I was pleasantly surprised to hear a great interview
Unlike all his other critics, Miliband did not claim to have a crystal ball and vast mind-reading powers to determine how 40 million people will vote in four a half years time - given that we don't actually know what's going to happen in Britain and worldwide over the coming period, other than the likelihood that it won't be plain sailing.
The interview was a rare moment of relief from the constant stream of snipes, attack interviews and constant attempts by the Beeb to remind us that we are not acually living in a democracy. They used to call Chile after Pinochet a 'managed democracy', meaning a country where the people voted but did not truly decide who ruled. That seems to be Britain - vote for who you want but don't have the temerity to break with the fixed set of ideas laid down by our elite. I'd like to see an analysis of the main 8.10 interviews on the Today programme to see how many feature pro or anti-Corbyn interviewees - and to look at the balance of questions. That old myth of BBC balance has been well and truly busted since Corbyn's election. I get the feeling that some in the BBC and Guardian think this is all just a momentary aberration and all will return to normal (ie Tweedledum Tweedledee politics) once Corbyn is overthrown or disappears in a puff of smoke.
Of course the cynics will say that an endorsement from Miliband is like a death wish, given what happened in May. But what all these Nostradamuses seem to ignore is what Harold MacMillan famously called 'events, my dear boy, events'. George Osborne has probably ruined his chances of replacing Cameron as prime minister by taking an axe to tax credits. Beyond that there are a series of dangers for the Tories in the economy.
For the first time in modern British history, the export of profits to foreign owners of British assets has now exceeded so-called invisible earnings (income to Britain from overseas assets). This is a result of the systematic selling off British companies to overseas firms and governments. They are creaming profits to such an extent that the old fail safe of UK multinationals earnings from overseas has been wiped out by the reverse flow of funds out of Britain. We are now the equivalent of a colony being bled dry by absentee overlords.
Britain's visible trade deficit has been growing steadily, and rose to 5.9% in 2014, its highest ever level. This is due to a decline in our energy and manufacturing exports, and the rise of the pound, making our exports less competitive. As Anthony Hilton in the Evening Standard has explained, it is also linked to the decline in our invisible earnings, as already stated:
The amount of credit generated by our overseas investments fell 31% between 2011 and 2014 to £73 billion. At the same time, the amount sent to overseas owners of British-based assets went exactly the opposite way.It rose 31% to £71 billion. The overall effect of the plunge in money coming in and the surge in money going out was to cut out FDI surplus from £54 billion in 2011 to £2 billion in 2014.This fact is the one that should have Osborne lying awake sweating. His strategy is to increase "earnings" by flogging off the last bits of family silver - Royal Mail, Eurostar, etc.
Meanwhile the deficit budget strategy is in tatters as the deficit continues to refuse to go down thanks to self-defeating austerity.
Then there is our unprecedented property bubble, which thanks to £100 billion plus invested by tax-dodging companies in London property has reinflated the bubble that wrecked the economy in 2008 to unprecedented levels, with prices 40 percent higher than the pre-crash peak. For potential future PM Boris Johnson, the social cleansing this is causing is apparently nothing to worry about - the more foreign millionaires who want to use our homes to stash their shady cash, the better. As the Standard reported:
since 2008 there have been 27,989 purchases of homes, buildings and land in the capital by shadowy corporate structures usually registered in tax havens to hide the buyers’ identities.Not only is this making London unaffordable for its inhabitants, and creating a kind of fake city for the global rich, it is creating an unsustainable bubble and denying the exchequer billions.
Then of course there is overall rising indebtedness: "Total outstanding non-mortgage borrowing grew by nearly £20bn or 9 percent in 2014, to reach £239bn." Including mortgage debt, people in the UK owed £1.443 trillion at the end of July 2015. This is up from £1.412 trillion at the end of July 2014 – an extra £604 per UK adult.
How are the Tories going to keep this all afloat over the next four a half years, when historically speaking, they have overseen a crash in each one of their periods of office.
Thatcher's first government exacerbated the recession with austerity policies, putting 3 million on the dole in 1979-81. The 1990-92 Lawson recession saw Thatcher removed and Major returned to power, only to oversee the ERM debacle, which pretty much destroyed the Tories' credibility until 2010.
Labour has not yet recovered from the reputational damage caused by overseeing the 2008 financial crash. But by offering a radical critique of this government's policies, Corbyn's Labour can be shown to have pointed up the disastrous policies that could yet again tip Britain into a major crisis by 2020.
There's been a major economic crisis in Britain in every one of the last five decades: 1973-5, 1980-82, 1990-92, 2008-11. It is highly likely that the cycle will be repeated, and the above underlying economic problems are the time bombs ticking for the Tories before the next election.The problems in the housing market relate to affordability - people are being squeezed by very high rents and prices are beyond the reach of millions.
This market cannot continue to rise like this. Most housing prices bubbles don't gently deflate. They crash. Presumably Osborne believes that Britain's shortage of housing and the love affair of the global rich with London will make sure that the music never stops. We've heard this tune before and as Einstein said, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a a different outcome is the definition of madness.
According to a certain reading of the historical data, property crashes occur every 18 years, so the Tories are safe through 2024-5. But this bubble has been re-inflated by trillions in government quantitative easing, so the rules of the market have been massively distorted and may not behave normally going forward. Besides some other 'black swan' event may come from the side that we don't anticipate. Remember the tech crash of 2000-1?
If the Tories oversee another crash, who then will be unelectable? Perhaps only Boris Johnson, the curly haired future king, knows the answer.
