Some employers are more unequal than others

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just thought I’d throw that out there…

Beeb says sorry for compulsive commentary

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

This was a significant political event and our aim was to reflect that in our coverage by striking a balance between live coverage of the event itself while offering analysis of the developments of the day as they unfolded.


However, complaints on this issue were forwarded to senior figures within the BBC Newsroom and BBC’s political team and they agree that on this occasion it was inappropriate to continue with the commentary and analysis whilst results were being read out. We would like to apologise for the interruption during the announcement.


Better Eds than Red

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

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

A terrible result

I’ve just emailed the BBC to complain about the fact that Emily Maitlis and Nick Robinson talked over the ACTUAL LIVE NEWS EVENT HAPPENING RIGHT IN FRONT OF US so that they could give us a bland piece of commentary that was ALREADY OUT OF DATE BY THE TIME THEY FINISHED MAKING IT.

A painful example of how the desperate urge to be seen to be ‘adding value’ actually makes things worse.

Oh, and congratulations to Ed. Bloody hell, that was close!

(Update: But it could have been closer. Ed's 50.65% vote was better than Nick Clegg's 50.62% leadership win over Chris Huhne.)

Why the government is not a household, by Nick Clegg (aged 43¾)

He wheeled out Thatcher’s old canard in his conference speech:

It's the same as a family with earnings of £26,000 a year who are spending £32,000 a year. Even though they're already £40,000 in debt. Imagine if that was you. You'd be crippled by the interest payments. You'd set yourself a budget. And you'd try to spend less. That is what this government is doing.

But wait a minute. Let’s take him seriously and imagine exactly that situation.

Would you think to yourself: ‘Yikes! We’re spending about a quarter more than we’re earning and the loan interest payments are mounting up! How can we deal with this debt crisis? Well, here’s the solution: next year, we’ll spend 20% more than we earn. The year after, we’ll overspend by 14%. Then by 9% and then by 5%, and so in 2016 we’ll only be spending 3% more than we earn. That’ll sort us out!’

No, you wouldn’t think that. You’d act a lot more urgently.

The above (as if you couldn’t see this coming) is the government’s timetable for deficit reduction. Their actions prove that they don’t for a minute believe their own rhetoric.

So, intuitively compelling as the analogy is, the government’s finances are nothing like those of a household. Or else it’s a pretty funny kind of household:

• It can borrow at well below commercial rates.
• The worst thing at all likely to happen to it – in an unexpected once-in-a-century calamity – would be a 6% fall in its income (that was the change in government revenues over the two years from peak to trough).
• It is in effect immortal, and has indefinitely long to service its debts, paying some off and rolling some over.
• A lot of the money it’s borrowing is going to subsidise the family firm while business is slow, which helps to generate income.

Update: Patrick Osgood also deplores the use of this domestic analogy by deficit-phobes.

Then Kew!

I saw highlights of Clegg’s speech on the TV in the gym, and of course the sound was off so we had to make do with the live subtitling. The end of it, I thought, was utterly inspired:

Stick with us and together we will change Britain for good. Then Kew!

And who says the Lib Dems are a bunch of oddballs who’ve failed to extract any major policy concessions from the Tories?

Labour strategy

I agree with Paul that Labour needs to treat the Lib Dems with something other than disgust and fury.

Luke puts the other case trenchantly: “We shouldn't just be attacking them we should be trying to destroy them as a viable political entity.” Now, I’m all for taking as many votes as possible away from the Lib Dems. I just don’t think a full frontal assault is the best way to do that. These are people who did, after all, choose to vote for the party and still at least in part identify with it. They may be uneasy, but most of them are still giving the coalition the benefit of the doubt, and if we try to savage the party then we risk deterring these would-be switchers.

(Have you ever had a friend who was going out with someone who you thought – and your friend was starting to suspect – was bad news? Slagging off this other half is tempting, but often counterproductive if your friend then rallies in defence.)

I’d have three tactics to use on the Lib Dems: (i) Ignore them. What better way to suggest their inability to tame the Tories than disregarding their existence? Refer to ‘the government’ or even just ‘the Tories’ – not ‘the ConDems’, which is cute but maybe a bit too pleased with itself, nor even ‘the coalition’, which sounds too much like ‘the consensus’, and who wants to be against that?

(ii) Make gentle overtures towards them on issues where their position differs from the Tories. It would be politically smart to campaign with them for AV. Even if the referendum fails, it’ll be handy to have stood with them on the side of reform. Also push hard on democratising the Lords: a government paper is due out on December, so we should be well into the debate before then. Also, we should scour their manifesto for any decent policies that didn’t make it through the coalition deal, and cheerfully adopt them.

(iii) Chastise Clegg, more in sorrow than anger, when he moves rightwards away from prior party commitments. Did the hopeful progressives who voted Lib Dem really sign up for this?

As well as straightforwardly winning voters from them, I want at the next election for Labour to be getting tactical votes/second preferences from people who still prefer the Lib Dems. Naked aggression won’t help so much with that.

But we also do need to win votes from the Tories – if they stay in the high 30s, we’re stuffed. So we can’t just play to left-liberal anxieties. We need to have things to say that are worth a broader audience’s attention in traditionally right-wing areas, such as the economy and immigration.

Even before the recession, living standards for middle-income people (I mean that literally, not in the newspaper columnists’ fantasy-land way) were stagnating. So Labour needs to focus hard on economic growth and job creation, which also brings us onto the matter of the deficit.

People aren’t going to listen to Labour on the public finances if they think we’re too statist and spendthrift, and many do. I think we’re in the same sort of situation as the Tories were with immigration in 2005: voters may in theory prefer our approach, but their general view of the party’s motives means that they don’t trust us to carry it out. We need to change that.

A ‘fight the cuts’ approach has virtue of simplicity but there’s also a hollow desperation to it, an implication of all-or-nothing that will leave many people resignedly thinking that it’ll probably just have to be all, then. But ‘slower cuts and faster growth’ is a positive proposal, turning the debate into a matter of choice between different degrees of action – not reality vs denial – highlighting that there’s a trade-off and pushing the government onto what many will think is the wrong side.

We should also go to great lengths to show that Labour isn’t just about the state. We should aim to outdo Cameron on the ‘big society’ front. Whatever specifics emerge from the current fog, the rough principle has merit. No doubt the policy agenda that comes under that heading will have failings – lack of funding and other support, incompetent organisation, too demanding of people’s time, unfairly distributed between different social groups, too much like government abdicating its duties, disregarding the negative social effects that the market can have, or just not amounting to very much – so we should develop a vision of decentralising and redistributing power that’s better than Cameron’s. And please, think of a better name.

And then there’s immigration, which has come up in the polls again and again as a big complaint for a lot of people. I don’t believe that Labour can win a numbers game: we’ll never convince the right-wing press that we’ll keep as tight a limit as they’d like, and trying to do that will tear us apart as well as repelling potential Lib Dem switchers.

So we need to change the terms of the debate: make it about the impact of immigration. We should pivot on Gordon Brown’s most painful moment (in the way that Cameron played off Thatcher’s notorious “society” quote) and say that most people worried about immigration aren’t “bigoted” but reasonably concerned about coping with change and whether they’ll get a raw deal as a result. It’s completely true that a lot of people moving into your area can be disconcerting – whether they’re from elsewhere in the UK or halfway round the world. There are all sorts of impacts on housing, public services and the labour market. That’s the set of concerns we should take on.

‘Managed immigration’ should be about this, not clumsy attempts to set a national limit. The total number of immigrants coming here is probably unknown to most people anyway, and official figures are distrusted. And of course immigration isn’t distributed evenly across the country; it’s the local amount that has an effect on people.

There are, of course, bigots who just don’t like foreigners; I don’t propose we try very hard for their votes.

I expect this parliament to last the full five years (certainly, I think Labour’s ability to shorten it is basically zero). But unlike the Tories after 1997, we’re not stuck miles behind an unnaturally popular government, so people are going to be looking at Labour sooner, with genuine – albeit critical – interest, so we need to get our act together quickly.

(These quarter-formed thoughts don’t add up to a strategy. But I think they point in roughly the right direction. And I think David Miliband is most willing and able to take this sort of approach, so he gets my vote. Ed M’s not too far behind, though. Also, I think David comes across a bit less awkwardly than Ed on the telly box.)

Labour, cuts and growth

Labour’s position on the public finances needs to do several things:

• show that the big deficit isn’t due to irresponsible spending
• show that the party is serious about getting borrowing down again
• argue that the government’s position is unnecessary: the scale and speed of cuts is their choice
• argue that the government’s position is positively dangerous to the economy
• avoid getting stuck in the bog of detailed shadow spending reviews that are quickly rendered irrelevant by events
• be reasonably easy to grasp in outline.

I’m sure that’s not an exhaustive list, and I’m sure I’ve not wholly succeeded on these counts, but I’ve had a stab anyway.

In brief
During the recession, the government had to offer what support it could to the economy. This meant more borrowing, but it was the right thing to do. And now we need to reduce borrowing, so there will have to be spending cuts – but not at the expense of economic growth. Public services are part of the economy too, so the responsible way to cut public spending is when the private sector is strong enough, not in a dogmatic rush to cut savagely no matter what.

In depth
The credit crunch hit the economy hard. Households had to cut back their spending, so the businesses they bought things from had to cut back theirs and lay people off or go bust, which just meant more households cutting back their spending and so on and so on. If the government had joined in with this spiral of cuts, that would have sent the whole economy into complete meltdown. But we didn’t. We knew that the government had to stand firm and limit the scale of the recession with temporary tax cuts and more spending.

And it worked. Even though it’s been tough going, there were fewer job losses and fewer repossessions than in past recessions. But this did mean that government borrowing went up. And now it has to come down. In fact, it already is: it’s been falling since the start of the year, as the economy’s started growing again.

And growth is crucial to getting the deficit down. A stronger economy with more jobs means more people paying tax and fewer people claiming benefits. But higher taxes for those who can afford to pay, as well as cutting public spending, are important too.

The big political question is how quickly to cut spending.

Once upon a time, it was written that the timing of spending cuts should be based on an “assessment of economic conditions, not political dogma”. That was the Lib Dem manifesto. The story didn’t have a happy ending, and now the Tory plan is to cut as savagely and hastily as possible, come what may.

Never mind what harm the cuts will cause to people who use public services – although of course that matters – just think about the effect on the economy.

The money we spend on public services doesn’t just disappear. It flows through the rest of the economy, because public-sector workers spend their pay just like the rest of us. So if you work for a business that sells things to ordinary people, then big cuts that make a lot of your customers worse off could hit you too.

The economy is still fragile and big cuts are risky until the recovery is secured. If the economy falters then more and more cuts will just make things worse.

We set out a bold but sensible timetable to get borrowing back down – not the Tories’ mad rush to cut. The government’s own Office for Budget Responsibility confirmed that our approach would have eliminated two-thirds of the deficit by 2015. But, crucially, we want to look to economic conditions, not political dogma.

We think public spending should be cut when the rest of the economy is strong enough to take the strain. There are many people out of work today because of the recession, and the speed of cuts should take into account whether businesses are hiring them again. As the private sector steps up, the public sector can step down.

But now, of course, we’re in opposition. The Tories are running the show, with a little help from their friends. So whatever detailed numbers we might come up with, events will quickly move on. But we will do all we can to push the government in the right direction. If they do propose responsible cuts, we’ll support them. When they propose over-hasty cuts driven by ideology, we’ll oppose them.

So that’s the choice we face over the next few years: faster cuts and slower growth and fewer jobs, or slower cuts and faster growth and more jobs.

This is a development of some earlier thoughts of mine, and has been shaped along the way by blogging by Duncan Weldon, Hopi Sen, Sunny Hundal and others.

I think this sort of approach could more or less be adopted by any of the leadership candidates, although Diane Abbott would want to steer leftwards. David Miliband is the only one to stick by Alistair Darling’s timetable, so the others would need to change that bit, but the broad thrust, particularly the contrast with the government, would basically be the same.

Update: a MORI poll out today finds that 23% of voters think that “It is important to cut spending quickly even if this means immediate job losses, because it will be better for the economy in the long term”, while 75% think that “It is better to cut spending more slowly, to reduce the impact on public services and the economy”. It strongly suggest that if Labour can communicate this position clearly and credibly, there are votes to be won.

Behead those who insult atheism!

Oh dear:

One of the Pope's senior advisers has pulled out of the papal visit to Britain, after saying the UK is a "Third World country" marked by "a new and aggressive atheism". Cardinal Walter Kasper, 77, made the remarks in a German magazine interview.
The Vatican said the cardinal had not intended "any kind of slight", and was referring to the UK's multicultural society. It added that he had simply pulled out of the Pope's visit due to illness.

Or, perhaps, rather than beheading him, we could send his eminence our condolences on falling unwell and our best wishes for a speedy recovery.

Mash-tastic

Love it:

The Labour leadership contest has been blown wide open after the shock return of Stryker, the secret Miliband brother.

How the leadership candidates come across

The YouGov poll [£] in today’s Sunday Times puts Ed Miliband very narrowly ahead of his brother, due to a big swing among trade union members. Among the general public, though, things are different.

30% of voters think David Miliband would make the best leader, 16% think Ed and 54% don’t know. The question seems to have excluded the other candidates, but another poll from just over a week ago covered all five. It gave David 19%, Diane Abbott 10%, Ed M 9%, Andy Burnham and Ed Balls 5% each, and 51% don’t know.

There’s obviously no strong public preference: most people know little if anything about the contenders. David Miliband’s profile after three years as Foreign Secretary is still not all that high, reflecting the dominance of the last government by Gordon Brown.

So we’re still painfully short of information about how people think the five come across.

I’ve been waiting for somebody to run some focus groups, showing potential swing voters the candidates in action and finding out what they think; it was a similar exercise in 2005 that first showed how receptive people were to the little-known David Cameron. And now Newsnight has done one [available to view until Sep 15], consisting of 12 people in Bristol who voted Labour in 2005 but not this year.

It’s a very limited sample, and their pre-existing views weren’t checked at the start, and the moderator was a Newsnight reporter rather than a professional market researcher, but it’s something. After hearing from and questioning the candidates, seven of them preferred Burnham and five David Miliband.

Personally speaking, the little I took from the programme was that the more I see of Ed Miliband interacting with people, the more awkward and self-conscious I think he is. His supporters boast that he “speaks human”, but to me he seems more like someone who’s just got a good grade in his GCSE Human. To give him credit, though, he has shed some of his fondness for polysyllabic abstract nouns.

As has David, who is also looking less wonkish than I’d feared. He manages more gravitas than the others, too, but remains in danger of being seen as a second-rate Blair rip-off.

Burnham and Balls probably ‘speak human’ better than the others. Burnham comes across as nicer, and earnest, but maybe a bit wishy-washy, and Balls a more confident, feisty proposition – although, as Paul Sagar cruelly puts it, with “the eyes of a toad and the smirk of a pedophile set free on a legal technicality”. Abbott remains a bad joke. I agree it’s good that the candidates aren’t all white men, and it’s good that the party’s left is represented, but it’s a shame that the person doing all this representing is so manifestly unsuited for the job.

I’m still unsure, so I’ll tune in to the BBC Question Time debate on Thursday, and leave the actual voting as late as I can (deadline for votes by post or online is September 22.

Bin Laden surrenders – “please, just don’t burn the Qur’an!”

The world of competitive moronism was stunned today by the news that Osama bin Laden, leader of terrorist network al-Qaeda, has surrendered.

Handing himself in at the US air base in Bagram, Afghanistan, bin Laden made the following statement:

For years we have fought to overthrow the Western world order, destroy the liberal capitalist conspiracy of crusaders, Jews and atheists, and establish a global caliphate in which decent, peace-loving Muslims can safely cover women in tarpaulins and then throw rocks at them until nobody wants to rape them. But no more.

On hearing of Pastor Terry Jones’s ingenious, terrifying plan to burn copies of the Qur’an this Sunday, I knew that we could no longer face the horrors of this jihad. I therefore announce the immediate and unconditional surrender of all al-Qaeda operatives worldwide.

Furthermore, while anticipating the pain that the burning of the holiest of all books would cause us, I have had occasion to reflect upon the suffering that we have inflicted upon others on the past. It has been an eye-opening and saddening experience.

I deeply regret any offence that may have resulted from our long campaign of mass murder.

From now on, all former al-Qaeda funds will be used, through the Osama bin Laden Faith Foundation, to promote respect and understanding about the world’s major religions and show how faith is a powerful force for good in the modern world.

Pastor Jones, this afternoon appointed as US Defence Secretary, was too busy receiving the Nobel Peace Prize to comment.

“Who controls the past controls the future”

Lacking any real ideological dispute between the Milibands, Sunder Katwala looks at a difference of strategy:

What the Milibands really disagree about is why Labour lost and how to win again. … What does "moving on" from New Labour mean, and how deep should it go? David Miliband warns that throwing out too much of a recently successful formula could mean a long spell in opposition; Ed Miliband fears that it is failing to recognise the scale of change needed which would keep the party from power.

I think this disagreement isn’t so much about how successful the New Labour “formula” was or is – rather, it’s how the brothers feel about the Blairite principle quoted in the title above.

Ed thinks Labour was more comprehensively and thoroughly rejected than David thinks. So Ed’s arguing for a bigger reinvention of the party, perhaps on the scale of what Cameron or even Blair did. He’s trying to persuade the party to get on with this quickly, repudiating the last government’s failures, so it doesn’t spend several terms in opposition as Labour and the Tories have done before.

David thinks the party’s not as deeply and widely unpopular as it was in the 1980s or the Tories after 1997, and that it should stand by its successes. He also thinks that such a radical transformation isn’t something you can convincingly pull off in one parliament. He fears that if Labour swallows the narrative that the last government was a failure then it will become accepted fact, making it all the harder for the party to recover.

Ed thinks that Labour lacks control over its past – or rather the public perception thereof – and should focus on moving away from it. David thinks that Labour can affect the way voters view its time in office, and thus how much punishment they think the party still deserves.

In practice, their difference on this is just a matter of degree: both defend and recant various aspects of the last 13 years. But which end of this spectrum should the party lean towards?

In support of Ed’s view is, very obviously and powerfully, the general election result. A half-decent tally of MPs – which won’t survive the boundary review – shouldn’t distract us from a vote share midway between Major’s in 1997 and Foot’s in 1983. It was a kicking.

In support of David’s view is the fact that (despite being rudderless and self-absorbed with its leadership contest) Labour is the first opposition party in many, many years to be significantly up in the polls very shortly after defeat. This doesn’t suggest massive public revulsion at the party. Also, there’s the fact that the coalition is doing its damnedest to blame Labour’s alleged profligacy for the cuts.

So it looks as though who controls the past will have more control over the future. And David may be right to be treating his own cute soundbite - “our task is not to debate a better yesterday, but to build a better tomorrow” – as a tad simplistic.

No UK debt crisis, part 89

Via Stephanie Flanders: an IMF report [PDF] has looked at how much governments are relying on the bond markets to fund their borrowing. The chart shows the overall gross financing needs of various developed countries’ governments. This includes both the new borrowing (the deficit) and the renewal of old borrowing, which depends on how much national debt there already is and on how long-dated the country’s bonds are.


On both of those counts, the UK does pretty well, so despite our large deficit we’re actually less dependent on the goodwill of the bond markets.

(I don’t know why these countries and not others were included. Germany in particular would have been good to compare. The best information I have is a Fitch analysis earlier in the year, suggesting that it would need to raise 38% more debt than the UK in 2010, in cash terms. Yes, the German economy is bigger than the UK’s, but not that much so.)

The Hague ‘scandal’: a personal statement

Four years ago, I shared a twin room in a hotel with a male friend of mine, J. The decision to have one rather than separate rooms was taken purely on cost grounds and not because we were having any kind of sexual relationship. Suggestions that we were are false, baseless and highly upsetting to J, who got married just two weeks after the night in question.

The fact that I also booked several other twin rooms in the same hotel, also to be shared by pairs of male friends, should not be interpreted as meaning that I had organised some sort of weekend of illicit gay coupling.

The fact that this took place in Brighton, a city renowned for its gay scene, is of absolutely no significance.

The fact that J described me at the time as his “best man” reflects only my unofficial job title at the time and not any romantically or sexually motivated evalution.

The fact that, two weeks later, I made a wedding speech that was by turns affectionate and mocking towards J is no basis for suspicion of anything improper. The affection was purely platonic and the mockery was in no way a bluff to conceal any kind of closer relationship.

The fact that J and I were both wearing skirts at the time can be easily explained by the fact that the wedding took place in Scotland. I believe they are known as ‘kilts’ and reflect an ancient warrior tradition rather than any urge to experiment with gender roles and sexuality.

I accept that my actions could be misrepresented by irresponsible journalists, as they now have been. In hindsight I should have given greater consideration to what might have been made of that, but this is in itself no justification for allegations of this kind, which are untrue and deeply distressing to me, to J and to his wife.

I did, however, once wear a baseball cap.

‘Fact in public domain for 17 years’ exclusive!!!

This is one of the stupidest things I’ve read in a news report for a long time:

Labour has defended its leadership election rules amid evidence some people can cast multiple votes. Labour MPs, MEPs, party members and members of affiliated trade unions and socialist societies are all entitled to take part in the contest. But people can register for more than one vote by joining different bodies.
…
Research by the BBC found it was possible to join a number of unions or societies - more than 30 of which are affiliated to Labour - and secure separate votes in the leadership contest.

“Evidence”? “Research by the BBC”?

The leadership election rules – last changed in 1993, if I remember rightly – state that this is so very clearly.

Morons.

A Journey Into The Past

What the hell is wrong with everyone? I am desperately trying to find something, anything, about the Blair memoirs in the media, but no: all the papers and airwaves and blogs are full of ‘actual current events of real significance’. Pathetic.

The worst of it is that the one possible source of precious information on this, Blair’s BBC interview tonight, has been ruined by Channel 4’s deeply irresponsible decision to schedule its so-called Labour leadership debate to clash.

I really don’t know how any of us is ever going to find out whether Blair thinks exactly what we all already know he thinks.

Mandelson’s blinkers and Labour’s trajectory

I think the political positions being adopted by Ed and David Miliband are a lot closer than the current sniping suggests – and both possessed of more depth than merely marking points on a left-right axis. Labour’s history is also a good deal more complex than ‘old’ versus ‘new’.

A fine case in point is Peter Mandelson. He says [£]:

Ed... is wrong when he describes new Labour as a comfort zone. On the contrary, it was about some difficult choices and some tough decisions on policy. There was nothing comfortable about many of the issues we had to face up to. … I think that if he or anyone else wants to create a pre-new-Labour future for the party then he and the rest of them will quickly find that that is an electoral cul-de-sac.
…
I understand that people of a certain age like Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley want to hark back to a previous age, and they believe that [Ed] Miliband would reconstruct the party in that image.
…
If you shut the door on new Labour you’re effectively slamming the door in the faces of millions of voters who voted for our party because we were new Labour.

Look at that line about Kinnock and Hattersley. Of course, it’s easy to make the quick retort that Mandelson is also a man of “a previous age”, but there’s more to it than that.

Think about what Kinnock did with his time at the top of the party. Yes, Labour was then to the left of where it has been since, but that sees things too statically. It was, in fact, an era of tremendous and furious modernisation – leading to improved popularity. During 1983-92, Kinnock and others (including Mandelson) reformed Labour probably more than Blair and others (including Mandelson) did during 1994-97, fighting harder battles than that over Clause IV.

Both were periods of reinvention appropriate to their time, and the specifics of both are of limited relevance to today. Mandelson should be able to see that, but he can’t.

So, what should we do about ‘new Labour’? Much of the debate assumes there’s a single, clear meaning to this phrase; there isn’t. Was ‘new Labour’ a marketing tool or an overarching political strategy or a programme for government? It was all three.

The marketing tool of that name was born in 1994 and has now become dated, useless and even counterproductive. The broader strategic principle, that Labour should adapt itself to changing circumstances and not sacrifice electability to any absolutist view of ‘ideological purity’, goes back to the mid-1980s (and indeed operated in one form or another under pre-Foot leaders), and has as much importance now as it did then.

The programme for government, as manifested in the policies of the late 1990s and 2000s, clearly has had its day. The legacy is of mixed quality, and should now be defended, repudiated, improved upon or entirely transcended as appropriate.

This is all theory, of course. The practice is harder.

Labour’s lost voters

As this has come up lately during the Labour leadership campaign, I thought I’d look at the socioeconomic status (or ‘class’ as I believe some people quaintly call it) of voters abandoning the party.

I’ve used MORI’s ‘how Britain voted’ data going back to 2001, the last time Labour won convincingly. To focus on political shifts rather than changes in the population, I’ve assumed a consistent electorate for all three elections of 2010 size and social structure: 44.4 million people, of whom 27% are social group AB, 29% C1, 21% C2 and 23% DE.


Over the two parliaments, Labour lost about 80,000 ABs, 560,000 C1s, 990,000 C2s and 650,000 DEs.

I’m not saying ‘therefore we must elect X’ or ‘therefore we must move to the Y’. These are just the numbers.

Update: Following some interest from Left Outside, I’m happy to share another chart I produced en route to the above. It shows the percentage of each social group – the total electorate, not just those turning out – that voted Labour. Since 2001, Labour has lost 3% of its support among ABs, 19% among C1s, 39% among C2s and 22% among DEs.


I’d focused on the previous set of numbers because – from the point of view of a party wanting to recover from defeat – you need to gain numbers of votes. A big percentage drop among a small group could distract from this. That said, I think a fairly similar picture emerges either way.

Clegg vs the IFS: reductio ad absurdum

Via Sunder Katwala, I see that Nick Clegg has reprised one of his greatest moronisms.

Back in June, the Institute for Fiscal Studies reported that George Osborne’s Budget would hit the poorest hardest. Clegg responded by saying that the IFS analysis didn’t take into account the effects of unspecified future policies that the government might introduce. This met with general ridicule.

Undaunted, Clegg has reacted in the same way to the latest IFS report:

It doesn’t cover what we’re going to do in future Budgets to build on the steps that we included in this Budget to make the tax system fairer.

Let me explain, in language that Clegg can understand, why this criticism is wrong.

It doesn’t cover what the IFS is going to do in future Budget analyses to build on the steps that it included in this Budget analysis to assess whether the government is making the tax system fairer.

An Office for Distributional Responsibility?

The Budget in June included a chart showing that its measures would hit the rich hardest and the poorest the least. Within a day, the Institute for Fiscal Studies had demolished this as a farrago of dishonesty (I paraphrase) and that the truth was exactly the opposite.

Now they’ve done a more thorough analysis that confirms and deepens this picture, and the government is getting a deserved kicking all over the media. Its spokespeople are still pathetically clinging to the bar chart George Osborne produced, which included some of Labour’s redistributive policies and omitted some of his new ones.

I would like to protect Osborne from this criticism.

Shortly after the election, in setting up the Office for Budget Responsibility, he said:

We need long-lasting change in the way we put together budgets in this country. The final decision on the forecast has always been made by the Chancellor, not independent officials. And that is precisely the problem. Again and again, the temptation to fiddle the figures, to nudge up a growth forecast here or reduce a borrowing number there to make the numbers add up has proved too great.

It’s obvious that we can’t trust the Chancellor to produce a distributional analysis of his own policies. The temptation to fiddle the figures has proved too great, and the political importance attached to them means that politicians don’t have credibility to speak authoritatively here.

Given that the government has followed Labour in declaring that it wants to fight poverty, and that it has asked to be judged on the impact its policies have on the poorest, it’s clear that we need an independent expert body to do its own, non-partisan assessment here. The IFS is fantastic, but it doesn’t have full access to all the government data.

So maybe the government should set up an independent Office for Distributional Responsibility – not to rule on how much redistribution should happen, that’s a political judgement – but to analyse the financial effects of policies on different income groups and to assess progress towards whatever aims the government might set.

Alistair Darling’s deficit speech this week

Is there a full transcript of it online anywhere? I can't find one...

“I couldn’t agree with Nick”

I’m deeply sceptical about Ed Miliband’s statement that he wouldn’t go into coalition with the Lib Dems under Nick Clegg.

Hopi thinks Miliband is spot on, though. He makes several very sound points, mostly boiling down to the fact that Clegg is the absolute embodiment of the Lid Dems’ rightward shift, their working with the Tories and their championing of a government agenda largely defined against Labour’s record. Hopi thinks that “whatever future relationship Labour and the Lib Dems may have, Nick Clegg won’t be part of it”.

This is probably true. But I still think Miliband was wrong.

In effect, he’s said that in the event of another hung parliament, the Lib Dem leader’s only option will be to do another deal with the Tories and ignore Labour. Lib Dems who’d prefer a coalition with Labour are being told that they’d have to dump their leader. Remember the weekend after the election when Clegg was swanning around demanding a new Labour leader? Remember, even given the limited support for Brown, how little the party liked getting an ultimatum like that from an opponent?

It may well be that Clegg and Labour couldn’t work together. But for Miliband to come out with it so bluntly would do serious damage to Labour’s negotiating position in another hung parliament. And it pushes the Tories and Lib Dems closer together.

In other news: I will definitely be voting for a Miliband as leader, although as yet I’m not sure which. I’m observing their tactics, reading their speeches and so on, but what I keep coming back to is whether the incipient white patch at the front of David’s hair or Ed’s ghost of a lisp comes across more oddly. I am shallow.

AV and tactical voting

I think Tom Harris misses the point here – or, at least, he misses the point I’d make. Possibly he very squarely addresses a point other people have made.

He claims to “explode another myth” about the Alternative Vote:

It will mean that every vote counts, say its “supporters”; no more tactical voting for candidates you don’t actually support.
Ah, bless.
In fact, AV will institutionalise tactical voting and make sure that many, many more voters than before will use their votes tactically.

But the truth is that it does both.

You use your first choice for whichever candidate you most like, without fear that you’re wasting the vote on a no-hoper. Because if they are a no-hoper, then you can use your lower choices to pick between the likelier candidates as you prefer. Under first-past-the-post, the first choice is all you get – so there is a conflict between between showing your support for your favourite and trying to get the best plausible option elected.

AV removes the need for tactical voting in first choices by institutionalising it in the lower choices.

What’s more, the type of tactics involved changes. Tom says that “Voting tactically with your second or third preference vote is no different from placing a cross against the name of the person you dislike the least under the current system.” But this isn’t true.

Tactical voting under FPTP requires you to know/estimate/guess which candidates have a genuine chance of winning and which don’t. This is often difficult, particularly with lots of horrendous ‘Only Party X can beat Party Y in Wibblesford North!’ leaflets, complete with dodgy bar charts, flying around.

Under AV, all you have to do is decide which candidates you prefer to which others. You need spend no time poring over opinion polls and past results.

And those bar charts will become obsolete.

Odds and ends

The Times has a list of ‘100 things you may not know about the first 100 days’ [£]. A few caught my eye.

10 Downing Street is cutting down on “garden girls” — No 10’s administration officials. One insider said there was less need for 4am help since Mr Brown’s departure.

Gordon Brown was criticised for shouting at these women. Much more compassionate to sack them.

53 Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, wanted to list “no top down reorganisations” as a success of his first 100 days. He was stopped by officials.

I wonder whether they actually believe their own PR?

82 Crispin Blunt angered No 10 by suggesting taxpayers should start paying for parties in jail. A Downing Street aide boasted that Mr Blunt was subsequently “bitch-slapped”.

The culture of aggressive, macho briefings against colleagues is dead. Long live the…

Bought t’book

Two things follow from this:

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair is to donate the profits from his memoirs to a sports centre for badly injured soldiers. A spokesman said Mr Blair would hand over the reported £4.6m advance payment plus all royalties to honour "their courage and sacrifice".

First, it will officially be unpatriotic not to buy the thing. Twice.

Second, it sets a bugger of a precedent for any other former prime ministers who may or may not currently be writing their memoirs and who may or may not be as cheerfully loaded as the Blairs.

Lib Dems try to airbrush their support for stimulus

It’s doubly sad to see Chris Huhne attack Labour’s increase in public spending over the last couple of years:

Labour leadership candidates say that spending was not the problem, it was taxes. Nonsense. ... Spending went from 44p in every pound generated by our economy in 2007 to 51p in 2009. Taxes went down by 1p in the pound.

First, an economist such as Huhne should know better. Another Lib Dem economist, former blogger and now government adviser Giles Wilkes, could set him straight. Giles, in his superb paper A Balancing Act, broke down the elements of the deficit and found that the loss of tax revenues accounted for far more of the increased borrowing than did the rise in government spending.

I looked [long-ish piece – a look at the third and fourth graphs should do it] at the Treasury figures and came to the same conclusion: while tax may have fallen by less than spending rose as a share of GDP, the sharp drop in GDP means that this disguises the fact that real spending rose by less than real tax receipts fell.

Second, as is well known, the Lib Dems have found themselves changing some of their pre-election positions (VAT rise, spending cuts this year), but now it seems that the Tories have persuaded them to change their views of the past as well. Because during the recession, the Lib Dems were in favour of more deficit-based spending to stimulate the economy. They disagreed with Labour on the details, but not on the principle.

In November 2008, Vince Cable said: “I hope the fiscal stimulus will work... it needs to be tried. Levers have to be pulled. … There would be massive civil disobedience if the government simply let the recession run its course.” And in March 2009, Nick Clegg said: “We accept that borrowing goes up automatically in a recession. Tax receipts go down; benefit costs go up. But we also accept that you should borrow sensibly on top of that, to try to help. A so-called fiscal stimulus.”

So really the Lib Dems should be demanding apologies from themselves for having supported a bigger deficit. Maybe punishment for this is why the Tories are making them squirm so much.

Relativity isn’t right

The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions. It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.

Yes, it could only be Conservapedia, the place where the religious right do battle with reality.

The New Scientist investigates.

Where’s Osborne’s axe when you need it?

And so, as the government recoils in terror from a cut that might get some bad headlines, I notice another exemption to the age of austerity (via Catherine Bennett).

Andrew Lansley has replied to the Commons Health Select Committee’s (highly critical) paper on homeopathy. He says that funding of this practice is to continue, despite a mass of scientific advice to the contrary. And why? Simple: “the overriding reason for NHS provision is that homeopathy is available to provide patient choice”.

Yes, you can have homeopathy on the NHS not because it works but because you might want it. You can choose to waste my money on a piece of quackery. Super. So, can you ask for any useless ‘treatment’ at taxpayers’ expense? Well, no. It seems that the power of lobby groups comes into it. Lansley says: “Given the depth of feeling on each side of the debate, it is unlikely that this controversy could be resolved by further analysis of literature or research on the efficacy of homeopathy.”

The “depth of feeling”. Is that peer-reviewed depth of feeling? Have double-blind studies been used to measure how deep these feelings are? Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. So it’s acknowledged that scientific evidence has no bearing on people’s tendencies to fall for the homeopathy industry’s PR, and in light of that, the government will boldly let them spend our money.

But how much money? Alas, we don’t know. The Committee urged Lansley to find out, but he replied that doing so “could well require a disproportionate amount of resource”.

This sits uneasily with David Cameron’s insistence [£] this weekend that “no detail and no sum of waste is too small to escape the microscope of efficiency… we are having a root-and-branch audit of recent public spending”.

Bah. And yes, Labour funded this crap as well. It’s cross-party pusillanimity.

Many happy returns! (The happiness of your returns can go down as well as up.)

There wasn’t a single moment at which the credit crunch started, but today is a good candidate for being its third anniversary – when a major investment bank announced it was having desperate liquidity trouble, and the ECB and the Fed started large-scale support operations.

To mark this, and given that I’m not in a position to write much at the mo, here’s a self-indulgent plug for my old explanation of the credit crunch in words of one syllable. Still just about hangs together, I reckon.

The internet giveth and the internet taketh away

On Saturday my laptop was assailed by a virus that’s stopping me from opening any programs. It’s masquerading as ‘Antivir Solution Pro’, which is a big fat dirty fake, as suggested by the iffy grammar in its offer of help for the problem that it’s causing. I’ve got hold of some instructions on how to purge it from my system, but if that doesn’t work then I’ll be blogging very little if at all in the near future. So you may have to miss out on my potential series of intermittently coherent brilliantly insightful posts on what strategy Labour should adopt over the next couple of years.

On the flipside, the Times website seems to think that I’m a paying subscriber, despite me cancelling my direct debit at the end of the one-month trial, telling them I’d cancelled it and getting an acknowledgement from them that I’d cancelled it. Great business model, Rupert.

Blessed be the name of the internet.

Weapons intelligence misreports

David Cameron says that “Iran has got a nuclear weapon”.

A No 10 source said the PM "misspoke", later adding he had been talking about Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Tony Blair must be kicking himself for not having thought of that one.

Grammatical nuance and scientific methodology

Two distinctions in one:

• We looked at all the evidence, which supported the hypothesis. (Systematic review; non-defining clause)
• We looked at all the evidence that supported the hypothesis. (Cherry-picking; defining clause)

Janet and John consult on welfare reform

The DWP has produced an “easy-read” guide to changing the benefits system. These guides have been around for a few years, but I hadn’t seen any before today.

As someone with an unhealthy appetite for policy documents and a desire for more people to be politically engaged, I’m torn between thinking that these are obviously a good idea and rolling on the floor laughing like a smug overeducated git.

We want to help people to get a job and to do well in that job. We also want to look after those people who need a lot of help.


We do not want to give less help to people who really need it. But we need to make sure we are helping the right people.


But first we want people to tell us what they think about these changes. This is called a consultation.

I’m very concerned that the government may be trying to encourage less well-off people to spend their newly earned wages down the pub. I’m also worried that most of the people seem to have been doing so much coke that their entire noses, not just their septums, have been eroded.

Dominus illuminatio mea (‘Do less to illuminate me’)

I’ve had a letter from the Vice-Chancellor of my old university, probably asking for money. I say probably because I didn’t read past the moronic first sentence:

Today, the defining struggle in the world is between relentless growth and the potential for collaboration.

Sigh… He sounds like he’s on day release from Comment is Free. Maybe General Melchett was right:

“The Secretary of State may enter into Academy arrangements with any person”

So reads the first line of the Academies Bill, which the government is pushing through parliament with the kind of haste usually reserved for emergency anti-terrorism legislation. It’s expected to get passed into law early next week. And, as befits its opening, it does devote a great deal of attention to giving Michael Gove more power.

Why the rush to get it enacted? Of course a government that thinks it has a good policy on its hands wants to get it up and running ASAP, but you could say that about any Bill.

Gove has a useful political skill: he knows how to make empty bluster sound like the sharp, forensic workings of a keen intellect. In his recent interview on Today, he said that of course there has been ample scrutiny: the idea of allowing all schools to become academies had been discussed a lot over the last few years and the Tory manifesto proposal had been debated during the election campaign.*

This is vacuous tripe and he knows it. There’s a world of difference between forming an opinion on a policy in principle and the close scrutiny required to test whether a Bill will indeed achieve what it aims to and check it for unintended consequences. Parliament has just not had the chance to do this properly, and certainly the 232 new MPs hadn’t previously been able to debate it.

So, in the spirit of the big society, I’ve had a quick look myself. Of course, I have no particular expertise.

The desire to minimise consultation and accountability isn’t just a feature of the parliamentary process; it’s key to how the new academies will be set up. Under John Major, would-be grant-maintained schools had to hold a parental ballot before opting out of LEA control, but under Gove’s law, things will work differently:

(5) Consultation on conversion

1. Before a maintained school in England is converted into an Academy, the school’s governing body must consult such persons as they think appropriate.
2. The consultation must be on the question of whether the school should be converted into an Academy.
3. The consultation may take place before or after an Academy order, or an application for an Academy order, has been made in respect of the school.

There’s nothing to suggest any check on whom a governing body considers “appropriate” consultees. Themselves? Their friends? And there’s nothing to suggest that they need to abide by the views of those consulted. And what a wonderful idea to allow them to consult after the decision has already been made.

Gove himself is not required to check whether such consultation has taken place, nor to do any consulting of his own when deciding whether to approve an application, nor to make public the grounds on which he makes these decisions.

But he does appear to be a fan of consulting people after the event. The Sunday Times (paywall) reports that he is already writing to schools and approving their applications - before the Bill has even been passed.

If this is true as reported, then he’s acting illegally. I suspect that it’s not quite that stark, but rather that he’s told schools what decision he’ll make just as soon as he’s legally able to. Even so, there is still scope for the Bill to be amended, so neither he nor the applying governing bodies can know exactly what the deal will be, and no one can have been consulted meaningfully.

This Bill is not about ‘parent power’. It’s about Gove’s power to bypass local councils and parliament, and it’s about governing bodies being able to bypass parents.

Is it a good idea to change the academies programme from being a way to rescue failing schools into an optional upgrade for potentially any school? What will be the effect not just on the schools that go for it but also on the wider education system? I’m afraid I’ve not had the chance to think this through. I’m not sure who has.

* The Lib Dem manifesto pledged to “replace Academies with our own model of ‘Sponsor-Managed Schools’. These schools will be commissioned by and accountable to local authorities and not Whitehall”. Oh well.

Bradman’s brilliance, Donald’s duck

I rarely if ever blog about cricket, but Norm, whose forte it is, has drawn me in. He writes:

'For ever to be remembered as one of cricket's nearly men' - so says Rob Eastaway (behind the Times paywall) about... Donald Bradman. I nearly spilled my breakfast cereal. Bradman a nearly man? He only had a Test batting average at least 50 per cent better than all the other most successful batsman in the history of the game. Eastaway is referring, of course, to the four runs by which Bradman fell short of an average of 100. But still - with 99.94 I'd say he was more clearly way above nearly than he was nearly, merely.

Dead right. I don’t know much about the sport, but I know enough to know that Bradman stands in a class of his own. And I know enough about numbers to know when one is absurdly bigger than all the others. Here are the top 20 career batting averages:


More than 60 years on, this is still the sort of achievement that deserves to be gawped at in awe.

But in fact, I think I’d go further than Norm. Of course missing a round 100 average must have been frustrating, but I think the story of Bradman’s swansong – or ducksong – makes his stunning achievement that bit more memorable, a more captivating human story, a more bittersweet legend; it’s a flaw that give the gem more depth to its beauty.

There’s nothing objectively special about 100. But there’s a lot that’s humanly astonishing about 99.94.

How to mouth off in parliament about the legality of war and get away with it

Nick Clegg’s “illegal invasion of Iraq” moment has raised questions about whether minsters speaking in the Commons are there as ministers or as random people with opinions. Lucy Mangan has some fun, as does the Daily Mash.

Hadleigh Roberts has an intriguing theory – that George Osborne fed him the line and was mouthing along as he delivered it – but I’m not convinced. I’ve watched the clip four times and I’m not sure Osborne’s lips are doing anything more than slightly, randomly wobbling.

I think the explanation is much simpler: Clegg was using the dog whistle. He knows he’s achieving less in the coalition than many of his party would like, so (to switch canine metaphors) he threw them a bone. His statement is of no consequence for government policy, but plenty of Lib Dems will have been heartened to hear it.

Just a thought, though: a senior member of the government has made a confident and unambiguous declaration on the legal status of a war without even bothering to consult his Attorney General. I’m sure that the usual suspects are rushing to the comment pages of the Guardian and the Independent to denounce his lack of respect for proper procedure…

How big? Introducing the Societometer

I had a mild rant the other day about the phrase ‘big society’ and how the concept of society’s size makes no sense. But, like a good blogger, I’ve now done some research and it turns out that there is an accepted measure, the Societometer, that gives regular assessments of how big society is.

Historical records show that society was huge in the 1950s, tending to shrink a little in the 1960s and more rapidly in the 1970s. Apparently, due to a small fire at the Office for National Statistics information warehouse five weeks ago, no figures exist for the years 1979-97, so we cannot possibly draw any conclusions about what happened during that period and must never mention it.


But it can clearly be seen that over Labour’s time in office, society hardly increased in size at all, and has even shrunk since 2007 – although the very latest figures show that in the five months leading up to the election, society did grow by 1.7%, as Labour leadership contenders have been quick to seize on. However, Downing Street argues that this increase was due to people expecting a change of government, and so acting so make society bigger in anticipation.

The current Societometer reading, for June, puts society at 33.2 SBU (social bigness units), although this preliminary estimate is subject to revision.

David Cameron has set an ambitious target, aiming to double the size of society in real terms by 2015. He has established the Office for Societal Embiggenment to assess progress towards this aim, although its independence has been called into question after it produced a set of very favourable predictions.

By contrast, the respected think-tank the Institute for Quantifying Woolly Abstractions calculates that policies announced so far will enlarge society by little over a quarter, and that this increase will be concentrated in better-off neighbourhoods where people share the same private security firm and know each other’s interior designers’ names.

There has been speculation that the government may change the way society’s size is calculated, giving less statistical weight to poorer areas on the grounds that they are ‘broken society’ and so appear smaller than they actually are. Furthermore, given the general austerity drive, it would be more efficient to measure fewer parts of society – the larger bits are easier to do – and then extrapolate from them. Critics say that this would be fiddling the figures, but no decisions will be taken until a commission led by maverick Labour MP Mark Meadow has reported.

Bang!

SSL International, the maker of Durex condoms, is set to be sold to Reckitt Benckiser - the firm behind Cillit Bang cleaner

And in other news, I am a mature grown-up with a sophisticated sense of humour.

(I hope they get ‘Barry Scott’ to do the adverts.)

Polysyllabic misanthropy

I was reading an old Stephen Fry book over the weekend and came across this passage, in which one of the characters has just started a newspaper column:

Ashley found that he had a gift for tediously obvious opinions expressed in a formulaic polemical style that exactly suited the kind of brain-fagged commuter most ready to confuse polysyllabic misanthropy for intelligent thought. … He had in particular that peculiar journalistic gift of stating all the prevailing bourgeois prejudices in a language that represented itself as ‘maverick’, ‘daring’ and ‘unconventional’.

I’m giving serious consideration to using a chunk of that as my blog strapline.

Candidate selection and the boundary review

Danny Finkelstein (paywall) has been struck by a thought:

It takes a long time to do even a very simple boundary review, doesn't it? And the boundary review that equalises constituencies and reduces the number of MPs to 600 isn't simple. There must be a big question mark over whether the review will be ready. And this by itself will tie in the politicians to a late election.

Yes – although of course both coalition partners say they want to go the full five years anyway. The review will take a good while. Unlike Danny, I expect it will be finished in time, but its lateness in the parliamentary term will still be significant.

Two words: candidate selection.

This can’t take place until we know what constituencies there’ll be. So it will have to take place late and quickly. This will mean would-be candidates (including MPs for seats that have been taken apart and then put together with bits of other old seats) rushing to get selected by their local parties and then known to the local public. The obvious consequence is that, except where one of them is a sitting MP for a mostly or wholly unaltered seat, the candidates will be less familiar than usual to the voters come polling day.

(Many, perhaps even most seats will be unchanged. But nobody will know which until the review is done.)

But also, I think this means that local prospective candidates will have an advantage in selections, as they may at least be known in the area as campaigners and/or councillors. National party ‘stars’ and leadership favourites will have much less chance to cultivate local party supporters, as they won’t know which seats will look tempting prospects until the review is complete. And if selected, they’ll have much less time before the election to get to know the area and its people.

Finally, while sitting MPs always have an advantage over other candidates in terms of their profile, next election this edge will be greater than usual: if they are selected to fight mostly/or wholly unchanged seats, then the lateness of the selection won’t make much difference to their long-term self-promotion campaign.

Exactly how much bigger should society be?

Please imagine that question being asked by Chris Morris on The Day Today.

Because whatever you might think of the general principle, or the motivations behind it, or the policies that may be produced in its pursuit, “big society” is a bloody stupid phrase.

Before Cameron coined it, had you ever heard anybody discussing the size of society? Sure, you’d hear about a strong society, a vibrant society, an active society, a good society, a flourishing society, an open society and so on. But had you ever heard anyone complain that society was too small, or argue that society ought to be made bigger?

Yes, I understand why he went for it: “big society not big state” sounds less nasty-old-Tory than “small state not big state”, so it was an effort to change the terms of the debate. But given that “big society” also makes it sound as though English is his second language, couldn’t he have done better? I gather that many on the Tory right thought that the idea was a very hard sell during the election campaign, and that doesn’t surprise me at all: “big society” is a category mistake.

Oh no. I was going to leave it there but then I made the mistake of looking for the Big Society website. It says: “The Big Society is a society in which we as individuals don’t feel small.”

Think about that for a moment. Surely, the bigger society is, the smaller I as an individual am going to feel by comparison.

Doing my bit for the cuts

At first I sneered, but then I felt guilty and resolved to help out by adding my own suggestions to the government’s Cut-U-Like website.

You can read my ideas here, at least until somebody realises and takes them down. Either way, I’ve reproduced them below:

How to save money literally

1. Require retina scans to get into government buildings. All the faceless bureaucrats will be unable to enter as they have no eyes. They will have to stop drawing their salaries and get proper jobs for instance circus freaks or estate agents’ gimps.
2. Use plain coloured tape rather than red tape for regulations. This will save money on unnecessary extravagant dye.
3. Find a feckless single mum and start a religion around her based on the fact that she has become a mum without having ever had a feck. Demand a tithe from followers.
4. Put an end to the something for nothing culture. Parminides said that “ex nihilo nihil fit”, which means that nothing comes from nothing and so welfare scroungers are breaking the laws of metaphysics. We should have more people like Parminides running the country except he was a foreigner.
5. Protect front line public services. But get planning permission to move the front line to somewhere unpopulated like Leighton Buzzard and then you will be able to cut everywhere else.
6. Harness the power of the black hole in the public finances to create a space time wormhole that will allow interstellar travel and then sell it to the military of a proper country.
7. Abolish gold plated public sector pensions and put them in envelopes instead. And paper is lighter than gold so you will also save on the postage as well.
8. Stop spending so much money on waste. I produce plenty of waste especially after curry night and can sell it to you much cheaper.
9. Put a cap on immigrants. Make it a stupid one like William Hague used to wear so they will not want to come here and ruin our Green and Pleasant Land and expect us to pay them for the pleasure.
10. You should have a bonfire of the quangos but the Health and Safety will never allow it because some chav kid with so called ADHD might run into the fire and get hurt. Yet they turn a blind eye to civil servants burning our money and that creates an even bigger fire. We have a smoking ban but they forget there is no smoke without fire and I think I have lost control of this metaphor now and need to stop.

You must be careful implementing these cuts. Above all make sure that they are PROGRESSIVE by means of saying that they are.

(Thanks again to Clifford for setting me off.)

Big society, small minds, big laughs

The government’s attempt to harness the wisdom of the internet is having predictable results. The Spending Challenge website, set up so that we can tell them what we’d like them to cut, looks like Blair’s old e-petition site on steroids. And on cocaine. And on and on and on and on and on. It’s proving to be a refuge for all those people too illiterate and hateful to feel comfortable in the Daily Mail’s online comment boxes.

There are doubtless some sensible ideas in there as well, but the words ‘monkeys’ and ‘typewriters’ leap to mind.

Clifford Singer has the full story.

Balls on borrowing

Yesterday Ed Balls said:

Halving the deficit in four years by cutting public spending... I think was a mistake. In government at the time in 2009 I always accepted collective responsibility, but at the time in 2009 I thought the pace of deficit reduction through spending cuts was not deliverable, I didn't think it could have been done.

I think it’s fair enough to say, in a leadership contest after an election defeat, that you didn’t agree with your party’s policy at that election. Collective responsibility in a government matters.

But what I don’t get is why Balls hadn’t recanted sooner. Indeed, just ten days earlier, he still seemed happy with the policy:

Of course we must start reducing the deficit, but it is the economics of the madhouse to do this before the recovery has been secured. In government we set out a plan to do this with a mixture of growth promotion through our new industrial policy, fair tax rises and spending reductions.

I smell tactical positioning. But then, what’s new?

I’ve heard people argue that Balls was wrong to soft-pedal on the deficit (although he has some support), but I’m more concerned about his apparent indifference to one of the main causes of the credit crunch.

On the Today programme this morning, his interview with the increasingly useless John Humphrys shed very little light on anything, except for one point when Humphrys raised the very high level of debt in the economy before the crunch. Balls at first didn’t seem to realise that this meant overall debt (including businesses and households, not just the government), and then once Harrumph had falteringly explained this, he seemed to shrug it off, saying that “the fact is we had low interest rates, the fact is we had low inflation, and people were borrowing – we had a million more homeowners and that was a good thing”.

There’s a significant body of opinion that rates should have been higher during the years before the crash, that we fixated on consumer price inflation to the neglect of asset inflation, and that borrowing in general should have been more restrained, perhaps by law. Balls should know this and at least be willing to engage on it, although to be fair Humphrys had left little time in the interview after wittering for ages about the Mandelson book. Where oh where is Evan Davis when you need him?

Memo to leadership candidates: please stop talking to us

I am fed up with hearing the Labour leadership candidates explaining to the party what we should do over the coming years to win over sceptical voters. Don’t tell us, show us. Stop trying to win a leadership election and start acting as though you’ve already won it.

Make speeches aimed at the wider electorate. Craft your arguments and language for an audience that’s not terribly partisan and only intermittently interested in politics.

To win a general election, you need to be able to do this. So start showing us that you can.

Yes, intellectual depth and strategic analysis are important – David Miliband’s latest effort I liked, but then I’m a political anorak and a philosophy graduate. Or, in other words, a weirdo. Most people will be left utterly cold by phrases like “a compelling articulation of aspiration and hope”, which is of course not a compelling articulation of anything. And that’s a very mild example.

But while I agree with Hopi that someone needs to “stop Mr Miliband stringing abstract nouns together and calling it an argument”, I wouldn’t join him in calling this sort of thing “Cameronian”. Whatever his faults, the PM does know how to use language in a way that ordinary people can nod along to.

The Milibands aren’t as bad as Jon Cruddas, who can hardly open his mouth without the names of half a dozen long-dead political philosophers dropping out, but they’re close.

We know you’re clever. Now show us that you can engage with people.

They’re sounding more and more alike

All politicians have their little verbal quirks. One of David Cameron’s that struck me during the third election debate was this:

It is completely unacceptable what has happened, and we need to grip it very, very hard to sort this out
…
they'd know their government had listened to them, gripped it, and got it under control
…
I say, let's grip this problem
…
What you can see is two parties that won't grip immigration, and one that will.

It’s very common to talking about ‘getting a grip on’ something, or ‘getting to grips with’ something else. But I’d never before heard anyone talking about simply ‘gripping’ a problem.

Now I’ve come across someone else doing this:

He said it would have been an "act of cowardice, socially deeply unjust and an abdication of political and moral responsibility not to have gripped the crisis."

It is, of course, Nick Clegg. I hear that sometime married couples grow to share each other’s tics. I also hear that pets can come to resemble their owners.

The markets talk with money, not words

Martin Wolf’s latest piece has helped me to crystallise something that’s been floating around my head for a while. He writes:

Fiscal default is nigh, insist the doomsayers: repent and retrench before it is too late. Yet I have a question: do we believe that markets are unable to price anything right, even the public debt of the world’s largest advanced countries, the best understood and most liquid assets in the world? I suggest not. Markets are saying something important.
On Monday, the yield on 10-year government bonds was 1.1 per cent in Japan, 2.6 per cent in Germany, 3 per cent in the US and 3.3 per cent in the UK (see chart). Based on yields on index-linked securities, real interest rates on borrowing by these governments are very low (1.2 per cent, or less, in the US, Germany and UK). Investors are saying that they view the risk of depression and deflation as greater than that of default and inflation.

This is the moral: if you want to know what the bond market thinks, do not listen to the words spoken by any of its participants. Watch what it does instead.

Government borrowing has been consistently cheaper since the end of 2008 than it was in the couple of years before the crunch. And the recent fall can hardly be attributed to the new anti-deficit government: it dates back to the start of the Greek crisis and extends beyond the UK.

A caveat is that, as those of you with memories stretching back two or three years may suspect, the prices that markets allocate are not always right.

The perfect man for the OBR

The Office for Budget Responsibility needs a new head, as Alan Budd isn’t staying on. Various names have been suggested, but there’s one striking omission from the speculation.

The job needs someone with experience of economic policy, who knows the way the Treasury works and the tricks chancellors try to pull. It should be somebody who will be able to resist political pressure from George Osborne to do what’s convenient for the government. It should be someone who likes to be in a position of authority without having to court popularity or charm and inspire people. And it should be someone who’s probably not happy in their current position.

Well?

Oh, come on. It’d be so funny.

Predicting the next financial crisis

This has put me in a silly mood:

European regulators to publish doomsday scenarios for banks
European banking supervisors are tomorrow expected to try to assuage concerns that their stress tests have not been tough enough, by publishing details of the types of calamities banks have been asked to withstand.

I can exclusively reveal that these scenarios include:

• An asteroid heading for Earth is blown up by Bruce Willis, but all the small chunks just happen to land on the banks.


• A giant mutant lizard besieges the Santander head office after his mortgage application is declined.


• A plague of the living dead ruins the actuarial projections on which pension funds are based; unable to afford the potentially eternal payments, they collapse.


• Staff at the credit-rating agencies responsible for grading sub-prime-mortgage-backed securities finally notice that their keyboards have letters other than ‘A’.


• Derren Brown snaps his fingers and we all remember that money is an illusion.


• Hapless subcontractors at HSBC branches accidentally fill the staff vending machines with money and the cashpoints with snacks.


• President Sarah Palin.


• The euro breaks up, and the public bulk-buy Sellotape to stick the notes back together again. Higher demand makes the price of Sellotape rocket, leading to a surge in the number of gnomes employed in the tape mines. However, the now-overcrowded working conditions cause a series of industrial accidents, sparking civil unrest, government intervention and the bankruptcy of Sellotape plc. The resultant continent-wide tape shortage provokes sanctions and ultimately war.


• The traders’ braces snap and their trousers fall down just as the vicar is about to come round for tea.


• Bank TV ads finally cause a series of murderous rampages; victims’ relatives sue for compensation on the grounds that where there’s blame, there’s a claim.


• Somewhere, a small child loses faith in the fundamental goodness of the finance industry.

But I’m sure there are other potential calamities…

Public- and private-sector employment

After the row last week about projected numbers of jobs, I was going to do a post based on this chart. Turns out I can’t be bothered, but here’s the chart anyway. It shows annual changes in the numbers of public- and private-sector jobs, and the size of the public-sector workforce relative to the total.


The ONS figures are for the second quarter of each year, except for 2010, for which the latest stats cover Q1.

How could I have been so dense?

Admittedly, Wikipedia is not the world’s most reliable source, but this one from its list of common misconceptions is really incredibly obvious:

Black holes, unlike the common image, do not act as cosmic vacuum cleaners any more than other stars. When a star evolves into a black hole, the gravitational attraction at a given distance from the body is no greater than it was for the star. That is to say, were the Sun to be replaced by a black hole of the same mass, the Earth would continue in the same orbit (assuming spherical symmetry of the sun). Due to a black hole's formation being explosive in nature, the object would lose a certain amount of its energy in the process, which, according to the mass–energy equivalence, means that a black hole would be of lower mass than the parent object, and actually have a weaker gravitational pull.

A moment’s thought confirms that this makes perfect sense, and yet it had never occurred to me.

Yes, black holes have a huge gravitation pull for their size, but for their mass their pull is normal. So the reason nothing can escape the pull from inside a hole’s event horizon would simply be that of close proximity to so much densely-packed mass; by contrast, if you’re on the surface of (or even inside) a large, heavy star, you’re still quite a distance from most of the star’s mass. I think that’s right. It sounds right…

(Via Matt.)

OBR and FOI

I don’t care enough to do it myself, but has anybody thought of submitting a Freedom of Information request to the Office for Budget Responsibility?

Something like: What communications took place, on 29 and 30 June 2010, between the OBR and ministers or ministerial advisers, about the timing of the OBR’s release of its employment forecast?

The answer’s probably ‘none’, but if not it could be embarrassing.

Not just another click on the wall

The Times paywall goes up tomorrow. I’ve said my piece on this, but I’d like to add a comment on their new-look site, which has been up and running a couple of weeks now: it’s terrible. The pages are slow to load, the pictures are vast and almost all stories are now split across two or more pages – even if the last page just has a couple of lines – so that they can tell advertisers they’ve got a higher number of page views.

I may or may not go for the £1 introductory offer for the first month, but £2 a week thereafter – sorry, no.