Man in a Shed: Liam Fox gets his message across on 18 Doughty Street

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Liam Fox gets his message across on 18 Doughty Street

I've been watching 18 Doughty Street for a few evenings now - and its soon going to start competing with blogging as the greatest destroyer of useful work time ! Tim Montgomerie and the crowd give you the feeling of being in a rather comfortable pub that you don't want to leave - just one more round then I must be going.

I was especially interested by the interview with Liam Fox broadcast last night, you can watch again here if you missed it.

Two things impressed:

1) The full nature of the conversation.
2) What Dr Fox was saying. (Yes really - he's right on the mark.)

I'm glad someone who is getting closer to power is thinking about the fact we are sending large amounts of our money, via high energy prices, to countries that do not always wish us well. Also that our defence focus needs to be on defending our supply lines, and even better generating more energy at home.

In my view Saudi Arabia is especially interesting - as the oil is running out ( maybe much faster than they admit ) and the population is exploding. It sometimes seems to me that parts of the Arab world who have populations that are exploding are desperately hoping to relocate many of them to the west.

Russia is looking more and more less friendly (their population is of course collapsing ) - see an article from last weeks Economist here.

Anyway nip over and have a listen to Dr Fox if you haven't already. This sort of interview gives politics a good name - and starts to let the public in on the deeper thinking that goes on below the sound bite.

By the way Alex Hilton, of NuLabour Home and Recess Monkey fame, did well in a polished barrister sort of way ( the same way that a good lawyer can get a guilty man off) spinning the NuLabour viewpoint, and using debating ploys to skewer the other bloggers present. With such an ability to disconnect himself from inconvenient past events and current evidence (failing NHS - Sion Simmons etc ) he has all the skills to do well in NuLabour. Maybe he could replace Sion Simmons - somebody has to.

1 comment:

Ellee Seymour said...: I like Liam Fox, he is very genuine and very clever.

I daren't go down that slippery slope of being permenantly glued to the internet all night too, though I have found you can continue blogging while being tuned in, but it is tricky.; 5:10 pm

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The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman