Long live the Class War strategy
Yesterday the Independent ran the “exclusive” that Gordon Brown had declared class war on fox hunting, which boiled down to a re-stating of long held Labour policy.
God forbid the environment secretary Hillary Benn launch a campaign to highlight that Tories are planning to repeal the hunting ban!
As pointed out over at Frank Owen’s Paintbrush, it is surely instructive the Tories and Countryside Alliance consider this issue more important than: “post office closures, house prices turning the countryside into the preserve of the rich, unemployment, pensioner isolation and poverty, and a host of other serious problems afflicting people in rural areas.”
But no. Pointing that out would mean ‘class war’ and today the Sunday Telegraph, which obviously has New Labour’s interests at heart, has an interview with Tessa Jowell where she apparently urges Brown to drop this “hideous” strategy and reveals that “she was pushing for reform of public services to be at the heart of the Labour manifesto“. Yup. Now that’s what you call an exciting and clearly defined electoral strategy.
continue reading… »
10 reasons why Daniel Hannan needs a new record on the EU
contribution by Left Outside
Tory MEP Dan Hannan has a dreadful top ten reasons to leave the EU (H/T Thomas Byrne). I hold no love for the EU but I hold Dan in even deeper disdain. This list has not changed my mind.
1. Since we joined the EEC in 1973, we have been in surplus with every continent in the world except Europe. Over those 27 years, we have run a trade deficit with the other member states that averages out at £30 million per day.
Correlation is not Causality. Perhaps, just perhaps, not being in a free trade area with other European states would have lead us to run a worse deficit with the rest of the world. Perhaps, just perhaps, allowing UK Governments to protect inefficient UK firms would have lead us to run smaller surpluses with other continents. I certainly don’t know; evidently neither does Dan Hannan.
continue reading… »
Stop supermarkets from wasting food on our behalf
contribution by Claire Spencer
Summits like Copenhagen can be frustrating because, by necessity, they place all the cards for positive (and negative) change in the hands of world leaders and delegates. The rest of us can only watch as our path to the future is pulled apart, rearranged and stuck back together. And when it all goes wrong, we feel more disenfranchised and powerless than ever.
But we do have power – and furthermore, we have the capacity to make meaningful change on an international level. Recently, I was inspired to act by Tristram Stuart’s Waste, an amazing narrative that uses reams of data to put our food wastage in a global context.
In the West, 10 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions come from producing food that is never eaten. In the UK, 752,290 tonnes of CO2 is used to produce our waste food, and 87,767 hectares of our land.
Personal profligacy is obviously a factor, and it clearly never hurts to keep an eye on how we all purchase, store and consume food. But it is a drop in the ocean compared to the waste generated by our major supermarkets.
continue reading… »
We are all anarchists now
The 193 governments that met at Copenhagen were unanimous about one proposition. And it’s a remarkable one – that whereas anarchy is a bad idea within national borders, it’s a good idea across borders.
The anarchist says: “We don’t need government. Private contractual agreements between individuals are sufficient.” No-one at Copenhagen agrees with this when they look within a national boundary. But they all agree with it, when it comes to supra-national matters. They think global government – in the sense of a coercive body standing above national governments – is inferior to agreements between national governments.
The failure to reach a meaningful agreement at Copenhagen, however, throws this view into question.
What I mean is that there are clear reasons why anarchy within borders is thought undesirable. If laws could only be reached by the unanimous agreement of all individuals, the rich and powerful would only consent to be bound by them on terms onerous to the poor.
continue reading… »
Climate change: back to basics
Thanks to the Copenhagen summit and the fall out from the CRU hack the subject of Climate Change here has been the subject of much discussion recently, not least here at LC.
A lot of this has centered on “climategate”, the battle between “deniers” and “believers”, or got bogged down in arguments about hockey sticks, computer models, the medieval warm period etc., but I think it is worth going back to the scientific arguments for AGW from first principles.
Much of this has been touched on before at LC and some of it may seem overly basic – but I believe it is worth going over again because it is important to keep sight of the basic scientific case for AGW and to point out that many of the disccussions I mentioned above have little or no impact on this basic science.
Human CO2 emissions
There has been an increase in the level of several GHGs in the atmosphere, the most significant being CO2 – which has increased from 280ppm to 385ppm. That this is due to human activity, largely the burning of fossil fuels, is not in doubt – CO2 from different sources contains different carbon isotopes and by analysing their relative presence it is possible to determine the source of the excess CO2 in the atmosphere. The notion that such an increase in CO2 levels as a result of the burning of fossil fuels would cause the earth’s climate to warm was first proposed in 1896 by Svante Arrhenius.
continue reading… »
Revealed: The AGW deniers behind Telegraph’s Hadley Centre smear
On Wednesday, The Telegraph’s in-house global warming denier, James Delingpole, published an article in which it was claimed that climate scientists working at the Hadley Centre for Climate Change, which is based at the headquarters of the Meteorological Office, near Exeter, had ‘probably tampered with Russian climate data’ under the headline:
‘Climategate goes SERIAL: now the Russians confirm that UK climate scientists manipulated data to exaggerate global warming’.
‘The Russians’, it turns out, did nothing of the sort and scientists working at the Hadley Centre are only tangentially related to the so-called ‘Climategate’ story, which relates to the hacking of a web-mail server at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit.
The source of Delingpole’s claims, which were reported uncritically by a number of Russian news agencies, is disclosed in the news release which he quotes in full in the article, before going on to provide links to articles by Steve MacIntyre (Climate Audit) and Jeff Id (posted at TV Weatherman Anthony Watts’ ‘Watts up with that’).
continue reading… »
Tory plans for personal tax breaks are regressive
contribution by Thomas Byrne
Recently outlined proposals by Tories to allow women who do not work to transfer their personal tax allowance to their husband are extremely flawed.
I agree with the principle being put forward by Iain Duncan Smith, but the means are wrong. Marriage tax breaks are much more important for the poor, yet this policy benefits the rich. And instead of changing tax boundaries, it’s tinkering with a system of complex allowances.
It is unlikely that people who can’t afford accountants will even know about this, let alone know how to transfer their personal allowance across.
Lets work out the maximum saving. This will be where one partner earns just under £50k and the other doesn’t work. Its £2414.
continue reading… »
The BA court order unfairly targets workers
The High Court ruled today to stop the 12 day strike of BA workers from going ahead. The grounds for this decision were the irregularity of including in the ballot cabin crew members of the union who were set to leave BA anyway prior to the strike itself. However I think there are grounds for viewing the decision by Mrs Justice Laura Cox as a political one.
Firstly, the inclusion of the 800 workers who are leaving (the number provided by BA’s legal team) could not have altered the outcome of the ballot. Unite represents 12,500 staff. On an 80% turnout, with 92.5% voting to strike (figures from BBC), 9,250 workers voted to strike. Even if all 800 of those leaving voted and voted yes to the strike, it would still not have been enough to sway the outcome.
Secondly there are some of the remarks made by Justice Cox herself:
“A strike of this kind over the 12 days of Christmas is fundamentally more damaging to BA and the wider public than a strike taking place at almost any other time of the year,” (BBC)
BS about BA
Libbie Escolme Schmidt – speaking as the author of a book documenting the too, too glamorous time she spent as a 1960s trolley dolly, you understand – thinks that striking British Airways cabin crew are ‘a disgrace to their profession’, and gets space in Britain’s biggest-circulation quality newspaper to tell them as much.
One line alone will give you a flavour of the piece: ‘For most of my career I felt guilty taking my wage, as it was such a fabulous experience.’ It presumably does not occur, either to Ms Escolme Schmidt or to the Daily Telegraph, that life probably just ain’t like that for the men and women working long-haul flights to huge numbers of mass market passengers.
Their basic wage is only £18,700 a year, and even if it is bumped up to something like twice as much as a result of allowances, many of them will be finding it difficult to make ends meet. Given that BA chief executive Willie Walsh is on £735,000, few will feel that their wedge is overly generous.
Elsewhere, the Torygraph slips into union-bashing on auto-pilot, seriously trying to maintain that the strike is really down to boosting devious leftie Len McCluskey’s chances of becoming general secretary of Unite next year.
continue reading… »
Why it makes sense for Labour to fight the ‘class war’
Oh dear, John Rentoul feels slightly stung by Don Paskini’s criticisms that his ‘please don’t hurt the rich‘ narrative doesn’t seem to be supported by polls.
He’s not alone.
The last few weeks have seen a succession of newspapers from the Daily Mail, Express, Telegraph, The Times and even The Economist play the ‘class war’ card. Surprisingly, a bunch of highly paid editors declared that increasing taxes on highly paid people was a bad idea.
But there are good strategic reasons for Labour embracing this phony ‘class war’.
1. Helps them re-frame the debate. The ‘class war’ is narrowly defined as being about bankers’ bonuses and higher taxes. Labour needs to expand this to include: Tories increasing IHT, deploring fairer taxes on the super-rich, their privileged backgrounds, the £250,000 “chicken-feed”, MPs “forced to live on rations”, Cameron not knowing how many houses he owned. In fact top Tory gaffes reek of how out of touch they are.
Re-framing the debate would allow them to talk about wider issues than just bankers’ bonuses.
continue reading… »
Supporting the striking BA workers
BA Cabin Crews have voted to go on strike over the Christmas period against the threat of reducing staffing levels through imposed redundancies and changes to staff contracts. 90% of the crews, on an 80% turnout, voted for the action.
There was some fantastic rhetoric flying about yesterday morning on Radio 4. BA Chief Executive Willie Walsh was reported to have said that the union shouldn’t bother going on strike, it should concentrate on helping the company reduce costs.
Of course the union might well have been in the mood to do that, but it wasn’t asked to help out. It was simply bypassed.
And now, though Walsh claims to be available for talks at any time, he has said that the central issue is not up for negotiation. So the union is absolutely correct to go on strike; this is not a case of simple costs it is now an attempt to de-recognize the whole union.
continue reading… »
John Rentoul vs most people
John Rentoul, chief political commentator for The Independent on Sunday, writes that “the tax on bankers’ bonuses was the final act of self-destruction” for the Labour Party, and that “Brown’s reversion to class-war politics has compounded his error. The City’s fury matters…And for what? It won’t make Labour any more popular among the voters it needs to save its marginal seats at the election.”
So according to Rentoul’s argument, we would expect opinion polls to reveal that most people oppose the government’s policies, right?
ComRes:
From what I have heard, the Government’s plans for heavier taxes on people with high incomes are fair
Agree 66%
Disagree 28%
Don’t know 5%
This illustrates: (a) The Government is right, in the eyes of most voters, to tax high earners more heavily. (b) Unsurprisingly the highest proportion who agree are DEs (71%) although even 64% of ABs agree. (c) There is also a correlation between age and agreement, with older voters the most likely to agree. (d) Although Labour voters are the voter group most likely to agree, 61% of Tories do too.
continue reading… »
The supposed criminality of black people
There’s a paradox raised by the reaction to “Rod” Liddle’s mostly incorrect claim that “the overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community.”
The paradox is this. When it comes to tax, the right are keen to stress that people respond to incentives. And yet when it comes to crime they seem coy about incentives, and prefer to talk about “multiculturalism“ or genes.
The paradox is especially strong because economic theory is much clearer on the link between poverty and crime than between tax rates and tax revenue.
This is because in the case of taxes, the income and substitution effects work in opposite ways. The substitution effect causes people to prefer leisure over work when taxes rise, whilst the income effect causes them to want to work more to recoup lost income. However, with crime the two work in the same direction. The income effect causes a poor person to turn to crime to raise money, whilst the substitution effect means the unemployed have more time with which to commit crime, and lower penalties – no danger of losing one‘s job – for doing so.
continue reading… »
Here’s how we regulate bankers
Know much about credit default swaps, do you? How about the Libor curve, how’s that playing out these days? I hear good things about those interest rate options. Maybe I should get me some of those.
Banking, frankly, is hard. We might like to think it’s just a bunch of suited monkeys pushing papers at each other. But a lot of it’s really, you know, complicated and stuff. These are bright guys. The rest of us (”taxpayers”, lets call us) can’t even begin to understand what they do. Hector Sants says as much. And he should know. He’s the chair of the Financial Services Authority.
Let’s be honest – the only people who have a hope of really understanding banking are the bankers. If we don’t want the events of the last two years to ever happen again, they’re the ones who are going to have to change things. After all, if we can’t do it, and the government can’t do it, the only answer is self-regulation.
They’ve shown scant interest in changing anything so far, of course. Indeed, if the crisis has taught them anything it’s that they can wreck the economy, take our money, plunge us into the deepest recession in 70 years, and still pay themselves enormous bonuses at the end of it. So – how do we get them to exercise some self control?
Here’s my suggestion. We give them whatever they want.
continue reading… »
A further blow for ID cards?
Could you keep a £61 billion secret? Its not always easy, says Chancellor Alistair Darling in his interview with Mary Riddell for the forthcoming Fabian Review, extracted in today’s Telegraph.
He was, he says, “living on the edge for a while. There were many days when I knew that unless the Bank was making [covert] interventions [such as the secret loans of £61.6 billion to HBOS and the Royal Bank of Scotland], then literally banks would have had to shut their doors and cash machines would have been switched off.
People should be in no doubt that the world banking system was on the brink of collapse in October 2008 … It was [irksome] to have people sniping at the edges, saying: ‘You should have done this or that’ when I couldn’t disclose what I was doing. I couldn’t have said: ‘By the way, the banks are about to collapse, but I’m doing something about it’, because the very act of saying that would have been disastrous.
The interview was conducted just before the pre-budget repot. The newspaper finds enough significance in a passing comment on ID cards to make a ‘Darling signals death of ID cards‘ news story of it.
This is the entirety of Darling’s discussion of the issue.
continue reading… »
Tory economic attacks keep missing target
Most of the time, the mainstream media acts like a baying mob with rarely a sense of nuance or self-reflection.
For example over the last few weeks we’ve seen journalist after journalist echoing the Tory line that Britain was in danger of having its credit rating downgraded because of its so-called “mammoth debt” (a narrative now taken up by the liberal press too).
At any other time the Tories would be furious at someone constantly trying to downplay the strength of the British economy. But when they’re doing it that’s ok.
And so it came to pass that Boy George’s constant dire warnings about the economy’s creditworthiness came to nothing.
continue reading… »
Jobs for all? Really?
One really good thing that James Purnell did when he was a government minister was to set up the Future Jobs Fund.
The Future Jobs Fund subsidises employers to create jobs for young people who have been looking for work for a year – the subsidy is roughly enough to employ someone for 25 hours/week for 6 months. In the day job, I’m hoping to employ a couple of people in January through the Future Jobs Fund.
Purnell and Graham Cooke have a good idea that the Jobs Fund should be extended to include older people, so that eventually everyone who has been unemployed for a year should have a guaranteed offer of a job. Their reasoning, that the government should become employer of last resort, is spot on.
Two concerns – firstly, the Future Jobs Fund has only just started up, so before extending it we should probably find out things like whether it actually works in practice (e.g. what percentage of people complete six months, what happens to them when the funding stops, is it beneficial for employees and employers).
continue reading… »
Right-wing notions of ‘middle-class’
The pre-budget report has triggered an entirely predictable swirl of reactions from the usual suspects. According to Andrew Porter in the Telegraph, “middle classes [are] to be hit hard”, echoing Tory criticism that Labour’s pre-budget report is tantamount to none other than “class war”.
The Daily Mail calls it “Clobbering the middle earners”, adding elsewhere that “Darling vows to hammer middle classes”.
So let’s look at what those warped minds think the middle classes are and let’s see what this looming “hammering” may consist of.
continue reading… »
Labour isn’t radical enough on the economy
The Pre-Budget Report yesterday was, at best, a muddle that won’t do much to shift voter perceptions about the supposed difference between Labour and the Tories.
Keep in mind that most voters won’t pay any attention to the PBR, let alone sit there and discuss its ramifications like much of the media and blogosphere has done.
Some people may notice the increase in the starting point for NI contributions, others may smile at the sight of bankers squealing on television about the decision to tax their bonuses.
And yet for a government that constantly claims there are clear dividing lines between them and the Tories on the economy – it has constantly failed to outline them in stark terms.
continue reading… »
Dave still doesn’t know what he’s doing
Why isn’t Dave a banker? The Times reports his City in my blood pride at his banking heritage:
David Cameron attempted the balancing act yesterday of wooing the world’s most powerful bankers while assuring Middle England that he would not give that most hated profession too easy a time.Speaking to a gathering of top financiers, the Conservative leader told them: “My father was a stockbroker, my grandfather was a stockbroker, my great-grandfather was a stockbroker.” The City, he assured them, was in his blood. Those present, who included Bob Diamond, president of Barclays, and Richard Gnodde, the co-chief executive of Goldman Sachs in London, purred their approval.
The Times report suggests it was an exercise in characteristic Cameron ambiguity, and not one which did much to answer the same newspaper’s challenge yesterday – “David Cameron has yet to answer a basic question: what does he stand for?”
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?
|
25 Comments 66 Comments 20 Comments 12 Comments 10 Comments 18 Comments 4 Comments 25 Comments 49 Comments 31 Comments |
|
LATEST COMMENTS » Nick posted on Why don't MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours? » Bob B posted on Complete tits » Nick posted on Complete tits » Mike Killingworth posted on Complete tits » Mr S. Pill posted on Complete tits » Nick Cohen is a Tory posted on Complete tits » Nick Cohen is a Tory posted on Complete tits » Matt Munro posted on Why I'm defending Ed Balls over immigration » Kate Belgrave posted on Complete tits » Kate Belgrave posted on Complete tits » Nick Cohen is a Tory posted on Obama is right to slam BP - and why capitalists should too » Thomas Hobbes posted on The Daily Mail and "Bongo bongoland" » Matt Munro posted on Complete tits » Matt Munro posted on Complete tits » Lee Griffin posted on Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed? |
