Post for British Heroes

January 20th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

BFPOSeveral weeks ago, the Parallax Brief signed an online petition to protest at the closure of British Forces Post Office facilities in mainland Europe. The service provides service personnel stationed in Europe with the same postal rates as residents of the mainland UK. The petition stated that “Withdrawal of this long established tradition will further erode personnel’s ability to communicate with their families in the UK and safe receipt of parcels etc through a secure network”.

But today, the Parallax Brief received an emailed response from Number10.gov.uk, the government’s website:

The Government remains fully committed to providing efficient and effective postal service to our armed forces, especially those serving on operations.

The Ministry of Defence is making some changes to the way BFPO services operate in order to ensure we make best use of military manpower and to ensure the service is delivered in the most efficient way possible. The drawdown of the BFPO personnel supporting the UK military in the NATO headquarters in SHAPE, Brussels, Brunssum, Ramstein, Stavanger, Karup, Rome, Milan, Lisbon, Valencia and Norfolk Virginia should achieve a saving in excess of £1M per annum. The drawdown is scheduled to be completed by September 2010, by which time we aim to have in place alternative arrangements.”

So, that’s a no, then.

The full folly of continually cutting military expenditure, caving in to the RAF and Royal Navy top brass on big ticket items designed to fight the last war, and fighting two brutal, and brutally expensive, counter-insurgency wars is only now becoming clear. In the coming months, probably mainly after the Conservatives win power and pass their promised emergency budget, the savage cuts in headline grabbing military projects such as the new aircraft carriers, the F35 stealth jets, and perhaps even the next generation of Trident subs, will get their fair share of headlines. But in the meantime, important services like the BFPO will likely disappear unnoticed.

That should not be the case.

Given that the US estimates it costs USD1 mn per year to keep a soldier in Afghanistan, surely we can find about the same to give cheap and reliable post to all our personnel in Europe?

And when it says that it “aims” to have in place alternative arrangements, what does that usually mean in government-speak?

It all seems like more shabby treatment for our heroes abroad.

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Categories [ Defence, UK Politics ]

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Dr InflationDove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bank of England

January 20th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

The Parallax Brief has found himself increasingly exasperated with the inflation hawks who have used the recent jump in inflation to 2.9% to holler in panic that these near record lows are harbinger of an impending Weimar-style wage-price death spiral. They themselves admit that inflationary pressures will ease after the first quarter, yet still pen these articles.

But in addition to this, the Parallax Brief also believes that even if inflation did increase to four or five percent, it wouldn’t be anything to worry about. Indeed, after some hunting around this morning, he discovered an article from Scott Sumner, professor of economics at Bentley University, which argued that inflation at 5% may be optimum, citing Australia as an exemplar:

Interestingly, I know of only one country that stayed away from the ever lower inflation obsession of the major central banks. The Bank of Australia. Australia had about 4% inflation in their GDP deflator and 7.4% NGDP growth between 2000:2 and 2008:2. With a much higher inflation and NGDP trend rate going into the crisis, they we able to avoid the zero interest rate bound. And by the way, for those who think nominal shocks don’t explain real events like the recent recession, Australia was the only major developed economy to avoid a recession last year. Indeed they haven’t had one since 1991. They are called ‘the lucky country,” but I have argued that their culture lacks our puritanical obsession with inflation.

That makes sense. And, indeed, if Britain did have inflation at around 4%, it would certainly do more to help our debt situation than at 1 or 2%.

So why on earth the trembling knees from the hawks on the right?

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Categories [ Economics and Finance, UK Politics ]

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Thank God for the British Electorate

January 20th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

The big political news overnight from Stateside was that Republican candidate Scott Brown defeated his Democrat competitor Martha Coakley in the traditionally left wing state of Massachusetts to take the late Ted Kennedy’s old seat in the US Senate. The result is a devastating blow to the Democrat party: psychologically, the best British analogy might be if a Labour candidate had taken Kensington and Chelsea ahead of Michael Portillo after the death of Alan Clarke, and legislatively it means the Democrats no longer have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, which will allow the GOP to block healthcare legislation.

The Parallax Brief has wondered for a while how the Republican Party has gotten away with the manner in which has conducted itself in the aftermath of its crushing election defeat to Barack Obama in 2008. The lies, perfidy, demagoguery, scaremongering, and hypocrisy from the right wing media, and the congressional party itself, has been breathtaking. Worse, the electorate is obviously falling for it.

Andrew Sullivan, the libertarian-conservative commentator is not, and he explains on his blog for the Atlantic (more…)

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Categories [ International Affairs, UK Politics ]

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Electoral Fraud in Britain

January 19th, 2010 by The Parallax Brief

Electoral fraud is something that happens in other countries. Mostly banana republics or the former Soviet Union, or perhaps in parts of America where elections are fought with the kind of ruthless and indecorous fanaticism that just doesn’t wash this side of the Atlantic.

Not true, according to ToryDiary on ConservativeHome:

“Judge Richard Mawrey tongue-lashed a level of organised fraud “that would disgrace a banana republic”… The authorities, he said, were in “a state not simply of complacency, but of denial…The fact is that there are no systems to deal realistically with fraud.” Until the system was tightened up, he said, “fraud will continue unabated”.

Is frightening stuff. The Parallax Brief doesn’t really like adding reporting news or linking to articles with little comment or value added, but felt he had to do something to publicise the article and urge all readers to follow the link, read the whole thing and then pass it on. Britain has rightly been an exemplar of electoral fair play, but complacency is not an option.

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Categories [ UK Politics ]

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Ralph Miliband’s David is the Wrong Figure

November 26th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

Ben Brogan recently passed on via his Telegraph blog an interesting whisper about the Labour leadership. Mr. Brogan reported that he had hitherto assumed that Harriet Harmon was “streets ahead of her colleagues” in the race to become Labour leader after Gordon Brown retired, but a Cabinet Minister had told him that Ms Harmon, “realises that she cannot muster enough support among her colleagues, which is why she has publicly ruled out the leadership. We should, I am assured, take her at her word. By contrast, Mr Miliband has discovered a new appetite and is now hungry for it.”

The Parallax Brief believes this is correct. Turning down the role as EU High Commissioner can only mean that Mr. Miliband has decided finally to aim for the Labour leadership.

But David Miliband the leader would be a poor choice for the Labour Party, in the Parallax Brief’s view. A recent op-ed by Jenni Russell on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site  summed up the point neatly.

What the electorate desperately wants is politicians who can talk clearly about how we might deal with these issues. Miliband, though, is much happier with abstractions. It means that we have no idea what would follow from his beliefs.

There was a classic example of that in September when an interviewer asked what Miliband meant by his “deeply progressive” “empowerment agenda”. Miliband’s reply is worth quoting in full.

“You can’t stand for empowerment unless you are an egalitarian. That’s the platform we then use to stand up for a strategic role of government, but also stand for decentralisation. We stand up for social mobility, and we see public service reform as critical to that, and welfare reform. We stand up for the diversity of Britain, but we know it has to be founded on strong rights and responsibilities. And, very importantly, although there’s no point in pretending it’s popular, you have to stand up for internationalism, and you have to stand up for the need to share power in Europe, to be influential in the world. That’s basically my pitch.”

Speeches like these have no clarity, no conviction, and communicate nothing except a kind of arrogance in the speaker. That is Miliband’s principal problem. Not only is there no sign that he is thinking deeply about politics, but he isn’t a natural communicator. That, in our multimedia era, is a fatal flaw. We’re no longer just in an era of 24-hour news. We’re living in the era of the 60-second minute, where effective politicians must be comfortable with the instant responses, informality and unguardedness of tweeting, blogging, YouTube and Facebook. The public still want their leaders to have big ideas. But they will warm only to those politicians who are so at ease with what they are and what they think, and so interested in engagement with others, that there is no sense of a barrier between them and the people they are trying to reach.

Miliband is not of this model.

This strikes the Parallax Brief as dead right.

Not much to add to that, beyond saying that a good place for Labour to start, and one which is rarely considered, would be a look at some polls like the ones we often see in American primary races which show how various candidates would match up against the president. Rather than thinking about which leader would be most popular, or best for the party, think about who would match up best with David Cameron — not always the same thing.  Who would contrast with Mr. Cameron in a way that exposed his weaknesses, while being able to present with conviction a cogent, congruent, persuasive message to the public?

Not David, the Parallax Brief believes.

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Categories [ UK Politics ]

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An Alternative To Straw’s Altertantive Vote

November 25th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

Jack Straw, the Secretary of State for Justice, said yesterday that the House of Lords should be elected by proportional representation and the House of Commons should shelve the first-past-the-post system by which its members are currently elected in favour of the Alternative Vote system, according to the Daily Telegraph.

With the Alternative Vote (see chart, below), voters rank their preferences in order. If no candidate wins a clear majority, that is, garners more than 50% of the vote, the last place candidate is eliminated, and the ballots of that candidate are recounted, with their second choices being reallocated to the remaining candidates as full votes. This process continues until one candidate has a clear majority. The Alternative Vote, the Telegraph reports Mr Straw argued in a speech at the Magna Carta Institute, “would enable us to retain the single member constituency link…” but “would also ensure that every MP is elected with the support of over half of the voters in their constituency. In an age of multiparty politics, it could both enhance the legitimacy of MPs and enable the public to express a greater range of preferences.”

The Parallax Believes Mr. Straw is wrong. (more…)

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Categories [ UK Politics ]

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Bush Administration Wanted Iraq Long Before 2003

November 24th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

The Telegraph reports today that senior British civil servants knew that the Bush administration wanted to topple Saddam in Iraq long before it had either the excuse of 9/11 or the casus belli of WMDs.

Sir William Patey, then head of Middle East policy at Foreign Office said that in February 2001, the UK knew that some in the new US administration wanted to topple Saddam

He said: “We were aware of the drum beats from Washington.”

[...]

Sir Peter Ricketts, then the political director at the FCO, recalled that in the summer of 2000, Condoleeza Rice, Mr Bush’s national security adviser, had written an academic article suggesting Saddam should be removed.

Well, quell surprise.

Who’da thunk it?

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Categories [ International Affairs, UK Politics ]

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Police Arresting the Innocent to Obtain DNA

November 24th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

Those who take the “I’ve got nothing to hide, so if it helps the police/security services…” approach to the pernicious assaults on the civil rights which seem commonplace in this increasingly police state should take a look at reports in the Times and the Independent today that the police are now arresting people with the sole motive of expanding their DNA database.

According to the Times, a report by the government’s watchdog for such matters, the Human Genetics Commission (HGC), criticises the paucity of government oversight which has allowed the police to expand functions and reach of DNA sampling and the database itself. It also contains evidence that police officers now routinely arrest people with the motivation of collecting DNA, which is stored permanently on the database irrespective if the person was found guilty, or even charged, with a crime.

The Independent quotes:

The report received testimony from one senior police source, a retired chief superintendent, who said it was “the norm” for officers to arrest someone to obtain their DNA profile.

“It is apparently understood by serving police officers that one of the reasons, if not the reason, for the change in practice is so that the DNA of the offender can be obtained,” said the source, whose identity has been kept secret. “It matters not whether the arrest leads to no action, a caution or a charge, because the DNA is kept anyway.“

This is a classic case of “mission creep”: Well meaning politicians or bureaucrats introducing a law or policy that is fundamentally against the principles of liberty but which seems innocuous and small enough to let pass given it will help the security services. At a pace so slow it is almost imperceptible, however, the reach of the policy or law expands until it is a genuine threat to freedom.

But at that stage it’s virtually too late to do anything about it.

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Categories [ UK Politics ]

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Where’s the Deflation? And Will it be Bad if we Find it?

November 18th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

Guido wants to know today “Where’s the Deflation?” because figures recently released show inflation back on the uptick. He also makes an argument that deflation isn’t very bad because “history shows that there have been times of increasing prosperity that coincided with deflation,” that “Deflation happened several times in the nineteenth century,” and, of course, the hoary point that “pensioners know that their standard of living would have improved” had deflation set in.

It is important to debunk the idea that deflation wouldn’t be that bad.

Deflation increases the real burden of debt — something that would be disastrous given current levels of debt in the UK — while providing powerful incentives for consumers to hold off on purchases — why would you buy now when it’ll be cheaper next month? — adding a further drag on economic performance. Japan’s lost decade went missing as a result of deflation. The privations of the Great Depression were brought forth by massive debt-deflation.

Of course, pensioners would see the real value of their pensions increase, but economic policy is not made to satisfy one specific interest group at the great expense of all others — as I’m sure Guido agrees when he discusses matters of pension reform.

Guido’s embrace of deflation might be the most unpopular economic decision since King… no, hang on, hasn’t that line been used before somewhere?

The Parallax Brief knows that conspiracy theories about shadowy groups deciding to introduce QE to prop up gilts and bail out Brown (and no doubt to further the new world order) are far more interesting than mundane reality, but is it too much to ask that Guido might consider the simple explanation that deflation was avoided because of the (independent) Bank of England’s super loose monetary policy?

A better question to ask, given the number of conservative and libertarian commentators droning on about Mugabenomics and Wiemar II, might be “Where’s the hyperinflation?”

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Categories [ Economics and Finance, UK Politics ]

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Spectator Defends Government Spending, Says Civil Servants are Efficient and Necessary

November 16th, 2009 by The Parallax Brief

It’s amazing how much money that so-called fiscal conservatives are willing to lavish on the armed services. The Parallax Brief believes our armed forces are grossly underfunded and overstretched for Britain’s current foreign policy brief, but what always shocks him is the willingness of those who spend the vast majority of their time engaged in a monotonous, aggressive siege of what they see government largesse (that is, all government spending) to not only join him in being against military cutbacks, but to argue that any it’s wrong to even question MoD spending.

Here, for instance, is the Spectator’s Daniel Korski who — and perhaps sit down now, because you might faint when you read what follows — criticised on Sunday on the Spectator’s Coffee House blog Liam Fox for wanting to reduce the size of the MoD’s civilian (civil servant) contingent.

“Liam Fox has made clear that the Conservative Party is planning to slash the number of civilian posts at the Ministry of Defence as a way of balancing the military budget if they win the general election in 2010. “We have 99,000 people in the Army and 85,000 civilians in the MoD. Some things will have to change – and believe me, they will,” Fox has said.

[But]…MoD civilians include “doctors, dentists, nurses, teachers, lecturers, policemen, security guards, Royal Fleet auxiliary sailors, intelligence analysts”. Many of these people would be considered essential frontline servabts if they worked elsewhere in government. Seeing them as bonus-craving, army-destroying time-wasters is wrong.

In fact, if the MoD axed its entire civilian workforce it would save no more than 2.7 billion pounds in pay pensions and other costs. By comparison, armed forces’ costs amount to 8.9 billion pounds.

While the MoD is clearly in need of reform, and the public can be counted to react in a pavlovian way to the juxtaposition of the number of civilian employees and military personnel, this is hardly the zero-sum issue it is made out to be. Nor is it a major strategic concern for UK defence.

The Parallax Brief was still in the process of preparing a stiff brandy to soften the shock of reading a Spectator journalist defending slothful, incompetent civil servants who could never find work in the private sector, when he read Spectator deputy editor James Forsyth on Obama’s Afghanistan dilemma.

“A report in the New York Times today suggests that the administration is now worried about the cost of sending more troops. The paper says that Obama is insisting that every option contains a quick exit strategy as part of an effort to keep costs down. When you consider the likely cost of many of Obama’s domestic priorities, especially health-care, it seems remarkable that he is so concerned about the costs of the Afghan mission.”

Let’s get this straight, then: The Spectator is now for government spending, and civil servants, who are now underpaid and overstretched, and against government carefully analysing costs against benefits?

If the Spectator was genuinely fiscally conservative, then there would be blog entries on the Coffee House supporting the decision to cut back on the MoD’s civilian contingent and Obama’s concerns about the cost of war.

By the Spectator’s own numbers, cutting even 5% of the civil servants working at the MoD would save GBP135,000,000. Given that there are currently 23,000 civil servants working for the MoD’s procurement wing, a staggering three times more than were needed for the job during the second world war, are cutbacks really unwarranted?

Is there any other department of state which can count on the Spectator’s support in this way?

The Parallax Brief suggests that if, say, Andrew Lansley said GBP135 mn could be saved by trimming civil servants and managers working in the NHS, those defending NHS bureaucracy would be ridiculed by the Spectator.

And would Obama be criticised by the Spectator for considering the cost-benefit dynamic of a new extension of education policy?

A question, then: Are James Forsyth, Daniel Korski and the Spectator true fiscal conservatives who genuinely want government spending to be lowered and government to be more efficient, or do they just want spending on services that help poor people to be slashed so rich people can keep most of their money?

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Categories [ Defence, Economics and Finance, UK Politics ]

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