I debated with Asa Bennett of the Daily Telegraph, who was Liz Truss's speechwriter for a number of years and who might be considered the archetypal Tufton Street commentator, on Times Radio on Wednesday evening.
We discussed Truss's speech to the Heritage Foundation in the USA made that day in which she claimed that the West was moving to the left, was being overtaken by woke sentiment and had lost its entrepreneurial spirit. The rest is in this exchange, which begins immediately after I was asked to comment on such sentiments. I think it fair to say that I opened up with both barrels:
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Incredible number of “Y’know´s” is a bit of an obvious giveaway….
That opening a as full Jonathan Pie! Didn’t recognise the the Presenter, they did a good job.
Except he is scripted and I was not
You really shouldn’t beat about the bush like that. Tell it like it is.
The presenter appeared to be enjoying himself and your opponent dealt with your points by ignoring them.
Absolutely brilliant.
Thanks
And you’re right
I should give up fence sitting
I’ve started reading Mehdi Hasan’s book: Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading and Public Speaking
I can recommend it, as it is relevant to anyone who wants to put across their point of view decisively and effecticely.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Win-Every-Argument-Debating-Persuading-ebook/dp/B09YRN6RXX/
I suspect I will read it
Good to hear the truth being put forcibly and Richard being allowed a reasonable amount of time to make his point.
Scary that you have to listen to a Rupert Murdoch owned Radio station to hear it.
If it was the BBC it would have been a discussion framed entirely by Daily Mail/Tory talking points and any time Richard tried to introduce reality the interviewer would have cut him off.
I may becoming paranoid but I am also intrigued by the number of times on BBC Radio you hear a non-establishment voice beginning to make real headway in a discussion when suddenly a technical problem means the line becomes very bad or they are cut-off mid sentence.
As I say, it is probably just me.
In fairness I do get on the BBC
But LBC and Times Radio usually give me much more time
Very well put.
But it does indeed need the equivalent type of programme on BBC. Very rarely do the fundamentals of public spending and its relationship to entrepreneurship etc. get an in depth airing.
To be clear Richard I am not anti-BBC, I would just like it to behave like the independent publicly funded broadcaster it is supposed to be.
The Today program was at it again today.
Interviewing a TUC spokesperson about public sector strikes, despite rigidly sticking to the the Daily Mail’s agenda, the man from the TUC was finally able to get to the real cause of the strike, the substantial pay cuts the workforce has suffered over the last thirteen years.
Immediately the BBC interviewer became very edgy, making frequent attempts to stop the TUC man speaking. Eventually she got he chance and closed down the interview with some childish dishonesty about pay cuts not being the subject of the interview and anyway, the BBC had frequently discussed the topic of pay cuts in the past.
News to me and anybody else that regularly watches/listens to the BBC.
No wonder even Elon Musk thinks the BBC is a Tory Government mouthpiece.
Goodness – more fascism again from the Tory Has-Been that was Truss. Once more creating an ogre for us to fear.
The best definition I ever heard about capitalism was a system that ‘delivered the highest amount of welfare to the most people’ in a 1950s American cartoon I saw in a documentary.
I still think that that is an important definition to measure capitalism by – because it could also be used to rope in the environment – the planet provides welfare (air,water, land) after all, which needs to be sustained and not eroded by capitalism – which it is.
But what is clear – what has been revealed – is that the current mode of capitalism does not create broad benefits to societies – they are in fact very narrow.
Any failing of contemporary capitalism is blamed on individuals or what state involvement is left. It’s never blamed on the way capitalism conducts itself.
That is why you are right to highlight the state’s involvement in supporting and intervening in markets, supporting education etc.
As for Asa Bennett – he’s just one of those bland hired hands all too prevalent in politics these days. He doesn’t really care what his employers believe in as long as he gets paid handsomely and serves by oh so politely of course reinforcing his employer’s world view.
So it was not an even fight – but tough shit Asa, eh? Man up or piss off.
Nice one Richard.
Of, I am sure Asa believes in free markets
The problem for him is he has not the slightest idea how they work, and I have
He pretty much conceded defeat from the off
There is no such thing as the free market that arises spontaneously without the societal constructs and common infrastructure – such as concepts of good faith and fair dealing, and property rights, and contract law, and the means to enforce them – that make its operations possible.
An appeal to the “free market” usually implies an absence of regulation that simply enables those with more power to abuse those with less.
Capitalism is a powerful economic motor but at its heart it is a selfish one, and so in a modern society it needs to be kept under democratic control to advance the interests of society as a whole and not just the individuals concerned.
“free market” does not mean what many think. Of course we all think we want freedoms, but to neoliberals, it means being free to dump millions of gallons of raw sewage into our seas and rivers, while paying shareholders £57 billion in dividends, CEOs huge bonuses, and “donations” to the Tories.
This attitude is partly due to Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” which somehow automatically ensures economic efficiencies and benefits for all. There clearly are benefits, but only to the few, at the expense and expoitation of the rest of us.
Sources
➡️ What Is the Invisible Hand in Economics?, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/invisiblehand.asp
➡️ England’s privatised water firms paid £57bn in dividends since 1991, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/01/england-privatised-water-firms-dividends-shareholders
➡️ What the boss of your water company earns and how much sewage discharge they’re responsible for, https://inews.co.uk/news/boss-water-company-earns-sewage-discharge-1813621
➡️ £3.5m of Tory donations linked to pollution and climate denial, says report, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/30/tory-partys-35m-dirty-donations-revealed-by-desmog-analysis
Smith asserts that “The rich … consume little more than the poor, and … are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants.”
But there is no modern society – with or without regulations – that has achieved a utopia where everyone has equal portions of the “necessaries” of life.
Would that it were so, but experience shows this has never been the case.
Continuing to support this dogma is like believing that the world was created in seven days.
Neatly put
I also suggest Smith was out of touch with the reality of his own time
The rich usually are
It was clear that Asa had no answer to Richard/s points that lower wages, increasing student debt, increasing rent, mortgages and housing crisis, failing health, Justice, transport etc prevent any sort of entrepreneurial spirit coming from young people as the conditions they face are increasingly appalling.
I don’t see how you get growth and a successful economy by impoverishing the majority. What is it that the likes of Truss and Bennett don’t get? Truth is, they and the likes of Sunak would rather the market be as free as possible to do what it likes. They just don’t like the state, certainly not the social side of the state as it is too “socialist” for them. Yet, a 1945 post war moment of state intervention is what is needed right now, not more market.
Your point about the basic functions of life oppressing people won the argument straight off. I just wish the likes of Labour would listen.
Well done Richard for exposing the fact that the BlunderTruss is a brainwashed nonentity.
The “ree market” is a myth as far as I can see. Truly free markets would be a horror show. And, the acid test of a free market, for me, would be abolishing anti union legislation. If markets were truly free, no interference in collective action would be countenanced. Markets emerge out of states. Without a state, markets can’t function. Neoliberalism inverts reality.
Facts, common sense and experience versus neoliberal waffle! That’s some contrast and no contest. Well done Richard.
To support his case Asa was saying that government spending as a % of GDP rose from the mid 30s in the late 90s to the mid 40s now and this shows how much more overbearing the state is becoming. We hear this a lot from those on the extreme tax-cutting right, about how it shows how left wing Johnson and Sunak were/are. Asa didn’t mention that there are two parts to this calculation and that both affect the overall %: government spending and GDP. The right focus on the government spending, although GDP was rising rapidly up to 2007 and then has remained fairly flat overall since (albeit with lots of ups and downs). He also didn’t mention that we got a big increase in the % after 2007, up to the mid 40s, and this then fell down and was still falling heading into the pandemic, and then we got another big increase to around 50% for the early part of the pandemic, and this is falling down now and maybe even heading back into the high 30s fairly soon (I’m not sure where Asa got his current figure of 47% from as I thought it has already gone down into the low 40s).
Also, Asa incorrectly suggested the increase in government spending as a % of GDP meant that the tax “burden” had similarly increased and this was stifling society and so this is why we need to get that % down, but my understanding is that he was incorrect to equate the overall tax level with the spending % of GDP because the overall tax level as a % of GDP has remained fairly constant since New Labour came to power and the big increases in spending after 2007 and then the pandemic were from QE and were not offset by a big increase in taxes (which you would say is a problem as the QE money ended up going to the rich and so we should have found a way to tax that money out of the system from the where it ended up, with the rich, after it had done the good that it was needed for, but this is another subject).
Richard, I don’t recall you ever covering this on your blog (though I could have missed it). What is your response to those on the right who keep saying government spending as a % of GDP is so much higher than it was under New Labour and this shows how left wing the last few years of Tory government have been, and how the government is doing far more than it should and far more than New Labour was doing? How much of this increase is from increased government spending and how much from flatlining GDP?
I will try to cover that