The Glenrothes Axis

The coming by-election in the Scottish borough of Glenrothes is one that is already looking to be a very close call between Labour and the SNP. It is also perhaps the most glaring example of how outmoded the traditional 'Left-Right' political axis is as regards politics within the United Kingdom.

As there is sadly, no Conservative presence in Glenrothes (as everywhere in Scotland) the two parties contesting the election are the immediately 'Right wing' nationalists and what one would presumably regard as their opposite, the self-described socialist and decidedly 'Left wing' Labour.

Yet in an election that cannot help but be defined overwhelmingly by the current state of the economy, there is actually very little to distinguish between the two parties' policies. Both are traditionally protectionist, interventionist, and in favour of State ownership. Both have been forced to climb down a peg or two in this post-Thatcherite political arena, but to be sure, only a couple.

For example, although Alex Salmond has paid lip service in the recent past on freeing up the Scottish economy for foreign investment, since becoming First Minister he has also sent Scottish State expenditure and benefit payments through the roof - a combination that would, to anyone with a reasonable grasp of economics seem utterly contradictory. But alas, it is exactly this kind of behaviour by Gordon Brown over the last decade that has landed us in the dire economic straits we're now in. Even worse, it appears that in his efforts to take a revised approach, the Prime Minister has got it the wrong way round - jettisoning the former while accelerating the latter.

In effect, by ditching the free-market rhetoric of Blairism from Labour policy, Gordon Brown has given the equally reactionary First Minister the green light to do the same. After all, it hardly opens the doors for a Tory take-over of Scotland. What it does do however is expose very plainly that on economic matters these two populist parties are completely out of their depth - meaning that in a crisis they invariably grasp for the same old tired straws of State intervention.

This shouldn't come as much of a surprise. There is a long precedent in Europe of seemingly opposite political parties of the 'Left' and 'Right' at each others' throats simply because their policies are so resoundingly similar. Indeed, the Nazis and Communists of inter-war Germany never ceased to tire beating each other senseless, but afforded very little attention towards the liberal and conservative groups. The Social Democrats too, had a rivalry with the Communists approaching that of which both had with the Nazis because all three were in competition for the same minds armed with broadly similar economic programmes. As economic disaster was the key to most of their electoral success, the conflict between them was bitter.

Unsurprisingly then, all three parties were fond of using the giant crimson proletarian superman on their posters - usually seen smashing through his chains and/or stomping upon the petrified faces of capitalists and priests. Nonetheless, this does seem to contradict the notion held by most of us that the ideologies behind these parties presented radically different visions on what the future of Germany should be. Indeed, the Third Reich and East Germany are both very real and chilling testaments to how the latter two would realise these differing but equally terrifying ideals.

Growing up with the idea that Nazism and Communism are as different as back and white, one may overlook the fact that the practical applications of their ideologies were not all that different. It is worth posturing that in domestic policy at least, the Third Reich and East Germany changed day-today life very little for ordinary Germans - even, to an extent - if you were Jewish. It is principally because all three had such a thin grasp on the study of economics itself that their policies were so resoundingly similar. As frequently put by the economist Milton Friedman - there can be no political liberty without economic liberty.

It is certainly no moot point that Hitler, a man who viewed economics as supremely unimportant in his grand scheme of things, should immediately jump to State ownership and direction as policy once his chief economist Schacht had stopped telling him what he wanted to hear on rearmament. Indeed Enoch Powell, a man many would wrongly associate with the nationalist 'Right' argued this precise point - observing that there was so little to distinguish the economic policies of successive Labour governments from the Fascist and Communist regimes of Europe simply because "they are all at heart totalitarian". Certainly in this light it can come as no coincidence that the celebrated fascists Oswald Mosley and Benito Mussolini were dedicated members of Labour and the Socialists respectively, before beginning their own political movements.

The point to be made here is this: when the crux of your policy falls on essentially one issue - be it the welfare of the toiling masses, national independence, the environment, religion or race - economic concerns inevitably take a back seat, more often than not as merely a tool used towards an end. Consequently it is always poorly understood, always misused and always abused. The consequence being, naturally, that it always ends in tears.

Conversely, the only surviving party in the United Kingdom that has ever viewed prudent maintenance of the economy and wealth creation as ends in themselves are the Conservatives. The United States has thus far been blessed by this trait in both the leading parties throughout its history. However, the Bush administration has been attacked for seemingly putting fiscal conservatism to one side in favour of pursuing an ideological foreign policy - namely, the neocon 'Towards an American Century' project. Obama too, seems set to repeat this folly with socialistic federal expenditure aimed at one slice of American society. This more European mould of politics is increasingly in danger of infiltrating the Anglo-Saxon community of nations as more and more political parties emerge with ulterior motives aimed at ever smaller sections of our society.

More than ever before then, conservatives in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia must stand strong with a One Nation base of support against this increasingly sectarian trend. We have a rich history to draw on. From the days of Tory paternalism against the Liberal 'millocracy' in the nineteenth century to the tides of Thatcherism against the undemocratic power of the trade unions; the Conservatives have been the only party in the United Kingdom to consistently unite these islands' inhabitants through an over-riding commitment to the cohesion of the Union itself. Who else has so successfully united agricultural and industrial workers with the landed aristocracy? The skilled working classes with a rising set of entrepreneurial of businessmen?

Unsurprisingly then, the Conservatives are also the only party with the accumulated knowledge and experience on economic and social matters to actually achieve this. They may be blamed for many things in the industrial heartlands of England, but it should be cited in their defence that the nationalisation of industry by Labour was the original sin. For ten years it must have seemed to the people of this country that Labour had finally 'got it' with the economy. Indeed, perhaps the most consistent complaint of recent years has been that, given Tony Blair's tough approach to law and order, there has been very little to choose from between the main parties.

Of course in hindsight we know that this really was too good to be true. The maintenance of the economy for the benefit of everyone was never, as it turns out, an end in itself for 'new' Labour - simply a change in tactics. The goal remains, as it was, the same. Socialism. Or, to put it in a few more words - handing all the proceeds of accelerated growth to the working (or more often, not-working) classes through damaging and massively inflated benefits and services while leaving nothing for a rainy day which your ideology has in any case expressly ruled out as a possibility; then, when everything goes tits-up, proceeding to blame it on the very people who raised you all that revenue in the first place before taxing and regulating them out of the country.

It doesn't take a political genius to see that in this way Labour has consistently been a divisive and counterproductive force in the running of British politics, because it has and always will represent the interests of only one section of society - one that happens to be disproportionately dominated by the trades unions who are once again forming the bulk of party funding.

This blinkered and interest-driven view towards policy will always be the downfall of Labour when it comes to economic matters. It nearly cost them their very existence as a mainstream political party in 1983. By 1997 Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had managed to successfully 'decontaminate the brand' so to speak, and make Labour appear electable again - for a short while even invincible. They had managed to convince us that after fifty years of wrecking the economy they'd finally gained some competence on the subject. This is no small feat, and they deserve some recognition for this.

But Gordon Brown has demolished this illusion as just that. It was a very fancy illusion, and darned convincing, but an illusion nonetheless. It is now not such a stretch to conclude that what Labour inherited in 1997 was in fact a Tory upswing in the economy - a Tory mistake fixed by the Tories - proceeding to hollow it out over the next ten years with a spendthrift attitude to public borrowing/spending prompted by an ideological assertion that there would never again be another economic collapse in Britain. "No more boom and bust" indeed! The very idea, that one can completely rule out this entirely natural outcome of the economic cycle and proceed to stick ones head in the sand, refusing even to prepare for the merest possibility of this eventuality shows an enormous degree of ignorance and arrogance on the part of Labour that is usually reserved only for the most feckless and stupid of individuals.

I put it therefore that Labour is unfit to govern. I put it that they have never been fit to govern and their trail of destruction in British industry and society since 1945 leaves very little to defend their claim to power. Furthermore, due to the deep-rooted socialist assumptions and instincts within the party, I do not believe they will ever conclusively prove themselves to be so. Attlee failed, Wilson failed, and now Brown has failed. It's a sloppy record.

This really ought to be the end of the road for Labour in Scotland, but without a fresh and renewed Tory presence there (perhaps by cutting the Scottish Tories loose again in the guise of a resurrected Unionist party?) all we can really expect to see is the replacement of one populist, spendthrift and economically ignorant party with another. The danger is that if the Tories fail to produce a real alternative to this socialist/nationalist economic axis, we may end up in a situation where it's no longer our problem.

Free Trade vs Live Aid

I remember quite vividly some five years ago first hearing that the eighties were 'back in'. The seventies garage band look popularised very briefly by the Strokes explosion had passed and eyes had turned elsewhere. This was fine by me of course - the 1980s was perhaps the greatest decade of the twentieth century, and not just because I was born bang in the middle of it. Yet, I couldn't help thinking to myself that only a few years previously the said decade could not be so much as mentioned without the mandatory epithet 'the decade that fashion forgot' - something these days about as memorable as Justin Timberlake's days in N*Sync. Yet suddenly it was okay again to like The Human League and to wear white jeans. Hmm. In a sense Francis Fukuyama may have been right when he mused on the 'end of history' - the eighties had become the height of cool again after only 10 years' absence, and with the new early-nineties craze for rave creeping ever deeper into popular culture, it appears we are now trapped on the ever-spinning wheel of fashion for the foreseeable future. So much so, in fact, that even the Labour Party have jumped the bandwagon.

A notable eighties fashion cynically lambasted throughout the 1990s (along with just about everything else, it seems) were overblown charity concerts. The year 2005 reignited the trend with Live Aid reincarnated as Live 8 on its twentieth anniversary. This summer we've managed to completely outdo ourselves on this score by staging not one, but two utterly pointless events within the space of a week. These days of course, the concerts are very post-modernly about 'awareness' because we've managed to figure out that fiscally they're a drop in the ocean and can't, sadly, save the world. Sad, yes, but you can't blame them for being optimistic - it was the eighties after all. But if Bob Geldof and Bono can't save the world, what hope is there? What to do with all these 'failed states'?

Well so far, half a century of throwing money at the developing world doesn't seem to have yielded any fruit. In fact all it can conceivably have achieved is a minutely lessened death toll, while at the same time giving already hopelessly inept governments even less incentive to face facts. This is rotten fruit. On the flipside, the continuous bleat for inaction due to corrupt dictators extorting any aid for themselves is neither constructive nor relevent. Such an attitude does nothing to help the suffering of millions, and besides - ten years of New Labour in this country has proved that even in the most well-intentioned hands, merely throwing money at a problem solves nothing. I'm thinking state education and health care here Tony. Likewise, the campaign to 'make poverty history' is not only hopelessly naive, but actually bordering on insanity. It is a campaign so economically ignorant and fantastical that it could almost have been devised by the Politburo itself. Poverty is a relative concept and will always be with us so long as some are better off than others. The fact that what we call 'poverty' in this country is such a highly desirable standard of living for most of the rest of the world is a testament to this - as indeed to the merits of liberal democracy and free market capitalism. Now, call me a Thatcherite idealist, but this is where I believe true hope lies.

On October 30 1990, Margaret Thatcher was prompted to defend the United Kingdom's aid commitment to the emerging democracies (and potential competetors) of Europe by the then-member for Oldham Central and Royton - what we would now call a very 'old Labour' MP - James Lamond. The said member - who had clearly been either hiding under a rock or lost in a coma for the duration of the seventies - went on to criticise the Government over their liberalisation of the economy and urged Mrs Thatcher to return Britain to the protectionist policies of the past in the interests of its workers, whom he accused Mrs Thatcher of 'selling down the river' to foreign competition and investment. This was greeted with groans of approval from the honourable member's backbench colleagues, while Mrs Thatcher pointed out that not only would protectionism hurt our workers more than help them, but that concerning the people of the Third World - 'They need trade as much as they need aid'.

That as late as 1990 - with 40 years' experience of what protectionism, corporatism and government intervention brings, and with the economic nightmare of the seventies behind them - this was still the prevailing attitude among the Parliamentary Labour Party in a country as 'developed' as Britain - shows just what we are up against in convincing developing world leaders to abandon their sloppy socialism and open their markets to free trade. Incidentally, the kind of xenophobic language used by backbench Labour MPs of the time on matters concerning foreign investment and competition serves only to reinforce Friedrich von Hayek's identification of 'the socialist roots of Nazism', as well as the intellectual bankruptcy and contradiction inherent in Left internationalists' resistance to globalisation.
But to get back to the point, promoting free trade to the developing world will indeed continue to be a difficult task, not least because of widespread suspicion even among large sections our own societies, exemplified most notably in the rise of 'ethical' trading and fair trade products. But in a sense the figures go a long way towards speaking for themselves - there is a startling correlation between data collected by the Heritage Foundation in their Index of Economic Freedom [1] and Foreign Policy magazine's Failed States Index [2]. Of the 157 countries listed in the Index of Economic Freedom, the top ten are all classed as either 'stable' or 'most stable' in the Failed States Index. According to the Heritage Foundation, the following are the ten most open and unregulated economies in the world

1. Hong Kong
2. Singapore
3. Ireland
4. Luxembourg
5. Iceland
5. United Kingdom
7. Estonia
8. Denmark
9. New Zealand
9. United States
9. Australia

We know these well as prosperous, affluent states with a high overall standard of living. The Republic of Ireland - for so long one of the EU's poorest nations - has experienced such a massive increase in prosperity since abandoning its anti-imperialist hangover that a new term has been coined in the wake of this phenomenon - Celtic Tiger.
In contrast, the bottom ten nations in the Index of Economic Freedom (below) are all classed as 'borderline' in the Failed States Index. This is excepting Venezuela ('In danger'), Myanmar, Zimbabwe, and North Korea (all 'Critical')

148. Turkmenistan
149. Laos
150. Cuba
151. Belarus
152. Venezuela
152. Libya
154. Zimbabwe
155. Burma
156. Iran
157. North Korea

With hard figures in front of us, it is plain to see that the most regulated, protectionist, and openly socialist economies of the world are by no coincidence also the most poverty-stricken and volatile. Other states similarly classed as 'critical' in the Failed States Index also rank very low in the Index of Economic Freedom. Haïti (147), Bangladesh (141), Republic of the Congo (143) and Ethiopia (133) all belong to this category and are infamous the world over for inhumane levels of poverty and degradation among their inhabitants. The typically Left explanation of this phenomenon - also tediously prevalent among otherwise well-educated young people - is that it is the result of European imperialism and racism. This is utter bolderdash, and there are many states around the world that prove this. Hong Kong and Singapore - topping the Heritage Foundation's index and practically isolated in Asia in terms of economic freedom are both former colonies of the British Empire. Both countries possess only a tiny fraction of the population and natural resources available to their much poorer neighbours, and are by far the world's greatest example of the benefits inherant in free trade and a healthy, open economy. Indeed, the contrast in Asia is greater than anywhere else in the world - Hong Kong and Singapore stand out as shining dynamic tigers of freedom and prosperity, while Burma and North Korea languish in the depths of extreme poverty and tyranny. Even their neighbours China and India - though still far from free and prosperous economies - have experienced unprecedented booms since shedding their own socialist pasts, accompanied by a rise in the overall stadard of living. What we see here is that poverty can in no way be pegged to imperialism or natural resources and that furthermore, prosperity can be directly linked to an open and free economy.

It is very easy to forget in today's political climate that as little 25 years ago, eastern Europe too relied on aid and debt relief from the west. Their poverty too was caused by economic restriction and mismanagement accompanied by vastly over-reaching governmental power. In her memoirs The Downing Street Years, Mrs Thatcher sheds light on her dilemma in how best to tackle the problem concerning Poland in 1981

If we continued to provide food aid and to proceed with plans for Polish debt relief would this benefit the Polish people or play into the hands of hardliners in Poland who are struggling to survive the consequences of misgovernment?

The new prosperity that eliminated this question entirely was brought about by democratic and economic freedom sweeping through eastern Europe as state by state freed itself from the Soviet yoke and adopted the western model. The eighties closed in a collective sigh of relief as Marx's Communist spectre 'haunting Europe' was finally and permanently put to rest. The developing world then, would do well to learn from this perfect miniature of their own economic history, as well as that of Hong Kong and Singapore's. For, as pointed out by Mrs Thatcher - there is always the danger that continued aid without dedicated political pressure will only perpetuate the kind of economic and political mismanagement that caused all the problems in the first place. With Zimbabwe's rapid disintegration worsening day by day, Mrs Thatcher's words continue to resonate into modern times. They really do need trade as much - if not in fact more - than they need aid.