Anthony Scholefield: Why the Great Depression did not return after WWII and the resulting lessons for today's policy makers

Anthony Scholefield is the Director of Futurus, a think tank specialising in EU and immigration matters and is also a member of the Global Vision Economic Advisory Panel.  His most recent booklet, Warning: Immigration Can Seriously Damage Your Wealth, was published by the Social Affairs Unit in 2007.

The failure of the Great Depression to return in 1946 has some lessons for policy makers in today’s downturn both in the USA and the UK.  Contemporary opinion in 1945 expected renewed economic decline and unemployment after demobilization.

It is generally conceded that Roosevelt’s New Deal did not stop the Depression, even if there is debate about whether it ameliorated the situation.  The New Deal was, in many ways, a continuation of measures taken by President Hoover.  Indeed, the first, and most widely praised, act of FDR, the Banking Bill, was virtually all written by Ogden Mills, Hoover’s Under-Secretary of the Treasury.

After all, Henry Morgenthau, Jr, Secretary of the Treasury for the whole of Roosevelt’s presidency, famously testified to the House Ways and Means Committee on May 9, 1939:

“We have tried spending money.  We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.  And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong … someone else can have my job.  I want to see this country prosperous.  I want to see people get a job.  I want to see people get enough to eat.  We have never made good on our promises … I say after eight years of this administration [worryingly Morgenthau said ‘eight’ when it was actually ‘six’] we have just as much unemployment as when we started.  And an enormous debt to boot.”

Anthony Scholefield: America must start drilling for oil

Anthony Scholefield is the Director of Futurus, a think tank specializing in EU and immigration matters and is also a member of the Global Vision Academic Council.  His latest booklet, published by the Social Affairs Unit in 2007, is 'Warning: Immigration Can Seriously Damage Your Wealth'.  In this extended Platform he argues that America must scrap restrictions on drilling for oil.

As the American economy crashes into what is becoming more than a recession and more like a slump, some of the political class’ most cherished beliefs are coming under attack.  These are fixed beliefs that are harmful to ordinary voters and are based on illusions, self-deception and lack of reasoning, but which have an ideological stranglehold over the political class and the media.

There are plenty of hallucinatory ideological strangleholds among the British political class, among which the alleged  benefits of the EU membership, mass immigration and public spending stand out as the most damaging.

In the USA, many forecast that illegal immigration would be the first policy area where some reality would take hold of the political class but, in the event, it now looks as though a hallucination peculiar to the USA, the influence of extreme environmentalists in preventing drilling for oil in the USA itself, will be the first casualty and awakening from this hallucination may determine the election.

It is certainly a peculiar fact that the United States, far and away the biggest oil consumer, has, for the last twenty-five years, been the only country in the world with a restrictive policy on oil exploration – restrictive to such an extent that 97% of Federal offshore areas are not available, one way or another, for exploration and 94% of federal onshore areas are not available for exploration.

In the meantime, the 12 million barrels of oil imported by the USA at, say, $120 a barrel, is costing 1.5 billion dollars a day.  This in turn has knock-on effects on the trade deficit and the increased unwillingness of foreign investors to trust the dollar.

Anthony Scholefield: The real history of the National Health Service

Anthony Scholefield is the Director of Futurus - a think tank specializing in EU and immigration matters - a member of the Global Vision Academic Council, and author of 'Warning: Immigration Can Seriously Damage Your Wealth'. To mark the 60th anniversary of the National Health Service he goes back to when the NHS expropriated the existing voluntary health services and asks what value it has brought to how healthcare is provided.

The Conservative Party wants us all to sign a birthday card to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the NHS which is to be presented by David Cameron. This follows the Conservative Party proposing that Aneurin Bevan was one of twelve great Britons who should be studied in school history lessons.

It seems opportune to review again Bevan, Attlee and the establishment of the National Health Service which continues, as Nigel Lawson once remarked, to be the religion of the British people.  Ignorance of the world of health provision before and after 1948 and what the NHS was really about remains profound.

It is certainly remarkable that so much veneration by the political class, the media and even the Conservative Party, has been accorded to a bureaucratic change which had virtually no contact with the actual health of the people and which was based on massive expropriation of the assets of charities.

In historical terms, the establishment of the National Health Service was one of the two great expropriations of property in British history, the other being the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII and the appropriation of their properties.

A contemporary analogy would be the expropriation of the assets of all charities such as Oxfam, Age Concern, on the grounds that a comprehensive charity scheme was more efficient.