"A future fair for all"

...being Labour's new election slogan - not quite as turgid as it could have been. The trouble is that it sounds like the sort of thing Gordon Brown might say.

Actually, reading it again, it makes me imagine some sort of sci-fi space carnival... "Daddy! Can we go to the future fair?" "Sure we can, Timmy - it's a future fair for all!"

Economical letters to the editor

Sir,

We are not economists by profession, but we didn’t see the credit crunch coming and so that surely puts us in the same boat as most people who are.

Following the letter from 20 economists to the Sunday Times and the letters from 58 economists and another nine economists to the Financial Times, we felt compelled to write.

These three letters variously advocate reducing the deficit at a rate of mumble mumble mumble, by means of cutting spending on mumble mumble mumble and raising taxes on mumble mumble mumble. We fear that each of these positions is dangerously misguided and negligently vague.

We wish to put on record that if we are to bring the deficit down in a way that maintains market confidence in the public finances while safeguarding the recovery, and neither raising taxes too punitively nor harming essential public services, the government must take steps to mumble mumble mumble. Encouragingly, all three main parties seem to be moving towards this view.

It is sometimes said that economics is not an exact science, but we are so confident of our recommendations that we are even using a first-class stamp to post this letter.

Yours faithfully,

Tom Freeman
And all my mates

I saw the picture and couldn't resist it

Oh, and while I'm here:

New Labour, new slogan

Prime Minister Gordon Brown will unveil the slogan of Labour's general election campaign in a speech at the weekend.

Announcing the fact that you’re going to be announcing your new slogan is dumb. It draws attention to the fact that you’re engaging in PR without giving you any of the benefit of that PR actually happening yet. Although it’s debatable how much use slogans really are – especially if they come attached to posters.

I’ve been poking deeply idle fun at the Tories lately, so maybe I should give my own side a few prods.

What, given Labour’s unhappy position in the polls, will this mystery slogan be?

• Better the devil you know. Oh, and we’re introducing a new brimstone tax


• We definitely won’t dash your high expectations


• Nobody likes us, we don’t care


• Going through the motions


• Won’t the look on Cameron’s face be priceless if he loses?


• I hadn’t abolished boom and bust, but I promise I will scrap Horne and Corden


• Governing over the next few years will be horrible – vent your anger by making me do it


• If you vote me out, I’ll write my memoirs. And then I’ll come round each of your houses and read you lengthy extracts

More?

I’ve never shot fish in a barrel before, but…

Now that there’s an automatic generator online, I can let rip a bit more freely:







Update 17/2: A couple more. I've had to do these myself from scratch, using Word, Paint and some sneaky screengrabbing (no Photoshop skillz), so they're a bit amateurish - but I'm all about the concept...

Like shooting fish in a barrel. With a Gatling gun. And fish-seeking bullets.

More sterling spoofery from Clifford Singer:




My own crude effort:

Correction: credit misallocation

Boris Johnson, a Daily Telegraph columnist, writes:

Thank heavens we stayed out of the euro.

That should of course read:

Thank Gordon Brown we stayed out of the euro.

Mature debate on the ‘debt crisis’

The UK government is less dependent on the bond market, and less affected by a rise in borrowing costs, than other states with smaller deficits.

Governments borrow by selling bonds. These bonds pay out yields each year (the interest rate) and they have an expiry date, at which time the original capital is returned to the buyer.

So the amount of bonds a government needs to sell in any year depends on: (a) the amount of new borrowing plus (b) the amount of maturing bonds that need replacing. Longer debt maturity means that (b) will be smaller.

Stephanie Flanders notes that “the average maturity of UK sovereign debt is 14 years. In the US, it's about four years. In France and Germany it's six or seven. In Greece, it's even lower… That makes an enormous difference to the amount of gilts we need to ask the debt markets to buy in a given year.”

In 2010, the budget deficits of Germany, France and Italy will be lower than the UK’s. But in terms of the bonds to be issued this year, Germany will be needing about 386bn euros, France 454bn, Italy 393bn and the UK 279bn.

It’s still a lot, but it’s also a lot less than these other countries.

The longer maturity of UK public debt also means, as Flanders explains, that an increase in the yields payable on new bonds will have a smaller effect on the total cost of servicing national debt.

We in the UK are right to be worried about our deficit. But the idea that we face a ‘debt crisis’ notably worse than other countries looks harder to sustain.

Update 18/3: I saw this nice chart from the Economist, illustrating how much longer-dated UK gilts are than other countries’.

Seeing through walls

Rich at Arbitrary Constant has posted a puzzle:

Name an ancient invention, which is still used in some parts of the world today, that allows people to see through walls.

I think I know what the answer is, although it requires quite a liberal interpretation of “some”.

More Tory posters

It's easy, it's cheap, it's right up my street...




Make your own here and see others here.

Cameron blames Brown for wisteria claims

By our correspondent Frank Blunt

Conservative leader David Cameron has laid the blame for the parliamentary expenses scandal squarely with Gordon Brown. “It is a measure of Labour’s Debt Crisis that even I could be bamboozled into claiming a load of money for the mortgage on my second home. Or possibly my third. Whatever.

“And the fact that I kept claiming for this even after I had started demanding the system be reformed just shows how badly Labour’s Age of Irresponsibility has broken our society.”

Meanwhile, Cabinet papers leaked to the Chilcot Inquiry revealed that Brown himself may have been involved in planting the unruly wisteria that so expensively besmirched Cameron’s beautiful home. Cameron said that there would be “no limit to the amount I would claim on expenses to clear him out. Gordon Brown cannot reform the institution because he is the institution. Whereas under the Conservatives, l’état, ca sera moi.”

“How Gordon Brown can claim to be a reformer with a straight face I just don’t know,” he added, hardly smirking at all.

Scientists admit: global warming ‘a big hoax’

By our correspondent Frank Blunt

The world scientific community yesterday confessed that so-called ‘climate change’ was a cruel trick that they had dreamed up to make us suffer. “It was at a party – or rather, it was during a party that we hadn’t been invited to. Again,” said a spokesprofessor. “We decided to invent reams of ‘evidence’ for a phenomenon that didn’t exist, just to confuse, frighten and annoy people.”

Further frauds have also emerged. An editorial in the Journal of Scientificality today confesses: “We also made evolution up for a laugh, just to see the looks on religious people’s faces. We didn’t expect anyone would actually believe it!” Other newly admitted hoaxes include the germ theory of disease, plate tectonics and gravity.

An ode to quantitative easing

Giles Wilkes, the multitalented git, has composed a really rather excellent poem about quantitative easing, ‘The ballad of Mervyn’s shovel’. Paul Cotterill, the sly dog, has responded with a limerick of his own on the subject and an invitation to submit similarly themed poems.

I cannot resist. Bear in mind that Giles has an unfair advantage in that he actually understands QE, whereas I’ve had to pick up the gist based largely on blog posts by him and others…

Sing a song of £200 billion

Mervyn King was in his counting house, counting out our money;
It didn’t take him very long, a fact he deemed most funny.
“To return our stagnant nation to a land of milk and honey,
I must make things more liquid – or at least, a bit more runny.”

And so he set off to create two hundred billion nicker,
Enough to buy the whole wide world a bathtub full of liquor
Though rather than buy fripperies he thought that he would pick a
Duller option: public debt. But now here’s the real kicker:

“The printing press – a minting mess – will debauch our fair pound,”
Said monetarist sceptics who were swarming all around.
“The value of dear sterling will collapse beneath the ground
And an explosion of inflation will astonish and astound.”

But King replied: “You dolts, it’s not a literal printing press;
I do it electronically, by clicking here on ‘Yes’.
And as for sterling, well it is now really more or less
Where it was back when we started – so no big deal, I guess.”

Now other critics did retort: “It’s no big deal, indeed,
For far too little’s changed vis-à-vis circulation speed
Of money; banks are hoarding what they fear that they might need,
So there’s precious little here on which recovery could feed.”

Yet assets boomed: the FTSE grew from suckling at King’s teat,
The once-tortured housing market had all expectations beat,
Estate agents were dancing in the (up-and-coming) street,
And the Treasury found buyers for all the gilts it could secrete.

Then QE stopped – not with a bang nor whimper, just a grumble
About its consequences, an impenetrable jumble;
Some feared that its reversal could provoke another stumble,
And King concluded: “I predict that (mumble mumble mumble).”


Also, just for good measure, a limerick:

The Old Lady was most displeased
That credit was painfully squeezed
She made billions from nought
And yet I must report
My own bank balance is uneased

BAE, ‘bribes’ and ‘settlements’

BAE, which had bunged a load of money to a couple of governments so that it could make a load more money without any questions being asked, has now bunged a load of money to a couple of governments so that it can go on making a load more money without any questions being asked.

Huzzah for justice.

Wanted: non-political blogs

Yes, I know, the concept is hard to grasp. Think of them as being like blogs, but with a subject matter other than politics, and you may start to get the idea. Anyway, I want to read stuff outside my usual field of obsession. I want to read interesting people who have funny, insightful, articulate, sad, angry, delightful, unexpected, thought-provoking things to say about, well, life. And, if you please, I’d like your help in finding them.

Suggestions?

Image management fail

My new stapler does not have the most fortunate of brand names:


Now, I’m sure it’s meant to be pronounced ‘Rah-pess-co’ and not, you know, the other way, the alarming way, the forehead-slappingly stupid way. And I’m sure they’re a perfectly reputable company run and staffed by perfectly decent people.

But, taking into account that the name can seem a tad iffy to an English-speaking audience, the images and headings on their website makes me mildly concerned about how much common sense their branding people have:


Yes, I know, branding people are contractually required to have the common sense sucked out of them with a special machine when they start work. But even so… ‘punching’?

And what the hell message is the ‘stapling’ woman supposed to be conveying – ‘Well, now I’ve attached one piece of paper to another, I’ll just roll around on this bed that I happen to have in the office. Mmm, they’re attached so firmly…’

Still, their stapler is bloody good. I’ll give them that.

Tories caught out on dodgy crime stats

A very good piece on Radio 4’s Today programme: BBC Home Editor Mark Easton looks into how the Tories are using official statistics on violent crime to apparently show that there’s been a big rise recently.

The snag is that the official sources make crystal clear that the way the figures are compiled changed significantly in 2002, resulting in an artificial increase in the numbers. This “has rendered direct numerical comparisons with pre 2002/03 levels inaccurate” – according to BBC pinko former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith.

The police are also objecting to the scaremongering way the Tories are using these stats:

In Milton Keynes, local [Tory] MP Mark Lancaster's office put out a statement last week claiming that there were 6,015 "violent attacks" in the town last year, reflecting a 236% increase over the past decade.
…
Milton Keynes sounds like Dodge City. That's a "violent attack" every 90 minutes.
However, according to the Milton Keynes Citizen newspaper, the town's police says that the statistics are "extremely misleading".
Local commander Nikki Ross told the local paper that the figure includes "everything from public order offences, to harassment, to allowing a dog to be out of control in a public place".
"The actual number of people who were victims of serious violence was 81," she said.
The point here is that the phrase "violent attacks" does not equate directly with the crime category "violence against the person". For instance, if someone swears at you in the street and you complain to the police about it, that incident goes down as an act of "violence against the person".

Evan Davis interviewed Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling about all this. Grayling’s defence was: these are the official figures produced by the Home Office, and even though they come with a warning not to use them for comparisons with before 2002, we can still use them for comparisons with before 2002. Except that he didn’t say the middle bit.

Easton’s report and the interview should be available here at some point today (at about 7.32, so 1 hour 32 mins into the programme), but Easton has explained it all in writing here, with another background piece from last week here.

A good result but a measly outcome

Good:

The medical journal which originally published the discredited research linking autism and MMR has now issued a full retraction of the paper. The Lancet said it now accepted claims made by the researchers were "false".
It comes after Dr Andrew Wakefield, the lead researcher in the 1998 paper, was ruled last week to have broken research rules by the General Medical Council.
...
Last week, the GMC ruled that Dr Wakefield had shown a "callous disregard" for children and acted "dishonestly" while he carried out his research. It will decide later whether to strike him off the medical register.
The regulator only looked at how he acted during the research, not whether the findings were right or wrong - although they have been widely discredited by medical experts across the world in the years since publication.

And a sad reminder, to the media who love a scare story as well as to slapdash scientists, that actions have consequences:

When can you make a citizen’s arrest?

George Monbiot is inviting us to attempt citizen’s arrests on Tony Blair, “for a crime against peace, namely your decision to launch an unprovoked war against Iraq”. He’s offering money, so I expect Cherie will have a go.

The response to this has not been universally positive (although someone’s already had a go). But Monbiot is undeterred: “you can mock our feeble attempts to hold Tony Blair to account, but only if you propose an alternative”.

OK, here are a few alternatives: have a nice cup of tea; take up knitting; put pretend arrest warrants out on the other 411 MPs who voted for the war; go online and find out what your old school friends are up to; put a pretend arrest warrant out on Blair for his illegal war against Yugoslavia; keep writing the same Guardian column over and over again until you hit retirement; send thank-you notes to Vladimir Putin, Hu Jintao and Jacques Chirac for declining to make the Iraq war was legal by giving it the nod; or eating some ice cream. These would be all be equally successful ways of holding Blair to account.

One other thing you could do would be to read section 24A of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, which covers the rules on citizen’s arrests [annotated with my own expert legal interpretation]:

Arrest without warrant: other persons

(1) A person other than a constable may arrest without a warrant—
(a) anyone who is in the act of committing an indictable offence;
(b) anyone whom he has reasonable grounds for suspecting to be committing an indictable offence.
[(a) is obviously out, as the war was in the past, and for the same reason so is (b)]

(2) Where an indictable offence has been committed, a person other than a constable may arrest without a warrant—
(a) anyone who is guilty of the offence;
(b) anyone whom he has reasonable grounds for suspecting to be guilty of it.
[No competent body has ruled that any indictable offence has been committed, so (2) is out. That basically stymies the whole idea, but let’s imagine that citizens are allowed to decide what counts as an offence, and carry on]

(3) But the power of summary arrest conferred by subsection (1) or (2) is exercisable only if—
(a) the person making the arrest has reasonable grounds for believing that for any of the reasons mentioned in subsection (4) it is necessary to arrest the person in question; and
(b) it appears to the person making the arrest that it is not reasonably practicable for a constable to make it instead.
[For (a), we’ll have to see below, and (b) is out as Blair is always accompanied by constables who could perfectly well make any necessary arrests. Actually, we could stop here, because the (3) demands that both conditions (a) and (b) be met. But while we’re so near the end…]

(4) The reasons are to prevent the person in question—
(a) causing physical injury to himself or any other person;
(b) suffering physical injury;
(c) causing loss of or damage to property; or
(d) making off before a constable can assume responsibility for him.
[No, no, no, no. Not even close]

It’s a jolly student jape, but the legal case for performing a citizen’s arrest on Tony Blair is even weaker than the political case. Sorry.

Higher or lower? The Tories, interest rates and the pound

As Chris reports, George Osborne has said: “The overriding objective of fiscal policy must be to provide the credible deficit reduction plan that allows the Bank of England to keep mortgage rates as low as possible for as long as possible.” He’s been pushing this view for a while.

In an intellectually hefty (by his standards) speech in September, Osborne said that “tight fiscal policy will allow the independent MPC to keep interest rates as low as possible for as long as possible while keeping inflation and inflation expectations securely anchored”. He also dealt directly with the argument that significant spending cuts too soon could such demand out of the economy and put the recovery at risk:

Not only does this argument ignore the risks of a loss of confidence and higher interest rates, it is also too simplistic. It ignores the impact of fiscal policy on the exchange rate in an open economy like the UK. Ben Broadbent, Chief UK Economist at Goldman Sachs, wrote recently that fiscal tightening in an open economy "has little appreciable impact on aggregate output" because it tends to rebalance demand away from non-traded goods and services and towards the traded sector. In other words, what you lose in government spending, you gain in exports.

The Goldman paper doesn’t seem to be online, but Stephanie Flanders has summarised its gist:

If the government… announced tighter budget plans starting in 2010, it is possible that the bond markets would reward that government by pushing down long-term interest rates (also known as the interest rate on government debt). That could stimulate the economy in its own right by making it cheaper for companies to borrow. It could also, by reducing the return on sterling investments, push down the pound, giving an extra fillip to exporters.

So, if I understand this right, the tighter fiscal policy that the Tories are planning (as Cameron says, “We're not talking about swingeing cuts”, which I believe to be literally true) will mean that monetary policy can stay looser for longer.

It will also push the value of the pound lower than it would have been, which will help exporters. This will also make imports more expensive, which will drive up inflation. But that will mean higher interest rates, which is exactly what Osborne wants to avoid.

Huh?

Then there’s the effect on the cost of government borrowing. If foreign buyers of UK gilts think that the pound will be lower in the future, then they’ll demand higher yields to make up for this – thus pushing up the cost of public borrowing.

Bill Gross, of fund managers Pimco, has been sounding the most lurid warnings lately about UK public debt and the gilt market. He said last week: “High [UK goverment] debt with the potential to devalue its currency present high risks for bond investors.” He’s in favour of fiscal consolidation, but so that the government doesn’t take on more debt than it can safely service, not in order to get the currency down – quite the opposite, as he seems to imply that a government that cuts its borrowing will be rewarded by a stronger currency.

So do the Tories really want a lower pound? Do they know how to bring it about? Do they want the consequences that flow from it? I confess I struggle to understand the rationale here. Perhaps it’s because I’m a bumbling amateur when it comes to economics and finance. Or perhaps it’s because Osborne is too.

Here comes the science bit – segregate!

Giles Wilkes muses on the libertarians and other assorted right-wingers who take climate change ‘scepticism’ to the point of ideological denial – and, by extension, the anti-consumerists who almost religiously grab the opportunity to argue that we need to replace the whole economic system:

For a great proportion of our scientific beliefs, we have to rely on a long-established consensus. … For views on evolution, the Holocaust, whether transfats cause cancer, or carbon dioxide causes global warming, no single person can themselves compile enough evidence. You need to rely on scientists who themselves rely on more scientists.
…
However, people often form opinions, or choose which ‘consensus’ to trust, on the basis of feelings. This particularly works in a negative way; if you really hate X and his/her group, then X believing something, and in particular X thinking it is important, then thinking and proclaiming it as untrue gives enormous pleasure. This happens whether X is some braying redfaced foxhunter or sanctimonious good for nothing leftie student. Most political extremes have convoluted theories for why their opponents think the rubbish that they do.

A very interesting paper in Nature last week supports this, explaining finding on the ways that “ordinary citizens react to scientific evidence”:

People endorse whichever position reinforces their connection to others with whom they share important commitments. As a result, public debate about science is strikingly polarized. The same groups who disagree on 'cultural issues' — abortion, same-sex marriage and school prayer — also disagree on whether climate change is real and on whether underground disposal of nuclear waste is safe.
…
A process that does account for this distinctive form of polarization is 'cultural cognition'. Cultural cognition refers to the influence of group values — ones relating to equality and authority, individualism and community — on risk perceptions and related beliefs. …
For example, people find it disconcerting to believe that behaviour that they find noble is nevertheless detrimental to society, and behaviour that they find base is beneficial to it. Because accepting such a claim could drive a wedge between them and their peers, they have a strong emotional predisposition to reject it.
Our research suggests that this form of 'protective cognition' is a major cause of political conflict over the credibility of scientific data on climate change and other environmental risks. People with individualistic values, who prize personal initiative, and those with hierarchical values, who respect authority, tend to dismiss evidence of environmental risks, because the widespread acceptance of such evidence would lead to restrictions on commerce and industry, activities they admire. By contrast, people who subscribe to more egalitarian and communitarian values are suspicious of commerce and industry, which they see as sources of unjust disparity. They are thus more inclined to believe that such activities pose unacceptable risks and should be restricted. Such differences, we have found, explain disagreements in environmental-risk perceptions more completely than differences in gender, race, income, education level, political ideology, personality type or any other individual characteristic.
Cultural cognition also causes people to interpret new evidence in a biased way that reinforces their predispositions. As a result, groups with opposing values often become more polarized, not less, when exposed to scientifically sound information.

It’s a fascinating piece.

(Update: Just remembered I came across this paper via Chris (I think), so consider my hat tipped.)

Blair denies Iraq war

Tony Blair today told the Chilcot inquiry that his detractors were wholly wrong to accuse him of having taken the UK into war with Iraq.

“Of course critics can disagree with my policy and the way I carried it out; I respect that,” the former Prime Minister said. “But I do ask people to accept that that in following the diplomatic route, I did what I thought was right.”

Rejecting the charge that he traded the independence of UK foreign policy for influence abroad, he said that he came to an anti-war view as a matter of principle, “not to cosy up to Vladimir Putin, Jacques Chirac and Hu Jintao”.

He added: “I am a man of peace. This notion of me taking part in some sort of war is just the usual media hype. If you don’t believe me, you can ask President Saddam about our latest round of negotiations.”

But seriously.

Were it not for the heap of Iraqi corpses in the background, I’d think the earnest and ferocious attempts to ‘prove’ Blair a liar were senseless. But not because they’re mistaken.

I pretty much take it for granted that almost any major contentious policy – from any government of any party in any country – is justified with some mix of exaggeration, selective omission, specious interpretation and outright falsehood. Introducing the minimum wage, privatising the railways, last year’s fiscal stimulus, the wars in Afghanistan and the Falklands – does anyone really imagine that these policies, whatever their true merits, were presented and advocated with such honesty that a string of inquiries and a pack of media wolves wouldn’t have something to get their teeth into?

That’s why I’m so unmoved by all the furious arguments that Blair lied (and why I’m so indifferent to the occasional counter-argument). Now, I resent being lied to as much as anyone else, especially by the people I pay to run my country. But what are the ‘Bliar’ brigade trying to achieve? He’s not going to be put on trial for war crimes in Iraq (why not war crimes in Kosovo?), so all they can do is to sully his reputation. But everyone’s opinions were set in stone long ago. Yes, there’s value in saying ‘the truth will out’, and Chilcot has been eking out a few more scraps here and there, but who at this stage is listening with an open mind?

I’m angrier about the needless and massively fatal incompetence of the whole affair than the unremarkable fact that the usual grubby political shenanigans went on behind the scenes.

Tough on the causes of crime

Via Ophelia:

A 16-year-old girl who was raped in Bangladesh has been given 101 lashes for conceiving during the assault. The girl's father was also fined and warned the family would be branded outcasts from their village if he did not pay. According to human rights activists, the girl, who was quickly married after the attack, was divorced weeks later after medical tests revealed she was pregnant. The girl was raped by a 20-year-old villager in Brahmanbaria district in April last year...Muslim elders in the village issued a fatwa insisting that the girl be kept in isolation until her family agreed to corporal punishment.

Her rapist was pardoned by the elders.

Out of recession – by £1 a week

I’d like to congratulate everyone in the UK for reaching the end of the recession. It’s provisionally reported that the economy grew by 0.1% in the final quarter of last year. In cash terms, that means that our GDP was about £350 million larger in that fourth quarter than in the third.

There are about 28.9 million people in work across the country, so that makes a shade over £12 extra output each. A quarter of a year, once you take into account the Christmas break, is roughly 12 weeks.

So we’ve each been producing a pound a week extra. Good work, team!

Matthew Dent, who did in fact produce that pound he’s holding.

The prose is purpler than the sword

Matthew Norman used to be a good diary columnist on the Guardian, inventive and cheeky yet understated. He’s also said to be (I wouldn’t know) a decent restaurant reviewer for various publications. But as a Serious Political Commentator at the Independent, he’s trying to do a very different kind of writing, and the results are perhaps not so good.

Here’s a digest of his latest column, on Tony Blair and the Chilcot inquiry:

feverishly awaited appearance … fresh revelatory nuggets … a vicious little irony … an indecently cute vignette of a warped morality … elite corps of commentators … heroic armchair warriors … cabal of staunch loyalists … Pinochet-type indignity … Olympian arrogance … soul-crushing futility … insouciant unconcern … Petit bourgeois notions such as international law … forever be eagles pecking at his liver … staggeringly defiant attitude … impossible to quantify, but it must be many millions … loyal to his own avarice … tosses and turns in the desolate small hours … the sunken eyes and haunted expression betray his fear of arrest … a demigod whose stature far transcends the insolent judgments of mankind … an outcast in his own land.

This is slightly unfair of me. You could probably create an edited torrent of bilge out of the work of many newspaper columnists, or plenty of Blair’s speeches, or maybe even some of my own writing. Actually, no, I don’t think I’m quite that bad. Not usually, anyway.

But you get the flavour of Norman’s piece. The thrust of the argument seems to be: (a) I can write all fancy; and (b) contrary to all available evidence, Tony Blair really does care that people like me hate him.

Ah well. I’d guess the man knows his readership.

This is a blog post consisting of nothing more than a reference to someone else’s blog post

This sentence states that Chris Clarke is a genius. This sentence includes a link and an exhortation to click on it. This sentence elliptically implies that even though I love Chris’s post, I could have thought of that and even done it better myself. This sentence does not explain why I didn’t in fact do it myself.

The only way to end poverty

(This excellent post by Neil Robertson, about wider awareness of poverty and coverage of things like the Edlington child torture case, prompted me to write the below – not a reply, just a riff on one of his themes.)

We hate the poor. And we’re right to hate them.

We try to ignore them, and usually we succeed. Then sometimes they go and do something monstrous, and they’re all over the news. We see it and we hate them all the more, and resolve to ignore them even harder. Everything we’re forced to find out about them is disgusting, and proves how right our instincts were, and proves that their material poverty is caused by their poverty of conscience. Is it any wonder we want to keep them far away?

But we’re good people. Really, we are. After all, we’re not poor, so that pretty much makes us good by definition. And, of course, hate isn’t a bad thing when it’s justified. So even despite our loathing for them and our desperate need to have nothing to do with them, we still want to help the poor. Even though they don’t deserve it, we show them such saintly kindness.

So we gave them social services. These are people we pay to go into whatever noxious holes poor people live their repellent lives and make them become, if they can, just a little bit less vile, just a little bit more like us. Especially the children. Because children born poor haven’t yet proved that they deserve their poverty (although almost inevitably they will grow into the kind of people who bloody well do – it’s like a kind of predictive natural justice, or at least a sign of their tainted genes).

Anyway, social services seemed like a good idea. And they did achieve some good – or, at least, we presume so. We weren’t really paying attention. But now two things have gone horribly wrong.

First of all, the people from social services sometimes give our own lives some of their suspicious, interfering attention. How dare they? We’re good people! What the hell right do they have coming into our homes and telling us how to raise our children? Don’t they know who we are?

Their attacks on us clearly prove that they too have been infected with the moral sickness of the poor, eager to cause us harm in their bitter resentment of the things that they have become. And we’ve had to protect ourselves from this contagion – which, after all, we’d only been trying to help with. Because if an intruder in your house threatens to come between you and your children, then you’re entitled – no, obligated – to defend yourself by any means necessary.

So we’ve done the only thing we possibly could, and got our politicians and newspapers to savage these jumped-up do-gooders who wouldn’t survive a day in the private sector, so that they would be too intimidated and too entangled in bureaucracy to ruin our lives, as the poor so surely ruin their own.

And then something else went wrong. Social services started tolerating the poisonous, callous irresponsibility that the poor are naturally driven towards. These dead-eyed, clipboarded council drones have clearly gone completely native and lost any sense of right and wrong. Overexposure to the poor has made them degenerate into part of the problem.

Poverty is a pestilence in our society. The poor corrupt everything and everyone that comes near them. We’ve tried, god only knows we’ve tried to help them, but in return they just threaten to engulf us in their plague.

This can’t go on. They don’t deserve our help, and we don’t deserve the evil that they spread. We can’t tolerate the threat the poor pose to us any more.

It is tragic that it’s come to this, but there is no alternative. And of course we must insist that it be carried out as humanely as possible.

We have to save ourselves. And in a way, by destroying the poor, we’ll be saving them too.

Cute things falling asleep

For example:



More here (via David).

Loss aversion and the bias towards conservatism

Anatole Kaletsky ponders the US Democrats’ political troubles:

Left-of-centre parties the world over might learn from this electoral disaster. They might start to understand why conservatism has an inbuilt advantage in all advanced democracies…
The conservatives’ advantage is simple: they know exactly what they are trying to achieve. They seek to preserve, as far as possible, existing structures of economic privilege, power and social traditions. … To achieve this, conservative politicians and voters are willing to bury all minor ideological differences and use every conceivable mechanism to keep power.
Progressives, by contrast, are united only by what they are against. They do not like the status quo, which they consider unjust. But once they gain power, as shown by the Democrats’ internecine struggles over healthcare, they are riven by conflicts. Because progressives are fighting for an infinite range of possible reforms, it is much harder to unite behind any specific programme.

I think he’s painting with a bit of a broad brush – a new government could well seek to transform things in a rightwards direction (Thatcher in 1979) – but he does have a point.

He doesn’t get to the bottom of it, though: even most of the people who are pretty comfortable with the way things are could think of changes to their advantage, and there are plenty of changes that parties of the left might introduce that would benefit more people than they harm. But even individual reforming policies often face an uphill struggle to be implemented, on top of left-wing parties’ difficulties in keeping together in power. So why a systemic bias in favour of conservatism?

Partly, no doubt, because the people who are doing well out of the status quo can exert more influence than those marginalised.

Partly also because of different campaigning styles of right and left: it’s easier to point to sins of commission than to sins of omission, and active-government parties of the left will have more of the former while anti-state right-wingers will have more of the latter. The right can be more gung-ho and direct in its campaigns because the points it’s making seem more concrete (‘they’re going to tax you for driving’ vs ‘they’re not going to tackle climate change’).

But part of the answer is psychological: loss aversion. People respond more strongly to losses than to gains. We’ll fight harder to keep something we have than to get an equivalent something more. This means that the potential losers from any policy shift will make more noise than the would-be winners, even if they are fewer. So it’s hard to assemble and maintain a popular coalition for reform.

If this is true, then we’d expect that psychologists would be able to pick up a greater bias towards loss aversion in people with right-wing politics. I don’t know of any studies that have looked at this. (Anyone?)

And there’s a strategic tip for the left in all this: if we want to succeed, we need (more than the right needs) to find policies that will demonstrably benefit as many people as possible. A party that’s seen as just the party of the poor is going to get shafted.

Nudge nudge, wink wink, doublethink doublethink

Ben Brogan is wondering how detailed the Tories’ plans for government are:

Certainly, the message from on high [in the party] is that all is in hand, that we should have faith and be patient. "We are Thatcherites, we are ready to take difficult decisions, but we can't say it publicly in case nobody votes for us," is how it was explained to me last week. But we have no way of testing whether that is true, or whether all that hard work we keep hearing about is producing something credible. For the moment, we are being asked to accept on trust that Mr Osborne and Mr Cameron have a robust plan that will be equal to the task.

So, if I’m reading that right, we’ll only vote Tory if we trust the off-the-record hints that they really do have secret plans that are so horrible that if we knew about them we wouldn’t vote Tory.

VAT and inflation

Inflation has jumped. And it’s jumped quite a lot for one month.

Those lovable monetarist scamps at the Spectator blog are creaming themselves. The ever-excitable Fraser Nelson is perhaps too busy changing his trousers to have posted about it yet, but in the meantime his colleague David Blackburn tells us:

We are now seeing the long-term effects of Quantitative Easing and the use of debt to finance further government borrowing.

Well, not exactly. What we’re now seeing is the short-term effects of a tax cut that lasted for 13 months. As you’d expect, after 12 months the effect of this cut disappears from the annual rate of inflation.

Let’s have some numbers.

The 12-month change in the Retail Price Index dropped from 3.0% in November 2008 to 0.9% in December 2008, the month when the VAT cut came in. Now that the start of the cut has fallen out of the 12-month figures, the RPI has reversed this drop: it rose from 0.3% in November 2009 to 2.4% in December 2009. So a 2.1% fall was followed, a year later, by a 2.1% rise.

As for the RPI-X measure of inflation (excluding mortgage interest payments), it fell from 3.9% to 2.8% a year ago and has now risen from 2.7% to 3.8% (down 1.1%, then up 1.1%).

And the CPI measure, which is the Bank of England’s target, dropped a year ago from 4.1% to 3.1%; it’s just risen from 1.9% to 2.9% (down 1%, then up 1%).

The similarity of the pairs of numbers is partly a coincidence, of course – many factors affect inflation. The Beeb’s Stephanie Flanders reports:

All told, Capital Economics calculates that about three-quarters of the headline rise in the CPI from 1.9% in November to 2.9% in December is due to the "level" effect of last year's VAT cut. The fact that oil prices were falling sharply at the end of 2008 had an impact as well.
It's not over yet. We can expect the rise back to 17.5% in January to push the headline rate up even higher, perhaps to 3.5% or more, before falling back.

Teach to their own

The Tories say they want to improve the quality of teachers in state schools, and to raise the status of teaching by making it “the new noble profession”.

(The old noble profession, I presume, is medicine. And I guess the oldest noble profession would be high-class prostitution.)

Chris Dillow is sceptical about the efficacy of demanding higher qualifications for teachers.

One way to test this – as well as, presumably, a way to improve underperforming schools – would be to require all private-school teachers to spend parts of their careers working at comps in poorer areas. It’s the same sort of principle as having GPs do work for the NHS as well as running private practices. Then we’d be able to see what effect these super-teachers have.

Another good lark would be requiring private schools to take an entire schoolful (not just a few assisted places) of low-achieving kids from sink estates, just to put paid to the socialist lie that good schools are good mainly because they have a well-heeled intake.

(NB I’m sure all of us can remember some really crappy teachers we had at school. Thing is, I’m not sure the worst ones are necessarily the least academically able. The job requires a wide range of skills, and I’m in awe of people who can do it well. I myself have – ahem – a pretty decent degree, and I’d be a terrible teacher.)

The ‘missing words’ round

From the Times:

Youngsters from poor backgrounds will be helped to break into _____________ under measures to be announced today by Lord Mandelson’s department.

(a) lucrative professions
(b) your house
(c) song
(d) ???

Total competence failure

Having to describe my lost scarf over the phone to someone who works at the cinema where I left it.

I really have very little idea. Pretty sure it’s a mix of fairly sedate colours, with some brown and some grey in there somewhere. Although at one point I realised I was describing the scarf that I’d had when I was 15.

Well, I don’t know. I don’t really get the whole clothes/fashion/style thing; I’ve never really paid much attention to what the scarf looks like, other than to notice that it’s nice enough. It keeps my neck warm.

But I’m sure I’ll know it if I see it, and they say they’ll let me come in and inspect the line-up (they have five).

(Apologies to JE, who bought me it.)

Update: Ha! Got it. And I have to say my description was a lot better than either I or the cinema bloke were giving me credit for.

Serious policy critiques of David Bumface Cameron

Finally, I've found a 'make your own Tory poster' site that doesn't crash or require Photoshop!



It's here, and is courtesy of Andy Barefoot.

Labour’s election campaign: a sorry sight

Alex Massie (via Hopi) has a strategic lesson for Labour (in the little time that remains for the party to shape its fortunes), borrowed from Domino’s Pizza, another deeply sullied brand:

Step One, then, is admitting you have a problem. Step Two is doing something about it.
…
[This might appeal to] people who aren't convinced by the Tories' own reinvention but would like to see Labour up its own game, address its past mistakes honestly and demonstrate a commitment to doing better in the future.

It has a lot to recommend it, not least the fact that trying to deny any past mistakes is both dishonest and implausible. And with the government under attack from almost every direction, a bit of self-criticism may be one of the few things that could make people sit up and take notice (is it ju-jitsu where you use your opponent’s strength against them?).

So what might this approach look like for Labour? Obviously, the below is too wordy for a poster, but it might be a starting point for the elements that the message would have to contain:

We’re sorry we didn’t see the credit crunch coming.
But we stopped the recession from becoming a slump.
And now we’ll help get people back to work again.

It begins with an admission of failure. Then it explains how they adapted to the storm, and then makes an offer for the future. With GDP growth returning (touch wood), the two big economic issues will be the deficit and unemployment. I think Labour will be better off, campaign-wise, focusing on the latter.

Bloated writing and the media urge to ‘add value’

I agree with Michael Kinsley, who says that newspaper writing “is encrusted with conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news”:

Take, for example, the lead story in The New York Times on Sunday, November 8, 2009, headlined “Sweeping Health Care Plan Passes House.” …

Handing President Obama a hard-fought victory, the House narrowly approved a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system on Saturday night, advancing legislation that Democrats said could stand as their defining social policy achievement.

Fewer than half the words in this opening sentence are devoted to saying what happened. If someone saw you reading the paper and asked, “So what’s going on?,” you would not likely begin by saying that President Obama had won a hard-fought victory. You would say, “The House passed health-care reform last night.” And maybe, “It was a close vote.” And just possibly, “There was a kerfuffle about abortion.” You would not likely refer to “a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system,” as if your friend was unaware that health-care reform was going on. Nor would you feel the need to inform your friend first thing that unnamed Democrats were bragging about what a big deal this is—an unsurprising development if ever there was one.

Once upon a time, this unnecessary stuff was considered an advance over dry news reporting: don’t just tell the story; tell the reader what it means. But providing “context,” as it was known, has become an invitation to hype. In this case, it’s the lowest form of hype—it’s horse-race hype—which actually diminishes a story rather than enhancing it. Surely if this event is such a big, big deal—“sweeping” and “defining” its way into our awareness—then its effect on the next election is one of the less important things about it.

This happens all the time. Look at these two opening lines from today’s Independent:

Gordon Brown drew the final line under the failed backbench coup against him by declaring last night that Britain's "hard-won economic recovery" could still be Labour's platform for election victory.

The Northern Ireland First Minister, Peter Robinson, yesterday stepped aside temporarily as his party staged a damage limitation exercise in the wake of the sex and financial scandals surrounding his wife.

Both keen to tell you about the political significance of the events. The Northern Ireland piece does at least state the key fact first, although it then explains it in terms of party politics rather than what might be going on with the governing of NI in his absence. The Labour story, which admittedly is of no significance at all other than for internal party politics, manages to open by saying something about the future (“drew the final line”) before reporting what Brown had said.

One of my personal hates is “in a move that will be seen as”, which reporters use to report on how other reporters will report on stories that the reporter thinks can’t simply be told. Googling the phrase gives 1.3 million hits.

What are your pet journalistic (or, for that matter, blogging) peeves?

Snow-karting

One thing I can strongly recommend is go-karting in the snow. It’s great fun, and completely safe – as long as you don’t try any complex manouvres such as steering or braking.

Have a go while weather permits!

The economy freezes

Recent events may end up hastening the end of Gordon Brown’s premiership.

No, not the witless flailings of a couple of has-beens. I mean the weather.

With the transport system struggling and people’s general unwillingness to go outside, severe weather like this does have some short-term economic impact. Not a lot, but if this very cold spell lasts much longer it could become statistically significant.

GDP growth figures for the last quarter of 2009, due out in a few weeks, are almost universally expected to show that the recession is over. However, even before the snow, there have been concerns that this quarter might not be so impressive, especially with consumers taking a breather after the December sales and the rise in VAT.

The chances of negative growth for the current quarter have increased, then – not so much a ‘double-dip’ recession as a wobble, but distressing all the same. The NIESR’s monthly GDP estimate, due out in February, should give us some kind of steer on this. But the official figures for the current quarter will be published in late April – shortly before the likeliest election date. And far enough away for memories of the snow to be fading.

Would Brown want the announcement that his economic recovery has failed to be the last thing voters hear before they go to the polling station? If not, then the odds of an early election have just shortened.

Labour’s inept suicide bombers

Hoon and Hewitt’s suicide attack on Gordon Brown demonstrated all the competence of the Christmas pants bomber. They carried just enough explosives to splatter their own innards all over the Labour party, but no more.

With every clumsy, self-destructive coup launched by Brown’s enemies, it becomes increasingly and horrifyingly clear that he is, somehow, the most politically competent person in the PLP.

That this odd, feeble little farce of an effort could be thwarted by such lukewarm, half-hearted Cabinet support shows that plenty of Labour politicians – whatever their views of Brown – seem to be going through the motions, ambling towards defeat.

Apropos of nothing

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well 

It were done quickly: if the assassination 

Could trammel up the consequence, and catch 

With his surcease success; that but this blow 

Might be the be-all and the end-all here, 

But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, 

We'ld jump the life to come. But in these cases 

We still have judgment here; that we but teach 

Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return 

To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice 

Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice 

To our own lips.

(Hat tip: WS.)

Historical pedantry and the leadership plot

Nick Robinson says:

Weeks before the country gets to choose who should be its next prime minister Labour MPs are considering taking the decision for them. If they succeed a man or woman who has not been elected by the public would replace a man who has himself not been elected by the public.
This is without precedent - in this country at least.

Not true: such a thing has happened here. Stanley Baldwin won the 1935 election and was replaced by Neville Chamberlain in 1937, who was in turn replaced by Winston Churchill in 1940, both sans election. Not a bad precedent, although I do believe the circumstances were ever so slightly different.

(Update: To be even more pedantic, nobody has ever been elected Prime Minister by the public. But you know what Nick sort of means.)

Day one: the horror, the horror

I don’t know if I can bear this.

The prospect of four months of ‘their sums don’t add up’, ‘they’re misrepresenting us’, ‘they can’t say how they’ll do it’, ‘here’s a nice poster of me looking stern yet smart-casual’, followed by the media reporting on how the media will be reporting on how assorted fragments of this will have been reported by the media.

I don’t know if I can bear four months of this, and I’m a political junkie. God only knows how normal people will react, other than by ignoring the whole thing.

As the poster says: we can't go on like this...

Update: See Paul's comment below about the eyes.

"Look into my eyes, look into my eyes, the eyes, the eyes, not around the eyes, don't look around my eyes, look into my eyes... you're under."

Update 2: I've just worked out what the Cameron stare reminds me of. It's Ben Linus, sinister and murderous leader of the secretive 'others' from Lost:

"I'll cut your throat, not the NHS."

I knew I could find a way to enjoy this!

Seal or no seal

Despite the likely outcome, I'm really looking forward to the election for at least one reason: we won't have to hear that awful cliche "seal the deal" in the media any more.

Dot-com boom hits Westminster, ten years late

If I even attempt to ridicule this, I fear my head will explode:

A £1 million taxpayer-funded prize will be offered by the Tories in a competition to produce a website that can "harness the wisdom" of voters if it wins the general election, the party has announced.
…
Announcing the cash prize, which would be taken from the Cabinet Office budget, the party said it believed "the collective wisdom of the British people is much greater than that of a bunch of politicians or so-called experts".
It would be paid to the individual or team "that develops a platform that enables large groups of people to come together online to solve common problems and develop new policies".

To save me the brain haemorrhage risk, I’m just going to point you towards Marina Hyde and Paul Sagar, who trash the idea.

Actually, no. I’m being too sneering. I’m a blogger, for heaven’s sake: I’m supposed to disagree with the view that (as The Now Show’s Jon Holmes puts it) online political discussion forums are like “an adventure playground for mentals”. In fact, I’m going to enter the competition myself:

Rather than having parliamentary committees scrutinise legislation, just publish all bills as wikis.

Nothing could possibly go wrong.

‘Our dodgy expense claims are above the law’

I don’t know which is more staggering – the arrogance or the stupidity:

Three Labour MPs being investigated for expenses fraud are arguing that they should not be prosecuted because their suspect claims are covered by parliamentary privilege.
The MPs have hired legal experts to assert that the 1689 Bill of Rights protects them from prosecution.
The lawyers are understood to have sent detailed submissions to police and prosecutors which contend that the House of Commons rule book on expenses is “privileged” and cannot be subject to scrutiny by the courts.
…
Two members, Elliot Morley and David Chaytor, are being investigated by the Metropolitan police over allegations that they received taxpayers’ money for non-existent mortgages on second homes. … The third MP facing prosecution, Jim Devine, is alleged to have submitted a claim for £2,157 for rewiring his London flat using a receipt bearing a bogus Vat number.
…
The question of whether the prosecution of the MPs is unlawful revolves around interpretation of article nine of the 1689 Bill of Rights, which states: “Proceedings in parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court.”

Twenty-ten: the Hastings precedent

After the end of the Noughties, without doubt the most recent decade in living memory, the new year begins and expert opinion comes to bear on the critical matter of what to call it. Norm draws our attention to a campaign to call it ‘twenty-ten’ rather than ‘two thousand and ten’, mainly on grounds of brevity.

But most of us have been saying ‘two thousand and X’ for the last decade, so why should we change style now?

A Times leader has half of the answer:

At present euphony dictates “two thousand and ten”, on the model of how the film 2001, A Space Odyssey is promounced.

Yes, “promounced”. Oh well. But the other mistake there is to forget that we also have a very well established precedent that supports ‘twenty-ten’. It’s one of the best-known years in all of English history.

1066.

Don’t try to tell me that you read that as ‘one thousand and sixty-six’. So it seems fair to conclude that once we get past the first decade of a millennium, we go from ‘two thousand and nine’ to ‘twenty-ten’.

On the subject of what to call the decade, that’s going to be harder (the 2010s works - no apostrophe please! - but we seem to need an abbreviation). I think the Times’s suggestion of the ‘Tennies’ is the best I’ve heard.

Passive-progressive conservatism

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” (Lewis Carroll, ‘Through the Looking-Glass’)

And so to David Cameron’s new year’s message to the masses, delivered on 27 December:

whether you’re Labour, Conservative or Liberal Democrat, you’re motivated by pretty much the same progressive aims: a country that is safer, fairer, greener and where opportunity is more equal. It’s how to achieve these aims that we disagree about

‘Progressive’ is one of those words that has been almost drained of meaning by the political classes. It has connotations of egalitarianism and liberalism, and has been far more associated with the left and centre than with the right, but in the absence of anyone willing to stand up explicitly for ‘regressivism’, it’s hard to say much definite about it.

I want to focus on Cameron’s use of ‘fair’ – an even more widely claimed, more fundamental and vaguer term. Yes, we all want Britain to be fairer. But do we all agree on what counts as fair? Of course we don’t. This smothering of all ideological difference by a single syllable reminds me of Wittgenstein’s “cloud of philosophy condensed into a drop of grammar”.

Is it fairer for the benefits system to recognise the hardship faced by single parents or to encourage two parents to stay together? What is the fairest point in the trade-off between police powers and civil liberties? When reducing the deficit, are tax rises fairer or less fair than spending cuts? Which taxes are fair and which unfair? Which public spending? What is the fairest level – national government, local councils, community groups, individuals – for any given political choice to be made? Which economic inequalities are unfair and when does action to reduce these become unfair?

The mere concept of ‘fairness’ will not answer any of these questions or a thousand others, and nor are they factual questions to which competent administrators could provide definitive answers. These questions are the stuff of politics, and Cameron is trying to wish it all away.

An opposition leader who was confident of winning for positive reasons, rather than because the government seems knackered and useless, would be making a very different case.

(Anne Perkins deplores Cameron’s attempt to foster a “myth of consensus”, and Paul Cotterill scents unease in Cameron’s plea that the election not be “some exercise in fake dividing lines”.)

I think that the biggest change in the Tory party over the last four years has been not in the image it presents to the public but in the image it holds of itself. I’m happy to credit Cameron and some around him (certainly not all) with sincerely caring about poverty more than their predecessors did – they think of themselves, if you like, as being more progressive. But the change in their plans for government have been far smaller. To adapt John Prescott’s maxim, the Tories have traditional policies for modern reasons.

I doubt this will end well, for them or for us.

Sunder Katwala has a good blog post up about this. He quotes Richard Reeves and Philip Collins:

"At present, he is signing himself up to Labour-style poverty and inequality measures, even as he rejects Labour-style redistribution. In other words, he is setting his own big trap and trotting gamely towards it"
And so Cameron's advocacy of "conservative means to progressive ends" risks turning into "Thatcherite arguments while hoping for the opposite results".

God only knows that Labour’s performance has been poorer than most of its 1997 supporters had hoped, but I’m sure the new Tory blend of fierce anti-statism and compassionate good intentions would be worse overall. They may relish some flavour of ‘fairness’ and they may truly feel themselves ‘progressive’, but I’m afraid their policies will be all too passive in the face of the market’s natural drive towards inequality.

How the other 0.1% live

Liz Jones is an entity of which I’d previously been unaware. She recounts a tale of terror and social injustice in the Daily Mail:

I turned up at the fairly cheap hotel in Shepherd's Bush I always stay in for work. They know me here: they valet-park and clean my BMW and understand I require soya milk with my cornflakes. As I handed the bellboy my Prada suitcase, the man at reception asked for a credit card. It was declined. I gave him another one. Declined.
…
I left my suitcase hostage and walked to the cashpoint in my difficult shoes. 'The amount you can withdraw today is NIL.' Oh dear. I called my bank manager. He was kind but said I would not be able to withdraw money until the next day.
…
The wind whipped around my legs and it was suddenly very dark. I had been tossed on to life's rubbish tip. For the first time, I felt what it must be like to be homeless, to have no money, no one to turn to.
I realised that this was about the worst thing that can happen to you. Your humanity is stripped away and you become something to be moved along, stepped over, ignored.
I had reached my low spot through my own stupidity. I had spent too much money and was temporarily broke (my agent eventually turned up to bail me out).

It makes me ashamed to be British.

All Around My Hat (NSFW)

Adrian Edmondson, of Young Ones and Mr Jennifer Saunders fame, is these days part of a ‘punk folk’ band called the Bad Shepherds. He plays ‘thrash mandolin’.

If you’re at all familiar with ‘All Around My Hat’, the 19th-century folk song popularised more recently by Steeleye Span, then I think you’ll really appreciate the Bad Shepherds version (NB you certainly don’t need to like the song to enjoy this one, and if you do like it you’ll never be able to listen to it in the same way again):



(Thanks to CF, who is just out of shot in the video, for the tip and for a rendition yesterday.)

Cheryl Cole vs David Cameron

Political earthquake transforms nation; bloggers chuckle


No jokes about puppies, please.

Cheryl Cole, the most wonderful and important person in all of Britain, has cast her vote:

"David Cameron. Brrrrr. Slippery isn't he?" she says. "We’ve always been Labour in our family, it just feels wrong not to be. Better the devil you know."

You can’t argue with that.

The distrust is not mutual, though: Cameron has previously described Cheryl as the “most fanciable” member of Girls Aloud – which, ironically, is the only thing he’s ever been right about.

(A festive tip of my Santa hat to Snowflake5. Smashing story!)

Goron Browen, Prim Minster

Nice work, the Times:

The demand for deficits

From a report in the Times:

Anxious families are repaying debts instead of spending in the shops, amid concern over the uncertain economic outlook. The share of income saved in banks and building societies has risen to its highest level in more than a decade, heightening fears that faltering consumer demand could prolong the recession.

So what we really need to escape recession is an immediate cut in government spending, reducing demand even further.

And a nice passage from Robert Skidelsky, on market sentiment about government deficits:

The government must cut its spending now, because this is what “the markets” expect. These are the same markets that so wounded the banking system that it had to be rescued by the taxpayer. They are now demanding fiscal consolidation as the price of their continued support for governments whose fiscal troubles they have largely caused.

Lolchristmas

Anyone in London (and, I presume, lots of other places) is likely to be pretty pissed off with the Transport Misery Caused By Freak Cold Weather In Mid-December (© Daily Mail). People are in danger of losing their Christmas spirit!

These videos will help to avert that:





Merri Chirstmaz!

A dim view of dark matter

I was very excited to find that scientists think they’ve detected dark matter. But then I saw this:

The tests are being carried out in an underground laboratory in a defunct mine in northern Minnesota.

Now, I don’t want to be a killjoy, especially at this time of year, but what with the tests being so far underground, might it not be that what they’ve detected is just ordinary matter… in the dark?

Inheritance tax cuts: it’s what they really, really want

Some people have wondered why the Tories refuse to abandon their promise to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £1 million.

It was stunningly popular when announced back in 2007, being instrumental in talking Gordon Brown out of a snap election. It was the most significant opposition policy announcement in many years. But times have changed a lot: the middle classes are less inclined to identify with the rich (bloody bankers); the Tories are coming under fire for being the party of wealth and privilege (especially on this one issue); and the public finances are not exactly conducive to tax cuts.

And yet, rather than dropping it, George Osborne is still insisting he intends to do it, although not straight away:

It’s now clear that if you want to get on in life, save for your retirement and leave something for your children then the Labour Party is not for you. But it won’t be in the first couple of years.

Why stick to this line despite the transformed public mood?

A possible answer could be inferred from an anecdote that Andrew Grice reports:

A Tory mole tells me that Mr Cameron has received about 4,000 letters of protest over dropping his "cast-iron guarantee" that a Tory government would hold a referendum on the EU's Treaty of Lisbon. … The issue for many correspondents was not Europe but trust, a promise broken. I suspect we won't hear Mr Cameron use the phrase "cast-iron guarantee" again.

Tory policies have been notoriously few and vague. Cameron and Osborne may fear that ditching this one – by far the best-known of their specific proposals – would be more damaging than any hits they may take from keeping it. U-turns can be executed gracefully, but a high-profile one such as this might have compounded many people’s suspicions that Cameron and gang don’t really stand for anything, and are just bog-standard politicians who’ll say whatever’s convenient for them at the time. This is all the more important given that the expenses scandal has subjected the political class to even more distrust than before.

That’s what occurred to me when I read Grice. But then I remembered something else.

Ken Clarke was publicly slapped down for suggesting the inheritance tax cut might be downgraded from a “commitment” to an “aspiration” – all the way back in March. This was before the Tory attack of the vapours over the Lisbon referendum made them fear looking wobbly; it was before the expenses scandal made political integrity into the issue of the year.

I can only conclude that Cameron and Osborne want to cut inheritance tax because it’s something they truly, madly, deeply believe in. You may agree or disagree, but there it is: this is the social injustice that they’re in politics to fight.

National insurance, jobs and the low-paid

I haven’t really had a chance to delve into the depths of the pre-budget report, so I’m just going to briefly touch on one thing I didn’t like and one thing I did.

Until last week, the aspect of Labour’s tax plans that worried me the most was the 0.5% increase in employer’s national insurance contributions. Given the dangers of a jobless recovery, possibly the riskiest form of tax rise is one that discourages employers from taking staff on.

Obviously the equivalent increase in employee NI would also be unpleasant for those of us paying it, but the number of people wanting work is high compared with vacancies, so I think that small tax disincentives to do so won’t really affect job applicants. But taxing employers for hiring people, when they’ve already been stretching their margins by keeping people on during the recession, is risky.

Now that this 0.5% rise has become a 1% rise, I’m twice as worried.

But given this, it’s a good thing that the threshold at which NI kicks in will be raised, so that lower earners will avoid the pain of this rise. (It was also encouraging to hear that the structural deficit and the taxpayer cost of the bank bailouts are both looking to be smaller than feared. But these aren’t policies.)

Gambling with the national debt

From Mike Smithson comes the news that you can get odds of 6-4 on the UK government losing its AAA credit rating.

Alistair Darling can now, if he’s smart and bold, solve all of our fiscal problems at a stroke. All he has to do is to divert all government spending into funding a colossal bet on this happening.

This would be such a deranged thing to do that the government would certainly lose its credit rating immediately. The Treasury would then cash in to the tune of several hundred billion pounds, wiping out the need for any more public borrowing.

Simples.

Beware Greeks bearing gilts

Worries about Greece’s soaring public debt have led to a downgrade in the government’s credit rating, and the Greek gilts market has taken a hit.

None of which particularly fascinates me, but I do love a pretext for a punning headline.

Rich early favourites in battle against poor

Because of an extremely extended work Christmas lunch yesterday involving copious alcohol, meat and karaoke, I’m not nearly up to speed on the PBR yet. In lieu of a considered commentary, here’s something from the Daily Mash:

LABOUR'S bid to engineer a battle between rich and poor will almost certainly result in a resounding victory for the rich, it was claimed last night.
…
"Our strategy for beating the poor is to keep making lots of money and then spending it on lovely things, such as a highly trained accountant and a large house in a small tax haven.
"I don't know the poor very well, but I suspect their central tactic will be to complain about all that while at the same time continuing to be less well off than me."