So President Putin probably isn't gay after all. Not gay in the sense of blithe and happy. Not gay in the derogatory sense used by teenagers to denote something a bit pathetic. He might still be gay in the homosexual sense, but it now doesn't seem like a good idea to suggest it, as many did after the furore in the run up to the Sochi Olympics. Have a Google for "Putin gay" images, and you will see that the Photoshop-literate have given their sense of humour a good workout in recent weeks.
Disturbingly, those pictures of Putin with the horse didn't need any doctoring.
This can't have pleased President Putin terribly, and one can only too easily imagine the conversation. "So they think I am gay do they? Pass me the map comrade. Where did you say Crimea was?"
Let no-one doubt that, whatever Putin's proclivities, he is no Judy Garland-loving interior-decorating panty-waister. No. He is the kind of man to send in the tanks. And there's nothing we can do about it.
Many commentators on both Left and Right have made this point. After the West's failure to intervene in Syria, referred to by Jonathan Freedland as the "global shrug", no-one can seriously have thought that we might have used military force to stop Putin. And of course you can argue that's a good thing. Military conflict could lead so easily to nuclear war. But that means that Putin - and other leaders like him - can do what they want with impunity.
How has this happened? Western revulsion post-Iraq has killed the appetite for intervention. You can argue that loss of appetite is due to a focus on the way the invasion was sold to British and American electorates, narcissistic in its refusal to see that the possibility of self-determination for Iraqis post Saddam might just trump our domestic politics; but we are where we are. We intervened there. Lots of people got very angry about it. Politicians are nervous. When Syria came up, Ed Miliband led his troops into the No lobby, and that was that.
Deterrence does not mean taking military action when something happens you don't like. It doesn't even mean readiness to take military action. It means the other people not being entirely sure whether you'll take military action or not. President Putin on the other hand was absolutely sure we would do nothing. That is a foreign policy failure.
Although I'm absolutely sure Putin is Not a Nice Man, I have some sympathy with the Russians. Ukraine used to be part of their empire. It's still part of their sphere of influence. The country has strategic military significance for them. Many Russian speakers live there. The outgoing Ukranian President was one of their people and was, apparently, democratically elected. The West can't really expect Russia to stand by when he is bullied from office by demonstrators who, however numerous, aren't representative of the country as a whole.
We get a curious picture from the media. Reporters like to interview people who speak English and with whom they can identify. So we get vox pops with Ukrainian web designers and academics. Thus a curious analogue of our own fixation with metropolitan elites arises. The people outside of Kiev are marginalised, the demonstrators encouraged, and it's quite late on in the day we discover that, funnily enough, to the east of the capital there are lots of other people who take a different view. Who knew?
If I were an opponent of President Yanukovyich, surveying the catastrophic scenes in my country, I might well find myself wishing that I had waited for the next election for a chance to throw out the regime.
PS David Cameron yesterday described the proposed Crimean referendum on joining Russia as "unconstitutional". Hmmn. Would be unconstitutional in the same sense that hounding President Yanukovyich from office was unconstitutional?
Wednesday 5 March 2014
Tuesday 25 February 2014
Harriet Harman, fruitcakes and Newsnight
The funniest thing I've seen on BBC TV for years was last night's Newsnight interview with Harriet Harman, in which Laura Kuenssberg grilled the MP over her time as Legal Officer to the National Council for Civil Liberties, a period in which, apparently, one organisation affiliated to the NCCL was the Paedophile Information Exchange.
The interview was funny in the first place because if anyone in public life strikes me as a sex-free zone it is the hapless Ms Harman; I cannot think of anyone less likely to have got into bed, as it were, with the furtive gentlemen of the PIE. Or indeed with anyone else (but she is happily married to Jack Dromey, so that's obviously a failure of imagination on my part).
It was also funny because no matter how hard Kuenssberg pushed her, Harman would not admit that the affiliation was a mistake. No one seems to have told her about holes and not digging.
Thirdly if you had to pick anyone to represent the self-righteous tendency of the Left I think Harman would be a pretty strong selection; and to see her default political anschauung so utterly disabled by a piece of crass stupidity in the 1970s was as nice an example of things going-around and then coming-around as you could hope to see. The wheels of justice grinding slow, but exceedingly small.
Actually I can just about see how PIE might have got under the NCCL's radar. I remember once being in the office of one of Ms Harman's fellow travellers amongst Left-wing lawyers, and there on the shelves was a memoir published by a PIE luminary, if that's the word, devoted to the joys and possibilities of adult/child sexual relationships. "What the flip (I paraphrase) is this?", I asked, appalled. "Oh, they were trying to see if there was any way there could be a human rights angle on paedophilia", my friend said casually. Whose rights would those be, I wondered, shaking my head. The child's? Or the adult's?
But then these were the 1970s, and even a decade later a close family member of mine recalls being asked to sit on a sub-committee of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers - a similar organisation to NCCL with considerable membership crossover - devoted to exploring the possibility of abolishing the police. This in about 1989.
Fruitcakes then, and fruitcakes still.
The interview was funny in the first place because if anyone in public life strikes me as a sex-free zone it is the hapless Ms Harman; I cannot think of anyone less likely to have got into bed, as it were, with the furtive gentlemen of the PIE. Or indeed with anyone else (but she is happily married to Jack Dromey, so that's obviously a failure of imagination on my part).
It was also funny because no matter how hard Kuenssberg pushed her, Harman would not admit that the affiliation was a mistake. No one seems to have told her about holes and not digging.
Thirdly if you had to pick anyone to represent the self-righteous tendency of the Left I think Harman would be a pretty strong selection; and to see her default political anschauung so utterly disabled by a piece of crass stupidity in the 1970s was as nice an example of things going-around and then coming-around as you could hope to see. The wheels of justice grinding slow, but exceedingly small.
Actually I can just about see how PIE might have got under the NCCL's radar. I remember once being in the office of one of Ms Harman's fellow travellers amongst Left-wing lawyers, and there on the shelves was a memoir published by a PIE luminary, if that's the word, devoted to the joys and possibilities of adult/child sexual relationships. "What the flip (I paraphrase) is this?", I asked, appalled. "Oh, they were trying to see if there was any way there could be a human rights angle on paedophilia", my friend said casually. Whose rights would those be, I wondered, shaking my head. The child's? Or the adult's?
But then these were the 1970s, and even a decade later a close family member of mine recalls being asked to sit on a sub-committee of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers - a similar organisation to NCCL with considerable membership crossover - devoted to exploring the possibility of abolishing the police. This in about 1989.
Fruitcakes then, and fruitcakes still.
Wednesday 19 February 2014
North Korea, Jonathan Freedland and the global shrug
They're making me laugh again over at the Guardian.
This time it's Jonathan Freedland, writing a rather strange comment piece entitled, "It's easy for dictators: these days the world lets you carry on killing". This is in the wake of the UN report into human rights atrocities in North Korea by a retired Australian judge, Michael Kirby.
Freedland writes that "the Kim dynasty has been inflicting agony on the people it rules for nearly seven decades . . . But how confident can (Kirby) be that action will follow (publication of his report)? . . . It's a similar story in Syria. Less than a month has passed since a report laid out comprehensive evidence of the suffering of detainees at the hands of the Assad regime . . . Yet did that report spark a worldwide demand for action? . . . It did not . . . the chief response was a global shrug".
"Maybe", Freedland continues, "this is what is means to live in the post-intervention era. Few even call for action - in North Korea or Syria - because we know it's not going to happen. In the 1990s, those outraged by the Balkan war could believe that, if they only shouted loud enough, they would eventually get the international powers to act . . . Now, after Iraq and Afghanistan, that belief has vanished . . . Few speak now of the notion that once seemed set to reshape international relations, the 'responsibility to protect'. It makes today a good time to be a dictator, a butcher or the torturing head of a brutal regime. The world will let you carry on killing - even when it knows exactly what is happening".
I described Freedland's piece as rather strange, and I find it so even as I think it is absolutely spot on. Why? Because if any organ in British public life is responsible for fostering the culture of the "global shrug" it is the Guardian, for which Freedland has written weekly columns for over a decade.
It is taken as read at Farringdon Rd that the Iraq invasion was a bad thing, a view which has gone unquestioned in the newspaper since the departure of David Aaronovitch, even though the invasion got rid of a horrible dictator and opened the way for Iraqis to create their own future (unbelievably, there are still people who think that issue of whether British politicians lied is one which trumps the removal of the Butcher of Baghdad).
Of the columnists who have promulgated the Guardian's view, none has been more energetic than Freedland himself. A search on the Graun's website under "Jonathan Freedland Iraq" produces more than 8,000 hits. You can take your pick from Freedland's dozens of articles excoriating the invasion. I quite like this one from 2004.
You're right Jonathan. Today is a good time to be a dictator. And no UK journalist I can think of did more than you to create the climate of opinion which has made that possible.
This time it's Jonathan Freedland, writing a rather strange comment piece entitled, "It's easy for dictators: these days the world lets you carry on killing". This is in the wake of the UN report into human rights atrocities in North Korea by a retired Australian judge, Michael Kirby.
Freedland writes that "the Kim dynasty has been inflicting agony on the people it rules for nearly seven decades . . . But how confident can (Kirby) be that action will follow (publication of his report)? . . . It's a similar story in Syria. Less than a month has passed since a report laid out comprehensive evidence of the suffering of detainees at the hands of the Assad regime . . . Yet did that report spark a worldwide demand for action? . . . It did not . . . the chief response was a global shrug".
"Maybe", Freedland continues, "this is what is means to live in the post-intervention era. Few even call for action - in North Korea or Syria - because we know it's not going to happen. In the 1990s, those outraged by the Balkan war could believe that, if they only shouted loud enough, they would eventually get the international powers to act . . . Now, after Iraq and Afghanistan, that belief has vanished . . . Few speak now of the notion that once seemed set to reshape international relations, the 'responsibility to protect'. It makes today a good time to be a dictator, a butcher or the torturing head of a brutal regime. The world will let you carry on killing - even when it knows exactly what is happening".
I described Freedland's piece as rather strange, and I find it so even as I think it is absolutely spot on. Why? Because if any organ in British public life is responsible for fostering the culture of the "global shrug" it is the Guardian, for which Freedland has written weekly columns for over a decade.
It is taken as read at Farringdon Rd that the Iraq invasion was a bad thing, a view which has gone unquestioned in the newspaper since the departure of David Aaronovitch, even though the invasion got rid of a horrible dictator and opened the way for Iraqis to create their own future (unbelievably, there are still people who think that issue of whether British politicians lied is one which trumps the removal of the Butcher of Baghdad).
Of the columnists who have promulgated the Guardian's view, none has been more energetic than Freedland himself. A search on the Graun's website under "Jonathan Freedland Iraq" produces more than 8,000 hits. You can take your pick from Freedland's dozens of articles excoriating the invasion. I quite like this one from 2004.
You're right Jonathan. Today is a good time to be a dictator. And no UK journalist I can think of did more than you to create the climate of opinion which has made that possible.
Tuesday 18 February 2014
Currency union - how Alex Salmond can still win
At the end of January I suggested that after a Scottish yes-vote, there would be a currency union. That was before George Osborne, Danny Alexander and Ed Balls stuck their heads above parapet and declared that there wouldn't be. In the face of which it now looks a pretty big claim.
I'm not going to do an about face straight away - maintaining a position for just three weeks isn't what you would call steadfast - but it's worth considering why there might not be a currency union, what that does to the Nationalist case, and whether it makes a blind bit of difference to the outcome of the referendum.
There are economic reasons for not having currency union, as you might expect. As Sir Nicholas Macpherson, Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, wrote to George Osborne last week, "Successful currency unions are based on the near universal belief that they are irreversible". Moreover "Scotland’s banking sector is far too big in relation to its national income, which means that there is a very real risk that the continuing UK would end up bearing most of the liquidity and solvency risk which it creates". Thirdly the rest of the UK "would be at risk of providing taxpayer support to the Scottish financial sector and sovereign. An independent Scottish state would not face the same risk as it is inconceivable that a small economy could bail-out an economy nearly ten times its size . . ."
"Finally," Macpherson concludes, "Treasury analysis suggests that fiscal policy in Scotland and the rest of UK would become increasingly misaligned in the medium term. Of course, if the Scottish Government had demonstrated a strong commitment to a rigorous fiscal policy in recent months, it might be possible to discount this. But recent spending and tax commitments by the Scottish Government point in the opposite direction, as do their persistently optimistic projections of North Sea revenues, which are at odds not just with the Treasury but with the Office of Budget Responsibility and other credible independent forecasters".
Alex Salmond's supporters counter these arguments with the views of their own Fiscal Group (including, as the Nationalists always say, two Nobel prize winners). This group's report suggests a currency union is perfectly possible.
Which it is. I don't think anyone seriously disputes that a currency union could take place, and I'm absolutely sure there are economic arguments in favour as well as arguments against (the most obvious reason currency union might be good for rUK is the threat of transaction costs for some cross-border businesses, although the Yes campaign would probably argue these would be offset by lower English tax rates post-independence).
But to assume that the existence or otherwise of a currency union will depend on economic arguments is naive of both sides, particularly so of Alex Salmond. It will depend instead on realpolitik.
The Nationalists will demand a currency union. Westminster will refuse. The Nationalists then say they won't accept Scotland's share of the national debt. That is also possible, but consider this.
Without a currency union Scotland will have no central bank, no lender of last resort and no control over interest rates. This is serious for many reasons, one of which is that, as Macpherson noted, Scotland has an outsized banking industry employing an awful lot of people which will be threatened by being inconveniently sited in a country other than the one with which it does most of its business; post-independence the Bank of England will not be bailing that industry out.
(Interestingly, a couple of days after I posted this, Lloyds, technically a Scottish company, announced that its new 600-branch TSB business is to be incorporated in London instead of Edinburgh. There's a report here. The banking sector is not taking any chances)
Like the rest of the UK, Scotland will be running a deficit, and it will have to borrow on the money markets from day one. How is it going to do this if it has just walked away from all its existing debts?
A couple of weeks ago the Treasury did something rather strange. It announced that post independence it would assume responsibility for Scotland's debts come what may. This was billed as a sop to the markets, but I wonder whether it was something more.
According to the NIESR, Scotland's share of our historic debt is in the region of £150 billion. It is only about a tenth of Britain's total historic debt, and, to put it in context, roughly the amount Britain had to borrow in one year at the height of the last recession. It might be possible to imagine David Cameron shrugging his shoulders and saying, "So walk away. The money markets already know that we're on the hook for the total sum. It'll make no difference to our bond yields. Walk away from the debt, but no currency union. Ever".
Actually I can't imagine Cameron shrugging his shoulders. That isn't his style. But it is George Osborne's style. And behind this Treasury manoeuvre lies the MP for Tatton.
Alex Salmond is a master tactician and a brilliant poker player. But he is a poker player with a truly terrible hand, and his ability to wing it has run out of road. His response yesterday was angry and incoherent. Westminster's ruling out currency union was "demeaning and insulting". Anyone would think a country no longer in the UK had some kind of right to a currency union.
There is, as someone pointed out in the Guardian this morning, an element of "we're getting a divorce but I want to keep using the car" about all of this.
Unlike Alex Salmond, George Osborne is a strategist. Only a strategist would co-ordinate the Treasury's pledge on the debt months before it could possibly become a live issue, and raise the issue of currency union in time for wavering Scots to get angry but then to calm down sufficiently to see the problem. Tantalisingly, Osborne has left the Nationalists time to come up with a Plan B. But this too would be a trap, because the adoption of a Plan B would open Salmond to the accusation that he is making policy up as he goes along.
There is one other matter of realpolitik worth considering. It is that post-independence there will be no electoral advantage to be had in England in being nice to Scotland. Even if the economic arguments overwhelmingly favoured a currency union (and they don't, not overwhelmingly), politicians don't necessarily do the sensible thing, not when their voters are telling them otherwise.
You might imagine that weaknesses of the Nationalist case which the scrapping over currency union reveal would be desperately damaging to Alex Salmond. But it might actually make no difference at all. I heard some vox pop Scotiae on The World Tonight last night. The level of ignorance and disengagement was quite staggering. It was of the "What fur wud they tak awa' the poond?" variety. Such people, with no understanding of the economic issues which make or break the case for independence, have a vote. And their resentment at the home truths currently emanating from Westminster is very easily exploited by Alex Salmond. He might have lost the argument, but could still win the war.
I'm not going to do an about face straight away - maintaining a position for just three weeks isn't what you would call steadfast - but it's worth considering why there might not be a currency union, what that does to the Nationalist case, and whether it makes a blind bit of difference to the outcome of the referendum.
There are economic reasons for not having currency union, as you might expect. As Sir Nicholas Macpherson, Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, wrote to George Osborne last week, "Successful currency unions are based on the near universal belief that they are irreversible". Moreover "Scotland’s banking sector is far too big in relation to its national income, which means that there is a very real risk that the continuing UK would end up bearing most of the liquidity and solvency risk which it creates". Thirdly the rest of the UK "would be at risk of providing taxpayer support to the Scottish financial sector and sovereign. An independent Scottish state would not face the same risk as it is inconceivable that a small economy could bail-out an economy nearly ten times its size . . ."
"Finally," Macpherson concludes, "Treasury analysis suggests that fiscal policy in Scotland and the rest of UK would become increasingly misaligned in the medium term. Of course, if the Scottish Government had demonstrated a strong commitment to a rigorous fiscal policy in recent months, it might be possible to discount this. But recent spending and tax commitments by the Scottish Government point in the opposite direction, as do their persistently optimistic projections of North Sea revenues, which are at odds not just with the Treasury but with the Office of Budget Responsibility and other credible independent forecasters".
Alex Salmond's supporters counter these arguments with the views of their own Fiscal Group (including, as the Nationalists always say, two Nobel prize winners). This group's report suggests a currency union is perfectly possible.
Which it is. I don't think anyone seriously disputes that a currency union could take place, and I'm absolutely sure there are economic arguments in favour as well as arguments against (the most obvious reason currency union might be good for rUK is the threat of transaction costs for some cross-border businesses, although the Yes campaign would probably argue these would be offset by lower English tax rates post-independence).
But to assume that the existence or otherwise of a currency union will depend on economic arguments is naive of both sides, particularly so of Alex Salmond. It will depend instead on realpolitik.
The Nationalists will demand a currency union. Westminster will refuse. The Nationalists then say they won't accept Scotland's share of the national debt. That is also possible, but consider this.
Without a currency union Scotland will have no central bank, no lender of last resort and no control over interest rates. This is serious for many reasons, one of which is that, as Macpherson noted, Scotland has an outsized banking industry employing an awful lot of people which will be threatened by being inconveniently sited in a country other than the one with which it does most of its business; post-independence the Bank of England will not be bailing that industry out.
(Interestingly, a couple of days after I posted this, Lloyds, technically a Scottish company, announced that its new 600-branch TSB business is to be incorporated in London instead of Edinburgh. There's a report here. The banking sector is not taking any chances)
Like the rest of the UK, Scotland will be running a deficit, and it will have to borrow on the money markets from day one. How is it going to do this if it has just walked away from all its existing debts?
A couple of weeks ago the Treasury did something rather strange. It announced that post independence it would assume responsibility for Scotland's debts come what may. This was billed as a sop to the markets, but I wonder whether it was something more.
According to the NIESR, Scotland's share of our historic debt is in the region of £150 billion. It is only about a tenth of Britain's total historic debt, and, to put it in context, roughly the amount Britain had to borrow in one year at the height of the last recession. It might be possible to imagine David Cameron shrugging his shoulders and saying, "So walk away. The money markets already know that we're on the hook for the total sum. It'll make no difference to our bond yields. Walk away from the debt, but no currency union. Ever".
Actually I can't imagine Cameron shrugging his shoulders. That isn't his style. But it is George Osborne's style. And behind this Treasury manoeuvre lies the MP for Tatton.
Alex Salmond is a master tactician and a brilliant poker player. But he is a poker player with a truly terrible hand, and his ability to wing it has run out of road. His response yesterday was angry and incoherent. Westminster's ruling out currency union was "demeaning and insulting". Anyone would think a country no longer in the UK had some kind of right to a currency union.
There is, as someone pointed out in the Guardian this morning, an element of "we're getting a divorce but I want to keep using the car" about all of this.
Unlike Alex Salmond, George Osborne is a strategist. Only a strategist would co-ordinate the Treasury's pledge on the debt months before it could possibly become a live issue, and raise the issue of currency union in time for wavering Scots to get angry but then to calm down sufficiently to see the problem. Tantalisingly, Osborne has left the Nationalists time to come up with a Plan B. But this too would be a trap, because the adoption of a Plan B would open Salmond to the accusation that he is making policy up as he goes along.
There is one other matter of realpolitik worth considering. It is that post-independence there will be no electoral advantage to be had in England in being nice to Scotland. Even if the economic arguments overwhelmingly favoured a currency union (and they don't, not overwhelmingly), politicians don't necessarily do the sensible thing, not when their voters are telling them otherwise.
You might imagine that weaknesses of the Nationalist case which the scrapping over currency union reveal would be desperately damaging to Alex Salmond. But it might actually make no difference at all. I heard some vox pop Scotiae on The World Tonight last night. The level of ignorance and disengagement was quite staggering. It was of the "What fur wud they tak awa' the poond?" variety. Such people, with no understanding of the economic issues which make or break the case for independence, have a vote. And their resentment at the home truths currently emanating from Westminster is very easily exploited by Alex Salmond. He might have lost the argument, but could still win the war.
Sunday 16 February 2014
Slavery and the Jamaicans - whose compensation is it anyway?
Opportunities for cynicism abound as news breaks that Leigh Day, an activist firm of solicitors in London, are to sue the UK Government on behalf of descendants of Jamaican slaves.
Slavery, to be clear, was not invented by the British. It is thought to have existed across the overwhelming majority of cultures for over 10,000 years. The British did not even invent it in Africa. Five hundred years ago, long before the Europeans started interfering on a grand scale, there were parts of Africa where 50% of the population consisted of people enslaved by other Africans. What the Europeans did however was approach slavery on an industrial scale, buying slaves in Africa and shipping them to the other side of the Atlantic.
Once the worm turned the British were instrumental in the fight against the slave trade, banning it throughout the British empire in 1807, encouraging other countries to do the same and finally devoting considerable naval resources to stopping the transatlantic trade by force. In the following 50 years the British navy seized 1,600 slave ships and freed over 150,000 Africans aboard them.
It would seem fair to suggest that Britain's record on the slave trade is no worse than most and a lot better than some.
The plaintiffs in Leigh Day's cases will be ordinary Jamaican individuals. They were not slaves themselves. The Torygraph today features one such, an elderly (please note) Jamaican called Willie Thompson, whose great-great-grandmother was sold for work in the sugar cane plantations.
Some facts. Mr Thompson would almost certainly not have been born were it not for slavery. Otherwise his great-great-grandmother would have had to meet his great-great-grandfather in Africa, give birth to his great-grandmother (or father), who would then have had to meet his great-grandfather (or mother), also in Africa, give birth to his grandmother (or father), who would then have had to meet his grandfather (or mother), in Africa, who would then have had to sire his mother (or father), who would then have had to meet his father (or mother), who would also have had to sire Mr Thompson. In Africa.
It is of course beyond unlikely that this should happen. Far from suffering from slavery, Mr Thompson in fact owes his life to slavery. And the fact that he is living in Jamaica, not in Africa.
To illustrate how lucky Mr Thompson is, the average male life expectancy in Jamaica is about 74 years. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, by way of example, it is slightly under 50.
So Mr Thompson is dead lucky. But he wants the British government to compensate him for the undoubted suffering of his great-great-grandmother. Leigh Day are a very effective law firm. I'm pretty sure they will succeed in gouging some pretty fat compensation out of the UK government, netting themselves some fat fees in the process.
Although actually of course it's not the UK Government's money at all. It's ours, yours and mine. Personally I don't remember profiting very much from slavery. It would be strange if I had. It was illegal for one hundred and fifty years before I was born. Yet Mr Thompson thinks some of my tax should be given to him.
So people who did not suffer from slavery (who in fact have benefited dramatically as a consequence) are now looking for a payout from people who did not profit from it either. Funny old world.
Slavery, to be clear, was not invented by the British. It is thought to have existed across the overwhelming majority of cultures for over 10,000 years. The British did not even invent it in Africa. Five hundred years ago, long before the Europeans started interfering on a grand scale, there were parts of Africa where 50% of the population consisted of people enslaved by other Africans. What the Europeans did however was approach slavery on an industrial scale, buying slaves in Africa and shipping them to the other side of the Atlantic.
Once the worm turned the British were instrumental in the fight against the slave trade, banning it throughout the British empire in 1807, encouraging other countries to do the same and finally devoting considerable naval resources to stopping the transatlantic trade by force. In the following 50 years the British navy seized 1,600 slave ships and freed over 150,000 Africans aboard them.
It would seem fair to suggest that Britain's record on the slave trade is no worse than most and a lot better than some.
The plaintiffs in Leigh Day's cases will be ordinary Jamaican individuals. They were not slaves themselves. The Torygraph today features one such, an elderly (please note) Jamaican called Willie Thompson, whose great-great-grandmother was sold for work in the sugar cane plantations.
Some facts. Mr Thompson would almost certainly not have been born were it not for slavery. Otherwise his great-great-grandmother would have had to meet his great-great-grandfather in Africa, give birth to his great-grandmother (or father), who would then have had to meet his great-grandfather (or mother), also in Africa, give birth to his grandmother (or father), who would then have had to meet his grandfather (or mother), in Africa, who would then have had to sire his mother (or father), who would then have had to meet his father (or mother), who would also have had to sire Mr Thompson. In Africa.
It is of course beyond unlikely that this should happen. Far from suffering from slavery, Mr Thompson in fact owes his life to slavery. And the fact that he is living in Jamaica, not in Africa.
To illustrate how lucky Mr Thompson is, the average male life expectancy in Jamaica is about 74 years. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, by way of example, it is slightly under 50.
So Mr Thompson is dead lucky. But he wants the British government to compensate him for the undoubted suffering of his great-great-grandmother. Leigh Day are a very effective law firm. I'm pretty sure they will succeed in gouging some pretty fat compensation out of the UK government, netting themselves some fat fees in the process.
Although actually of course it's not the UK Government's money at all. It's ours, yours and mine. Personally I don't remember profiting very much from slavery. It would be strange if I had. It was illegal for one hundred and fifty years before I was born. Yet Mr Thompson thinks some of my tax should be given to him.
So people who did not suffer from slavery (who in fact have benefited dramatically as a consequence) are now looking for a payout from people who did not profit from it either. Funny old world.
Wednesday 12 February 2014
Floods, housing and population
In the bad old days of the 80s Tory ministers were fond of telling us we were being "flooded" or "swamped" by immigrants. I've been reminded of this rhetoric by the apocalyptic scenes from the Thames Valley of watery inundation, made all the more shocking and bizarre by taking place in the blandest parts of the Home Counties.
There is a linguistic clue here that past generations seems to have missed. The low land of the Thames Valley is a flood plain, and the phrase "flood plain" contains the word "flood". If you build houses in such a plain, every hundred years or so the river is going to rise and wipe you out. And the south of England is full of such lowlands.
There is by common consent a housing crisis in Britain. We don't have enough houses to accommodate our growing population. Part of the recent increase is attributable to immigration - 800,000 Eastern Europeans cannot all be occupying the same Portakabin by a Lincolnshire turnip field. Moreover we have built in places that aren't really suitable, and as pressure for more housing grows this is something we're going to be doing more and more.
Both Labour and Conservatives have been looking at schemes to build new towns. Putting aside the elementary point that there won't be enough jobs to occupy their inhabitants, not even in the south, that the people will have to commute to earn a living, and that the towns will quickly become extended satellites of a vast, cancerously-expanding London, they are also likely to be built on low ground sites which flirt with flood risk.
There is another way of looking at the housing problem, however, which is to say that our population might be too big for a small island, and that a managed decline - deaths from old age exceeding the birth rate - might offer a better long term solution.
You will think this marks me out as a crank, and it's a shame that population control is, like immigration control used to be, the cause that dare not speak its name.
But the issue's flagship organisation, the Optimum Population Trust, is supported by luminaries such as David Attenborough and Jonathan Porritt. Are they cranks too?
PS Four days after this post the Torygraph printed the following story to the effect that not only have many Councils in southern England earmarked for housing land which is at risk from flooding, but some of the sites are currently underwater.
Sometimes real events are beyond the reach of satire.
There is a linguistic clue here that past generations seems to have missed. The low land of the Thames Valley is a flood plain, and the phrase "flood plain" contains the word "flood". If you build houses in such a plain, every hundred years or so the river is going to rise and wipe you out. And the south of England is full of such lowlands.
There is by common consent a housing crisis in Britain. We don't have enough houses to accommodate our growing population. Part of the recent increase is attributable to immigration - 800,000 Eastern Europeans cannot all be occupying the same Portakabin by a Lincolnshire turnip field. Moreover we have built in places that aren't really suitable, and as pressure for more housing grows this is something we're going to be doing more and more.
Both Labour and Conservatives have been looking at schemes to build new towns. Putting aside the elementary point that there won't be enough jobs to occupy their inhabitants, not even in the south, that the people will have to commute to earn a living, and that the towns will quickly become extended satellites of a vast, cancerously-expanding London, they are also likely to be built on low ground sites which flirt with flood risk.
There is another way of looking at the housing problem, however, which is to say that our population might be too big for a small island, and that a managed decline - deaths from old age exceeding the birth rate - might offer a better long term solution.
You will think this marks me out as a crank, and it's a shame that population control is, like immigration control used to be, the cause that dare not speak its name.
But the issue's flagship organisation, the Optimum Population Trust, is supported by luminaries such as David Attenborough and Jonathan Porritt. Are they cranks too?
PS Four days after this post the Torygraph printed the following story to the effect that not only have many Councils in southern England earmarked for housing land which is at risk from flooding, but some of the sites are currently underwater.
Sometimes real events are beyond the reach of satire.
Friday 7 February 2014
Kicking Mario Draghi's OMT into the long grass
It takes a special kind of saddo to have any interest in the decisions made by the German Constitutional Court, but I am that person so here goes.
The Court has this morning pronounced on the legality of a scheme devised by the head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, known as the Outright Monetary Transaction (OMT). Eurozone watchers have been waiting for this Court decision for months.
The background is that a couple of years ago southern European countries (Italy and Spain in particular) were having to pay alarmingly high interest rates on their government borrowing. The markets feared that these countries had got into a kind of vicious circle where the closer they got to insolvency, the more expensive their borrowing became, pushing them closer still to the edge. Doomsayers like me were predicting Eurozone exits, but suddenly in August 2012 ECB chief Mario Draghi came up with OMT, a scheme whereby in exchange for stringent economic conditions, the ECB would buy afflicted countries bonds. No country has had to apply for funding, because Draghi's assertion that the ECB would do "whatever it takes" was sufficient to lower bond prices. Almost overnight the debt markets calmed down. OMT is widely perceived to have saved the Euro.
The only problem was that OMT is probably illegal, infringing the ECB's mandate, which does not include paying to prop up member countries' economies. The ECB is not, the argument goes, a lender of last resort. These sentiments are particularly strong in Germany, which has used its association with the weaker economies of southern Europe to export its way to massive (and sanctimonious) prosperity.
So last year the issue was referred to Germany's Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, and Eurozone nerds like me have been wondering what the Court would do.
One of the lessons of the Eurozone debacle has been that the great and the good, people my age growing up in Europe in the aftermath of the 39-45 war, are so wedded to the idea of European unity (and so dependent on it in terms of career advancement) that they are capable of any kind of ingenious sophistry (and OMT is itself a prime example) if it helps keep the project going.
In other words the Court's ruling was always going to be political as much as legal.
This morning came the verdict.
Das Bundesverfassungsgericht has said that "there are important reasons to assume that (OMT) exceeds the ECB's monetary policy mandate and thus infringes the powers of Member States, and that it violates the prohibition of monetary financing of the budget . . . primary law stipulates an explicit prohibition of monetary financing of the budget and thus unequivocally excludes such powers of the ECB".
Seems clear enough. OMT infringes Germany's basic law. But hang on a moment - "the OMT decision might not be objectionable (if) . . . government bonds of selected Member States are not purchased up to unlimited amounts, and that interferences with price formation on the market are to be avoided where possible".
Now it may be that something is being lost in the translation here, but government bonds can never be bought up to unlimited amounts, because if the ECB buys, say, 1 billion Euros worth of Spanish bonds the number, although quite large, has by definition been limited to 1 billion. And moreover it is always going to be impossible to avoid interfering with "price formation on the market" (that would actually be the object of such purchases). So it looks as if the Court is giving OMT the green light.
So what was its decision? Well here comes the clever part. The Court hasn't actually made one. It has decided to refer the whole issue to the European Court of Justice. And given that the ECJ is stuffed with apparatchiks devoted to European Unity as well, I wonder if you can predict what their verdict will be?
It will be a couple of years before that verdict arrives. After that the matter will go back to the Verfassungsgericht for a decision as to whether OMT infringes Germany's Grundgesetz or basic law.
Truly a decision on OMT has been kicked well and truly into the long grass.
Meanwhile, southern European bond yields remained steady. Mario Draghi must be feeling pretty pleased with himself.
The Court has this morning pronounced on the legality of a scheme devised by the head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, known as the Outright Monetary Transaction (OMT). Eurozone watchers have been waiting for this Court decision for months.
The background is that a couple of years ago southern European countries (Italy and Spain in particular) were having to pay alarmingly high interest rates on their government borrowing. The markets feared that these countries had got into a kind of vicious circle where the closer they got to insolvency, the more expensive their borrowing became, pushing them closer still to the edge. Doomsayers like me were predicting Eurozone exits, but suddenly in August 2012 ECB chief Mario Draghi came up with OMT, a scheme whereby in exchange for stringent economic conditions, the ECB would buy afflicted countries bonds. No country has had to apply for funding, because Draghi's assertion that the ECB would do "whatever it takes" was sufficient to lower bond prices. Almost overnight the debt markets calmed down. OMT is widely perceived to have saved the Euro.
The only problem was that OMT is probably illegal, infringing the ECB's mandate, which does not include paying to prop up member countries' economies. The ECB is not, the argument goes, a lender of last resort. These sentiments are particularly strong in Germany, which has used its association with the weaker economies of southern Europe to export its way to massive (and sanctimonious) prosperity.
So last year the issue was referred to Germany's Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, and Eurozone nerds like me have been wondering what the Court would do.
One of the lessons of the Eurozone debacle has been that the great and the good, people my age growing up in Europe in the aftermath of the 39-45 war, are so wedded to the idea of European unity (and so dependent on it in terms of career advancement) that they are capable of any kind of ingenious sophistry (and OMT is itself a prime example) if it helps keep the project going.
In other words the Court's ruling was always going to be political as much as legal.
This morning came the verdict.
Das Bundesverfassungsgericht has said that "there are important reasons to assume that (OMT) exceeds the ECB's monetary policy mandate and thus infringes the powers of Member States, and that it violates the prohibition of monetary financing of the budget . . . primary law stipulates an explicit prohibition of monetary financing of the budget and thus unequivocally excludes such powers of the ECB".
Seems clear enough. OMT infringes Germany's basic law. But hang on a moment - "the OMT decision might not be objectionable (if) . . . government bonds of selected Member States are not purchased up to unlimited amounts, and that interferences with price formation on the market are to be avoided where possible".
Now it may be that something is being lost in the translation here, but government bonds can never be bought up to unlimited amounts, because if the ECB buys, say, 1 billion Euros worth of Spanish bonds the number, although quite large, has by definition been limited to 1 billion. And moreover it is always going to be impossible to avoid interfering with "price formation on the market" (that would actually be the object of such purchases). So it looks as if the Court is giving OMT the green light.
So what was its decision? Well here comes the clever part. The Court hasn't actually made one. It has decided to refer the whole issue to the European Court of Justice. And given that the ECJ is stuffed with apparatchiks devoted to European Unity as well, I wonder if you can predict what their verdict will be?
It will be a couple of years before that verdict arrives. After that the matter will go back to the Verfassungsgericht for a decision as to whether OMT infringes Germany's Grundgesetz or basic law.
Truly a decision on OMT has been kicked well and truly into the long grass.
Meanwhile, southern European bond yields remained steady. Mario Draghi must be feeling pretty pleased with himself.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)