"Protests as five-week Parliament suspension begins"

From the BBC:

Parliament has officially been suspended for five weeks, with MPs not due back until 14 October.

Amid unprecedented scenes in the Commons, some MPs protested against the suspension with signs saying "silenced" while shouting: "Shame on you..."

Zero sympathies from me.

Rumours - well-founded as it turns out - that Johnson would suspend Parliament if he couldn't get his own way started circulating three months ago, before he'd even won his party leadership contest and thus by default (or by tradition or by custom, but with no particular legal force) become Prime Minister.

MPs have therefore had plenty of time to organise a vote of no confidence. It appears that they were incapable of agreeing on who would be the replacement PM. By default, it would have to be a moderate Conservative MP who is a Remainer (of which there are plenty) or at least in favour of a soft-ish Brexit (of which there are also plenty).

The template for this is the Chamberlain-Churchill handover. Technically, the Norway Debate was not a vote of no confidence, but it is accepted as having had the same effect. A majority of MPs from all parties had more or less agreed beforehand that Churchill - who was a Conservative MP, just like Chamberlain - would replace Chamberlain as PM. The whole thing took three days start to finish.

Today's MPs have been fannying around for three months and achieved precisely nothing. Corbyn had the mad idea that he might be PM; Lucas thought there should be an all-woman government and heck knows what Swinson wanted. Not exactly serious grown-up debate, in other words.

Remainer MPs - couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery

First write down what you know:

a) My general impression is that a majority of MPs, however slim, are Remainers.

b) We know that the Tories are by far and away the largest party, and with the support of the DUP they have a majority of 1.

c) Jeremy Corbyn thinks that if he can trigger a vote of no confidence, that he will somehow end up as PM. Most Remainer MPs have told him to get stuffed.

Therefore the only workable plan (from a Remainer MP point of view) is to trigger a vote of no confidence. Johnson would clearly lose it, as it would only require a few Tory MPs (i.e. Remainers) to vote against him (let's assume all non-Tory/DUP MPs vote against him) and then MPs have the opportunity to choose a new PM. Those are the rules.

The chosen new PM has to tick two boxes:

a) A Remainer.

b) A Tory (they are the largest party etc).

Remainer MPs - even non-Tory Remainers - would be daft not to vote for him/her, as the alternative is leaving Johnson in place; let's rule out Corbyn as PM, that's not happening. Half of his own MPs wouldn't vote for him. The Lib Dems, SNP et al are all saying "Ooh, avoiding a cliff edge Brexit is the most important issue facing this country today". Well, either it is or it isn't, but if it is, then hold your noses and vote for a Tory.

Tory MPs - even Leavers - would be daft not to vote for him/her, as the alternative would probably be a General Election, which most of them don't want to risk.

Fun with Extinction Rebellion

From the BBC:

But those involved with Extinction Rebellion say the future of the planet depends on it.

"We have left it so late that we have to step up in a semi-miraculous way to deal with this situation," said co-founder Gail Bradbrook.

However, the group doesn't say what the solutions to tackle climate change should be.

Instead, it wants the government to create a "citizens' assembly", made up of randomly selected people representing a cross-section of society. Its members would decide how to solve the climate crisis, with advice from experts.

But who's going to choose the 'experts'?

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From The Metro:

I think it's only fair we help out Harry and Meghan with their home alterations, as I imagine their mortgage payments must be enormous.

Bruce, Edinburgh.
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As to the endless comments about it not being fair that Tory party members will be electing the next Prime Minister:

Firstly, if you want a vote, join the Tory party.

Secondly, every party can decide its own rules for choosing a leader, by election or lottery or anything else.

Thirdly, it is the House of Commons which decides whether somebody can be/can continue to be Prime Minister, traditionally they choose the leader of the party with most MPs.

Fourthly, Neville Chamberlain*, Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Alec Douglas-Home, Jim Callaghan, John Major, Gordon Brown and Theresa May. Which is half the people who have become PM since the late 1930s.

Fifthly, for my Scottish viewers, Nicola Sturgeon.

Sixthly, as Farage said, the key to democracy is accepting an outcome you don't like. I didn't vote Tory, and I wouldn't vote for Hunt or the overgrown public schoolboy, but enough people do, and that's that.

* Baldwin and MacDonald seem to have taken it in turns since the 1920s, without a general election each time they swapped.

Wales does "joined up government"

People aged 16 and 17 could soon be able to cast a vote in Wales under plans to modernise elections

Young people under the age of 18 are from today banned from piercing their tongues, nipples or genitals in Wales.

"... because they didn't teach us about it at school." is the short answer to that.

From The Daily Telegraph, April 2015:

Why has everyone forgotten about male suffrage?

... Before 1918, the vote was restricted not simply by sex but also by property qualifications. Roughly 60pc of adult men were then entitled to vote. At the 1910 general election, 7,709,981 men were registered to vote. By the time of the 1918 general election there were 12,913,166 registered male electors in the United Kingdom.

The 1918 Act is, rightly, most famous for having brought more than eight million women into the electorate; but, for the first time, it also enfranchised more than five million men over the age of 21 without regard to property or class.

I knew that the number of men allowed to vote crept up gradually over the centuries, as the "property owning" condition became less and less onerous, but I didn't realise that universal (male) suffrage was as recent as that.

Which makes the outcomes of the 1906 election and the second 1910 election, when the Liberal Party won on a platform of Land Value Tax, all the more surprising.

Thank God?

This is an interesting poll except it draws the correct conclusion ('members' does not equal 'voters') to misdirect.

Tories are a 'breed apart'. Simple answer from a democrat: "Yes They Are - Thank God." Isn't that a good thing?

Now what are they up to in this guff? Well, if they were actually trying to do anything worthy for our democracy. First tell readers what the total 'membership' of each party is, that your 1,000 member survey is drawn from.

If your party membership falls below 100,000 members, then the views of the Praetorian are going to be pretty marked are they not?

None of that serious discussion of course. It seems to me that the data is being used to show that 'eveybody' holds a certain view of Brexit; in counter point to the Tories.

So add in the SNP figures and it is another: Corbyn 'look mate', Labour must either: ignore, rerun, just pretend Brexit VOTE didn't happen. So the researcher says: "even Labour, which under Jeremy Corbyn is occupying the middle ground over Brexit. Among Labour members, 87% want the UK to remain in the single market, 85% in the customs union, and 78% support a new referendum."

Is the 90,000 Tory, Praetorian membership more reflective of the Tory vote generally than the 500,000 Labour Praetorian Guards and 'members of the line' are of Labour's?

I hope politics, economics and sociology students at the professor's University start with that question and what the serious answers mean for our democracy. Not how we discredit it.

Best news I've had all day.

From City AM:

Bookies' odds on Jacob Rees-Mogg to take over leadership of the Conservative party from Theresa May have been slashed.

His chances have been cut from 50/1 to 16/1 to be next Tory leader, according to Oddschecker.

"His growing popularity was bound to affect his chances of becoming the top-dog in the Conservative party," said Oddschecker spokesman Sam Eaton, "He is still only ninth favourite to replace May so we aren’t getting too carried away, but we do expect these odds to continue to shorten with every quirky Instagram post. Jacob Rees-Mogg has even been installed as 33/1 to become the next Prime Minister, just imagine that…”

JR-M is a brain-dead, smarmy hereditary MP and Home-Owner-Ist of the worst sort, if he gets the top job, that's the Tories out of power for an election or two. He'd take us back to the 1950s but without the affordable housing or the budget surpluses.

I liked it when I was a kid (1970s) and the two big parties took it in turns f***ing things up, that always seemed fair and democratic to me. It's when one lot keeps getting re-elected (Thatcher, Blair) that things really get bad.

"Electoral fraud: Voters will have to show ID in pilot scheme"

From the BBC:

Voters will have to show proof of identity in a government pilot scheme to reduce electoral fraud.

Some councils in England, including Birmingham and Bradford, will trial the scheme at local elections in 2018. Constitution minister Chris Skidmore said the pilot would "ensure the integrity of our electoral system".

Fair enough, but actual fraudulent voting at the ballot box is negligible, it would require real nerves and you'd have to gamble on the person whose vote you are stealing not having already voted.

The real big frauds all relate to postal voting, they ought to tighten up on that and they've fixed 90% of fraudulent voting…

There will also be reforms to improve the security of the postal ballot system, such as requiring postal voters to re-apply every three years.

In other words, they are not taking this seriously at all. I suppose there are two kinds of postal voter, the disabled and people who happen to be going away at the time of the election. Seeing as ballot cards are sent out a couple of weeks before an election, couldn't we just ask those people to use their ballot cards in advance, the disabled can drop them off at their GP or something else convenient for them and those who are going to travel can vote early at the nearest town hall?

Vote early, vote often, vote Leave!

This'll be our last chance for another forty years to give them all a good kick up the arse.

It is highly unlikely that we would actually leave the EU, even in the event of a largish majority for Brexit, that's not the point, is it?

The point is to shake them up a bit/a lot and give our pol's a stronger hand when they go back to Brussels to do some serious re-negotiation of how the EU is supposed to work, not just on behalf of the UK but on behalf of all those countries who are getting a far worse deal than we are, maybe they'd have the nerve to speak up this time.

The lies are coming thick and fast now...

David Cameron, in The Telegraph:

So much is at stake on Thursday. And so rarely will we ever make a decision of such magnitude. And here’s the thing: it’s irreversible.

There is no turning back if we leave. If we choose to go out of the EU, we will go out – with all of the consequences that will have for everyone in Britain.

That's the whole point, isn't it, if there is a slim Brexit majority on Thursday, then it is unlikely to lead to an actual Brexit.

It's just a way of giving TPTB a good kick up the arse and temporarily delaying things, giving our pol's a stronger hand in the next round of negotiations.

The outcome of the referendum is not binding on the UK government, anybody who thinks otherwise is deluded and people like Cameron who know it isn't but pretend it is are just lying.

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (382)

Buried somewhere in the hundreds of pages of the Scottish Local Tax Commission's report and supporting schedules (I can't find it again) was a new one, the first new one I've seen for years. It went roughly like this:

If we have a property tax (i.e. LVT) to cover part of local government spending which is payable by the owner, not the occupant, then this breaks the link between local democracy, local taxation and local spending decisions.

Owner-occupiers want sensible spending so there is an incentive for them to turn out and vote, but tenants will be less likely to vote.

OK, facts.

a. Turnouts at local elections are currently very low, presumably because people know that councils only have limited flexibility on how much or little they spend, what they do and how high or low Council Tax is.

b. Older people are more likely to vote than younger people and owner-occupiers are far more likely to vote than tenants, who are usually younger.

c. Younger people/tenants are likely to only live in any area for a few years, are less likely to be registered to vote and less likely to use 'local services', having finished school and seldom being in need of regular NHS treatment.

So it is quite possible that in some local elections, no younger people/tenants vote at all. On that basis, the position can hardly get worse, whoever pays the tax.

This argument is also the equal and opposite to the tried and tested one:

"If landlords have to pay the tax, not tenants, then tenants will always vote for more local services and higher taxes."

So either the first argument is correct or the second one is, more likely neither and it is irrelevant anyway. As long as everybody has the right to vote, it is up to them if they don't bother.

The next KLN in the canon adds a third contradiction:

"Tenants will pay nothing so homeowners will end up paying all the tax."

Which is also nonsense; if 80% of homes are owner-occupied they will end up paying 80% of the tax.
---------------------
What all three arguments miss is that if more taxes were collected from land values (and less from output and employment), there would be less concentration of land wealth which inevitably means that many more households will be owner-occupiers (as we saw from the 1940s to the 1980s when we had Georgism-lite in the form of rent and mortgage caps etc).

In which case, the legal and economic incidence of the tax will be the same and the people paying it will be the ones who benefit from sensible local spending but who don't want wasteful spending or high taxes. Everything is now aligned nicely and it will all sort itself out.

Ich bin ein Hamburger!

(As JFK never said.)

From the BBC:

Residents of the German city of Hamburg have voted against hosting the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Hamburg was one of five cities left in the running, alongside Rome, Paris, Budapest and Los Angeles.

But 51.6% of residents of the city voted no in a referendum on Sunday. The No camp argued that money earmarked for the Olympics could be better spent...

Hamburg's mayor Olaf Scholz was disappointed with the result: "That's a decision that we didn't want, but it's clear."

Well done lads!

Things which most people accept as a given...

… but which are actually a result of lots of self-reinforcing least-bad decisions taken collectively:

- The nation-state with fixed borders
- Land ownership
- Taxation
- Currencies/money
- Democracy
- Banking
- Government spending
- Peace
- National identity and immigration control.

You can't really have any of these without the others.

For example,
- the nation-state with fixed borders and land ownership are more or less synonymous;
- autocratic nation states/dictatorships are inherently less stable than democracies;
- democracies are less likely to wage war on each other than dictatorships or autocratic states;
- democracy isn't much use if there isn't a defined area within which the rules will apply, to be defended;
- there can be no taxation without government (even though the reverse is just about conceivable);
- democratically elected leaders like to be seen to spend money for the benefit of the masses;
- more spending/redistribution means higher taxation;
- peace is cheaper than war, enabling higher spending for a given level of taxation;
- nation-states themselves are a bit of a confidence trick, they require a national identity/sense of collective, which in turn means some brakes on immigration.
- tax and spending is more or less synonymous with currency;
- which people then use as a unit of measurement for everyday trading;
- which banks then use as a unit of measurement for creating debts i.e. money in the narrow sense;
- but banks are a huge confidence trick, they can only work as long as there is a government to enforce debts for them.

And so on and so forth.

The beginning of the end of democracy.

From the BBC:

Under the old system, one person in each household completed the registration for every resident eligible to vote. Now everyone has to register individually by providing their national insurance number and date of birth.

About 7.5 million people had already gone missing from the electoral register before the new system was introduced, but campaigners fear a further million have been disenfranchised.

The article helpfully contains a link to the government's register to vote page:

The deadline to register to vote in the general election is 20 April 2015.

NB, when I'm in charge and introduce a Citizen's Income, one of the minimal requirements will be that you are registered to vote at your current address, which would lead to 99% enfranchisement within a very short space of time.

Iraq and Democracy

This will be my last post on this subject.

I had a look around at some bits of research to try to understand why some countries become democratic and others don't. It's often spoke about in terms of people becoming rich enough, but we can look at countries like Qatar that aren't democratic that have a very high GDP per capita and it doesn't quite add up.

I stumbled across a paper on  The Impact of Economic Development on Democracy by Evelyne Huber, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and John D. Stephens which contained the following:-

Our central thesis, and indeed our most basic finding, can now be stated in stark fashion: Capitalist development is related to democracy because it shifts the balance of class power, because it weakens the power of the landlord class and strengthens subordinate classes. The working and the middle classes—unlike other subordinate classes in history—gain an unprecedented capacity for self-organization due to such developments as urbanization, factory production, and new forms of communication and transportation.

If we look at Western democracies that's pretty much the case. Countries like Taiwan and South Korea also became democracies after their countries industrialised.

If you look at countries like Qatar or Iraq, though, while they're advanced countries, the shift in the balance of class power hasn't happened in the same way. The wealth of the country is still under the control of the leaders, that wealth being the oil in the ground (nearly half of Iraqi GDP is oil). On the other hand, Egypt, a country that is developing and moving away from a dependence on oil and tourism does seem to be rising up on their own. Early days perhaps, but they seem to fit the pattern.

The one place we successfully imposed democracy was Japan which was already quite an advanced industrialized economy in 1945.

Which now makes me ponder if imposing democracy, shortcutting the process and not building up the structures is sustainable. Can you intervene and create it and expect it to last, or does the lack of class shift mean that it's a house built on sand?

Direct democracy doesn't care what business or Government thinks

Which is why we won't get it in the UK, just more Strictly Come fcuking Dancing and other shiny shiny, look over here shit. 

Anywhose; passed by 50.3% Switzerland has decided to tear up the bilateral free movement treaty it has with the EU and impose quotas for EU immigrants (there are already non EU quotas). The measure, which doesn’t specify how high those quotas should be, passed by fewer than 20,000 ballots in a national vote yesterday (Sunday). The government has three years to impose new rules, which will primarily affect workers from the EU, many of them highly qualified (like me FFS!). 

To be fair to the Swiss, (and while there is definitely a fair bit of “well we just hate people with a sun tan”) I get the impression that the border cantons, Ticino/ Schaffhausen etc are a bit fed up with the watchmakers bussing Germans and Italians across the border daily for what are poor Swiss wages but quite good Italian or German wages. Of course the French bit is all for this because it has sour grapes that those cantons generally always got a kicking from Bern and were only grudgingly let into the Confederation in the first place. As such they don’t like the rich German parts and their imported smart people that keep them rich. 

It will be interesting to see how the EU responds to this. By interesting, I mean, how dickishly. The consensus being that the EU might take the chance to be difficult, to try to show that “leaving” the EU (even if you are not really in it at all) is a bad idea, especially when you have no ports and all your exports have to go across the border into the EU (unless you export to both of the permanent residents of Liechtenstein I guess).

Possibly time for the UK, Luxembourg, Austria, Switzerland and the Nordics to actually put their heads together for once. Since they all have the same complaints against Germany and France. 

Readers' Letters Of The Day

Both from The Metro, page 14/15.

Those who say Underground workers should not be allowed to strike would transport us back to Dickensian times when children were forced to labout in match factories and clean chimneys...

Just joking. Bored already. Next.

Ah, this is more like it:

Many would agree with the view that workers should not be allowed to strike without greater support because just 30% of union members voted in favour.

But perhaps London mayor Boris Johnson should think more carefully before suggesting a 50 per cent threshold for strike action. If you factor in thos who did not vote in the last London mayoral election, Boris only received 17 per cent of first preferences.

Another way of putting this is that 83 per cent of Londoners did not put Boris as their first choice for mayor.

If you do a similar calculation regarding the 2010 election based on the Conservatives winning a 36 per cent share of a 65 per cent turnout it becomes apparent that 77 per cent of the electorate did not vote Tory at the last election.

John, Greater Manchester

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (314)

Here's another one which keeps coming up and which I have now added to The List.

"Over sixty per cent of voters are home owners and turkeys don't vote for Xmas"

This is a non-argument.

Even if were a valid objection, you might as well point out that considerably more than 60% of people have income on which they have to pay income tax and/or employment income on which they have to pay National Insurance; that nearly everybody buys goods and services subject to VAT etc.

If 'the tyranny of the majority' were an important factor in designing a tax system, then we would find that the only taxes levied would be those only ever borne by a minority (for example alcohol, tobacco and gambling duty, possibly corporation tax and Business Rates).

And as a matter of fact, for most households (certainly for most working age households) their earnings as a share of total national earnings is much higher than the value of their home as share of total land wealth, so shifting taxes from the former to the latter will reduce the tax bills for most households (quite dramatically, as it happens).

Those who would see their net income fall would mainly be members of The One Per Cent whose entire income consists of monopoly income (land rents, mortgage interest, the value of banking licences etc). Everybody else, and the productive economy as a whole, wins.

So if we did have 'the tyranny of the majority', Land Value Tax would be the way forward!

Ideas for blog posts

After six years of this, I'm still not running out of stuff I'd like to write about.

My output in the last few weeks has slowed down slightly because there are too many topics which have sprung to mind and I waste time deciding which one to do and then I end up doing nothing. I scribble them down on bits of paper during the day and then accumulate the unused ones on a master list at home, which is now three pages of A4.

They cover all sorts of different themes, so today, I'll list all the ones that vaguely relate to design, organisation or evolution:

1. Why democracy only works if there is a sense of 'national identity' in the first place. Democracy still works in federal states as long as people in each sub-division have a sense of identity. So there are tensions between different cantons in Switzerland who speak different languages and there are tensions between the English, the Welsh and the Scottish but these are surmountable because they all live in their separate pristine areas; but 'democracy' in the modern sense simply does not even work properly in Northern Ireland - it's all about tribalism and favours. So these people who think that you can simply install or impose 'democracy' in Middle Eastern or African countries have completely missed the point.

2. Why only a few people have 'leadership skills'. This is an atavistic thing that was useful when we still lived in small bands or tribes, but on the level of nation-states made up of millions of people, it can be sorely counter-productive - even though, having a single national 'leader' goes some way towards creating a sense of 'national identity' and thus enabling democracy to continue.

There was a good article by Jamie Tehrani at the BBC explaining the analogous phenomenon of celebrities; this urge to follow successful people was a useful trait when we lived in small bands or tribes but is now largely counter-productive.

3. Town planning: if you allow people to pitch their tents or huts any old where, what do they always overlook/forget to create, even though it would be to everybody's advantage? Look at the pictures of the tent city at Glastonbury or the huts round a Tibetan temple.

4. Town planning: because the original settlers in the British isles all lived along the coast, most people, however urban or urbane, still attach a premium to having a view over, being able to take a stroll along or being at a pub-restaurant overlooking a river, harbour or beach. It doesn't seem to matter if the waterway is almost entirely man-made i.e. canal or dock.

5. Town planning: some people have a dog and/or like dogs, other people hate dogs, so there would be an overall benefit to everybody if the two were segregated. It's fair to assume that dog-lovers would be happy to pay a bit extra to live in an area where dogs are allowed/welcomed, and dog-haters would be happy to pay a bit extra to live in a dog-free area. I'm always wary about banning things, but there's no reason it can't be applied ab initio to new estates and could be phased in elsewhere, i.e. people in each smaller defined area can simply have a vote. From there on in, dog-lovers will graduate to dog areas and dog-haters to dog-free areas.

6. The same logic applies to 'expensive' and 'cheap' areas. If you are the council and you build two more or less identical estates and set the rent at £100 a week in one of them and £200 a week in the other, then initially this will seem bizarre, but after a while, those will be come the new 'market rents'. People who earn a bit more and can afford to pay a bit more will be happy to pay to be among their peers and sheltered from the great unwashed, and lower income people will be happy to make do living among the GU because the rent is cheaper.

7. These people who hanker after the old county boundaries. Do they seriously imagine that the land has some magical properties which makes it "Berkshire" rather than "Oxfordshire" or vice versa? Where conflicts are a little more recent, let's say five or six centuries ago, I can vaguely understand which some people classify themselves specifically as Yorkshiremen or Lancastrians, but are there really some people who object to being subjected to the cruel tyranny of the Oxen when they'd rather be ruled by Berks? When was the last war between the two tribes?

8. Drewster's idea about private compulsory purchase orders as briefly discussed on this thread at HousePriceCrash.

9. Somebody told me that the opposition to the Aberdeen bypass was spear-headed by one single NIMBY who owned an isolated house on the route of the new road who didn't want the traffic noise. I said that there was a simple solution to this: buy up a small plot of land half a mile away, build an identical copy of his existing house, only a bit newer and better, and lay out the garden exactly the same and just do a swap (forced or otherwise).

The 'value' of his land is only the scarcity value of the planning permission in a noise-free area. Superficially, that 'value' is reduced or destroyed if the road is built, but the 'value' can easily be released again by building the new house. So the only cost involved would be building the new house for a hundred thousand quid; this would save the millions of pounds which all the enquiries and delays cost.

10. A design lecturer at printing college told us this simple rule: "It's good design if nobody notices it". This is a very good rule indeed, and applies to more or less everything, whether you are looking at form or function. For example, the first thing you notice when you sit in the driver's seat of a Trabi is that the steering wheel is slightly to your right, which is really annoying. So you notice, so it's probably bad design.

But conversely, have you ever consciously noticed that the steering wheel in most cars is dead straight in front of the driver's seat? The same applies to aesthetic questions just as much, so the rule with typefaces is do not mix and match typefaces or even line-spacing in one document because this detracts from the actual message your are trying to convey; the human eye is distracted and it is more difficult to concentrate on reading it.

11. As I've said before, having a fixed daily routine appears to help you live longer. Part of this is simply because it saves you having to think too hard about what you are going to do that day, so your life is less stressful. Which segues in nicely to the finding that having a fixed bed time for your children helps their development; it takes the stress out of things, kids just have to learn to put up with it rather than having a fight every day.

12. A more specific rule for interior design is: "More storage space = more crap", see also "Why having in-trays is a recipe for disaster".

13. Optimum land use: the striking similar between the 'chalets' at Butlins and some retirement bungalows in Uxbridge (in terms of both internal and external layout) which I saw when I was out getting my nomination papers when I stood as a candidate for a party I used to belong to.

Just sayin', is all.