Coalition Shambles

John Ward has a good article on the disastrous mess the UK Coalition Government has become, in his blog "The Slog" this weekend, linked here. Read it all I would suggest, but merely quote the conclusion:

For a while, most of us were asleep – and then just dozy or distracted. But the loss of job, services and home alongside rocketing costs will sober every last one of us up….for be it uncles, kids, siblings or parents, we are all going to share the experience of seeing the unthinkable come to pass.

How those events are handled will decide a lot more than whether we stay in a rapidly crumbling EU or avoid debt default. Which is why I do still want a stable, sensible Government to prevail: because the alternative of pie-in-the-sky pc aided and abetted by the dead hand of a corrupt State would be the end for anyone who genuinely understands the responsibility of being British.

But I’ve given up on this lot. They are governing in the only way they know how, and it is nowhere near enough to guarantee our survival in the harsh world that must pertain for the next decade or so. Somewhere between Etonian toffs and obese bar stewards lie the rest of us. All we ask is a Government that reflects our decency, commonsense and courage. It surely cannot be too much to ask; but equally surely, it won’t happen unless more of us get off our backsides, get together on the internet, and get real about what really matters in life.

Cameron, Clegg and the Titanic

George Osborne's Child Benefit Cut and its Timing

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, we are told, considers himself a political strategist. Why then announce a cut to universal child benefit at your own party conference, which will bear most heavily on the income group which provides your party's core support yet will only come into effect some three years into the future?

The first assumption I make is that Osborne believes that the Coalition will (note; not 'can' but 'will') survive the full five years in power. Interestingly Parliament will almost certainly at some stage need to have its powers further neutered if such is to be guaranteed. A General Election in May 2013, a probable date in my earlier calculations of likliehoods would now appear totally out of the question coming one month after the money is actually cut at the start of the financial year.

A rational and consistent approach to reducing universality by cutting heating allowances and free bus passes for the over 65s would have been consistent and logical, dispelling the impression that there is some form of political process in play.

The greatest mystery arise from the deferment of the cut to 2013. Surely any unpopular move such as this is best brought in as far from the next election as possible, therefore as soon as possible. As austerity and the huge government borrowings of one pound in every four being spent today is the ostensible reason then logically the cut should be effective at the latest at the start of the next tax year or lumped in with any other necessary fiscal changes coming from the spending cuts to be announced later this month.

There is no discernible logic behind the change or the timing of its announcement.

What I believe we have seen is a drawing of the line at a level of income where a future combined political party will look for support at the next general election when the coalition will plan to run only joint candidates. Cameron and Osborne will thus have achieved that of which Blair could only dream in his long gone Labour Party Conference speech, the destruction of Conservatism.

Cameron and Osborne are now betting that their Tory supportes are too dense to perceive this reality, a calculation in which they are probably correct.

This post will also appear on the blog Teetering Tories.

Cameron/Clegg and the EU

There is an interesting, if rather flatteringly effusive review of the Coalition Government two months from its formation by Peter Oborne in the Daily Mail this morning which is linked here.

Absent from this review is the area most crucial to the future of Britain, namely the crisis within the EU and its common currency.

I commented in depth on Ironies Too this morning, link here, on the Telegraph's schizophrenia over the EU. Unhappily the Mail itself seems to prefer to join the Coalition co-leaders themselves in ignoring this most important of all issues for the country they now govern.

Could the EU crisis, the main difference that divides the two parties which form the coalition, perhaps not be used both to resolve the crisis within the EU itself, but also perhaps prevent an early destruction of the coalition concept by disaffected MPs from both parties on the Government's backbenches?

Britain has a driving interest in maintaining a prosperous Continent of Europe freely trading in a partnership that above all values the wealth brought by its diversities of backgrounds, languages and cultures.

A joint party political coalition committee, meeting in public and drawn from leading Conservative MP Eurosceptics and MP Liberal Democrat EU enthusiasts, charged to suggest means of resolving the single currency crisis and future for the pound for presentation to the Cabinet, may well aid the Coalition in resolving how it might in future proceed on this thorny issue and even perhaps prevent the EU crisis becoming the reason for its own demise.

Somewhere, some politicians in the EU should be solely concerned with this issue. It is not a matter for resolution by either Germany and France battling out their disagreements, nor by a dark manipulation by the EU Commission and the ECB working in tandem.

Countering the EU grab for the City of London

Federalist thinking on the takeover by the EU of the City of London may be read in detail from this link to a PDF Document issued by The Federal Trust last March.

The frightening detail of the exact proposals whereby National Financial Regulators will be over ruled by EU technocrats are detailed in the appendix which is reproduced below:

Financial regulation: Britain’s next European challenge?

APPENDIX
EUROPEAN FINANCIAL REGULATION:
THE PROPOSED INSTITUTIONS

The European Systemic Risk Council (ESRC) will monitor andassess potential threats to financial stability that arise from macroeconomic developments and from developments within the financial system as a whole (“macro-prudential supervision.”) The creation of the
ESRC is designed to limit the vulnerability of the European financial system to interconnected, sectoral and cross-sectoral systemic risks.

The members of the ESRC will be the President of the ECB, national central bank governors, the chairmen of the European Supervisory Authorities and a representative of the Commission. Each central bank governor will be accompanied by one senior representative of the national supervisory authorities as observer. Decisions of the ESRC will be taken by a simple majority. The de Larosière report recommends that the chairperson of the ESRC should be the ECB President. A small steering committee will prepare and administer ESRC meetings. The ECB will provide the Secretariat to the ESRC, as well as analytical, administrative and logistic support.

The ESRC will issue warnings and recommendations, whether of a general nature or to individual Member States, with a specified timeline for the relevant policy response. These warnings and/or recommendations will be channelled through the ECOFIN Council and/or the new European Supervisory Authorities. The ESRC will also be responsible for monitoring compliance with its recommendations, based on reports from the addressees.

The ESRC will not have any legally binding powers. However, the ESRC may be expected to exert major influence on the addressees of warnings/recommendations through the high quality of its analysis. The ESRC will decide in each case whether a recommendation should be kept
confidential.

The European System of Financial Supervisors (ESFS) will consist of three new European Supervisory Authorities, i.e., a European Banking Authority (EBA), a European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA), and a European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA.) These new European Supervisory Authorities will take on all the missions of the current Committees of Supervisors, but in addition exercise increased responsibilities, defined legal powers and greater authority. They will also contribute to the development of a single set of harmonised rules, improve the supervision of cross-border institutions by developing common supervisory requirements and approaches and help settle possible disputes between nationalsupervisors.

The focal point for day to day supervision will remain at the national level, with national supervisors remaining responsible for the supervision of individual entities, for example with respect to capital adequacy. This reflects the contemporary reality that the financial means for rescuing financial institutions remains at the Member State level and with nationaltax payers, as the current crisis has demonstrated. The chairpersons and secretary generals of the European Supervisory Authorities are expected to be full-time independent professionals. The chairpersons will be nominated after an open competition. The appointments will be confirmed by the European Parliament and will be valid for five years.

The European Supervisory Authorities’ decisions on technical rules will be taken, through the board structure, by qualified majority based on the Treaty weighting for Member States. The European Supervisory Authorities will be accountable to the Council, the European Parliament and the European Commission.

The main tasks of the Authorities will be the following:

1. To ensure a single set of harmonised rules throughout the Union, by developing binding technical standards in specific areas and on the basis of criteria which will be specified in Community legislation; and drawing up interpretative guidelines.

2. To ensure the consistent application of EU rules.

3. To ensure a common supervisory culture and consistent supervisory
practice.

4. To exercise full supervisory powers for some specific entities, such as
credit rating agencies and EU central counterparty clearing houses.

5. To ensure a co-ordinated response in crisis situations.

6. To collect micro-prudential information.

7. To undertake an international role on behalf of the European Union.

8. To ensure that decisions taken under the above mechanisms do not directly impinge on the fiscal responsibilities of the Member States

(Emphasis added by blog editor!)
++++

Cameron and Clegg will therefore soon have to decide whether or not they will vote against the takeover of the City of London by the EU, given that the body of the linked document makes clear the EU will be prepared under 'enhanced cooperation' to proceed against a UK NO vote, as described in the body of the report on page 18 as follows:

If Mr. Cameron did decide to please his party, already uneasy at his refusal to hold a referendum on the now-ratified Lisbon Treaty, by refusing to endorse the institutional proposals of Mr. de Larosière, the consequences could be dramatic. The political momentum behind the proposals is such that the great majority of Member States favourable to institutional reform would almost certainly be prepared to vote down the United Kingdom in the Council on this issue. Nor can it be excluded that France and Germany in particular, whose co-ordination of policy on these matters was reaffirmed at the recent France-German Summit, might be willing to use the Lisbon Treaty’s provisions for ‘enhanced cooperation’ in order to set up the desired new institutional structure. This would be both a destabilizing setback for the Conservative Party at the beginning of its period in office, and damaging to the position of the City of London, where substantial continental European representation has come over recent years to be a constituent feature of the City’s functioning. It is difficult to believe that British self-isolation from central European financial regulatory bodies would be compatible in the long term with a continuing major European presence in the City.

Independent's Hamish Mcrae wrong again!

The article defending civil service salaries is here. My response, which the new comment facility of that newspaper refuses to accept, would have been posted as follows:

I regret that with the present debt crisis this attitude is unsustainable. The deficit and near bankrupt condition of the nation with the State failing at almost every interface with the general public and a grossly overstaffed civil service those at its head should necessarily be the first to bear the brunt of the earliest cuts.

To carry the country along with all the other austerity to come, the pensions of the retired mandarins and ex-MPs would ideally be single out to receive the first and deepest cuts. Unhappily this will of course never occur, thus the nation will be condemned to continuing and ever growing impoverishment.

Re-instate David Laws NOW!

A remarkable article in the Daily Mail today, here, reveals the disgusting travel scam run by Danny 'boy' Alexander and his wife at the cost to taxpayers of thirteen thousand pounds.

Meantime in The Independent, linked here, it is reported that David Laws, who appears to have been the most sensitive towards public expenses of all MPs who have hit the headlines in the expenses scandal, is quite typically and understandably considering quitting politics.

Cameron and Clegg, Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister titularly should now show some leadership! Cajole Mr Laws, by whatever means to return to his post and re-summon Parliament today to make an emergency announcement pledging their full backing for Mr Laws in his awesome task of cutting the national deficit and DEBT.

Danny Alexander will not do!