Freemania

Balls prepares to U-turn

2012-02-19T10:44:00.002Z

Today Ed Balls announced that he’s going to stop calling for a temporary VAT cut.

Not in so many words, of course. What he actually did was repeat his call for a 12-month cut in the rate of VAT – which he first proposed last June.

However, this given Labour an awkward problem of timing: Balls has been arguing for “combining stimulus now to get the economy moving with a tough but balanced medium-term deficit plan”. But this leaves the question of what happens when we get to the medium term. He will have to say ‘You know that stimulus we wanted? Well, even though we didn’t get it, it’s too late now, so now we want austerity instead.’

The other question this position left open is: when will we get to the medium term? Today Balls answered that:

In my view, the Chancellor does still have the power to shape events. Next month’s Budget is his last chance to make a real difference to Britain’s economic prospects. …the Chancellor should announce a temporary reversal of his VAT rise.

There you go: next month’s Budget is the last chance.

So after that passes, with George Osborne once again inexplicably deciding not to abandon his policy on Balls’s say-so, Balls will abandon his policy and stop urging a 12-month VAT cut. Possibly, as the year goes on, he’ll urge a VAT cut lasting 11 months, 10 months, 9 months and so on. Or maybe for simplicity’s sake he’ll throw in that particular towel straight away.

But one thing’s for sure: 12 months from now, Balls won’t be calling for a temporary fiscal stimulus. Definitely not. Definitely.

Edlock

2012-01-17T10:10:00.004Z

Over the weekend, union leader Len McCluskey and millions of others watched, horrified, as their beloved Ed Miliband committed political suicide... or so it seemed.

McCluskey stood in the street and saw – he swears he saw – Miliband throw himself from the heights of a two- or three-point lead in the opinion polls and fall, fatally, onto the pavement of austerity.

A sudden throng of spin doctors prevented McCluskey from reaching Miliband’s broken leadership, but an autopsy performed by Ed Balls confirmed that Labour’s public-spending strategy was indeed dead, having sustained a lethal series of cuts.

And yet...

Why would Miliband have jumped, just as his arch-enemy Cameron’s plans to lay the country waste with a few short lines of economic policy were becoming exposed as a sham? Were other sinister figures putting pressure on him? Had he been told that Blairite assassins stood ready to kill his dear Labour party if he didn’t sacrifice his own position?

And then there’s the question of whether Miliband really did it. Surely he would have avoided such a grim ending at all costs. And surely a genius who can become party leader despite getting fewer votes from the party’s members could think of a way out of a pickle like this.

Could Miliband have put a mask of his own face onto the body of a suspiciously overhyped former “senior adviser” who disappeared from the Labour party that same weekend?

Could Balls – known to have a soft spot for stimulus spending – have faked the evidence?

Could there be a clue in the Labour protestations that their acceptance of cuts is about what happens after the next election, not before? Could Harriet Harman’s “we're not accepting austerity cuts; we are totally opposed to them” give the game away?

Could Miliband’s estranged older brother be somehow involved?

Could McCluskey have been drugged to distort his perception of reality?

Only time will tell.

Miliband the misfit

2012-01-09T13:53:00.002Z

The E4 show Misfits is about a bunch of teenagers doing community service who acquire superpowers, which they use to fight crime, have sex and learn valuable life lessons.

(Spoiler alert.)

One of them is an awkward boy called Simon. A major part of series 2 and 3 is that a version of him from the future travels back in time. He’s far more self-assured and capable than the earlier version, and one of the other characters – a girl called Alisha – falls in love with him. Alas, he (future Simon) dies saving her life.

The earlier version of Simon is also impressed by his future self, and vows to become more like him so that eventually he can go back and save Alisha – who he has now fallen for, and who transfers her affections over to him.

Simon gradually develops the skills, courage and self-confidence of his future self, but then another tragedy strikes; he sees Alisha killed in front of him and is unable to help. He decides then to travel back in time to be with her again, creating a doomed temporal loop in which he inspires himself to discover his inner strength, wins his love and then fails her.

I only mention this because Ed Miliband said at the weekend:

You discover things about yourself in this job, which is that I am someone of real steel and grit, which is why I stood for the job in the first place.

Simon the self-inspiring Misfit. Not to be confused with his brother David.

The great Diane Abbott tweetgate scandal of 2012

2012-01-06T13:01:00.003Z

Here’s the exchange, as reproduced by the BBC:

Bim Adewunmi: I do wish everyone would stop saying 'the black community' though. WHICH ONE?
Bim Adewunmi: Clarifying my 'black community' tweet: I hate the generally lazy thinking behind the use of the term. Same for 'black community leaders'.
Diane Abbott: I understand the cultural point you are making. But you are playing into a "divide and rule" agenda.
Bim Adewunmi: Maybe. I find it frustrating that half the time, these leaders are out of touch with black people they purport to represent.
Diane Abbott: White people love playing "divide & rule" We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism
Bim Adewunmi: I don't advocate 'divide and rule'. But I wish we could deal more effectively with issues without resorting to monolithic view.
Diane Abbott: Ethnic communities that show more public solidarity & unity than black people do much better #dontwashdirtylineninpublic

I should start by declaring that my general opinion of Diane Abbott is pretty low, although my estimation of her importance is also pretty low. I find it hard to get worked up by this.

Still, on the offending phrase: I don’t quite grasp the mental process that starts with wanting a quick and clear way to describe people who seek to weaken black people by turning them against each other, and ends with choosing “white people” rather than “colonialists” or “imperialists” or “racists”.

Nonetheless, I’m sure she knows full well that there are loads of white people who don’t fit that description. My best guess is that she was aiming to be a little cheeky in the vague service of solidarity-building, in the way that Harriet Harman might make some semi-serious unflattering overgeneralisation about men to make the sisters nod along.

If so, it’s still unpleasant and it’s still untrue – I go along with Russell on “the superior virtue of the oppressed”. But the idea that any white person has in any way been harmed by this tweet is just ridiculous. At the very outside you could argue that impressionable young black people might read it and as a result take more of an ‘us vs them’ outlook towards all white people, but I think that’s stretching it well past breaking point.

My real beef with what Abbott said is precisely because of the “context” that she protests her tweet was taken out of. I don’t like the way she rejects Bim Adewunmi’s point.

Questioning the merits of a set of “community leaders” (black or otherwise) is not on any meaningful continuum with the tactics and values of 19th-century colonialism. And the suggestion that black people shouldn’t criticise their so-called “community leaders” for fear of being seen to “wash [their] dirty linen in public” is depressing.

But then, there are far more depressing things to do with race. And yet this is the issue we’re all yelling about this week. Well, it’s easy, isn’t it? We know how to do ‘somebody said something and people say they’re angry at her and other people say they’re angry at them and now I’m going to say something’. We don’t know how to make society more just and people less prejudiced. Well, I don’t, anyway.

He moves in implausible ways

2011-12-21T10:23:00.000Z

There’s an oddly lovely exhibition at Wellcome Collection at the moment of ‘Mexican Miracle Paintings’ – votive offerings from people in small towns in Mexico, dating back over a century, expressing thanks for the assistance of God and his saints in times of trouble.

The art isn’t world-class and nor is the prose of the messages that go with each picture, but the whole point is that these are heartfelt expressions of ordinary people’s hopes and fears – and the whole effect is quite touching.

That said – and far be it from me to judge other people’s faith, especially at Christmastime – a few of the stories didn’t leave me completely convinced that divine intervention really was at work:

I thank Our Lady of Zapopan for giving me back my health. I was suffering cancer of the face and on 17 September 1936 it was considered to be incurable. I pleaded to the Holy Virgin of Zapopan and on 17 March 1941 I was completely cured through the intervention of the Holy Virgin and the doctor Edmundo Aviña.

Miracle granted by Our Holy Mother of San Juan to Antonia Lopez on that memorable 18 January 1888…while, during the flooding in Leon, seeing herself and her family in great danger along with 15 other people, implored with all her heart to the Holy Mother of San Juan. On hearing her prayer, our Divine Lady intervened and they were miraculously saved by climbing a tree and for such a great miracle she dedicates this retablo.

In Matehuala on 7 January 1937, Juan Hernández became so drunk that he completely lost his senses, to the point of walking into the mountains where he passed out all night. The following morning he returned and headed for the train station, but before getting there he felt so ill that he kept thinking he was going to die. Nevertheless, he managed to get back home. His wife Lazara Alonso, noticing what a serious state he was in, pleaded with all her heart to Saint Francis of Assisi of Catorce to restore his health as he had to support her and her child. If he would intervene then she would commission a retablo for such a great favour and, because it was granted exactly as asked, she presents this retablo giving a truthful testimony of the work of his divine majesty in this evident miracle.

Thanks to God All Mighty Saint Francis of Assisi, the Seraphim I thank you with all my heart for this miraculous accomplishment: a warehouse with multiple uses. “Potrero del Moro” Ranch, C del Oro, Zac. For the resistant structure (foundations, columns, walls, internal structure, window frames, beams and paving slabs). He thanks you with all his heart.

Hmm.

Merry Christmas!

Cameron’s bad faith

2011-12-17T15:02:00.000Z

This is (some of) what David Cameron had to say about religion and secularism yesterday:

The Bible has helped to shape the values which define our country. … Responsibility, hard work, charity, compassion, humility, self-sacrifice, love, pride in working for the common good and honouring the social obligations we have to one another, to our families and our communities - these are the values we treasure.
Yes, they are Christian values. And we should not be afraid to acknowledge that. But they are also values that speak to us all – to people of every faith and none. And I believe we should all stand up and defend them.
Those who oppose this usually make the case for secular neutrality. They argue that by saying we are a Christian country and standing up for Christian values we are somehow doing down other faiths. And that the only way not to offend people is not to pass judgement on their behaviour.
I think these arguments are profoundly wrong.
…those who advocate secular neutrality in order to avoid passing judgement on the behaviour of others fail to grasp the consequences of that neutrality or the role that faith can play in helping people to have a moral code. …for people who do have a faith, their faith can be a helpful prod in the right direction.
And whether inspired by faith or not – that direction, that moral code, matters.

And this adapted version illustrates how utterly wrong he is:

The Conservative Party has helped to shape the values which define our country. … Responsibility, hard work, charity, compassion, humility, self-sacrifice, love, pride in working for the common good and honouring the social obligations we have to one another, to our families and our communities - these are the values we treasure.
Yes, they are Conservative values. And we should not be afraid to acknowledge that. But they are also values that speak to us all – to people of every party and none. And I believe we should all stand up and defend them.
Those who oppose this usually make the case for secular neutrality. They argue that by saying we are a Conservative country and standing up for Conservative values we are somehow doing down other parties. And that the only way not to offend people is not to pass judgement on their behaviour.
I think these arguments are profoundly wrong.
…those who advocate secular neutrality in order to avoid passing judgement on the behaviour of others fail to grasp the consequences of that neutrality or the role that party politics can play in helping people to have a moral code. …for people who do have a party, their party can be a helpful prod in the right direction.
And whether inspired by party politics or not – that direction, that moral code, matters.

Cameron’s abuse of the term “secular neutrality” is striking: it means religious neutrality, not – as he seems to think – moral neutrality. This isn’t a petty point about semantics, much as I enjoy those. I’m actually trying to take him at his word and offer some helpful advice (he’s a regular reader here, and he knows I’m a big fan).

The final sentence of the quote (in either version) is, I agree, the most important. But it’s crippled by the rest.

If what you’re trying to promote is a moral code, a set of values that most of us agree are pretty sound even if we often don’t live up to them, you do not do it by branding those values with a sectarian label that lots of people don’t accept.

Yes, he litters the speech with polite caveats that of course people who aren’t religious can be moral. But his central argument rests on the opposite (and false) assumption that you can’t steer clear of religion without also abandoning morality.

Christianity has been a huge factor in British history. It’s still a big presence, but it’s fallen a long way. In terms of what British people today believe and practise (or don’t), it’s hardly accurate or helpful to say we’re “a Christian country”. If he can’t think of a way to promote morality without talking about “Christian values”, he’s doomed to fail.

Calling for delayed cuts means delayed calling for cuts

2011-12-08T08:16:00.000Z

Something interesting is happening to the Labour leadership. They’re starting to realise that their current ‘cuts later’ position means that later – at the next election, say – they’ll have to be for ‘cuts now’.

They’re also starting to think about the relationship between the image they project now and the image they’ll want to project come 2015.

If they carry on as they have, using most of their airtime to attack cuts that they genuinely see as too fast and too deep (but that they cannot possibly stop), they’ll establish themselves in the public mind as anti-cuts. They can certainly win some support like this, but the trouble is that when they get to ‘later’, they’re going to have to say ‘OK, we’re pro-cuts now’.

At that point, their anti-cuts supporters will lose enthusiasm, and much of the rest of the electorate – who will be more pro-cuts – will be deeply unconvinced by this late conversion from the party that’s been so vocally anti-cuts all this time.

But, as I say, they seem to be shifting their emphasis. Ed Miliband recently gave a speech in which the most-reported line was that “the next Labour government is likely to inherit borrowing levels that still need to be reduced. So even then resources will have to be focused significantly on paying down that deficit.”

And Ed Balls, writing this week, makes a similar point, but still gives the impression that he wants to slow down this repositioning: “it is so important that we set out before the next election tough fiscal rules that the next Labour government will have to stick to – to get our country’s current budget back into balance and national debt on a downward path”.

Before the election, yes, but how long before it?

Balls argues for “combining stimulus now to get the economy moving with a tough but balanced medium-term deficit plan”. But this leaves the question of what happens when we get to the medium term. He will have to say ‘You know that stimulus we wanted? Well, even though we didn’t get it, it’s too late now, so now we want cuts instead.’

Changing tone like that as an election nears is a very hard sell – as David Cameron found when, having spent a few years promoting a more caring, less anti-public-sector image, ended up campaigning on a much more conventionally right-wing platform in 2010. The difference is that Cameron’s about-turn arose from an unexpected crisis, while Balls is implicitly promising his in advance.

Labour will have to choose between arguing for what they would be doing/have done during this Parliament and arguing for what they want to do in the next.

Their struggle to make this choice is a symptom of a deeper tension: parties can respond to being kicked out of power by telling voters ‘we didn’t deserve to lose your trust’ or by telling them ‘we now deserve to regain your trust’. Miliband and Balls have preferred the former but are now fitfully edging towards the latter.

George Osborne has forgotten what Nigel Lawson learned

2011-12-06T08:00:00.001Z

Last week I argued that the cost of UK government borrowing is determined mainly by wider economic conditions – on an international scale – and that increases in the amount the government is borrowing appears to have had no negative effect on the interest rate paid.

Now, via an FT article by Samuel Brittan, I find I’m in surprising company:

The chancellor’s main argument against fiscal stimulus was that it would raise interest rates and thus be self defeating. … Mr Osborne vastly exaggerates the effect of the UK Budget deficit on long-term rates. He need not take my word for it. Lord Lawson reports that a similar argument was used in the run-up to the tough Geoffrey Howe Budget of 1981. But he later thought better of it. He writes in The View from No.11, published 11 years later: “Long-term interest rates ... are determined by the balance of supply and demand in the capital market. As the capital market was becoming increasingly a single global market the public borrowing in any one country [with the exception of the US] had a correspondingly diminished effect.” He was right second time round.

The confidence trick

2011-11-28T07:58:00.006Z

This is the heart of the narrative that holds the government’s economic policy together:

Towards the end of Labour’s time in office, government borrowing was threatening to spiral out of control. Questions were being raised about our national credit rating, and the bond markets were pushing up the cost of borrowing. The coalition’s determined programme of larger and faster spending cuts has rescued the UK, creating much-needed confidence in the prospects for deficit reduction and, as a result, economic growth.

So: what’s the evidence?

I’ve looked at the yield on 10-year government bonds – a standard measure of the interest rate the government pays to borrow – and worked out how it changed when a select half-dozen events happened. I’ve taken the average bond yield over five trading days before each event and over five days after, to smooth out the effect of momentary blips, and compared each pair:

On 29 March 2009, credit-rating agency Standard & Poor’s warned that without a stronger deficit-reduction strategy, the government’s AAA credit rating might be at risk. Between the five days before this and the five days after, 10-year bond yields rose by 0.06%, making borrowing a bit more expensive.
On 21 May 2009, Standard & Poor’s formally moved the UK government from a “stable” outlook for its credit rating to “negative”. Bond yields rose by 0.38%.
On 26 January 2010, the fund management firm Pimco (a major player in the global bond markets) said that UK national debt was a “must to avoid” as it was “resting on a bed of nitroglycerine”. Bond yields rose 0.002%.
Coalition negotiations meant that the change of government took longer than usual. But between the five days before the election (6 May 2010) and the five days after David Cameron became PM (11 May), bond yields fell by 0.21%, making it cheaper for the government to borrow.
On 22 June 2010, George Osborne produced his first Budget. Bond yields fell by 0.18%.
On 22 November 2010, the government published its full spending review. Bond yields fell by 0.04%.

Well, this all seems to support the government’s case. There’s only one small problem: all these numbers are for US government bonds, not UK ones.

Here, by contrast, is what happened to UK government bond yields:

So in all six cases, when there was supposedly bad news for UK bonds, US bonds took a bigger hit, and when there was supposedly good news for UK bonds, US bonds got a bigger boost.

[Update: For a longer perspective than five days, I’ve averaged over the six months before the election (November 2009–April 2010) and the following six months (May–October 2010). From the first period to the second, UK government bond yields fell by 0.64%, but this was beaten by US bonds, which fell 0.75%. This simply does not support the claim that the coalition and its policies have been key to keeping UK borrowing costs down.]

In fact, US and UK government borrowing costs are very strongly correlated these days (since 2008, a massive +0.9):

So, unless the US markets are hypersensitive to what happens in Britain, something much bigger has been going on.

Before I get into what that is, let’s see how the actual amount of government borrowing relates to the cost of borrowing. The government’s story says that these are positively correlated – as does common sense. Surely, the more you borrow, the bigger a credit risk you become and people will charge higher rates to lend to you. So, if the amount of money the government is expected to borrow rises or falls, bond yields should move in the same direction.

Let’s see.

Every month, the Treasury collates the latest set of independent economic forecasts. Sometimes these look only two years ahead and sometimes they look farther, so the data I’ve put together is a bit irregular.

First of all, in Labour’s final year, there were five sets of independent forecasts of government borrowing that covered 2010/11 and 2011/12. This chart shows these alongside monthly averages for government bond yields (yes, UK ones):

As Labour’s time in office drew to a close, independent expectations of government borrowing were falling, not rising. The correlation between the level and cost of borrowing (albeit from a tiny sample size) was strongly negative. This means that fears of higher deficits could not have been responsible for the rise in bond yields that happened during this time. (And bear in mind that US bond yields also rose over this period.)

Secondly, over the lifetime of the coalition, here’s a chart showing monthly bond yields alongside independent forecasts of government borrowing across 2011/12 and 2012/13:

Again, the correlation is negative. As borrowing expectations have risen over the last six months, the cost of borrowing has fallen. This means that increased confidence about lower deficits could not have been responsible for the fall in bond yields. (And bear in mind that US bond yields also fell over this period.)

I’ve shown one chart for before the election and one chart for after. Wouldn’t that miss the change between the two governments, when both borrowing forecasts and the cost of borrowing both fell? Yes. But this fall in UK bond yields was matched – in fact, exceeded – by the simultaneous fall in US bond yields, which really can’t be explained by changes to UK fiscal policy. Something bigger is going on. But what?

The answer has two parts. For the first part, we can turn to Nick Clegg.

After the election, the Lib Dems abandoned their more gradual manifesto proposals for reducing the deficit and signed up to the Tories’ plans for faster, bigger cuts. Clegg said that the situation in Greece, which exploded shortly before the election, had changed things. In that, at least, he was right. However, he meant that there was a danger of the sovereign debt crisis spreading to us, so we had to be extra cautious with our finances. But the real lesson is different.

Investors have to put their money somewhere. Bonds issued by developed-country governments are normally seen as ultra-safe, and the yields paid on these bonds are normally quite low, as the safety is their main selling point. For higher returns, you can make a higher-risk investment elsewhere, if you dare. But the crisis in the eurozone meant that the risk-averse large institutional investors lost their appetite for Greek (and later Portguese, Spanish and Italian) government bonds.

So they needed to invest somewhere else.

On 23 April 2010, the Greek government requested an IMF/EU bailout. Between the five trading days before this desperate act and the five after, UK government bond yields fell by 0.07% and US bond yields by 0.04%. Rather than a fear of contagion hitting all sovereign debt, those countries that the markets saw as nowhere near the danger zone – including the UK – found that they could borrow more cheaply. Increased demand from fleeing investors brought down our bond yields.

And this persisted: 23 April 2010 was the day that US and UK bond yields both began a largely uninterrupted four-month fall.

The second part of the answer – what bigger thing is going on to make non-eurozone government borrowing so cheap even while so much of the stuff piles? – is the condition of the economy more broadly. But it relies on the same principle: investors have to put their money somewhere.

Jonathan Portes of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research reasons that lower bond yields would be a sign of confidence and economic strength if they were associated with a better stock-market performance; but they’d be a sign of weakness if they went hand in hand with stock-market falls. He finds that, since the coalition was formed, there’s a “strong, significant and positive” correlation: bond yields fall when the stock market does as well.

He’s right. I’ve checked, and from June 2010, government bond yields and the FTSE have shown a correlation of +0.56. The persistent weakness of the economy as a whole (in Britain and elsewhere) means that private-sector investment prospects look poor. The result of this pessimism – as with the flight from Greek bonds, although at a less frantic rate – is that investors who might have put their money in the stock market are instead going for government bonds, further pulling yields down.

This can also explain the counterintuitive positive correlation I noted earlier between the cost and the predicted amount of government borrowing. As the economy falters, investors move from stocks and shares to the safety of government bonds, driving down the yield on them. But a weaker economy also means lower tax receipts and higher welfare spending, so borrowing forecasts go up.

And that’s exactly what’s happening. The government can borrow so much so cheaply not because its plans (which keep getting rewritten for the worse) inspire such stunning confidence but because the rest of the economy inspires so little. It’s a sign of failure, not success. The story the government’s trying to spin us is entirely the wrong way round.

A few closing remarks, because I’m not in this post advocating any particular fiscal policy over another:

While the government’s deficit-reduction plan has had little discernible effect on the cost of its borrowing, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a difference between safe and risky borrowing. There is. Both this government and the last have clearly been seen as being on the right side of the line – by the markets if not by the commentators. Despite the political rows, the difference between the Osborne plan and the Darling plan wasn’t massive.
While nobody knows exactly where the line is, it’s clear that a few extra tens of billions of borrowing wouldn’t spark a crisis; indeed, feeble growth and high inflation mean this is exactly what’s happening. But, conversely, it’s far from clear whether a few tens of billions of stimulus would really make much difference to growth.
Crisis avoidance isn’t the only reason to reduce borrowing as quickly as we reasonably can. A 12-digit deficit, even on a low interest rate, still costs a lot, and servicing debt interest isn’t the most socially or economically useful thing to do with taxpayers’ money.
Economics isn’t the only reason to be sceptical about the virtues of rapid public spending cuts. It’s not just faceless bureaucrats and feckless scroungers that will suffer as a result.

Update: Chris Dillow also ponders what low bond yields mean and what the stock market can tell us. but he looks at the FTSE small caps index rather than the more globalised FTSE 100. I think the lesson is that the economic slowdown that's pushing bond yields down is not confined to the UK - just as my chart of US and UK bond yields would suggest.

Poor school results

2011-11-21T07:54:00.002Z

One of the biggest things affecting a school’s exam results is not what happens inside the classrooms: it’s the backgrounds and circumstances of the children the school lets through its gates in the first place. The more children from poorer families a school has, the worse its exam results tend to be.

The graph below shows almost every state secondary school in England [1]. It plots how many of each school’s pupils qualify to receive free school meals against how many of each school’s pupils get at least five A*-C grades at GCSE including English and maths. Roughly speaking, it plots poverty against results [2].

There’s a pretty good correlation, of -0.57, between how many pupils are on free school meals and how many get five A*-Cs including English and maths. As poverty rises, exam results fall (although this fall levels out after around the point where a fifth of a school’s pupils qualify for free meals).

The grammar schools skew the picture – but only a little. Among comprehensives, the correlation is -0.55 – only slightly lower.

Most grammar schools are clumped up in the top left corner of the graph. They get very good results, which is hardly surprising given their intake. But selecting for ability also tends to select for wealth. The average selective school has just 2.6% of its pupils on free meals, while comprehensives average 16.7%. In fact, there’s not a single grammar school in all the land with even three-quarters as many kids on free school meals as the average comprehensive.

The next graph tells a similar story to the first, but it just covers comps, and it gets rid of a lot of the noise by grouping together schools by how many children on free meals they have (0-0.9%, 1-1.9%, 2-2.9%, 3-3.9% etc.) and shows the average results score for each such group:

But the correlation figures above understate the strength of the relationship. There are wide regional variations in prosperity across England, and of course parents don’t navigate the education system on a national scale: school choice works locally.

So by breaking the figures down into individual local education authorities (LEAs), we can see how strong the relationship is between poverty and results on a scale more relevant to parents’ choices about which neighbourhood to live in and which schools to apply to.

I’ve checked every LEA with 20 or more secondary schools (the smaller they are, the less reliable the correlation stats become [3]). There are 45 such LEAs, out of a total of 150.

The correlations range from -0.57 (Cornwall) to -0.90 (Leeds) – with an average of -0.76. So if you look into an individual LEA, the local link between poverty and results is usually much stronger than across England as a whole [4].

(LEAs with selective schools appear to have only slightly stronger poverty-results correlations than all-comprehensive LEAs.)

All this just shows how strong the link between poverty and GCSE results is. The exact nature of the causation is more complex to untangle, but it’s going to involve the fact that struggling to make ends meet makes it harder to devote time and resources to one’s children’s development. It’ll also, conversely, involve the fact that schools with good results become oversubscribed, driving local house prices up so that these schools become fuller and fuller of children with well-to-do parents.

One way to stop the education system from segregating children is to prevent popular, higher-scoring schools from cherry-picking the most promising ones. Banding and lotteries are efforts to achieve this, but I’m not aware of any compelling evidence either way on their effects.

The government’s big plan is the pupil premium, Nick Clegg’s favourite boast but something that appeared in all three main party manifestos in 2010. It’s an interesting way to motivate higher-scoring schools to admit more poorer pupils. Whether it succeeds or fails will depend on whether the extra cash can overcome the fear of being dragged down by the chavs.

[1] 2009/10 data, from the ‘Secondary’ tab of the ‘School spending – all data’ spreadsheet produced by the Department for Education. I’ve had to take 23 schools out of the calculations as there aren’t exam results figures for them.

[2] Qualifying for free school meals is an imperfect measure of poverty, related as it is to receipt of certain benefits. But it’s a decent indicator. Also, there are many other ways to measure how good a school’s results are than the number of kids getting five A*-Cs including maths and English: you could raise or lower that bar as you liked. This, however, is the data I have.

[3] Out of curiosity, I also looked at each of the 26 LEAs with under 10 schools in the data set. All have similarly strong negative correlations, for whatever that’s worth – except for the odd (but tiny) outlier of the Isle of Wight, whose five schools form a decent line sloping the other way, for a correlation of +0.51. I don’t know what, if anything beyond random variation, is going on there.

[4] How can pretty much every LEA have a stronger correlation between poverty and results than the national figure? Simple. This chart shows the schools in Bradford and Northamptonshire:

The red dots are pretty clearly grouped around a line (Northants has a correlation of -0.81), and so are the blue dots (Bradford’s is -0.76). But they’re different lines: Bradford is, on the whole, poorer and has more schools getting lower results, but with increasing poverty making less of a difference among its schools than in Northants.

So putting all the dots together blurs the clarity of the lines a bit: the overall correlation across the two LEAs between poverty and results is -0.73 – still high, but lower then either alone. The same thing happens, on larger scale, when looking at all the schools across England together.

Grammaricks

2011-09-28T23:03:00.003+01:00

Over on my other blog, I've got some limericks about language, grammar and editing.

Because silliness is better than politics.

(It'll help you with the first one if you know that 'stet' is a proofreading term meaning 'leave it the way it was'.)

Brown’s fiscal mistake

2011-09-26T13:51:00.002+01:00

Labour’s time in power can be divided into three periods, as far as the public finances go. First, borrowing was reduced to zero and below, cutting the national debt from 42.5% of GDP in 1996/97 to 29.7% in 2001/02. Then, a period of borrowing 2.3-3.3% of GDP a year, raising the national debt to 36.5% of GDP in 2007/08. And finally, all hell broke loose.

It’s the middle six years that are now the most contentious, when the government ran deficits that weren’t huge but were still on the large side given that the economy was doing well.

That said, there was a world economic slowdown around 2001-03, and the fiscal stimulus that resulted from extra borrowing probably helped the UK come through in pretty good shape. Indeed, Chris Dillow goes further, arguing that the longer pre-crisis period was one where government spending was an important prop to the economy – tighter fiscal policy would have meant less growth and potentially a bigger housing boom if interest rates had been cut to compensate.

It’s also debatable how much less bad things would now be if we’d gone into the crisis with a balanced budget rather than a 2.4% deficit. We could have had a bigger stimulus (and, hopefully, a smaller recession), or had the same stimulus with less borrowing overall (so smaller interest payments and, hopefully, slower spending cuts now) – which would have been better. But the flipside of going into the crisis in better fiscal shape, as Chris argues, is that we might have been in worse shape in other ways.

But there is one sense in which Gordon Brown unarguably got it wrong.

This graph shows government revenues relative to GDP (thick black line) compared with a series of Brown’s Budget forecasts (dotted coloured lines):

Year after year, Brown predicted the Treasury’s income was about to rise to 40% of GDP and above; in reality, it never even reached 39%. Now, public borrowing is hard to predict, and so a couple of years of undershooting is acceptable margin-of-error stuff. But by, say, 2004, it must have been clear that something was wrong with the forecasting assumptions: the money consistently wasn’t appearing as expected.

Brown should have rethought his tax and spending plans or at the very least his predictions. After several good years, the Treasury had – like the financial sector – become optimistic to the point of complacency. And so, as they don’t like to mention, had the Conservatives, who in 2007 signed up to Labour’s spending plans for the following years.

Zeno’s paradox of fiscal policy and Osborne’s prophet motive

2011-09-23T14:54:00.002+01:00

As Duncan reminds us, the central aim – the “fiscal mandate” – of the government’s fiscal policy is this, as set out by George Osborne in last June’s Budget:

the structural current deficit should be in balance in the final year of the five-year forecast period, which is 2015-16 in this Budget.

The thing about the fiscal mandate is that it’s a rolling target. In June 2010, the end of “the five-year forecast period” was 2015/16. Now it’s 2016/17. During the next election campaign, it’ll be 2020/21.

(Also note that it covers cyclically adjusted borrowing, excluding capital spending. These caveats take out a hefty chunk of the actual deficit. And yes, Brown was just as bad, with his ‘borrow only to invest over the course of the economic cycle’ Golden Rule.)

Which means that the notion of ‘hitting’ this particular target collapses – like the protagonists in Zeno’s paradoxes of motion, we’ll never reach the end of the rolling five-year period and see where it hits. But if Osborne can’t ever hit (or miss) the target, all we can do is judge whether he’s ‘on course’ to hit it.

This is why the Office for Budget Responsibility is so important to him: the official central objective of fiscal policy is for the announcement of that policy to induce the OBR to make a favourable forecast. That’s all.

It is, of course, ridiculous to think that government borrowing can be accurately predicted that far ahead. Osborne and the rest, whatever their faults, are (mostly) not mentally subnormal. And the OBR shows no signs of being any more accurate a coven of seers than the in-house Treasury forecasters used to be.

All of which means that the fiscal mandate in itself is a convenient fiction. Nobody cares about a few billion pounds here or there several years down the line. The real aim of this device is to persuade the king’s prophets to pull something out of the entrails that will give the troops confidence for the fight. And, given the sheer amount of ‘eliminate the deficit by the end of this parliament’ coverage that’s followed, it’s working. Politically, at least. Temporarily, at least.

Because Osborne has allowed an impression to take hold that the target is more rigorous than it really is. That suits him for the time being. But those simplified headlines, which he’s hardly rushed to correct, may end up as embarrassing for him as “Brits 45 mins from DOOM” became for Blair. In early 2015, when we’re still borrowing however much, it’ll look like a failure.

(And, as Duncan also points out, there’s also a ‘supplementary’ target that does have a fixed date: for government debt as a share of GDP to be falling by 2015/16.)

Updte: here's a chart showing what happens to the deficit when you adjust for the economic cycle and then take out capital spending (predictions as per Budget 2011):

Note that Osborne's taget measure (the green line) excludes roughly half of public borrowing at the moment. This cyclically adjusted current deficit was hardly out of control before the credit crunch hit; indeed, Labour had it lower going into their recession than the Tories had it going into theirs at the start of the 1990s. I raise this not to imply that everything was fine in 2007 but to point out that Osborne's choice of target doesn't necessarily do the political work he'd like it to.

Well, quite

2011-08-19T14:29:00.000+01:00

I’ve just noticed that David Cameron began his speech about the riots and looting with this line:

It is time for our country to take stock.

The labour market

2011-08-19T08:24:00.003+01:00

Just been listening to Peter Lilley on Radio 4 explaining why we need to force the workshy to get jobs.

Good luck with that.

Update: I should have included my data source. From the Office for National Statistics, select option 21.1 (Vacancies and unemployment). Then data series AP2Y is total UK vacancies, MGSC is seasonally adjusted LFS unemployment among those aged 16+, and JPC5 is the ratio (excluding agriculture, forestry and fishing for a reason that escapes me – perhaps there are a couple of million lumberjack vacancies that could save the day). Thanks to CH and friends for reminding me to add this.

How I tried to incite a riot using the mainstream media, and got away with it, by Tom Freeman (aged 18¼)

2011-08-17T10:34:00.004+01:00

What with the recent rioting and looting – and the four-year sentences given to two morons who tried (and failed) to whip up a bit more trouble by posting on Facebook – I was reminded of my own murky past.

In 1995, when I should have been revising for my A levels but found everything else somehow more interesting, I noticed a letter in the Guardian from a man complaining about how unaccountable our rulers were. I don’t remember whether the idea came to me immediately or crept up on me over a few hours, but my reply was published on May 31:

In answer to Joe Phillips (Letters, May 30), I’m afraid there are very few ways in which we can vent our dissatisfaction at the monarchy, or the House of Lords, or even the Government between elections. We have opinion polls, where we can say what we like but get dismissed as unrepresentative, and we can write letter to politicians and newspapers but get dismissed as cranks.
However, there is a third way. At 2.30 tomorrow afternoon I will be conducting a violent and bloody revolution at the Palace of Westminster. All welcome. Refreshments will be served and crèche facilities will be available. Weather permitting.
Tom Freeman

Nobody could possibly take that seriously, just as nobody could possibly take seriously a jokey tweet pretending to threaten Robin Hood Airport with destruction if it didn’t clear the snow and reopen quickly.

Later that day, I received a phone call from a man from Stoke. (Back then, the Guardian printed its correspondents’ full addresses, so he’d clearly rung directory enquiries.) This polite and, from the sound it, ageing class warrior wanted to know about travel arrangements.

I let him down gently, and he had the decency to chuckle. But I realised that further explanation was needed, and so on June 2 the Guardian was good enough to print this:

My fellow anarchists and I apologise to readers for the failure of the planned “violent and bloody revolution” (Letters, May 31). The oppressed masses we had hired for the event were held up by traffic cones on the M4, and so the uprising was inquorate. The regulator Offcoup has recently revoked our Chartermark: with the loss of such government approval, we were unable to recruit enough passers-by to smash the state.
Tom Freeman

The police have yet to come a-knocking.

A quiet quinquennial

2011-08-03T10:32:00.001+01:00

Five years ago today I started this blog. This, according to my powers of pretext detection, justifies cake.

But it’s obvious that my heart’s not been in it lately:

I don’t exactly know why the decline. Probably a whole bunch of things.

For most of these five years I’ve been expressing my opinions faster than I’ve been forming new ones, so eventually I was bound to feel I was running out of fresh things to say.

My work has been more demanding lately, leaving me less mental energy for other things. Oh, and I got a new widescreen TV with more channels than I could ever have dreamed of. My IQ drops 10 points when I’m even in the same room as it.

My main subject matter, politics, grabs me less than it used to. I’m still interested enough to read, but not usually enough to chew things over, to chase up some background info, and to write.

The biggest issue these days is how the government’s plans will affect the economy, but economic prediction is a mug’s game. And even once we’ve waited and seen what’s happened, it can damned tricky to untangle what caused what. So all most of us have are our broader views on different fiscal doctrines. And mine are not nearly as well-informed or lucid as plenty of other people’s.

More generally, the novelty of the coalition has faded and the novelty of Ed Miliband’s leadership never quite managed to arrive. I find it hard to care all that much about the supercilious progress of the Tory campaign to disguise power as necessity, or about Labour’s fitful drifting between trying to find a way to be noticed and trying to find a way to be. Balance requires that I also mention the Lib Dems here.

And then, of course, there’s the Blogger’s Ruin, luring so many of us away from the precious paragraphs we once took such earnest pride in researching and sculpting, Twitter. (That said, I’m taking this week off Twitter, so it’s possible that in a couple of days I’ll crack and post 3000 words here about Syria or something.) (I won’t.)

But I’m not quitting. I’ve noticed that bloggers who announce they’re quitting are often back, a few weeks later, as prolific as ever. Maybe I should try that? No, I can’t trick myself if I know what the trick is. So I’ll carry on, posting bits and pieces when the mood takes me. But I can’t promise my former regular readers – I’m no longer a regular writer, therefore I can’t have regular readers any more – the kind of output I once produced.

Either way, thanks for dropping by.

Demons at News International

2011-07-07T13:06:00.006+01:00

Usually, when I rewrite a song, I’m trying to raise a chuckle or two. But the News of the World phone-hacking scandal doesn’t really deserve ridicule; it deserves contempt and disgust. So I hope the tone of this is right.

To the tune of ‘Angels’ by Robbie Williams.

Demons

I hear your pain
Do the fear and grief drive you insane?
And do you know
The lengths to which I’ll go
To get your tale told?
But my heart’s not cold
I’m just selling things that can be sold
So when I hear that you’re in dread
Your hope has all but fled
All those desperate things you’ve said
I’m feeding demons instead

[Chorus]
And through it all I offer a great story
All heartbreaking and gory
Whether I’m right or wrong
And down the mobile phone
Wherever it may take me
I know how much you’ll make me
When you try to call
You won’t escape me
I’m feeding demons instead

When you’re feeling grief
And you’re yearning for some dear relief
I’ll be right here
And you know I’ll always give you my ear
And as the story grows
I’ll rake over the bones
And when love is dead
I’ll see the demons are fed

[Chorus]
And through it all I offer a great story
All heartbreaking and gory
Whether I’m right or wrong
And down the mobile phone
Wherever it may take me
I know how much you’ll make me
When you try to call
You won’t escape me
I’m feeding demons instead

Brothers in arms

2011-07-01T08:05:00.002+01:00

The origins of the First World War is a classic history exam question. One issue that comes into many answers is the web of allegiances and rivalries among the interrelated royal families of Europe.

The Independent’s picture editors have taken the occasion of this book review to reveal the real family dispute that explains the War:

Oops.

Banks, but no banks

2011-06-23T13:10:00.001+01:00

I quite like the idea of giving everyone shares in Lloyds and RBS, because there is a nice neatness (almost a sense of closure) to the concept of us getting something back from the banks we saved. But at the same time I think it’s an unworkable stinker – quite apart from the issue of whether it wouldn’t be better for the government to sell the shares normally and use the proceeds to cut public borrowing.

Mr Clegg said that it was “psychologically immensely important” for people to be given a stake in the banks … to turn RBS and Lloyds Banking Group into “people’s banks”. … “The idea is that people could buy or sell shares over time.” … Mr Clegg said the proposal would create an army of private shareholders that could hold some of the big banks to account, replacing institutional investors who had done too little to curb boardroom excess.

I see his point. But I don’t think it’ll work. He’s reckoning that people will think:

Ooh, shares in a couple of banks that almost went catastrophically bust! That’ll definitely be a good investment, I’ll hang onto those for the long term and certainly not sell them immediately.
And I’m sure everyone else won’t be selling them immediately either, because that would (a) depress the price of the shares, limiting the benefit that people would get and hitting public confidence in the whole exercise, and (b) quickly concentrate ownership of the banks back in the hands of large institutions.
What’s more, now that I own 0.0000018% of RBS and 0.0000009% of Lloyds, I can use my spare time to become an active shareholder and contribute to how these banks are run. It’ll be like the Big Society meets the minutiae of financial corporate governance – I can’t wait!

I suppose it’s possible, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Fraternité

2011-06-13T08:16:00.001+01:00

Last year I thought David Miliband would be a more capable Labour leader than Ed; I still do. But I worry about the idea of (somehow) replacing the one with the other.

The main thing most people know about Ed is that he beat his brother to get the job – and they think that’s a bit odd, and maybe a bit suspicious. That’s a pity. But for Labour to go on to dump Ed and install David would magnify this ‘dysfunctional family’ thing a thousandfold. And it could make the party look very short of talent. Speaking of which...

If there were another credible leader in the wings, the dynamic might be different, but I don’t see who that would be. So, for the time being, we’re stuck with Ed.

The timelessness of news values

2011-06-06T17:14:00.002+01:00

My colleague K, who is trawling through old newspapers for her dissertation, has just unearthed this report from the Daily Express in 1965:

Rhyme and reasoning

2011-05-27T09:11:00.000+01:00

~~I know! I can fob them off with some stuff I wrote somewhere else a couple of months ago!~~

Ahem. A while back, Jams O Donnell asked his blog readers for philosophy poems. Among the responses were a few from me.

First, a pair of limericks advocating and rejecting Descartes’s ‘real distinction’ between mind and body:

A skeptical Frenchman did find
He couldn’t deny his own mind,
But his brain he could doubt
So he therefore ruled out
That the two things were of the same kind.

But Lois thought Clark was a clot
While Superman surely was not;
So they differ, she’d claim,
And yet they’re the same –
So distinctness from thought can’t be got.

First-year undergrad stuff, to be sure, but that’s about all I can remember these days. And they’re bloody limericks, how much sophistication do you expect?

And then I tried a haiku based on David Hume’s view about the standards of evidence needed to establish that a miracle had really happened:

Water into wine
Or wine into witnesses:
Which would you swallow?

Raise rates to cut inflation? It may not be so simple

2011-05-26T08:17:00.003+01:00

Higher interest rates do, other things being equal, lead to lower inflation – but this effect takes time to work its way through the economy. What doesn’t take time is the rise in mortgage costs when rates go up. So, in the short term, a rate rise increases rather than lowers the cost of living as most people understand it.

The Bank of England’s target measure of inflation is the CPI. This differs from the previous target measure (up to 2003), the RPI-X, but both have in common that they don’t include mortgage interest payments. The RPI measure does include these (the X that RPI-X leaves out).

This table shows correlations between changes to the Bank’s base rate and changes in the three inflation measures:

(Data from the Bank and the ONS; going from January 1997, before which CPI figures are only estimates, to September 2008, after which we had the extraordinary bout of rate-slashing followed by two years and counting of no change.)

So rate rises are, in the short term, associated with barely lower CPI and RPI-X but substantially higher RPI. A 1 percentage point rise in the base rate over the course of up to a year is on average associated with a 0.7–0.9 point rise in RPI.

Of course, there are plenty of things that affect inflation on any measure – the pressures that might prompt a rate rise are likely to persist – so we have to be careful drawing conclusions about causation. But the difference between RPI and RPI-X is very telling. The two measures should be subject to the same pressures except for those to do with mortgage costs. So this comparison is a pretty good control, suggesting that the Bank’s rate rises cause a much bigger short-term rise in the RPI – and in mortgage-holders’ experienced cost of living – than they cause a reduction in the other components of overall inflation.

This means that if the current high inflation (on any measure) is only temporary, as is often suggested, then rate rises are not just an unnecessary response but a positively counterproductive one. If the inflationary pressures (from e.g. the VAT rise and higher energy costs) are going to drop out of the figures before too long, the only real danger is if these permanently raise people’s inflation expectations and fuel a wage-price spiral.

Given that, an extra jump in the RPI via higher mortgage costs would only add to the risk.

(On the other hand, if the inflationary pressures are likely to endure, then the longer-term disinflationary effects of higher rates may outweigh the short-term risk.)

VAT: the inflationary fiscal contraction

2011-05-18T08:18:00.000+01:00

Plenty of us are worried about George Osborne’s doctrine of ‘expansionary fiscal contraction’ – that as he cuts public spending and raises taxes, the economy will not weaken but strengthen.

His theory is that the financial markets will ease as the government borrows less, so that businesses and households will be able to borrow more cheaply and thus spend more, because the now perfectly healthy banks have oodles of spare money to lend and the last few years have absolutely not made any of us debt-averse. This will boost growth and certainly not store up any kind of trouble because rising private debt never leads to economic problems. What’s more, by laying off hundreds of thousands of its own workforce, the government will free up productive capacity and stop ‘crowding out’ our frustrated private sector, which has been desperate to hire more people but just can’t find anyone who’s unemployed.

Well, maybe. But I’m thinking about yesterday’s inflation figures. CPI is up to 4.5%, well above the 2% target, and it’s expected to go higher. As Duncan notes, without the effects of the VAT rise and other indirect taxes, inflation would be a more manageable 3%. Three-fifths of the above-target inflation is the government’s fault.

Pretty much all tax rises slow the economy down. Mostly, they also reduce inflation, as producers and retailers adapt to lower demand by cutting prices. But the government has discovered the ingenious double whammy of a tax hike that raises prices as well as hitting growth: an inflationary fiscal contraction. Both of these things are bad in themselves, but there are two further bad consequences.

First, the combination of them makes life very hard for the Bank of England. Inflation is way above target, but interest-rate rises – the tool for reducing inflation – are risky given the weakness of the economy. The theory was that loose monetary policy could offset ever-tighter fiscal policy, but with fiscal policy creating higher inflation, the Bank will probably have to put rates up sooner rather than later.

Second, state pensions and a number of benefits are linked to inflation. Putting up VAT is supposed to reduce the deficit, but the resultant higher inflation means that a fair amount of the money raised will just end up being paid out again: as a revenue-raiser, it’s inefficient. This will mean the deficit stays higher for longer – unless Osborne, who takes pride in refusing to budge from his Plan A, tightens further still.

Lucky us.

The last gasp of the Labour government

2011-05-14T08:50:00.002+01:00

From the IFS:

Crossing out and counting in

2011-05-03T08:04:00.000+01:00

As the dullest farce in British history crawls to a close, those of us still in the audience grow gloomily aware that we need to write its ending. This flat, tetchy, flimsy spectacle of a referendum campaign is going to have to have a winner. And what rotten, wooden characters to choose from, reciting lines so outrageous they almost threaten to rouse us from the torpor they send us into.

But I don’t know how to abstain. So I have to try to focus: Alternative Vote or First-Past-The-Post?

Throw off the pious fantasies of the ‘yes’ campaign – as if reshaping the ballot paper would make politicians more decent and diligent, as if we could fashion saints using origami. Cast aside the paranoid fallacies of the ‘no’ campaign – as if some people would get more votes than others, as if a vote counts for more when it’s forced to move downmarket than when it can stay with its first true love. Focus.

As you’d expect from a man of his political acumen, David Cameron cuts to the heart of the matter. He says he will vote against a system that is “a confusing mess of preferences, probabilities and permutations”. And so will I.

Under FPTP, you pick which candidate you like the most. Then you try to estimate whether they have a chance of winning, based on your calculations of how other people are going to vote (all the harder given the big boundary changes for 2015). If you assess that they’re unlikely to win, you have to decide whether it’s more important for you to register your support for them or to pick one plausible winner that you prefer to another such. You mentally compile a list of the candidates that you judge to have a fair probability of winning and decide how much you like or dislike each of them. Then you compare how strongly you feel about your favourite candidate with how strongly you feel about the difference between your most and least preferred of the serious contenders.

And then you distil all this down to one cross in one box. One cross, whether you’re wildly keen or glumly tolerant, whether this is your first choice or just the lesser of two evils.

Yes, AV is more complex than FPTP. That’s something it has in common with us: we are more complex than FPTP, and AV lets us show it without having to second-guess whether our favourite is in with a chance. Because AV is more sophisticated, it allows us to be sophisticated too; it doesn’t force us to feign a single, all-or-nothing partisan identity.

And I’m not just talking about political anoraks like me. Most voters don’t have an overwhelming party allegiance. A poll for the Institute for Public Policy Research finds that just 18% of people are strongly attached to one party; 60% of us have some sympathy for a number of parties.

But is AV too complex to understand? Well, the Aussies seem to manage. Londoners seem to manage with the preferential voting system for the mayor. The Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish seem to manage with the assorted proportional systems for their devolved bodies. And the 2010 British Election Study (cited by the IPPR) gave 13,000 people a mock AV ballot: of those who voted in it, more than 90% picked a second preference, over 80% picked a third and over 70% picked a fourth. It seems that most of us have the nous, as well as the range of opinions, to do this.

It’s true, AV will need more explaining than FPTP. But it’s not nearly as hard as people are being led to believe. Alas, the Electoral Commission’s official explanation is dry and abstract; my own effort was also a bit abstract, as well as being handicapped by its own words-of-one-syllable gimmick.

But I have seen one very good showcase for AV – a three-minute video of people picking where to go for a drink. It ingeniously uses ‘voting to make a choice’ as a metaphor for ‘voting to make a choice’. It applies AV and FPTP in an easy-to-understand context, and shows how AV can stop a minority from beating a majority who are divided by less than what unites them.

So I like the process. What about the results?

The concrete effects AV would have are hard to guess. The safest prediction seems to be: (some) more seats for the Lib Dems, making hung parliaments and thus coalition governments (some degree) more common.

I don’t think coalitions are good or bad per se. I’m no fan of the current one, but I don’t imagine I’d like a Tory majority any more. There’s a view, though, that the process of coalition-making is undemocratic. As Janet Daley puts it, “no political leader can be held to account for his pre-election commitments because they must all be up for grabs in the post-election horse-trading”.

The Lib Dem poll ratings disprove this. There’s a world of difference between political leaders feeling able to say ‘don’t blame me, it’s a necessary coalition compromise’ and voters accepting that.

What’s more, with parties competing for lower preferences as well as first ones, campaigns – and our whole political culture – are likely to become less absolutist. Without the dogma of the immaculate election, as the sanctity of the unsullied party ebbs, so the idea of coalition will become less alien. I don’t say this is good or bad, just that if AV does produce coalitions, it’ll do so by a process that gets us thinking in that direction anyway.

So I’m voting ‘yes’. While AV does cost us some clarity, a lot of that clarity is phoney or forced. AV lets us say more. It allows us to think a little more broadly, to do a little more than dump all our reproachful hopes at one person’s door. People who truly do love one party and hate the rest can carry on putting a ‘1’ and nothing else; people who see shades of grey can be as discerning as they please.

There’s a lot more that could be said about either system; I’ve just focused here on the points that keep leaping out to me. And there are plenty of failings in British democracy, both constitutionally and culturally, that a change of voting system won’t solve. But AV or FPTP is the choice we’ve got to make this week. So, however this ends, after the curtain falls and we shuffle back into the daylight, let’s not conclude that ‘reform is done’ or ‘reform is dead’. Let’s try to do politics better.

Jack Bauer, copyeditor

2011-04-08T09:09:00.002+01:00

If you share my sense of humour and fondness for grammar, you might like this what I wrote. (If you don’t, you probably won’t.)

Update 2/5: And here’s a topical second episode, revealing Jack’s role in bringing bin Laden to editorial justice.

AV and minor parties

2011-04-06T08:23:00.000+01:00

What would happen to minor parties under the Alternative Vote?

It’s well known that, under First-Past-The-Post, there are people who vote tactically: for a tolerable party that stands a decent chance of winning rather than for a favourite party that doesn’t. This means we can reasonably expect that parties placed low down the poll would get more first preferences under AV than they do votes under FPTP.

How many more votes would the small parties get under AV? This is impossible to quantify in advance, but one thing worth noting is that this question is the mirror of another: How many votes do minor parties currently lose to tactical voting?

Another fair assumption is that the current tactical switching (from a no-hoper to a serious contender) is likelier when one of the big parties is politically closer to the smaller party in question. Thus Green supporters may vote tactically for the Lib Dems (or, these days, perhaps more likely Labour) and UKIP supporters vote Conservative. The more extreme a smaller party is – in terms of distance from the larger parties – the less likely its supporters will be to find one of those larger parties a tolerable compromise.

And so, conversely, introducing AV would be likelier to boost those smaller parties that are closer to large ones, as the tactical voters instead follow their hearts with their first preferences.

This suggests that BNP supporters are currently less likely to vote tactically, and thus there would be fewer of them to switch to voting BNP under AV. One important caveat, though: this assumes that BNP supporters share the mainstream view of the party as being in a league of its own rather than part of the normal political spectrum. This may not be the case.

But so far this is all about votes. What about how smaller parties would do in terms of seats won?

This is even harder to tell. If there are massed ranks of people who’d like to back these parties but don’t, because they think their ranks aren’t all that massed, then AV could mean quite a big rise in these parties’ votes – in some cases, perhaps enough to put them into contention for winning a seat. In that case, if they can attract the lion’s share of second, third etc. preferences from other eliminated candidates, they can win the seat.

I suspect that in most seats, these two ifs would be too big. And again, parties perceived as more extreme would be less likely to pick up second etc. preferences.

So my reasoning is that minor parties would get more first preferences under AV than they get votes under FPTP (with those that are seen as very different from the bigger parties gaining the least). And my hunch is that this will translate into very few extra seats in parliament for them.

If so, this could actually promote disillusionment with the system. The gap between minor-party representation and actual minor-party support would shrink a bit, but the gap between minor-party representation and visible minor-party support would grow significantly. What’s more, the rise in visible support for minor parties may give their spokespeople greater moral authority given the larger share of the electorate they could claim to speak for.

Ouch

2011-04-04T19:10:00.001+01:00

This is one of the most damning opinion poll findings I’ve seen in a long while:

Love makes fools of us all

2011-04-01T14:39:00.001+01:00

Having shared the good news with my friends on Facebook this morning, I thought I’d announce it to the rest of the world:

It’s been a whirlwind romance. We met while stuck in a kettle at the protest last weekend. We were already quite emotional having heard Ed Miliband's uplifting speech, and one thing led to another...

Apparently she had been seeing some other guy, but “he’s just not classy like you are, Tom”. Ah, that’s my Kate. There’s something special about her. It’s as if she somehow embodies the entire nation’s dreariest hopes and dreams.

Labour ponders shooting itself in the other foot

2011-03-29T12:12:00.001+01:00

I’ve said it before, but reality unaccountably failed to bend to my will, so as it’s in the news again I’ll say it again.

Labour’s electoral college for choosing its leader means there can be a split result (party members voting one way but union members and/or MPs voting more strongly the other way), and a new leader can come to office facing jeers of ‘you’re the choice of the unions, your own party members didn’t want you’. This is what happened to Ed Miliband and it’s embarrassing.

Now there are moves afoot to give the wider public a say in leadership elections, by allowing them to register as supporters for free:

How registered supporters could be involved in leadership elections will not be detailed tomorrow, but [Peter] Hain said they could be given their own section in the electoral college of MPs, individual members and affiliates.

Please, no. The party should scrap the electoral college and have everyone’s vote going into the same pot. Otherwise the risk of embarrassment will grow.

Making a big show of reaching out to members of the public who are not normally into party politics is fine. But if they’re going to be given a say in party elections, it will risk looking terrible if they can then be outvoted.

Don’t put the party in a position where a future leader can come to office facing the even more embarrassing jeers of ‘you’re the choice of the party machine, the public didn’t want you’.

The Libyan aftermath: not in his name

2011-03-22T18:19:00.000Z

What follows is rather jumping the gun – and a lot more firepower besides – but it struck me as potentially significant, so here you go:

I do believe that David Cameron wants Libya to become safe, peaceful, stable, free and democratic, and he’s made a difficult decision sincerely in support of that. But I’m less sure about his deeper political position.

Before all this, his occasional speeches on foreign affairs had been notable for their implicit sneers at (a caricature of) Blair and Bush: “I am not a naive neocon who thinks you can drop democracy out of an aeroplane at 40,000 feet”.

His push for military action therefore struck many as a change of heart. But the same scepticism of foreign entanglements is still there. I was struck by one thing he said in the debate yesterday:

This is different from Iraq. This is not going into a country and knocking over its Government, and then owning and being responsible for everything that happens subsequently.

I find this unsavoury: it sounds as though the key point is not whether Libya goes to hell after the bombing is done but whether we (or, in practice, he) can avoid blame if it does.

Probably the greatest failing of the Iraq war was the negligent planning for post-Saddam. The result was bloody. One lesson you could take from that is that we should stay out of the Middle East; another lesson is that if we do go to war, we need to be very aware of the social, religious, ethnic and institutional background and think much more thoroughly about what follows any military action.

A third possible lesson, which might appeal to a consummate politician, is that when it’s hard to predict what will happen beyond the short term, you should take care to establish that people won’t say it’s your fault.

I hope we don’t get to find out who would be blamed for disaster.

Necessity is the mother of invention

2011-03-22T10:55:00.000Z

Resolution 1973 allows the use of “all necessary measures… excluding a foreign occupation force” to “protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack” and to “enforce compliance with the ban on flights”.

So, as David Cameron says, “the action has the full and unambiguous legal authority of the United Nations”.

The thing is (and never mind exactly how one defines “occupation” and “civilians”): who decides which measures do and don’t count as “necessary”? In practice, the governments taking those measures get to make those calls. One couldn’t rule on every possible path through the fog of war in advance, and there’ll be no UN tribunal at the end of it to assess every bomb dropped. So, in reality, “unambiguous legal authority” blurs into what the governments think they can make plausible. Bombing tanks outside Benghazi? Taking out air force bases? Destroying a government compound in Tripoli? Killing Gaddafi?

What is Cameron’s rationale in establishing what’s necessary? This:

Targets must be fully consistent with the UN Security Council resolution. We therefore choose our targets to stop attacks on civilians and to implement the no-fly zone, but we should not give a running commentary on targeting and I do not propose to say any more on the subject than that.

(And just look at this poor wretch of a Foreign Office minister getting Paxmanned [from about 27’00].)

There’s something of a Humpty Dumpty-ish “it means just what I choose it to mean” quality to this. While bombings and raids are ongoing, Cameron will often refuse to elaborate, implicitly demanding our trust. More broadly, he’ll come up with whatever justifications are needed to maintain a sense of legitimacy about this campaign. Every war leader does this.

International law is a morass of grey areas. In the end, the only authority that will matter to him is moral authority, as defined partly by him and partly by public opinion.

But I hope it works. I hope the cost in lives is minimal. I hope Gaddafi is deposed quickly; given the coverage of the amateurish-looking rebels, it appears that the likeliest way for that to happen is for the army leadership to turn against him. And I hope the successor regime is benevolent.

If I have to be on one side of the fence, then I’ll come down in favour: with no military intervention, Gaddafi would have finished crushing the rebellion and then redoubled his repression. As it is, some other series of events will happen. In the short term, things will be better (or less bad); in the long term, nobody knows. But I hope people smarter than me are thinking hard about it.

The weight of a vote and the strength of a preference

2011-03-16T16:18:00.000Z

“And for dessert, sir?” the waiter asked. I ummed and ah-ed and then said: “The chocolate cake, please.” “An excellent choice.”

Two minutes later he returned to tell me they’d run out. I looked at the menu a little longer, and picked the sticky toffee pudding. “Certainly, sir, another fine dish.” And he was right: in fact, their selection was generally pretty good all round.

Shortly, he came back, a little sheepish, to tell me the toffee had come unstuck. I pondered again. “Then I’ll take the crème brulée.”

Alas, it turned out that the blowtorch had blown a fuse. After he’d finished grovelling, I looked at what they did have left – hot fudge sundae or nettle tart – and found my decision very easy. So hot fudge sundae I had, and while it was no better than passable, I was deeply glad to have avoided the nettle.

Now, where was I? Oh yes: Danny Finkelstein [£] makes a number of sound points about the AV referendum campaign, including a sensible response to one common canard about AV (which he opposes):

I don't agree with the "no" campaigners that I am voting more than once. Everyone gets the same right to express their other preferences.

Quite right. But then he goes and spoils it all by saying:

But there is a serious - in my view, fatal - objection… The system gives my fourth preference the same weight as someone else's first preference. And it shouldn't.

Two things:

First of all, it’s a mistake to think that what matters most to a voter is the pick of their favourite. What about someone who thinks Labour is marginally better than the Greens, the Greens marginally better than the Lib Dems, the Lib Dems marginally better than the Tories and the Tories vastly better than the BNP? Here, the real passion, the strongest choice, only appears at the fourth preference. Just as I found in my badly stocked restaurant.

Under AV, picking a first preference is answering the question ‘Who do you like the most?’ Picking a second preference is answering the question ‘With your first choice unavailable, who do you like the most?’ And so on. I don’t see why the later questions should be less important and people’s answers accordingly less significant.

Secondly, under first-past-the-post, we already have people picking their second, third and lower preferences – it’s called tactical voting. Plenty of people have done it at one point or another. Under this system, you look at all the candidates, mentally rank them in order of preference, then pick the highest-ranked one who you think has a real chance of winning and write an ‘X’ next to their name.

And your second- or third- or fourth-preference vote will carry as much weight as my first-preference vote. So the putative unfairness Danny attributes to AV also exists under FPTP, albeit in a less obvious form. But I don’t think it’s unfair.

Unless we require voters to award each candidate marks out of 100 (and do it honestly, which of course is unenforceable), there is no way for a ballot paper to distinguish enthusiastic, overwhelming endorsement from grudging, borderline, best-of-a-bad-bunch acceptance.

I’ve got a little list

2011-03-14T08:15:00.000Z

Nick Clegg, September 2010:

Clegg feels he is "constantly being urged by commentators, by party activists" to "express identity by tearing strips off the Tories" and by brandishing "trophies of achievement to show the Liberal Democrats have secured this or that concession".
One of the big points he wants to make to his party is that "this temptation" ought to be resisted. "The moment we get drawn into that sort of dynamic, two things will happen. Firstly, it will actually make us seem more irrelevant than we are because it will perpetuate the idea that the point of being in the coalition for the Liberal Democrats is to have a little shopping list of achievements, the assumption being the rest of it is Conservative policy. The truth is much more radical than that. All the big judgments are genuinely jointly taken by David Cameron and myself. That's why I didn't want to have a department, that's why I'm a hop and a skip from his office."

Nick Clegg, March 2011:

Would a Government without Liberal Democrats have ended child detention? Got an extra ten billion out of the banks? Would it have held a referendum on the voting system? Or put up capital gains tax? Ordered an inquiry into torture? Brought in a pupil premium? Or replaced Control Orders? Would a Government without Liberal Democrats have cut taxes for the poorest?
I don’t think so.

I can’t see the Tories being happy with this.

Stroppy editing

2011-03-10T12:56:00.001Z

I reckon that what my psyche really needs is a bit more fragmentation. So I’ve started another blog, focusing on things I’ve come across in my work as a copyeditor/proofreader/general editorial dogsbody. All anonymised, to spare the blushes (and the sacking).

I like my work in theory, but in practice it often annoys me. Hence the title: The Stroppy Editor. It’s of niche interest, but it’s my niche, so there.

Political meanderings and intermittent silliness will continue here as usual. But posts like this and this and this will in future appear in the other place.

War and democracy

2011-03-10T08:17:00.001Z

A propos of Libya, Tony Benn, John Pilger and others write to the Guardian warning against any military action. One thing they say is:

The disaster in Iraq should have taught us that military intervention cannot hasten democracy.

For one thing, this seems an overgeneralisation from one example. West Germany post-1945 springs rather quickly to mind.

But more than that, one may agree that the Iraq war caused a disastrous loss of life and was utterly wrong while still doubting that the country would have made faster progress towards democracy if there had been no war.

War does not in itself bring democracy, but can – in some circumstances – remove obstacles to it.

Vegetables, rodents and the man responsible for a Mickey Mouse government

2011-03-09T08:18:00.002Z

Matthew d’Ancona says:

One of the great Spitting Image sketches portrayed Margaret Thatcher dining out with the Cabinet. “Steak, please,” she says. “How would you like it?” inquires the waiter. “Raw,” replies the Iron Lady. “And what about the vegetables?” he asks. “Oh,” she says, “they’ll have the same as me.”
One of Mrs Thatcher’s most cunning tactics was to distance herself from the government she led when it was under-performing. Routinely, she would refer to her own administration as “they” – signalling that her deeper loyalty lay with the electorate. Now, in a smoother, less combative fashion, David Cameron is borrowing this very technique.

And, a day later, Cameron pops up on the One Show. When asked about the “bit of a rodent problem at Number 10”, he joked:

Don’t talk about the Cabinet like that!

A couple of months back there was much chatter in and around Labour circles about whether using the phrase “Tory-led government” would make criticisms stick better than “coalition”. I joined in myself. On reflection, this was inane.

The government’s (and the Conservative party’s) strongest political asset, and the name that Labour needs to tar with all government failures, is David Cameron. Never mind Clegg: there are more votes and more seats that need to be won from the Tories and that will require knocking down their figurehead. He can’t be allowed to float above the day-to-day grind of governing, a hands-off national leader rather than a politician. Because whether he delegates or micromanages, he’s still in charge and he’s still responsible.

A long time ago in an office far, far away...

2011-03-07T12:48:00.001Z

I’ve staged a few more Lego Death Star office scenes. By making it a satire on working life, I’ve convinced myself that playing with toys is a legitimate pastime for a 34-year-old. Result!

I’m going to try to do one of these every Monday. I imagine they’ll be hit and miss, which is at least better than a stormtrooper’s shooting.

C what he means

2011-03-05T13:56:00.003Z

Damian (who, incidentally, made a point worth taking seriously about my AV explanation) has just tweeted this:

It’s not what you think it is.

(In that post, he asks: “Is the World ever going to grow the fuck up about sex?” I believe I’ve proved that the answer is no.)

No flies on Gaddafi

2011-03-02T19:22:00.001Z

One of the most troubling things about the situation in Libya is the proposal to make the country a ‘no-fly zone’. The sheer amount of pesticide required would surely bankrupt NATO, as well as causing severe harm to the environment and public health.

The Alternative Vote system explained in words of one syllable

2011-02-24T13:23:00.003Z

This isn’t an attempt to plug AV, nor to speculate on what would happen under it, but just to knock down the notion that it’s fiendishly complex.

(Update 26/4: I'm getting quite a bit of Google traffic to this post, which is nice, but I should say that this video featuring Dan Snow is a much better explanation of the difference between AV and FPTP. It's not neutral, but I'm sure you're smart enough to separate out the 'how it works' from the 'why it's good'.)

How to vote
Anne, Bob, Claire, Doug and Eve all want you to vote for them. So who do you like the most? Pick one (Bob, say) and put a ‘1’ next to their name: that’s your first choice. Then, pick which of the rest of them you’d like the most if Bob were out of the race (Eve, say) and put a ‘2’ next to their name. Then, pick which of the rest you’d like the most if Bob and Eve were out of the race – and so on.

You can go all the way and put ‘1’, ‘2’, ‘3’, ‘4’ and ‘5’ next to each name, or you can stop at the point where you don’t have a view on which of the rest is best. You can just put ‘1’ and leave at it that, if you don’t care for the rest of them at all. Then you’re done.

How to count the votes to see who wins
We put all the votes that mark Anne as the first choice in a pile. And then the ones for Bob and Claire and so on. If one of them has more than half the votes, they win.

If not, then the one placed last (say it’s Bob) gets knocked out and we move to round two. Round two, at root, asks: ‘Who do you like the most out of Anne, Claire, Doug and Eve?’

We look at all the votes from Bob’s pile to see who’s the next choice on each. If you marked Bob ‘1’ and left it at that, then you’ve said you have no view on the rest of them, so your vote gets put to the side. If you marked, say, Eve ‘2’, your vote goes on her pile. We move all the Bob votes that do have a ‘2’ marked to the piles for Anne, Claire, Doug or Eve. The votes these four had from round one still count this time, of course: those who cast them still have the same first choice in a race with no Bob.

And if one of them has more than half the votes, they win.

If not, we do the same thing: say Anne is last this time. She gets knocked out and for round three the votes in her pile get moved to Claire’s, Doug’s and Eve’s piles, as marked. And if one of these three has more than half the votes, they win. If not, we knock out the one placed last and go to round four, in the same way. When we get to the point where one of them has more than half the votes, they win. And that’s that.

(Number three in an extremely occasional series.)

Mass uprisings against hated regimes – they’re all the rage

2011-02-22T11:59:00.001Z

If I had anything of substance that half as clever as that pun to say about Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya and wherever else, I’d say it here. But there’s a limit to the number of countries on which I can quickly get myself up to the level of expertise needed for a pub conversation, let alone meaningful blogging. And that number is one, give or take.

I’ll just make the very general point that booting out a dictator isn’t the be-all and end-all of democratisation. If you can wring concessions out of him that seriously and permanently constrain his power, it may not be needed at all. And if he does go, what most matters for how the country then fares is the incentives faced by those (such as the Egyptian military) who find themselves in charge. Do they have greater motive to push for deeper constitutional reform or to consolidate their newfound power?

Are you smarter than David Cameron (thinks you are)?

2011-02-20T11:48:00.003Z

I’m still undecided about voting systems, but I am starting to think that the FPTP campaign (or, more accurately, the anti-AV campaign) is arguing in a marginally more annoying way than the AV campaign (or, more accurately, the anti-FPTP campaign). I’ll try not to let this bias me.

One thing FPTP certainly has going for it is that it’s simpler: simpler to vote and simpler to count. But I don’t think the difference is really all that big, and I’d treat this as a small factor that would only come into play if I couldn’t decide otherwise.

But David Cameron thinks AV is far too complicated to understand:

Here's a passage from a book detailing how the Alternative Vote system works:
"As the process continues the preferences allocated to the remaining candidates may not be the second choices of those electors whose first-choice candidates have been eliminated. It may be that after three candidates have been eliminated, say, when a fourth candidate is removed from the contest one of the electors who gave her first preference to him gave her second, third and fourth preferences to the three other candidates who have already been eliminated, so her fifth preference is then allocated to one of the remaining candidates."
Do you understand that? I didn't. And I've read it many times.

I understood it straight away. Now, Cameron has a first in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford, so unless he’s been in mental decline since his Bullingdon days, he really should be able to get it. Or, as I suspect, he gets it perfectly well and is just playing dumb because he thinks everyone else is.

That said, the passage is much, much longer than it needs to be. But that’s bad writing, not inherent complexity. Here’s my shorter version:

When a candidate is eliminated, each of their votes is allocated to that voter’s highest preference among the remaining candidates. Preferences for candidates that have already been eliminated are skipped over.

And you could cut the second sentence; it’s implicit in the first.

Here I stand; I can do no other

2011-02-19T17:16:00.000Z

Norm asks for a second opinion on the anthropic principle, in relation to our existence, the laws of physics and the ‘multiverse’. He seeks input from “someone who understands the science”. Well, that definitely isn’t me, but I think I do at least understand the logic (and I think Norm does too, really).

If life-supporting physics is extremely unlikely (and I make no claim about whether that’s so or whether it’s even knowable), then the fact that our universe has just that is, to say the least, curious. Possible explanations are: random chance; deliberate design; or a change of perspective that makes this unlikely situation less remarkable. (The other option is that the physical laws we actually have are in some way necessary – that is, to deny the antecedent.)

The first and second options are the sort of thing that scientists will only seriously settle on if they’ve exhausted all other possibilities, the first being no explanation at all and the second simply shifting the missing explanation back a stage and magnifying it in the process. The third route, which the multiverse hypothesis takes, say that if there is a vast multitude of physical universes, then there are bound to be some life-supporting ones. The fact that we’re in such a universe is no more surprising than the fact that fish are found in seas and not in deserts.

Of course, a multiverse would be quite a thing, and naturally the people from Occam’s Razors Ltd are hesitant to invest. But which is the more extravagant hypothesis: lots and lots and lots more physical stuff, or a creator?

(I don’t rule out other possibilities; I’m no more a scientist than Jennifer Aniston. And I’m also not saying that an atheistic desire to resist the design argument is motivating the idea: the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics gets us into that sort of territory.)

The idea that Norm rightly identifies as unreasonable is that “our physical laws might be explained ‘anthropically,’ meaning that they are as they are because if they were otherwise, no one would be around to notice them”. This of course is rubbish (and backwards causation at that).

All the anthropic principle can give us is the weaker, epistemic conclusion that any observed physical laws must be such as to enable the existence of lifeforms that can observe them. But that’s nothing special: it’s like saying that all instances of drunks recovering their dropped car keys take place under lamp-posts (because when the keys get dropped somewhere dark, they remain unfound).

Choosing how to choose

2011-02-17T08:19:00.000Z

I keep thinking I should write about the electoral reform referendum (assuming it happens), but I keep being beaten into despair by the fusillades of drivel being fired off in the media by pro- and anti-AV campaigners. It’s as if they’re competing to avoid my support.

If anybody can recommend some blogs/papers/articles on either side, making arguments that don’t pointlessly exaggerate, that haven’t been knocked down on factual or logical grounds a thousand times already, that don’t ramble on about irrelevancies, and that don’t amount to pleading for the advantage of someone’s favourite party, I’d be grateful. I’m genuinely undecided.

Or maybe I should just get it out of my system and fisk all the crap from both sides.

The love that dare not remember its name

2011-02-14T14:41:00.001Z

This may be the best notice I’ve ever seen posted on our office intranet:

Valentines flower delivery
Flowers have been delivered this morning to the post room with no addressee name on. The sender is "Paul from Lancashire". Please contact the Mail room if you know Paul from Lancashire.

The dark side of the workforce

2011-02-13T23:06:00.000Z

It was my birthday last week; you can see what silliness I got up to here.

All the latest ‘news’

2011-02-10T10:14:00.002Z

On reading the Independent’s report that the Daily Star is giving helpful coverage to the English Defence League, I went and had a look. It’s true. there’s nothing like an actual endorsement, but some fairly positive noises are being made.

But what I also noticed (apart from enough tat to make the Sun look sombre and classy) was the button the Star has at the bottom of its news stories:

One for The ‘Blog’ of ‘Unnecessary’ Quotation Marks, I think.

The bonfire of the charities

2011-02-08T08:05:00.001Z

Stories like this one are becoming familiar, even mundane:

The government's spending cuts are "destroying" volunteering and undermining its "big society" vision, the head of a leading charity has said.

But there will be more of them, and they’ll keep mattering, because they embody the central flaw of Cameronism.

In economics, the government believes in the notion of ‘crowding out’: if there’s less state, there’ll be more growth. But ‘the state’ and ‘the economy’ are not intrinsically rivals, fighting a zero-sum game: they interact in a variety of ways, positive and negative. Indeed, they blur into each other in so many places that while we can talk of them distinctly they shouldn’t be thought of as wholly separate entities. Labour warns that cutting the state too far, too fast will harm growth.

The same applies to ‘the state’ and ‘society’ (the latter per se is a sprawling, amorphous concept; I’m focusing here on the more formal institutions of ‘civil society’). Here, David Cameron has for years been flogging the crowding-out doctrine: if government does less, civil society can and will do more. But the two are very interdependent, often supportively so. Charities, membership organisations and other community bodies operate in an environment shaped by government policies as much as by social norms, and in turn the work they do weaves the social fabric that serves as a context for government action.

And of course a good deal of voluntary-sector funding comes from the state.

The recession means greater demands on many charities and fewer public donations for them to work with, so government money becomes all the more crucial. But of course the government’s cutting its support for charities. This does not look promising.

“But there’s the deficit,” they say. “We need to make cuts, and those, alas, are going to hurt.” Plenty of people may accept that – and perhaps even that the speed and scale of cuts George Osborne has chosen luckily happen to be exactly right. What doesn’t really wash, though, is to simultaneously play the ‘crowding out’ card and argue that less government money for the voluntary sector will strengthen it.

Civil society minister Nick Hurd says:

This is a government absolutely determined to try and help a sector that has become arguably too dependent on the state, to manage through a painful transition into a future where we see a lot of opportunity for it, not least in terms of delivering public services.

He nods to the pain (which is certain and looming), but puts most stress on the sunlit uplands. I think he truly believes in them, but they sound vague to me. The basic assumption is that the state is (on balance) a threat to civil society. If I’m right, this is also the fatal flaw: a government programme based on this assumption will falter and fail.

Piotr Brzenzinski says that “Labour has yet to come up with an alternative to the Big Society, or even a substantive critique of the idea.” But that, in the end, may not be the point. Labour won power on the promise of providing social justice and a strong economy. It lost power because too many people judged that it hadn’t, and because Cameron promised to succeed where Labour failed. Likewise, to defeat Cameron, it may be better not to argue that the general idea of a more plural and decentralised public realm is wrong but to explain why he’s mucking it up and how Labour would do it better.

Showing that government cuts lead to a bonfire of the charities may help to do this. Arguing that the state can help voluntary and community organisations to flourish may help to rehabilitate it in the public eye.

Another twit

2011-02-05T10:47:00.001Z

So, I’m on Twitter. I have been for ages, but I don’t do much political stuff there, so I’ve never really bothered to integrate it with the blog or cross-promote or multi-platform or whatever ghastly thing it’s called. It’s hard to say anything original or insightful in 140 characters, so it really suits me very well. I mostly use it as an outlet for puns, plus the odd bit of ranting.

Here are some free samples:

I just saw a group of fish swim up to a floating marker, thinking it might be food. School buoy error.
My architect asked me if I want a room where I can sit down and work quietly, but I’m not sure. So I’ve commissioned a study.
I love the new M Night Shyamalan film about a man trying to open a jar of pickles. There’s a great twist at the end.
Just saw a lorry carrying 30,000 newly printed copies of the Iliad drive into a lake. Epic fail.
A statistician walks into a bar chart.
My son has taken some photos of a dominatrix. What a young whippersnapper!

These are some of the better ones. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

If you want to follow me, then I suggest you either buy a van with blacked-out windows or look at @SnoozeInBrief. If you don’t want to follow me, my understanding is that that’s OK too.

Things real people don’t say about advertising

2011-02-04T15:42:00.001Z

I think you’ll find that this is very funny.

A cut-price stimulus

2011-02-03T09:39:00.000Z

On the state of economy, the Institute for Fiscal Studies says (among many other things):

High inflation… may constrain the Bank of England’s ability to provide further support to the economy in the event of another adverse shock to aggregate demand. … As a result, it may be wise for the government to have a contingency plan for ‘trimming the sails’, holding back on tax increases and/or delaying spending cuts to ensure that poor growth out-turns in the short run do not sink the longer-term fiscal consolidation plan.

But:

Given this risk to growth and these recent developments, the government could consider loosening its currently planned fiscal tightening for 2011–12. However, this would not necessarily pass through into higher demand in the economy if it merely causes monetary policy to become tighter than would otherwise have been the case. Essentially, the argument in favour of announcing a temporary fiscal loosening in the forthcoming Budget is weaker the more confident one is that it would result in tighter monetary policy.

They have a fair point. Almost anything you do with fiscal policy to support growth is also likely to stoke inflation (which in turn makes higher interest rates likely).

Almost.

Cutting VAT – or undoing last month’s rise – would reduce prices as well as helping growth.

William McGonagall and the GDP figures

2011-01-26T08:17:00.001Z

To describe William McGonagall as the worst poet in Scottish history is to insult the rest of the world by implication. His style was excruciatingly, hilariously terrible – and eminently spoofable, although it’s very hard to do a rip-off that’s as so-bad-it’s-good as the original. But I thought the new GDP figures (in time for Burns Night) gave a suitably momentous occasion for a poor tribute.

Lament for the Wintry Loss of Gross Domestic Product

Upon the birthday of one of the two giants of Caledonian verse
A startling signal came that the economy had taken a turn for the worse,
And fears of recession were raised once again,
For gross domestic product had fallen in the last quarter of two thousand and ten.

Having enjoyed twelve months of reasonable growth
Many had feared the pace might now drop towards that of a sloth.
But woe! It was announced that GDP had fallen by 0.5 per cent
And economists aghast were forced to wonder where the recovery went.

Some counselled that this was an early estimate and subject to revision,
Yet those charged with writing headlines treated such caution with derision;
And the myriad writers of web-logs wasted little or no time
In publicising their interpretations, typed out line by line.

Critics of the government decreed that it surely had blundered
By causing the destruction of one pound in every two hundred:
Its policies for the substantial reduction of public spending
Had doubtless contributed to the recovery’s untimely ending.
These cuts were mostly yet unleashed, it must be noted in the government’s defence;
Yet its portentous talk of them had doubtless ailed consumer confidence.

But surely none could wholly deny the Chancellor’s claim
That people heart-broken by the economic news should not apportion him all the blame
Because Nature had cast upon our fair land a most ferocious frost,
Which had exacted from many industries a severe cost
And accounted for some of the GDP that had been so tragically lost.

The month of December had brought weather most snowy and cold,
Causing discomfort and inconvenience to young and old
When winter’s chilling hand of our nation took hold;
There was more disruption to businesses than can easily be told
As workers were cruelly kept from travelling due to the extreme cold
And great depths of snow meant fewer of retailers’ wares could be sold.

Whatever the causes may be of this tragic decline in national wealth
Or the merits of proposals to restore industry to ruder health,
Naught but time shall deign to tell whether this truly is a double-dip
Or but a temporary financial eddy o’er which sails our troubled ship.

Sticks and stones and Tory-led coalitions

2011-01-24T22:44:00.002Z

Labour has executed a small, but smart bit of media handling:

Ed Miliband's office is writing to the BBC, ITV and Sky demanding they stop describing it as a coalition and instead use Labour's preferred description, a Tory-led government.

Everyone knows that the government is a coalition in which the Conservatives are the larger party and the Lib Dems the smaller party. To describe it as “the coalition government”, “the Conservative-led government” or indeed anything other than “the government” is to specifically draw people’s attention towards one aspect of it.

If the modifier is factually accurate, then that’s fine – as long as the context makes it reasonable to highlight that aspect. “Lib Dem backbenchers have been arguing for X, but the Conservative-led government is maintaining its policy of Y” – fine. “Despite tensions, the coalition government shows no sign of breaking up” – fine.

Otherwise, you’re making a political point. And unless you’re a news reporter who needs to present things neutrally, that’s fair game. Labour calculates, probably rightly, that “Tory-led” is likely to make some left-leaning Lib Dems less keen on the government. And the Tory and Lib Dem leaderships calculate, also probably rightly, that the word “coalition” makes them seem to be doing lovely things such as making sensible compromises, forming a consensus, putting aside partisanship for the greater good. But whatever effects this language has are probably marginal.

(I’d love to see an opinion poll testing the effect of the word “coalition”. For instance, ask half the sample “Do you think the government is acting in the whole country’s interests/understands the problems faced by people like you/whatever?” and ask the other half “Do you think the coalition government…”)

Now. Miliband’s people will not get the news media to start using “Tory-led” in standard reporting. But, as James Forsyth says, “I suspect that this whole row will rumble on for a while yet. It is tempting to dismiss the whole thing as absurd, as only of interest to a few journalists and spin doctors. But labels do matter.”

Yes. And while this spat is not going to achieve its nominal aim – as Krishnan Guru-Murthy says, “because of the associated controversy my own view is currently that I should avoid the phrase [‘Conservative-led’]”. But the effect is that “coalition” has now been outed as a politically loaded term. So we may well see less of it. Guru-Murthy again: “However the exclusive use of ‘coalition’ feels equally unfair and controversial”.

Sentencing policy

2011-01-24T09:41:00.000Z

I enjoyed Adam Haslett’s review of How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One by Stanley Fish. I’ve heard Fish’s name around but don’t know his work at all. The book looks pretty interesting.

I have few ambitions that I’m aware of, but one of them is to implement a forward-looking raft of proposals to action sustainable enhancements with respect to my capabilities in the area of impactful prose production in order to deliver on the objective of the progressive maximisation thereof.

A song and dance about Iraq

2011-01-21T13:27:00.000Z

Typo of the day:

Doing things with words

2011-01-21T08:21:00.000Z

I’m writing very little here these days, so to sort-of make up for that, here are two people writing about writing:

Cathy Relf reports on a debate between David Marsh and Simon Heffer, style guide supremos of the Guardian and Telegraph respectively.

Tim Radford has 25 tips for journalists (with a lot of them applicable to other types of writer).

A wake-up call

2011-01-11T12:23:00.001Z

I’m going to forgo an extended rant about Nick Clegg’s new name for his target voters, “Alarm Clock Britain” – the phrase is only marginally stupider than Miliband’s “squeezed middle”, Cameron’s “great ignored”, Blair’s “Mondeo man”, Hague’s “pebbledash people” or every dreary bugger’s “hard-working families”.

All I will say is that for many people, the alarm clock is the most feared and hated thing in life; Clegg is one of the few people who might be able to boost his popularity by associating himself with it.

Me, I’m hitting the snooze button.

First past the alternative postal vote

2011-01-09T10:22:00.002Z

The Independent on Sunday has asked ten “leading advertising agencies” to design billboard posters for the two sides of the AV referendum campaign. They’re all terrible, but this one from King and Tuke did at least make me smile:

Ten anorak points to the first person who can explain the unintended irony.

Happy Birthday, Mr Deputy Prime Minister…

2011-01-07T15:30:00.001Z

It's Nick Clegg’s birthday today! Cameron and Osborne have got him a cake, and he’s going to help them cut it.

(Ahem)

I said, he’s going to help them CUT - oh, never mind.

(You might retort that it’s Brown’s fault for having cooked an irresponsibly large amount of cake to start with, but I bet if he’d done that he’d have won a landslide.)

Control nudges: the big society fights terror

2011-01-06T09:28:00.000Z

David Cameron wants to ‘nudge’ us towards better behaviour rather than nanny us, and “has now established a ‘behavioural insight team’ in Downing St to look at ways of changing behaviours without increasing taxes or introducing penalties”.

He also wants to find a new way to stop people killing us all: “The control order system is imperfect. Everybody knows that. … It hasn't been a success. We need a proper replacement”.

Well, this is simple. Rather than those illiberal, statist control orders, we could introduce a system of modern, subtle control nudges – a counter-terrorism strategy fit for the big society.

For instance: terror suspects would be able to leave their homes, but rather than wearing electronic tags they’d wear iPods programmed to play UK Eurovision Song Contest entries on repeat while out of the house. They’d still be free to go and blow things up, but having to listen to this would be a powerful deterrent. In that event that they did still choose to proceed on their mission, this would admittedly be unlikely to change their minds about the merits of the British way of life. On the other hand, it would encourage them to set off their suicide bomb as soon as possible rather than waiting until they’d arrived at their intended target.

They would no longer have their telephones tapped, but in advance of each conversation with their co-conspirators they’d have to ring BT customer services to get their line specially connected for the call. While it’s true that BT customer services is the greatest contributor to violent radicalisation that the world has ever seen, the prospect of going through such an ordeal would daunt even the most dedicated jihadi.

Furthermore, terror suspects would no longer be subject to 28 days’ detention without charge. However, all bomb detonators (I presume there are specialist shops that sell them) would come with timers pre-set to 28 days. This would give those angry youngsters time to calm down and reflect on whether they really want to be doing this. It will also enable police to catch them in the act, as someone standing in a public place for four weeks, wearing a backpack and repeating “Allahu Akbar” while clutching a clock with a big red button on it, will be reasonably easy to spot.

The detonators would still be reprogrammable for shorter times – we mustn’t deny these people their rights, after all – but in order to do so, the aspirant bomber would have to interact with the Microsoft Office paperclip. A gentle, but surely unconquerable, last line of defence. Nudge, nudge.

The Campaign for Real Tea

2011-01-02T13:46:00.002Z

Christopher Hitchens has written a fine piece about one of the greatest cultural and geopolitical matters of our time: how to make a decent cup of tea (via Norm).

He covers sugar policy and milk tactics – and, while I think he’s a little too prescriptive on the former (personally I’m a sucrophile but I’m happy to be libertarian about this), he’s absolutely right that the only way to ensure you add the right amount of milk is to add it, i.e. after the tea.

And, as Norm rightly identifies, the most important issue is this:

ground [coffee] beans are heavier and denser [than tea leaves], and in any case many good coffees require water that is just fractionally off the boil. Whereas tea is a herb (or an herb if you insist) that has been thoroughly dried. In order for it to release its innate qualities, it requires to be infused. And an infusion, by definition, needs the water to be boiling when it hits the tea. Grasp only this, and you hold the root of the matter.

Hitchens bemoans how little this is known in the USA.

Tea, like modesty, irony and imperialism, is something that we Brits understand far better than Americans do (indeed, we have our imperialism to thank for our tea expertise). Perhaps the USA would benefit from the establishment of a Campaign for Real Tea, to promote this simple, vital but apparently not self-evident truth.

It sounds stupid? Well, yes, it does. But I think you’ll find it’d be the least stupid American political movement with ‘tea’ in its name.

That’s a yes, then

2011-01-02T12:07:00.001Z

The clever thing about breathalysers is that you don’t actually need to use them in order to find out whether people have been drinking:

In the early hours, staff tried to breathalyse a number of prisoners because they suspected they had been drinking.
When the prisoners refused to be breathalysed they became violent along with other prisoners and went on what we call a mutiny.

(Also, I do like that “what we call a mutiny” - very Nicholas Parsons.)

Miliband misses the point

2010-12-28T13:29:00.002Z

This is the wrong answer:

He [Ed Miliband] also wants to change Labour's culture by allowing the public a vote when the party chooses its leader. He plans to give 25 per cent of the votes to non-party members who register as Labour supporters. MPs, trade unionists and party members would also each have a quarter of the votes in Labour's electoral college. At present, MPs, union and party members each have a third of those votes.

The problem with an electoral college such as Labour’s is that it can give split results. We had one this year, allowing critics to say (correctly) that Miliband wasn’t wanted by the members of his own party. A little embarrassing.

The way to avoid this is to abolish the electoral college, not to increase the number of sections.

We could let MPs keep their special role in nominating candidates, but beyond that it would be better to have a single electorate of equals. We could do this by restricting the franchise to party members only; we could have party members plus union members who choose to pay an affiliation fee – but treated as a single bloc (perhaps by simply giving the union supporters standard party membership for their fee).

Or we could set up a register of party supporters, potentially a millions-strong section of the public, who would then vote for the leader. But please, let’s not make these people into a new category in the electoral college. That would just magnify the problem that embarrassed Ed Miliband.

Not only would it mean that the party membership could still have its verdict outweighed by that of union members (and/or MPs); it would also mean that the registered supporters, who had signed up to join a new era of mass democracy, could find their verdict outweighed by the other, smaller, established sections. The other parties would crow that the ‘old politics’ had triumphed, and the press would merrily sneer that the party machine had crushed the public voice.

And the new leader would start his or her job by having to explain why this didn’t really matter.

God is a Lib Dem

2010-12-24T10:13:00.000Z

Either that, or the Pope has been getting spin lessons from Nick Clegg:

God is always faithful to his promises, but he often surprises us in the way he fulfils them.

Uxbridge English Dictionary

2010-12-21T16:58:00.000Z

From time to time, I like to play Uxbridge English Dictionary. It’s a game from ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue’ (new series starts on Radio 4 next Monday), taking an educational look at our mother tongue.

English is a rich and varied language, but there’s often confusion between apparently similar terms. For example, a lot of people don’t know the difference between adverse and averse. But anyone who takes the trouble to look them up will discover that adverse means harmful or unfavourable, whereas averse is the less catchy bit between choruses.

But meanings are constantly changing, so here are some new definitions I’ve spotted recently:

Abominable – practice frowned upon by all but the most aggressive of matadors
Accomplish – one who aids and abets Sean Connery
Admin – contribute the least
Apollo – Roman god of chicken
Appearing – an iPhone app that pierces your ear while you talk on it
Balderdash – the rapid receding of a hairline
Canada – a snake in a tin
Category – an allegory about a cat (q.v. Allegory – a category of alley)
Cauterise – what I did just before she looked away with disdain
Cognac – to trick a long-haired Himalayan beast
Dysentery – what the seeds of dissent eventually grow into
Exist – person who is prejudiced against their former lovers
Hackney – IRA punishment before the invention of guns
Hammersmith – the legend of Mjöllnir, weapon of the mighty Thor
Laxity – a rural area
Lymph – mythical woodland seductress with a sore leg
Mailbag – scrotum
Phobia – not real ale
Polymath – if Janet has two parrots and John has three parrots…
Post-it – girl who was once fashionable, now of very little note (q.v. Exit – recently fashionable girl now on her way out)
Psychotic – nervous twitch that makes you stab people
Pumpkin – commit incest
Rampart – part of a ram
Rueful – a traffic jam in France
Seamstress – the consequence of an over-generous lunch
Transsubstantiation – providing evidence of one’s sex change
Treacle – deforestation
Unleavened – the condition of trees in autumn
Vagrant – taxi driver’s conversation
Watershed – outdoor water closet
Wednesday – ‘At what hour does the sun rise?’

Your turn...

I want to ban Christmas

2010-12-20T16:56:00.002Z

Are you one of those people who says things like: “Raaagh burble splutter NOW THEY WANT TO BAN CHRISTMAS it’s disgusting political correctness gone mad multicultural thought police our proud nation liberal elite great traditions militant atheists historic freedoms nanny state two world wars am I alone in thinking snort harrumph froth”?

If so, I always feel a bit sorry for you. My instinct is to tell you that the people who want to ban Christmas don’t really exist, but I fear that that might spoil the festive magic for you. In fact, I suspect many of you (the older ones) have secretly worked out that there is no Christmas Abolition Brigade, but you still like to play along because it makes it all so much more fun and magical.

Well, I have a gift for you. I hereby declare that I want to ban Christmas. And you can quote me on that.

I demand that laws be passed forbidding the use of the C-word and that this time of year be called ‘the holiday season’, ‘the festive period’, ‘Winterval’ or ‘Seculetide’. (I just made Seculetide up just now all by myself and I’m spankingly proud of it.)

I want carol singing to be replaced by readings from The Selfish Gene, I want nativity plays to be dumped in favour of re-enactments of the founding of the European Union, and I want shopping centres to be enlivened by children’s entertainers dressed not as Santa but as Harriet Harman. I will stop at nothing to achieve this.

OK, I don’t want any of this. This is a string of clumsy lies (apart from the ‘stop at nothing’ bit – I will indeed do nothing and then stop). But let’s face it: you people have no interest in truth. You just like to have a bugbear to shout about. And I hereby offer you my services.

Whenever anyone turns around to you and says: “Oh come off it, nobody really wants to ban Christmas,” you can smugly retort: “Ah, but that bloke off of the internet does, HE ADMITS IT! So you see, I’m not a loathsome bullshitter pandering to the paranoia of the ignorant, I’m a BRAVE CRUSADER FOR TRUTH AND OUR VERY WAY OF LIFE can I have some mince pies and a rabies shot now please?”

Merry Seculetide one and all!

(Come on, it’s clever wordplay: secular and yuletide, they both share a ‘ule’ syllable, so you can – oh, never mind.)

What’s in a name?

2010-12-19T12:01:00.000Z

I’m glad to see Ed Miliband doing this:

Miliband has banned the shadow cabinet from using the word "coalition" to describe the government because it sounds too moderate and reasonable, and fails to convey what he says is its true "ideological, rightwing agenda". …the Labour leader's director of policy, Greg Beales, says that from now on they must use the term "Conservative-led government"

And it’s only taken him three months since I suggested it:

What better way to suggest [the Lib Dems’] inability to tame the Tories than disregarding their existence? Refer to ‘the government’ or even just ‘the Tories’ – not ‘the ConDems’, which is cute but maybe a bit too pleased with itself, nor even ‘the coalition’, which sounds too much like ‘the consensus’, and who wants to be against that?

I am confident that he’s shaping up to be a better leader of the opposition than Iain Duncan Smith or even William Hague.

A poverty boom? Wait for the real expert

2010-12-17T07:58:00.002Z

The claims from the Institute for Fiscal Studies – that the government’s tax and spending plans will increase the number of people in poverty – are eye-catching and alarming. But as with all such superficially striking headlines, we should reserve judgement.

Within a day or two, we can expect an independent analysis of the merits of these claims to be issued by the non-partisan Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, headed by the independent academic Nick Clegg.

The ODPM proved at the time of the Budget and the Spending Review that it has the rigour, expertise and impartiality to provide reliable and honest assessments of the many politically motivated statements, produced by the IFS and other third-rate Marxist outfits, about the effects of government policy on poor people.

Offended? Ram it up your pimhole!

2010-12-15T08:03:00.000Z

This is very simply the most brilliant opinion poll I have ever come across. Anthony Wells and colleagues at YouGov surveyed people on whether they thought particular swearwords were acceptable to broadcast.

Included among the 20-30 words was the made-up ‘pimhole’, which comes from a 1990 Fry and Laurie sketch about them not being allowed to use proper swearwords.

And? 14% of people said pimhole should be allowed on telly at any time, 38% said it should only be used after the watershed, and 23% said it should be totally banned. 25% of people said they didn’t know.

Anthony speculates:

I expect the main reason was context. The question was all about bad language on television, and pimhole was included in a list of swearwords including some that are considered extremely offensive. It’s likely many respondents assumed that pimhole must, therefore, be a swearword.

Probably that’s some of it. I think it also illustrates the common desire simply to have an opinion, any opinion, as well as the fear of admitting ignorance. It also warns us that polls on things people don’t know about can produce useless answers.

But the point about context can be cast in a different light.

Whether the subject is cartoons of Mohammed or a spoof paedophilia documentary or radio presenters leaving rude answerphone messages or a TV talent show featuring skimpily clad performers, there are a lot of dubious claims of people being ‘offended’ by things in the public domain.

People’s fulminations about things that have caused them offence often seem to be based on what they think they’re expected to find offensive, rather than any genuine, independent judgement about how something makes them feel. This poll suggests that a good amount of any given spasm of public outrage is likely to be empty, bandwagon-jumping bluster.

Am I alone in being disgusted by this state of affairs???

Comparative media studies

2010-12-14T23:43:00.001Z

One story, two newspapers, two angles.

The Guardian: Poorest councils will face biggest cuts

The Telegraph: Cuts in council services to be deeper in wealthy areas as Coaltion diverts millions into poorer towns and cities

Hmm. It’s almost as if the two publications have some sort of inherent political bias. But that’s crazy talk.

Anyway, I want to make another point: when you see headlines like these, using comparative words (“biggest”, “deeper”), you have to ask yourself: relative to what? What’s the other side of the comparison?

The Guardian story explains:

The poorest councils face the biggest cuts next year … Eric Pickles, the communities secretary, today allocated a last-minute emergency £85m fund in an attempt to insulate the poorest areas from the worst cuts next year. But despite his efforts, deprived inner-city areas of London and large cities in the north are facing the most drastic reductions of up to 8.9% this year alone, with the shires and county councils relatively protected by their burgeoning council tax revenue.

And the Telegraph does too:

Ministers have been able to limit the cuts with a special “transition grant” to divert £99milion of central Government funding from richer to poorer areas over the next two years. The extra cash will mean that spending cuts in areas like Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Doncaster, South Tyneside and Hartlepool will be limited to 8.9 per cent in each of the next two years.
People living in more prosperous areas will see cuts almost as big. Residents in Woking in Surrey will see cuts of 7 per cent in each of the next two years, while residents in Tunbridge Wells will see cuts of 5.9 per cent.
While the cuts in urban areas are larger than those in wealthier parts, they would have been bigger if the transition fund had not been set up.

So the Guardian is right to claim that poorer areas are having bigger cuts than richer areas, and the Telegraph is also right to claim that richer areas are having bigger cuts than they would have had were it not for this transition grant. Which is the more important comparison is up to the reading public.

(Oh look, I’ve written a post nominally about the media that in the process manages to illustrate a way in which the government is shafting the poor. It’s almost as if I have some sort of inherent political bias.)

A palpable hit

2010-12-11T10:33:00.002Z

I may not be blogging properly right now, but other people are. Go and read this by Cathy Relf, on the media use of “hit by” to jazz up abstract noun phrases, because it’s right and because it’s well-written.

(I’m just very busy at work at the moment, and quite drained the rest of the time. It’s annual financial report season, and I’m struggling to prevent a small band of fanatical yet shambolic illiterates from sabotaging it. Yesterday’s only light relief came when I took a short break to proofread a Christmas menu that included “mice pies”.)

Tumbleweeding

2010-12-07T08:05:00.000Z

So, things have been getting pretty quiet here over the last couple of months. I’ve just not had a whole lot to say lately – or at least not a whole lot of time to think of things that are worth saying. Soon as that changes, I’ll let you know.

A party political broadcast on behalf of the Liberal Democrats

2010-12-01T12:23:00.002Z

Some time ago, I tried to persuade my party to support X rather than Y, but I failed, so I then went around saying that Y was right and that we would do it and I would definitely oppose X. Now I’ve agreed to do X.

I’m sorry about all that Y business, but things have changed, you see. There’s another party that likes X too and I’ve made a deal with them, and I’m sure my party and the public will understand that I couldn’t possibly break my word on that. Plus, of course, I’ve thought all along that X was right.

However, I realise that my party still supports Y and opposes X, and so just to make them happy, I’m thinking about not voting for X, even though I’m the individual who’s personally in charge of doing it. But I’ll still publicly support it, and certainly won’t vote against it, and will encourage my party colleagues not to vote against it either, so that we guarantee X happens even while making an incoherent gesture in the vague hope that someone might think it leaves our hands clean.

Thank you and goodnight.

In fairness, this sort of thing goes on in politics all the time. But it’s happening rather more publicly than usual at the moment.

Update: Chris has a good post on this.

Promissory notes

2010-11-21T13:09:00.001Z

Vince Cable’s brain may be starting to melt under the pressure:

Business Secretary Vince Cable has denied breaking promises on university tuition fees, insisting the Liberal Democrats' pre-election pledge to oppose any rise was not binding. …
Dr Cable said the Lib Dems "haven't betrayed anybody" and that the coalition agreement struck with the Tories was their only binding commitment.
"We didn't break a promise. We made a commitment in our manifesto, we didn't win the election. We then entered into a coalition agreement, and it's the coalition agreement that is binding upon us and which I'm trying to honour," he said.

First, the pledge that the Lib Dems proudly signed didn’t require them to “win the election”. It was: “I pledge to vote against any increase in fees in the next parliament and to pressure the government to introduce a fairer alternative.” Cable could have honoured this promise had he been the only Lib Dem MP in a parliament where the Tories had a majority of 200.

Second, the coalition agreement is no more “binding” than their manifesto. Neither is legally enforceable; both are political statements. What happens if either is broken? The Tories/voters respectively would/will have to decide, ad hoc, how they want to react. That’s all.

Third, given this, the statement that the coalition deal is more important than anything they had previously said to the public to win votes is not going to foster much trust in their reliability in the future.

Fourth, the coalition agreement doesn’t commit them to support raising fees. It says: “We will await Lord Browne’s final report into higher education funding, and will judge its proposals” based on several criteria, including “the impact on student debt”. Either they abandoned their anti-fees promise well after the coalition deal, or they contracted out this “judging its proposals” to the Tory part of the government, or they were just lying so they could back out of a promise they’d never really meant.

My dependency culture

2010-11-17T10:32:00.001Z

My name is Tom and I live a life of economic dependency.

I depend for my livelihood on all the strokes of luck – most obviously my parents’ dedication, a hefty amount of genetics and a good, free education – that gave me the qualities I have. More immediately, I depend on an economic system that values these qualities, so that there have (mostly) been job vacancies in the right place at the right time, with a level of pay that covers my needs and even my tastes.

On top of that, I’m willing to work to earn this pay; for this, I’ll take some personal credit (although plenty of people worse off than me have stronger work ethics). But apart from that, I’m responsible for none of the circumstances that allow me to convert my willingness into comfort.

My job, while mostly tedious and often frustrating, rarely places too much strain on me – and is occasionally rewarding. Now and then, if I do something particularly well, I might feel proud of what I’ve achieved. But a moment’s reflection tells me that the more pertinent feeling is gladness at a situation where I have the ability to achieve such things and the opportunity to use that ability (and to sell it for a decent price).

I’ll never be rich, but I’m still dazzlingly lucky. What separates me from all the people who’d like to work but can’t, or want decent work but can only find back-breaking, soul-destroying, minimum-wage drudgery, is sheer chance. They may be dependent on benefits to keep the wolf from the door; I’m dependent on the coincidence of supply and demand that happens to define my labour as valuable. The labour market may more or (often) less efficiently rate our merit as employees, but it isn’t a fair judge of our virtues as people.

Moral crusaders against ‘dependency’ need to remember this.

(This train of thought, if you can call it that, was set off by two good posts from Peter Ryley and Paul Sagar.)

Missing voters: one cheer for Clegg

2010-11-16T14:56:00.001Z

This is absolutely right:

Up to 3.5 million potential voters are to be targeted by the government as it seeks to ensure that the "missing millions" who fail to register are given a voice in elections, Nick Clegg will announce today. …
Clegg will say: "It is not good enough to simply ignore the millions who aren't registered, especially when you look more closely at where the problem is worst: among the young; among black and ethnic minority communities; in areas with high social deprivation."

Good. I hope it works.

My quibble is how this fits with the timing of the government’s boundary review, which seeks to cut 50 MPs and equalise constituency sizes. The review will take place before any voter registration push, and so the new constituency sizes will disregard these millions of people. The result will be to more deeply entrench an electoral system that under-represents “areas with high social deprivation”.

But it’s nice that Clegg now admits this.

Presenting an image

2010-11-16T12:39:00.001Z

In order to understand a political U-turn, you need to get answers to both of these questions:

Why have you taken the new position?
Why did you take the old position?

For instance, Nick Clegg on tuition fees has been trying to focus on the first question, allowing him to plead the necessity of tough decisions, while avoiding the second: the issue of whether his pre-election promises were idiotic or dishonest.

In the case of David Cameron’s very recent decision to put his personal photographer and film-maker on the public payroll, and his decision today to take them off it again, the only explanation we have so far is:

A source has told the BBC that Mr Cameron now accepts it "sent the wrong message" to employ them at a time of public sector job cuts.

From this we can see that the answer to both my questions above is: ‘To make me look good.’

Useless polls on the tuition fees protests

2010-11-14T18:16:00.002Z

This week has offered an excellent case study in what effect public protests – including small but prominent violence – have on public opinion. The Sunday Times YouGov polls this weekend and last asked about the government plans for tuition fees.

Unfortunately, the two polls used very differently worded questions, so the results are not comparable. A pity.

For what it’s worth, last weekend’s poll found 11% in favour of universities setting whatever fees they wanted, 26% in favour of the government policy of a £9,000 fee cap, and 50% in favour of a lower cap or no fees at all. It also found 51% in favour of and 32% against the government policy on repayments of student loans (raising the earnings threshold to £21,000 and having higher earners pay more interest).

This weekend’s poll, using very different wording to set the background, had a single question that covered both the increase in the fees cap and the raising of the repayment threshold; 35% supported this, 52% opposed it.

There’s not really anything we can conclude from that.

The new poll did ask about the protest, though:

Earlier this week there was a violent demonstration against the proposed rise in tuition fees, which included protesters invading and damaging the building containing the Conservative party's headquarters. How much sympathy do you have with the demonstration?
I sympathise both with the demonstration and the direct action against the Conservative party headquarters – 13% (inc. 20% of 18-24-year-olds)
I sympathise with the demonstration, but not the damage caused to the Conservative party headquarters – 52% (inc. 47% of 18-24s)
I do not sympathise with the demonstration, nor the damage caused – 32% (inc. 23% of 18-24s)

Do you think this week's demonstration against tuition fees and the violent scenes at Conservative party headquarters helped or damaged the protesters' cause?
Helped their cause – 11% (inc. 18% of 18-24s)
Damaged their cause – 69% (inc. 58% of 18-24s)

Neither of these, though, comes close to being a measure of how the protests actually changed public opinion – if at all.

And there was a standard question about whether you think the government “will be good or bad for people like you”. Before the protests, 29% of people said good and 48% said bad; after, 28% said good and 48% said bad. Basically, no change. But among 18-24-year-olds, last weekend 24% said good and 46% said bad, while this weekend 27% said good and 40% said bad. This suggests a swing towards the government among those likeliest to empathise with the protests, but breaking the poll down into age groups means you have much less reliable sample sizes (about 130 in each poll).

I don’t think this tells us anything. A wasted opportunity.

Why does the Milibaby not honour our brave troops?

2010-11-10T17:58:00.002Z

It's an outrage.

“An important diagnostic tool”

2010-11-09T10:58:00.001Z

Sometimes the stuff I have to edit for work is borderline incoherent, sometimes it’s full of painfully misjudged jargon and sometimes it barely even exists. This sort of thing can exasperate and entertain me in equal measure.

But the latest gem is none of these; it’s a simple yet massive failure of perspective:

In medicine, identifying changes in handwriting may provide an important diagnostic tool to monitor neurological disorders and motor function.
In the case of Lord Nelson, British Naval Officer, his handwriting changed dramatically after the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife (1797), when he lost his right arm.

Something new every day

2010-11-06T09:51:00.001Z

Guy Keleny’s superb Errors and Omissions column in the Independent has delighted me today, by giving me a piece of knowledge that makes sense of a little bit of the English language – and that immediately makes me wonder why I hadn’t already realised it.

Living things are categorised by kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species (‘keep playing church organs, for god’s sake’). Scientists normally use the last two of these to identify organisms: Homo sapiens, Panthera leo, Tyrannosaurus rex, Staphylococcus aureus and so on. The genus identifies the wider group and then the species narrows it down.

What Keleny reveals (in the process of making an entirely different point) is that the adjective for species is specific and that for genus is generic.

Obvious, really.

Government uneasy about allowing prisoners to vote

2010-11-02T14:56:00.001Z

A Conservative minister said:

Look, we’ve got these people locked up for the very good reason that they can’t be trusted to be responsible on their own. Fortunately, their collapsed poll ratings make it impossible for them to leave the coalition until they’ve served the full five-year sentence – so frankly, it’s the safest place for them.
Yes, we want to reform them into decent, law-abiding right-wingers, and we’re making good progress. But allowing them to have a say over the government’s policy direction before they’re properly rehabilitated would just mean they’d revert to their bad old ways.

Entente cordiale for now, but we may fall out later…

2010-11-02T12:52:00.001Z

Congratulations to David Cameron for his negotiating skills. I can’t help but feel we’ve got the better end of this deal:

The UK and France have signed treaties agreeing to military co-operation including testing of nuclear warheads. One centre will be set up in the UK to develop nuclear testing technology and another in France to carry it out.

Deficit metaphors: the state took a bullet

2010-10-31T13:15:00.003Z

What with the government trying to flog us the old ‘government budget as household finances’ metaphor, Liam wondered if anyone had any others.

I suggested we could think of the deficit as a metaphor: a powerful use of it can be stimulating and help to move things along, but if you stretch it to breaking point you’ll lose credibility and have to spend even longer getting back to where you started.

More seriously (and more partisan), here’s one that occurred to me this morning:

Unlike the Tories’ laissez-faire attitude, during this recession Labour decided the government should take a bullet to protect the economy. To prevent the worst of the harm to businesses and households, we let government borrowing take the strain.

Letting the deficit rise was the right thing to do. In normal times, this much borrowing would be a terrible idea, but a global financial crisis is not normal times. And it worked: unemployment and repossessions have not been nearly as bad as in previous recessions. The Tories, on the other hand, wanted us to gut the public sector at the same time as the private sector was taking hits, and they opposed the VAT cut that helped people struggling to make ends meet.

So the government took a bullet, and now we have to repair the harm to the public finances. There are two ways we can cope with this bullet-wound: cut off the injured limb and hobble on as best we can, or stop the bleeding and then take time to heal and grow back to strength. The first option is quick but brutal, causing irreparable damage. The second is less dramatic, but it allows us a fuller recovery.

Does this have potential? Maybe not – it’s a bit all-or-nothing – but I’ve been blogging so little lately I figured I owed you something.

I’ve also got a half-formed idea about the dangers of slamming on the brakes when your car’s skidding, even though it seems the instinctive thing to do – instead, you have to slow gradually and turn the wheel back steadily. Anyone’s welcome to develop that one, but I’m too clueless a driver to do it myself.

(The standard political metaphor for deficits is the ‘black hole’, the most destructive thing in the universe, swallowing anything that comes near it and becoming all the more powerful in the process. If it hadn’t been cheapened by overuse to describe any old gap in the public finances, then it would have been perfect for those warning of a catastrophic debt spiral.)

Words fail me

2010-10-28T09:46:00.001+01:00

I am ‘editing’ (turning gibberish into language) a graduate recruitment pack. The section that lists the qualities applicants should have is currently divided into subheads with sets of bullet-points underneath, and I’m supposed to turn each of these into a paragraph of flowing, meaningful, engaging prose. One of the sets looks like this:

Curiosity and Critical Thinking:
Critical thinking
Curiosity

I especially like that they’ve reversed the order to try to avoid the impression that they’ve just typed the same thing twice.

It’s going to be a long day.

Who says geeks can’t get dates?

2010-10-22T17:05:00.003+01:00

A couple of friends of mine have been involved in creating the Geek Calendar. They’ve put in loads of work, and luckily it’s really very good, so I can plug it without feeling embarrassed.

What is the Geek Calendar?
It’s what it says on the tin, not that it comes in a tin; that would be madness. It’s a 2011 wall calendar, featuring geeky pin-ups for every month – and it also includes December 2010 and January 2012, so you get extra geek value! (16.6 recurring % more months than a boring regular calendar, or 16.9863% more days.)

Did you say “geeky pin-ups”?
I sure did. These characters are some of the very best (and most photogenic) of British geekery: crusader against bad science Ben Goldacre; maths and science writer Simon Singh; actor and comedian Chris Addison; chess champion Sabrina Chevannes; physicist Brian Cox; former Lib Dem science cheerleader Evan Harris; comic book artist Sydney Padua; gadget obsessive Jonathan Ross… and many more!

Um, are they–
No, they’re fully dressed. Don’t be disgusting.

Well, it sounds fun anyway. So have they done this just for a laugh, or to make a bit of cash?
Neither! Geeks all take a solemn oath to use their powers only for good. And the good cause here is libel reform: all profits from sales of the Geek Calendar go to the Libel Reform Campaign. English libel law, as the calendar geeks explain, is notoriously restrictive, and risks undermining the principles of free speech that are particularly vital in debates on science and medicine.

This sounds like the best thing since the idea of using sliced bread as the benchmark of innovative brilliance. How much does it cost?
A mere £11.75. (But don’t forget those 62 bonus days: once you take those into account, the notional – seasonally adjusted? – price, for real-terms comparisons with unambitious 365-day calendars, would be just £10.04. Excellent value.)

A bargain indeed. And are you a geek yourself?
Of course not! I work for as a copy-editor for a medical research charity, I blog about politics, and I entertain myself with such down-to-earth blokeish pursuits as writing poetry about economic policy and reconstructing famous philosophical arguments in words of one syllable. I am therefore obviously a mainstream alpha male. But I have nothing against geeks: many of my best friends, etc. etc.

But doesn’t your blog have about 12 readers? If you’re doing the PR, that’s a bit feeble, isn’t it?
Oh, it’s not just me. This week the Geek Calendar has featured in the Telegraph, the Guardian, the Metro and elsewhere. They’re selling like hot cakes, albeit non-edible ones at room temperature made of paper and in calendar form.

So, to summarise, should I buy it now?
That’s a very good question. Yes, you should buy it now. Thank you.

Let Clegg join the Bullingdon Club

2010-10-22T10:32:00.003+01:00

I’ve finally worked out the dynamic at the top of the coalition.

Oxford’s notorious public-school drinking-and-mayhem Bullingdon Club, which counts David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson among its alumni, has a characteristically deranged initiation ritual.

Members will turn up at the new boy’s room in the middle of the night, force their way in, smash everything he owns to pieces – pictures, furniture, records, manifesto pledges, opinion poll ratings, backbench morale – and then storm out again, after roaring at him that he’s in.

This is what Osborne is currently doing to Nick Clegg.

It’s taking a while longer than the usual initiation, though. Clegg, like most new recruits to the Club, doesn’t particularly welcome the wreckage that’s forming around him as such, but on the other hand he’s thrilled to bits by what it means: the much bigger prize of a place in the ~~cabinet~~ Buller.

Now and again, though, one of the braying mob crushes something of sentimental value, and a pang of sadness and frustration runs through him. Like the Lib Dem commitment to helping the poor, for instance.

Back in the Budget in June, for instance, Osborne produced a graph that showed poor people came out best. A torrent of independent experts, led by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, promptly tore this claim to bits for its manifest shoddy falseness on multiple counts.

George didn’t care; that wasn’t the point. It was Nick who charged into the media, struggling to defend the indefensible, and he (and his party’s reputation) got a thorough kicking.

Now we have the spending review, and George has stuck another distributional chart in there, with most of the same inadequacies as the earlier one, and the IFS et al. have reacted in the same way, and once again it’s Nick who’s taking the hits.

Enough damage to the new boy. Dave, you need to call George off. Let Nick in, let him buy his fancy jacket and tails, and the three of you can get on with the serious business of smashing other things up.

Trained in the ways of the Dark Side

2010-10-21T10:47:00.000+01:00

Best. Fact. Ever.

When Christopher Reeve first got the part of Superman, he was tall and fairly athletic but not all that muscular. So he took an intensive training programme to bulk up, which was run for him by David Prowse – weightlifting champion, Green Cross Code Man… and the occupant of the Darth Vader suit.

One of the great movie clichés is the training montage. Wouldn’t you just love to see one of Darth Vader training Superman?

George Osborne: cheerleader for higher public spending

2010-10-20T13:15:00.003+01:00

I gather there’s some sort of spending thingy going on today. What better occasion for a stroll down memory lane?

Whenever you hear the Tories blame Labour for the cuts on the grounds that spending was too high before the recession, remember this, from 3 September 2007:

George Osborne today pledged to match Labour’s public spending plans for the next three years

In his Times article that day (which began by noting that “mortgage defaults in America have sent shock waves through financial markets in London”), Osborne proposed to “share the proceeds of economic growth between the funding our public services need and the competitive lower taxes our economy demands”. He mentioned the (then-smaller) deficit briefly, but didn’t mention anything about reducing it. He also smirked that Gordon Brown “has now been forced to adopt our approach to spending”.

If Labour is guilty of complacency about the economic good times, so are the Tories. If Brown is to blame for wanting higher public spending rather than ‘fixing the roof while the sun was shining’, so is Osborne. Like ERM membership, it was a misjudgement shared across the political mainstream. As he likes to say, they’re all in this together.

How not to get sperm

2010-10-18T23:15:00.004+01:00

(I’m experimenting with search engine optimisation in my headings)

I saw an ad on the Tube the other day and couldn’t help but notice this logo:

I would love to have been a fly on the wall when the ad agency managed to rationalise this to the client. But then, after my teenage sense of humour calmed down, I noticed the oddness of the rest of the ad:

This is an attempt to appeal to sperm donors, not to would-be mothers or couples wanting to conceive. Does the LSB really think that potential donors, who may be tempted to get some cash in hand in return for taking, er, something else in hand, want to be reminded that the consequences of this will be their biological kids running around out there?

This level of communicative incompetence makes me think that the logo was genuinely thought to be a good idea rather than something someone did for a dare. I fear that the ad campaign will come to nothing (sorry).

Cable, Clegg and the fine art of manifesto escapology

2010-10-16T12:20:00.002+01:00

I’ve already looked at why David Cameron feels that he’s entitled to abandon his election promises – despite the fact that the deficit is not turning out to be worse than predicted pre-election.*

The Lib Dem leadership has also, of course, been dropping its own commitments willy-nilly. Yes, part of this is to do with the necessity of coalition compromise, but not all of it is. Like Cameron, the party leaders in the Cabinet are subtly implying that the Lib Dem manifesto is something that it’s positively right for them to discard as they see fit.

Vince Cable (the one who’s allegedly a bit of a disgruntled lefty) offered a fine case study this week on tuition fees. On the subject of the pledge (“I pledge to vote against any increase in fees in the next parliament”), he told the Commons:

Like many Members, I wanted to ensure that my children's and my grandchildren's generations enjoyed that free system of university education. In an ideal world, that is what we would do, but we are not in an ideal world. We are in a world in which we have inherited a massive financial mess. We have come to terms with reality, and it is time that the right hon. Gentleman and his friends did the same.

Implication: Before the election, even though everyone knew full well about the big deficit, the Lib Dems were not in touch with reality; now, he, Clegg and the rest are having to shake off some of the party’s delusions so that they can run the country properly.

I signed that pledge with my colleagues, and I have explained the reasons why I did so. It was a stand from a commitment to try to keep universities free, which is what I enjoyed. I have explained, however, that in the current financial situation, which is truly appalling and which we inherited, all commitments and pledges will have to be re-examined from first principles.

Implication: And it’s not just fees. A lot of what his party said before the election was impractical rubbish, and he’ll have to bin a good amount of it.

The DUP’s Willie McCrea tried to challenge him on the ‘financial mess’ card, which he keeps playing as a fig leaf when disowning his party’s policies, and got an answer that in part was frank but refused to give any kind of explanation:

Is the Secretary of State telling the House that he did not understand that the United Kingdom was in dire financial straits when he signed the pledge five months ago?
Vince Cable: Of course we realised that the financial position of the country was serious. We must now make very difficult choices on the back of that, which I am sure is understood as well in Northern Ireland as it is everywhere else in the UK.

Implication: He fears that his party members did not understand the financial position (and politics forced him to play along with them); he, Clegg and other senior Lib Dems in government are U-turning not out of unexpected fiscal necessity but because they think their party was wrong – and perhaps they always did.

*Darling’s March Budget put the deficit at 11.8% of GDP in 2009/10, then 11.1, 8.5, 6.8, 5.3 and 4.0.
The OBR’s report in June put the deficit at 11.1% of GDP in 2009/10, then 10.5, 8.3, 6.6, 5.0 and 3.9. This was after the Greek crisis had supposedly made everything worse and before Osborne’s Budget had supposedly made everything better.

Mr Cameron, what a big society you have...

2010-10-10T11:52:00.001+01:00

Norm bemoans, as I have now and then, the term ‘big society’. But listening to this bit of Cameron’s speech, I stopped to think again:

So that great project in your community - go and lead it. That waste in government - go and find it. That new school in your neighbourhood - go and demand it. The beat meeting on your street - sign up. The neighbourhood group - join up. That business you always dreamt of - start up.

He sounded tired just saying this – imagine how we’ll feel after trying to find time to actually do it. Big? It’s bloody huge.

Cavalier Cameron: I’ll say what I like and then I’ll do as I see fit

2010-10-05T21:52:00.003+01:00

Does anyone else find this a disturbing attitude in a Prime Minister? From the Today programme [about 8’05 in]:

Jim Naughtie: What I’m suggesting is, perhaps, that if the chancellor says something in the run-up to the election campaign – “we will preserve child benefit” – quote, George Osborne – that is changeable...
David Cameron: I don’t think that is fair. Look, what we’re having to do as a government – and frankly, we’ve all made pledges about child benefit, ’cause we all like child benefit... We’ve all made these promises. But in government, you cannot afford to just put off difficult decisions, you have to go through them, and with child benefit we’ve made a difficult decision.

Does he think that being in coalition entitles him to abandon promises so breezily? Does he think that the problems with the public finances give him carte blanche to do anything? Maybe a bit, but I think it’s more that he finds this whole electoral politics business a dreary, distasteful chore that one has to go through in order to get hold of power; that promises and manifestos are vulgar trifles when what really matters is his freedom to exercise his own thoroughly sound judgement.

Out of the danger zone, into the...

2010-10-05T08:25:00.000+01:00

If I were David Cameron, I’d be careful about saying that Britain was “out of the danger zone”. It suggests that “Labour’s debt crisis” has now been averted, which rather implies that large, rapid spending cuts are now simply a matter of choice. The popularity of these cuts depends in part on maintaining an air of crisis.

What’s more, if Cameron and Osborne have taken us “out of the danger zone”, then any future economic difficulties would be an entirely new danger zone that they’d have taken us into.

Some employers are more unequal than others

2010-10-03T11:08:00.002+01:00

As John Rentoul and Sunder Katwala note, we’re inundated with party leaders who emote about the gap between rich and poor while having little to say about policies to address it.

Here’s a small suggestion: require organisations to publish, as part of their annual accounts, the ratio between the highest- and lowest-paid of their workforce.

This in itself wouldn’t force any changes in pay, but it would at least give us information about which employers produce the biggest inequalities. What’s more, those that like ‘nudge’ thinking may see this as something that could motivate change, if the media compile league tables and campaigners put moral pressure on employers to narrow their own pay gaps in light of social norms.

Perhaps as a second stage, once we’ve had some data to look at, government could offer tax breaks to those that have lower ratios. But let’s walk before we run.

And the lack of coercion may help such a policy’s political appeal: people may be concerned about massive pay inequalities but that doesn’t necessarily mean they want government-imposed salary caps. This policy would be a clear statement that the gap matters and that a rising tide really should lift all boats without any suggestion that the Chancellor should become every firm’s payroll manager. It’s not against success; it just want to encourage that success to be more widely shared. (If you like the kind of soundbites that only think-tank wonks can digest, you could call it ‘progressive aspirationalism’.)

It would also demonstrate that the biggest pay gaps by far are in the private and not the public sector.

There are plenty of practical questions about this policy, some of which have clearer answers than others. For instance:

Should all employers have to do it? I think smaller ones should be exempt from having to jump through the hoops. Individually, they have little social impact; collectively, there are so many of them that we’d be snowed under with numbers; and smaller organisations tend to have smaller gaps between top and bottom pay anyway.

Should bonuses be included? Yes, otherwise it’d be a way to play the system. Should benefits in kind be included? Likewise, yes.

Should the pay of external contractors be included? Yes, as many larger organisations outsource lower-paid functions like catering, cleaning and security, which artificially reduces their own direct payroll ratios.

How should we treat part-timers, people getting overtime pay, and people doing unpaid overtime?

Should we just look at the very best- and very worst-paid individuals or take, say, the top and bottom 5%?

Would it be worth breaking the ratio down into bottom-to-middle and middle-to-top as well?

Just thought I’d throw that out there…

Beeb says sorry for compulsive commentary

2010-09-30T13:35:00.001+01:00

The BBC has replied to my complaint about their presenters talking over the announcement of the Labour leadership vote, rendering it inaudible. The reply says:

This was a significant political event and our aim was to reflect that in our coverage by striking a balance between live coverage of the event itself while offering analysis of the developments of the day as they unfolded.  
However, complaints on this issue were forwarded to senior figures within the BBC Newsroom and BBC’s political team and they agree that on this occasion it was inappropriate to continue with the commentary and analysis whilst results were being read out. We would like to apologise for the interruption during the announcement. 

Better Eds than Red

2010-09-27T13:58:00.002+01:00

Given Ed Miliband’s need to shake off the silly ‘Red Ed’ tag, we at Freemania Rhyming Consultants have been hard at work brainstorming more voter-friendly yet equally catchy nicknames for the new leader:

Bed Ed - Nick Clegg first came to public notice by claiming to have slept with 30 women, and now he’s Deputy Prime Minister. We calculate that a revelation of 60 former lovers will therefore help to catapult Ed into the top job.
Bled Ed - To counter fears that Ed is too much of a softy, we will create the image of him as a tough street fighter who has suffered numerous horrific wounds but still keeps coming. Alternatively, this could reassure adherents of medieval medicine that Ed is free from noxious humours.
Bred Ed - David Cameron’s posh heritage has clearly impressed the voters, so promoting Ed as a toff with good breeding is bound to help (NB this may not help to distinguish him from David).
Dead Ed - Zombies, vampires and the like are increasingly common in popular culture. The implication that Ed may be such a denizen of the underworld could help with certain segments of the youth vote. We may need to target the use of this one quite narrowly.
Fed Ed - You can’t run the country on an empty stomach, so the public will need to be reassured that Ed has had a proper dinner in this age of austerity. This is a particular concern to address given that 37% of British mothers, on being shown a photo of Ed, believe him to be “a boy at my son’s school”.
Head Ed - Our personal favourite, conveying a simple but effective air of authority and leadership. Also a subtle dig at Ed Balls, which is always fun.
Lead Ed - Maggie had great success as the Iron Lady, and our Psephological Metallurgy Department’s research finds that lead is the substance swing voters most look for in a modern leader.
Shed Ed - Labour needs to demonstrate that it has shed its old Blairite/Brownite baggage, and also to appeal to men who like sheds.
Sped Ed - Very fitting, given Ed’s meteoric rise and the implied speed with which he seeks to transform his party and his country in years to come. (Why a rise is said to be meteoric when what meteors actually do is fall to Earth is a question we have referred to our Metaphor Aptness Department.)
Wed Ed - This is a possible future direction, should Ed and his partner Justine decide to rebut the Mail’s “living in sin” sneers by marrying. We’re currently looking into how David would perform in the electoral college Labour uses to select the leader’s best man.