A month ago someone emailed me to offer me an e-Cig starter kit in return for a plug on a blog post I’d written on the subject many moons ago. I actually didn’t accept that offer, because the e-Cig technology, whilst being very promising, still has some kinks to be worked out – the batteries can’t cope with the demands placed upon them, and they’re limited by size and modern battery technology which remains one of the biggest technological bottlenecks still to overcome (that and anti-gravity hoverboards). 

Despite this I was very surprised then when a week ago a publisher got in touch and asked if I’d be interested in having a book sent to me. I said, “sure” and was sent a copy of “When the Lights Went Out” by Andy Beckett, which so far is a very accessible and absorbing history of the 1970s, and surprisingly balanced, too. I’ll be putting up a review once I’ve finished it. 

Going to the blogs is smart marketing, I think. This particular book is aimed at exactly the sort of people reading political blogs, so I hope the experiment pays off. 

Interestingly, I’ve seen review copies of computer games before, but never books. They’re hard-back sized but bound like paperbacks, with functional covers rather than covers designed to attract the consumer’s money. Fascinating.

Paul Burgin over on the Mars Hill blog invited me to participate in his “20 Questions to a Fellow Blogger” feature. All the stuff I can never justify talking about here can be found over there!

Quote of the day: “I’m not a creative. I manage creatives” – Heard on the radio, taken from The Apprentice, from a horrendous marketing woman who believes it’s possible to be good in business without being creative, as if management is simply box-ticking and following procedures without any creativity required. I mean, business is creation, it is innovation.

From what I gather, her ‘creative’ for the little project they were given turned out to have come up with a stupid idea, but she ticked the boxes, dotted the i’s and managed it anyway… and Alan ‘Fired’ her. Turns out not being able to tell if something is a pile of shit might be a set-back for someone who wants to ‘manage creatives.’

Alan Sugar’s got more sense than I give him credit for.

Labour’s having a rough time of it, but considering real long term public opinion typically lags about a year behind, the worst is yet to come. The longer Brown stays in, the more permenant and engrained the hostility towards Labour will become.

Tony Blair, for all his trickery and deceit, made Labour electable 3 times in a row. In hindsight I think perhaps I underestimated this man’s talent – he made Labour electable. The mind boggles. Famously Alistair Campbell said, “We Don’t Do God” which I thought, at the time, meant they didn’t want to offend Christians. Turns out the opposite was true, that they “Didn’t Do God” because Blair’s religiosity would frighten voters and turn the media spotlight onto something that Campbell intuitively understood would be electoral poison. But then that was the point – say nothing and let people see whatever they wanted to see.

But the veil of electability, so fragile and so hard fought for, is being brutally torn down. The latest Kamikaze ‘Scorched Earth’ Budget shows a political party still thinking no further ahead than the next day’s Newspapers. Just do whatever it takes to get a popularity boost, deal with the consequences when they arise.

So in this manner they’ve borrowed more money than all previous Governments put together since the creation of the Bank of England. Prudence? Golden Rules? The golden rule was, “whatever it takes to get good headlines.” This ‘strategy’ has, unsurprisingly, nearly bankrupted the whole economy.

Next, the Labour Party itself has borrowed too much money without the means to pay it back. They are in a financially compromised position. This mountain of Party Debt (acquired during General Elections) means the risk that they can be ‘bought’ is very real. They need the money so desperately that they have no power or leverage over the Unions – or any other donor. This internal ‘strategy’ has nearly bankrupted their own party.

It’s ironic that the party’s own internal financial conduct told us more about the reality of Labour’s ‘prudence’ long before it became easily apparent in their handling of the economy. 

Finally, just as their “do whatever it takes to get a good headline” approach to policy has brought both their party and the economy to their proverbial knees, so this ‘strategy’ is exposed as political cowardice and…  moral bankruptcy. There’s nothing but media manipulation and creating the illusion of ‘good government’. 

So that’s the hat-trick. We’re not quite there yet – only 1 of the 3 so far – but there’s still a year to go. Most disturbing for me is the Party bankruptcy, vulnerability to coercion,  and the growing power of the Unions. Except now the Unions don’t need to strike – they just need to threaten to withdraw funding. When one particular lobby group is able to pull the strings of Government like this, we should all be very concerned indeed.

After reading this comment by “Ian B” in reply to another post, I fired off an email asking him if he’d mind, ever so much, if I could reproduce it in a blog post of it’s own, such was the level of, “Yes! Yes!” I felt.

This explains so much:

I am, perhaps, primarily interested in social liberalism, i.e. everyday freedom. I am also an economic liberal, but that came later when I thought and then studied a lot about economics. But I think a central argument for economic liberalism is simply this: you cannot have general freedom, that is, independence of action, without economic freedom. Economics- money, finance, work, trade etc, are such a major part of life that anyone who seeks a general or social freedom cannot hope to attain that if their economic life is rigorously controlled by the government. It’s simply useless to hope for any real devolution of power when that which has so much power in your life- your money- is controlled by someone else.

The flipside of that argument is that, in order to control money and trade, the government has to control everything else, because everything else is intertwined with the economic market. This is why we are increasingly moving back to a society in which- rather than being free to do all which is not specifically prohibited- we are only allowed to do that which is specifically authorised. Regulation extends into every nook and cranny of our lives. The hope of then “devolving power” in anything more than a tokenistic way is hopeless.

So I contend that you can’t be a social or political liberal without being an economic liberal, and vice versa.

Amen! Thanks Ian

I’m not going to waste your time echoing the same sentiments expressed elsewhere except in exhaustive depth – I’ll keep this brief:

Scorched Earth Election Budget.

Plans depending on growth of 3.5% in 2011? A joke – and an insult. It’s a figure plucked out of the air to make the sums ‘add up’. Who seriously believes that we will experience this level of growth in an environment of ever increasing public debt, taxation and an ever bigger public sector?

I mean, it’s a joke right? Scorched Earth.

£2000 bung per new car sold for the Car Industry? Pure unadulterated protectionism.

For starters it creates a nice market in buying old cars and relisting them at £1,500 – it’s worth buying an old banger for that if it knocks you another £500 off the price of a new car. It also means, if you don’t already have an old car, you pay £2000 more than everyone else for new cars (unless you buy a second hand one… and of course all the ones under about £1500 will be bought up). In addition it reduces the total supply of cars, further increasing the value of second hand ones. In addition it encourages people with 8 and 9 year old cars that don’t even work to hang onto them for that little bit longer. Expect lots of bangers that never move cluttering up streets while their owners wait for their little investment to pay off.

I do not approve.

Welcome to the new mantra: Tough on Wealth. Tough on the Causes of Wealth.

UPDATE: Nick Robinson’s picked up on the end of the stealth tax culture – and importantly points out that they’ll raise more from increases to fuel duty than they will from the new 50% rate. Hammer the Rich. And the Poor. And everyone. Who exactly is supposed to benefit? Who’s all this serving?