It was announced today that the UK population increased more last year than at any time in almost half a century. According to figures from the Office for National Statistics, the number of births in the UK is now at its highest since 1991, with 797,000 during the year to mid-2010 and this contribution to overall population growth is greater than that from net migration.
So why has there been a new baby boom without a war for an excuse?
Increased government support for families – notably the introduction of the Working Families’ Tax Credit (WFTC) in 1999 and greater generosity of means-tested Income Support (IS) payments – has coincided with a rise in births among couples who left school at 16 relative to those who stayed in education after 18.
According to research summarised in the Autumn 2008 issue of Research in Public Policy, the probability of having a birth increased by 1.2 percentage points among women with low education, which equates to nearly 45,000 additional births. The study also finds that the decision whether to have children – or when to begin having them – seems more susceptible to financial incentives than the decision over how many to have. The UK birth rate has increased steadily since 2001 and now stands at an average of 1.9 births per woman, the highest level since 1974.
Some women told researchers they had stopped using contraception. The more generous welfare system is being credited with contributing to an increase in the overall UK birth rate, which is now at its highest level since 1974. The report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies concludes: “We have shown that more generous Government support coincided with an increase in births among the group most affected by the [welfare] reforms.
The study says that the introduction of Working Families Tax Credit and an increase in Income Support between 1999 and 2003 triggered a rise in taxpayer spending on children “unprecedented” in the previous 30 years. Because the reforms were targeted at the poorest families with children, the value of their state handouts increased by 10 per cent of their total household income. For couples who both left school at 16, the reforms meant an increase in benefits of 45 per cent, from £39 a week to £56.76. This is a rise almost twice as much as the handouts for which a couple who went on to sixth form college would be eligible, which increased by 25 per cent to £37.27 a week. The researchers then looked at fertility rates both before the reforms were announced and after, for a sample of 101,330 women aged between 20 and 45. They found a large increase in the first year after the benefits were made more generous, particularly among women who had left school as soon as possible. The results show a 15 per cent increase in the probability of having a baby in the “low education group”.
People will have different views about whether a larger population is a good or bad thing. What cannot be rationally disputed is that dipping into taxpayers pockets to encourage the births of a whole new generation of welfare dependants can only take us closer to the economic collapse that state spending and borrowing has speeded us toward. Labour justified this handout on the grounds of reducing child poverty. The result will be lots more children in homes where inadequate parents don’t have the will or the ability to raise these children to be responsible and contributing members of society.
Germany and Switzerland have announced plans to phase out nuclear power in the next ten years or so. These decisions have come in the light of the difficulties faced in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami damage suffered by their nuclear power plants.
You have to wonder how rational it is for European countries that are not on geological fault lines to make these kinds of these decisions about their future energy provision. The Germans claim that it is possible for them to reduce electricity demand by 10% over the phase out period, but being possible and actually achieving that reduction are very different things. More importantly though, 23% of German electricity is nuclear generated so there will be a very big energy shortfall even if they can reduce demand.
We have heard some very airy fairy aspirations about wind and solar power, but they do not have a hope of filling the gap. Either there will be a return to dirty coal generating power stations or, much more likely, they will be importing nuclear generated power from France and Poland.
Now that’s very sensible isn’t it?
Why don’t the German and Swiss governments just shut up and allow a free energy market to meet the demands of its citizens by whatever generating method they choose. The responsibility for safety and pollution control will then be in the hands of the operating companies and paid for by consumers, rather than taxpayers being bled dry by confused governments attempting to tell the industry how to do its job.
Abolition of the minimum wage is one of the Libertarian policies that causes some people to worry about us. They believe that it is a protection for some of the less powerful members of society and we are seen as uncaring in wanting to remove this supposed protection.
First of all I would say that the government did not introduce the minimum wage to protect anybody other than themselves. It is the sort of populist action that governments do all the time in an attempt to buy votes and keep themselves in power. It is really aimed at middle class campaigners, activists and voters rather than those who will be employed at this low level income.
The economic issues are really quite straightforward. A completely free market with good information will result in everybody who is seeking work being employed at a wage that is the real value of the work they do and every employer will be able to fill their employment needs at a price that the sale of goods or services will support. Of course, such perfection can never be achieved, but the closer we can get to it the more prosperous we will all be.
At whatever level you set a minimum wage, there will be some potential workers who cannot contribute sufficient to justify that pay. What happens then is that these people are unemployed or they work outside of the ‘legitimate’ economy. It also means that employers cannot fill all their requirements at market prices so they are less productive than they could be or their costs are higher than they should be. Either way, the situation is less efficient than it should be and this damage to productivity diminishes total wealth for the country.
It follows from the argument up to now that the higher you set the minimum wage, the greater level of unemployment it will create or the larger number of people will be forced into the informal, or black, economy. Pushing people out of lawful employment results in higher benefit costs and larger taxes to support them as well as diminishing overall wealth production.
It is for this reason that the state sets the minimum wage as low as it thinks it can get away with and not alienate the campaigners whose support it was trying to buy in the first place. The consequence of keeping the minimum wage is that we all lose.
In addition to these direct effects, the minimum wage is also a bad thing because it encourages unscrupulous employers to tell some staff that they can’t pay them more than minimum when they may be worth more. They can get away with this because they know that the alternative jobs open to that employee would be likely to be at minimum because it becomes a standard in jobs like catering, hospitality, care, leisure, etc. There is also the overhead of bureaucrats employed to administer and police the minimum wage. These people contribute nothing to the real wealth of the nation, but require taxes to pay them.
In summary, the national minimum wage does not protect anybody from exploitation or poverty, but it impoverishes all of us to a small extent by distorting the market and imposing an unnecessary overhead on us.
Visit the Libertarian Party UK website to take part in discussion on this and other topics:
Society has been progressively smothered by big government in a process that started at least a hundred years ago with the Lloyd George government.
It will take several generations for citizens to emerge from their present infantilised condition to be able to run their own lives, bring up their families and self manage their communities.
Government cannot create a ‘Big Society’, it can only start getting out of the way so that society is given the space to grow.
At the moment our economy is prevented from emerging from worldwide recession by the enormous debt created by the disgraceful spending spree in which the Labour Government tried to buy an election victory.
Job creation is also strangled by the the thousands of laws and regulations that began with the deluge of equality and health and safety laws in 1974 and reached epidemic proportions with the last government. I know that many people like to blame the EU for this. They play their part, but the truth is that our own government gold plates EU directives all the time and our bureaucrats are at least as bad as the Brussels ones.
Never mind the political slogan of Big Society. Let us have the freedom to build our societies. Essential steps are to cut state spending and cut taxes. Abolish laws and regulations that are making it difficult to employ people and unattractive for enterprises to want to operate in Britain.
Reduce the number of MPs, abolish all Quangos and scrap unaccountable bodies like the House of Lords. Devolution of some power to Scotland, Wales & NI was a good thing, but nothing like enough. Power must be devolved from Westminster to villages, towns and communities. Society can only function on a human scale. Things affecting our everyday lives should be the responsibility of ourselves and people who are so close to us that we know them and can call them to account.
National and international bodies are necessary for the law of the sea, defence of the nation and the small number of things which cannot be done locally.
Power corrupts. We have too many corrupt politicians because they have been allowed to take on too much control of our lives. Laws are necessary, but they need to be small in number, easily understood and rigorously enforced. We should never have got into a situation where some of our law makers are law breakers. The answer is to bring politics home, or at least to our neighbourhoods.
As it seems that some form of agreement between the Tories and Lib Dems may be emerging, democrats must maintain the demand that electoral reform has got to be part of the political reform.
The need is straightforward. We need legislation in the first Queen’s Speech that provides a national ballot within months in which the following alternatives are offered to the electorate:
A Conservative preferred option which might be expected to be the maintenance of First Past The Post, but with a smaller number of MPs and equal sized constituencies.
A Labour preferred option which is likely to be the Alternative Vote System.
A Liberal Democrat preferred option which would be the Single Transferable Vote System that they included in their election manifesto.
No change to the existing system.
An additional choice proposed by the Electoral Reform Society if they wish to present one.
As the Conservatives are the largest Party and they are adamantly opposed to fair votes, it may be that the Lib Dems will cave in and agree to allow the Tories to govern without a commitment to give the voters this choice. If that is the case, we must demand that those people who argued for fair votes before and during the election should stand by their commitments and present a Bill to Parliament for a national ballot on the above lines. There is actually a majority in Parliament for reform of the electoral system and that should allow such a bill to pass into law. In the event that a minority Conservative Government prevented this Bill from being presented to Parliament or obstructed it being passed into law, they should face a vote of no confidence and another election be forced.
Democracy in Britain must be modernised and the current opportunity presented by the lack of an overall majority by a single Party must result in genuine electoral reform being offered to the public.
Opportunities for meaningful political change do not come often, but there is one now and it must be seized.
The situation is clear although it is complicated. The Tories did not win the right to form a government, but Labour most definitely lost the election. The bizarre effects of a First Past The Post (FPTP) election means that many people who do not support Labour or the Tories either do not have any opportunity to vote for a party that they do support or they vote tactically for one of these two in order to keep the other out.
This means that although the Lib Dems (LD) had 28% or 29% popular support before the election, only 23% of voters turned that support into a real vote. In addition to this, the LD vote was more evenly spread than that of the two major parties so they had lower chances of their votes being converted into seats. The consequence is that with 23% of the vote the LDs have only 10% of the seats. That is profoundly undemocratic and it is worse when you consider that 28% of voters may have wished to vote LD.
For Libertarians, the situation is far worse. We are in the position that the Green Party were in a generation ago. Despite the Greens standing hundreds of candidates and having a massive public profile for their policies, they have only just been able to secure a single seat in Parliament for their leader. This is a democratic disgrace.
For a new party with good, clear policies that would appeal to many voters, but lacking big financial backers and the army of backers of the big institutional parties, FPTP prevents any chance of even the smallest success in either national or local elections. That is not democracy and it must change now.
The Labour Government has taken this country into such massive debt that our economy is on the brink of collapse with all the terrible consequences that are beginning to unravel in Greece. This means that we must have a new Prime Minister and the prospects of reasonably stable government in the short term established very early this week. If that is not achieved, there will be great volatility in the currency markets and it will become harder every hour for all of us to be saved from very serious damage to our quality of life and financial future.
The tasks for today for our political leaders are these:
Gordon Brown.
Resign immediately. You were never elected as leader of the Labour Party, you were never a legitimate Prime Minister, your performance in office has been disastrous and in the only leadership election you have ever faced you have conclusively lost. The Labour Party cannot maintain any credibility so long as you remain Prime Minister and the interests of the country require Labour voters to be adequately represented in the negotiations to form a government.
Nick Clegg
Do not make any deal that does not include a commitment to the introduction of electoral reform with a timetable for completion before the end of this year. You stood on a platform of fair votes and your present bargaining position owes everything to that undertaking. Failure to deliver electoral reform would be a betrayal of the worst kind and would not be forgiven.
David Cameron
You did not win a mandate to form a government and the economy of this country is in such a perilous position that you have a duty to reach agreement without delay on the formation of a government that can command a clear majority in Parliament so that effective decisions can be taken without delay. There is no Parliamentary majority among parties of the political right. Differences between Tory and LD memberships mean that a coalition is unlikely and a supply and confidence arrangement will be fragile. In these circumstances you should present a simple draft Queens Speech and emergency budget to all Parties and seek agreement to them being allowed to pass. Despite the opposition of your party to PR, there is clear demand from the public for electoral reform and it must be offered within a strict timetable that does not extend beyond this year. All other Parties should allow your minority government to function until a reformed electoral system is in place and a new General Election can be held.
The chaos of queues outside polling stations as polls closed; the disgrace of stations running out of ballot papers; the nonsense of an unelected second chamber and the absurdity of not having fixed term Parliaments, all contribute to Britain being seen as a country with third world election standards and grossly outdated democracy. All our leaders have an urgent responsibility to resolve these matters with the urgency that is necessary to prevent us collapsing into a third world economy as well.
Yes it is something to get really excited about. Not just a drink and the company of good friends although it will be that I am sure.
What this is really about is getting together to discuss the problems of Wirral and finding solutions through clean, decent, honest politics. In recent times our politicians have disgraced themselves by their secrecy, deception and fiddled expenses, but the truth is that we cannot do without government or politics. We have to do politics differently.
Instead of Party puppets who vote however the whips tell them, Libertarians believe in independence and individuals who are happy to be held to account for everything they do and say. The Government that has bankrupted this country is probably in its last weeks, but there will be no solution from Caneron’s Tories who offer nothing other than Blairism with a blue rosette. The Liberal Democrats are a directionless irrelevance who will be used by one of the two big parties as crutch to help them cling onto power.
What has been happening to us for too many years now is that government has grown and taxes have been increased by stealth until the state now directly controls nearly half of the economy and you cannot move without being on CCTV, needing a Police check or permit, or having to follow endless amounts of expensive and useless red tape.
Libertarians know the way to get lower taxes, safer streets, full employment and freedom from officials interfering in the private lives and decisions of adult citizens, but I can’t deal with all that in this note. We need to get together and discuss it.
Please come along and join us at 8pm on Wednesday 13th January 2010 at:
Punch Bowl Hotel
77 Market St
Hoylake
Wirral
Merseyside
CH47 2BH
The pub is a five minute walk from Hoylake railway station. If you are unsure how to find it please contact me for further directions.
Everyone is welcome. You do not have to be a member of the Libertarian Party UK. The meeting will be relaxed, friendly and informal. At this first meeting we will be getting to know each other and having a chat about what Libertarianism is. I am delighted to tell you that Councillor David Kirwan, Prospective Independent MP for Wirral West, is in agreement with the Libertarian approach and will be coming to our meetings. This is your opportunity to meet the man who will break the grip of the failed Parties in Wirral and take a truly independent, honest voice to represent us at Westminster.
The reason why western democracies have the highest standards of living in the world and why the Soviet Union and its satellites collapsed in economic ruin is that wealth creation is driven by private enterprise.
When the state owns and controls most of the economy the generation of new ideas and products withers. This causes public discontent because they are deprived of the things they need and which they can see being enjoyed in freer societies. The government which cannot face letting go of the control that it has grabbed from its own citizens can only respond by ever more interference in personal choice.
When the Labour Government came to power in 1997 about 33% to 35% of the British economy was owned and controlled by the government. That was an unacceptably high proportion and very damaging to the efficient development of wealth creating companies. The laws we have to control monopolies and to try to stop large corporations from completely dominating a market define an unacceptable monopoly as control of one third or more of a market. On this basis the British Government had a monopoly grip on our economy even in 1997. Since then the government stake in gross domestic product (GDP) has risen to nearly 45% and it is growing at an increasing rate.
According to Dominic Lawson in the Sunday Times there were almost 1,200 quango’s in 2001 costing £20 billion a year to run. By last year the cost of quango’s had risen to £34.5 billion a year. In just seven years the quango bill has risen by 75% at a time when inflation has only been around 2.5% and at the moment it is close to zero.
This government has taken the country into near bankruptcy. We have a national debt so huge that our grandchildren we be left with trying to pay it off and it is still increasing at a rate of £200 billion a year.
Desperate all the time to find more money to finance their lust for control, the government continually increases taxes. The recent increase in top rate income tax from 40% to 50% will actually produce almost nothing if not even reduce the tax take because high earners will move away, but an even more damaging consequence is that the decline of the wealth producing sector will accelerate. This is the road to collapse that killed off European communism twenty years ago.
We need to call a halt before we are all ground into destitution and subservience. A good start is to kill off the quangos.
The only legitimate function of government is to provide citizens with personal safety and protection of their property. While the state interferes to an ever increasing extent in the personal lives of everybody and passes ever more restrictive laws on the businesses that provide income, and goods by which we live our lives, it is repeatedly failing to do the job for which it exists.
A recent BBC enquiry revealed that in the east of England alone the police issued nearly 30,000 cautions for burglary, sex crimes and assaults in 2005/6. A caution is only given where there is sufficient evidence for a prosecution and yet in this large number of serious offences the police are choosing not to prosecute even though the offender has accepted their guilt.
The Home Office website makes a strong point about cannabis having been re-classified as a class B drug (despite the scientific evidence making it very clear that this was not justified) and that personal use of cannabis could result in a prison sentence of up to five years and fourteen years if you sell it. Using cannabis has some risk for the person doing it, although not as much as for some legal and prescription drugs, but it is not something that does harm to other people. Burglary, sex crimes and assault are violent crimes that traumatise victims and cause peoples lives to be seriously limited by fear.
We have more police in this country than we have ever had in our history and we also have more laws than ever before. The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police has said in today’s Sunday Times that the public are being let down by failures in the criminal justice system. Too many violent criminal and habitual re-offenders are not being dealt with effectively.
The public is worried by it and the police are well aware of it, but the government continues to fail to do its only proper job.
Our message must be clear. Stop telling us how to live our peaceful lives in our own way; stop spying on everything we do or say; stop taking most of our money away from us in taxes and then wasting it on failed bankers or stupid PC laws. Above all stop violent criminals from damaging our lives by properly enforcing the simple laws that have regulated our society for centuries and which you have now lost sight of.
Dangerous criminals must be taken off our streets and the rest of us must be left to live our lives.
Pervert David Sturgess secretly filmed visitors to his holiday cottage in Ceredigion, Wales. He was rightly gaoled for 30 months. The judge said:
“the offences were a gross intrusion into people’s privacy and they were rightly devastated”
The judge is obviously right.
Poole Borough Council secretly filmed Jenny Paton at her private home. Ms Paton is rightly taking legal action against the Council for this gross intrusion into her privacy from which she is rightly devastated.
Will the snooping officials join Sturgess in gaol? Not a chance. The perversion of government intrusion into the private lives of citizens is completely out of control
We condemned East Germany for employing the Stasi secret police to spy on its own citizens. We denounced the Soviet Union for trying to control the lives of its people. We were right to condemn these disgusting tyrannies and they eventually collapsed because their people demanded freedom.
It is time for us to demand freedom. Kick out the national and local governments that take your money away in taxes and then use it to spy on you and force you to do what they demand.
Posted by malpoet 
