He’s an old Social Democrat but favours the sort of free trade that
Posted in General on 16. Oct, 2010
He’s an old Social Democrat but favours the sort of free trade that old Liberals did (I’m talking very old Liberals, active circa 1870). He will remain the Lib Dems’ most attractive MP until Daisy Sampson finds her seat.Vincent Cable is an under-rated sort of fellow; perhaps because he looks like an undertaker He’s the spokesman for Trade and Industry. This will reduce the alienation of people from the tax system It will prevent politicians interfering with NHS funding. And it will, like the candy that cleans and straightens your teeth, remain a comic fantasy. None the less, it was a pleasure to be caressed by Mr Huhne’s voice and to have my pain felt by his big, spaniel eyes.
We can call it “electoral fraud”.Chris Huhne pitched the party’s big idea to its conference It’s to earmark national insurance for the health service. This is how the executive can appeal to freedom-loving Tories while retaining the totalitarian lefties that form most of their membership.Bill Clinton called it “triangulation” Tony Blair calls it “squaring the circle”. I’d go into it myself if I weren’t so fat and lazy.In order to attract Tory voters, political rhetoric is veering to the right.Normal analysis would suggest that policy is veering sharply to the left.And so it proves. Just underneath the surface we can discern a thumping rise in taxation (local income tax, anyone?) and a vicious transfer of power to the political class. That, if history teaches us anything, will make it more destructive. At least the rest of us will have something to laugh at.
Linguistic analysis of the Liberal Democrats shows that the party is made up of two factions.
The creative tension in the Lib Dems is getting more creative. However, history, together with London’s long, should I say sterling, reputation as a place to do business, seems to have spurred market participants to continue to trade through London.. London has stayed on top in the provision of financial services despite the emergence of the euro, which some expected would divert a significant share of foreign-exchange trading to a single centre on the Continent.Although financial sector activity in Frankfurt has increased substantially in the past few years, largely reflecting the growing importance of the euro, trading volumes there are still well below those of London and New York.Another potential challenge to the City’s prominence in the provision of financial services has been the telecommunications revolution, which presumably should diminish the need for physical proximity to conduct transactions. Today’s remarkably sophisticated international financial system took root several centuries ago within hailing distance of Her Majesty’s Treasury.
London, and other British financial centres, had developed by World War I into the dominant lender to the world, accounting for half the world’s trade financing, and London remains, with New York, at the top of the world’s financial pyramid.The City has a long tradition of leading the world in foreign-exchange trading and currently conducts twice the volume of New York. The ties between the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve were cemented in the 1920s in that extraordinary relationship between Benjamin Strong, the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, and Montague Norman, the Bank of England governor.
Those ties endure to this day. Maybe I didn’t realise I was leaping into the fire, but I’m not sorry I did. As G?r Grass said: “The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.”The writer is the founder of The Body Shop. But it is a vocal vigilante minority that is attempting to intimidate those with whom it disagrees, and it is able to do this with the encouragement of Bush, who – by equating dissenters with terrorists – has declared open season on anyone who disagrees with him.Which, of course, proves precisely the point of my original article: the freedom to dissent is in danger in America.