Wednesday, April 15, 2015 

The Liberal Democrat manifesto.

For the second day in the row, the Liberal Democrat "battlebus" broke down.  As metaphors go, they don't come much more obvious and yet all but impossible to avoid using.

Only it's probably too kind to how the party has gone about the campaign thus far to say it's merely having a few mechanical problems and will be up and running again shortly.  In actuality the Lib Dem campaign hasn't so much as got started.  The party has been all but invisible, and when it has succeeded in getting coverage it's been possibly to its detriment.  Clegg was anonymous during the leaders' debate, the party's reliance on their desperately unpopular leader baffling.  It's not as though the party doesn't have other communicators it could push to the fore when they have Vince Cable, Tim Farron or Jo Swinson to name but three they could choose from, and yet it's Calamity Clegg every time in front of the cameras.

The campaign's biggest misstep isn't the reliance on Clegg so much as the patently false, confused and deeply negative message they've decided can't be reiterated enough.  You see, the Tories, the party they've propped up for the past 5 years are heartless bastards, whereas Labour are economically incontinent.  Only the moderating influence of the Lib Dems can ensure the Tories won't bring back the workhouse, while if the numbers go in the opposite direction only the mellow yellows can ensure Labour won't immediately increase the deficit by eleventy trillion pounds.  This assumes firstly that everyone accepts there's going to be another hung parliament, which despite being highly likely isn't a certainty, and secondly that the past five years have been such a wonderful experience everyone will vote for the party that wants to do it all over again.  Precisely who this is meant to appeal to beyond past Lib Dem voters isn't clear.

It also assumes it's accepted the Liberal Democrats have been that moderating influence, when this is a view held almost only by right-wing Tories.  Yes, they did prevent the very worst instincts of the Conservatives from becoming reality, stopping the snoopers' charter, the repeal of the Human Rights Act, further cuts to welfare, but this has to be offset against their support for the immediate austerity that stalled the recovery, the imposition of the bedroom tax, the hardening of attitudes to those on benefits, the welfare sanctions that hundreds of thousands have suffered for the merest of infractions if that, and every other destructive policy the coalition has pursued.

This knowledge makes the party's claims that either the SNP or UKIP will hold their prospective partners to ransom all the more risible.  The UKIPs aren't going to win enough seats to be able to govern alone with the Tories full stop, while the SNP would have to extract a far better deal from Labour than the Lib Dems did the Tories, and they would be making demands not so much for a coalition as a confidence and supply arrangement.  It simply isn't credible, and that the party hasn't realised its pitch has failed to hit home and switched tactics strikes as being in denial.

Nor would it matter as much if the manifesto (PDF) had been written with the intention of being genuinely open to coalition with either Labour or the Tories.  Instead the policies on the front cover, declared by Clegg to be all but non-negotiable are almost a mirror image of the ones announced by their coalition partner yesterday, right down to the £12,500 personal tax allowance.  The only real sticking point would be Clegg's one other declared "red line", the further £12bn in welfare cuts, and that isn't too massive a stumbling block when few realistically expect the Conservatives would even as a majority government eliminate the deficit wholly through reductions in spending as they claim.  Dropping opposition to the Tory pledge of holding a referendum on EU membership all but gives the game away.

Which leads directly on to the other obvious problem: you therefore can't take seriously a single other policy set out in what is by far the most extensive but by the same token least enlightening manifesto of the main three.  Those who like me will cheer the promise to take the very first steps towards reforming our drug laws will at the same time know it'll be one of the first proposals to go.  Then there are the sections that are just embarrassing: the party that as Ian Dunt says went along with the disgraceful ban on sending books into prisons still claims it will put an emphasis on rehabilitation and reducing the prison population.  There isn't so much as a hint of the crisis inside as a direct result of the cuts and overcrowding the Liberal Democrats have to take ownership of, while the spare room subsidy, aka the bedroom tax, which the party belatedly discovered was cruel and unfair is relegated to the very last point on the unbelievably patronising "improving support for the hardest to help" page.

The decision to hug the Tories close, understandable as it is considering most of the former Labour-Lib Dem marginals have been written off as a lost cause with a couple of exceptions, has some especially perverse consequences.  The effective choice in the south-west for instance, likely to be the party's one remaining stronghold come May the 8th, is between the Tories and the Lib Dems.  Following today's manifesto launch that choice has effectively become a Hobson's choice, with all that entails for disenchantment and resentment.  Nick Clegg talks of being the alternative to a coalition of grievance, yet the Lib Dem decision to move to the centre-right when 5 years ago there seemed for the first time to be a real third party alternative is a manoeuvre guaranteed to create very legitimate grievances, with so many of those voting for a change left feeling abandoned and unrepresented.

Nick Clegg opens his introduction to the manifesto with the line "few people expected that many of the policies it [the 2010 manifesto] contained would be implemented by the next Government".  Least of all, the statement begs, the party itself.  We could also quibble on just how many of its policies have been implemented also (three quarters, Clegg claims, hardly any, the Graun answers back) but frankly my will to live is ebbing just thinking about it.  On this day back in 2010 I concluded my post by saying what was holding the party back was knowing when to go further and "most pertinently, their leader himself".  In 2015 the only thing motivating the party is holding on to the vestige of power, and that self-same leader is in a position where he could oversee the loss of half of his MPs and still remain deputy prime minister.  Funny thing, politics.  And by funny I mean hateful.

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4/15/2015 11:59:00 pm | |

Tuesday, April 14, 2015 

The Conservative manifesto.

Some days, I don't have the slightest idea how to open these posts.  I doubt this is much of a revelation.  This isn't one of those days.  I thought for instance of something along the lines of today saw the publication of a manifesto written by people safe in the knowledge they'll never have to implement it, and it accordingly reads like the deranged wishlist of crazed fanatics.  And the other is from the Green party.  I could have gone with the more than faintly sinister overtones contained within the Tory manifesto, from the "plan" for every stage of your life, far more Stalinist than anything Labour have come up with in decades, a theme it carries on with through the centrepiece of selling off at a discount houses the government doesn't so much as own.  Then I could have made something out of "the good life" the manifesto is meant to usher in, so long as your vision of the good life is one that is so beige as to not be worth living at all.

We'll settle though for the sheer one-eyed monomania the manifesto confirms prevails within today's Conservative party.  Apart from the Thatcherite true believers, nearly everyone now recognises that right to buy has been one of the most destructive policies of the last 30 years.  The social housing stock has never been replaced, it kick-started the runaway price inflation we've seen since, and rather than creating the home owning democracy initially promised has instead overwhelmingly contributed to the situation we have now where only with the help of said home-owning parents can most of those looking to buy afford to do so.

A sensible party, rather than promising to sell off more would be pledging to empower councils to replenish the stock they've lost.  Raiding housing associations whether they like it or not is an act of wanton vandalism, utterly self-defeating and for the briefest short-term gain.  Indeed, it's not even remotely clear if there are votes in this latest cloth-eared Tory venture.  Many housing association tenants are the same people who've suffered the most under the coalition so far, unlikely to be able to get together the heavily discounted amounts mooted.  This might well be the point of the policy: meant to hark back to those glorious days when the party could win a majority, enthusing those who still believe the word aspiration means something, while at the same time not expecting it to be much used.  The reaction from those at the sharp end has been little short of brutal, for good reason.  Taken alongside the raising of the inheritance tax threshold, it speaks of just how narrow and stuck in the past the Conservative vision of what motivates the average person has become.

Apart possibly from the pledge to double the number of hours of childcare available to parents of 3 and 4-year-olds, there is absolutely nothing in the manifesto itself (PDF) that was unexpected.  By necessity, it's a very different document to the one of 5 years ago, which hilariously offered "an invitation to join the government", RVSPed only by a group of people no one is paying the slightest attention this time round as a result.  Gone is even a whiff of the experimentation of the early Cameron years, before the "green crap" was all cleared out, replaced with various shades of blue.  The cover, complete with its angled photo of the Tory "team", George Osborne's fizzog obscured to protect the young and innocent, Nicky Morgan on the far left struggling to remain in focus and with the usual expression of apparent shock on her face, is navy blue, while the fonts inside alternate seemingly at random from light to dark.  The photographs used are all but identical to the ones featured in Labour's manifesto yesterday, the portraits of Cameron the only shots of a politician, then the various images of Brits at work.  At least Labour named them; the Tories leave them anonymous.  Perhaps it was to hide their shame.

Certainly you couldn't pay many people enough to feature alongside such utter lies as are featured in the text.  I honestly don't think I've read a more mendacious official publication from a party in the entire time I've been writing this blog.  Apparently the UK was the fastest growing of all the major advanced economies last year, which must mean neither China or India fit such a description; the national debt was rising out of control 5 years ago, which is why it has gone up even further under the coalition; living standards will be higher this year than in 2010; those with the "broadest shoulders have contributed the most to deficit reduction", which is true only so far as the richest have contributed the most in cash terms, not as a percentage of their actual wealth, with the poorest having been hammered on that score; "International evidence and Treasury analysis shows that the only way to keep our economy secure for the future is to eliminate the deficit entirely and start running a surplus", the manifesto claims, a statement so patently absurd and false that no further comment is necessary; and, just to limit this to a single paragraph of semi-colons, "Under Labour, road and rail were starved of resources".  Yes, really.

The Great Recession then has given way to a Great Revival.  Our friends and competitors overseas look at Britain and see a country on the rise, perhaps even about to make a Great Leap Forward.  Except this Great Revival is fragile, and the slightest deviation from the Plan will result in things going Backwards.  This is why every single thing Labour did in power is blamed for why things still aren't Good Enough now.  Almost every individual part of the manifesto begins by outlining The Evil That Labour Did, even when it jars completely.  Labour for instance forgot that government is the servant of the British people, not their master, goes the introduction to making government work better for you section; it always knew best.  The current government of course doesn't, which is why one part of it has gone to such lengths to demonise its supposedly weak and useless opponent and seems fixated as much on how terrible things were and still are rather than on how it's going to fix them.

Some things go strangely unmentioned.  You won't for instance find any reference to either the bedroom tax or the spare room subsidy, a policy it seems the Tories are completely ashamed of but still won't do the decent thing and admit they got wrong.  You won't discover just where the proposed £12bn in cuts to welfare will fall, nor is there any detail on where the axe will be wielded outside of the protected areas of spending.  There's no detail on how the proposed rise in the personal allowance to £12,500 will be paid for, estimated to cost an eye-watering £3.2bn by the IFS, which again despite the spin of taking those earning the minimum wage out of tax (for those working 30 hours at least) benefits middle earners the most.  The higher rate threshold will also rise to £50,000, again paid for who knows how.  There'll be no increases in VAT, national insurance or income tax, but certainly not guaranteed is there won't be a further cut in the top rate of income tax.  There is, unexpectedly, a mention of food banks, not to promise a desire to reduce the need of such institutions in a country experiencing a Great Revival, but obviously as an example of the role played by the voluntary sector in the country's social fabric.  Absent is a promise to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, but Labour's Human Rights Act will be repealed and replaced with a British Bill of Rights codifying exactly the same things.

In so many places reality is completely absent, none more so than the hysterical Britain standing tall in the world section.  Labour's Great Recession apparently weakened Britain on the world stage, whereas the Conservatives have strengthened our influence.  Quite where our influence has been strengthened is a mystery; certainly not in Europe, not in the Middle East, where we remain beholden to authoritarian Arab regimes that Cameron spent much time fawning over in an effort to sell weapons to, nor in America, where the refusal to sign up to spending 2% of GDP on defence per NATO agreements and the various cuts to the military have been complained about.  We intervened to stop a massacre in Libya, which turned out absolutely splendidly, saw William Hague team up with Angelina Jolie to end sexual violence in conflict once and for all, and helped women and children who have fled violence in Syria.  That last claim is so egregious as to impress with the sheer chutzpah it must have taken to write it.

Then again, the whole manifesto is defined by such chutzpah.  The party that claims to be the new vanguard of the workers is determined to push forward with 40% turnout thresholds on strike ballots, a move which if applied elsewhere would see nearly every local election result declared null and void.  If you want to live in the most vibrant and dynamic country in the world, which is seemingly this one, a decent job is the best weapon against poverty.  The Conservative definition of decent is any job, regardless of the conditions, zero hours contracts meriting a single mention.  The principal reason immigration has not fallen to the tens of thousands is because of how wonderful the economy's been doing, and yet at the same time rather than being attracted to all these jobs the real reason migrants from Europe have been coming is to claim benefits.  Finally, we measure our success not just in how we show our strength abroad, but in how we care for the weakest and most vulnerable at home.

I could just leave it there.  I probably should.  There is though something exceptionally depressing, at least to me about just how limited and limiting the Conservative view of life set out by their "plan" is.  Be born.  Grow up.  Get a job.  Raise a family.  Retire.  Die.  Is that all there is?  Is that all we're meant to aspire to?  Nothing else?  What if I don't have, don't want a family?  What if I'm a hopeless loser?  Where do I fit into this?  I don't.  But then I was never going to. 

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4/14/2015 11:59:00 pm | |

Thursday, November 25, 2010 

I'm still your fag (or the importance of being Gove).


(Apologies to Broken Social Scene for the title.)

The Guardian opens its editorial on the schools white paper with the assertion that, if nothing else, it's palpably clear that Michael Gove cares about schools. Perhaps a more accurate line would be that he palpably cares about some schools. Someone who palpably cares about all schools would have made certain that the lists his department released concerning the abolition of the Building Schools for the Future program were accurate the first time. Instead, numerous schools were told their new buildings would still be constructed only to then to have the news broken that in fact they wouldn't. One of the Tory jibes against the Labour was that despite spending so much, they still failed to fix the roof while the sun was shining. For those now sitting in freezing cold or leaking classrooms or portacabins, safe in the knowledge that they'll be doing so for a good few more years to come, such criticisms ring rather hollow.

Labour's attack line on Gove's reforms, that they'll create winners and losers, is in fact better than it looks at first for Gove has created an at times truly bizarre concoction of changes and new measures which often contradict each other. He wants to increase freedom and autonomy for all schools, while at the same time imposing new edicts on them from the centre. He's cutting the number of modules to GCSEs and ending the practice of students repeatedly re-sitting parts of A-levels in an attempt to get a better grade, while at the same time setting up an independent review of the key stage two SATS even as he adds yet more components to them in the interim. He wants to free teachers from the worst constricts of the curriculum while, to quote from the executive summary of The Importance of Teaching, "specifying a tighter, more rigorous model of the knowledge which every child should expect to master in core subjects at every key stage", the number of which incidentally is increasing.

That's the really odd part of this white paper. For all Gove's emphasis on the freeing of schools, not only from central but also local control, encouraging all to become academies and clearing the way for his pet "free schools" program where anyone who has the time and money can start up a school and more or less anyone can also teach there, there's also much that he thinks has to be encouraged, if not demanded of these new autonomous educational establishments. Although it goes unmentioned in the executive summary, we already know of his quaint if not slightly unsettling affection for uniforms, especially blazers and ties, coming just as politicians increasingly abandon the wearing of the latter. He also favours the reinstatement of the house system, something bound to send a shiver down the spine of those of a certain age, with their children now being urged to care about the most meaningless of distinctions between peers as they were once meant to.

Alongside this real-life renactment of Tom Brown's Schooldays is an emphasis on an academic curriculum at the expense of vocational training of almost any sort. While Gove wants to introduce his English Baccalaureate, noted by Simon Jenkins as surely something of an oxymoron, which will include the usual English, Maths and Science along with a foreign language and a "humanity", vocational qualifications merit only a single mention, where they'll be overhauled to "ensure they match the world's best". Those that despair of being forced into taking subjects they despise, knowing full well already at 14 that the academic path isn't for them are going to be in an even worse position than now.

Such changes wouldn't be complete without the also long heralded return to common sense on behaviour. A month back Gove announced an end to the "no touch" rule, a rule which it almost goes without saying doesn't exist. Likewise, it's almost equally certain that if a teacher wants to search those under their care for something then they'll do it, and if they're that concerned they'll even call in the police to do it for them. Gove's plans to restore this right will probably not then quite inspire the dread it might, yet it's still the kind of measure which is almost actively designed to make school an even less pleasant place than it already is. Much the thinking seems to be behind the bringing back of same-day detentions, indeed if they have also disappeared. The main reasoning behind giving notice of detentions was so that parents knew their offspring were being punished and thus ensure they weren't doing something with them immediately after school that day, which believe it or not tends to annoy them regardless of what their child has done to deserve the punishment in the first place.

Not quite as draconian as first advertised are the changes to the appeals panels for those who have been excluded, which were at one point wholesale threatened with abolition. Instead the process will be speeded up, while those who have committed a "serious offence" will no longer be reinstated against a headteacher's will. Teachers will still however get anonymity until proven guilty of accusations made against them, something not afforded to those in the criminal justice system, or anyone else in the public sector going through a disciplinary action. Also worthy of mention is how Ofsted will focus more strongly on behaviour and safety, including bullying. Quite how they'll be able to accurately identify the level of bullying in a school over the usual week long inspection is anyone's guess.

One thing that is clear is just how little influence the Liberal Democrats have over Gove. Apart from the intro from Dave 'n' Nick where they already seem to be settling into aping the Private Eye caricature of themselves, which only seems to be there for the purpose of Clegg emphasising the piss-poor pupil premium his party demanded, the rest is straight out of the Conservative manifesto. Granted, their proposals on education were always vague outside of their promises on tuition fees, yet you'd have thought they might have had something to say about Gove's curious glorification of prefects and other favoured aspects of private schooling which comprehensives for the most part long ago abandoned. Then again, Clegg went to Westminster; Gove coming from a Labour background, only won a scholarship to the far less exclusive Robert Gordon's College.

Every education secretary wants to leave some sort of lasting legacy behind, and Gove is no exception. Somewhere, hidden deeply in the white paper is his passion for making our current failing system world class again. It's sadly buried by the myriad of oddities outlined above, along with the baffling commitment to outdated methods which he either really does believe in or he thinks he has to include to convince his party that he isn't just a Blairite in Tory clothing. How else to explain a white paper which will deny state funding to those who only get thirds, a move which puts elitism and qualification ahead of the actual ability to teach, yet also advocates the construction of "bespoke, compressed" undergraduate courses for those from the armed forces without degrees whom they seem to think can't wait to get into the classroom? Bending over backwards to help some while shutting the door permanently on others is exactly what Gove seems destined to do.

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11/25/2010 11:59:00 pm | |

Monday, September 20, 2010 

The Liberal Democrats and the anxiety of power.

It's become traditional when the party conferences come round yet again to take a look back and see what nonsense I wrote about them twelve months ago. This time last year the Liberal Democrats seemed to be, as usual, treading water. Nick Clegg, that eternal hopeless optimist, thought that this might be the long-awaited liberal moment even while everyone around him yawned. And I, in full Mystic Mogg mode, said that the Liberal Democrats deserved a chance even as the spectre of a hung parliament faded. In fairness to myself, the Conservatives were 17 points ahead of Labour at the time in the opinion polls.

Nevertheless, ahem. True, Clegg was wrong: it wasn't a liberal moment. Nor however was it a truly Conservative moment, as the election results attested. Far more controversial is whether we can still agree if the Liberal Democrats deserved that chance, now knowing just what sort of agreement would be reached with the Conservatives for the two parties to go into coalition. The problem is that so many, having voted for a party which promised not to cut until the recovery was secured, now find themselves have helped into power a party which turned that policy on its head as soon as it was offered the slightest trappings of government.

The party is more than just aware of that bargain as it gathers together in power for the first time in over 65 years; it actively pervades it. While the Conservative party conference will probably not be quite as triumphant as it would have been had Cameron won power outright, you expect that it'll be far more pleased with itself than the Liberals are in Liverpool. You'd also imagine that the atmosphere would be completely different if the result had been slightly different and Labour had still held the upper hand, presuming that Labour in power would have stayed with its previously articulated deficit reduction plan. As it is, there's both a sense of anti-climax and trepidation, with the delegates fearing the future, leaving the new government ministers having to face the tricky task of both recognising the anxiety many feel at having to take responsibility for the coming cuts, while also urging them to celebrate, or if not, at least be thankful for having gained office under first past the post, achieving so much in the process.

If the discomfort of sharing power with the Conservatives is already apparent amongst the rank and file, it doesn't show in the top ranks, or at least not amongst those most associated with the Orange Book. While Vince Cable mutters out loud about the effect the immigration cap is already having, Nick Clegg is going so far in his speech as to accentuate the positive effects working together is having and go to have: when he says "we have become more than the sum of our parts" you imagine a slightly over-the-top couple describing their close relationship, not two parties which away from civil liberties had many policies which were almost complete polar opposites. As unconvincing as his line is that "two parties acting together can be braver, fairer and bolder than one party acting alone", alluding to how two heads are usually better than one, which doesn't really work when parties almost always contain a multitude of differing views, he's right that it would have been seen as a rejection of the pluralistic politics the party has always identified with if they had let the Conservatives attempt to govern as a minority.

This was though fundamentally a speech directed at the party's supporters, not at those who voted Liberal Democrat and already regret it, nor really at a country which is equally worried about how savage the cuts are going to be, as Clegg himself suggested last year, even with the much increased media attention upon the event. Try as he did to play down just how sharp the slashes in spending would be as he appealed to public sector workers, claiming that the cuts would only reduce spending back to a 2006 level, it was mostly an exercise in semantics: the cuts might not take us back either to the 80s or the 30s, but such massive cuts in spending are the biggest since those eras, if not even larger in practice. He may have promised those in the north and in Scotland that the cuts will not have the same effect as they did then, and that the cuts are not ideological, yet there's nothing to suggest the private sector can currently pick up the slack from the public economy in those areas, while certain Conservatives, including those in senior government roles, actively do consider the cuts to be part of a political program aimed at shrinking the state rather than just eradicating the deficit.

Perhaps, as so often when it comes to conference speeches, what's just as instructive is deemed either unmentionable or forgotten about. Hence there's no mention of how the Institute for Fiscal Studies declared the first joint Conservative-Liberal Democrat budget to be regressive despite it being lauded otherwise by both parties, with Vince Cable deeming it one they could be proud of, nor was there any defence of its progressive intentions. Trident was left well alone, as was the previously toxic issue of abolishing or reforming tuition fees, left for Lord Browne's review to sort out.

It would certainly be churlish to describe the speech overall as anything other than well-constructed, in areas cogently argued and making the best of a difficult case to an unconvinced and concerned party. The best praise it can possibly be given is that it kept the devices so often used by politicians to a minimum: he only falls down completely when he bothers to inform us that he "believes in work". It may well be however his vision of a strong, fair, free and hopeful nation come 2015 which comes back to haunt him: if the cuts tip the economy into a double-dip recession then the imagined achievements the activists will be able to boast about come that year will be more than just overshadowed; they could well condemn his party to another 65 years in the wilderness.

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9/20/2010 10:39:00 pm | |

Wednesday, April 14, 2010 

The Liberal Democrat manifesto.

There's a school of thought inside the Conservatives, and one that even I have to admit that I'm partial towards, that thinks their entire campaign, rather than revolving around the "Big Society" or fixing our broken society, should instead entirely focus on Gordon Brown. Not in the way that their truly dismal "attack" adverts did, featuring Brown and his various "triumphs", but instead simply asking whether they can bear the thought of another 5 years of Brown.

The obvious problems with this approach are not just the negativity and personal nature of campaigning in such a way, nor that 5 years of Cameron and Osborne is an equally appalling vista, but that there is alternative to both Brown and the Tories. This is the area that the Liberal Democrats' relatively limited campaign finances have tried to home in, with probably the most success of any of the advertising campaigns thus far, melding both Labour and Conservatives into one whole, emphasising the 65 years which the two have spent in power combined. It's certainly been different to anything else thus tried, and has also been incredibly difficult to spoof, both major bonuses with us political obsessives but perhaps not with those potentially confused by the whole thing. When you remember the polls suggesting that a majority (60%) are unable to identify Nick Clegg, it further hits home the difficulty the party has in attracting attention, gaining recognition and also successfully registering their distance from the opposition.

In that sense, their advertising up till now has been a far greater success than the manifesto launch was today. In an election where the other two parties are trying to outdo each other in their claims as to just who will make the country fairer, with neither prepared to use that dreaded socialist word equality regardless of whether it's what they mean or not, Nick Clegg spoke of his ambition to make Britain... fairer. He also did so with all the rhetorical weight and forced passion of Nick Griffin laughing at the accusation from a member of the public that he was a racist. The problem, which has been ever present since Clegg assumed the leadership, has not been the relative wealth of policies which the party has, which are of much the same, high, reasoned standard as they have always been, but the simple fact that Nick Clegg does not seem to be comfortable in his own skin, that he can't seem to decide just who it is that he, rather than party, is appealing to, and that on the big occasions, whether it be his speech to conference or his performance today, he doesn't manage to strike the right tone or have the gravitas which his role requires.

There is of course absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to base your campaign around fairness, it's just that when you're fighting to get the attention of what seems to be a highly apathetic, and with reason, electorate, you need to be saying something other than what the others are only in a slightly different tone and order. Understandably, everyone is focused on the economy, although even that seems to be slipping slightly as most appear to be optimistic about the growth figures shortly to be announced, but just when the Lib Dems needed to be distinctive they came up short. Even more infuriating is that they dumped their best case for drawing a line of difference between themselves and Labour and the Conservatives onto the Guardian's front page, something which they could instead have easily appended onto the manifesto launch and got full television coverage for. Here was their case for promoting liberty, attacking New Labour's authoritarianism, with Clegg's brilliant observation that their manifesto didn't once mention it, although it did claim that they were "proud of their record on civil liberties", which just shows how perverse a once liberal party has become, and it just became part of the background noise.

This is, sadly, reflected in the manifesto itself. It alternates between the great and the not so good, almost as if the party are convinced they need to counterbalance some of their best policies with ones that either haven't been thought through or, although nowhere near as awful as though proposed by Labour and the Tories, aren't much better. Following on from Nick Clegg's truly insipid introduction, which is so nondescript that it doesn't really invite further comment, you encounter a style which is by far the cleanest and most eminently readable of all three manifestos, straight-forward while in places becoming forthright. It also goes further than the other two parties in getting at the very heart of the problem in sections, as it does early on here:

At the root of Britain’s problems today is the failure to distribute power fairly between people. Political power has been hoarded by politicians and civil servants; economic power has been hoarded by big businesses. Both kinds of power have been stripped from ordinary citizens, leaving us with a fragile society marked by inequality, environmental degradation and boom-bust economics.

As a brief description of what's wrong with Britain today, it would be difficult to be more succinct while also painting a broad enough picture of the nation's problems. Perhaps the media and especially the tabloid press could be added to those hoarding political power, but it's difficult to disagree or qualify much else. The Liberal Democrats are also the only party that pledges to break up the banks, separating the retail sides from the investment operations, the only real proposal likely to prevent a re-run of the 2008 crisis. It's not exactly declaring a philosophical opposition to neo-liberalism itself, but as an attempt at reform, it goes far further in the right direction than the mainstream is prepared to go.

On far less solid ground is the obvious attempt to replace the formerly totemic policy of a 50p top rate of tax for those earning over £100,000. Ever since it was dropped they've struggled to replace it, and while their proposed raising of the income tax threshold to £10,000 on the surface seems a step in the right direction, in practice, and as the Fabians in Labour have showed, because the very poorest do not earn above the £10,000 level, the main beneficiaries are not the poorest fifth the Lib Dems have been complaining pay a larger proportion of tax than the richest fifth (also a shaky claim) but rather those on middle incomes, exacerbating the income gap ever further. While most can agree that Labour's main method of redistribution, tax credits are bureaucratic, cumbersome and in fitting with the party in general, they are also targeted in a way which helps the poorest in the way that a threshold rise does not. Add into this how the £17bn which needs to be raised to fund it is partially based on the admirable aspiration of cracking down on tax avoidance and evasion, which is far harder in practice when those tasked with finding loopholes are being paid vast sums themselves to do so, and you have a policy which falls apart once you even begin to probe it. That wasn't true of the 50p rate, and isn't usually true of the Liberal Democrats in general. The sloppiness is deeply regrettable, and it makes you wonder whether the centralisation which has happened under Clegg and Cable hasn't directly affected the discussion within the party over policy which previously took place.

This nagging sense of doubt is what stops the manifesto from being very good rather than simply adequate. Why not go all the way on so many things rather than stopping at a half-way house? Why not scrap Trident altogether rather than pledge to not build a "like-for-like" replacement? Why not axe the national curriculum altogether and trust teachers rather than putting in place a slimmed-down "minimum curriculum entitlement"? Why not abolish SATs or Key Stage 2 tests altogether than scaling them down? Why connive in the stupidity which is putting more police "on the beat" when it doesn't cut crime? Why not have a general amnesty for illegal immigrants rather than one with silly and unworkable conditions? Why not make the case for immigration rather than apologise for it while copying the points-based nonsense, even if making it regional is more an improvement? Why not be wholly critical of the insanity which is our involvement in Afghanistan rather than a critical supporter?

Of the three main party manifesto published this week, there's no doubt whatsoever as to which is the best, which poses the most unanswered questions and which is the political equivalent of treading water. The shame about the Liberal Democrat manifesto is that the policies are far more convincing than the politicians, and that it's sadly the latter rather than the former which will be the most scrutinised. This should be, and is, Lib Dems' greatest opportunity in those 65 years they talk about, greater even than that which the Liberal-SDP alliance had in 83 and Charles Kennedy had in 05, and there's still every chance that they could hold the balance of power. Holding them back is their failure to recognise when to go further, and most pertinently, their leader himself.

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4/14/2010 10:35:00 pm | |

Tuesday, April 13, 2010 

The Conservative manifesto.


If yesterday's Labour manifesto cover was superficially reminiscent of socialist realism, or at least socialist realism in the age of Photoshop and when the artist was instructed to forget subtlety, at least it was colourful and stood out without being garish; the Tory manifesto by comparison, looks austere and stern in its dead blue hardback bounding, although the already mercilessly mocked invitation to "join the government" somewhat lowers the tone. It's doubtful whether when they were putting it together they were deliberately thinking of modelling it on Margaret Thatcher, but it has all her qualities as can be expressed in book form; you can almost imagine her using it to smack an unruly member of her cabinet around the head.

The shadow of Thatcher continues to overshadow politics in this country to a far greater extent than Reagan say does in America, almost certainly for the reason that we continue to be riven as a nation as to her legacy, something not mirrored to quite the same extent in the States. The Conservative manifesto released today can be seen as an attempt to meld the smaller government philosophy of Thatcherism with the repugnance felt by many towards the extremes of individualism which were also flaunted during that same era; the refrain throughout is the Cameron attempt to put the infamous quote "there is no such thing as society" into a thoroughly modern Conservative context, that there is, it's just not the same thing as the state.

Credit has to be given to the Conservatives for trying to mould together what would seem to be two competing value systems: the individualism of Thatcherism with the co-operative, communitarian philosophy of helping each other to help themselves in the hope of creating something unique, perhaps something which might one day be identified as "Cameronism". It is however the naturally contradictory nature of the two, combined with the gaping holes in the manifesto itself and the unmentioned fact that they've wanted to do this because it's cheaper rather than necessarily better that undermine the in places fine words which litter the document.

To fully understand the manifesto you also have to chart how Conservative thinking has changed since David Cameron became leader. While much has been said about the now almost clichéd "detoxifying the brand", it still remains for the most part the same old Tory party underneath, even if the advisers are new. Cameron himself meanwhile has gone from calling for sunshine to win the day, urging the public to vote blue to go green, to decrying our broken society and now, finally, to wanting to build the "big society". In his foreword, which reads like an especially heavy-handed attempt to inspire ala Barack Obama's "yes we can" speeches, he claims that "if we can [insert list of fixing everything together] do that, we can do anything. Yes, we can do anything." It's really difficult not to sneer and giggle at just how weak that repeating of the mantra is, almost as if Cameron himself is trying to convince himself of it, rather than doing so for emphasis. It's this uncertainty that reflects just how suddenly this change in Conservative thinking, and it is a huge change, has come about, and makes you wonder just how real the belief in it is.

For this sudden "empowerment" agenda is almost inimical to the values that arguably, if we have a broken society, caused it to fracture. Many nodding their heads at the idea of communities working together, such groups running public services and public sector workers being their own bosses will be thinking: well, isn't this same party that rejoiced and continues to rejoice at the smashing of the trade unions and thinks that they should be consigned entirely to history? Isn't it the party that helped to atomise communities where their work was either the most important or one of the most important parts of their identity? Well, yes, it is, but then these groups which the Tories are suddenly so keen on devolving powers to must seemingly be either apolitical, or share the Conservative philosophy on cutting costs while not believing in the state's ability to do so. What happens if these groups become the "vested interests" which the Tories are so convinced need to be challenged? What if they demand changes which the Tories are ideologically opposed to? Where or when exactly will they intervene if they decide that these groups and the schools they might set up or the hospitals they might run either fail themselves or rather attempt to go against the Tory grain in what they provide? Will they truly be free or is this empowerment agenda simply the bogus attempt to marry two contradictory values and provide something "different"?

After all, the aforementioned refrain of society not being the same thing as the state is the classic straw man. Those critics of Thatcher never claimed that the state and society are one and the same thing; rather, that her formulation was the classic example of how the Conservatives rewarded a very constrained individualism while being actively hostile towards difference. This continues to be reflected in the Conservative party today and in the manifesto which it has produced. It claims that we're all in this together and for us to come together despite our differences, yet the policies within it make clear those who are most deserving, those that are more equal than others in Orwell's classic formulation. Married couples, especially it seems those where one of the partners doesn't work are more deserving, as shown by the promised tax allowance, while rather than everyone having to pay their fair share, it remains Tory policy for the inheritance tax threshold to rise in effect to £2m. This same confused approach to cutting the deficit is also reflected in their refusal to countenance the planned national insurance rise for next year, instead almost certainly deciding upon a VAT increase which will disproportionately impact on the poorest, those who have to spend and whom simply can't afford to save.

It's also instructive just how quickly the manifesto seems to imagine we can suddenly move from the "broken society" to the "big society". It claims that it's "the size, scope and role of government" which is now "inhibiting ... the progressive aims of reducing poverty, fighting inequality and increasing general well-being." This is so wrong as to be close to criminal. While inequality and poverty have either increased or stayed roughly the same by most measures, the very fact that they haven't got even worse is directly down to Labour's almost silent attempts at redistribution. The actual section on fixing society itself rather than public services along the lines of the "big society" is woefully thin, being dedicated almost entirely to neighbourhood groups, and even this involves further reform of the local services rather than the transforming of local communities as whole. Then there's just utter gibberish, such as this last point on how to "stimulate social action further":

develop a measure of well-being that encapsulates the social value of state action.

Would someone perhaps like to explain exactly what that means and how such a thing could be measured?

Strip away the choice to focus on the "big society" and devolution which may well never arrive, and you have much the same Conservative policies which have been there since time immemorial, crime being the most instructive. They're still dedicated to repealing the Human Rights Act, without explaining how a "British Bill or Rights" will be any different or what the point will be when those who want to claim or challenge under the HRA will still be able to go to Strasbourg, still want to crackdown on teenagers drinking at all rather than challenging the actual behaviour, and still want to stigmatise the drinks which those drinking to get drunk don't touch, or won't touch after they've put the tax up. They still want to send every knife carrier to jail, no exceptions, without bothering to understand why some do so. They still want to elect local police commissioners, without learning the lessons from America of how this politicises the police and makes corruption endemic. They still want to build even more prisons, and would turn the probations service over to the private sector. They want more drug rehabilitation orders to be abstinence-based, a recipe for disaster which I've witnessed personally over the last year.

If Labour's manifesto showed how 13 years of government has made the party tired and complacent, then the Conservative document released today should have been brimming with ideas and the lust for power, the "natural party of government" riding to the rescue yet again to save us from bankruptcy at the hands of Labour. The latter is much in evidence; the former, away from the attempt to create a dividing line over the role of the state, the attempt to fuse together individualism and small government with strong, well-funded public services and community action, has been abandoned. The same old heart of the "stupid party" remains, covered up by veneer of progressive politics which will be forgotten or actively abandoned at the first possible opportunity. It's impossible to deny that the Conservatives have changed since they were last in power; the problem is that they haven't changed anywhere near enough.

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4/13/2010 11:11:00 pm | |

Tuesday, January 19, 2010 

The depressing political fight over binge drinking.

There's little that's more depressing than politicians attempting to outdo each other when it comes to the latest social evil to have been sporadically identified. We went through it on gun crime, on knife crime, and now as we approach the election it seems we've decided on binge drinking as the next thing to be cracked down upon, at least until the new and even deadlier scare comes along, which looks at the moment to be shaping up to be mephedrone.

While it's often been the moralising tabloid press that has screamed loudest and longest about the damage being down to the centres of our towns and cities at weekends in the usual hyperbolic fashion, alongside the health workers who find themselves at the sharp end, it's been the Scottish National Party that started the arms race and which is attempting to legislating a minimum price for a unit of alcohol sold off-licence. It goes without saying that this is the equivalent of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, penalising everyone regardless of how little or how much they drink, a flat tax on booze if you will.

It is though the kind of policy that ensures you know where you stand. The same can't be said for either the government's changes to the current licensing conditions or to the Tories' counter proposals. Labour seems to be completely ignoring the fact that it isn't the pubs or clubs which are overwhelming flogging cheap alcohol to the masses, as anyone who visits either even casually will notice, but the supermarkets with their offers on cases of the stuff, usually with either 2 for a £10 or a similar slightly higher sum. The Tories admittedly have recognised this, with their new policy being to ensure that supermarkets can't sell booze at below cost price, but their other proposals are even more draconian than Labour's, and typically stupid. The idea that imposing extra tax only on strong lagers and ciders, as well as alcopops, which those drinking to get drunk rarely imbibe will have any effect when they can downgrade to the only slightly less strong "ordinary" beers is ludicrous, and seems more designed to sneer at those who drink them than anything else.

As always, the real reason why there's something approaching a drinking problem in this country is not mentioned. When quality of life is so poor that the one thing to look forward to is getting smashed at the weekend, or indeed every night to take away from the everyday nightmare of living and working, the problem is not with individuals or with the opiate, but with the entire philosophy of a nation and the modern nature of capitalism itself. We then further promote an immature attitude towards drink by denying it to teenagers as a matter of politics, while families across the countries connive in breaking the law to give it them. When politicians are not prepared to so much as consider the first as a factor, while continuing to regard alcohol as a terrible thing until we reach a certain arbitrary age, we're always going to be reduced to a political auction where everyone asks how much without considering why we're bidding in the first place.

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1/19/2010 09:39:00 pm | |

Monday, January 18, 2010 

The Tory education class war.

At the weekend Peter Oborne treated us to a treatise on how the Conservatives have put together the most radical program for government since Oliver Cromwell, or words similar to that effect. Cameron is far more prepared for government than Blair ever was, and he'd make Margaret Thatcher look like an, err, Conservative by comparison.

Back here in the real world, when you can put a cigarette paper between Labour and the Conservatives, it's invariably the Tories that have the more stomach-turning ideas, as well as those which are simply wrong-headed, or indeed those that are openly reactionary, somewhat strange for a party that claims to now espouse liberal conservatism, whatever that is. Hence we have the pledge to openly redistribute from the single, engaged and everyone else to the married, those who are truly the most in need. Or as today's launch of the party's education policies showed, somehow managing to be even worse than Labour at reforming our benighted education system.

After all, it really ought to be an open goal. Even after almost 13 years under New Labour, still barely 50% manage to get 5 "good GCSEs", a record so appalling that it can't be stressed often enough. There have been improvements made, although considering the amount of money pumped in it would be incredible if there hadn't been, and diplomas as introduced by Ed Balls with the mixture of vocational and academic work contained within is one of the few reforms which has been a step in the right direction, but on the whole Labour has been too focused on the league tables, the incessant examination of students and the continued reforming of schools purely it's seemed at times for the sake of it, with academies being the obvious example, which in equal measure have failed to raise standards while at the same time imposing the kind of discipline and rigidity which seems to actively sexually arouse certain individuals pining for the corporal punishment and being seen and not heard of their own childhood. Oh, and the lessons in working in call-centres, the kind of aspirational teaching that the Conservatives seemingly want to build on.

When Cameron then immediately decides that the most important thing which will decide whether or not a child succeeds is not their background, the curricula, the type of school or the amount of funding it receives but the person who teaches them, he's on the verge of talking nonsense on stilts, with Chris linking to some research which is in disagreement with that which Cameron quotes. Ignore that for a second though, and just consider Cameron's thought process: because the teacher is so important, only the very finest should be funded. How are we judging whether the teacher will be any good or not? On the basis of err, the university which they received their degree from and on the grade on the paper they received at their graduation. Surely if the type of school isn't important from the start, it also shouldn't matter which university the degree came from? Obviously not.

For a party which has been crying about Labour's piss-poor supposed class war, the thinking behind the proposed education policy is openly elitist, and also openly discriminatory in favour of the middle and upper classes: when only the top 20 colleges are likely to be considered good enough for those applying for the funding scheme and for their student loan to be paid off, colleges which are overwhelmingly populated by former private school students and which most state school applicants are actively discouraged from applying to for that very reason, this is the Tories' very own class war, their prejudices writ large in the same way as they claim Labour's to be. Even then it's contradictory: only a few months back Michael Gove wanted ex-service personnel to be fast-tracked into schools; now only the "best professionals with the best qualifications" need apply.

Others have pointed out that there is no correlation between the degree you get and the ability you have to teach. In fact, as Chris again suggests, the most academically gifted can potentially make things worse for those with lesser ability. I'd go as far to suggest that there are three groups of teachers out there: those that know what they're doing, those that can connect with those they're teaching, and that far rarer group, those that can do both. The exam results you get in your early twenties are no indication of how good you'll be at either of those things.

Not that the contradictions stop there: on discipline the Tories want to hand all the power over to the teachers themselves, ensuring that they can't be overruled by independent panels on exclusions, while at the same time wanting to ensure that schools can be held to account. Except on the former presumably? Alongside this, we have all the usual promises on cutting bureaucracy, on defeating waste, empowering everyone and all, as is likely, under the constraints imposed by cutting the deficit. Missing, as always, is the realisation that the number one thing parents want is a good local school which they can just send their offspring to in the knowledge that they will receive a good education, not the option to set-up a new one if it isn't good enough or they decide it isn't good enough. This however simply won't float when you can instead introduce your own pet projects, or prove to the newspapers that you're going to do something through even further shake-ups. Just letting the current system settle isn't an option when you've got to put your own imprint onto it, and if anything is likely to make things worse, Cameron's prescription is likely to be it.

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1/18/2010 09:36:00 pm | |

Thursday, October 08, 2009 

The shape of the Tories to come part 2.

The plan for the Tory conference has been both obvious and has worked: ensure that Osborne and Cameron get all the coverage and limelight and hope that the underlings stay in the shadows, or at best don't make any horrendous gaffes. This was clearly what was in action yesterday, hoping that only the faithful or interested would notice that both Michael Gove and Chris Grayling were making speeches on their specific areas and announcing either new or somewhat new policies. As it turned out, this was further helped when Grayling himself gaffed by describing the appointment of General Dannatt as an adviser as potentially a gimmick, not realising that it was err, his side, not Labour, that had done so.

It was Gove's proposals though which were clearly the more ghastly. Alix Mortimer thinks of him as a prep school teacher circa 1965 and it's clearly a description which fits. His proposals for what should be in and out of education when the Tories come in are so overblown it reads like a an old reactionary's wish-list. What's wrong with our school system, it seems, is that the kids aren't dressed archaically enough. Just as much of the rest of society decides that suit, blazer and tie aren't perhaps the most practical or comfortable of clothes, in comes Gove, who thinks that as adults are giving up on it, children should wear it instead. His other great wheeze, setting by ability, is just as old and hoary. Listening to Gove you'd think that state schools haven't so much as tried such a thing. I hate to break it to him, but at my bog-standard, at times failing comprehensive we had setting by ability, and all it did was further entrench those in the particular sets at that level of knowledge, not stretching them or helping them, just leaving them to get on with it, failing everyone. Adding to the sense of nostalgia, rote learning was the next thing to be mentioned. He also wants "the narrative of British history" taught, without mentioning whether or not history will be made compulsory post-14, and which in any case Alix Mortimer demolishes. Just when you think it couldn't get any worse, he also wants soldiers to be brought into instil discipline, which is just the thing that we need in general in schools: ex-military personnel with a high opinion of themselves thinking that all the children of today need is regimentalism and a shared bond which develops in the line of fire.

Chris Grayling didn't have much of a chance of living up to such a litany of pure bollocks. He did though have a go, further broadening the mind-bogglingly stupid policy of taxing strong lager and cider as well as "alcopops" because of their link to anti-social behaviour. There is a case for taxing the likes of Special Brew and the ultra-strong ciders which have never seen an apple for the simple reason that the only people who drink them are alcoholics and those looking to get drunk as quickly as possible, but the downsides are obvious: when an ordinary can of Wife-Beater isn't going to cost any more, you might as well just downgrade slightly, and it's what people will do. You have to challenge the behaviour, not the drink itself. I've also lost count of the number of times I've said it here, but it needs stating yet again: those meant to be targeted by this tax do not drink alcopops. The people who do are those might get drunk, but are not those who specifically go out looking for trouble; it can be best described as a tax on those who don't like the taste of other drinks. Despite all the mocking, Grayling also still believes in the "21st century clip round the ear", now examining "grounding" as an "instant punishment". We laughed when New Labour proposed taking yobs to ATMs; now the Tories, that party of the family, wants police officers to take over parenting. Finally, once again the Tories want to ban Hizb-ut-Tahrir, a group which although reprehensible and may have incited hatred in the past, most certainly does not incite violence. If we're going to ban every group alleged to do both, why focus on HuT and not the BNP or EDL, who are the number one current threat to community cohesion? Answer came there none.

All everyone was interested in though was the main event. There is one thing to be said for Cameron's speech, and that's at least that it was a speech rather than just a series of connected thoughts, as both Brown and Clegg's attempts were. It was also a good speech in another sense: that it at least partially showed what Cameron does believe and think, and quite how wrong his interpretation is of what has gone wrong, primarily with the economy:

And here is the big argument in British politics today, put plainly and simply. Labour say that to solve the country's problems, we need more government.

Don't they see? It is more government that got us into this mess.

Why is our economy broken? Not just because Labour wrongly thought they'd abolished boom and bust. But because government got too big, spent too much and doubled the national debt.


It is indeed putting it simply, and also not accurately. Labour may have massively increased the size and scope of the state, but to break this down to saying that Labour's only solution is more government is nonsense. If it was, it wouldn't have spent the last 12 years trying to insert the private sector into every public service or continued with the horrendously wasteful private finance initiative, to give but two examples. More gob-smacking though is that Cameron seems to be suggesting that the reason our economy's broken is because of the size of government and because it spent too much: this isn't just wrong, it's politically bankrupt. The reason the economy's broken is primarily because there was too little regulation of the financial sector, not too much. Even if we had saved for that "rainy day", we'd still be in the same recession even if the deficit could be dealt with quicker, and considering that the Tories would have hardly done anything different on the economy to Labour until very recently, this is hindsight of the lowest order. He continues:

Why is our society broken? Because government got too big, did too much and undermined responsibility.

This is even more nonsense. Even if you accept that big government has and does undermine responsibility, and even if you accept that society is broken, the real thing that broke it was the undermining and even open destruction of economic communities over 20 years ago. Labour has tried and mostly failed with its initiatives, but at least it has tried. All Cameron offers, and continues to offer in this speech, is the firm smack of responsibility and the recognition of marriage in the tax system, something just bound to cure problems at a stroke and not just provide the middle classes with a helpful cut. And so it goes on:

Why are our politics broken? Because government got too big, promised too much and pretended it had all the answers.

Cameron on the other hand doesn't pretend to have answers, as he doesn't offer any specific reform of politics in this speech except for the cutting of some ministerial salaries. All the talk of a new politics has completely evaporated, and who could possibly be surprised? Cameron doesn't need to change anything to win, and so the status quo is far more attractive.

Again, like Osborne on Tuesday, Cameron also offers precisely nothing on economic recovery. It's presumably just going to happen magically, while all we need to worry about is getting the deficit down. As Chris Dillow and an increasing numbers of others are now arguing, the preoccupation with the deficit is potentially dangerous when there are other threats and decisions to be taken. The Tories have focused on the deficit because this is one of their very few selling points, yet it's also a point on which they could be attacked if Labour was reasonably sure of itself, with even the potential to turn everything back around. While trying not to be triumphalist, what is clear is that the Tories themselves are now absolutely certain of their return to power. From his mention of Afghanistan at the very beginning to the condemnation of the EU at the end, this was also a speech written to touch every hot button on which the Sun newspaper has recently focused. Nothing is being left to chance. The irony of it all is that on the one thing that the Tories are significantly at odds with Labour on, they're wrong. The sad thing is that it seems it won't make any difference.

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10/08/2009 09:54:00 pm | |

Wednesday, October 07, 2009 

Ready for the same old dishonesty.

Like Craig Murray, I had to wonder whether I was on the same planet yesterday as some of the hacks who were clearly incredibly close to falling in love with George Osborne and his "massive electoral gamble", as Nick Robinson put it. Robinson was so over the top in his clear adoration of Osborne on the 10 O'Clock News that the only thing he didn't do was film himself shooting off while listening to the speech as a result of his excitement. If the BBC turned over and fell for New Labour, then the same seems to be happening now that the Tories are on the way in. Even the Graun described Osborne's gambit as their biggest political gamble in a generation.

Osborne's explanation of just what his new and doubtless "tough and tender" interpretation of austerity will entail left as many questions as it did answers. To start with, this is a very funny sort of austerity: let's accept for a second that the cuts and wage freezes which Osborne announced yesterday result in the £7 billion saving which he claims they will. Undoubtedly, these cuts will cause suffering, and they fall mainly on the middle, which is usually anathema to his party. All the same, this is as Robert Chote described it, nothing more than a dent in the actual deficit. Over a parliament it should save £35 billion. This year alone we've already borrowed over £175 billion. This isn't even going to begin to cut the deficit by half by 2014, as Labour have promised, with the Tories, although not being specific, saying they will act faster.

This therefore fails Osborne's own honesty test. He might not have said that these are going to be the only cuts, and he hasn't specifically ruled out tax rises, but many will get the impression that this will be the Tories' main prospectus for bringing down the deficit. Instead, this will only be the very, very beginning, as the Tories themselves must know if they are serious about reducing the deficit, and considering that it now seems to be their only real economic policy, it seems safe to assume that they are. Nick Clegg might have regretted talking about "savage cuts", but it's the closest description to what can be expected will be the order of the day once the Tories do seize the reins of power.

For this was just as fantastical a speech and lacking in any real integrity as Gordon Brown's was last week. Does anyone seriously believe that Osborne's repeated dirge that "we're all in this together"? I didn't even watch the speech in full, but the number of times he repeated the ridiculous phrase left me wanting to cram it down his throat. Indeed, it's fantastically clear from the very policies promised that we're not all in this together. Magnanimously, Osborne decided that he couldn't possibly repeal the 50p tax band for those earning over £150,000 a year while we're in the current mess, he's had to put the inheritance tax threshold raise on the backburner, although it's still a commitment during their first term, and if the bankers continue to award themselves ludicrous bonuses, he will step in to tax them, but apart from that there was nothing here that would shift the burden of bringing down the deficit to those who got us into this mess from those at both the bottom and the middle. Anyone earning over £18,000 in the public sector will have a year's pay freeze. The full-time median wage is £25,123. What is interesting is what both the Tories and Labour are prioritising: the military will not have to undergo any such pay restraint, meaning that if you're trained to kill people rather than trained to save people you're currently the more highly valued. To go off on a tangent for a second, it's also instructive that no party has considered getting out of Afghanistan to save money, but then that sort of thinking would make too much sense.

Just to highlight further how we're not all in this together, it's hard not to detect something afoot in the demand that no one in the public sector should earn more than the prime minister. Fair enough, but why not extend it completely? After all, just who is exactly worth more than just under £200,000 a year? Clearly, no one should earn more than David Cameron will, and if anyone suggests this isn't about all making a contribution and rather about envy, which is of course a Labour trait, then the Bullingdon might be paying you a visit.

Not everything that Osborne proposed was instantly objectionable. I'm one of those lefties who believes that only those who need the state's help should get it: why on earth were those earning over £50,000 a year getting tax credits in the first place when those at the bottom could have been receiving more (indeed, tax credits have always seemed a poor alternative to a guaranteed citizen's basic income and taking the lowest paid out of tax altogether)? I'm not as certain on the abolition of the child trust funds for all but the poorest third, as anything that encourages saving is welcome, but it may well be one of those cuts which we have to accept in the circumstances.

Most offensive is just the sheer disingenuousness of most of the speech. Osborne complains at one point that all Labour did last week was announce yet more spending; Osborne's party would never be so crass in committing to spending increases and tax cuts at a time when the books are so in the red. All they're doing is reversing Gordon Brown's tax raid on pensions, which won't cost much, probably only 3 to 5 billion, wiping out all but 2 billion of the savings so far announced. That's to add to the pledge that those going into care homes will no longer have to sell their houses, changes to the tax system to "support marriage", the freeze in council tax for two years, the decision not to introduce the rise in national insurance contributions Labour has pencilled in, and also now the promise not to tax new businesses for their first ten employees.

The most amazing hole though is that not once does Osborne broach the one thing that is more important than the size of the deficit: the recovery. He attacks Gordon Brown for not mentioning borrowing, then takes for granted that the recovery is already on the way and that he doesn't need to anything to stimulate it further. Indeed, he again claims to be right in not supporting the VAT cut. He scaremongers that our creditworthiness is being brought into doubt while Chris Dillow points out that in fact the yields on index-linked gilts have fallen to record lows, the bond markets never so keen to lend to us. Osborne's soundbite that we need to return to being a saving society might be right in the long-term, but not when we're not even certain that growth has started again. Osborne isn't going to be chancellor until at least May, it's true, by which time if we're not back in growth we really will be worrying, but even then we're going to need investment as well as cuts and tax rises.

We have to make allowances for the fact that no politician is going to give us their budget for after they win the election the year before it even happens, but that Osborne will only "not rule out additional tax rises" is simply not credible. Either you're serious about bringing down the deficit or you're not. It's one thing to be in denial as Labour arguably are, but it's something else entirely to be as dishonest as the Conservatives have been this week. Everyone knows that they are going to be cuts, and there are going to be tax rises, even if they don't like the idea. The real "massive electoral gamble" would be to set out what they are likely to be now. Only then will we be able to decide later whether or not a party was elected on a false prospectus.

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10/07/2009 09:24:00 pm | |

Tuesday, October 06, 2009 

The road to Purnell.

Over on the bustling Open Left blog, James Purnell has had a look at the Tories' welfare proposals and rather than arguing with the merits of their policies has instead decided to pick holes in them. If anything, Purnell is critical of the fact that they could be less tough on claimants:

The other big mistake the Tories are making is giving up on the Job Guarantee. In fact, this seems to me to be the bit no one has picked up on – looks to me like they are abolishing the Future Jobs Fund which is creating jobs with public and charitable organisations so we can offer everyone a job to every JSA claimant aged 18 to 24.

I think this would increase the number of claimants – training has limited value in helping people back to work. Instead, places like Denmark and the Netherlands guarantee people work but require them to take it up. That helps people such as the disabled who sometimes get overlooked in interviews. But it also forces people who are cheating the system to stop claiming. This is also the lesson from the US welfare programmes – what works is work. The Tories seem to be moving away from it (and indeed this seems to contradict the headline in the Sunday Times “Tories would force jobless to work”).

Even if Purnell is right, the Tory proposal is much more preferable. Just what jobs exactly are these lucky people going to have to take up or lose their benefit? Ones you would imagine that are dead-end and which no one who had a choice would want. Training on the other hand is a different realm of possibilities, although the funding and planning required would be far larger than simply plonking someone into what could be a completely unsuitable job. The other lesson of course from US welfare programmes is that they simply give up on those who exhaust their entitlement to benefits, leaving the charity sector to pick up the pieces, which is only slightly more draconian than what is being proposed here.

The real point though is that the Labour and Conservatives plans are almost identical, and that although I was highly critical of the Tories' policies yesterday, Purnell may well have set me straight on which will be the most destructive. It's worth quoting the comments left by both myself and Lee Griffin:

Interesting fight going on isn't it. On the one hand you have a party demonising the poor and the out of work, threatening them with destitution and a life of crime if they don't follow the government's prescribed course of "work-fare". And now you also have the Tories giving their own perspective on the same thing!

Is this really about picking (what are minor) holes in Tory policy, or outpourings of jealous petulance at them coming so close to Purnell's own frankly despicable policies?

I notice that nowhere in this does Purnell address the feasibility or likelihood of moving 500,000 individuals from IB onto JSA when there's the simple fact that there's no jobs for those people and that even if there were employers are loth to touch those who have been sick for years with a ten-foot barge pole. The real point here is that there is next to no difference between both the Tories' and Labour's policies: both are intent on further impoverishing the most vulnerable in society, not because it will save money, as it almost certainly won't, but because the focus groups and tabloids demand it.

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10/06/2009 08:55:00 pm | |

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