Britain: What happens after the General Election? The package of promises falls apart when confronted with reality.

 

A few days ago came the news that life for 4 million people in the UK will turn into a nightmare if they don´t manage to regularize their visas turning paper visas into digital visas. 4 million people? How much can the state apparatus do from now until 31 December 2024? 

How many people are needed to locate and process 4 millon visas in such a short period? But this is a minute dot in terms of things that will need to be done. Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves has formally committed a new Labour government to increase salaries across the entire public sector and Unions are already on a war footing to keep the now Shadow Chacellor of the Exchequer accountable.

The promise about getting rid of Zero Hour Contracts might erode even more public services in an attempt to improve working conditions in the UK and the effect in the private sector must not be underestimated. Faced with the prospect of having to issue regular contracts with all legal requirements, both the public sector and the private sector will struggle.

Grant Shapps as Defence Secretary has been struggling to explain where he is going to find more than 70 billion Pound to beef up the Armed Forces. The same questions will be asked to a new Defense Secretary since Grant Shapps has publicly acknowledged that he believes that the Conservative Party will lose the General Election.

The clock is ticking and many of the faces we see today as symbols of power and decision making will vanish and probably soon to be forgotten. Should announcements made about critical issues be postponed until we know who is going to be in command? Whatever the present authorities say today could be absolutely irrelevant in a few days time. It is a tradition that a new Parliament is not bound to follow what the outgoing Parliament decides.

With a new Parliament, today´s points of reference will vanish. There will be a new political reality. Rachel Reeves has already announced that there will be a new relationship with the European Union. Does this mean the end of Brexit? Reform´s campaign might have a lot to do not with destroying the Conservative Party but with assurances regarding the present relationship with the European Union. the irony is that freedom from any budgetary restrictions gives Britain the necessary flexibility to increase public deficits. We known what happened with the ERM, precursor of the EURO. Will a government headed by Keir Starmer want to fall into the same trap John Major and his government were in before finally deciding to step out of the ERM? What did Tony Blair and Gordon Brown avoid joining the EURO? Precisely because of what happened with the ERM?  

  

In 1997, the Labour government with Gordon Brown as Chancellor of the Exchequer made the Bank of England independent

 

Dear Helen Hayes MP,

What many politicians don't seem to undertand is that:

1) The Bank of England was made an independent organization. It was Gordon Brown MP as Chancellor of the Exchequer that made the Bank of England independent in 1997.

2) The moneys lent by banks don't belong to banks. Banks borrow money to lend. The banks gave people huge amounts of money for people to buy property and must return the said moneys when people pay back loans and pay interest to those they borrowed money from.

Because of this, when people started to default loans, Gordon Brown had to prop up banks so that the financial system would not collapse.

Was Rachel Reed an MP under Tony Blair? Does she know how tha banking system works? If she was an MP then and if she knows how the banking system works, she shoudn't come up with the load of nonsense she has come up about 'banks helping people'. If banks have to borrow money - provided they can come up and borrow money - they will have to borrow money at market values, thus increasing their vulnerability and cutting down their margins. Does the Labour Party want the banking system to collapse?

When banks where capitalized under Labour, there were new rules implemented by :Labour about reserves that had to keep in order to protect peoples' accounts. The division was made between conventional banking and investment banking. Is Rachel Reed suggesting, that safety rules imposed then by the Labour government have to be abandoned?

Is the Labour Party if in government ready to face a massive financial crisis without having reserves to bail out the financial system? I see an unavoidable financial crisis that will lead to a tsunami of strikes in 2024 and beyond. 

 Best regards

Karl Hohenstauffen

Brexit and Nationalisation: Reality and fiction

Brexit and Nationalisation: Reality and fiction

Overnight, with the flick of a switch, Jeremy Corbyn plans to nationalise every single utility company and railway services. Now, apart from the monies needed for such enterprise, who is going to run the said companies and who is going to work for the said companies? Will the top managers and the middle managers want to become state employees? Will the workers want to become state employees?

Will specialized individuals want to work receiving lower salaries? What about the shareholders' position in what looks like a massive expropriation process? We are talking about billons of Pound invested in shares in companies that are valued in the London Exchange. The financial sector is the hearbeat of Britain and anything that affects the heartbeat of Britain can have widespread repercussions.

This proposed nationalisation has little to do with improving services for the general public. It has more to do with increasing the power of the trade unions that was dramatically reduced. In past public companies were used by the Labour Party for political purposes. Governments of a different political persuasion had to contend with the reality that despite having won an election they were often kept hostage by Labour Party controlled trade unions.

It was Tony Blair that despite being the Leader of the Labour Party knew that unless he curbed the powers of some elements within the Trade Union Movement the then Labour Party as it was would be unelectable. So he set out to transform the trade unions. The first thing that he looked at, together with John Prescott, was Clause Four - block vote.

The only way to weaken the influence of the bosses of the trade unions was to implement the rule of "one member, one vote". Having done that, for thirteen years - the Labour government firstly led by Tony Blair and in the end by Gordon Brown, never nationalised any utility companies and didn't nationalise railway services. Why? Because they didn't want to become themselves hostages of the trade unions.

When Labour Party MPs and now former Labour Party MPs speak against Jeremy Corbyn and describing him as dangerous, they know very well that Jeremy Corbyn is trying to turn the clock back in the Labour Party and in the country as a whole. The whole agenda is about power and control. Those led by Jeremy Corbyn want total control and controlling mass media and social media and any form of communication is very much appropriate in a dictatorial regime.

They will also control education in Britain. The idea of abolishing private institutions and the idea of putting everything under the control of a single authority will ensure that those born and growing up in Britain will have to conform to the ideological dictats. We have already seen quite a few examples when people who have different ideas or beliefs are excluded by Student Unions, Colleges and Universities.

At every level, this Labour Party Leadership is leading the nation towards a dictatorial regime dressed as a democracy in which everything you do will be scrutinized by ideological zealots. With this Labour Leadership we are going back to the days before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Massive tax increases, massive borrowing, loss of incentives for private investors, and in a country like the United Kingdom this will mean having to pay ever higher interest rates to attrack people willing to buy state bonds to manage the debt. The reality of low interest rates comes to an end and will go back to boom and bust that in the end will more bust than boom. The moment interests rates start rising homeowners that have mortgages will be hit hard and unable to make payments and we know what happens when this happen. 

Wasn't the banking crisis caused by a crisis in the housing market in the USA when people could not afford to make mortgage payments and many lenders found themselves with massive debts and devalued housing stocks? This is called negative equity. The words was repossesion. Thousands upon thousands of homes repossessed and the state having to go out and rescue banking institutions to prevent total collapse of the economy. 

And we will get to the moment when borrowing will not be borrowing to invest or to pay for public services. It will be borrowing to pay debts and for little else. At this stage, Britain becomes a Third World Country, no more the thriving economy of today, but a country at the mercy of foreign lenders. This is the cost of the approach proposed by the present Leaderdhip of the Labour Party. 

For Jeremy Corbyn, Brexit is an unexpected issue to have to deal with. The real issue is the creation of a completey different kind of Britain. Some say that he is a secret supporter of Brexit because the enormity of the changes he plans to implement would not fit in in a free and democratic society. This is not just about Political Correctness. This is about Democratic Centralism and those who know the meaning of Democratic Centralism and the source of such expression will be horrified. 

    

Michael Heseltine: I side with Lord Tebbit. Michael Heseltine must go.

Michael Heseltine: I side with Lord Tebbit. Michael Heseltine must go.

Those who remember what led to the debacle in the Conservative Party that lost the 1997 General Election must surely remember the role Michael Heseltine played as a member of a team of conspirators that included John Major and Ken Clarke and what followed after they destroyed Margaret Thatcher.

John Major, Ken Clarke and Michael Heseltine were the protagonist of a very sad and very tragic saga that could have bankrupted Britain. The ERM (Exchange Rate Mechanism, precursor of the EURO) was a complete and utter disaster. No matter how many efforts the then Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont made to protect the Pound, Britain was forced to sell massive amounts of Gold reserves that incidentally ended up in German hands.

The Trio that could hardly ask for any Oath of Allegiance since they have behaved as traitors went on to lead a Conservative Party that was de-facto four political parties in one. The ERM, like the EURO, is not an economic idea. It is an ideological idea and even the most ardent supporters of the EU like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown stayed well away from the EURO. They knew the potential for disaster.

The latest statement made by Michael Heseltine - now Lord Heseltine - saying that he prefers a government headed by a Marxist is yet another example of Michael Heseltine's Conservatism. But he is not alone. His co-conspirator Ken Clarke should also be given his marching orders. John Major is doing his best to undermine the Conservative government and those who stand for Britain and made it plainly clear at a speech he made as a host of the Church of England.