Observer repeating right-wing spin on inheritance tax
Andrew Rawnsley has an excellent article in today’s Observer on the changing politics of inheritance tax. In the era of deficits and looming austerity, the Conservative pledge looks less canny than when it was first announced in 2007, as if the one group that the Conservatives can find some tax relief for in these difficult times are the very rich.
The Observer’s Political Editor, Toby Helm, also reports that, in view of the changed circumstances, the government is considering freezing the threshold, rather than increasing it as planned.
This would seem to me to be the least the government could do as part of a program for spreading the burden of paying for valuable public services in what are indeed difficult times.
But consider how Helm chooses to describe the issue:
continue reading… »
Against the ban on minarets
contribution by Left Outside
Swiss voters have supported a referendum proposal to ban the building of minarets. More than 57% of voters and 22 out of 26 cantons – or provinces – voted in favour of the ban.
In Switzerland a referendum on any new piece of legislation can be held if the sponsor collects 100,000 signatures from the citizenship in the 18 months following its introduction. The opposition Swiss People’s Party have earned the ire of the Government by introducing the Bill to ban Minarets this way. There democratic credentials of this referendum seem clear, after all this was no close run thing, more than 57% of voters and 22 out of 26 cantons voted “yes.”
Yet despite all this, banning one particular sort of building seems spectacularly undemocratic. When it is accompanied by a rise in Islamophobic violence, it seems down right authoritarian.
Guthrum over at Old Holborn is managing to do a great disservice to Libertarians everywhere by holding up this as an example of democracy in process.
Bizarrely he concludes with “The people told the Government, not the other way round” when in fact what has happened is the “the people told some other people to stop doing “that”.” Moreover, they told them to do it by co-opting the massive repressive potential of the state.
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Does taxing the rich work?
Tim and Richard are debating that old question, would higher taxes on the rich, as demanded by Compass, actually raise tax revenue, or would the rich emigrate, work less or fiddle their taxes with the result that less income would be raised?
Economic theory is absolutely no help here, as there are two competing effects. The income effect predicts that higher taxes might lead people to work harder, in order to maintain their post-tax incomes. The substitution effect says that if work becomes less remunerative, they’d do less of it and spend more time with the guitar or golf clubs.
It is an entirely empirical question as to which one dominates – in other words, as to where the Laffer curve is.
Here, though, is the problem – the empirics are also uncertain. Take, for example a recent paper (pdf) from IFS economists. It says:
If the richest 1% see a 1% fall in the proportion of each additional pound of earnings that is left after tax, then the income they report will rise by less than half that – only 0.46%. Although a tentative estimate, this suggests that the government would maximise the revenue it collects by imposing an overall marginal rate on the highest earners of 56.6%, very close to the 53.0% currently charged.
Victory to Tim, you might think.
No. For one thing, as they say, the estimate is tentative. Allowing for this gives us another interpretation. This is that the revenue-maximizing top tax rate is 95% likely to be in the range 45-75%. This encompasses Tim’s and Richard’s views.
And it could be that Richard is nearer the truth. continue reading… »
Reporting back from the Citizens’ Assembly
You’ve got to love London Citizens’ strategy. Stick a politician on stage in front of several thousand people, present him (and it usually was a “him”) with some wonderfully populist solutions to a bunch of devastating facts and ask, “So are you with us?”
The policies presented to the squirming politicians and business leaders at a choc-a-bloc Barbican last night were made all the more difficult to avoid because they were decided democratically. Over a thousand of London Citizens’ members were involved in developing the policies, which you can read here.
Despite some inevitable wrangling, representatives from all political parties committed to working with London Citizens on these proposals. Greg Hands said the Conservatives would introduce a cap on store card interest rates (although notably, he didn’t say what that cap would actually be) and a representative from the British Bankers Association, who was brought on stage straight after a heart-wrenching personal testimony about debt, was asked if he’d commit to help responsible lending. (He did). Stephen Timms said he’d hold a meeting with London Citizens and the OFT to discuss capping interest rates, and Andrew Altman, CEO of the Olympic Legacy Programme said he’d meeting with London Citizens quarterly to discuss their plans. (Damn I’d love to see officials’ faces when these bigwigs tell them they have to add these dates to their diaries.)
Although London Citizens does get a bit happy clappy at times, it would be pretty arrogant of the left not to think it hasn’t got a lot to learn from this movement. Besides the “stick ‘em on stage and see” tactic, I took away three other lessons:
Be prepared to risk anarchy for democracy. This organisation isn’t afraid to hand highly eccentric people the microphone, to put street dancers on stage or to ask the audience if they endorse their chair. Somehow, it works.
Don’t be afraid to work across groups. London Citizens has got representatives from mosques, unions, churches, race-based organisations and schools. Sure they don’t agree on everything, but they agree on the important stuff.
Don’t be afraid to put morality, art and emotion into politics. It doesn’t water it down – it makes it come alive.
A gram is better than a damn
Attention shoppers, and ladies that means you: now that marriage, mortgage and maternity are the new must-have items in today’s post-credit-crunch-pre-Torygeddon social control bonanza, there’s a new lifestyle drug on the market. It won’t help you dance all night, shunt you through a red-eyed work deadline or – heaven forbid – encourage you to go to bed with random strangers; it won’t even make you lose weight. It’s called Filibanserin, and it’s here to help you please your man.
As any fool knows, in this all-the-sex all-the-time society the only functional couples are the ones who are going at it like crack-addled bunnies night after hard-shagging night, whatever their age or personal preference. Your duty as a woman is to provide your male partner with the sexual release he needs. Don’t fancy sex with hubby tonight? Let’s not be silly enough to question mandatory heteronormative monogamy or a culture that frames heterosexual intercourse as the ultimate panacaea: the problem, little lady, is with you. You have a disease called Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder, and Filibanserin can fix you.
According to Boehringer-Ingelheim, which just happens to make and sell Filibanserin, HSDD is “a form of Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD)” affecting around 10% of women. It is “a medical condition characterised by a decrease in sexual desire…. the condition can negatively impact a woman`s life and her relationship with her partner.” continue reading… »
Citizens’ response to the economic crisis
Earlier this year, London Citizens asked its member organisations to come up with a ‘citizens’ response to the economic crisis’.
Thousands of people were involved in these discussions, and the following priorities were agreed:
continue reading… »
How to help the homeless
Guest post by Cllr Patrick Murray
Ten years ago, at the age of 19, I was homeless. I had been suffering from depression for several years and my life was really on a downward spiral. I lost count of how many colleges I walked away from and jobs I messed up. I had been in hospital at the age of 17, on an adult ward. I had lived in a halfway house. Nothing had worked. So when I got discharged from the hospital I was in, after an argument with one of the doctors, I didn’t have many options. I turned up at the door of the homeless shelter for young people in Oxford and stayed there.
What I saw on the streets were a lot of people who had been repeatedly let down by society and the state. People who had been discharged from the care system with nowhere to go. People who had left the army and been unable to cope with civilian life, to give two examples.
Some of the faces I see on Oxford’s streets now are recognisable from my time. They’re a lot older, and they disappear for stretches at a time, but they’re still around. They’ve fallen through the cracks in our system so many times by now. I’ll be honest – I feel guilty that I got out and somehow they didn’t. So why did I get lucky? continue reading… »
Do not fear a crooked shadow
This is a guest post by Sarah Brown
On Saturday, two events took place within a few hundred metres of each other in central London. The first was the London vigil for the International Transgender Day of Remembrance, where trans people come together to remember those who met their deaths simply because they were trans, or were perceived as trans. This was a quiet and emotional affair.
Emotional in perhaps a different way was the London Reclaim the Night march, a march ostensibly aimed at highlighting the fear and violence women face can face simply because we are women.
As a transsexual woman I attended the former event, but not the latter, ironically because of fear. After the vigil, myself and some friends bumped into the march on our way to get food, and it got me thinking.
I think “facing ones fear” is a cost-benefit thing; I’m scared to go on the RTN march, and I know lots of other trans women are. Ironically, I’m scared to go on it for a reason which may be very similar to the reason those women on the march did go on it…
When a woman walking home alone, in the darkness, she might encounter a man, or group of men walking along. These men probably intend the woman no harm at all, but quite a few men do intend harm, or at the very least, they intend to subject her to verbal and possibly physical harassment. Lots of women therefore treat all men as potentially suspect until proven otherwise out of simple self preservation. When hearing this, lots of men tend to protest – “But I’m not like that!”, they’ll say. Chances are they’re not, but we don’t know, and it pays to err on the side of caution, because erring the other way only has to go wrong once.
Britain’s first green city
Arguably, Stoke is already England’s greenest city on the grounds that there isn’t much industry left, or that much employment of any other kind. Still, nowt wrong with making a virtue out of necessity:
This evening, in St Margaret Ward Roman Catholic high school, Stoke-on-Trent is set to become the first city to sign up to the 10:10 pledge to cut its carbon emissions by 10% during 2010…
… Out in the cavernous main hall, waiting for the bingo to start, members Dave Athersmith and Julie Hulme agree: “We car-share to come here. We’ve all got to do our bit, haven’t we?” John Clowes, a retired ceramic tilemaker of 76 (”There’s tiles of mine in the Houses of Parliament”) has just had his loft insulated, and turns everything off at the mains at night. “It’s the young people you need to worry about,” he says. “Those electronic games. What happened to a kickaround in the street?” (In two days in Stoke, by the way, I met only three people prepared to dismiss climate change as a notion cooked up by a control-crazed government (or as one local put it, “absolute bollocks”). Most confessed to at least some concern.)
It’s conventional wisdom that the stout yeomen of the working classes will have no truck with all this environmental nonsense: conventional wisdom, that is, amongst rightwing or otherwise anti-crusty middle class types. continue reading… »
Tories: filling in forms will strengthen the family
Almost nobody outside the political classes has yet heard of Chris Grayling, the populist, telly-themed soundbite obsessed shadow Home Secretary.
But while his colleagues attempt a liberal love-bombing strategy by posing as progressive, Grayling is already gearing up for what could prove a very successful bid to achieve Michael Howard and Ann Widdecombe levels of notoreity.
Here’s his latest headline-grabbing wheeze.
Tories to demand: are you married? reports The Sunday Times.
Official forms will routinely demand to know whether a person is married under Conservative plans to promote stable families.
Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, claimed that, under Labour, marriage had become a “non official institution”. In an interview with The Sunday Times, he pledged that a future Tory government would make it a priority to raise the status of married life. “Marriage has almost disappeared from official forms, from official documents,” he said. “I think that needs to change.”
A Straight White Men’s Officer at SOAS..?
London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) was established in 1916 as the School of Oriental Studies, with the specific remit of training future colonial administrators in the language and culture of the people they were destined to rule.
Nearly a century later, at this institution founded on racist, patriarchal principles, straight white males account for less than 20 percent of the SOAS student body – a fact that has prompted calls for them to be recognised as a minority group by the students’ union, and granted their own exclusive welfare strategy. On Thursday 19th November, as part of their Diversity Week, SOAS will debate whether or not to appoint a ‘Straight White Men’s Officer’.
University life often comes as a shock to the privileged sons of this country. Higher education is the time in their lives when young men are most likely to experience minority status; white men may dominate the world of work, top-level management, politics, administration, the arts, culture, the military and the media, but as undergraduates they make up only 36 percent of the student population. White males are also less likely to graduate with a first or upper second class degree and find immediate employment than their female classmates, where by contrast, less than thirty years ago, white males appeared to dominate every mixed-gender campus. At university, unlike in other environments, straight, white young men cannot pretend that they represent the standard for normal humanity – instead, they are required to confront their roles as members of a privileged minority on the world stage. Nowhere is this sea-change more evident than at SOAS. continue reading… »
Pants off to impropriety
I’d like to shout out for an unsung hero of improper, joyful, self-actualising women everywhere: Knickers Girl.
When a Sun photographer snapped Knickers Girl – aka 20 year old teaching assistant Sarah Lyons -cavorting in Cardiff centre with a pair of pants around her ankles, she instantly became the face of female reprobation up and down the country. Never mind that she wasn’t exposing any naughty bits; never mind that dancing with a pair of knickers around your ankles is perfectly legal behaviour; never mind that the pants in question weren’t the ones she’d been wearing, but a comedy pair of David Hasselhof knickers a mate had picked up in a bar.
Never mind that poor Ms Lyons was on a course of antibiotics and hence was actually stone-cold sober at the time: the new postergirl of binge-drinking ladettes everywhere has been suspended from her job pending a disciplinary inquiry, for the dubious crime of having fun in public. And they say sexism in the workplace is dead.
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Julie Bindel does transphobia again
Julie Bindel is wrong again. She was wrong in 2004 when she said that “I don’t have a problem with men disposing of their genitals, but it does not make them women” and she’s shockingly wrong in a recent article for Standpoint mag that I can only describe as hideously transphobic.
There’s a lot in this article to take issue with. Other bloggers, such as cave of rationality have discussed it from a human rights perspective, specifically the human rights that she fails to apply to trans-gendered people.
I want to examine it through her discussion of biology as destiny, when she says:
transsexualism, by its nature, promotes the idea that it is “natural” for boys to play with guns and girls to play with Barbie dolls. The idea that gender roles are biologically determined rather than socially constructed is the antithesis of feminism.
Have we no shame?
I was struck by this article, in which American journalist Penelope Trunk defends her decision, despite an unanticipated global barrage of hate mail, to post the following to her Twitter feed:
“I’m in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there’s a fucked-up three-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.”
That right there, in >140 characters, is possibly the most succinct and effective piece of feminist gonzo journalism I have ever read.
continue reading… »
Cameron’s Lithuanian ally: Children need protection from ‘evil’ of homosexuality
Last month on Liberal Conspiracy I exposed how the Conservatives have allied themselves in the European Parliament with Valdemar Tomasevski, a Lithuanian MEP who has described homosexuality as a ‘perversion‘, and who voted in his national parliament earlier this year for a draconian new law banning public discussion of homosexuality.
Today, on Left Foot Forward, Will Straw publishes striking new evidence of Tomasevski’s homophobia:
David Cameron’s Lithuanian partner has revealed his homophobic views in an email to Left Foot Forward. Valdemar Tomasevski MEP – leader of the ‘Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania’ and a member of David Cameron’s alliance of far right Europeans – describes homosexuality as an “evil” from which children should be protected and says “we cannot allow these people to claim … that homosexuality is normal.”
Tomasevski’s anti-gay beliefs were set out in an email to Straw after Left Foot Forward requested an English translation of a Lithuanian interview appearing on the MEP’s website. The email, which also describes Tomasevski’s opposition to almost all abortions, says:
“I accept existence of homosexuals – we are tolerant state. But homosexuality is also a very good example of the wrong understanding of tolerance. We have to respect every human being, including those who experience sexual attraction to the same-sex.
But we cannot allow these people to claim and explain even to children at kindergarten that homosexuality is normal and encourage people to become homosexuals. Those who talk about tolerance should understand that and respect the constitutional right to protecting children from evil.”
Who pays for Primark’s high profits?
contribution by Jesse Lerner-Kinglake
British companies have been battered by the financial crisis. Yet Primark, one of Britain’s largest retailers, continues to thrive. Fuelled by the retailer’s impressive sales growth of 7%, AB Foods, the group which owns Primark, yesterday announced £655 million in yearly earnings. The future looks bright for the high street chain.
How is it that Primark has been able to post lucrative profits while the rest of the country plunges deeper into recession?
The answer lies in its business dealings with overseas suppliers. To obtain cheap garments as cheaply as possible for sale in the UK, companies like Primark squeeze suppliers in developing countries. The net result of this practice, however, is a vicious race to the bottom in which overseas workers are hit the hardest.
The conditions facing men and women in factories making clothes for top high street brands are simply scandalous. According to original research carried out by War on Want, garment workers in sweatshops across Bangladesh earn as little as 7p an hour and face up to 80-hour weeks. Abuse at the hands of factory owners is endemic, with women workers particularly at risk.
continue reading… »
Carrot and sticks: getting people back to work
The digested DWP evaluation of Provider-led Pathways to Work:
What worked well:
• finding provider staff pleasant and helpful;
• feeling that the environment within provider premises was hospitable, and a
more inviting place than Jobcentre Plus;
• meeting needs, where people felt the support received was beneficial and
appropriate;
• challenging people to think differently about their employment prospects;
• contributing to people’s progress and movements into work, by providing
encouragement, financial support and access to other helpful provision.
What didn’t work well:
• the way that provider staff are incentivised to focus on people who are considered
job ready and leave those furthest from work inadequately supported, because
of the way providers are contracted to deliver job outcomes and are paid
according to the number achieved;
continue reading… »
Don’t believe your eyes
Two different comments on different subjects reveal a common error in thinking about social affairs.
First, in response to my claim that much of the gender pay gap is due to women having children, Toto says: “you didn't consult any childless women before writing this, did you?” You’re damn right, I didn’t.
Second, a commenter on a post by DK says:
Both commenters make the same mistake – they think we can trust the evidence of our own eyes. We can’t.
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They hate our prosperity
The Legatum Prosperity Index is a free market think tank which ranks 104 countries according to nine different measures of prosperity.
There are some predictable results – four of the top five countries are in Scandinavia, and Zimbabwe is last, just behind Sudan. But it is interesting to see what they say about the UK.
The Daily Mail writes on a daily basis about a UK where business is stifled by regulation, the economy is burdened by a bloated public sector, we are run by a corrupt politicial elite, terrorists and violent criminals menace the law abiding public, the traditional family is under assault, ancient freedoms have been taken away, our universities teach ‘mickey mouse degrees’ and our health service is inefficient.
The research suggests that every single one of these are right-wing myths.
continue reading… »
Right-wing attempts to legitimise BNP policies
The BNP’s Question Time appearance has led to two predictable responses from the right.
First, they’ve been whinging that Nick Griffin was singled out by the audience. After declaring for years that ‘no platform’ was wrong and it was better to expose the BNP publicly, most now seem to think even exposing them on national TV is a step too far.
Apparently if the BBC invite a Holocaust denier and avowed racist on to TV we should just ignore their past and talk about his views on the Royal Mail strike. Pathetic. Nick Griffin repeatedly lied during QT. Why aren’t right-whingers talking about that?
The second predictable response is to play up a ’surge’ in BNP support following the programme.
A Telegraph poll following BBC-QT said this:
The survey found that 22 per cent of voters would ’seriously consider’ voting for the BNP in a future local, general or European election. This included four per cent who said they would ‘definitely’ consider voting for the party, three per cent who would ‘probably’ consider it, and 15 per cent who said they were ‘possible’ BNP voters.”
The 4-3% is not unexpected and is within the margin of error for the 2% that BNP voting intentions lie along.
continue reading… »
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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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