Bankers taking the piss
Senior City bankers are demanding pay rises of up to 10 per cent this year to make up for the clampdown on the bonus culture, a senior City head-hunter has told The Independent.
So when they fuck up and can’t get ‘performance related’ bonuses they then want more on their salary? So what happened to all the free market arguments about competition, rewarding ability etc etc.
Seems they want to get paid well regardless of how well they perform. Now what would they say of that was the public sector?
Should lone parents work?
Laurie Penny is keeping up her attack on James Purnell’s Welfare Reform Bill, and in particular the plan to get single mothers back into work.
She has a point. If we look at the DWP’s own figures (big pdf), the returns to work for low-skilled lone parents are small. Table 1.2f suggests that a mother of one child who works 30 hours a week on the minimum wage is £56.87 better off in work than out. This is an effective wage of just £1.90 an hour.
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Labour’s response to economic crisis is all wrong
Effectively dealing with the economic crisis is Labour’s last hope for re-election. So it’s rather bizarre that though Brown has recruited apparatchiks obsessed about honing the New Labour message, the response so far has been all over the place.
The polls show people want left-wing economic policies; they have no problems with bank nationalisations; they don’t trust the Tories on dealing with the crisis; and they gave Brown a chance once the economy nose-dived.
But the response has been all over the place. People aren’t obsessed about bank bonuses as much as they are about jobs. Jobs. They want to hear you talk about what will create jobs, New Labour, not what you’re doing about bank bonuses. And yet Brown keeps talking about banks.
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Report: UK companies linked to Israeli settlements
A new research paper has identified 68 British companies which have direct or indirect relationships with illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory; 49 of which have their head office in the United Kingdom and 19 of which are British subsidiaries of companies based in Israel or other countries.
The report focuses only on Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. It does not examine settlement products emanating from the occupied Golan Heights or whether any UK companies are involved in the construction of settlement infrastructure, including the West Bank wall.
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Why do our politicians continue to mislead us about the recession?
I stopped and blinked when I saw this headline on The Guardian’s site:
Bank bail-out ‘could send national debt soaring by £1.5 trillion’ (link)
Okay, upon reading the article it’s clear that the “soaring” has much to do with the ONS (the Office for National Statistics) reclassifying banks, that have been “recapitalised” with public funds, as public institutions (i.e. taking on the bank’s liabilities*). Therefore, we learn, that debt may exceed 150% of national income.
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Why some ‘British workers’ have a right to be angry
The recent British Jobs for British Workers union strikes sparked a big debate on whether UK firms were right to employ people from Europe to undercut local workers. We may want to allow Europeans the opportunity to work in the UK, but how far should this go?
It is not unusual for British firms to now actively look for staff outside the country and undermine conditions bargained for here. In fact, these laws offer firms unprecedented bargaining power to companies. In such cases, why wouldn’t workers feel angry?
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Movement politics: a century ago
The new movement politics – the lessons from Obama and the potential of the internet for progressive campaigning, which new spaces such as Liberal Conspiracy seek to realise
– is both the idea of the moment and quite an old idea too.
If politics is the art of the possible, progressive change has depended on the arguments and campaigns which can change the possibilities of politics. One of the best descriptions of why this matters was offered a century ago, as Beatrice Webb recorded in her diary the reaction of Winston Churchill, then a New Liberal member of the Asquith cabinet, to her campaign for the abolition of the poor law.
That campaign arose from the publication – one hundred years ago tomorrow – of the Minority Report to the Royal Commission on the Poor Law.
October 3rd 1909 – Winston and his wife dined here the other night to meet a party of young Fabians. He is taking on the look of the mature statesman – bon vivant and orator, somewhat in love with his own phrases. He did not altogether like the news of our successful agitation. ‘You should leave the work of converting the country to us, Mrs Webb, you ought to convert the Cabinet’. ‘That would be all right if we wanted merely a change in the law, but we want’, I added, ‘to really change the minds of the people with regard to the facts of destitution, to make the feel the infamy of it and the possibility of avoiding it. That won’t be done by converting the Cabinet, even if we could convert the Cabinet – which I doubt. We will leave that task to a converted country’
The rationality of Valentine’s Day
Paul Walker says Valentines day is irrational. Giving a woman money, he says, is Pareto-superior to dinner and flowers.
Now, I’m not famed for understanding women. But my hunch is that a man who says: “I can’t be bothered with that Vally day bull. Here’s a £100 – get yourself another pair of shoes,” will not be getting any action for a while.
Giving women what they want is rational. Some women want romantic gestures. And this demand can be rational, especially for a woman who is looking for commitment. I say this for four reasons:
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The Tories want ‘freedom’ for pay-cuts
The danger of twelve years of New Labour in power is that it’s easy to forget the Tories’ true nature. It’s in the interest of every single person in and out of work that the true substance of the Conservative party remains visible to all.
For evidence, look no further than Christopher Chope, Tory MP for Christchurch, Dorset. When the minimum wage was brought in in 1999, Chope almost had a seizure. The idea that the weakest members of society could be paid a touch more really didn’t agree with him. In the Commons, he barked that it would have “a massive impact on small enterprises”, in line with his party’s view that the minimum wage would quickly cause an economic collapse.
Which is why, in the face of overwhelming evidence, David Cameron was later forced to admit that the opponents of the minimum wage were wrong. But that doesn’t mean the old Tory instincts were kept at bay. Of course they would be daft to openly campaign to scrap the minimum wage as they wouldn’t want to be seen as the party in favour of a pay cut to millions of workers in Britain. So, with the crisis as the perfect platform to attack workers’ rights, they’re now trying a sneakier, more bizarre approach.
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The power of sterotypes
Reputations can be self-fulfilling prophecies ; if you give a man a bad name, he‘ll live down to it. A new paper (pdf) by Thomas Dee shows this.
He did an experiment at Swarthmore College, asking a group of students to take a GRE test. Before the test, some students were asked about their sporting activities, and whether these conflicted with their academic work, whilst others were not asked.
And Mr Dee found that the athletes who were asked these questions performed significantly worse than the athletes who weren’t.
This corroborates the finding of an immediate “Obama effect” upon blacks’ exam performance. As Obama became more prominent, the stereotype of blacks as non-cerebral declined, and so test scores improved.
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Bankers and bonuses
Listening to the Today Programme the other morning, it seems a consensus has been reached: the problem in the banking industry is big bonuses, and if the politicians can command the banks to stop paying big bonuses, then the “bonus problem” will be solved.
Why are big bonuses are paid in the first place? Unpleasant as they may be, the reasons described by Chris Dillow cannot simply be wished away. Individual bankers generate huge quantities of revenue, and if they walk out the door they take the revenue with them, giving them bargaining power that (partially) explains their incomes.
We – the taxpayer – own some banks now, and our interests will not be served if the revenue generators walk out the door and take the business with them. The general impression appears to be that big bonuses exist simply because bankers are greedy and like paying themselves lots of money, as if people in other industries wouldn’t pay themselves lavishly if they could.
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Polls: Good news for Labour on economic crisis
Forget the headline polling figures, what’s more interesting are the other results from Channel 4’s YouGov poll on the economic crisis.
A few points out of the way first. I think we’re going through a potentially huge economic crisis that is crippling our banks, the high street and hence jobs. The Tories have no policy to deal with this and Osborne is widely seen as a lightweight (see numbers at end). So I want the government to get off its butt and formulate a coherent and wide-ranging strategy. So far it’s done almost nothing useful apart from the bailout of overpaid WBankers, who should be fired enmasse, and announce some haphazard initiatives.
On the centre left, especially on blogs (apart from Chris Dillow), I see no serious attempt at reviewing the situation, watch opinion polls, and develop a broader narrative for the future. I keep highlighting polls because they illustrate that most right-wing assumptions about public opinion in the UK being peddled about are rubbish.
The public still wants to give Labour a chance to lift our economy and forge a new economic consensus that forces political winds to the left. But he’s not doing it. I’d at least like to ensure the Tory majority at the next election isn’t huge.
So, on to the poll numbers, which are quite surprising:
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Has the VAT cut worked?
Does Nicolas Sarkozy have a clue? He says the VAT cut had “absolutely not worked”:
Britain is cutting taxes. That will bring them nothing. Consumption continues to decrease.
However, official figures (pdf) flatly contradict this. They show that the volume of sales actually rose by 1.6 per cent in December, to stand 3.9 per cent higher than last December. Of course, there are all sorts of ways to quibble with this data – ordinary noise is magnified by uncertainties about seasonal adjustment processes and the fact that the statisticians’ definition of “December” actually stretched to January 3.
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TPA bullies score own goal
Hot on the heels of the Guardian’s excellent Tax Gap series, LabourList’s Derek Draper sparked a shouting match – real and online – when he invited the TaxPayers’ Alliance to condemn corporate tax avoidance. He pointed out – quite reasonably – that corporate tax avoidance increases the burden on those ordinary taxpayers that the TPA claims to represent.
But the TPA’s campaign director, Mark Wallace, complained that Draper’s tone was quite unreasonable – and added: “Corporate tax avoidance is a rational response to an overly complex and burdensome tax code.” So no condemnation there.
I find the spectre of being shouted at by Draper less menacing than the TPA’s own sneering condenscension towards seemingly everyone involved in providing public services.
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The “Italians” on wildcat strikes
“If the Brits kick us out, we’ll do the same to their workers here”
As I translated this article from the Italian daily la Repubblica, I discovered that about one hundred Brits are currently working on a regasifier on an oil rig in the Northern Adriatic. This is the stuff the Daily Mail & chums conveniently don’t tell you about.
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Is George Osborne turning socialist?
George Osborne must already be feeling a bit sidelined since Ken Clarke made his comeback. But even he must be surprised at how little attention has been paid to his speech this week, with Conservatives proposing a “new banking settlement”. Is Osborne leading the new “Red Tories” strategy that Sunder Katwala has extensively remarked on here?
Hmmm. Let’s see. In brief, he says:
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The government’s reaction to strikes has been terrible
In September 2005, hundreds of Asian women working for a British Airways supplier, Gate Gourmet, went on strike to protest that their employer was planning to fire them enmasse and bring in cheaper Eastern European labour. Before Gordon Brown had announced his slogan, here was British Jobs for British Workers in practice.
So I have a few quick points to make regarding this whole controversy as I’m trying to pull them together for a broader article.
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British jobs for British workers, in practice
A few weeks ago, Chris Dillow warned of some of the nasty social side-effects of the recession. He noted that “the main effect of recession is not to cause poverty, but insecurity. And when people are insecure and anxious, they care less for others.” In short, fear makes us all more selfish.
On one level, what’s transpired in Immingham over the last few days has been the opposite of that stark prediction.
The unofficial walk-out by employees at an oil refinery – protesting their company’s decision to employ foreign labour – was an act of solidarity, not selfishness.
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Could a Labour / Libdem coalition happen?
It could, according to Sunder in this week’s edition of New Statesman.
But there must be changes to the New Labour agenda…
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Nick Cohen plays the blame game
So when I read this, my first thought was: is there anything Nick Cohen hasn’t blamed the left for recently? Let’s face it, if the guy’s taking up more column inches than usual, it’s normally because he’s found an inventive way of trashing his former comrades.
Anyway, aside from decrying the lifestyles of the super-rich and the increased polarisation of wealth in Blair/Brown’s Britain, Cohen’s substantive argument is that New Labour could’ve moved Britain away from the Thatcherite consensus, been less lavish in its spending and cultivated an economy less reliant on financial services. Cohen posits that New Labour’s legacy will be a self-harming slavishness to lawless, reckless financiers to the expense of us all.
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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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