Corruption
Why Kemi Badenoch was wrong about the Glorious Revolution
It is a week or so ago now that Kemi Badenoch claimed that it was wrong to suggest that the wealth of the UK was founded on the basis of its slave-owning and imperial past. She did, instead, suggest that the foundations of modern British wealth could be found in the relationships embedded in the Glorious Revolution that ended the rule of the Stuarts and brought William and Mary to the throne in 1688.
In a post I published here I expressed my considerable doubt about this claim, with reasons given.
In response a commentator named Steve Cushion offered a much more detailed analysis. He has, since then, explained that this comes from academic research that he has been undertaking on behalf of Caribbean Labour Solidarity, who have published his work here.
I did, however, feel it worth promoting both that paper and his original comment as a weekend read on the blog, just to show how utterly unfounded is the claim made by people like Badenoch.
This is the comment that he posted:
A different explanation of the “Glorious Revolution”
The Royal African Company, which had a monopoly on the trafficking of enslaved Africans, acted as a means for the Stuart royal family, Charles II and James II, to finance their dictatorial rule without Parliamentary sanction, while personally enriching themselves and their associates and backers from the City of London. However, denying other City of London businessmen, as well as traders based in other cities, access to this profitable trade was one of the reasons the increasingly powerful capitalist class in England turned against Catholic King James II. It led to their support for the 1688 invasion from the Netherlands, led by Protestant William of Orange and James’s daughter Mary Stuart, resulting in the coup d’état known as the Glorious Revolution. Opposition to the monopoly of the Royal African Company also came from the owners of the slave plantations in the West Indies, whose increased wealth enabled them to buy growing influence in the British Parliament. The Royal African Company could not supply enough enslaved labourers to meet the West Indian landowners’ requirements for the growing slave-based economy. At the same time, restricting the numbers shipped by the Company enabled it to exploit its monopoly to force up the price of enslaved Africans.
Pressure from those businessmen excluded from the trade, as well as the demands of the West Indian plantation owners for ever increasing supplies of enslaved labour, forced Parliament to pass the Trade with Africa Act 1697. This opened the slave trade to all English merchants who paid a ten per cent levy to the Company.
Colonial commerce, including the business of slavery, was one of the driving forces of the capitalist economy from its earliest manifestation, encouraging the expansion of a manufacturing economy. Exports from Britain accounted for around half of all industrial production in the 18th century. Inikori tells us that, in 1770, the slave trade and the plantation economy furnished as much as fifty-five percent of gross fixed capital formation investment in Great Britain.
The increased rate of industrial growth based on exports depended on purchasing power generated by the British West Indies. Demand stemming from Africa, the Caribbean and North America based on the sugar industry was responsible for more than half of the growth of English exports in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. The business of slavery greatly contributed to increasing investment in the British Empire, particularly the construction of the infrastructure that such trade required. Additionally the re-export of sugar to the Europe brought enormous profits. Half of the non-agricultural workforce in England and Wales was employed in production for export, accounting for much of the growth in manufacturing output.
Based on: Patrick K. O’Brien and Stanley L. Engerman, “Exports and the growth of the British economy from the Glorious Revolution to the Peace of Amiens in Barbara Solow (ed.), Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
This is where Tory laws on protest might lead
This is how the US police treat professors who ask what they are doing on the campus where that professor teaches:
It is worth watching this CNN video from the moment Emory Econ Professor @CarolineFohlin came across the violent arrest of a protester on campus and asked the police, with shock, "What are you doing?" That's all that prompted an officer to hurl her to the ground and handcuff her. https://t.co/QKNRqOoIiS pic.twitter.com/3wzSIOcD6U
— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) April 26, 2024
I have little doubt such behaviour will be copied here in due course.
Labour has supported Tory laws on protest. They give me no hope that anything will change.
Penalties on carers make clear that we are being governed by people who do not care
As the Guardian has noted:
New figures show more than 150,000 unpaid carers are now facing huge fines for minor rule breaches, as MPs, charities and campaigners demanded an immediate amnesty.
They added:
The Guardian can reveal 156,000 unpaid carers are repaying severe penalties – in some cases tens of thousands of pounds – for often unwittingly overstepping the £151-a-week earnings limit while caring for a loved one.
11,600 carers hit by the penalties are paying back sums of more than £5,000. About one in five unpaid carers in work breached the strict weekly earnings limit last year, an illustration, campaigners say, of a broken system.
The last point is the key one. Of course, benefits have to be limited as to who can claim them. But benefits also have to recognise the realities of life - where rigid control of everything that happens within chaotic real-world situations - as the lives of carers usually are - cannot be controlled. That is most especially true when care-giving is the absolute and necessary priority of those providing it.
A system that does not provide for that is callous.
A penalty system that imposes costs way in excess of the loss suffered by the government, as this one does, is beyond callous.
Creating the capacity to pursue claims that impose poverty when the object of this benefit was to relieve it is indicative of a mindset that has lost touch with reality.
Of course, if there is fraud, chase it, but I very much doubt that many of these claims involve fraud. They refer to simple human error. In that case, there should be forgiveness in most cases, coupled (perhaps) with repayment, at most, of a part of the sum overpaid, representing a fair tax rate (ten per cent?) on the excess earnings not declared.
But so long as this persecution continues, we are living in a country governed by a political party that shows it just does not care.
As disasters go, the Rwanda Bill knows almost no limits.
The Lords gave in to the Commons on the Safety of Rwanda Bill last night, as ultimately they must. Democracy is sovereign and if those who have been elected insist that red is blue then the Lords, having used their best endeavours to request that the Commons change its mind, must give way even though they know that what the Commons is claiming is wrong.
This is what happened last night. The Lords eventually agreed to let a Bill promoted by a corrupt and racist government pass despite all the false claims within it. Rwanda is not safe, whatever the Tories say.
The Lords are also right that the damage to the UK’s reputation as an upholder of international law will be considerable.
The law that will now be enacted is also absurd. Instead of in any way solving the problem of migration it will throw vast sums of money at token gesture deportations that will be devastating for those involved, including most of the public servants who will have to be engaged in this process. It is not even clear, as yet, that any planes will be found to undertake the necessary flights to Rwanda.
And at the end of the day, after all this waste of effort, political capital, international reputation and money, the policy will not work. The chance of being deported to Rwanda will be so small, so extraordinary is the cost of each person deported and so limited is the capacity to actually secure agreement for anyone to leave, that the deterrent effect on those seeking to cross the Channel will be precisely zero. The boats will not be stopped, and that was the aim, racist as it always was.
So, what has been achieved by the Tories? They have proved that they are racist, vindictive, callous and straightforwardly cruel.
They have evidenced that the truth does not matter to them, and nor does the rule of law.
They have delivered overwhelming evidence of their ability to waste public funds when it suits them.
Most of all, they have shown that they are liars. Rwanda is not safe, even if they have passed a law saying it is, contrary to all the evidence.
So, electorally I think this also backfires for them. As disasters go, this one knows almost no limits.
The absurdity was apparent in comments by Tim Loughton MP on Sky last night. His claim was that we must have somewhere to send people who came to the UK who we decide are not refugees but who could not be returned to their country of origin because they would be refused entry there or they would be harmed if they did return. In other words, they are undoubtedly refugees with a right to asylum but we just do not want them, which contravenes international law. He then wanted them sent to Rwanda, with a dubious recent history on this issue.
You could not make such absurd claims up, but he offered then as if he was sincere. If he was then he also proved he will be doing politics a public service at the next election by standing down. In the kindest possible comment I can offer, let me suggest that he clearly is unable to construct coherent thoughts.
And meanwhile, some poor refugees will suffer the most inhumane treatment by this government. It is my hope that lawyers will still be able to find ways to obstruct their evil desires. What else is Common Law for?
US refuses to say it won’t kill Assange
Wikileaks journalist remains imprisoned as US continues to pursue discredited extradition case – and refusal to give binding guarantee would result in his immediate release if UK justice system was fit for purpose
The US has refused to give a specific, binding guarantee to a UK court that it will not execute journalist and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Assange has been held for years in solitary confinement in Belmarsh prison while he fights the US government’s attempt to extradite him so it can imprison him for years beyond his lifespan, after Assange exposed war crimes in Iraq by the US military.
The case should have been laughed out of court three years ago, when the main US witness admitted he had been lying all along in his claim that Assange induced him to hack US systems. Instead, Assange has been submitted to what former UN Special Rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer described as sustained psychological torture – and still faces the likelihood of imprisonment for more than a century.
His recent appeal was adjourned to give the US time to affirm properly that it would not kill him if he was extradited, a sick joke when there has been longstanding evidence of US plans to murder him outside the US.
Incredibly, the High Court has refused to admit fresh evidence of CIA plots to kidnap or kill Julian Assange.
The judges say the rationale for kidnapping or killing Assange would be removed if he is extradited, and the evidence is thus not worth consideration.
Read that again. pic.twitter.com/PqwJIg4yAn— Declassified UK (@declassifiedUK) March 26, 2024
The judges even refused to admit fresh evidence of the US’s plans to assassinate Assange, instead offering the US another opportunity to have him in their hands if they would promise not to put him to death. The US.
But Assange’s wife Stella has revealed that the US has refused to say that it will not kill him and has offered only a boilerplate statement about the death penalty, while denying Assange the free speech protections it would offer to any US citizen:
The United States has issued a non-assurance in relation to the First Amendment, and a standard assurance in relation to the death penalty.
It makes no undertaking to withdraw the prosecution’s previous assertion that Julian has no First Amendment rights because he is not a U.S citizen. Instead, the US has limited itself to blatant weasel words claiming that Julian can “seek to raise” the First Amendment if extradited.
The diplomatic note does nothing to relieve our family’s extreme distress about his future – his grim expectation of spending the rest of his life in isolation in US prison for publishing award-winning journalism.
The Biden Administration must drop this dangerous prosecution before it is too late.
The US statement says the death penalty will be ‘neither sought nor imposed’, but this is non-binding and meaningless given its previous attempts to kill him. The refusal to guarantee there will be no death penalty in Assange’s specific case should mean under UK and European human rights laws that the extradition is immediately refused by the UK court and Assange should already be free. Even if the assurances had been given, the likelihood that the US’s treatment of Assange would lead to his death should be enough to quash the bid.
The fact that he is not yet free of the threat of extradition, let alone walking around in the freedom he should have, is a damning indictment of the state of UK justice and democracy.
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Rishi Sunak is to blame for the inability of millions to work
Rishi Sunak has launched am attack on what he calls ‘the sick note culture’. I am, quite frankly, appalled.
Sunak is one of the richest men in the country. He has admitted that his family uses a private GP, let alone private healthcare for more complicated issues.
He is protected by privilege and wealth from the stresses that impact millions of people in the UK.
The possibility that a person might suffer stress as a consequence of their inability to work out where their child’s next meal might come from, or how they might keep a roof over their head, or how they might provide childcare when they go to their third job, which they have to take to meet the extraordinary increases in the cost of living imposed upon them by the Bank of England, or that they might be racked with guilt about their simple inability to provide for those about whom they care, is, I am quite certain, beyond his comprehension.
More than that, I doubt that he has even thought about the need to imagine it. In that case, of course he cannot see why those things that he calls the ‘ordinary stresses and strains’ of life might become, in themselves, totally incapacitating. It takes callousness on a considerable scale for anyone in his position to describe them as such, but that is what he has done.
Worse than that, fourteen years of Tory rule have created the healthcare crisis that we have.
Let’s leave aside the underfunding of the NHS, where funds provided have been insufficient to ensure that demand, not least for mental health services, can be met.
Let’s also leave aside the deliberate attack on the credibility and work ethic of NHS staff since 2021, in which he has played such a major role. Instead, let me just draw attention to other critical factors.
First, there is Covid. Sunak is a key player in the collective denial of the impact of this disease by his government and its predecessors since Boris Johnson decided to claim that its impact had effectively ceased from 2021 onwards.
That claim is complete nonsense. Not only do lots of people still get Covid, but it is as debilitating as ever, in many cases significantly threatening health well-being.
Covid is also a major secondary health risk. Increases in related illnesses, and in particular cardiac-related disease, are significant. The government is trying to pretend that none of this is happening.
Nor are they taking necessary action. For example,they are still doing nothing to provide a guarantee of clean air which is a precondition of good health. It could do that. Moreover, it has been shown that if it did so in school classrooms, where the spread of this disease is so easy, not only would we get major healthcare benefits, but the rate of learning amongst children would increase dramatically, improving education performance across the board. But his government does nothing, because it does not care.
Secondly, the age to which people are expected to work is now increasing. I might be in the fortunate position of being in good health and able to work to the capacity that I have delivered for many years at nominal retirement age, but I am well aware that this really is not normal. Vast numbers of people from their 50s onwards struggle with all sorts of well-being issues related to health that reduce their capacity to work, and too many employers know this and refuse to provide opportunity for those of older age.
Third, Sunak’s government has done nothing whatsoever to address the crises of diabetes, where the type two variant of this disease is entirely treatable. However, that is only possible if major changes in diet are made. This does, in particular, require dramatic reduction in the intake of sugar among the population as a whole, and a significant reduction in the consumption of ultra-processed foods. There is, nothing that could increase health in this country more than doing that, reducing both obesity related illnesses and type two diabetes hospital admissions as a result. Despite this, and despite the fact that this has been known for a very long time, his government has absolutely refused to address this problem. Instead, his health secretary is actually married to the boss of British Sugar. You could hardly make that up.
Then there is the assault on employment rights that this government encouraged. Its goal of a so-called ‘flexible workforce’ has been achieved at the cost of an enormous increase in insecurity for the majority of people in the country, who have suffered a reduction in their economic security as a consequence, giving rise to an increase in their stress. This now seems to have transferred into a widespread inability to work, so disabling is it.
There are, I am sure, other factors in play. But, these are sufficient to make it clear that if there is a responsibility for sickness in the UK then that belongs to Rishi Sunak and his predecessors and his colleagues in office since 2010. There is, quite literally, no one else to blame.
Badenoch’s spinning a totally fabricated yarn about the origins of the UK’s wealth
Kemi Badenoch was reported by the Guardian yesterday to have said:
It worries me when I hear people talk about wealth and success in the UK as being down to colonialism or imperialism or white privilege or whatever.
They added:
Instead, she said the Glorious Revolution of 1688 – which led to the development of the UK constitution and solidified the role of parliament – should be credited for providing the kind of economic certainty that paved the way for the Industrial Revolution.
As I said in the tweet that I issued in response:
There is nonsense, bullshit, fabrication and then whatever it is that Kemi Badenoch has to say on any subject.
If I failed to hide my contempt, I do not apologise.
I almost felt like asking on Twitter “Whatever did the Glorious Revolution do for you?“ Apart from the suppression of Catholicism, the creation of the Bank of England, the institution of the national debt, the imposition of a monarch who believed in the importance of the navy, largely as a weapon for imperialist, colonialist inspired territorial expansion, and who paved the way for the subjection of Scotland to the whim of the English, what did the Glorious Revolution do for you, after all?
The one thing I think we can say with confidence is that it did not deliver the industrial revolution.
It did however fuel demand for income to fund royal fantasies and foibles that most definitely required the exploitation of colonies in the USA, the Caribbean, West Africa and elsewhere.
So is Badenoch wrong? In my opinion, she is not just wrong, but is actively misrepresenting the truth.
Why would she do that? Partly because she does, for her own reasons, wish to deny Britain’s racist past, and present, because her denial of that racism is itself racist, in my opinion.
As significantly, she also wants to deny the role of monopoly-based rentier capitalism and exploitation as the common foundations of the wealth of this country.
She is, instead, pretending that entrepreneurial activity did deliver that wealth. But that is largely untrue. For example, those canal and coal pioneers who, if anyone did, started the industrial revolution later in the 18th century were able to do so on the basis of land ownership, wealth and property, all of which was supported by extraction of profits resulting from privilege, patronage, expropriation, rents and exploitation. Some of that undoubtedly would have been derived from colonial activity.
In that case Badenoch’s commentary does not just fail; it stinks because she is denying the truth and presenting a wholly false, politically inspired narrative that is unsupportable by evidence. But when did someone like her worry about things like that?
The UK’s missing companies
I posted this video on YouTube and elsewhere this morning:
In case the video does not show, the link is here.
The transcript is:
We do not know what at least half the companies in the UK are doing, which is absolutely staggering when those companies may exist to undertake fraud and abuse us.
Why is this possible? Well, because it is so easy to form companies in the UK. You don't even have to physically sign a form to pay £12, get Companies House to incorporate your company, and then you have what is in effect licensed identity theft, which you can hide behind to undertake fraudulent activity, collect money, trade without ever having any intention of telling the Revenue that you are, not pay your taxes, then throw your company away at the end of a year or so, and form a new one.
How do I know this is happening? Well, because, the data from Companies House shows it. There are 5.3 million companies in the UK at the time that I'm recording this. Of those, half a million are being got rid of at the moment – meaning nearly 10 per cent of all companies in the UK are currently in the course of being dissolved - many of them by Companies House because they've lost touch with the companies in question. Many more will be because they paid £10 to say they don't trade any more, and could they please be struck off? and please don't ask any questions because that's, in effect, what happens. We are literally letting these companies trade without telling HM Revenue and Customs.
How do I know that? Well, in the last year for which we've got data, HMRC only got corporation tax returns from three million companies of whom one quarter weren't trading. So that leaves only 2. 2 million or so companies which were actually declaring that they had positive income, of which only 1.5 million said they were actually making profits. About 160,000 said they were making losses, and the rest said they were getting other income like interest, rents, or dividends, for example as companies within groups. But what we do, therefore, know is that the majority of the companies in the UK aren't actually paying any tax at all, and you have to ask why they exist.
I know the answer to some extent. I've been a director of a company that never traded because it existed to protect the name of a website. So, yes, that's possible. But those companies should be filing tax returns. They should also be filing full accounts, which I admit Companies House is now beginning to address.
But they're not getting the data to HM Revenue and Customs. There are two ways to get around this. One is to make directors of companies that don't declare their tax liabilities personally responsible for the taxes they evade. It would be simple, straightforward, and fair to do that. After all, they're the people who are cheating.
Secondly, get our banks to tell HM Revenue and Customs every year which companies in this country they supply services to, who runs them, and tell HM Revenue and Customs how much they bank for that company and what the bank balance was at the end of the year. Then we'd know which companies who are not declaring their income need to be chased and who might be liable for the money that's owed.
We could do that.
If we did, we'd have fair competition, we'd have fairer taxation, and we'd stop this criminogenic environment existing which is undermining the fair trading of honest people in the UK. And we'd have a more vibrant economy as a result.
So why aren't we doing it? I just don't know because it would pay for a better society in every way that I can imagine.
There is much more on this in the Taxing Wealth Report 2024.
Share buybacks
Or what in the US is called ‘stock’ buybacks are, as Professor Robert Reich suggests below in this clip of just over two minutes, intimately involved in why Chief Executives are paid so much, and workers, so little: Indeed the evidence would seem to be that buybacks started first in the UK and the idea... Read more