Further Media Recognition Of The Need For Change,
In a Daily Telegraph article of 27/11/20, entitled ‘If we don’t reform the state now, we never will’ and subtitled ‘Throwing ever greater quantities of money at an unreformed public sector is inefficient and unfair’, Jeremy Warner quotes Winston Churchill as saying ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’ and by way of introducing his analysis of the current crisis he observes that ‘if ever there was a time to press the button on long overdue and much needed institutional reform of our bloated public sector – which despite the Herculean efforts of NHS and other essential public sector workers, Covid-19 has found wanting on multiple different levels – it is now’. Again, he observes that ‘crises normally and naturally give rise to radical thought and solutions’; that ‘perhaps the biggest curiosity of this one is that so far it hasn’t, except in regard to putting the economy on what amounts to a wartime footing’; that ‘the Government has (thus) hugely expanded the role and reach of the state’; that ‘as we discovered after the second World War, once this type of economy is established, it is extremely difficult to be rid of it’; that wartime regimes and the social support arrangements then put in place, are not easily dismantled’; and that ‘they remain sticky long after the emergency that created them has passed’.
His article goes on to report that ‘according to the Office for Budget Responsibility forecast this week (c.f. the above date), the UK public expenditure is due to surge from a staggering 16.4 per cent to a peacetime record of 56.3 per cent this financial year’; that ‘this tapers away in the central forecast until it reaches the same level of spending in five years time as before the crisis, at around 40 percent of national output; that ‘that may be what the Government aims for, but given the hard choices that need to be made in getting there, it is going to be politically very difficult to achieve’; that ‘in any case, we’ve already thrown more money as a proportion of output at the problem than in any other advanced economy bar Canada’; that once loan guarantees and other forms of liquidity-support are taken into account, other countries such as Germany have admittedly gone further still; but that their up front spending has been significantly less’; that channelling such a huge increase through an unreformed public sector has proved a scandalously wasteful process; that if success is measured by excess deaths per capita, only Spain has performed worse than the UK among the advanced economies’; and that ‘on any objective analysis, the UK has proved shockingly inept in its handling of the pandemic crisis’.
‘That said’, Jeremy Warner, proceeds to say that ‘it is hard to see how ministers could realistically have acted differently in terms of the overall approach’; that ‘he is something of a lockdown sceptic’; but that ‘he would readily acknowledge that politically it would have been extraordinarily difficult to adopt alternative strategies while all around Europe and beyond are responding in the way they have’; that ‘in previous pandemics, people on the whole got on with their lives regardless of the disease; that ‘the mounting death toll was seen as just part of the human condition’; but that ‘we are rich enough and savvy enough not to have to adopt such a fatalistic approach’; that we can ‘imagine the headlines if Britain had stood alone in letting the virus rip and as a consequence seen its health service overwhelmed and the vulnerable dying en masse’; that it is not a risk that any responsible government with political survival in mind could take’; that ‘it is not even certain that the economic impact of such an approach would have been less’; that the higher the incidence of the disease, the more people are likely to choose voluntarily to shield themselves, especially in advanced economies where many people are rich enough to forgo earnings and where home working is easier; and that the economy might substantially shut down anyway regardless of Governmental instruction’; that nonetheless ‘the pandemic has exposed myriad failings and weaknesses both in our system of governance and in the provision of our public services’; that nowhere is this more apparent than in healthcare, where decades of penny-pinching and the rationing of provision’ (and mismanagement) ‘have created a capacity constraint that necessitates closing down much of the economy merely to prevent the system being overwhelmed’; and that ‘there could scarcely be a better example of false economy’.
He concludes that ‘as a nation, we need to be spending more on social care to provide the sort of service people increasingly demand and expect, perhaps two to three percentage points of our GDP more’; that ‘institutional reform – allowing healthcare to be transformed from the producer determined service it is today, into the modern consumer-led business it needs to be – would flow naturally from changing the funding model of general taxation to a system of hypothecated national insurance’; that ‘public or private makes no difference in principle’; that ‘the NHS was a glorious thing when it was conceived’; but that ‘it is no accident that no developing nation has chosen it as a model for universal healthcare’; that ‘if we can’t reform it, even after a crisis as serious as that produced by Covid-19’ (more correctly by our response to Covid-19 ) ‘we never will’; and that ‘sadly, there seems to be little if any appetite for it among our perpetually fire-fighting political leaders’.
As I have previously reported in this website, I am grateful to such as Allister Heath and Jeremy Warner for identifying the failures of political parties to implement successfully their respective policies in reality. However, while media commentators in general only respond to expressions of beliefs with those of counter-beliefs, and while such as Heath and Warner do point up these failures with occasional references to reality, all thus identified failures are generally treated as inconclusive by the readership because no commentator ever differentiates belief/counter-belief from conclusive knowledge of reality, without which, the debate itself is interminable and inconclusive, and while debate can change an elective belief-consensus to an elective counter-belief-consensus, as happens in elections which change the governing-party, this change is merely that of changing the temporary beliefs of relatively few voters to temporary counter-beliefs. However, with the political handling of response to the Brexit referendum, and of response to the to Covid-19 infection, having now brought some commentators to call for something different to be done in future, without actually specifying this difference, I am now more hopeful that those who already see the need for change, will now also see the need to replace belief/counter-belief with conclusive knowledge, and will also see that this need can be satisfied only by replacing definitive belief with definitive knowledge as these terms have been definitively differentiated in this website; and that this replacement would be greatly facilitated were media commentators, who have the public ear, to support my Campaign for knowledge to replace belief in all future policy-making, as these terms are definitively differentiated in this website. 3/12/20.
Article 34Media Recognition Of The Need for Change.
In a Daily Telegraph article of 26/11/20, entitled ‘Britain is facing ruin, but deluded Tories are still refusing to accept it’, and sub-titled ‘Rishi Sunak knows the dangers, but his party has embraced a destructive economic illiteracy’, Allister Heath claims that ‘Britain is permanently poorer and the British state weaker as a result of the Covid induced by collapse of GDP and the gargantuan debt binge that has kept us going’; that ‘our economy is more socialised than it has ever been outside of war’; that ‘we have resorted to the printing presses to finance spending in a shockingly unprecedented way, pushing the great fiat money experiment close to breaking point’; that ‘we will spend a lot more every year even after the virus is gone, which will necessitate tens of billions worth of tax hikes or spending cuts merely to stabilise the debt’; and that, this, in summary, is the economic devastation described or implied by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in what is easily the most terrifying official economic assessment from a developed nation that he has ever read’. He goes on to say that ‘there is no consolation in the fact that much of the spending was necessary and affordable (in the sense of being able to borrow more) while interest rates are dementedly low’; and that ‘growth will bounce back with the vaccine’; that ‘we remain in what the Chancellor correctly described yesterday (25/11/20) as an economic emergency, one which will scar our private sector and society, damage our long term economic performance, shift us towards a social democratic European economic model and leave us stuck with a debt level of over 100 percent of GDP.’
Indeed, he adds that ‘the scale of the catastrophe is even worse than the official forecasters admit’; that nobody knows what the impact of extreme quantitative easing (QE) will be on the structures of the financial system’; that ‘the cultural damage is unquantifiable with a return to welfarism, statism, an exodus of foreign workers, and a growing sense that money is free and government doesn’t really suffer from a budget restraint’; and that ‘the OBR is optimistic in other areas where it thinks the economy will only be 3 per cent smaller permanently than it would otherwise be which, as Pantheon Economics says, implies that “scarring” will be less than half the scale seen after the previous three recessions’; and that ‘incredibly, the total cost of servicing our debt will fall to a new historical low of 1.7 per cent of government revenues next year’; and that ‘we have been able to borrow longer term than other countries, locking in this cheaper financing – but what happens if and when interests rates go up’? At this point, he goes on to say that ‘we are, to paraphrase of Bill Cross, writing at the time of the last financial crisis, “lying on a bed of nitro-glycerine”; and that ‘in a crucial line, the OBR explains that the impact of each percentage point rise in short-term interest rates on the deficit has risen from £6 billion (0.2 per cent of GDP) to £12 billion (0.5 per cent of GDP)’. At this point Allister Heath states that ‘Rishi Sunat understands all this and can surely barely sleep as a result’; but that ‘what if a future banking, or trade, or military crisis sends interest rates up by 3 per cent, thus sending the deficit to £36 billion immediately and sending borrowing rates even higher’?
For comparison, he recalls that ‘every big economic crisis overshadows politics for at least a decade, such as that of the stagflation of the seventies’, in which includes ‘the recession of 1982, the boom, bust and ERM crisis, culminating in the nightmare of 1992, the financial crisis of 2008, and now the Great Pandemic’; and, set against this experience of past economic carnage, he expresses surprise that ‘our political landscape remains stuck in an absurd state of suspended animation’ with ‘our political classes continuing as if nothing had happened’; that ‘the Government clings to an obsolete manifesto predicated on the very opposite of a Covid shock’: on ‘an assumption of being richer than we were’; that ‘the supposedly austere 2010s were over ’; that ‘we could afford to live beyond our means’; that ‘incredibly the Government is sticking with its promise of years of French-style debt-fuelled public bingeing on grands projcts – some useless (H2S), others worthwhile (roads, hospitals, broadband) – and lots more cash on day to day spending, not least on the levelling-up fund despite the radically changed economic background’; that ‘the only cuts recommended at the Spending Review were symbolic: the welcome reduction in foreign aid from 0.7 per cent to 0.5 percent of GDP and a botched public sector pay freeze which will see most public sector wages rise at a time when the private sector is being furloughed or fired’; that ‘Sunat rightly didn’t extend the increase in universal credit, but that was always meant to be temporary’. He accepts that ‘the aid cut was red meat to the Right’, but asks why it didn’t go further, why their was no public sector recruitment freeze (excluding the NHS), and ‘why there was no build-back-better by using this crisis as an opportunity to reform the public sector fundamentally’? ‘Why no war on waste, no cuts to various departments, why no delays to spending promises, why is the living wage shooting up again guaranteeing more job losses in hospitality? Allister Heath ‘doesn’t blame Sunat.’ He recognised that Sunat’s speech ‘almost deliberately emphasised the extremity of its internal contradictions, its cognitive dissonance, the inconsistency between economic reality and the politics, and its identification of the economic emergency’, though he did recognise that Sunat ‘did little to tackle it’.
In conclusion, Allister Heath speculates that ‘the Chancellor, a free marketeer and fiscal conservative, perhaps couldn’t convince Boris Johnson that now was the time to tackle the public sector’; that ‘instead he set the scene for a future ideological reckoning in the Tory party, one which will determine whether we become more like Italy or more like Singapore’; that ‘Sunat knows full well, the challenge isn’t just about the deficit: it’s also about growth and competitiveness’; that ‘Brexit needs to be accompanied by radical cuts and changes to tax and regulation, as well as longer-term reforms to training and education, to succeed’; that ‘massively increased taxation would kill that dream and Johnson’s legacy stone dead’; that ‘this Spending review didn’t tell what Rishi-economics looks like; that the Chancellor will soon have to put his cards on the table and stake his career on his vision’; that meanwhile he must explain to his increasingly economically illiterate party that it cannot continue its debilitating descent into proto-socialist stupidity’; and that the Tories must get real, or else they will never be forgiven for ruining the economy.
Having written to my previous MP, following the referendum concerning my perceived need and opportunity to replace belief with knowledge in post-Brexit policy-making, to which his only reply was to state that leaving the EU would be a dawdle. He ignored my definitive knowledge/belief differentiation in his reply. However, Allister Heath’s article encourages me to hope that my campaign for knowledge to replace belief at least in Tory party circles may yet be seen to fill the hole so ably identified by the article referenced above, in respect of its speculation vis a vis the attitudes of Rishi Sunat and Boris Johnson.
1/12/20.
Article 33Knowledge Versus Belief In Response To Problems Identified By Political Parties.
With Article 32 having shown that knowledge ought to replace belief in party-specific policy-making, this Article shows that this replacement ought also to be applied to the delivery of such policies, and having shown in article 28 that knowledge has been ignored in respect of the formulation of belief-only policies respecting anthropogenic global warming, I now show that knowledge is also being ignored in respect of response to this belief-only problem. My reference press-article, on this occasion, is one by Bjorn Lomborg, entitled ‘Don’t expect electric cars to save the planet’, which appeared in The Daily Telegraph of 18/11/20 under the sub-title ‘Banning petrol and diesel vehicles would deliver only minor emissions savings at a vast cost to consumers. It opens by stating that ‘in a move to burnish Britain’s green credentials, Boris Johnson is to announce a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030’; that in doing so, ‘he is following other political leaders, including Joe Biden, in promising lavish carrots to energise the market for electric cars’, in the belief that ‘this will reduce anthropogenic global warming’; that, ‘unfortunately electric cars will deliver only tiny emission savings at a very high price’; that ‘they cost more over their life-times than their petrol counterparts’; that ‘this is why subsidies are needed’; that nonetheless, ‘consumers are put off by the vehicles’ short ranges and long charging times’; that ‘despite the US offering up to $10,000 (£7,600) for each electric car, fewer than 0.5 percent of the nation’s carsare battery electric’; that ‘almost all the handouts go to the rich’; that ‘some 90 percent of electric car owners also own a fossil fuel car’; and that ‘indeed electric vehicles are mostly a “second car” used for shorter trips and virtue signalling’.
He admits, however that ‘if electric cars are subsidised enough, people will buy them’; that ‘almost 10 per cent of all Norway’s passenger cars are electric, thanks to generous policies which waive most costs’; that ‘over its lifetime a £23.000 car might receive benefits worth £20,000; but that ‘this approach is unsustainable for most nations’; that ‘even Norway is starting to worry, subsidised drivers (already) cost the country more than a billion euros a year’. (I would ask, how this will be sustainable when all cars are electric and the market for Norway’s oil exports collapses?) Again, he admits that ‘innovations will (I would say might) make electric cars economic even without subsidies’ but that ‘concerns over range and slow charging will remain’; and that ‘scientific projections do not predict that electric cars will take over the world’; that ‘a new study shows that by 2030, just 13 per cent of new cars will be electric’; that ‘if new petrol cars are banned by then, this will prevent 87 per cent of consumers from buying the cars they want’; and that this ‘hardly seems politically viable’.
At this point in his article, Bjorn Lomborg quotes the International Energy Agency (IEA) when he says that ‘it estimates that by 2030, if all countries live up to their promises, the world will have 140 million electric cars on the road’; but that ‘this would not make a significant impact on emissions for two reasons’. The first is that ’electric cars require large batteries which are often produced in China using coal-power’; that ‘the manufacture of one electric car battery releases almost a quarter of the greenhouse gases emitted by a petrol car over its entire lifetime’. The second is that ‘electric cars are recharged with electricity which in most countries is generated by fossil fuel combustion; that ‘together this means that a long-range electric car will cause the emission of more carbon dioxide for its first 60,000km than its petrol equivalent’; and that ‘this is why owning a second small car for short trips could result in higher overall emissions’; that ‘the IEA estimates the electric car will save 6 tons of carbon dioxide emissions over its lifetime assuming global average emissions in electricity production’; that if Biden restores full electric car tax credit, he will essentially pay £5,700 to reduce emissions by up to 10 tons’; but that he can get US electric power producers to cut 10 tons for just £45’; and that ‘the IEA estimates that if the whole world gets 140 million electric cars by 2030, it will reduce emissions by just 190 million tons of carbon dioxide – a mere 0.4 per cent of global emissions’.
Thus, he claims that ‘we need a reality check’ in which ‘politicians should stop writing huge cheques just because they believe electric cars are a major solution to climate change’, and recognise that ‘there is a simpler answer’; that ‘the hybrid car saves about the same amount of (total global) carbon dioxide over its lifetime’; and that ‘fossil fuel cars represent about 7 per cent of global emissions’; that ‘right now, electric car subsidies are something wealthy countries can offer virtue-signally elites’; but that ‘if we want to fix the climate, we need to focus on big emitters and drive innovation in fusion, fission, geothermal, wind and solar energy’; that ‘advances making any of these cheaper than fossil fuels would mean it is not just rich Londoners, but everyone, including in China and India, switching their energy consumption towards zero emissions’. However, I say again, as I have throughout this website, that we must know there is a need, rather than merely believe there is, before we change anything, and even then we must know how to change it, rather than merely believe how to do so. 20/11/20.
Article 32Knowledge Versus Belief In The Formulation Of Party-Specific Policies.
In an article in The Daily Telegraph of 16/10/20, entitled ‘Boris must not betray the voters who made him Prime Minister’, and sub-titled, ‘Tory infighting is about much more than Dominic Cummings: the party’s very future is at stake’, Nick Timothy states that ‘amid all the confusion sown by briefing and counter-briefing, gossip and smears, the Tories face a remarkably simple strategic choice. Do they want to become the party whose MPs are respectable enough to win back-invitations to dinner parties in Islington and Notting Hill, or to make themselves the party of provincial normality – dependable enough to champion the values and interests of ordinary working people?’ Thus, he claims that ‘this choice – between appealing to the Respectable or the Dependable – lies at the heart of the struggle we will witness in the coming weeks and months’; that ‘it will determine not only Boris Johnson’s premiership, but also the future of the Conservative Party, and the shape of British politics for years to come’; that ‘it will be a ferocious fight’; that ‘for much of recent history, the Respectable had things their way’; that ‘they enjoyed in David Cameron a leader who prioritised fighting climate change, reducing public spending, ‘and keeping Britain inside the European Union’; that ‘with the approval of the Respectable, he sought and won an electoral coalition based on his liberal and affluent perspective, until he lost the referendum that led to Brexit’; that ‘Cameron had made conservatism acceptable again’; and that ‘prosperous liberals could vote for it in their economic self-interest reassured that the Tories were led by a man with is own wind turbine’.
Yet, Nick Timothy observes that ‘the referendum killed Cameron’s coalition of voters and led to the usurpation of the posh and privileged by the plain and provincial’; that ‘the elections of 2017 and 2019 saw the departure of the leading Respectables, such as George Osborne and Amber Rudd, the establishment of a new coalition of Tory voters, and the arrival in Parliament of dozens of new Dependables, with high-income constituencies like Winchester now being marginals’, and ‘with ‘the party holding seats – often with large majorities – in Brexit-supporting seats like Middlesbrough and Walsall’. Now, as Nick Timothy observes ‘with Dominic Cummings gone, the Respectables want their party back (as they think it), they say they want to “soften” the Government’s image, and imagine Boris Johnson governing as a reincarnated Cameron with messier hair and better jokes, they want to avoid a culture war, accepting instead of resisting extreme identity politics – from trans-genderism to theories of structural racism – which divide society and destroy trust and reciprocity: and they recommend a new political emphasis, not on jobs and financial security for ordinary families, but on climate change and other issues that gnaw at the consciences of the high-consuming and socially self-segregating rich’.
Again, Nick Timothy notes that ‘complicating matters, is the fact that the choice before the Tories is not simply between the status quo and the preferred agenda of the Respectables, it is between two very different futures’; that ‘to become the Dependables, to deliver for the party’s new voters, the Government will need to be far bolder than it has been hitherto in delivering for them’; that ‘a year on from giving Boris Johnson his majority, voters in constituencies like Dudley and Workington have little so far to show for it’; that ‘yes, Britain will soon be out of the transition phase as we leave the European Union’; that ‘yes, as Covid-19 struck the economy, Rishi Sunak’s business support and furlough schemes have kept companies and families afloat’; but that ‘the much vaunted points-based immigration system will almost certainly fail to reduce the number of people coming to Britain’; that ‘there is little sign of the new industrial strategy which will bring growth to the regions, no trace of the decentralisation proposals to put power in the hands of local communities, and no confidence that we will see the decisive shift needed to fund the technical education and training the country so badly needs’; that ‘things will get tougher’; that ‘a year ago, it was possible to imagine the Tories borrowing more to fund regional infrastructure spending’; that ‘it was possible even to imagine them funding the increases in day-to-day spending made necessary to “level up” the country; but now that Covid’ response has blown a hole in the public finances, this intent is in doubt’. Nick Timothy concludes that ‘the durability of the new Tory support would be tested not during periods of political peace, but when hard choices have to be made’; that ‘sure enough, ministers and advisers have been arguing for some time about whether Covid’s fiscal impact means they must retreat from the promises they made to their new voters’; that ‘this would be a terrible mistake’; that ‘if Boris Johnston wants to govern for the whole country – the true meaning of the One Nation tradition – he has to stick with the provinces’; that ‘if he wants his electoral coalition to hold together, he needs to show – now more than ever, when the chips are down- that he puts ordinary working families with modest means first; that if later this requires asking more of the privileged and prosperous, then so be it, and in fact so much the better, because it will show, at the toughest moments, t
Article 31Knowledge/Belief Differentiation with Respect To The Covid-19/Brexit Combination.
This article was prompted by that of Allister Heath, in The Daily Telegraph of 12/11/20, entitled ‘We have one chance to stop Britain’s slide into another socialist nightmare’, and subtitled ‘Even a vaccine won’t halt the Left-wards drift of a society permanently scarred by Covid-19 lockdown’. It opens by stating that ‘this ought to be a time for hope, for optimism, for celebration even, and yet it is hard to shake off (fear of) impending doom’; that ‘the end of the Covid emergency is finally in sight’; but that ‘this doesn’t mean that all will soon be for the best in this best of all possible worlds’. It goes on to state that ‘yes, the vaccines may allow Britain to return to a society with most of the trappings of normality, hopefully by the spring’; but that ‘is where the Panglossian vision ends’; and that ‘we will emerge from lockdown a permanently scarred country’. However, I note that Allister Heath does not define “normality”. Nonetheless, he goes on to state that ‘the old Britain is gone, replaced by a jaded, poorer, more indebted, more risk-averse, and above all, more collectivist economy’; that ‘the story of the past nine months all over the Western World is one of state failure on a colossal scale, ended only by the extraordinary capitalist miracle that is Big Pharma’; that ‘the script could almost have been written by Ludwig von Mises or Ayn Rand’; but that ‘this risks making no difference to the Left-wards, socialist shift, triggered by the virus and our response to it’, which ‘swept up by a tornado of unintended consequences has now set us on course for permanently higher taxes, more red tape, greater paternalism and less freedom’; and that ‘this will apply across the developed world, with the national debts of France, Spain and Italy all soaring by roughly the same amount as ours’; but that ‘Britain, as the least social-democratic, the most culturally entrepreneurial, the most risk-taking of all the large European nations, has the most to lose from the trend to higher taxes and less individual responsibility’; that ‘the British economy may well return to the size it was before the virus struck, by late 2021-early 2022’; but that ‘this would still leave it 2 to 3 percent smaller than it would have been in the absence of Covid-19 and the accompanying lockdowns’; and that ‘the missing-growth will never be caught up, punching a permanent hole in the public finances’. My only quibble with the above analysis is that vaccines are the only products of science in whole sorry tale; that they are not the products of capitalism per se. I note, however that this analysis does not specify how its cited fates can be avoided.
Nonetheless, it states that ‘the answer, as far as the Resolution Foundation (a purveyor of the centre-Left technocratic consensus in economic policy) is concerned, is eye-watering tax hikes’, which ‘would (post-Brexit) reduce us to ‘a self-governing version of Italy – a country that has stagnated for two decades’; that ‘the dream of a dynamic post-Brexit buccaneering Britain would be dead and buried’; that ‘there is no path for the UK to thrive, no combination of other ingenious Tory policies which can save us. if our tax and spending end up at Continental levels’; that ‘we can forget about levelling up’; that ‘we would be dragged down to the level of the worst-performing European nations, unless we begin to react very differently’. However, I note that Allister Heath does not define this “difference”. Nonetheless, he opines that ‘there is no sign of this difference’, while I state there is no sign of a definition of what the difference would be. Indeed, he contents himself with opining what appears to be currently wrong when he states that ‘the report from the Office for Tax Simplification on capital gains tax (CGT) is predictably grim’; that ‘it was commissioned by the Treasury and calls for a large increase in the tax’s scope to include the owners of small businesses and private investors’; that ‘a raid on the petite bourgeoisie and capital in general can only reduce Britain’s performance further’; that ‘the current system is broken and unfair in many ways’; that ‘there are ways of fixing it that don’t lead to double or triple taxation of some income; and that don’t chase billions of pounds out of the UK. However, he doesn’t say what these ways are, though he implies that they ought to be the opposite of what he expects them to be.
However having thus pushed himself into a corner, he cites ‘the 2020 Tax Commission (which he chaired) as having published a “comprehensive” report eight years ago, which recommended the total abolition of capital gains tax, and its replacement with several other levies, such as a flat tax of 30 percent on all income from capital (dividends and rents) and from labour (pay and bonuses), and which would have the consequence of forcing public spending back down to 35 percent of GDP’ which he now recommends ‘as the sort of reform we should be looking at after Covid-19’. Again, I note that the Commission did not question the purposes to which tax revenues are put, while in contrast, I recommend that they should be put to knowledge-only objectives and not to belief-only objectives as they have been thus far; and that they should be put to the knowledge-only means by which, and only by which, such knowledge-only objectives can be achieved in reality. However, Allister Heath does foresee that ‘post-Covid tax hikes would finally destroy the Thatcherite-Blairite-Cameroon consensus’; that ‘the scale and duration of the furlough means millions are now addicted to free money’; and that ‘a JL Partners poll finds that 48 percent of the public don’t want restrictions to be lifted even when a vaccine is rolled-out’. Again, in contrast to him, and to all other media commentators, I foresee that aversion to taxation might well be moderated, were taxation revenues to be applied to knowledge-only policies for their knowledge-only objectives to be delivered in reality.
Meanwhile, however, he concludes that ‘the culture has changed’; that ‘Britain now loves and expects a bail-out’; that ‘welfarism has now gone mainstream as has the idea that Government doesn’t have a budget constraint’; that ‘the Bank of England can simply print money’; that ‘lockdown has made self-employment and small business creation less attractive’, while ‘working for the state has become more attractive’; that ‘at some point the Government must remake the case for individual self-reliance’; that, ‘in the meantime, it is struggling to fend off ever-louder calls for extension of the welfare state’; that ‘first it was free school meals, next it will be unemployment and every other kind of benefit’; and that ‘other reforms are already under threat including the drive to increase standards in school’. However, he recommends that ‘while the situation is grim, both Right and Left should avoid descending into a defeatist declinism of a sort last seen in the Seventies’; that ‘Remainers believe Britain to be doomed because of Brexit’; that ‘many Brexiteers believe we are doomed because of Covid-19’; and that ‘because of this social-economic drift, and the Government’s environmentalist obsession, others fear we will be prevented from leaveraging our strengths to make the most of our coming independence’; but that ‘this requires the Government, next year, to come up with an entirely new economic strategy that goes further than simply spending borrowed money on Northern infrastructure’; that ‘we must seek to undo the damage from Covid-19’; that ‘we need a plan to reboot all of Britain, to re-ignite our animal spirits, to attract foreign investment, to create millions of new firms, to increase our trend-rate of GDP-growth, and above all to cut the state down to size’; that ‘the Government may not wish to call this austerity’; but that ‘it is Britain’s last chance to fight post-Covid-19 socialism’. However, I would attribute the aforementioned damage to our belief-only response to every issue, and not only to Covid-19 per se.
Again, I observe that while Allister Heath identifies the need for such a plan, he omits to specify its objectives and the means by which these objectives are to be realised. In contrast, I contend that the objectives of the plan must be based on cause-effect knowledge of need and that such need can only be satisfied by the recognition or acquisition of cause-effect knowledge of how to respond. Nonetheless, I am grateful to him for his analysis of what is wrong with our political system, but, as to its correction, I can only take his analysis as an un-intended re-enforcement of my invitation to my readers to support my campaign for knowledge to replace belief in all currently active policy areas, and in all future policy areas, without which, there can be no hope of satisfying any policy-objectives in reality. 16/11/20.
Article 30Knowledge Versus Satisfaction By Belief-Only Consumables.
If we direct our imaginations to the pre-history of humanity we may safely conclude that our earliest concerns would have been for satisfaction of our knowledge-only needs for food, clothing and shelter; that our earliest acquisition of knowledge would have been directed to the satisfaction of these knowledge-only requirements, that all such knowledge would have been successively acquired by our imaginations being stimulated by our surrounding reality to beliefs as to the means of such satisfactions; that these beliefs would have been evaluated as to their compliance or non-compliance with this reality in so far as they satisfied one or other of our thus identified requirements; that such reality-evaluation would thus have produced positive or negative knowledge of what produced or did not produce the desired result; that this process of reality-validation or reality-refutation of belief to positive or negative knowledge would have progressively produced tools, weapons and artefacts for the progressive acquisition of food, clothing and shelter in such profusion as to sustain specialisation, trade, exchange, barter, wealth accumulation, and the acquisition of luxuries beyond any known need; and that after many millennia, the cause/effect relationship of tool to work-piece would have led to the investigation of cause-effect relationships in the natural world, and experimentation would have been born to convert hypothetical beliefs to positive or negative cause-effect knowledge of our surrounding reality.
However, despite our progressive acquisition of the reality-validated knowledge which is craftsmanship and science, a school of thought developed in the ancient Greek world which held, and still ubiquitously holds, that knowledge can be acquired by rational thought alone, i.e. without any reference to the reality-evaluation which is indispensable to the conversion of belief (as hypothesis) to positive or negative knowledge. Again, those who believe in knowledge being accessible to rationality alone also believe that knowledge is acquirable through debate, while it ought now to be obvious that the debate of opinion/counter-opinion is no more than the debate of belief/counter-belief supported by partially selected facts/counter-facts, evidence/counter-evidence and/or news/false-news, no set of which is debate-terminating conclusive knowledge; and that such debate never leads to more than a transiently elective belief-consensus pending the next debate and the next transiently elective belief-consensus.
Again, it ought by now to be obvious that while the progress of our scientific, engineering, technical, and craft knowledge, makes all sorts of progress possible beyond our basic needs for food, clothing and shelter, it also makes possible a wide range of knowledge-only responses to belief-only needs such as the range of energy-sources now available as alternatives to those of fossil fuel combustion and such as the range of alternative consumer-products now available for satisfaction of the belief-only needs of individual members of the public as daily advertised in the media. Thus, we may see that knowledge-only hydroelectric power stations, wind-turbines, solar cells, tidal-turbines and nuclear-fission power-stations are already available together with the prospect of nuclear-fusion stations as alternatives to existing fossil fuel- ( oil-, and coal-burning) power stations and with hydrogen-burning power-units in prospect, without any knowledge of need for such alternative sources of electricity, especially if these are producible only at greater unit cost (c.f. Article 29). As to the proliferation of new consumer-goods and their variants, these also seem to multiply without limit, and again, without of any knowledge of need for such multiplicity regardless of comparative cost.
However, we now see that the economies so far sustained by ceaseless proliferation of knowledge-only services for largely belief-only needs, are exhibiting a more or less uncertain sustainability for the long-run; that these economies now seem subject to additional uncertainties arising from our departure from the EU and/or from the Covid-19 lockdowns which isolate the non-infected from the infected rather than isolating the infected from the non-infected as was formerly the accepted practice; that it thus remains to be seen whether or not these now disordered economic systems will be recoverable to their former states, or be re-ordered by a long overdue replacement belief with knowledge in the conduct of existing political-economic systems; that were this transformation from belief to knowledge to occur in light of belief-only lockdowns being recognised as errors of belief-only judgement, then the Covid-19 infection would, ever after, be remembered as having ushered in a recognition of the general benefits which would arise from an overall replacement of definitive belief with definitive knowledge; and that were our joining the belief-only EU to be thus recognised as an error of belief-only judgement, then our departure from the EU would similarly be remembered as having contributed to our recognition of the benefits to be derived from replacing belief with knowledge wherever/whenever such knowledge is available; and to our recognition of the need to acquire the relevant knowledge as soon as may be, wherever/whenever it is recognised as not yet available. 12/11/20.
Article 29Knowledge Versus Governmental and Industrial Belief-Only Response To Global Warming.
Following application of my definitive knowledge/belief differentiation to global warming since the last Ice Age (Article 28), I now apply it to governmental and industrial responses to the more recently alleged anthropogenic warming to show that global warming by our fossil fuel combustion is merely a belief; that this belief and other hypotheses (beliefs) as to the cause of the effect which is global warming ought to be investigated by cause/effect science rather than asserted as belief; that this now ubiquitous belief and all other governmental and associated belief-only policies require my definitive reality-validation of cause and effect if they are ever to be shown to need knowledge-only alternatives; and that it is now necessary to explain the means by which belief-only pressure groups have converted not only belief/counter-belief governments to a specific belief in anthropogenic global warming, but have also persuaded industrial scientific/technical (knowledge-based) companies to respond to this belief as though it were knowledge.
During my longstanding involvement with the Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC) of United Nations’ International Maritime Organisation (IMO), first as a UK delegate and subsequently as an accredited independent-observer, I was able to observe the attitudes of 192 national delegations, the oil and chemical industry representatives, their respective ship owners, and accredited environmental pressure groups, and to note that the beliefs of the environmentalists were taken as read; that their re-enunciation by the attending representatives was unnecessary; that the industrial representatives spoke mainly to request delay in the implementation of ever-increasing levels of regulation; that the nation state representatives spoke only to support new regulations and/or increasing levels of existing regulation, and to suggest the means by which they were to be achieved. When I asked a soon-to-retire oil company representative why none of the industry representatives ever offered a knowledge-based objection to further regulation, he replied that none of them were there to object; that they were there only to report back to HQ on what IMO would next require the industry to do; and that all they were actively required to do, was to request sufficient time to achieve compliance.
Thus, I was left to conclude that ship owners did not see objecting to be in their best interests; that they were content to comply; that they could pass all additional costs to the cargo owners who could not find any cheaper transporters, all of them being subject to the same regulations; and that member states and the environmentalists could claim credit for acting to protect the marine environment whether or not such protection was actually known to be necessary, and whether or not the new or increased levels of regulation were actually known to achieve what was only believed to be necessary. However, these conclusions led me further to conclude that compliance with new regulations almost always required the ship-owner to install new and additional equipment designed and manufactured for compliance with these ever-developing regulations; that the additional costs to ship-owners would also be passed to the cargo owner by all compliant ship-owners; and that nothing would for the regulation of global warming.
Again, these consequent conclusions led me further to conclude that costs arising from all innovations intended to protect the environment whether they achieve their belief-only objectives or not are ultimately passed to the consumer; and that this transfer of costs is ubiquitous whether it arises from changes of regulation in marine, land or air transportation; that when it arises from belief-only environmentalism it is pointless and futile; and that costs would more usefully be incurred and passed on to consumers in the correction of knowledge-only problems by knowledge-only solutions. If we now examine environmentalism’s belief-only concern to replace fossil fuel combustion with alternative energy sources for activities at sea, on land or in the air, we may conclude that whatever costs fall to the ultimate consumer will be of no concern to environmental activists; that so long as these costs remain acceptable to consumers who believe them acceptable in the good cause of preventing belief-only global warming and/or reduction in belief-only marine pollution, industrialists and their investors will turn a profit; but that were consumers to begin to hear that such investments and the resulting costs to themselves were doing next to nothing to restrain continuing rise in global temperature for example, consumers would refuse to absorb the costs falling to them and investments would not return profits.
Indeed, were reality itself to show that anthropogenic global warming is mere belief, the pleasure of owning an electric car at twice the price of the hydrocarbon alternative would soon vanish; that public pleasure in the current myriad of available options for consumer goods such tooth-paste for example, might vanish at the same time with considerable readjustment of global economies; and that all in all, it would be more cost-effective to rely on knowledge rather than on belief. 5/11/20.
Article 28Knowledge Versus Belief In Anthropogenic Global Warming.
My previous articles have sought to show that political debate is purely a matter of opinion/counter-opinion which is merely the debate of belief/counter-belief respectively supported by partially selected facts/counter-facts, evidence/counter-evidence and/or news/false-news in the absence of any debate-terminating conclusive knowledge; that press-comment from even the most trenchant critics merely continues this debate of opinion/counter-opinion, again without reference to the absence of debate-terminating conclusive knowledge, as exemplified by the belief/counter-belief press-comments on Brexit and Covid-19 which I have previously cited to expose their lack of any such knowledge or of any recognition of the need to acquire it. Having thus exemplified these deficiencies, my subsequent Articles will now demonstrate the extent to which politicians, bureaucrats, pressure groups, think-tanks, government agencies, and the public itself, are content to debate belief/counter-belief in ignorance of the counter-knowledge which is already available with respect to all political issues in addition to those of Brexit and Covid-19. I start by showing here that the belief in anthropogenic global warming ignores all knowledge counter to it.
This belief is that humanity has been warming the planet since the start of the industrial revolution by increasing its release of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere from its ever increasing combustion of fossil fuels, while existing counter-knowledge is ignored by such believers and is unrecognised and unused even by its non-believers. However, this issue has already gone beyond the stage of belief/counter-belief debate to the implementation of belief-only responses by governments and industrial companies at the prompting of belief-only agitators, despite existing geological and archaeological counter-knowledge as to causes which long pre-date anthropogenic causes whether industrial or pre-industrial.
As to the prehistoric period, a recent article in The Daily Telegraph reported the finding of Dinosaur remains on the island of Eigg in the Inner Hebrides; referred to an earlier and similar finding on the Isle of Skye; and commented that when these animals were extant, these islands were joined to the Scottish mainland, but it did not identify the process by which they came to be separated from the mainland and from each other. Indeed, the author of the article gave no thought to whether these separations might be indicative of global warming, ice melt and sea level rise, long before the industrial revolution. On the other hand, perhaps that thought had occurred to the reporter, and had been suppressed out of deference to the belief in global warming being anthropogenic. Again, another recent Telegraph article reported the finding of a hand-carving on the Island of Guernsey dated to a time when the Island was attached to France, but again no mention was made of the process which caused their earlier separation.
However, as a schoolboy I had already known of the coastal trading city on the Nile delta, the ruins and artefacts of which are now under the Mediterranean Sea and of the two cities formerly at the mouth of the Indus which are now under the coastal waters of the adjacent Ocean, presumable because of global warming, associated ice-melt and sea-level rise, long before our anthropogenic industrial revolution. Yet again, as a schoolboy, I had already known that the earliest settlers of what is now the British Isles had arrived here by walking dry-shod across the bed of what is now the English Channel; that ancient tree trunks have been dredged from the bed of the North Sea; and that there was human settlement on what is now the submerged Dogger Bank. Further more, I read in The Telegraph that worked planks were recently recovered from the bed of the Solent suggesting to me that these had been produced by humans when what is now the Isle of Wight was attached to the English mainland. Furthermore, as a schoolboy I had already known that the Scottish landscape and sea lochs had been produced by the movement of glaciers; that the sills towards the mouths of these lochs were deposits of glacial debris where the glaciers had been melting in contact with seawater; and that the now raised beaches and associated inland sea cliffs parallel to the present shores which characterise the eastern coast of the Clyde Estuary had not been produced by a drop in sea level, but by a rising of the land caused by the reduction of the weight upon it when the earlier ice melted; and that this rise enabled physical geologists to estimate the viscosity of the underlying molten magma of our planet.
Thus, we may conclude that our planet has been warming since the lowest temperatures of the last Ice Age; that this warming clearly predates our industrial revolution; and that if the current warming is influenced by our anthropogenic releases of carbon dioxide, these can make but a small contribution compared with the warming and associated rise in sea level which have occurred since the earlier global ice-cover began to melt without any assistance from us. Article 29 will consider whether or not anthropogenic belief should be influencing the global economy to the extent it now does. 30/10/20.
Article 27A Critique Of The Management Of Brexit.
Having used my definitive differentiation of the knowledge/belief dichotomy to attribute the mishandling of Covid-19 response to political reliance on belief and rejection of knowledge since March 2020 (c.f. Article 26), I now attribute the mishandling of Brexit to same reliance on belief and rejection of knowledge for what is now nearly four and a half years since the referendum result was declared. However, I recognise that the issue put to the referendum, was itself a matter of opinion/ counter-opinion; that opinion/counter-opinion is never more than belief/counter-belief in the absence of any citation of debate terminating conclusive knowledge; and that with the absence of any citation of such knowledge one way or the other, the result could only be a belief-consensus for leaving the EU or for remaining in it. Again, I recognise that there was no referendum vote for or against Lockdown in respect of Covid-19; that while the absence of a vote in this case was justified by spurious reference to science as provided by Sage, this ‘knowledge’ immediately became a non-conclusive debateable issue as far as Sage members and non-Sage members of a self-styled scientific community were concerned; that it can thus be concluded that no irrefutable scientific knowledge was or is referenced to support the lockdown; and that the Covid-19 issue was and is being handled as one of belief/counter-belief as was that of Brexit, and as are all others treated as transient belief-consensus pending further debate.
With respect to Brexit, it was and is clear that Mrs May did not want to leave the EU; that those who opposed Mrs May and her supporters were content to support the referendum result without actually endorsing it; that they were careful not to cite available knowledge as to the failure of the EU’s belief-only policy choices; that supporters of the EU were content to cite the belief-only difficulties which they claimed the UK would face were it to leave; that they avoided all reference to any knowledge-only benefits to be derived from leaving – as indeed did those who merely supported the referendum result. Again, for its part, the EU also relies on belief rather than on knowledge in seeking to retain the UK as a member and in doing so ‘Brussels has attempted to sabotage any hope of a deal with its bizarre approach to the Brexit talks’, as Daniel Hannan describes the situation in a Sunday Telegraph Article of 18/10/20. In this article, he states that he ‘had assumed that when it came to it, the EU would prioritise the economic interests of its 27 members; that ‘he was wrong’; that ‘by sticking to a number of deliberately absurd positions – including demanding British fish as a sort of leaving fee – Brussels has now effectively collapsed the talks’; that ‘there will be no trade deal’; and that ‘the question now is whether we agree a series of technical accords on aviation, road haulage and the like’.
He goes on to recall that ‘Mrs May’s accidental premiership, following the withdrawal of every other candidate, gave rise to her refusal to go for a quick and easy EFTA deal, at least in the short term, which would have obviated the row about withdrawal terms’; that the disastrous 2017 election ushered in a parliamentary majority ready to work with Brussels to reverse the referendum’; that ‘the other side acted on the flawed belief that, if the terms offered were harsh enough, Britain would somehow drop the whole idea of leaving’; that Michel Barnier saw it as his job to (as he put it) teach the Brits a lesson’; that ‘institutional inertia left him in place even when it was clear that that policy had failed’; and that ‘Britain was leaving anyway’; that ‘there was the disastrous insistence on the Irish protocol’; that ‘had it not been for the belief that Brexit might be overturned, perhaps Brussels would have listened to those who, in the aftermath of the referendum, wanted to draw Britain into a market-only tier, part of a “ring of friends” around the EU’.
He goes on to state that, ‘if nothing else, the lengthy talks served to establish beyond doubt that the EU was not negotiating in good faith’, that the French position on fisheries – the UK should be treated as a third country in every other respect, but should remain fully subject to the Common Fisheries Policy – is seen as preposterous by every neutral observer and by most of the EU’; that it does not even make sense in terms of narrow French interests’; that ‘Britain is offering French vessels a phased and partial reduction in access to our waters, not complete exclusion, but if there is no deal, there will be zero access for French skippers – who currently land 84% of all fish caught in the Channel’; and that ‘there is a suspicion in some Continental capitals that Emmanuel Macron is looking for an excuse to wreck the talks’; and that ‘no French leader loses votes by bashing the Brits’. Daniel Hannan thus concludes that ‘what had been Boris’s chief worry – a go-slow at French ports leading to tailbacks along the M20 – has been overtaken by travel bans and a fall in goods trade’; and that the difference between the basic no-frills deal which Britain wanted and no deal was pretty thin; and that ‘given the vast sums now gobbled up by the epidemic on both sides of the Channel, it now looks almost trivial’; and that ‘Britain should annul the Withdrawal Agreement which it signed on the basis of a promise that a trade deal would not only be signed but implemented in 2020’; that ‘we will guarantee the rights of EU citizens’; that ‘we will raise no infrastructure in Ireland’; and that ‘we should leave it to an international tribunal to work out any outstanding debts; and that it is time to turn our faces back to the open main’. 20/10/20.
Article 26Knowledge Versus Covid-19 Beliefs And All Other Belief-Only Topics.
Now, that we face localised and tiered restrictions on social contact and a threatened return to national lockdown, despite its previous failure to achieve anything other than economic damage and a reduction in hospital treatment of non-Covid conditions, and having had nothing resolved in four and a half years of Brexit negotiations with the EU, is it not now time for the public to recognise the need to abandon all belief/counter-belief debates and to call for the application of debate-terminating conclusive knowledge wherever and whenever possible?
To this end, I now remind my readers that this recognition and application is achievable only by reference to my newly definitive differentiation of the knowledge/belief dichotomy and with it those truth/falsehood, wisdom/folly right/wrong and good/bad; that otherwise we will continue to treat all problems as topics for belief/counter-belief debate to one or other transient belief-consensus pending the resumption of debate intended to reverse the previous belief-consensus; that we must thus recognise that the debate of opinion/counter-opinion is never more than the debate of belief/counter-belief supported by partially selected facts/counter-facts, evidence/counter-evidence, and/or news/false-news, no set of which ever amounts to debate terminating conclusive knowledge; that definitive knowledge, whether positive or negative, is thus preferable to any definitive belief-consensus; that where and when such knowledge is ignored or is as yet unavailable, we have only belief/counter-belief; that transformation of belief to positive or negative knowledge is achievable only by direct observation of cause-effect relationships in reality or by laboratory experimentation designed to isolate the hypothetical (believed) cause from all other possible causes; and that when the actual cause is thus determined, such experimentation enables the known cause to be altered in magnitude, and the corresponding magnitudes of the effect to be measured, and their relationship to be expressed by a mathematical equation which ever-after enables the magnitude of effects to be calculated from measured magnitude of causes and vice versa; but that if the necessary apparatus cannot be designed and built for practical reasons at any time, then the hypothesis remains belief-only, until the means of its reality-validation or reality-refutation can be designed, built, and operated.
Thus, I remind my readers that the term ‘science’ is properly applied only to knowledge, reality-validated by direct observation such as is practised in craftsmanship by observing the causative effect of the applied tool to the work piece, or in science by designed cause/effect experimentation; and that those who propagate conclusions as to cause and effect without bothering to verify the actual cause by isolating it experimentally from all other potential causes, are not scientists, though they describe themselves as such to increase their credibility with voters, politicians and bureaucrats, no member of which categories has ever yet recognised the difference between science and non-science (nonsense) either for themselves or for their colleagues.
A favourite stratagem of pseudo-scientists (those who never reality-validate or reality-refute their beliefs by experimentation) is to clothe these beliefs in mathematical models and to tout their belief-only outputs as knowledge. However, if the input to a mathematical analysis or treatment is belief, then the output must also be belief; mathematics neither adding to nor subtracting from the initial equation or its derived model, otherwise the sequential signs of equality which advance the analysis or the treatment to the model would be invalid as are all rational/philosophical analyses which purport to derive reality-valid conclusions in the absence any reference to reality. That is why the pursuit of validity through metaphysical (rational) reasoning is entirely futile, as Socrates attempted to explain to his audiences almost 2,500 years ago, failed to do so, was required to drink the proffered hemlock, and has been ignored ever since, even by practicing scientists who do not properly recognise the need for reality to be directly observed as in all craftsmanship, or through designed experimentation as in all science.
Thus, as to the present Covid-19 infection, we need to recognise the knowledge that the percentage death rate is too low to have justified the first lockdown, let alone a second, third or fourth. . . ; that this is presumably why Sir Patrick Vallance tells us that infection numbers are doubling every so many days despite our knowledge that they are not now, and never have been even at their highest recorded level. Indeed he recently calculated on this basis that we would have new infections and subsequent deaths at rates by mid-October which enabled Chris Kirk-Blythe of Manchester to calculate by extension (c.f. Letters to the Editor, The Daily Telegraph 22/9/20) that the entire population of the UK would have Covid-19 by Christmas Day; and would all be dead shortly before New Year’s Day. I have never before heard a more devastatingargument against reasoning in the absence of knowledge of reality. However, I have often wondered, why we have heard nothing of the conclusions reached by the Cygnus study of potential pandemic response conducted in the UK in 2016. I had thought these conclusions were too problematic to publish, while I now think the conclusion was that a lockdown would be needed; but that this was best kept under wraps until its need was deemed to have arisen.
In contrast, as I have previously said in this website and in an unpublished letter to The Daily Telegraph, there have always been two options for response to infections: the first is to isolate the infected from the non-infected for treatment, and the second is to isolate the non-infected from the infected to minimise transmission; that the first has hitherto been preferred for its minimisation of the numbers isolated and for its minimisation of the economic damage arising from their removal from the workplace, while the second maximises both. I now add the possibility that the second was adopted in the current case because it may have been the covert choice arrived at by Cygnus. Nonetheless, this choice was clearly not justified by the known death rates and age distributions exhibited by Covid-19, the young being only mildly affected if at all, and the susceptible elderly, being no longer part of the workforce, could have self-isolated with minimal effect on the economy, and while adequate provision of PPE for isolation wards in hospitals and in their Nightingale extensions could have prevented the former from becoming major sources of public infection. Again, we now know that lockdown not only failed to rid us of the infection, it caused damage to the economy and failed to maintain NHS treatment of symptoms other than those of Covid-19. 24/9/20.