William Shepherd

I was woken up around five o’clock by a rustling in the oven. Since ovens do not normally rustle there had to be some outside agency at work. There was. My houseboat guest was busy trying to remove a bag of bread from beneath the lid of my lecreuset...placed in the oven to ensure that this event did not occur. The mouse was unsuccessful. This was no surprise as Le Creuset manufactures the finest enamelled cast iron cookware in then world so is mouse-resistant. According to the website Le Creuset pots are colourful, versatile, energy efficient, and have great heat retention. The rest of the food onboard is in plastic containers. Le Creuset 1 - Mouse 0. Tupperware 7 - Mouse 0.

After dozing off to sleep I awoke again at seven and was in Jempsons by eight organising my day which began with the downloading of a job from Sweden at the library. The NCAB website job needs to be translated from Swedish to English to provide a base text for the Danish, Norwegian and Finnish translators to work with next week. I promised to have the English text ready by Friday evening so we have the weekend for proof-reading.

I returned to the boat at midday and lit the fire so I could work there all afternoon. At 7.15 pm Heidi picked me up for choir practice in her new car. Afterwards I had the pleasure of her company aboard Vemara until 1130 which was unexpected as I thought we were on the verge of breaking up. Now I am not so sure. We now know that we are giving a concert on Saturday 17th June 2006 of Mozart Magic. This is going to include the Flanders & Swann song Ill Wind based on one of the Mozart Horn Concertos but arranged for four parts.

Tessa Jowell, the New Labour Culture Minister living off the crumbs from Silvio Berlusconi’s table has been given a very easy ride so far. But this may change. The urban elite are more nervous than they care to admit because they are all into tax havens and money laundering themselves. Minister Jowell and her tax avoidance expert of a husband are estimated to be worth a few million pounds at the last count…most of it in property. The reality could be much higher. Who knows what they have in offshore trusts and indirectly controlled shareholdings? However there is nothing special about Minister Jowell. If there is one thing that New Labour luvvies love it is money. Here is my report on the estimated wealth of the New Labour members for Barking, Leicester West, Slough and Stevenage.

Margaret Hodge was left shares in a £60 million steel business by her daddy and is worth an estimated £5 million with a five storey house in the same Islington street as the Blairs. Patricia Hewitt’s father used to sit on the board of Quantas and is now Australia’s top civil servant. She has a home in an affluent square in Camden and an estimated wealth well in excess of a million pounds. Fiona MacTaggert inherited a fifth of her daddy’s six million pound estate, owns property in London and a flat in her constituency ad is estimated to be worth five million. Then there is the luvvies of them all Barbara Follett. She and her husband Ken Follett are reckoned to be worth £15 million with a flat in County Hall, a house in South Africa, a home in Antigua, a flat in Soho and a mansion in Knebsworth.

When I stood as the Referendum Party for Oldham West and Royton in 1997 I had a brief dust-up with my party managers when I drew up an election manifesto that included a pledge to take out only the average UK wage for my own use and put the rest of my parliamentary salary into a lottery for welfare recipients in the constituency. The argument was that this would distract from the Referendum Party message…which was true…so I was instructed to withdraw the pledge. Shame! It seemed a good idea at the time…and still is. I wonder when some real old-style socials like George Galloway will take up the idea. It could be an election winner.

You may have wondered about the breakdown of the figure for government handout dependents in yesterday’s weblog because the official statistics provide a rather different picture. This is quite interesting. Unemployment in the UK for instance is officially about 5%...half German and French levels. Except it isn’t. The figure of 870 000 unemployed and claiming benefit does not include the 2.7 million on incapacity benefit two thirds of whom would be forced to get a job if the Government had its way.

Then there is my figure of 6.8 million state employees…up from six million when New Labour came to power in 1997. The government figures leave out university staff, general practitioners and the ever increasing number of jobs generated by government contracts. They also leave out almost 800 000 lone parents and an ever increasing number of carers. These too are included in my figure of 4.5 million out of work and on benefit.

The situation becomes clearer when we look at particular places. In Glasgow, Newcastle and Liverpool for instance a third of the population is on benefit and a third o the public payroll. In places like Cynon Valley, half an hour north of Cardiff capitalism has been virtually squeezed out of the area. Unemployment is no greater than average but almost 43 percent are on welfare and 35 percent of workers are paid by the government. As Fraser Nelson points out in his Spectator article, ‘It is against such a background that Conservatives are trying and failing to win back Wales and Scotland. In both state spending is higher than in any country in the developed world save for Sweden and France.’

I have published more than a hundred articles. As far as Fourth World Review is concerned I come in fifth after John Papworth, Leopold Kohr, John Seymour and Kirkpatrick Sale. Many of my pieces are book reviews which suit my way of writing so is a genre I adopt quite often. When I looked in Books in Print ten years ago before Google was invented I found that my principal claim to fame was as the translator of a book about the King of Sweden. However since then I have got myself an ISBN for my 1989 publication The Rise & Fall of The Swedish Green Party (1982-1997).

Over the weekend I revisited this magnus opus about the future of European politics after reading an article entitled How Big Government has Swallowed the Tory Party by Fraser Nelson in the 25th February 2006 issue of The Spectator. In a chapter on Democracy and the Money Power I wrote about pocket boroughs and electoral bribery. Here is an extract from a meeting of the newly established Money For Old Votes (MOV) Party.

‘If we are going to bribe people to sell us their vote, let us get on with it and let the people know we will buy their vote. Why beat around the bush talking, talking, talking instead of getting on with it. The question is quite simple. What is the price? Once we know that, we can get on with the job of agreeing who is going to put up the money and how he is going to be paid back! Everybody has their price. So what does it cost to turn a Green Lady into a Blue Meanie? Throw out a scenario. 2801 Liberals to turn and 2437 Greens...[we are considering the Gotland constituency at this point]...A few idealists, but with a budget of a few million pounds, we could offer them five thousand kronor each. That compares with the hundred thousand we have to invest in each work station promised in the days before the New Realism, so looks cheap at the price. We will work on that basis.’

I continued with the arithmetic. ‘One Member of Parliament from a Rotten Borough will cost us five million pounds, allowing for our own fees. With something on the side for the Heavy Mob that’s a working figure of ten million pounds for each rotten borough member of parliament...five thousand votes bought gives ten thousand votes for us...so that means twenty rotten boroughs and we are into parliament...that is a quarter of a billion...no problem there...good...go ahead on that basis.’

Here is how I ended the chapter: ‘Unlikely? Improbable? Never heard of such a thing? Then you have not read history’...leading into the chapter entitled Investing in Democracy. There is one other extract I intend to burden this weblog with. It comes in the chapter about Democracy & Communism. ‘As a politician in a party created specifically to crush Capitalism, [the Communist’s] target is always to acquire the power to effect structural changes in the distribution of wealth and to shift the distribution of daily rewards from the looter, the moocher and the usurer to the producer. The British Fabian Socialists at the turn of the [nineteenth] century introduced the idea of ‘Earner’ and ‘Unearned’ income as helpful labels in this regard. Indeed the Shavian wing always insisted that Socialism was Equal Money.’

In the past two hundred years instead of electoral reform eliminating the corruption of the rotten borough it has extended this corruption to the entire democratic process so that mass elections are now exercises in mass bribery. Here is the reality confronting any political party seeking to win control of the House of Commons.

More than half the electorate are dependent upon the government for their guaranteed incomes and therefore have a vested interest in ever expanding government spending. Leaving on one side subsidy-dependent farmers and untraceable tax credit recipients, 52% of the electorate come from four groups dependent upon the state for their money: 15% are state employees (6.8 million); 11% are out of work and on welfare (4.5 million); 18% are benefit dependent pensioners and 8% are pensioners of independent means. The Department of Works and Pensions estimates that two-thirds of pensioners are dependent upon the government for at least half of their income.

This new democratic model was pioneered in Sweden by the ruling Social Democratic Party. Fredrik Erixson from the right-wing think tank Timbro summed it up when he remarked that ‘Even if Sweden has a change of government at the next election the policies will not change. It will just be new faces.’ Since the new Conservative Party leader David Cameron has reached the same conclusion as his Swedish counterpart Fredrik Reinfeldt it is of more than passing interest to British politics to study The Swedish Model….

In my little local internet café community it is sometimes quite difficult to concentrate with the banter bouncing around. Today everyone creased up at Tony Payne's joke about a Buddhist monk who walked into Pizza Hut to place his order. ‘Make me one with everything.’