The Fisk

Phil Taylor: Fisking fiction

Sunday night's Waking the Dead was a great example of the BBC view of the world, ie Tory government bad.  It featured a murder on Black Wednesday which most commentators identify as the point at which the Tories lost their reputation for economic management.  It also happens to be the foundation of the UK's relative outperformance economically speaking for the last fifteen years - an inheritance from the previous Conservative administration that Chancellor Gordon Brown has never had the good grace to acknowledge. 

 

Trevor Eve's character Peter Boyd filled his young assistant in on what Black Wednesday meant - it cost taxpayers £4 billion and there were £3 million unemployed. 

 

Let's look at this in more detail. In 1997 the Treasury totalled up the cost of Black Wednesday. This came out a £3.3 billion.

 

Sure this is a lot of cash but just about everyone in the commentariat thought that we should be in the ERM, even Gordon Brown (see what Sam Brittan has to say).  So this was a decision taken with the grain of pervading expert opinion that turned out wrong.  The current Chancellor Gordon Brown never got such a bad press for his decision to sell gold.  This was taken against the grain of expert opinion and cost £2 billion .  In terms of financial loss pretty much an equivalent cock up.  Brown got away with it. Lamont did not. 

 

As Samuel Brittan wrote in a paper for The Institute of Economic Affairs in October 2004 (Page 62):

"One favourable surprise after Black Wednesday was the speed with which an alternative policy was put together.  Nearly all of the characteristics of the present - and so far successful - stable monetary regime were announced within a few weeks of the exit from the ERM.  These included the inflation target; the Bank of England's quarterly inflation report; the formal monthly meetings, followed, when Kenneth Clarke became Chancellor in 1993, by publication of the minutes of these meetings.  These paved the way for operational independence of the Bank and the establishment of the Monetary Policy Committee.  Many of these policies were first contained in embryonic form in a letter dated 8 October 1992, from Norman Lamont to the Conservative chairman of the House of Commons Treasury Committee.  They apparently emerged from a meeting between the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and senior Treasury officials in Brighton, on the fringes of the Conservative party conference."

A quick trip to the National Statistics website reveals the numbers behind the 3 million unemployed claim.  The September 1992 figure was 2.85 million.  So rounding it up you do indeed get to 3 million.  By the May 1997 election the figure was down to 2.06 million and the latest figure stands at 1.70 million but the direction of travel is upwards again.  The reality is that unemployment is an intractable problem but it got a lot better in the four and a half years after Black Wednesday, it improved at a slower rate for 8 years under New Labour but the trend has been in the wrong direction for 18 months now.

 

Anyway our fictional copper Boyd doesn't know much economics.

Phil Taylor: Burning books on the public payroll

Lee Jasper was the ring leader of a rag bag of self-styled anti-fascist campaigners who were hounding English National Ballet prima ballerina Simone Clarke on Friday.  The protest happened on a Friday afternoon so I guess Jasper, who is the London Mayor's extremely highly paid director for equalities and policing, must have been doing it in work time.  At least most of the rest of us were at work on Friday afternoon.  He was interviewed by Andrew Bomford (approx 16 min in) on behalf of BBC Radio 4's Broadcasting House which went out on Sunday morning.  Here is the interview and my observations.

Lee Jasper (introducing himself): "Lee Jasper, secretary of the National Assembly Against Racism and advisor to the mayor Ken Livingstone."

It seems that Jasper does not understand basic concepts like conflict of interest.  Is Jasper a local government officer or an activist?  He seems to want to have his cake and eat it.  His organisation received £50K from the Mayor in 2004/5 and £60K a year for three years from 2005/6 to 2008/9.  Meanwhile Jasper has received a salary from the GLA for many years. 

Andrew Bomford: "We would know nothing about her political views if it wasn't for that Guardian article which outed her in the first place.  So yes, she talked to the Daily Mail, but presumably they approached her and asked her the questions." 

Bomford quite reasonably points out that she has not thrust herself into the media spotlight. 

LJ: "Well, it's morally reprehensible for a modern multicultural society like London.  It's vital that we defend multiculturalism.  And the air of democracy doesn't extend to people who have racist and fascist views."

Jasper splutters incoherently.  We are not sure what it is that is morally reprehensible.  I suspect that if he spelt it out it wouldn't sound that bad really.  The consensus around multiculturalism has been massively rolled back over 2006 and only a few people who depend on the idea for their income are defending it anymore.  I think Jasper will find that the surest cure for racism and fascism is the "air of democracy" or more accurately perhaps free speech.  Jasper's view seems to be that anyone who questions mass immigration is a racist and fascist and should be gagged.  For him multiculturalism is king even if people don't want it.

AB: "Do you think that it's wrong for people in her sort of position, public positions, to hold any sort of extreme views?  What about on the left wing for example?  You know, would it be wrong to support organisations like Herri Batasuna or Hamas or Hezbollah and have the kind of position which she holds?"

Bomford now goes off piste and draws a moral equivalence between a legally constituted, if simple minded, British political party that makes no overt threats of violence to anyone and three organisation that are either officially proscribed terrorist organisations and illegal in Britain or act as mouthpieces for such organisations.  It seems if you are left wing you are bad if you actually kill people but if you are right wing you are bad if you just say stuff. 

LJ: "Can you imagine the furore if she was a member of some proscribed, so-called Muslim extremist organisation?  We would never hear the last of it.  I think it is not different for the extreme right.  We have a ballerina who has declared her view, knows and understands that the party is considered racist, and is still positively advocating for them.  She is in the public domain.  She's paid by the public purse.  Simply not good enough.

Jasper endorses the moral equivalence and then distorts Clarke's views, effectively calling her a racist.  Jasper cannot work out that it is inappropriate for he himself to be "paid by the public purse" and to go around harassing people at their place of work with loud-hailers. 

 

All of the people interviewed by the media over the last few days on this subject were associated with the National Assembly Against Racism, Unite Against Fascism or Love Music, Hate Racism all of which are funded by or connected with the London Mayor and his agit prop on the rates style of local government.