Getting The Message Out!

Leverington Common
At the Leverington Parish Council meeting this week I witnessed the power of local politics in action!  A group of concerned villagers brought their case to the parish detailing a local traffic danger spot - Leverington Common.  Passionate, eloquent and impressive, they spoke with a united voice and made a clear and powerful case.  The Parish Council, to their credit, took the worries on board and vowed to work with them to convince the District and County councils of the need for investment in improvements that would help reduce the potential for a serious accident in the area.  I met the group after the meeting and listened to their very valid comments.  There was no doubt in my mind that this was a cause I needed to throw myself into.  As a prospective candidate for the County Council seat I really have no influence right now (you have to win an election first – roll on June 4th and a chance to make a difference!) but I promised them that I would stand right with them in getting something done.  This is another of those situations where the traffic authority wont do the work because there are other locations which need the resources and have a “higher record of accidents”.  While that sounds reasonable from a purely logical point of view, it does seem to suggest that blood must be spilt before work will be done.  Surely, with local folk showing such solidarity of purpose, we should be able to push for preventative safety measures too?  I think so, anyway, and that’s what I’ll be working towards.

National Service
This week, I have been asked to sit on one side of a structured debate panel at the Fens Conservative Future Pizza & Politics evening.  The motion being considered is : “This house would see a return of National Service.”  For anybody who has never been involved in a structured debate before, the point is to give both sides a good airing.  You can be tasked with arguing for a case which doesn’t necessarily reflect your own views (as I have… I’m arguing against, when I can see the value of National Service all too well.)  It’s an interesting chance to bring ideas into the public forum and get all sorts of takes on the argument.  While preparing my three-minute presentation, which is the opposite of my actual view, I found that I was not as open-minded as I had surmised.  All sorts of challenging arguments against are fairly difficult to equate with my own current opinion.  As such, I’ve had to revise my real-life stance from ‘in favour’ to ‘sceptical’.  Here, then, is the absolute value of debate for debate’s sake.  Forced to think something through from the other side, and argue against your own personal position, is a genuine learning experience. If you have some time free on Friday night and are in the area, come along to Pizza & Politics.  It’ll be a very interesting evening.

Parliament At It’s Finest
The death of David Cameron’s son this week was a terrible tragedy.  I cannot express the sympathy I feel in words.  Parliament’s response, from all sides, was a fine example of decency and honour.  Even Gordon Brown, for whom I generally have nothing but disdain, sounded earnest and sincere.  In a moment of deep sadness parliament did us proud with their compassion.

Deflation
Governments live in fear of the word.  Banks tremble before its dark and awesome majesty.  They would have us believe that a deflationary environment is the worst of all things.  Of course, the picture isn’t as clear as all that.  During a period of deflation, money goes up in value.  Each day that passes, the money you have is worth more.  So if you have savings, or a good reliable income, or if you are a creditor, you will find deflation rather less than an unhappy situation.  If you are a low earner you don’t get all these benefits, but you do still find your lower wage goes a lot further as the cost of living drops.  The people who are really hurt by deflation would be anybody who owes a huge amount of money.  This is because the debt, with each day of deflation, increases.  Now, who do we know who really owes a lot of money.  Trillions, say?  Oh yes, it’s the government isn’t it?  But don’t worry, they can just print fictional money, pay what they owe with that, and force the country back into inflation again.  What do we call it when people deliberately play with the economy to make themselves consistently richer?  Corruption, isn’t it?

Gordon Brown Wants To Ban 100% Mortgages, Does He?
Well, of course he does.  Two thousand-nine is  ”invent a stupid initiative year” and he has to junk one out at least every forty seconds or he’ll lose a bet with Jack Straw.  Please, somebody tell me, what business is it of government to tell banks how much they can lend?  It’s private business, despite their best attempts to make it otherwise with our favourite high-street brands.  Government has a job, but this isn’t it.  What government should be doing is making sure that banks lend a reasonable amount that people can afford to pay.  If thats 100%, or 500% or whatever, fine.  The important thing is that the bank does due dilligence to make sure its borrowers are within their means.  Banks that deliberately lend more than somebody can afford, or who make no attempt to even check how much their customers can afford, should be directed to the courts – who should have the power to write off the debt due in its entirety.  Then, I suspect, we’d see sensible lending come back very quickly indeed.

Pizza & Politics
I’m quite excited about this coming week, and that’s because we’ve reached Pizza&Politics II (The Revenge of Pizza & Politics?)  Following the phenomenal success in March last year, FensCF are bringing their flagship event to Wisbech for another run of intelligent debate, friendly congregation and a huge amount of PIZZA to be Scoffed.  The event is aimed at anybody from 14 through to 30 years of age.  Coming To Wisbech on Friday 27th February 2009, 7.00pm to 9.00pm at the Oasis Centre.  Free Pizza, Free Soft Drink, Free Your Mind.  Special Guests:- Malcolm Moss MP and Stephen Barclay PPC.  Come along, it’ll be a great night!

Trillions In Debt
Many of today’s newspapers have the headline talking about how we are now Two Trillion in debt.  Just to show you how many zeroes that is : £2,000,000,000,000.  It equates to £33,000 pounds each.  If you are a pregnant woman right now, your child will be born into a debt of £33,000. 

So when you receive your oh-so-generous £250.00 cheque from the government which is supposed to kick-start savings for your new baby, that’ll leave a £32,750 outstanding balance.  Let’s hope they don’t start sending red letters too soon!  The sad thing about all this is that it’s almost certainly under-estimated.  Yes, it takes into account the banks we part-own.  But it’s only guessing the liabilities of those banks and its being optimistic in its guesses (in my humble opinion). 

Nor is it taking into account those mysterious PFIs (Public Fund Initiatives) that Gordon Brown is so keen not to talk about.  In a year’s time we’ll have the costs of welfare soaring through unemployment, massive falls in income from business taxation, and a pound whose value could be so debased by ‘Quantitative Easing’ (creating money via magic wand) that it will look a sorry relation to today’s already-damaged sterling currency.

I suspect the real figure is much higher.  With every month that passes it will continue to climb.  Our Prime Minister, like so many debt-laden individuals before him, is dealing with it by dropping the outstanding bills into a bottom drawer and taking on more debt to create the illusion of wealth.  That’s understandable (if unwise) from a stress- and worry-worn debtor who is out of options.  But Gordon Brown isn’t doing it with his money.  He’s doing it with our money.   Or rather… our future money.  He ran out of ‘our current money’ years ago.

The Madness Of Printing Money
Economics is a subject that can be mystifying to those who haven’t studied it, or who aren’t confident with mathematics.  It isn’t really that tricky, it’s just that economists have that infuriating tendency to bury everything in their impenetrable economist’s language. 

In the world you have a certain amount of money chasing a certain amount of products.  If you suddenly increase the amount of money in circulation, the knock-on effect is to increase the cost of the products.  Markets, given a little ‘time’ to adjust, automatically fix the prices on products to equal the amount of money available to buy them.

 As a very basic example, if two men have £10.00 each to spend on an item they both want badly, and if nobody else wants to buy the item, then the item is probably worth £10.00.    Why?  Because they both badly want it and will pay what they have to spend to prevent the other getting it instead.  The most they have is £10.00 so that is all it can hope to achieve in sale price.  If you print some magic-money and give both men another £10.00 each, what happens to the value of the item?  It increases to £20.00.   Why?  Because this is the same situation!  You’ve just increased what the man had to spend from £10.00 to £20.00.  So £20.00 becomes the new ‘highest price the item can achieve.’  There’s ‘Printing Money’ in action, inflationary by its nature!

‘Real’ economies are, of course, vastly more complicated.  Even in my simple example it’s easy to bring up questions.  “What if both buyers clubbed together…?”  “What if they both agreed to only pay a fiver privately?”  However you look at it though the basic premise remains the same. 
Print more money = higher prices. 
If the government pursues its plan to wildly print money, which they tell us is to prevent deflation (arguable), they will in actuality cause inflation.  Possibly massive inflation.  

This is, of course, if you even accept the reason behind this is that the government wishes to prevent deflation.  Might it actually be that the government is fearful that it will be unable to raise money on the bond market?  Might they be terrified that every crazy spending binge they plan will fall flat if they find themselves so mistrusted by the lenders of the world that they can’t borrow the money?  Am I being paranoid?  Maybe.  But if so, ask yourself this.  Why is the government quietly changing laws to make it easier to print money without telling anybody how much, or when they do it?  Why is the Bank Of England being so cagey about how much it plans to print, or the mechanisms it will use to circulate the new money?  Laws and practices that have remained unchanged for hundreds of years are quietly being altered with only one obvious outcome that I can see.. to print a whole LOT of money.  And to keep everyone in the dark about it as long as possible.

Quantitative Easing (Money Printing) is the ultimate stealth tax.  To the average working person its almost invisible.  It ‘appears’ to be just the ‘workings of the market’.  “Prices rise,” people say, “But the government aren’t in control of prices, the markets are.”  Not true.  When the government prints a mountain of money and uses it to pay off it’s debts (through convoluted routes) the value of every pound you own falls.  That’s a stealth tax.  The most insidious and secretive one of all.

Harriet Harman
There is some talk in the media right now about Harriet Harman being a ‘leader in waiting’ for the Labour Party. I hope so. I really do. Back when Tony Blair was Mister Big and Gordon was trying to oust him I remembering telling everybody it would be the best thing that ever happened to the Conservatives if he managed. (It’s obviously not good news for anybody that he’s destroyed the country, but most of that job was already complete back then, all he did as Prime Minister was put black icing on his rotten cake.) The thing is, whatever you thought about Tony Blair or his politics, there was something like-able about him. He was a good statesman and a good front-man. There is patently very little to ‘like’ about Gordon Brown. While he sat brooding in the background he was fine, but bringing him to the forefront of politics was always going to be a disaster. Well, Harriet Harman is just as bad, if not worse! Substituting her for Brown is a wonderful idea… for the opposition. In fact the only more detrimental figure I can think of as Labour Leader is Hazel Blears. Now if they chose Mandelson… that might be dangerous. People may not like him, but many do respect him. And these days he has more political weight than most of his team put together.Of course, they made him a Lord, so maybe they realised they needed to keep his ambition for the top position untenable…

Good Manners
David Cameron was interviewed by Iain Dale in Total Politics this week. The interview is very well done and extremely interesting. (You can read it here.) For the most part I enjoyed Mr. Cameron’s answers and thought he sounded confident and level-headed. There was, however, one exception, which worried me. This is the extract in question:-

Q: How will you defend the right to offend?
A: This goes back to the ‘do you listen’ question because on the one hand you don’t want someone inciting hatred of gays but on the other hand you want to live in a society where people don’t feel their free speech is restricted if it is about humour. So there is a balance. We all rage against political correctness and there’s lots of political correctness which is ridiculous- silly health and safety worries that stop children grazing a knee on an outward bounds adventure. We have got to get rid of that. But there’s one bit of political correctness which is terribly important and that’s about politeness. I have a disabled son and I don’t want people to call him a spastic. You are a gay man, you don’t want someone to call you a poof. If you have a black friend, you don’t want someone to call them something offensive. It’s about manners and I think what we’ve got to do is frame this debate in a sense of what is good manners and politeness and what is common sense.

Now this seems to suggest that the Conservative Leader (leader of the party I’m a member of and support) thinks that we should ‘legislate’ good manners.  Perhaps I’ve misunderstood his comment.  I certainly hope so.  Good manners are important.  Vital even.  But it’s the place of friends, family and parents to teach and enforce it, not government.  The state should have no say whatsoever in what people are allowed to say, think or feel.  Each one of us has a right to be a jackass if we wish.  Free Speech is not free if you only get to say what people want to hear…

The Spring Forum
The Conservative Spring forum is just around the corner.  I haven’t been before but this year I’ll be attending, along with a considerable contingent of the Fens Conservative Future group.  You’ll know them.  They’re the guys and girls who will be wearing the T-Shirts that say “Putting the Party In Politics”.  I expect a couple of days of political discourse and a couple of evenings of mayhem.  We won’t be painting the town red though.  We’ll be painting it blue.

The Great Free Speech Debate
Much time has been given to the government decision to refuse Geert Wilder’s entry into the UK.  He was invited by members of the House Of Lords to be present at a screening of his short documentary, ‘Fitna‘.  The argument has three sides.  One group thinks he is a nasty piece of work and just shouldn’t be allowed in.  The government seems to agree with that.  The second side thinks that he has something valid to say about the dangers of ‘Islamisation’ in the West and shares some of his sentiments.  The UKIP party (and, presumably, the BNP) seem to be part of that camp.  Finally there’s the group that don’t agree with him, but who think we must stand up for his right to say what he wants to say.  I’m in that camp.

Look: Free Speech means people have the right to say whatever they like, as long as it does not incite to crime or violence, and is not perjury.  That means that people will sometimes say things you don’t like, don’t agree with, or don’t want to hear.  But their right to do so is also your right to do so!  In my opinion, there is no other right which is as important as Free Speech.  Without it, there is no way to defend any of the other rights we hold dear.  We must protect our freedom diligently and despite the fact that sometimes it is painful to do so.  We must even defend those who we vehemently disagree with, because if we do not, sooner or later, it will be our own right to free speech which falls foul of someone’s censorship.  Or it will be our friends or loved one’s lips who are forced closed by the state. 

The government should have let Geert Wilder in.  He is not (presently) a convicted criminal.  He was invited by the House Of Lords.  You cannot defeat a debate by pretending it doesn’t exist, or by sticking your head in the sand.  The battle of ideas must be won by challenge and intelligent comment.  Not by narrow-minded censorship.

LabourList & Derek Draper
Unless you are an avid follower of political discussion this won’t be of any interest to you at all.  But there’s this guy called Derek Draper and he’s in charge of the Labour Party’s attempt to do battle in the ‘blogosphere’ (a bunch of independent folk who talk about politics on the web.)  He set up a website called LabourList (you can find a link to it on this page.)  Then he proceeded to get into a catfight with leading right-wing bloggers Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale.  It’s all gotten pretty childish and petty on both sides.  Which is a shame because all three of these guys are interesting, passionate about their cause, and respected in their relevent quarters.  I suppose you could argue that they are bouncing off one another in the standard political way.  But it would be so much more useful if they were using their obvious intellects to debate actual issues.  Maybe I’m being naive.

Wisbech & District Conservative Association – AGM
Wednesday 11th was the day of the Wisbech & District Branch of the Conservative Association’s AGM.  It was an interesting meeting with a reasonable turnout.  There was some discussion about the proposal to pedestrianise Wisbech Town Center, which is a really thorny issue locally.  It’s a helter-skelter story that is just too complex to go into here.  Suffice to say, there is much disagreement about what should be done.  MUCH disagreement!

Officers were elected for the next year.  Bruce Wegg remained chairman.  Yours Truly remained Vice Chairman.  Simon King remained Secretary.  The only change was Town Mayor And Cllr. Jonathan Farmer elected to stand down and allow the job of treasurer to pass to Samantha Hoy, the secretary of the Fens Conservative Future group.   

Skiing In Euroland
I’ve just come back from a week’s skiing in Kitzbuhel, Austria. Before anybody accuses me of being a ‘fat cat’ can I just say that I generally don’t take any other holidays all year, that I work extremely long and demanding hours, and that I save up in order to do this with a large group of old friends each winter. Even so, with our current economic climate, like everybody else I’m going to need to reassess if I can afford to do the same things next year. One thing I noticed while being forced to trade in the Euro is just how very expensive everything was. Not just because of our poor exchange rate, nor just because ski resorts tend to be expensive everywhere. The basic cost of everything for those in the Eurozone is just much higher than the amounts we pay for the same items. The friends who I travel with are, in general, quite a successful bunch, yet they were all talking about how the recession…
(or is it depression Gordon?)… is affecting them. Another thing I couldn’t help but notice is that everybody had an opinion on the current government and, with one single dedicated left-wing exception, those opinions were not pretty. These are not political people, not the sort of folk who are given to care about the government beyond their yearly tax bill. But the venom that was apparent when the Prime Minister’s name was mentioned was all too clear. That, even if there were no other evidence at all, would be enough to convince me that Labour are doomed. Hat tip to Dain Jensen, who organised this year’s trip and was responsible for it being such a success.

Free Speech
We’ve got Princes using racist language, Carol Thatcher called people ‘Golliwog’ and the press enjoying the whole furore with their usual gusto. I’ve been reading it all with increasing surprise that nobody ever seems to say anything that gets to the heart of the matter. The whole argument seems to be whether or not these public figures “should be allowed to” say things which may be deemed, by some, to be racially, religiously or ethnically-offensive. Frankly, I think this debate is missing the point. I don’t think that the government (or anybody else) has any right to tell people how they should speak, what they are ‘allowed’ to say, or what opinion they should have about others. We used to have a thing called Free Speech and it meant that, as long as you were not committing perjury, or inciting to violence or crime, your right to say what you felt (however unpleasant or unappealing to others) was protected by law. I believe in free speech passionately. Even when people are saying things I don’t accept, don’t want to hear, or find offensive. When the Powers That Be try to smother free speech they don’t change anyone’s mind, or win any sort of debate, they only shove the whole thing underground, while increasing their mindless ability to meddle with our lives. This assault on free speech, aka political-correctness, is an insidious and dangerous attack on our liberty. Having said that, Carol Thatcher is clearly an unpleasant, mindless idiot. Anybody who thinks that using the term ‘Golliwog’ to refer to somebody who is black, or partially-black, is the right thing to do is worthy only of contempt. And that’s the right way to deal with people who talk like this. Not by trying to enforce some kind of ‘right way to speak’ or by resorting to top-down control. But by trusting decent folk to take a look at the individual in question and realise just what sort of nasty piece of work they clearly are.

The House Of Lords
There are some dodgy folk in every arena in the world. It doesn’t matter where you go. There are always people involved for the wrong reasons, or in it for themselves, or who are seduced away from an honest path. The wrong thing to do is to presume that because there are one or two bad eggs, the whole carton is bad. The press love to tell you the dirty stories because that is what sells papers. But The House Of Lords does its job extremely well, despite ill-advised tampering by the most recent government, and is full of honest, decent people. This is true in every arena in the world. Let’s get rid of the bad eggs as and when we find them, without letting it colour our opinions in general. That’s a healthy way to deal with sleaze, isn’t it? I’m tired of letting opportunistic journalists force one knee-jerk concession after another. It doesn’t lead to improvement. It leads to chaos.