Runnymede & Weybridge Conservatives

The Constituency Association would like to know more about what you are thinking on some of the major topics of the day. You can join the debate by clicking on the link marked "comment" at the foot of each item.

Philip Hammond MP addressed the Runnymede & Weybridge Conservative Association A.G.M. on Friday 13th March

Mrs. Maureen Furey recieving the John Whittet Cup on behalf of Woodham and New Haw Branch, for the branch which had made the most overall improvement over the year.

Mrs. Margaret Wicks recieving the King Cup on behalf of Weybridge Green Branch for the best all round branch, covering fundraising, membership and campaigning activities.

Cllr. Geoffrey Woodger receiving the Cumper Shield on behalf of the Virginia Water and Thorpe Branch for the highest financial contribution to the Constituency.

Michelle Obama may have been trying to appeal to a certain English eccentricity when she paired an asymmetrical Junya Watanabe cardigan with a full-skirted Jason Wu dress and added debutante-style pearls for a photocall with Sarah Brown this week.

It was a relaxed look, fun and informal yet stylish. But if she was aiming for the quirky English look, it was not an unqualified success. When canvassed, Dame Vivienne Westwood, doyenne of daring British fashion, said: “I don’t think either of them dresses very well. I’m completely and utterly focused on the danger we face from global warming.”

For the meeting with Carla Bruni yesterday, Mrs Obama was not taking any risks. The mood was notably more conventional, presidential even. Still feminine, but not girlie – and more than a match for her notoriously soignée counterpart.

The coordinating coat and dress ensemble, by Thakoon, was quirky – bold colours, clever contrasting design – yet classical. It was also flattering, well cut and with that bateau neckline that so suits Mrs Obama. For her part, Ms Bruni opted for her now trademark interpretation of First Lady chic. That is to say, demure yet sexy.

The soft grey, three-quarter-length sleeves and pussycat bow (as favoured by Margaret Thatcher in her heyday, although to entirely different effect), worn with French flats might have been a little too coy on any normal female. On Ms Bruni they added up to extreme European elegance, laced with minxish potential.

For most women the prospect of being photographed alongside Ms Bruni, and having the results beamed around the globe, might easily lead to a crisis of confidence. (The same is not true of most men: look what it has done to Mr Sarkozy’s ego.) Not so Mrs Obama, who has a highly developed sense of personal style.

The Daily Telegraph's economics editor, Edmund Conway reveals that the Bank of England knew in 2006 precisely what risk was posed by the dangerous build-up of debt which was brewing in the economy but neither the Bank, the Regulators nor the Government took any action.

......... but we (financial journalists) were guilty of a more fundamental failing – one about which most of the financial press has remained shamefully silent. We should have made more noise about the risks of a crisis before it erupted. And I feel this more keenly than most. You see, I was among the few writers privileged to have been shown the evidence that the crisis was heading our way – more than a year before its earliest impact.

I remember the moment that I twigged that something was wrong. I was sitting in a wood-panelled room in the Bank of England on a rather warm July morning. In front of me were three of the Bank's leading experts in financial stability – the emergency room surgeons of the City. On the table was an intriguing chart. What it seemed to be saying was rather alarming, or at least that is how it struck me.

Cast your mind back to summer 2006, when the idea of a run on a British bank was among the most peculiar conceits imaginable. Although we had issued plenty of warnings on the levels of debt being taken on by anglophone households around the world, the notion that the entire British banking system could, in little more than a year, find itself on the brink of collapse would have sounded ridiculous. But on this chart was a wiggly line screaming that something was going very wrong: the banks and building societies were lending significantly more than they had in their vaults.

Wasn't this, well, a bit of a worry? I asked (in the Bank of England understatement is the modus operandi – or at least it was then). The faces that stared back looked drawn, fearful and rather weary. They pointed me towards another set of figures, even more worrying. They implied that if there was an unexpected shock that made it difficult to fill that gap by borrowing short term from other investors, home and abroad, the consequences would be disastrous: we were talking about a year's worth of profits – £40 billion – being wiped out; about house prices falling by a quarter and the economy shrinking by 1.5 per cent.

The boom went on for another year and a bit, and the eventual slump looks like being even worse, but the fact remains: there was a distinct bat-squeak of worry in the Bank of England in 2006 – and it was more or less ignored. Granted, the Bank had not identified all of the details, nor precisely how this crisis would become the worst since the Great Depression, but it did enough; it identified the root cause of the credit crunch.

So what went wrong? There was enough time to have prevented Northern Rock from embarking on the horrendous borrowing and mortgaging spree that led to its destruction; enough time to have ensured that a fatal breath was blown into the housing bubble; enough time to ensure that while a slowdown was inevitable, it needn't have been so panicked and painful.

The large part of the answer was the failure of the Bank's experts to send out a louder clarion call to chief executives; the failure of Gordon Brown to take seriously this threat, relayed directly by his central bank; the failure of City regulators to turn this worrying little chart into action.

The Independent's Jeremy Warner has published two articles on Sterling recently and wonders why there has been so little public attention given to this. He wonders if this is because the public's immediate reaction is that devaluations are probably beneficial overall. However there are some significant disadvantages and Jeremy Warner argues that these may both outweigh the advantages and also kick in immediately while any benefits (exactly what exports are going to benefit?) will only show later on.

....... Government ministers lambast the banks for not lending enough, yet the reason credit is being squeezed is because it is no longer possible to borrow internationally as freely as we used to. In extremis, the flight of capital becomes a self-feeding phenomenon. The lower the pound falls, the more it frightens the money markets and the less inclined they are to lend in sterling.

Many international investors regard the outlook for the UK economy as truly dire. Its key strengths, the housing market and financial services, lie in ruins, and now there isn't even the attraction of high interest rates relative to Europe to keep the money flowing in. Like the banks, Britain as a country is being forced to deleverage, and most disagreeable it is likely to prove too........

George Bridges argues that “The middle classes will pay for Brown’s bust”. Against a background of shrinking financial, manufacturing and farming sectors, he argues that the state sector will increase as the middle classes are forced back onto it.

This raises the interesting question whether, Balance of Payments aside, there is any reason why the state service sector should not grow to 100% of the economy and is there any economic difference between a service job that seems useful – such as a nurse or graphic designer – and one which is at first sight less evidently so, such as a “gender outreach worker”. If there is a limit on the size of the state service sector, how do we know what it is? If it is the Balance of Payments which ultimately provides the limit, the first signs of strain will be seen in Sterling's exchange rate.

........ And here's the rub: the State isn’t offering a helping hand to lead the middle classes back to self-reliance; instead, it is getting a stranglehold on their lives. After a decade of Sisyphean labour trying to push the state's rock out of their path, the Middle class has once again been flattened by it, crushing its independence:

Consider education. Thousands thought, like Alastair Campbell, that too many state schools are bog standard; and scrimped and saved to send their children to private 'schools. Today, these are the parents most at risk of being called in for `a quiet word’ with the boss. The upshot : 20 per cent of local authorities expect to see higher demand for state school places. Then there is private medical insurance, held by: four million people: how many of their subscriptions will be scrapped? Likewise with private long term care, which already cripples many families: a quarter of councils report increased demands for state-funded care.

You may say this is no bad thing. If the middle classes didn't evacuate their children from state schools and used the NHS, they might exert more pressure to get real change in these services. But you would not force a man back into a burning building in order to get the fire brigade to come quicker. So why should we have to risk children getting a bad education or picking up an infection in hospital, in order to get change?

Yes, these trends might pass. As people grow richer, they will once again return to the private sector. What is more worrying is the growth in the state itself. Thanks to Gordon Brown, it is now the only growth industry. It employed 14,000 more people between June and September - while the private sector shrank by 128,000: Over the past year the numbers employed in health, education and public services rose by 90,000, while the number in financial and business services fell by 112,000, For all its “efficiency drives", the state is a good employer and a bad sacker. How many of these will be jobs for life, complete with a pension -pumping up the public sector's pension liability of £1 trillion? And who is making the simple point that the more people work for the State, the fewer there are to create wealth to pay for it, and the higher the taxes they have to pay?

The middle classes have been milked to pay for Brown’s boom. They will soon be mugged to pay for his bust. The question is how they will react. John Prescott, in one of his more eloquent moments, said, “We're all middle class now." If he's right; Gordon Brown should be very worried indeed."