As the FT reports this morning:
Boris Johnson is hoping to line up major Saudi investment in British renewable energy on a visit to Riyadh on Wednesday, during which he will urge the desert kingdom to increase oil production to tackle market volatility.
I tweeted in response to reports of this sort yesterday, saying:
The data to support this argument is here.
The explanation as to how to raise the funding is also available in my work with Colin Hines.
As I have previously noted:
We now face a crisis in the UK. There is no public debt crisis. Nor do we have to pay for Covid, because quantitative easing already settled all the bills for that. But we do have to pay for the transformation of our society so that it is sustainable in the future.
The government is reluctant to use conventional quantitative easing for this purpose because of the boost that it has provided to inequality, and for that reason there are arguments to be made that this type of funding should not be used for this purpose although green quantitative easing, which is quite different in the way in which it works, would remain appropriate.
What we know is that the pressure on taxation also means that funding significant investment out of this source is going to be hard.
In that case, and presuming that the government is reluctant to borrow generically, then by far the largest pool of funding that is available for the climate transition is to be found within the savings accounts of the wealthier UK households.
As Colin Hines and I have long suggested, this requires that conditions be attached to the tax subsidies given to these savings. If all ISAs were required to be saved in bond accounts, with the proceeds being used to fund the Green New Deal, approximately £70 billion a year would be made available for this purpose. If 25% of all new pension contributions were similarly required to be invested for that purpose as a condition of the tax relief granted it is likely that a further £30 billion of funding would be made available each year.
What this latest data on wealth shows is that the impact of the suggestions on the overall allocation of wealth in the UK would be tiny, and wholly affordable. The social consequence would, however, be massive.
The time for the transformation of the UK's saving of its wealth in the interest of funding our green transition has arrived. If we have more than £15 trillion worth of personal wealth in the UK to suggest that we cannot afford to save the planet is quite absurd. Simple changes to the law could deliver massive social gains in this area. When will politicians step up and do them?
So why are we asking to become dependent upon Saudi Arabia, with its appalling human rights record instead? Is it that Johnson just loves a tyrant? Or is he stupid? There is almost no other available explanation when all the funding that we need is ours to have.
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When talking in forums where he thinks that what he says is unlikely to leak out to the public Johnson has repeatedly said that he believes that progress in Civilisation is driven by Greed and Jealousy.
In both his public and private behaviour he is treacherous, dishonest and incompetent.
You do not have to have read many spy novels to understand that anybody so compromised is a perfect subject for blackmail by a foreign hostile power.
It is hard to imagine anything good for Britain or the British people coming out of his trip to Arabia.
Mr Langston,
Ah, “Jealousy of Trade”; who knew that someone as crass as Johnson would spark a comment that would lead to the portals of a very important seam of intellectual history, with important contemporary importance?
The world is full of surprises, as usual!
important importance? It has obviously startled me!
Going back to a speech that Johnson made in 2013/14, to something like ( I can’t remember the correct name) the Margaret Thatcher Institute, I don’t think he had in mind any thing as intellectual as the Jealousy of Trade.
But you can never tell with Johnson, who is particularly fond of using obscure or misunderstood words in order to confuse and insult his listeners.
Huh……….honestly …..this is just desperate opportunism isn’t it?
Let’s not kid ourselves that principles come first here OK? It’s just tyrant rotation.
All Johnson has done is turn away from one tyrant to another – from Putin to the House of Saud – need we go in to detail about what they’ve been up to recently? It’s pure opportunism, based on a reluctance to invest home grown or created money and use the Tories much vaunted ‘inward investment’ which led to money laundering being enabled in the first place anyway.
You couldn’t come up with a more toxic mixture of motives could you that created all this in the first place – atavistically avoiding domestic Government spending but raking off taxes (the rentier state); using the investment as a financial profit motive and generator for the provider; casting a blind eye to human rights and criminality.
And we wonder why we are in a mess?
Johnson and his Government are a morality free zone, ennobling criminality. Incredible. Your work grows with importance and urgency hour by hour it seems to me.
How many more lows before those supporting this regime ‘get it’?
The immediate reaction to Russia invading Ukraine contrasts sharply with the toleration of six nearly seven years of Saudi air strikes – and consequent destruction, famine and disease – in Yemen. Truly a far away country of which we know little and apparently care less – seemingly having forgotten that Aden was under British control for over a century from 1839, shortly before the UK took control of Hong Kong Island, with a British protectorate gradually extending over about two thirds of the territory of present-day Yemen into the 1960s, albeit Sanaa is in the north.
I did not want to mention Yemen because it makes me sick to my stomach to think about what is going on there.
It has been reported that the UK has returned the £400 million owed to Iran, presumably either to pave the way for oil, or prevent Iran getting involved in the Russia Ukraine conflict.
If I heard aright, BBC Scotland News reported this (3pm), in its typical cack-handed way – as £4m. I went on-line to check the gaff. How long will it stand? Maybe BBC Scotland think that is Scotland’s share of the debt (plausible, if only because that would also be wrong).
As Politico noted: Saudi Arabia executed (by beheading) 81 people last week – this is the country that Mendacious Fatberg wants to do more business with & take money from. Words fail. A mad bad violent bunch – & thats just the tory party/gov.