The not quite so United Kingdom

And so the inevitable is happening-
Over three hundred years after the Act of Union in 1707, Southern Britain and Northern Ireland and Scotland look likely to go their own separate ways again. It is rather ironic that it should happen in an epoch where governance is becoming broader, and political units are getting bigger - as with the ever expanding European Union,with its increasing influence over the lives of Europeans.

However, with devolution the break-up of the United Kingdom was always going to happen sooner or later. Devolution is a one way street: it is rare that - in the neo-functionalist sense - you get 'spill-back'. So it looks likely that Scotland will be having a referendum in 2014 - if Alex Salmond gets his way, and I see no reason why he should not -  to decide whether it wishes to remain a constituent and equal nation of the United Kingdom.        

The United Kingdom that Salmond wants Scotland to leave is one that led a global wave of industrialisation, held sway over a quarter of the world's population, the largest empire the world has ever known, fought two world wars, English, Welsh/Cymraeg, Irish/ Northern Irish and Scottish service men and women fighting and working alongside each other in the two biggest conventional interstate wars the world has ever borne witness, and continues to have a large influence over the world. On a daily basis, British service personnel are giving their lives in Afghanistan to keep these islands, perched on the European continent's north west flank, safe - regardless of nation of origin.

And even if Scotland was to vote to become an independant nation, lots of problems and hurdles would still remain.

-What currency would an independant Scotland use? 
The two options that have been put forward by Alex Salmond in the last few weeks both look rather dubious. The idea of Scotland keeping the Pound Sterling as an independent country - whilst theoretically not impossible - would leave the Scottish economy's fiscal and monetary policy split. This eventuality is akin to Zimbabwe adopting the US dollar a few years ago because its own currency became worthless as pointed out by Alistair Darling last week.  Scotland would be in the bizarre position of having an independent fiscal policy whilst being in monetary union with what would remain of Great Britain. The difficulties in the Eurozone can be explained in the same way: the countries that have the Euro can indeed share the same currency, the difficulty is that each state runs a separate fiscal policy. This leads to stronger Eurozone countries metaphorically 'dragging weaker, less financially stable, countries through a bush backwards'- enforcing their economic model on other states.

The other option would be for Scotland to join the Euro. Although for the arguments stated above, this seems a self-defeating and stupid policy. In all likelyhood, Scotland - when its portion of the UK's debt is repatriated to Edinburgh, despite receiving income for North Sea oil- will not reach the entry requirements of a 3% or less budget deficit and 60% debt to GDP ratio required to join the single currency. This then seems another pie in the sky option given current economic circumstances. Not to mention that not so long ago Salmond's economic policy for an independent Scotland included creating an 'arch of prosperity' including the Republic of Ireland and Iceland - two countries that no longer appear to be examples of fine economic governance. On the back of shouldering more debt, Scotland would have to get a credit rating in order to borrow money. It would appear unlikely that an independent Scotland would be awarded a prestigious triple A rating.

-The nuclear detterent based at HMNB Clyde and Scottish industry
Another issue that would of course have to be resolved if Scotland was to become an independent nation is the UK nuclear detterent which is currently based at HMNB Clyde, near Glasgow. Who would take command of the detterent? It has been payed for out of taxpayer's money from across the UK and with Salmond's SNP determined not to enter NATO and to oversee a pullout from Afghanistan what would happen to it is in doubt. Post independence, if Scotland were to maintain the nuclear detterent for a brief period of time, and was viewed as signature of the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty (NPT), given its previous link to the United Kingdom which ratified the treaty in 1968, than it would be in breach of Article 2 of the treaty. The portion of Great Britain that remained united - viewed as the primary successor state - could also conceivably be in breach of Article 1, even if Scotland did not maintain nuclear weapons. States now party to the treaty but that were still part of the British Empire when the treaty came into force have since had to ratify as non-nuclear weapon states in accordance with the treaty .

So with these two difficulties that would have to be overcome and the common sense of unity that has existed for over three hundred years between Scotland and England, it would appear that independence is not going to quite as simple as Alex Salmond wants it to be. Nevertheless, with an overall majority in Edinburgh and the Unionist parties in complete disarray, it looks as if the we may well see the breakup of the United Kingdom into its contituent ethnic groupings. The largest party in the current government, the Conservative Party, is almost an irrelevance in Scottish politics holding only one out of a possible fifty nine seats and winning less than 20% of the votes in the 2010 General Election in Scotland, and with Labour's current general confusion - the Unionists are not in a very strong position.

The next two years will decide the fate of the United Kingdom. Once one country goes, I think the entire union will likely disintegrate into its constituent chunks. Devolution was always going to lead to a looser union between the four countries that comprise it. We have now arrived at the inevitable: the time when the United Kingdom has to choose its future. Does it want to continue united - as it has successfully done for the past three hundred years - or break up. It will be sad if it chooses the later, considering what the United Kingdom has achieved in the last three centuries and can continue to achieve in the future. Devolution means that from many come one. It should represent that fact that the United Kingdom is a patchwork quilt of various cultures and languages. It does not - as Alex Salmond wants - mean that we should all go our separate ways.  Together the United Kingdom is stronger than divided for all its citizens lest Alex Salmond forget.  

   


  

An appraisal of Vladimir Putin

When the Chinese offered Vladimir Putin their equivalent of a Nobel peace prize at the end of last year, many commentators seemed confused. How could a leader who is increasingly seen as dictatorial receive such an accolade. Many assumed it was just another attempt by China to snub the Western Human Rights agenda and culture. However, have China got it right on this one. Peace prizes are presumably meant to be awarded to those who try and avoid war or military confrontation, and condemn them when they occur.

Russia under Putin has taken a very pragmatic approach to foreign affairs: getting involved in countries that border it but rarely venturing much further. It has learnt, in large part, the lessons of the Soviet misadventures, like in Afghanistan.

Russia has never functioned as a liberal democracy: it experienced the autocratic Tsars monarchy followed almost immediately by a Communist revolution that installed a dictatorial regime in Moscow. Russia is a country that is used to having a strong leader - whether that is a Tsar, Lenin, Stalin or Putin. Autocratic powerful leaders are all many russians have known. And the two times that Russia has had a system almost equating to democracy, just before the 1917 revolution and in the years after the Soviet collapse, it has failed them in a big way. The first because it was ineffective, and then with the return to democracy after the Soviet collapse- during Boris Yeltsin's leadership - Russia was ridiculed on the World stage.      

No wonder then that Putin's more autocratic style is popular amongst Russian: as far as many are concerned it is the only system that has worked for them. Putin has succeeded because he has put some pride back into Russian society. After the collapse of communism, many Russians felt humiliated. Under the Soviet system, Russia had a sense of pride in competing against America: after its collapse they had nothing, they were a defeated nation entering a period of military hegemony by a state they had once competed against for global influence. 

Putin is seen as a leader that is willing to defend Russia's national interest once again. A bulwark against attempts by the west to spread normative values. He has succeeded on the economic front as well. Russia has experienced 9 years of continous economic growth: GDP has risen by 63%, poverty has halved and average monthly incomes have increased from $80 to $640 under Putin's stewardship of the economy. 

Like him or hate him, Putin has been a successful leader of the Russian Federation. And as he mentioned in an interview, and I paraphrase, "of course Russia has freedom of speech, otherwise there would not  have been any protests in the first place". 

Occupy movement complaining against centre-leftist corporatism not capitalism



Above: the OWS protest in Zuccotti Park, near Wall Street,
New York City
(Source:  http://www.city-analysis.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/zuccotti-park-ows.jpg)

This blog is a bit late because events were moving rapidly. It is about the Occupy movements that sprung up in America and around the world. It has been repeatedly claimed that the movement is entirely opposed to capitalism as a entity. However, it seems that a slight re-evaluation of this statement would perhaps be helpful.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, and its syndicates in various other nation states around the world, is primarily focused on a perceived greed of 'bankers' given the massive bailouts that nation states supplied to them during the economic crisis of 2008-2009. But that is exactly where a misinterpretation has taken place: the Occupy movement seems opposed to the bailouts themselves, and perhaps with some reason, rather then the principle of banking institutions. The bailout of banks, and in Britain's case the effective nationalisation of the banking system, increased national Government debts aroound the world massively. As Benito Mussolini once said:       

"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power"1      



Above: The Rt Hon Gordon Brown, former 
PM of the United Kingdom
(Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/grahamstewart/gordon_brown_portrait.jpg)

 What many in the Occupy movement are opposed to is the use of public funds to bail out large, "capitalist", banking corporations. In effect, they want free market capitalism to work as it should do, not in its state-collaborating  current form. Capitalism, fundamentally, is not about propping up failed companies, banks or otherwise. The difficulty is that the way that the system was allowed to function, especially throughout the Brown Chancellorship in the United Kingdom. encouraged undue risks to be taken - and for banks to expand to become too big for any one state to control properly. 

It is now states that have borrowed too much who are forcing Banks into difficulty. Banks and Governments have become far too interlinked. There is now a realisation that the debt accrued by Banks lending to sub prime borrowers never really disappeared: it was merely transferred from Bank balance sheets to those of respective governments. The truth is that the corporate relationship between Banks and States - highlighted by acts taken by the previous centre-left government in the UK to prop up banks as a face saver after years of mismanagement of the sector - is going to be very hard to dissolve.  It is obvious that big was not best when it comes to the banking sector. Governments that now try to spend their way out of trouble are stuck: by spending they increase the debts held by Banks and end up back at square one or in a worse position.

The lesson, as pointed out by the Occupy movement, is that corporations have to be able to fail. Capitalism functions by creative destruction ('schöpferische zerstörung')2 as mentioned in The Communist Manifesto, but in a different context: out of the ashes of disaster arises success. The correct response to the global credit crunch would have been for governments to have allowed national banks to collapse into central banks, with central banks effectively taking over ownership. In this manner, debts owed to the Bank could have been removed, central banks would have actioned their responsibility as lender of last resort, and the crisis would have been contained to adlanticist countries.
 

Mao Zedong, Guerrilla Warfare, Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda




 Osama Bin Laden, former head
of terrorist network Al Qaeda

There seems to be a link that nobody is making - well, at least not until a lecturer of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, mentioned it in one of my recent lectures after I had already started this blog.                  

The idea, at least to me, seems very obvious indeed. Since the end of the Cold War, interstate relationships have improved markedly. Since 1990 we have moved from an era of duopolistic military power to having a hegomonic international system with one state, the United States of America having more control over the Westphalian state-system than any other, and trying to shape the world in its image of free-market liberal capitalism. It has become the status-quo, at least for the time being and the immediate future. No other state in the system can yet question America's military pre-dominance.

However, in much the same way as there were military rules of the game during the Cold War era, so there are a new - or a reinstatement of the old, depending on how you see it -set of rules under the new circumstances. States and non-governmental actors have realised that they cannot realistically compete with the United States through military means: in a conventional war, any ideological terrorist group, like Al Qaeda, that formed an army or state would be - metaphorically - flattened.  

Hence, terrorist groups like Al Qaeda have adopted a new method - guerrilla warfare. It is the only way that any NGO terrorist organisations can take on the United States's "force de frappe". Al Qaeda are using the same techniques against the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq as Mao Zedong used against the Japanese and nationalist government after the Second World War. What is even more embarrasing is that 

Mao Zedong, leader of the
Communist Revolutionaries
against Japan and the nationalist
government 


we were the ones who inadvertantly enlightened them as to how to fight this kind of war. During the Soviet Union's occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980's, Western powers spearheaded by the United States aided the Muhajadeen in agitating for a Soviet withdrawal. They achieved their aim but at a price for the West. Osama Bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda at the time of the attacks on the World Trade Centres of the Twin Towers in September 2001, must have been overjoyed when then President George W. Bush steped into the trap of declaring a War on Terror'. Declaring war on an a concept rather than a physical object, a nation state or even a single enemy. 


Mao-Zedong commented that his political goal was 'the complete emancipation of the Chinese people'. The concept of emancipation strikes an accord with the expressed aims of Bin Laden's organisation: they wish to remove Westerners, who they accuse of cooperating with 'zionist forces', from lands in the Middle and near East. They wish to create a Islamic calaphite under sharia law in the region. The organisation has become a franchise, a bit like a terrorist Macdonalds, or split into 'units' as Mao termed them, of guerrilla fighters.

An example of an Al Qaeda training camp
in the lawless tribal border lands of Afghanistan
Pakistan 

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and Mao in 1930s China are both in countries which are , in the words of Mao, 'politically, militarily and economically [deficient]  ' They are both following the principle of 'dispersion, concentration, constant change of position' in order to outwit their foreign adversary - the United States and NATO or the Japanese.   

The way to combat this kind of guerrilla warfare (or terrorism, if you prefer) will require an embellishment of current military tactics, a revolution in military affairs, which is woefully lacking at present. Mikhail Gorbachev, the former leader of the Soviet Union, has been fantastically enlightening in pointing out that America is experiencing a déjà vu of their adventure in Vietnam and the Soviet misadventure into Afghanistan in the 1980s. By killing one terrorist you create a thousand new recruits. Osama Bin Laden used textbook Mao,  of dispersing 'in order to promote mass movements over a wide area' and using the principle of 'the people are the water, our armies are the fish'. The west has not and obviously ugently  needs to find a cure for this type of warfare.
    

Legalise currently illegal narcotics and prostitution



Is there any logic behind keeping drugs illegal?

This article will look at the issue of illegal narcotics and prostitution in the United Kingdom and ask the question: is it really beneficial to maintain the ban on these two aspects of society? Does keeping drugs and prostitution illegal make us safer as citizens in the United Kingdom or create more problems than it solves?

There is an immense cost to the taxpayer in trying to police and punish those who carry drugs. This uses up valuable resources, especially in a time of economic hardship and fiscal retrenchment, which could be better used funding other more constructive projects in society, such as more funding for schooling and higher education or schemes to get unemployed people skilled and back into the workplace.

The battle against illegal drugs is one that simply cannot be won. It drains a lot of money and time with no perceivable benefit. By criminalising possession of drugs you make otherwise law-abiding citizens into criminals. Instead of dealing with the harmful effects that drugs have on communities, you are dealing with the consequences.                                                                                                                                      

Many who take drugs are forced into crime, which transcribes into a social cost for everyone, and makes neighbourhoods more dangerous. This acts as a vicious cycle. It can destroy already less advantaged areas of the UK, areas such as Hackney in London, Motherwell, Govan, in Glasgow, Small Heath and Sparkbrook in Birmingham and the Guernos, near Merthyr Tydfil. These areas do not need higher crime rates. From an economics perspective, restricting supply (adding an element of risk to the supply of drugs), puts the black market price for drugs above the natural market clearing price and increases the difference between the price of supply and the price that can be demanded. Consequently, this means that the drugs cartels can harbour artificially high profits, which then go into committing crime and adding an even larger social cost. .

Legalising drugs would allow the government to have more control over the industry. The government could regulate the sector through taxation: the social cost would become more socialised. It would put drug barons out of business: buy safe legal drugs from a high street shop or some dodgy stuff off a street corner at an exuberant cost?                 

Also, by legalising the sector, it can help those who find themselves wanting to give up but prevented from doing so for fear of being labelled a criminal, or facing a penal sentence. The government would be able to offer support to people that would be more compelled to come forward for help and advice. If the government legalised currently illegal drugs, it could ensure that minimum standards are complied with, making it safer for those who are addicted.

The argument that by legalising drugs more people would be attracting to drugs seems 'non-sensical'. Just because a product becomes legal does not mean the populace will suddenly start buying it?



Above: The Red Light district of Amsterdam,
the Netherlands

The second consideration is whether prostitution should be completely legalised in the United Kingdom (referring to English and Cymraeg/Welsh law, and not Scots law). In much the same vein as the previous argument, it seems that the government cannot help those who find themselves trapped in this profession without knowing who they are.

In completely legalising the profession, the government could do more for the women and men who are compelled into prostitution as a form of income. Instead of pushing the problem into the dark alleyways and background of society and forgetting it exists - effectively turning a blind eye - it would be more constructive to do much the opposite. By completely legalising the practise, the government could encourage these people to seek advice on retraining for a profession which offers more dignity and workers rights for the employee.

By making the profession illegal, it forces the abuse of rights, without the possibility of the vulnerable seeking help. Even for those who willingly partake in the profession, the illegal nature of the profession makes it dangerous, with a plethora of harmful consequences on wider society. Legalisation would allow government intervention to divert people from the industry.

This article, as I mentioned at the beginning, has been attempting to answer the question as to whether keeping drugs and prostitution illegal has any benefits for the nation. As I hope this article shows, it would appear evident that keeping these two aspects of society illegal has few benefits for either the citizenry at large or those directly involved.

        

Fair trade is compatible with centre right politics

Three years on, the world is still living through the mess that was the near complete implosion of the World banking system. Governments have had to intervene to keep the cogs of Western economies turning. They have had to give bailouts to the financial system in an attempt at damage limitation. The crisis though has moved on. The debt has not gone, it has merely been absorbed by states, and is now threatening their stability as well. States in Europe and North America are starting to have difficulties paying their own bills, highlighted by the crisis in Greece. With the crisis now threatening to spread to the Chinese housing market and other sectors in the BRIC economies, there is a question that needs to be asked. Is there a way of enhancing our economic system  in a way that can provide more global economic stability?

It seems that the market system is an effective way to increase general prosperity, or at the very least it is the best of a bad bunch. The market system has seen global rates of poverty fall continuously since the 1970s. However, given the recent economic turbulance, it would seem apparent that it needs to be enhanced, but by what mechanism?  

Fairtrade, advocated by the Fair trade foundation set up in 1992, is a compromise. It is not unregulated capitalism, that seems quite evidently to be experiencing some difficulties,  but a compromise which includes global rules governing an otherwise market economy. It does not require the government to take ownership of sectors of the economy but uses regulation to steer the global economy. It, therefore, keeps market principles, advocated by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Adam Smith, at its heart, but manipulates them to include a sense of social justice.

The concept of the market economy is consumer-led: it is driven by demand from the people. Therefore, any system that intends to boost that demand would be beneficial to the system. Fair trade seeks to increase the wages of the proletariat in developing countries above a subsistence level. If these individuals have an increase in their disposable income they are more capable of buying goods and have a higher standard of living. The firms they buy the goods from have more money to invest and create more jobs. It is a multiplier effect that grows the national economy.

An expansion in the economies of developing nations is likely to have a positive effect on developed nations. Over time it has the potential to expand the number of places that goods made in developed markets can be sold to, having a positive effect on lacklustre manufacturing industries in developed nations. An expansion of developed economy markets has the potential to increase the demand for fair trade goods and so the cycle goes on.

It is now plainly obvious that governments that attempt to structure their economies through a central planning system, like North Korea or Venezuela, do not deliver the promised economic prosperity for their workforces. They have never produced equality or high standards of living for the masses. With a bit of alteration, the market system, advocated by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Adam Smith, has the potential to continue to create prosperity not just in developed nations but in the developing world. Free trade has served the purpose of creating prosperity and reducing poverity well but it now seems that Fair trade has to take over the reins in order to create a more balanced world trade situation. In light of the financial crisis, a quote from Edmund Burke might be useful: "a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation". The global centre-right, notably in the UK and US, was right to advocate free market economics but now needs to embrace Fair trade as a way to further global prosperity. Far from being at odds with Fair trade, Fair trade seems a natural progression in centre right politics,  and is compatible with the market economics encouraged by many centre right parties.   


     

     

Is Western-style democracy really the best form of Government?

In light of the Arab spring revolutions throughout North Africa, and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia's granting sufferage to women starting with the 2015 elections, it seems a good time to discuss the thing that so many people have been fighting to achieve this year: democracy. For most of the 20th and 21st centuries, the right to vote has been deemed something for which everyone should strive for. But is democracy really the best way to run a nation state?

From a European perspective, the consensus seems be that democracy is by far and a way the best way. The Second World War and the repression experienced under Adolf Hitler's National Socialists, Benito Mussolini's National Fascists and  Franco's Spain has convinced many that democracy,  representation by elected members of national parliaments, is the best system because everyone gets the right to chose who they desire to represent them, whether that be a right wing, centrist or left wing candidate.

However, a flaw of democracy is that, rather than simply doing what is morally right, politicians will do what is politically popular with their electorate - even if it is not in the long term interests of their citizens. Perhaps cynically, you could say that leaders in democracies are not driven by beliefs but by their electorates. It would have been in Greece's national interest to get its finances in order long before the financial crash, but pressure from the government's electorate to keep spending high stopped it from making the difficult decisions that it should have taken to get its house in order. George Papandreou, the Greek Prime Minister, and his Panhellenic Socialist Party would simply not have won the 2009 legislative election promising to do what was in the national interest, to dramatically and, at the time, prematurally reduce spending, because national interest and what is popular do not correlate. The unpopularity and animosity among many in Germany and France to bailing out Greece is understandable. Of course, the elected officials in France and Germany are echoing the hostility of their electorates to spending money on other countries. However, if Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy were  to appease their electorates and refuse to find some money for Greece they would violate their countries national interests. German and French banks would collapse if Greece defaults wholesale on its debts. The consequence of that? Well, working class German and French savers would lose all their savings. Leaders have to lead: however, in a democracy, leaders are sometimes forced to capitulate and not do what is right but what is popular or fashionable. 

On the contrary, dictatorships do not have an electorate to look out for. Dictators are not in a popularity contest for votes. Whilst history suggests that in some instances - and notably in European history- dictators have been a force for bad, in others dictatorship has actually been beneficial. China is an example of a dictatorship that seems to run rather silky smooth. In the last twenty years, China has seen phenomenal growth almost unparalled anywhere in the world. In the last quarter of economic activity, China continued to achieve a dizzyingly high 9.5% growth. This compares to 7.7% in India, the largest democracy in the world, and rather pathetic growth statistics in the countries of almost completely democratic Europe. Added to this, China is set to face years of double-digit wage increases which will help the Chinese proletariat: yet again, many workers in Europe and other democracies are unlikely to see such large wage increases in the near future despite high inflation in many countries.           

The attempts to enforce democracy in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is instructive as to the failings of the democratic model of governance. The people of Afghanistan simply do not want democracy: they deem it to be a foreign concept not congenial with their culture and their way of doing things. Many Islamic nations are dictatorships for a reason. It is the system that works well for them, a way of doing things that they can relate to culturally. The West just does not get it: the Western value system assumes that a peoples not under democratic rule are, therefore, an unhappy not contented peoples. However, in many of these countries, security trumps personal liberty and human rights. Freedom from state violence and a state where torture does not exist are perhaps desirable, but they are higher order demands: a political do not run before you walk. Ultimately, people are concerned about their personal safety: human rights are nothing if to inforce them means your citizens will be blown to smithereens?                       

The post- war consensus has been that democracy is good and, therefore, dictatorship is evil, and with valid reason to believe this given the horrific events of the Second World War in Europe and the wider World. Many rich liberal do-gooders and socialists of all degrees use the human rights argument to critize dictatorships. However, with the debt crisis and the need for leaders to lead and not follow, and the ascendancy and success of China, could dictatorship be right after all? I leave you with the following quote by Charles Bukowski: 'the difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later: in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting' (http://www.dumb.com/quotes/dictatorship-quotes/2/).