John Poynton

You can download the first leafet for my Maidenhead campaign here
You can also download our leaflet for the Wellingborough by-election on 15th February 2024 here

UKIP LONDON AND SOUTH-EAST REGIONS AUTUMN NEWSLETTER

30TH ANNIVERSARY CONFERENCE
Our annual conference was held in Newport, Wales on Saturday, 14th October and was attended by 86 people plus a number of rousing speakers and younger independent campaigners who now seem to appreciate finding a home in our party. Unlike Reform (allegedly) we did not have to bribe any of them to come or bus them in in large numbers! Some of the speakers such as Bishop Ceirion Dewar were so rousing I have completely forgotten what they said, whilst others such as Lord Christopher Monkton regaled us in the higher reaches of mathematics to prove that climate change is a hoax.
The mood was definitely up-beat despite some recent by-election disappointments and the more we think about it the more we are convinced that no other party can provided the common-sense policies and the forum for personal freedom and national independence that we do.

The conference concluded with around sixty of us attending the Gala Dinner and a closing speech of such wit and humour that only our Dear Leader, Neil Hamilton, can provide. It was also Jack Thompson’s 18th birthday (yet again) and the caterers managed to provide him with an enormous cake. Apart from the speeches a number of younger members, led by Jack, put forward the idea of getting involved in some of the many protest meetings that now occur regularly in London and elsewhere, such as those against ULEZ, as an opportunity to fly the UKIP flag, literally, and sign up new members. Lets’ wish them the best of luck.

This conference would not have been possible without the enormous hard work and vision of our erstwhile Chairman, Ben Walker, ably assisted by Ruth Purdie and Jamie Baker, in overcoming both the frustration perpetrated by some Neo-Nazis from ‘Hate Not Hope’ and others who managed to get the Dragon Hotel in Swansea to withdraw from their contract with us to host the conference, and also in reaching out to a number of young campaigners to come and speak to us about the injustices they have suffered at the hands of our woke establishment. A very worthwhile event.

BY-ELECTIONS AND THE ‘UNITE THE RIGHT’ ALLIANCE
Just in the last few days we have seen by-elections in Tamworth and Mid-Bedfordshire which show we are still in there with a fighting chance against the so-called alt-right parties such as Reform UK, Reclaim, Heritage and a number of others. In Tamworth Robert Bilcliff came 5th out of 9 beating both the LibDems and Greens in a contest where Reform came third but only just managed to save their deposit. We did not compete in Mid-Bedfordshire, but Reform lost their deposit there.
Our attempt to ‘Unite the Right’ has not borne fruit. Reform are positively hostile, and Reclaim (Laurence Fox) reneged on the agreement when Fox stood in Uxbridge after agreeing our Rebecca Jane should be the umbrella group representative. Only the English Democrats are with us. At least this gives us the opportunity to say we tried. The others didn’t. And do not confuse us with the Patriotic Alliance which has been set up by former UKIP members, including Lord Pearson, and is strongly Islamophobic but which appears to be dormant.

OUR MANIFESTO – REVISION 4
This year’s revised manifesto was handed out at Conference though not discussed. That was a shame since a lot of hard work by the Policy Team, led by Pat Mountain, has gone into it, and it has increased in length from 75 pages to 95. Significant changes to immigration and housing policy have been included together with a commitment to referenda on Net Zero (climate change), proportional representation, abolition of the House of Lords and capital punishment.
Currently around 90,000 people a MONTH are coming into this country quite legally. It is a shame this huge figure gets overshadowed by the much smaller, though growing, problem with illegals – about 5000 a month. I don’t know how many people realise that under the points-based system work visas are handed out for five years to immigrants who have been offered a job paying a minimum of £21,000. There is no limit to these, which are at well below the average wage. That means most of them are taking out more than they are putting in and are a drag on our economy. Not only that, most of them can extend for another five years and so on until they are granted permanent leave to remain or citizenship. An open-door policy if ever there was one.
It has become apparent from polls in Sweden that assessment of illegals results in about 80% being granted asylum, but of that 80% 79% regularly visit home on holiday. Clearly Rwanda would be a waste of time as 80% of them would just be ‘legalised’ and returned here!

Our manifesto now includes the following new policies on immigration:

• scrap the points-based system and replace it with a quota system which covers both extensions and new applicants,
• tighten up the database records to give daily updates on overstayers of all sorts so Border Force officials can be dispatched immediately to locate and assist them on their way home,
• scrap the illegals assessment system and whisk all illegal arrivals straight out to British Overseas Territory such as West Falkland where they would get asylum automatically. The genuine ones would stay and the economic migrants would not. After a while under British rule and protection they would develop their own economy and become self-sufficient.

So far as I know UKIP is the only party advocating these policies.

Anyone seriously interested in housing policy should read Liam Halligan’s new book “Home Truths” in which he charts the changes in housing policy over the past hundred years since Lloyd George promised Homes for Heroes returning from the Great War. Some, but not all, of his points were covered by the recent BBC series entitled “The Housing Crisis – What went wrong?”. Predictably the BBC did not once mention mass immigration as being a factor, though they did allow a brief clip of Neil pointing out that a city the size of Cardiff is coming in every year.
Our manifesto now recognises that steps must be taken to make housing affordable again and concentrate development on brownfield sites and unused government land (15% of all freehold property according to Halligan), protect greenfield sites much of which is farming land and important natural habitat, stop central government from overriding local development plans, the reintroduction of building regulations for all new homes, and a range of other measures. I will focus further on the effects of corruption on housing policy in my section under that heading below.

REFORM UK
Last month also saw the publication of Reform UK’s new manifesto, and a bigger load of incompetent rubbish I have seldom read. Mind you they have strong competition from both Labour and the LibDems for that accolade! What a relief we are not getting into bed with Reform UK! Their leader, Richard Tice, is a Truss spin-off and we all know what happened to her economic policies. The Terrible Twins, I call them.

Here is a summary of their worst policies:

• Reform wants to cut 5% from all government budgets willy-nilly and regardless of the consequences. This will destroy Britain not Save us. They do this in the mistaken belief that the tax cuts will create economic growth. It won’t and never has. The Tories first tried it in the early 70’s when Reggie Maudling and Tony Barber unleashed their Dash for Growth. Within five years the Labour Chancellor Jim Callaghan had to go cap in hand to the IMF for a bail out, which was followed by the Winter of Discontent. At least that got Margaret Thatcher elected, but I somehow doubt that was the original plan!

Then in the late 80’s Nigel Lawson repeated the attempt when he cut the top rate of income tax from somewhere up in the stratosphere to 40% and the basic rate to 25%. At least he had a fiscal surplus to do it with following Geoffrey Howe’s bonfire of credit and exchange controls when Maggie took over. Unfortunately a loose fiscal policy on top of an already loose monetary policy just blew up the economy so all we got was the ‘Boom and Bust’, which resulted in record levels of unemployment and house repossessions. When people found that extra money in their pockets from the tax cuts they used it to jack up their mortgages and chase up house prices busting the money supply in the process. And since then we have had QE and Truss-o-nomics with disastrous results. As Einstein pointed out only a fool continues repeating the same mistake expecting a different outcome next time!

I do understand the logic behind it though. Low tax economies such as Singapore show far higher rates of growth than we do. However Singapore’s success probably relies much more on its location as the principal shipping hub for the Far East – they are still expanding their port on reclaimed land – than on low taxes. The idea is that low taxes release capital funding for investment and incentivise entrepreneurship, but in fact there is no shortage of funds sloshing around in the City of London desperately searching for yield and last year saw a record number of new companies being registered at Companies House. Regrettably most of those will fail within their first few years because the market simply isn’t there to support them, buy their stuff or give an adequate return to investors.

And that really is the nub of the matter. Growth depends on investment, and investment depends on presenting British business with an expanding market to invest into. That will occasionally happen as the economy enters the recovery phase of the economic cycle, but otherwise is dependent on a reducing trade deficit or increasing surplus. Historically all the most successful economies have produced balance of payments surpluses, as indeed we did during the Industrial Revolution, whereas regrettably since WW2 we have consistently recorded deficits – or losses in commercial language – probably because politicians could not resist the populist bleating for cheaper imports. These deficits were then exacerbated from 2000 onwards when we refused to join the Euro and in revenge Brussels started deliberately and maliciously if surreptitiously blocking our exports resulting in a massive trade deficit of £109bn, 6% GDP, at the time of the referendum. How else to you explain how our trade with the rest of the world moved into a small surplus over the same period?
All we need to do now is to reduce and eliminate that trade deficit with the EU, which presented British business with a contracting market both a home and abroad and was, together with mass immigration, the obvious cause of the productivity gap, and target a BoP surplus of perhaps 1% GDP and unemployment back down to 2% within five years and the growth will follow.

• A slightly technical one this, but it comes in as second heading on their Agenda so I guess they are betting heavily on it. They have come up with the bizarre proposal to consolidate the QE element of the National Debt, some £850 billion, by substituting a 75 year ‘Corona Bond’ paying 2%.

Now the National Debt comes in two parts – the £850 billion referred to which the Bank of England has bought in order to inject liquidity into the market – and the balance, now over £1.2 trillion which consists of gilts issued by the government to finance its spending. About 80% of the QE debts, which sits on the Bank of England’s balance sheet as an asset, are gilts and the remainder corporate bonds (nothing to do with commercial banks which are mentioned for no apparent reason other than I suppose some of the corporate bonds have been issued by them for their own internal financing).

The gilts owned by the Bank of England are free money. The taxpayer does not pay the interest on them because that is just money going round in circles within government. And the corporate bonds are a source of income for the Bank. So why on earth would we want to start paying 2% for any of it? Bonkers.
As regards the rest of the debt I could find no bonds offering yields less than 4.3% today apart from the index-linked ones. So why would anyone want to buy Reform’s junk returning only 2%. Completely bonkers.
Perhaps Reform envisages imposing new bonds for old, since they talk about ‘reorganising’ the debt. But that would be a breach of contract and create new chaos in the markets. Grossly irresponsible.

The one area where I did have some sympathy is the proposal to start a Sovereign Wealth Fund. I have always regarded it as a matter of extreme negligence and incompetence by the Coalition (George Osborne) that he did not start one after the banking crisis when interest rates hit the floor and long-term money was available for less than 3% simple. Since then and indeed since the start of globalisation international fund managers have been getting average compound returns of 7% and more. 7% compounded quadruples your money over twenty years (and 5% over just thirty). So why on earth didn’t they do it?

Recently however that window of opportunity may well have closed. Interest rates have risen and the international economy is slowing under the burden of debt. It could well end up making a loss now. Had we started one I would now be advocating using it to pay down the national debt.

• Let’s change the subject. The NHS. Reform wants to eliminate waiting lists by shifting them onto the private sector. Think it through. What will happen then is that lots of NHS doctors and nurses will chase the work into the private sector, doubtless doubling their pay in the process, and leaving even an bigger waiting list behind for the NHS. Indeed the process is unstable and will result in an atomic explosion effect until there are no doctors and nurses left in the NHS at all! We shall just end up paying twice as much for the same work as now with the waiting list unaffected. Doh!

• On education they want to reduce university courses to two years to save money. That should be a matter for the Universities and their reputations. They are free now to offer shorter Ordinary degrees.

A better approach would be to increase the exam qualifications required to access student loans, maybe offer them for only two years and leave it to universities to fund the brightest students for a third year Honours degree out of their increasing scholarship funds. No mention either of prioritising STEMM subjects.

Nor is there any mention of the critical issue that we now have record drop-out rates from our state secondary schools, nor of scrapping the National Curriculum to end bureaucratic interference in the way teachers teach. Nor any commitment to protect our independent schools or make them accessible to all parents no matter how poor.

• On defence commendable commitments to spend more money but, oops, weren’t they going to cut the defence budget by 5%?

• On public sector waste there is the usual tearing of hair over cost but no real understanding of how to improve efficiency. Cutting costs without improving efficiency will only destroy outcomes. Their suggestions are unlikely to add up to more than a row of beans, yet the NHS, for example, employs as many support staff as professional. You would never find that in the private services sector – 20/80 is the usual target. They should study the techniques of Arnold Weinstock!

• Housing? Completely ignored!!

CORRUPTION
Last month also saw the publication of Theresa May’s memoirs which she has entitled “The Abuse of Power”. Now this immediately intrigued me as it sounded rather as though Satan was preaching about Sin. So, not wishing to add to her income more than absolutely necessary, I purchased the Kindle version of her book and started reading.

What I found was a whole series of social injustice cases such as the Hillsborough Stadium disaster and subsequent enquiry which took years to get to the truth. OK, she does deserve credit for pushing it forward. Those involved naturally tried to avoid responsibility. That’s just human nature. People cover up. Theresa dear, you can’t change human nature. Didn’t your Dad tell you that? But what also struck me was that there was not a single case of fraud or financial corruption in there anywhere. It would appear that Mrs. May’s mind-set excludes economics, possibly because she sees it as part of the domain of the Devil (she is a vicar’s daughter) and not to be entered. That would explain the massive cock-ups she made over both Brexit (no mention of the trade deficit throughout all the debates – though Tory Brexiteers were also guilty of that) and housing policy.

Now I have already mentioned Liam Halligan’s book “Home Truths” and I was fascinated to see that the BBC documentary which must have been based on it made no mention of his principal conclusion and recommendation, probably on legal advice under pressure from landowners, namely to repeal the 1961 Land Compensation Act. This is the Act which gives 100% of all planning gain to land owners, including ‘hope value’, the entitlement to gain even after they have sold the land without planning permission to a developer who subsequently obtains it. It is why over the past sixty years landowners have been able to ratchet up the price of land until we have nothing left for anything else, and why it is not only first-time buyers who cannot afford a home of their own, but also that local authorities and housing associations cannot afford to buy either, resulting in almost no new social housing now being built.

Which makes me wonder if Labour have spotted this, because their programme, which is based on compulsory purchase at existing use values, will come horribly unstuck if they do not first repeal that Act. There is no mention of this in their current draft proposals. Indeed they are even contemplating introducing a new version of the Tories’ catastrophic Help to Buy scheme with their ‘comprehensive mortgage guarantee scheme’. Aargh!

We are all familiar with the corruptive influence of Unions over Labour, seen again now in some of Labour’s proposals to ‘liberate’ the Unions from existing legislation, but we often forget the massive corruptive influence by a whole shed-load of vested interests on the Conservative Party, including land owners, property developers, City institutions and many more. When I read of the massive £16 million donation Persimmon made to the Tories in 2017 my first reaction was that it was to encourage Mrs. May’s huge extension of the Help to Buy scheme, costing taxpayers a mere £3bn pa when George Osborne started it in 2013 but climbing to £33bn pa by the end of the decade, which has boosted developers’ profits and share prices through the roof, yet resulted in fewer new homes being built now than in 2013. Property developers wine incessantly that they cannot produce their agreed quota of affordable homes in any new development because of the ever-increasing cost of land, which at first sight appears plausible, but falls apart when you see Jeff Fairburn, chief executive of Persimmon at the time, paying himself a £70 million bonus. Today nearly 70% of the cost of a new home is the cost of the land. Prior to 1961 it was less than 10%. The Tories have consistently protected the 1961 Land Compensation Act for land owners, amongst their principal donors.

But the corruption is far worse than that. In 2017 Sajiv Javed, Mrs. May’s housing minister, drafted a White Paper in which he proposed repealing the 1961 Act and sharing planning gain 50/50 between landowners and local authorities, which is commonplace across Europe. He had broad cross-party support and put his draft up to No.10 for approval. It came back totally redacted of all references to the 1961 Act. I don’t know about you but I find it almost impossible not to conclude that Mrs. May’s attention was much more clearly focused on the size of the donations flooding into Tory Party coffers than it was on the needs of the British people.

IN CONCLUSION
When it boils down to it it is clear to me that it will require a truly independent party such as UKIP to push through the essential policies necessary to SAVE BRITAIN and MAKE HER GREAT AGAIN. To those who say we haven’t a hope of getting elected I say that is not the point. The point is that we can offer a range of policies which we consider to be essential to the future well-being of our beloved country yet which NO OTHER PARTY is advocating. We must persuade people to vote positively, not tactically. It is no good voting out the government if the alternative is just as bad or worse. So let’s get this ball rolling and produce another Brexit in a few years’ time.

John Poynton
UKIP LONDON Hon. Treasurer
UKIP NEC Member

October 2023

Facing massive problems funding the budget deficit, record levels of structural unemployment, public sector wage claims, energy prices and national debt,  a fragile bond market, an imminent recession and negative growth, the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, simply froze in the headlights.

A budget for growth it was not, given the forecast recession, but just possibly it might have eased that recession a fraction, so I am not going to carp over some pretty minor spending increases. It’s his strategy, or lack of it, I worry about.

Take the issue of childcare support for working mothers. He chooses to spend an additional £4bn on professional child carers. Leaving aside the age-old concerns about separating mothers from their new-born children, surely a much better and cheaper solution is Single Parent Circles. In this a social worker organises five single parents to form a group in which one looks after the children while the others go out to work and pay across a fifth of their earning to the first. Apart from the social worker it doesn’t cost the taxpayer a penny. You could even take it a step further and rehouse all five of them in a single large house where they will also get the mutual emotional support they need.

Obtusely Hunt has picked up on the problem of record unemployment (only about 10% of those of working age unemployed are benefit claimants), of which about 17% claim it is due to lack of affordable child care, but he has completely ignored the root cause of it all which is open borders. The points-based immigration system is supposed to exclude anyone who cannot earn a living in this country, but because Big Business prefers younger, cheaper, trained workers these are simply displacing older or untrained British workers and the result is the same. Only a switch to an auctioned quota system for total immigration will solve this. If we can reduce unemployment by 5% (8% to 3%) that in itself would save the Treasury over £100bn.

And just a point on immigration whilst I am on it. Total gross immigration is now around 75,000 a month. Of these ‘only’ around  5000 are illegals and refugees, and another 5000 could generously be attributed to people with rare skills and experience we cannot generate here. The rest, 65,000 of them, are simply cheap labour. They are undermining our economy, not benefitting it. Indeed, look at the GDP per capita growth rates over the past 22 years. They show a steady and persistent decline. No benefit whatsoever showing up as a result of massive immigration!

But back to the budget. No further relief for business from energy costs – that could cause havoc during a recession. But the main argument is over growth, with the Tories still stubbornly insisting that massive tax cuts are required to create economic growth. Wrong – it is investment that does that. Investment in productivity is uniquely being undermined in this country by three factors – the still ever-increasing trade deficit with the EU, open borders as above, and what I call ‘impotent’ investment, in other words  the amount of available investment funding going into pushing up house prices rather than productivity. The Bank of England must be instructed to manage house price inflation separately from general inflation so as to squeeze available funding back towards industry. No need for tax cuts – and in any case there has been no shortage of funds in the City recently desperately searching for yield.

But what I found particularly amusing on Newsnight last night was Jacob Rees-Mogg pointing out that the Irish raise more in corporation tax (presumably % of GDP) than we do despite have a rate of only 12.5%, which he used to present a sort of Laffer-curve argument for cutting taxes. Presumably a logical extrapolation of this would lead to the conclusion that zero tax rates would result in infinite tax revenues? A reductio in absurdum, methinks!

But the real point Jacob has missed is that the Irish are taxing profits generated in the UK but booked in the Republic via transfer pricing. This is just another example of how the Bond Villains of Davos have their sticky mits in our till. Until we tax multinationals on the basis on their global profits apportioned by turnover they will continue to get away with it.

Rishi Sunak’s ‘solution’ to the small boats crisis is no such thing. He has no plan of where physically to put them! Rwanda could only take a few hundred and, while he recognises the need for other ‘safe places’ he cannot tell us where, how or when. He even thinks he can send them back to the EU, who are in fact absorbing even more than we are, by negotiating some sort of returns agreement. But why should they give us that? In return for what?

I have repeatedly advocated purchasing a substantial tract of habitable land somewhere OUTSIDE Europe, perhaps Central Asia, to be run in perpetuity as British Sovereign Territory. Yes they would want a high price for this but it would be a gold mine of foreign currency for them as well as an effective local regional policy. As the old saying goes, you cannot win a war on a budget. In any event as the colony develops it own economy the burden on the British taxpayer would reduce. The colony would have open borders so that they can self-segregate between genuine asylum seekers, who would stay, and economic migrants who would leave.

Interestingly I learnt over the weekend that recent polls in Sweden have shown that 79% who have been granted asylum do go home for holidays periodically. And in Germany it is 60%. Switzerland cancels their refugee status if they do.

Finally let us never forget that a far greater problem is legal immigration. Around 70,000 a month compared to ‘just’ 5000 illegals. A tiny minority, probably around 1000 a month, have skills we cannot source in this country, but the remainder are just cheap labour who are taking out more than they are putting in. We must scrap the points-based system which allows Big Business to bring in as many as they want, and substitute an auctioned quota system where the quota is set a fewer than the number who emigrate each previous year. Only then can we start to reverse the immense damage open borders have caused this country in so many ways.

This includes our environment. I am looking forward to David Attenborough’s new series on the British Isles. We have a record rate of extinctions going on. I wonder if he will acknowledge that open borders are the cause?!

We also have record amounts of crap in our rivers from overflowing sewage works. Yes that’s right. CRAP. Don’t let them tell you it is agricultural runoff. That has been going on for decades. There is nothing new about that. The fact of the matter is that immigrants crap. OK, so do we, and my political opponents through both ends, but our sewage facilities were previously adequate for purpose. Now they are not. So who’s going to pay for all that new investment. We are!

On 31st October the ONS published a breakdown by country of our balance of payments for 2021 so I have updated the graphs I do each year to show how our trade with the EU is developing.

We are now facing opinion polls showing a majority in favour of re-joining the European Union. How could this have happened?

Some Labour MPs, LibDems and Rejoiners think it is to do with labour shortages. They mistakenly associate tighter immigration with Brexit. But Brexit merely allows us to determine our own immigration policy, and that can be for more immigration if we so wish. So immigration now has nothing to do with Brexit. That shouldn’t be too difficult to get across but we have to make the point.

More seriously they associate Britain’s economic decline to Brexit. This is also nonsense as the above graphs illustrate.

The first graph shows our Balance of Payments (mostly trade) from the years 2000 to 2021, split between the EU (red line plummeting down through the floor) and the rest of the world (which I have split into three to show the US and China separately for comparison). Note that those other three lines taken together show a movement over that period into surplus. So at least until 2018 we have a divergence between the two areas – the EU and the Rest of the World.

How come? It can’t be us because we are common to both. It has to be Brussels. My theory (in the absence of any other explanation) is that since 2000 Brussels has be deliberately though surreptitiously blocking our exports in revenge for our not joining the Euro. The thieving bastards have been stealing our trade, and our dozy officials in Whitehall haven’t even noticed (or didn’t want to, which is even worse).

Is this important? Well yes it is because an increasing deficit presents British business with a contracting market, and business will not invest into a contracting market. No investment, no growth. It is the greater efficiency of production resulting from investment that creates economic growth. Tax cuts may help, but the opportunities to invest must be there in the first place.

This analysis is confirmed by the second graph which shows our growth rate plummeting alongside the EU trade deficit. The productivity gap is no mystery. It is a direct consequence of the increasing trade deficit with the EU, and explains why other countries are not experiencing it.

SO THE ONLY WAY WE CAN GET GROWTH GOING AGAIN IS BY RIPPING UP THE TORY DEAL AND USING TARIFFS TO OFFSET THE EU BARRIERS AND BRING THE BALANCE BACK INTO SURPLUS. ONLY UKIP IS SAYING THIS SO ONLY UKIP CAN GET THE ECONOMY GOING AGAIN.

Of course exporters will squeal if they have to face EU tariffs, but the uncomfortable fact for them is that our domestic market is far larger than our trade with the EU. Tariffs will reduce the volume of trade in each direction across the channel, but because we have a deficit the deficit will reduce as well. This means people in the UK will be buying more British stuff and less EU stuff. That presents British business with an expanding market to invest into thus generating investment and economic growth. So whilst those in exporting might struggle, those supplying the domestic market will have a bonanza – an import-substution led expansion.

Even better we can in fact protect our exports to the EU from tariffs, though not against the non-tariff barriers already there. This is because the new UK import tariff revenues will be much greater than the cost of the EU tariffs on our smaller volume of exports, so we can cross-fund them. It would be interesting in fact to start right now promising our EU customers a refund on any excess charges they are paying on British imports so we can confront Brussels with them. Doing so is entirely legal under WTO rules.

Looking at the past two years however we see that the deficit has reversed and it is tempting to say that is the Brexit Dividend! However It is much more likely to be due to Covid, but we will have to wait and see over the next couple of years. At least we can say it shows the current mess is NOT due to Brexit.

John Poynton.  December 2022

It is extremely unlikely that Lady Sarah Hussey meant any offence when she asked Ndozi Fulani where she came from at a Buckingham Palace reception last week. She was helping the Queen Consort entertain her guests; a role she has been playing for decades having been Lady in Waiting to the late Queen, and was simply taking an interest in her guest by way of conversation. It is perfectly normal to ask someone about their background in such situations. The late Queen did so constantly and indeed liked to be briefed in advance about whom she was going to meet.

If someone asks me where I come from I simply say Croydon. If I want to extend the conversation I say my mother was Welsh and father born and bred in Oxford. Still further back my ancestors were a mixture of immigrant Vikings, Normans and Saxons. To be able to say my parents came to this country from Barbados but that I was born here and am now a British citizen, as Fulani (born Mary Headley) could have done, would be much more interesting. Why couldn’t she have just said so nicely and politely? Ancestry is a very popular subject. The BBC has a whole series devoted to it. Nobody accuses them of racism.

Much has been made of how Lady Hussey pressed the point after an initial hostile reaction, but she would naturally have wanted to clarify the situation after being taken aback.  Unfortunately it only made the situation worse, but how was she to know that? More likely Fulani was deliberately milking the situation as she appears to be making something of a career for herself insulting the Royal Family. According to returns to the Charities Commission her charity was set up in 2018 and has received £350,000 since then, but has not made any significant disbursements to anyone other than Ms. Fulani herself. The Palace should strengthen its due diligence procedures. Then she really would have been excluded!

Most of us do now know that black British citizens are peculiarly sensitive on this point. I myself have had the same experience and we learn that way. We are not mind-readers. I now avoid asking that question of black people, but that is my choice as a matter of individual moral sensitivity.  Racism is defined in the dictionary as the belief that some races are inherently superior to others. Absolutely nothing in what Lady Hussey said indicated she ascribed to such a belief. Fulani simply misinterpreted the conversation – quite possibly deliberately.

We had the same situation arise in The Duchess of Sussex’s interview with Oprah Winfrey where she revealed that “questions had be asked about Archie’s skin colour”. Note, she did not say that “concerns had been raised …..”, which is what the media invariably reported. It is perfectly normal for prospective relatives to speculate about an unborn child’s characteristics and, for example, which parent they might more resemble. In the case of mixed-race parents skin colour is an obvious interest.

It is highly regrettable now that the Palace has caved in to the criticism and thrown Lady Hussey to the wolves. If anything Ms. Fulani owes Lady Hussey an abject apology for the distress she has caused. The late Queen would am I sure have shown much more backbone. She might have issued a statement along the following lines:

“It is with deep regret that we have learned of a substantial misunderstanding last week between a member of the royal household and a black guest at a reception here at Buckingham Palace. The guest is claiming she had been subjected to racist questioning. Opinions on this may vary but may I take the opportunity to reassure our black community that no offence was intended and that we value highly the involvement of black people in British life today.

Misunderstandings are commonplace in life, particularly where people of different backgrounds come together. Let us all learn from such experiences and always try to understand the other person’s point of view. I am sure we can overcome such differences and see the good in others, as well as the shortcomings in ourselves, and that way develop peace and understanding amongst us all.”

Herewith my answer to another question on Quora.

You don’t want to get too tied down by the General Theory. It’s complexity undermines its validity and he appears to have been transfixed by Einstein’s general theory of Relativity which genuinely did extend the boundaries of physics rendering what we now call Classical Physics as merely a special case. Go to the extremes of matter moving close to the speed of light or the interaction of sub-atomic particles (or waves – see Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle) and the classical laws of physics break down. But that does not mean that classical physics is redundant. It is still used for every day understanding and technology including rocket science! I suspect that Keynes wanted to be seen as having done something similar for economics, but he didn’t.

However he did undoubtedly extend our understanding of fiscal macroeconomics beyond the received wisdom of Alfred Marshall and the Cambridge school, which were largely based on microeconomics, and those theories are as valid today as they were then.

There are three broad elements to macroeconomics: fiscal, monetary and international trade. The first two are now broadly understood, but I see little evidence of any understanding of the economics of international trade amongst our politicians and bureaucrats. Free trade is commonly regarded as a general panacea but in fact it breaks down in the case of substantial deficits. A good example of this is the EU Single Market. That is free trade, yet the UK’s experience of being in the single market has been a disaster, resulting in a trade deficit now of nearly 7% GDP, which undermines investment and growth. Clearly business will not invest into a contracting market, and UK GDP/capita growth has plummeted in parallel.

This is a question recently posed on Quora where I frequently post. Here is my answer.

Depends how it is funded. If that is by corresponding cuts in government expenditure then the net effect will be zero. However if it is by increasing borrowing then net demand in the economy is increased. That is what we have seen since the banking crisis and to combat the ever-increasing trade deficit with the EU over the past twenty years which has destroyed jobs. The result is record levels of both national and personal debt. Indeed they have over-done it which is one of several reasons why we now have a shortage of labour.

It is worth noting at this point that increasing demand in the economy to reduce unemployment, sometimes referred to as Keynesian economics after the way the famous economist John Maynard Keynes advocated ending the depression of the 1930’s, is not at all the same thing as economic growth in our standard of living (GDP per capita). “Treasury Orthodoxy”, now being blamed by the Tory leadership candidates for the lack of growth, is to balance the books over the course of the economic cycle, not year by year. That allows for borrowing during a recession to reduce unemployment provided it is paid back during a boom so that debt as a percentage of GDP remains constant or falling. Whilst it has nothing directly to do with growth it does lead to a disposition in favour of inflation to reduce the debt rather than balancing the books with tax increases or expenditure reductions.  Inflation reduces real interest rates and hence savings and investment thereby undermining growth.

Internationally there is much evidence to suggest that smaller government produces higher rates of economic growth, the logic being that high levels of government expenditure uses up finance available for investment and therefore ‘crowds out’ the private sector which produces most of that growth because it is subject to competition. In the UK however the electorate demands expensive public services (eg the NHS) and a reliable welfare state making that difficult to achieve. That means separate policies are required to make public services much more efficient (the potential is huge, not least from introducing some proper accountable top management for each service) as well as finding other sources of finance, such as a Sovereign Wealth Fund or optional means-tested access to the private sector for services, if we are to reduce tax levels permanently. This is the essence of a centrist, radical economic strategy.

Over the past twenty years we have seen very little growth in our standard of living, This “productivity gap” is in fact a direct result of our increasing trade deficit with the EU, which presents British business with a contracting market and thereby little incentive to invest, and of open borders causing increasing levels of structural unemployment (the mismatch between people and jobs by skills and location. Square pegs will not go into round holes). Interestingly record levels of immigration have not provided any boost to growth. Only a quota system for legal immigration will solve that. The points-based system, which Tony Blair introduced in 2006, is too easily gerrymandered in favour of Big Business, thereby creating a self-perpetuating immigration spiral. Unless business is forced to train up British workers by a quota system the levels of structural unemployment will just get higher. A Tory government will never do this as their donors in business will not allow it.

The main condition for growth is investment by British business which carries more efficient means of production (productivity). For that you need both an expanding market and available additional labour resources. If you try to increase demand when there is a shortage of labour the result will be a combination of increased inflation, immigration and imports, the last giving all the investment benefit to foreign business. Open borders also imports wage compression which offsets the inflation and so masks the alarm bells at the Bank of England, which uses inflation as an indicator of an over-heated economy and the need to increase interest rates to control it. Hence the immigration spiral.

Many of us remember the Boom and Bust at the end of the 1980’s when Nigel Lawson’s 1987 budget cut income taxes substantially just when the economy was expanding as a result of Geoffrey Howe’s earlier cuts in credit controls. The result was that people used the extra money in their pockets to jack up their mortgages and chase up house prices.

The only way now to present British business with a sustainable expanding market is to reduce and eventually eliminate that trade deficit with the EU. This has grown steadily over the past 22 years to over 6% GDP while our trade with the rest of the world has moved from deficit to a steady 1% surplus. This divergence demonstrates clearly how the EU acts surreptitiously and maliciously to block our exports, (probably in revenge for us not joining the Euro), and the Tory deal has just allowed them to keep on doing that. Only a full No Deal Brexit will give us legal protection from such practices under the WTO’s ‘most favoured nation’ principle which applies where no bilateral trade agreement is in place. Furthermore it would enable us to use tariffs to offset the EU non-tariff barriers and take back control of our economic sovereignty as well as our legal sovereignty. Free trade on top of a deficit only increases that deficit and makes matters worse – simple mathematics!

Furthermore recovering £120 billion of trade deficit improves total GDP by that amount which in turn improves the tax base which produces about one-third of GDP as tax revenues. That means an extra £40 billion of tax revenues without increasing tax rates one iota.

It is interesting that neither of the Tory leadership candidates has drawn a distinction between the cost-push inflation that is now being imported on oil and gas wholesale prices, and over which no amount of increased interest rates will have any effect at all, and the monetary inflation resulting from government mismanagement and over-heating of the internal economy. We have to address both types separately with separate policies.

Cutting direct fuel and energy taxes makes a lot of sense to offset the imported inflation and keep domestic fuel and energy prices stable, thereby cutting off a wage/price spiral at the knees. Means-testing energy bills will also reduce the cost of this and ensure the poorest get the most help, at least pro-tem until the danger has passed. This will probably prevent most of the forecast recession. This can be done by enabling householders to direct their energy suppliers to send their bills direct to the taxman, who will pay them. The taxmen then applies the means-test to the increase since the start of the Ukraine War and recharges the householder through their PAYE code or deduction from benefits. Similarly for business, the taxman can agree to pay a percentage of the increase in return for a profit cap. For example if 100% of the increase is accepted the profit cap would be 1%, whereas for 25% it could be 4%, or some such gradient.

There has been the usual nonsense from Labour about imposing price caps, but this would inevitably lead to blackouts and supply shortages. There has also been talk of windfall taxes on suppliers without any consideration of what level of profits is normal and necessary for investment. Energy company profits comprise a significant parts of most pension fund portfolios. However a profit cap set at say 5% before tax does make sense as a general policy which should also include wind and solar farms.

Then we all the nonsense about converting to electric cars. These are now actually more expensive to run than petrol cars! Not only that, but the electricity that comes out of your socket is hybrid! If it is generated that way, as it is because of the proportion that comes from gas, then what comes out will be hybrid as there is no way of separating them in the grid. Indeed many of the blackouts now predicted for this winter will be due to electric cars. It would take massive investment to expand the National Grid to cope with everyone plugging in their electric cars at the same time, and supplying electricity in this way involves substantial transmission losses. Far better to go for hydrogen-hybrid and carry your fuel around with you just like petrol.

However in parallel with all this the Bank of England must get its act together on interest rates to get some flexibility back into the labour market. I should also like to see them given a quite separate target to stabilize house prices using credit controls, as house price inflation often leads general inflation. The former will be difficult as there are a number of other factors which have glued up the labour market. Incredibly we now have a record 8% of the working-age population who are classified as economically inactive. Whilst much of this is the result of many years of open borders, it is also due to the botched implementation of Universal Credits, IR35, the traditional poverty trap as well as hangover from the Covid restrictions.

Perhaps the silver lining is that 10% inflation on top of a £2 trillion national debt releases an extra £200 billion for government expenditure if the aim is to keep the debt at a constant percentage of GDP in line with treasury orthodoxy.  My suggestion would be to save half and spend half, and allocate half the spending to tax cuts and half to budget increases. That should be sufficient to knee-cap energy prices and provide some protection from inflation for public-sector workers and those in need as well as fund essential public services acceptably.

So now I am the candidate for the above by-election. I have done a short leaflet for the Royal Mail to deliver freepost, but have a much more comprehensive address for you here.

Before you download it, please note that some of the ideas and policy recommendations are my own and are not reflected in the Party’s manifesto. You can also download that here for comparison.

UKIP has a rolling manifesto system whereby any member can contribute a policy idea for assessment by a standing review committee and get a response. If accepted by the committee it is proposed to the National Executive who make the final decision whether to include it in the manifesto. This is a recent innovation and I haven’t had time to put all of my ideas through it yet. JOIN UKIP TO PARTICIPATE IN POLITICS.

And please don’t overlook our petition on Net-Zero immigration, on which more details here.

It seems to me there are at least six strands to this complicated subject as follows:

1. The Science,

2. Security,

3. Risks, costs, fear and democracy,

4. Usage levels,

5. Protection vs. Prevention

6. Government failures to date.

1. The Science.

Although I have a physics degree and understand the principles of the greenhouse gas effect, I would not claim to be an expert in the subject and could not, for example, assess the calibration of the various effects involved. Now that we have some actual results coming through for things like sea temperatures, they seem to be about halfway between the zero baseline and the original (ice-)hockey stick projections. That still leaves us with a serious problem to address.

We are faced with two sets of scientists apparently saying opposite things. Or are they? Perhaps they are both right and both wrong to a degree and the truth lies somewhere in the middle? UKIP’s traditional view is sometimes misunderstood as a denier position, but it is actually more subtle than that. Our argument has not been that climate change is not happening but that its causes are not significantly man-made, and that a panic reaction has already been and will become even more counter-productive. As a centre politician I don’t see a conflict between supporting a move towards green energy provided we do not shoot ourselves in the foot in the process. As I say, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.

2. Security.

At this very moment we are facing a massive increase in wholesale gas prices. This almost certainly is to do with international politics rather than climate change, with the allegation being that the Russians are closing off the gas pipelines for their own economic advantage. We could see a similar position develop over nuclear fuel as the Chinese buy up most of the mines in Africa and elsewhere.

UKIP is all about independence, and green energy potentially gives us that independence if we can just get round the intermittent nature of wind and solar. Hydrogen is on the way and tidal lagoon generation can give us that independence, and maybe some other technologies as well.

Although very little progress has been made in developing tidal lagoon generation yet (why?), with the Swansea Bay project being refused for reasons that are unclear, mainly political it would seem, and the MeyGen project in the Pentland Firth now in financial difficulties apparently, the potential in the seas around our island is both untapped and virtually unlimited. How can the cost be significant? Tidal lagoon is basically the same as hydroelectric. Just a wall with some turbines in it, and hydroelectric has been economic for decades. Perhaps Big Business deliberately wants the expensive option?

There are many locations in our seas, such as the Severn estuary, which must be sufficiently shallow in many places and have a sufficient tidal fall to make tidal lagoons economic. We could build great big circular lagoons in the middle of the estuary and stick dozens of turbines in them. And what about all those long thin Scottish sea lochs, absolutely begging to be brought into use. Or we could be encouraging individuals to buy up old shipping containers, stick a couple of small turbines in the side, one in each direction, and plonk them in the sea. You could have thousands of such mini-lagoons all hooked up to the grid, or a local hydrogen plant, all producing green energy pretty much round the clock (except when the tide turns). Indeed if you split them in half you could phase out the turning tide as well. Not very scenic at low tide I admit, but much better than wind turbines.

3. Risks, Costs, Fear and Democracy.

There is no point in taking up an extremist position that is simply counter to the popular view just for the sake of it, even if the science is dubious. There are no votes out there. However, much of the fear relates to costs as it does to extinction, so we have an opportunity here to emphasize a balanced approach that is both responsible and practical at the same time. Fear in society is pernicious and subversive and can cause people to take up confrontational and totalitarian attitudes as they seek refuge in the simple clarity of extreme positions. The alarmist demands fall very much into that category. We have already seen the effects of fear with Islamophobia and now we are seeing it with climate change. Fear must be taken seriously in itself. As libertarians we must fight against this danger and address the fears as much as the science. Whatever populists may say about politicians doing what the people demand, they still expect us to get the technicalities right. At an election they will judge us by results anyway, and that is as it should be. It is no good delivering a disaster and then saying it was what the people demanded at the last election! We are expected to exercise good judgement.

Which brings us to Hinckley Point C. This is supposed to have a 60 year operation span starting in 2026. And they have agreed a fixed price at £92.50 pMwH, albeit subject to upwards inflation adjustments, when it is impossible to predict costs and prices six years ahead let alone sixty?!  I bet the investors are rubbing their hands, as I should not be at all surprised if operating profits turn out to be high. Those costs they have been bandying about will have been padded out to the heavens to cover the long-term risks involved, unless that is they intend to re-insure them in the City in which case the City will be rubbing its hands. Either way the customer and taxpayer are going to get screwed. We must substitute a cap and collar profit contract if this happens. That will protect both investors and consumers at the same time. Why didn’t they think of that at the outset?

Nor have we heard much about small nuclear, which benefits hugely from much lower transmission losses. Again the hand of Big Business appears to be involved, and their poodles, the Tories, will do whatever they want.

A similar approach should be taken to wind and solar farmers. How much profit after receipt of subsidy are they actually making? I don’t know but we need reassurance that profiteering is not taking place. Again, cap and collar is the way forward. This means that if profits exceed an agreed maximum, say 5%, then prices must be reduced, but likewise if losses occur prices or subsidy can be increased. Wind farms have an operational life of only 35 years. Let us aim not to have to replace them when the time comes.

The 2050 net zero target must be seen as an aspiration not a commitment. I would never sanction the closure of existing power generation if adequate and economic replacement generation were not already in place. We cannot guarantee to achieve that, but we can try, and actually I am quite optimistic about it. Hydrogen is on its way and various technologies and economies of scale are developing fast. We must also guarantee that energy prices do not increase by more than say 1% above inflation each year, if that. Recovering our trade deficit from the EU could be instrumental in financing that.

4. Limiting electricity usage.

Extinction Rebellion are current campaigning to insulate all our houses at enormous cost. But what does it matter how much electricity we use provided it is all green? It just adds to the confrontational nature of the whole thing and the idea we must all be poor in the future. Then we have the exhortation to switch to electric cars when the grid itself is still hybrid. These cars are no more pure green than a hybrid car. Green and fossil energy is mixed up before it goes into the grid, so you can’t get out anything other than hybrid. And what about all those electricity supply companies promising to supply only green energy. They should be prosecuted for misrepresentation. Likewise smart energy meters – pointless. These are all examples of totalitarian government.

5. Protection vs. Prevention.

With increasingly alarming weather events on our television screens each evening, the question arises as to what we are doing about any damage already with us, whether or not it is man-made? We hear no plans from the government about this. And what about that infrastructure tzar? Haven’t heard from him in ages. Is he asleep? Clearly adequate funds must be allocated to sea defences, river defences and other matters.

6. Government failures.

We got off to a ‘good’ start with the disastrous 2008 Climate Change Act, which artificially increased energy prices to the extent that many firms could no longer compete and went out of business, throwing thousands of workers onto the dole in the process. Coming on top of the banking crisis and the ever increasing trade deficit with the EU, the poor suffered a triple whammy leading to the riots of 2011. That should have been a wake-up call.

We appear to have the general lack of planning and concern for finding the most efficient solutions and the best protection as I have described above.

CONCLUSION.

In conclusion our policy must be to proceed with conversion to green energy in a careful and economic way so as to address all of the challenges I have outlined above, not least the imperative for national energy independence. Even if we don’t make it by 2050 that is not disaster when you consider the UK’s contribution to greenhouse gases is only 1% of the global total. Let’s just make sure we don’t shoot ourselves in the foot in a panic along the way.

In the meantime there is no reason why we should not exploit our own fossil reserves to promote independence over conversion until there is no conflict between the two and to keep costs within reason. In other words a balanced approach taking into account all four factors: independence, cost, conversion and protection.