Boiling blood and living wages

A guest post by Baroness Tyler.

The living standard is, I believe, perhaps the most pressing issue facing this country. Despite the recent and, of course, very welcome signs of economic recovery, real anxiety over the cost of living is the day-to-day reality of many British families, particularly people on low incomes.

The stark fact is that living standards have been stagnating for the past four years and households are spending an increased share of their incomes on ‘essentials’ such as food, fuel and housing.

The Which? Quarterly Consumer Report for October 2013 found that just 24% of people surveyed believed they were able to live comfortably on their earnings, and 52% in the lowest income group are still cutting back on essential spending.

The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission has done important work in bringing to our attention the growing problem of in-work poverty, and in highlighting more generally the changing face of British poverty.

It is now the case that two-thirds of our poor children live in households where at least one adult works, forcing us to abandon for good the long-held prejudice that poverty is the preserve of the work-shy.

I want to recognise that the coalition government has a genuine commitment to easing the burden on low and middle earners and acknowledge the very welcome measures already taken, particularly the raising of the tax-free allowance to £10,000, the freezing of council tax and fuel duty, expanded free childcare and increasing the state pension.

These efforts to ease the pressure on household budgets are laudable, but more needs to be done – and quickly – if we are to tackle the looming cost-of-living crisis.

In common with most people in this country, the ever-rising price of energy – way above the rise in wholesale prices – makes my blood boil. It simply feels as if we are being held to ransom for a basic essential of life.

The antics of the Big Six energy companies – which as far as I can tell seem to operate as a price-fixing cartel – tell me that privatisation has created an energy market that is simply not working in the public interest. Otherwise why would prices be going up so sharply when wholesale prices – by far the biggest element of costs – are relatively stable? Anything that could feasibly and realistically bring down prices – and quickly – deserves further investigation to test its workability and impact. I hope that this doesn’t simply turn into political football – the stakes are simply too high with the winter approaching.

I strongly support shifting some of the cost of green levies from individual energy bills to general taxation, which is more progressive in nature. In simple terms, it prevents the cost of vitally important energy efficiency measures, such as insulation and new boilers for households in fuel poverty, from falling disproportionately on poor households.

Money is tight, but if the choice is between doing something to reduce energy bills and introducing tax breaks for married couples, it’s the former that gets my vote and I suspect the same could be said for many up and down the country.

Turning to low pay, the Living Wage has a valuable role to play in the fight to raise living standards. Encouraging employers to pay a wage that allows workers to attain an acceptable standard of living without recourse to benefits is not just about fairness, it also makes sound economic sense.

According to figures from the Resolution Foundation, savings of up to £3.6bn could be made by the Treasury if employers paid the Living Wage, ending the current situation whereby tax credits to low earners are used to top up wages – effectively subsiding some employers who could afford to pay better wages.

It seems a much more empowering and liberal approach if people could maintain or improve their standard of life through earning their own money, rather than through complicated tax credits whose take-up rate is only around 65%.

There will be those who will argue that this will lead to a loss of jobs; similar concerns were raised when the National Minimum Wage was introduced and simply didn’t materialise.

We must also tackle the costs and availability of childcare. Lack of access to affordable and good quality childcare is preventing many women from returning to work following childbirth, denying their skills and potential tax take to the economy, and is proving a major squeeze on household budgets of those that do. Indeed, the Institute of Fiscal Studies has shown female employment to be the key driver for increased income among low to middle income families in the last 50 years.

However, the cost of additional hours of care above the free entitlement has been rising rapidly and squeezing the living standards of working parents. That is why I am so pleased that Liberal Democrat party policy is to extend the number of free childcare hours on a stepped basis. In addition, measures to provide more flexible childcare arrangements that recognise that not all parents work the standard 9-5 day would help better meet the needs of many.

The Crazy World of Jeremy Browne

Having lost his ministerial job in last week’s reshuffle, Jeremy Browne was interviewed in Friday’s Times (£) – and it’s not a pretty sight.

What’s that? You won’t pay to enter the Times’s firewall? Quite right, so a copy of the story is provided at the end of this blog post. There are also summaries of the Times’s story in the Guardian, on Liberal Democrat Voice and at Politics.co.uk.

The interview has fuelled speculation that Browne will eventually defect to the Tories, which his half-hearted denials do not entirely dispel.

Meanwhile in the Liberal Democrat blogosphere, Browne’s comments have earned a universal raspberry:

• Naomi Smith (co-chair of the Social Liberal Forum) responds at the Huffington Post, accusing Browne of posing “a false dichotomy when he says the Party must choose whether to be a party of protest or of Government”.
• In a must-read post, James Graham examines Browne’s behaviour in the context of the increasingly authoritarian drift of the Liberal Democrats’ right wing.
• The Fact Collector argues that, if Jeremy Browne were to defect to the Tories, then strangely enough everybody would gain.

What has earned all this hostility? There is much in both the content and tone of the interview that has caused offence, but the essential problem is Browne’s apparent inability to distinguish between government and party.

Controversially, Browne wants the Liberal Democrats to run on a coalition ticket rather than a Liberal Democrat ticket:

Mr Clegg told delegates in Glasgow last month that he “hadn’t said enough” about what “Britain would look like today if the Tories had been alone in Whitehall for the last three years”.

By contrast Mr Browne urges his party to take responsibility, and credit, for the Government’s “central pillars”, including reducing the deficit, curbing immigration and crime and education reforms.

Curbing immigration?!

But the Browne quotation that will doubtless attract the most criticism from within the Liberal Democrats is this:

Comparing his party to a shopping trolley that “left to its own devices defaults to the left and to being the party of protest”, he says that he became exposed after years of trying to exert “corrective pressure”.

“I saw my role, and continue to do so, as doing everything I can to accelerate the Lib Dems’ journey from a party of protest to a party of government.”

This ‘party of protest’ thing is a tired old trope, already worn out by Nick Clegg over the past year. It is simply untrue that the party had no interest in power before the 2010 general election. This falsehood is linked to the suggestion that anyone in the Liberal Democrats who is critical of the coalition government is necessarily against being in power at all. Strangely, both Browne and Clegg never seem able to cite any specific examples of these power-averse party members, which suggests such members are straw men.

Why, then, does Clegg retain support within the party but Browne has virtually none? The reason is not Browne’s views on economics, even though these are about as right wing as they come within the Liberal Democrats. It is because of Browne’s views on civil liberties.

If there is one thing that unites Liberals from left to right, it is support for civil liberties. Yet Browne seems to have a tin ear for this issue, so his move from the Foreign Office to the Home Office last year left him vulnerable.

His weakness on civil liberties was exposed at the end of July, when the Home Office sent advertising vans round several London boroughs advising illegal immigrants to turn themselves in. A few days later, it was revealed that the UK Borders Agency had been hanging out at Kensal Green tube station in London, randomly stopping non-white people supposedly in an effort to catch illegal immigrants.

Browne had not been consulted about these measures so could not be blamed for them. But once he had heard about them, he should have been quick off the mark. As Jonathan Calder and Caron Lindsay pointed out at the time, the silence was deafening. It is a poor state of affairs when Liberal Democrat ministers appear unconcerned that government officials are stopping citizens in the street at random and demanding to see their papers.

Browne’s ineffectiveness on such crucial Liberal issues is basically why he was fired and why no one in the party has come to his defence.

The Times’s interview with Browne will win him no new friends within the Liberal Democrats but simply confirm the perception of his semi-detached status. Disparaging one’s party having just been fired also makes Browne look churlish. But it is the association with authoritarian policies that has, in the end, proved fatal.


The report in The Times (Friday 18 October 2013):

And they’re off!

Nick Clegg has taken the unusual step of deciding to sum up in the debate on the economy motion at the Liberal Democrat conference in Glasgow next week, in which he will attempt to convince the party and country that the coalition’s economic policy has been a howling success and needs only minor tweaks. Or not as the case may be.

But who will draw the short straw of having to propose this nonsense? Liberator’s bookmakers suggest the following:

• Duncan Hames: 2-1. Wide-eyed young colt, keen to impress. But he is Clegg’s PPS, so may not get a choice.
• Stephen Gilbert: 6-1. Economic right-wing MP needing to raise his profile.
• Jo Swinson: 100-30. Heavily promoted by Clegg; Not renowned for substance and moving this motion will hardly help in that cause.
• Danny Alexander: 8-1. Do they actually want to win...?
• Mike Thornton: 4-1. Still glowing from the spotlight of being a Liberal Democrat who got elected in 2013, but low profile since.
• Lorely Burt: 8-1. Guaranteed to keep the sign language interpreters busy.
• Stephen Williams: 16-1. But he would love to do it.
• Shirley Williams: 20-1. Another abuse of her name in a motion would surely result in a suit for defamation of character by association with Clegg, after the debacle last year over the ‘Shirley Williams’ health motion.
• Paddy Ashdown: 3-1. Would even Ashdown approve of the tactic of facing down bloody-minded activists in a debate, with a party to enthuse ahead of a general election? A speech would be enough, though.
• Jeremy Browne: 12-1. Plausible after promoting Tory policies in the Home Office but, let’s face it, Jeremy Thorpe would be more likely to go down well at conference.
• Tim Farron: 25-1. Believes in divine intervention, and might just get his wish.
• A Leadership Programme Candidate Who Nobody Has Ever Heard Of: evens. Guaranteed to deliver any old rubbish he/she has been given with starry-eyed, uncritical zeal, exactly as trained to do in the programme.
• Floella Benjamin: 15-1. Guaranteed wholesome fun.
• Vince Cable: 1000-1.

Latest news:  A late entrant to the field - Steve Webb. 2-1. He thinks God made him do it. But he’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty minister.

Has Nick Clegg lost the plot?

The detention of David Miranda at Heathrow Airport has turned into a major news story, and rightly so.

The story has revealed dangerous levels of state power, as the Guardian’s editor Alan Rusbridger explains in an account of the assorted threats he received from “shadowy Whitehall figures”, culminating in a raid by GCHQ on his offices and the destruction of computer hard drives.

Also in the Guardian, columnist Simon Jenkins (who can hardly be dismissed as a dangerous lefty) explains how the term ‘terrorist’ is being applied loosely by the state to hoover up any person or data it wants, under the catch-all justification of the ‘war on terror’. Jenkins concludes, “It is simple harassment and intimidation”.

The question now for Liberal Democrats is why the reaction of their party has been muted, to put it mildly. After all, this is the sort of civil liberties issue that would normally unite the party from left to right.

On his blog, Mark Pack asks this very question. Mark bends over backwards to be fair but nevertheless finds the leadership’s muted response strange.

The likeliest explanation is that this non-response is all of a piece with the narrative Nick Clegg has constructed about being ‘grown up’ and his repeated (and unfounded) attacks on party members as allergic to power, which Alex Marsh analysed on his blog and I analysed here. After all, if civil liberties were considered a ‘grown up’ issue, Clegg would have been quick to take a stand. But if raising such concerns does not fit with Clegg’s tendentious definition of political maturity, then he will steer clear. We should not forget that Clegg is building up to a series of stage-managed confrontations with the membership at next month’s party conference, and events must be considered in this context.

If you find that analysis unconvincing, consider a report in today’s Independent, where the remarks of one anonymous ‘ally’ of Clegg are reported:

One said there were now some “totally irrational people” in the party who would not accept another coalition with the Tories under any circumstances.

The leader’s overriding consideration appears to be a desire to maintain a coalition with the Tories after the next general election. Abandoning the party’s traditional concerns for civil liberties can therefore be justified in terms of a muscular pragmatism. But maybe Clegg or Jeremy Browne could surprise everyone by remembering why our party exists, condemn the tactics of the police state, and prove me wrong?

In the meantime, Sarah Ludford MEP has just announced on Twitter (@SarahLudfordMEP) that she is gathering support for an emergency motion at September’s party conference.

Postscript: More on this topic from Jonathan Calder.

Ending the obsession with deficit reduction

Most politicians are economically illiterate, preferring homespun wisdom to intelligent macroeconomic analysis.

Thanks to Liberator Collective member Gareth Epps, who (via Mark Pack) spotted an article by Professor Simon Wren-Lewis on his blog mainly macro. Wren-Lewis explains why Nick Clegg’s economics motion at this September’s Liberal Democrat conference is wrong-headed. He summarises the motion as asserting that:

...the best thing that has happened to the UK economy recently has been that the deficit has come down. The message seems clear: reduction of the budget deficit is the number one priority and all else has to be subsumed to that.

Now you might in Clegg’s defense say that he has to put it this way, as he has been part of a government which has made deficit reduction the overriding priority. I think that is simply wrong. He could say instead that the focus on deficit reduction was appropriate given all the uncertainty as the Eurozone crisis broke. However now it is clear that this was a crisis specific to the Eurozone, and with interest rates on UK borrowing really low and likely to stay there, the UK can make reducing unemployment the priority, while still of course operating a prudent fiscal policy in the longer term. In other words, he could begin to de-prioritise deficit reduction. The fact that he chooses to do the complete opposite suggests he is content to see fiscal policy as an extension of household financial management. We will see in September whether the Party as a whole is happy to follow its leader in ignoring 80 years of macroeconomic analysis.

So the conference will be faced with a choice between Clegg’s Tory-lite folk wisdom or intelligent macroeconomic analysis. If ever there were a case for delivering a humiliating defeat to the leader, this is it.

Are Lib Dem ministers happy with a “wogs go home” message?

Yesterday came news of the government’s latest wheeze to reduce illegal immigration. The Home Office is planning to send large billboards round six London boroughs on the back of advertising vans, carrying the slogan “Go home or face arrest”.

For the full sordid details, read Caron Lindsay’s report on Liberal Democrat Voice, the report in last night’s London Evening Standard, and a statement issued by Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather, which is worth quoting in full:

This is the latest in a string of Home Office announcements that are designed to make the Government look tough on immigration. But I fear that the only impact this deeply divisive form of politics will have will be to create tension and mistrust towards anyone who looks and sounds foreign.

Instead of trying to grab cheap headlines, the Government would be much better advised to tackle the real issues that undermine confidence in the immigration system. Home Office statistics show that decision making by officials is extremely poor and leads to a quarter of initial decisions to refuse asylum being overturned on appeal. And many of those people who the Government are targeting with these policies are either those whose case has been mishandled by the Home Office, or who Ministers acknowledge cannot be sent home because they wouldn’t be safe.

Vulnerable individuals who are fleeing persecution and violence are treated with disbelief and a complete lack of compassion in a rigid and inhumane system. But rather than tackling these problems head on, Ministers are choosing to once more crank up the anti-migrant rhetoric.

These adverts are nothing less than straight forward intimidation and can only have bad consequences for communities like those I represent in Brent, where people from all faiths and races have mixed for decades. We will all be much poorer for it.

Well said, Sarah. The question is why there have been no similar utterances by any Liberal Democrat minister. After all, this is not merely some mildly unpleasant concession the Liberal Democrats have made as part and parcel of the coalition agreement. This is a fundamental issue of principle, where the Tories are indulging in blatantly racist and provocative tactics. It’s not even a practical policy; these billboards will have no impact on immigration but they will help increase racial tension. Any self-respecting Liberal should publicly disown this policy. Instead, not a word.

Might this be the explanation? In yesterday’s Guardian, John Harris noted how all the proud talk of Britain’s diversity we heard during last year’s London Olympics has been dropped by the government. He reported:

Ten days ago, the former Lib Dem education minster Sarah Teather broke cover, and talked not only about initial Tory intentions to restrict the bringing-in of non-European spouses to people earning £40,000 a year or more, but a new subcommittee of government called the Inter Ministerial Group on Migrants’ Access to Benefits and Public Services. No cabinet ministers attends its meetings, but it apparently includes such figures as the Lib Dem education minister David Laws and the Tory immigration minister Mark Harper, and its fingerprints are all over many of the proposals above.

What on earth is David Laws doing participating in such an exercise? Did he consult Liberal Democrat colleagues before agreeing to these racist policies? The man is a complete and utter disgrace to the party.

And why has Nick Clegg failed to respond to criticisms from within his party? In this instance, he would be well advised not to resort to his usual tactic, which is to patronise internal critics as naive children who don’t understand the practicalities of government. Party members already understand perfectly well what nasty game the Tories are playing – the question is, does Clegg?

Postscript: See Liberal Democrat Councillor Lester Holloway’s blog post: “Theresa May and her ministers and officials know full well the impact of this billboard will be on multicultural communities in general rather than the odd illegal immigrant who might be passing by. It reads like a message to the whole community, an attempt to divide communities and harvest the racist vote from UKIP.”

Politicians and pornography

In politics, appearing to do something is often more important than actually doing anything. This is especially so when tackling global phenomena over which individual governments have little or no control.

In an appropriate spirit of impotent rage, Prime Minister David Cameron announced today that the British government was going to do something about online pornography:

Most households in the UK will have pornography blocked by their internet provider unless they choose to receive it, David Cameron has announced.

Two other reports suggest that this policy is not all it’s cracked up to be. The first is the row between the government and the ISPs that preceded this announcement, which demonstrates that the government has simply not thought through the practicalities of its policy. The second is that the Daily Mail is claiming all the credit for this “crackdown on web filth” (despite the Mail’s hypocrisy, demonstrated by the links to various salacious stories down the right-hand column of its report).

But even if this policy were better conceived, it would still be doomed. Several years ago, Scott Adams (creator of the Dilbert strip cartoon) invited us to ponder the futility of such measures by asking us to imagine which was the more powerful force in the world: the combined brains of all the world’s greatest computer experts, or the combined libidos of all the world’s teenage boys.

How the ‘bedroom tax’ hits disabled people

What are disabled people cutting back on as a result of the ‘bedroom tax’?

Thanks to the Same Difference blog (via the Liberal Democrat Disability Association) for this very stark illustration:

More information is available from the Papworth Trust, which explains why the government’s Discretionary Housing Payments (DHPs) are not providing adequate compensation to disabled people.

Sarah Teather: the revolution starts here?

Last Saturday’s Guardian included a remarkable interview with Sarah Teather MP about the coalition government’s immigration policy.

The interview is remarkable because no Liberal Democrat MP, not even the usual suspects, has previously made such a trenchant public criticism of government policy. Moreover, Sarah Teather has never had a reputation as a radical but has generally been regarded as a loyalist (although she has been increasingly critical since losing her ministerial job last year). If such fierce criticisms are coming from such a normally moderate source, it makes you wonder how much more dissent is bubbling under the surface of the parliamentary party.

In the interview, Teather explains at some length why the government’s new immigration policy is unworkable, even if you accept its dubious objectives. But then she gets to the heart of the matter:

The idea that these policies will save money is “patently nonsense”, she argues, looking torn between dismay and incredulity. “So what are we trying to do? To drive down the total number of immigrants, irrespective of what’s good for Britain. Everything is about getting the net immigration numbers down. That’s what’s driving this, nothing else. Even though it’s obvious that a lot of these people are not a burden on the taxpayer.”

When the spousal visa proposal came before the home affairs cabinet committee, she reveals that Tory members strongly argued for the minimum income threshold to be £40,000. “That would put you in the top 15% of national income!” Part of the problem, she concedes, is the gulf between the life experience of her coalition colleagues, and the reality of the lives they are legislating for.

During discussions to increase the delay in benefits eligibility for the newly unemployed from three to seven days, “there was a general idea that people would have their redundancy payments to get them through”. She allows a dry chuckle. “I’m not sure that my constituents coming out of short-term, low-paid work are getting big redundancy packages.” But she doesn’t believe that ignorance born of privilege is the real problem. “No. I think it’s more nakedly political than that. It’s about short-term tactics – and I’m deeply uncomfortable with a type of politics that is deliberately using people who are already relatively vulnerable, as outsiders, as a tool to demonstrate how tough we are. I don’t like that type of politics.”

If the problem were merely Tory ignorance, she says that would be relatively easy to solve. “What alarms me is that the immigration proposals feel as if they’re hewn from the same rock as welfare earlier in the year, where a lot of that again was about setting up political dividing lines, and trying to create and define an enemy. It’s got to a stage where it’s almost unacceptable to say anything else, and it bothers me that there is a consensus among the three party leaders that they are all making, well not quite the same speech – there are differences, significant differences – but there’s a consensus. It’s stifling the rest of the debate, making people afraid to speak. If you get to a stage where there is no alternative voice, eventually democracy’s just going to break down.”

The coalition’s flagship benefit cap has nothing to do with getting people back to work, she maintains. “It’s populist. It’s a headline. Just look at the evidence. You’ve got first the overall universal benefit cap, then you’ve got a 1% welfare cap, and then you’ve got the big macro welfare cap. So they’ve found something, a message that works in polling, it’s called a benefit cap. And then they’ve invented policy around it three times.”

This government policy reveals two fundamental problems. First, the subordination of policy to short-term public relations objectives, where unworkable and unethical policies are pursued to mollify popular prejudices irrespective of the financial or human costs. And second, the competition between all three main party leaders to mollify the same set of popular prejudices.

And this reveals Nick Clegg’s main failing as Liberal Democrat party leader: his fallacious belief that most voters basically agree with one another, therefore that the party’s strategy should be to compete with the Conservatives and Labour for this imaginary ‘centre ground’.

But there is no such thing as the ‘centre ground’, no opinion that “most people think”, no mass in the middle you can mollify to win power. Yes, every poll result shows an average, but an average is not necessarily normal or typical. As Brian of Nazareth famously declared, “You’re all individuals!” Every Liberal should know that.

To understand why Clegg’s belief in the ‘centre ground’ is so utterly, catastrophically wrong, it is worth studying the Cultural Dynamics system of mapping of people’s different values. Basically, people divide into three broad categories: ‘Settler’, ‘Prospector’ and ‘Pioneer’, each sub-divided into four ‘values modes’, 12 in all. Take the test here to see where you fit.

The Liberal Democrat heartland is among ‘Pioneers’, and in good times expands into ‘Prospector’ territory. Support is negligible among ‘Settlers’, even when the party’s poll ratings are high. The voters who are nervous about immigration are concentrated in the ‘Settler’ group and never vote Liberal Democrat anyway, so why on earth does Clegg imagine he has to mollify such people when he has no chance whatever of winning their support? It can only be because he imagines that the electorate is essentially homogeneous, hence his repeated references to the ‘centre ground’. It cannot be overstated what a disastrous illusion that is. It explains why Clegg is alienating the party’s natural base while predictably failing to encroach on UKIP’s territory, hence Liberal Democrat poll ratings remain stuck at 10%.

Despite Sarah Teather’s warnings, the party will probably have to learn the hard way why Clegg’s ‘centre ground’ strategy is so disastrous. Even then, will there be enough party activists left after 2015 to rebuild support among ‘Pioneers’?

Postscript: In a blog post for the Centre for European Reform titled Don’t let England’s poujadists kill London’s golden goose, Simon Tilford argues why pandering to anti-immigrant sentiment is wrong. Since anti-immigrant sentiment is concentrated among older people who never vote Liberal Democrat anyway, the Liberal Democrats have nothing to lose by attacking their ignorance and bigotry.

What political genius thought of this?

Yes, let’s pick at some old scabs, shall we?

The New Statesman reports that Danny Alexander has confirmed the student loan book will be privatised. The report explains why this makes no economic sense.

What the New Statesman doesn’t say is that reopening the issue of student loans makes no political sense either. That issue has become a byword for mistrust of the Liberal Democrats. So why revive the controversy?

Oh yes, I forgot. Everybody who used to vote Liberal Democrat is a ‘protest voter’ who can be safely jettisoned in favour of hard-working-centre-ground-alarm-clock-Britain. I hope these imaginary voters will be impressed.

Back from the dead: the snoopers’ charter

We all thought the snoopers’ charter (aka the Communications Data Bill) was gone. We thought Nick Clegg had killed it off. We thought it was safely dead and buried.

But today, a loud creaking sound could be heard as two coffin lids opened. One coffin contained the Communications Data Bill. The other contained former Tory leader Michael Howard (who you may recall had “something of the night” about him). Besides Howard, various zombies from among the Labour Party’s former home secretaries also sprang into action, aided by the Liberal Democrats’ very own Alex Carlile, who seems to have gone over to the dark side.

The BBC reports:

Labour and the Conservatives could unite to push through the controversial communications bill despite Lib Dem objections, a former Tory leader says.

The reason Howard and other leading Tory and Labour politicians want to revive this bill – apart, of course, from rank populism and instinctive authoritarianism – is a knee-jerk reaction to the murder in Woolwich. It’s an example of “hard cases make bad law” if ever there was one.

In today’s Observer, Henry Porter explains why mass surveillance wouldn’t have saved Drummer Rigby:

Two former Labour home secretaries, a security minister and a former “independent” reviewer of terror laws have called for the swift review of the communications data bill, following the Woolwich killing. If I didn’t believe these were the first reactions to a shocking crime, I’d put the interventions of Jack Straw, Lord (John) Reid, Lord (Alan) West and Lord (Alex) Carlile down to cynical opportunism, because I’m afraid that is very much how it looked.

Give our guys the tools to fight terror on the streets, they say; “the proportionate tools”, eagerly adds the former reviewer of terror laws, Lord Carlile. But not one of them bothered to produce the smallest evidence that the type of surveillance proposed in the “snoopers’ charter” would have stopped the two suspects, Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale.

The simple flaw in their case is that both men were already known to MI5, which was aware of their associations and radicalisation. The agency, it’s claimed, may even have tried to recruit Adebolajo. If intelligence officers had thought it necessary, they possessed all the powers they needed to monitor the pair’s emails, texts, phone calls and internet use. Some 500,000 intercepts are already granted every year. So the idea that giving police and MI5 untrammelled access to the nation’s communications data would have provided vital information that would have averted Lee Rigby’s murder is almost certainly wrong.

Porter warns us about the role of the civil service in persistently reviving this bill:

...the forces advocating oppressive laws are never far from the surface. At the Home Office, there are still several senior civil servants, most notably Charles Farr, head of security and counterterrorism, who are committed to mass surveillance. Not just out of the belief that the public would be safer, one suspects, but because their personalities incline them to authoritarian solutions – obedience and control over personal freedom...

Sooner or later, another surveillance bill will appear, probably devised by Charles Farr, and almost certainly supported by [John] Reid and his nervy, authoritarian pals. If interceptions are to be upgraded to meet the challenges of developing communications, we have to be sure that they are compliant with a fully functioning democracy.

It could be worse. We could have had a Labour government:

In response to this terrible event, the government didn’t do too badly and we should be thankful that, for the moment, we are not facing another Labour attack on our freedom.

This is why I have never shared the view of some of my friends on the left of the Liberal Democrats that we and Labour are somehow together on the ‘progressive’ side of politics. The enthusiastic support for the snoopers’ charter shown by John Reid, Jack Straw and Alan Johnson should serve to remind Liberal Democrats with short memories just how illiberal New Labour was.

Postscript: An excellent piece by Fraser Nelson in the Spectator:

On Friday, I was thinking how lucky we are not to have Tony Blair anymore. Had he been still in power, there would be about 12 new laws being rammed through parliament by now.

How the case for austerity has crumbled

Make a pot of tea because you are about to read a long essay. It is a very good essay by Paul Krugman, explaining why the orthodoxy of austerity, adopted throughout Europe and North America in 2010, is profoundly wrong:

Three years after the turn to austerity, then, both the hopes and the fears of the austerians appear to have been misplaced. Austerity did not lead to a surge in confidence; deficits did not lead to crisis. But wasn’t the austerity movement grounded in serious economic research? Actually, it turned out that it wasn’t—the research the austerians cited was deeply flawed.

Krugman also takes apart the motivation of austerians and finds emotions rather than rationality; a flawed impulse to treat macroeconomics as if it were a morality play instead of a technical malfunction.

It is not as if we did not have the knowledge to prevent such misjudgements. But as Krugman concludes:

To the extent that policymakers and elite opinion in general have made use of economic analysis at all, they have, as the saying goes, done so the way a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination.

Fairer society? You must be joking

If Nick Clegg and other Liberal Democrat ministers want to salvage any credibility for their repeated claim that they are creating a “fairer society”, they should act over the scandal of Atos Healthcare, which has been accused of using unfair methods in assessing people for disability benefits.

The BBC has interviewed Greg Wood, a former Royal Navy doctor, who resigned from Atos earlier this month after working as an assessor for two-and-a-half years:

Dr Wood says he believes Atos assessors are not free to make truly independent recommendations.

He said he felt compelled to speak out because it was “embarrassing to be associated with this shambles”.

“It’s very unfair on the people making claims, they deserve a fair assessment and as a taxpayer I’m pretty cheesed off about the £100m plus that’s being sprayed away on this dog’s breakfast,” he said.

Of course, you might prefer to believe Atos’s denials. If Atos is right, we can expect it to take Dr Wood to court and win. If all we hear from Atos is more PR blather, this scandal will only undermine the coalition’s claims about ‘fairness’.

Why re-privatise East Coast?

Just what is the point of re-privatising the East Coast railway operator?

East Coast is the state-owned inter-city train operator on the main line from London King’s Cross to Yorkshire, the North East and Scotland. It is due to be re-privatised this month.

Along with the rest of British Rail, the service was originally privatised in 1996 but it had an unhappy history in private hands. The first private operator was Sea Containers trading as GNER, but it was stripped of the franchise in 2007 due to financial difficulties. The franchise was then awarded to National Express, which lost the franchise two years later when it refused further financial support to its National Express East Coast subsidiary.

The franchise was re-nationalised in 2009 under the East Coast banner. This was always intended as a temporary measure, so a return to the private sector comes as no surprise. That is not the issue.

As Rachel Graham points out at OurKingdom, the issue is that East Coast is outperforming other operators and providing far better value for money:

The coalition government re-iterated their intentions to re-privatise the East Coast mainline rail network this month. This despite a new report by the Office of Rail Regulation (ORR) showing the line as the most cost efficient. The Financial Times stated that the report proves the East Coast line is “the most efficiently run rail franchise in terms of its reliance on taxpayer funding”.

The ORR report shows the East Coast line required the lowest level of government funding as a percentage of total income, at just 1.2%, a mere 0.2% of the overall share.

The irony of Britain’s privatised railways is that they receive far more in government subsidy – both in real terms and as a percentage of overall income – than British Rail did before privatisation. And this higher subsidy is being provided despite growing passenger numbers.

It is unclear what concrete benefits privatisation of East Coast would bring. The burden on the taxpayer is unlikely to go down. There can be only two possible motives. One is a dogmatic belief in privatisation regardless of the consequences. The other is a scorched earth policy, a desperation to privatise East Coast before the Tories lose the next general election (similar to John Major’s original privatisation of the railways ahead of the 1997 election). These two motives are not mutually exclusive.

Private good, public bad?

For more than thirty years, we have been taught to believe that the private sector is automatically superior to the public sector. Another mythbuster by nef (the new economics foundation) demonstrates the falsehood of this dogma.

For Liberals, the point is the distribution of power and the human element. The private and public sectors can both be well or badly run. They are equally capable of remoteness, alienation, bad service, waste and incompetence.

As Britain’s experience with the railways demonstrates, privatisation is no guarantee that things will improve. Furthermore, when politicians repeatedly tell public sector workers such as teachers or nurses that they are rubbish, it hardly works wonders for the quality of public service.

Few push the dogma of nationalisation anymore. No one should push the dogma of privatisation either. The guiding principle should be to put people first, which is why social liberals prefer voluntary, mutual, cooperative and social enterprise models to private or state monoliths. As David Boyle points out on his blog today, we should be exploring ways to enable local communities to develop and run their local economies and local services, instead of pushing them into dependence on large organisations.

Transferring bus services from the National Bus Company to Stagecoach, or care homes from the council to a big private operator, fails to address that need. So there is no reason to believe that a private monopoly is somehow morally superior to a public one.

George Osborne believes in fairies

The coalition government’s harsh austerity policy isn’t working, for the reasons the Liberal Democrats predicted in their 2010 manifesto. Even the IMF has advised the government to rethink its strategy and spend more. So why is the government refusing to change course?

As Paul Krugman explains, it is because George Osborne still believes in the confidence fairy. And the arguments for the existence of this fairy are utterly implausible.

What is the reason for Osborne’s stubborn persistence with this nonsense? Superstition, muddle or callousness? You decide.

Yet another myth busted: “A competitive tax system is a better tax system”

You’ve heard the arguments: Having a ‘competitive’ tax system is a good thing for the UK. Trying to tax the wealthy and corporations just stifles economic performance and puts off investors. If business and wealthy people are taxed too much, they will desert Britain for countries with a more ‘competitive’ tax system.

Does this belief in a ‘competitive’ tax system have any evidential basis?

nef (the new economics foundation) has produced another of its useful mythbusters. The evidence shows what happens when you pursue a competitive’ tax policy:

• Only big, multinational companies can afford to shift operations to take advantage of different tax regimes, so that when governments lower business taxes, local businesses face unfair competition.

• A race to the bottom means that, as countries respond to one another’s policies, everyone ends up where they started, except more impoverished and with greater inequalities of wealth.

• There is no evidence that differences in the tax take have any impact on GDP growth.

• Genuine investors are not deterred by tax regimes. They are attracted by a good infrastructure, a healthy and educated workforce, and the rule of law – all of which rely on tax.

 Oh dear. Another of those tired old right-wing tropes bites the dust.

Another myth busted: ‘strivers v skivers’

nef (the new economics foundation) has produced another mythbuster, this time debunking fallacies about welfare expenditure.

Only 2.6% of Britain’s social expenditure is received by able-bodied unemployed people. And the situation is dynamic; these people are not permanently unemployed:

In reality, people slip between employment and unemployment, often within the space of a few months, as the economy relies increasingly on short-term, low pay, insecure contracts. This happens even more in areas where the economy is especially weak. In Teesside, one of the UK’s struggling economic regions, research has found that, for many people, ‘shuttling between benefits and jobs’ has become their predominant experience of working life.

People in full-time work but whose pay is too little to live on receive a much greater share of benefits:

A far greater proportion of social expenditure is spent on people in paid work, through working tax credits, than is spent on the fit and able-bodied unemployed. Last year expenditure on Income Support and Working Tax Credits amounted to £13.8bn, more than double the £4.9bn paid out to JSA [Job Seeker’s Allowance] claimants. Taking into account all the different benefits available, and distinguishing between different groups by their primary benefit, 20.8 per cent of the total benefits bill is spent on employed people on low incomes, while only 2.6 per cent is actually spent on the able-bodied unemployed.

For the first time ever, in-work poverty has overtaken workless poverty, with 6.1 million people in working households living in poverty. Instead of tackling the problem of low income, the government is subsidising employers offering poor quality employment through working tax credits. Taxpayers are picking up the bill by topping up wages so that paid workers can feed and house themselves and their families.

The ‘strivers v skivers’ argument suggests there are two distinct groups in society and tries to pit them against one another. In reality, this caricature is a complete myth, and certainly no serious basis for devising any reform.

Postscript: Some sense on this subject from Chris Dillow (with thanks to Nick Barlow for spotting it).

Britain isn’t ‘broke’

“Britain has maxed out its credit card. The level of debt is too high, and the cost of servicing that debt risks bankrupting the UK. We’re in real danger of heading the same way as Greece.”

Really?

The ‘maxed-out credit card’ metaphor is actually complete bollocks, and nef (the new economics foundation) has just published a handy mythbuster to expose this metaphor as both false and damaging.

‘Unease’ about Osborne is not good enough

“Lib Dems attack Osborne for ‘playing politics’ over Philpott” says the front-page headline in today’s Guardian.

But the story beneath does not justify the hype. What does this “Lib Dem attack” actually consist of? According to the Guardian:

A coalition rift was blown into the open when the Liberal Democrats condemned George Osborne for “playing politics” with the deaths of six children after the chancellor highlighted the Mick Philpott case to raise questions about high welfare payments.

Amid deep unease among senior Lib Dems – up to and including Nick Clegg – over the Conservatives’ use of the deaths of six children to make the case for controversial welfare reforms, the party went out of its way to distance itself from the chancellor’s remarks.

Danny Alexander, the Lib Dem chief secretary to the Treasury, who is usually careful not to criticise the chancellor, made clear his unease. “The Philpott case is an individual tragedy,” he said. “Children have died in that case. I think that is where we should let that case lie. I would not want to connect that to the much wider need to reform our welfare system.”

So this is not an attack, merely “deep unease”. Furthermore, only one Liberal Democrat minister (Danny Alexander) has gone on the record, and his remarks are guarded. The only evidence we have for the “deep unease” of other ministers “up to and including Nick Clegg” is unattributable briefings. This doesn’t much sound like “a coalition rift was blown into the open” or that “the party went out of its way to distance itself from the chancellor’s remarks”. In fact, it doesn’t amount to much at all.

The Guardian’s report includes only one genuine Liberal Democrat attack:

In the most hard hitting remarks by a Lib Dem, the party’s former Treasury spokesman accused the chancellor of playing politics with the deaths. Lord Oakeshott of Seagrove Bay said: “You can forgive George Osborne’s immaturity and inexperience as chancellor but not this calculating, callous cruelty. If he can’t see it is wrong to play politics with the death of six children, he is not fit to be chancellor.”

Oakeshott, who acts as an informal adviser to the business secretary Vince Cable, often does not reflect the thinking of the leadership. But Cable is understood to feel that vilifying people on benefits in the way Osborne has done is misplaced.

That’s more like it. Except that Oakeshott is not a member of the government but an outspoken backbench peer known for his off-message remarks. The only other prominent Liberal Democrat to condemn Osborne publicly is Sarah Teather – again, not a member of the government but an ex-minister.

Osborne’s statement is morally disgusting and has poisoned discourse on a controversial subject. Yet the best that Liberal Democrat ministers can do is express their “deep unease” or feelings that Osborne’s view is “misplaced”, and only then via their spokespeople’s unattributable briefings.

If Liberal Democrat ministers had openly expressed their revulsion in similar terms to Matthew Oakeshott, the Guardian’s headline would have been justified. As it is, we must conclude that there is no “rift” in the coalition, barely a ripple.