Right-wing attempts to legitimise BNP policies
The BNP’s Question Time appearance has led to two predictable responses from the right.
First, they’ve been whinging that Nick Griffin was singled out by the audience. After declaring for years that ‘no platform’ was wrong and it was better to expose the BNP publicly, most now seem to think even exposing them on national TV is a step too far.
Apparently if the BBC invite a Holocaust denier and avowed racist on to TV we should just ignore their past and talk about his views on the Royal Mail strike. Pathetic. Nick Griffin repeatedly lied during QT. Why aren’t right-whingers talking about that?
The second predictable response is to play up a ’surge’ in BNP support following the programme.
A Telegraph poll following BBC-QT said this:
The survey found that 22 per cent of voters would ’seriously consider’ voting for the BNP in a future local, general or European election. This included four per cent who said they would ‘definitely’ consider voting for the party, three per cent who would ‘probably’ consider it, and 15 per cent who said they were ‘possible’ BNP voters.”
The 4-3% is not unexpected and is within the margin of error for the 2% that BNP voting intentions lie along.
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We shouldn’t help starving people, apparently
Rarely can the standard neo-Malthusian rightwing orthodoxy on development have been expressed quite as bluntly – or quite as nastily, come to that – as it is in The Times last week: ‘Do starving Africans a favour,’ runs the headline over a piece by the paper’s former Africa bureau chief Sam Kiley. ‘Don’t feed them.’
Well, they do say the first rule of good journalism is to cut to the chase, and Kiley certainly does that:
The Horn of Africa is in the grip of the worst drought for 47 years! Some 23 million people are threatened with starvation! When you see children on TV with distended bellies keening over their dying parents, it would be inhuman not to be moved to tears. But do them a favour. Sit on your hands.
There follows a spot of quibbling over the statistics. The compassion industry routinely ramps up the disaster stats on its press releases, the better to gull the guilt trippable into emptying their wallets. That 23m figure is ‘humbug’, he argues. Nobody is in a position to count.
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Go and support your postman tomorrow
Early tomorrow morning, I shall be awake and walking down to the local Royal Mail depot to support the postmen and CWU in their dispute.
As Dave Osler points out, the issue has gone far beyond the mere question of who is right and who is wrong over the specific issues of modernisation. The question is now whether or not Royal Mail has the unmitigated right to do what it wants with its business.
Bearing in mind that the business survives on the labour extracted from tens of thousands of postal workers up and down the country, few of whom are paid very well – whilst their bosses enjoy bonuses on a level with parts of the City of London – I’m inclined to say that no, they do not. Modernisation must be agreed with the workers, or it simply should not be permitted to happen. It hasn’t been agreed.
In fact, Royal Mail have now said that they will only take the question to arbitration if the CWU give up their planned strike – which has been endorsed overwhelmingly by CWU members in a national ballot.
This amounts to asking the union to surrender before negotiations begin, and with the leaked Royal Mail policy document indicating that they want nothing less than union derecognition, it would be criminal to concede it.
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Labour betrays the workers, again
With last week’s Tory conference peppered with proposals coming straight from the Thatcherite book, Labour was handed a slight chance to make up some lost ground. Instead, they’ve just scored another massive electoral own goal.
This weekend, in fact, to the cheers of the CBI and other employers’ organisations, Labour announced they’re backtracking on their promises to finally adopt the European Working Directive, a set of measures aimed at protecting the most vulnerable workers in Britain while, at the same time, preventing full-time staff being undercut by cheap agency recruits.
The government has now said that the Agency Workers Directive will not be implemented until October 2011, meaning that it will be left to the whim of the next Tory government – meaning, in turn, that it will probably be scrapped.
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Does the Arts Council need trimming too?
contribution by pagar
Unity wrote an article recently questioning whether, as we approach an era of fiscal restraint and pressure on public spending, it was appropriate to give public money to a rich organisation like the Catholic Church. And this got me thinking.
Are there other areas where we are currently spending public money that it would be appropriate to axe before we have to get to the nurses and teachers?
I came up with quite a few but perhaps the most obvious is funding for the Arts Council.
In September 2008, a £150,000 managed funds grant enabled 40 artists and scientists to set sail on Cape Farewell’s 12-day Disko Bay expedition. The trip aimed to put artistic responses to climate change in the spotlight, and the crew featured 10 musicians (including KT Tunstall, Martha Wainwright, Jarvis Cocker and Ryuichi Sakamoto), two architects, two oceanographers, a ceramicist and a comedian. This was the organisation’s seventh expedition.
Investors complain about insufficient corruption
The couple of times I’ve ventured on to LibCon turf to have a rant about international credit rating agencies, I’ve been told I had no idea what I was on about, what with not working in financial markets, and then that I am a nutjob conspiracy theorist who think the world’s controlled by white cat-stroking evil dudes.
To be fair to the second commenter (Giles), it was very funny and he has since softened his line commendably. He now suggests that, while I may not be a total nutjob, I’m wrong to see what the credit rating agencies have been up to as a systematic abuse of power, rather than occasional rank incompetence.
Since those little contretemps, the US House Committee on Oversight and Government reform has been investigating what the credit rating agencies have been getting up to for the last 70-odd years, and has discovered that for the last thirty five years of those they have been tailoring their credit ratings so as to maximize income from the very people whose financial products they are rating. (backstory here)
That is, they have been acting corruptly.
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Why the debate on the deficit is dumb
The debate about government borrowing shows how backward our political class and media are. It's being conducted within the wrong framework. It’s about what the parties will or will not do, when in fact it should be about the range of policies they are considering.
To see what I mean, here is my view of the deficit, which I suspect is reasonably mainstream among economists.
We haven’t a hope of cutting the deficit significantly by policy measures alone; Osborne‘s proposed measures aren’t just a tiny fraction of borrowing, but are a tiny fraction of the forecast errors for the deficit. Our only chance of getting the deficit down seriously is to grow our way out of it.
This requires that the private sector start borrowing again, which means that policies that “encourage saving”, such as the raising of the pension age, might actually raise the deficit.
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What about those people on the margins?
Whilst the media spotlight has been shining on the sparkling big-teethed smiles of Tories in Manchester this week, I have been living with a family in the shadows. Yasmin and her 13-year-old daughter are asylum seekers from Bangladesh.
They invited me to stay with then in their Bolton home, just ten miles away from the conference, to write about family life on the poverty line.
Life on benefits for Yasmin is not a choice; it’s a legal obligation. She is desperate to work, but like all asylum seekers who are waiting to have their claims processed, she is forbidden to do so by the Home Office.
As I write, the signs of relentless cost cutting are scattered all around me. By the kitchen sink there is a small pot of diluted washing up liquid to make it last longer. A small jug sits in the bathroom, helping to make the most of their deliberately shallow baths. She knows about efficiencies.
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Worldwide, left has gained in the financial crisis
The Financial Times has an article called ‘Global Insight: Europe’s left is failing’, which asks:
But why should the left be doing so badly at precisely the time when raw and unregulated free-market capitalism has precipitated a global financial crisis? State intervention and regulation are returning with a vengeance. Yet the parties of the left are getting none of the credit for saying: “We told you so.”
But is ‘the left’ really doing that badly in response to the global financial crisis?
In the past month, left and centre-left parties were re-elected in Norway and Portugal, and gained power in Greece. In their worst result since the 1950s in Germany, the left mustered 46%, compared to 48% for the right wing parties.
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Conservatives: party of jobs and opportunity?
David Cameron this morning asks us to believe that an entity he notably refers to as ‘the new Conservative Party’ is now ‘the party of jobs and opportunity’. Either the overnight transformation took several tonnes of fairy dust, or it is a hallucination caused by some other magical powdery substance reputedly once much favoured by opposition frontbenchers.
Nobody who is historically literate will forget that it was the Tories that ruled Britain through most of the 1930s and all of the 1980s, the only two decades in which the dole queues topped three million.
And didn’t Cameron once work as special adviser to Norman ‘Black Wednesday’ Lamont, the Conservative chancellor who famously argued that joblessness on a massive scale is ‘a price well worth paying’ to control inflation?
The truth is that the brand of free market economics to which all good Tories subscribe clearly maintains that involuntary unemployment can only arise in a limited range of special cases. Until Cameron explicitly disavows this doctrine, the suspicion has to be that he agrees with his former boss. continue reading… »
Cameron’s ‘typical family’ is a rich one
If you missed yesterday’s edition of The Sun – which I guess means most of you – then I’d suggest that pop over to Tom Watson’s blog, where you’ll find a copy of David Cameron’s ‘10 Key Pledges‘ for the upcoming General Election, much of which the FT’s Westminster blog has already neatly picked to pieces.
However, one thing that did intrigue me was the very first pledge on the list…
We will work with councils to freeze council tax for two years – saving over £200 for the typical family.
Oooh, a saving of £200 in just two years – can that be right?
And if it is then exactly how typical does a family have to be to make this kind of saving?
Let’s crunch a few numbers shall we…
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The BBC is good for household debt
The financial crisis suggests there’s a strong argument for the BBC remaining state-owned and not carrying adverts.
Yes, this claim looks bald. But the reasoning’s simple.
Let’s start from the assumption (which might be questionable) that high levels of personal debt were a contributory factor to the recession, and/or that a desire to pay down this debt might hold back the recovery.
The question then arises: why is debt so high?
TV advertising, that‘s one reason. A new paper by Matthew Baker and Lisa George establish this very cleverly. They exploited the fact that TV’s spread across the US in the 1950s was uneven, with some areas getting it earlier than others. They show that, in those areas where TV reception arrived earlier, households were more likely to take on debt.
In other words, TV – and TV advertising – contributes to household borrowing.
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Who hates the “Mansion tax”?
The Lib Dem ‘Mansion Tax’ policy could hardly have been presented more ineptly. The person who announced it hadn’t told his colleagues about it, and wasn’t able to answer simple questions about how it would actually work.
Furthermore, as with any policy which attempts to get rich people to pay more tax, there was a lot of very hostile coverage by the rich people who own and write in newspapers.
And yet for all that, I am willing to bet that if an opinion pollster asked people “Do you support or oppose a ‘Mansion Tax’ on homes worth over £1 million?” then a majority would support it, and if you asked “Do you think the government should introduce a new tax on homes worth over £1 million to pay for income tax cuts for lower and middle earners?” then an even bigger majority would support it.
Maybe one of those newspapers which has been telling us what an electoral disaster the policy would be will commission a poll and we could find out.
Labour: losing friends in the north
For generations, the default assumption of southerners meeting northerners has been that they are likely to be Labour supporters.
There always have been pockets of Toryism at positions further up the M1 than Londoners usually care to go, from the rolling farmlands of the East Riding to the Cheshire stockbroker belt, of course.
But they were more than outweighed for by solid ranks of proletarian steelworkers, miners, textile workers and shipbuilders. Yorkshire, Lancashire and Tyneside rank among the historic cradles of Labourism.
These have been the bastions of ‘our people’, the ones who voted Labour in 1979. The ones who voted Labour in 1931, for that matter.
Until now.
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Tories arguing for extra borrowing shock
On the evening of Thursday 24 September, click here and you’ll be able to watch Conservatives arguing hard for additional borrowing.
Sounds unlikely? Well, it’s true.
The venue for this bizarre reversal of Conservative orthodoxy will be the Council Chamber in Preston, where Lancashire’s new Conservative administration will argue for an additional £10million in immediate borrowing to cover additional revenue costs, £9 million of this for ‘highways works’, and a further £39 million over three years to cover a range of capital costs. See press coverage for a quick overview.
A Tory council spending massively beyond its means? A Tory council making future generations hostage to fortune? What’s going on?
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Lessons in spending from Norway
It is common wisdom that back in the 1970s and 1980s the Hard Left in the Labour Party, led by Tony Benn, made Labour unelectable with their extremist ideas.
One of Tony Benn’s extremist left-wing ideas was that the British government should keep the North Sea oil money ring-fenced for specific projects and ensure that the government planned to ensure maximum benefit from the revenues from the oilfields.
Maggie Thatcher, of course, opposed this and spent the oil money on tax cuts for the rich, profits for private companies, closing down coal mines and out of work benefits for millions of people.
In contrast, Norway decided on the same approach as Tony Benn recommended, and have built up a multi hundred billion dollar State Petroleum Fund.
As a result, in 2009, the Norwegian political debate is ‘how shall we spend the vast sums of money that we have’, and the British political debate is ‘how savagely can we cut spending and raise taxes’. And last week, our comrades in the Norwegian Labour Party were re-elected, increasing their share of the vote compared to 2005.
But, y’know, thank goodness Maggie Thatcher ’saved’ Britain from the loony left who wanted Britain to have its own sovereign wealth fund.
Will Vince Cable’s “Mansion Tax” pitch work?
So Vince Cable has announced Lib Dem policy to introduce a “Mansion Tax” targeting the very wealthiest. The tax would be paid at a rate of 0.5% on the value of properties over £1m, and would affect around 250,000 people who would pay an average of £4,000 a year.
Cable – unlike the Tories – has apparently been reading his Adam Smith, who said:
The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principle expense of the rich; and a magnificent house establishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be any thing very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expence, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in proportion” (The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Ch II, Pt II, Art 1).
But it’s also a shot across Tory bows: “You want to give millionaires a tax break? We want to reel them in and help ordinary people”. Not only is this the right thing to be saying in a country where inequality has increased – it is likely to be electorally wise.
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Labour spends (nearly) 25.2 TRILLION on quangos!
The cost of taxpayer funded quangos – the shadowy, oddly named things that you don’t really understand but we use to scare you – has hit an incredible £170 billion, or 25.2 TRILLION yen.
An analysis that involved picking numbers from a hat, discarding the small ones, adding the big ones together, then multiplying the answer by the speed of light in a vacuum (C), has revealed they are swallowing up, let’s say, 160 times more money than a certain amount of time ago, or something roughly approximate to that anyway.
In 1997/8, quangos cost a very reasonable £24.1bn, but thanks to Labour cronies given free reign to set up millions more since then, their number and spending have sky rocketed. A guess by our work experience boy puts the number of quangos at 994, while the tea lady says the number of staff employed by them has jumped from 1m a decade ago, to 1.5m today.
The spending on quangos is almost five times the Ministry of Defence’s £35.4billion budget, and billions of times more than my wife spends on the weekly shop.
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Why Tory ideas on welfare reform won’t work
Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice have published a report which they modestly claim is “the most far-reaching review of the welfare system in 60 years”. It can be downloaded here.
At the core of the CSJ’s recommendations are measures to make work pay, and reduce the working couple penalty. To encourage claimants into work, the report recommends more gradual rates of withdrawal of benefits.
It says there should be only two benefits for working age people: Universal Work Credit “earned” through participation in welfare to work schemes, which would integrate benefits such as Jobseeker’s Allowance and Income Support; and Universal Life Credit providing additional income to people with low or no earnings. The report also advocates changes intended to reduce penalties for socially constructive behaviour such as marriage and cohabitation, saving and taking out a mortgage.
Some quick thoughts:
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Can Cameron meet his own “honesty” test on cuts?
Let me make it clear: they are not wrong to be planning cuts but they are wrong to try to cover up their plans for cuts. This is about honesty, it is about trust. This is about not taking people for fools.
So said David Cameron at his news conference yesterday, excitedly promoting leaked Treasury documents about possible spending cuts. Yet Cameron refused to offer any substantive answer to questions from Nick Robinson and others about what the Conservatives are planning, as Andrew Sparrow’s liveblog for The Guardian captures.
But what is sauce for the goose … especially if there are already secret Tory plans for cuts already under discussion in the Treasury too. The senior and well respected Daily Mail journalist Peter Oborne seemed pretty confident in his report that the Tories have asked the Treasury to officially investigate much deeper cuts of 30% of departmental spending, as Next Left noted on Saturday.
The truth is that Osborne will be forced to implement swingeing cuts after the election. Indeed, I can reveal he has ordered the Treasury’s permanent secretary, Nick Macpherson, to find savings of nearly 30 per cent in departmental budgets which would come into effect immediately if the Tories gain power.
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» The Labour leadership’s token contender.. and it’s not Diane Abbott
» In defence of these fraternal nominations
» Is this the end for the socialist left?
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