Britain needs hard money, hard Brexit

On June 8, Theresa May’s Conservatives came close to losing an election they should have won easily. The commentariat, all of whom like the Brussels bureaucrats and love the Brussels restaurants, claimed she had lost because of her firmness on Brexit and the Tories’ excessive devotion to fiscal austerity. Actually the Tories, not notably devoted to fiscal austerity, lost because they have tolerated the Bank of England’s appalling monetary sloppiness, with its devastating effect on the economy and on house prices. A hard Brexit and hard money are now needed to right the ship.

May is not a good campaigner, though she has other virtues, and she did not run a good campaign. However, the election result if looked at appraisingly was not a disaster; the Conservatives lost only a net 13 seats, and picked up twelve glorious new seats in Scotland, cementing the Union for at least the next decade or so. Almost all the parts of Scotland one would conceivably like to visit are now Conservative, ending a troubling period when some of the most beautiful places in the world were represented by either socialists or Scottish Nationalists (also in practice socialist.) Aesthetically, one really doesn’t care how Glasgow votes.

If May had lost another six seats, the result would have been a true disaster as the Conservatives would have been unable to form a government, but she didn’t; with ten staunch Democratic Unionists from Ulster she has a solid majority. Given that seven Sinn Fein MPs will not take their seat and the Speaker does not vote, and assuming the Independent Unionist Sylvia, Lady Hermon votes with the opposition, as do the LibDems, Greens and Nationalists, the vote in a full House vote of confidence would be 327 votes to 315. All May has to do is avoid losing too many by-elections.

The reason for the Conservatives’ unexpectedly poor result can be clearly seen when we examine individual constituencies which swung strongly to Labour or unexpectedly to the Conservatives, in an election in which swings differed markedly from region to region and even from seat to seat. One factor alone explains the poor Tory performance and, contrary to media commentary, it is not Brexit, which tended to push voters towards the Conservatives. It is house prices.

Since the middle 1990s, and especially since 2008, the Bank of England has followed an exceptionally loose monetary policy, with interest rates close to zero for almost a decade. This has tracked monetary policy in other countries, notably the United States under Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, but also Japan and more recently the Eurozone.

The policy, reinforced by Mark Carney since he took over as Bank of England Governor in 2013, has had two unfortunate economic effects everywhere it has been tried. It has caused a massive misallocation of capital, which has pushed productivity growth far below historic levels all over the rich world (less than 0.2% per annum since 2008 in Britain.) Second, and most especially in Britain, it has caused an explosion in house prices to levels completely unaffordable by anybody under 40, or who did not buy their house a quarter-century ago.

Apart from Kensington and Chelsea, surely a special case with average house prices around £2 million, you can look at another London Conservative loss, Croydon Central. Here the average house price was a relatively affordable £380,000 in 2016 – but this was up a full 26% in the preceding two years. The result was a 5.2% swing to Labour and another lost Conservative seat. Again, the problem wasn’t London’s Remain vote; there was a 3% swing to Labour in 2015; it was the excessively high level of house prices compared to incomes, even in scruffy Croydon.

In 2016 London was a special case in the Brexit referendum, but in 2017 it wasn’t a special case on house prices and electoral swings to Labour. Canterbury, Labour’s most famous seat gain, saw a house price rise of 21% between 2014 and 2016 and a 10% swing to Labour. Brighton Kemptown, another big Labour gain with a 10,000 majority and an 11% swing, saw house prices up 20% between 2014 and 2016. Bath, a surprise Conservative loss to the Liberal Democrats on a 10% swing, saw house prices rise 23% between 2014 and 2016. In all these constituencies, as a result of the Bank of England’s lunatic monetary policies, house prices had risen by more than 20% in two years, dashing the hopes of younger people for home ownership. No wonder these places saw a massive increase in youth turnout against the Tories.

Turn it around, and look at the constituencies where the Tories won from Labour, against the national trend (ignore Scotland, where special factors were at work.) In Mansfield, home of an unexpected Conservative victory with a 7% swing, house prices rose only 10% in 2014-16 – and only averaged an affordable £145,000 in 2016, less than half Bath or Brighton. Stoke on Trent South, with average prices up 12% in 2014-16 to a level 10% below Mansfield, saw another Conservative gain with a 4% swing. Walsall North, slightly more expensive but with only a 6% house price rise in 2014-16, was a Conservative gain with a 6% swing.

In summary, the Conservatives won marginal seats where house prices were modest and price rises equally so; they lost badly to Labour in places where house prices were exorbitant and rapidly getting more so. Exorbitant house prices are almost entirely the result of a decade of near-zero interest rates; to modify a famous Sun headline: “It was Carney wot lost it.”

If May wants the Conservatives to win the next election, she must fire Carney forthwith, and find a Bank of England Governor who will push interest rates up rapidly to their natural level of around 5% (since UK inflation is currently running at 3%.) That will crash house prices, probably by as much as 75% in London, making housing once more affordable for the under-40s. This will cause a massive pro-Tory swing among younger voters, who will thank the government for their huge improvement in real living standards. It will also restore British productivity growth to its historic level of 1.5% annually, pushing up output and wages for everybody. May or a Conservative successor will need to hang on five years to outlast the inevitable economic downturn and the house price crash, but by 2022 things should be looking good.

I have previously written how the main criterion for Brexit should be that Britain regains the ability to write its own trade treaties, liberating it from the protectionist EU bureaucracy. When the referendum passed, I thought the best British negotiator would be the smooth and pleasant David Cameron, who if negotiating with the equally pleasant Donald Tusk, should be able to reach a deal satisfactory to both sides. That option is no longer on offer, partly because EU negotiating policy is being set by Michel Barnier, an abrasive Frenchman and Jean-Claude Juncker, whose antipathy to all things Anglo-American is well known. In addition, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, the leaders of Europe’s two most important political and economic powers, appear determined to make Brexit as unpleasant for Britain as possible. Therefore May, in her “bloody difficult woman” mode is ideal as Britain’s negotiator, along with the no-nonsense David Davis.

A “soft” Brexit is neither desirable nor attainable. Juncker in particular is determined to make Britain pay an “exit tax” of some 100 billion euros. Were Britain to agree to this, the government that agreed it would rightly be booted out by the electorate, to be replaced by Jeremy Corbyn, who would crash Britain’s economy. Overall therefore, an ideal outcome from the Juncker viewpoint. Hence there is probably no negotiated settlement that could be reached, short of electoral suicide. In those circumstances, no deal is indeed better than a bad deal; Britain should exit the EU in March 2019, and seek to negotiate trade agreements with the EU afterwards, when there is no question of an exit tax.

That’s not to say that there may not be some small part of the 100 billion euros that is legitimate; British lawyers of a suitably euro-skeptic frame of mind should examine the small print of the various treaties, and tell May what if any bill it is reasonable to pay.

The worst possible outcome, which I still fear, would be a British wimp-out, in which its negotiators decide that the cost of exit is simply too high, and so crawl back to Juncker and his minions asking to be let back in again. That would almost certainly be the outcome if May is replaced by the odious, untrustworthy and inept Euro-madman Kenneth Clarke, for example. Armed rebellion should be the response if this is attempted.

We must remember that the EU is not the free trading association Britain thought it had joined in 1973, but has morphed into a centralized unitary state that in authoritarianism and economic counter-productiveness increasingly resembles the late unlamented Warsaw Pact. Fortunately, this should become all too clear within the next few weeks, when Juncker’s mob sues Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to force them to take some of the Middle Eastern refugees, terrorists, and riff-raff that Merkel has so unwisely welcomed into Europe. Should that occur, I think it likely that Britain will not be alone in seeking to escape the Euro-Leviathan; it should do all it can to help its Eastern European friends join it in freedom.

The British public appears to have voted on June 8 in search of a soft option, a very common electoral failing in that country. No soft option is available in either economic or Brexit policy that will not impoverish and enslave Britain’s voters. Accordingly, May’s new government must remember Enoch Powell’s famous question to her great predecessor “the Lady herself will learn of what metal she is made” and seek to make both its monetary and Brexit policies follow his post-Falklands description: “ferrous matter of the highest quality, of exceptional tensile strength.” Only with such policies, monetary and Brexit, can success for the British people and May’s Conservatives be achieved.

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Coach Kennedy, Who Lost His Job After Praying, Makes His Case to 9th Circuit Court

Coach Joe Kennedy took his fight to be allowed to pray with his high school football players back to court this week, appealing to a bench with a liberal reputation.

“My hope is that, at the end of the day, the court will let me get back to the sidelines and back with my team,” Kennedy said in a statement after his appearance in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

In late October 2015, Kennedy lost his job with the Bremerton High School football program in Bremerton, Washington, after administrators repeatedly told the Marine veteran to stop praying on the 50-yard line.

Kennedy’s lawyers argued Monday before a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit in Tacoma, Washington, asking the judges to overturn a U.S. District Court ruling against him, also in Tacoma.

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His lawyers want the appeals court to order the Bremerton School District to stop discriminating against Kennedy based on his “brief, private religious expression” and reinstate him, the Kitsap Sun reported.

The superintendent of the Bremerton School District first told Kennedy in September 2015 that he must stop praying because the public display of religion by a public school employee could be misconstrued as the district’s endorsement of religion.

The school district said it based its decision on the Supreme Court’s 2000 ruling in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe.

Kennedy, 48, is not seeking monetary damages, saying he wants to be back on the sidelines, coaching his players, while maintaining his First Amendment rights.

In response to questions from the three judges on where the line is between private and public prayer, one of Kennedy’s lawyers, Rebekah Ricketts, said the coach never coerced students to participate in his 15- to 30-second prayer on or off the field.

The school district’s attorney, Michael Tierney, argued that teachers and coaches do have influence over students, whether subtle or not. So, Tierney said, teachers and coaches must refrain from religious expression that could be perceived as coercive, or risk violating the Establishment Clause, the Kitsap Sun reported.

The judges questioned why the school district didn’t take action earlier, since this had been Kennedy’s ongoing practice since 2008, shortly after he was hired.

Tierney said district officials had thought Kennedy was making an inspirational speech to the crowd gathered around him on the field.

The 9th Circuit has a disputed reputation as one of the most liberal courts in the nation.

If the appeals court allows the lower court’s ruling to stand it essentially will be “affirming the school district’s discrimination” and affecting “millions of Americans, especially teachers,” Jeremy Dys, senior counsel at First Liberty Institute, which represents Kennedy, said after the oral arguments.

In a telephone interview with The Daily Signal, Dys said the lower court ruling also would mean that “the Muslim teacher cannot wear her hijab, the Jewish teacher cannot wear his yarmulke, the Catholic teacher cannot wear her crucifix to work.”

“This is an overwhelming burden on the free exercise of religion by a free people in the United States that ought to be rejected,” he said.

“I just want the ability to go back out there and help these young men, and also have my constitutional rights that I fought for in the Marine Corps for 20 years,” Kennedy said in a telephone interview last year with The Daily Signal. “That’s it—it’s pretty simple.”

Prior to losing his job, Kennedy served as head coach for the junior varsity football team and assistant coach for the varsity football team for seven years.

In a video created by First Liberty Institute, Kennedy hints at his own rough childhood, and says he believes that “all the hard times I had in my life were really setting the stage for exactly this battle that I’m at right now.”

He adds: “And that’s why I really love coaching, it’s because I understand what those kids are going through.”

Kennedy says he chose to fight the legal battle because “we need to fight for our freedoms, we need to fight for the things that are right in society, and for America.”

Ryan T. Anderson, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation who studies religious liberty, told The Daily Signal in an email:

Americans do not give up their right to the free exercise of religion simply because they work for the government. Religious Americans need not become secularists anymore than secularists need to become religious in order to lend their services to our government.

Upon taking his position at Bremerton High, Kennedy previously told The Daily Signal, he made a promise to God to pray after each game for his players, for the opportunity to play, win or lose, and for his ability to coach. He did just that until 2015.

That October, First Liberty Institute sent what is called a demand letter to the school district, seeking a religious accommodation for Kennedy. When the district refused, the group filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which issued a “right to sue” letter in December 2015.

Following the District Court ruling against Kennedy, two professional football stars filed a friend-of-the-court brief on his behalf to be included in the arguments before the 9th Circuit.

One was Steve Largent, a former congressman from the state of Oklahoma and Pro Football Hall of Fame member who played for the Seattle Seahawks, the other Chad Hennings, a former Air Force pilot and defensive tackle for the Dallas Cowboys.

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The Medical Evolution of Gender

A doctor who incorrectly diagnoses patients just to keep them happy deserves not praise but rebuke.

Well-known blogger Matt Walsh recently recounted a difficult conversation with his son after he caught the lad attempting to climb over the second-floor balcony railing. It seems little Walsh Jr. thought he could be Spider-Man. Walsh writes, “I knew it was time to explain that he doesn’t really have super powers. He seemed pretty devastated by the news, but for his own health it was necessary to put an end to this particular fantasy. ‘But I want to be Spider-Man,’ he protested. ‘I know, buddy,’ I said. ‘I wish I could be Spider-Man, too, but Spider-Man is just pretend. If you try to jump over the railing like Spider-Man, you’ll get very hurt.’”

This seems a logical parenting approach: Stop the kid from jumping off a balcony and address the incorrect belief that made him think a leap was a good idea in the first place. Hardly revolutionary. But apparently, it’s radical when kids imagine themselves not a super-hero but a gender not their own.

The American Medical Association (AMA) has this week adopted policies endorsing transgenderism — despite enormous evidence of the physical, emotional and psychological harm experienced by those who fantasize themselves the opposite sex.

The Washington Free Beacon reports the AMA’s policymaking group has embraced the belief that gender is “incompletely understood as a binary selection.”

According to the official AMA statement, “Acknowledging that individuals’ gender and sexual identities do not always fit neatly into binary paradigms, delegates to the 2017 AMA Annual Meeting in Chicago took several actions that support broadening how gender identity is defined within medicine and how transgender patients are treated by society.” The group went on to state that “gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, and genotypic and phenotypic sex are not always aligned.”

As Walsh pointed out, saving someone from harm often means telling them when their beliefs and feelings don’t align with truth.

But the AMA would rather gain political points than save lives.

Indeed, the group also came out against so-called bathroom bills, claiming, “Laws and policies that restrict the use of public facilities based on biological gender can have immediate and lingering physical consequences, as well as severe mental health repercussions.” Of course, they conveniently ignore the mental health repercussions of transgenderism. Transgender and gender non-conforming adults have a suicide attempt rate of more than 40%, compared with 4.6% for the overall U.S. population.

But please, let’s talk instead about how transgender individuals can now battle suicidal thoughts in any bathroom they choose.

Sadly, this latest descent into madness shouldn’t be too surprising. As Mark Alexander has recounted in detail, the spiral from recognition to acceptance and now endorsement of self-destructive sexually deviant behaviors by the medical community has been at play for decades.

In the 1950s, the first edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) recognized homosexuality as a sociopath personality disturbance. And the 1968 DSM II was updated to classify homosexuality as a sexual deviancy.

This is significant because only by acknowledging that homosexuality and gender dysphoria are concerning and have negative consequences can people in the throes of sexual addictions and confusions be best helped. When we validate harmful behaviors, we close the door on help and hope and instead confine individuals to the statistics of higher suicide attempt rates as well as higher instances of sexually transmitted diseases, not to mention the psychological trauma of those who pursue sex changes and live to regret it.

And that’s to say nothing on the trauma suffered by family and friends of transgendered people.

Yet, amid the sexual revolution, the AMA abandoned any pretense of caring for people and instead caved to political pressure and removed homosexuality as a mental disorder in DSM III in 1973. Now, they’ve gone a step further and rejected the reality of gender entirely by basically saying it’s whatever someone fantasizes it to be.

A doctor who incorrectly diagnoses patients just to keep them happy deserves not praise but rebuke. The AMA may be congratulating itself on its progressivist acceptance of transgenderism. But the result will be thousands of people who desperately need help and instead are prodded to jump off the second-story balcony, where the fantasies they embrace will not save them.

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Let’s stop treating the young as political sages

We should be challenging the naive, unaffordable views of many under-25s, not kowtowing to them

Clare Foges

‘Respect your youngers,” tweeted the pop star Lily Allen after the shock election result driven by a high youth turnout. But have we come to respect the youngers and their opinions too much?

Recent years have involved increasing youth worship in politics. Come election time, TV producers fall over themselves to put together panels of young people to offer up vacuities about “choosing hope over fear” and other quotes they may have spotted on Instagram. Grey-beard presenters nod deferentially at every complaint offered up by youthful contributors, however inane or ill-informed (the passion of youth requires no substantiation). Millennial mouthpieces on social media rouse the tribe with talk of reclaiming their future and how dreadfully they have been let down by older generations.

Then there are the politicians engaging in something akin to dad dancing; loosening the tie to get down with the kids. Ed Miliband making a midnight visit to be interviewed by Russell Brand, Corbyn shooting the breeze with a grime artist, Theresa May grimacing her way through a Snapchat interview. You’ve got to engage with the young, see, however unstatesmanlike the process.

And since Thursday people have been falling over themselves to congratulate the younger among us for doing their democratic duty; a five-minute detour to the polling station given the same weight as going over the top at Ypres. Young people posted selfies taken after the event and wore stickers saying “I voted!” Should they get lollipops too?

Yes, an increase in turnout at any age is to be welcomed. Only 43 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds voted in 2015. Although we are yet to see the hard data, the “youthquake” this time was doubtless real. And, of course, many people born post-1990 are spectacularly well-informed, public-spirited, energetic and the rest. Yet what is galling is the veneration of youthful opinion regardless of the sense it makes; this growing idea that being under 25 confers some special sagacity that the rest of us might benefit from. A generation reared to revere the words “empowerment” and “respect” is demanding that they are empowered and their views respected.

The argument goes that because they have more decades ahead, they are the best judges of how that future might be shaped (hence the rather distasteful suggestion that oldies should have refrained from voting in the EU referendum because they’ll be dead soon). In recent days we have heard that The Youth Has Spoken, with the implication that we should jolly well sit up and listen. But should we?

Last week’s election revealed the judgment of many young voters to be as we might expect of those with relatively limited experience: hopelessly naive. They turned out in their droves for a man who became a kind of millennials’ prophet; promising to lead them out of the badlands of austerity and towards a future where everything is nicer, cheaper, or indeed free. They voted for a man who would have endangered our economy, the whisper of whose name can send the pound on a swan-dive.

There is no wisdom here, no great lesson to be learnt; just the insight that many young people rather like being offered free stuff and ask few questions about how, ultimately, that stuff is funded. It has been suggested that the great turnout of the youth vote is an argument for lowering the voting age to 16. Given who they voted for en masse, I would say it’s an argument for raising it to at least 21.

This is not to suggest that the young have no cause to desire real change. It’s true that many have it hard: qualifications that don’t get you anywhere, work that is tenuous, homes that are impossible to afford. Serious action on these fronts would be welcome, within the constraints of our debt-laden public purse.

Yet the passionate sense of grievance among many young people — that theirs is a generation uniquely betrayed by the generations above — should not simply be “listened to” as though it were true; it must be robustly challenged. The phrase “intergenerational unfairness” has a lot to answer for, conjuring up a picture of the baby boomers and Generation Xers scrabbling up the ladder of opportunity and booting those below in the face. It hasn’t happened like that. Those older generations simply took whatever chances were on offer, from £50,000 family homes to university grants, and this does not make them the deniers of opportunity for young people today.

What should be challenged too is the youthful expectation of a free lunch. For instance, many 18 to 24-year-olds — reared on the language of rights — believe it their right to receive a free university education, as Corbyn exploited so successfully. What must be communicated to young people is not congratulations for backing wish-list politics but the reality that public resources are finite.

Wishing for a better world is nothing to be derided, and there is always something appealing about youthful enthusiasm. As Churchill reputedly said; “If you are not a liberal at 25 you have no heart.” But when it comes to the way we run our country, we have a duty not to kowtow to youthful dreaming but to confront some of the myths that underpin it. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Socialism is a proven disaster. These might not make for inspiring Facebook posts but they have the virtue of being the truth.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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