People will be outraged once they find out about the difference between the money in their pockets and the currency of their country. Nobody likes to be taken for a ride and the people of this and most other countries have been the victims of a tragic delusion. We The People have been duped by economists, merchants and bankers, who first had to be miseducated so that they could teach the new ‘religion’ to the uneducated.
One of the first things I discovered was that even Prime Minister Thatcher had been fooled. The country is not like a grocer’s shop. The first law of shop keeping is to make sure that your mark-ups cover your overheads with a little to spare. The second law is the conservation of money. Countries are quite different. There was no printing press in the attic of her father’s shop in Grantham, and no need of a furnace in the basement. Countries create and destroy money. Shopkeepers only set fire to the shop when all else fails. It is called an insurance job.
When looking into the data base of the Bank of England, I was first depressed (for four days). Then I got angry. But as the Americans say, ‘Don’t get mad, get even!’ So I educated myself even more. To find out what really goes on in the vaults and behind the counters of the Banking Business.
Through the Christian Council for Monetary Justice[1] I had found out that the National Debt[2] was the mechanism governments use to borrow money. The UK’s annual budget has a similar amount for military expenses and for paying interest on debt. The budget for 2008 is published here[3].
It is almost four hundred years since this country ended its experiment with Republican Government. Roundheads and Cavaliers put down their swords and agreed a new constitutional settlement…the first since Magna Carta four hundred years previously. Control was vested in the King in Parliament.
As a temporary expedient twenty years after the settlement the nation’s money supply was outsourced to the Bank of England Company…a private cabal of Dutch merchant bankers. It made sense, just like the Lend-Lease deal with the Americans made sense, because there was a war on…a trade war of little relevance to ordinary people who would eventually pick up the tab and pay the bills.
When there is a war on, anything goes. The Dutch lost the war and won the peace[i]. It is time to review the situation…a job that the British People seem to have to do every dozen generations. We see this Public Credit Petition as the foot in the door. It is our good fortune that the door was unlocked forty years ago when on 22nd December 1964, the Conservative MP Henry Kerby placed before the House of Commons an Early Day Motion in which he wrote that:
‘…the aims of those who want to assure private property and free enterprise, as well as those who want to protect the British people from unfair exploitation, would both be best served by restoring the power of issuing money to Her Majesty The Queen.’
Kerby went much further than our petition. He made the important link between the UK and the USA in claiming that that his Early Day Motion was:
‘in accordance with ancient tradition and law, as is also demanded by the American Constitution, which gives the right of issue solely to Congress, so as to assure the State and Nation the benefits of that emission and relieve them of the immense and growing burdens of a parasitical National and private debt.’
And not content with this, he continued that the purpose of his EDM was:
‘…to make certain that control passes to the taxed and is taken out of the hands of the present hidden and unlawful beneficiaries of taxation, much of the proceeds of which they collect as interest on all money and immense debts:’
Kerby then requested that Parliament call upon Her Majesty’s government:
‘…to introduce the required legislation, to assert the proper sovereignty of The Queen in Council in this most important of all sovereign functions [and] assure unprecedented prosperity with true sovereignty and liberty.
Kerby knew his political history. The original Tories may have been Jacobites but the spirit of the old Jacobites expressed a sounder understanding of the functions of the Crown as the fount of Sovereignty and the manner in which it was to be exercised through Counsellors[ii] working in tandem with a Parliament that reflected the opinion of local people throughout the land.
These old Tories were opposed by the old Whigs who were the proponents of Dutch Finance, of the issue of the means of exchange as an interest-bearing debt by private bankers, and of the domination of the State by High Finance, not the Sovereign in Council, the King and people.
With the decline of Liberalism in Great Britain it might be thought that Socialist Labour is the heir of that tradition. And so it was until the sudden death of John Smith and the rise of New Labour which ripped the heart out of the party when it arranged for the rapid abolition without meaningful debate of Clause Four of the Labour Party Constitution.[4]
Henry Kerby says in the comments on his Early Day Motion:
‘It is essential that the issue of money be as needed by the whole nation and hence free from private or political influence. Consequently it is essential that the Queen in Council should resume the power and duty of monetary emission. If new money is spent (not lent) into circulation[5], taxes could be reduced to a small fraction of their present and growing burden and the National Debt will gradually disappear.
‘Banks should only be able to lend moneys that they have earned or borrowed. With the release from the debt and tax burden and with the issue of money in accordance with the needs of exchange, the country would experience unexampled and lasting prosperity, with no slumps and unemployment. Financial principles and policies would be open and broadly understood: instead of being Master, Money would become a public servant.’
Sidney Webb was a little more succinct forty years earlier when he sat down to draft Clause Four for the Labour Party Constitution. He talked about the means of production, distribution and exchange. The whole point of a Labour Party was to sort these three things out. It still is.
But let us take one step at a time. Step One was Kerby’s Early Day Motion in 1964. Step Two is to put pressure on Parliament and on its members. Party allegiances are breaking down. An informed public will vote for the candidate they trust to do what needs to be done. The Public Credit Petition will touch MPs directly. In three-corner fights between Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat, the PCP vote in 2010 could swing the balance. So we have begun by putting a foot in the door that Henry Kerby has opened for us by asking the Treasury Select Committee[6] to organise an inquiry into the long-term development of the money supply[7] or public credit[8].
[4] Link to the Tony-Natasha Dialogue on the cesc website.
[5] Link to We Are All Social Business Men and Women…It is Time to Tell Parliament. On the cesc website soon.
[i] A case can be made that this is our island story. It was repeated in the 1940s when the UK won the war but then watched as their Empire disintegrated and America won the peace. This branch of the English Speaking Peoples may have gained by this retreat from empire…and from the reverse immigration that has followed in its wake…Nigerian nurses from Lagos to Lewisham and Bangladeshi merchants from Dacca to Dagenham and from Mumbai to Manchester. But they have yet to kick out the Imperial Administration with gun running, money laundering and propaganda as its principal exports. And it is a zero-sum game for the English Speaking world as the American people pick up the pain deficit and try to ignore the plight of their war veterans. Empires are so yesterday. [PE]
[ii] This is an English tradition that was interrupted in 1066 when the Roman Catholic Church…the principal source of William the Conqueror’s external funding…took over England in a victory as lucky as that of the Duke of Wellington against Napoleon many centuries later. Can History really be such an accidental affair? The rest of William’s business plan to steal the estates of the nobles who had opposed him and dole these out to his supporters. This practice continues to this day which gives the international financiers sleepless night as they try to play both ends against the middle so their net war gains exceed their net war losses. The underlying grievance of the German Chancellor in the 1930s were the terms imposed on his country at the end of the Kaiser War. His claims for limited restitution were quite reasonable. From the time of his election in 1933 to the palace coup that saw Chamberlain replaced by Churchill, Hitler repeatedly sought a peaceful settlement with the British Empire so that together they might set about the task of destroying Stalin’s Soviet Union…the empire not the ideology of Communism. The eventual consequence of this most unlikely coup…Churchill was much hated and Halifax was the obvious Man of the Hour…including the destruction of the British Empire is likely to be seen very differently by future historians. The generation of Europeans who suffered and died in the 1940s is of course unable to face up to this possibility. So they must die off before the English come out of denial. [PE]
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