Pursued By A Bear Market

A tale of fiscal policy and self-justification

The Royal Palace. The KING holds court with CAMERON, OSBORNE and CLEGG, Lords of the Treasury, and MILIBAND and BALLS, courtiers.

King:

Lords Cameron and Osborne, here you stand

To bring us tidings of financial woes.

You feared that those three Fates of credit would

Condemn us for our royal borrowing

And curse our land so nothing more could grow.

Thus warned, we charged you to avert this doom,

To halt the spending of our ministers

And raise such levies as could bring us gold

So that our monstrous debts would grow no more.

Now speak! We yearn at last for happy news.

Osborne:

My lord, we were entrusted to reduce

The vastness of your annual deficit.

And now it is my honour to declare

We’ve cut a quarter of this giant sum.

King:

That’s but a quarter – this news meets our ears

With disappointment, and familiar ring:

Was this not what you said a year ago?

Osborne:

It was.

King:

And now?

Osborne:

A quarter still, my lord.

King:

So when will all four quarters then be gone?

Osborne:

I swear, my lord, within five years from now.

King:

Was this not what you said a year ago?

Osborne:

It was.

King:

And what you said two years ago?

Osborne:

It was.

King:

And now?

Osborne:

Five years from now, my lord.

King:

These riddles disenchant us. How can time

So dance away as we approach each year

And stay as distant as horizons far?

Cameron:

My lord, I can explain my kinsman’s words.

When you appointed us, we sought to change

The short-term thinking of past ministers

And always turn our eyes to future times,

Determined that they must be better days.

We screwed our courage to the sticking place,

But now we find the sticking place can move

And so our constancy demands we change,

For we are bound to keep our fiscal oath:

‘Five years from now’, my lord. Always five years.

King:

How now, what craven sophistry is this

That conjures strength and virtue from a wreck?

Balls:

Methinks that ‘screw their courage’ gets it right,

For fools stand fast where angels fear to stay.

Cameron:

Damned knave! Your wretched insolence is cheap

And marks you out as low-born scoundrel, sir.

Balls:

Such ready fury boils your noble blood

And gives the lie to your play of command.

For you have marched us all into a swamp

In which our people cannot hope to thrive

Nor even stem His Majesty’s great debts.

And now you cannot dare to lead us out,

So make us all the captives of your fear.

Cameron:

This barking oaf! He tries to slander me

Before the very presence of the King.

I take no lectures from the gentleman

On courage; if he seeks to challenge me

I’ll slit his smug, fat belly with this blade!

Osborne:

Now cuz, hold still, for though he is a rogue,

The temper that he slyly sparks in you

Is crafted to repel you from the King,

Who cherishes good manners over all.

So douse your voice, and breathe until your face

Can lose this violent hue: a red as bold

As those bewitching locks of your true love.

Cameron:

The thought of dear Rebekah cools my bile,

But quickens yet my blood, for how I long

To be with her again, at last, to ride –

Miliband:

Rebekah, lady once of Wapping, stands

Accused of treason. Hold you her so dear?

Cameron:

I know! I know it! And she shall face trial.

I will denounce her crimes, if proved.

(If not, I shall her favour once more seek.)

King:

Pray stop this wanton prattle. We care naught

For squabbles or ill-chosen loves.

Our business here is fiscal. Miliband?

Miliband:

My lord, we seek to build one nation here:

Unsqueeze the middle and let fairness reign

Throughout the realm, as in your own good heart.

My raft of policy initiatives

Is not quite yet constructed to be launched

But, as I argued in my speech last week

To that esteemèd think-tank called –

King:

Enough!

Is there much more of this? Our bones grow old.

Balls:

If I may speak my mind, my lord, you’ll hear

My language is more plain than my wise friend’s.

Your ministers have failed, as you have seen,

When few can prosper and your debt still grows.

King:

They are your rivals, yet we find it sad

That now you smirk; this failure taints us all.

Balls:

I swear, my lord, it is no gleeful smirk

At their humiliating haplessness,

Which surely will entail their public fall

And clear a path for better men to lead.

I smile in nothing more than humble joy

At being granted your majestic ear.

And with this honour, I shall now explain:

Their folly is to try to cut too fast.

Dismissing servants of the Crown to save

A penny here and there may seem to help,

But if too many quickly lose their wage

Then how can merchants hope to sell their wares

And earn the gold with which they pay their tax?

And if proud Osborne asks them to pay more,

However can they hope to trade at all?

King:

You bring to us a thrifty paradox

That seems to beg we borrow more to save.

We would have further counsel on this point,

So let us hear from our Lord Clegg now. Clegg!

Where are you, man? Come forth! Now speak.

Clegg:

Sorry.

King:

Indeed! A sorrier sight we never saw.

And now we see it, we have quite forgot

All reason to have sought to see. Begone!

Cameron:

If further counsel do you seek, my lord,

Then I, unlike that grey-faced mope, can talk

And warn against the madness of these two,

Whose optimistic fancies are a dream

As fever’d as the mad Caligula

And surely as destructive to your realm.

Miliband:

Why, sir, if mad destruction do you seek,

Then walk the streets of any English town

And see the pain that your infernal cuts

Have wrought upon the visages of all.

Cameron:

I surely walk, and I can see each day

That everyone is grateful for my work

To build up our society so big.

But what, I ask, would you do in my place?

If you lack now the stomach and the will

To dam the fearful flood of royal gold,

How long yet must we wait? When will you act?

Miliband:

In time, and in a very real sense,

But I shall not get into that today.

Instead, I say again that you have failed:

Your recklessness has undermined your plan;

More haste has now resulted in less speed.

Osborne:

Your clumsy wits have led you far astray:

We made great haste to guarantee great speed.

And now, when it appears that speed is low,

This grim misfortune only proves us right,

And heralds the necessity of haste.

King:

Now gentlemen, we tire of these words

That tie themselves in cruel, ingenious knots,

To trap the earnest listener in a noose

While failure wears the robes of victory

And solid now dissolves to future mist.

We know from sad acquaintance what we have.

But tell us, clear and true, what else might be?

Balls:

I plead for lower taxes, for a year

So that our merchants may advance their trade

And earn a profit that they then can spend

Elsewhere, so new prosperity can spread.

And when, after a year, they all have thrived,

We can return to levy our demands

Now knowing that they have the strength to pay.

King:

You plead for lower taxes, for a year?

Balls:

For just this year, then we’ll have no more need.

King:

Was this not what you said a year ago?

Curtain.

A bad recession and a terrible recovery

The UK recession of 2008-09 was a bit deeper than the 1980s recession but shallower than the 1930s one – and briefer than either. It was much deeper than the 1970s or 1990s ones: by historical standards, it was pretty bad.

But what about the recovery from recession? I find it hard to get too excited about whether the technical definition of a double-dip or triple-dip recession has been met: the overall picture is two-and-a-half years (so far) of stagnation. And it’s this that is so terrible by historical standards.

For about the first five quarters after the end of the recession – up to autumn 2010 – it looked like a normal recovery. And then it stalled. We haven’t seen anything like this before.

Blind on welfare

You may remember George Osborne explaining his method for identifying his next victims:

Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits?

But here’s the thing: in “the dark hours of the early morning”, aren’t most of us still asleep? To get to work for 9, I don’t need to wake up until 7.30 (although I have curtains rather than blinds – I’m not sure how much of a difference that makes).

And this symbolises Osborne’s bigger misjudgement. His decision to uprate most working-age benefits by 1% a year for three years – a real-terms cut – was supposed to show the government on the side of the strivers not the skivers, the workers not the shirkers, the hard-grinders not the closed-blinders.

But in fact, most of those hit by the policy are in work, having their low incomes supplemented by tax credits and the like. Whatever kind of drapery they have.

Some inequalities are more unequal than others

John Rentoul and others have been talking about economic inequality. John argues that the Gini coefficient is “the only statistical measure that captures the full extent of inequality in any population. Any other measure, such as 60 per cent of median income or the ratio between the 10th and 90th decile points, would fail to do this.”

 

In a sense that’s true, but for me the Gini coefficient’s strength is also its weakness. It gives you a single number for inequality in a population (from 0, meaning everyone is completely equal, to 1, meaning one person has everything) – but it can’t tell you whether that inequality is because the people at the bottom are a long way behind or the people at the top are a long way ahead.

 

For instance, these two sets of numbers both have a Gini of 0.13:

• 5, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29
• 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 52

If we want to measure economic inequality meaningfully, we mustn’t treat it as a single phenomenon. If the very rich are racing ahead, then that’s quite a different thing from the very poor falling behind. These two phenomena have different causes and different consequences – and, if we want to do anything about them, different policies will be needed.

 

So I propose that rather than looking at a single Gini coefficient for everyone, we break the population down into, say, fifths. We look at the Gini among each group, from the poorest to the richest, and see how they compare.

What follows is a very crude attempt to do that (this post develops an idea I had a few years ago).

 

I start with this chart from the Institute for Fiscal Studies [PDF], showing household income for different percentiles of the population:

 

 

Unfortunately, the numbers that went into the chart aren’t given. So by measuring the size of the bars (I told you it was crude), I’ve reconstructed it:

 

 

It looks about right. Note that I’ve added a bar for the richest 1%, not shown in the original – perhaps because those people are hard to get data on. I’ve assumed that the gap between 99 and 100 is the same size as the gap between 98 and 99 (which I’m sure is a conservative assumption).

 

And, treating each percentage point as an individual, the Gini coefficient for these 100 numbers is 0.33. The IFS report gives the Gini for the whole population as 0.34, so again, I feel confident that my reconstruction of the numbers is about right.

 

Now I can break this down into five groups, from the poorest 20% to the richest, and calculate and compare the Gini coefficients across the spectrum:

 

  

The greatest inequalities are at the top and the bottom of the scale. To see the size of these, we can look at ratios: the Gini at the bottom is 3.6 times as high as the middle one; the Gini at the top is 4.9 times the middle one.

 

It would be good to see how these ratios have changed over time, and how they vary between countries. But here I really do run out of even approximate data. If better people than me agree that this approach is worthwhile, then I encourage them to give it a go.

 

One thing I feel confident in saying, though: John reproduces an IFS chart showing the distributional impact of government policies, and guesses that “overall inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, would be more or less unchanged”.

 

Maybe. But taking my approach, the government’s policies look like they’ll reduce the Gini at the top and increase it at the bottom and in the middle. The gap between the very rich and the fairly rich may fall, but all other gaps will grow.

The sense of unease: an open letter to David Davies MP

Dear David,

When I first saw your views on sexuality reported a few weeks ago, I took you to be a bog-standard old-fashioned Tory bigot who was worth no more of my attention than the time it took to write an angry tweet.

But in your interview today with Decca Aitkenhead – a cracking read – you come across differently. You seem more like someone who’s willing to engage on the subject, and to be engaged with. So, in a spirit of seasonal goodwill, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. And, even though ‘open letters’ are generally silly and pompous, and there’s a near-zero chance of you reading this, I’m writing anyway.

Because I think you do speak, in your own uncertain way, for quite a lot of people.

I personally don’t understand prejudice, of whatever kind, against homosexuality. From the thug wielding a baseball bat to the priest wielding Leviticus, I just don’t get the motivation. But I think most of the people who have a “sense of unease” (as you put it) about gay people aren’t near either of those ferocious extremes. You seem to be generally well-meaning, but you don’t like the thought of gay relationships and you find it very hard to say exactly why.

Here’s some of your interview:

His big worry about gay marriage, he explains, is that it will necessitate a revision of sex education. … He looks down and shifts awkwardly. "But I suppose, at a certain level, I see heterosexual sex as being – and it's probably the wrong word to use – but the norm. I think it's reasonable to say that the vast majority of people are not gay." He hesitates, sighing. "I just worry if children are going to be taught that [heterosexuality] isn't necessarily the norm, and that you can carry on doing all sorts of other things, are we going to have a situation where the teacher's saying, 'Right, this is straight sex, this is gay sex, feel free to choose, it's perfectly normal to want to do both. And you know, why not try both out?' I mean, are we going to have that?
…
"I suppose what I'm trying to say, in a very clumsy way, which will again probably cause offence, is that some people might be going through a bit of a funny phase between the age of 15 and 20 when they're not sure. And I'm not absolutely convinced it's a good idea to be changing sex education in school to try and say to people, 'Feel free to go out and experiment and do this, that and the other.'"

Here’s a thought or two in response:

Talking about sex can be awkward and embarrassing. Talking about sex to children is even more so. I don’t have kids myself, but if I do someday then I’m sure that I’ll spend a long time mentally cringing in anticipation of The Talk.

One thing that might make that talk a little bit simpler would be if there were only one type of sexuality. Because where there’s variety, you have to explain the variations and how they differ. And then you have to start getting into orifices – so to speak – and talking about sex in perhaps more graphic detail than you’re comfortable with.

But the things you’re worried about would still exist even if there were only one type of sexuality.

Lots of young people have sexual partners who turn out not to be right for them. Some of these they go on to bitterly regret, others they look back on as learning experiences. It takes plenty of us a while to figure out what, or who, we really want. ‘Experimenting’ has become a euphemism for trying out a different sexuality, but in reality it covers so much more than that.

And sex education could in theory take any position on promiscuity, even if we took differences of sexuality off the table. As it is, the Department for Education guidance says:

Effective sex and relationship education does not encourage early sexual experimentation. It should teach young people to understand human sexuality and to respect themselves and others.
…
Teachers should be able to deal honestly and sensitively with sexual orientation, answer appropriate questions and offer support. There should be no direct promotion of sexual orientation.

That seems fair to me (although let’s not overestimate what effect teachers can have on teenagers here). Sex education shouldn’t encourage kids to try all sorts of different things with all sorts of different people, but it also shouldn’t tell them that they ought to be a certain way and that they’re abnormal if they aren’t.

This takes me on to what you said about heterosexuality being the “norm”.

You struggled with that word, and it’s understandable that you did. Sometimes people use “norm” and “normal” in a purely statistical way, about whether something is common or uncommon. And, at an estimated 5-7% of the population, people who are gay, lesbian or bisexual are definitely a small minority. But that’s hardly rare: one or two out of an average classroom.

But “norm” and “normal” also often carry a sense of moral judgement, implying that what’s different – or abnormal – is inferior or wrong. Do you believe that? I don’t think so. In the seven byelections this year, about 4% of people turned out to vote Conservative. The fact that they were in a small minority didn’t make them wrong to do so.

So when it comes to the question of what to teach children, my answer is: facts. Most people are heterosexual. Some aren’t. And as for what sorts of relationship are acceptable, we should teach children what the law says: gay and straight alike are OK.

There are lots of gay people. Even 5-7% works out as 3 or 4 million people in Britain. They have friends, families, neighbours, jobs, cars, mortgages, gas bills, votes and all the things in their lives that straight people have as well. They are part of society.

I think it would be best for all of us – especially any children or grandchildren you or I might have who might grow up to be gay – if our attitudes as well as our laws accepted gay people as full, equal members of society. I think that part of the way to master the “sense of unease” is to appreciate that we don’t need to share someone else’s tastes, or even understand them, in order to accept them.

I’m glad you’ve changed your mind on Section 28, on the age of consent and on civil partnerships. And I applaud your openness about your doubts – there should be a lot more of that in politics.

I hope that you’ll keep thinking, and that you have a merry Christmas.

Tom

The unspoken fallacies of the Second Amendment

The Second Amendment of the US Constitution is odd. It’s odd because, unlike all the others, it doesn’t just declare a right: it also gives a reason; it makes an argument.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Everything up to “State” is a preamble, a statement of fact (or apparent fact) that justifies the statement of the right that follows. (It’s probably best to ignore the first and third commas: people used a lot more of them back then.)

This needs a bit of unpacking. The argument implicit in the Second Amendment is this:

(a) We want the state to be secure.
(b) A well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state.
(c) The right of the people to keep and bear arms is necessary for there to be a well-regulated militia.
Therefore:
(d) The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

(a) is unstated, but as a general principle it’s completely uncontroversial. (b) is stated, albeit in the form of an absolute clause. (c) is unstated, but is the essential logical link that joins (a) and (b) to (d). And (d) is stated as the main clause of the sentence.

There are two obvious problems with this: (b) is not true and (c) is not true.

First, (b). There are plenty of free states that manage to be secure without having a militia (something distinct from the regular armed forces). It is also hard to argue that what remains of the US militia really makes that essential difference to national security.

Second, (c). It is perfectly possible to have a militia without the general population having the right to keep and bear arms. Local militia organisers could very easily look after the weapons and distribute them at the first sign of the invading English. Also, given that not all citizens would be in a militia, any right to arms need not extend beyond militia members.

Therefore (d) is not justified: the need for the people to have the right to keep and bear arms does not follow from a platitude and two historically short-sighted falsehoods.

And yet there it is, in the Constitution, in black and white.

And so I come back to the oddity of the Second Amendment: uniquely, it doesn’t just state a right but also gives a reason for that right. But it doesn’t therefore follow that the right legally depends on the stated reason.

My objections above are factual and logical. They are not legal objections. I don’t see that my argument justifies an interpretation of the Second Amendment that lets only members of well-regulated militias have access to guns.

What I do see is that this tragic piece of law, which seemed reasonable in 1789 but is now so drenched in the blood of innocents that its existence is an ongoing threat to the security of a free state, should be repealed.

Byelection results

Because turnout in byelections is usually so low, a handy way of looking at them is to see how much of a party’s previous vote it manages to hold onto.

For instance, in Rotherham last week, the Lib Dems got 2.1% of the vote on a 33.9% turnout – that’s 0.7% of the electorate. Back at the 2010 general election, they had managed 16% of the vote on a 59% turnout – that’s 9.4% of the electorate.

So they lost 92% of their previous support. On the same measure, the Conservatives dropped 81% and Labour – even though their vote share was up – dropped 53%.

The other defining feature of byelections is that they’re local elections for local people, and you shouldn’t generalise from any one result. But averaging across all the byelections that happen during a parliament is a bit more informative.

The chart below shows how much of their previous vote the parties lost (or, in some cases, how much they added to it) at byelections in the last eight parliaments:

The obvious points are that governing parties do particularly badly, and the Lib Dems (or their predecessor parties) have sometimes made impressive gains. Until now.

After only two years in government, the Conservatives are doing as badly as John Major did, and the Lib Dems are doing even worse. Labour are doing better than when they were in power, but not as well as during most of their last period of opposition.

Update: I've been asked if I could do a similar chart showing the conventional change in the share of the vote - so the Lib Dem fall in Rotherham from 16% to 2% would count as -14%. I think this is less significant, because the numbers are more easily distorted by the variability of the starting points of the constituencies that happen to have byelections.

For instance, across the 12 seats that have had byelections since 2010, the average starting point was Lab 46% Con 24% LD 19% - an unrepresentatively low start for the Tories, meaning that in these seats, there was a limit to how far they could fall. That's why I looked at how far the parties had fallen relative to their original positions.

But with that caveat, here's the chart:

And, while I'm here, below is a version of the first chart but disregarding changes in turnout. It shows the change in vote share as a percentage of the previous general election vote share. So the Lib Dem fall in Rotherham from 16% to 2% of the vote counts as -87%.

The polarisation of the US electorate

Something odd has been happening in US politics.

As presidential elections have become closer nationally, most individual states have become more and more firmly aligned with one or the other party. The Republican vote and the Democrat vote have been segregating, leaving fewer and fewer swing states.

I don’t know why this has been happening, nor whether it will continue, but here are the figures.
This chart shows how many of the 51 states (including DC) have voted the same way in the last four (or more) consecutive elections:

And this chart shows how many of the 538 electoral college votes are held by those states (based on each state’s current electoral vote):

Either way, it’s high: 80% of states, with 78% of the electoral vote, have not swung since 2000 or earlier. And, while the Republicans had a run of good results in the 1970s and 80s, today’s peak is made of a bipartisan mix. The recent rise in reliably Democrat states has come mostly by reducing the number of swing states rather than the reliably Republican ones.

If we tighten the criterion to look at states that have voted the same way for six elections or more, it’s much the same picture:

Going back through Obama, Bush and Clinton, past Romney, McCain, Kerry, Gore and Dole, 64% of states, with 65% of the electoral vote, have not changed sides.

And the winning margins are rising, too. This chart show how many states have given the same party a lead of 15% or more – averaged over four elections:

Here it is in electoral college votes:

But this is happening even as presidential elections have become closer nationally. This final chart shows the national margin of victory in the popular vote at each election and the average state margin of victory (for whichever party wins it):

To start with, the two lines go up and down together, as you might expect. In landslides like Johnson’s in 1964 or Nixon’s in 1972, lots of states voted heavily for the winner, and in closer elections like 1968 or 1976, more states were narrowly won (by both sides).

But since the late 1990s, this pattern has broken down. A series of narrow-to-middling popular vote leads has been matched by a steady but impressive rise in the average state margin of victory – shared, unlike previous highs, between both sides.

I don’t know why this has been happening or whether it will continue. But because election campaigns mostly focus on swing states, the polarisation of red states and blue states means that more and more Americans are getting less and less attention from their political leaders.

(Using data from here.)

How much work are people getting?

How should we take part-time work into account when thinking about the employment rate?

The number of people in work is back to its pre-recession peak, which the government is unsurprisingly pleased with. But there’s been a shift from full-time jobs to part-time, which means that the total number of hours worked per week hasn’t risen so much:

Then, of course, you have to remember that the population is growing, including the large part of it that makes up the labour force (the people with jobs plus the people who are looking for jobs). So a simple rise in numbers isn’t the same as the rise in the employment rate – the rate has recovered a bit, but it’s still well short of its previous peak.

Putting these two thoughts together leads me to this chart. It shows the total number of hours worked divided by the total size of the labour force – in other words, how much work the average person who wants work is getting:

There has been pretty much no change since 2009. The rise in employment since the election averages out as an extra 2 minutes and 43 seconds of work per person per week. This compares with almost an hour and a half lost in the recession.

Data from the ONS.

How oppositions should respond to good news

Last week, David Cameron shouted about Ed Miliband’s alleged desire for bad news:

It is only a bad week if you think it is bad that unemployment is coming down. We think it is good. ... Every bit of good news sends that team into a complete decline, but I can tell the right hon. Gentleman that the good news will keep coming.

This is the same David Cameron who, as an opposition MP, once wrote about his own “opposition disease”, in which “part of you actually starts wanting things to get worse. …an enthusiastic Tory backbencher like me can hardly wait to switch on the Today programme every morning in order to listen to all the bad news.” So he knows what he’s talking about.

But it’s tricky. When there is good economic news, how should an opposition party handle it? You don’t want to seem an unpatriotic doom-monger, but you don’t want to gush praise for the government, either.

At PMQs tomorrow, Miliband should take this head-on. He should raise the good GDP number that Cameron was hinting about last week and say something like this:

Will the Prime Minister join me in congratulating the British people for having finally pulled the economy out of recession? Is this not a great achievement for British businesses and British workers – especially in light of government policies that even the IMF now says are more damaging than expected?

Part-time unemployment

Delia Koczwara asks:

Does anyone have the figures to calculate the true rate of unemployment if those holding part-time jobs who would prefer to work full-time were counted as 50% working and 50% unemployed?

Good question. Here’s the answer:

The proportion of  people who want a full-time job but can only find a part-time one is at its highest since records began. If you count them as half-unemployed, this takes the unemployment rate from about 8% to about 10%. If you count them in full, that’s over 12% of people who are under-employed.

One aspect of this change is patterns of self-employment. While the proportion of workforce who are self-employed has risen only slightly, self-employment is increasingly likely to be part-time – more so than being an employee. And the proportion of part-time workers who want to be full-time is at a historic high:

Data from the ONS, covering all adults aged over 16 who are economically active (working or looking for work).

5.5 million bubbles of polling froth

According to YouGov, 40% of people think Ed Miliband is doing well as Labour leader. A week ago, only 28% thought this. So, in an electorate of 46 million, this means that about five-and-a-half million people have changed their minds. In one week. On the basis of a few headlines and TV clips about one speech.

Do you believe that?

Actually, I do. But what I don’t believe is that any kind of firmly held opinion could change so quickly and easily among so many people.

A lot of survey responses are just froth on the surface of an uncommitted mind, as suggested by this ingenious study that manipulated people into justifying answers that they hadn’t really given.

And this latest boost to Miliband’s ratings? It may well harden, at least in part, but only if he keeps up a better performance and gets decent coverage for it. The longer a vague impression lasts, the firmer it becomes.

But my general rule is that sudden improvements in polling are normally an illusion – like the way that Nick Clegg’s 2010 campaign surge led to only slightly more votes, or the way that Gordon Brown’s impressive honeymoon ratings were blown apart by something as flimsy as an opposition tax promise.

I’m at Number 10 so why try harder?

Andrew Grice reports a new Labour attack line on David Cameron:

Being born to rule doesn't mean you are any good at it.

It’s cheeky, it’s catchy, and while it alludes to his background it doesn’t go for the crass (and failed) ‘toffs are bad’ angle. Instead, it ties incompetence to arrogance: Cameron and his team are failing because they think that what Britain needs is to be governed by good chaps with sound instincts – like them.

In essence, Labour are trying to make Cameron look like the t-shirt on that old Fatboy Slim album cover:

Michael Gove’s GCSEs: four more years

Having spent several years of my life attending school, I am of course an expert in education policy. But I’ll spare you my undoubtedly correct opinion of Michael Gove’s ‘English Baccalaureate’ and go straight to the politics.

Gove has presented the reform as something desperately needed to rescue a dire situation. He announced it by saying:

Critical to reform is ending an exam system that has narrowed the curriculum, forced idealistic professionals to teach to the test and encouraged heads to offer children the softest possible options. It is time for the race to the bottom to end. It is time to tackle grade inflation and dumbing down. It is time to raise aspirations and restore rigour to our examinations.
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We want to ensure modules - which encourage bite-size learning and spoon-feeding, teaching to the test and gaming of the system - go, once and for all. We want to remove controlled assessment and coursework from core subjects. These assessment methods have – in all too many cases – corrupted the fair testing of all students.
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And – critically – we will end the competition between exam boards which has led to a race to the bottom with different boards offering easier courses or assistance to teachers in a corrupt effort to massage up pass rates.

Strong words. The only problem is that he still has to administer this narrow, soft-optioned, dumbed-down, low-aspiration, unrigorous, spoon-feeding, system-gaming, corrupted race to the bottom for another four years. He still has to congratulate the kids who float out of it each year with their corruptly inflated grades.

How can he possibly tolerate this?

The answer, surely, is that he won’t – or at least he’ll say that he won’t. He’ll do various things in the meantime that he can claim are improving GCSEs.

But if he can do that, what’ll then be the point of replacing them?

The incredible credibility of a failed plan

One of the biggest arguments in economic policy is finally over.

The government says that it mustn’t change course on fiscal policy, because of the danger of losing market confidence and having to pay high rates for its borrowing. Opponents say that these low rates mean that we can afford to borrow more without spooking the markets, and give the stagnant economy a bit of a boost.

In yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph, Liam Halligan quickly, compellingly and accidentally settled this argument:

“Ah, but Britain is a safe haven”, the detractors cry. “Government borrowing costs are low, so we can afford to spend more.”
Where does one start when faced with such nonsense? The UK government can currently borrow cheaply, partly because –when compared with much of the eurozone – we have a reasonably credible fiscal plan. We aren’t sticking to it, of course.

We aren’t sticking to it. This is like saying that the police can trust a witness’s statement because they’ve got a sophisticated new lie detector – although they didn’t use it, of course.

And Halligan’s right that the government’s plan has come unstuck. They’re now facing the prospect of borrowing £200 billion more than planned over five years:

This is not because they’ve got cold feet on the cuts; it’s because the economy is due to grow by less than half the rate they expected:

A plan that’s going hopelessly wrong is not a credible plan. It follows that the reason for the government’s low borrowing rates isn’t faith in its credibility.

No doubt there is a point where the markets would take fright at the amount of government borrowing. But £200 billion extra doesn’t seem to have taken us significantly nearer it. This follows the pattern of late 2008, when an even vaster surge in government borrowing was accompanied by a fall – not a rise – in the rate charged on that borrowing. A major developed economy with control of its own currency, and with relatively low inflation, has to go horrifically wrong before there’s any real risk of a government debt default. We’ve not been anywhere near that point and there’s no sign that we will.

The best idlers in the world

A gaggle of Tory MPs has declared:

Once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor.

I was so shocked when I read this during my mid-afternoon two-hour internet break on Friday that I had to go and have a lie down. After my union rep explained the situation, my line manager was very understanding.

Now that I’m recovered, I’ve been wondering: if we’re such a useless, lazy bunch, this would show up in the growth figures, wouldn’t it? So, here’s a chart of GDP per capita growth among the G7 countries over the last two decades (OECD data):

Oddly, the idling Brits seem to be up front. And this isn’t a matter of us coasting on an unsustainable debt-fuelled boom. We’d taken the lead before the excessive borrowing of the 2000s set in, and we’ve held the lead following the crash.

So it looks as though we’ve been doing something right, and that Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore and Elizabeth Truss are missing something.

If political interviews were like sporting interviews

Downing Street. A breathless, downcast Nick Clegg hobbles out of the door. Our intrepid reporter bags the first interview.

“Nick, second place in the long-distance Lords reform – how do you feel?”

“I just – it’s really emotional, I haven’t had a chance to let it sink in yet.”

“Because I know you had high hopes for this event.”

“Yeah, I’ve been in training so long for it, and to get this far is – well, it’s great, it’s an honour, but in the end I just wasn’t good enough.”

“But this has always been a strong event for the Conservatives.”

“It has, and congratulations to them, they played an absolute blinder. But I really wanted to bring home the gold for Team LD. And I gave it my all, and really that’s all you can do.”

“And despite that nasty fall where you fractured your credibility, this result is a personal best for you, so that’s something you can be proud of.”

“Yeah, I … I’ve never come so close to being able to achieve something before, and I just hope my team-mates and my family back home can find … I’m sorry … it’s all kind of intense, you know?”

“That’s OK, Nick. There’s no denying that silver is a great result, and doubles the LD medal haul after your bronze in the freestyle electoral reform. So where are you going to go from here?”

“Well, after my injury I’ll have to withdraw from the synchronised boundary changing, so my next big hope is 2015. We’ve got a lot of work to do, but we’re going to rethink our tactics so we can bring home the best result we can.”

“Nick, I’d better let you go. Best of luck with the recovery and we’ll all be rooting for you come 2015!”

“Thanks.”

He staggers away.

Religious opposition to gay marriage

Jonathan Chaplin, a theologian, writes that the gay marriage debate should become more temperate. He argues that religious opponents of gay marriage shouldn’t be branded as homophobes but also that they shouldn’t gloss over their own failings on matters of sexuality.

For instance, he criticises a letter written by the conservative group Anglican Mainstream:

The letter was within its rights to challenge Cameron's ill-informed misrepresentation of the churches' attitudes towards gay people. But it included the unsustainable claim that people of homosexual orientation "have always been fully welcomed" in the churches. Whatever the official teaching of the churches may have been, their practice has all too frequently fallen lamentably and hurtfully short of the goal of "welcome".

This is true, and on the whole his article is calm and sensible. But he goes on to commit a strikingly equivalent act of glossing-over:

But whatever the shortcomings of individual statements on the question, the churches' opposition to gay marriage is now facing the undiscriminating charge that it is driven by "homophobia". In fact, most of their public statements on the matter are only attempts to re-articulate what has long been the most fundamental and enduring principle of Christian (and Jewish) sexual ethics, which is that human beings have been created in such a way that sexual union is appropriately enjoyed in the context of permanent heterosexual commitment. This principle is as much a restraint on heterosexual behaviour as it is on homosexual behaviour

This is self-evidently not true. Ruling out straight sex except within a permanent relationship is much less of a restraint than ruling out gay sex entirely. This is obvious. So why does he deny it?

We all have our blind spots. You’d hope that intellect would help us to reduce these, but sometimes it just helps them to hide more effectively.

Some religious opponents of gay marriage are clearly ranting homophobes. Others are more sensibly and sensitively weighing their scriptural traditions against modern liberalism. But what they have in common is a conviction that gay relationships are in some way inadequate or illegitimate. And that fact is terribly sad: it shrinks their moral universe and, by extension, that of society as a whole.

Bringing forward the consensus-building

This is what the coalition agreement says about electoral reform:

We will bring forward a Referendum Bill on electoral reform, which includes provision for the introduction of the Alternative Vote in the event of a positive result in the referendum, as well as for the creation of fewer and more equal sized constituencies. We will whip both Parliamentary parties in both Houses to support a simple majority referendum on the Alternative Vote, without prejudice to the positions parties will take during such a referendum.

And this is what it says about House of Lords reform – note the difference in language, and in the strength of the commitment:

We will establish a committee to bring forward proposals for a wholly or mainly elected upper chamber on the basis of proportional representation. The committee will come forward with a draft motion by December 2010. It is likely that this will advocate single long terms of office. It is also likely that there will be a grandfathering system for current Peers. In the interim, Lords appointments will be made with the objective of creating a second chamber that is reflective of the share of the vote secured by the political parties in the last general election.

I think the problem is that the Lib Dems have read too much into this Lords agreement. The Tories will be keeping their side of the bargain even if they vote against Nick Clegg’s reform bill. “Bring forward proposals” means very nearly nothing.

But John Rentoul doesn’t agree:

This is a quirky reading of the Coalition Agreement, with which several of the Tory rebels persist. What would be the point of promising to “bring forward proposals” just so that everyone could say, “nice proposals”, and put them in the bin?

This is a fair question, and if (as looks likely) Tory opposition does kill this bill, the Lib Dems would be fairly justified in thinking that the spirit of the agreement had been broken.

But the answer to John’s question is that the point of promising to bring forward proposals only for them to be binned is that it was a piece of constructive ambiguity that smoothed over the signing of the coalition agreement. That is now unravelling.

There is, though, another small matter. The Conservative 2010 election manifesto promised:

We will work to build a consensus for a mainly-elected second chamber to replace the current House of Lords

So while the coalition agreement doesn’t require Tory MPs to support the reform bill, their own manifesto requires them to try to build support for something along those lines.

A tricky thing to do for the many of them who’ve never wanted an elected Lords. But they should have thought about that before the election.

Lords reform: grand plans fail, so keep it simple

Given how fiendishly difficult it has proved, year after year, decade after decade, to get House of Lords reforms through the Commons, let alone through the Lords, it strikes me that if you’re going to get anywhere you’ll need to be sneaky.

The government’s proposals, in brief: over the course of three general elections, they would replace the hereditary and life peers with ones elected through a party list system to serve 15-year non-renewable terms. These party peers would make up 80% of the new House, and 20% would be ‘great and the good’-style non-party appointees with expertise in various worthy fields.

As I say, pretty much a complete overhaul. And yet…

Most of what these reforms would achieve could be done much more easily, by making just two changes to the current House of Lords:

1. Fix the numbers of new appointees to match party vote shares at the last election (with 20% non-party worthies). That gets you the proportionality based on election results.
2. Change the length of a peerage from life to 15 years. That gets you the regular turnover. (If it’s less of a wrench for them, I’m happy to let former members keep their titles.)

Job done. No endless debate about the merits of election vs appointment or about different electoral systems or about the supremacy of the Commons. The change would be nearly as big as that envisaged by the government, but it would be legislatively far simpler. Quick and dirty and effective.

Now, I’m not necessarily saying that the government’s plan is good even in theory, just that my plan would get us most of the way there a lot more easily. And of course there are other things you might want to change about the Lords (me, I’d kick out the clergymen). But the more you try to change in one go, the more fronts you’ll find yourself fighting on.

Keep it simple.