Saturday PS: Hello, hello, they're back again!

FUNNY how all those things about which we were told we need worry no more seem to be making a comeback.

Unemployment was supposedly banished by our flexible labour market and astringent benefits regime. Now it's surging, the direct result of panic measures to control the Virus of Mass Destruction urged on the Government by pointy-headed "experts". That's what happens when you have a Prime Minister who wouldn't say boo to a quack.

Inflation was supposedly dead, killed off by a combination of globalisation and the wonders of independent central banking. Now it is tipped to rise markedly.

Government debt was, apparently, nothing to worry about. Ultra-low interest rates made heavy borrowing the prudent course of action (as Anthony Burgess said of the price of cigarettes on one of his overseas sojourns, you couldn't afford not to smoke). And anyway, the central bank could conveniently print the money with which to buy the bonds issued.

In the words of Prefect Renault in Casablanca: "They put it on the bill. I tear the bill up. It is very convenient."

Now, however, gilt yields are set to rise, the price of persuading foreigners to lend us the money we need to maintain the style to which we have become accustomed.

That said, the early-warning bell suggesting our international creditors are experiencing a sense-of humour failure is likely to sound first in sterling's performance on foreign exchanges. Here, the auguries are already worrying.

The sterling/euro rate a year ago, on January 24, was €1.1855. Now it is  €1.1242. 

Thanks to the excellent research firm Consensus Economics, we can see how City, academic and independent economists see things panning out. The average forecast for the Consumer Prices Index is for 1.5 per cent this year and two per cent next year.

For unemployment, the average forecast is for 6.8 per cent of the workforce this year and 5.9 per cent next year. Public sector net borrowing is predicted, on average, at a staggering £196.8 billion this year and $138.8 billion next year.

Most astonishing, perhaps, given that our borders are semi-closed, is the average forecast for the current account deficit: £73.7 billion this year and £77.8 billion next year.

There you have it, ladies and gentleman, the twisted wreck that is the British economy. It wasn't in great shape before the VoMD, but assorted lock-downs seem to have finished it off. 

1) Saturday bits and pieces

HOW convenient that yet another "deadly mutation" of the coronavirus should have emerged just as we were looking forward to some easing of restrictions. Previous "new variants" are said to have come from Brazil and South Africa. Why not claim the next one came from outer space? Michael Crichton's 1969 novel The Andromeda Strain, filmed in 1971, explored precisely this theme. Maybe the Prime Minister and his kidnappers (sorry, "advisers") should mug up on it before their next press conference.

THAT said, the ground was being laid even before this "new variant" to soften us up for the admission that "all over by Easter" was a lie. On Wednesday, The Daily Telegraph carried a story headed: "Public against rush to re-open, say Ministers." Presumably they are relying on the same opinion polls that, had they been accurate, would have seen Ed Miliband beginning his second administration and Britain still in the European Union.

I hope the railway industry bounces back from all this nonsense in reasonably good health. Yes, I have moaned about the horrors of commuting, not least the fatuous announcements of the "See it, say it, sorted" variety. But over the winter of 2019/2020, I have a problem with my right foot that made it hard to navigate staircases and to get on and off trains. From train crew and platform staff, on both the railway and the Tube, I experienced nothing but kindness and assistance. May their jobs be safe.

BACK in May 1966, Private Eye published a spoof "Swinging London" supplement. Being five at the time, I don't remember it, but my parents passed it on. One article is headed "The English Press: boring, hack-ridden, the best in the world." This came back to me recently surveying the quality end of the market. Maybe there is a wholesaler somewhere supplying those heavy-bottomed opinion pieces that all read the same and cover the same ground: why the time has come to stand up to China; vaccine or no vaccine, things will never be the same again; Angela Merkel will be a very hard act to follow; Joe Biden has his work cut out to re-unify America. What's that? Sorry old man, nodded off there.

FINALLY, a film director (I forget which one) mentioned one or two of his less renowned works. As with children, he said, you love the least successful ones the most. Of the five books I have co-authored with Larry Elliott, I (and he) long thought that perhaps the weak sister was Going South, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2012. In it, we suggested Britain was best looked at as a Third World economy, exhibiting a huge trade deficit, a reliance on imported capital, political instability (then, as now, it seemed probable that Scotland would break away), a mendacious political class and chronic economic problems. I think we both thought we had over-egged the pudding. After the events of the past year, maybe the problem is one of understatement.

Thanks again for reading and enjoy the weekend.

atkinsondan323@gmail.com

Europe Didn't Work, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Yale University Press

 

Saturday PS: Watch out for the begging bowl

I was pleased to see the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) warn the public that they could lose all their money investing in Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies, but I doubt it will do much good. When one or other of these brands of cyber-cash crashes to zero, the demand will come loud and clear for the "victims" to be compensated by the taxpayer.

You can just see how events will unroll. A "victims' group" will be formed, out of which one or two media-savvy people will emerge to guide journalists to the more pitiable cases; destitute elderly people always make good copy in these case.

Ministers will explain that there can be no question of compensation, as those involved knew the risks. Gamblers, they will say, cannot expect to be bailed out.

One or more ambitious backbench MPs will take up the cause, and get some great PR in the process, but until now the Government will stand firm. Three of the key elements are now in place - victims' group, sympathetic journalists and MPs - but the final victory requires a fourth: lawyers.

Legal eagles, working for the "victims" on a no-fee beau geste basis, will set to work unpicking the Government's defences. Official warnings, they will say, came too late. The regulators were asleep at the switch. Crypto-currency had long been ripe for proper investigation, but there was none of any substance.

Then comes the trump card: the authorities actually encouraged cyber-money activity in the UK. Which they did, especially the Treasury under George Osborne, which wanted London to become the world centre for crypto-currency trading.

That is actually going to be a hard one to shake off when the begging bowl is rattled. Not that it does anything to justify taxpayer-funded bailouts for those who have lost a bundle on crypto-currency. But it simply makes them more likely.

At this stage, spineless Ministers and officials will start muttering about how "the optics aren't good" and how the compensation campaign has "gained traction". Shortly afterwards, they will be smoothing out the Treasury chequebook and popping the tops off their fountain pens.

As mentioned before, the idea has taken hold that, should anyone lose money on any investment or any financial product, this is proof positive that they were "mis-sold". Quite what are the implications for future investment activity are uncertain; by definition, there have to be some losers in financial markets alongside the winners.

This is doubly the case in foreign currency trading, which is a classic zero-sum game. Currencies are priced in reference to each other, so the dollar rising against the pound is another way of saying the pound fell against the dollar. For every winner, a loser.

The huge widening of the definition of "mis-selling" comes in parallel with the ease with which PR-obsessed governments can be rolled over and made to cough up even when the case in question is dubious to say the least.

So, good news that the FCA has acted, but I don't think it will make much difference.

1) Saturday bits and pieces

ANOTHER week, another frightening "mutant strain" of the coronavirus. This one comes from Brazil, apparently, while the last one emerged from South Africa. Funny how far-off second-world countries seem always to be the origin; you never hear of a "mutant strain" appearing in Luxembourg or the Netherlands. Anyway, brace yourself for "tighter restrictions. Do you think Ministers are aroused by the idea of tighter restrictions? Fifty shades of grey suits, perhaps.

IN the same neck of the woods, I increasingly suspect that Boris Johnson's successor will probably be a current Minister who is as far from the present disaster as was Margaret Thatcher as Education Secretary from the calamitous economic policies of Edward Heath. There will have been no outright disloyalty, merely an avoidance of any significant endorsement of lock-down after lock-down, on the apparently reasonable ground that his or her department is simply not involved in the crisis and it would be quite wrong to barge on to other Ministers' turf. A winning strategy, I believe.

I had a brush with the Barclay brothers' business empire in the late Nineties, when I was working for The Guardian. One or other of our learned friends working on their behalf was on the phone about some footling objection to something I had written. So I was not the obvious candidate to be rather impressed on reading the obituary in Wednesday's edition of The Daily Telegraph of Sir David Barclay, who has died aged 86. It wasn't so much the collection of business assets he and twin Frederick had built up (including the Telegraph) as his attitude to privacy, which he described as a "valuable commodity", adding: "There is no incentive for us to talk about our business affairs." What a refreshing change from the grand-standing business people of whom I, personally, cannot get too little. Let's start a new campaign: keep private enterprise, er, private.

Thanks again for reading and enjoy the weekend.

atkinsondan323@gmail.com

Europe Didn't Work, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, is published by Yale University Press

 

Saturday PS: They can't let go

IT is now surely obvious to everyone that the Public Health Blob will never voluntarily relinquish the powers it has accumulated to boss the rest of us about.

Within hours, apparently, of Jello-Man in Downing Street announcing the third lockdown (the one that was not going to happen, remember?) the Pointy-Head "experts" were urging yet more repressive measures on the Government. As Boris Johnson blathered about it all being over by Easter, at least one Pointy-Head warned that restrictions may need to be in place next winter.

If nothing else, this gave the lie to claims that the current controls represent "one last heave" before, thanks to assorted vaccines, we are free. 

Do you get it now? If the blobbies have their way, there will be no end to face nappies, lock-down, "sew shull dustancing", pointless "Covid marshalls" and all the rest. No matter if the virus disappears, there's be another one along in a moment. Now they know how much they can get away with, how much power they can accrue, why would they give it up?

It would be rather like Arthur Scargill, after his victory at Saltley coke depot in 1972, declaring that this secondary picketing lark is all very well but it's time to move on.

As with the union barons, the Public Health Blob will meet its match eventually, in a Prime Minister determined to prise its members' fingers off the national windpipe. In other words, not this one.

1) Saturday bits and pieces

IN the early Eighties, when Tony Benn and his mates were supposedly dragging the Labour Party way to the left, various commentators mourned that this was no longer the movement of giants such as Aneurin Bevan. I think it was the great Keith Waterhouse who pointed out that these same people, or their spiritual ancestors, had never had any time for Bevan and his colleagues when he was actually alive and had decided only posthumously that they were jolly good fellows. This came back to me in the last few days when learning that Donald Trump's reaction to the assault/protest/whatever in Congress showed he was not fit to be mentioned in the same breath as Abraham Lincoln or Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan? Here was someone routinely excoriated at the time as a dangerous maniac intent on starting a nuclear war. Now, apparently, he was an Olympian statesman.

ACTUALLY, Reagan's two terms between 1981 and 1989 demonstrated the truth of Annie Duke's observation in her book Thinking in Bets (Portfolio/Penguin; 2018) that there are two elements to the outcome of a decision: the quality of the decision itself, and luck. Thus the fact that, for example, a British company's decision to open a subsidiary in Finland and one in Wolverhampton should not be judged on the fact that the latter was a failure and the former a success. Given the cultural, linguistic and currency barriers (Finland is the only Nordic country to have adopted the euro), the Finland decision was inferior to that of Wolverhampton. That it worked out was luck.

Similarly, huge, unfunded tax cuts and a $1.5 trillion arms build-up ($1 trillion was real money in those days) do not become high-quality decisions simply because the Cold War ended in victory for the west.

TO end where we began, I am indebted to Mail Online for this: "Experts are calling for an even tougher lockdown after Boris Johnson last night begged families to stay at home, with the Government launching a new campaign blitz to scare people into obeying the rules. Scientists warn the current measures are too 'lax' and can't contain the new coronavirus variant, so are demanding stricter restrictions." Of course they are. It's how they get their rocks off.

Thanks again for reading and enjoy the weekend.

atkinsondan323@gmail.com

Europe Didn't Work, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Yale University Press

 

 

 

Saturday PS: Beyond question

A lifetime ago, a friend and I were swigging Swiss beer on a hotel balcony when the talk turned to Sir Karl Popper, the philosopher then still very much with us but who died in 1994. Said friend knew a fair bit about him, but I did not.

However, something that has stayed with me has been (I hope i have this correctly) the great man's injunction to beware any proposition that could not be falsified. This could range from the statement that football team X is "the greatest in the world" to the claim that all our thoughts and feelings are being controlled by invisible aliens.

That's really where we are now, isn't it, with regard to the Glow Bull Pun Demic? If punitive lock-down measures are followed by a fall in infections/hospitalisations/deaths (pick measure that best suits the new pointy-head dictators) that proves they work. If they are not, that shows they were not tough enough.

There is, in contrast to the British tradition of jury trial or parliamentary democracy, no "opposition", no case put against locking down, simply an argument among different degrees of doing so.

In parallel, there is a similar heads-I-win tails-you-lose construct applied to the moral turpitude of those who question oppressive measures to "tackle" the coronavirus. Were someone to suggest that we ought to shield those most at risk while letting the rest of us get on with our lives, they would be accused of monstrous selfishness.

Were they then to point out that they are themselves at risk as a result of their age or a pre-existing health condition, or both, they would be accused of...monstrous selfishness, because they would be a potential burden on our wonderful, envy-of-the-world NHS (the one that had all summer to prepare for the current wave of cases and doesn't seem to have done so).

Now we learn of the latest Government cave-in, the one on school re-openings, and readers yesterday of The Daily Telegraph were treated to the hysterical ravings of Professor Hugh Montgomery of University College Hospital, London, that those refusing to wear face nappies or who were "Covid deniers" had "blood on their hands". On the nappy issue, he may or may not have a point, but scepticism about the Virus of Mass Destruction is simply a point of view.

Presumably, "Covid denial" ought now to be a "hate crime", creating yet more displacement activity for our police "service".

As the Government flails uselessly in its response to the coronavirus and cedes more and more power to the pointy-headed "experts", someone in the Cabinet is biding their time, making as few pronouncements as possible on the issue and waiting to take advantage of the inevitable political upheaval once the full extent of the grotesque mismanagement of this event and the ensuing economic devastation become clear, not to mention the broken promises - does anyone believe the lie about life getting back to normal by Easter?

The likely candidate? Well, I have a couple of ideas, but will say nothing, given my own record of handing the Black Spot to anyone I tip for the top. Just look out for Cabinet Ministers happy to talk about their own achievements and the areas for which they are responsible, but strangely quiet as regards the Virus of Mass Destruction.

1) Saturday bits and pieces

AN old mate and fellow journalist once confided that he expected at any moment to be called in for a chat by someone fairly senior, assistant editor rank or similar. After closing the door, said important person would say: "I expect you know what this is about", and go on to explain that the newspaper in question had twigged that his employment had been in error and that he had never been any good at all. This fear (which I shared) came to mind when reading the headline in this week's edition of The Observer over a piece by Catherine Bennett about "imposter syndrome", asking: "Do men just not get it?" Yes they do, is the answer there.

WHEN you hear the words "soft power", it is advisable to check your purse or wallet, because the chances are that someone is trying to pick your pocket. Britain's aid budget, the BBC, the British Council or lavish subsidies for higher education, all supposedly enhance our "soft power". A parallel argument has it that "every £1 from the taxpayer" generates, oh, £5, £10 or whatever of economic activity.

ON November 28, I wrote here about the effect of declining trade union membership: "[M]ost union reps solved far more disputes than they caused. With them gone, the law has had to step in, with voluminous workplace legislation, codes of conduct and the rest. Is this really an improvement from the management perspective? Those who were delighted to see the back of the unions should have been more careful what they wished for." The writer Robert Taylor warned of this several decades back, in his book The Fifth Estate: Britain's Unions in the Seventies (Routledge & Kegan Paul; 1978) after various legal challenges to collective action: "If the right wing in Britain wants to play by the rules of the legal game, we need to change those rules." Well, quite.

Thanks again for reading and a Happy New Year.

atkinsondan323@gmail.com

Europe Didn't Work, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Yale University Press

 

Saturday PS: For latest blogs, go to the "recent posts" panel to the right.

You just know that they'll call it The Christmas Eve Agreement, in the manner of the Good Friday variant. Somewhere in Whitehall, I suspect, there is a special department for thinking up twee names for bureaucratic/diplomatic events.

Is TCEA - also known as our trade deal with the European Union - any good? I don't know, because details are still emerging. The key thing is that we are free to change our minds at some point in the future, as of course is the EU.

That's what happens when you get two freely-contracting parties. It happened with the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed in the Nineties and re-negotiated by President Donald Trump more recently.

It seems fair enough on the surface, but imagine how differently things could have been. It is November, and the Government is under huge pressure from Brussels to leave the UK subject to the European "Court of Justice" (it isn't a court in any recognisable sense and justice doesn't get a look-in). 

The Prime Minister resists. At this point, the Government economic service (or a part of it) produces terrifying forecasts as to job losses and corporate insolvencies if the Government doesn't do as it is told.

The Prime Minister caves in, explaining that the new forecasts take on board previously-unappreciated economic costs.

That this didn't happen with the EU negotiations is greatly to be welcomed. But it is precisely what happened with the cancelling of Christmas. Assorted medical and scientific big-wigs mounted a concerted campaign to have the "five days of Christmas" called off.

Initially, the Government resisted, after which, most conveniently, the big-wigs "discovered" a new, mutant strain that was tearing through the country, apparently. The Boris Johnson who held his course throughout the Europe negotiations would have laughed in their faces, told them he wasn't born yesterday and to take their bad Fifties sci-fi film script and shove off.

He didn't, of course, and Christmas was duly cancelled. A clear win for the pill-pushers and pointy-heads, whose mission in life seems to be to take revenge on all those people who weren't science students, who had a ball at college and well-paid employment afterwards.

Why don't they simply re-name SAGE and Nervtag and all these other quangos as The Committee of People Who Couldn't Get Laid at University?

A last word on trade deals before I sign off - a lot to do today so I'm keeping it short. It seems Britain is seeking membership of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. 

That's pretty ambitious, considering Britain's sole presence in the Pacific is represented by the Pitcairn Islands (think descendants of the Bounty mutineers), population 50. 

Global Britain indeed.

Thanks again for reading and happy Boxing Day.

atkinsondan323@gmail.com

Europe Didn't Work, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Yale University Press

 

Saturday PS: The price is right

ED Miliband must be experiencing a certain grim satisfaction. During his spell as Labour leader - 2010 to 2015 - he proposed that energy customers should be automatically signed up to the cheapest available tariff. 

Cue a vast amount of scorn from his opponents, particularly the Tories. Here, they said, was yet further proof of his unfitness for high office.

Six days ago, the BBC website carried this item: "Consumers could be automatically switched to better value energy tariffs under a plan to make the system fairer. The Government says it wants to stop suppliers putting loyal customers on to the worst deals when their current contracts come to an end."

Well, well. We certainly seem to have come a long way from then days when pro-market commentators felt able to claim that, if customers could tell which was the best deal - on mobile phones, gas, electricity or anything else - then you didn't really have a free market.

As a former boss used to say, not entirely seriously: "Roll that round your tongue for a moment." If people can compare one price with another, then the market isn't truly free? 

Such statements, of course, have a period flavour now, a prime cut from the ideology served up before the 2008 financial crisis and certainly before the current disaster of the measures to control the coronavirus. They are reminiscent of staunch defences by union bosses circa 1975 of such practices as secondary picketing or the closed shop.

What is being said is that bamboozling the customer into paying too much is central to the functioning of a market economy. The defence, presumably, is that every customer is different and the market will seek to create bespoke packages for everyone, thus comparisons are meaningless.

It's rubbish, of course, but eerily suggestive of a reverse version of the justification offered in the old days for a spectacular lack of competition in banking services. The reason, the banks said, that they all charged the same rates on overdrafts and paid the same rates on savings was because ferocious competition had resulted in perfect "price discovery".

They charged the same, they said, because they had found the correct balance point at which people would be prepared to borrow and to save.

In parallel with this, the debate starts at the wrong end, assuming customers eagerly scanning the small print of each offered deal in order to find the right one for them. Do I have a good deal? I really don't know, but my monthly energy, phone and mobile bills are manageable, leaving me free to worry about other things.

That said, Ed Miliband (and now Boris Johnson) are right. Everyone should be enrolled on the cheapest tariff. The former is now shadow Business Secretary, with responsibility for energy. If the latter continues to make a pig's ear of handling the Glow Bull Pun Demic, he may get a chance to implement his own proposal.

1) Saturday bits and pieces

AS quoted here recently, the late John Hoskyns, one-time adviser to Margaret Thatcher, noted that good government was a limited resource, rather like oil or coal. I recalled this in relation to the Mickey Mouse devolved administrations and to the likely (low) quality of those who would staff any English parliament. But even within Westminster the evidence is there to see in much of the rubbish produced by backbench select committees. One egregious example from two years ago came with a report into pornography from the pointless "women and equalities" committee, eviscerated by Alwyn Turner here. I imagine that, in their fantasies, many select committee personnel imagine themselves as Senator Robert Kennedy characters, grilling the likes of dodgy union leader Jimmy Hoffa. But that's not how our system works. The reality is that they are people who couldn't get even the lowliest government job.

AM I alone in this country in rather admiring the Academie Francaise, official guardian of the French language? Last month, The Times report that: "Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, 91, head of the Académie Française, fired a broadside in Le Figaro newspaper at the linguistic fashion of leading Parisians to abandon old-fashioned French in favour of jargon that aped trends in the English-speaking world." Good for her. I wish we had something similar to the Academie here. Every new illiteracy in our country, whenever criticised, brings forth a chorus of "English is a living language". Dying, more like. 

FINALLY, has the Health Blob leaned on our TV cops? There seems to be a new-ish convention that no detective is ever free to go for a drink with another, pleading family duty, childcare responsibilities and the rest. It has even crept into Wallander (BBC1; 2008-2014), although given it is set in Sweden, maybe that is not so surprising. But across the board, the two-way dialogue ("Are you coming for a pint?"/"Ah, sorry, can't") is ubiquitous. It wouldn't have happened in the old days, although the blokes in The Sweeney (ITV; 1975-1978) didn't "go" for a drink at all. They slugged whisky in the office.

Thanks again for reading and enjoy the weekend.

dan.atkinson@live.co.uk

Europe Didn't Work, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Yale University Press

 

Saturday PS: Starting to look a lot like sanctions

ONCE again, Atkinson's Law comes into its own, which states that the same people or person who have, on any contemporary issue, argued X will also come to argue Y.

Recently, I noted that those most condemnatory of British "imperial nostalgia" are also those who bewail the "loss of British influence" attendant upon our departure from the European Union. There is, it would seem, no imperialist like an anti-imperialist.

Similarly, the prospect of this departure being undertaken "without a deal" is said to be particularly worrying with regard to our financial services sector. Said, of course, by the same people who have spent years deprecating the  City's dominance in the British economy.

I have been equally deprecating, but at least I am trying to be consistent. If a no-deal Brexit means a smaller role for financial services, that may well be a good thing, especially if, as has been suggested, some sort of side-agreement on trade in goods can be struck.

That could see less of our economic energies spent on financial engineering and more on real engineering. 

But what of the absolutely worst-case scenario, in which not only is there no agreement about anything but the European Union is as obstructive as possible in terms of movement of products and people and trade in services? This would violate the "most favoured nation" principle of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), but its dispute settlement body has been effectively moribund since President Donald Trump blocked the appointment of new judges in protest at the way the WTO does business.

Joe Biden would be likely to end that policy, but even so, getting the WTO to find against the EU would be a lengthy process.

Incidentally, "most favoured nation" is a misnomer, as the principle requires every WTO member-country to treat all the others in trade terms as favourably as its most favoured trading partner. Imagine a rule that said everyone has to behave to everyone else exactly as they do towards their best friend, and you'll get the idea.

There are exceptions to this rule, however, for regional trade blocs - "plurilateral agreements", in the jargon - such as the EU. Thus, the EU is not obliged to treat Britain (or any other non-member) as well as its member-states treat each other, but it cannot treat us less favourably than, say, the United States.

Anyway, back to where we were, and no-deal exacerbated by serious obstruction of UK-EU commerce. In such a situation, a simple no-deal would have mutated into something more like a trade embargo - sanctions, in other words.

Here, surely, is the disaster scenario of which the Remain lobby warned? 

Possibly not. In the wake of the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the (temporary) conquerors were subjected to strict international sanctions. At the behest of my then immediate boss, I had a poke about to see what was the record of such embargos, and the results were not particularly encouraging.

I recall two examples. One related to 1973, the last and, in some ways, craziest year of the post-war boom. In Britain, gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 5.3 per cent in the first quarter - the average rate of GDP growth is about 2.5 per cent a year. 

Pretty much everywhere was booming (until the world economy collided with the energy crisis at the end of the year), but which was the fastest-growing economy? The US, perhaps, or Japan, or West Germany? No, it was actually Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), a country whose economy had been supposedly throttled by tough international sanctions.

In what was then the present (1990), I found a second example, from the same neck of the woods. Despite - yep - tough international sanctions against South Africa, petrol was cheaper in filling stations in Durban than in London.

Some of this can be explained by import substitution. In the first example, then Prime Minister Ian Smith noted that what had been a commodity-based economy was now turning its hand to products it had never made before, such as transistor radios.

South Africa's Sasol company (still with us) used coal to produce synthetic oil, petrol and diesel.

In our own case, our import bill is so high (we haven't run a trade balance or surplus since 1984) that any substitution would surely be welcome? 

1) Bits and pieces on Saturday

AN article by Louise Perry on the UnHerd site took me back several decades. It concerns a case currently before the courts in which a mentally-disabled man has asked his carers, in effect, to procure a prostitute for him. He lacks the confidence to meet a woman in the conventional way, or even to arrange to pay for nookie, but the argument seems to be that he has a "right to sex". Ms Perry disagrees, and his carers want legal guidance as to whether they would be breaking the law if they did as he asked.

In the mid-Eighties, I was a regional business correspondent and one day the local organiser for what was the National Union of Public Employees (now part of Unison) turned up with an unusual but explosive document. He represented staff in care homes, and this was a confidential paper from the local authority on the subject of "facilitation", essentially lifting disabled people who wish to have sex on and off each other.

What goes around...and all that.

AN addition to my embryonic dictionary of bourgeois euphemisms: homage - middle-class plagiarism.

RETAIL guru Mary Portas popped up in the Financial Times on December 8, once again to cast an eye over our stricken high streets. Part of the answer, she suggested, was for brands to embody "environmental and social commitments" to which their customers can relate. What, as The Body Shop did more than 40 years ago? Very original.

FINALLY, back to "facilitation". As I worked on the story, I was steered to call Stanley Segal, who ran Ravenswood, a care and education facility in East Berkshire for children with mental disabilities. He was generous with his time and quite happy to go on the record. Told about this, my NUPE man sucked his teeth and said Professor Segal had "a very poor industrial relations record". I replied that he said that about every employer, to which he said that, industrial relations aside, the great man was a wonder-worker. On his death in 1994, the obituary in The Independent described him as a "rare combination of teacher, publicist, campaigner and champion of the rights of people with learning difficulties". Hear, hear.

Thanks again for reading and enjoy the weekend.

dan.atkinson@live.co.uk

Europe Didn't Work, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Yale University Press

 

Saturday PS: Parallel lives

SOME time ago, I wrote here that our public services - police, schools, National Health Service and so on - appeared to have conjured into existence a "parallel public", with demands and requirements quite different from the actual public.

This second public comprised politicians, pressure groups and others, and public services could now concentrate on serving it rather than the general public. For example, police could now cease to investigate burglaries and focus instead on "hate speech".

Since then, of course, the NHS has gone one step further and decided the public it serves is...itself, hence exhortations to "protect" this national treasure.

Now, the private sector seems to be getting in on the act. In The Times on Wednesday, Matthew Parris opened his column thus: "If you want a modern slavery transparency statement, may I recommend British Gas? Easy-to-follow links on its website make clear British Gas is against slavery. If, however, you want to talk about actual gas, forget it."

Not only is what follows a masterclass in writing a multi-item column (his hanging on the line to the gas people is the thread that ties the different parts together), but it had me thinking about historical parallels. Doubtless domestic energy suppliers in the USSR were pretty useless at supplying domestic energy, but I bet their top brass were fully up to speed with Marxist-Leninist doctrine, or, at least, knew enough phrases to sound as if they were.

Indeed, some large industrial plants in the former Soviet Union employed "chief ideology officers". In our own time, of course, they are called HR departments.

In this parallel universe, the actual business of a company takes second place to demonstrating its ideological soundness: not only against modern slavery, but in favour of the environment, "diversity and inclusion", female directors and social responsibility. 

It hardly matters what the company is supposed to do. Years ago, I wrote that it would be quite possible to run one of those "sport governing bodies" without having a clue about the sport in question, given you would be concentrating on "inappropriate betting activity" by the players, "racist chanting" by the fans and dubious player-transfer payments by the managers.

Much the same is true now, I think, when it comes to the new breed of in-house corporate ideologues.

1) Let’s parler bourgeois!

SOME time ago, I announced that I was putting together a dictionary of middle-class expressions, allowing those who wish to converse with Britain’s professional, managerial and intellectual types to navigate the terms and phrases they are likely to encounter.

The project has been revised, and here are some examples:

Erotica: Middle-class porn

Burlesque: Middle-class strip show

Soft commission: Middle-class kickback

Courtesan: Middle-class hooker

Gourmand tour: Middle-class binge-drinking jaunt

Thirst for ancient knowledge: Middle-class devil worship

Oenophile: Middle-class alcoholic

The project is in its early stages but all suggestions gratefully received.

2) Bits and pieces on Saturday

IN the Daily Mail this week, Stephen Glover turned the spotlight on Michael Gove, once seen as liberal and broad-minded and now the Cabinet's leading lock-down fanatic. What, he asked, had happened? True, Gove was ferociously anti the public-sector blob at Education and has proved ferociously pro the public-sector blobs at Environment and, now, health. I am reminded of the late Clive James’s comment about former senior White House official John Ehrlichman, “who you will remember was once a Nixon aide chiefly distinguishable by his fanatical loyalty. After being indicted and locked up [over the Watergate affair] he became chiefly distinguishable by his fanatical disloyalty, but there is nothing remarkable in that, since the abiding characteristic in men like Ehrlichman is not loyalty but fanaticism".

LET'S get this straight. Jeremy Corbyn is a member of Parliament. And his membership of the Labour Party has been restored. But he is not a Labour MP. How so? Well, he has not had the Labour whip restored. Said whip is a bit of paper circulated every few days telling MPs which way to vote, and presumably Jezza can always look over someone else's shoulder. To have an MP who is a Labour Party member but not a Labour MP is a bit too metaphysical for me. And, I would guess, for the public at large.

TWO weeks ago, I criticised the proliferating tiers of local government during the last ten years, citing Liverpool as an example, somewhere with no fewer than three mayors. What, I intimated, do they actually do? This week, we learned that the "Liverpool region mayor" Steve Rotherham is demanding Boris Johnson apologise for a disobliging article about the city published in The Spectator in 2004, during his editorship, until which time he will not shake hands with him. So that's what the job entails - not shaking hands with the Prime Minister.

LAST year, ahead of lunch in London with a former schoolmate of an ex-girlfriend, I bought a new pair of shoes from Debenhams. The assistant asked if I'd mind being e-mailed with special offers, and I agreed to this. Now, with the store in liquidation, there is something melancholic about the fact that the e-mails keep arriving, like light from a long-dead star.

IN her much-discussed article "Why I had to leave The Guardian", Suzanne Moore notes with regard to the outcome of the 2017 election: "I understood that the possibility of a left-wing government was exciting, but unlike half the paper, I didn’t believe that Corbyn had actually won." That took me back to another election, that of 1987, after which Labour types insisted that "we won the campaign" (Mrs Thatcher had a majority of more than 100). It was left to Arthur Scargill to point out that "winning the campaign" usually involves winning the election.

Thanks again for reading and enjoy the weekend.

dan.atkinson@live.co.uk

Europe Didn't Work, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Yale University Press

Saturday PS: You don't get me...

ONE of our most distinguished economists told me the other day that a clear lesson of the present crisis, agreed by almost everyone, was that essential workers, such as delivery drivers and shelf stackers, needed to receive better pay than they do presently.

What, I asked, would be the mechanism for delivering these improved wages? His gloomy reply was that there isn't one, with even the minimum/living wage (I lose track of what it's called) proving a highly uncertain method of achieving such a result.

I suspect he is absolutely right. There is no mechanism.

But there used to be, and not so long ago either.

Every now and again, a commentator will allude to the fact that trade union membership is now a largely public-sector affair. Younger readers may wonder whether it was ever anything else, given coverage of The Brothers (as no-one calls them any more) is dominated by "angry" spokespeople for teachers, doctors, Tube drivers and civil servants. 

Go back 40 or 50 years, and a very different picture emerges. Car workers, lorry drivers and dockers made much of the running, along with people in the food and drink industry, light engineering, commercial television, construction and shipping. 

The 1978-1979 winter of discontent is a case in point. Remembered today as pretty much a general strike in the public sector, accurately enough, it started in the distinctly private sector Ford car company.

True, the industrial public sector - the mines, the railways, the airports - were strongholds of union activity. But of teachers and nurses we heard little; indeed, it was an (inaccurate) myth that nurses "have never been on strike", while the lower number of working mothers reduced the inconvenience of teachers walking off the job, weakening their hand.

Industrial action in the civil service had a patchy record, and the initials of the white-collar town hall union NALGO were said to stand for Not A Lot Going On.

Ironically, private-sector trade unionism went into decline at about the time, 1990, that the right to join a union was restored to the statute book (it had featured in Edward Heath's ill-fated 1971 Industrial Relations Act, repealed by Labour which shortly afterwards discovered to its horror, regarding the Grunwick dispute, that it had repealed this entitlement at the same time). The 1990 law also abolished the closed shop, and Labour declined to commit to reinstating it.

The party's employment spokesman was a young chap called Tony Blair. I wonder what happened to him?

Shrinking union involvement in the private sector has been a disaster, for three reasons. One is that it tilts the Labour movement further away from the concerns of ordinary workers and towards the obsessions of middle-class public employees ("hate speech", "trans rights" etc).

Second, most union reps solved far more disputes than they caused. With them gone, the law has had to step in, with voluminous workplace legislation, codes of conduct and the rest. Is this really an improvement from the management perspective? Those who were delighted to see the back of the unions should have been more careful what they wished for.

Third, as mentioned earlier, it has broken a key instrument for giving low-paid but essential workers the pay rises to which everyone now says they think they are entitled. Minimum wages are a blunt instrument, a single percentage figure that will never be right for everybody.

Job done, eh fellas?

1) Saturday bits and pieces

HANDS up who was surprised this week to learn that Government pledges that we would be set free after December 2 proved to a big, fat, hairy lie? I said hands up...oh, right. No-one. Me neither. Now we have a new lie, that we will all be set free at Easter. The British State, ladies and gentleman, a stranger to the truth.

MANY years ago, during his stint at was then then the Department for Children, Schools and Families, Ed Balls took a lot of flak for a booklet from his ministry ahead of Christmas on Yuletide hazards in the home, entitled 'Tis the Season to be Careful. Boris Johnson ripped into "Blithering Balls" and his "elf and safety" obsession. So what did the Prime Minister say this week ahead of the nation's five-day parole next month? 'Tis the Season to be...you were looking over my shoulder, weren't you?

AND so the Baroness Sugg years draw to a close. Who will ever forget where they were when they heard this colossus of modern politics had stepped down as a junior Foreign Office Minister, whose responsibilities included the delightful title Minister for the Caribbean? Apparently, she was jolly upset at the reduction of two percentage points in our overseas aid spending. It seems she used to work for David Cameron. Why am I not surprised?

YEARS ago, one of Kenneth Clarke's Budgets was leaked ahead of the event and the Treasury made a big song and dance about the ferocity of its leak inquiry. I made myself very unpopular by ringing the Treasury most days to ask if the leaker had been caught (no, obviously). Expect the same from the investigation into the leak of the Prime Minister's cave-in to the pointy heads (sorry, his wise decision to "follow the science" and lock as all down during November).

THE wokening of the Financial Times continues apace. On Wednesday, the main opinion piece on its website was headed: "Double standards on sexism rock Canberra's bubble." Can you rock a bubble? And "double standards" is always illiterate. Something is either a standard or it is not.

Thanks again for reading and enjoy the weekend.

dan.atkinson@live.co.uk

Europe Didn't Work, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Yale University Press

Saturday PS: Quiet flew the, er...

EVERYONE, it seems, have their "memories of Dom", the now-departed No 10 adviser. I can't claim to, but I remain enormously grateful for the outcome of his first (I think) foray into public life, as an/the organiser of the No campaign in the 2004 referendum on establishing a regional pseudo-parliament for the north-east.

Here's the background. New Labour's first term established the Mickey Mouse "governments" in Scotland and Wales that are causing so much trouble and costing so much money today. By the early years of this century, the "devolution settlement" was looking unstable, so the "answer" was to extend home rule to English regions as well.

The trouble was the lack of any enthusiasm among the English for such institutions, but Tony Blair's deputy John Prescott hit on an idea that could lead to "rolling" devolution, starting with those regions thought most likely to go for it initially; the north-west, Yorkshire-Humberside and the north-east. This last was selected for the first "Great North Vote" on the ground that, being near Scotland, its people supposedly envied their neighbours the opportunity to keep the political class in comfort.

Not only did Cummings and friends defeat this at the polls, they did so by a huge margin that effectively killed off both the other two referendums and ended the whole regional devolution project. Advocates of a Yes vote whinged afterwards that the No campaign had relied heavily on anti-politician sentiment, on stoking fears of a new tier of free-loading elected representatives.

Diddums. What is illegitimate about that? Prescott did a number of very good things in office - starting London Overground, commissioning a property value index that reflected house prices actually paid rather than use just mortgage advances, rescuing the merchant marine with a reformed tax system - as well as planting the seed of the idea that became the Northern Powerhouse project. 

But his fondness for the notion of more salaried politicians, and their officials, as the solution to our problems was very much a blind spot.

However, here's an interesting point. Tony Blair said he would go along with English regional assemblies only if the establishment of each involved the abolition of a subordinate tier of local/regional government - county, borough, district, or whatever. One in, one out.

Contrast that with the "combined authorities"/"metro mayors" set up by George Osborne as Chancellor, all of whom sit on top of whatever collection of Alderman Foodbotham characters was there already. One egregious example is Liverpool, now supporting three mayors: the metro mayor Steven Rotheram, the mayor-mayor Joe Anderson and the Lord Mayor Anna Rothery.

All this plus the city/borough/district authorities in the region. That's right - the Conservatives are actually more in favour of extra tiers of municipal/regional bureaucracy than was New Labour. Perhaps they think those finding employment in this sprawling local-government mess will vote for them.

Dream on.

1) Saturday bits and pieces

SYMPATHETIC journalists tell us that Boris Johnson is desperately hoping to "save" Christmas from the power-crazed pointy-heads ("scientific advisers") who control him. One "adviser" says every day of liberalisation will mean two more days of lockdown; Public Health England (wasn't that worthless body supposed to have been closed down by now?) wants five days. Never forget this is how they all get their rocks off - pushing everyone else around. We all know Big Chief Broken Reed will cave in, cheered on by King Twerp Matt Hancock. Let's just hope everyone ignores him. By the way, why does the Twerp wear that silly NHS lapel badge? The Defence Secretary doesn't saunter round in a beret. And he was actually in the Army.

I have been binge-watching Endeavour, (ITV; 2012 onwards), the story of the young to-be Inspector Morse. What's fascinating is the way the scriptwriters drop bits of the period concerned (the Sixties) into the narrative. There's the up-front, knowing stuff, such as a reference to a Rhodes scholar who plays rugby despite being American, name of Clinton, or the filming of a puppet show that bears more than a passing resemblance to the work of Gerry Anderson. More challenging are the less obvious references to other entertainments of the era. I spotted the following: a transport company called Hammonds (The Brothers; BBC1 1972-1976); a detective called Box (Softly, Softly; BBC1 1966-1969) and a motel called Crossroads (er, Crossroads; ITV; 1964-1988, 2001-2003).

A senior officer states his liking for the novels of Holly Martins, a fictional light-entertainment writer dreamed up for the 1949 film The Third Man, while the spooky scene in which a new schoolmaster replacing one who has disappeared is effectively told by his pupils that they killed him and will do the same to his replacement is an homage to the 1958 radio play Unman, Wittering and Zigo, by Giles Cooper.

ONE aspect of the culture/identity "wars" that is very definitely not new is the notion that white men, well-meaning or not, can never understand the perspective of black people/women/gay people/whoever given their irredeemable, in-built prejudices and role in the "power structure". About 35 years ago, I was having dinner with two young women who were on a (generally quite sane-sounding) training course for social workers. When they told me that this was very much the view of at least one tutor, I (in the most polite way) declared myself rather relieved. Were there no point in trying to empathise with such groups, I said, I would spend the time saved doing something else. I got the impression that this wasn't quite the reaction they had been looking for. Herbert Stein, who had served as a White House economic adviser, tired of hearing that this or that economic variable (trade deficit, government borrowing or whatever) was "unsustainable". If that was the case, he said, there was no need to worry about it, as something unsustainable would not, by definition, be sustained. What his interlocutors meant, of course, was that they did not wish this to be sustainable but feared it may be. They wanted efforts to "unsustain" it redoubled, not abandoned. Similarly, those who declare that white men (or whoever) are utterly incapable of understanding the feelings and views of supposedly "out" groups, they don't want them to stop trying, merely to try much harder.

Thanks again for reading and enjoy the weekend.

dan.atkinson@live.co.uk

Europe Didn't Work, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Yale University Press