Productivity in public services: how the Tories lie
contribution by Margin4Error
Last week the Conservatives launched a new line of attack on the public sector. Phillip Hammond, the Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, told Policy Exchange that the public sector was inefficient.
He said that in the last twelve years its productivity had grown a lot slower than the private sector. Then he concluded that had it kept pace we could have had the same services for £60billion less tax each year.
There are a lot of inferences intended. One is that Labour is wasteful. Another is that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector. Another is that voters can expect something for nothing from the Tories, or “more for less” as the official line goes.
But the most important inference is that the Tories can cut the deficit by cutting waste rather than by raising taxes or sacking nurses.
£60billion?
So let’s start with the £60billion annual saving that Labour cruelly denied us.
First of all I have to acknowledge a weakness in my article. I can’t break down their figures for you. I can’t break them down because I don’t have them. In fact no one seems to.
The Conservatives don’t appear to have referenced their assertion anywhere. As such, other than the mouth of Phillip Hammond, we don’t know where £60billion came from.
That problem aside, we are talking about a fairly modest rise in productivity over twelve years.
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The vision thing
Guest post by Matt Sellwood
“The very least you can do in this life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance, but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyed nor the destroyers.” – Barbara Kingsolver
British politics is in a mess. That much is obvious to anyone who has spent any time speaking to people about politics over the last year. The issue of expenses was simply an explosive symptom of a much deeper-rooted cause, rather than the cause itself.
The cause, simply, is that very few people are inspired by politics any longer – and even fewer believe that electoral politics has any transformatory potential to offer. This is not limited to the left or the right – politics as a whole is being damned by millions of people. The most common reaction that canvassers of all parties in my constituency receive is “not interested, mate”, followed closely by “what’s the point?”.
And who can blame them? British politics has, it seems entirely lost the understanding that politics is about vision. Its about improving people’s everyday lives, yes – but its also about being able to look to the horizon, and beyond, for a promise of something better. It’s about being able to identify with a party because that party embodies what you believe in – your ideals. continue reading… »
What is the future of social democracy?
contribution by Arjun Singh-Muchélle
When social democrats write about the future of social democracy, there is a conspicuous absence in their writing of ownership. They make references to elusive ‘social democracy’ and ‘social democrats’, without ever referring to themselves.
I am a social democrat, avowedly so. This offers my final cry on the future of our ideology.
Our ideology is in need of an intellectual renaissance. When the first and second ways of our ideology faltered, we created a third way, branded it ‘new’ and sold it, en masse. This however, was a momentary lapse in judgement. This third way has now failed, with its intellectual foundation in tatters.
It is our imperative, as social democrats, to dispense of this third method in to the dustbin of history.
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Britons want: to reform, regulate and redistribute
Thanks to tim f for drawing our attention to this recent BBC / GlobeScan poll. The top findings…
1. Most British people (57%) think that the problems associated with free market capitalism can be addressed through regulation and reform; however, 19 per cent think that capitalism is fatally flawed, and only 13% think that it works well as it is.
2. Four in ten (40%) believe that the government should play more of an active role in owning or controlling major industries, 31 per cent believe that the government should play a less active role, and 23 per cent believe that it should continue to play the same role it does now.
3. Two-thirds (67%) of respondents say the government should do more to distribute wealth more evenly, while 20% say it should maintain its current level of involvement and only 10% say that it should do less.
4. A majority (56%) favour increased government regulation of businesses, compared to 23% who favour the status quo and 16% who favour less regulation.
More information, including comparisons with 26 other countries, can be found here.
Reforming English Libel Law
There is a growing consensus that English libel laws are not fit for purpose. The list of libel cases that seem to defy common sense grows longer every day. Bloggers are threatened by vindictive vested interests, and football fans on chat-rooms are bullied by their own clubs. Regional newspapers are intimidated into timidity, and publishers punt on commissioning the investigative journalism that is supposed to keep our democracy strong. Scientists who challenge the claims of alternative medicine are hit with writs.
And then there is the problem of forum shopping, or “Libel Tourism”:
Britain is a pariah state, shunned by its allies and exploited by the unsavoury. The state of English libel laws (Scotland’s provisions are a little better) is so embarrassing that a number of US states have enacted legislation to protect their citizens from our courts. London is the global centre of libel tourism. From Middle Eastern potentates to Russian oligarchs, the rich and powerful use our legal system to bully people who try to hold them to account.
That’s John Kampfner, former editor of the New Statesman and Chief Executive of Index on Censorship, introducing the Index/PEN report into English libel laws. The report is the result of a year long inquiry that took in the opinions of publishers, lawyers, journalists, novellists, NGOs and bloggers, and identifies ten challenges for libel reform.
First amongst these the problem of burden of proof, which in libel lies uniquely with the defendant. The report recommends reversing this, and requiring claimants to demonstrate falsehood and damage. We also recommend reducing damages in libel to £10,000 and establishing a low cost libel tribunal that would allow bloggers, and others of slender means, to defend libel actions without having to re-mortgage their children.
You can read the rest of our recommendations at www.libelreform.org, a new hub that will co-ordinate the campaign for libel reform, in collaboration with Sense About Science. We need to lobby MPs to sign an EDM calling form reform, and to pressurise both the Tories and Labour to join the Liberal Democrats and make libel reform a manifesto commitment. The campaign for libel reform has already attracted the support of writers such as Monica Ali and Andrew Motion, and makes bedfellows of newspaper editors Alan Rusbridger and Peter Wright. If you are fed up with the wealthy and big corporations using English laws to suppress free speech, then we urge you to join them, and sign-up to the campaign.
Where is the left’s new economic map?
contribution by Adam Lent
Imagine this scenario. You’re driving to a vital meeting in a part of the world you’ve never visited before. The roads are winding and there are lots of unexpected turns. So you are relying very heavily on your map of the area, which begins to appear increasingly divorced from reality. Bu in the absence of anything better you plough on.
You only realise quite how bad the map is a few minutes later when you and your car end up bonnet first in a ditch. In disgust and anger you decide to tear up the map. It is then you notice the thing was printed forty years ago.
Those with a pathological inability to analyse a situation might believe that they just need to stick to the map even more closely. Most of would probably chuck it and look for a more up-to-date map.
Long metaphor but this pretty well summarises where we are on economic policy at the moment. The old neo-liberal economic paradigm has clearly dumped us into the mother of all economic ditches.
For groups like the Taxpayers Alliance and increasingly the Conservative Party, the problem originates not with the paradigm but because we drifted too far away from it.
continue reading… »
Reform parliament: abolish the three-line-whip
contribution by Josh Plotkin
The Power 2010 campaign is asking people for ideas to refom our democracy. Here is one proposal.
The idea that British politics needed a radical shake-up; and that this time – unlike any time before – the politicians themselves knew it, gained enormous currency in these heady months. Things were going to change: Brown said so, as did Cameron, as did Clegg, as did almost every other MP with a public profile. Maybe, just maybe, they meant it.
The closest we got was Gordon Brown’s speech, and that was deeply unimpressive on reform. Labour are such pussies that even in the almost certain knowledge that they wouldn’t actually have to live up to anything they proposed, the best they could come up with was a referendum. At some unspecified point in the future. On alternative vote. It’s a stunning lack of ambition, especially since Labour promised a similar referendum in 1997 and never delivered.
This is not good enough. So time for some wishful thinking: perhaps the most obvious and, at the same time, the most seismic of parliamentary reforms would be the end of the three-line whip.
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What might a 21st century Libel Law look like?
I don’t usually do requests, but as libel law reform is a particular interest of mine and a subject I’ve blogged on previous occasions, I’m more than happy to rise to the challenge set by ‘organic cheeseboard’ in comments under Sunder’s commentary on yesterday’s events.
but for god’s sake could SOMEONE writing about this stuff PLEASE offer an idea of what those reforms might actually look like?
Fair enough, lets start with an internet specific reform which, as a blogger, is number one on my own shopping list of reforms, and a measure that we absolutely do want to import from our cousins over the the other side of the Big Pond.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Acy specifies simply that:
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
Under English libel law, at present, web hosting companies may treated as the publisher of, and held liable for, [allegedly] defamatory content published to their servers by a third party despite having had no absolutely part in in, or prior knowledge, of the that material’s publication. Likewise, bloggers and forum operators can be sued over comments, posted to their blog/forum by visitors, over which they will have had no control whatsoever unless they actively pre-moderate all such comments. continue reading… »
A social democrat is a conservative with some research
A while back, I wrote that:”One criticism of the welfare state is that once you include tax credits, child benefit, housing and council tax benefit and so on, a lone parent who is not in paid employment and has two children has roughly the same income as a single person who works and gets the average wage.”
One possible reaction to this is “that’s a disgrace, and it shows that benefits are too high.” This is the one which you will read a lot in the newspapers.
Fraser Nelson, Thatcherite editor of the Spectator, wrote something similar a couple of weeks ago:
Take, for example, a British girl leaving school and imagining a life of lower-paid work. The UK government presents her with two options: employment or pregnancy. If she has one child and no job, the benefit income of £207 a week is more than the average wage for a hairdresser or teaching assistant. With two children, it is £260 a week — more than a receptionist or library assistant earns. With three children, it is £324 a week, more than a lab technician, typist or bookkeeper.
Fraser is not, however, arguing that benefits need to be slashed.
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So what is Tory policy on tax havens?
Left Outside recently wrote a solid deconstruction of the Conservative International Development paper, also cross-posted to LC. The conclusion? One World Conservatism is a well intentioned but fatally flawed scheme.
But I want to go further and ask what the Tory policy on tax havens is.
Tax havens – or as they are more accurately termed, secrecy jurisdictions – facilitate mass capital flight from developing nations. Capital flight is the number one reason developing nations cannot grow their economies and develop out of poverty.
It is, in turn, seconded and worsened by corruption (which tax havens also facilitate) and its effects exacerbated by a lack of secure, constant and domestically-accessible tax revenue (ditto).
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We should focus our anger on Standard & Poor’s
The slightly heady days of the initial financial crisis, when there was a naïve hope around that radical change might somehow come of its own accord, seem a long time ago now. We should still be angry at what’s happened, but what can we actually do? Where can we focus our anger in a way that actually changes things?
Well, here’s one suggestion for where we should focus our anger.
I and others recently picked upon the still startling notion that Standard & Poor’s (S&)P, the biggest international credit rating agency, should have been both instrumental in bringing about the financial crisis, but is now proceeding to throw its weight about, telling us all how we’re going to have slash spending in order to keep the country ‘creditworthy’.
Not content with playing a major part in bringing unemployment and financial pain S&P published, in March 2009, ‘Toward a Global Regulatory Framework for Credit Ratings‘. In what must be the understatement of the year, the report says:
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Is Attlee relevant to our economic troubles?
noticed a letter in the Guardian this weekend written by Michael Bath of Rochester, Kent, which read:
Instead of interviewing four monetarist ex-chancellors [on the subject of public spending cuts], why don’t you explain how Attlee funded his programme of nationalisation, and founded the NHS, when the country had been virtually bankrupted by the second world war?
Uninformed criticism of Child Poverty bill
The government will be introducing a child poverty bill, which aims by 2020 to ensure that no children are growing up in relative poverty.
Grassroots Tories have attacked this plan, because they claim it is mathematically impossible to achieve this. They combine this with amusing jokes about how the government is full of maths clowns, before going a bit quiet when it turns out that it is, in fact, they who are the maths clowns.
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Is James Purnell using Sen?
Amartya Sen and his capabilities model is all the rage in cabinet, and ex-cabinet. Gordon Brown’s read all about it, Liam Byrne’s been quoting Sen in the Guardian, and now James Purnell’s been using him as the basis for his attempt to portray himself as a leading left thinker, ready to lead Labour and the left out of the electoral wilderness with his new best think-tank mate Jon Cruddas.
So what are we to make of the adoption of a piece of thinking which dates from the 1970s, and set out most famously in Sen’s seminal 1979 Tanner Lecture ‘Equality of What’? Like Stuart at Next Left, I’m not a little worried about how Sen’s being used and abused.
continue reading… »
Does the Jury Team have more potential?
contribution by Josh Plotkin
Following the European elections, it appears that this new please-don’t call-us-a-party party didn’t manage more than a handful of votes. But while the rag-tag bunch of retirees and borderline weirdos recruited as candidates are clearly unelectable, we shouldn’t be so hasty to junk the concept with the candidates.
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Meet the prisoners
There are 83,000 people currently incarcerated in England & Wales. Of that number, I’d wager all the money in my pockets that not one of them grew up wanting to do this.
Like us, they will have grown up dreaming impossible things; fantasising about future fame or heroics; quietly relishing the adventures of adulthood.
continue reading… »
The case against First Past the Post
There is a voting system that exists that tends to take away the meaning of your local MP as a representative, a system that allows a minority of MPs to greatly influence the direction of laws passed by the House of Commons, a system that encourages back room dealing and negotiations away from the public eye. That voting system is First Past the Post (FPTP).
For a long time now we, supporters of electoral reform, have spent our time defending the supposed negative aspects of good PR systems. We have to contest with the broad and misleading statements of the likes Cameron makes, and we have to defend against shoddy government spin of shoddy reviews in to the subject.
The reality is that it is now time for FPTP to be put in the dock, to try to put an end to the sort of articles that blindly make sweeping statements for FPTP. In this time of reform the narrative shouldn’t be why the PR systems are supposedly bad, but why does anyone think that FPTP is any better?
continue reading… »
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» Why Alan Johnson was the right choice for shadow Chancellor
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» Join us and get organised: your planet needs you
» Hague’s farcical attempt to establish ‘supremacy’ over EU law
» Shadow cabinet: why strategy triumphed over necessity
» The Tories and the curse of proletarian fecundity
» Four reasons why we should be defending the middle-classes too
» Why Labour desperately needs Yvette Cooper or Ed Balls as shadow chancellor
» Our priority should be free childcare, not child benefit
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» Osborne could be planning to disrupt Labour’s plans again
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