Being regrettable shouldn’t make radical realism unpalateable

New figures from the Office of National Statistics ten days ago about the degree to which the dependency culture has taken hold shocked even me. One in three households in Glasgow, Nottingham and Liverpool have nobody at all in work. Cardiff’s figures are not far behind…and in Wales as a whole, only 1 in 2 work in the private sector. About 20% of the Welsh population is now dragging the rest behind it in terms of directly productive work.

Glasgow will soon be the slippery Salmond’s problem I fancy, but in the meantime the UK clearly has a massive social issue to solve. However, as I keep returning at regular intervals to point out, the problem is as much structurally economic as cultural. There are four basic causes that lie behind our problem.

The first relates back to the Mad Handbag’s visceral dislike of working class trade unionists. By the time good old Maggie had finished breaking the TUC (a very good thing) she had also managed to destroy all of our manufacturing regions and most of its communities. There being no such thing as society, this didn’t concern her; and she is now far too batty to remember anyway. The legacy for the rest of us, meanwhile, is the situation in Nottingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, and a dozen or more midlands and northern cities.

She’s also partly to blame for the second cause of structural unemployment: letting the bankers out of the attic unaccompanied. This was more to do with her naivety about people with nice accents in nice suits than hatred of Arthur Scargill, but to be fair to Baroness Thatcher, things didn’t really get out of hand until the City took one look at Tony Blair, and immediately spotted one of their own: shallow, greedy, opportunistic – and far too middle class to be concerned about yer workaz. With the world clearly moving into the golden age of financial and information services, Gordon Brown carried on and accelerated the process of moving from grime to graft.

Brown hadn’t a clue how to create a new economy to bring respect back to Old Labour voters, but as the Chancellor he was in pole position to bribe them; and after 2002, that’s exactly what he did. Over a five-year period, Brown spent billions creating a public and welfare-dependent sector that (he reasoned) would always vote New Labour. In many larger downmarket families, the impetus to find a job left quietly by the side entrance. But nobody noticed in the South, because Gordon was busy courting the banking sector in a manner less excusable than Thatcher – on the grounds that he knew exactly what he was doing, wheras she was just a silly girl.

The third factor concerns the generally very poor quality of business, marketing and export management in the private sector. Here are a couple of very interesting figures. After a few months of its existence in 2001, the euro was trading at 1.42 to the Pound. Today it’s weighing in somewhat heavier at 1.14. That is a colossal devaluation of Sterling. But during that period, our trade gap with the EU has worsened.

Now it would be nice to go all Dacre Mail and blame beastly foreigners for cheating, but the truth is that even with that competitive price advantage, our trading gap with the EU has widened during that time. As always, we are more interested in fat bonuses and the shareholders than investment in new products and employee skills: which is why (allegedly) we still need to keep on importing immigrants to do that sort of stuff. Our big business management in Britain is almost devoid of new ideas, and largely dysfunctional.

But perhaps the most obvious reason of all is represented by the simple horror of our demographic noose. The UK is by far the most densely populated large EU member state – only tiny Belgium and Malta’s are higher. Britain has 12.4% of the EU’s population, and just 5.5% of the land area. The French population is almost exactly the same, but has 2.3 times more land space – and far more land suitable for agriculture. Sweden has one seventh of the people and twice the land space. (It does, however, have more elks than anywhere else in the world).

Thus, the United Kingdom is under more infrastructural pressure than anyone: there isn’t enough room to build, and what land we have without bricks on it is limited in terms of suitability for agriculture. This state of affairs New Labour compounded after 1997 by letting in a veritable flood of immigrants: far, far more per square kilometre than any other EU State….yet we were already the most overcrowded.

Now, the Coalition wants to take away more land…to put houses on. For people unlikely to be able to afford the mortgage, and where stuff should be growing. The houses should be going where the jobs will need to be – because as well as being overcrowded, Britain also has a lot of people in the wrong place….as this satellite map shows:

Taking this bit by bit, bottom left is where the old folks live, middle left is Wales where everyone works for the State anyway, and then all those white bits going from the top to middle right are the ones Thatcher’s mob destroyed. These are the traditional Labour voters that Brown always drivels on about, but about whom he couldn’t care a fig and never did a thing. There are some more white bits on England’s bottom there, which is mainly Fenland sparsely populated by inbred people in wellingtons with a tendency to shoot each other.

The dark to medium blue bits are where (a) all the work is at the moment and (b) house prices are higher so there’s more lovely money to be made by developers. Looked at in this light, the £3.5M given by these reptiles to the Conservative Party has to be one of the best and fastest ROIs in history. The problem is that these houses will not only cover land for growing food, they will also cater mainly for the employees of service industries….already 86% of Britain’s profitable endeavour. So this is only going to discourage reconstruction and rebalancing of the economy….which remains one of our central problems.

In January of this year, I posted a long piece explaining why the current balance of the British economy – along with some of the problems outlined above – could never employ everyone, and would always be massively dependent on imports. It got 57 comments and 21 positive votes – at the time, far more than any Slogpost had done before. Eight months on, everybody seems surprised that not only are the cuts behind schedule, but the economy is flatlining.

Labour, naturally, blames this on Plan A, saying that what we need is to spend even more money we don’ t have on stimulation….of an economy that isn’t there. That’s Ed Balls’ view, the man described frequently as ‘the best economic brain in Parliament’. Like his former boss, I suspect the soubriquet was invented by Ed himself. But the truth is that ‘New’ Labour as it then was blew Britain’s last chance to reshape its economy – when times were good, and there was useful seed investment money and/or tax break possibilities to help the older industrial areas get back on their feet. Instead (see earlier) Brown chose to shower the work-free with welfare, while Blair burbled a lot about Cool Britannia.

The Tories blame the global economy, but these problems came to light after 2007, and started growing back in 1980. Like Baroness Thatcher before him, Cameron listens to the wrong people and moves in the wrong circles: he hasn’t any more of a clue how to stimulate the growth of cutting-edge manufacture than his illustrious predecessor. Churchill bankrupted the country to get rid of the Nazis, and Thatcher then destroyed its potential in order to get rid of Scargill. Why Cameron’s doing more of the same is beyond me…because the bankers tell him to, probably.

I suppose the point of this piece is to reaffirm that we not only have an econo-fiscal disaster coming our way on a scale most people cannot even imagine: for three decades, we have ensured that the problem will be worse for us than most countries. I still believe that in the medium term, the markets will respond to what has – whatever any of us think about it – been an honest attempt by Britain (albeit far too late) to get its debts under control – and honour them. There is no sign that I can see of this from the Greeks, Italians and French. Iberia I’m unclear about, but Ireland I know from personal experience is pulling out all the stops under incredibly onerous circumstances…a mess created by a minute proportion of its population – and lax monetary control by the ECB.

In the longer term, there are four things we must do: that is, stop seeing the United Kingdom as a world player in any shape or form. Stop clinging to the potty precepts of Globalism. Stop sucking this moth-eaten security blanket called the EU. And above all, stop rejecting the idea of a ‘siege economy’.

It was the globalist Believers led by Gordon Brown who invented this term siege economy, as a means of suggesting desperation and dysfunctionality. This is bollocks. We should continue to trade – but on fewer conditions and with better products – to anyone who will buy our stuff, short of nations so roguish that we find them abhorrent. But ditching nuclear weapons would massively reduce our costs, growing more food would reduce our import bill, and rebalancing the economy will clear off our trade gap – eventually delivering us a massive surplus.

The problem we are stuck with is the size of our population….and within that, the number of people doing, literally, nothing. Rebalancing the economy will help, but it still won’t be enough. Every last immigrant from tomorrow must be turned away, without exception. With an unemployment base of 2.5 million, it is ridiculous bordering on mendacious to suggest we need to import skilled labour.

We should retrain the unskilled we have – and refuse welfare to anyone who fails to complete the course once enrolled as being a suitable human resource. We must abolish all welfare associated with children, and switch to an active campaign of free contraception – resorting to compulsory abortion in cases of repeated pregnancy outside a stable environment. And even within families, we should increase the tax burden of those who insist on having large families – that is, more than two children.

These are terrifyingly anti-libertarian ideas, are they not? But I didn’t create this situation: it was produced by years of can-kicking and perhaps even intentional social engineering by overpaid politicians who will never have to suffer the consequences of it. There are going to be more posts like this one, and then more illiberal laws in practice, until those in charge finally grasp the fact that farting about is not going to cut it: that looking for a legacy just isn’t good enough, and that tough decisions have to be taken. To those who ask how I can even think such things, my answer remains the same: what would you do then?

The answer that usually comes back is fluffly, uncommercial waffle atop a big skybound pie. But from here on, the real world is coming. The only alternative to radical realism is a rapid descent into lawless penury, and an inevitable takeover by The Strong One. Much better to have people wake up now and take responsibility for the solution – than have a bunch of fascist Moonies promising to do the thinking for us further down the road.