puts Scotland first and Plaid puts Wales first. The English Democrats are the only party that is committed to putting England first. English voters might welcome such voting option as election day approaches and the demands for yet more money by the SNP and Plaid become yet more strident.

Secondly we are the only party with a well thought through but radical alternative to the current constitutional settlement. Our plans have matured over the last eight years and are not a knee-jerk reaction to current problems. So have the rest of the policies in our Manifesto

Thirdly we are not that small anyway. In the 2009 European elections over 280,000 people in England voted for the English Democrats – compare this to around 321,000 for the SNP and 127,000 for Plaid. We will soon be the largest nationalist party in the UK. We plan to field over 100 candidates in the Parliamentary election, much more than the SNP or Plaid. The Alliance for Democracy, of which the English Democrats are a founding member, plans to field 300 or more candidates.

We are in a critical election period. A recent survey said that 38% of the population wanted a hung parliament. It is quite possible that as the election date gets closer this proportion will increase. But do voters know what they wish for? A hung parliament of the three main parties plus the nationalist parties of Scotland and Wales will lead to an unprincipled grab for yet more English taxpayers money for the already over-paid Scots and Welsh.  The three main parties will eagerly connive in this, driven as they are by ego and bombast rather than a true love of country. They have already shown themselves  happy to sell the English down the road in order to get an opportunity to implement their already degraded ideas. They will not stop at this. For the English it will be a bit like a vanilla-chocolate-strawberry Neapolitan ice cream with an added extra – a layer of strong mustard!

The results of this will not be pretty. A severe reaction by the English leading to civil unrest, riots and mayhem by a nation that has already signalled that it has had enough is an almost certain outcome of this scenario.

And all for the want of not allowing the voter to see the full range of ideas and parties open to them. How sad can you get?

The recent snow and cold weather in the Four Nations has, in some minds, shown that global warming is an evil plan, concocted by mad scientists, to enslave us. One of the reasons behind this belief is a confusion between weather and climate.

Weather is what happens on a day to day basis. It is notoriously variable. Even in the last ice age there would have been very hot summers from time to time. To distinguish between the two one needs to have regard to:

1. Long-term trends in the averages of such variables as temperature and precipitation. By long term I mean over hundreds of years. By average I mean that the data is averaged over a period of ten or more years.
2. Changes to the weather caused by events such as vulcanism.
3. Short-term cyclical factors of the order of up to 25 years such as El Nino or the sunspot cycle.
4. Longer term factors such as changes in the orbital characteristics of the earth or on earth factors such as the cessation or diminution of the North Atlantic Oscillation. The NAO is the current that flows from the Caribbean to Northern Europe, then up to Green land and back down the eastern seaboard of the USA to the Caribbean.

Taking these factors into account is not simple. Look for example at the sunspot cycle. Sunspots are dark areas that appear on the sun. The number of sunspots increases to a maximum and then declines to zero and then start to increase, so repeating the cycle. The key fact here is that the sun is hotter when there are sunspots, increasing as the number of sunspots increases, than when there are none. So in theory the earth should get, alternately, slightly warmer and then slightly colder. If the earth is warming then this will tend to amplify the warm maximum and minimise the effect of the cold minimum.

Detecting this change is difficult for a number of reasons. Firstly the cycles are not all the same length, neither is the cold minimum period always the same length nor  does the hot maximum always reach the same intensity. For example the current minimum is one of the longest in recent times and has only just started to turn.  To complicate matters every second cycle or in other words every 22 years, the suns poles change over. What was the north pole becomes the south and the old south pole becomes the north pole.

On earth as well things change. The earth might be in the grip of an El Nino event or there may have been a recent major volcanic eruption or the weather patterns may just be going through an extended ‘random’ change. As a result of all these factors it would be unreasonable to expect a clear cut effect.

If you go to http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/Zurich_Color_Small.jpg you can see a chart of the sunspot cycle since 1750.

Sun Spot Cycles

We are currently in the 24th minimum. The peak sunspot number varies between 68 and 250 or in other words by a factor of nearly four!. If you print out the graph and use a ruler you can measure a number of things. First whilst the average length of a cycle from one minimum to the next minimum is around 11.2 years it can vary from 8 years to nearly 15.5 -a range of nearly two times!. If you count the low (cold?) period as starting when the sunspot number decreases to 25 on the way down and to 25 again on the way up it appears that the length of this low time varies between 2.5 and 8 years – a range of over three times – with an average of 4 years! What is more it looks as though the current low time which has already been going 4 years could be 6 or 8 years in length. The peak sunspot number has exceeded 205 only three times in the last 260 years whilst it has been lower than 113 on five occasions. On the other 16 times it has been between the two.

Interesting though this may be what is the effect, if any, on the weather? Between around 1807 and 1827 the two low periods lasted five and eight years respectively whilst none of the peaks around  1805, 1816 and 1830 exceeded 113. This was an exceptionally cold period called the  Dalton minimum. Charles Dickens was a child in this period and it is thanks to the cold winters he experienced then that we owe his later writing about winters and Christmas. The previous minimum was over a 100 years long lasting the  whole of the 17th century and gave rise to the delightful paintings of winter by the Dutch master painters.

In more recent times it is not clear that the weather is linked to the cycles. The last cold period in Hertfordshire where we live was in the late 1970’s to the late 1980s during which time the sunspot cycle was either increasing to a maximum or decreasing from it. If you go back 22 years to around 1962 we get to a cold period once again. The winter of 1962 – 1963 was one of the coldest on record and it coincided with a minimum. Go back another 22 years to 1940. The winter of 1939 – 1940 was severe and in January there were frequent frosts and heavy falls of snow. Go back 22 years to 1918 and you get a year with millions dying from flu. Whilst the winter was only average it was preceded and followed by snowy winters. Go back another 22 years to 1896 and you read in the Stepney diary http://website.lineone.net/~fight/Stepney/weather.htm that the Thames froze over in 1895-6 although the other winters appear to have been relatively benign.

The winter of 1940 came just before a low period, that of 1917-8 coincided with a maximum as did that of 1895. So it is difficult, unequivocally  to link the winter weather fluctuations with the low period in the sunspot cycle, principally I think because there are so many other factors that can upset the relationship.

This has not of course stopped some scientists form abusing the data. A recent paper purported to show that sunspot cycles were the cause of current global warming. Hopefully the reader can see that the variability and confounding factors are so great that such a conclusion has to be nonsense, at best. It is, at best, poor science, done by poor scientists. At least they did not attempt to use the data to show the world was cooling. We still have that claim to look forward to!

If you wish to see images of the sun and sun spots go to http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/sunspots/

It isn’t just David Cameron schmoozing this idea. Now POWER2010 http://www.power2010.org.uk have jumped on the bandwagon whilst engaging in a very worthwhile exercise in deliberative democracy. That deliberative democracy is not the solution to our current woes, that it is not without its problems, one being the narrow basis on which policies are selected – a scientifically chosen sample of 130 individuals (my emphasis) – is clear from my rant below. However do not let this dissuade you from going to their site and voting on what you think are the most important issues for democracy today.

One question I would like to know the answer to is who was allowed to vote on this issue. If it was just the  “scientifically’ chosen English amongst the 130 then that is one matter. However if it was everyone then the vote is invalidated straight away – The English have never been allowed to vote on devolution in Wales, Scotland or N. Ireland!

How Power 2010 could have failed to select an English Parliament as one of their issues I do not know. Over 50% of voters in England regularly support the idea in opinion polls. They do so because an English Parliament gives the people of England  a government of the English, by the English, for the English, just as the Scots, Welsh and N. Irish have for themselves.

Having a glorified Commons Committee, subject to the other nations simply because it is a committee of the House, does not provide a government of the English, by the English for the English. And what will happen after the Commons? Will the bill go through to the Lords to be adjudicated on by the Scots, Welsh, and N. Irish?

Does this proposal require that Cabinet Ministers for devolved matters (Health, Education, Transport, Justice and so on) only come from English constituencies? And will these and only these Cabinet Ministers make decisions in Cabinet about English matters, sitting on the English, yet again, sub-committee?

A clearer example of confused thinking and poorly thought out logic is difficult to find.

Currently three, 75%,  out of the four nations, having 16% of the population, have their own government. In round terms 20% of the people have 80% of the democracy! This is a clear and absolute nonsense and no clearer example of Pareto’s Principle need be given http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto%27s_principle.

When Jack Straw (Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice in the Westminster government, that most racist of governments!) claims that the English cannot have a Parliament because they constitute 84% of the population he is not showing his ignorance of Pareto. Misquoting Pareto is a ‘cunning plan’ based on a clear assumption that the electorate are a bunch of ignorant idiots who will not recognise his statement as a misquote, but rather treat it as a clever analysis of the issue, which it is not.

Do not vote for this committee approach. It is disrespectful to the English, it makes the English less equal than the other nations, it is extremely unfair to the English and worst of all it will not work!  Better by far to have a Parliament for the English, an elected House of Lords and a House of Commons with, in total, no more elected representatives than currently are elected or debate matters. No extra cost and much greater democracy!

I suppose Power2010 will come up with the usual excuses for putting forward this idea, along the lines of “It wasn’t us gov.”, or “I was only following the rules” or “The committee we appointed made these decisions” -  (whine, whine, whinge, whinge). Shame on you! This is a disgrace!

David Cameron’s motive for putting the idea forward is clearer. He has already said that he does not want to be “Prime Minster of England”, conveniently forgetting, or perhaps never understanding, that the devolved governments are led by a First Minster and not a Prime Minster – not much respect for the English there, then. The real reason he made the remark is of course about Power. It is correct that most of the work of government occurs in the matters that are devolved; Justice, Health, Education and so on. This means that most of the key levers for getting re-elected or gaining the confidence of the electorate are in devolved matters. Given that 84% of the votes are in the 84% of the devolved English matters you can see how Cameron, Clegg and Brown (and Straw) want to keep these matters within reach of their sticky fingers, close to their greedy hearts and out of Control of the English for ever.

It might be of course that Cameron just wishes to distance himself from Bonar-Law an earlier Conservative Prime Minister, a Scot, born in 1858 in New Brunswick (the Canadian Confederation did not occur until 1867) but raised in Scotland, who referred to himself as the Prime Mister of England [The Making of the English National Identity by K. Kumar, ISBN 0521777364]. Bonar-Law became leader of the Conservative Party  after Aurthur Balfour (also a Scot) and became Prime Minister in 1922 but sadly had to resign in 1923 due to throat cancer. His was the shortest Prime Ministership of the twentieth century and he is known as the Unknown Prime Minister. A name Cameron will not want!