I have found myself described as far left, quite often recently. I find this rather puzzling. I would not even describe myself as a socialist. Economically, I wish to see much greater worker share ownership, limitations on extreme pay differentials between management and staff, and strong regulation of casino banking with a far smaller, taxed and regulated derivatives market. I support state ownership of natural monopolies, such as rail, roads, and public utilities. I support state welfare provision and excellent state health and education services. But that is as far as it goes. I do not advocate central planning and in general prefer to keep the state out of commercial activity – which is why I support the EU so strongly in removing barriers to the mobility of all factors of production. I am not a socialist.
This blog is read by many people who have known me since university, some even earlier. I think I am right in saying that my beliefs have not changed in any fundamental way over 40 years. What I outline above was what I believed in 1976. I stand open to confirmation or correction.
Yet in 1976 I was a Liberal, and politically centre or only slightly left of centre. My views were absolutely mainstream and were voiced in mainstream media every day.
While standing still, I now find myself far left as the mainstream political spectrum rushed rightwards past me.
Is this because the Thatcherite revolution, carried on so enthusiastically by Blair and New Labour, proved wildly successful? Is it because deregulation and privatisation has brought prosperity, harmony and an inarguably better society?
No, not at all. The new right wing consensus has been a disaster. It led directly to the great crash of 2008 and the resulting austerity, which will dog us for another two decades at this rate. It led to massive, astonishing inequality of wealth and a society in which it is considered normal for top executives of an organisation to be paid 100 times more than the lowest employee. It led to hedge fund managers owning our politicians, and to Russian mafia owning our football clubs. It led to a world where Save the Children can pay its chief executive £375,000 a year of donation money yet nobody pukes. It led to collapse in manufacturing and to vast areas of blight and hopelessness, to a generation who will never afford a house while buy to let multi millionaires abound, to QE transferring yet more money straight to financial institutions.
The great right wing experiment has been a disaster for the country. Outwith the economic field, we have seen a massive attack on civil liberties, the growth of the 100% surveillance state, and end of respect for international law including the invasion of Iraq and the programme of torture and extraordinary rendition.
Yet although the disastrous failure of Britain’s forty year far right experiment is evident all around us, public opinion continued to move inexorably ever more to the right. It did so because the sheer propaganda power of the corporate media, led by the BBC, pushed it in that direction and had the power to do so. Dissident voices were excluded from the airwaves. The positions I agree with and which I heard regularly on the airwaves forty years ago no longer get airtime, even where they retain majority public support, such as nationalisation of the railways.
Some of my views have become more radical, and they relate to the need to break up the institutions of the right wing state. I believed in Scottish independence forty years ago, but it is much more central to my thinking now. Forty years ago I would have been shocked by the idea that the BBC should be utterly destroyed, but now that seems to me the only sensible approach.
I am not without hope. There is no doubt that the Sanders/SNP/Corbyn phenomenon represents a reaction to the dreadful inequality of society and all the evils which I have described. But I would also argue that this reaction has only been practical because of the new maturity of social media, weakening the grip of corporate media on the popular field of debate and the popular imagination.
Perhaps then, without moving, I became revolutionary just in time.
You’re not hard left. Anyone who has followed your trajectory over the last 15 or so years would only conclude that you’re a crank, unbearably self-righteous, and possibly mentally ill.
“Indeed this contention is supported by the dramatic broad based collapse in CAPEX.”
Hardly a “dramatic collapse”
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/datasets/businessinvestment
It might be the case that the long term trend since about the 1890s has not been helpful but there has not been a dramatic collapse – so the contention is not supported and you will need to change your thesis if you have any integrity.
WHS
13/03/16 12:17pm
Craig did not say hard left – he said far left, pay attention. If you are going to be gratuitously insulting, get things right.
It would be a lot better to take a particular posting of Craig’s and analyse what is wrong with it (if you’ve got the brains) than just throw vicious insults. I don’t agree with everything Craig’s posted in the years I have been aware of him, and have said so frequently, but he seems a pretty reasonable person to me, he accepts correction if he’s mistaken, and he appears to me to be eminently sane. If you are aware – it’s no secret – that he has had some mental/emotional difficulties over the years, your final gibe is vile and disgraceful. If you are not aware of that, then you’re either lying about having followed him over 15 years or you are too dumb to have paid attention.
John
Nicola Sturgeon gets slaughtered (on economics) by Andrew Neil on “Sunday Pölitics”.
Worth (re)watching for anyone with an iPlayer or whatever they’re called.
BBC1 earlier today.
@ Resident Dissident – Your post at 10.01 AM opens with a quote from me which references, inter alia, the abandonment of the rule of law.
The first thing you state is “There are perfectly good explanations for all of these…” i,e. there are good explanations for the abandonment of the rule of law. There is no other way that your words can be interpreted and hence there is neither inference nor lie on my part.
However let us accept that your words did not convey your intent.
To be clear I would not recommend operating any economy with a central tenant of price suppression. The price signal is a necessary means of avoiding mal-investment.
As appears to be a habit of yours you seek to conflate the price signal with resource allocation. There are problems in this regard since the world is running short of commercially viable resources. We need to use less of them. This is not so much economics as a principal, albeit a principal given some urgency as a consequence of an economic imperative. There is a further problem in that most resources are traded in US$ and increasingly few people retain confidence in the US$. Obviously the price signal only works to the extent that a price is being paid in a currency that is valued by the recipient of that currency.
Market economies assume the meeting of willing buyers and willing sellers. If, for whatever reason, there are no sellers then you cannot buy that product – just like you cannot buy a bus ticket to the moon. Of course that is not acceptable to the west and so they simply steal whatever it is they think they want. A return to the rule of law would put an end to this theft – of course it may also make the law abiding poorer – perhaps much poorer.
With regard to negatively priced money: There are now some $16 trillion of negatively yielding government bonds. Someone owns these bonds. $16 trillion is quite a lot to be un-observable to you.
The effects of zero or negative interest rates that I have described are not my opinions they are the opinions of central banks. Central Banks have been very clear that their policy is to discourage saving and encourage spending. Obviously if you discourage saving then you discourage capital formation and without capital formation you cannot have capital expenditure.
I do not understand why this point seems so hard for you to grasp. Take a look at Hinckley Point – underwritten by the UK government with guaranteed inflation proof returns – and yet still the investment does not go ahead, and very senior figures are in open disagreement. The reasons for this are very simple: they do not know how to analyse investment opportunities in an environment where money has no price.
Try to remember that the concept of negatively priced money would have been considered literally insane just a few years ago.
“Nicola Sturgeon gets slaughtered (on economics) by Andrew Neil on “Sunday Pölitics”.
Worth (re)watching for anyone with an iPlayer or whatever they’re called.”
It isn’t available yet I’ve been trying. Might have to wait till after it has been on BBC Parliament this afternoon. I hear her humiliation will be well worth watching.
It’s very interesting to note that the unionist media, along with the unionist parties crowing over the GERS figures for one year. Yet no such crowing has taken place for the last 30 odd years when Scotland’s economy produced a surplus for the treasury coffers.
It’s also interesting to note that Westminster currently runs a deficit, and the national debt is frankly unpayable. But there’s no mention of that either it would appear that a independent Scotland running a deficit is akin to a apocalyptic event.
Of course when you strip back the madness that is the unionist media frenzy. You realise that countries such as Finland and Denmark, who have no oil or gas, manage just fine, an independent Scotland would be no different.
Looney
Negative real interest rates have appeared in the past. what is new here is negative nominal rates. The problem you describe has thus existed before, but was easier to ignore.
A key thing to understand is that money is not a real thing – it exists only as a medium of exchange. Central banks are trying to kick start the economy by pumping out money as a way of encouraging. People to exchange stuff and I agree this is not working. But I’m not sure that I understand in your example how theft comes into it. Theft clearly avoids the price mechanism, but the price of oil is now low mainly because willing sellers (eg US frackers) are pumping the stuff out like there’s no tomorrow
Fred : I hear her humiliation will be well worth watching.
You’re in for a disappointment. You’ll see an able politician dealing competently with a rude and biased journalist who poses a string of hypothetical questions and ignores the answers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVynXGj4eyA
You seem to have a grasp of the current economic situation, which is a failed construct based on the Rothschild model. Although the price discovery is an important part of the system or at least it ought to be, but given the restrictive practices of imposing sanctions on differing countries that somehow are never pointed to but are in fact a softer smash and grab policy or engaging in kinetic warfare and as you rightly point out stealing the assets of the target victims. Despite these failures the same insane tack is kept to regardless of the consequences.
The fact that Enron was the turning point and the beginning of the end was masked and covered over by the prior events of the September of the same year that in turn set off the current century of war that is a continual theme of the 21st century so far.
The madness of the operatives is so malignly skewed that currently the disabled benefits are being targeted to be cut to make way for tax cuts for the middle-class! This failed paradigm that has been proved to be a singular failure in the US is nonetheless thought of as a solution to the problem of the velocity of money that has long peaked and has been on the downward trend ever since.
As you have pointed out when there is a $16 trillion bond holdings with a negative interest in the vogue the extent of the market failures then become apparent. The fact that combined world output is estimated to be around $78 trillion dollars with a debt bubble of $4.3 quadrillion that gives rise to silly gearings, never heard of before.
The simple fact is whilst the banksters are busy playing a game of monopoly for real the world economy is going down the shitter because the quantitative easing is only further feeding the veracious hedge fund game and the stock market ponzi schemes. The real economy is shrinking due to the higher fixed costs of citizenship leaving the citizens with little disposable income for any meaningful participation in the economy.
The fixed costs of citizenship increasing combined with a declining income brought on by the parasitic privatisation schemes that have brought about the most expensive energy prices in Europe, the most expensive transportation prices in Europe, and the most expensive food prices in Europe in addition to the increasing lack of services that are being withdrawn under the guise of austerity effectively proving the measures of success of the parasitic practices that are literally killing off the host!
PS recollecting the horse meat that was being fed to we the people, one could speculate this as a measure of stemming the probable and potential food riots. This is strange that to date none of the culprits are brought to justice, and those of the operatives “caught” have been low ranking minions with no understanding of the mechanics of that gigantic fraud.
“You’re in for a disappointment. You’ll see an able politician dealing competently with a rude and biased journalist who poses a string of hypothetical questions and ignores the answers.”
__________________
Thank you Node for that link, I must agree with your take on the interview, the FM was coherent firm and resolute. Andrew Neil however was crass, continually interrupting, and spoke constantly over the FM who couldn’t get a word in sideways.
Why the Politics show, puts up with that tired old has-been, one can only ponder.
The swivel eyed loons in here who commented on the interview, and imagined they saw something else, need not apply for any critique positions in the near future.
Node you may care to peruse, this article.
http://scotlandowntwofeet.blogspot.co.uk
@ Why Be Ordinary. You are correct with regard to the historic emergence of negative real rates. A key difference was that this was not policy. In fact policy was set so as to seek to eradicate this phenomena as quickly as possible.
Again you are correct in that oil prices are low today because of over production with US shale as the marginal production. Economics suggests that this marginal production should be constrained by, if necessary, the bankruptcy of the marginal producers. That this is not happening is in part a consequence of interest rate policy.
Energy markets are as much (maybe more) connected with politics as with economics. The assaults against Iraq and Libya were all about gaining control of resources. The assaults against Afghanistan and Syria are all about gaining access to resources (pipeline through Afghan for Turkmenistan resources, and pipeline through Syria for Qatari gas).
Anyone that will supply resources on terms acceptable to the west are left alone – so for example Saudi Arabia can execute as many people as it wants and fund whatever terrorists it wants. Anyone that defies the hegemonic power is destroyed – Iraq wanted to price oil in euros and Libya wanted to develop a gold backed currency.
Most natural resources are priced in US$. A fast way to destroy the $ is to follow the monetary policies that are being followed. Places like Russia and Iran are not too keen on the US$ – so they are routinely vilified in the west – and policy toward them is unremittingly aggressive.
My use of the term theft is merely shorthand for the policy that is “give us what we want on terms that are acceptable to us or we will kill you” This maybe does not meet the dictionary definition of “theft” – but it is pretty close and the policy is equally despicable.
” You’re in for a disappointment. ”
Oh no he isn’t. It’s a interviewer’s job to give politicians a hard time, ask difficult questions, and all Sturgeon could give back was waffle.
A disability charity that Zac Goldsmith is a patron of has criticised the MP for voting in favour of sharp disability benefit cuts.
Richmond AID said it was “shocked and disappointed” that Mr Goldsmith, the Conservative candidate for Mayor of London, had voted for the £30-a-week cut to Employment and Support Allowance
The charity, which lists the Richmond MP as a patron on their website, said it would ask him to come to their office to explain his decision.
Mr Goldsmith’s campaign declined to comment when approached by the Independent.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/zac-goldsmith-criticised-by-disability-charity-he-is-a-patron-of-for-voting-for-disability-benefit-a6923586.html
Well what a surprise, or rather not a surprise, a wolf in sheeps clothing, is still a wolf.
@ Resident Dissident. You have supplied a data series from the ONS which deals with the UK. The term “A broad based collapse” should not be taken to apply to everywhere at all times. I am sure you can find days during the Great Depression when stock prices rose, but that does not mean that there was no broad based decline in the stock market.
Look at Caterpillar – a company often referenced as a bell weather for the global economy. Its sales have declined for 37 consecutive months which is an unparalleled event in the history of the company. Look at the CAPEX cuts announced by some of the worlds biggest companies. The American Road and Transportation Building Association estimates that 58,495 US bridges are structurally deficient.
Taken together these examples and others constitute a trend. It is possible that I am misinterpreting that trend. In common with all other people I can get things wrong and make mistakes. In this instance I do not think I have, but I recognize that it is possible. The recognition of fallibility is vastly different from the pejorative insinuation you make with regard to integrity. Why do you do this? Are you incapable of rational debate?
@John Spencer-Davis
Not to mention that your today’s so-called “jihadists” were created by the US and Israel – I wish the earlier Muslims “jihadists” had acted like Christian Crusader, so Muslims would not have been “a minority” in Spain, Greece, Sicily, India, Malta, Albania, Serbia, Eastern Turkistan, Bulgaria, and Crimea to name a few.
Spanish Muslims ruled the Mediterranean Christian island of Malta from 870 to 1091 CE. The Normans took the island from Muslims but allowed them to remain subjects of the new rulers, and Arabic became their common language. In 1224 Frederick II, responding to religious uprisings in Sicily, expelled all Muslims from the island. During the reign of Charles II of Naples (1254-1309) the Muslim inhabitants were exiled or sold into slavery, with many finding asylum in Albania. All mosques were destroyed or converted to churches.
https://rehmat1.com/2015/01/09/malta-under-220-year-muslim-rule/
“You’re in for a disappointment. You’ll see an able politician dealing competently with a rude and biased journalist who poses a string of hypothetical questions and ignores the answers.”
I watched a stammering Sturgeon blindly repeating a memorised script even after the arguments had been well and truly demolished. Blindly repeating the same untruths over and over again.
The right wing usually sees anyone left of them as the extreme left. So Republicans view Democrats as the extreme left, and will call them all Communists and UKIP will often use that term for parts of the Conservative Part.
“It’s also interesting to note that Westminster currently runs a deficit, and the national debt is frankly unpayable. But there’s no mention of that either it would appear that a independent Scotland running a deficit is akin to a apocalyptic event.”
If Scotland had voted for independence it would have been a apocalyptic event. Scotland would be right up the proverbial creek without a paddle.
Anyone wondering why the recent re-tweets of a few old but important posts please see https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/forums/topic/recent-tweets-of-old-important-posts/
Rehmat
Maltese people are genetically about 70% Arab/Berber. And the Maltese language is clearly Arabic.
When Malta was conquered by the Normans Maltese people were originally allowed to stay Muslim. Hundreds of years later the Pope gave the order that everyone has to be forced to become Catholic.
In 2010 the UK’s deficit was a bigger share of GDP (11%) than Scotland’s is in the latest GERS figures (10%), but nobody said it proved the UK wasn’t a viable independent country.
That’s because the media, are biased towards the union. No swivel eyed loons mentioned paddles or creeks, the Marr’s and the Neil’s of this world kept their propaganda powder dry for another day.
Independence will remove Westminster, and the Marr’s and Neil’s from the equation, one and for all.
@Republicofscotland. I was under the impression that the subtext of those supporting that the UK remain in the EU is that the UK is not a viable independent country.
Given that the UK has no independent foreign policy and no independent economic policy and an “independent” nuclear deterrent that can only be deployed with explicit US approval then there may be some merit to this argument.
It is possible that independence will remove Westminster, but will most certainly not remove Washington.
“In 2010 the UK’s deficit was a bigger share of GDP (11%) than Scotland’s is in the latest GERS figures (10%), but nobody said it proved the UK wasn’t a viable independent country.”
Actually people were worried about such a high deficit, measures had to be taken to bring it down, it wasn’t sustainable. Now it is down to 4.9% while Scotland’s is 9.7%.
I suppose Scotland might have found someone prepared to lend them money at high interest but then the SNP would have had to abandon their principles and stop pretending they are the party which defends human rights.
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/revealed-msps-kept-silent-human-7548439#ICID=sharebar_twitter#j4wJRtOXovR4VgEQ.97
Interesting interview of Nicola Sturgeon by Andrew Neil. It seems that there was a one to two second delay between Neil speaking and Sturgeon hearing him. It makes Sturgeon seem hesitant in her answers, and when Neil interrupts Sturgeon she continues talking longer than seems natural, falsely creating an impression of stubbornness. The programme broadcast was from Neil’s end. It would have seemed emotionally quite different if broadcast from Sturgeon’s end.
Audio delays are one of the reasons I hate conversing on mobile ‘phones; delays disrupt the flow of conversation making it tense and strained.
not a right left division , its a neo con neo liberal v the rest.
its why labour liberals conservatives can have in essence a one party system in the uk . the bbc is the same with its neo con gatekeepers .. in fact its across the the media
so whilst some still talk in terms of left right capitalism socialism .. the real power and debate is elsewhere
RobG – while working for my Jewish mentor Ronnie in London in the 80’s, an Israeli from the now called Unit Hatzav was researching the precursor to the Odigo messaging system – he hinted this system “would someday save many Israeli lives” – I recalled those words some years later…
Some here I suspect consider me to be slightly to the left of Craig. On many things our opinions agree. We are both convinced that the BBC News is largely propaganda and I recall not too long ago Craig exposing a doctor in Syria in a propaganda piece. It would seem not only is the BBC capable of making up stories to fit its agenda but the German Channel ZDF too. Unable to find paid Russian soldiers who have been fighting on behalf of the NovoRossiyans in Ukraine they paid an actor (if the story is true) to pretend in order to present the angle they wanted to portray. It seems he’s gone public.
http://russia-insider.com/en/media-criticism/busted-russian-channel-1-exposes-fake-german-report-donbass/ri11990?
Wendy
In wartime, which so far as I know the west’s war against Islam and Saudi Arabia’s war against Islam called Arab Spring, both put us in, truth is the main casualty.
As Craig so perceptively pointed out a few weeks ago, the Thatcher revolution was empowered by feminism, the sacrifice of core Christian values. Hardly surprising then that the core value of amaanat/ trust with money went down the plug-hole along with family values etc.
When in 2008 the Thatcherite swivel-eyed morality busters had devoured ALL the money, and ALL the social capital too, they turned to Islam both for capital and social capital, meaning family values.
saudi Arabia wanted something in exchange for re-financing the swivels who had destroyed the money and the society in order to gain power:
Saudi demand 1/ very low interest rates
Saudi demand 2/ permission to eradicate Shi’a Islam
Saudi demand 3/ removal of Muslim Brotherhood Muhammad Mursi in Cairo
Saudi demand 4/ removal of Assad in Syria
USUKIS is desperately trying to prove to the Saudis that our economies are now self-sufficient so we don’t need to give them their final demand in Syria.
But the reality is that Cameron is still borrowing more than his New Labour rivals and darling Assad, who was a faithful slave to Jack Straw will have to be sacrificed soon.
Unfortunately the Left’right discussion is a diversion from the realpolitick of bankruptcy. Corbyn is a fossil, Cameron is a con-man, and both are mortgaged up to the eyeballs both economically and socially to pay for neo-liberal power.
does that mean that neo-liberal power is about to fall? Yes, every time an Afghan, Syrian or Kurd, Pole, Slovak or Romanian, enters this country , its social capital and hence its ability stand on her own feet economically, goes up a few notches. Common sense is slowly restored.
But meanwhile Saudi is calling the shots and it wants power in Damascus.
Neo-liberals, you are the weakest link. That’s why they call Craig a leftie, because they haven’t got a prayer…
“There are perfectly good explanations for all of these…”
Like I didn’t accept your original contention re a broad breakdown of the law as applied to financial institutions – there may well have been gaps in the existing law which meant that the most egregious cases could not be dealt with here in the UK ( but to a lesser extent in the US and elsewhere) but that is another matter
“A broad based collapse of investment”
Afraid not http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.GDI.FTOT.KN
Time to abandon that thesis I’m afraid – referring to one particular company that is particularly exposed to resource extraction and increasing foreign competition is not the basis for you form such macro based conclusions, and it really isn’t a rational way of debating.
As for negative interest rates – thanks for making my point that they only apply to amounts lent to governments/central banks – like others I have doubts as to the provenance of your figures ( do the yields include capital movements after the issue of the bonds, are they before or after inflation). Apart from the State, I very much doubt that there is any substantive borrowing at negative interest rates. The problem in investment appraisal with regard to Hinckley Point is not one of negative funding rates – if this were the case, this would INCREASE the returns on the project and make it easier to make the decision – the problem is about revenues ( and how much they are guaranteed by the State) and costs (building and decommissioning in particular.
I repeat commercial companies do not have negative costs of capital at present (made up of funding costs on debt and returns on equity and risk premia) – so normal investment appraisal is still alive and well despite your claims to the contrary.
We could have sensible discussions regarding whether monetary policy is the best way for Central Banks to encourage investment or what the State could do to provide greater certainty about future revenues and costs so that the uncertainty element in investment decisions can be reduced and further investment considered – but I suspect that is not something that you would be interested in within the mixed market paradigm in which we now exist.
I do not conflate resource allocation with price signals – this is a figment of your vivid imagination – I pointed out this morning one way as to how resource allocation might work without such signals, and I have already acknowledged that price signals are not available for everything (not that means that you should ignore those that do exist) and that markets are often not efficient – which is why there is a role for the State as well as markets.