Yes I agree with you- we each do something that the mainstream media don’t do- but I do think that one of the strengths of this blog is its diversity. For example you are absolutely right about Kate, but isn’t Chris’s economic analysis something that you don’t get elsewhere- I learnt something from his discussion of the value of board members. I think that we need a broad front- not a prescriptive analysis of what we should be doing. Yes lets do something different from the MSM- but I don’t think that the only way to do that is by highlighting injustices- we also need better analysis. I don’t think that the left should only be more compassionate, we should also be brighter, and more willing to provide good explanations of why events are happening, what’s going on and what the world is.

sorry that should have been ‘we each SHOULD do something that the mainstream media don’t do’

Missed out the crucial word 🙂

The ‘tens of thousands of council workers’ facing ‘devastating pay cuts’ is not backed up by the article you linked to:

Under the new system, designed to get rid of pay differentials between men and women and white and blue collar staff, 42 per cent of the council’s 41,000-strong workforce will be better off, 46 per cent will continue to receive their existing salary, and 12 per cent will suffer a wage cut.

That makes just under 5,000 to receive a pay cut, whilst 17,000 receive a pay increase, and apparently this is being done to correct pay differentials between staff doing similar work. It doesn’t look like a clear-cut case to me, unless we take the view that no public sector worker can ever have a pay cut. Can you elaborate on the case?

If you want to do something different then why not try to stop applying labels to yourself for other people to get annoyed with.

Left-right-centre are relative terms which have no intrinsic meaning other than to indicate nominal stances on an axis of opposition – it does help identify the enemy, but accepting the axis in the first place is what creates the opposition. Yet why continue trying to aggravate those you wish to reach out to when your stated aim is to build a broad coalition? In the final analysis your enemy is only him or her with whom you haven’t yet settled your differences, reconciled yourself to, made friends and started campaigning on shared issues with. And don’t pretend, we all share some things in common.

LC’s mission statement clears the way for practical discussions aimed at developing real policies, yet here is another article which has discriminating labels as its DNA.

In a time when many commentators and spokesmen call for an end to the ‘Punch and Judy’ politics of ‘tribalism’ it seems the only way to succeed in this aim is by getting one tribe to wipe out the other and end dissent.

It is an absolute no-brainer that any form of sensible policy development should be able to examine all the issues from every possible perspective, if at least to be able to satify the claim that all possible consideration has been taken into account…oh, isn’t that where and how democratic accountability raises it’s phoenix-like head?

Come on LC, you can do better than this, you can do more than this: you’ll have to do more than repeating hackneyed old half-answers like this.

It’s not about drawing battle lines and taking sides, its about seeking higher purpose and embracing others who would by any other method be excluded.

And it means doing it even if it makes you want to spit or seethe, or especially because it does.

In which case, how about a ‘Normal Conspiracy’?

Rob – “That makes just under 5,000 to receive a pay cut”

That’s just in Birmingham Council. Single Status pay reviews are going on in every council in the country, so if you extend your (optimistic) figure to 12% of all local council employees then we’re talking tens of thousands of council workers.

Single status/job evaluation has been brought in to rectify current discrepancies between the pay of men and women in the public sector. However, the idea surely should have been to bring women’s pay up to meet men’s pay, not to cut pay to a significant proportion of the workforce…..

Cath – It’s not my figure, optimistic or otherwise; it’s the figure in the article that the post linked to. 12% of 41,000 equals 4,920 whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist.

In order to raise pay for 42% of workers, 12% may have their pay cut. The alternative you propose is to raise or maintain pay for everyone. Now, how is that to be paid for? Assuming no other means of saving money is found, it is paid for by giving everyone else a pay cut via increased taxation, thus, as you object to, cutting pay to a significant proportion of the workforce…

I actually have no real problem with this. If there’s a genuinely unfair pay imbalance and we need to increase taxation in order to rectify it, then say so. Couching the whole thing in language of ‘devastating cuts’ or suggesting that there’s something inherently wrong with taking from one group to give to another (which you’d have to do via the tax system if not via direct pay cuts) simply undermines your argument.

Thanks for your comments people.

@ Gracchi – good points. I should point out first of all that I wrote this on Tuesday/Wednesday last week, and I’ll willingly admit that I was basing my opinions on first impressions gleaned from the first few contributions, along with Sunny’s introductory articles. I’ve been impressed and (partially) pleasantly surprised by some of those that have gone up since. Perhaps I could have waited, but I’m very impatient and wanted to get my retaliation in first!

My main concern is that in seeking to provide analysis and explanations of ‘why events are happening’ we don’t lose sight of the need to actually change events as well. Analysis is ultimately fruitless unless it leads to some kind of action. That’s what conspiracies are all about, aren’t they? I’ll be honest and say that I wouldn’t be especially interested in LC if its only intention is to host intellectual debate and feed ideas into New Labour and LibDem policy units. Maybe there’s a place for that, but it can’t be the be all and end all, because Parliament is only a very small part of the political arena, IMO.

@ Rob Knight – Cath answered your points perfectly beneath, Birmingham is only one part of the story. I’ll confess I struggle to understand the ins and outs of Single Status funding myself and don’t feel qualified to lead that debate, but what puzzles (and slightly depresses) me is that nobody else seems to want to talk about it at all, even though this should be a massive issue for ‘the left’ or anyone concerned with social justice. I suspect Cath may be the woman for the job though… (just read your follow-up and you miss the point that the article I linked to refers to 41,000 workers IN BIRMINGHAM. The same process and same disputed is being replicated in most other large councils, so we are indeed talking tens of thousands across the country)

@ thomas: don’t be so touchy! I’m not remotely interested in labels, and the reason I started this piece in a slightly provocative manner was partly because I was getting fed up with discussions about what it means to be on the ‘liberal-left’ with all the emphasis on ‘liberal.’ I’m not saying that issues of liberal politics are not important or necessary, I’m saying they are only one part of the equation. This was my attempt to redress the balance. I’m not interested in what’s liberal, what’s left and what’s right. I’m interested in what’s right and what’s wrong. If you think this argument has ‘discriminating labels as its DNA’ then either you read it wrong or else I writ it rong.

@ Cath – *waves* thank you!

“Single status/job evaluation has been brought in to rectify current discrepancies between the pay of men and women in the public sector. However, the idea surely should have been to bring women’s pay up to meet men’s pay, not to cut pay to a significant proportion of the workforce…..”

Cath Elliot

You’re being naive – no commercial organistion or government is going to willingly implement equality legislation that cost them money, if there is going to be any levelling, it will usually be downwards. Women camapigned for the right to retire at the same age as men and… now they had to work longer, an own goal of staggering proportions.

Ally, you should be aware that while many of the liberal left/greens, no labels, etc, support the idea of no borders/open borders implicit in your post, not all do, some of us want a well managed immigration fair to migrants and fair to settled communities.

Rob – Another point to make is that the figure of 12% depends on which job evaluation scheme is being used. I’ve been involved in JE in my own council, and we’ve been told to expect a third of the workforce to gain, a third to stay the same, and a third to lose. So in a workforce of 22,000 that’s potentially 7000 who are set to see their pay reduced. (And you can bet it won’t be the Chief Exec or any of the senior personnel who lose out)

Matt – I may be naive, but Agenda for Change in the health service was funded by the Government, whereas no extra funding has been allocated to councils for implimenting single status. Personally I think it’s going to prove to be hugely divisive, as predominantly male departments see their wages decrease while predominantly female departments get a raise. As a trade union rep I’m expected to sell this to members as a positive step towards achieving equality, but even I’m finding it hard to justify men losing out so I can get a pay rise.

Are we seriously telling a significant proportion of local council employees that they’ve been overpaid for years? It’s nonsense, of course they haven’t. Those at the top end maybe, but as I’ve said, it’s not them that will lose out in this, it’s more likely to be those in the middle that do.

Hey Ally, I meant to say earlier – great article!

@ John Rogers – first, I don’t for a moment think that everyone on the left / lib / green spectrum agrees about anything, least of all immigration controls. I think one of the interesting aspects of LC will be to see whether many of us can disagree about many issues while still finding common ground and co-operating on those we do.

Secondly, I’m not ‘No borders’ on immigration. I just don’t think deporting people back to brutal regimes or leaving refugees to starve is humane, necessary or desirable. Do you?

Cath, you’re still dodging the conclusion though. What you are saying is that taxes will have to rise to pay for equalisation of pay amongst council employees. Make the case for it! Tell anyone who will listen how important that this issue is, that it’s about striking a huge blow for gender equality and so on. If the story is ‘money-grubbing public servants won’t stand to lose a penny of their pay, and will go on strike to ensure that they all get more money, forcing the rest of us to pay for it all’ then you’re never going to win the argument. Or you could suggest more clearly that it’s the top level managers who should be having their pay cut, and I’d be agreeing wholeheartedly with you.

Ally – sorry if I seemed a bit combative. I’m not trying to disagree with you, I just want the details before I’ll agree that this is an issue that I should care about. I’m still not entirely convinced that this is one of the biggest issues we face today, but perhaps that proves your point that people need to talk more about these kinds of things.

I’m almost definitely one of those liberals who you think needs to shut up a bit so that we can all focus on the important business of campaigning against pay cuts for council workers 😉 , so I hope you’ll forgive me if I need a little convincing.

Roob – ‘combative’?

Not at all, this will become a pretty dull place without people disageeing with each other from time to time. Fill yer boots!

And I wasn’t trying to say that a council workers’ pay dispute is necessarily the most important issue of our time or even that the rights and wrongs are necessarily clear cut.

I raised it as one issue among many that could have been in the news over the past week or two but which has been completely ignored by the national MSM.

I don’t necessarily think you should be dropping everything to join a picket line outside Birmingham Town Hall. However I do think that all of us, as liberal-left bloggers, need to stop from time to time and say ‘so where are we going with this?’

As I said on Sunny’s CiF blog last week, if LC is here to help secure the re-election of New Labour or Lib Dem MPs, then I’ll back away and leave it to others. Because I think there’s an opportunity here to do something much more effective.

Or if our purpose is no more than scoring debating points off the right, then I think we’re wasting our time.

The launch of LC seemed to provide a good opportunity to raise this issue, and I make no apologies for that. I’m not outright condemning those who want to discuss theory and policy, just suggesting we try looking at things from a different perspective.

To clarify my position, I think some people have read my piece as an attack on liberals or on theoreticians – it wasn’t meant to be.

Some people have read my piece as a call for campaigns on single issues. It wasn’t meant to be that either.

I was really calling for us to work harder at setting an agenda rather than following it. That could be on issues that are traditionally leftist, issues that are traditionally liberal, either, neither or both!

HTH.

Or ‘Rob’ even!

No, not touchy, just worrying that the use of labels encourages prejudice, which undermines any sense of egalitarianism or enlightenment.

Similarly, “endangering and exploiting vulnerable migrant workers”. Why not just unpick the knots in this type of slack wordage and stop trying to create emotive associations.

Immigrants are people first and foremost, not workers, please don’t forget. The requirement to work is a consequence of this. It is the fact that their status is politicised that creates the vulnerability and is where the danger arises from.

Use of the word exploitation is the non-sequitur which causes aggravation on both sides of the argument. I could give the example of the Bulgarian girl I talked to who explained that she spent her first month in the country living in squats and walking the streets at night as a prostitute because she needed to save money to be able to rent a flat before she could get a job – she didn’t view herself as a victim, she said in the town where she came from it was seen as normal to exploit the resources you have!

The issue is more about force and acceptable standards.