Is James Purnell using Sen?
Amartya Sen and his capabilities model is all the rage in cabinet, and ex-cabinet. Gordon Brown’s read all about it, Liam Byrne’s been quoting Sen in the Guardian, and now James Purnell’s been using him as the basis for his attempt to portray himself as a leading left thinker, ready to lead Labour and the left out of the electoral wilderness with his new best think-tank mate Jon Cruddas.
So what are we to make of the adoption of a piece of thinking which dates from the 1970s, and set out most famously in Sen’s seminal 1979 Tanner Lecture ‘Equality of What’? Like Stuart at Next Left, I’m not a little worried about how Sen’s being used and abused.
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Tory councils: rhetoric versus reality
The Tories are decimating local services, even as David Cameron claims he’s a great fan of local power: here’s more on local Tories who see the public spending squeeze as a justification to keep flogging public services off to the voracious private sector.
Another windy night in the Tory borough of Barnet, and your reporter is snuggled in with the crowd at yet another Barnet council cabinet meeting, watching and listening as this council’s rightist zealots pour forth another torrent of pro-privatisation, efficiencies horseshit.
As many good burghers of Barnet already know, Barnet Tories are working up a mad, massive and massively unpopular scheme (tweely dubbed Future Shape) for future public service delivery in lucky North London.
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Purnell: What might have been
As James Purnell launches his new think tank project, having seemingly learned nothing from his undistinguished ministerial career, it seems an appropriate moment to look at how things might have been so different.
So let me present, from Paskini’s alternative history files:
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Is this James Purnell’s leadership vehicle?
Having failed in his attempt to knife Gordon Brown, it looks like James Purnell is positioning himself as the intellectual driver of the left. The think-tank Demos has given Purnell the space to develop an off-shoot: Open Left.
It’s nice to know Purnell has been thinking about “the left” outside the intellectually bankrupt Labour Party, especially given he tried his best to junk all left-wing ideals while in the cabinet. This is the same minister who: constructed a welfare-to-work programme that didn’t actually work; gave the go-ahead to an unworkable plan to force benefit claimants to lie-detector tests; had this silly plan for alcoholics. Don Paskini also tore apart the DWP’s plans for welfare reform here.
But in the spirit of comraderie, and avoiding the temptation to pour cold water over the project just because its run by James Purnell, here is their website. It features a sort of usual suspects outlining some ideas on what it means to be on the left. Do any catch your imagination? They also have a launch event today at 6pm. (via @josephlaking)
How the government started owning our pubs
It hadn’t occurred to me, though it really should have, that the British Government is now a considerable player in the pub trade. It was pretty much inevitable, given that the financial crisis is derived from an artificially inflated and then over-exploited property boom, that at least one of the failed banks was going to be a pubco owner.
So, my hat is tipped to Private Eye (1240, p29) who have had a good look at the ridiculous and incestuous relationships between the PubCos, the government, and the Government’s “independent” body of pub valuers, RICS. This Labour administration has continued the trend established in the 80s of setting thieves to encourage thieves when it comes to regulation. In the process, they managed to create the conditions for a scam even more ridiculous than the brewery-tied lease.
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Could Red Toryism deeply wound the left?
Red Toryism is perhaps the only intellectually interesting debate that has come from the right over the last, say, 20 years. In many ways it firms up the superficial ‘compassionate conservatism’ agenda that David Cameron had borrowed from Republicans in the US, while he avoided the nasty immigration rhetoric that habitually eminates from the Tories like a bad smell.
But what I like about Red Toryism, and the very reason it poses a great philosophical threat to the left and an electoral threat to Labour, is because it is a deeply emotional philosophy.
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Fit to work, but can’t work
The FT reports:
More than two-thirds of applicants for sickness benefits are being rejected under a new testing regime, casting doubt on the validity of 2.6m existing claimants deemed unfit for work. According to data seen by several welfare industry figures, up to 90 per cent of applicants are being judged able to work in some regions and placed on unemployment rolls rather than long-term ill-health benefits.
The government prevented me from stopping tax avoidance
The need for a general anti-tax avoidance principle (GANTIP) to be enshrined in the British finance system is now overwhelming.
The totality of tax avoided by super-rich individuals and big corporations has been estimated by independent research at some £25bn a year, and even by the Treasury at up to £13bn a year.
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Developing a new economic common sense
I’ve recently written quite a lot on my own blog about the need to develop a new economic policy narrative, and soon.
I’ve also written about how the now dominant narrative of neoliberalism and money supply control became so dominant; despite the fact that the fundamental assumption of a finite world money supply is flawed, the ‘good housekeeping’ / ‘you cannot spend what you have not got’ narrative has continued to hold sway over public opinion for a generation and more.
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Red Toryism – ignorant and incomprehensible
Philip Blond, the so-called ‘Red Tory’, has just written an article setting out his new Big Idea for reducing poverty, which is about ‘recapitalising the poor’.
These Big Ideas come along quite frequently, and there is quite an easy and quick way to test them out. Simply pick one policy area that you know about and see if the author’s suggestions and analysis suggest they know what they are talking about. If so, read on, if not, bin the rest.
So here is Blond’s ‘Red Tory’ approach to social housing:
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Thoughts on reducing poverty
The Fabian Society and Joseph Rowntree Foundation have just published the findings of research about public attitudes to reducing poverty and inequality.
Some of the key findings:
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Why we need more workers in the boardroom
Tying to put the pieces of the economy and our financial system back together again, it is clear that one of the underlying problems has been the vulnerability of many institutions to lop-sided incentives.
We’ve seen it as its most obvious with dealers – who can run big risks, retire very rich very young – and not have to worry about the long-term consequences, because they’ve long since left the scene. Another example has been in the boardroom – huge bonuses in the good times, and if it goes wrong? A nice little pay off and pension pot.
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It’s time to get the recession back on the agenda
post by Josh Ryan-Collins of the New Economics Foundation
The expenses scandal may not have cost Gordon Brown his job, but it has done a good job of helping everyone forget about the fact that the world is facing the most serious economic downturn since the Great Depression.
The recent talk of ‘Green shoots’ is now looking distinctly optimistic. A recent analysis by economists Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O’Rourke suggests that the world economy is following a worryingly similar pattern to the Great Depression. One year in, global output is declining at roughly the same rate as it was in the 1929-30 downturn (Chart 1).
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Union slams BA over free champagne
British Airways has been sharply criticised for offering free luxury food and drinks while at the same time asking staff to take pay cuts. Unite, the UK’s biggest union, said it was “angered” by news that BA are to provide free champagne and smoked salmon for ‘taste of London week’.
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Top Stories – Thursday 18th June
Kitty Ussher leaves the Government, as TheTelegraph’s Augean project continues…
NATIONAL
Governor seeks more powers for Bank of England
Belfast Romanians rehoused after race attacks
Terror law used to stop thousands ‘just to balance racial statistics’
INTERNATIONAL
Mousavi urges more demonstrations for Thursday
New financial rules in the USA too…
Cricket attacker arrested in Pakistan
British ambassador attacked for supporting gay march in Bulgaria
While Labour fiddles…
More on sheltered housing warden cuts in Barnet – an example of the sort of Tory public service cuts we’ll see more and more:
We go now to a tall, brutalist council building in Barnet’s Totteridge and Whetstone, where yours truly is holed up at a cabinet meeting in a large committee room, watching Cllr Mike Freer, the spiritual void who runs Barnet council, brush aside the concerns of elderly sheltered housing residents who are about lose their cherished onsite warden service in Freer’s latest cost-cutting wheeze.
As reported here recently, Barnet council and its financial team – that group of fiscal legends best known for investing (riskily) £27m in Icelandic banks, where the whole pile tanked – claim they need to find £12m in savings to balance books compromised by inadequate central government settlements (ie, it’s Labour’s fault – a point that Labour rubbishes, for what it’s worth), inflation, and a desire to keep council tax increases below three percent as local and national elections loom.
The council believes it can save £950,000 (re-forecast to £400,000 in a rapidly revised proposal for this evening’s meeting) by removing onsite residential wardens (whose tasks include dealing with health and security emergencies, organising GP visits, organising social activities, and checking on residents at least once a day) from sheltered housing scheme. They’d be replaced with a ‘floating’ support service where support workers based at hubs would visit elderly people who met eligibility criteria. continue reading… »
The left needs to confront the root causes of BNP support
This article is by author Paul Kingsnorth
The response of the British ‘left’ to the depressing sight of Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons grinning like spoilt children on the election podium on Sunday night seems to be dividing into two broad approaches. The first is attack, the second denial.
The first approach was illustrated nicely by the egg-throwing, car-kicking, insult-chucking attack on Griffin yesterday by Unite Against Fascism. The left can’t agree on much, but it can always agree that it doesn’t like fascists, so it feels good and righteous and very simple to shout and throw things at them. But, entertaining though it is to see Nick Griffin pelted with yolks, he is no longer a fringe baddie; he is an MEP, and he represents people. It may be hard to stomach, but it is a fact that nearly a million Britons voted for his party last week.
Pelting elected representatives with eggs and shouting down their press conference has the effect of making the BNP look reasonable and the egg-throwers look, well, a bit fascistic in their keenness to silence by force the views of those they don’t agree with. Any approach which makes Nick Griffin look reasonable has to be judged a pretty dismal failure.
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It’s time to nationalise Vauxhall
General Motors’ chief executive Charles Erwin Wilson apparently never did utter the precise words ‘what’s good for General Motors is good for America’, although he did say something like it at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in 1953.
And what is good for General Motors these days is de facto nationalisation. The Obama administration is expected to have a 72.5% holding in the Detroit-based car giant when it re-emerges from bankruptcy.
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Where are the fans of greed now?
Not long ago you couldn’t utter a single word against excessive City bonuses. Those who did were envious moaners clueless as to how financial markets work.
Take the same pious Telegraph that was this week ranting against the “scandalous greed” of MPs. As recent as October 2006 they sported this proud headline: “Greed is good“.
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Will the govt really crack down on Tax Havens?
“We agree… to take action against non-cooperative jurisdictions, including tax havens. We stand ready to deploy sanctions to protect our public finances and financial systems. The era of banking secrecy is over. We note that the OECD has today published a list of countries assessed by the Global Forum against the international standard for exchange of tax information.”
Those were the stirring words of the G20’s London Summit communiqué last month. In advance of the summit, Gordon Brown was keen to put himself at the vanguard of the heroic assault on those foreign resorts. “Old tax havens and the regulatory havens have no place in this new world,” he declared. So is his government going to start cracking down on tax havens?
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» Why don’t MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours?
» Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
» Why does Phillip Blond see civil cohesion as a security issue?
» So what if the Labour candidates went to Oxbridge?
» Last night’s Labour hustings: will it get interesting or turn to torture?
» It’s now down to Ken to win London for Labour
» The Labour people need
» Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed?
» 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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