English: Commemorative plaque, The house where Margaret Thatcher was born, Grantham Français : Plaque commémorative, Maison natale de Margaret Thatcher, Grantham (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Rodney Willett sent me a tweet and invited my views on the following article. His article is well worth a read:
Yesterday, I published by response.
Planned austerity or unplanned austerity? – Rodney Willett – A response from Dr Alf
I received a detailed response from John Gelmini which provides a third perspective, so I am re-blogging it below:
Rodney Willett has a point but we do need a reasonable and planned injection of credit from the banks because initiatives like the Bank of Essex (a joint venture with Santander and Essex County Council), Foundation East based in Suffolk and the emerging “Bank of Cambridge” are not enough to replace bank lending for SMEs and not enough to fund new startups by school leavers who will otherwise never work because of complete lack of growth.
Globalisation was originally a mental construct of the Bilderberg Group and has resulted in a net loss of jobs in the West mirrored by a corresponding increase in the number of jobs in China, India and the rest of the Far East.
Eventually this will lead to a loss of military power as we will not be able to afford it any longer.
This is evidenced by the Navy risk register, which now shows that one nuclear submarine which is part of our deterrent, will have to remain in dock because of a lack of submariners and the fact that we now share aircraft carriers with the French and cannot protect our own coastline for lack of ability to afford a coastal protection vessel.As an island, we need to able to protect our sea lanes and trading routes, something which Henry VIIIth, one of England’s great kings recognised hundreds of years ago when he laid the foundations for us to become a super power.
Twice we have nearly been starved to death in two world wars, yet those lessons have already been lost on our vacuous and extremely lazy Prime Minister, who is content to let more expensive food imports into the country, our young people to languish on the dole and our businesses to be starved of credit.
We can reduce our deficit as has been suggested in the latest post above and by reducing the number of public bodies involved in administering public services and by strictly controlling staff numbers.
Outsourcing of non-core functions is a given but we should where possible keep those jobs here and not offshore them so as to keep the tax revenues here where they belong.We must also look at our population size and composition.
There are 35 million, too many people for our physical and financial resources (current population 63 million officially plus 4.5 million illegal immigrants and 250,000 new migrants a year) and too many, very costly, old people, often living in subsidized council houses at below market rents and costing the NHS and local authority budgets dearly.
Our public services would cost a lot less if there were fewer people so measures like a new Assisted Migration Programme to reduce population numbers need to be pursued.
We have 16.5 million people who are not working and not producing out of a potential workforce of 32 million. We need the economy to expand so that the dole bill is reduced and the proportion of those not engaged in tax and wealth generative employment falls to less than 20% of all people in the workforce.
Similarly, we need to take action to improve our abysmal productivity(60% in the private sector and 40% in the public sector) which is 15th in the world and our poor value per taxpayer pound (17th).
To improve our national top line we need:
–An export programme of substantial proportions,faster writing down allowances
–Language skills training
–A competitive tax system
–More innovation
—Inward investment from the wealthy from overseas
–Money from Sovereign Wealth Funds for infrastructure solicited by Boris Johnson who has not insulted any foreign leaders of countries like China in the way David Cameron has and Margaret Thatcher never did in 18 years of office.
–A real effort to recover money stolen from taxpayers by the rich and powerful.
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There is so much in John Gelmini’s response with which I agree but which I do not believe can be controlled or even facilitated by the government.
Yes we need more investment into business – and especially for the young who wish to try and start a business. Is it not of great interest that the schemes that are now operating are small scale and operating in a given locality? Government can pump and has pumped cash into banks but it cannot control what those banks do with that cash – true even when the bank is in effect owned by the tax payers. We need many more such schemes and then we would have something to replace the sector previously filled by the big high street banks. Government could facilitate the creation of such small scale enterprises by offering minimal regulation and a freedom from taxation so long as the bank does not exceed a certain size (and possibly is, in effect, a mutual society?).
Whilst I share some disquiet regarding the Bilderberg Group I suspect that nothing came from the meetings that would not have arisen by other means. In other words, the realignment of wealth over the planet was inevitable (and probably morally right) and the globalisation of commerce, made easier by modern communications and transportation, was bound to lead to work drifting away from high cost work forces such as our own to those of places such a China. The reality of the situation is that there will be a drop in living standards in the UK (which is where all this started with the concept of planned austerity) which we cannot avoid but which could, in terms of human well-being, be an opportunity rather than the reverse.
It follows that there is no possibility of our being able to afford to remain a world military power. We could, however, afford properly to protect our own if we stopped intervening in problems that are not of our making and none of our business (especially as history records that most such endeavours have failed to achieve anything of permanent note.
There are many reasons why we should do all in our power to be self-supporting in food. I would suggest that small scale but intensive horticulture would be the best option not least because it can be very labour intensive so offering opportunities to people who would otherwise be unemployed.
I agree that we need to improve our performance and I agree with the bullet points above except that I see no opportunities to export other than in the field of expertise and innovation. As an example, we have a wonderful record in educating people from around the world and that is an area where we could/should seek improvements.
Rodney Willett writing under the umbrella of ‘Think Local’.
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