Why is the government losing this argument?
I frequently get the feeling this government would have trouble selling a Che Guevara t-shirt to a socialist, given how badly it is at communicating anything.
We are amidst the greatest financial crisis of several generations, with the world’s largest bank, Citigroup, and largest carmaker, General Motors, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Those who called loudly for more de-regulation and piously informed us that financial markets were looking after the interests of shareholders and pension funds are now running for cover. And yet New Labour still looks like its losing the public argument.
I think there are two reasons for this.
Firstly, it’s fighting the battle on a losing battle-field; its narrative is all wrong.
The Conservatives astutely made this a discussion about taxes and Public Sector Debt, and Labour has fallen directly into their trap. Instead, the government should be pointing out the need to keep retailers and our banks afloat – hence the tax breaks and banks guarantees and loans. For once I actually agree with Gerard Baker in that this stimulus doesn’t go far enough. But of course, while the Tories are trying to scare everyone about the coming tax bombshell, New Labour is too scared for anything radical enough to have an immediate impact.
continue reading… »
Living Wage campaigns across London
Yesterday evening I attended the launch of the London Living Wage campaign at Kings College London – aimed at helping the cleaners and caterers at the uni. Various organisations in London already pay the LLW to their lowest paid, including Barclays, HSBC, Morgan Stanley, PWC, IPPR, City Hall, LDA, Police, TFL, Westway Shopping.
I like the campaign especially because its driven by London Citizens, and done in their grassroots organising style. One of their key focuses now is on Higher Education. This week KCL and Birkbeck kick off their campaigns, run mostly by students (over 30 people turned up last night to get involved!), on the back of recent successes at London School of Economics, SOAS and Queen Mary’s.
A representative from LSE recounted how their group had to run a guerilla PR campaign to force the uni through with their promises. This even involved demonstrating at recruitment fairs where companies that didn’t pay the LLW came to recruit. It embarassed the university and employers: things moved quicker.
Even Boris Johnson supports the LLW, what’s not to like? Don’t answer that, right-wing libertarian readers. I’m going to keep the blog updated with the LLW campaigns across London. If your university doesn’t pay it yet, then get in touch and I’ll point you in the right direction so you can help organise and start a campaign.
Update: Noel helpfully points to a Compass LLW campaign toolkit.
Voters still don’t trust Tories on economy
While following the US elections for two years, I became converted over to the not-so-secretive world of polling, mostly thanks to the genius of Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight – who did a fantastic job of building narratives and challenging preconceptions through raw polling data (see this interview).
So here’s my question. Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the impending financial crisis, the poll numbers decisively moved against the Republicans because voters blamed them for mismanagement of the economy. In the UK however the opposite seems to have happened. Polling released yesterday by Mori put Conservatives only 3% ahead, from a high of between 15% – 20% only a few months ago, highlighted on UK Polling Report and Political Betting. Why are voters in the UK punishing Conservatives for the financial crisis instead of Labour?
continue reading… »
Right wing confusion & bile over Baby P
More nanny state, less nanny state. From castration to welfare layabouts, how the depressing tragedy that took place behind close doors is fuelling the tabloids’ rage and anti-working class bias
In Haringey, North London, a 2-year-old child died after being tortured by his scummy parents.
The resulting blaze of finger-pointing is reminiscent of an incoherent pub talk amongst pissed-up geezers. “This beer’s fookin shite, ennit?”, says one. And the other slurs “Yeah mate, ‘know what you mean, it’s ace, love it“.
Look at this. David Cameron, the man who suckled his political milk from the tits of there-is-no-such-thing-as-society, now is making the government accountable for anything dysfunctional that may go on in our society, even if it’s behind closed doors. The high ranks of the anti-”nanny state” brigade are asking angrily where nanny was. At a guess, the implication is, if the Tories were in power, no family violence, no barbaric cruelty, would take place.
continue reading… »
We’re burning up
This report (PDF) by ten of the world’s leading climate scientists (very briefly discussed here) has been causing a fair amount of worried hand-wringing on the environmental blogs, partly because of the very stark predictions it makes, but also because it renders the task of constructing an effective climate change policy more difficult than ever.
As I wrote earlier, the magic number used by climate scientists is 350 parts per million (ppm); that’s the maximum amount of carbon our planet can handle before the damaging effects of climate change take effect. At the moment, we’re at around 385, and that number is increasing by about 2 ppm every year.
As Bradford Plumer explains, until recently, climatologists have believed that stabilising the amount of carbon at around 450 ppm was the most realistic target for world governments to aim for, and if there was a concerted global effort to cut emissions 80% by 2050, then there’d be a good chance of us achieving that. We would still inevitably experience the damage of climate change, such as changes in weather patterns and rising sea levels, but it would at least avoid something far, far worse.
continue reading… »
The timeless Tories
Why the Tories will forever be old hat.
Hello, all.
This lengthy piece (tis a bit long – got carried away) is the first in a number that will look at Conservative behaviour on the ground. Yours truly wonders if the Tories are fit for public office, exactly, and/or if social responsibility is really their bag…
This week, staff at Tory council Hammersmith and Fulham will meet to organise a response to the latest attack by the council’s Conservative leadership. What a distasteful attack this one is, too – all council staff have been told they will be dismissed and forced to sign new employment contracts on much-reduced terms and conditions.
So.
I know exactly how the Tory trollies among you will greet this news: you’ll say (sans deliberation, as always) that lazy, fat arsed public sector staff – those you doubtless imagine operate the schools, housing offices, libraries, street cleaning and social services at Hammersmith and Fulham – deserve it (do you class bankers as fat arsed, overindulged public sector workers now, btw?). You’ll say that public sector workers deserve the awful hours, and the lack of union representation and employer sympathy and flexibility that your average working stiff in the private sector gets.
But do they?
I think not.
The opposition lie while Iceland freezes
There is a massive false meme, prevalent both in the UK and in Iceland, that Gordon Brown last month froze Icelandic companies’ assets in the UK as an angry gesture after the collapse of Landsbanki, by labelling Iceland as a ‘terror state’ like Sudan or North Korea.
The existence of this meme is sad, very slightly because it’s caused large numbers of British morons to explode with rage (here’s a good example by ignorant buffoon and Tory MEP Daniel Hannan), partly because it’s hurt Icelanders’ relationship with and perceptions of us – and they’re people who we really ought to get on with, both because of our enormous shared cultural heritage [*] and because they’re great (full disclosure: I’ve just returned from a week in Reykjavik), but worst of all because of the myth’s impact on the already-struggling Icelandic economy. continue reading… »
US Elections 08: Key moments
Hey all, here is a post about the key moments that are happening in this potentially historic election. There is the liveblog/chat on the right of the main page for quick and more light hearted discussion, but here you can be as serious and excitable/cynical as you need to be about what is happening.
05:20 – Last word
Only five states are left to come in, all republican. Obama is likely to take Indiana, Montana and North Carolina off of the Republicans hands, but I can no longer wait up to see this happen. Good night all, it’s been an amazing evening. Well done to the new President Elect, Barack Obama.
TODAY’S TOP STORIES / 2nd November
And more…
Candidates Make Their Final Push on Reshaped Map
Republicans Ramp Up Negative Attacks
BBC is told to starve its fat cats
David Mitchell dissects the Brand/Ross/Sachs furore
China’s toy makers face bleak Christmas
UK calls for urgent aid for Congo
DAILY BLOG REVIEW / by Jennie Rigg
Adrian Sanders MP (with a little pointer from the sainted Vince) knows how to get us out of recession.
Rhythmaning’s grandad was a pre-war Labour party candidate. Here he presents some scans of his grandad’s election materials. It’s one of the most illuminating posts I have seen in months.
Nich Starling has a spirited and pin-sharp defence of the BBC.
Steph Ashley, meanwhile, reminds us that not all prank calls are bad and wrong and evil.
The Mustard Seed reminds us that female and black have both been qualities of American candidates since the early seventies. The embedded documentary is fascinating.
CNNBC has a news bulletin from the future.
The Filthy Smoker has an interesting guest post on Devil’s Kitchen.
My fiancé Mat Bowles has a good rant about bad signposting. He got lost on the way to Yorkshire regional conference, and nearly missed the bloggers’ interview with Nick Clegg, poor lamb.
The Honourable Lady Mark Valladares made it to conference, though, and is very proud of his missus.
And if that’s not enough links for you to be going on with, head over to Septicisle’s place…
The benefit of inequality
The UK’s tax system is regressive* and income inequality is high. Whilst the left bemoans these facts, they might be necessary for Darling’s plan to increase borrowing to succeed in supporting economic activity.
Last night, Darling said the rise in borrowing would be only temporary. He promised to “return borrowing and debt to a sustainable level – once these shocks have worked through.”
This raises an obvious question. If government borrowing today merely means lower state spending or higher taxes tomorrow, why should it boost aggregate economic activity at all? Won’t it just cause tax-payers to save in anticipation of higher future taxes, or public sector workers to save in anticipation of redundancy?
What sterling crash?
The Tories are trying to blame sterling’s fall on Gordon Brown. And they’re failing. Fraser Nelson writes:
The sterling crash has now begun in earnest. The pound has today (today!) fallen 9% against the Yen and is off 4% against the dollar to a lowly $1.56 with forecasts of $1.40 or lower next year. Against any other currency you may mention, it’s now plunging.
Don’t mention the Aussie dollar: the pound’s near a four-year high against that. And it’s only 1.6% below its six-month average against the euro.
The fact is, sterling is largely a sideshow now. Although its trade-weighted index has fallen 5% in the last month, the majority of its decline happened over the winter. Sterling weakness is an old story. Instead, the story is about the dollar and yen. It’s these that are soaring, not sterling that’s crashing. This is probably because a scramble for cash is forcing investors – perhaps especially hedge funds – to close positions. And as many were short of dollars and yen, so these have risen.
And this is just drivel:
There is a serious prospect that Brown will try and inflate his way out of this debt problem, a prospect which terrifies currency dealers.
If this were a serious prospect, gilts would have sold off along with sterling – inflation is terrible for government bonds. But they haven’t. Indeed, spreads between 10 year gilts and their US equivalents are close to their lows for this year, whilst spreads over 10 year Bunds are an insignificant 0.13 percentage points above their post-2000 average.
Far from being a sign of trouble, sterling’s weakness is actually a help. In making exports and import-substitutes cheaper, it will – with a long lag – help boost profits and economic activity and relieve the recession.
Fraser continues:
I have heard serious people talking about parity with the dollar.
If he knew anything about FX markets, he’d one that the one parity that does exist is the one between the value of an exchange rate forecast and that of a wet fart.
Bye bye Milton, hello Keynes
We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step ~ Prime minister James Callaghan, Labour Party conference speech 1976
Britain will boost public spending to help pull the economy through a looming recession, Chancellor Alistair Darling said in an interview published on Sunday ~ Chancellor Alistair Darling, cited by AFP, October 2008
The term ‘the long boom’ – in the classical periodisation of postwar capitalism, anyway – is generally used to describe the years circa 1947-1973, in which the system seemed to have overcome its cyclical tendencies.
Mass unemployment: Labour should do ‘whatever it takes’
THREE million people on the dole in Britain; symbolically speaking, that figure still represents some kind of benchmark, bringing to mind all those sepia photographs of 1930s hunger marches and memories of the grimmest years of rampant Thatcherism.
Well, dust off those Right to Work Campaign and People’s March for Jobs badges; several leading forecasters are predicting that unemployment is set to return to that level by 2010.
It is my own direct experience of being an unemployed school-leaver that, more than anything else, galvanized me into political involvement and gave me a set of socialist convictions that I have somehow sustained into middle age. continue reading… »
Top Stories and Blog Review – 15th Oct
And more…
Colour may not work against Obama
Convincing Jews to vote Obama
Novel on India takes Booker prize
World press praises Gordon Brown
Israeli papers shun pictures of upcoming woman PM
Royal Mail honours ‘Women of Distinction’
US unveils $250bn banking rescue
Storm over Big Brother database
Long sentences ‘overload prisons’
DAILY BLOG REVIEW / by Aaron Heath
Shami Chakrabarti/CiF – Somewhat enjoying the government’s defeat over 42-days. A victory for “common-sense”.
Paul Linford – If David Davis is “vindicated”, will Cameron bring him back as Shadow Home Secretary?
The Daily (Maybe) – On the scrapping of Key Stage 3 testing.
donpaskini – On the Dem’s most effective ad.
The Angry Black Woman – Racism – the worst kind – is threatening to destabilise this election.
Political Byline – As William F. Buckley’s son Chris comes out for Obama, will more principled conservatives finally say enough is enough, and take back their party?
TPM – Palin has failed in her first national security test: the Russians have invaded Alaska. Heh.
The UK bank bail-out: some notes for idiots
Note 1: Lloyds TSB’s involvement in the government plan to stop RBS and HBOS collapsing is not evidence that Lloyds TSB’s own loanbook was dodgy, or that it had funding problems: rather, it’s taking the government bail-out money so it can buy a bank with assets equal to its own for half the price.
Note 2: it is probably true that as a shareholder, having the government take a majority stake in your company for far less than the price you paid isn’t ideal. However, if the alternative is that the company goes bust, then it’s still a pretty good deal for you. So anyone suggesting that the bail-out is bad news for HBOS or RBS shareholders is entirely clueless.
Note 3: if you were looking to ‘featherbed Scottish jobs’, then creating a nationalised HBOS would be a better way of doing that than the alternative of selling to an English-based bank with a large existing Scottish branch network.
Note 4: if, in 2003, you say “house prices are going to crash and we’re all fuxxored OMG OMG!!!!”, that doesn’t mean that you’re prescient for projecting a downturn in 2008, it means that you’re a moron (see also: anyone who thinks that the current problems invalidate the concept of fractional reserve banking, aka “the main thing which turned us from being really poor to being really rich”).
Note 5: the taxpayer isn’t “footing the bill” for anything. The taxpayer is getting an excellent portfolio of assets, which will be worth a great deal of money in five years’ time, for next to nothing. I don’t normally believe it’s appropriate for the government to engage in financial speculation, hence why people who think Gordon Brown should have run the government’s currency portfolio as a commodities hedge fund are morons, but in this particular case it’s an excellent call. Hell, I’m currently looking to buy Lloyds TSB stock because they’re so clearly undervalued today given the brilliant deal they’re doing [*] – and I’m certainly not getting the ‘borrowing at 5% and lending at 12%’ which makes the government’s preference shares an incredibly good deal.
[*] NB I’m not a UK retail banking analyst or fund manager, and I’m not qualified to offer financial advice in the UK or elsewhere. My view is based on publicly disclosed information only, and may turn out to be nonsense – I’m piling in a bit of spare cash, not my life savings.
The upside to the financial crisis
The biggest upside to the financial crisis is that it has boosted Barack Obama’s chances, when the election was in serious danger of becoming about culture wars again. The fact that McCain has nothing worthwhile to say and is fighting only by trying to associate Obama with William Ayers is a sign of how badly depleted the Republican intellectual base is.
Here, David Cameron has tried to assert his authority by making a plea to save capitalism, and has been been buried in the subsequent onslaught. It’s time to save banks, not capitalism. If the left really has no real response to this crisis, the Conservative response is even more laughable.
For example, Iain Dale is desperately trying to pretend that Gordon Brown is to blame for all this mess. In this parallel universe, only the US and UK are facing problems (nothing wrong in Japan, Iceland and Germany then). The Tories want to blame Labour for the regulatory system, without specifying whether they were for more or less regulation during that time, and what their solutions are now. They’re stumped – and in response trying to chuck mud at Brown again. Hence, the absolute silence from the Conservative front bench.
But the main problem for the right is that while Republicans have been criticised for an inadequate response, Brown and Darling have been praised everywhere for a solid plan that mainland Europe and the States are being urged to adopt. See this piece by Nobel prize winning Paul Krugman, for example. The Tories are floundering.
continue reading… »
Hague travels Barclays style
Who says those Tories don’t feel your pain…
From The Daily Mail::
William Hague is facing awkward questions about his judgment after he joined a lavish Italian trip for Barclays executives on a black day for global markets.
He spent Friday on the sunny shores of Lake Como, on the final day of a luxury break organised by the hard-pressed bank’s private wealth division.
While he enjoyed the balmy surroundings of one of Europe’s most expensive hotels, where rooms can cost £1,000 a night, markets in London and America went into freefall.
And yeah, that was a Daily Fail link.
Yes, British councils were right to invest in Iceland
ICELAND has – to use the technical term employed by trained economists – gone tits up, and such staid bodies as Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council and West Yorkshire Police Authority are suffering the collateral damage.
Incredibly, Gordon Brown has responded by invoking anti-terrorism legislation, although rumours that he has asked his friend Dubya to add the Reykjavik pariah regime to the Axis of Evil remain unconfirmed.
Perhaps the prime minister is simply a bit spooked that his Icelandic counterpart is called Geir Haarde; when you think about it, that is probably pronounced not dissimilarly to Keir Hardie, and names just don’t get any more Old Labour than that. continue reading… »
Healey blurts it out
Local government minister John Healey has blurted out the ideology of our rulers. Councils, he says:
are in a different position from individual savers. They are intelligent, they’re well-informed investors…
This is not just false. It is the precise reversal of the truth.
The fact is that it is individual savers, on average, who are intelligent and well-informed, whilst it is the professionals who get it wrong.
It is not ordinary individual investors who caused the present crisis and need a multi-billion pound bail out. continue reading… »
Bank rescue plan: will it work?
And the $64,000 dollar question– if such a trifling sum can stand metaphorical duty in this context – is whether the government’s bank rescue plan is going to work.
At one level, it bloody well better do; ‘failure is not an option’ may be one of the worst clichés of modern management-speak, but just for once, this assertion is unquestionably true.
Moreover, I still have yet to see any obviously superior or even radically different ideas coming from commentators linked to the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats or the even the hard left. So this is what we are going to get. continue reading… »
You can read articles through the front page, via Twitter or rss feeds.
» 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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