The Worron Office

It may sound like I am out to lunch, but there are some powerful arguments for socialised convenience shopping. We could introduce a new system that could smash the establishment, increase diversity, decrease carbon emissions, and ensure that you can always buy salt and vinegar crisps.

Why is it madness to nationalise the unco-ordinated, chaotic sprawl of corner shops across the country? We know nationalisation is popular, so let’s have more of it. Especially of small businesses, because, actually, Margaret Thatcher was the first person to care about them. Yeah. Thatcher.

For starters convenience shops are an obvious natural monopoly. Also, the current fragmented system is inefficient. Yes,  that’s right, the fragmented inevitable monopoly. If that doesn’t make sense nothing does. And the fact is that you cannot just go in and buy anything you – like my book – in most of the nation’s stores. The reason for this is that the shops are putting profits ahead of people.

The eternal irritation of the corner shop user is that that it will be slightly more expensive than larger shops and cannot have everything you want. This affects everyone. Sometimes even David Cameron. It also affects Richard Brown in Brighton who you have never heard of. He paid three pounds over the odds for pretty mediocre bottle of Ernest & Julio Gallo wine last week.

Darren in Southend reports a grim tale of austerity-fuelled despair from his local corner shop: although they will usually have Kit-Kats they will never have chunky Kit-Kats. Anyone who thinks they half-understand Keynesian economics knows that chunkiness can unleash animal spirits and kickstart the economy. Why do the Tories do this? Why do the Lib Dems let them?

The reality is that we all know what can go wrong in a corner shop. John in South London was once given the wrong change. Brenda in Rochdale was once given a pack of Marlboroughs rather than Lights. It is the unique horror of capitalism not only to be a system in which people make mistakes, but you have to take your business elsewhere rather than write a letter of complaint.

The real mistake though is to think the corner shop is a triumph of the private sector. Who built those corners in the first place? The government that’s who. As for the goods they stock, well many consumer goods industries probably only got off the ground because of big government orders for everything from the 18^th century Royal Navy to the 1940s US armed forces.

The reality is that what we have here is a natural monopoly, because, err because, how can each corner have more than one shop? Oh, and if it isn’t a monopoly, if there are two convenience shops on one street, well how wasteful and inefficient is that? They stock the same goods and sell at the same prices, as if they have the same customers and suppliers and people want mostly the same stuff.

The case for nationalisation is overwhelming once you are glib and simplistic about it. We could create an integrated corner shop network, with stores precisely separated and always stocked to meet people’s needs, not the needs of the corporations. Susan from Portsmouth need never again go to the shop and find that there is no Monster Munch for her 6 year old. Profits could then be reinvested in a high-tech, low carbon, diversity programme delivered on the Guardian website.

Under people’s ownership the shops could then be ethical, with no products made by Israelis, or for some reason no one quite understands, Gazans either. Procurement of goods for the shop could also be used to  drive a green industrial revolution, which is a really great idea, just like coal mines were.

Of course this wouldn’t be run by a bunch of bureaucrats, oh no. It would be run by a true people’s panel, composed of people, good people, chosen to sit on a panel. We could then have true diversity in ownership. I haven’t looked into it but I am willing to bet that corner shops are owned by the usual public school elite. Finally, we can smash that system and spread ownership to all in society. Has anyone thought of what some of the ethnic minority communities could deliver through a socialised system?

All this doesn’t have to be costly either. Everyone could have their corner shop compensated for with a free BBC license, Guardian subscription and copy of my book.

Far-fetched? Next time you are in a store open long after your surgery, school council office or Job Centre Plus has closed but, cruelly, oh so cruelly, it doesn’t stock pork scratchings, you ask yourself if it’s far-fetched. And if you happen to agree with me I will quote you like it’s Gospel.

Because let’s face it, nationalisation offers one thing for sure, a chance to put losses before people.

If you wish to know why the Israelis are the Israelis the question was answered very simply this week: they used to be a people like the Yazidis. They used to be the victims of brutal violence meted out by implacable oppressors. History has taught them the importance of choosing very determined self-defence instead.

The reality is that the Israelis are not alone in facing this choice. Yesterday a man called Sam Harris wrote an excellent blog concluding that we are all Israelis. I think he is wrong. I think we risk being forced to choose between being like the Israelis or Yazidis. Most of us don’t want the choices facing either people. To avoid those choices we need to start taking security more seriously right now.

In practice the vagaries of history did not leave the Yazridis with the chance to effectively defend themselves and they are trapped in tragedy. We in the West are more fortunate. We will not have really have to make hard choices either this time, because ISIS surely will be stopped far away from us. We are remote and part of a powerful alliance. ISIS’ dreams of global conquest will not become our nightmare. This does not mean ISIS’ actions do not have implications. The slaughter of the Yazidis  and other Iraqi minorities is appalling, and our hearts should reach out, and there should be humanitarian and military steps taken. We should be quite clear that what is being done by ISIS is an attack on the entire human race. But our minds need to turn also to the challenge of preventing similar tragedies happening to others.

The important point, the critical point which the Israelis, Hamas, and ISIS understand, and which, for example, those still demonstrating over Gaza do not, is that the line between security and helplessness is in fact very, very thin. The gap between being powerful and being helpless is small, and can close very quickly. The fact that ISIS seem to cause revulsion amongst the entire Muslim world, and that their numbers are small, should actually give us cause for worry not relief: a small number of people can cause a lot of damage and disruption in a very short space of time.

What is happening to the Yazidis almost certainly couldn’t happen to you and is highly unlikely to happen to your children, but if you don’t think that history could turn in a way that makes it a real possibility for your grandchildren then you are a fool. I don’t say the future threat will necessarily be from the heirs to ISIS. In a world of great insecurity it could equally from White Supremacist neo-fascists. This is why security and international order must always be our focus, not the villain of the month.

And it is this general insecurity that we should reflect on when we turn the news on each morning and the bad news from Russia or the Middle East floods in. Every time the violence gets worse, or closer, or the tyrants more powerful that gap  between power and helplessness closes a little. The West’s freedom to act is a little diminished, our power constrained. Then one day we will wake up and there is no freedom to act at all.

The reality is that in a darkening world we need moral rearmament followed by real rearmament. The earlier we decide to stand up to tyranny and build security the less likely we shall be forced to choose between being like the Israelis or Yazidis.

Len McCluskey’s speech to the Unite Policy Conference yesterday has been covered largely in the context of internal struggles in the Labour party. Much of the rest of the speech being ignored, including the rather disturbing fact that the leader of the country’s biggest trade union, and the single largest funder of the Labour party is perfectly happy to break the law.

Don’t take my word for it, take Len’s, speaking about potential changes to trade union law emerging from the Sir Bruce Carr Review into trade union tactics:

The Conservative Party should not assume that we will put respect for unjust laws ahead of our duty to fight exploitation and ruthless employers. 

We will fight for our members within the law where possible. But outside it if necessary, while taking all prudent steps to protect our union. 

Prudence, however, cannot mean paralysis, as it did for too long in the past in our movement. 

Our first obligation is to the members who pay their subs and look to us for support, not to a judiciary implementing class-war laws. 

And let the Tories be in no doubt that if they push us outside of the law, they will be responsible for the consequences, not us.

Just to be clear, Unite the Union, who harassed managers’ families in their homes in Grangemouth, and whose officials jumped on the Mayor of London’s car (i.e. criminal damage) when he visited Essex, believe they have the moral right to decide what is a just law.

Just to be clear, the single biggest funder of the One-Nation Labour party believes that the laws of the nation need not apply to them.

In case you missed it Ed Miliband made another announcement today, pledging to build 200,000 homes a year by 2020. Curiously, he also made the same pledge back in June and then again in September. A one-nation policy can be announced many times it seems.

It’s difficult for any Opposition to attract attention so we should have some sympathy for Ed on this front. But the real story here is not the re-hashing of old news but what this says about Ed’s tactics. The Red Eye of Miliband is searching not for solutions but for scapegoats.

Ed has blamed the lack of housebuilding on landhoarding. The evidence seems to suggest (thanks be to Conservative Home for doing the homework) that this is not particularly a problem. So, as with energy prices, Ed has found a convenient scapegoat: an unpopular group of big businesses is accused of profiteering. It doesn’t add up regarding energy prices either of course: profit is not a vast proportion of the total cost and UK prices are not high by European standards.

Nevertheless, energy prices and the housing shortage are still problems. However, they are complex problems, cause not by profiteering but by lack of production. In energy there is a lack of a clear, consistent steer from government and in housing too complex and bureaucratic a planning system. Neither of these is the simplest problem to solve, and to be honest we should expect progress to be one step at a time.

Miliband though does not wish to get to grips complex answers to complex problems. He wants the lazy scapegoat solution, also known as the one that won’t work. It is perhaps odd from someone who is apparently some sort of intellectual. More seriously it also means that a Miliband government would quickly turn into disaster: the profiteers would be squeezed/driven away but the problems would still be there, only worse.

Perhaps, even more seriously though it means that a Miliband opposition will also be damaging for the economy. Ed’s red eye would continue to roam, turning on new sectors – transport, retail and water spring to mind – creating uncertainty and undermining investment.

On at least one occasion in the mid-twentieth century Harold Macmillan is reported to have said that Britain would be Greece to America’s Rome – i.e. providing the strategic brain for the new empire. The remark was patronising, and deluded, but what is also striking is that the analogy is inaccurate. The Greeks did not provide the strategic brain of the Roman Empire. What they did do was to provide much of the cultural and intellectual life, particularly in the East of the empire.

During the American hegemony Britain has not exercised intellectual or cultural dominance. California remained the centre of the entertainment world and American universities were the leading academic institutions. In fact, Britain was not the centre of world culture during the period of British dominance – this was, without a doubt, France throughout the nineteenth century.

Cameron’s recent trip to China highlighted Britain’s cultural attractiveness – the “Downton Abbey” factor – to the rising power. Cameron was asked about why the Americans are allowed to do bad remakes of British shows, suggesting that perhaps Britain and China have common tastes. The Sunday Times’ coverage today (£) of Cameron’s China trip includes an interesting section on Britain’s soft power, including the striking fact that Britain produces 13% of the world’s music and the increasing importance of British stars and directors in Hollywood.

Of course this is all slightly anecdotal at this stage. And to give the counter-anecdote I am a Homeland, not a Downton, watcher. Realistically we are past the days when any one country, even the US or China, could exercise any sort of cultural or intellectual hegemony.  Cultural industries are as cross-border as any other and source skills, products capital internationally. Still, soft power is useful, and if we have strength in that area we must make the most of it as a country.

If you read one page of the Autumn Statement then make that page 38. There you will see a chart that should strike fear into anyone concerned for the future of this country:

This image (apologies I had to take a photo to use it) illustrates the scale of the fiscal black hole the country is in.  The graph demonstrates that we will return to our 2007 level of debt – below 40% of GDP, by 2031. Yes 2031, one of those science fiction years. But we will only achieve this if we run a 1 percentage point surplus for 12 years after the books are balanced in 2019. To put this in context there have been surpluses for 12 years in total since 1945, and not for more than three years in succession since the 50s.

However, as a recession is almost inevitable at some point over the next 20 years the alternative option presented above, in which we continue to run deficits, is more likely. Under these circumstances the national debt declines very slowly, down to only 70% of GDP.

Does this matter? Debt denialists point out that Britain had much larger debts over the post-war period and they were steadily whittled away. This is the height of complacency, we are in a far more competitive world economy. This means that the government needs to be spending every penny on services and infrastructure not debt interest. It also means that servicing the debt may become ever more expensive as investors start to see better uses for their capital. Either we exercise discipline up to 2031 or the country could be economically hobbled for decades afterwards. Our emerging market competitors will have lower debt levels – more like 30-40% of GDP, freeing up more resources for investing and staying competitive.

What is astonishing is just how quickly we got into this mess. Brown yanked up the deficit after 2008 and the Coalition has been able to unwind it only painfully slowly. That’s the power of the deficit – three years of Brown’s short-termist spending incontinence could hold this country back for decades.

What this definitey means though is that we cannot afford to behave in that way again. In the next recession a far tighter grip will need to be kept on spending. This will quite simply mean that the government is able to do less to ameliorate the social and economic consequences of that recession.

Whoever is in government over the next twenty years will need to exercise fiscal discipline in good times and bad. If they do not then the national debt really could be sent into the stratosphere – i.e. over 100% of GDP – creating a Greek-style crisis. Right now it is very hard to see how the Labour party is ready to exercise that discipline.

Squeezing the balloon is usually the ideal metaphor for bad economic policy – a “saving” made in one place inevitable reappears somewhere else, much as the air moves around the balloon. Energy price caps are a classic balloon squeeze. The costs will simply appear sooner, later, in lower investment/worse service or will be imposed on business, making jobs more expensive – so increasing unemployment.

Inevitably some time after the balloon-squeezing policy is applied people start to notice the the problems. At this point there are two possible responses.  There is the one preferred by, for example. Venezuelan socialists (who are often thugs): just squeeze the balloon until it bursts. British socialists (who tend to be intellectuals) look for ever more sophisticated ways to manhandle the balloon. Others simply change the topic: the really important thing is that the balloon is red (publicly owned) or green (environmentally-friendly), which for some people means actual policy failure becomes unimportant.

The truth is that there is only one question where asking: how does the air get in or out of the balloon? Who is creating energy and who is buying it? Anyone who isn’t asking that question doesn’t have a solution, and never will.

Miliband’s speech today made quite clear that there aren’t really any difficult decisions facing the country: we just need the “goodies” in control. The problem is greedy energy companies, and selfish, hateful Tories, in it to help their rich friends. Indeed, the government are actually deliberately driving down the cost of living. But don’t worry: Labour offers hope, a different sort of politics

It’s amazing how hypocritical this is. Accusing your opponents of bad faith is one of the most unpleasant, hateful things you can say. The McBride affair exposes this hypocrisy utterly but it is only the icing on the cake. Personal attacks are too often Labour’s modus operandi – from modern smears about NHS “privatisation” back to the “milk-snatcher” line. It’s incredible that anyone could think it legitimate to suggest that ministers actually cut the higher rate of tax for their personal benefit.  And let’s not even talk about the wider left’s reaction to Lady Thatcher’s death.

The truth is that those who accuse their opponents of hate are surely bound to be overcome by it themselves in the end because they cannot solve real problems. Miliband’s failure is intellectual: the country’s problems are not driven by malice but by the need to make difficult choices. Energy prices are high because we need more investment –   be it green or not. There are tax cuts for the rich because the morality and efficiency of the better off keeping their own money needs to be balanced with the needs of the worse off. These are trade-offs, difficult decisions. Putting the “goodies” in charge changes none of these dilemmas. Discovering this was a large part of the story of 13 years of New Labour under-achievement.

The problem is if you do not recgonise this, but think that the problem is your opponents’ malice and hate , then the natural solution is to hate them back in turn – after all you think it the source of their power. Also, as Brown and McBride showed, you must hate the internal enemy: those on your own side not towing the line, those slacking from the cause, not backing the true Leader. Eventually a sense of proportion about ends and means diminishes, and the ability to distinguish between belief in cause and thirst for power is dimmed.

These are the Labour party’s inner demons. They don’t end in guns or bloodshed, but they do end in casually wrecked careers and partying over the death of an elderly lady. And that is quite enough. Ed Miliband needed to confront those demons. He didn’t. He fed them Britain deserves better. But perhaps so too does the Labour party.

For those who don’t remember Fur Q (caution, Anglo-Saxon lyrics) was a character from The Day Today, a rapper who believed that “you’ve got to kill people to have respect people, you gotta kill some people but you can’t kill everyone or you’d have no-one left to respect.” This counter-intuitive, but nevertheless logical, proposition seems to be Nick Clegg’s electoral strategy.

Clegg’s speech yesterday called on us to vote Lib Dem to get a coalition in 2015. Unspoken of course is that if we all voted Lib Dem there would be no need for a Coalition – which for Nick Clegg is when there is no-one left to respect. Therefore in fact only some of us somewhere should vote lib Dem. The problem is which of us is not at all obvious. If you voted lib Dem in a Labour Conservative marginal you might make a coalition less likely.

Clegg’s pitch is a proposition fundamentally different from that offered by any other party. Labour and Conservatives, even the Greens and UKIP, have an offer targeted, at least to some degree, at everyone. The SNP, Plaid Cymru, and in an evil way the BNP, target small groups, but it is at least clear who. The Lib Dems are after somebody, somewhere, depending presumably on how the bar charts can be made to look.

There is much excitement today about the Lord Ashcroft marginals poll out today, revealing that the Labour lead in key battlegrounds has grown to 14 points, in part because of UKIP. If this was reflected nationwide in 2015 Labour could be winning nearly 100 seats.

Lord Ashcroft himself writes that he is nevertheless optimistic, and past evidence suggests he is write to be. A 2008 battlegrounds poll, so at a parallel point in the electoral cycle, predicted a Conservative majority of 146. Another poll the following year showed good news for the Conservatives in northern marginals. Unfortunately for David Cameron, the landslide did not materialise.

None of this is surprising. These seats are battlegrounds for a reason. They are composed of swing voters who are likely to change their minds. So if Miliband’s poll lead does melt away then that change will be disproportionately concentrated in these locations. Of course the poll is bad news for the Conservatives, but there is no need to panic.

PS: The 2009 link to Political Betting contains the telling phrase that the Conservatives “might be feeling a bit uncertain” that their poll lead was down to 10 points. In 2008 the Conservative lead was 20 points.  Ed Miliband’s position is not that good in terms of historical comparison