Posts by I ain't Spartacus

Neither main party is much of a good representation of their base. That's because they want to get elected. But the two big parties memberships have hollowed out over the years, such that the majority of their supporters and campaigners seem to be further from the centre than their MPs and leadership.

Which is why you find almost as much anti-Cameron vitriol in the Telegraph as you will in the Guardian or Mirror. And I'd guess why Cameron has consistently polled as more popular personally than the Conservative Party.

The Americans have a similar situation, where Donald Trump appears to be appealing to the Republican base at the primaries. But I suspect would get slaughtered at the national election. Although early leaders in the primaries do tend to get slaughtered before the end.

If Corbyn doesn't win at this point, it's going to leave painful scars, and either Burnham or Cooper will have their work cut out to heal the party.

But if he does win, I can't see Labour's parliamentary party holding together. They might be no formal split, but they will be totally unable to work together. There's blame on both sides for that, but a serial rebel like Corbyn has no right to claim anyone else's loyalty. And there have been some pretty hair-raising comments from some of his supporters about purging the opposition.

Even if he had the best policies in the world, if he can't command the loyalty of his own party, he can't win an election. Miliband was given a reasonably easy ride by the Parliamentary party. There was no more grumbling than any other leader has to face - and he did well at keeping the party united. Corbyn has no hope of that. If he wins it will be a horrible mess.

Re: Bonds

Tim,

Sure. QE could die a natural death. But at some point, might some future Chancellor not be tempted to say - "we've got low inflation and there's £umpty billion of QE bonds coming due next year, so we're simply going to write them off, and not pay the BofE"?

In a few years, QE will have already caused what inflation it was going to. And some future Chancellor will be looking at the extra interest payments if that debt is sold back to the markets, and feeling sad about the next election. I'm sure some will be, to mop up excess liquidy, I'm surprised the Bank of England haven't done a bit of it already.

So they'll maybe keep rolling the bonds over at the BofE, paying them the interest and then taking it back as profits - and that's going to start looking increasingly silly, so why not just write the whole lot off? In ten years time, is anyone going to care all that much?

The Guardian are a Labour paper. They think Corbyn will knacker the party they support. Opposing him therefore makes sense. I've seen no smears in there against him, please point some out if you have. All I've seen is disagreement. Which surely is part of normal politics. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

It may be we need PR. So we can have centre left and further left parties, as well as centre right, libertarian, green, nationalist and whatever else. Then we'd get to see who really supports what.

The problem then, is that you've no idea what you'll get after the election. Which is the reason I don't like PR. But politics have to work, and if not enough voters can agree on being in the two main parties, then PR is a better solution that watching them becoming more and more remote from teh voters.

Also, remember the vitriol is not one way. The number of Corbyn's supporters who've been screaming that anyone inside Labour who disagrees with them is an evil Tory is unpleasantly large. It's looking uncomfortably close to splitting the main opposition, and leaving us with an effective one party state - until we get a new opposition sorted out. And that worries me as much as Corbyn's policies (which I also believe to be economically illiterate).

Re: ha ha ha

What's wrong with Corbyn-bashing? As long as it's polite, and is attacking his policies.

As many people believe that a lot of his policies would have seriously bad effects, it makes sense to point that out before he's elected Labour leader. People can then make their own minds up as to whether that criticism is fair or not.

As a Conservative voter, I still believe in a strong opposition. Parties that are in power for too long lose their grip. They risk becoming corrupt, incapable of having new ideas, riven by factions, or all three.

It is my belief that Corbyn is un-electable. Someone viewed as competent with Ed Miliband's policies might well get a good hearing from the electorate. Corbyn appears to be further to the left of him. Being seen as principled I'd imagine will be good for his political image - but on the economy I think he's too far out of step with the majority of the electorate.

Re: Not impressed

Joe Harrison,

in the context of the current worldwide insanity (central banks printing like crazy to buy up bonds and stocks)

This isn't total insanity. I believe QE worked in Japan in the 1930s. But it's the mainstream response to people studying the 1930s depression over the intervening years. Economics tried to learn someothing from why that happened. Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve made his name on the topic, and so happened to be in the right place at the right time to test his theories. And seems to have done a retty good job, there was no repeat of the Great Depression.

Note that the things governments got wrong were:

To stay on the gold standard too long, which caused the money supply to collapse. Causing deflation, which lead to a drop in demand and businesses to sack people they could no longer afford to employ.

To let the banks go bust, destroying confidence in banks leading to a cascade of failures.

Cutting government spending too much, leading to an even bigger drop in demand in the economy.

So most governments did make cuts, but much more slowly, and they compensated by lowering interest rates, doing QE and bailing out the banks.

Note that the Eurozone is a bit like the gold standard in our current example, and so those countries in trouble have struggled to fix their problems, hence the problems in Spain, Ireland, Portugal etc. And the total disaster, and hideous policy clusterfuck, in Greece.

Re: Oh puhleeze

A bit too ranty, and very much too ignorant of basic economics.

Inflation is too much money, seeking too few goods. That pushes the price up, as you've only got so many goods to go round - however much money you have. Hence the spectacle of billion mark or Zimbabwe dollar notes.

If the government sells bonds, then someone has to buy those bonds. With money. They give that money to the government in exchange for the bond. So the government can spend that money. So the money supply has remained the same.

If the government has printed money, and therefore not sold a corresponding bond, then the money supply has grown. Thus there is now more money around, so all things being equal that will result in the price of goods and/or labour going up.

Obviously if you're way below full employment, then wages need not rise. The government of Greece say could easily print a few billion (if only they were allowed to) and pay some of those unemployed people to do something useful. That would grow the economy, as they'd then have cash to spend on other people's goods and services - and yet with unemployment at 25% - you need to employ a lot of people before you start pushing wages up.

Actually it would cause some inflation, but as Greece currently has -2% inflation, that would actually be a good thing for their economy.

For Britain, which has much lower unemployment and is now getting some welcome small wage inflation, printing would be inflationary. Inflation is low, we might even get away with bit anyway. But the hit to the credibility of our government might be disproportionately large, such that inflation expectations suddenly rise, leading to an inflationary devaluation in the currency - and the requirement to have higher interest rates or inflation than otherwise needed.

Who's pursued "austerity at all costs though"? The UK are still running a budget deficit of nearly £80 billion. Down from £150 billion in 2010. Sure there have been cuts, but not as huge as some people would have you think. The US continued stimulus for longer, and then had some pretty steep cuts because of the gridlock, and not renewing various tax cuts.

Now austerity at all costs was imposed on Greece. With truly disastrous results. But even then, there was an alternative. If Greece were willing to leave the Euro, they could have a sane economic policy.

Ireland, Spain and Portugal have had some pretty heavy cuts though. But again - that's more part of being in an unworkable currency union and trying to force economics to submit to politics. Which they're still managing to do - but I'm not sure how long they can keep it up. Of course they only made less than half the cuts that Greece was forced to, and 2 of them are back to growth.

The really ideological austerity fetishists are in Germany. Who are running a budget surplus, despite having the cheapest government borrowing in their history available - and infrastructure investment at a low. But they're also running at historically low levels of unemployment and huge levels of exports. Actually I'd argue that's a bad thing, Germany is becoming a less equal society and damaging the Euro because of it.

Your comment comes across as a bit of buzzword bingo - so I'm afraid you're going to have to say why you think Worstall's understanding of money mechanics is poor.

Worstall's understanding of the quantity theory of money and QE seems pretty mainstream to me. There's certainly plenty of debate about cause and effect though - I don't recall whether he's outed himself as a monetarist a Keynesian or somewhere in the middle.

But my understanding from studying economics, politics and history is that if you get large rises in the money supply you get inflation. The argument in economics is whether the rise in the money supply is the cause or the effect. If you print money, you raise the money supply. If you do it to buy things from foreigners then you get currency devaluation, leading to higher inflation and the need to either make cuts or the temptation to keep on printing, leading to a vicious inflationary cycle.

You can get away with it for a short while, or on a small scale. Particularly if no-one finds out. But not long term.

Re: At least you declared an interest this time

No, abusive means exactly what I meant it to "using hurtful language".

Will 28,

You're really going to have to go and find some of this hurtful language that you see, because I really don't. I even went off and read that Morozov article you linked to. I see no vitriol there.

Worstall spends both that and this article debating the issues. So he explains the technical points that he believes are important and then talks about the things that he believes they've got wrong.

He might make the odd comment about how he doesn't know what Morozov is banging on about, but that's by no means abuse. And to have a go at Murphy for having failed economics is perfectly legitimate if Murphy is trying to claim expertise in economics. Particularly as I've now had Murphy's arguments pointed out to me three times, and each one of those times he's made a basic error in understanting how accounting or economics actually work - and then refused to accept it when his error is pointed out to him.

He then uses these misunderstandings to build startlingly huge figures like the supposedly £190 billion tax gap, which he then uses to get publicity, in a sort of Daily Mail headline writing method writ large. Those figures then get into the mainstream political debate, and need to be challenged - otherwise we may end up with people making policy based on them.

Even if there was 7% of GDP of tax avoidance, you can't just magically grab all that cash for government with no effect on the economy.

There's plenty of legitimate economists, who do understant what they're talking about, to make the left wing argument. Such as Wren-Lewis or Krugman.

Re: Bonds

Be that as it may, it doesn't have to be inflationary - as long as the government isn't competing for *real* resources - commodities, people, etc, then inflation doesn't have to follow.

G Mac,

You can't follow a statement like the above with this:

Again, MMTers know this because they follow how money works in real-life, not just a theory on how it should work in a perfect world.

You're basically trying to say that in theory, in a perfect world, the government can print money to spend without inflation. Just so long as it doesn't compete with everyone else in the rest of the economy.

But unless it's paying unicorns to do the stuff it wants, of course it's competing with the rest of the economy. If you print money to build a road, then you're going to be employing people who would otherwise be doing other stuff - using their mechanical diggers (that now won't be digging holes for other clients), and concrete/aggregate/fuel that other people now won't be using.

The same if you employ more nurses, someone else now won't be paying those people to do stuff.

Now you can get away with this in Greece for example. Where they have deflation and mass unemployment and under-utilisation of resources. Printing money in Greece is exactly what the Eurozone should have done, but they deliberately decided to exclude Greece from Quantitive Easing - due to being incompetent fuckwits.

In the UK, with much lower unemployment, and wages already slowly rising, printing money to spend would be inflationary.

Secondly you have to remember that economics interacts with politics and public expectations. If enough people believe there's going to be a recession, then there will be. Banking crises are all about confidence. People's belief in what future inflation will be, drives their current actions, and can cause that future inflation. So if you allow the feeling to develop that you're going to lose all monetary discipline, you'll get more inflation than a government that is believed to be prudent doing the same thing.

As an example, I don't believe that QE will in fact be unwound. The Central Banks will use it as a tool to dampen money supply growth without having to raise interest rates so much. So they'll sell some bonds back to the markets. But at some point, I believe a Chancellor will stand up at the budget and quietly just write-off a chunk of the government debt held by the BofE. Because it's a one-off, we'll get away with it with just some minor harrumphing from The Telegraph and the FT. I think that'll have no effect on inflation, and be seen as a one-off. Although it's important not to do it until we're sure we won't need QE again for a nother few generations. As it would make QE (and us) much less credible if say we did that now, then China and the Eurozone economies both collapsed, and we needed to resort to it again.

Re: Guilt all round

From the High Court hearing into the Assange case it was shown that the accusations of rape met with the UK defnition of rape. At the time there were two accusations:

1. That he'd been told no sex without condom. After a bit of sulking they went ahead. So it was made fully clear what the rules were But when she was asleep he allegedly had another go and didn't put on a condom. That's clearly sex without consent, as her consent was conditional. The definition of which is rape. Obviously it's not rape with violence, but it's still rape. And the UK judges confirmed this would also be so under UK law. I could equally imagine it getting prosecuted as a less serious charge though.

2. In the other case he also had been told no condom, no sex. But in this case he's accused of not just complaining but trying to carry on regardless. She claims to have closed her legs, while he was lying on top of her trying to force himself on her. No violence is alleged, just superior size, weight and leverage. Eventually he realised it wasn't working, put on his condom like a good boy, and got some sex as a reward.

Not the most serious accusations ever for sure. But not minor either. As Ken Clark got into trouble for saying, there are degrees of rape, and some are more serious than others.

But if using your superior size and weight to force yourself on an unwilling partner isn't being counted as rape - then the people trying to make that claim in Assange's support need to take a long, hard look at their idea of morality. Because they're doing it wrong.

Re: WTF?

This is why he's unhappy about not being able to have these trumped up charges put before a court.

Craigness,

You're quite right! He was so desperate to clear his name that he fled the country, went to every legal effort possible in the UK in order to avoid being sent back for his pre-charge interview, and then when that also failed broke bail and ran away again (as close to South America as he could manage). Incidentally costing his "friends" a few hundred grand that they'd put up to cover his bail.

Then he loudly shouted how he was eager to be interviewed in the Ecuadorian embassy, but amazingly, that hasn't happened either! Who would have thought it? Ecuador and/or he, managed to find various excuses as to why the interview couldn't happen until the statute of limitations kicked in.

Now were I an uncharitable chap, I would be mighty suspicious of this series of actions, that has led to him not having to face any of the charges he's apparently so eager to have his day in court about.

If you put an impossible condition on your willingness to do something, that suggests that you are in fact trying to avoid doing it. Being given a legal indemnity against unspecified future charges is impossible. QED...

Re: So is there a statute of limitations about skipping bail?

I don't think we have a statute of limitations on crimes in English law. I'm less good on the Scottish legal system.

Civil matters usually have time limits, but I don't think there's anything even for minor crimes. Although the longer ago something is, the harder evidence is to produce.

I remember there were a bunch of rape prosecutions and convictions in the 90s, based on the new ability to process DNA evidence. I think the police had a program where they re-opened unsolved cases where they still had physical evidence from the crime scene, from as far back as the 70s.

Re: Here’s an idea for the journo’s

Do people still send faxes?

Horrible, nasty things fax machines. I was very glad when email finally killed them. We killed our company fax number 3 years ago, I had one request to send us a fax about a year later - but haven't had anything since.

Re: WTF?

william 10,

Your ignorance of UK law is total.

How would we charge Sweden for policing our laws? I suppose we could pass some fancy new law to do so. Although it wouldn't be worth the vellum it was written on in Sweden of course.

And there is no legal mechanism for a UK government to give a guarantee not to prosecute or extradite someone for an unspecified crime - of which no charge currently exists. It would have no validity with the courts. I know nothing about Swedish law, and what their government is allowed to do.

There is also no ministerial discretion in either the European Arrest Warrant, or the US extradition treaty. They are entirely a process for the courts to enforce, only our extradition treaties with everyone else allow for the Home Secretary to have the final word.

We did admittedly give letters of guarantee to certain IRA suspects, as part of the peace process. But that was not legal and therefore done in secret. And only came out as one seems to have been given out to someone in error. The Blair government managed to combine their usual lack of respect for due process and competence again... I don't know if the letters would stand up in court anyway, but of course political influence could be brought to bear on the police and prosecution services to stop any investigation from getting to court in the first place. It was also a rather unique situation, and frankly, Julian Assange just isn't that important.

Re: Is there any point in having a comment section?...

Astroturfing for who? There's plenty of comments both for and against St Julian. Plenty of them from regular posters on here, who'd be going to an awful lot of effort if they were posting all their usual crap just a cover for the odd bit of shilling on behalf of Uncle Sam / the UK / Sweden / Space Lizards / whatever...

I can confirm that my opinions (not very sympathetic to Assange) are entirely my own, and not paid for by anyone. If you can tell me where I can sign up to get paid decent money for posting any old crap online, please let me know. I might be tempted to quit my job, and sign up. So long as the hours are good.

Otherwise, if you're going to accuse people of shilling, kindly come up with some sort of evidence, or at least argument. Put up, or shut up.

He is indeed innocent. I have to say that he's innocent of these charges, because Swedish law says they have to be dropped, if you can successfully hide for 5 years. And I do believe in the rule of law. Although in the UK we don't run our system the same way, so the same trick wouldn't work.

But the Swedes have a much more liberal judicial and penal system than us, and there's much to admire about how the Nordics go about running their societies.

Of course that, and the fact that Assange said he was planning to seek permanent residency in Sweden, does rather undermine his claims about fearing that he's been set up by the evil Swedes to be fitted up for a crime he didn't commit without fair trial, then shipping off to the States. Given that he'd chosen to hang out in Sweden when he already claimed that the US were after him, and then chose to run to the UK - not a sensible place to be if you want to avoid Uncle Sam!

So I am entitled to be of the opinion that everything he says is total bollocks. And that he's got a proven track record in this case of getting his lawyers to put out misleading statements, and has many loyal supporters willing to do the same.

And no, he wasn't in hiding before all this blew up. He only went into hiding after the UK courts had finally blocked his final attempt to avoid being sent to Sweden to face the charges he'd already run away from. At which point he broke his bail, and fled to the Ecuadorian embassy.

So he is entitled to the presumption of innocence. Which means I am very careful with my language. But, I am entitled to take a view on his actions too. And I find them rather objectionable. He came to my country, got a more than fair hearing from our courts, who ruled that there was at least enough evidence to answer to charges of rape, but obviously it wasn't their job to rule on how good that evidence was. Only that it was enough for charges under UK law. Then he abused our hospitality, and buggered off, costing us quite a bit of money to enforce the laws of the land.

The only conclusions that I find that fit the data are that he's insanely paranoid, or that he's guilty. Admittedly the paranoia bit is quite likely, from everything I've read about him. But his attitude to women and what he's said about the charges could equally be interpreted to say that he's guilty as hell, and getting away with it.

Although as he's voluntarily locked himself in a tiny embassy for years, "getting away with it" obviously isn't true.

From a distance it's hard to know what combination of narcissim, his political beliefs, paranoia, publicity seeking and a weird childhood drives his actions. But he doesn't strike me as a particularly admirable human being. His supporters are often as self-righteous and annoying as he is. And I'm not all that convinced by Wikileaks. The Afghan war logs don't seem to have shown anything untoward, certainly I've seen nothing to justify the risk to the life of innocent Afghan locals of publishing them. Although I believe Julian Assange did say something like "they're informers, so fuck 'em". Which was nice...

Anyway the 'Collateral Murder' video showed nothing of the sort, just the usual fuck up you get in warzones. Someone pointed a camera at a helicopter during a convoy escort operation, and got shot at. The initial version edited out the weapons that the party who were attacked were carrying too, not that those weapons were a reason to attack them, but the cockpit audio suggested that the crew thought they'd seen an RPG and so fired. They sounded more inexperienced, and a bit panicky, than malevolent.

The diplomatic cables were interesting. I'm not sure they told us anything we didn't already know. It's hard to know whether they did more good (political transparency is worth something after all) than the probable slight harm to diplomatic communications - but I'm not sure they were worth Chelsea Manning going to prison for.

Re: Just to clear this up...

Bloody hell! Are people still peddling this shit? Have you guys never heard of the separation of powers? It's only basic political theory, not complicated, or new or anything...

We have separate judicial systems for a bloody good reason! So that politicians can't pick and choose who gets tried and who doesn't. It's not perfect, but it's set up that way for a reason.

And Assange is asking for a get out of jail free card, where he gets a guarantee of immunity from unspecified crimes he's not even been charged with. The legal advice given to a UK Minister would be that this would not be legal for them to do, as they have no legal power to give immunity. Also even if they gave such a guarantee, it would have no legal validity, and would be ignored by the courts.

There is normally a right for the Home Secretary to use discretion in the case of extradition. But the last Labour government, in some bout of collective insanity, decided that in both the case of the posspoor US extradition treaty and the European Arrest Warrant, the Home Secretary would give up that power to protect out citizens. Sadly the coalition failed to correct this monstrous fuck-up, and so far the Conservatives haven't talked about it either.

I don't know Swedish law. So don't know what their ministers can or can't do. Although I believe they have a standard block on extradition for "political crimes", so would be unlikely to extradite anyway. And of course with a European Arrest Warrant in place, Sweden would not be able to extradite without the permission of the UK courts as well.

Re: The Impact On The Public Was Terrible @Vorland

The Prince of Wales still had dockyard crew onboard fixing various problems. I seem to remember the captain gave up and buggered off at the point that 3 of his turrets had stopped working due to mechanical failures. The ship wasn't ready for combat.

Re: The Impact On The Public Was Terrible

So please stop repeating the result of the board of inquiry which was more worried about morale and public opinion at the time, not finding the real cause.

Voland's Right hand,

That looks like a rather niche reading of history. I've not read enough about the actual battle to know whether Hood failed to take avoiding action after being straddled.

However WWII battleships did regularly survive hits from other battleship guns. Which had larger than 11" guns too. I think the Bismark had 16" guns.

The problem for the Hood was that it exploded. Which meant that plunging fire was able to enter the magazines - and blow the ship up. Unless it was destroyed by too much live ammo being around, able to take a flash back to the magazines (and it was due for work on the loading system - I've not read about this in years). Thicker deck armour should cause the enemy's shells to explode at deck level, which is not much fun for the people up there, but stops them destroying the ship in one go. So you then lose whatever systems they hit near, and that's for damage control to try and fix so you can contine the battle. Or if you lose too many turrets and can't fight, you try to run away. And that's what faster speed or a destroyer screen is for.

Re: Darn - they saw me rolling back those laptops to XP last week

It will be interesting to see if W10 increases from now draw more from 8/8.1 or 7 though.

Having just upgraded my work laptop from 8.1 to 10 this morning, I'd say that we'll be upgrading the 2 Win 8 machines, but the Win 7 ones will probably stay where they are. I don't think it's a got anything extra that's shiny to make it worth the change in UI. Being a small business, we don't have IT, there's only me. Anything I can't do we pay outsiders for, like hosted Exchange and CRM.

The last sad user with Vista will be stuck with it until the laptop dies. I'm amazed it's lasted this long. Hmmm. I'd forgotten how old that was, I might suggest our first ever upgrade of a laptop not due to it falling apart - they never seem to live that long.