The General Election in the UK, 2024

[Stavros]

There has been the usual sloganeering in this election -the key one is that 'Labour will raise your taxes'. Rachel Reeves, who looks like becoming the first female Chancellor of the Exchequer in British history, denies it, of course.

The problem Labour will have is finding the money needed to repair what has been damaged, and fund new policies. If, as the data suggests, daily trade on the City of London Stock Exchange is worth c$3.8 trillion, why not levy a 1% tax on those daily trades, as on the basis of the paper figure, the City and its customers can afford it?

The problem is that while the City and related financial services provide His Majesty's Treasury with 10% of its annual tax revenue, the City of London/Stock Exchange is to some people in a crisis.

Firms are leaving, de-listing from London, registering in New York. The American market has fewer regulations than London, is more receptive to new ventures, and adds value where some think they lose out in London, which is why firms have left, and the oil major, Royal Dutch Shell, is also thinking of moving. Is this a form of Capital Flight? If it continues, the new Labour Govt may find that it has less resources to use in funding its re-generation of the NHS, a house building programme, the new energy firm it proposes, and much more.

It may have to put up income tax, or VAT, or some related tax to make up for the money lost through Brexit, low productivity and the general lack of excitement that the UK is to investors at home and abroad, football clubs excepted.

Some sources to look at-

Why is the London Stock Exchange failing? | News | Warwick Business School (wbs.ac.uk)

A more relaxed view here
Big firms quitting UK 'not a crisis' says stock market boss - BBC News

London fears for its future as companies defect to Wall Street | CNN Business

Opinion: Why is the London Stock Exchange losing out to the US – and can it stem the flow? | UCL News - UCL – University College London

[Stavros]

Some -well, 4- Conservative candidates in the election are accepting campaign donations from a rival part, Reclaim, and thus adopting that lunatic fringe party's 'Four Commitments to Culture'-

"These consist of: leaving the European Court of Human Rights, repealing the Human Rights Act, banning all forms of gender reassignment [for children]and reforming the Equality Act."
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/reclaim-pl...211659305.html

If some Conservative candidates are willing to take money and policies from another party, those in or fomerly in Rishi Sunak's Cabinet, are threatening to produce a 'rival manifesto' of their own if the official one doesn't meet their expectations-

"Prominent party figures including Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick are said by Tory insiders to be among those waiting to see how the manifesto is received by the public before they act.
In the event Sunak’s launch fails to shift the dial on the Tories’ floundering election campaign, one option under discussion is a press conference next week to set out a series of alternative pledges."
https://www.theguardian.com/politics...sto-falls-flat

Divided in Defeat. How sad.

[Stavros]

Nigel Farage is on a mission. In today's Telegraph he declares "I plan to run for PM in 2029", as if we held Presidential elections in this country. Farage is a Trump wannabe, for in much the same way that Trump realized in 2000 he would get nowhere as an Independent candidate, and hi-jacked the Republican Party to gain entry to the top level of power -for his own benefit, nobody else's- so Farage has invented political parties to suit his ambition, which now appears to be to morph Reform UK with what he sees as a walking corpse known as The Conservative Party. (Telegraph article is behind a paywall).

He has also viciously attacked Lord David Cameron who has openly objected to Farage. Ignoring completely that it was David Cameron who, as Prime Minister steered the EU Referendum Bill through to law in the House of Commons in 2015 -though I am sure he will take credit for that too, even though he has never sat in Parliament- Farage now claims-

"Cameron has the nerve to claim that, after 14 years of failure, the Tories now have a plan to deal with Britain’s immigration crisis."

This is because for Farage, immigration is the key that will unlock the prison into which Britain has consigned itself. Brexit does make an appearance, as usual, for being shunted offside-

"Cameron called that referendum in the smug belief that the Project Fear run by him and his chancellor, George Osborne, would hoodwink the British electorate into voting to Remain in thrall to the EU. When instead 17.4m voted Leave – lest we forget, the biggest vote for anything in British history – he flounced off and left Theresa May and the Remainer-dominated parliament to try to sell out Brexit."

That Brexit has cost the country £40 billion, lost opportunities for investment, a decline in trade with the EU and a mountain of regulation strangling business -none of this matters for the man forever chasing headlines.

Farage is also a liar. He lied about the benefits of Brexit during the referendum campaign, and here is another lie

"Keir Starmer’s Labour is set to win on July 4th, despite the lack of public enthusiasm for his party, his personality or his six big election pledges – which do not include a word about migration." One of the pledges is to 'Launch a new border security command', but I guess this is not enough for Nigel.
David Cameron is a disgrace to Britain (yahoo.com)

In his book, How They Broke Britain, James O'Brien has a chapter on David Cameron, and another on Nigel Farage. Two privately educated boys. one with the links to the Royal Family that O'Brien suggests was crucial in developing Cameron's career; the other since boyhood a nauseating racist whose views would not only sound like the vile propaganda of the British Brothers League of the early 20thc, in some cases is almost the same -just as one claim was that you could walk from Aldgate to Bethnal Green in London and the only languages you would hear were Russian, Polish and Yiddish, thus

"Nigel Farage has said he felt "awkward" on a recent train journey in central London when he heard only foreign languages spoken by his fellow passengers."
Farage 'felt awkward' on train | London Evening Standard | Evening Standard

Ukip is nothing new: the British Brothers’ League was exploiting immigration fears in 1901 | Immigration and asylum | The Guardian

British Brothers’ League | rebel notes (wordpress.com)


If Farage has a dark past, littered with loose connections to a generation of English racists, he also failed to make a career when he was inside the Conservative Party, going through the endless rounds of meetings and deals, so he just took over UKIP, made it his own vehicle and ran it like a private club, rather like Reform UK, which after all, remains a private company in which he is the largest shareholder.
How They Broke Britain: Amazon.co.uk: O'Brien, James: 9780753560341: Books

At root of the man's arrogance, is his conviction that he will be elected MP for Clacton. If he fails, will he claim the election was stolen? Even if he does, he doesn't have the armed terrorists ready to storm the Houses of Parliament, though I guess they could always storm Clacton Pier, to what purposes nobody knows.

[Stavros]

Candidates for Reform UK have a sophisticated way of explaining things, such as the introduction of Socionics to explain why Hitler was 'Brilliant'. Socionics is a jargon-laden theory derived in part from Jungian psychology/personality types which has been heavily criticised for its lack of empirical research. The same candidate who said Hitler was 'brilliant' -while also condemning his historical record- claims Bashar al-Asad is a 'gentle by nature', but let down for being weak. As an introduction to traits such as FE + NI Socionics has a long way to go before becoming the go-to explanation for mass murder, mass destruction, and thus at some point mass failure, though it is relatively easy to pluck Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar from history to show how the strong survive and the weak fail.

Reform has a problem because another candidate, now legally registered as their boy in Bexhill and Battle (in Sussex) has said that Britain should have been neutral in the Second World War.
Reform UK candidate defends Hitler remarks (msn.com)

As for Socionics, this site has some probably typical personality analyses, but this one on, yep, you guessed it, Adolf Hitler, has the astonishing claim that "It is difficult to pin down Hitler's true ideology precisely, not only because he lied shamelessly about everything, but possibly because he himself wasn't fully sure"- whereas history records an obsession with Race as a scientific explanation for the extermination of the Jews, Slavs and others who just did not match up the Aryan standards. He was so sure of it he ranted on about it from the start to the finish of his lamentable career. The gallery of people on the website don't all seem to have their own entry/analysis, which is a relief. Try it here-

World Socionics: Adolf Hitler (EIE): Personality Type Analysis

Socionics - Wikipedia

As for the Reform UK launch yesterday, they were keen to call their proposals a Contract, not a Manifesto. Now where have we heard that before....Contract with America? It's not as if Nigel Farage has ever had an original thought. One wonders if his entire political programme has been scripted for him by Turning Point USA- ?

Two weeks to go before we find out what we find out if BS + Pr =ES. My new science: voternomics.

[Stavros]

Seeing 7 representatives from the parties standing in front of an audience, repeating rehearsed sound bites to no effect, makes me think of Donkeys and Elephants. This is a pity because Donkeys are both useful and lovable animals. The Elephants in this case are two policy areas that seem to defy solution -Social Care, and Prisons.

Successive Govts have resisted merging Social Care with the NHS -being separate from it means that social care is not free at the time of need, and if it were, the UK health and social care network would be in an even worse state than it is now. As happens when a service is underfunded, and subject to market forces, in this case the shrinkage of labour post-Brexit, the costs for those who remain -residents and staff- solving the problem becomes harder and without doubt more expensive.

These two articles outline the problem.

Nine major challenges facing health and care in England - The Health Foundation
The British public are clear-eyed about the problems in social care | Nuffield Trust

The other policy knot is Prisons. An obvious solution to the fact that the UK imprisons more people than most of Europe (because we tend to model policy on what they do in the US rather than Sweden or the Netherlands), would be not to send people to prison in the first place. If a crime is not violent, suggesting the person responsible has a tendency to be so, is prison the right form of punishment? It might favour white collar crime if those convicted of embezzlement, say, were not sent to prison, but it costs a lot of money to do so, and alternatives are available that are a form of punishment.

This article looks at it-
The State of the UK Prison System: Urgent Need for Reform (govnet.co.uk)

Neither Labour nor the Conservatives have a coherent plan for either, but lots of soundbites. It comes down to money and will -is the new Govt willing to devise a workable policy that is properly funded that will produce positive change over the next 5 years? Trillions of pounds flow through the UK each year, we can have some of it if Govt wants it, just as Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling found 3 trillion to save the banking sector in 2008; just as after Brexit, the May/Johnson Govt spend millions and millions on port facilities that have never been used, and during the Covid crisis, Chancellor Sunak handed out around 4 billion quid to firms for emergency services that turned out to be ghosts, disappearing into the ether with taxpayers cash lining their sheets.

Dare we hope for some good governance from the next party to have a go at it?

[filghy2]

That sounds a lot like Australian politics. I believe that UK Labour has been very influenced by the small target strategy that saw the Australian Labor Party return to power in 2022. Both Labour parties are evidently terrified of scare campaigns about increasing taxes or being weak on crime or national/border security (or reversing Brexit in the UK).

The problem is that even if this approach helps them to win office it also limits what they can do once they are in power. At best, they can only make some modest improvements. But once they have been in government for a while, they will in turn receive blame for all of the problems that voters are dissatisfied about.

To be fair, a good deal of this is the fault of voters who too often behave like children who demand that problems be solved but don't want to bear any cost for doing so.

The other problem for the ALP here is that their caution has resulted in a steady leakage of votes to the Greens and independents who are seen as having more principled positions. The ALP won the last election through preferences, but with a historically-low primary vote of less than 33%. Perhaps that's not such an issue in the UK because the FPP system favours larger parties.

[Stavros]

That sounds a lot like Australian politics. I believe that UK Labour has been very influenced by the small target strategy that saw the Australian Labor Party return to power in 2022. Both Labour parties are evidently terrified of scare campaigns about increasing taxes or being weak on crime or national/border security (or reversing Brexit in the UK).

The problem is that even if this approach helps them to win office it also limits what they can do once they are in power. At best, they can only make some modest improvements. But once they have been in government for a while, they will in turn receive blame for all of the problems that voters are dissatisfied about.

To be fair, a good deal of this is the fault of voters who too often behave like children who demand that problems be solved but don't want to bear any cost for doing so.

The other problem for the ALP here is that their caution has resulted in a steady leakage of votes to the Greens and independents who are seen as having more principled positions. The ALP won the last election through preferences, but with a historically-low primary vote of less than 33%. Perhaps that's not such an issue in the UK because the FPP system favours larger parties.

You probably know this but I will quote it anyway

"According to a former member of Blair's staff, Blair and the Labour Party learnt from and owes a debt to Bob Hawke's government in Australia in the 1980s on how to govern as a Third Way party."
Third Way - Wikipedia

I think Starmer is closer to Blair than he is to either Clement Attlee, or Keir Hardie, after whom I believe he was named, though I can't verify that. Labour is basically terrified of alienating Nationalist working class voters whose views on immigrants are, shall we say, toxic. But also running scared of the City of London and 'capital flight', which thus fits in with the 'Third Way' argument that without Capitalism there would be no money, which is ironic given that the ultimate dream of Socialism is a society without it. Thus 'Social Democracy' and Capitalism are locked in a relationship they can't get out of. One of them needs the money which the other admits funds the social policies markets don't want.

Somewhere in this knot, there might even be something which political 'scientists' (= lecturers) used to call Good Governance, something that seems to have withered and died but since when I am not sure.

[Stavros]

I thought the ineptitude of the Conservatives in the 2017 election was a one-off, whereas this election is turning into the 'mother of all shambles'. Quite astonishing, but indicates a party in a state of disintegration.

"Hundreds of campaign leaflets for Conservative Party chairman Richard Holden have been sent to the wrong constituency, the BBC has been told.It is understood the literature ended up at homes in a neighbouring Essex seat.".
Tory chair Richard Holden's leaflets sent to wrong constituency - BBC News

"The Metropolitan police has announced that five more officers are being investigated in relation to suspect bets on the date of the election, in addition to the protection officer who was arrested...The officers are based on the Royalty and Specialist Command, the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Command and the Central West Basic Command Unit."

"The Association of Electoral Administrators has confirmed that there is nothing that can be done to stop Craig Williams or Laura Saunders being listed as Conservative candidates on the ballot paper, even though the party no longer supports them"

And then-
"Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, was not impressed by Labour’s Nick Thomas-Symonds saying this morning that when the party “opens the books” if it gets into government, it may find the economic situation worse than expected...Oh dear, oh dear. The old "we may open the books and discover the situation is even worse..."The books are wide open, fully transparent. That really won't wash..."

"A Reform UK candidate in Salisbury was booed at a hustings after he praised Vladimir Putin, the Wiltshire Times reports.
Arguing for a negotiated settlement in Ukraine, Julian Malins said it was wrong to compare Putin to Hitler. “I have actually met Putin and had a 10-minute chat with him and he seemed very good. He is not the Austrian gentleman with a moustache come alive again,” Malins said."

"Victoria Atkins, the health secretary, has accused Labour of planning “to eradicate women from our national language” as the Conservatives sought to ramp up attacks on Keir Starmer around gender identity issues."

All in this link, if you can summon up the interest-

UK general election live: five more police officers alleged to have placed bets on election date as Tories drop two candidates (theguardian.com)

[Stavros]

Is Nigel Farage 'merely' being a Realist? Or is he suggesting that it is tough shit when a State violates a raft of international laws but hey, if Israel can get away with it, why not Russia?

"Nigel Farage has urged Volodymyr Zelenskiy to seek a peace deal with Russia, “otherwise there will be no young men left in Ukraine”.The Reform UK leader, who has been criticised for suggesting the west provoked Russian aggression against Ukraine, said it was time for the Ukrainian president to rethink his goal of reclaiming all territory lost to Vladimir Putin’s invasion, as such a mission was going to be “incredibly difficult”.
Farage says Zelenskiy should seek Ukraine peace deal with Russia | Nigel Farage | The Guardian

The Charter of the UN, the Geneva Convention on Human Rights, the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the Minsk Agreement of 2014 -are there any laws that can be broken that Farage thinks are not relevant today? That he is alleged to be 'soft' on Putin is one thing, the actuality of Russia's attacks inside the UK, in London and Salisbury makes his 'realist' position even more offensive -but this is a man who sees himself as a Revolutionary, and who commands his private company/political party more like Lenin than Kerensky. One wonders if by comparison the UK decided Northern Ireland was no longer worth the cost, and abandoned it, instead of taking on the challenge of a negotiated settlement. It amounts, in effect, to a dereliction of the very politics that Farage claims he wants to be a leading part of.

Dangerous times, when a candidate for Parliament endorses a convicted criminal in the US, and bends his knee to the diktat of another Russian mass murderer.