Income inequality – Tories v Labour
Looking at the above graph (via), would you say income inequality has increased more under this Labour government, or under earlier Conservative governments?
I think it may be obvious but someone may want to explain this to Chris Mounsey of Devil’s Kitchen, the idiot with tourette’s syndrome and a penchant for writing sexual fantasies about newspaper columnists, who thinks this is rubbish. It doesn’t help does it, if you’re angry at someone saying nasty things about right-whingers, and then get it wrong yourself with irrelevant statistics.
Update: Unity at Ministry of Truth sets the fool right, decisively.
Has Britain really been ‘buying’ medals?
Now the last glittering firework has sputtered and died and Beijing has regained its industrial atmospheric fog – our Olympic athletes will amble through airport security with less chance of a cavity search than… well, a state-educated person has of winning a medal. Or an inhabitant of a “low-income nation” apparently.
That is according to Matthew Syed who does a good job in stating the bleeding obvious really. Private sector schools have more money to throw at sports, never abandoned the competitive ethos, haven’t sold off quite so many playing fields to make ends meet, etc – and when were the Olympics ever ‘egalitarian’, anyway?
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Why it’s OK to dislike Bob Crow
Bob Crow, the leader of the RMT rail workers’ union, is one of the less popular men in London due to his union’s propensity to go on strike at, apparently, the slightest provocation (most recently, a 5% pay rise, and someone being sacked for punching a customer – although I’ve got a theory about the 5% one).
And indeed, as someone who has to go to work, I irrationally hate and despise Mr Crow and the RMT for interfering in this already unpleasant process – in the same way you hate and despise the ‘person taken ill at Temple’ and hope the ‘person under a train at Moorgate’ is thoroughly squashed. But these hatreds are obviously unfair, and they disappear once you’re out of the tunnels and back in the real world…
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Osborne’s failed attempt to woo lefties
There are two ways to look at George Osborne and the Tories’ latest kite-flying exercise, this time on social justice, equality and fairness.
You can accept it takes a great degree of courage that it’s the Tories recognising their past mistakes and moving onto the New Labour agenda; or you can just be staggered by the chutzpah from a group of politicians that don’t seem to have any limits to how far they will go to prove that they really, honestly, truly care about subjects which they previously had very little time for.
On the basis of Osborne’s article, it’s difficult not to come to the second conclusion.
It’s with a piece with most of the recent articles by the Conservatives that have appeared in the Guardian – big on rhetoric, minuscule on actual policy. The one thing that Osborne’s has going for it is that unlike Oliver Letwin, who managed to write over 600 words without naming one specific policy, he actually suggests what the Tories would actually do were they to win power. The problem is that we’ve heard it all before multiple times, and indeed, some of it is what Yvette Cooper covered in her piece on Monday.
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Why aren’t unions united over pay rises?
In a few short weeks delegates from all our trade unions will gather once more in Brighton for the Annual TUC Congress.
Last year’s Congress instructed the General Council to:
Give full support to affiliated unions’ efforts to protect their members’ real and relative pay levels, to oppose the Government’s two per cent pay target for public sector workers, and to co-ordinate a joint campaign of opposition at national and local levels to the Government’s unfair public sector pay limit, including co-ordinated joint industrial action.
What have we seen as a result of this decision?
Well, on Thursday 24 April, members of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) at schools in England and Wales took strike action alongside members of the University and Colleges Union (UCU) in the Further Education sector and about a third of the membership of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS).
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David Cameron: you broke it, you own it
David Cameron will – according to extracts from a biography published today and carried in just about every newspaper – be “as radical a social reformer as Mrs Thatcher was an economic reformer.”
He tells author Dylan Jones: “[J]ust as Margaret Thatcher mended the broken economy in the 1980s, so we want to mend Britain’s broken society.”
You have to laugh, don’t you?
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We call for a windfall tax on energy companies
Rising energy and fuel prices are affecting everyone but it’s the poorest and those on fixed incomes who are paying the heaviest price. The warm summer weather will not mask the anxiety and anger at dramatically rising bills for the essentials of life – light and heat.
We believe that the moment is right for the government to levy a sensible one off windfall tax to guarantee social and environmental justice both now and in the future. This is why.
The average annual spend on domestic energy per household has now breached £1200. Since 2000 we have faced gas price rises of 100% and electricity price rises of 61% – with further increases including British Gas raising its gas bills by a record 35%. Simultaneously the main energy providers have seen their profits rise from £557 million in 2003 to now over £3 billion. This alongside the recent news of profits made by oil companies – BP is now making £37 million a day with a 23% increase in profits to £6.7 billion for the first 6 months of 2008.
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Imagine if Labour were in opposition
Unusually for a government minister, Tom Harris has a good idea. He says:
If we were in opposition right now, and the country were facing exactly the same challenges as it is now, and we were determined to form the next, new, government, what would be in our manifesto?
This is a good question for two reasons.
First, it’s a way for the party to avoid two common cognitive biases. One is ego-involvement; we all tend to defend decisions not because they are good ones, but simply because they are ours. The other is Bayesian conservatism; we stick to our prejudices too much in the face of contrary evidence.
Secondly, it allows the party to ditch some policies which were, at best, only temporary expedients. There are four I have in mind:
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Have the Tories misunderstood ‘equality’?
To those of us whose political views were formed in the 1970s and 80s, Michael Gove’s speech yesterday looked disconcerting.
He said:
Our social policy is…explicitly redistributive…we’re concerned about growing inequality…
When we talk of a broken society today one of the fractures we are concerned about is the growing breach between richer and poorer.
What world are we in, where a Tory can claim to care about equality? Is Gove sincere here – in which case he is flatly repudiating Thatcherism, or is this just another exercise in “decontaminating the brand” of Toryism?
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Can Cameron’s big ‘nudge’ idea work?
The Spiritual Civilisation Construction Commission has the job of curbing anti-social behaviour in Beijing whilst cultivating courtesy and civility instead. It has issued booklets and launched campaigns to minimise littering and China’s problem with public spitting, it has issued edicts on sartorial and social matters from handshaking to the length of one’s skirt. It has also been accompanied by a zero tolerance, broken windows approach to minor infractions such as spitting.
This is interesting for one major reason: it sounds very much like an extreme version of policies suggested by David Cameron, a whole suite of policies that might be labelled “soft paternalism”.
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Compass v Progress – who will win?
Neal Lawson’s recent article, offering suggestions on how New Labour could rebuild its election winning coalition, has attracted some predictable flak. Here’s Labour councillor Luke Akehurst:
What’s striking about the policy reactions to Glasgow East, such as the statement yesterday from Compass, is that many of them are just recitations of the writers’ pet hates, not attempts to address voters’ actual concerns. Voters are angry about the credit crunch, knife crime, unaffordable housing, fuel prices and fuel tax, and food prices. The Labour left are talking about hostility to ID cards, Trident, 42 day detention and public services reform and PFI, issues where the public support the Government or just don’t care.
And here’s Tim at TOK:
Some people will never learn. While the UK Labour Party is indisputably stuffed at the moment and most definitely needs to address its utter lack of direction and message, it is beyond my comprehension why so many progressives over here want to model a new electoral strategy based on the Labour Party of 1983, rather than the Labour Party of 1997.
You could characterise this as the ‘Compass versus Progress‘ debate.
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Andy Burnham’s concern is only for the rich
There was, in last Friday’s Independent, a most remarkable piece of writing on the subject of the Internet and the role of the state. Written by Andy Burnham, the Minister for Culture, Media and Sport, and weighing in at 800 words or so, it does something I might otherwise have considered impossible in such a brief statement. It encapsulates just about everything that is wrong about the government’s thinking, if ‘thinking’ is not too strong a term, about the Internet and the culture of cyberspace.
Burnham’s central thesis is simply this: that cyberspace is an anarchic, value-free, quasi-Hobbesian homagé to the frontier values of the American Old West. A place in need of a new breed of lawmen and state-sponsored private sector bounty hunters. Sam Peckinpah’s Tombstone.com:
…the internet is a lawless zone, where it is the vulnerable, the poor and the weak who are most at risk from the absence of any guiding rules. Democratic consent on guiding principals upholds the common good, and prevents one group in society pursuing their own interests at the expense of others.
This is a caricature, of course.
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New Labour’s path to power is shattered
The Glasgow East byelection result is another nail in the coffin of New Labour. Across the country, the electorate are crying out for change, they want a government that can help improve their lives.
But a politics that is rooted in the 1990s has simply run out of answers. In response, the government once again claim they are listening, but things still seem unlikely to change; despite political wipe-out now staring Labour in the face.
If Labour politicians refuse to protect people from the economic forces that are harming their lives it’s no wonder people are turning to other political parties.
This awful defeat vindicates what Compass has been saying for three years – that the coalition that brought Labour to power in 1997 has been shattered. Between 1997 and 2005, the party lost 4 million voters – and this time we saw a further pulling-away of the working-class vote that New Labour has always ill-advisedly taken for granted.
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Not a nanny state, not a neglectful state
So how should a serious political party of the 21st century faced with the acute and growing problems [of obesity] react?
The Foresight scientists highlighted the fact that for an increasing number of people, weight gain is inevitable and largely involuntary as a consequence of exposure to a modern lifestyle.
They used the term “passive obesity,” and pointed out that it particularly effects the socially and economically disadvantaged.
Not every child is lucky enough to live in an environment that promotes good health. Not every family has a leafy back garden for their kids to play in. Not every family can afford to buy fresh organic produce from the local farmer’s market, or to put food on the table that their children will refuse to eat.
Our strategy made clear that in approaching this problem, we reject both the “nanny state,” which polices shopping trolleys and institutes exercise regimes and the neglectful state, which wipes its hands of the problem, and wags the finger in the direction of the most vulnerable families in the vague hope that they will do as they are told.
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But will it actually work?
Just how much bigger will this week’s ‘biggest shake-up of the welfare state since the 1940s’ be than ‘the biggest shake-up of the welfare state for 60 years’ unveiled by David Blunkett in 2005?
Will the impending ‘Labour Blitz on Dole Scroungers’ hailed by the Sun be more or less of a blitz than the ‘Brown Blitz on the Black Economy’ similarly praised in the Murdoch press eight years ago? Luftwaffe, eat your heart out.
Come to that, how is it that those people singled out in pensions secretary James Purnell’s work for dole proposals are exactly the same people name-checked in Peter Lilley’s ‘I have a little list of benefit offenders who I’ll soon be rooting out and who never would be missed’ speech to the Conservative Party conference in 1991?
Why is New Labour stigmatising poor people?
James Purnell says the long-term unemployed “will be required to work full-time or undertake full-time work-related activity in return for their benefits.” (par 2.18 here).
This raises several questions. Isn’t this an abuse of language? I had thought that if you work, the money you get in return is wages.
And if you have to work 40 hours a week to get Job Seekers Allowance of £60.50, you’re paid £1.50 an hour. How is this consistent with the principle of a minimum wage?
But there’s a deeper question. Purnell could have sold a similar policy differently. He could have spoken thus:
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A nine-word summary of what’s wrong with our journalism
“Now Labour plans to bar white men from jobs” – just one of the recent screaming tabloid headlines about the Equality Bill.
What a fantastic nine-word summary of what is wrong with so much of our tabloid journalism: whipping up fear and division based on a fairy tale.
I’m not sure what is worse – believing that the person who wrote the headline was so ignorant of the story they thought it was true – or so cynical they were happy to write it knowing it wasn’t.
Because the truth is there is no provision like that in the Equality Bill. Nowhere. All the Bill proposes is that if two different people are equally qualified for a job (and that is a very big if!), it should be ok to choose between them on gender or race grounds.
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Waiters must get the tips we give them
Throughout my teenage years and early twenties I had many jobs as a waitress, in a number of different restaurants. Sometimes fun, with friendly customers, plenty of staff camaraderie and after-work drinks, other times gruelling with hot hours spent in a nasty uniform trying not to look embarrassed as I handed over another overcooked/overpriced/much delayed by a fight between the chefs, pizza.
Part of what drew me to these jobs was the tips – by smiling, being helpful and pandering to odd food requests I could significantly increase the amount I took home at the end of a ten hour shift thanks to the generosity of some of those I waited on. Lucky, since these jobs usually had pretty low hourly rates.
But I was furious when I realised the last restaurant I worked in not only paid a low hourly rate but actually took money from my tips as a top up to the minimum wage.
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Casting the Net and bringing in LJ-shaped Fishies
Aaron is leeeeeaaaaving onna Jet Plane this morning, so I’m afraid you’re stuck with me. Tips to the usual address if’n you’m got any, and away we go:
Anna Jane Clare meant to post about Henry James, but ended up devoting most of her post to how the feral underclass is created (NSFW warning: may contain swearing).
Lynne Featherstone has been on t’wireless.
Love and Garbage has less a post and more a treatise bemoaning the MSM’s failure to examine Cameron, especially his speeches to the CBI.
Nicholas Whyte has decided who he’s going to support in the race for Lib Dem party president, and reveals that it won’t be the same person he voted for last time. Despite my detesting the slogan, I’m 4 Ros too (see sidebar). Huzzah for the Blogging Baroness!
Matt Wardman has a challenge for Unity and other bloggers who like to dig for obscure things. His post comparing webstats for newspaper websites and blogs is worth looking at too.
Lizbee has discovered an early Fandom Wank and relates a Tom Baker anecdote. I link to these for those of you who still labour under the delusion that Doctor Who fans, like bloggers, are (and always have been) male.
And finally, those philistines of you who still don’t read Livejournal blogs? Have a look at Livejournal Aqua. The post titles float past as they are posted, hover over them and you get an excerpt; click and the post will open in a new tab (assuming that you’re using Firefox like all sensible persons)
Let’s have a party for Thatcher
So, a state funeral for Maggie? Why the hell not. Let’s do it.
And whilst we’re at it, let’s have a frantic choir of badly-dressed midgets singing the ding-dong song. Hell, I’m only 5ft tall myself, I’ll lead the chorus. Let’s have a party. Let’s have a gigantic piss-up to see the old girl off, and with her what remained of industrial Britain: its hatred.
Because once the witch is dead, maybe the progressive left can finally move on.
We lost, back in the mid-80s. Well, in fact, I was watching The Poddington Peas and eating a rusk on a sofa in Islington at the time, officer – but, vicariously, I lost too. We all lost. We need to face that, forgive ourselves and move on.
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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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