Referral of Prime Minister to Committee of Privileges

Debate between Ian Blackford and Steve Baker

Thursday 21st April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Ian Blackford]

I hope Conservative Members listen very carefully to what my hon. Friend says, because the power to remove the Prime Minister rests with them. They can submit letters to the 1922 committee, and they can recognise the damage that the Prime Minister is causing to the fabric of our democracy—and, yes, to the integrity, honesty and decency of this House.

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman sit down?

[Ian Blackford]

Here we go. Once again, the Conservatives want us to sit down and shut up. They do not wish to hear the voices of those of us, here to represent our constituents, who are frankly appalled at the way the Prime Minister has laughed at the people of these isles with his behaviour during covid. If Conservative Members vote down this motion, not only will they be endorsing all those scandals and all that sleaze, but they will be handing the Prime Minister a blank cheque to do it all over again. I would be surprised if the hon. Gentleman accepts the scandals, the sleaze and the corruption and is prepared to give the Prime Minister a blank cheque. I do not want to do that. If he does, he can explain why.

[Mr Baker]

The right hon. Gentleman is right to be surprised, because of course I am appalled; that is why I encouraged him to sit down. If he would let us speak, he might advance his own cause. Some of us are actually extremely disappointed. The right hon. Gentleman heard what I said on Tuesday. He is a brother in Christ. Does he not believe in redemption?

[Ian Blackford]

I believe in truth and justice, and I believe that a Prime Minister who has misled the House should face the appropriate sanctions.

Early Parliamentary General Election Bill

Debate between Ian Blackford and Steve Baker

3rd reading: House of Commons & Committee: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 29th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Baker]

My hon. Friend is right, as is the wonderful Laura Kuenssberg. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, as the Prime Minister has said.

[Ian Blackford]

I should point out to the hon. Gentleman that EU nationals are given the vote in Scottish elections, and they voted in the 2014 referendum. [Interruption.] I hear Conservatives shouting “national”; I hate to point this out, but Scotland is a nation.

[Mr Baker]

I think Conservative Members are quite comfortable with the notion that Scotland is a nation, but the United Kingdom is the basis for the electorate for this House, and it is quite right that the franchise should therefore be in citizens, or perhaps subjects, of the United Kingdom.

I do feel, Dame Eleanor, that I should now draw my opening remarks to a conclusion. I will simply say, on a serious note, that this Bill of course has to go through the other place. If the other place were to insert amendments in this simple and straightforward Bill that sought to produce a particular outcome, we would have to say that it has no right whatever to do that and that it would be quite unconstitutional. I think its Members would be playing with fire and, indeed, they would be playing with their own futures in that House were they to seek to amend the Bill to produce a particular outcome.

Quantitative Easing

Debate between Ian Blackford and Steve Baker

Thursday 15th September 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

I welcome this debate. I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman saw the editorial in The Daily Telegraph of 13 September headed, “A pension scandal at the Bank of England”, which discussed the fact that senior staff had been given massive increases in their pension contributions in order to fight the phenomenon he mentions. I am afraid that what is sauce for the goose in the case of the Bank of England is not sauce for the gander. Does he agree that the Bank of England is in danger of being accused of hypocrisy again and again as this proceeds?

[Ian Blackford]

The hon. Gentleman makes a very good point. I have not read the article, but I have seen the press headlines about it. That is exactly the point I have tried to make in painting a picture of the inequality. Those at the top or in the vanguard of society, if one wants to put it that way, are seen as benefiting from the quantitative easing programme—it benefits the pension schemes of those in the Bank of England—while ordinary workers and savers have been penalised. He is absolutely right, and one therefore recognises why we have the disconnect in society.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Baker]

My hon. Friend asks a magnificent question, one that is discussed on the website of the Cobden Centre—a think-tank that I co-founded. [Interruption.] There, I said it. The question is, “Would Hayek have supported QE?” The consensus of Hayek scholars is that, given all the circumstances at the time, he would have supported it, to prevent the money supply collapsing and the horrific humanitarian consequences that that would have involved. But would he have supported it now to try to stimulate the economy, creating patterns of economic activity sustained only by that expansion of the money supply? Flatly, no. I was not in Parliament at the time, and I am happy to tell my hon. Friend that I did not have to make that decision. We are where we are.

My second point is that I believe policy is now ineffective and counter-productive. The Governor told the Treasury Committee that we have “extraordinary, if not emergency” monetary policy; we have had it since 2009. I believe that if, during that seven-year period, productive investments could have been made, brought forward and induced by these low interest rates, they would have been made by now. When it comes to real productive investment, I think we are into the law of diminishing returns. We therefore run the risk of inducing firms to engage in activities that will not have a return—in other words, banks will make non-performing loans. That is, of course, the problem afflicting the Italian banking system, as we sit here.

The question is whether this monetary policy can produce a self-sustaining recovery and do it in a non-inflationary way. One of my advisers wrote to me before this debate to say that if we

“remove the base effects from the collapse in oil prices—as will happen over the coming months—and then just let the underlying ‘core’ inflation trends continue as they are, CPI would be 4%+ by mid-2017.”

That is something I shall ask the Governor about next time we see him.

Further to what the hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber said, Andrew Lilico, an economist at Europe Economics, has pointed out:

“In the three months to July 2016…the UK’s broad money supply (on the Bank of England’s preferred ‘M4ex’ measure) grew at an annualised rate of 14.7%”.

When I raised this with the Governor at the last Treasury Committee meeting—I used the monthly figures; it is far starker if we look at it quarterly—I asked whether, if the money supply is currently growing by 14.7% annualised over three months, we should expect more or less inflation next year. I think that I know the answer, but when I put it to the Governor, his answer was that aggregates had moved away from the whole problem of inflation targeting. I encourage the hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber to have a look at exactly what he said. I shall return to some of the Governor’s remarks in a few moments.

[Ian Blackford]

I am very much enjoying listening to the hon. Gentleman’s contribution. Given the case that he outlines, does he consider that there is a bubble in financial assets and, indeed, in property assets, and if he does, what would he do about it today?

[Mr Baker]

I certainly agree with the hon. Gentleman. Indeed, the Bank of England’s Andy Haldane said that the Bank had deliberately inflated the biggest bond market bubble in history. That is not a literal quote because I do not have it before me, but that is broadly what he said. If we look at the period 1997 to 2010, the period before the crisis, and look at the regional distribution of house prices, we find an eerie correlation between it and the increase in the money supply. That distribution of changes correlates with what one might expect of Cantillon effects—in other words, in London and the south-east, house prices rocket away quicker and earlier, while in the north-east and Scotland, house prices increase more slowly as the money spreads out. My point is that there is a good case for saying that Cantillon effects and the increase of the money supply have a profound effect not only on particular assets, but on the regional distribution of prices. It is something that the Bank should consider in its report. It should speak to and address the issue. Speaking as a humble aerospace and software engineer who has only read a few books, it is not within my gift to produce the research.

My next point is that this is a deliberate policy of manipulating asset prices, disrupting the price mechanism in the capital markets. Therefore, there will be a misallocation of capital. The Governor made a speech in New York at a monetary policy conference in which he acknowledged this phenomenon. I have tried to raise it further with him, but he is very good at moving the subject on. His speech was in defence of inflation targeting, and he dealt with four criticisms of it. The first was that price stability does not guarantee financial stability. He went on:

“Second, the stronger critique of the Austrian school is that inflation targeting can actively feed the creation of financial vulnerabilities, especially in the presence of positive supply shocks… From the Austrian perspective, this misguided response”—

the response of the central bank—

“stokes excess money and credit creation, resulting in an intertemporal misallocation of capital and the accumulation of imbalances over time. These imbalances eventually implode, leading to crisis and ‘bad’ deflation.”

It cannot be said that the Governor of the Bank of England is unaware of the somewhat unfortunately titled Austrian school of economics, which I believe in and which tells us that money creation has real structural effects on the economy that affect people’s everyday lives. I was going to challenge the Bank to include in its report an assessment of these things, to demonstrate whether or not it was aware of these effects, but the Governor’s speech has shown us that the Bank is aware. It should not only show in its report that it is aware, but justify what the Governor went on to imply, which is that, by using other instruments, it could deal with these structural consequences. That is one of the big questions of our time: whether or not the structural consequences of easy monetary policy can be dealt with using its other instruments. I am absolutely convinced they cannot be dealt with, and therefore we will have a worse crisis later than the one in 2008.

I sense that Mr Deputy Speaker would like me to wrap up, so I will just make the following point. This has gone from an exercise in saving the financial system to an exercise in kicking the can down the road. How will it develop in future? We have gone from low rates to QE, and I think we will go to negative rates. There has already been talk of banning cash. There have been discussions of helicopter money, too, and at the recent inflation report meeting, out of four people, only the Governor would rule out helicopter money. It is encouraging a misguided belief that if only we printed money and gave it to everybody, there would be justice. This kind of naive inflationism is madness.

[Ian Blackford]

indicated assent.

[Mr Baker]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for agreeing with me.

We have got to get to a point where we escape from easy monetary policies. That will come through one of three mechanisms: a self-sustaining recovery, which I emphasise I very much hope for—I hope that the Bank, and all the central banks, are right on that—or the next phase will be massive inflation, or there will be an abandonment of easy monetary policies before either of those things, at which point there will be an horrific correction.

The great question for society and us as representatives, and indeed for monetary economists, is going to be what went wrong. Will people blame the free market and vote for the policies of certain Opposition Members, which will lead to more statism and I would argue impoverishment and misery? Or will people blame central planning by central banks, which is deliberately dislocating our economy, manufacturing injustice and undermining faith in the market economy and has dropped us into a profound crisis of political economy?

I very much welcome this motion. I shall certainly support it, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber on moving it.

Royal Bank of Scotland

Debate between Ian Blackford and Steve Baker

Thursday 5th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Baker]

The hon. Gentleman knows that I often agree with him, but on this point I do not. I am an old English liberal free trader and I think that the fundamental problem is the chronically inflationary system of fiat money. I hope that he will forgive me if I talk instead about the Royal Bank of Scotland, because I have put the other issues on the record since my maiden speech.

I have two long-standing misgivings that come to a head in RBS. The first is about the effect that the international financial reporting standards have on our ability to see the true and fair position of banks. The other is about the stress tests. I am grateful to Professor Kevin Dowd, Gordon Kerr and John Butler of Cobden Partners for their advice, but any errors or omissions are my own. I should say that I have no financial interest whatever in Cobden Partners, although it was a spin-out from the Cobden Centre, which I co-founded to advance the ideas on which they are now working.

I have said many times that the IFRS allow, enable and encourage banks to overstate their asset values, and therefore their profits, and to understate their losses. In May, we conducted an exercise in which we compared the accounts of RBS with the statement of its accounts in the asset protection scheme. We believed that its capital was overstated by £20 billion. We had a meeting with RBS at which that was admitted.

If it is the case that the IFRS encourage banks to overstate their capital positions to such an extreme degree, I am not in the least convinced that we are selling something that we truly understand. Indeed, as the hon. Member for Edmonton (Kate Osamor) was opening the debate, on which I congratulate her, Gordon Kerr texted me to say that if we broke up the bank into 130 pieces, it would reveal its insolvency. I am not asserting the insolvency of RBS; what I am saying is that with the IFRS the way they are, we simply cannot know whether RBS is in the position it appears to be in.

In such circumstances, the paying of dividends, which has been proposed, would be extremely unwise. It would risk exposing taxpayers to future claims from stakeholders ranking superior to those common stakeholders. The claim will be that their entitlements have been improperly paid out as dividends, when those funds should lawfully have been held back and attributed to creditors and depositors. Tim Bush of Pensions & Investment Research Consultants, Gordon Kerr and others argue that we should have strong reservations about the integrity of the numbers and the ability of the firm to distribute profits under the law.

[Ian Blackford]

The hon. Gentleman is painting an interesting picture of the deficiencies of the IFRS. If we believe it for a second, does it not behove the Government to do a proper analysis of the true value of Royal Bank of Scotland, given that we own over 70% of it?

[Mr Baker]

I banged on in the last Parliament about the IFRS and their shortcomings. Indeed, I introduced a Bill to require parallel accounts to use the UK generally accepted accounting principles, precisely because I think there is a serious problem. I refer the House to Gordon Kerr’s book “The Law of Opposites”, published by the Adam Smith Institute, which not only covers this problem in detail, but explains how it feeds into the problem of derivatives being used specifically to manufacture capital out of thin air to circumvent regulatory capital rules. That is an extremely serious problem that might mean that the entire banking system is in a far worse place than we might otherwise think.