Off Topic Political Debate

I had one of the most surreal experiences of my life in Bergen. I was there for meetings which stretched over 2 weeks so on the Sunday decided to go to mass in the city's only Catholic church. It was packed to the rafters and the Priest and I were the only non Filipinos in the building. The entire service was conducted in Norwegian and everyone knew all the words!

 

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Quite right, it is being spent on a grand scale. Quite a lot comes from the EU, then the national purse, then the region, followed by a small contribution from the town or village. Much of the work undertaken is an attempt to get unemployment figures down, without any success. It seems that as fast as this government tries to save a company from disappearing another one joins the list. SNCM is one of two ferry companies running from mainland France to Corsica. They went bust last year and it turns out that they had received €300m in loans from the government, which is illegal. Air France is trying to reorganize itself and the government is the largest shareholder. The company wants to change conditions for the staff, but workers physically attacked managers, so when the President goes to say he is on the side of workers his Prime Minister is saying that the company must be supported to protect the government investment and the workers must behave. I could go on at length about what is happening, but while it is good to see the improvements to towns and villages, it doesn't seem to make sense to keep on spending with an economy that is on it's knees.


This is what left wing governments do, a la Gordon Brown. The left in the UK is against the government running a surplus, this means not attempting to pay back the 1 and a half trillion pounds which we have borrowed. Are they not concerned about future generations?

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I take it that you would like to dispose of your President as well as the Queen cologne as his powers are very similar. Does not get involved in party politics, has to sign treaties etc. has a veto that never gets used. Even the common man does not get to elect him.

 

His powers are not similar Frenchie. It is not the case that all members of Parliament, together with all judges, all high ranking officers of the military and police have to swear allegiance to him and to his successors, as is the case in the UK. Germany does not have such a thing as a Privy council with anyone kneeling to anyone else. The president of Germany does not live in palaces, or have a large family and hangers on which are all kept at the tax payers expense. He is not the head of any churches, or the source of aristocratic privilege (ie. the house of Lords) and, most importantly, few outside of Germany even know his name.

 

A quite predictable situation Dan as I know of absolutely no native Norwegian Catholics - if you went to a Catholic Mass in Hamburg the situation would be the same the majority there would be Portuguese, Italian, or Brazilian.

 

Are you saying that he doesn't appoint judges, civil servants and officers of the armed forces? I thought he lived in Bellevue Palace in Berlin.
The fact that no one knows who is the current holder of the office is not anything to be proud of. It just shows up that he doesn't attract the attention of the Queen. There are many French nationals who rue the day they disposed of their royal family.

 

Socialist spending is normally in form from investments which will not bring a return within a particular election period which often gives the impression that they are profligate with money, but someone must invest in the longer term future. Also Socialist spending belongs to a time in which the state had more resources than it does now. If the state had held onto all of the industries which were privatized in the time of Thatcher it would have the resources to cover investments now.

 

The present one is called Joachim Gauck Frenchie, and although he appoints those people they do not have to swear allegiance to him, also his residence there is only for the duration of his office - he has access to a small part of it (roughly the same as the PM. in number 10). He also does not stand at the head of the aristocracy or of the history of 1,000 years of hereditary land ownership which have so ******ed England and its class system.

 

That is the point surely. They don't have the money, except by taxing people and more importantly business, that if treated better could create wealth that would then make some of the schemes to install new lamposts affordable.

 

What I am saying Frenchie is that the state should take back those resources, and run them at a profit, so that they can subsidise other areas of the economy and invest in the future without it all having to go via the tax system. What people did not realize in the past was that the state sector must remain bigger than the private one and be able to make a profit - if the private sector is bigger then democracy starts to become eroded because the state no longer has the resources to turn the wishes of the people into practice. How much democracy does Greece now have since it has been forced to further privatize its resources.

 

I am surprised that you do not remember the huge debts that the nationalized industries ran up in the past rather than making a profit. The private railway companies operated profitably, but became a huge drain on the public purse after they were nationalized. Rather than having money to spend on what the public wished to see, the government was using it to keep a badly run industry afloat.

 

The fact that they didn't make a profit had to do with bad organization and bad management Yorkie not in the idea of state ownership, an idea which works successfully for the railways in many countries including Japan, Sweden and Germany - the same applies to state ownership of energy (eg. coal, electricity) which also works successfully in many other countries.

 

I came across a paper written for the Socialist Worker, hardly a right wing institution, that told their supporters not to expect any benefits from returning industries to state ownership as the owners/shareholders would be replaced by a small army of civil servants who would not see the need to make a profit. EDF is state owned and runs at a huge loss, French railways the same. Maybe it is bad management, but who weeds the bad ones out? Someone sitting in an office 500 kms away?

 

Oh please pull the other one!!! Socialist spending if it had continued in the pre Thatcher manner would have lead to no no resources being left in this country. Properly state managed infrastructure is better in state hands but always with the view that it is there to facilitate the wellbeing of the populace with valuable wealth creation and a landscape to enjoy. State control is a type of negation of human rights to self fullfillment I cannot abide.

 

My only real long term experience of state controlled industry is in Britain and although there were many well meaning individuals at the level where public interaction occured these industries did seem to be a magnet for anyone with a predispostion to officious behaviour and managerial incompetence. All had very strong and militant trade unions who had no interest in looking after their paymasters, the general public, and we appeared more as a cach cow to be milked rather than anything else. In my youth we were regularly beset by string railwaymen, postal workers, coucil employees and the like, even teachers. If a return to state run industries, and even I can see that some benefit might be had in some areas, means a return to this sort of industrial behaviour the thought should be stopped immediately.

 

I could refer you to my later post 2472 here. State owned industry is not a problem in itself - many other countries have eg. railways, power etc. in state hands - countries which you would not normally describe as socialist, such as Sweden, Japan, Israel, Italy and in some cases Germany. The problems which state owned industry in Britain had may have had more to do with the disastrous post war industrial/class relations which were the norm there than with state ownership itself. My reasons for prefering state ownership (I would prefer even more direct worker ownership in the form of worker cooperatives - and state ownership would always be seen as a prelude to this in real socialism) are the following. If the private sector has more financial resources than the state does - if firms have become so big that their turnovers have become larger than both the GDP and inland revenue of their respective countries eg. Maersk Lines and Denmark, then it means less democracy because the state is no longer in the position of being able to fully actualize the wishes of its population - it is at this point that you can use expressions such as 'corporate dictatorship`to describe our political systems rather than democratic. The second reason I prefer the idea of state ownership is because the infrastructure of a country can react quicker to emergency situations - look how long the USA took to react to the flooding of New Orleans, and how much quicker relief could have arrived in a more centrally planned system. The third reason is that central coordination of energy will be essential if we are to manage the demands of Co2 reduction in a meaningfull way.

 

The biggest danger to democracy in the Uk is the unelected crooks in Brussels lining their own pockets whilst stifling enterprise. Have they managed to sign off the accounts yet or has the fiddling continued year after year?

The second biggest danger to the UK is the threat by the union barons to support illegal actions against our elected governments legitimate policies.

The USA failed to act properly after the New Orleans floods because it predominately affected a poor black district. If it had been New York the response would have been very different.

 

Before pointing your finger at Brussels it might be wise to consider the powers of the corporation of the city of London - the tax haven of all tax havens, at the powers it has (even extending to the ability to have its own police force) and to firstly ask how transparent this is for the average voter, and secondly what influence they can have on UK. politics.

 

The financial centre in London has contributed hugely to the UK's coffers. Admittedly Blair and Brown did turn a blind eye to some of the excesses.

The french and german financial markets are extremely jealous of the success of the city and would like to damage its present position as the world's leading financial centre. Due to the UK's entrepreneurial spirit it is no wonder we remain the number one destination for inward investment in Europe.

Cameron and Osbourne have been at the forefront of limiting the scope of tax havens and forcing multinationals to pay fairer taxes in the country of trading.

In thirteen years of power the Labour government did nothing to address these issues.

 

I wasn't talking about success or investment, or what the Labour Party did, or did not, do but about democracy, or the lack of it. The fact is that the average voter has no idea of what actually goes on in the City of London, and is, still less, able to influence it.