Arguably Gordon Brown's most successful policy was designed while waiting for office, and implemented as a coup over Labour's first weekend: the independence of the Bank of England.
As he waits for the possibility of taking over as Prime Minister, he may well be wondering how he might similarly create an immediate and lasting impact in his first week in the highest office.
One option for Gordon to consider is the abolition of the royal prerogative. The royal prerogative gives extensive, and unaccountable power to the executive. The government of the day, especially the Prime Minister, exercises enormous patronage and considerable power in its name. These powers enable the executive to appoint and dismiss ministers, dissolve parliament, grant clemency and pardons, award honours, declare war, declare a state of emergency, sign treaties, issue passports, deport foreign nationals, create universities, designate cities, and to make thousands of appointments. All these powers are exercised with no legislative oversight or control.
The legitimate authority for these decisions should reside in Parliament, which could choose whether and how to delegate decisions to the excecutive, and how the executive would be held to account for the exercise of those powers.
Such a move would be popular with Labour's back-benchers, who want Parliament to determine whether the Government should declare war. It would be be modernising and forward looking. Opposition would come from only a very narrow group, easily portrayed as reactionary. Many traditionalists might see it as a necessary step towards the preservation of the monarchy.
Of course, he may not have waited so long and fought so hard to reach the top job only to give many of its powers away.
It is good to see some American voices speaking out against farm subsidies. Here is Jonah Goldberg in today's Los Angeles Times:
There are few issues for which the political consensus is so distant from both common sense and expert opinion. Right-wing economists,left-wing environmentalists and almost anybody in-between who doesn't receive a check from the Department of Agriculture or depend on apolitical donation from said recipients understand that Americans are spending billions to prop up the last of the horse-and-buggy industries. …
Subsidies combined with trade barriers (another term for subsidy) prop up the price of food for consumers at home and hurt farmers abroad. This is repugnant because agriculture is a keystone industry for developing nations and a luxury for developed ones. This keeps Third World nations impoverished, economically dependent and politically unstable. Our farm subsidies alone — forget trade barriers — cost developing countries $24 billion every year, according to the National Center for Policy Analysis. Letting poor nations prosper would be worth a lot more than the equivalent amount in foreign aid. But Big Agriculture likes foreign aid because it allows for the dumping of wheat and other crops on the world market, which perpetuates the cycle of dependency.
For an alternative view, see Daniel Davies's contribution at Comment is Free – and make sure you read the interesting discussion in the comments.
SaharaReports.com reports that the Nigerian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mrs. Okonjo Iweala, who was formerly the Finance Minister, has resigned from the Cabinet, citing “deep personal clashes between her and the president”.
If so, that is very bad news for Nigeria. She earned the confidence of donors and played a crucial role in negotiating the debt relief deal (the world’s largest ever debt relief package).
Much of the literature about the effectiveness (or otherwise) of aid revolves around whether aid accelerates economic growth.
But there is another purpose to giving aid: to redistribute income and consumption from rich to poor. If aid is taken from people who are quite well off, and used to put food in the bellies of people who would otherwise go to bed hungry, it might have no lasting or measurable impact on the economy, but the world would be a better place as a result of this redistribution.
A new paper by World Bank economists Francois Borguignon, Victoria Levin and David Rosenblatt looks at the impact of aid on global inequality (ignoring, for these purposes, any dynamic effects on growth). The paper finds that aid does indeed reduce global inequality; and that while it is extremely small in terms of changes in standard inequality measures, it is of some importance for the lowest decile of the world's income distribution. The authors also find that some of this impact is counteracted by trade barriers imposed by high-income countries.
They make this interesting observation:
Although this paper is about international inequality, we know that the actual level of global inequality of income is extremely high with a Gini coefficient between 0.64 (Milanovic 2005) and 0.66 (Bourguignon and Morrisson 2002). If this level of inequality were to exist within a single country, that country would probably experience substantial social strife. That this does not happen in the world simply means that, as of today, there is nothing like a global community.
When writers such as Charles Dickens wrote about the lives of the poor in England and other newly industrialised countries, they made it impossible for society to continue tolerate or sustain the inequality and poverty in their midst. We desperately need that same realisation for the world.
Hat tip: PSD blog
Bruce Bartlett blames the US in general, and George Bush in particular, for “the death of Doha”:
Last week, the Doha Round of trade talks collapsed. Future historians may well conclude that of all the Bush administration’s economic mistakes, this one was the biggest. That is because we may have just seen the end of the free-trade consensus that has been at the core of U.S. international economic policy for both parties since World War II. The result may be a new era of protectionism that could be extraordinarily costly and painful.
I am not so sure. Measured by the amount of protectionism they were giving up, the US offer was more stingy than the Europeans. But measured by the tariffs, quotas and subsidies they would still have in place after the deal, the US would have been less protectionist than the Europeans, as they are now. It was incumbent on Europe to make the most concessions; and had we done so, the US might well have felt obliged to match them.
Of course, every country should abolish all tariffs, quotas and subsidies, unilaterally and immediately, in their own interests as well as everyone else’s. But in the Alice-in-Wonderland world of trade negotiations, we still talk about changes which would be in our own interest as “concessions”.
In the meantime, Alan Beattie, in the FT (behind firewall, but reproduced in full here) reckons that the WTO should not try to be a development institution. I don’t agree: I think it is entirely reasonable for the members of the WTO to want to give priority to changes in trade rules that will tend to promote economic development in the poorest countries.
It seemed a good idea at the time. The SF Marathon starts at 5.30am, so we would stay at David's appartment in the city, and I would cycle to the start. It was, after all, only a few miles and mainly downhill. And in any case, this was only a training run: I had not trained for this marathon, had not tapered, and did not expect to do a good time. I just wanted the practice, and this was a good way to do a long Sunday run.
It all went according to plan. Cycling along Market Street, I reminded myself not to let my wheels get caught in the tram tracks, as Dave Parrish did last year. How stupid would that be, I asked myself, to crash on the way to a marathon? (You can see how this is going to end, can't you?) A few minutes later, I saw the perfect bike rack to lock to, on the other side of the road. I started to edge across, focused on waiting for a break in the oncoming traffic, until my back tyre dropped into the tram tracks and the bike went from under me. I left a lot of skin and blood from my knees, hip and shoulder on the road, and limped to the other side of the road. All this at 5am, in the dark.
Perhaps more driven by adrenaline than common sense, I started the race anyway. I was hobbling – my hip was (and is) severely bruised and my knee was bleeding, but you expect to hurt in a marathon (maybe not so much in the first mile).
At about 17 miles, I got the most severe stitch I had ever experienced: I imagine this was because I was running unevenly because of my hip; but it might have been the gel that I took at mile 15. I was stooped on the ground. A police motorcyclist offered me a lift to the medical tent at the finish line. I declined, and walked and jogged as far as Leah and Nathan, who had selflessly got up early to support the runners. I chatted to them for a few minutes while the stitch cleared, and then set off again up Haight Street, hoping that I might catch some of the runners that I had been with before the stitch began. (I did, but not until the 25 mile mark).
When I got to the finish, the crew in the finish area rushed me to the medical tent to treat my injuries. What had happened to me, they wanted to know? I told them that it had all happened before the race even began. I think they were relieved that the race was not to blame for the state I was in.
All in all, this was a horrible run: it hurt every step of the way. I was pleased to finish in 2:54:20 – not bad for a hilly course, with no taper, and carrying injuries. I reckon I can knock a few minutes off that in a serious marathon.
The Prime Minister, House of Commons Hansard Debates, 18 March 2003
I have never put the justification for action as regime change. We have to act within the terms set out in resolution 1441—that is our legal base.
The Prime Minister, speech to the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles, 1 August 2006
The point about these interventions, however, military and otherwise, is that they were not just about changing regimes but changing the values systems governing the nations concerned. The banner was not actually "regime change", it was "values change".
What we have done therefore in intervening in this way, is far more momentous than possibly we appreciated at the time.
Quite so. And perhaps not in a good way.
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