Politics

The country is running on empty.

Forget what you’ve heard about the English classes being defined by culture and leisure-time pursuits.

The classes in England are defined by money.

If it was hidden by a smoke-screen in earlier generations, it is naked now.

The solid middle class might have to pull their belts in a notch in times of economic austerity, but they will be able to sail to safety in the lifeboat of their cash savings. Not that I blame them – let’s be clear. This is just about people surviving as best they can in a fragmented society.

Available cash is what marks the middle class from the lower-middle class below them.

The lower-middle class has the aspirations and some of the jobs, but they don’t have the cash. They exist on borrowed money. Their greatest fear is to lose their house. Their mortgages are what keep them compliant.

I didn’t mention the working class. There isn’t any working class any more. As soon as the Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Right To Buy’ scheme gave Council tenants the right to buy their rented property, the working class disappeared. They are now the lower-middle class.

Well of course there are true working class people – people with nothing to protect and only their labour to give. But they don’t constitute a class now because they are too marginalised even to recognise one another.

Mark Carney On Bank Stress Tests

Shortly after the EU Referendum vote the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, sat on a panel and explained the stress tests that British banks were dealing with in the aftermath of Brexit. I listened to the whole thing – an hour of it.

If you want to listen to it, it’s on the Bank Of England website under Publications/Financial Stability

He said the banks are able to deal with twice as much stress as they faced in the days following Brexit. And they can deal with any future shocks.

A bit previous, as you might say, is what I thought. Let’s see what the situation is in six months or a year. Brett might be a slow burn.

He also said that banks needed to make credit available.

And now I have just read the August paper from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. It starts with a quote about the blues from Gil Scott-Heron, so it can’t be all bad.

It concludes that these are risky times, but financial markets worldwide continue to have an appetite for holding UK debt. And it says that banks need to make credit available.

As I said, we have a pseudo-middle class living on borrowed money. Mark Carney didn’t argue when one of the audience asked what he meant about banks extending credit given that the ratio of average debt to available income in the UK is 132%.

And if the average is 132%, think how high it must be for some people.

That can’t go on forever. I mean, seriously, how can it just trundle on?

And if you are in the ‘poor’ sector of the population, how can you even think about getting credit from a high-street source?

Mortgage Relief On Buy-To-Let Properties

Did you see how the Government took away the tax relief on mortgages on buy-to-let properties? That’s going to put the squeeze on those landlords who can only make their sums work when they get that relief.

They will have to sell the properties, and then those with real free cash will buy up the properties. Meanwhile, slowly but surely, those who bought their Council houses will lose their properties and the gap between the rich and the poor will widen yet more.

It really is the Enclosure Acts for the twenty-first Century.

Meanwhile the new Prime Minister talks about making this a society that is fairer and includes us all. Well I shouldn’t bitch before I see how it plays out, but I have my doubts.

My Take On This

You know the story of Nero fiddling while Rome burned? Well it seems to me that the one thing that is not taken into account in these bank stress tests is when the pips start speaking for enough people to do more than just complain.

I really shouldn’t go on about this much more, because remember that we (the UK, that is) voted for the Conservatives a second time after complaining for five years that they were terrible.

We railed against their inhumanity. We asked how they could tip invalids out on the street and deny them benefits. We said it was an attack on the three pillars of the Welfare State – health, education, and housing.

And then we (the UK, that is) voted for them again.

And what did we learn? We learned that when push came to shove, we voted for ‘I’m alright Jack and let someone else suffer.’ And all that complaining was just hot air.

So maybe Britain is genuinely immune from any action to adjust society to a fairer, more inclusive version.

United By Faith and Informed By Science

My wife pointed out that Theresa May is the daughter of a vicar and Angela Merkel is the daughter of a theologian. What insights they must have into each other – something that not a lot of other politicians can share.

And did you know that Angela Merkel was a research scientist before going into politics. She holds a Doctor of Natural Sciences for her thesis on quantum chemistry, and worked as a researcher and published several papers.

I am a sucker for education.

The experts never had a chance against the threat of the immigrant in the room.

It truly didn’t matter how much the experts told Middle England the economy would tank if Britain left the EU. All Middle England heard was that leaving would stop those bloody immigrants and that’s what mattered.

Yes, they can allow London to be a melting pot. But Middle England doesn’t want immigrants messing up its vision of English life in the provinces.

The immigrant in the room is OK as long as the immigrant is in someone else’s room.

How can you counter that when the free movement of people is a fundamental pillar of the EU?

With hindsight, the architects of the EU might agree that the idea of the free movement of people is flawed.

They might recognise that giving people the right to work anywhere in the EU doesn’t take account of the fact that people are not just workers, they are people.

With hindsight they might see that people are not nomads floating like specks of dust to the nearest work hotspot.

In fact, say the Left, that was the idea. Corporations want to treat workers as faceless, replaceable units.

Jeremy Corbyn thinks the EU is a creature of corporations who use it to outflank collective bargaining.

When a workforce isn’t playing ball, both sides know that threatening to move production to Poland is a hollow threat but importing Polish workers who will work for less pay is a real threat.

Game, set, and match.

Corbyn Got What He Wanted

That’s why Corbyn made such an obvious dog’s breakfast of saying the opposite.

It was patently obvious during the lead up to the referendum that he was at war with his own Cabinet.

First he tried hiding in small venues up and down the country. Then he came out and delivered his message with such reluctance that anyone wondering where he stood could see he had a gun to his back.

Corbyn was sly by winking to his audience to tell them he was being forced to take a line he didn’t agree with.

The risk he ran, and the race he still has to run is whether he came across as muddled at best and disingenuous at worst – or whether with the old cadre gone he can forge a new face for Labour.

Personally I don’t like what he did. By all means be disingenuous with your political opponents. But don’t do it to your audience.

Nigel Farage sensed the zeitgeist; he knew what bigotry there was in the heartland of England. He knew he could swing enough votes to make a difference. He just didn’t imagine it would be enough to swing the decision.

So when Corbyn’s tactic coincided with the Middle England anti-immigrant voice, it created a storm that took the Leave campaign over the finish line – to everyone’s surprise.

Corbyn got what he wanted – and we are out of the EU. He was very quick to say there was no backtracking from that.

So where are we now?

Corbyn thought the overwhelmingly important issues for the populace were fair working conditions and a fair society.

It turns out that immigration of the ‘because they’re different’ kind was the most important decider for a lot of voters.

The elephant in the room after the referendum is still the question of immigration.

So now we have Corbyn’s version of the Left against Farage’s version of the Right. It’s a contest that Europe has seen before.

Strangely, the marginalised group are the moderate Conservatives.

Coda

Things are moving so rapidly that by the time I hit Publish, Corbyn may be either undisputed leader or out of the race entirely.

It’s been a strange week in British politics. The EU referendum has driven every other kind of political question to the margins. The only question is IN or OUT of the European Union.

It is an open secret as to why we are having a referendum at all. It is because the Prime Minister, David Comeron, feared a takeover by an alliance of the far right of his own Conservative Party and United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).

He was accused at the time of putting party politics above the health of the nation.

When he went to Brussels to negotiate changes, he said that by holding a referendum the Euro partners would know that he wasn’t just posturing when he set out his demands.

And then he came back and pulled out of his hat a small or non-existent rabbit, or a big rabbit – depending on who is telling the story.

Then the campaigning got under way and his message was that we would risk falling off a cliff if we voted to leave.

Well if that was true when he said it, it was true before he went to Brussels and he should never have risked the decision to a vote that was out of his control. Not if he believed in the principle rather than the desire to hold onto power.

How Real Is UKIP

So how real is the threat from UKIP? If there are only a few UKIP supporters, then they aren’t much of a threat.

After the national election, Lord Leach of Fairford, Chairman of Open Europe, wrote to the Times saying what would have happened had the German form of PR applied in the general election.

Under that system, any party getting less than five percent of the vote is not allocated seats. The reason for that is to prevent a huge number of parties with one or two votes each swamping the actual business of government.

And what would have happened is that we would have had the Conservatives with 275 seats, labour 229, UKIP 92, Lib Dems 54 and no seats for any of the other parties. That is, the SNP would not have got any seats at all.

The Scottish National Party swept the board in Scotland – but only because it has 56 constituencies in a country that is only five-million people out of a total UK population of sixty-four million.

In other words, our first-past-the-post system and the constituency boundaries that apply in elections hide the fact that UKIP has a large base of support.

Here are the numbers for the seats, the number gained and lost in the election, the actual number of the popular vote and the percentage of the vote that the number represents.

Conservatives 330 (+37, -10) 11,334,726 36.9%
Labour 232 (+23, -48) 9,347,324 30.4%
SNP 56 (+50, -0) 1,454,436 4.7%
Green 1 (+0, -0) 1,156,149 3.8%
Lib Dems 8 (+0, -48) 2,415,862 7.9%
UKIP 1 (+0, -1) 3,881,099 12.6%

Nearly four-million people voted for UKIP. But they only got one seat in Parliament.

So the threat was real and Cameron has played it well – well that is if the Remain camp wins.

But what a risk to take.

My Prediction Is…

I think the vote will go with David Cameron and the Remain camp.

And if it does, then he will be saved again. And for some stupid reason, people will think he was the better option and we will all love the moderate Tories. Ha!

On the 5th May, the people of Scotland will vote to elect Members Of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs).

Every registered voter received a leaflet from the Electoral Commission that explained the voting system.

If reading the leaflet left you with unanswered questions, read on.

There are eight regions in Scotland, with seven MSPs for each region, giving a total of 56 regional MSPs.

Within thoses eight regions that are 73 constituencies, divided roughly equally across the regions.

So the total number of MSPs is 129 (56+73)

Therefore, everyone in Scotland is represented by eight MSPs – one constituency MSP and seven regional MSPs.

MSPs serve currently for four years, and the last election was in 2011 – hence the election on 5th May. That’s changing and those elected on 5th May will serve for five years to keep in line with European Union terms and the rest of the UK. The idea is that it will help cut costs by not having elections in different years.

At the polling station everyone will be handed two voting slips – a lilac voting slip for the constituency MSP and a peach-coloured voting slip for the regional MSP.

The lilac constituency ballot paper lists the name of each candidate along with their party name and party logo.

The peach regional ballot paper lists the parties and any independent candidates. It does not list the names of the party candidates.

So in essence and leaving independents out of the picture, you vote regionally for a party, and locally for a person.

Constituency candidates are elected on a first-past-the-post system.

Regional votes are counted using the Additional Member System. The system attempts to ensure that it is unlikely that one party will dominate the seats or that any party that gets less than 7% of the vote will get a seat.

A party can list up to 12 regional candidates in each of the 8 electoral regions and could get up to seven members voted in at the election. The remaining people on the list are there to fill in any places that become vacant during the next five years due to death or other cause.

The City of Edinburgh Council has a link where you can download the Lothian Regional party lists for each party.

The Scottish Regions