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.

The ignorance of the Great British Public

A poll has just been produced by Ipsos MORI for the Royal Statistical Society and King’s College London, which reveals a high level of ignorance among the British public about various social statistics.

But before you read the results and get too smug, take this test published by the Guardian to check your own level of knowledge. (I managed ten out of ten, but only by guessing on the basis of choosing the opposite of likely tabloid newspaper prejudices).

IPSOS Mori’s results reveal a shocking level of ignorance among the Great British Public:

• On average, the public thinks that teenage pregnancy is 25 times higher than official estimates.
• 58% of people do not believe that crime is falling, even though it has been falling for many years.
• 29% of people think we spend more on Jobseeker’s Allowance than pensions, when in fact we spend 15 times more on pensions.
• 26% of people think foreign aid is one of the top two or three items of government expenditure, when it actually comprised only 1.1% of expenditure (£7.9bn) in the 2011/12 financial year. More people select this as a top item of expenditure than pensions (which cost nearly ten times as much, £74bn) and education (£51.5bn).
• People estimate that 34 times more benefit money is claimed fraudulently than official estimates. On average, the public thinks that £24 out of every £100 spent on benefits is claimed fraudulently, compared with official estimates of 70p per £100.
• On average, the public thinks that 31% of the population are immigrants, when the official figure is 13%.

Since I am writing this blog and you are reading it, it is safe to assume we share membership of a minority with an interest in public policy issues. Most people do not share our level of interest and cannot reasonably be expected to have a detailed knowledge. So the issue here is not ‘ignorance’ so much as the fact that perceptions vary so wildly from reality, and that this variance distorts the political climate in which decisions are made.

The Guardian’s analysis reports that the Royal Statistical Society cites three main reasons for popular misconceptions:

1. Political spin – Politicians tend to twist numbers for their own ends rather than discussing statistics even-handedly.
2. Tabloid journalism – The researchers argue “the media has to try and genuinely illuminate issues, rather than use statistics to sensationalise”.
3. Data literacy – If statistics were taught differently in UK schools, the public would have a better ability to critically assess evidence for themselves.

Politicians’ dishonesty, sensationalist journalism, poor education or merely popular indifference? All play their part but the most important question appears in the least likely of sources.

Of all the daily newspapers, you might expect the Daily Express to defend popular prejudices most but, to be fair, the Express’s report is even-handed. It quotes Hetan Shah, executive director of the Royal Statistical Society, who poses the key question:

Our data poses real challenges for policymakers. How can you develop good policy when public perceptions can be so out of kilter with the evidence?

This question reveals the risk, or rather two risks; two (small ‘c’) conservative responses.

The populist response – which is more likely in an age of followership – is for politicians to adopt policies intended to mollify popular prejudices irrespective of the evidence, for example by demonising welfare recipients. But why must public policy genuflect to popular ignorance? Yes, we live in a democracy and government should reflect the will of the people, but that does not absolve politicians of respect for the truth or responsible leadership. If an opinion poll says that a majority believes that 2 + 2 = 5, it remains the duty of politicians to remind people that it equals 4. To do otherwise is to abdicate all responsibility. After all, it’s not as if rank populism has succeeded in raising popular respect for politicians.

The elitist response is expressed by Alex Massie in the Spectator. He seems to suggest that popular ignorance can justify ignoring the public and concentrating power still further. His message seems to be, “leave it to the grown-ups”:

The public mood matters – and measuring it is important – but when it comes to the detail of actual government policy the public is, generally speaking, clueless.

Massie adds:

...the next time you find yourself outraged by some politician’s witless stupidity you might pause to remember the clay with which they have to work. It’s not a pretty business.

No, it’s not a pretty business, but we seem to have forgotten what true political leadership entails. It is neither the craven populism of “give ’em what they want” nor is it Massie’s contemptuous elitism. It is about standing up for truth and justice, even at the risk of short-term unpopularity.

As everyone involved in politics knows to their cost, the age of deference has gone. The Great British Public has no fear of challenging any politician. But what poll-fixated politician would risk reciprocating by telling the Great British Public when they are talking demonstrable bollocks? Paradoxically, such brutal honesty might earn more popular respect. Challenging popular falsehoods treats the falsehood not the believer with contempt. Repeating popular fallacies to curry favour with the public treats the believer with contempt, and is why such rank populism has contributed to the decline in popular respect for politics and politicians.

When wrong arguments are used for the right cause

The cost of cleaning up Britain’s nuclear power stations is rising and likely to exceed £100bn, reports the Guardian.

The high cost of decommissioning has always struck me as the strongest argument against nuclear power. As costs continue to soar, this argument becomes even stronger. It stands in stark contrast to the claims made in the 1950s when Britain’s nuclear power programme began, when it was said that the electricity would be so cheap to produce that it wouldn’t be worth charging customers for it.

But the main argument you hear against nuclear power is that it is dangerous. This was an understandable sentiment after the accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, and remains so following the more recent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan, sparked by an earthquake and tsunami.

However, Britain’s nuclear power stations are generally safe and certainly cause a lot less environmental damage than power stations using fossil fuels. Modern designs of nuclear power stations are becoming safer. But arguing that people will grow two heads has more emotional resonance than the crippling long-term cost, so environmental campaigners eager for a sensational headline will opt for the sexier argument. Unfortunately, once the armies of mutant humans fail to materialise, the environmentalist cause looks weaker and the case against nuclear power is compromised.

It’s the same with genetically-modified organisms (GMOs). Opposition has focused on the risks of ‘Frankenfoods’, when in fact no evidence has been found that GM foods are dangerous to eat. Still, fear of toxic food is a more emotionally resonant argument than the economic and political one, which was made the other day by David Boyle:

The real question is the monopoly power that GM crops gives to a handful of global megacorps carving up the world’s food production between them... and the income they extract from it, and from the poorest subsistence farmers every time they plant seeds which they used to be allowed to save until the following year.

Again, when people fail to drop dead from eating GM foods, they will gradually accept them and the case against is weakened.

Why do environmentalists indulge in this ultimately counter-productive form of campaigning? The answer is that it raises money. Scare the bejesus out of people and the donations come rolling in.

Environmentalists might argue that they are operating in a world where everything is just surface or in a Daily Mail world where everything is a potential risk, and that their sensationalist public relations tactics therefore represent some sort of realpolitik. In fact, weakening your case in the long term for a tabloid headline in the short term deserves a different word of German origin, Faustian.

Pornography on Radio 4

Yesterday’s edition of the BBC Radio 4 programme Analysis examined the evidence for whether pornography is harmful.

The presenter Jo Fidgen began by describing her liberal dilemma:

I have a dilemma I’d like to resolve... I’m a feminist and a liberal. I’m troubled by degrading images of women but I’m unwilling to condemn private behaviour if it’s not causing serious and direct harm. So I’m looking for hard evidence about the effects of pornography that will persuade me to come down on one side or the other.

I don’t wish to get into that argument here. The programme was a calm, deliberative examination of the issue and the latest research, and you can listen to it online and make up your own mind.

The argument I do wish to get into is how you resolve such dilemmas, and in particular the importance of rationality.

I was struck by the arguments of one protagonist on the anti-pornography side, Professor Gail Dines. Fidgen introduced Dines by explaining that “she doesn’t feel constrained by the research from invoking cause and effect”. Dines argued that the anecdotes she heard were evidence enough, and that it isn’t worth bothering even to define pornography. She dismissed any research that didn’t meet her prejudices as “junk science” and rejected the need for further research, arguing that it is merely an excuse for inaction. For anyone employed as an academic, let alone a professor, these attitudes beggar belief.

Fidgen exposed the weakness of Dines’s case:

[Dines is] a feminist, first and foremost, and it’s that ideology that underpins her search for proof that pornography is bad for women. Now I’m a feminist too, but that strikes me as a risky approach because, if it can’t be proved in a way that would persuade a neutral observer, then she’s lost the argument. I wonder if her case mightn’t be stronger if she dropped her reliance on evidence and instead argued purely on the grounds that she disapproves of the depiction of women in pornography.

That was the approach taken by Professor Roger Scruton, who opposes pornography on moral grounds and thinks that any evidence, one way or the other, is beside the point. Although as Scruton admitted, subjective moral disgust is not a basis for legal bans.

But if you are going to argue from an evidential basis rather than a purely moral standpoint, the belief that feelings trump facts, emotion trumps reason or anecdotes trump research is simply not acceptable. It takes us back to a pre-enlightenment age when behaviour was governed by superstition.

We rightly criticise UKIP and Tory MPs like Peter Bone for their gut politics based on groundless beliefs. We should show no greater tolerance for this behaviour when it crops up on the ‘progressive’ side of politics.

Scientific proof that James Delingpole is an ignoramus

Did you have the misfortune to hear the appalling James Delingpole on this weekend’s Radio 4 Any Questions? As usual, he paraded his ignorance and prejudice about climate change.

As an antidote, do watch and, indeed, relish the forensic demolition of Delingpole by Sir Paul Nurse during a BBC2 Horizon documentary:



(This is just a short extract but you can watch the whole documentary ‘Science Under Attack’ here).

Delingpole later complained on his blog that this interview amounted to ‘intellectual rape’. No James, it’s simply that Sir Paul Nurse is President of the Royal Society and a Nobel Prize winning scientist, whereas you aren’t.

Busted: the greatest authoritarian myth of all

The Communications Data Bill would not have prevented last week’s murder in Woolwich. I know that. You know that. Even MI5 knows that.

But here’s another authoritarian myth busted: The greatest authoritarian myth of all – that Mussolini made the trains run on time. In fact he didn’t. Brian Cathcart explained why in the Independent in 1994:

Say what you like about Mussolini, he made the trains run on time. That was the famous last excuse for Fascism, conveying the idea that while dictatorship might not be very nice, at least it got things done.

It is an argument we may hear again following the election triumph of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and its allies, who include neo-Fascists. After all those years of chaotic politics and corruption, perhaps what the country needs is the smack of firm government. Mr Berlusconi, people may be tempted to say, could be just the man to instil punctuality in those recalcitrant Italian train drivers.

But did Mussolini really do it? Did Il Duce, in his 20 years of absolute power, really manage to make the railway service meet its timetable? The answer is no.

Like almost all the supposed achievements of Fascism, the timely trains are a myth, nurtured and propagated by a leader with a journalist’s flair for symbolism, verbal trickery and illusion.

Cathcart goes on to cite several eyewitness accounts of the unpunctuality of Italian trains in the 1930s. And we now know what a shambles Berlusconi turned out to be.

But why dredge up an article written in 1994 about events before the Second World War? It is because the article concludes with an important lesson:

Typically, [Mussolini] fell victim to his own propaganda. Mussolini’s biographer, Denis Mack Smith, points out that Italy usually imported its coal by sea, but after the Second World War broke out this was no longer possible and it had to come overland. The Duce’s railway system, however, was not up to the job.

“Only two of the nine railroads through the Alps had been provided with double tracks and their capacity was estimated as equal to little more than a quarter of Italy’s peacetime needs,” writes Mack Smith.

“As the trains running on time had become one of the accepted myths of Fascism, and as Mussolini had never charged anyone with the task of planning communications in the event of war, the matter had gone by default.”

Authoritarianism simply doesn’t work, and it’s the same whether the dictatorship is in politics or business (as Jonathan Calder explains here and here). Without the benefits of an open society, poor decision-making is never open to scrutiny or tested by criticism. That is because there is no tolerance for critical thinking and people are afraid to admit failure or suggest improvements. Hence bad decisions go unchallenged. Indeed, the spectacular failure of Fred Goodwin at RBS was largely the result of his dictatorial methods and the climate of fear he created.

Despite this, authoritarianism remains fashionable in certain quarters. In a period of uncertainty, there is a temptation to believe that the answer to all our ills is a “smack of firm government” – just look at the wistful hankering for a messianic leader that surfaced after Mrs Thatcher died. Meanwhile, the television shows The Apprentice and Dragons’ Den ignore the example of Fred Goodwin and continue to encourage the idea that management is basically about being macho and shouting at people.

In our age of impatience, instant gratification and shortened attention spans, it is harder to argue for such time-consuming processes as critical deliberation or rational problem solving. So politicians assert their authority through ill-thought-out ‘initiatives’. What matters is getting things done, without stopping to ask whether these things are any good. The difference nowadays is that, whereas Mussolini declaimed to huge crowds from a balcony, today’s managerialist politicians read out a press release in a branch of Morrisons.

Immigration: proof that The Sun is talking bollocks

Yesterday’s edition of The Sun claimed that foreigners would outnumber native British people in London by 2031.

Well, whaddya know? It turns out that The Sun’s claim is complete and utter bollocks. Full Fact has checked the facts and discovered a dubious form of statistical methodology:

(Abuse of research + absurd extrapolations =) bollocks + malevolence + dishonesty = complete bollocks.

Complete bollocks + desire to make money by feeding prejudices = complete and utter bollocks.

Europe: If only rational argument were enough

On the Left Foot Forward blog, Phillip Souta (director of Business for New Europe) demolishes many of the Eurosceptic myths surrounding the EU.

Souta warned that leaving the EU could jeopardise the 49 per cent of foreign direct investment stock in the UK that comes from other EU countries, as well incur significant import taxes for British goods entering the EU market. Souta also points out that the practical arrangements for life outside the EU simply haven’t been thought through.

All sound, rational arguments, which will give heart to pro-Europeans. The trouble is that most Eurosceptics aren’t moved by rational arguments one way or the other. Their hostility to the EU is essentially a gut reaction. And the EU isn’t even the focus of their ire, but merely a symbol of a deeper resentment of all that’s changed in the past fifty years and a desire to pull up the drawbridge.

Sadly, the Age of Enlightenment, despite having begun over 250 years ago, is still work in progress. Until that project is complete, pro-Europeans will need to develop an emotional appeal to complement their rational arguments. They won’t be able to win a referendum campaign unless they do.

Postscript: The need for a strong emotional case is reiterated by George Smid of Corby Liberal Democrats.

Nick Clegg’s dog-whistle politics

How often does it need saying? There is no need, repeat, no need for the Liberal Democrats to be spooked by UKIP or to appease xenophobic opinion.

UKIP is basically the Conservative Party’s problem. It is threatening the Tories’ right flank, giving Tory backbenchers the jitters and prompting the Tory leadership to react with rightward moves on various issues (as today’s Queen’s Speech demonstrates, with its emphasis on immigration and the dropping of policies on plain cigarette packaging and overseas aid).

UKIP is not the Liberal Democrats’ problem. There is no rational reason why the Liberal Democrats should move rightwards on immigration or Europe. If anything, the effect of UKIP on the Tories opens up a greater space for liberal opinion. The opportunity is there for the taking, to appeal to voters who don’t buy into the UKIP/Daily Express ‘drawbridge up’ agenda.

Nick Clegg obviously doesn’t see things that way. The Daily Express reports:

Speaking on BBC Breakfast, the Liberal Democrat leader said: “We need to be an open country in terms of welcoming people who want to make a contribution to the United Kingdom, but of course we should stamp out abuse.

“We need to stamp out levels of illegal immigration and of course we need to make sure that our public services and our benefits are not simply a free-for-all when of course there needs to be some relation to what you put in and what you get out.”

The idea that hordes of immigrants are coming to Britain to sponge off the welfare system is a complete myth. There is no “free-for-all”. It’s a non-problem. Despite this, Clegg seems to think that action to combat this imaginary threat is vital (and it’s a topic on which he has recent form).

Clegg continued:

“My advice to the Conservative party, if they’d listen to it, is don’t run after Ukip as it would just strengthen Ukip’s hand.”

In which case, why is Clegg ignoring his own advice and indulging in this unpleasant dog-whistle politics?

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.

Did the earth move for you?

You thought earthquakes were caused by natural geological forces, and the recent earthquake in Iran is no exception. How wrong could you be?

It turns out that when you have sex, the earth really does move. Or at least it does according to one senior Iranian cleric:

A senior Iranian cleric says women who wear revealing clothing and behave promiscuously are to blame for earthquakes.

He’s obviously not convinced by the theory of plate tectonics, then.

“Many women who do not dress modestly ... lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes,” Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi was quoted as saying by Iranian media.

If you live in an earthquake zone like Iran, it is wise to take precautions. What does this senior cleric advise? Improve building construction standards, perhaps?

“What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble?” Sedighi asked during a prayer sermon last week. “There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam’s moral codes.”

This superstitious nonsense does not entitle you to feel smug, not when children in Britain have died of measles because of the unfounded belief that the MMR jab causes autism, and not when there are shelves full of quack remedies on sale in Boots.

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).

Move along folks, nothing to see here

David Cameron won’t like it. The Daily Express won’t like it. But their favourite scare story will be a non-event.

It turns out that there will probably not be hordes of Bulgarians and Romanians descending on Britain on 1st January 2014 (when restrictions on the free movement of workers from Bulgaria and Romania will be entirely lifted across the European Union).

EurActiv reports:

A Foreign Office-commissioned report has directly challenged claims by UK Prime Minister David Cameron that Britain faces a massive wave of immigration from Bulgaria and Romania when labour restrictions applying to these countries are lifted next January.

The 60-page report [pdf] by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) says that Britain is unlikely to be the preferred destination for Bulgarians and Romanians when labour restrictions are lifted.

And those who do plan to come are unlikely to take advantage of the UK’s social security system, it adds in a direct rebuttal of arguments put forward by the UK Prime Minister.

So, panic over.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite the end of the story. The Daily Express refuses to have its fox shot. It dismisses the NIESR report as a “whitewash” and has found a red under the bed:

The NIESR, whose director is Left-leaning economist and well-known immigration enthusiast Jonathan Portes, unsurprisingly seems to talk down the potential downsides of this impending migration.

Not just reds, but “liberal intellectuals”:

Instead of being soothed by warm words from cabals of liberal intellectuals, ministers should wake up to a looming disaster.

Well, it’s a free country and you are free to choose who to believe: “intellectuals” who have conducted serious research and produced a detailed and reasoned report, or an anonymous third-rate hack employed by a “porn baron” to churn out ignorant, hateful, racist bile.

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.

Where is the evidence for evidence-based policy?

‘Evidence-based policy’ seems to be all the rage these days. And little wonder. Because it is actually fallacy-based policy that is all the rage.

Reactions to the Philpott manslaughter case are the most recent example. The tone was set by yesterday’s appalling Daily Mail front page. The airwaves have been full of Tory MPs – oblivious of the old adage ‘hard cases make bad law’ – claiming that the Philpott case is an argument for cutting back on welfare payments generally.

Nick Clegg’s immigration speech last week was informed primarily by a need to mollify popular irrational feelings about immigration.

The most notorious case was the MMR vaccine controversy, which led to a sharp drop in vaccination rates, resulting in several deaths. And as the news from Swansea shows, this 15-year-old groundless scare is a gift that keeps giving.

Fallacies are powerful. They are promoted by charlatans, whipped up by the tabloids, swallowed whole by a credulous and irrational public, and adopted by cynical politicians eager to follow rather than lead public opinion.

And these fallacies are not isolated cases. Their prevalence can be judged by the need for websites like Dr Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science blog, Channel 4 News’s FactCheck Blog, and the independent fact-checking organisation Full Fact.

There is a rational answer to all these fallacies: evidence-based policy. Never mind fallacies, prejudices and dogma; just ask the experts what the evidence says and – hey presto! – there’s your evidence-based policy. And why stop there? If there is one evidence-based answer to every political question, why bother with elected politicians? We could simply be governed by unelected technocrats.

There’s just one snag. Technocracy has no place for morals. Which is important, because politics is ultimately about making moral choices. Evidence-based policy can tell you “what works” but even that is problematic. As Alex Worsnip explains on Prospect magazine’s blog:

The notion of “what works” is amorphous and vague. One can only assess whether something is working against some kind of a standard for what a well-functioning society looks like; for what it is that you want to work and how. As an economist might put the point, you have to have a utility function to maximise; you can’t just maximise.

Is a society “working” if GDP rises steadily but citizens are drastically unequal? What about if people of different races and religions have different access to opportunities and goods? These questions are ineliminably moral, and must be answered in detail before we can have a useable notion of “what works.” The attempt to find some value-neutral standpoint from which to assess what works – the aspiration for an escape from ideology altogether – is an impossible one. Deciding how to weigh up different social benefits and harms is hard; it goes to the core of what we want our society to be like. But these questions are just made harder by reducing a vast swathe of distinct and often competing considerations to a single, sweeping judgement of “what works.”

The error here is not just a philosophical one. When politicians talk about what works, they make tacit assumptions about various moral questions concerning the proper aims of public policy. But by presenting themselves as “non-ideological pragmatists,” they get away with leaving these assumptions unarticulated and undefended. And so we get a particular value-laden agenda – often, though not always, that of the ruling class – smuggled in, under the banner of anodyne pronouncements about the need to sometimes make compromises or to be sensitive to empirical evidence.

At its worst, this can amount to making a set of value-assumptions seem like incontestable and ineradicable features of the world; to what the sociologist Max Weber called the “routinisation” of value. Those who oppose a particular agenda are characterised as “living in the past” or as failing to recognise the facts of the modern world. Likewise, talk of “possibility” is frequently used to delimit the range of political options, without it being made clear in what sense and why a particular course of action is supposedly “impossible.”

In short, ‘evidence-based policy’ carries the risk that it can be exploited by politicians claiming that theirs is the only option. It can be used to deny alternatives and shut down debate. This outlook is the source of Nick Clegg’s dubious claims that he is not ideological but “pragmatic”.

On the LSE’s British Politics and Policy blog, Professor Michael Bassey suggests that the problems with evidence-based policy are basically methodological, arguing that the best we can hope for is “what may work” rather than a definitive solution. He is correct up to a point, but ignores the moral dimension.

We should always insist that policies do not fly in the face of the evidence. But evidence does not resolve moral questions, and moral choices are what politics is ultimately about.

Migrants and benefits: fact or myth?

David Cameron made a speech yesterday promising a crackdown on abuse of the welfare state by migrants. If you suspected that this crusade is based on dodgy assumptions, you’d be right.

Full Fact has analysed the facts and found that this is not exactly a case of evidence-based policy making. But then it rarely is in this age of tabloid hysteria and poll-driven policy.

No wonder Cameron’s speech is already unravelling. And as with Nick Clegg’s recent speech, no matter what protestations they make about the good side of immigration, merely to discuss the subject in terms of the anti-immigrant agenda is to validate that agenda.


Postscript: Chris Dillow has published a very good blog post on the facts about immigration, and the causes of popular irrationality.

Nick Clegg and the politics of immigration

Yesterday, Nick Clegg made a speech about immigration. Since it has been the subject of much misinterpretation and anger, it is advisable to read the actual whole speech before going any further.

At first, the speech seems quite reasonable. In the face of extremism, Clegg wants to move the debate onto “practical and sensible ground”, talks about wanting to maintain “an open and tolerant Britain”, and promises “the Liberal Democrats will never seek to outflank our opponents because we think that’s what people want to hear”.

Yet the more you study the speech, the more it reveals fundamental flaws in not only Clegg’s thinking but also his whole strategic approach. Taken together with the recent dispute about secret courts, both the speech and the reactions from within the party suggest that the party is falling out of love with its leader and that the feeling is mutual.

So far as the question of immigration itself is concerned, others have already criticised the speech in detail. On Liberal Democrat Voice, Caron Lindsay tried to be even-handed in a post titled ‘the good, the bad and the ugly’ but concluded there was more bad and ugly than good. Her LDV colleagues Stephen Tall and Nick Thornsby had no inhibitions, making the case against Clegg in no uncertain terms. They were joined in a thorough demolition job by Lester Holloway.

It was a fortunate coincidence that Liberal Democrat Voice conducted a poll of party members on this very topic a few days before the speech. It showed that these hostile reactions to Clegg’s speech were not the views of an unrepresentative minority but that the membership’s view of immigration remains highly liberal.

Rather than repeat what others have said about the issue of immigration per se, I want to look at the politics of this speech and what it tells us about the party leadership.

The first problem with Clegg’s speech is that, although it purported to show leadership, it did the opposite. Clegg was ostensibly critical of the anti-immigration agenda but, by debating the issue on anti-immigration terms, he effectively validated that agenda. He made little attempt to tackle the popular myths about immigration, let alone enthuse about the positive things immigration brings to society. This approach makes anti-immigration sentiments more respectable and shifts the debate from morality (“right or wrong”) to management (“how much?”).

Most mainstream politicians are in a flat panic about popular opinion on immigration (recall the fiasco during the 2010 general election when Gordon Brown encountered the “bigoted woman”). Hostility to immigration is not a new problem nor is it unique to Britain. What has made the problem more acute is the recession (resentment of outsiders always grows in hard times) and the rise of UKIP.

As Nick Thornsby argued in the Independent, it is at times like these that we look for true leadership, even when the liberal position risks unpopularity. Unfortunately, we live in an era when politicians tend to be driven by opinion polls and focus groups. If politicians had thought like that during the 1960s, we would never have had the abolition of capital punishment or the legalisation of homosexuality.

This brings us on to the second problem, which is the concept of the ‘centre ground’. Tory MP Bernard Jenkin recently criticised this idea:

Politicians often talk about “the centre ground” of British politics, as though there is some big bell curve of voters in the middle where we have to be in order to get elected. The three main parties are crowded there in the facile belief that being anti-immigration, anti-EU, pro-business, tax cuts and tough on crime is “right wing”; while more spending, concern about the poor, pro-EU, pro-human rights and CND is “left wing”, and therefore sensible moderate people weigh up these “extremes” and finish up somewhere in between. And, of course, most people are sensible.

The Clinton/Blair people called it “triangulation”. The architects of Conservative modernisation copied it and made David Cameron in this respect the “heir to Blair”, but the result is that all the parties are now losing to “extremes”. Eastleigh showed there is no such thing as the centre ground – a great pile of voters in the middle waiting to be harvested by politicians’ cynical positioning. Nor is there a magic bullet labelled “immigration” or “Europe” either.

Clegg frequently bangs on about the ‘centre ground’ (indeed, he would have you believe that he is a non-ideological pragmatist) and this latest speech merely underlines the fact that he sees the voters in terms of Jenkin’s ‘bell curve’. His speech can therefore be seen as an attempt at triangulation. But as Jenkin pointed out, this won’t make him more popular or respected. You can only do that by standing up for what you believe in and accepting that this risks making as many enemies as friends.

Anti-immigrant sentiment cannot be ignored, of course. Many voters say they are against immigration, although on closer inspection it is hard to disentangle whether they are concerned more about new immigrants or the ethnic minorities already settled here, and whether immigration directly affects them or is merely something they’ve read about in the papers.

There is a valid non-racist argument that immigration must be managed, but management does not seem to be a major source of popular concern. The one occasion in recent years when the volume of immigration threatened to overwhelm local services was the large influx of Poles following Poland’s accession to the European Union in 2004, yet Polish people have rarely been the target of racist sentiment. If you want to tout for racist votes, you would be more successful calling for the repatriation of black and Asian people than Poles. I am sure Nick Clegg would baulk at that, even if the polls and focus groups said it would be popular.

The third problem is Clegg’s attitude to the party and its policy-making process. His speech follows on closely from the notorious vote in favour of secret courts in the Commons earlier this month. Party members are starting to see a pattern of top-down policy-making that contradicts their wishes.

Strictly speaking, Clegg’s speech has not changed party policy. Policy is developed by the party’s Federal Policy Committee (FPC) and approved, democratically, by the party’s Federal Conference. In terms of the party constitution, Clegg was doing no more than kite-flying and, to be fair, he actually only called for existing policy to be “reviewed”. Try explaining that to the media. The Guardian talked of Clegg “abandoning” existing party policy on an amnesty, the Telegraph of him “dropping” it, the Mail of him “ditching” it. So far as the outside world is concerned, an ex cathedra statement by the leader is enough to change party policy – and Clegg and his media advisers must have known it.

Worse, Clegg’s new policy to replace an amnesty is half-baked. His big idea is that visa applicants from ‘high risk’ countries should pay a ‘security bond’ in the form of a cash deposit (Clegg mentioned no specific amount in his speech although the sum of £1,000 is being bandied about), which would be repaid when they leave the UK. This obviously hasn’t been thought through, as various knowledgeable people in the party could have told him if he had bothered to consult anyone beforehand. It’s not as if Clegg lacked the time or the opportunity; the speech was originally due to have been delivered in mid-February but was postponed (presumably because of the Eastleigh by-election), so a draft of the speech has been sitting around on his desk for over a month.

The lack of consultation is particularly inept, since the FPC recently appointed a policy working group on immigration, asylum, and identity, chaired by Andrew Stunell MP. This working group has so far met twice and is due to report to the spring 2014 party conference. Clegg’s speech was not presented to the working group at all, while the Federal Policy Committee was made aware of the speech’s existence but not its contents. Which is all a bit odd when you consider that Clegg, expressing his dissatisfaction with the current party policy on an amnesty, said in his speech, “I have asked Andrew Stunell, the former Integration Minister, to lead a review of this and our other immigration policies in the run up to 2015”. It is unclear whether Clegg was announcing the setting up of a working group that already exists or announcing the appointment of Stunell to conduct a separate review in parallel with the working group.

Of course, the reason for Clegg’s failure to consult the working group might be that he is unhappy with it for some reason. If so, he could have discussed his reservations with the chair of the FPC, Duncan Hames MP, who also happens to be Clegg’s Parliamentary Private Secretary. Or since Clegg is a member of the FPC himself, he could have come along to a meeting and expressed his views in person. He did neither.

Meanwhile, any outsider puzzled about what current Liberal Democrat policy on immigration actually is should consult the motion (‘Immigration in the 21st Century’) debated at the party’s 2007 autumn conference. It was proposed by the party’s then Shadow Home Secretary – one Nick Clegg.


Postscript (1): Nick Barlow has written a very perceptive blog post, which questions whether the arguments for remaining in coalition still hold water, and ponders what depths Nick Clegg will next plumb.

Postscript (2): Several members of the party’s FPC and policy working group on immigration have written an open letter to protest about the speech.

It’s in the Daily Express so it must be true

Thanks to Tabloid Watch, which found this headline in Tuesday’s Daily Express:

EU attempts to brainwash children with ‘sinister Soviet-style propaganda’

It is, of course, another Euromyth. The story turns out to be complete and utter bollocks.

Opposition to the European Union is a legitimate point of view but, like any other political opinion, it should be supported by evidence and rational arguments. When Eurosceptics resort to this sort of nonsense, they really must be on weak ground.

As the European Parliament’s Information Office in the UK points out:

Welcome to the brave new world of EU reporting at the Daily Express, where information is bad, transparency is dictatorship, civic rights are forms of oppression and checking facts makes you blind.

Cameron was talking bollocks – official

Remember David Cameron’s big speech yesterday on the economy? It turns out he was being economical with the truth.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has contradicted Cameron’s claim that spending cuts and tax rises were not responsible for the weak economy. Cameron quoted the OBR in his speech, in which he rejected calls for increased borrowing:

[Cameron] said the OBR had made it clear that growth had been depressed by the legacy of the 2008 financial crisis, instability in the eurozone and a sharp rise in oil prices between 2010 and 2011.

The watchdog, he added, was “absolutely clear that the deficit reduction plan is not responsible, in fact, quite the opposite”.

But the OBR’s chairman, Robert Chote, has written to the prime minister to take issue with his comments.

“For the avoidance of doubt, I think it is important to point out that every forecast published by the OBR since the June 2010 Budget has incorporated the widely held assumption that tax increases and spending cuts reduce economic growth in the short term,” he wrote. “To summarise, we believe that fiscal consolidation measures have reduced economic growth over the past couple of years.”

A triple-dip recession (the British economy contracted in the final three months of 2012), then last month the UK lost of its triple-A credit rating, and now Cameron delivers a triple load of bollocks. How much worse do things have to get before Cameron and Clegg admit that ‘Plan A’ isn’t working?