The Taxpayers’ Nemesis

Christmas has come early for those who don’t want to see the Tories gain a landslide victory in the 2010 General Election as one of their key satellite groups, the “Taxpayers’ Alliance” has been unmasked as using phony foundations to circumvent UK charity laws.

The Alliance has consistently supplied talking points and even policies for the Conservatives over the past few years, almost always relating to fiscal and economic matters. Its ideas are always the same. As its own literature puts it, “The government is riddled with waste and inefficiency…High taxes are damaging the British economy and our way of life is suffering as a result…tens of thousands of jobs are being lost to off-shoring as huge tax bills reduce incentives to work, invest and save and discourage entrepreneurship” etc…

Its mission is to shrink the state along Thatcherite lines, which translated in the 1980s into attacks on the welfare state, deindustrialization (to break the unions mainly) and high unemployment, which had the effect of necessitating increased benefit payments and so on. It is also a fundamentalist grouping, seeking to “Oppose all tax rises” – an extremist view if ever there was one.

Presumably, the Alliance is quite happy, ecstatic even, that as tax expert Richard Murphy reports, “One third of the UK’s largest companies do not pay tax” while “In 2006 Grant Thornton calculated that the 54 billionaires in the UK paid tax at an average rate of 0.14%.”

The Taxpayers’ Alliance doesn’t care about such issues – it doesn’t feature them at all on its main site (using the search string “corporate tax evasion”) and there have been only 3 blog postings by bloggers associated with the Alliance who mention it (only to play down its importance).

In its day to day hack work, the Alliance attacks government spending by appealing to ordinary taxpayers – which on the face of things is fair enough. After all, with corporations like Google able to shift the vast majority of their profits out of the country with ease, the tax burden falls disproportionately on the citizenry.

But that’s not the purpose of the Alliance. As this week’s revelations have made clear the Alliance is merely a policy unit of the Conservative Party, taking “charitable donations” via an arms length proxy called the Politics and Economics Research Trust.

By channeling their money through the PERT, wealthy donors to the Alliance (such as Sir Anthony Bamford owner of JCB, or Tony Gallagher of Gallagher Estates) have been able to claim 40 percent tax deductions, even though the money has then found its way to the Taxpayers’ Alliance – a political campaigning organization, not a charity.

Under British law, charities are not supposed to be political organizations, putting the Alliance at risk of breaking the law. As the Guardian reports, “The Charity Commission has opened several “assessment cases” prior to a possible investigation.”

Moreover, one of the brains (and the beef) behind the Alliance, a “retired teacher” named Alexander Heath reportedly “does not pay British tax and lives in France.” Strange then that he should be so concerned with the plight of British taxpayers.

What emerges is an unflattering arrangement where the Alliance is benefiting from government instituted tax breaks designed to boost private charitable giving (as the exchequer steps in to make up the gap between what the donor “gave” and the amount after the 40 percent deduction).

The crusaders against government waste, public sector employment, high taxes and big government are living off the largesse of big government themselves, but we shouldn’t be surprised, as the Alliance is purely a political tool used by the right to pillory the left and create room for further Thatcherite economic policies.

And a very effective tool it has proved too. Take this week’s press references to its activity:

- From the Telegraph, “The public service chief on £5,000 a day” speaking of the head of the Financial Services Authority Sir Callum McCarthy. “The TaxPayers’ Alliance, which has researched the earnings of quango chairmen, calculates that Sir Callum effectively earned £4,872 a day for a four-day week.”

- The Daily Mail reports on the same material, slamming the “Quango ‘kings and queens’ earning up to £5,000 a day for part-time work” and quoting Ben Farrugia from the Alliance, who says that “instead of serving taxpayers’ interests, some non- executive members and chairs may put their quango’s interests first….”

- The Daily Star quotes Susie Squire of the Alliance in a story about the “MORE than 100 greedy peers [who] claimed over £50,000 in expenses for working in the House of Lords.”

- The Express quotes an Alliance spokesperson in a story about a doctor who had been suspended on full pay for three years before being found guilty of malpractice.

- The Scotsman reports on the alleged £12 million bill for fraud within the civil service, using Matthew Elliott of the Alliance as an interviewee.

- The Telegraph reports on Alliance research which reportedly shows “green taxes” rising to £26 billion this year meaning that “Families up and down the country have been overcharged on everything from turning on the TV to flying abroad, all for the sake of ineffective green taxes and regulations.”

The list goes on. Obviously the Taxpayers’ Alliance has established a massive reach within the UK Press – as a glance at the “media coverage” section of its website will inform you. What it won’t tell you about, are the Guardian allegations against the Alliance, but no matter.

According to its own propaganda, the Alliance remains a virginal crusader seeking to purge the UK of its bloated and inefficient public sector and, up till now, the press has been happy to quote from them universally uncritically – handing them a mysteriously free pass to spread their information.

This week, the theme has been Quangos (Quasi-non governmental organizations)- with the Alliance bemoaning how “they remain unaccountable and distant from the public that pays” while “Serious action needs to be taken to increase democratic control over quangos, so that they are genuinely accountable to ordinary people.”

Very well. But only as long as the Taxpayers’ Alliance recognises itself as a bloated Quango in its own crusade. And while they are at it, why not release details of their funders, if they are to receive charitable donations while ranting about Quangos being undemocratic and aloof from the concerns of citizens?

If not, then shut up.

In reality, there are plenty of eloquent advocates of lower taxes and better public services, voices which also try to take into account abuses of the tax system by the wealthy and don’t seek to pummel the public sector simply because it is public.

The real enemy of ordinary taxpayers isn’t the highly abstract “public sector.” The distinction between public and private makes little sense anyway when both prop up the other and the private sector has thoroughly penetrated public services while the banks depend on tax monies to survive. No, the real enemies are those who seek to make ordinary people pay for the vices of the rich – speculative finance gone wild, tax evasion on a mammoth scale, environmental devastation – through diminished services, fewer social protections and – yes, higher taxes.

Dreaming of a White Christmas

Just like the ones (the burgeoning European right wing freikorps feels like their parents) used to know. As the Guardian reports:

As the first snow fell at the foot of the Italian Alps, the centre of Coccaglio presented an idyllic scene. In front of its 18th-century church, the flakes came to rest on a magnificent Christmas tree, rising almost to the height of the Roman tower opposite.

But in this town of 8,000 inhabitants between Milan and Venice, the approach to Christianity’s most sacred festival has been marked in a very special way. On orders from the local council, controlled by the conservative Northern League, police have been carrying out house-to-house searches for illegal immigrants in an action dubbed Operation White Christmas. The operation is due to finish on December 25.

There has been resistance, with “Some 3,000 people hav[ing] marched through the town in protest at the operation, which the Vatican called “sad and distressing.”

“But it has been endorsed by Silvio Berlusconi’s government.” What a surprise. This operation will, unfortunately, have massive consequences for the people of Coccaglio, where “non-Italians outnumber natives in the centre, which is lined with halal butchers, African markets, Chinese bazaars and takeaway kebab shops.”

There have been rumours of lynch mobs being formed after rape allegations were made against a Moroccan man. Not a pretty picture at all.

Meanwhile, more and more immigrants have been returning to Nigeria with tales of torture and brutality handed out by Libyan prison guards and officials. According to the Nigerian Guardian, women “painted a gory picture of how they were raped by some of the Libyan security personnel” with the Libyan state simply swallowing Nigerian women in the category “prostitute” and men as “drug dealers” before shoving them over the desert border towards their homeland.

As one put it “Regardless of the business you have come to do in Libya, they see you as illegal immigrant that must be destroyed by all means.” Many seem to have been arrested despite holding valid papers, as the Qaddafi regime seeks to purge its society of African migrants.

The fragile transnational space in which migrants must move is shrinking, propelled by the economic crisis and the rise of the far-right across Europe. Qaddafi has been pressured to crack down by leaders like Nicolas Sarkozy and Berlusconi – and he has obliged.

Societies across Europe are, to some degree, staging “debates” about national identity, debates which are likely to precede increasingly exclusionary immigration policies.

Take France, for example, where one local mayor loyal to Sarkozy said recently of immigrants that “It’s time we reacted because we are going to be eaten alive. There are already 10 million of them, 10 million who are getting paid to do nothing.”

After the Swiss voted to halt the construction of minarets, Sarkozy weighed in with a  slimy editorial for Le Monde, which counselled the French: “Instead of condemning the Swiss out of hand, we should try to understand what they meant to express and what so many people in Europe feel, including people in France” adding that “Nothing would be worse than denial.”

Yet his calls for openness and honesty are more likely a facade. As Laurent Joffrin, editor of Liberation puts it, “Instead of making the French reflect on themselves, it goads them to express their rejection of others.”

Across Europe, people are increasingly being forced to measure up to a random standard of national qualities. As Marc Cheb Sun, editor of Respect magazine put it to the Globe and Mail, “The problem is that the way the question is posed, it makes people like me think that we are always going to have to prove our Frenchness.”

In the UK, immigrants are now required to pass a “Life in the UK test” instituted by New Labour, which many natives would flunk. In Germany, meanwhile, the government is working on a “contract” that would require incomers to “learn the German language and uphold values such as freedom of speech and sexual equality.”

Yet like in the UK, the German government is seeking to radically filter those immigrants it accepts, discriminating based on class by favoring “expertise” and qualifications. This though, is more than likely to prove an excuse to limit all migrants, apart from those that are sorely needed (hypocritically enough) by European nations’ creaking health services.

This is also a naked powerplay aimed at sucking the best educated people from poorer nations. As German Commissioner for Immigration Maria Bohmer puts it, the nation seeks “the expertise that will enable us to ensure our leading economic role in world markets.”

The obvious corrollary to that is that the nations losing experts will be hindered, and continue to be excluded or exploited by global markets. At the same time, they will need to cater for those immigrants who are forced to return, having failed to breach “fortress Europe” – a daunting economic task. Failure to do this will lead to conflict and instability as remittances decline and social tensions grow.

In reality, the social tensions caused in Europe by immigration cannot be solved by purging the nations in question of minorities. They are essentially class questions based on increasingly unequal, dysfunctional economies which discriminate against almost everyone, black or white.

And in any case, migrants will continue to leave nations with high unemployment, corruption and repressive state apparatus which sit on the periphery of the global economy and are suffering the most from that economy’s current stagnation. So it is also fundamentally a question of international equity.

The Nigerian people, for example, suffer so much because of the resource curse exerted by oil – with the connivance of multinationals like Shell, which arm local strongmen and facilitate corruption in the interests of social control. Hideously brutal police forces in the country have also been trained by European nations and America – while agricultural production has been decimated by rich country subsidies.

The context is much bigger than a pogrom in northern Italy, but the reality on the ground in communities across Europe is becoming more tense and worrying by the day.

Cockburn’s Climate Cock and Ball Story

It’s truly sad to see once articulate, passionate advocates of progressive internationalism reverting in their dotage to peddling stale old conspiracies and repeating the talking points of right-wing (corporate funded) foundations.

Unfortunately, Counterpunch editor Alexander Cockburn has well and truly slipped into this demented dream-state, finding in the “climate alarmists” and “AGW industry” a suitable target for contrarian zeal.

In the process, he is becoming as absurd and risible as Christopher Hitchens did when he hitched onto the Neocon wagon back in 2002 and cheered for the war in Iraq.

In an editorial today, Cockburn wades into battle against the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit, calling it “surely the most outlandish foray into intellectual fantasizing since the fourth-century Christian bishops assembled for the Council of Nicaea in 325AD to debate whether God the father was supreme or had to share equal status in the pecking order of eternity with his Son and with the Holy Ghost.”

Well, that quip certainly fits the content of his article neatly, if not the UN sponsored summit, which has admittedly delivered a terrible, unsatisfactory outcome, but it was not simply an exercise in tilting at windmills.

Cockburn writes that in the 1970s “the supposed menace to the planet and to mankind  was global cooling, a source of interest to oil companies for obvious reasons” while “Coolers transmuted into warmers in the early 80s.”

He’s dead wrong, and sadly hasn’t paid much attention to work being done on the history of science in the 1970s which would set him embarassingly straight.

In 2008, a study group led by Thomas Peterson of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration looked at every scientific paper on the world’s climate from the 1970s. What they found was, as Nature reported, “only 7 of the 71 total papers surveyed predicted global cooling” while “The vast majority (44) actually predicted that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide could lead to global warming.”

An inconvenient truth for Mr Cockburn, who needs to brush up on his history if he is going to paint the UN IPCC process as merely a front for corporate rent-seekers.

Cockburn goes on to accuse the “warmers” and “true believers” in Climate Change of erecting a vast propaganda edifice as “Billions in funding and research grants sluice into the big climate modeling enterprises.”

He discounts those “deniers” – who have been lavishly rewwarded by oil firms for their labours, trying to cast the “warmers” as the true intellectual harlots seeking money from the powerful for purely venal purposes.

Cockburn needs to read the Union of Concerned Scientist’s 2007 report “Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to “Manufacture Uncertainty” on Climate Change“ for more background. Then he might realise how Exxon Mobil had “raised doubts about even the most indisputable scientific evidence…funded an array of front organizations to create the appearance of a broad platform for a tight-knit group of vocal climate change contrarians who misrepresent peer-reviewed scientific findings…attempted to portray its opposition to action as a positive quest for “sound science” rather than business self-interest” and “used its access to the Bush administration to block federal policies and shape government communications on global warming.”

Despite chiding the “warmers” for taking the “moral high ground,” Cockburn is not averse to doing precisely that, assuming a paternalistic mantle towards free thinking young pups, writing that “Scepticism, particularly for a young climatologist or atmospheric physicist, can be a career breaker. “

Ironically, the “climategate” e-mails that form the spine of his rant show plenty of evidence of scepticism amongst scientists who still have jobs. If he’d read them, he’d know. But their scepticism is not the all-or-nothing, paranoid conspiracy-mongering type. It’s the – how can we be sure, and let’s look at the methods and evidence again type – the one associated with real scientists, who generally aren’t engaged in a juvenile insurgency against their contemporaries and the institutions which employ them.

Cockburn also evinces a cock-and-bull approach to the much discussed “medieval warm period” which he locates between 800 AD and 1300 AD and, apparently is “a historical fact which made nonsense of the thesis that global warming could be attributed to the auto-industrial civilization of the twentieth century.”

But unfortunately, it isn’t. Aside from the fact that we can’t be sure of local and global temperatures for that period – using proxies like tree rings, pollen grains and written evidence – there’s the glaring problem that the “medieval warm period” was nowhere near a global event.

I’m going to avoid trawling the academic literature and take a brief diversion through Cockburn country by quoting Wikipedia on this point, and for that forgive me. But it’s worth it. Here’s part of the entry on the MWP:

[the] MWP pattern is characterised by warmth over large part of North Atlantic, Southern Greenland, the Eurasian Arctic, and parts of North America which appears to substantially exceed that of modern late 20th century (1961-1990) baseline and is comparable or exceeds that of the past one-to-two decades of in some regions. Certain regions such as central Eurasia, northwestern North America, and (with less confidence) parts of South Atlantic, exhibit anomalous coolness.

I’ll say it again. The MWP was regional. Globally temparatures probably didn’t rise higher that the moment, but we don’t know for sure.

Cockburn’s suave deployment of an e-mail from climate scientist Keith Briffa seems to seal his rhetorical deal, but it really doesn’t. I’ll include the quote in full, as Cockburn excerpted it:

“I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple…I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago.“

Damning stuff. But what Briffa is referring to is not the problem that the MWP poses for the theory of anthropogenic warming. He is talking about the problem is poses to a linear narrative of gradual warming. This is a key difference which contrarians like Cockburn can’t be bothered to discuss.

Briffa is worried by cavalier scientists and commentators who want to over-egg the climate pudding and is aware of the complexity involved in discussing the climatic history of the globe as a guide to its present and future.

He isn’t admitting that climate change is caused by sunspots, or isn’t caused by greenhouse gas emissions. He is privately challenging colleagues to produce work which doesn’t patronise the public and doesn’t over-simplify.

Cockburn would do well to follow his example.

But Cockburn then excecutes another rhetorical “trick,” suggesting that “a mid- to late-twentieth-century decline” found by climate scientists (and readily apparent in all of the IPCC literature that Copenhagen is working from) invalidates the idea that greenhouse gases alter the climate.

Of course, he doesn’t note that data shows an upward trend from about 1800 to 1940, a levelling or decline and then a rapid increase after 1980. And he doesn’t even pay lip service to the widely accepted idea that the plateau was a product of particles in the earth’s atmosphere caused by industry exerting a “global dimming” effect and reducing the impact of greenhouse gases.

No chance.

The case is similar with arctic sea ice. Cockburn writes that “As for the nightmare of vanishing ice caps and inundating seas, the average Arctic ice  coverage has essentially remained unchanged for the last 20 years, and has actually  increased slightly over the last 3 years.”

This is extremely misleading, where not flatly wrong. Sea ice has not remained “essentially unchanged for the last 20 years” as a trip to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center will show (this graph, for example,  shows how recent sea ice levels have been far lower, consistently, than previous periods).

What Cockburn seems to have been referring to was sea ice maximum, ie/ in the winter months, and not the minimum. Yet this minimum is what most concerns scientists, having fallen abruptly in recent years. In 2009, the NSIDC reports that “At the end of the Arctic summer, more ice cover remained this year than during the previous record-setting low years of 2007 and 2008. However, sea ice has not recovered to previous levels. September sea ice extent was the third lowest since the start of satellite records in 1979, and the past five years have seen the five lowest ice extents in the satellite record.”

Cause for alarm, certainly.

On sea level rises, Cockburn writes that “The rate of rise of sea level has declined significantly over the last 3 years, and its average rate of rise for the last 20 years is about the same as it has been for the last 15,000 years.”

Unfortunately not. As far as we know, the rate of sea level rise has accelerated in recent decades. One group of researchers reported this year that “the most recent satellite and in situ data showed seas were now rising by more than 3mm a year” a rate which the Independent newspaper comments is “more than 50 per cent faster than the average for the 20th century.” [backed up by this study as well].

This is mostly due to the expansion of the oceans as temperatures rise – not the melting of the icecaps. But Cockburn wouldn’t care too much that the worst effects of climate change in terms of sea level rises are expected as large icesheets such as those on Greenland or the Antarctic, begin to melt. Hence, although sea level rises have not been massive enough to warrant Cockburn’s alarm, they should certainly interest us.

Cockburn might, I suppose, be interested to know that scientists have questioned the size of the contribution that might be made by these icesheets. But what he probably won’t be too keen on, is the conclusion of these scientists that a “global, eustatic sea-level rise contribution of about 3.3 meters” is a more likely figure.

The seriousness with which Cockburn views such matters is evident by the maturity of his conclusion. Musing on the after effects of the last ice age, he quips that “The sea rise of that still on-going interglacial warm spell, among other things, flooded the land bridge between  Siberia and Alaska to form the Bering Straits—without which we might be a province of Russia today. So much for the terrors of sea rise.”

This, given the likely consequences of a rise of 3 metres worldwide, is the height of self indulgent contrarian claptrap.

Cockburn will, alas, reach for any source material which confirms his inherent bias, his embrace of dissident physicists Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf Tscheuchner being a case in point.

Gerlich and Tscheuchner argue that the mechanism of anthropogenic climate change violates the laws of physics as, in Cockburn’s version, “a cooler body cannot warm a hotter body” meaning that, “Greenhouse gasses in the cold upper atmosphere, even when warmed a bit by absorbed infrared, cannot possibly transfer heat to the warmer earth, and in fact radiate their absorbed heat into outer space.”

This has been extensively, and eloquently, refuted by physicists. As one of them has written in response, the paper presents “no logical counter to the simple truth that the presence of Earth’s infrared-absorbing atmosphere does indeed raise our planet’s surface temperature by at least 33 degrees C from what it would be otherwise.” (Much more here).

The original paper appeared on an open physics site called Arxiv, which one reader describes as being “popular for maths, but has become a bit of a dumping ground for papers that couldn’t get into a journal (which, seeing as there is very much a pecking order in journals, is something of an achievement).”

The mystery is how the paper then appeared minus a lot of the fat, in the International Journal of Modern Physics. It’s a mystery not unlike the question of why the Nation published Cockburn’s screed. Ah, editors.

Cockburn’s article is an astonishing broadside aimed at the IPCC and the environmental movement in general. It’s highly inaccurate, unhinged, incoherent. It’s also very dangerous – at a time when the British tabloid press has opted to take a climate “sceptic” line and as the legitimacy of the IPCC process lies in tatters (for reasons other than the soundness of its science), and hence demands a rebuttal from progressives.

Whether or not climate change is a personal priority, I hope that those on the left can agree that contributions like Cockburn’s are anathema – unless you buy the “deniers” viewpoint, which is fine – just don’t do it because you are another frustrated lefty contrarian, groping about for an issue with which to rile up ignorant followers.

More Mumbai Jumbai?

This is interesting, if true:

David Headley, a Pakistan-born American national arrested in Chicago in October, is alleged to have carried out reconnaissance missions in the run-up to the Mumbai attacks, in which 166 people were killed.

He is also believed to have been present in the terrorists’ “control room” in Pakistan where their handlers directed the killing spree over an open telephone line.

According to Indian officials, Headley travelled to India again in March this year, with the knowledge of American agencies who did not inform their Indian counterparts. During the trip, Headley is alleged to have collected intelligence for future terrorist attacks on civilian and military targets, including India’s National Defence College.

Indian officials are desperate to question Headley but have been frustrated by American refusals to grant them access. A team of Indian investigators travelled to Washington shortly after Headley was arrested in October but soon returned after their American counterparts told them they would not be able to meet him.

…Headley, who was born Daood Syed Gilani and schooled in Pakistan before moving to Philadelphia with his American mother in 1977, was convicted of smuggling heroin into the United States in 1998. He served only 15 months in jail after agreeing to become an informant for the Drugs Enforcement Administration (DEA). He changed his name to David Headley in 2006.

According to Indian officials he continued to serve as a DEA informant until shortly before his arrest in October. Indian intelligence sources believe Headley may have been recruited to work for the CIA which, along with the FBI, shared intelligence with the DEA and other government agencies after the creation of the National Counter-Terrorism Centre in 2004.

B. Raman, a former senior official in India’s intelligence agency, said: “He was working for Lashkar e Taiba, taking photographs and video recordings of the [Mumbai] hotels and harbour. And he was an agent for the DEA on drugs, so in that sense he was a double agent.

Hmm.

Protests Being Repressed In Copenhagen

Following the wholesale pre-emptive arrest of protesters, Denmark’s finest are distinguishing themselves on the streets of Copenhagen.

Activists under the Reclaim Power banner have been marching on the climate conference venue,  seeking access to “expose the COP process as undemocratic, unjust and inadequate to deal with the scale of the problem” as they put it.

The idea today is to meeti up with those walking out of the conference venue to stage a People’s Asssembly, and then gain access.

Those attempting to do so appear to have been met with tear gas from police lines.

A Times reporter who was trapped with a group of around 2,000 protesters in a police tactic known as “kettling” said that officers were charging demonstrators and using pepper spray to break them up.

According to Indymedia DK correspondents:

Police have been repeatedly attacking the crowds with batton charges and pepper spray, as well as arresting protesters throughout the morning

Those attempting to meet up with the Peoples Assembly from within the conference have apparently been prevented from doing so, according to Twitter reports.

Meanwhile, two German reporters have been arrested while covering the protests:

The arrest took place on the fringes of a demonstration as the Danish police tried to dissolve it. In this situation the police tried to prevent a large number of journalists from reporting by shoving them. One of the arrested was also hit in her face whilst filming. Her footage was passed to a colleague shortly before the arrest. In the meantime the videoclip can be watched on the internet.

None of it looks terribly good for the powers that be.

Naughty Britain Must Change Silly Human Rights Laws

Where’s the outrage Littlejohn? Clarkson? Anyone?

Britain is being bullied by a foreign state into changing its laws to shield that state’s politicians and citizens from prosecution for crimes against humanity?

How humiliating for Brittania!

After a meeting with the Israeli ambassador, Ron Prosor, the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, said: “Israeli leaders, like leaders from other countries, must be able to visit and have a proper dialogue with the British government.

“We are looking urgently at ways in which the UK system might be changed in order to avoid this sort of situation arising again.”

As Ron Prosor says “The British Government must take a firm stand to prevent British courts becoming a playground for anti-Israel extremists.”

But making the whole nation a playground for anti-Palestinian extremists with access to an utterly modern arsenal and happy to use it against civilian targets whenever they feel like it…

No problem.

Shurely the Guardian, that hotbed of anti-Israeli prejudice will have issued a series of biting comment pieces on the issue, attacking the willingness of David Milliband to kow tow to a known murderer?

Not a chance. No comment pieces on the Livni affair. No Palestinians or human rights activists (outside the letters page). Not even an Israeli. Silence.

But at least we do have Hadley Freeman’s robust “defence of Christmas gift guides.”

Spot the Red Herring

Climate sceptics (or “wreckers”) often like to point towards “alternative” theories to explain the warming of the globe in the past 50 years, if they aren’t denying the existence of that warming altogether, but that’s another story.

As the Independent’s Steve Connor explains, the theory goes something like this:

The theory of [Eigil] Friis-Christensen and [Henrik] Svensmark revolves around [an] argument connected to the well-established 11-year cycle of sunspots that appear on the surface of the Sun. Sunspots are dark pools of magnetic activity that well up to the solar surface in periodic peaks of 11 years or so. When there are a lot of sunspots, the Sun is said to be more active.

In fact 11 years is only the average length of the activity cycle, which can vary between seven and 17 years. Shorter cycles of 10 years or less are associated with a more magnetically active Sun, when the solar wind of charged particles streams out towards the Earth with greater-than-normal intensity.

When sunspots are most active there is also a slight increase in solar intensity of 0.1 per cent. But this is hardly enough to account for the increase in global warming over the past half century, and this cyclical variation is not what Friis-Christensen and Svensmark are proposing as the cause of global warming.

The two Danes believe instead that there is a complex relationship between the length of the solar cycle and the amount of low-level cloud that forms in the Earth’s atmosphere. Because shorter cycles are associated with a more magnetically active Sun, this affects the cloud cover and hence the climate on Earth.

This theory appeared to provide a robust alternative theory for temperature changes – complete with photogenic graphs tracking temperature changes with sunspot activity.

It certainly fooled many people. In the past few weeks, content using sunspot activity as a possible explanation for climate change has appeared on the website of CBS News, while Christopher Brooker continues to peddle it in the Telegraph and the Times’ Stuart Clark wondered last month whether decreased sunspot activity might be bringing a decade of arctic weather….

Spotting those spots is something the mass media regularly likes to engage in.

The problem is, the graphs in question were heavily doctored by the scientists involved to produce a correlation. Even the aforementioned Eigil Friis-Christensen accepts that there is a clear “divergence” between sunspot activity and global temperatures.

New research by retired climate scientist Peter Laut has pretty much closed this area of debate, for now. Incidentally, this also reflects very poorly on “the Great Global Warming Swindle” which relied heavily on doctored graphs to make its point that greenhouse gases are not responsible for global warming.

Yet the media is unwilling to give this much exposure, excepting the Independent’s excellent article and, of all things, a minor piece by the Telegraph (which, as noted above, has aired extremely questionable musings on the role of sunspots by Christopher Brooker in the recent past).

But surely the misplaced enthusiasms of climate scientists should be exposed wherever possible?

Apparently not. Such misrepresentation is ironic given the ongoing “climategate” controversy over allegedly doctored research into global temperatures which formed part of the 2007 UN IPCC report into climate change.

On the subject, here’s a comprehensive rebuttal of those commentators who feel the leaked e-mails from climate scientists in any way invalidates the idea that greenhouse gas emissions are linked to climate change:

The Tzlippery Slope

David Milliband doesn’t seem to realize that Tzipi Livni, who wasn’t arrested last week as she didn’t arrive in the UK, is not an “Israeli leader.”

Our Foreign Secretary said today that “Israel is a strategic partner and a close friend of the UK…We are determined to protect and develop these ties. Israeli leaders – like leaders from other countries – must be able to visit and have a proper dialogue with the British government.”

As a result, “The Government is looking urgently at ways in which the UK system might be changed in order to avoid this sort of situation arising again.”

Yet Tzipi Livni is not an “Israeli leader.” She is an ex-Foreign Minister and as the head of the political party Kadima. Generally, opposition politicians do not enjoy immunity around the world – and in any case, human rights which respect the immunity of butchers is pretty intolerable.

The fact that Milliband is seeking to erase what few means we have in this country of pursuing mass murderers when they arrive in this country is sickening.

The Business Cycle, Explained

The deficit issue is truly absurd. One thing I didn’t think to mention in my earlier post is the staggering circularity of it all.

The banks foul up, lose trillions in brainless, hugely risky investments, thanks largely to the rating agencies…

The people, via the state pay for those losses, propping up the hapless banks, which then..

Invest the money granted them in the name of the people in government bonds and other instruments…

Which they demand be kept stable and lucrative via rating agencies,  who demand that governments take “painful” measures to cut spending and hurt the people…

Who bailed out the banks and now have to go into more personal debt to pay taxes, pay for essential services and a decent lifestyle..

While the banks and raters (and politicians) wander off with a big sack of swag and find news ways of buggering up the financial system based on personal debt…

Attention: Deficit Disorder

At the moment, it seems as if there is only one issue in British politics. It isn’t the Afghan war, scandalous though that it. It isn’t poor hospitals, disgusting human rights abuses during the “war on terror,” the government’s hugely contradictory policies on climate change or the escalating costs of public works projects like the 2012 Olympics.

After the release of his “pre budget report” (pre-election report would be more accurate, it seems), Alistair Darling has brought the deficit into centre stage. Or, to be more accurate, two aspects of the deficit loom large. On the one hand, there is its size – £178 billion for 2009 alone, and counting. On the other, there is a debate about how much to cut public expenditure to reduce that deficit and, theoretically, the national debt.

But cutting the debt is a long way off if discussion is generally about getting that deficit down to size. The deficit refers to the amount that the public debt has grown in the past year. Hence, if you cut the deficit in half, the debt is still growing. Generally, this is seen as a bad thing. After all, on a personal level, such behaviour would be penalized (for most of us) by sanctions – letters from the bank, mounting bills, a court order, repossession – that sort of thing. We can’t really go through life accumulating ever larger debts and placating our creditors by cutting the amount we borrow – at least not forever.

Fortunately, however, governments aren’t people. And they aren’t corporations either. Companies are supposed to disappear if their business model falls into the red and they consistently deliver profits below the level needed to service and reduce their debt – in theory. In this respect, they resemble individuals. But the past few years have shown how far this idea departs from reality. The government has massively subsidised a series of corporations, allowing them to accumulate and then mitigate enormous deficits abd debts.

First, they deregulated the City – taking a hands off approach, declining to investigate irregularities (for the most part), slashing taxes on profits and investments, promoting neoliberal globalization at every turn and encouraging private debt to spiral via housing investments and credit cards. When this scaffolding of risk collapsed, as it did in 2008, the government transferred huge public resources to the major banks as part of its “stimulus” package.

This produced the “mountain” of debt that we are now faced with, although its important to note that the bloated military budget (some £40 billion) is part of the problem. In most commentary, the budget deficit is compared to the military budget, as if the deifict is reducing the quality of equipment sent to our boys in Afghanistan, but it is in reality all part of the same problem. And never, on any account, forget the cost of Trident (maybe £100 billion).

So the budget deficit is the product of a few important developments. Firstly, the financial crisis created by i) the government and its cronies within the financial system, who pushed for the retreat of government from overseeing their activity and ii) the military state which continues to fight expensive, unnecessary wars and pay for overpriced, useless technology.

The social demands of the British people – healthcare, pensions, education, roads, housing, benefits – none of these have caused the “crisis.” Yet money to satisfy those demands will now be diverted to servicing the national debt. The quality of healthcare for Britons will be sacrificed to maintain the profits of Lloyds and Boeing alike.

Neither the Tories nor Labour (or the Lib Dems for that matter) are willing to admit this. For them, the question is one of crisis management. “Who pays?” is not the question. The real problem for them is “how much of what ordinary people need and value must we sacrifice to ensure that the bailouts and wars do not bankrupt the nation?”

This debate is enthusiastically reflected and promoted by the mass media. Everyone agrees that the deficit has to be reduced. For example, William Keegan – one of the more Keynesian observers of the crisis - writes that although “the large deficit about which so many people fret is not the problem” and indeed “it is an integral part of the solution,” nevertheless, “Treasury control of public spending is back with a vengeance, and that is a healthy sign.”

The Telegraph is naturally more blunt, writing that “The nation’s finances are in their most parlous condition in modern times” and Britain is staring at “an unprecedented debt mountain,” barely concealing its distaste that “those “front-line” services so dear to Labour – schools, hospitals, the police – will have their budgets cocooned.”

Will Hutton, again a Keynesian of sorts, writes that “The public sector needs to get more from less in a way that it has not considered ever in peacetime…Britain may have to ask up to 20 of its new universities to become colleges again. To run a navy without aircraft carriers. Roll back its cherished overseas aid budget. Phase in the age when pensions kick in. Everything should be on the table and the challenge the government has accepted should be spelled out.”

Such language is common. This is a crisis, and crises need responses “across the board.”

But such hysteria is misplaced. All sides agree that there is a crisis and it needs to be solved by making ordinary people feel the pain. This is a mistake, and nobody is willing or able to recognise it.

Take a look at this graph. It shows the UK’s national debt as a percentage of its GDP (Gross National Product) which is a sum of all economic activity in a given year.

As can be clearly seen, Britain has in the past had far, far higher levels of national debt and avoided bankruptcy. And these debt levels were not just a result of the Second World War. A rise can be seen from the 1910s (the First World War) until peaking in 1950 when the national debt reached almost 250 percent of GDP. Only then did it begin to recede, yet debt did not reach current levels until the mid 1970s. It is, according to this graph, at a historically farily low level.

Nobody has made this point in the press, as far as I can tell. Indeed, history is largely used as an ideological weapon, rather than a sober illustration. Dominic Sandbrook, writing in the Daily Mail, is a case in point. The historian writes that Labour’s first chancellor, Philip Snowden, is something of a hero (relative to Alistair Darling and Denis Healey).

Sandbrook writes that, “as Chancellor during the banking collapse of 1931, Snowden defied his party critics and put financial rectitude ahead of short-term popularity” while “Slashing a then-record £70m (£20bn) in benefits made him few friends on the Left, and the Labour Party split over his economic austerity.” Yet as we can see from the graph, Snowden barely made a dent in debt-GDP levels.

Now, Britain was a poorer country in the early twentieth century. Yet in terms of growth rates, the 1950s (when borrowing was much higher than now) were a boom time while borrowing also rose during the 1920s (another growth period). Clearly high levels of borrowing did not prevent growth from occuring. Indeed, as Hutton noted, it is likely that debt and deficits promote growth by promoting increased demand. At least they did in the twentieth century.

Despite all of this, there is huge momentum towards cuts and “fiscal discipline.” Commentators are extremely unwilling to depart from this mantra, dangerously so given the implications for public services and, conceivably, economic growth.

Will Hutton is a case in point. Despite noting that the crisis is the product of deregulation and the profligacy of the banks, and also noting that “tax revenues are proportionally the lowest since 1960″ Hutton calls strongly for more cuts in public spending. As he writes, “Brown as chancellor spent too much and hugely overestimated future tax revenues, believing his own propaganda that he had eliminated boom and bust and created a wonder economy.” Extraordinarily, he argues that while the government “needs to spell out that although it believes in an activist approach to public spending and borrowing and that a growing national debt in these circumstances is nothing to be frightened about…everybody has to tighten their belts and contribute, because the situation has to be brought under control” and, in this way, the nation can “create a wider economic base with innovation at its heart.”

One crucial element encouraging such hysteria is the fear of a debt “downgrade.” This refers to the rating given to government debt (and most forms of debt in which is it possible to invest) by private “rating agencies” such as Moody’s or Standard and Poors. The agencies strike fear into politicians and columnists alike with the threat of grading a government BBB – instantly raising the interest paid by taxpayers on governnent bonds.

The Telegraph’s Jeremy Warner calls these agencies “shadowy creatures that sit in judgment over the trillions of dollars of debt that swirl around the world’s money markets” and writes that “By assigning a top-notch, triple-A rating to many of the products that emerged from the boom in “structured finance”, the credit rating agencies played a pivotal role in fostering the mad dash into sub-prime mortgage lending which eventually triggered the worst banking crisis since the Great Depression.”

Moreover, “The sub-prime meltdown is only the latest offence in a serial list of failings, be it the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, the Far Eastern crisis of the 1990s, Enron, and just about any other major default you can think of in recent history.”

“In all cases, the rating agencies failed to see it coming.”

Yet we rely on these same agencies for information about whether to invest in government bonds. Governments fear them because they act as arbiters of whether their policies are good for investment or bad, and they invariably apply a powerful brake to public spending. But why believe a word that they say about government deficits, given their historical incompetence?

Governments are not corporations. They are (theoretically) sovereign institutions able to draw on the bedrock of credit supplied by tax receipts and to, if necessary, print money to stimulate the economy when credit is unavailable. Yet in practice, they are treated like corporations (or perhaps more accurately, like individuals) with the same discplines applied to their finances by people trained (we have to assume) in assessing corporate debt.

This is a huge anomaly in the global financial system, and one generated by the way that capitalism has become globalized, heavily dependent upon financial sectors and, many would argue, parasitic in its quest for profit over the past thirty years. But it doesn’t have to be like this. As Hutton writes, tax rates could rise to pay for further investment and – yes – borrowing.

Capital Gains Tax, for instance, was set by James Callaghan at 35 percent back in 1965. It now stands at 18 percent – for individuals and coporations whatever their income. This could be graduated or reformed (and be popular as well). It will hardly be lost on the public that reducing Capital Gains Tax provided a significant spur to financial speculation, for which we all now have to pay.

Shutting down tax havens across the world would be another popular policy, causing huge funds to be diverted back to national economies for public investment. Gordon Brown is keen on a “Tobin Tax” on currency transactions across borders. This would be better by far, hitting rich individuals and corporations, and helping smaller, poorer nations who continue see money bleed away into secretive parasitical tax havens.

The idea of a “non-dom” remains repellent – a hideous luxury for oligarchs and oil billionaires and an affront to human rights when poor asylum seekers are routinely sent back to lethal homelands and hounded for the pennies that they earn, when they can.

There are, in short, alternatives. Nationalising the banks would be another, and deploying their “expertise” to promote equitable, sustainable investment. There are alternatives, it bears repeating.

The truly dangerous deficit is not in the British budget, so much as within the minds of those who formulate, discuss, influence and grade it. We remain wedded to an orthodoxy which stifles public investment and protects, even subsidises the private profits of a tiny few.