How Boris Johnson is writing himself into history

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is using his creative journalist skills to write himself into history.

Operation Save Big Dog and the Pork Pie Plot will be studied by students from primary school to PhD.

It's a brilliant ruse, I tip my finger Sir.

If Mr Johnson breaks free of Thatcherism, dumps Friedman and the free marketeers who are trying to rip him, and turns to Keynes:

Boris Johnson could be one of the greatest Prime Ministers Britain has known and really go down in history on a level with Churchill and Pitt.

Turn the tide of British history Sir, and follow in the steps of a fellow Kings Scholar.

Why levelling up can't work

Levelling up is a soundbite from the imagination of Boris Johnson

Manufacturing has left Britain for China

With the loss of manufacturing is the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Jobs gone forever

Most of the 'red wall' towns in the North and Midlands were manufacturing, mill and mining towns. Most of their jobs have gone never to return.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation calculate the minimum income to raise a family of two children is just under £40K/annum. This is the bare minimum, making a real living wage about £18/hour. (https://bit.ly/jrfminimumincome)  Half what Mr Sunak offers.

Few firms can afford a living wage.

Green, environmental jobs are supposed to come to the rescue but these jobs are in the wrong areas and there aren't enough of them.

Could construction help? Offices and flats are bolted together by a crane driver and a couple of erecters now. Construction needs a lot less skilled workers than in the pre-Thatcher daze. Flexi jobs (multi-skilled workers) are being trained up to become the norm nowadays.

Less workers are required at a time when more work is needed

Chancellor Sunak says education and training will do the trick.

Education and training to do what? 

Jobs must come first. Just as demand stimulates supply.

Mr Sunak's plan is just a re-run of the Youth Opportunity Scheme that flopped in the 1980s.

Even if we had a radical government, Labour perhaps, that reshored (brought back) all the lost industries. Technology has moved on so there wouldn't be as many jobs as in the pre-Thatcher era. The higher wages the levelled up workers would need would make UK manufactured goods too expensive for the levelled up working people to buy. 

Britain is in a downward spiral

No one in government or opposition is putting forward the radical ideas needed.

A quarter of the levelling up budget is to be spent on culture for example. New museums, art galleries and theatres like ones they've just got in Doncaster. 

How can a museum, art gallery and theatre level up Doncaster 

or anywhere else for that matter?

The white paper? 400 pages written by civil servants for civil servants and local government officers to pore over and write long reports about. 

Job creation here but nothing that will level anything or anybody up.

Why Mr Johnson will be cleared by an enquiry

Why Boris Johnson will be more or less cleared

The enquiry will smack Martin Reynolds on the wrist for inappropriate wording of an end of day debriefing and encouraging drinking at work. Prime Minister Johnson may or may not be censured. Senior civil servants and possibly 'advisors' who run the operation will be asked (told) to resign.

End of day debrief

The staff had been working on multiple aspects of the covid response and needed to come together at the end of the day for a debrief. There was nowhere suitable inside so they chose the garden as the safest place to debrief and pull the strands of the day's work. This was allowed within the covid regulations.

It was inappropriate to call the debrief a party and to encourage alcohol. But this is the Prime Minister's informal style of management. He does after all believe in a laissez-faire approach to the economy. Laissez-faire management isn't considered the best but it is a recognised style.

I'm sorry but Sue Gray will have no option but to conclude that the 20th May gathering was an informal work based meeting and no law was broken on that occasion.

The police would come to the same conclusion.

Informal end of day debriefs with alcohol are part of the Downing street work culture and have been for years.

Similar work based outside meetings across the country

(Minus the party atmosphere and alcohol).

During this period universities held lectures for students doing practical courses and seminars outside because it was deemed safer. Students brought drinks to the lectures and seminars. Lecturers and students had socially distanced meals outside. I saw it at Bournemouth on the front lawn area.

Schools did the same.

Hospital staff took breaks and meals outside and had meetings outside in a socially distanced way. In Bournemouth, it was at the back of the hospital around the lake.

I went to a work based informal meeting held outside at the 'beach' area of Castlepoint (Bournemouth) near the office, we had coffee and sandwiches from M&S.

The same thing was done in offices and factories across Britain.

Other than alcohol and calling it a party, the number 10 staff did nothing that wasn't being done in almost every hospital, university, school, college, factory and office.

Mr Johnson knows it too...

Why most Christmas songs are from the 1950s and 60s

Why are most Christmas songs from the 1950s and 60s?

You don't hear Frank Sinatra very often except in the run up to Christmas when he's a regular singing romantic and nostalgic Christmas songs.

Most of the Christmas songs played in shops, bars, street markets and bazaars are from the 1950s and 1960s with a few from the 70s. How come?

This was a golden period when there was, in the west at any rate, some degree of goodwill to all in the air. Most people could afford to buy their children Christmas presents and kids would be out playing on their new bikes or roller skates on Christmas afternoon whatever the weather.

I'm glad I was around during this time when everyone who wanted a job had one. Where one wage was enough to bring up a family. When the Conservative party, for a short period in their history had values they could be proud of. Conservative governments thought every family should have a decent place to live and built 100 000s of council homes. In fact, Tory policies during this period were something along the lines of Labour policies today. Labour during this period had a hint of socialism about it, though never in parliament.

Some problems arose in the 1970s. Inflation and 'stagflation'. Some industries needed to modernise to compete globally. These problems could have been solved.

North Sea Oil came along just in time in 1975 and the golden years of Keynesian economics could have been extended another 30 years at least.

But the Conservatives reverted to type. The type that fought tooth and nail in the late 18th and 19th centuries to keep the corrupt parliament of the time. Fought against every reform, fought to keep ordinary working people in their proper place. As they still do today. They also reverted to type in their economic ideology, abandoned Keynes and went back to Adam Smith via Milton Friedman whose ideas were tried and failed in Chile.

Mrs Thatcher levelled down Britain, cut jobs and wages and forced UK consumers to buy from the cheapest sources overseas. China, although calling itself communist were operating all out Keynesian policies and were happy to oblige and take the biggest share of British consumer spending.

The Tories are operating the same 18th century ideology of Adam Smith today. A highly intelligent and highly educated Chancellor, Mr Sunak, is pedalling failed 18th century free market ideology that is the exact opposite of what's needed. Forcing wages down, lowering demand and preventing the UK economy from working as it could and handing consumer spending to China and other countries operating more Keynesian economic systems. Even the Americans are waking up from Friedman's free market slump.

We listen to Christmas songs from the time when Christmas really meant something.

Can it be brought back? Sadly no. Not without 'reshoring' industries, the Tories lost to China and similar economies and not without a near doubling of real wages.

The golden post war years when we never had it so good needn't have been lost though. They were lost because the Tories have been levelling down Britain since 1760.

What is Adam Smiths invisible hand

 Adam Smith didn't see the invisible hand but it was there alright and it has a name now. 

And it wasn't that invisible either.

It moved the world from medieval to modern and is still working away today. It's always been around from ancient times but it started to pick up momentum in its modern form around 1600. The English civil war gave it a boost. In fact, every war boosts the power of the invisible hand and it's even used to fight and win wars. By the 1950s it had become scientific by the 1990s it had become a social science and was taught in universities and has many sub specialisms.

It's the invisible hand that promoted fashion, pottery, tableware, furniture, home goods, theatre, arts, travel, good manners, politics and religion (and just about everything else we desire and buy).

It's stronger than ever today; Adam Smith's invisible hand is marketing.

What's wrong with Adam Smith's opening premise

The first known book on contemporary economics is Adam Smith's: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations 1776.

Its opening premise is an increase in wealth comes through increasing productivity through a division of labour. He goes on to describe the more efficient making of a pin.

I'd just like to question this idea.

1. An increase in wealth (of a nation) must come through an increase in demand first in order to stimulate supply?

2. The division of labour with its increased productivity increases the wealth of the business owner or even the business owning class (capitalists) This does not necessarily mean an increase in the wealth of the nation because capitalists may keep all or most of the wealth to themselves?

3. One way or another profits, however they are made, need to be shared in order to benefit the nation? One way of sharing profits for the benefit of society is through tax.

An outline of Adam Smith

Adam Smith 1723 - 1790 Was brought up in a house overlooking a street market, this influenced much of his thinking and is a basis for some weaknesses in his economic theory. He was a moral philosopher and economist active during the Scottish Enlightenment. His two books mark the start of contemporary rational thinking.

Theory of Moral Sentiments 1759

Wealth of Nations 1759

He advised, do what you do best and trade for the rest.

Don't make (at home) what you can buy cheaper.

He wrote that we have internal conversations with an impartial spectator who is our moral compass.

He argued that the economic activity of humans is action but not design. Even if he was right in the mid 18th century this idea might not be so sound now.

He put forward the idea of a division of labour to increase productivity with the eventual aim of automating the production process

Describes making a pin as an example

During the period of his writing the industrial revolution was taking off and manufacturing technology was advancing rapidly. When Smith worked as a professor and administrator at Glasgow University he made room and facilities for James Watt to work on steam power.

He called the economy of his time 'commercial society. In 1707 Britain united into a free trade area and by the 1750s in company with the Netherlands, Belgium and parts of Italy had become capitalist.

Capitalism is where production is organised to make profits through selling into a market rather than manufacturing for the use of the producer with a small surplus sold locally. It involves the organised use of labour working for wages. Capitalism is organised by the people who own the means of production and distribution.

Smith believed competition would force producers to sell at the most competitive price and that this would benefit everyone. The British Conservative government still holds onto this idea.

In the early part of the industrial revolution, most factories were owned and run by individuals or small partnerships where the owners were personally involved in the day to day running of the process. Most people still worked in agriculture and agriculture was still mainly subsistence farming although change was happening. Slavery was still a major form of labour and wasn't abolished until well after Smith has passed away. Slavery is another inconsistency in his arguments for free and open markets.  As was child labour which was normal practice.

Smith was against limited liability companies, he said it was playing with other peoples' money. Throughout his economic thinking, he bases his ideas on small free markets but he does acknowledge markets will become oligopolies or even monopolies. He hated the East India Company. He continually stresses the need for markets to be free like the one he saw every day when he was growing up. In reality, his whole theory is based on his local street market applied nationally and even globally. Most markets at this time except sugar, cotton, wool and textiles, slaves and spices were still local, regional and rarely national.

Most firms were small so competition did exist. It was impossible for one firm to dominate a market but the economy was changing. Oligopolies and monopolies existed and were emerging. The monarch could grant monopolies for example and the East India Company is a prime example. Smith knew his arguments were idealistic and couldn't work.

A small business person, like a butcher in a local market, provides a product for sale that is not from benevolence, it is for the self interest of the provider. In acting such, he is promoting a wider end through other traders and manufacturers that promotes an end result that is not his intention. Buyers vote with their wallets and mould the trading activity of the market. All the individual small transactions happen automatically influencing the whole like an invisible hand. It's like an economic murmuration.

He knew that firms found ways of collaborating to form predatory oligopolies that snapped up and out produced the small firms. He argued for free markets knowing they couldn't be maintained. He argued that governments should keep out of the market other than passing laws to stop the growth of oligopolies and even worse monopolies.

His arguments were based over and over again on small businesses working in open and free markets.

He explained that monarchs can grant monopolies. That rich and powerful people oppress the powerless and the poor. Guilds and regulations prevent free trade. Ordinary working people are left out of the process.

He thought the East India Company was evil and an antithesis to free markets. In fact, the East India Company had become too big to fail and the government had to step in to bail it out with a tax on tea. Something that was to play a part in the American revolution.

Adam Smith's two main philosophical and economic insights are,

Governments should bring about peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration.

The automatic summation of huge numbers of transactions is guided by an invisible hand.