There’s a worrying tendency emerging in some sections of the left to cite China as a positive example for the UK.

At the Progressive London” conference, Ken Livingstone gave a speech in which he declared that the proof that government investment ends recessions lies in China’s staggering rates of state spending, and enormous correlate levels of growth.

Later, John Ross of Socialist Economic Bulletin (and Ken’s former economic adviser) took some time out from claiming that Britain’s national debt didn’t need to be repaid, that the triple-A rating is meaningless, and that all spending cuts are completely a choice and not imposed by brute economic circumstances, to cite China as proof-positive that government-led investment ends recessions. He waxed lyrical about China’s 9% growth in the last quarter, and how the Chinese government simply told banks to lend and – hey presto – they lent.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for keeping government spending as high as possible to protect the tentative recovery. But citing China as a model for UK growth is idiotic, and deeply troubling.
continue reading… »

You’re not exactly spoilt for choice, but you’d be hard pressed to find a more interesting member of the U.S. Congress than Jim Webb. A decorated Vietnam veteran who still defends the decision to go to war; an outspoken opponent of the invasion of Iraq; a journalist & author; a former Secretary of the Navy; a former Republican and now the Senior Democratic Senator from the traditionally conservative state of Virginia.

But it’s not just Webb’s rich life story which makes him interesting; he’s also won admirers for the kinds of issues he works on. Whilst widely-regarded as conservative, Webb is one of the few politicians to speak out about the vast inequalities of wealth in the United States, even going so far as to speak of ‘class struggle‘. He’s also started trying to raise awareness about America’s broken prisons, and is proposing reforms to the criminal justice system and drug laws which might lead to fewer people rotting away in jails.

But it’s Webb’s mission to Burma which will stand as the most significant moment in the Senator’s short legislative career. As the highest ranking American to visit this vile dictatorship in 10 years, there’ll be much comment in the next few days over what might have been achieved, what could be achieved in the future and what this reveals about the Obama administration’s foreign policy.

continue reading… »

So, in the last couple of days I think we’ve safely established that Daniel Hannan is a complete and utter twat.

That said, the full extent of Hannan’s outright twattery only becomes fully apparent when you examine the background to his assertion that the NHS should be replaced with a Singapore-style system of personal health accounts because…

The Singapore system produces better outcomes than ours for half the price.

Taken at face value on a comparison of key health indicators and taking into account the relative proportion of GDP spent on healthcare in the UK and Singapore that’s perfectly true but it rather ignores a very important and somewhat unusual feature of the Singaporean system, one that makes it very different from healthcare systems in both Britain and the US.

When it comes to providing healthcare to its citizens, both the supply and the price of healthcare in Singapore is actively regulation by the Singaporean government, in both the public and the private sector in order to control costs and avoid the kind of significant inflationary pressures that pretty much every other healthcare system in the world has had to deal with.
continue reading… »

One of the world’s least-known and yet most obvious cases of the oppression of a minority group by a powerful state, China’s brutal hegemony over the Uyghur people of Xinjiang province, should be more widely known to western progressives.

It isn’t, partly because of the effectiveness of the Chinese state in blacking out mainstream media coverage of the region, but also because of residual left-wing quietism when it comes to criticising a stalinist state: one could safely assume that there would be far more banner headlines if the oppressor state involved was the USA.
continue reading… »

Article by ‘Left Outside‘

After weeks of duck houses, moats, fork handles and so on some people are actually rather excited that something has happened.

Some blogs have concentrated on the fact that this is actually a big deal and not a debate on PR vs. STV; others have focused on the militarisation of the Korean Peninsula; others have seen fit to question the moral authority of Gordon Brown to criticise Kim Jong-il.

I have decided to focus on just why such an impoverished nation is so interested in the Bomb, what it means for regional security and what is to be done.
continue reading… »

I didn’t know that Salman Rushdie and Aung San Suu Kyi shared a birthday:

On this day, my birthday and yours, I always remember your long ordeal and silently applaud your endurance. This year, silence is impossible. It is not any action of yours, but your house arrest, which symbolizes the suppression of Burmese democracy, that is criminal. It is your trial, not your struggle, that is unjust. On this day, on every day, I am with you.

Rushdie’s message launches the Sixty-Four Words for Aung San Suu Kyi project.
continue reading… »

The New York Times reports:

Japan announced its biggest-ever economic stimulus plan Thursday, a $154 billion package of subsidies and tax breaks that aims to stem a deepening recession in the world’s second-largest economy. Prime Minister Taro Aso also outlined an ambitious long-term economic strategy that he said would make Japan a global leader in “green” technology like solar energy and electric cars.
…
The plan announced Thursday is the largest single such effort ever proposed in Japan, dwarfing any of the stimulus measures the country enacted during the 1990s, during its so-called lost decade of economic stagnation.
…
By 2020, Japan aims to increase its solar-generating capacities twentyfold, and raise the domestic sales of eco-friendly vehicles to one million vehicles a year. The plan would create four million new jobs in Japan, the prime minister said.