Churchill

Glasgow East: Blasted by the past?

Jock — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:23:56 +0000

They've been talking about poverty in Glasgow for a long time. They've been into land reform as well. Not just the work of Mary Barbour and the Glasgow Women's Housing Association and rent strikes during the first war, but at the turn of the twentieth century Glasgow was also the de facto HQ in Britain of the Single Tax movement, those followers of Henry George's idea of taxing land values. The poverty in the city was legendary, and it was it seems often used as an example by either side in the land tax debates almost exactly a century ago.

Here's a response from Winston Churchill in the House of Commons to the leader of the opposition, Arthur Balfour's attempts to rubbish the idea:

The Glasgow Example - I do not think the Leader of the Opposition could
have chosen a more unfortunate example than Glasgow. He said that the
demand of that great community for land was for not more than forty
acres a year. Is that the only demand of the people of Glasgow for
land? Does that really represent the complete economic and natural
demand for the amount of land a population of that size requires to
live on? I will admit that at present prices it may be all that they
can afford to purchase in the course of a year. But there are one
hundred and twenty thousand persons in Glasgow who are living in
one-room tenements; and we are told that the utmost land those people
can absorb economically and naturally is forty acres a year.

What is the explanation? Because the population is congested in the
city the price of land is high upon the suburbs, and because the price
of land is high upon the suburbs the population must remain congested
within the city. That is the position which we are complacently assured
is in accordance with the principles which have hitherto dominated
civilised society.

The "Poor Widow" Bogey - But when we seek to rectify this system, to
break down this unnatural and vicious circle, to interrupt this
sequence of unsatisfactory reactions, what happens? We are not
confronted with any great argument on behalf of the owner. Something
else is put forward, and it is always put forward in these cases to
shield the actual landowner or the actual capitalist from the logic of
the argument or from the force of a Parliamentary movement.

Sometimes it is the widow. But that personality has been used to
exhaustion. It would be sweating in the cruellest sense of the word,
overtime of the grossest description, to bring the widow out again so
soon. She must have a rest for a bit; so instead of the widow we have
the market-gardener - the market-gardener liable to be disturbed on the
outskirts of great cities, if the population of those cities expands,
if the area which they require for their health and daily life should
become larger than it is at present.

What is the position disclosed by the argument? On the one hand, we
have one hundred and twenty thousand persons in Glasgow occupying
one-room tenements; on the other, the land of Scotland. Between the two
stands the market-gardener, and we are solemnly invited, for the sake
of the market-gardener, to keep that great population congested within
limits that are unnatural and restricted to an annual supply of land
which can bear no relation whatever to their physical, social, and
economic needs - and all for the sake of the market-gardener, who can
perfectly well move farther out as the city spreads and who would not
really be in the least injured.

One hundred years ago, the Liberal Party could have begun to eradicate Glasgow's poverty once and for all. How sad that a hundred years later Glasgow East continues to shine mostly as an example of those same problems we could have solved all those years ago. What benefit has the political game been to them in all those years? What good the franchise? What good socialism? Or the vested interests of the Tories' friends? BBC News tonight suggested that this might be the most important by-election in thirty years. Maybe for the first time in a century someone could once again explain how they are going to make life really better for the constituency's long suffering inhabitants. And then make it happen. read more »

Henry George

Protection or Free Trade - Tories debate

Jock — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 02:18:23 +0000

There's this extraordinary debate going on (well actually the comments are closed) on ConservativeHome about a piece by a chappie called Tony Makara who is advocating a protectionist trade policy the likes of which has not been seen in the UK for a generation:

Anthony Makara: Britain imports too much

Over the last weeks I've read much about the subject of welfare reform. The arguments about incapacity benefit and workfare. However all these strategies for welfare reform fail to answer one fundamental question. How are we going to get people into work? I believe all the proposed plans for welfare reform will fail because they do not tell us how we are to create the one million plus jobs needed to end welfare dependency. This is because the British economy no longer produces the jobs that the unemployed need. Lets face it, a person is either in work or they are on benefit, it really is that simple, the answer to unemployment is to create jobs. [From ConservativeHome's Platform: Anthony Makara: Britain imports too much]

The outrage in the comments is interesting. We all know the Tories made a seismic shift in the mid-late seventies in embracing what they liked to call "free trade". Of course, without radical tariff eradication and resolute policing of monopoly and cartel, there is no truly free trade. But what is interesting is that this was the debate over which Winston Churchill first left the Tories at the turn of the twentieth century and joined the free trade Liberals.

You see, for forty years, free trade was a policy of the "left" (indeed much longer if we go back to the Radicals and the Corn Laws debates), a key plank of trying to increase the returns to labour and in reducing the cost of necessities to make the average working person better off, either through higher wages or through lower prices (they have the same effects). It was Philip Snowden, the Labour chancellor of the exchequer, who wrote in a foreword to a new edition of Henry George's book of the same name "Protection or Free Trade" that...

"Each new generation has in a large measure to re-learn the truths which its ancestors established by discussion and practical experience. Free Traders have been so confident in the fundamental soundness of their faith and in the security of the system, that they have neglected to keep the rising generation well grounded in the principles of the faith."

He was writing in response to the Tories' re-adoption of a protectionist stance in the face of the beginnings of the Great Depression.

I have no doubt that most Tories today believe in something called "free trade". I don't believe that most of them actually realise how far away we are from it and what steps will be necessary to get there. But I am sure myself that if we get there, we will all benefit. As Snowden also wrote, "Protection is the foster-mother of monopoly, and monopoly in all its forms...is the robbery of the community for the benefit of private interests" (you can see why Tories would like the idea!).

It is worth mentioning that the Lib Dems have a consultation paper out on the UK Response to Globalization. Go respond - we must resist any attempts at introducing protectionist policies.

Ricardo’s Law - The Great Tax Clawback Scam

Jock — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:16:50 +0000

Hat tip to US Georgist tax researcher "Taxpayer" who highlights that Fred Harrison has made a seven or so minute introduction/video advert for his book "Ricardo's Law: House Prices and the Great Tax Clawback Scam"

If you want to understand a bit about just how unfair a tax system based on incomes is, have a watch, and hopefully buy the book - it goes into a lot more detail and will leave you I am sure convinced of the place of LVT.

Churchill's "Tax Switch"

Jock — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 05:52:02 +0000

New at 1909, how the People's Budget was intended to change the whole ethos of tax, asking not merely "how much have you got?" but also "how did you get it?" and giving us ideas just as pertinent today for differentiating between people's justified wealth and wealth gained by exploiting the common wealth and the needs of others.