Simon Jenkins’ most insistent message in his recent Guardian columns has been that governments are terrifying their citizens with needless panics: pandemics, terrorism, and antibiotic-resistant bugs. For Jenkins these have all been proved to be hysterical over-reactions. His analysis, that governments play on these fears to cow the populace  and that big money is often made out of such scare-mongering  is undoubtedly true. But that doesn’t make him right every time. The point about the story of the boy who cried world is that eventually there was a wolf.

The most likely wolf amongst the current terror stories is the antibiotic crisis. Trying to resolve this is now the aim of the new £10 million Longitude Prize.  It is on the Prime Minister’s radar, which is one reason Simon Jenkins dismisses it.

But the science is inexorable. Current antibiotics only have a time-limited  window against the evolutionary  potential of bacteria. Without new therapies – and there have been no new antibiotics since the ’ 80s – the bugs will win. It is still possible that Simon Jenkins will go to the grave saying I told you so: “the antibiotics are still working”. But we’re not good at understanding time scales beyond our own lifetime. The bugs have got time on their side.

A fine piece by Ian Jack in the Guardian today on the folly of privatisation and outsourcing but there is more to say. It was the nation state that brought an end in human history to thousands of years of tribalism, warlordism and the rule of the robber barons. Those who come to power in government to dissolve it risk reversing all the gains that made the West successful (as detailed by historians such as Ian Morris and Neil Ferguson) and tipping us back into the nightmare of private fiefdoms, privates armies and perpetual squalid civil strife.  Only the state can run an army, a police force, have the right to tax (at present the energy utilities are taxing a helpless citizenship). If you don’t believe this you’re probably a Serco shareholder. Incidentally, it is either crass in the extreme or deeply sinister that this corporation should choose so perfectly Orwellian a name for itself.

This Facility Contains Chemicals...

Besides much that is admirable and glorious California also has its mad bureaucratic streak. A notice that appears in hotels and other public places startles: “This Facility Contains Chemicals Known To The State of California To Cause Cancer, And Birth Defects Or Other Reproductive Harm. A Brochure With More Information Is Available At The Registration Desk”. To which the obvious retort is: why isn’t the State of California doing something about it then rather then frightening people needlessly.  The answer of course is California’s direct voter legislation. This is Proposition 65, passed in 1986. It has a laudable aim of reducing known carcinogens in the environment but the blanket use of this warring; often unattached to any actual assessment of any chemical risk is counterproductive. Wikipedia comments: “Because of the overuse of the vague warning, the ubiquitous signs ultimately communicate very little information to the end user... Most of the Proposition 65 complaints are filed on behalf of straw man plaintiffs by private attorneys, some of whose businesses are built entirely on filing Proposition 65 lawsuits”. Hmmm.

On BBC TV's Question Time last night again and again panellists of all stripes consigned British industry of the 70s to the scrapheap once again. It was inefficient and had to be swept away. Did it occur to none of them that with Britain’s technological and scientific strength, reshaping them and promoting new hi-tech industries might have been a better option? The result is that both the private industries that replaced the nationalised ones and the car, train, plane and power-station makers who came in to fill the gap were almost all foreign-owned. Is this what the woman who wouldn’t eat French mustard wanted?

Certain assumptions are being made about Mrs Thatcher’s legacy that don’t stack up. Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian quotes Mrs Thatcher’s remark: “How absurd it will seem in a few years ‘   time that the state ran PIckford’s removals and Gleneagles Hotel “ and points to “the plethora of competing companies, replacing the single British Rail”. On Newsnight Jeremy Paxman jeered at the old order in which a monopoly telephone company kept you waiting for months for service.

Yes, many restrictive practices were swept away by Thatcher.  But look again at the industries privatised by Thatcher or her successors. No major decision on the railways – whether it is building HS2 , electrifying existing routes or buying new trains – is made by anybody other than the government. The track, stations and signalling are all owned by Network Rail, a not-for-profit company (effectively, the government again) that replaced the failed private Railtrack. For the last two and a half years the key East Coast route has been run by the government again, following the collapse of the last private franchise.

In energy, the private companies seem unable to make good the looming energy shortage. Of course, they blame it on government but if the market is so good, it would surely sort itself out without any reference to government at all, wouldn’t it?

Just as Thatcher jeered at the dinosaur state running Pickfords and Gleneagles today we cast a baleful eye on  the ludicrous incompetence and dodgy practices  of many private enterprises and observe that once-private banks required part nationalisation to avoid collapse.  Just as the state has to run railways when the private contractors run away.

The last word on Thatcher, the Iron Lady of over-centralised government, should perhaps go to Shakespeare. In The Tempest, Gonzalo waxes eloquent on the freedoms he would introduce “Had I plantation of  this Isle”:  “Riches, poverty, use of service, none: contract, succession, borne, bound of land, tilth, vineyard none: no use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil: no occupation, all men idle, all: and women too, but innocent and pure: no sovereignty...”

“And yet he would be King on’t”, Sebastian retorts. The same apples to Reagan, spending billions on defence that he refused to pay for in taxation because it offended his free market principles.

It is shameful that opposition politicians and the media have let George Osborne set the agenda on the welfare changes. It is all about making the system fairer for those in work and thus encouraging people back into work. No, it isn’t. It is not the poor who create jobs and at the moment it is the rich who are destroying them. The government’s attack on the welfare system owes its origin to the failure of British industry and the consequent creation of a dependent underclass in place of the working class: the collapse and/or selling off of the country’s manufacturing base. The City and Tory Party actively encouraged this process and it is still going on.

Vodafone are the latest target in a process that turns former industrial bosses into rentiers, living off their cashed-in share options. As Alex Brummer, the sole voice to lament the destruction of ICI, put it:

“As firms fell like ninepins around them, canny chief executives demanded new clauses in their contracts that guaranteed the equivalent of lottery wins if their firms were taken over. They did this by insisting that their share options — usually paid out only after a number of years — could instantly be converted to cash.”

So arise serial sell-off merchants  like Sir Nigel Rudd, knighted for services to industry. And a supine press and political class seemingly cannot even see this process for what it is, let alone try to halt it.  

Coming in minutes into Paul Mason’s report on Newsnight  I thought he  seemed to be saying that the IMF had done a Dept of Transport: got its sums wrong. They had been working on the assumption that for every pound/dollar or euro cut in govt spending only half would be lost to the economy. Newsnight seemed to be saying that in fact the figure was 1.7, an enormous multiplier effect.

If true, this is a bombshell: what is at stake is not who will run the trains to Glasgow but the entire world economy. That 1.7, if true, means the savage cuts will increase the deficit. Pain in vain.

I expected the papers and blogs to be heavy with it this morning but all I could find was an item tucked away on an Irish website to the effect that this wasn’t an IMF statement but a minority footnote by two people in the report suggesting that the multiplier might be 0.9 to 1.7.

It always seemed likely that high-spending  governments (which all the governments in crisis are) trying to make savage cuts would incur a double whammy from a decreased tax take and increased welfare spending. A multiplier of more than one seemed likely. But then I’m not an economist.

I now eagerly away the expert enlightenment of Peston, Mason, Flanders et al. I think we should be told.

 

With the long Olympics feelgood summer finally over, the harsh awakenings are coming thick and fast: the killing of the US Ambassador in Libya; the revelation of widespread corruption in British institutions following the Hillsborough tragedy 23 years ago. One that won’t be noticed by many is the startling revelation that BAE, Britain’s’ largest manufacturing company, wants to tie up with the European giant EADS. That would be 60% EADS/40% BAE. You need to know the back story that was completely ignored by the BBC News report last night.

BAE is the rump of Britain’s’ once diverse aviation industry.  EADS is primarily a civil aircraft maker, parent company of the enormous and successful Airbus range of airliners. BAE is mainly a defence contractor (now also owning the UK warship and tank industry) . Six years ago it sold its 20% stake in Airbus because it wanted to concentrate on defence, especially in America. It is a subcontractor for work on the way-over-budget-and-schedule Joint Strike Fighter.  BAE hoped, it seems, this would all lead to a full tie-up one day with Boeing.

The American ambitions always looked dubious. The US has never had much respect for British military aircraft, the Harrier excepted. They bought the plane, adapted it, and built it under licence. When Britain foolishly decided to pension off the Harriers as a quick budget cut the US paid it the ultimate compliment of buying up the entire stock. But that’s about as far as it goes.

Come the financial crash and all has changed. BAE is a weak exporter  – it has just lost the contract to supply Typhoons to India. It is heavily reliant on supplying the UK armed forces. This of course is not a growth area at present.  US defense budgets are similarly down.

So now BAE wants to REBALANCE IN FAVOUR OF CIVIL AIRCRAFT! Six wasted years in other words. It should have upped the stake in Airbus 6 years ago, not sold it. BAE seems to be doing its best to follow in the wake of the British car industry and ICI. The latter, in a suicidal fit, sold all its heavy chemical businesses and bought into perfumery and flavours. “You’d never know us”, they crowed in an asinine advertising campaign. A few years later, the once giant of British industry had gone, the rump Dulux paint business sold to the Dutch Akzo Nobel.

So where does this leave Britain’s rebalancing in favour of manufacturing industry? I ask the question.