18th April 2015 - response to Michelle Donelan's latest missive

Aaah Michelle ... how many more Tory heavyweights are we going to have shipped in to try to wrestle Chippenham away from the Liberal Democrats?

 “My home is here”. Really, how come? Were you also shipped here by Tory Central Office, in 2013, with the express intention of fighting this marginal seat?

“Working damn hard”. Like the miners? Remember them – working damn hard and then thrown on the scrapheap.

I loved this bit so much that I have copy/pasted it:

“I am fed up with politicians trying to trick voters into voting for them with negative campaigning about their opponents. It is desperate stuff, insulting the people’s intelligence. So this is what I am for, rather than what I am against. Hold me to account on it – I won’t let you down.

Nationally – why is this area so important?

The national choice is clear. It is between the leadership, security and competence of David Cameron as Prime Minister, or the chaos of Ed Miliband trying to cobble together a group of SNP, Liberal Democrats, Greens or whoever will put him into Downing Street.”

Hard to believe that Michelle has forgotten “what she is for” within one paragraph! Talk about insulting people’s intelligence! And she follows this with another negative paragraph (“Last time …”) about the Lib Dems. Also in this para. is a basic grammatical error (from a university graduate) – “his remaining MP’s” should read “his remaining MPs” – one MP, two or more MPs – this is a plural – no apostrophe Michelle.

Any road up (as they would say in Michelle’s former prospective constituency) enough of this pedantry; on to substantive matters. Michelle’s plan for the Chippenham constituency divides into seven principal areas (e.g. More local jobs, Protect our countryside etc) and forty specific targets. Many noble causes no doubt but as with most MPs (no apostrophe) of all shades, this is bluff and bluster, pure electioneering. Forty targets is way beyond any one person’s capacity to deal with substantively. Let’s just deal with one of the targets here – “Re-open Corsham Station”.

There is absolutely no point in re-opening stations that would have no services. The only passenger trains on this route are the inter-city HSTs and these certainly would not stop at Corsham. Over many years, MPs and others have, for many reasons, been campaigning (and failing) to initiate an Oxford – Bristol service which would, it is hoped, precipitate the re-opening of Corsham and Wootton Bassett stations. However, thanks to the expensive shambles that is our privatised railway system, there is little rolling stock that could operate this service. A few years ago, after having had to sit in the luggage rack of such a local service from Dorchester to Westbury, I wrote to Mark Hopwood, the managing director of First Great Western, and he responded as follows: “Of course we know crowding still exists, but we are very limited in what more we can do to address the situation, at least within the terms of this franchise. This is because there is simply no more rolling stock available for us to lease. We have quite literally been given everything that there was spare”.

There is much material available on the subject but I’ll just quote from Wikipedia here: “The privatization of British Rail led to a hiatus in the ordering of rolling stock, which predictably led to the almost complete collapse of the rolling stock manufacturing industry. When purchases of rolling stock resumed, with little remaining capacity in the UK contracts were increasingly placed overseas”. Interesting isn’t it that with privatisation being heralded as the cure for the supposedly ailing British Rail, HSTs which were designed and built by British Rail Engineering (BREL) at Derby and Crewe, are still, forty years after their introduction into service, providing inter-city services; privatisation has brought nothing better. The ‘British’ BREL, like everything else, was sold off and is now owned by a Canadian company, Bombardier. Similarly, the train operating companies (TOCs) are in the hands of many foreign railway organizations. The twelve franchises listed below are in the hands of the state-owned (ironic isn’t it!) SNCF, Deutsche Bahn and Nederlandse Spoorwegen! Even the royal train is powered by German-owned (Deutsche Bahn) locomotives (also ironic!).

The following paragraph (also from Wikipedia) perhaps illustrates the shambles that is our privatised railway system.

“The Railways Bill, published in 1993, established a complex structure for the rail industry. British Rail was to be broken up into over 100 separate companies, with most relationships between the successor companies established by contracts, some through regulatory mechanisms (such as the industry-wide network code and the multi-bilateral star model performance regime). Contracts for the use of railway facilities - track, stations and light maintenance depots - must be approved or directed by the Office of Rail Regulation although some facilities are exempt from this requirement. Contracts between the principal passenger train operators and the state are called franchise agreements, and were first established with the Office of Passenger Rail Franchising (OPRAF), then its successor the Strategic Rail Authority and now with the Secretary of State for Transport”.

All this time and money wasted in a complex structure of companies and regulators with contracts required between all elements. Franchises being let by the government give little inducement for long-term investment as the bottom-line is short-term profit (or rather reduction of losses) – this is the principal reason that no HST replacements have been introduced – why should a company invest heavily in new rolling stock only to lose its franchise in years to come.

The ‘problem’ with British Rail was lack of investment. More money has been pumped into our privatised system by governments than was ever made available to British Rail. What the railways need, and needed, was a long-term strategic vision with associated investment as has happened across the channel with our near neighbours, the French, the Germans and the Dutch. Instead, we have a typically British fragmentation, lacking any long-term, national goal of an integrated transport infrastructure. The Germans, French, Dutch and others have taken advantage of an absurd system created by Michelle’s Tories.

Re-open Corsham Station? In the second decade of the 21st-century, First Great Western (aka Worst Great Western or First Great Western Apologises) is not able to provide any more 'cars' because "there is no more rolling stock to lease" for existing services never mind new ones. Anyway, this is a relatively short-term issue compared with the bigger picture of regenerating our rail transport infrastructure. The Corsham Station project could be seen as a cameo in this regard. The re-opening of part of the Waverley Route between Edinburgh and Galashiels and the re-opening of the Portishead line are major taxpayer- or ratepayer-funded infrastructure projects. The Waverley Route (part) has so far cost the taxpayer £50 million but this is, and will be, money well spent for this and future generations with its mitigation of road traffic jams, parking problems and environmental damage in south Edinburgh and other locations along the route. Similarly, the Portishead line is needed for the same, common issues of road traffic jams, lost time, pollution etc. In July 2012, a £1 billion government 'City Deal' was announced which included funding for MetroWest including the Portishead line (note - taxpayers' money). Similarly, in April 2013 North Somerset Council announced that £1.35 million (note - ratepayers' money) had been allocated by four unitary councils towards preparation work for this line.

As indicated, these infrastructure projects are, and will be, taxpayer- or ratepayer-funded. There has been no mention of privatisation at this stage. Why? Because a national transport infrastructure requires a national plan; there is no profit in creating infrastructure; as with our road network (apart from certain toll roads) our infrastructure is planned and constructed for the benefit of the nation, the people. Privatisation will only come about when certain people see a profit to be made out of something that has been funded by the taxpayer. This is why privatisation of the railways (and other privatisations e.g. water companies like Wessex Water which is owned by YTL, a Malaysian company) was so wrong. Gordon Brown may have sold off the family gold but the Tories have sold the family silver big-time with our infrastucture now largely in the hands of foreign companies who do not, fundamentally, give a damn about any national plan - they are in it for profit.

My challenge to Michelle - get a private company to build Corsham Station.

Your vote really counts - My Plan for our community

Today, the first batch of postal vote ballot papers are being sent to local people. TOMORROW, voting in the 2015 General Election will begin.  Why am I standing for Parliament? My home is here and I am standing to be our next Member of Parliament so that I can represent my neighbours and friends locally. I want to be your MP to challenge those in the Westminster bubble and shake up the system. For too long there has been too small a pool from which MPs are selected. Having never had a ‘job’ in politics, I have always worked for my money in a ‘real’ job, managing a tight household budget. I was the first in my family to finish University. I was taught to work damn hard and make the most of the opportunities that came my way. So, I believe an MP’s job should be to knock down barriers, open doors and create opportunities for all, especially those who need that little bit of extra help. My Beliefs I am fed up with politicians trying to trick voters into voting for them with negative campaigning about their opponents. It is desperate stuff, insulting the people’s intelligence. So this is what I am for, rather than what I am against. Hold me to account on it – I won’t let you down. Nationally – why is this area so important? The national choice is clear. It is between the leadership, security and competence of David Cameron as Prime Minister, or the chaos of Ed Miliband trying to cobble together a group of SNP, Liberal Democrats, Greens or whoever will put him into Downing Street. David Cameron is only 23 constituencies short of forming a majority Government and keeping Ed Miliband out of Downing Street. Ours is one of those 23 constituencies – so how you vote will determine not just our next MP, but our next Prime Minister. Last time Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats had no choice but to support David Cameron. This time we don’t know what he will do with his remaining MP’s. They have already shown they would abandon their key election promises like tuition fees to get power. It’s been exposed that they will say or do anything to cling to power. What would they do this time? I hope you can use your vote to support me so I can start the job of serving you and our community as your next hardworking, accountable local MP, delivering on my plan to improve our area for all With very best wishes,     Michelle Donelan

Myth, chicanery, distortion, fabrication

Once again in this week’s (31st March) newsletter (see below), Michelle repeats “hard-working” and “the economic mess we inherited from Labour”. These mantras became tiresome way before this election campaign but their repetition at every opportunity characterizes a campaign (hers and the Tories) devoid of intelligence and imagination.

I shouldn’t have to replay this but research the global financial crash of 2007/8 and you will find in any academic paper or industry report or studied newspaper or magazine article, the underlying reasons for the crash. Examples below:

from The American Spectator, May 2011:

 “ … there were weaknesses in the financial system -- failures of regulation and risk management, excessive leverage and risk-taking -- that were responsible for the ensuing devastation”.

from The Economist, Sept 2013:

 “The collapse of Lehman Brothers, a sprawling global bank, in September 2008 almost brought down the world’s financial system. It took huge taxpayer-financed bail-outs to shore up the industry. Even so, the ensuing credit crunch turned what was already a nasty downturn into the worst recession in 80 years.

With half a decade’s hindsight, it is clear the crisis had multiple causes. The most obvious is the financiers themselves—especially the irrationally exuberant Anglo-Saxon sort, who claimed to have found a way to banish risk when in fact they had simply lost track of it. Central bankers and other regulators also bear blame, for it was they who tolerated this folly. The whole system was revealed to have been built on flimsy foundations: banks had allowed their balance-sheets to bloat but set aside too little capital to absorb losses. In effect they had bet on themselves with borrowed money, a gamble that had paid off in good times but proved catastrophic in bad”.

from University of Ulster paper on the global financial crisis, Mar 2009

"The origins of the financial crisis are firmly embedded in the deregulation in financial markets and the innovations in financial structures including Asset Backed Securities and Collateralised Debt Obligations. Financial innovation has improved liquidity and enabled investors to spread risk through international diversification. The downside is that the global implications of the current downturn are more profound than anything previously witnessed. The collapse of the subprime residential mortgage market in the US was the catalyst for the financial crisis. There is $900 billion in sub-pime paper on the balance sheets of the world’s financial institutions …”

and from the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, Nov 2013

“Housing was at the centre of the financial train wreck of 2007-08 that has seriously damaged most rich countries. In many countries the effects of that crisis on the wider economy have been large, negative and persistent”.

So, as I said, these are just some examples of learned, professional articles on the 2007/8 global financial crash. Nowhere here will you find “an economic mess left by the last Labour government” which is simply absurd, fatuous propaganda and electioneering of a kind that treats the electorate as dimwits. The trouble is that this repetition has been going on for five years and the old saying ‘repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth’ comes into play as does (apologies for repeating this!) ‘history, twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools’.

Should the Tories be re-elected then the old adage 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it' will, no doubt, come to pass. Interest rates have been kept artificially, politically low for some years; as soon as they start to rise, then we will see another 'sub-prime' (all housing is unaffordable now) housing debt crisis with mortgage defaults, repossessions etc. And at the 2020 election, the mantra will mutate to 'the economic mess inherited from the Tories'.

Here's some information on 'the deficit' and 'the debt':

The Deficit

The chart (unknown source unfortunately) shows the year-on-year 'deficit' (the gap between government income and spending) increasing marginally until the financial crash of 2007/8 since which time the gap (yes, thanks to the present government) has been getting back to pre-crash levels.

However, the national debt (the total amount the UK owes) has been increasing year-on-year and is forecast to continue increasing (see chart below).

The Debt

Whilst the national deficit has been decreasing since 2010, the national debt (the total amount owed by the UK) has been increasing and is forecast to continue to increase.

This chart was obtained from a marvellous source of any and every possible financial/economic/industrial chart and information here: http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/

Rich richer, poor poorer

There’s been another email exchange (27th - 31st March), shown below, with our dear Michelle regarding the Tory mantra “hard working people” … allow me to expand (‘Call me Dave’ has said he would like to see election issues debated so I’ll take him up on the offer).

In the 1980s a significant shift from the public sector provision of elderly care to private sector homes occurred, with the proportion of private facilities increasing from just 18% in 1980 to 85% by the end of the century (from Wikipedia). This shift illustrates the success of the Tory privatisation doctrine (I will perhaps start on the railways, my pet subject, later).

Prior to 1980, most care homes were run by local authorities. They were well-run, staff were well-paid and motivated (we have 20-years worth of experience in this household). Privatisation and its required profit have seen staff paid the minimum wage for all shifts whether it be night or weekend (including Sunday) – so £6.50 per hour for working a Saturday/Sunday night shift! As I have said in a previous article, this level of pay is not a living wage so workers are forced to claim benefits funded by the taxpayer.

Taxpayer subsidy of low-paid workers allows company bosses and investors in those companies to reap richer rewards (this is the Tory aesthetic, or ethic, isn’t it – the rich becoming richer and the poor poorer?). Take investment company IQ whose website ‘headline’ is “Creating wealth through knowledge and secure investments” and later “Why invest in the care home industry?”. Apparently “Banks and lending institutions are becoming very eager to lend within this industry due to the long term, robust and lower risk income streams that it offers”. Delighted clients state “In IQ I feel I have found a company who I believe has my best interests at heart” and “in-depth knowledge of the local area and ability to understand exactly what we wanted made the buying process so simple”.

This is the privatised world – the “best interests” of investors while taxpayers support low-paid staff and the aged have to suffer the consequences.

Yet it needn't be this way. Whilst the performance of the French economy is currently being derided, it is still larger (and companies more successful) than the UK's economy. This is in spite of its Code du Travail (employers regulations regarding workers) weighing in at more than 2kg. Look how many successful (publicly-owned in some cases) French companies operate here in the UK - Alcatel, Alstom, Astrium (in Corsham!), ATOS (running our disability claims system!), AXA, EDF, Lafarge (cement), Sodexo (services including works canteens), SNCF, Thales (defence, aerospace, transport - offices in Reading) and so on.

In France with its highly-regulated companies, 57 per cent of institutional care facilities are public facilities, about 27 per cent are private not-for-profit facilities and around 16 per cent are private for-profit facilities. Rather than deriding the French way, I think we should more use it as a model.

The email exchange

Michelle,

Dear Reader (yes, you),

You may wonder (but you probably don't) why I have an ongoing dialogue with the prospective Tory candidate for the Chippenham constituency on these pages. Well, for one thing, I just happen to be on her mailing list. But the other reason is that the North Wiltshire constituency (currently and in its former life when it was Chippenham) has been Tory since the collapse of the Liberal vote (and the party) in the 1920s. So there is no point in dialogue here; in fact there is no point in trotting off to the polling station here. I must be barmy - I have voted in every election since 1964 (thirteen general elections I believe) and my vote has never counted towards anything. With our postcode lottery, first-past-the-post system, voting in safe seats (unless you vote for the 'sitting' party) is an absolutely futile exercise - 50 years of worthless voting in my case.

Anyway I should, perhaps, have been more expansive in my response to Michelle Donelan’s latest, 20^th March 2015, email.

Thatcher’s monetarist policy of reducing inflation and its corollary of high unemployment, which rose from 1.4 million in 1979 to 3.2 million in 1984, was the seedbed of our supposed benefits ‘culture’ which has been so derided by the present government.

In 1986 deregulation of financial markets, the Big Bang, was the seedbed of the creation of financial ‘instruments’ to make money through, for example, packaging debt, derivatives (whatever they may be), futures – all sorts of exotic, imprudent methods of investment gambling. The complexity of this imprudence was bound to end in tears and it did, after American (subprime) mortgage debt effectively precipitated the 2007 financial crash (and none of our high-paid, expert City executives whose inflated salaries are necessary to attract the “best” people, saw it coming) . The lending of money, in the US, to those that couldn’t afford repayments had been reflected in the UK since the 80s. Maxed out on your credit card? We’ll increase your spending limit. Or another bank will give you new card without compunction. When I worked in Belgium, I had a credit card with a Belgian bank. The monthly limit was 2,500 euro and the total amount spent in month A was automatically taken from my bank account in month B – so no possibility of accumulating debt. Contrast the UK where banks positively encouraged people to accumulate debt – the result of deregulation, demutualisations and imprudence. And who had to bail out the high-rolling, irresponsible, deregulated bankers – you did, my dear taxpaying reader. And the b******s (there’s six stars there!) still take their bonuses.

A property-owning democracy – bloomin’ marvellous.  However, speculators or buy-to-rent, millionaire (or multi-millionaire) landlords now own a substantial percentage of ex-council property. It was first revealed by Danny Dorling (geography professor at Oxford) in his 2013 book All that is Solid that Charles Gow, the son of Ian Gow, Thatcher’s minister who presided over the Right to Buy scheme, is a housing tycoon, owning more than forty (perhaps ninety-three according to another source) ex-council flats in one London estate alone. A report published in January 2013 by London Assembly member Tom Copley, From Right to Buy to Buy to Let,showed that 36% of homes sold under Right to Buy in London (52,000 homes!) were in the hands of under-regulated, private landlords. So the Right to Buy scheme has resulted in multi-millionaire private landlords renting ex-council properties (often through councils) to tenants, many of whom are on housing benefit subsidised by the taxpayer! Get the picture? The great council house sell-off has culminated in the rich taking advantage and you, my dear taxpaying reader, subsidising the rents of their tenants. The seedbed of today’s supposed housing crisis.

The mantras “hard working people”, “the mess left by the last government” and so on have been programmed at Tory madrassas and trumpeted by their mouthpieces for five years – history, twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools (thanks Rudyard)!