How excellent then, fast fashion is a problem that is solved
We do rather wish that people would grasp the implications of what they themselves are saying. Life would just be so much simpler if all did understand that if you say x then y ineluctably follows.
But it is entirely unsustainable. We send £140m of clothing to landfill every year in the UK, much of it made by workers scratching a subsistence wage in poor conditions in countries such as Cambodia and Sri Lanka. And the environmental cost is ruinous: the fashion industry is the world’s second biggest polluter, after the oil industry.
There is, however, evidence that this era may be drawing to a close. It is estimated that the secondhand or resale market could be bigger than fast fashion within a decade as we become more aware of the social and environmental impact of cheap clothes.
There are those obvious errors. Things that we’re throwing into landfill aren’t worth £140 million. We’d not be throwing them into landfill if they were worth money. And if we were then there would be eager supplicants at the gates of the rubbish dumps insisting that we proffer these things worth money to them. Why, they might even, under the impetus of competition, offer to pay us for them. The absence of those importunates does indeed tell us there’s no value there.
The scratching of a subsistence wage - that is to forget, as Paul Krugman has pointed out, that the sweatshops are very much better than the alternative employments on offer. Most lives are better than one spent watching the south end of a north moving water buffalo.
But to theimplication of what is being asserted. The era is drawing to a close, fast fashion is just so over as we consumers all change our habits.
OK, great, so there’s no need to do anything is there? We’re done here. The only argument in favour of restricting, or taxing, or even exhorting, is that we’re not all changing our behaviour. Which means we’d like to carry on doing it - so, why restrict, tax or even exhort us to stop doing what we clearly desire to do?
How to turn around loss making rural rail lines
From the north of Scotland to the tip of Cornwall loss-making rural railway lines are embedded in the landscape. Epitomised by slow, infrequent clapped out trains often carrying just a handful of passengers they wind their way from somewhere to nowhere. Inefficient, unappealing and ultimately underused it’s understandable why many question why such lines continue to be a ‘drain on the public purse’.
However, the reason for these lines survival is complex. Most of these routes are purely ‘social’; to even suggest closure would be political suicide. So successive governments have simply given up and have resorted to instructing franchise operators to provide the bare minimum level of service.
However, such a negative approach is short sighted. Private companies might run the services but with the regulatory brief so restrictive and narrow focused there is no ability for the companies to show entrepreneurial flair. If the state can’t or won’t make a go of it then it needs to allow the private sector – or at least a partnership between the two – to have a go.
Conventional wisdom dictates that rural lines are loss making basket cases. But such narrow focused ideology is to miss a trick. After three months of painstaking forensic analysis of the Settle to Carlisle route, what was widely assumed to be a loss making liability in fact turns out to make a small profit.
The route was once described by the late Bishop of Wakefield, the Rt Rev. Eric Treacy as “the 8th wonder of the world”. While this exuberant ecclesiastical accolade might be over egging the pudding, there is no denying that the line has oodles of untapped potential. Had private sector nous been allowed to flourish earlier the route could by now be a major visitor attraction.
Tourism is set to be worth £257bn to the UK economy by 2025. The Yorkshire and Cumbria Dales are major players yet are hampered by poor roads. The Settle to Carlisle route runs right through the middle of the Dales national park, it even has nine intermediate stations where today only a handful of people join or alight. If ever there was an example of supply so mismatched to potential demand through lack of vision this must surely be it.
The line is currently run by the Northern Rail franchise, a vast short distance inter-urban provider of largely commuter trains serving conurbations such as Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield. ‘No frills’ trains of distinctly utilitarian ambience shuttle back and forth between city and suburb all day with the average fare less than a Starbucks latte. The Settle-Carlisle line is about as mismatched from Northern’s core business as Ryanair would be from providing a bespoke limo service to ‘Fortnum and Mason’ shoppers.
Over a drink recently, a friend who is the Finance Director for one of the leading industry players told me: “The model for rural lines is all about delivering the status quo as cheaply as possible. There’s barely a budget for marketing let along doing anything entrepreneurial.”
As I identified in my recent ASI policy paper, How to Make Long-Distance Work: Fixing Britain’s railways with open access, rail is not a ‘one size fits all’ model. Different routes have strengths, weaknesses and potential, whether its long distance business travellers, commuters, rural locals or tourists. What is needed is a visionary new approach that looks at the assets individually and then adopts a bespoke plan. This approach would stimulate growth, generate additional revenue, support the wider economy and provide a better return on investment for the taxpayer.
With a focused service offering, improved rolling stock and targeted marketing there is huge potential for the Settle to Carlisle line to become a thriving niche business. The route can act as a foundation where other businesses can thrive off the back. The private sector is extraordinary adept as making a go of things with other Cinderella businesses having been turned around into successful ventures.
For too long the railway industry languishes near the bottom of both innovation and creating thinking. Other businesses such as aviation, hospitality and retail have thrived largely as a result of a free market but also because there is a genuine desire to think outside the box and do things differently.
It is widely accepted across the political spectrum that the current franchising model is broken. We need a consumer rather than government led railway where innovation is allowed to flourish. Only by adopting a broad and flexible approach will patronage increase, jobs be created, local economies strengthened and hard pressed taxpayers, at last, seeing more bang for their hard earned buck.
Adrian Quine is a Non-Executive Director of the Settle to Carlisle Development Company Ltd and the author of a submission to the Williams Rail Review on turning around loss making rural lines. Twitter: @adrianquine
The man who created the spitfire
On June 11th 1937, an aircraft designer named R J Mitchell died of cancer at the age of 42. By then he had done something that proved vital to Britain’s survival and to the eventual World War II victory of the Allies. He had designed the Supermarine Spitfire.
Working for Supermarine, Mitchell had designed several of the seaplanes that had won the prestigious annual Schneider Trophy events. He feared the rise of Nazi Germany, especially of its growing air power, and wanted a high-speed monoplane fighter for Britain that could stand up to the best in the world.
Supermarine authorized him to go ahead, on a private basis, but the RAF soon became interested and funded them to build a prototype. Mitchell’s genius was to meld developments that had taken place elsewhere, including elliptical wings and underwing radiators, into a radically new aircraft. The prototype flew in 1936, achieving 349mph, and even before it completed its tests, the RAF ordered 350 of them. They called it the “Spitfire,” which Mitchell thought was “a bloody silly name.”
Mitchell never lived to see it in combat, though in the throes of his final illness he used to watch it be put through its paces. It proved its worth in the Battle of Britain, which could not have been won without it. Its superior performance made it a match for the German ME109 fighter escorts, while the Hurricanes took on the bombers. Has Britain not won that battle, it would not have been still in the war as a base for the build-up of supplies and troops that launched the D-Day landings.
It was the UK’s most produced WWII aircraft, with 22,685 built of its different versions. In 1943, a Spitfire XI reached 606mph in a 45-degree dive, and in the following year it achieved Mach 0.92, a record for a propeller aircraft. During its dive the propeller and reduction gear broke off, making the plane now tail heavy. Its pilot, Squadron Leader Martindale of the RAF Volunteer Reserve, blacked out with the 11g forces of its climb, and came to at 40,000 feet to find the plane now had slightly sweptback wings (originally straight). Martindale successfully glided it 20 miles to a safe landing at the airfield, and won the Air Force Cross for his exploits.
Mitchell himself was the subject of a biopic movie, “The First of the Few,” starring Leslie Howard, and is honoured today as one of the men whose dedication and patriotism saved the nation. His story is a timely correction to those who claim that history is shaped by impenetrable forces, and that the lives of individuals have no significance. He made his life matter.
Adult Health and Social Care
Jeremy Hunt kept telling us, when he was Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, that an adult social care green paper was about to be published. Matt Hancock has been repeating the mantra since he took over the job. Both are now vying to be the next PM but if neither of them can deliver a green paper, neither of them is likely to deliver Brexit. On 6th June Hancock announced a “prevention green paper, which we will publish soon,” (here we go again) which “will give people an opportunity to let us know their views on how we achieve this [the commissioning of care services] and build on the excellent local practice happening across the country.”
He is saying, in effect, that the government has no idea what to do. Furthermore it muddles prevention, i.e. the avoidance of the need for health care, with the provision of adult care services which is what the missing green paper was supposed to be about.
In what fantasy land is the DHSC living to believe that the need for adult care can be removed by some magic formula which only the general public knows how to construct? Is it credible that the general public have the answers when the DHSC and its myriad consultants do not? Why are we paying them? We have already had plenty of expert reports, notably from the King’s Fund, Sir Andrew Dilnot, the Local Government Association and the Care Quality Commission. The central reason for declining care is the shortage of cash available to local authorities to provide it. Inept ministers have failed to address the problem or even to propose possible solutions in a green paper. Of course imposing new taxes and/or making old people pay more towards their upkeep are electorally unpopular, as Mrs May discovered in 2017. And opposition parties are irresponsible in calling such things death or dementia taxes or the like but proposing no solutions. Failing to address difficult issues will not make them go away.
Whether the NHS has more money than is good for it is open to debate. It certainly does not use its resources optimally but, even if it did, that may not be enough to meet growing future demands. On the other hand, the shortage of funds available to local authorities for adult social care is universally acknowledged. “Spending on adult social care in England has fallen by 3% since 2009/10.” The Institute for Government’s 2018 report showed that of nine major public services, the public were most concerned about the support for adult social care and prisons.
In his June 6th announcement of the green paper to come, Hancock concluded that the answer was that the “NHS work much more closely with local authorities on public health so that commissioning is more joined-up and prevention is embedded into a wider range of health services.” The reality is that no amount of joint, with the NHS, commissioning will solve the adult social care cash shortage. It is more likely to distract the NHS from its own business. The senior partner of a Norfolk primary care practice put it like this: “Every minute spent working with/for local authorities is a minute NOT spent doing our core NHS medical work.”
A further example of kicking the adult care can down the road was the creation, two months ago, of the “Health Foundation’s new Health and Social Care Sustainability Research Centre” which “will find and undertake research on the long-term demand and cost trends affecting health and social care in the UK with the aim of improving the evidence base to inform policy.” Sir Andrew Dilnot is the Chairman of the Oversight Board. No one doubts his expertise but do we need new research to recognise that all the local English authorities simply need more money for social care?
How much more? The Local Government Association “said funding pressure and increasing demand for services like adult and children’s social care and support for homeless people, would leave English local services facing a £3.9bn funding deficit in 2019.” In order words, adult social care needs a £3bn top-up immediately – chicken feed compared to the £20bn given last year to the NHS – and probably a lot more thereafter.
The truth is that their relative funding is distorted by politics: the Tories give money to the NHS to keep the Labour Party at bay. There is no similar benefit from giving more to local authorities. Sir Andrew Dilnot, and another other ten members of the expert group the DHSC created to advise on the social care green paper, published a letter in the 8th June Daily Telegraph saying: “we are united in our despair at the failure of governments for the last 20 years to deal with the critically important issue of the funding of social care. The system is underfunded, unsustainable and unfair.”
We regularly hear calls for “politicians on all sides with the courage” to come together and address the problem. Nice words but it will not happen without a formal cross party commission finally to determine how much money is needed, what for, howit should be scrutinised, and how that money should be raised through progressive taxation and optional contributions from those who can afford them — and to mitigate tail risk in any private sector provision. Any of the major three political parties that refuses to participate should be held up to public ridicule by the other two. It would be a vote loser.
In the meantime the DHSC should stop pretending it is doing something.
The Americans have reason to be upset over tech company taxation
We have long argued - in common with a substantial portion of the economic research on the subject - that there should be no taxation of corporations. There’s only us people here to carry the burden of a tax, all taxes are paid by live humans beings, don’t disguise who is being taxed by claiming that some fiction of a legal intermediary is carrying the weight. While correct this view has less political traction that it ought.
The actual rule is that a corporation - or any other activity - should be taxed where economic value is added. Quite clearly the bulk of the value of the Google search engine, say, is created where the engineers who write the Google search engine are. Thus the taxation should be in California, or the US at least.
The complaint has long been that this hasn’t actually been happening. Offshore profits not taken into the US tax net were, for US corporations, never taxed. This was, apparently, an abomination. That’s the argument in favour, or the one used, to tax the tech giants differently. At which point America is complaining:
The US will retaliate if European officials attempt a tax raid on Silicon Valley, the tech industry has warned. Plans by a number of countries to propose new taxes on Google, Facebook, Apple, Airbnb, Uber and Amazon are being closely monitored in Washington, with the UK and France’s new digital services tax highlighted as a barrier to trade by the United States Trade Representative in a recent report.
France’s proposed technology tax, the details of which will be known in July, have annoyed trade officials and that the US might come down hard on the country in an attempt to deter other countries from doing the same.
Within the terms of the current argument they’ve a right to complain too. Because America has already changed its corporate taxation system. Those global profits are now taxed in the US, just as they should be given the value creation there. These arguments in favour of digital taxes are not, now, about profits going untaxed. They’re instead catfights over who gets the revenue. And if the people who host the value creation don’t gain that revenue then what’s the justification for the taxation in the first place?
This isn’t an argument about justice or righteousness, it’s one about which politician gets to spend the cash. As ever, pigs have more manners at troughs.
Salem witch trials
On June 10th, 1692, Bridget Bishop was hanged in Salem, Massachusetts, for witchcraft, the first person to be convicted and executed for this offence in a series of trials between 1692 and 1693. The hearings and prosecutions became known as the Salem witch trials. Altogether over 200 persons were accused, and 19 of them, 14 women and 5 men, were hanged. Another man was crushed to death when he refused to plead, and at least 5 more died in prison.
Bishop was accused of bewitching five women, and evidence was supplied by witnesses that her spectral shape, materialized with the connivance of the devil, would pinch, choke or bite them. It was also alleged that the shape threatened to drown one victim. Spectral evidence featured strongly in the prosecutions, with those afflicted testifying they had seen the apparition of their tormentor. While some suggested that the devil could use anyone’s shape, the Court ruled that it could only be done with the person’s consent, proving they were in league with the devil.
Witch cake was used, this being “white” magic used to identify witches. A slave was instructed to make the cake from rye meal and the urine of the afflicted girls, and feed it to a dog. The belief was that the invisible particles a witch sent to afflict the girls would remain in their urine, and that the witch would betray her identity by her cries of pain when the dog ate the cake.
It was America’s most celebrated case of witchcraft trials, although some took place elsewhere in the colonies. It has been immortalized in Arthur Miller’s 1953 play, “The Crucible,” which presented a fictionalized account, and the Salem cases have featured in several books and movies. One reason for the fascination is that they took place on a borderline between a theology-dominated medieval world and a more rational modern scientific one.
The episode is widely cited as a case of mass hysteria, warning us of the dangers of being carried along on a wave of superstition and false accusations. It has also been used to point to the dangers of religious extremism in isolated communities, and to the consequences of abandoning due process in the interest of saving society from perceived threats.
The trials have been compared to the investigations conducted by Senator McCarthy in the early 1950s, and the hearings conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. While Soviet records now show that there were active Communist spies and subversives in the US at the time, the hearings amounted to mass persecution of people who had dabbled in youth with left-wing politics. Arthur Miller’s play was almost certainly an allegory of this.
More recently on social media, a lynch mob can rapidly form with Salem-style mass hysteria, denouncing the “crimes” of “cultural appropriation,” “triggering,” “misogyny,” “neo-colonialism,” “transphobia,” and various other “offences” that make people feel ”unsafe,” often based on the flimsiest of evidence, perhaps of youthful remarks made years ago. People don’t tend to get executed for this type of witchcraft these days, but jobs can be lost and careers destroyed, often based just on an accusation rather than a conviction. The Salem episode still has much to teach us.
The lighthouse never justified state intervention
Lighthouses are the textbook example of a “public good”: goods that are socially beneficial but that free markets under-provide.
The narrative goes that because everyone can see the light that they emanate but the producer of the light cannot see who consumes the light it is impossible to charge for the service. This leads to the free-rider problem: it is possible to benefit from the provision of lighthouses but avoid paying, leading to under provision. Therefore, the state must step in to build lighthouses. which is socially beneficial because they reduce the number of shipwrecks.
This is a nice theoretical story told by many introductory economics lecturers. But the historical experience shows that lighthouses are not in fact a public good.
Beginning with Ronald Coase, economists have objected to the lighthouse example. Coase pointed out that in pre-19th century Britain most lighthouses were provided privately. Other economists more recently pointed out that most lighthouses in Tokugawa Japan were privately constructed and operated. During the 18th century, many of the lighthouses of colonial America were privately built. These works suggested that, even if they were public goods, lighthouses could be privately provided.
However, these works never considered the possibility that lighthouses are not public goods. There are many historical examples of rudimentary lighthouses organised by shepherds or farmers during the off-season or by local taverns close to the seaside. These lighthouses, some of which are mentioned in sources such as Homer’s Iliad, have been lost to history because they were simple. They were unlike the towering edifices constructed by kings which have been left to weather the passage of time. History has only left us the state-constructed ones to observe physically. Mentions in old books are all that we have for the more rudimentary ones.
Yet, these more rudimentary lighthouses were economically relevant. Many sources concerned with the history of navigation point out that those who operated these lighthouses were using them to signal their offering of services as pilots to ship captains unfamiliar with local waters. For these local individuals who were familiar with the surrounding waters, these lighthouses operated as directional pilotage stations from which they could wait for clients rather than sail around in the hope of finding a client. The lighthouse was a complement to the services of pilots. More importantly, it made them more efficient as pilots because they could also use the lighthouse to better guide ships to port. In fact, even after lighthouses were fully nationalised by governments, they continued to frequently act as pilotage stations suggesting that even government-entities were aware of the possibility of bundling the two.
So why was there so little private provision of lighthouses in history? The reason is that pilots were one of the first trades in medieval Europe to organise and push for the formation of guilds that restricted access to the piloting trade. The first guilds faced important pushbacks from the providers of the rudimentary lighthouses who acted as pilots. However, they were gradually able to restrict entry in pilotage which, while increasing income for pilots, increased prices for shipowners (through a reduction in competition). In essence, the creation of a pilotage cartel reduced the supply of pilots which meant that the supply of lighthouses (which was jointly supplied) was also reduced. Had governments not conferred legal rights to restrict competition, there would have been more pilots and more lighthouses.
As such, the question is not why there were so few private lighthouses but why do we find so many. The best entrepreneurial option, the bundling of two services, recognised as the most efficient manner to provide lighthouse services, was legally restricted. This left entrepreneurs with “second best” options such as using subscriptions before provision (or lotteries which served the same end) or social ostracism of free riders. The fact that there was considerable private provision of lighthouses in this context of being constrained to use second-best solutions is an astounding one.
It is ahistorical to claim that lighthouse are an example of a public good that markets would fail to provide. The free market was perfectly capable of providing lighthouses and was only prevented by excessive government regulation.
Vincent Geloso is assistant professor of economics at King’s University College (London, Ontario)
The Observer Is more than usually confused on the subject of climate change
The costs of doing something about climate change versus the costs of not is a subject that has been well hashed over in the Stern Review and the work of William Nordhaus. No point in revisiting all of that here. However, The Observer manages to get itself more than usually confused over the subject in the business editorial.
The idea is that we should strive ahead to be a zero carbon society and economy because we’ll create vast profits from having done so:
But the spin-off economic benefits of being in the vanguard of decarbonisation are potentially enormous. The countries that move first to develop green technologies will reap monopoly profits until such time as their rivals catch up.
That’s not quite how it’s working out already. Britain installs a large number of solar panels - too many for a country so far north perhaps - but not one single solar cell is made in Britain. It’s difficult to have world leadership in the manufacturing of a technology when you don’t actually do the manufacture. To be world leader in solar panel installation might be a nice green badge to wear on the Scout’s uniform but being able to nail things to the roof is not what international monopolies are built of. We seem to import our windmills from Denmark and such places. And so on.
But even to think along such lines is to be making a category error. For while it might be true that government policy encourages the development and deployment of such technologies it’s not actually government, nor the country, that does or will own them. They do belong and will belong to the private sector economic actors who develop them.
Perhaps Drax will solve the thorny problem of carbon capture without expending so much energy doing the capturing as to make the process economic. Unlikely but still - that process will belong to Drax, not GB PLC.
That’s not the only error of course. For British companies to be able to extract monopoly profits from foreigners means that they must have actual monopolies. Which means that they’ll have a monopoly over their technologies here in the UK too, extracting monopoly profits from our hides. Which isn’t the point nor the policy at all, is it?
There’re unlikely to be monopoly profits from going green, they wouldn’t belong to the nation that suffered the costs and even if there were we’d be working as hard as we could to break the monopoly for fear of the costs such would extract from us. Meaning that the promise of global monopoly profits from going green isn’t all that alluring a prospect, doesn’t it?
Sorry John, it is socialism and it has failed
John McDonnell recently stated that Chavista Venezuela and communist Cuba, were “never socialism.” In this denial he is contradicting himself, having declared as recently as 2014 that Chavista Venezuela was “socialism in action.” McDonnell has long praised Chavez, saying that he “lit a spark that really started a firebrand…Venezuela and the Bolivarian Revolution became an item on the agenda for all socialists…here you had the contrast between capitalism in crisis and socialism in action”.
As a Venezuelan who has lived the bulk of his life in Venezuela before coming to Britain, the nature of the system in Venezuela and whether it is worthy of support from foreign politicians like Mr McDonnell are important questions. International support from sympathetic politicians and the states some of them control is one of the reasons that the regime has been able to survive for as long as it has.
Have we in Venezuela experienced socialism and has it worked? Let’s look at some of the individual policies we have experienced. Firstly, nationalisation. It seems clear that nationalisation is a socialist policy. It was defined as the “common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange” in the original clause four of the Labour Party constitution and further defined as ‘public ownership’ in Labour’s 1945 election manifesto. Nationalisation was one of Chavez’s most significant economic policies, and he proceeded to nationalise not only the ‘commanding heights’ of the Venezuelan economy, but many other assets too, often refusing to compensate the owners of the property that he confiscated.
Let me provide a few examples:
The steel industry was nationalised. The biggest steel company, Sidor, produced 4.3 million tonnes of steel a year before it was expropriated by Chavez in 2008 and handed over to an allied member of the military. By 2014 its production was less than 700,000 tonnes per annum. In March 2019 Sidor closed its doors for the last time and ceased production permanently. 13,000 employees lost their jobs.
The Venezuelan assets of the four major private cement companies were expropriated by Chavez, and the assets were integrated into one state company, the Socialist Cement Corporation, which controlled 90% of cement production. By 2015 production had fallen by 42% and today cement is barely available in Venezuela, with resulting mass unemployment in the construction sector. Utilities have also been nationalised and now there are constant power cuts (of over 10 hours a day in my home city), a lack of running water to most dwellings and extraordinarily poor telecommunications service.
Agricultural land was also expropriated under a Land Law introduced by Chavez in 2001. Seized estates were turned over to co-operatives and regime supporters without the technical know-how, management skills and capital necessary to run them. By 2010, the government had seized 20% of all agricultural land. Consequently the remaining private farmers do not invest in their farms for fear of expropriation and food production has collapsed.
Secondly, price controls, a common feature of socialist economies. Any products made by the remaining private companies are subject to price controls, which usually means they operate at a loss. The 2014 ‘Law on Organic Prices’ created the National Superintendency for the Defence of Socioeconomic Rights (Sundde), responsible for the “consolidation of the Socialist economic order.” With inflation at around 1.3 million%, prices have to change constantly if a business wants to survive. But under the law an inspector can immediately occupy or shutdown an establishment if he accuses it of non-compliance. In 2017 alone, there were 9,341 inspections which resulted in 3 outright expropriations, 12 shutdowns, 10 occupations, 186 confiscations, and 1,189 cases of state-encouraged looting.
The combination of nationalisation and price controls have led to a collapse in domestic production, which the regime sought to compensate for by increasing imports, which more than doubled in per capita terms between 2000 and 2012. It financed this with over a decade of unsustainable borrowing. Between 2002 and 2016 Venezuela increased its debt burden by a factor of 6. Venezuela’s foreign debt now equals more than 5 years’ worth of exports, the worst ratio of any country. Now the regime can no longer finance imports, which explains the widespread hunger and malnutrition. Excessive borrowing is not an inherent feature of socialism, but it does seem to follow from the phantom of abundant resources and to be a by-product when socialist economies are no longer able to sustain themselves.
Fourthly, state-directed investment. Chavez established large state investment banks and funds, notably BANDES and FONDEN, through which he channelled huge resources. Such organisations are commonly put in place by socialist governments, for example the National Enterprise Board set up by the Labour government in 1975 to extend state ownership of industry. By 2012 FONDEN accounted for a third of all investment in Venezuela and half of public investment, having taken in some $100 billion of Venezuela’s oil revenue over the previous seven years. What happened to all the money is unclear. Many FONDEN projects never started or were half-completed.
Fifthly, centralisation of power in the hands of the ruling socialist party, a feature of many but not all socialist countries. Chavez put the media and judiciary under state control, getting rid of media outlets and judges that he did not like and packing the supreme court with his cronies. He took control of the once independent electoral commission and financed his party’s election campaigns from public funds.
Mr. McDonnell’s line has been that Chavez was a great socialist, but Venezuela “took a wrong turn when Chávez went and I think unfortunately since then, I don’t think they have been following the socialist policies that Chávez developed. And as a result of that they’re experiencing problems.”
The socialist policies were indeed introduced by Chavez and these caused Venezuela’s economic collapse. His hand-picked successor Maduro has not changed any of these policies but faithfully continued them.
Finally, and turning to a qualifiedly political aspect, socialist ideology has played a fundamental role in setting political goals and interpreting concrete historical events. Most importantly, to justify the actions of the regime and its costs.
Today, when the revolution results in repression, misery, oppression and crime, socialist ideology is used to justify the outrages of the regime: The people responsible for the political and humanitarian catastrophe – began by Chavez and completed by his followers – turn to socialist ideology to justify the chaos and entrench themselves in the decision to pay any cost to maintain their power.
Venezuelans today immensely regret the mistake they made believing Chavez’s promises of a perfect future under socialism – consider all those people who fall under the spell of an advertisement promising magical results; they end up regretting it.
Chavista policies and socialist ideology have been an unmitigated disaster for my country and I would strongly advise against any attempt to introduce them here.
The launch of the USS George Washington
June 9th, 1959, was a significant date in the history of the Cold War, because it was on that day that the USS George Washington was launched. The Soviet Union had acquired an early lead in long range missiles, largely because they gave it huge priority and spent a large proportion of the budget on their military. The US response was to develop a new technology, the submarine launched ballistic missile. The Polaris nuclear-armed missile would pop to the surface before its rocket motor ignited to send it to its target.
Rather than wait until new submarines designed to carry it could be built, the US Navy basically inserted a new 130ft missile section into the hull of an attack submarine under construction. Admiral Hyman Rickover played a key part in this move, which saw the Polaris system combat ready at least two years before it would otherwise have been. The submarine was renamed the George Washington, and seven months later lest-fired two Polaris missiles while submerged. Despite all their effort and financial sacrifice, the Soviet advantage was nullified because no first strike by them could now eliminate the West’s retaliatory response.
The US did this again when the Soviet’s deployed their SS20 medium range missiles. Launched from trucks hidden in forests, they again threatened a strategic advantage, but again the US responded with a technological leap in the shape of the Ground Launched Cruise Missile and the Pershing II. The BGM-109 GLCM (called “glickum” after its initials) was a small, pilotless flying machine, powered by a turbofan engine. The point was that, while subsonic, it flew so low that it was undetectable, and had a sophisticated guidance system that allowed it to veer around obstacles and fly to within metres of its target with its single nuclear warhead. Both weapons were deployed in Europe, and led the Soviets to sign the agreement limiting medium range missiles. Again, new technology had nullified their advantage.
When the US announced the Strategic Defence Initiative, dubbed “Star Wars,” it again threatened a technological leap that would render the Soviet missile arsenal obsolete. Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB station head who was an undercover Western agent, reported that the Soviets could not compete technologically or financially with such a project, and were determined to reach an agreement with the US that specifically prevented it. When President Reagan refused to abandon the project, the Soviets folded, and the Iron Curtain came down. But it was the launch of the USS George Washington 60 years ago that started the process that led there.