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We’re often told by the likes of Polly Toynbee that we should be more like Sweden. And it has to be said, there are times when this is true.
The home market is looking bruised as well. Sweden’s property prices have begun to buckle after rising by 175pc since 1996 in a British-style boom. The Riksbank slashed rates to 1pc last week and is openly mulling currency devaluation as well as bond purchases as a part of a radical stimulus. The kronor has fallen nearly 20pc against the euro, helping to cushion the downturn.
“It’s been a blessing. This is exactly why a country needs its own currency,” said Mr Magnusson.
Quite. You need to have flexibility in an economy and a floating currency is one of the best ways of getting that.
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A very nice point made in the Lords:
I suggest to the Minister—perhaps he will correct me if I am wrong—that a man is innocent until he is proved guilty.
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Made very well here:
None of this misery should entitle Britons to much Schadenfreude; indeed, it will intensify our own recession. But we can at least afford ourselves a grim smile over the fact that this crisis is not ours alone. And we should thank the Lord that we stayed outside the euro. This is precisely the moment when free-floating independent currencies and interest rates come into their own. The nasty dose of medicine doled out to the patient is starting to work.
Alarming and discomforting as it is to see the Bank of England pledging to start the printing presses, or to watch the pound slide by more than a quarter, these are precisely the factors that will ensure Britain’s recession is less intense than that experienced by other countries. The only worry is that the freeze in world trade leads to a full-blown slide into protectionism, but that is a horror story for another day.
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Bruno Waterfield reporting upon the Parliament’s TV channel:
It costs £53,000 for every hour broadcast but under 160,000 people have watched it since broadcasting began in mid-September. Over 60,000 of those were in the first week.
This means that this lavishly funded European Union channel attracts less than 1200 viewers every day, from a potential audience of over 400 million.
It is, of course, the European Parliament’s EuroparlTV. That’s the web-TV service that will cost more than £32 million over four years, over £9,000 worth of vanity programmes for each and every MEP per annum.
1200 a day? For £32 million?
That’s less traffic than my blog gets. No, not this party one, but my personal one, the one that’s just me grumbling at the world.
They’re really not getting very far in this bright new online world, are they?
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Very interesting indeed. I normally take MigrationWatch with a pinch of salt but as far as I can see these figures stand up:
5 The Labour force survey is the best available source. For the fourth quarter of 2008 this shows a UK born workforce of 25,582,000. The number of workers born in the A 8 countries was 482,000; this represents a fall of about 6% on the previous quarter but is very similar to the level of Q 4 2007 so there is, as yet, no clear sign of a significant return home by East European workers. The number of workers born in the EU 14 countries was 690,000; thus the total born in the other European Union countries was 1,172,000. The same survey gave the total number of non UK born as 3,819,000. Thus 70% of foreign born workers come from outside the EU [1].
6. Measured by nationality the results are different because some 1.5 million migrant workers have acquired British nationality. A8 nationals are 469,000 while EU 14 nationals come to 548,000 giving a total of EU nationals of 1,017,000.
British workers in the EU
7 The number of UK Nationals working in other EU countries is approximately 286,000. The main destinations are Germany 65,000, Ireland 52,000, Spain 42,000, France 36,000, Netherlands 28,000 (Annex A).
8 The number of EU workers in Britain is thus three or four times the number of British workers in the EU, depending on whether you take the EU born or those who are still EU nationals. Reasons for this imbalance may include limited language skills among British workers, relatively low unemployment rates in Britain in recent years and the fact that wages here are generally higher than in most EU countries.
Fascinating, no?
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It really is remarkable what people will complain about:
French and German ministers are expected to confront the Chancellor over sterling’s weakness at the opening dinner for the Group of Seven finance summit in Rome tonight. They will ask him to consider direct action to increase the value of the pound, which has suffered its worst devaluation since at least the final breakdown of the Bretton Woods agreement in the early 1970s.
What’s that use of the word “worst” there? “Best” would be more appropriate, no? The economy has suffered a shock and prices must therefore change. That they change to the new, correct, level is not a bad thing, but a good thing. And an exchange rate is only that, a price.
The pound has weakened by about a quarter over the past year as it has become increasingly apparent that the UK faces a worse recession than most other developed nations, and that the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee will be forced to slash interest rates as a result.
OK, if this is true, then the pound should indeed change in value in response. This is the very point of having a market in anything at all, so as to discover prices.
In particular, companies in Europe have complained that the pound’s recent devaluation has left their exporters suffering, as businesses are switching to cheaper British goods.
Well, quite, that’s rather the point. That’s why we’re happy that we have an independent currency so that the value can indeed change: and thus the symptom of the problem, a falling exchange rate, becomes the solution to the problem.
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An interesting little detail that explains something that sometimes puzzles people about our activities in the European Parliament.
The European Parliament’s campaigning Petitions Committee approved a damning new report slamming planning loopholes which leave homeowners defenceless against developers seizing part or all of their property.
Sounds terribly important, doesn’t it? And the law they’re complaining about is indeed vile. But here’s the important line:
Now the Petitions Committee - which has no direct power - has made a new call on the Madrid government to force revision of the regional law.
This is why we almost never sign up to such petitions and motions. They have no power over anything at all. They’re simply pious notions that show that MEPs “care”….not that MEPs are going to do anything about the subject. Something to show the constituents, not something that’s going to change anything.
For the truth is that MEPs and Parliament cannot do anything about this or any other matter. The European Parliament does not have the right to initiate legislation. It can only vote on or attempt to amend legislation sent to it by the Commission or perhaps other agencies of the EU.
It’s just another example of the lack of democracy within the whole system. The only elected people in it aren’t able to even propose the law. There is indeed a Parliament, as we know, but it’s a facade, the real power lies elsewhere.
Which is why we must leave, of course.
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Nigel has a piece in The Guardian’s Comment is Free.
Worth having a read.
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Has a great letter in the North Devon Gazette.
While the opposition leader foolishly derides ‘British jobs for British workers’ as a phrase “borrowed from the BNP”, Government Ministers claim to be looking for “a change in the rules” to prevent the monumental realisation that this is what EU membership is, fundamentally, all about. We are one of the wealthiest countries in the community of 27 - so everything we have must be made available to the others, until we are all as poor as each other.
Lord Mandelson, who is still paid to promote the EU despite being a British Cabinet Minister (his handsome EU pension will be withdrawn if he does otherwise - that is the rule), has broken the habit of a lifetime by telling it straight on this occasion: “Within the rules, UK companies can operate in Europe and European companies can operate here. Protectionism would be a sure-fire way of turning recession into depression.”
In the EU which is now our ruler, ‘British jobs for British workers’ is protectionism, it is against the rules and it will not be allowed. As Nigel Farage of UKIP told the BBC, “It doesn’t matter how many meetings are held, how much or how loud anyone shouts… we signed away our rights when we joined this prison of nations that is the EU.”
Get used to it. Or get angry, and demand that we withdraw from the EU and regain the right to keep ourselves in work.
There’s more there so do click through to read it. And you tell ‘em Steve, you tell ‘em like it is.
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Over at the EU Parliament site, they’ve got a little form asking what would be your first priority if you were elected as an MEP.
As Gawain says, it’s just too easy to have fun with something like this, isn’t it?
Go on, have a go. Tell ‘em what you really think.