Jesse argues the free market case: interventions just make things worse; real wages in Western economies must decline; international currencies must float freely.
Okay, if we also have some other system of supporting our workers through the change, instead of import tariffs and other protectionist measures. You can't drop masses of people from a great height and expect society to remain stable.
A lot of our present arrangements - health, education, welfare - seem to me to be a fairly inefficient way of transferring wealth from the upper strata to the lower, less the cost and inconvenience of all the system servicers in between.
Why don't we get honest and open about the need for wealth redistribution, balanced with the need to encourage enterprise? Could we get rid of weaselly taxes and insidious benefit traps? All we need is some way of levelling the playing field between groups of workers in very different parts of the world, in such a way as not to force the game to be abandoned by either side. Can anyone propose a system of financial support - could some form of the Citizens' Basic Income be made to work?
Sunday, December 07, 2008
Saturday, December 06, 2008
What is "Common Purpose"?
Googling this term, one gets (a) lots of stuff by Common Purpose and/or a Julia Middleton, (b) lots of favourable stuff about either or both, and (c) a handful of snarling "stop-them" sites. I shouldn't bother asking any more, except it seems that this organisation does have connexions with many influential people and organizations.
What is the "Common Purpose" of the eponymous outfit? Who exactly is this Julia Middleton, and why has she become so apparently prominent? Is it a McKinsey-type thing, or a McCarthy-type thing? Can anyone who isn't obviously a nutter tell me, in cool and rational terms?
What is the "Common Purpose" of the eponymous outfit? Who exactly is this Julia Middleton, and why has she become so apparently prominent? Is it a McKinsey-type thing, or a McCarthy-type thing? Can anyone who isn't obviously a nutter tell me, in cool and rational terms?
And as for the D-word...
The Economist Intelligence Unit democracy index has moved the UK up from 23rd place in 2006 to 21st place in 2008. Of course, this was before the government started nationalising the banks and arresting the Opposition.
Even so, the Civil Liberties strand has fallen in two years from 9.12 to 8.82; and the competition seems to be weakening anyway, as the 2008 report notes:
...following a decades-long global trend in democratisation, the spread of democracy has come to a halt. Comparing the results for 2008 with those from the first edition of the index, which covered 2006, shows that the dominant pattern in the past two years has been stagnation. Although there is no recent trend of outright regression, there are few instances of significant improvement. However, the global financial crisis, resulting in a sharp and possibly protracted recession, could threaten democracy in some parts of the world.
Even so, the Civil Liberties strand has fallen in two years from 9.12 to 8.82; and the competition seems to be weakening anyway, as the 2008 report notes:
...following a decades-long global trend in democratisation, the spread of democracy has come to a halt. Comparing the results for 2008 with those from the first edition of the index, which covered 2006, shows that the dominant pattern in the past two years has been stagnation. Although there is no recent trend of outright regression, there are few instances of significant improvement. However, the global financial crisis, resulting in a sharp and possibly protracted recession, could threaten democracy in some parts of the world.
Press release from September:
Transparency International’s global Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) 2008, launched today, shows a significant worsening of the way the UK’s attitude to corruption is seen in the world. The UK’s score has dropped from 8.4 last year to only 7.7 today: the first time it has ever fallen from the high rating of more than 8 (10 is the highest a country can score on the Index).
The UK's engrained complacency over its failure to take international corruption seriously is now further exposed to public scrutiny. The UK has a wretched foreign bribery prosecution record compared to most of its G7 peers. It was strongly criticised this summer by the OECD body responsible for ensuring that members comply with the 1997 OECD Anti-Bribery Convention and may now face tougher measures by the OECD if it continues to fail.
The top 20:
Transparency International’s global Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) 2008, launched today, shows a significant worsening of the way the UK’s attitude to corruption is seen in the world. The UK’s score has dropped from 8.4 last year to only 7.7 today: the first time it has ever fallen from the high rating of more than 8 (10 is the highest a country can score on the Index).
The UK's engrained complacency over its failure to take international corruption seriously is now further exposed to public scrutiny. The UK has a wretched foreign bribery prosecution record compared to most of its G7 peers. It was strongly criticised this summer by the OECD body responsible for ensuring that members comply with the 1997 OECD Anti-Bribery Convention and may now face tougher measures by the OECD if it continues to fail.
The top 20:
(htp: Hatfield Girl)
BTW: Zimbabwe is not even in the bottom 10 of the list.
An expert writes
The words...
In truth, gold has been a poor investment for a long time...
Other safe havens have done much better... Government bonds... Swiss franc...
Gold rises and falls with oil, copper and wheat, and all the other things that get turned into stuff in factories. It is still a useful metal. But it is not money — and after its failure to rally in this crisis, even the most dogmatic gold bug may well have to admit that.
(Matthew Lynn in The Spectator)
The picture...
Friday, December 05, 2008
Corruption Competition
Jeremy Clarke's dragoman introduces a brilliant new system of classification:
The Egyptian government is 100 per cent corrupt. In other countries the government is 10 per cent corrupt or maybe 20 or 50 per cent. Here in Egypt it is 100 per cent corrupt. I am telling you.
You are invited to argue the case for one or more "other countries" to be considered as runners-up in this competition.
(Please have regard for libel law.)
China to devalue its currency?
I said some time ago that Far Eastern creditors weren't going to let themselves be swindled by currency depreciation; now it is rumoured that China (and maybe another country also) will take their revenge and begin a dangerous round of competitive devaluation around the world.
Hurray for a radical
I sympathise with Mish; but getting it done would be like a goat persuading a tiger to turn vegetarian.
If deflation is not the problem, what is?
The problem is fractional reserve lending that allows banks to leverage lending 12-1 and broker dealers like the now defunct Bear Stearns and Lehman 40-1. It does not take much to cause a run on the bank when leverage is 40-1. Fannie Mae is leveraged many times more than that.
Without that excessive leverage, no one would be in trouble over falling prices. Actually everyone would benefit. The cure is not to defeat deflation, the cure is to embrace deflation and stop fractional reserve lending and the serially bubble blowing activities of the Fed.
I support abolishing the Fed and the elimination of fractional reserve lending. Those are the only long term cures to the problems we face.
If deflation is not the problem, what is?
The problem is fractional reserve lending that allows banks to leverage lending 12-1 and broker dealers like the now defunct Bear Stearns and Lehman 40-1. It does not take much to cause a run on the bank when leverage is 40-1. Fannie Mae is leveraged many times more than that.
Without that excessive leverage, no one would be in trouble over falling prices. Actually everyone would benefit. The cure is not to defeat deflation, the cure is to embrace deflation and stop fractional reserve lending and the serially bubble blowing activities of the Fed.
I support abolishing the Fed and the elimination of fractional reserve lending. Those are the only long term cures to the problems we face.
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
The dangers of harmony
I'm still convinced that many in the financial community deserve far harsher treatment than they've so far received - if they didn't know what would happen, they should have.
But I've been casting about for some deeper structural reason - what allowed financiers to kid themselves that they were acting reasonably, or at least assure themselves that they had followed official guidelines and were "covered"?
So I looked for something relating to the regulation of fractional reserves, and came across references to the Basel Accords (I and II). These are an attempt to "harmonise" central banking policies in developed nations, and perhaps can serve as an object lesson (especially for EU enthusiasts) about international legislation.
Here is the conclusion of an analysis of the two Accords (highlights mine):
One very important fact to assess is the achievements and limitations of each Basel Accord. The first Basel Accord, Basel I, was a groundbreaking accord in its time, and did much to promote regulatory harmony and the growth of international banking across the borders of the G-10 and the world alike. On the other hand, its limited scope and rather general language gives banks excessive leeway in their interpretation of its rules, and, in the end, allows financial institutions to take improper risks and hold unduly low capital reserves.
Basel II, on the other hand, seeks to extend the breadth and precision of Basel I, bringing in factors such as market and operational risk, market-based discipline and surveillance, and regulatory mandates. On the other hand, in the words of Evan Hawke, the U.S. Comptroller of the Currency under George W. Bush, Basel II is “complex beyond reason” (Jones, 37), extending to nearly four hundred pages without indices, and, in total, encompassing nearly one thousand pages of regulation.
The author's concern is that the rules can permit the risk of assets in emerging markets to be understated, and as it turns out the Trojan horse came in through another gate; but in complexity lies opportunity, and in rule-following lies the illusion that personal responsibility is thereby written off.
But I've been casting about for some deeper structural reason - what allowed financiers to kid themselves that they were acting reasonably, or at least assure themselves that they had followed official guidelines and were "covered"?
So I looked for something relating to the regulation of fractional reserves, and came across references to the Basel Accords (I and II). These are an attempt to "harmonise" central banking policies in developed nations, and perhaps can serve as an object lesson (especially for EU enthusiasts) about international legislation.
Here is the conclusion of an analysis of the two Accords (highlights mine):
One very important fact to assess is the achievements and limitations of each Basel Accord. The first Basel Accord, Basel I, was a groundbreaking accord in its time, and did much to promote regulatory harmony and the growth of international banking across the borders of the G-10 and the world alike. On the other hand, its limited scope and rather general language gives banks excessive leeway in their interpretation of its rules, and, in the end, allows financial institutions to take improper risks and hold unduly low capital reserves.
Basel II, on the other hand, seeks to extend the breadth and precision of Basel I, bringing in factors such as market and operational risk, market-based discipline and surveillance, and regulatory mandates. On the other hand, in the words of Evan Hawke, the U.S. Comptroller of the Currency under George W. Bush, Basel II is “complex beyond reason” (Jones, 37), extending to nearly four hundred pages without indices, and, in total, encompassing nearly one thousand pages of regulation.
The author's concern is that the rules can permit the risk of assets in emerging markets to be understated, and as it turns out the Trojan horse came in through another gate; but in complexity lies opportunity, and in rule-following lies the illusion that personal responsibility is thereby written off.
Monday, December 01, 2008
The eyes, look at the eyes
I referred recently to some BNP supporters as "scrubbed-up thugs"; sadly, that also is the impression given by some New Labour apparatchiks.Is it true that, like Cordelia and the Fool, Ed Balls and Nick Griffin have never been seen together?
"When the going was good"
Marc Faber, on Bloomberg: "US stocks will rally further he maintains, at least for a short while. In January to March next year you must get out as the economy will implode."
And he's a gold bug again - and says hold it outside the US, as many have long recommended.
And he's a gold bug again - and says hold it outside the US, as many have long recommended.
Cruising for a losing
Mish's graph suggests houses could lose another 40% or so over the next 7 years.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Tony Murdoch, Rupert Blair
Reading Michael Wolff's article in the Spectator today, I was struck by the uncanny resemblance of his subject to another. Here, with only a few substitutions, cuts and emendations, is my version.
Blair’s big secret is that he doesn’t have one
Wednesday, 26th November 2008
Sackerson reveals how he secured Tony Blair’s co-operation for his biography and discovered that this political titan has no interest in posterity. He is, at heart, a political operator
There is, on the one hand, the unparalleled national dominance in politics that Tony Blair and his New Labour have achieved. And yet, on the other, there’s an almost endearing attention-deficit lack of organisation and heedlessness that I witnessed in many years of chatting with Blair and his ministers.
The fact that I was talking so often and so openly with Blair was as good an example as any of the absence of planning and strategy that backs up one of the country’s greatest control freaks. Indeed, throughout the company, people kept saying to me (and among themselves): has he lost his mind, spilling the beans? Why is he doing this? What is he thinking?
The answer involves, I believe, New Labour’s essential political advantage and fundamental personality trait: Blair and Labour act without thinking very much. Or the only sustained thinking that goes on is about what he might be thinking. And that’s extremely hard because the man, contravening all rules of modern analytic politics, acts almost entirely on impulse — his method is all based on instinct, urge, gossip (i.e. a more or less random collection of things he’s been told), and the impelling force of immediate and casual circumstance. It’s serious ADD.
It was during his takeover in the 1990s of the Labour Party — a set of brilliantly executed strategic moves that occurred mostly without any kind of analysis about why he might be changing it and what he would be getting after he took charge — that Blair and I began our interviews. I had gone to the publisher of my last book and argued that there might be a chance Blair would agree to a long exclusive interview — the kind which, out of impatience or defensiveness, he had never granted. I sensed he might be open to the attention — that he was proud of winning the Labour Party.
Blair found himself talking to me with no plan or agreement or understanding or even time constraints. For the first several years of our interviews, he was clearly wondering how it was that I had got there. Only the fact that he is a very polite man, and conflict averse — at least in a one-to-one sense — kept him, I often felt, from tossing me out on my ear.
The vastness of an organisation like New Labour, dominating nearly every political platform in the country, makes it perceptually almost impossible not to believe that there is a vision here, a method and a far-reaching intelligence (pernicious or otherwise).
This was what I obviously tried to probe, sitting with Blair for nine months. What’s going on in there? What does he know?
To be with Blair, to view him, to get inside his head, and to understand how he does political, you have to take away all technology — that is, all the web-searches, all the data, all the correspondence, all the communications resources, that ministers everywhere rely on. Blair, at 55, can’t use a computer, doesn’t get email, can’t get his cell phone to work properly, can’t even imagine changing the variables on a spread sheet. (The fact that New Labour often bills itself as a technologically farsighted, aggressive and clever party is amusing to everyone there.) During the campaign to take over New Labour, Blair’s spies and surrogates would email Blair’s 54-year-old wife, Cherie, and she’d read to him from her mobile phone. Indeed, while many people at New Labour were trying to talk about the cross-platform synergies at New Labour and the future of electronic voting, Blair was only ever talking about the Party.
Psychologically, he is far from modern too. He can’t question his own motivations (a curious problem for a biographer). He truly doesn’t believe in interpretation. His face draws back, and he scowls in a remarkably dismissive way if you try to suggest that there might be a deeper pattern to his actions — that there might be meaning beyond living to fight another day. Accordingly, he has surrounded himself with a cadre of unanalysed people who believe it’s best to act before thinking too much. Curiously, his children are reasonably nuanced thinkers, which is perhaps one reason he thinks they are the most brilliant people in the country.
He has no historic interest — even in himself. This sets him at odds from most men of accomplishment, who generally cherish all their achievements. Blair hardly remembers his. The past has receded. He cuts himself off from it. In conversation, he often loses or transposes decades. This is only partly age. More to the point, he obviously has no use for memory. That’s a distraction. He is not demoralised by defeats. He’s not aggrandised by victories. When you interview him, you can’t, profitably, ask about what has occurred, you can only engage with him if you talk about what’s going on now. What’s on your mind this morning, Mr B? Who are you feeling competitive with today? What fly is buzzing near your face?
He is, and runs his career like, an ambitious man. He’s a dealmaker. No more, no less. No better, no worse. What he values is the ability and inclination to make split-second decisions. He’s rather proud when that ability is not slowed by too much information or explanation. He is most motivated by the last interesting thing someone told him — whether it is true is not as important as how it will read. Sitting with Blair for so many years, I’d regularly see the odd bits of information come in (my stock obviously went up when I offered him a tidbit), and be directed to a political researcher, or become part of his world-view or some instant political decision-making process. (At a cocktail party, he meets someone from Afghanistan, who suddenly informs his view of that conflict; at another party he meets someone who knows a policeman on Long Island, and that colours his view about a lecture tour in New York) He has no interest in understanding himself, because he sees himself as an everyman. He’s Mr Basic, Mr Uncomplicated; he has no airs, no fancy aspirations. He can trust his own gut. And why should he remember the past, he has to be in tomorrow’s papers? And once again beat the competition.
I have sometimes had the feeling, over the past years of talking to Blair and New Labour ministers, that his people are humouring him. That he is not so much, in Alistair Campbell’s formulation, the Sun God, who people cannot question, but instead a sort of long-running joke in which everybody at New Labour — so many of them career employees — is complicit. The joke is that this greatest of modern political men, the architect of the synergised, cross-platform, integrated, national political party, has no vision, no method, no strategy. Nor, likewise, does this man, perhaps the individual with the single most powerful political voice of our time, have any politics — save for what makes for good newspaper copy or puts money in his own pocket. Rather it’s all made up — what he buys, how he spends, what he believes, who he supports — on the fly.
In my interviews, Blair, even though a professional in the political world, was guileless — or ultimately unconcerned. It was a book, for one thing, and, as his advisers suggested to me, he might never have read one. What’s more, to think about how he might be portrayed would be to have an idea of his own self — to have to dwell on things he is incapable of or vastly uninterested in dwelling on. And yet he did it — blabbered away for years. With hardly a thought he exposed himself, his family and all his ministers to a biographer who one day happened to walk into his office. Even prospective immortality is something, at New Labour, which you just throw against the wall and see if it sticks.
Blair’s big secret is that he doesn’t have one
Wednesday, 26th November 2008
Sackerson reveals how he secured Tony Blair’s co-operation for his biography and discovered that this political titan has no interest in posterity. He is, at heart, a political operator
There is, on the one hand, the unparalleled national dominance in politics that Tony Blair and his New Labour have achieved. And yet, on the other, there’s an almost endearing attention-deficit lack of organisation and heedlessness that I witnessed in many years of chatting with Blair and his ministers.
The fact that I was talking so often and so openly with Blair was as good an example as any of the absence of planning and strategy that backs up one of the country’s greatest control freaks. Indeed, throughout the company, people kept saying to me (and among themselves): has he lost his mind, spilling the beans? Why is he doing this? What is he thinking?
The answer involves, I believe, New Labour’s essential political advantage and fundamental personality trait: Blair and Labour act without thinking very much. Or the only sustained thinking that goes on is about what he might be thinking. And that’s extremely hard because the man, contravening all rules of modern analytic politics, acts almost entirely on impulse — his method is all based on instinct, urge, gossip (i.e. a more or less random collection of things he’s been told), and the impelling force of immediate and casual circumstance. It’s serious ADD.
It was during his takeover in the 1990s of the Labour Party — a set of brilliantly executed strategic moves that occurred mostly without any kind of analysis about why he might be changing it and what he would be getting after he took charge — that Blair and I began our interviews. I had gone to the publisher of my last book and argued that there might be a chance Blair would agree to a long exclusive interview — the kind which, out of impatience or defensiveness, he had never granted. I sensed he might be open to the attention — that he was proud of winning the Labour Party.
Blair found himself talking to me with no plan or agreement or understanding or even time constraints. For the first several years of our interviews, he was clearly wondering how it was that I had got there. Only the fact that he is a very polite man, and conflict averse — at least in a one-to-one sense — kept him, I often felt, from tossing me out on my ear.
The vastness of an organisation like New Labour, dominating nearly every political platform in the country, makes it perceptually almost impossible not to believe that there is a vision here, a method and a far-reaching intelligence (pernicious or otherwise).
This was what I obviously tried to probe, sitting with Blair for nine months. What’s going on in there? What does he know?
To be with Blair, to view him, to get inside his head, and to understand how he does political, you have to take away all technology — that is, all the web-searches, all the data, all the correspondence, all the communications resources, that ministers everywhere rely on. Blair, at 55, can’t use a computer, doesn’t get email, can’t get his cell phone to work properly, can’t even imagine changing the variables on a spread sheet. (The fact that New Labour often bills itself as a technologically farsighted, aggressive and clever party is amusing to everyone there.) During the campaign to take over New Labour, Blair’s spies and surrogates would email Blair’s 54-year-old wife, Cherie, and she’d read to him from her mobile phone. Indeed, while many people at New Labour were trying to talk about the cross-platform synergies at New Labour and the future of electronic voting, Blair was only ever talking about the Party.
Psychologically, he is far from modern too. He can’t question his own motivations (a curious problem for a biographer). He truly doesn’t believe in interpretation. His face draws back, and he scowls in a remarkably dismissive way if you try to suggest that there might be a deeper pattern to his actions — that there might be meaning beyond living to fight another day. Accordingly, he has surrounded himself with a cadre of unanalysed people who believe it’s best to act before thinking too much. Curiously, his children are reasonably nuanced thinkers, which is perhaps one reason he thinks they are the most brilliant people in the country.
He has no historic interest — even in himself. This sets him at odds from most men of accomplishment, who generally cherish all their achievements. Blair hardly remembers his. The past has receded. He cuts himself off from it. In conversation, he often loses or transposes decades. This is only partly age. More to the point, he obviously has no use for memory. That’s a distraction. He is not demoralised by defeats. He’s not aggrandised by victories. When you interview him, you can’t, profitably, ask about what has occurred, you can only engage with him if you talk about what’s going on now. What’s on your mind this morning, Mr B? Who are you feeling competitive with today? What fly is buzzing near your face?
He is, and runs his career like, an ambitious man. He’s a dealmaker. No more, no less. No better, no worse. What he values is the ability and inclination to make split-second decisions. He’s rather proud when that ability is not slowed by too much information or explanation. He is most motivated by the last interesting thing someone told him — whether it is true is not as important as how it will read. Sitting with Blair for so many years, I’d regularly see the odd bits of information come in (my stock obviously went up when I offered him a tidbit), and be directed to a political researcher, or become part of his world-view or some instant political decision-making process. (At a cocktail party, he meets someone from Afghanistan, who suddenly informs his view of that conflict; at another party he meets someone who knows a policeman on Long Island, and that colours his view about a lecture tour in New York) He has no interest in understanding himself, because he sees himself as an everyman. He’s Mr Basic, Mr Uncomplicated; he has no airs, no fancy aspirations. He can trust his own gut. And why should he remember the past, he has to be in tomorrow’s papers? And once again beat the competition.
I have sometimes had the feeling, over the past years of talking to Blair and New Labour ministers, that his people are humouring him. That he is not so much, in Alistair Campbell’s formulation, the Sun God, who people cannot question, but instead a sort of long-running joke in which everybody at New Labour — so many of them career employees — is complicit. The joke is that this greatest of modern political men, the architect of the synergised, cross-platform, integrated, national political party, has no vision, no method, no strategy. Nor, likewise, does this man, perhaps the individual with the single most powerful political voice of our time, have any politics — save for what makes for good newspaper copy or puts money in his own pocket. Rather it’s all made up — what he buys, how he spends, what he believes, who he supports — on the fly.
In my interviews, Blair, even though a professional in the political world, was guileless — or ultimately unconcerned. It was a book, for one thing, and, as his advisers suggested to me, he might never have read one. What’s more, to think about how he might be portrayed would be to have an idea of his own self — to have to dwell on things he is incapable of or vastly uninterested in dwelling on. And yet he did it — blabbered away for years. With hardly a thought he exposed himself, his family and all his ministers to a biographer who one day happened to walk into his office. Even prospective immortality is something, at New Labour, which you just throw against the wall and see if it sticks.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Damian Green update
I've just heard Geoff Hoon on Radio 4's "Any Questions?" trying to defend the arrest etc. of MP Damian Green. I can only think he was chosen because he is somehow politically expendable. The transcript will be available in a few days here.
His Wikipedia entry says "His notorious skill is 'stonewalling' - deflecting difficult questions by 'playing a straight bat', or appearing to do so." Maybe so. But all it did - for me and the audience - was pretty much to damn him, and by implication the government.
His Wikipedia entry says "His notorious skill is 'stonewalling' - deflecting difficult questions by 'playing a straight bat', or appearing to do so." Maybe so. But all it did - for me and the audience - was pretty much to damn him, and by implication the government.
Default is mine
A warning from history
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana
I can't hope to improve on Cranmer's piece regarding Speaker Martin's betrayal of the proudest tradition of his office; I can only echo his cry of "Shame!"
UPDATE
Yet, alas, even Speaker Lenthall had his regrets:
In his will, Lenthall asked to be buried without any state and without a monument, 'acknowledging myself to be unworthy of the least outward regard in this world and unworthy of any remembrance that hath been so great a sinner'. The most he would permit was a plain stone carved with the Latin inscription Vermis sum, which means: I am a worm.
What epitaph will Speaker Martin cause to be inscribed for himself?
Handy-dandy, the pigs are the farmers
Place your political parties in the schema below:
At first, I wondered what Hatfield Girl was talking about. Now it's one of the news headlines on the morning radio, and in the papers: the Government has taken to arresting members of the Opposition, like tinpot dictators in faraway countries that it's difficult to believe really exist.
At first, I wondered what Hatfield Girl was talking about. Now it's one of the news headlines on the morning radio, and in the papers: the Government has taken to arresting members of the Opposition, like tinpot dictators in faraway countries that it's difficult to believe really exist.
Difficult to believe; that's part of the process. Honestly, I have felt since 1997 (and I am no natural Conservative voter, please believe me) that something was obscurely wrong, that we were all inside someone else's dream. It's like that feeling you get that you've forgotten something, but haven't a clue what it might be.
Before 1997, the Government was Them and we were Us: British, muddling through, ready to heave a brickbat at these clowns who pretend to rule us, but all of us bound by habit and tradition. But in Tony Blair's revolution, the Government claimed to represent all of us: it was the political wing of the British people as a whole, or some such typical Toni verbalfluff.
This is how Nazism took hold - and my mother lived through it. No need for the unions, we the national socialist State represent the worker's best interests, etc.
Fascism, Communism - it's all the same, structurally.
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