The talking politics of abortion
This piece was first published two years ago at The Sharpener and in an edited form in this book (as “Talk amongst yourselves, we couldn’t possibly comment”). It’s main hope – that Westminster politicians stop ducking the abortion issue – has come to pass. That is a development I welcome; and I stand by (most of) what I wrote then (some of it now in lost, much missed links). The piece also tries to define “what’s so special” about 24 weeks, though perhaps less elegantly than Unity. So now’s a good time for a re-run. It does seem, alas, that what we’re about to get elsewhere is tabloid drivel (via) rather than proper debate. I guess that’s what happens when professional politicos get involved.
One word absolutely not on the lips of political hacks, not even Tory political hacks, is… Abortion. Not this week, not any week. It’s impolite conversation inside the beltway.
But a post here last year (picked apart here) attracted over 250 comments. Just publishing the word is pure Google-juice. Everyone in the real world has an opinion, so why does nobody in political Britain want to discuss abortion in public? It can’t be that 186,274 (2001 data; pdf) annual terminations don’t warrant justification or inquiry. continue reading… »
Portillo: Cameron not yet ready to govern
In today’s Sunday Times Michael Portillo says the Northern Rock fiasco means the Tories should now attack Brown over his economic record. Still, he thinks Cameron needs time to develop “a more radical agenda” and it will be good for them to lose the next election. Or perhaps it may be an excuse for why the Tories, despite recent Labour troubles, cannot manage a substantial lead in the polls.
Can Gordon Brown make a comeback?
[This article is a prelude to the Fabian Society's 'Fabian Review' new year editorial, published on January 3rd. It was previewed in Sunday's Observer.]
Whose has been the greatest political fightback of all time? The championship bout of our times would be between John ‘Soapbox’ Major, who won an unwinnable election in 1992, and Bill ‘Comeback Kid’ Clinton, reduced to lame duck status by Newt Gingrich’s revolution just two years into his Presidency.
While Harold Macmillan’s ability to turn the Suez debacle into a Tory landslide has many contemporary parallels, the all-time champion of champions has to be Harry Truman, able to brandish the famous headlines ‘Dewey defeats Truman’ after his surprise Presidential victory sixty years ago.
After Gordon Brown’s Autumn horribilis, it may be little Christmas consolation to think that others have dug themselves out of considerably larger holes than he finds himself in. Labour has been buffeted by events ever since a hubristic party conference.
The result is that the Conservatives are now favourites to win the next general election. That, of course, is the threat to Brown. The fightback strategy he needs depends on realizing how he could yet turn it into his opportunity too.
As I argue in an editorial in the Fabian Review new year issue. Like Harry Truman, embracing the status of the underdog could be the key to political recovery.
continue reading… »
Marriage tax myths
Remember policy – y’know, that stuff politicians are meant to do? Well, here’s something for the few of you who do – new research suggests that the Tories‘ proposals to encourage marriage through the tax system would be a wasteful bribe to median voters, rather than a way of improving the way children are brought up.
Granted, there’s evidence that the children of married couples do better – on average – than those from single-parent homes.
But correlation isn’t causality. It doesn’t follow that marriage causes children to do better. It might be that the sort of people who get married are just better parents (on average) than the sort that don’t get married. Economists call this a selection effect.
If this is the case, giving financial incentives to people to get married won’t improve children’s upbringing. It’ll just mean kids live with bad married parents rather than bad unmarried ones.
And evidence from Sweden suggests this is the case. In 1989 a change to rules on widow’s pensions increased financial incentives to marry. The upshot was that 64,000 couples got wed in December 1989, compared to an average of 3000 in normal Decembers.
And did the children of these additionally married couples do better than those from cohabiting couples? No:
We find little evidence that marriage has a causal effect on children’s grade point averages. The marriage by parents responding to financial incentives appears to provide no advantages to children…The positive association between marriage and children’s education is due to selection…rather than to causation.
If you want to ram this point home, remember another distinction – between the average and the marginal. The average married family is tolerably happy and a decent place to grow up in. But the sort of parents who only marry for a few quid are likely to be the marginally married couple – the sort that fight. And this older paper (pdf) by Thomas Piketty shows that children from such families do as badly at school as those from single parent homes. Evidence from Germany corroborates this.
The bottom line here is simple. As Unity said a few weeks ago, Cameron’s plans to give tax breaks to married couples are a scam. They’re illogical, and lacking a basis in hard evidence. Like his inheritance tax plans, they are primarily a bribe to people he likes.
Will Sajjad Karim backfire?
Although Iain Dale and his lapdog are faithfully playing the party line that Sajjad Karim’s defection from the Libdems to the Tories is great news, I think it will backfire because of this. I said the same during the Southall by-election when the Tories trumped the defection of 5 Labour councillors and I was proven right. Wait for tomorrow’s headlines. The Tories want brown people not because they’re good but because they’re brown, it seems. Why not recruit ethnic minorities from the ground up instead?
Lifting the (financial) veil
I surely cannot be alone in thinking that reports of Lord Levy coming out in support of capping political donations and increased state funding for political parties amounts to little more than another nail in the coffin of political satire.
And yet for all the mock outrage that surrounded the so-called ‘cash for honours’ investigation the reality is that ,throughout its entire history seats, in the appointed portion of the UK’s legislature, the House of Lords, have been bought and sold as a matter of routine for all that the currency of such transactions – cash, political support, vacating a safe parliamentary seat at an ‘opportune’ moment, turning a blind eye while the king engages in Ugandan discussions with your wife – varies from case to case.
The investigation into the funding of, primarily, the Labour Party (although the Conservative Party received some modest measure of police scrutiny too) and the alleged relationship between a number of loans made to be party and subsequent nominations for honours was, in truth, less a scandal than an all-too-brief window into a world that the political classes do their level best to conceal from the vast majority of the electorate out of deference to the illusion of popular sovereignty. The notion that party political peerages are ‘earned’ by way of a little ‘quid pro quo’ is anything but an aberration, its inherent in the very design of a legislative chamber in which the majority of its membership owe their position and status to political patronage.
The House of Lords is, in its present form, not merely an anachronism but a curious inversion of once common and wholly discreditable ‘feature’ of the UK Parliament, the rotten (and pocket) borough. This long discontinued electoral ‘vehicle’, the last of which was abolished in 1867, afforded landowners – many of whom were peers of the realm and, therefore, members of the House of Lords – the means to effectively appoint a significant cohort of the membership of the House of Commons. Today it is the members of the House of Lords who owe their position to a small number of members of the House of Commons; to the Prime Minister, whose authority under the Royal Prerogative provides the means for such appointments, and to the leaders of other political parties represented in the Commons, in whom the power to put forward individuals for membership of peerage is vested. The practice may have flipped through one hundred and eighty degrees over the last century or so but the underlying principle remains the same; political peerages are, by and large, rewards for services rendered and a, in many cases, a down-payment on services yet to be rendered not least amongst which is dutifully voting as directed by party whips. To profess, therefore, to have been ’scandalised’ by the recent allegations of, and investigations into, the conduct of a small number of politicians and party functionaries is to miss, almost entirely, the larger and more important point; that it is the system that lends itself, all too readily, to what, in the public eye, would seem to amount to corruption.
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