Would the real coward please stand up?

Benazhir Bhutto, the supposed saviour of democracy in Pakistan, has been assassinated. This has prompted Gordon Brown, our self-appointed expert on courage, to describe the perpetrators as "cowards [who are] afraid of democracy".

It strikes Woody that this is an excellent example of what psychologists call projection - casting your own obvious failings onto others in an attempt to distance yourself from them.


Just in case anyone forgot, Brown the Clown:

• Bottled out of standing against Smith for the party leadership in 1992
• Bottled out of standing against Blair for the party leadership in 1994
• Did everything he could to ensure that he was handed the party leadership without any opposition or general election
• Bottled out of a general election in November 2007, when he realised he might lose

So who's really the coward who's afraid of democracy?

Woody apologises for falling off a cliff in his blogging earlier this month. He hopes to be more consistent in future.

Ignorance should be no excuse

Another week, another scandal.

The Labour Party have been caught breaking a 2000 law they themselves introduced by taking money from David Abrahams when he was known to be avoiding public disclosure by channelling his donations through his employees.

According to the 2000 Act, anyone who did anything which could have made it easier for the secret donations to be made, has committed an offence. The relevant section is below.

Offences concerned with evasion of restrictions on donations

(1) A person commits an offence if he—

(a) knowingly enters into, or

(b) knowingly does any act in furtherance of,

any arrangement which facilitates or is likely to facilitate, whether by means of any concealment or disguise or otherwise, the making of donations to a registered party by any person or body other than a permissible donor.

This is why all the key players are making ignorance the central plank of their defence. Because if they were in anyway knowingly involved in the arrangements, they would have committed an offence.

In Brown's case, he claims:

"I had no knowledge until Saturday night, either of the donations or of the practice which had grown up where they were improperly declared to the Electoral Commission... The money was not lawfully declared."

Woody says: If that's true you should be ashamed, because you had no oversight over the fundraising practices of your own party. And if it's false you should be even more ashamed because you have brazenly lied and cooperated in breaking the law.

In Harman's case, that she did not know that the money came from Abrahams rather than from Kidd.

Woody says: I refer the right dishonourable lady to the answer I gave above.

In the case of Abrahams himself he claims:

"Until the weekend I didn't know it was illegal for a person who hadn't personally donated to have to declare his hand to the Electoral Commission."

Woody says: And I didn't know I couldn't w**k on the bus. You broke the law, and you should face the consequences.

And in any case, the law is totally flawed - ignorance should be no defence at all.

If ignorance is a permissible defence then all Brown and Harman would have to do (and in practice exactly what they seem to have done) is to say to their funding teams "Just get the money in, I don't care how you do it, I just don't want to be told about it or involved in any way."

And then the team would have carte blanche to break the law, with Brown / Harman knowing full well that in the unlikely event that it comes to light they would be able to claim ignorance.

Such a law simply encourages politicians to deliberately lose sight of fundraising, when in fact they should be held responsible for it.

The whole thing stinks to high heaven.

It's not Black Wednesday - it's a lot worse

Jack Straw, the "Minister for Justice", is furiously fighting back against allegations that Discgate is Labour's equivalent of Black Wednesday - when Britain was forced out of the ERM in 1992,under the Chancellorship of Norman Lamont (right).

He says: "The idea that this is an equivalent to Black Wednesday is utter nonsense."

He's quite right - it's much worse than that.

Black Wednesday was a short-term embarassment which had very beneficial consequences for Britain in the medium-term. It was foolhardy to lose money trying to fight what was a necesssary devaluation of the pound. But once we were ejected, interest rates could come down, enabling us to revive the economy in a way that would have been impossible within the ERM.

Nor did it 'ruin' the Tories' reputaton for economic competence, as is so often claimed. The Tories' reputation was ruined by trying to keep us inside the ERM, not in us being ejected from it. The effort to keep us inside it meant much higher interest rates which triggered a housing market crash and painful recession.

Most people had no idea what Black Wednesday meant, only that they couldn't afford their mortgage any more or were out of a job.

The Discgate saga, on the other hand, is a huge, catastrophic failure in the short-term which will probably have very negative long-term consequences for both the UK and the Labour Party.

For the UK it will probably undermine the public's already shaky faith in government management of data. Indeed why anyone would voluntarily give the government personal information, or tell them the truth any more, is beyond me. This is on top of the potentially disastrous consequences of organised criminals using the data to commit large-scale fraud.

Remember that before this happened the tax credit system was already responsible for nearly £2bn of fraud and overpayment. What's going to happen now?

For the Labour Party, it should - taken together with the numerous other cock-ups they have presided over - ruin their reputation for the prudent management of government affairs. Whether it does so depends largely on whether it does indeed end in large-scale fraud and how smart the Opposition are in exploiting this.

Icebergs don't give you soft landings

With the good ship housing market having apparently hit an iceberg, there are nonetheless still people out there who still think that a 'soft landing' might be possible.

By 'soft landing' they mean some period of stagnation of house prices, presumably followed by the resumption of crazy levels of inflation like we've seen over the past 10 years.

This is pie in the sky. It's of the very nature of these things that there can be no soft landing, that house prices will fall, reposessions will soar, and unemployment will increase, before things eventually bottom out in a few years' time.

Why?

In short, because it's an inherently unstable market, where investors expectations of price changes become self-fulfiliing. Sellers who expect price falls will try and sell as soon as possible, but they will find that buyers are waiting for those price falls to materialise. And if sellers refuse to drop prices, they will simply pull the rug out from underneath the sellers of the house they were going to buy. And so on.

The very factors that led to the boom in the first place are going into reverse and there's little that anyone can do to stop it. Where before we had irrational exuberance, we will now have a period of mounting fear and panic, before reality eventually sets in again.

To summarise, we have: rising borrowing costs, less mortgage availability, weak income growth, and increasing expectations of price falls. That's a crash in the making.

Interestingly Spreadfair now projects that house prices will fall by 7-8% (in nominal terms) by end 2008. I'd probably sell that if I wanted to hedge against falls. But not owning any property, I'm hedged up to my eyeballs anyway.

The ship is sinking, evacuate!

A liner is sinking off the Antarctic after hitting an iceberg.

Meanwhile mortgage approvals hit a record low.

Something about this feels very ominous.

Deckchairs? Titanic? Anyone?

Don't pay any attention to this idiot

News reaches us that "Sir" John Gieve, member of the Monetary Policy Committee, voted for an immediate rate cut at the last meeting of the Bank of England.

Woody would like to remind people that Gieve has a track record as an irresponsible idiot. He was Permanent Secretary at the Home Office when Blunkett tried to fast-track his nanny's visa but conveniently 'couldn't remember' how it happened. That earned him a knighthood.

He was still Perm Sec when the Home Office was accused of colossal financial mismanagement. He was also personally involved in the (now forgotten) release of a thousand foreign prisoners who should have been deported.

Needless to say this qualified him for a plum job on the MPC, particularly as at the time GB really needed to get rid of Andrew Large who was far too hawkish for his liking.

He's an idiot and a stooge, probably under direct orders from the Clown himself to reignite the economy.

So if Gieve voted for it it's almost certainly the wrong thing to do. Fortunately it seems likely that other factors will prevent rates from coming down anyway.

1. Sterling is relatively overvalued, making it much harder to cut rates without immediately importing inflation. (This is not the case with the dollar.)

2. Commodity inflation has been soaring and will continue to do so while the yuan is so under-valued.

3. King doesn't want to be seen to make the same mistake as in 2005 when an injudicious rate cut prompted the property market to take off again. Unlike Gieve, King is no idiot.

So rates will probably stay on hold until well into the New Year at least.

NB Woody is quite happy to be debt-free and renting for the time being.

Why is Brown apologising?

Woody is confused.

Brown yesterday apologised for the loss of two discs holding personal data on 25 million children. But why?

If it's a genuine apology then that means he is admitting he is responsible for the breach - in which case surely his position as PM is untenable.

He can't simply be apologising 'on behalf' of HMRC, because HMRC have already apologised for it. They are not some wayward child that Brown has to apologise 'on behalf of'.

On the other hand if it's not a genuine apology then he's just being insincere isn't he? And doesn't that just add insult to the injury already caused?

It seems that Labour think that an apology is just what you do when things are so bad you can't spin your way out of it.

How Discgate has let Blair and Smith off the hook

Here are two people who will be breathing easier today.


It's a fact of life that the media only ever have room for one big scandal. There can only be one 'top story' which obsesses them, and brings out their periodic ability to ferret out interesting and embarassing truths.

But one unfortunate side-effect of this is that when there are several big stories at the same, some people get off too lightly.

It seems that the current massive 'Discgate' scandal, which looks set to rumble on for a while, has taken the pressure of two people who were in a quite a pickle before all this kicked off.

Ian Blair. Who presided over a series of failures in basic policing which led to the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. He then tried to deliberately obstruct the investigation of the IPCC. He has just escaped a vote of no confidence by the Met.

That's like Genghis Khan getting the thumbs-up from a band of marauding Mongols. Nevertheless it looks like he's survived.

Jacqui Smith. Whose Department allowed huge numbers of illegal immigrants to work in government security posts and arguably misled Parliament about it.

No one's talking about that any more. Lucky her.

The Opposition would do well not to forget this. Because together it starts to make a compelling case for an arrogant and incompetent government who have let standards slip and failed to fulfil basic governmental responsibilities.

Let's hope McLaren's sacking doesn't push Darling and Brown off the front pages for too long...

Why Darling won't be resigning

The government is in a mess. Darling is taking some serious flack for the malinvestment of public money in Northern Rock and the failure to follow basic security procedures at HMRC. But he'll be keeping his job as Chancellor for the time being. Why?

He's probably one of Labour's most competent and experienced Ministers. Believe it nor not Darling is Chancellor mainly because he is actually one of the few Ministers around who has good experience in several major departments without having cocked up anything too badly.

The Tories won't be asking for his resignation. They want to pin this on Brown and taint the whole government. They want it to rumble on for a good while yet, poisoning Brown's reputation for economic competence and making him look at the mercy of events. A quick Darling exit would close it down too easily.

By and large it isn't t his fault. He's obviously the monkey, not the organ-grinder. Anyone with half a brain knows that there's only one person who's responsible for this, and his surname rhymes with Down. And Clown.

Because he is too useful to Brown just where he is. Having Darling in the Chancellor role allows him to do a McAvity and avoid what is obviously his own responsibility. Darling can be his whipping boy, while he 'moves on' to other pressing issues like banning plastic bags and trying to discredit the military.

And anyway, we'd all miss those amazing eyebrows wouldn't we?

Might we be seeing this again at the next election?

One unfortunate feature of both the mainstream media and the blogosphere is that, by and large, commentary on economics and politics remain divorced. The politicos often talk as if all that matters is who said what to whom in Westminster, while the economists spend too much time looking at charts and don't understand how the messy world of politics gets in the way.

What strikes Woody is that political blogs have yet to pick up on the fact that the political atmosphere up until the next election is likely to be dominated by a bad and worsening economic situation.

The general consensus among economic commentators is now that there is a significant likelihood that the next few years will see an economic downturn, a declining or crashing housing market, and rising unemployment. This is already happening in the US, and it seems likely that where they lead we will follow.

A growing economy, with low inflation, interest rates, and unemployment has been the economic back-drop to the entire political scene of the past 10 years.

When that changes, so too will politics. Will this be the nail in the coffin for Labour? Or can Brown 'do a Major' and come through any economic downturn?

Woody will post some more on this when he has the time.

Are we heading for a constitutional crisis at the next election?

Current Prediction: Labour short 13 of majority

Party	2005 Votes	2005 Seats	Pred Votes	Pred Seats
CON	33.24%	209	40.01%	284
LAB	36.21%	346	36.10%	313
LIB	22.65%	66	13.80%	20

Prediction based on opinion polls from 22 Oct 07 to 10 Nov 07, sampling 6,624 people.

The above table shows Baxter's current prediction of the likely result of the next election. It predicts that Labour will still be the largest party, but lack an overall majority. The most likely outcome would therefore be a Lab-Lib coalition of some sort.

Baxter's system takes a weighted average of recent survey results and converts them into a likely distribution of seats according to new constituency boundaries.

So if this happened Labour would still be forming a government even though the Tories had polled over 40% of the vote.

Would this really be politically acceptable?

While disparities between voting shares and seat shares are always going to be a feature of the first past the post system the fact is that nothing remotely like this has ever happened in the past. There has only been one election since the war when the party with the most seats did not also have the largest proportion of votes. That was in 1951 when the Tories won the election with 48% of the vote, although Labour actually polled higher, with 48.8% of the vote.

That didn't really bother anyone because the margin was so small, and in any case the Tories had nearly 50% of the vote.

But will people really accept a Labour-led government when they polled a full 4% less than the Tories?

This issue will be made all the more acute by the fact that Labour are already struggling to defend their reliance on Scottish and Welsh MPs to pass laws that primarily affect English constituencies (the so-called West Lothian question).

Could this be the trigger for a change in the electoral system and/or the representation of Welsh and Scottish MPs at Westminster?

The Nobody PM

It's hard to believe now that some people held out hope that this man would be a great Prime Minister.

After 6 months in the job he's shown that his entire political philosophy can be summarised as follows.

He's Not Tony Blair.
He's Not a Conservative.
He's Not a Socialist.
He's Not Great Mates with Bush.
He's Not Anti-American.
Etc.

The fact is, he's just a nobody who wants power for the sake of power.

When Miliband made that gaffe on Question Time, it seems he pretty much hit the nail on the head.

Blair was a huge disappointment but even he realised that ultimately any worthwhile political career must amount to something positive and substantive.

Brown doesn't even seem to care.

The Great British Injustice System

Barry George, the eccentric idiot who was stitched up for Jill Dando's killing has thankfully won his appeal court ruling.

At the time jurors were led to believe that a particle of gun residue found on George proved that he was her killer. This was reported unreservedly, and without any challenge, by the BBC at the time:

"A speck of residue from the gun used to kill Miss Dando was found in his coat pocket."

In fact, today the judge ruled that:

""It was, in fact, no more likely that the particle had come from a gun fired by Barry George than that it had come from some other source," he said.

Bit of a change isn't it? How are we to have any confidence in convictions based on 'forensic evidence' of this kind? The case should never have gone to court.

Alan Farthing, Dando's fiance at the time, said:

"I am disappointed, particularly for those of us who have suffered the tragedy of losing a loved one prematurely."

No disappointed then over the fact that Dando's killing has been compounded by banging up an innocent man for 6 years?

Now there's an airport I'd like to visit

Vice-Fuhrer Gordon Brown today announced a number of spurious measures to change the design of public buildings to make them 'safe' from terrorists.















Shame no one can make the public safe from him. The beeb have helpfully provided a mock-up of how public buildings like airports and train stations will look in our brave, new, ultra-secure world. Imagine Heathrow - but with entrances and exits barricaded, and external security checks before you enter a building made of non-fragmenting material (presumably diamond).

Does he really expect anyone to be impressed by this? I guess the clever boys in Number 10 thought - "It works for Number 10, so it should work everywhere".

In that case we should feel very safe indeed.

No more monkeys, thanks

Scientists are cloning monkeys.

Don't we have enough already?

Poor Langham can't get work

Langham gets off scott free

He said: "My life has completely fallen apart. Offers of work have almost entirely disappeared, at a time when I was looking forward to something of a golden year."

Diddums.

This just shows how utterly morally bankrupt the man is. No thought at all for the children whose abuse he watched, or their familes.

Mervyn tells it like it isn't

Mervyn King just gave a press conference on the monthly Inflation Report.
He are the highlights and what he really meant for those who don't speak gobbledeegook.

On whether he considered resigning in wake of Northern Rock Crisis:
He said:
"No."

Which means: "No, it wasn't up to me. On balance they'd rather I resign when things are really bad."

On equity markets
He said:
"It's very striking that despite developments we've seen in the last three months, equity prices are on average higher now than they were in August. This is true around the world and in emerging markets they're 20 percent higher: There must be some downside risks there. That's factored into our projections. That's the bigger risk to the global economy."
Which means: "The traders are crazy. If you haven't sold your shares, do so before it all goes tits up."

On his own reappointment as Governor:
He said:
"This can wait until the new year and I think it should."

Which means: "They've given me a year to find something low profile."

On staglation:
He said:
"It's not a word I intend to use."
Which means: "I hope to be out of here by then."

On the economic outlook:
He said:
"There will be an adjustment of saving rates in which tighter credit conditions will lead households to raise saving ratios; growth both in consumer spending and output can return to more normal levels, not go back to the heady highs of the 2000s but something closer to the longer run rate of GDP."
Which means: "This is going to be nasty."

On the impact of the credit crunch on the economy;
He said:

"We wanted to see how this really was going to feed through into activity. We expected a slowing but is the slowing we are going to see bigger than we had wanted to see?"

Which means: "I can't atually say it's going to push us into recession, so best to simply raise a question."

On outlook, data
He said:
"Trying to describe the outlook in terms of adjectives is less helpful than in terms of numbers. It's a matter of data, not a matter of time."
Which means: "I'd like to use words like: "buggered", "up shit creek", and "meltdown", but I can't so, so I'll take refuge in meaningless drivel instead."