donpaskini

Lessons from Hackney

2011-03-03T11:36:00.004Z

Last night Hackney Council passed a budget with £44 million of cuts, amidst protests from anti-cuts campaigners. Having looked at their budget, I think councillors have done very well in extremely difficult situation - unlike in many other councils, no youth facilities will be closed, no libraries shut, no reduction to key services like recycling or street cleansing, no restrictions on care to be provided to our oldest and most vulnerable of residents, and the council is maintaining services such as support for victims of domestic violence and youth crime intervention work which the national government had cut funding for.

There is an irony in watching protesters who say all political parties are just the same with one breath, while with the next protesting against the Tory/Lib Dem decision to end Labour's policy of giving more money to the most deprived areas.

Hackney councillors will face an even harder job next year, with a further £26 million in cuts needing to be made. I think it is worth revisiting an article I wrote in 2009, in response to Hackney's decision to freeze their council tax.

There are good reasons for trying to keep council tax low - particularly in poor areas where it was historically amongst the highest in the country. But it is one of the few ways that local councils can raise money, as the following example shows:

If Hackney Council had decided in 2006, instead of freezing their council tax, to raise it by 1% per year, then they would have raised roughly £900,000 per year, at an extra cost to the average household of £10 per year (more for people in higher value properties, less for people in lower value properties, and nothing for people eligible for council tax benefit).

Over four years, this would mean that the average household would be paying an extra £50 per year, and the council would have an extra £3.65 million to spend on local services. This year and next year, it would also have received an extra £90,000 from central government in council tax freeze grant.

If, instead, councillors had raised council tax by 2% per year, then the average household would be £2 per week worse off (more for wealthier households, nothing for the poorest households), and the council would have approximately £7.5 million in extra revenue, including council tax from residents, extra council tax benefit and council tax freeze grant.

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Now, obviously, an extra £3.5-£7 million in revenue wouldn't prevent all the cuts, and higher council tax would make life even tougher for many people, particularly lower paid workers and pensioners who are just above the threshold for receiving benefits. But, crudely, the overall impact of small annual increases in council tax would be that young professionals in the trendy bits of the borough would now be paying more taxes to provide services for people with long term illnesses to receive social care, young people to be able to go to enjoyable and safe activities on the estates, and victims of domestic violence to get support when they need it.

Labour councils are still boasting about having taken the "tough decision" to freeze the council tax. I think most councillors are doing their best now in desperately tough times, but a really tough and correct decision would have been to raise council tax while Labour was in power, in order to help protect our communities when this bunch of sub-Thatcherite extremists took over.

Is there a "new politics of identity"?

2011-03-02T11:00:00.000Z

The Searchlight Education Trust's "Fear and Hope" research is very interesting, and points out a number of challenges and areas where further investigation would be useful. I'm less convinced, however, by the claim that there is a "new politics of identity". Or, rather, I think the case is not yet proven.

For their research, the authors commissioned an opinion polling company to ask people a whole load of questions about identity politics. The shock horror finding reported in the press was that 48% would definitely or would consider voting for a party which would "defend the English, create an English Parliament, control immigration, challenge Islamic extremism, restrict the
building of mosques and make it compulsory for all public buildings to fly the St George's flag or Union Jack."

But before answering that question, people had been asked more than fifty questions on immigration, what they think about different religions, the extent to which different religious groups cause trouble, the extent to which different religious groups are similar in terms of habits, customs and values, freedom of expression, national identity and much more. This will have put people in a particular frame of mind when they got round to answering the question about support for a new non-violent far right party.

For example, we don't know how many people found the questions on identity really boring and stopped completing the survey part way through, or starting clicking answers at random (I've done this with YouGov surveys on brand awareness). If a large number of people who started the survey dropped out part way through, then it would suggest that claims about a "new politics of identity" are somewhat overstated.

This is not to dispute that the findings are interesting, but to measure the impact of the 'framing' of the questions, it would have been interesting to compare how many people would support a non-violent far right party if asked about it as the first question, rather than after answering several dozen questions on related subjects. We can see, for example, that the poll found that more people identified with the Tories than with Labour, and higher levels of identification for UKIP, BNP and the Greens then other polls have found.

An interesting comparative piece of research, which someone like the TUC might consider commissioning, would be to conduct a similar kind of poll but with a different set of questions.

For example, I wonder how many people would express definitely or possible support for a party which pledged to "defend ordinary working people, crack down on bankers' bonuses, protect British manufacturing from unfair competition, withdraw from the European Union, reduce excessive spending cuts by taxing the rich and renationalise the railways" after being asked lots of questions about bankers' pay, whether ordinary people get a fair deal, whether Britain benefits from the EU, whether they support spending cuts such as closing libraries and whether they think privatisation is appropriate for public services.

I reckon you could get at least 50% support for that party (let's call it the Bony Tenn Party) if you'd asked the right questions, which could then be used to argue that the time has come for the return of the Alternative Economic Strategy.

Searchlight might well be right that identity politics is increasingly important and that Labour is "marooned" in its response. But they need to do more than one big opinion poll to make that case convincing.

Shorter version of this post - what Yes Minister said.

Three questions to ask your councillor

2011-03-01T12:10:00.003Z

One of the keys to effective local action is making sure that campaigners think ahead and get decision-makers to respond to them, rather than waiting for decisions to be announced and then complaining. In that spirit, here's three questions to ask your local councillor:

1. What have you done to make sure your council obeys the laws on promoting equality?

Some anti-cuts campaigners have been urging councillors to defy the law and set illegal budgets, to which nearly all councillors have responded by explaining why it is important to obey the law.

But obeying the law doesn't just mean supporting enough cuts to balance a budget. If these cuts are decided on "without due regard to the statutory equality needs in the performance of its functions as required by s71 Race Relations Act 1976, section 76A Sex Discrimination Act 1976 and section 49A Disability Discrimination Act 1995", then they can be quashed by a judge.

As a general rule, any decisions about funding cuts should be supported by a full equalities impact assessment. Councillors don't have to carry these out themselves, but they need to ensure that council officers have done this properly. This applies both to councillors in power, who need to make sure that they are not complicit in breaking the law, and to those in opposition, who should use these laws to scrutinise decisions effectively.

I think this is a much more fruitful approach for anti-cuts campaigners to adopt - rather than urging councillors to act illegally, we should instead urge them to obey the law. Councillors have a decent argument that it would be harmful for them to set an illegal budget. They have absolutely no good excuse for waving through cuts without considering the impact on equalities.

2. What are you planning to do about the government's plans to increase council tax for millions of low paid households?

After years of pious talk about how unfair they think council tax is, the Tories and Lib Dems plan to impose council tax rises on up to 5.8 million of the poorest people in Britain in 2013. They have announced that they will cut the budget for council tax rebates by 10%, while leaving it up to local authorities to set their own criteria for eligibility (which goes against their plans to simplify the benefits system).

So local councillors will get the choice - do they cut services even further in order to prevent tax rises on those least able to pay? Or they could start work now to get the government to abandon these proposals (and maybe even get our shadow ministerial team to take an interest).

3. How will you work with anti-cuts campaigners to win council tax referenda?

From 2012, any rise in council tax beyond the amount set by central government will have to be agreed in a referendum. Although there is a vocal minority who are protesting against cuts, recent surveys have shown that at present a majority of people favour deeper cuts to many local services such as housing and homelessness and adult social care.

If councillors don't want to preside over a system where each year they get to make deeper and deeper cuts and provide an ever more restricted range of services because they would lose a referendum on raising council tax to maintain services, then they need to work together with anti-cuts campaigners. There will never ever be a majority for a referendum on raising council tax, but with the right preparation there can be a majority for maintaining decent services rather than cutting them even further.

Many of those who have turned up to anti-cuts protests are exactly the people who councillors should be desperate to work with - people who are passionate about local services and who want to see them defended. There is a big danger that they get disillusioned by taking part in ineffective protests and just give up. Instead, councillors need to develop a strategy to build relations with them and involve them for the future. I'd hope, for example, that some of the young people whose first political experience was protesting at a Town Hall over the past couple of months would be standing for election for Labour at some point over the next few years.

This strategy involves trying to listen and find opportunities to reverse cuts to services like youth clubs which have got people engaged in anti-cuts campaigning; identifying people who are passionate about their community and helping them to be effective in campaigning for new services; and finding ways of developing joint campaigns with anti-cuts campaigners, for example on the changes to council tax benefit mentioned above.

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One of the frustrating things about seeing increasing antagonism between councillors and anti-cuts campaigners is that there is so much where they are on the same side. Hopefully, these three questions are the start of a dialogue which reminds us how much unites, not divides, us.

Cameron praises social enterprise saved by Future Jobs Fund

2011-02-28T17:00:00.004Z

I've been watching the documentary about the "People's Supermarket", a co-operative supermarket in north London which is owned by its members, all of whom pay a fee to join and agree to work in the shop with the aim of creating "a sustainable food cooperative that responds to the needs of the local community and provides healthy, local food at reasonable prices".

On 15th February, David Cameron went to visit it, hoping to associate this social enterprise with his plans for the "Big Society".

One thing which the documentary mentioned was that while the supermarket was trying to establish itself in the first few months, it was able to employ some young trainees through a government scheme. Without these trainees working alongside the members, the supermarket would have collapsed and gone out of business.

David Cameron and his allies often claim that the aim of the "Big Society" is to replace the "Big State". They argue that because government has got so big, it crowds out these kind of initiatives and prevents people from getting on and being self-sufficient.

But as the People's Supermarket experience shows, reality is somewhat different. Far from being crowded out, this social enterprise was able to get help from the government when it needed it. It was able to hire trainees on short term contracts with the government paying their wages, in order to get time to establish itself and get more members involved, while also giving young unemployed people a chance of a job.

The name of the "government trainee scheme" which supported the People's Supermarket was the Future Jobs Fund. The Future Jobs Fund, of course, was one of the first programmes which David Cameron's government cut.

The People's Supermarket avoided being a victim of Cameron's cuts by no more than a few months. Rather than turning up for photo opportunities and claiming that this is an example of his Big Society, he should learn the lessons and bring back the Future Jobs Fund.

How to stop David Cameron's Corporate Welfare plans

2011-02-23T09:44:00.003Z

David Cameron has announced that the latest version of the Big Society is that just about all public services will be opened up to be run by the private sector. He says that these "are more significant aspects of our Big Society agenda than the work we're doing to boost social action".

The Big Society started off with the idea that people would run services for themselves, but it became clear that this wasn't going to work, so Big Society 2.0 was that it was all about promoting charities. Then it became clear that many of these "Big Society" charities were being wiped out by the cuts, and anyway, they were very ungratefully complaining about the government.

So having given up on the people and the voluntary sector, the Big Society is now all about getting the private sector to run services. Unlike the users of public services or the voluntary sector, the private companies can be relied upon not to complain about the government, and will be suitably grateful for large sums of government money coming their way.

There are any number of reasons why this is a bad idea, but I just wanted to focus on a very revealing quote by the architect of this Corporate Welfare programme, who is reported as claiming that "responsibility for fixing the deficit can be transferred from the central state to the customer by transferring responsibility for the cost of services via a market to purchasers of public services."

Get that? If you use public services, the responsibility for fixing our budget deficit now falls on you, not the government.

I firmly believe that this is an even less popular idea than the original Big Society one, and one which more people should know about. It also highlights a key feature of the Corporate Welfare programme, which is that it is bound to lead to service users and taxpayers getting ripped off.

I've run some consultation meetings over the last few weeks about the government's NHS reforms. Out of all the different proposals, the two which worried people most of all were firstly that services which people rely on might be got rid of as a result of the changes (for example local hospitals closing), and secondly, that these private providers will run rings round the doctors who are commissioning services and exploit loopholes in contracts to increase charges for services which are currently free, or demand more money to keep a service going. This is, after all, the business model for the many of the American companies which will be bidding to win healthcare contracts (along with denying sick people the chance to claim on their health insurance to pay for their medical care).

The government proposals which protect users of public services and taxpayers if a service gets taken over by the private sector and closed down or loopholes get exploited can be summarised as:

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Crucially, we don't have to wait until the next election in order to stop and reverse some of the most malign aspects of these plans. The Tory Corporate Welfare plans will attract all sorts of people looking to make money from government contracts. Some will have a genuine belief that they can run a service at a higher quality and lower cost, while others will believe that they can make money by cutting costs, and deliver the bare minimum required of them (as with cleaning in hospitals or safety on the railways).

What Labour should do is announce that they are very concerned about the lack of protection for service users and taxpayers, and announce that a future Labour government would put in place legislation which allows every corporate welfare contract to be reviewed. In cases where it is clear that the taxpayer is being ripped off or service users are getting a worse deal, the contracts will be declared null and void, and the contractor will be liable to fines equal to a proportion of the profits they made from the contract. (The mechanism could be something like 5% of service users have to request that the contract be reviewed, in which case the service is reviewed by a citizen's jury).

The advantage of this is that the threat of it will be enough to protect people from the worst of the corporate welfare parasites. Companies won't bid to take on contracts and provide the bare minimum, or exploit loopholes to charge patients for services if they know that there is a risk that they could end up losing the contract and getting fined if the Tories lose the next election.

This would highlight the way that the Tories are putting the producer interest of a small number of private companies ahead of the needs of taxpayers and service users, whether in the NHS or now across almost every single other public service. Those who are confident that they can provide better services have nothing to fear, while those that want to get rich on government handouts should look elsewhere.

Attack the Tories, get voting reform

2011-02-21T17:38:00.003Z

Some thoughts on the voting reform referendum.

The No campaign’s claim about the £250 million cost might not be accurate, but is a pretty effective campaigning message. I really don’t understand the Yes campaigners crowing about how it is a ‘gaffe’ or sign of how the No campaign is in trouble. It’s going to be mentioned in every single article on the subject in right wing newspapers from now til polling day.

The reason that the cost is a more effective message than those coming from the Yes campaign about “make your MP work harder” is that it recognises that most of the people who will be voting in the referendum won’t think that voting reform is a big priority. For what it’s worth, I think the claim that AV will make MPs work harder is just as inaccurate as the claim about cost[1].

It’s relatively easy to predict turnout levels in the referendum. It will be around 50% in Scotland, 40% in the northern cities, Wales and the Home Counties and other places with local council elections, and about 10% or less in London and other places where there aren’t any other elections. Most people filling in the ballot paper won’t have gone specifically to vote on the issue, but to vote to choose their MSP, AM or local councillor, and then will fill in Yes or No in the referendum as an after thought.

What both campaigns need to focus on is thinking about how to appeal more effectively to these crucial swing voters. Compared to the UK population as a whole, the people that will decide the referendum will tend to be older than the national average, more likely to live in a town in northern England or Scotland, less interested in the details of different voting systems, and more likely to support Labour or other left of centre parties. The Yes campaign needs to win amongst groups such as Labour-voting pensioners in Glasgow or Manchester.

The good news for the Yes campaign is that Matthew Elliott of the Taxpayer’s Alliance and his Tory chums are not exactly people who are well placed to appeal to the majority of these undecided voters. But the Yes campaign risks losing their advantage by sticking to a not very compelling general anti-politician message and paying too much attention to people who have already made up their minds with detailed arguments about technicalities. Worse still and actively counter-productive are smug articles like this one from Andrew Rawnsley which classily calls low income voters “the Thicko Vote”.

The absolutely crucial task for the Yes campaign is to make sure that every single one of the people who goes to vote for centre left parties and against the Tory government in the local elections gets the message that the way to protest against this government is to vote Yes in the referendum. This message might annoy a few committed Liberal Democrats, but the Yes campaign has already got their votes anyway. What it needs a clear and simple message about how voting reform will damage the government, and it needs to make sure that majority of anti-Tory voters have heard this message by the time they go to vote. What it doesn’t need is wealthy journalist “supporters” insulting undecided voters.

[1] What AV will do is incentivise parties to target supporters of other parties who always vote to get second preferences, rather than focusing on ensuring that all of their own supporters turn out to vote.

Welfare reform: harder than it looks

2011-02-17T18:09:00.004Z

The FT has a good run down of today's welfare reform changes. Key points:

1. Spending on benefits will increase by £2.6 billion, which will give more money to 2.7 million people.

2. Incentives to work for the average claimant will decrease, particularly for people working more than 30 hours a week; receiving tax credits; and not claiming housing benefit or council tax relief.

3. The government still has no idea how the new Universal Credit will interact with childcare costs or council tax benefit. In particular, their plans for council tax benefit will make the benefits system more complicated, as every local council will be able to set its own different criteria for eligibility.

4. Some people will be hit really hard - 100,000 will lose more than £75 per week, and 1.7 million will receive less money. That's on top of the cuts to housing benefit, unemployment benefits and disability benefits which were previously announced.

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It is revealing that after all these years of studying the system, Iain Duncan Smith and chums' landmark welfare reforms have managed the feat of increasing spending on benefits, increasing marginal tax rates for the average worker, making some parts of the benefits system more complicated and taking more money away from thousands of low paid workers and disabled people.

Participatory budgeting and the fear of crime

2011-02-17T13:23:00.003Z

I pass this email from a friend on without further comment:

"Last year, my charity was involved in a project with the local council and police around participatory budgeting. The Home Office allocated funding to spend on projects to tackle crime, on the condition that the decisions about how to spend the money were made by local people.

The council, police and voluntary sector worked together to engage residents, despite a very tight timeschedule for engaging people and getting them to decide how to spend the money. One thing which was interesting from this work was that, given the choice, people chose to prioritise help for homeowners to prevent burglary, more activities for young people, more bikes for the police, and outreach work with street drinkers as their top priorities for cutting rather than CCTV or other anti-crime initiatives.

We've just had the latest results from the Residents' Survey since this work was done. The percentage of people who thought that crime was one of the top three problems in the area fell from 29% to 20%, the percentage of people who felt that levels of crime was the reason why their area was not a nice place to live fell from 63% to 39%, the percentage of people who felt safe in their local area in the evening and at night increased from 54% to 71%, and the percentage of people who felt safe in the borough at night increased from 46% to 62%.

Clearly, this can't all be put down to the participatory budgeting work. But these results are encouraging, particularly as in other areas levels of dissastisfaction increased, so that it can't just be put down to generally increasing satisfaction. You might expect that the government would be keen to develop the learning from this and the other pilot areas where this work took place, given their rhetoric about putting people in charge and devolving power to neighbourhoods.

But if you thought that the government would want to support this work, then you would be wrong. One of the first things which they did last summer was to cancel this programme, cut the budget, stop work to share learning from the pilots, and redeploy the civil servants who had been managing the project to work instead on developing policies for the Big Society.

Just think, if they had been prepared to build on what the previous government had done in terms of giving power to people, then by now they might have developed a really effective approach which local areas could use to help reduce the fear of crime. But because they pretended that they were doing something entirely new, scrapped existing projects and started from scratch, they've achieved nothing and created a national joke."

Government plans “Community Right to Privatise”

2011-02-16T15:57:00.002Z

The government’s Localism Bill includes a new policy called “Community Right to Challenge”.

Under this proposal, charities, parish councils and local authority workers will get the power to submit an Expression of Interest to run services which are currently delivered by local councils. The idea is that this will allow people who have good ideas about how to run services better or at a lower cost to be able to do so.

Now you might think that, as the stated aim of this policy is to increase the number of services run by voluntary and community groups, that the way it would work is that the council would either accept the expression of interest, in which case they transfer the service to the relevant charity or co-operative, or they would reject it.

Here’s what is actually planned:

“If an Expression of Interest is accepted, the relevant authority must carry out a procurement exercise relating to the provision of that service. This should be appropriate to the nature and value of the contract. So where the contract is for a service, or it is of a value to which the Public Contracts Regulations 2006 apply, the authority must follow the procedures for advertising, tendering and awarding contracts set out in those regulations. Where the service is of a nature or value that the Public Contracts Regulations 2006 do not apply (i.e. where it is listed in the regulations as being exempt, or is below the threshold of £156,000) then the authority will need to decide what sort of exercise to run – just as it will already do when contracting out a service. Other organisations may bid in the procurement exercise that follows a successful challenge relating to the provision of the service – these could include other relevant bodies, or private sector organisations.” [my emphasis - DP]

So the government says that the aim is to transfer services to local community and voluntary groups. But once these groups have gone to the time and expense of developing expressions of interest, they then get to compete against private sector companies in a procurement exercise. I wonder who will really benefit from this?

One thing which we know, and the government admits, is that small, innovative community groups are at a disadvantage when competing in procurement process against private companies and larger charities which are more distant from local communities.

If I worked for a private company which wanted to make serious money out of the Localism Bill, I'd already be preparing to make use of this legislation by working out how to get local authority workers or astroturf community groups to submit expressions of interest and open up contracts to bid for. Just as in the welfare to work field, more and more public money would end up going to a handful of private prime contractors, while small, innovative community groups lose their funding and have to cut or stop their work.

There's a very simple fix to this problem, if the aim is to encourage local community groups to have opportunities to run more services. Just amend the process so that only non-profit groups can take part in the procurement processes created by the Right to Challenge. But under the rhetoric of "more power for communities", the legislation as currently written is bad for users of public services - who can expect lower quality services and no protection if they fail, bad for community groups, and good for companies looking to make a profit out of public services.

The couple who could save the Big Society

2011-02-15T13:37:00.003Z

As the latest relaunch of the Big Society flops, some people are calling for David Cameron to appoint someone senior who can champion the Big Society within government.

And as it happens, I know just the people, a couple whose track record, passion and commitment makes them uniquely qualified to make Big Society work.

*They volunteered on local community projects during their holidays - unlike the minister in charge of the Big Society or 92% of government MPs.

*They work closely with a wide range of charities, from better educational charities to decreasing maternity mortality to human rights and expanding access to the internet.

*She set up a children's charity which works to give every child the chance of a healthy and happy start in life, is a patron of two other charities, and co-authored a book to raise money for charity.

*He helped tens of thousands of young, unemployed people develop their skills by working for charities and community groups.

*He helped innovative start up charities and social enterprises get new kinds of funding and helped charities win contracts to deliver increasing numbers of public services.

*He helped increase the number of people who work for voluntary groups by more than 200,000, and oversaw huge increases in the number of people who offered to volunteer.

*He received a rapturous reception and standing ovations when he spoke at a conference organised by David Cameron's favourite community organising group, Citizens UK.

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If, as David Cameron says, the Big Society really is his passion, then he should take advice from two people who have a successful track record in so many areas of the Big Society - from setting up charities to volunteering, creating opportunities to deliver services differently to community organising.

But instead of seeking their advice, his cuts are destroying the society which Gordon and Sarah Brown helped build.

Is Labour's future conservative?

2011-02-15T12:18:00.003Z

Marc Stears argues that Labour's emerging new identity, championed by people like Jon Cruddas and Lord Glasman and supported by Ed Miliband "is encouraging the Party towards a celebration of tradition, locality and even some forms of social conservatism. It is urging a shift away from the focus on the left on material redistribution and the need for public services always to be delivered directly by the state.

The emerging new identity, on this account, will be more localist and less statist than we have been used to. It will also be more focused on questions of belonging and identity and less concerned with issues of material equality."

Stears urges that we support this tradition, against the "liberals" "who worry that this new identity is dangerously conservative and contains too little to attract many of the minority groups with whom Labour has come closely to identify," and the "progressives" "who see the new identity as backward-looking and nostalgic. Labour, to them, should be about equipping Britain for global economic competition, through dynamic technology and transferable skills, rather than seeking to re-establish community life at a local level."

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I'm all for building deep roots in communities, moving away from decisions being taken by a Westminster elite and so on. But I would humbly suggest that this will involve a greater, not lesser, focus on material equality and high quality public services.

At a time when benefit cuts are making life even tougher for millions of low paid workers, disabled people, carers and the increasing number of unemployed people while bankers get back to business as usual, at a time when the NHS is under threat from being broken up and handed over to private health companies, when the government's policies will increase crime by slashing police numbers and youth services alike, this is the moment for Labour to talk about "belonging and identity" rather than greater equality and defending public services?

I think it is quite sad that Jon Cruddas and his allies have concluded that "Labour's future in England is conservative". There is a lot which this government and market forces are trying to destroy which should be conserved, from forests to Sure Start centres. But there is, now more than ever, a need for greater equality, good quality public services, and an active state. Abandoning that in favour of this week's new buzzwords is wrong in principle and wrong in practice.

More fun with the Big Society

2011-02-02T12:36:00.003Z

Big Society, the gift that keeps giving:

"It could become the allegory of the "big society" age. The man appointed by the prime minister to kickstart a revolution in citizen activism is to scale back his hours after discovering that working for free three days a week is incompatible with "having a life".

Lord Wei of Shoreditch, who was given a Tory peerage last year and a desk in the Cabinet Office as the "big society tsar", is to reduce his hours on the project from three days a week to two, to allow him to see his family more and to take on other jobs to pay the bills...

The role is voluntary and Wei had to to give up jobs in the charitable sector when he was appointed to avoid a conflict of interest. Whitehall sources said that when he was invited to take the role he had expected it to be remunerated but was told only the night before that it was a voluntary post and there would be no salary."

Meanwhile, Lord Wei has decided to use some of his free time to concern troll lefties on his blog:

"There remain however risks ahead for this new consensus on society. First is Ballsonomics, that lingering belief that high spending and a big state in parts of Labour which has the potential to crush good society. The second is that in the move to decentralise power as part of the big society you simply recreate local versions of big government or other overweening institutions. The third is that Good Society ultimately becomes a cover for Big Government – direct (web-enabled and/or street-based) action that leads not to self help and mutual support but to a form of lobbying in which the assumption remains still that government should do everything."

Those wicked lefties, crushing the good society with their lingering belief that funding charities and community groups is preferable to taking away their funding! How dare the people come together to demand that councils keep libraries open rather than using the powers which we give them to do exactly what we want them to!

The 2010 election explained

2011-01-27T16:46:00.002Z

This:

"I suspect the dividing line between the Continuity Blairites and everyone else on this[economic policy] is as follows: Gordon Brown, ~~Alistair Darling~~, and Ed Balls actually realised how awful the Tories would be and that there was a real risk of a double dip recession, and that therefore it was necessary to fight the “language of cuts”. Balls did get to cut loose on this towards the end of the campaign. I suspect Labour would have done better to define against them on this.

However, conventional wisdom demands that Brown be seen as an egghead with no grasp of campaigning. The media-savvy eye catching initiative peddlers, however, were the ones who ended up campaigning on a line of “cuts! cuts! cuts! but not like those evil Tory cuts!” which wasn’t clear or convincing."

Why the Big Society failed...and what Labour should learn

2011-01-26T10:00:00.001Z

Philip Blond and Steve Hilton had a ‘crisis meeting’ last month about the Big Society…

…Frontline workers “haven’t a clue” what the Big Society is meant to be about, and are “shocked to learn how little money is attached to it”.

…Phillip Pullman launches a withering attack on it in front of hundreds of people campaigning to stop library closures.

…The Chief Exec of the Royal Society for Arts writes that “if the Big Society doesn’t get more substantive and granular quickly, it will feel like the only credible thing to do is knock the whole idea.”

…Charities which provide vital and innovative services are cutting their services or even closing completely.

…A group of young volunteers get involved with a community group to produce a film mocking the Big Society.

…Tory MPs describe the Big Society as “intangible and incomprehensible...odd and unpersuasive”.

Its critics mock it, volunteers and charity workers despise it, its creators are briefing against each other, and its core supporters in the Tory Party and the think tanks are turning against it. The only remaining question about the Big Society is not whether or not it will succeed, but how long it will be before the government quietly drops the term. John Major’s Traffic Cones Hotline lasted three years and three months, and it would be a surprise if the Big Society staggered on much longer than that.

Problems with the Big Society are too numerous to mention, but to highlight just a few – its supporters can’t explain what it means, it has become associated primarily with closing libraries, it is very easy for opponents to mock, the people who have to deliver it don’t understand or support it, and the few detailed proposals are being appallingly badly implemented. Any one of those problems could be lethal for a government programme – let alone all of them together.

The only thing which the government could do now to save the Big Society is to throw some money at it – reverse the library closures and the cuts to charities, fund their community organiser training programme properly (rather than training people and then expecting them to be able to fundraise for their salaries), invest in the infrastructure, create a level playing field for government procurement and build the capacity needed to ensure, for example, that their neighbourhood plans don’t get dominated by a vocal minority.

But even given the political will, the fact that the Big Society could only be saved by the Big State chucking money at it highlights the flaw at the heart of the whole idea. Anyway, if the government wants to spend some money on new projects to win back public support, why would they risk these projects flopping by associating them with the Big Society?

*

It is worth remembering as the Big Society collapses into chaos and ridicule quite how popular it was amongst the political elite when first announced. A whole “Big Society industry” sprung up over the summer, soaking up thousands and thousands of hours of civil servant and policy researcher time in conference after conference, seminar after seminar. Labour thinkers from Demos’ Open Left project to Jon Cruddas argued that it was a brilliant strategic move which posed a deadly threat to Labour, and would define the future of political debate. Others called for Labour to embrace “the Good Society”, or “take back the Big Society”.

Instead of taking back this mess, I think Labour’s approach should learn from the Big Society in the following ways:

First, ensure the “Big Society” fiasco does maximum political damage to the Tories. Labour's team should invest just a little time in making sure that the Tories aren't able just to drop the term and walk away, and that “Big Society” becomes to David Cameron what “Cones Hotline” was to John Major – a well known policy disaster which also highlights a wider message about the government’s mistaken approach.

Second, impose the “Philip Blond test” on all new policy ideas for Labour’s policy review. The Philip Blond test is simple – if Philip Blond would support the policy proposal, bin it. This has the advantage of (a) weeding out daft ideas and (b) avoiding the risk that Philip Blond tells all his friends in the media that Labour is listening to him.

Third, make sure that they understand the policies that they adopt, and can explain them to others. This should be obvious, but was in many ways the biggest failing of the Big Society. The people on the ground who could have made the Big Society work were alienated by the insulting, top down way that millionaire, out of touch politician David Cameron announced that his Big New Idea was that they should do what they had been doing anyway, except with no money.

Fourth, listen to people outside of the political elite who can show how their ideas work in practice. The people who fixated on the potential of the Big Society and who thought it was a work of strategic genius missed the big story, which was that the Big Society was popular with political insiders, and a disaster with everyone outside of the Westminster bubble. It is easy to imagine Labour repeating the mistakes of the Big Society by, for example, adopting the new wheeze from someone like Neal Lawson as our Big Idea, spending a year trying to explain it to people who are largely hostile or indifferent, and then getting slagged off in the newspapers by Lawson for failing to implement his brilliant ideas correctly.

Instead, we should pay attention to the people whose ideas actually have been shown to work in practice – people who work and volunteer in community groups, councillors, public sector workers and so on.

Just to take one example from thousands, David Robinson has some brilliant ideas about how early action can prevent social problems from happening, rather than public services just picking up the pieces after the problems have been caused. He is worth listening to because the charity he founded has run projects which cut crime by 50% and which has the best record in Southern England in helping unemployed people get jobs.

At the moment, too much attention gets paid to people whose only credentials are that they have a think tank in central London and good media contacts. Instead, Labour needs to listen to the people who can show that their ideas work in the real world.

Lastly, recognise that even popular ideas about how to improve communities get tainted by association with politicians. Donating money at cash points was a popular idea – until it was suggested by government as part of the Big Society. As Julian Dobson notes, “you’ll find very few people ready to buy a message about society promoted and preached by a government that’s generally perceived to be undermining society.” It's not just the Tories, living wage campaigners worry about their campaigns being weakened if they come to be associated too closely with the Labour Party.

Rather than Cameron’s top down approach, Labour needs to develop a different way of doing its business, building from the grassroots and making sure that the people who are going to have to carry out our policies understand them, support them and were involved in designing them.

How the Big Society works

2011-01-17T16:36:00.003Z

2004-2010: Number of people working in voluntary sector rises by 200,000, in a steady upwards trend.

May 2010: Conservative / Liberal Democrat coalition formed. They pledge to roll back the state and give new opportunities to voluntary and community groups to run services and take action to make society stronger, as part of their flagship "Big Society" programme.

Jul-Sep 2010: Number of people working in the voluntary sector falls by 13,000.

Evidence based policy

2011-01-12T15:10:00.002Z

Nic Dakin: To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions what evidence he used to determine that planned changes to housing benefit for those out of work for over 12 months will increase employment levels.

Steve Webb: We did not make any specific assumptions about the impact on employment levels of this measure. Research shows that the reasons for long term unemployment are complex. However we believe reducing housing benefit after 12 months will provide an additional financial incentive for jobseekers to take up work.

*

So the government has no evidence that cutting benefits for people unemployed for more than one year will impact on employment levels, but they are going to cross their fingers and hope that the fear of becoming homeless will force people into work.

In other news, their Universal Credit scheme (which will add nearly £2 billion to the welfare bill) will make 1.4 million people worse off, increase marginal tax rates and reduce work incentives for 1.8 million people, and penalise savers and lone parents. The government is yet to explain how the Credit will interact with housing or caring costs, and they currently plan to require every local council to set its own rules on who is eligible for council tax benefit, which will make the benefits system even more complicated.

And the whole thing relies on setting up an earnings database which tracks people's earnings on a real time basis and which is going to be set up on the cheap after the Treasury slashed the amount of money available for it.

The welfare trap

2011-01-11T14:07:00.004Z

At his press conference yesterday, Ed Miliband got asked about which cuts he accepted, and replied that Labour has accepted the need for welfare cuts.

The hope, I guess, is that this sounds sensible and moderate. Miliband aims to position Labour against the government making excessive cuts, and against the unrealistic lefties who oppose all cuts. By supporting cuts to a sacred cow like welfare, he shows Labour's credibility and prevents attacks from hostile journalists. And it sort of worked in its own terms, judging by the next day's newspaper coverage of his press conference.

But this kind of triangulation on welfare is a big strategic error.

At the next election in 2015, George Osborne is aiming to pose a choice between the Tories offering tax cuts and Labour offering higher welfare spending. His hope is that faced with that choice, a majority of people will opt for the tax cuts and the Tories will win the election. In order to get to this dividing line, he will be prepared to cut, cut and cut again at the welfare budget over the next few years.

In response to this, Labour could decide to accept every single welfare cut the Tories propose, no matter how ill advised, savage or counter productive. Or they could agree with the need to cut welfare spending overall, but pick a few specific examples to oppose - as Miliband did over child benefit for higher earners, and as his brother did by suggesting a mansion tax instead of the housing benefit cuts.

But both of these are pretty weak options. People affected by the cuts will quite reasonably conclude that there is little point in supporting Labour if they accept the need for massive welfare cuts - whether or not they pick out one or two specific cuts to oppose. And people not affected by the welfare cuts will definitely pick Tory tax cuts over Labour's alternative at the next election if our message for the next four years is "we agree with cutting welfare, but slow down a bit".

Instead, we need to challenge the basic assumptions of the Tory case. The Tory approach to welfare policy is to pick a handful of highly unrepresentative examples of how the system works and pretend that all the money gets spent on them, and to make up their numbers and facts. Their cuts are making millions of people worse off, and thousands homeless or destitute. Their policies involve cutting support which used to help people live and work with dignity, and then spending more on picking up the pieces when people lose their jobs or are forced into residential care.

This should provide ample material for a tough, principled opposition to inflict major damage on an extreme right-wing government, particularly when most people already think that the Tories are more concerned with looking after the rich than ordinary people. And yet this is an issue where Labour is running scared and where our leaders appear to believe that credibility involves pretending we agree with the Tories rather than taking their flawed, lying policies to pieces.

Labour can't win on this issue by splitting the difference between the Tories and the people that the Tories are trying to hurt. And they can't rely on civil society, disabled people's groups, women's groups and all the rest, to defeat the government on its own. Even if there wasn't an absolutely overwhelming moral case for opposing welfare cuts - and there is - it would still be the right thing to do.

A tale of two coalitions: using German opinion polls to predict the future

2011-01-11T10:35:00.004Z

Guess who:

This party achieved its best election result in a generation recently. Then it went into coalition with the main Centre Right party, since when its support has collapsed.

It is, of course, the German Free Democrat Party, who achieved nearly 15% of the vote in the 2009 elections, and then formed a governing coalition with the Christian Democratic Union. Fifteen months on, one recent opinion poll showed the FDP polling at a mighty 3%.

The German elections took place seven and a half months before the UK elections, and both resulted in a similar outcome. So I wondered whether there were any other parallels in how public opinion in the two countries has changed since the elections.

To find out, I took monthly data from Forsa opinion polls in Germany and YouGov opinion polls in the UK. I compared the opinion polls results for each successive month after the election (so the first poll compared October 2009 in Germany with June 2010 in the UK, and the latest comparison was between May 2010 in Germant and January 2011 in the UK).

- After 8 months, the FDP in Germany had lost just over half their support from the election, going from 15% to 7%. At the same point, the Lib Dems had also lost just over half their support, from 24% to 10%.

- In contrast, support for the CDU and the Tories had stayed roughly the same as at the elections (CDU was down 2% after 8 months, the Tories were up 3% after 8 months). As a result, the governing parties lost 10% of their support in 8 months in Germany, and 11% in the UK over the same time period.

- Labour's level of support was almost exactly the same as the combined score for the SPD and the Greens at the same point after the election. After 8 months, combined support for SPD and Greens was 42%, for Labour was 41%. With the exception of one month, Labour's opinion poll rating has been within 2% of the combined SPD/Green score for every month since the election.

- Labour recovered support more rapidly than the SPD/Greens in Germany, gaining 12% in 8 months compared to 8% - possibly a result of more effective leadership and campaigning? However, they started from a worse position. In the 2009 election, the combined SPD/Green vote was 34%, 15% behind the CDU/FDP. In the 2010 election, Labour got 29%, which was 32% behind the combined Tory/Lib Dem score.

There are considerable differences between British and German politics (a Left Party which gets 10% of the vote in Germany, different electoral systems, different economic policies, leaders and much more). However, it is interesting to note these similarities in trends in opinion polls since the respective elections and formation of a Conservative-Liberal coalition. If these similarities persist over the next few months, we could expect the following:

1. At the local elections in May, the combined vote of the Coalition parties will be just 4% more than the Labour vote. Labour's share of the vote will peak at 46% during the summer.

2. The Lib Dems will continue to decline in support, and by next July or August will be at 5% in the polls. The Tories will continue to poll close to their score in the General Election over the next six months.

3. Other parties outside of the Big 3 or 4 will continue to get a similar share of the vote as they did at the General Election.

Lessons from Latin America: how to reduce inequality

2011-01-11T10:00:00.000Z

Over the past decade, the gap between rich and poor in most Latin American countries fell, in contrast to the rest of the world where it rose.

Recently published research found that there were two key reasons for this. Firstly, there was a decrease in the earnings gap between high-skilled and low-skilled workers; the second was an increase in government transfers to the poor.

Market forces in Latin America were likely to produce and maintain inequality unless government action equalised opportunities and outcomes. Furthermore, these countries are likely to benefit from redistribution not only through improvements in equality but also through improvements in growth.

The research found that social democratic left-leaning regimes have been more effective at reducing inequality and poverty than both non-left and radical left regimes. Inequality fell more quickly in Lula's Brazil than in Chavez's Venezuala.

To sustain the reduction in inequality, the researchers argue that it will be essential to help the disenfranchised to mobilise and to act collectively through political parties as well as to promote the strengthening of legislatures and the restriction of presidential powers. Sustaining equity over time requires a permanent redistributive effort through progressive income and wealth taxation of the very top incomes in particular. They also find that progressive fiscal policy is consistent with prosperity.

There's a lot here that we could learn from in the UK. Reducing the earnings gap between high and low paid workers and cash transfers to the poor really does make a difference in tackling poverty, and government action to counteract market forces can increase prosperity. And social democratic parties which closed the gap between rich and poor won landslide election victories.

Lib Dem Doublethink

2011-01-10T12:28:00.003Z

Lib Dem Voice has an article called "One Good Reason to vote Lib Dem", which concludes:

"The decision really is that simple for OE&S Conservatives. Vote Conservative, UKIP or just stay at home to cause chaos and give Labour and the Trade Unions a blank cheque for mayhem, or vote Lib Dem to send Parliament an MP that will sit beside Conservatives and vote for Conservative Policies along with Lib Dem policies and Coalition policies.

Ironically, he [Norman Tebbit] leaves a great advertisement for the Lib Dems to the progressive community, stating that a Lib Dem win would shift the coalition further to the left and further from Conservative policy. Not sure whether to vote Green, Lib Dem or Labour? A vote for Lib Dem is a vote to make the Coalition government just that much more progressive."

So Tories should vote Lib Dem because the Lib Dems will vote for Conservative policies, and the "progressive community" should vote Lib Dem because they will shift the government further away from Tory policies, according to, erm, Norman Tebbit.

Only a true master of Lib Dem Doublethink would be able to follow a paragraph about why Tories should vote Lib Dem with a paragraph about how voting Lib Dem will shift the government away from Tory policies. Normally, they at least have the decency to put the pro-Tory bit on one set of leaflets on blue paper and deliver it to Tory-supporting households in one part of the country, and the pro-Labour/Green bit on red or green paper and deliver it to another set of households in a different part of the country. But I suppose it is all a bit more difficult now.

Civil Society and the Big State

2011-01-07T10:44:00.003Z

Maurice Glasman is one of Labour's rising stars. A founder of London Citizens, he was recently made a Lord and is one of Ed Miliband's closest advisers.

Writing in the Fabian Review, Glasman sets out a critique of how Labour lost its identity, and what needs to be done to reconnect with its core purpose.

For Glasman, the rot started in 1945, as "the triumph of Labour in 1945 was based upon the defeat of the Labour movement. It placed all hope in its continuing control of the state and moved from organisation to mobilisation at elections, from the good to the right, from democracy to justice, from reciprocity to fairness." This led in turn through Crosland to New Labour and a focus on managerialism as a means to achieve equality. Labour needs to learn James Purnell's "crucial insight" that it was "too hands on with the state, and too hands off with the market".

Instead, Glasman argues, Labour "needs to rediscover and then embrace the meaning of the Labour movement as the democratic resistance of organised working people to the commodification of their lives and environment. And it must do so without resorting to the state as the exclusive instrument of regulation but also turn towards a balance of power in corporate governance through the democratic representation of the workforce."

*

I think this analysis, while interesting, is deeply flawed. It simply isn't the case that the "ultimate end" of the Labour government of 1997-2010 was equality, nor that there was the level of continuity between the Attlee, Wilson and Blair governments which Glasman's case would suggest. If James Purnell really believed that Labour was being "too hands on with the state", he had a pretty funny way of showing it as a minister. And so on.

But for the key weakness in this argument, let's return to 1945. Why did Attlee and his government choose to nationalise the coal mines and create the National Health Service, and was this really, as Glasman argues "a defeat of the Labour movement"?

In fact, the reforms of the Attlee government were shaped by the experiences of the Labour movement and organised working people. Civil society demanded the nationalisation of the coal mines. And the poor experience of being treated by a range of different charitable health providers in the 1930s and before was precisely the reason why the creation of the NHS was - and remains to this day - so popular.

The Big State, in other words, was created by and in response to the demands of organised working people. And the approach which Glasman calls for, of a strong civil society built on relationships of organised people where equality is an active practice, will lead to calls for more action by the state, not fewer.

Consider the causes which London Citizens has adopted in recent years. They range from requiring councils and businesses to pay a "Living Wage" to an earned amnesty for illegal immigrants, a cap on interest rates to a statutory charter on responsible lending, getting local councils to provide wheelie bins rather than plastic refuse bags to closing down betting shops to improving road safety with a new traffic crossing.

These are all excellent causes, but it is hard to see how responding to the economic crisis by capping interest rates, for example, is an example of being "less hands on with the state".

On the same day that I read Glasman's piece, I also saw some excellent research by Community Links, an anti-poverty charity in East London. Like Glasman, Community Links noted the importance of good relationships between professionals and clients in areas such as helping people find work, do well at school, live healthily and get advice to sort out problems.

They have found that public service professionals (whether they work in the public, voluntary or private sector) need autonomy, time to build relationships with clients, access to training and skills development, and positive attitudes towards clients.

This strikes me as a very serious challenge to New Labour's (and the current government's) approach to public services, and offers a very helpful way to think about how to redesign public services for the future. And it is interesting that, like Glasman, it focuses on the importance of taking time to build up good relationships with people as a means to strengthen society and improve outcomes.

But this approach is not going to work if the aim is to roll back the State, which is the aim of both Glasman and the "Big Society". Instead, it needs to be about helping to make the state more effective in meeting people's needs and aspirations, and in using the state and civil society together to resist the domination of capital.

The year of the liberal moment

2010-12-24T10:00:00.000Z

Part 2 of Paskini's Alternative History files. Part 1 is here.

Guardian Review of the Year, December 2010:

As an extraordinary political year draws to a close, one thing is beyond dispute. 2010 has been the year of the Liberal Democrats. It is easy to forget, however, how differently things might have turned out.

With hindsight, Chris Huhne's decision to reject a formal coalition with either the Conservatives or Labour looks obvious. But there were those in his party at the time who urged a "Rainbow Coalition", and even a few who argued for a formal Coalition agreement with the Conservatives.

In those first few weeks after the inconclusive election, the turning point was the deal which Vince Cable and George Osborne struck to make public spending reductions in the current financial year calmed the markets. The fears of those, including some in Mr Huhne's own party, who feared that the UK could go the way of Greece if there was no overall government majority, now seem laughable.

The Liberal Democrats cemented their reputation for economic competence with a devastating response to the government's Comprehensive Spending Review. David Miliband's crushing leadership victory over Ed Balls was followed by a decision to appoint Alan Johnson as Shadow Chancellor and set out Labour's plans for public spending cuts in detail, to head off accusations of "deficit denial". But after a weak and uncertain response from Johnson to the Spending Review, it was left to Vince Cable to make a passionate and authoritative case for an economic policy which put economic growth, not an ideological assault on the public sector, at the heart of Britain's economic recovery.

The dramatic showdown over the government budget, in which the Conservatives were forced to modify their proposals and accept policy after policy which the Liberal Democrats proposed, was perhaps the turning point. The list of concessions which the Liberal Democrats fought for and won - raising capital gains tax by 10%, keeping the 50p top rate of tax and forcing the Conservatives to abandon their plans to cut inheritance tax and winning a commitment to introduce a multi billion pound pupil premium to boost educational attainment for poor children and a major new green energy programme - established them firmly in the centre ground of British politics. The attempts of Education Secretary Michael Gove to claim that the pupil premium was in fact a Conservative idea was met with ridicule.

The negotiations over the Budget highlighted the dilemma for the Conservatives. Some argued for a dissolution of parliament rather than agreeing a deal with the Liberal Democrats which forced them to ditch so many of the cherished policies of the Right Wing. But polls at the time showed clearly that the electorate would prefer to see politicians compromising rather than inflicting another election on them. Like Gordon Brown in 2007, David Cameron decided not to take the risk of serving as Prime Minister for just a few months. With his party sinking in the polls, the window of opportunity for holding an election has now definitively passed.

Indeed, some within the Conservative Party suspect that Cameron has been making use of the need to secure confidence and supply from the Liberal Democrats in order to abandon some of his party's policies, and watched with suspicion as he praised the work of Liberal Democrats such as the party's Home Affairs spokesman, Nick Clegg.

But it was the student fee protests which, in Mr Huhne's words, showed that the Liberal Democrats had replaced Labour as the main party of the centre left. With tens of thousands of young people rallying behind the Liberal Democrat demands to scrap fees, the Conservative policy of uncapping student fees was in jeopardy.

The fateful decision of Labour leader David Miliband to agree a deal on student fees which led to them being doubled was praised by some newspapers as "a bid to regain the centre ground", but provoked fury amongst many of Labour's supporters. The vote showed Labour's divisions, with over fifty left wing MPs joining the Liberal Democrats in voting against, the majority following the Leader and abstaining, and a few such as Tom Harris voting with the government.

With all opinion polls in the past month now showing the Liberal Democrats in the lead, buoyed by substantial support from ex-Labour voters as well as centrist voters impressed by the party's role in moderating the Conservatives, the chances of a Liberal Democrat government seem greater than ever before. With both Labour and the Conservatives looking exhausted and divided, it is clear that 2010 was the year when the liberal moment came.

Displacement activity

2010-12-23T10:12:00.003Z

Anthony Painter has an article on Left Foot Forward, which argues that Labour has spent the last year engaged in "displacement activity", and needs instead to set out a new vision and to articulate a different future.

The four pieces of "displacement activity" which Labour was apparently involved in was plotting against Gordon Brown, the general election campaign (!), the leadership election and campaigning against the cuts. And what Labour needs to do instead of this permanent campaigning is set out a vision of "an economy that provides good jobs in new creative services and industry; that re-defines public value and values for the post-austerity age; and makes real the promise of the Big Society as a new citizenship that tangibly improves communities and lives."

This might be the defining statement of the Pamphlet Labour tendency - a clever, articulate piece which argues the totally nonsensical proposition that campaigning in elections is displacement activity for the Labour Party and is a distraction from the key task of re-defining public value and values for the post-austerity age.

I would argue the opposite. Labour wins not "when it is the future" (whatever that means), but when Labour activists knock on doors and talk to people. Anything which doesn't contribute to that is displacement activity.

One of the biggest mistakes Labour made over the last few years was to undervalue the importance of grassroots campaigning, and to overvalue the kind of elite politics of student politics to think tank to special adviser to MP to government minister. A kind of vicious circle developed, where Labour drew its ideas from a narrower and narrower group of people, lost the expertise of people who knew how to win elections, and became ever more distant and out of touch in both the content of its policies and the way it communicated them. Correcting that mistake, talking to people and letting their experiences and ideas shape Labour's policies is absolutely necessary.

There is a kind of virtuous circle which the grassroots-led approach taps into. The more people that Labour activists talk to, the more people vote for us. More local campaigning increases the number of members and volunteers, and helps us find excellent new people from all walks of life to become Labour candidates. Better Labour candidates increase the number of people who vote and volunteer for us. And developing policies in response to conversations on the doorstep helps to root them in the real world.

I'm happy to help Anthony develop a vision about making the promise of the Big Society real and talk about ways of creating good new jobs, and I am intrigued to learn about what "public value and values for the post-austerity age" might mean. But let's have those sorts of conversations as a bit of light relief after the important business of a productive canvassing session.

Next year as the cuts hit home, going out and campaigning for Labour will be more important and rewarding than ever. Whether you've never done it before or (like me) you've done some but could do more, why not make a New Year's Resolution to cut out a bit of displacement activity and go knock on some doors?

Useful facts about economics for lefties

2010-12-20T14:47:00.003Z

Two useful resources for lefties:

1. via Duncan, an IMF research paper on how increasing workers' wages is key to preventing future financial crises:

"For long-run sustainability a permanent flow adjustment, giving workers the means to repay their obligations over time, is therefore much more successful than a stock adjustment, unless the latter is extremely large.

Any success in reducing income inequality could therefore be very useful in order to reduce the likelihood of future crises...[for example] a switch from labor income taxes to taxes on economic rents, including on land, natural resources and financial sector rents...And as far as strengthening the bargaining powers to workers is concerned, the difficulties of doing so have to be weighed against the potentially disastrous consequences of further deep financial and real crises if current trends continue."

If we want to reduce the risk of another economic crisis, and are worried about the level of debt which households and government has, then the evidence here is that it is essential to strengthen the bargaining power of workers against investors (defined as the top 5% wealthiest).

2. The Realignment Project demolishes the arguments put forward by right-wingers in favour of the Laffer Curve:

"A progressive counter to this theory would be to ask – what about government spending, or in other words, social consumption? Because what the Laffer Curve leaves out, and this is endemic of conservative thought, is what taxes pay for. Keep in mind that the premise of the Laffer Curve is that revenues decline because people stop working when taxes eat up their income. However, if we think of taxes as financing the collective or social consumption of goods – what scholars sometimes call the “social wage;” think things like Social Security and other forms of government-provided income – then a decrease in after-tax wage income might be matched by an increase in the social wage, such that real income doesn’t change at all and eliminating any disincentive effect. Indeed, when we think about the actual distribution of income, taxes, and public benefits, for many people the change in income might actually be positive."

Specifically, government action to create jobs can create all kinds of positive benefits:

"By showing how the huge dead-weight loss of unemployed labor – both in terms of lost consumption and lost production – has to be included as an “opportunity cost” inherent in the laissez-faire model, the Baxter Cycle shows that government efforts to provide equal protection against unemployment can actually raise production and produce a more prosperous, more secure, and more just outcome.

And ultimately, this is why conservatives want to believe in an economic law that limits the size of government and proclaims the futility of expansion – because a government that can alter that balance between individual and social consumption threatens the assumed inevitability of the free market. And a theory that suggests to the contrary that the people have the ability to change how consumption is organized for the better is quite powerful weaponry in the rhetorical battle over taxation and government."

How the Lib Dems can still win elections in the future

2010-12-10T14:19:00.003Z

I know that lots of people are predicting that the Liberal Democrats will get wiped out in the next elections as a result of their betrayals over fees etc.

But yesterday they managed to secure a massive win in a local by-election in Fareham, Hampshire, securing a swing of 27% from the Tories. I was interested in how they did it, and what this might tell us about their future strategy.

Their candidate, Nick Gregory, stood for election last year as a Tory. After losing to the Liberal Democrats in that election, he decided to become a Liberal Democrat. The key policy issue in Gregory's campaign was his opposition to the proposals to build 7,000 eco homes in the area. As he put it, "a Conservative vote is a vote for their plans to build 7000 more houses here".

The new homes, expected to be built between 2016 and 2026, will be subject to the toughest environmental standards ever set for new developments in the country. They must be specially designed so that they need less energy to run. It makes sense that the Liberal Democrats, with their commitment to solving the housing crisis and tackling climate change would, erm, campaign against them.

So any Liberal Democrats feeling worried about the future after their decision to go into Coalition with the Tories and break their promises should rest a little easier. They might have lost support amongst some people who are concerned with trivial matters such as education or the welfare state.

But they can still win elections when they get someone who used to be a Tory to be their candidate and attack the Tories from the right on housing and climate change.

Neal Lawson and the New Socialism

2010-12-10T11:28:00.003Z

Neal Lawson, chair of leftie campaigning group Compass, explaining the "New Socialism":

"Unlike the Labour Party of the past, we now have to focus on the non-material things that foster contentment and fulfillment. We have to place much greater value on time, care, and cooperation, and aim at a different culture and identity of belonging, with deeper foundations than either production or consumption. We have to redefine "aspiration" to bring it into line with people's real hopes: not just to earn and own, but to reach one's full human potential, and live in a society that is safe, caring, and neighbourly. The old social democracy concerned itself with greater quantity, but the New Socialism's thinking is altogether more qualitative. "

Neal Lawson, chair of leftie campaigning group Compass, quoted in Mail on Sunday explaining the consultancy payments which he received from the organisation:

"Mr Lawson angrily defended the payments of £60,000 last year and £53,498 for the previous financial year, saying they were ‘a pittance’ compared with what he used to earn.

He said he was due the cash because he worked for it ‘24 hours a day, seven days a week’ and acted as Compass’s ‘fundraiser, the strategist, the talker, the thinker, the go-to-meetings person’."

*

It is easy to tell other people that they need to place a greater value on non-material things when you are paid a 'pittance' of £60,000 per year to do so. How is the "New Socialism" going to win over a majority of people when even the man who invented it doesn't believe in it?

Is John Rentoul right about child poverty?

2010-12-06T11:37:00.002Z

John Rentoul:

"[Flight] said that policy designed to alleviate child poverty has a perverse effect in encouraging people on benefits to have more children than they otherwise would. This has been demonstrated by several academic surveys, not least a recent one by the unimpeachable Institute for Fiscal Studies. In December 2008 it published a paper entitled "Does welfare reform affect fertility?" It was barely reported in the press, for reasons in which social psychologists might be interested, because it found that, since Labour increased child-related benefits in 1999, "there was an increase in births (by around 15 per cent) among the group affected by the reforms"."

John Rentoul is the author of a series called "Questions to which the answer is no". Here's one for his list - "Are John Rentoul and Howard Flight right about child poverty?"

The Institute of Fiscal Studies research doesn't examine the question of whether "people on benefits", by which I assume he means people who are not working, were more likely to have children as a result of Labour's policies. Instead, it found that women who left full time education at the minimum leaving age, and who had a partner who also left left full time education at the minimum leaving age, were more likely to have children as a result of Labour's reforms, particularly the financial help provided by tax credits.

The IFS report also noted, however, extensive research which showed how Labour's reforms helped more lone parents into work- and found that lone parents were not more likely to have children as a result of the reforms. And many of the women with partners who were more likely to have children were in paid employment - the IFS research didn't look at "people on benefits" as a separate group, and aimed to examine the effects of Working Families Tax Credit. I know that the benefits system can be complicated to understand, but it shouldn't be that hard to work out that some of the people receiving Working Families Tax Credit might be families who are working.

To summarise the research accurately - Labour helped families, particularly those on low incomes, with extra cash payments. These payments increased the number of lone parents in work, without incentivising lone parents to have more children. These payments and extra help did incentivise some couples to decide to have children, and in some cases this involved the mother giving up work and staying at home and looking after the children while the father went out to work.

Despite the recession, child poverty actually fell between 2008 and 2010. Rentoul may believe that the new government should abandon one of the most effective anti-poverty programmes in the world. But financial support to reduce poverty is part of the solution, not part of the problem.

What's wrong with the New Socialism

2010-12-03T11:26:00.005Z

John Harris and Neal Lawson have written a very long article on the Compass website claiming that it is time for "The New Socialism".

After painting a gloomy picture of the current situation, they write:

"So where is the light? It comes from two places: from leaders, and from people. Both tell us that it is both feasible and desirable to renew social democracy - socialism even - but that renewal must be truly transformative. It cannot be about a change of direction, but a paradigm shift to a very new form of left politics.

Let's start at the top."

No.

If you want to talk about a New Socialism, then absolutely and fundamentally you do not "start at the top". Apparently "among writers, thinkers and activists outside parliament, a new socialism has been cohering for the best part of five years". What Harris and Lawson don't realise is that this is the problem, not the solution.

After paragraphs of praise about how imaginative they and their friends have been, with a bit of sucking up to Ed Miliband, Harris and Lawson don't discuss how ordinary people have been involved in the development of the new socialism, beyond an anecdote about how managers and cleaners alike would like to get home from work in time to read bedtime stories to their children.

This article, and Lawson and Harris' entire approach, could do with a big dose of "show, don't tell". They tell us about how the New Socialism will be an alternative to the crisis of social democracy, but they don't show any evidence for this. Jon Cruddas, who has been involved in developing all this stuff, was in a tough re-election campaign earlier this year. The logic of Harris and Lawson's analysis is that his campaign should have been about an alternative to materialism which emphasises caring and sharing, action on climate change, electoral reform, user involvement in public services and making the tax case for the public sector. Suffice to say that none of these were major features of Labour's campaign in Dagenham and Rainham.

The process of grassroots campaigning, of trying to persuade people, involving them and reshaping ideas and policies in line with their priorities, is absolutely vital. Rather than being a top down project, where a few influential people persuade the leader of the Labour Party to adopt their ideas, New Socialists need to get out into neighbourhoods across the country - building from the roots, getting their power by persuading people to vote from them, rather than from pamphlets.

No one should take seriously claims that the "New Socialism" is a better electoral alternative to social democracy/New Labour/Labourism until leading "New Socialists" actually make use of these supposedly popular arguments and win elections with them. I'm sympathetic to some of the ideas which Harris and Lawson put forward. But until the New Socialism is shaped by people at the grassroots, rather than just being a project of "writers, thinkers and activists", then it is at best irrelevant and at worst harmful.

Questions to ask your Labour councillor

2010-12-01T12:30:00.002Z

Following on from the previous post, here's five questions for Labour councillors to reflect on, and which Labour activists could ask their councillors. The intent is not to catch anyone out, but to get people thinking about how we can all work together.

1. How does the council budget which you've voted for reflect the priorities of Labour supporters and activists?

2. Has your Labour Group discussed and developed a political and organisational strategy for campaigning against the cuts? How can non-councillors help support this work?

3. What has been the impact of central government cutting council budgets by 28%or more, as George Osborne has done, rather than 20% as Alastair Darling planned to do?

4. Which services have been saved by setting a legal budget rather than refusing to set a budget and forcing the section 151 officer to do so?

5. What advice should I give to people who are angry about the cuts so they can get involved in community campaigns and make a difference?

Labour councillors and cuts

2010-12-01T11:21:00.002Z

In recent days, there has been some comradely discussion between lefties about what local councils, and specifically Labour councillors, should do in response to the cuts.

Leftie activists make helpful and informed points such as “on a point of principle, Labour councillors should resign rather than make any cuts and if you don’t agree then you are a sell out”, and Labour councillors make inclusive and coalition building points such as “you don’t know what you are talking about and I know better than you about why these cuts have to happen and aren’t my fault”.

Let’s try and find some consensus.

The leftie activist case argues that the duty of local Labour councillors is to resist the cuts, through a variety of strategies such as increasing borrowing rather than making cuts, transferring assets to community groups, resigning en masse and forcing central government to make cuts, and building a mass movement of resistance. This is inspired by the example of Poplar, Liverpool, Clay Cross and other past socialist heroes.

The councillors’ case is that the law is quite clear. Councillors have to set a legal budget, or the council’s designated section 151 officer will do so. Refusing to get involved with making cuts won’t stop them from happening, it will just ensure that there are bigger cuts which reflect the priorities of an unelected bureaucrat. People who are angry about the cuts shouldn’t be shouting at or denouncing councillors, but should focus their anger on the Tory/Lib Dem government which is responsible for these cuts.

In summary, the activists are Wrong but Romantic, the councillors Right but Repulsive.

The law is indeed quite clear, and was written to stop all the clever wheezes which Labour councillors came up with in the 1980s to avoid making cuts. In addition, councils don’t even have the option of raising council tax in the short term. The timescale is also very tight. Councils won’t know their final funding allocation for next year until December, and will have to have a budget in place by around February. It’s easy to talk about “building a mass movement to fight the cuts”, but setting one up in twelve weeks is going to be a bit of a stretch, and it is much harder to build a national anti-cuts movement against cuts in local government spending then against, say, student fees – by definition the issues in each area are different.

There is no point in denouncing Labour councillors for making cuts this year. Sweeping moral statements about the immorality of making cuts achieve literally nothing except antagonising people. The position of calling for “no cuts” is not credible – is it really the case that lefties should oppose every single cut to the number of senior managers that a local council employs, for example?

This is not to let councillors off the hook, however. The specific solutions which leftie activists call for might not be credible, but they are articulating real and important concerns. Labour councillors need to do more than just work out how to minimise the impact of the cuts and then vote for a budget which adds up. Being a councillor is a political role, not a bureaucratic one.

Specifically, councillors need to make sure that they don’t get caught up in the town hall bubble. Local government finance is a very, very dull subject, most people don’t really know the difference between, say, a councillor and MP, and lots of people are going to be furious when they feel the impact of these cuts. There’s no particular reason in the abstract why people will understand the need for cuts, or understand why councillors chose to make the cuts which they did.

So councillors need to be out in the community, explaining their decisions to people, listening to their ideas and concerns, making sure that anyone can understand the dilemmas which they faced and – crucially – helping to organise people who are angry about the cuts to help them do something productive.

Some specific ideas:

- Labour Groups should allocate time in their group meetings to discussing their political and organisational strategy for responding to the cuts. This can include ensuring that they organise speakers at residents’ associations and community groups, agreeing lines to take, making sure leaflets explain what is happening and why. Develop allies – a message that the council isn’t to blame for these cuts and people should focus their anger on the government is much stronger if made by people who are not councillors and who are well known as anti-cuts campaigners, champions for elderly people and so on.

- As part of the budget, a paper should be published which shows the difference between a 20% cut in local government funding (as proposed by Alastair Darling), and the 28%+ cuts imposed by George Osborne. This shows exactly which services are being cut as a result of the Tories and Lib Dems. In Ealing, for example, the council would have been able to reduce spending by 20% over three years without any cuts to front line services. But because Labour lost in May, millions will be cut from front line services.

- If possible, the cuts which would be required by the section 151 officer if the council refused to make cuts should also be set out. This is a powerful argument to make against those who say that councillors should resign rather than make cuts (“if we didn’t take these decisions, here’s what would have happened”). But also, it is a point of accountability. The argument “we had to make these cuts because otherwise the section 151 officer would have done these terrible things” rather disappears if it turns out that Labour councillors were voting for a budget which would have been identical to the one imposed by law.

- Labour councillors need to try to create more opportunities to share ideas and learn from each other, and to adopt good ideas from party members, supporters and others. There’s probably scope for a website which could help with this – I note that the LGA, which presumably should fulfil this role in part, isn’t doing so.

- Above all, give people hope and a chance to be involved. If Labour councillors make the argument “we had to do what we did, these cuts are inevitable, here’s why your alternative ideas are nonsense, if you want to oppose the cuts you should go and deliver my leaflets”, then they shouldn’t be surprised if people choose instead to join up with local anti-cuts campaigns and denounce them as sell outs. Councillors need to show how they are on the side of people angry about cuts, and work as equals with them on organising to build an alternative. Be prepared to make concessions, show people how their priorities are reflected in the decisions taken, help set up clever and interesting ways to organise anger against the cuts.

I know that there are all sorts of examples round the country where Labour councillors and activists are working well together and doing all the above and more. But I hope the above principles are ones which both leftie “no cuts” activists and councillors who have been working for months to minimise the impact of cuts can see the advantages of.

Rewarding failure: more government handouts for Atos

2010-11-26T15:14:00.005Z

On 23rd November 2010, the Harrington Report into Work Capability Assessment was published. It found 'numerous examples' of 'particularly poor treatment' of claimants by Atos Origin, the private contractor hired by the government to carry out the assessments.

Poor treatment included an impersonal and mechanistic system, reports which are not an accurate reflection of the assessment, lack of training and knowledge of assessors, use of closed questions which did not identify fluctuating medical conditions, and unacceptable behaviour by Atos staff.

For example:

"Evidence presented at a user seminar came from a woman who had expressed suicidal tendencies. At her Atos assessment, she was kept waiting for two hours before being seen. Then during the assessment she was rudely treated by the Atos HCP who at one point told her to “stop crying and hurry up because I need to go and pick up my kids from school.”"

“The interview was very intimidating, and I was reduced to tears of frustration by the end. When I was asked the questions, I was stopped by the assessor from being able to explain and add essential supplementary information. The assessor frequently just held his hand up to stop me from talking and then he moved directly on to the next question.”,

“At the end of my assessment the doctor felt the need to inform me “ME/CFS doesn’t exist in any physical form as there’s no definitive test for it”. When the doctor saw my surprise he soon followed this comment with “there’s a big world out there you know, you should go out and see some of it””

“I’ve sat in on numerous assessments and just found them a joke. Seriously, no eye contact, face buried in the laptop, and… the one that got me was, he (the assessor) said that the claimant had good eye contact, but the doctor never looked at him once. Not once. His face was buried in the laptop.”

“Whatever the content, and outcome, of the interview, it can be conducted in a way which is human and respectful, and leaves the interviewee feeling that they have been treated as a fellow human being. I did not.”

Two days later, on the 25th November, Atos Origin was named as a "preferred supplier" in seven UK regions for delivery of employment support services through the new multi billion pound Work Programme.

Because, after all, who better to get billions of pounds from the government to give personalised support to help people into work than a company which - according to evidence in an official government report - offers impersonal and rushed assessments, inaccurate reports, and which humiliates and bullies sick and disabled people?

How Labour built the "Big Society"

2010-11-26T12:32:00.004Z

Prime Minister's Questions, July 2010, offered us a clue in the ongoing quest to try to work out what the "Big Society" is all about:

Angie Bray (Ealing Central and Acton) (Con): In south Acton, the Acton Community Forum is piloting an extremely good scheme called "Generations Together", which is all about encouraging each generation to pass on its own skill sets to each other; basically, it is about getting the community to help itself. Does the Prime Minister agree that this is an excellent example of what the big society is all about?

The Prime Minister: I agree. I have to say to Labour Members, who sort of sigh every time an hon. Member actually mentions a worthwhile charity, voluntary body or project that is doing something in their communities, that we are going to change the way we do politics in this country. Instead of endlessly talking about the money that goes in, let us talk about the outcomes that come out. I think that that is a better way of doing things.

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So "Generations Together" is an excellent example of what the big society is all about. We know this because the Prime Minister said so. Who came up with this wonderful idea?

The Department of Children, Schools and Families. In 2009. As part of the Every Child Matters programme.

"The Generations Together programme is seeking bids from all English LAs with social services / children's service responsibilities to submit expressions of interest, in partnership with third-sector organisations, for funding to develop demonstrator sites of intergenerational practice.

We want LAs to consider how they can utilise the talents of our younger and older people, whether it be for their own benefit or the benefit of the whole community. It is a £5.5m programme which will run during 2009-10 and 2010-11. The closing date for applications is 10 June 2009."

This "excellent example" of the Big Society was an initiative of the Labour government, made possible because central government allocated £5.5 million to fund it.

So when David Cameron says, "let us talk about the outcomes that come out", let's remember that these Big Society outcomes only came out because Labour put the money in. And if you cut funding for the education department so they can't set up these kinds of programmes, and cut the budgets of local authorities so they can't support them, then you end up undermining the Big Society and reducing opportunities for people from different generations to share their knowledge and experience. The outcomes stop coming out.

Why won't New Labour claim credit for the Golden Age of civil society?

2010-11-23T12:13:00.002Z

Patrick Diamond:

"Late 19th century liberals and social democrats gave considerable thought to how the public realm ought to be strengthened. They envisaged a sweep of civic institutions from guilds and friendly societies to mutuals and trade unions that would generate public value, and offer protection from the turmoil of rapid industrial change.

These bodies were not positioned against the state. Over the course of the early 20th century, they were seen as increasingly complimentary to the expansion of government activity. But this insight was steadily emasculated in the second half of the 20th century, with the growth of the post-war welfare state and the enlargement of the public sector at the expense of community organisations."

NCVO "The State and Voluntary Sector"

Between 1997 and 2006, income for charities increased from £17.5 bn to £33.2 bn. 634,000 people work as paid employees for the voluntary sector.

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New Labour helped to double the income which charities received. Income for the voluntary sector increased faster than increases in public spending throughout Labour's time in power. Over 600,000 people now work for charities, and hundreds of thousands more volunteer.

This should be a source of massive pride and something to build on and learn from for the future. But instead, even one of the key architects of the policy - someone who was an adviser in Downing Street while this happened - claims that the public sector grew at the expense of community organisations.

For all the talk of the friendly societies, guilds and mutuals, and all the rest which existed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the real Golden Age of civil society was between 2000 and 2010, when it grew at a scale without any precedent in the whole of British history. There were a far wider range of civic institutions, generating more public value, protecting and supporting people, involving more people and with far greater resources in 2009 than at any time between 1850 and 1940.

Instead of lectures about how social democracy needs to go back to the days before the NHS, the architects of this Golden Age should be highlighting the way that under the cover of the "Big Society", the Tory cuts to the welfare state and public sector are threatening thousands of civil society organisations.

Against the bailout

2010-11-19T12:15:00.002Z

So after claiming there is no alternative to slashing public spending, our government plans to contribute £7 billion towards the bailout of the Irish government/banks.

Since May, we've heard the Tories say that we have to slash public services, make hundreds of thousands of people lose their jobs, and cut benefits for everyone from ex-servicemen to pensioners and carers. They wouldn't even loan money to British businesses to invest in new exports.

But as soon as a corrupt, incompetent right wing government and their partners in crime in the banks need our cash, Cameron and Osborne manage to find £7 billion for them.

I understand the economic case for the bailout, and feel every sympathy for the people in Ireland who didn't gain from the boom and now get to suffer the bust. But if the UK is broke, as the Tories claim, then we can't afford to be part of this bailout. And if the UK can find £7 billion for this, then they've got enough money to stop the most devastating cuts over here.

There might be circumstances in which Labour should support a bailout - things might be different if elections were called and a new government formed (possibly led by the Irish Labour Party) with a mandate to clean up the mess, or if an extra £7 billion was raised from extra bank levies or taxes on bonuses.

But this bailout, given to the exact same people who got Ireland into such a dreadful mess, at the same time as our government makes the same savage cuts which caused catastrophe in Ireland - definitely not.

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I see that Very Serious Commentator David Aaronovitch, writing in the Times, advises Labour to avoid the temptation to become a "Tea Party of the Left", to support the government in areas such as mutualism, electoral reform and student fees, while opposing them on the immigration cap.

Similarly, I'm sure that the "centrist" line on the crisis in Ireland is that Labour must support the bailout, while at the same time supporting cuts in welfare spending and public services, because otherwise we will lose "credibility". I think this advice is more or less exactly wrong - only someone as out of touch as a newspaper columnist could believe that it is a sensible political strategy to support the government when it does irrelevant or unpopular things, and oppose it only when it does popular things.

Politically, the bailout is a golden opportunity to take away one of the most potent lines of attack which the Tories have against us. One thing which Labour should learn from the Tea Party is that opposing bank bailouts is fantastically good politics. In the future when the Tories claim they are forced to cut services and demand what our alternative would be, we could start by pointing out that unlike them, we wouldn't have handed over billions to bailout right-wing governments which destroyed their economy with savage cuts in public spending.

How IDS misled parliament about housing benefit cuts

2010-11-17T11:04:00.004Z

I've said for a while that Iain Duncan Smith and his team at the DWP are weak on the detail of their policies and have a preference for "policy based evidence", ignoring any data which doesn't support their view of how the world should work. I think this is a fatal weakness when it comes to the intricacies of the welfare state, where any changes which haven't been fully analysed and considered have the potential to hurt huge numbers of people.

Here's a great example.

Inside Housing have been doing some excellent investigations, and found that a key fact which IDS and his Tory and Lib Dem allies quoted to justify their housing benefit policies was inaccurate, based not on the Office of National Statistics (as they claimed), but on a property website owned by Associated Newspapers, and that the real stats demolish the claims of government ministers about the likely effect of housing benefit cuts.

IDS claimed, in parliament:

‘We now know that, according to the Office for National Statistics, the private marketplace in housing - Labour Members are completely wrong about this - fell by around 5% last year. At the same time, LHA rates, which the previous Government had set and left to us, had risen by 3%. There is thus a 7% gap with what is going on in the marketplace.’

Here's the fact s, from John Birch at Inside Housing:

"His reference to the ONS puzzled many people as they were unaware that it produced any statistics on private sector rents. And the Department for Work and Pensions has now confirmed to me that the source of the 5% figure was in fact the rental index set up by find-a-property.co.uk (now findaproperty.com), a website owned by Daily Mail publisher Associated Newspapers.

However, the problem with the figures goes way beyond the issue of what I am sure was IDS inadvertently misleading parliament about their source...

First off, rents for advertised new lettings are not a guide to rents in the market as a whole and especially to the rents of tenants who remain in the same property.

Second, findaproperty records asking rents rather than actual rents in its quarterly survey. Although its methodology adjusts for weightings by region, property type and number of bedrooms, that needs to be borne in mind because asking rents (just like asking prices in the for sale market) tend to be more volatile go up more in booms and down more in busts.

Third, findaproperty appears to cover a different part of the market to the local housing allowance. The average findaproperty rent in March 2010 was £820 a month - almost double the average amount of LHA paid.

Fourth, the comparison fails to consider what’s happened since February 2010. Between March and September 2010, findaproperty’s index rose 3.8% from £820 a month to £851 a month. In June the website’s property analyst Nigel Lewis said: ‘Rents have gone from strength to strength during the first half of 2010. The resurgence of the sales market has left tenants short of options and the result has been increasing rental prices.’

And in September he said: ‘Average rental prices are back up to where they were two years ago and I can only see them going up even more.

‘Stock levels in both the home buyer and rental markets are dwindling, and would-be buyers are still having a hard time getting mortgages. This is all putting increased pressure on the available rental stock which pretty much makes it a landlord’s market at the moment as they can effectively name their price.’

However, if it’s a landlord’s market and landlords are taking advantage of housing benefit, why did the average weekly award for LHA tenants only rise by 0.05% (from £112.85 to £113.43) between February and July 2010?

Fifth, as I blogged on Friday, the DWP’s own stats do not seem to support the view that the LHA somehow distorted the market. LHA awards only rose by a little more than non-LHA private rents in the period quoted by ministers and awards paid to private regulated tenants and housing association tenants both rose by more."

The key thing here is not that IDS is using incorrect stats to mislead Parliament (although he did, and should apologise), and it is not even that his analysis that LHA is distorting the housing market is incorrect (though it is).

It is that the real stats show that landlords have no need to drop their rents if benefits are cut, they can receive the same income by evicting LHA recipients and replacing them with other tenants. And if that is the case, then the government's housing benefit cuts will lead to mass evictions of people who rely on LHA to pay the rent.

Rather than twisting the facts to fit his argument, IDS should adjust his policies to fit the evidence. And in this case, that means avoiding a social catastrophe by dropping the plans to cut Local Housing Allowance.

OECD: spend more on higher education to increase jobs and tax revenues

2010-11-15T13:51:00.003Z

The OECD have done a report on who participates in education, how much is spent on it and how education systems operate across different countries.

One interesting finding should inform the higher education debate.

At present, the total cost per student of full time higher education is $43,208 for a male student and $32,610 for a female student (including direct costs and also foregone taxes on earnings - the figure for male students is higher because women earn on average 78% of what men earn).

However, the total public benefit from a student is $138,526 per male student, and $114,899 per female student (made up of extra income taxes from higher earnings, "social contribution" and reduced unemployment payments).

So the net present value is $95,818 per male student, and $82,289 per female student. This is higher than the OECD average of $86,404 and $52,436. Further education generates similar value of $73,267 per male and £109,394 per female. The internal rate of return
on higher education is 10.4 and 10.1, and on further education is 13.6 and 22.2.

Therefore, the argument that the state "can't afford" to fund higher education is exactly and totally wrong - this is a money maker, not a money loser and borrowing to spend on higher and further education is a fantastic deal for the taxpayer. To improve the public finances, we should support greater spending on higher and further education, not massive cuts.

Reducing asset inequality

2010-11-15T11:47:00.002Z

Phillip Blond's Res Publica think tank has a new report out, about different ways of supporting community groups to take over the management and ownership of assets which are currently owned by the state.

The report cites a number of sensible ideas which other people have come up with, such as letting unemployed people work and receive a 'Community Allowance' in addition to their benefits; supporting community groups to be able to use empty shops in deprived areas; and urging local authorities to have a strategy for asset management which gives community groups opportunities to take over the management or ownership of state assets, rather than just selling them all off to balance the books.

There isn't anything particularly new here (which is a good thing - for once Blond has drawn on existing ideas rather than coming up with his own wheezes), so by the usually abysmal standards of Blond's work, it is quite good - though very light on detail. There is, for example, a grand total of one paragraph on the risks involved in transferring assets to community groups, which concludes “there are risks but they can be minimised and managed – there is plenty of experience to draw on. The secret is all parties working together.”

For some weird reason, the press release for this report is all about how this is like selling off council houses and will reduce asset inequality. I guess this is an attempt to interest Tories in a set of technocratic leftie policies designed to make modest improvements to the delivery of public services, but the fact it is being spun in this way suggests that Blond doesn't actually understand his own pamphlet.

In particular, if transferring assets to community groups is meant to be an alternative to privatisation, why not follow the logic of this argument through. There are a wide range of public services which are currently being delivered by private companies which are dependent on money from the state. Rather than asset strip the public sector, why not start by breaking up companies like Capita and Serco and transferring their assets and contracts to local community groups?

Instead of the profits from delivering public services going to wealthy shareholders, thus further increasing asset inequality, these resources could be redirected to local community groups and their members in low income communities. If you want to reduce asset inequality, as these "Red Tories" aim to do, then it will involve taking on vested interests in the private sector, not just attacking the state.

An introduction to Iain Duncan Smith's Magic Pony Scheme

2010-11-12T12:44:00.004Z

Iain Duncan Smith published the government's new strategy on welfare policy yesterday. This has two basic strands - a Universal Credit which will simplify the benefits system and make people better off in work than on benefit; and sanctions for people who don't want to work.

The Universal Credit is based on the idea that rather than having lots of different benefits, it would be simpler just to roll them into one, thus reducing fraud and error and making it easier for people to claim. It is the welfare equivalent of a Magic Pony Scheme.

Now Iain Duncan Smith is hardly an example of a steely eyed Master of the Detail, and he is being supported by Lord Freud, who is well known for making slapdash errors about welfare policy. So let's look at the Universal Credit policy, and see whether everyone (except the Bad People who are lazy, sinful and workshy) will, in fact, end up with a Magic Pony. I've just picked out a few areas to show the challenges of implementation - administration of the credit, housing costs, council tax and childcare.

On Administration, there is going to be "an IT development of moderate scale" and close working between HMRC and DWP. The past history of these sorts of projects isn't overwhelmingly encouraging, and the potential for things to go wrong is pretty awe inspiring if people's entire benefits are going to rely on the information being correct, all the time. I suggest that this is an area which will repay careful scrutiny over the next few years.

On Housing costs, there are some basic errors of fact in this section, such as the claim that the Budget made "the lowest third of market rents affordable". The aims include simplifying the system, making sure people don't get into arrears or become homeless and rents will be "fair but not excessive".

Since the Universal Credit will be based on the current system, which achieves none of these aims, it would be nice to hear about how any of this will be achieved. It is therefore slightly disquieting to find that there is not a sentence of detail about how this will happen, and the section concedes that "there are many policy and operational issues to work through in respect of housing. The Government will work closely with Local Authorities and the housing sector as plans develop."

At the same time as the government is planning to ensure that every claim for housing support is determined by the Department of Work and Pensions, it has also decided that every single local authority should develop its own criteria for paying council tax benefit. It is hard to see how this sits with the overall aim of simplifying the benefits system.

As the paper says, "There is more work to be done on the practicalities of the new approach and the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Department for Work and Pensions will work closely together with local government and the devolved administrations to develop detailed proposals." Localising council tax benefit is a separate fiasco waiting to happen - more on this next week.

On childcare, the problem is that childcare costs vary considerably, so including childcare in Universal Credit will make it hard to calculate, but excluding childcare would mean that many parents can't afford to work. The government "would welcome views from key stakeholders and will work with them to establish how support for childcare could best be delivered as part of, or alongside, Universal Credit", maybe through vouchers, or earnings disregards, or a self-service process, or who knows what else - because they certainly don't.

How about something more basic? The white paper doesn't even set out how much people will receive in Universal Credit. It will "broadly reflect" some current benefits, offer "an appropriate amount" of support for housing, promises that if people lose out in the transition to Universal Credit then they will be compensated, but doesn't have any numbers to back up the warm words.

*

There's quite rightly been a lot of debate about the principles of the government's proposals - is their general approach right, what role should sanctions play and so on. But regardless of what you think about these principles, there must be considerable doubt that this Magic Pony scheme is actually going to deliver.

Iain Duncan Smith started work on this six years ago, and has had the full efforts of hundreds of civil servants since May, working out how to turn his ideas into reality. And they still don't know how much people will receive in Universal Credit, how housing costs will be handled, what to do for carers or to cover the cost of childcare - to take but a few examples. While extolling the virtues of simplifying benefits and centralising the administration, they are letting every local council set their own criteria for council tax benefit. And they are betting that their new computer system will be able to calculate real time changes in earnings without making mistakes.

Like everyone else, I hope that these problems can be worked out, and that we end up with Magic Ponies for all - savings billions on reduced fraud and error and spending billions more on helping people in low paid work. But let's stop talking about "welcoming the principles of benefits simplification" and the populist platitudes, and let's start addressing the woeful lack of detail about how this is actually going to work.

Tory MP: people on benefits "only" losing £7.50 per week

2010-11-10T17:18:00.005Z

Aiden Burley, Tory MP for Cannock Chase, speaking in yesterday's debate about Housing Benefit:

"Even according to Shelter's own briefing, the average loss in my constituency will be £30 a month-£7.50 a week. The total number of claimants in Cannock Chase is 10,278. Therefore, one eighth of my constituency-it is a very poor working-class constituency that used to have 52 coal mines-will have to adjust their weekly outgoings by less than a tenner."

Bridget Phillipson, Labour MP for Houghton and Sunderland South:

"Before I was elected, I managed a refuge for women and children fleeing domestic violence, and the city council supported these homeless families and got them rehoused, often in the private sector. The women would often pay a small top-up to their housing benefit, often to be near supportive family who could help with child care so that they could undertake training or return to the workplace. Such women will be doubly hit, and at the point when they are trying to get their lives back on track."

£7.50 per week probably isn't much for someone whose life experience is private school, Oxford Union, Oxford University Conservative Association, working for an MP and management consultancy. But it is a lot if you are a woman fleeing domestic violence.

It makes me feel sick to read the arrogant, flippant, smug drivel which Tory boys like Aiden Burley use to justify attacks on people who are less fortunate than them.

Rethinking dependency

2010-11-09T12:40:00.004Z

I spoke at Capita's welfare reform conference a couple of weeks ago, on the subject of "engaging the third sector in back to work programmes". The audience were a mix of people from local councils and private employment providers. Here's an excerpt:

"I’d like to offer a contribution to the conversation that we’ve been having today about the role of the third sector in Back to Work programmes, with a case study and some reflections which I hope will help you with your work.

It comes from our experience of working with small community groups which work with few resources in deprived neighbourhoods, and how we’ve managed to get them involved in supporting people to overcome barriers and get paid work. I guess in policy terms, you could characterise it as an example of where the Work Programme meets the Big Society – although our work predates either.

Our work to date has been fantastically successful – we’ve met and exceeded targets for getting people into work, won awards for partnership working and reached the people who need help most. 40% of the people who have been helped were out of work for more than three years before they got help from the local community groups in our network. And of the eight providers in our network, five had never been involved in providing employment support before – so they’ve developed their capacity to help people into work in the future.

But before I describe how we set up and developed this network, I just wanted to say a word about this notion of “dependency”. We hear government ministers talk about a “dependency culture”, and about “people sitting at home on out of work benefits”. We’ve heard this kind of language for a quarter of a century. I think these attitudes need to be chaned if the Work Programme is going to work.

I work with more than 300 community groups in our locality. The overwhelming majority of these are dependent - indeed are proud to be dependent - on the contribution of volunteers who receive out of work benefits. Their commitment and hard work helps to deliver the services and build the relations which make small community groups so effective at helping people when they need it most.

I think we need to get away from the ideas and values that treat unemployed people as “customers”, or as a kind of “social problem”. Community groups working at the grassroots think of them instead as valued volunteers, friends and neighbours. I believe that one of the great benefits of engaging the third sector in delivering back to work programmes is that it is a way of accessing the skills and talents of the people that our groups depend on and serve.

Why workfare won't work

2010-11-07T14:09:00.006Z

Some thoughts on the government's new idea that people who are long term unemployed could be placed on four week mandatory placements of thirty hours per week doing jobs like cleaning litter and gardening:

1. It is a job killer.

There are lots of people who work as street cleaners, toilet cleaners, gardeners and other unglamorous and poorly paid jobs. If these policies go ahead, they will lose their jobs. No employer in their right mind would pay £6 or £7 per hour to employ street cleaners if they could get an unemployed person to do it for free.

In my local area, residents nominated one of the council's street cleaners as employee of the year. He's been working for more than thirty years, never taken a sick day and people always see him out and about working hard. But our council's got to make £58 million in cuts over the next three years. So instead of getting paid £7.60 per hour for an honest day's work, he'll end up being made redundant - and presumably in due course get one of these "mandatory work placements" doing his old job but without pay.

2. These plans can punish or help - they can't do both.

Government ministers on the telly today said that these plans were intended to help people get jobs, not to punish them. But they are likely to make it harder for people to get jobs, not easier.

If you are an employer, having to choose between hundreds of employees, and you see an applicant's CV which states that he or she has completed a "mandatory work placement", then you know the following things:

- They haven't worked for a long time.
- They were workshy and so had to be forced to do menial jobs with the threat of losing their benefits.

Armed with this information, 99% of employers would throw their CVs in the bin and move on to the next one.

Now, you could have work placements which help people get the skills and experience to make it more likely that they can get a job. But, um, these already exist.

3. These placements don't give people proper experience of work.

Imagine if you turned up for work, and your boss bullied you every day. Or sacked you for being one minute late. Or you thought that something that you were being asked to do was unsafe, or you felt ill. But you couldn't do anything, because if you complained, or objected, then you could lose your job and have to live on nothing for three months. And even if you do a really good job, you don't get paid.

As currently presented, these placements aren't like giving people an experience of what work is like. They are like what work would be like in a world without any protections or rights for working people.

4. Or is it just a gimmick?

This government has already got form for putting forward "symbolic" policies, ones which don't actually achieve much, but which attract lots of media attention and give the impression that they are doing something popular. Think of the constant announcements cracking down on the same few benefit fraudsters (none of whom ever seem to be affected by successive government crackdowns), or the cap on housing benefit, which is just 3% of their cuts to housing benefit.

It would cost billions of pounds to put everyone who is long term unemployed through a four week placement - money which we know that the DWP doesn't have. So maybe the aim is to get a few pictures for the media of long term unemployed people looking like criminals on community service picking up litter - to send a message about the government's approach and use nudge techniques to modify the behaviour of unemployed people or some such.

If this is just a stunt, then the good news is that it won't do much harm - and it is telling that the government hasn't even talked to any of the councils or charities which it says are going to create these placements. But nor will it do anything substantive to reduce unemployment. When the government publishes their plans, we'll be able to see how much money they have allocated for it, and whether it is any more than a piece of spin.

*

I can see the case, from the government's point of view, for giving employment advisers the power to require people who have no interest in looking for work to do mandatory placements, as a punishment to catch the people working cash in hand and for those who have a bad attitude when they turn up to the Jobcentre.

If the government wants to do this, then they should drop the rhetoric about how this is going to help people - because it's not meant to do that and it won't, and the fantasy that charities will be involved in providing these placements - because charities won't get involved in punishing people because it is against their charitable objects. They should be honest that it will destroy jobs, and honestly argue their case that this is a price worth paying to punish people who are long term unemployed. If they are inspired by the USA, where millions of people have lost all benefits because they've been out of work for 99 weeks, then they should make the case for why they think we should learn from the Repulican Party. Similarly, if this is a symbolic policy which will affect a few hundred people, then be honest about that.

Or they could change this programme so that it actually helps reduce unemployment. They could require that these placements don't duplicate or replace existing jobs, they could incentivise charities to create innovative and rewarding placements which develop people's skills and encourage them to look for work. They could give people experience of real work - with the same protections and rights as every other worker, and experience of earning a proper wage rather than handouts. And they could extend the placements from four weeks to a longer period of time. Like the Future Jobs Fund. Which they scrapped.

If these mandatory placements are about playing politics, a "wedge issue" to get votes from people who don't like scroungers and want to see them punished, then the victims will be low paid manual workers, who will lose their jobs, and people who are unemployed and want to work, who will live with the fear of being forced into placements which will make it even harder for them to work. If they are genuinely intended to help people get jobs, then they haven't been thought through and need big changes.

Why the Democrats lost on Tuesday

2010-11-05T14:51:00.002Z

This analysis of why the Democrats lost so heavily on Tuesday, by Drew Westen, is the best piece of commentary on the recent American elections. It was actually written a year ago, but the points and predictions that he made were more than validated. Two excerpts :

[on "winning the centre ground"]

"Obama, like so many Democrats in Congress, has fallen prey to the conventional Democratic strategic wisdom: that the way to win the center is to tack to the center.

But it doesn't work that way.

You want to win the center? Emanate strength. Emanate conviction. Lead like you know where you're going (and hopefully know what you're talking about).

People in the center will follow if you speak to their values, address their ambivalence (because by definition, on a wide range of issues, they're torn between the right and left), and act on what you believe. FDR did it. LBJ did it. Reagan did it. Even George W. Bush did it, although I wish he hadn't.

But you have to believe something.

I don't honestly know what this president believes. But I believe if he doesn't figure it out soon, start enunciating it, and start fighting for it, he's not only going to give American families hungry for security a series of half-loaves where they could have had full ones, but he's going to set back the Democratic Party and the progressive movement by decades, because the average American is coming to believe that what they're seeing right now is "liberalism," and they don't like what they see. I don't, either.

What's they're seeing is weakness, waffling, and wandering through the wilderness without an ideological compass. That's a recipe for going nowhere fast -- but getting there by November."

[on denying illegal immigrants healthcare]

"Good policy? No. Not only is it inhumane -- can you imagine being really sick or in terrible pain but being too afraid even to go to a clinic because you might be deported? -- but it's a public health hazard for sick people not to get care and spread their illnesses, a drain on American taxpayers as illegal immigrants who finally have no choice but to find their way, when they're incredibly ill, to emergency rooms or public clinics, and a despicable policy toward their children, many of whom are American citizens, but who in either case shouldn't have to be sick, in pain, and without preventive care as their bodies and minds are developing, no matter where their parents come from.

Is it good politics? No. During the election I tested messages on just this issue, and a strong progressive message beat the most convincing anti-immigrant message we could throw at it by 10 points. Two weeks ago, I tested messages on just this issue as it applied to health care, and that margin had doubled.

If you just talk sensibly with Americans, they are sensible people. But ask them one-dimensional polling questions like, "Do you think illegal immigrants should get health care?" and you'll entirely miss the art of the possible."

Housing Benefit: the facts

2010-10-28T09:57:00.002Z

1. The vast majority of housing benefit claimants are either pensioners, disabled people, those caring for a relative or hardworking people on low incomes, and only 1 in 8 people who receive housing benefit is unemployed.

2. The cap on housing benefits - which the discussion in the media has focused on - saves £65 million. This is less than 3% of the total which is being cut from housing benefits.

3. The government plans to save £100 million by cutting housing benefits payments by 10% for people who are unemployed for more than one year.

4. The amount paid in housing benefits will be reduced in every area of the country, not just in London. You can see the reductions in your local area here.

5. The government has acknowledged that there will be negative consequences as a result of these changes - for example on homelessness, overcrowding, and child poverty - no proposals have been put forward for mitigating these effects.

6. A survey of landlords who currently rent properties to housing benefit tenants in London showed that very few would be prepared to lower their rents when changes to Local Housing Allowance (LHA) come into effect next year. Using the results from the survey, London Councils can estimate that more than 82,000 households – well over a quarter of a million people - could be priced out of their homes and the communities where they live and work.

7. The government is cutting housing-related support for people at risk of homelessness, even though a national evaluation has estimated that the £1.6bn spent annually on housing-related support through the Supporting People programme generates savings of £3.41bn to the public purse – by intervening earlier to prevent more severe problems arising, helping people live more independently and avoiding more costly acute services.

8. Single homeless people use around four times more acute hospital services than the general population, costing at least £85 million in total per year, according to Department of Health. That figure is likely to rise sharply if support is withdrawn to prevent homelessness. Research also shows that having stable accommodation reduces the risk of re-offending by a fifth.

9. Over time, the government is planning to reduce the value of Local Housing Allowance by raising it more slowly than inflation. This will reduce the amount of affordable housing every year.

10. In June, the government scrapped regulations which would have given tenants greater protection against being exploited by bad landlords.

11. A government impact assessment on the changes has concluded 936,960 of the 939,220 local housing allowance claimants will lose out. The average loss will be £12 per week.

*

Government ministers will only talk about the benefits cap, hence David Cameron making the claim that "If you are prepared to pay £20,000 in housing benefit, there is no reason why anyone should be left without a home." But this is just one small element of a set of cuts which will take money away from pensioners, carers and people in low paid jobs, as well as people who are out of work.

Everyone who has looked in detail at the cumulative effects of these cuts - from the Citizens Advice Bureaux to charities which work with homeless people, to Lib Dem housing experts to the Mayor of London - have concluded that they will be a disaster which will increase homelessness.

How welfare cuts hammer low paid workers

2010-10-27T08:36:00.001Z

In 2008, David Cameron declared that the abolition of the 10p tax rate for low paid workers was "punishing the low paid". Vince Cable called for "fully costed proposals on how to make those on low incomes better off" and Nick Clegg said that "this was a matter of principles - remember them?"

They were right to do so. So how have they been putting these fine words into action since they took power in May?

The abolition of the 10p tax rate left some low paid workers worse off by up to £4.46 per week. Households with two adults, each earning less than £18,000 per year, were, therefore, hit by up to £8.92 per week - a substantial sum for people in low paid work at a time when the cost of living was rising, as Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg pointed out.

So let's use that as an uncontentious baseline measure for measuring the impact of policies on low income workers. Everyone now agrees that the abolition of the 10p tax rate was a shameful attack on the working poor. Instead of the overheated political rhetoric about social cleansing, or competing graphs from government departments and research institutes, let's just compare any recent policies which the government has announced, and compare them in magnitude to the impact of abolishing the 10p tax rate.

In the Comprehensive Spending Review, George Osborne announced that the percentage of childcare costs covered by tax credits would be reduced from 80% to 70%. A technical sounding change, which a casual listener might presume would have minimal impact.

This will cost a low paid worker with two children up to £30 per week, or rather more than three times as much as the maximum impact of the abolition of the 10p tax rate.

Osborne also announced that after one year, people would lose their entitlement to contributions- based Employment and Support Allowance. Probably fewer than 1 in 100 people know what contributions-based Employment and Support Allowance is. How bad could that be?

It means that a family where one adult is in low paid work and the other is currently receiving Employment and Support Allowance could lose up to £91.40 per week, or rather more than ten times as much as the maximum impact of the abolition of the 10p tax rate. Even if they are then able to claim Jobseekers' Allowance instead, they will lose more than £30 per week.

What of housing benefit? Inside Housing magazine calculates that 936,960 of the 939,220 local housing allowance claimants will lose out by an average of £12 per week - rising to £22 per week in London. The average loss from technical sounding things like "setting rents based on the 30^th percentile of private sector rents rather than the median" is more than one and a half times the maximum amount which the abolition of the 10p tax rate cost any family. That's the average - some low paid workers will lose far more.

*

That's just the initial impact (it is possible to calculate the effect of other cuts using the same measure). It doesn't consider what happens to the low paid lone parent who has to try to find an extra £30 per week to pay for childcare, and is forced to quit her job as a result. It doesn't consider the health impacts where one person is trying to hold down a low paid full time job and care for their sick partner, when they suddenly have to manage with £90 per week less. Or someone who has to find £12 a week or more in extra rent every week out of the wages of their minimum wage job, and who ends up getting into debt and getting evicted.

But even if you just consider those policies in cash terms, without making any further assumptions, then it shows that the government has already, within its first six months in office, announced three separate policies, each of which hit low income workers far harder than the abolition of the 10p tax rate.

How to win a landslide

2010-10-22T14:15:00.003Z

Lots to think about after yesterday's elections, but one absolutely brilliant piece of news was Mike Rowley getting elected to Oxford City Council. Mike is one of the nicest and most hard-working people that anyone could ever has as a councillor, and he won with an absolute landslide. In May 2010, Labour got 43%, which at the time was seen as a fantastic result. Yesterday, Labour got an amazing 59%.

The ward where he was standing, Barton and Sandhills, was won by the Liberal Democrats in 2004, and held by them in 2006 and 2008 (by just 4 votes!) In the general election in 2010, Labour won it back after a strong campaign and higher turnout amongst lower income supporters.

This by-election was caused by the resignation of the Lib Dem councillor, Patrick Murray, who has moved to another area to get a job. Patrick was, by some distance, the most effective Lib Dem councillor in Oxford in recent years. He was an extremely effective campaigner, and as a councillor who put aside party politics in the council chamber to work closely with Labour on trying to help solve the city's housing crisis. He'll be a tough act to follow, and people in Barton and Sandhills have been lucky in recent years that the fierce political competition in the city of Oxford has given them some great local champions.

In some ways, this by-election marks the changing of a political cycle. Between 2004 and 2008, the Lib Dems did well with effective local campaigns which harnessed the opposition to the Labour government. In 2010 and for the foreseeable future, political fortunes have changed and Labour is on the up.

But there's another way of looking at it. Over the past decade, people in Barton and Sandhills have been remarkably consistent in their views. The majority wanted decent, principled, hard-working left-wingers as their local representatives. Back in 2002, they voted overwhelmingly for Labour's Alex Hollingsworth. Then, for a few years, it was the Lib Dems who were best able to demonstrate that they were in touch with the views and values of the majority.

Over the past few years since the Lib Dems first won in Barton and Sandhills, Labour has listened, learned, worked hard to win back people's trust. And the result is that yesterday we won in a landslide.

How Labour can win in the South

2010-10-14T11:09:00.004Z

A new pamphlet was released this week about why Labour lost the support of people in Southern England, and what it needs to do to win them back. It is written by a former MP, Giles Radice, and the former head of policy planning under Gordon Brown, Patrick Diamond.

This pamphlet is the follow up to research that was done after the 1992 election, which argued that Labour needed to modernise and stand up for individual freedom, against public and private vested interests, to show that the party could be on the side of those who wanted to get on, making responsible tax and spending commitments and promising to manage capitalism more efficiently than the Conservatives.

The 2010 remix has pages and pages about how immigration and welfare reform lost Labour support, the inevitable opinion polls designed to prove that the public agree with the authors, and concludes with eight "key messages". Some of these are statements of the obvious such as "Labour can only create a better society by winning and retaining power", or "Labour should try and recruit new people to stand as councillors". Some are rather more dubious, but you can kind of see what they are getting at. I sort of agree that "the 2010 leadership election showed the power and potential of community organising to reform and revitalise Labour", it is worth remembering that the candidate who devoted most resources to community organising actually lost, despite having the backing of the media, most MPs and the most money.

But the majority of "key messages" from the pamphlet are where the authors pretend that their own interests and opinions are representative of voters in Southern England. So we get recommendations that Labour must back the referendum on the Alternative Vote whole heartedly (although most voters in the South oppose it), and face up to issues that concern voters such as "the role of the state after the financial crisis" - a subject which, in fact, interests very few voters in Southern England, but which fascinates policy wonks who write pamphlets.

Perhaps the most glaring weakness of the "Southern Discomfort" pamphlet (although there are many) is that it doesn't actually look at where Labour did well in Southern England, and what we could perhaps learn from these successful campaigns.

Labour holds ten seats in the South East, Eastern and South West regions. In two of these seats, Labour's share of the vote increased - Oxford East where the Labour vote increased by 6.5%, and Luton North where it increased by 0.7%.

So let's compare Diamond and Radice's analysis of how Labour should win the support of people in Southern England with how Labour actually did so.

[It could, of course, be argued that these seats are not representative of Southern England. While there is some truth in that, it is worth noting that Labour did particularly well in Oxford East amongst the groups of voters who Diamond and Radice think that we need to focus on. Support for Labour amongst C1C2 voters was around 50%, and amongst DE voters over 60%. Winning support amongst these voters was essential in a constituency with 15,000 students at the height of "Cleggmania"].

Diamond and Radice argue that Labour needs to debate openly contentious issues such as immigration and welfare reform. In Oxford East, neither of these issues featured on a single leaflet, and I can't imagine that Kelvin Hopkins in Luton - a left-wing critic of the government's policies on both issues - did so either. Ditto for the role of the state after the financial crisis. Just because people raise particular issues in a focus group or agree with a statement in an opinion poll doesn't mean that it is sensible to campaign on these issues.

Here, instead, are some key lessons about how to win in the South and increase support for Labour, from the people who actually managed it:

1. Good candidates - both Andrew Smith and Kelvin Hopkins were personally popular, decent, principled MPs, prepared to vote against their party when they thought it was wrong on issues from renewal of Trident to the Gurkhas. While some MPs of all parties abused the expenses system to enrich themselves, Andrew has lived on Blackbird Leys council estate for more than thirty years, and Kelvin commutes from Luton to London daily, just like many of his constituents.

2. Hard work. Astonishingly, the Diamond/Radice pamphlet doesn't devote a single sentence to local campaigning or the importance of talking to voters in winning elections. Their analysis is entirely from the perspective of national policy-making. One key thing about active, local campaigning is that it reduces the influence of the media. Rather than trying to "triangulate" on pet topics of the right-wing press like immigration and welfare reform, personal contact with voters allows Labour to find out which issues really matter to people, and to take up and help sort out problems. If people find out about what Labour is up to in their area from their local MP or a Labour volunteer, they are going to be much more supportive than if they read the Daily Mail's view about what Labour's priorities are.

3. Oppose savage cuts. In Oxford, Labour attacked the Lib Dems for their support for savage cuts, and for their leader's idea of breaking up the NHS. This was fantastically successful in persuading people to vote Labour. It is not fashionable to say this, but I believe that in 2010, Labour would have won more support if we had been tougher in our opposition to savage cuts, rather than listening to wealthy journalists whining about how we needed to show "credibility" by pledging to cut services.

4. Improve and extend public services. Extremely few people are interested in discussing "the role of the state after the financial crisis". But extending recycling schemes so that people can recycle plastic, setting up playschemes for children, letting children swim for free and older people use public transport for free - all examples of concrete ideas for reform of public services which people put forwards, and which Labour won support by delivering. Even in safe Tory seats like Salisbury, people are receptive to policies like the Living Wage or universal childcare. (It's well worth reading the excellent article by our candidate in Salisbury).

5. Understand and call for action where the market is failing to deliver. On housing, childcare and social care for the elderly, Labour's failure to act meant that there was too little provision, and that which was available was often poor quality and too expensive. Local campaigners knew that parasites like bad landlords were wrecking communities in southern England, but government ministers blithely dismissed concerns and were more worried about the mythical dangers of "over-regulation".

In terms of political strategy, Labour should always be particularly focused on where the market is failing to deliver, because the instincts of the Tories and Liberal Democrats will always be to go against public opinion and refuse, on principle, to act to correct market failure. This allows for popular campaigns where the overwhelming majority back, say, tough regulations on slum landlords or paying a living wage to cleaners, but the right wing parties refuse to act.

*

This is only the starting point for a discussion about Labour's strategy over the next five years. Just because opposition to savage cuts, good candidates, improving and expanding public services and hard work were the keys to Labour's success in southern England in 2010 doesn't mean that they are a panacea for the next election.

For example, the advantage of having excellent, independent-minded local candidates is magnified when they have a team of staff and communications paid for by the taxpayer. In most Southern seats, our candidates won't have that advantage next time. On the other side of Luton, local candidate Gavin Shuker, who grew up in the town, managed to pull off one of the biggest shocks of the election - our new candidates should try to learn from his experience.

We need to develop new ways to get more activists involved in local campaigning, whether through community organising or other means, and build on Project Game Plan (silly name, great idea) to get more resources into local organising.

On policy, we need to gather new ideas about where the market is failing, and which public services need to be expanded or improved.

And there will be issues and challenges which are crucial in other parts of the South which didn't apply in Oxford or Luton.

But I really think we will learn a lot more from the campaigns and the approach of people like Andrew Smith and Kelvin Hopkins than from pamphlets like "Southern Discomfort". We need to recognise that Labour fought the 2010 election with official policies in favour of a points based immigration system, videos at airports of immigrants being deported, locking up immigrant children and trying to starve those without children to force them to leave the country, unemployment benefits which had been halved since the 1980s, medical assessments by private companies to force sick people off incapacity benefits, and £44 billion in spending cuts including bigger cuts in the NHS than the Tories were planning. Rather than helping to win us public support by addressing their concerns, our best results were found where our candidates didn't mention these absolutely abhorrent and shameful policies and instead gave people reasons to be proud to support Labour.

I don't know quite what more than this Diamond and Radice were thinking Labour could propose in terms of addressing immigration, welfare reform or a "credible" approach to reducing the deficit, as they don't deign to put forward any specific proposals. But we've already tried the approach set out in "Southern Discomfort", and that's why we only hold 10 seats in Southern England outside of London.

Excellent advice for Labour's economic team

2010-10-14T09:48:00.004Z

This is absolutely brilliant:

"1. It is a common criticism levelled at politicians of the modern stripe that they have "never had to make a payroll" - ie, that they have no real understanding of how the economy works, because they have never been in a situation of managing a business through tough times.

2. This is also true of Alan Johnson MP, as it is of the Chancellor, George Osborne. However, unlike George Osborne, Alan Johnson has experienced something that's quite like managing a business which needs to make its payroll in a recession, which is called "being poor".

3. When Alan Johnson found himself married with two children at the age of 18, with an income inadequate to his expenses, he did not put his family on an "austerity" programme. Instead, he got a job in the post office, attracted to it by the possibility of well-paid overtime.

4. In general, as anyone who has actually found their household in a situation of having too much debt knows, it's really not usually all that possible to get yourself out of a hole by reducing your expenditure. In general, when you've got an actually serious debt problem, the interest bill is already larger than your discretionary expenses, and so "economising", while it will slow down the rate at which the problem gets worse, will not make it get better.

5. Households which successfully get out of debt, in general, do it by increasing their household income - either by having a non-working partner take on a job, or by doing overtime, or by changing career to something better paid. That's what Alan Johnson did, when he was on his uppers.

Unlike the rather sickening lectures Margaret Thatcher used to give about housewives and their clever domestic scrimping and saving, this is an analogy between the finances of a single household and those of a country which actually works. When you have a debt/GDP ratio which is too high, this is nearly always because the GDP is too low and needs to be increased, not because the debt has got too high and needs to be decreased. If you have a debt/GDP problem that can't be made better by investment and growth, then it's likely that you have a debt/GDP problem that can't be made better at all - ie, you need to default, a situation which the UK is not even nearly in.

A few months in, I'd start showing my man a few straightforward back of the envelope calculations, and maybe even chucking a few debt dynamics finger exercises into his speeches, because I have a canny idea that the man in number 11 is not necessarily in command of his numbers and might be shown up if put in a position of having to do sums in his head (I am guessing that former postmen who have worked with the Byzantine schedule of overtime rates might be quite good at this, plus I seem to remember that Johnson as Work & Pensions Minister did a pretty good number on David Willetts over "the pension crisis", which was a similar combat of neoliberal platitudes versus arithmetic). But the key priority would be to a) get the central intuition lodged into his backbone, and b) set up a sensible and comprehensible counter-narrative to all this dreadful New Austerian nonsense about "money in the kitty" and so on."

How student fees hit the middle class hardest

2010-10-12T10:19:00.003Z

A key part of the argument for raising student fees is that, as one Tory activist put it, "our universities need extra funding and they are not going to get it from the taxpayer".

This argument relies on a very strange definition of "taxpayer". The Browne report recommends that people earning more than £21,000 should pay a lot more to help fund universities. By definition, these people are all taxpayers. So, in fact, the universities are going to get extra funding from the taxpayer.

So why do supporters of higher fees argue that universities "aren't going to get extra funding from the taxpayer", when the opposite is true? The most common explanation given, over the past ten years that I've heard these arguments, is that middle class people will not support rises in general taxation to pay for higher education.

This leads to a very strange situation. In order to avoid making middle class people annoyed at having to pay extra taxes, the government is proposing to ensure that the cost of funding this particular public service falls disproportionately on middle class families, through a complicated and bureaucratic system of fees and loans.

We see this in other areas, too. In order to prevent council tax from rising, many councils have a policy instof increasing the fees which they charge for services like childcare, parking or care for the elderly. Again, this hits hardest people who earn or who have savings just above the threshold to qualify for help.

Politicians who promise to keep taxes down pretend that they are doing so to support middle class people. But what they give with one hand in lower taxes, they take back several times over with fees, charges and cuts . And you end up with the absurd situation where people who go to university and go on to earn £100,000 end up paying less then those who go to university and end up earning less than half that, or where families earning £80,000 get more in benefits than those earning £50,000.

AJ was the right choice for Shadow Chancellor

2010-10-08T13:16:00.003Z

From the archives, 2nd September 2010:

"When he is elected leader, Ed Miliband will come under the most terrific pressure from the opposition, media and Blairites over his supposedly radical and left-wing policies. If David were elected leader, the main pressure which he would face would be to win over and enthuse the people who supported his brother or Ed Balls. To unite the Labour Party, Ed Miliband would need to appeal to the Right, David to the Left. "

8th October 2010: Leftie supporters of Ed Miliband get v v cross when he appoints Alan Johnson as Shadow Chancellor.

From the Shadow Cabinet appointments, it looks like Labour is planning strong opposition to government policies on the NHS, defence and police cuts - areas where they have put combative ministers who vocally disagree with what the government is planning. They seem more likely to try to find compromises on justice & prisons and welfare reform.

I understand why lefties wanted Ed Balls as Shadow Chancellor and his economic policy adopted 100% . But Balls doesn't come across particularly well to the public, and opponents of his policy within the Labour Party would have briefed journalists that they thought his policies were not credible. The resulting civil war would only have helped the Tories.

We know the problems when economic policy is seen as being under the sole control of the Chancellor - to win the economic argument and defeat the Tory cuts, we need an economic policy which the whole Cabinet - including Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper - are involved in developing and can sign up to. Johnson can be a persuasive public advocate for Labour's alternative and the comparisons between his life experience and George Osborne's help reinforce the message.

And in developing their alternative to George Osborne's savage cuts, Labour should pay close attention to this brilliant article from our new Chief Secretary to the Treasury, the fantastic Angela Eagle:

"The so-called deficit ‘emergency' was ironically caused not by profligate government spending but by a failure of the market-based international banking system and the triumph of unbridled greed amongst the super rich. David Cameron's immediate excuse to act was the deficit generated by the previous Labour government to stabilise our banks and successfully mitigate the social effects of the global recession which followed the credit crunch. He did so by launching an assault on the post-war state settlement more extreme than anything Mrs Thatcher's most swivel-eyed fanatics could have fantasised about. The theatrically named ‘emergency budget' began this process and the October spending review will continue it.

That there was no electoral mandate to introduce the largest public expenditure cuts in British peacetime history is clear. Those who voted Liberal Democrat had a right to assume that their chosen party would stick with the economic policy clearly set out in their manifesto at the election. Like Labour's, this emphasised the danger of cutting the deficit too far or too fast while economic recovery was still fragile. In fact it was this economic position which achieved majority endorsement once the votes were counted."

Our priority should be universal free childcare, not child benefit

2010-10-07T12:47:00.003Z

One reason why lefties are concerned about George Osborne's plans to restrict child benefit is that they think it will be the beginning of the end of universal benefits, and that once the principle has been conceded, it will lead to the dismantling of the NHS, state pension etc etc.

But if we want to build support for universal benefits, we shouldn't just react to the Tories and oppose every cut that they make. 4 in 5 Labour voters agree with the principle of taking child benefits from the richest families. Lining up on the other side to them won't help save the universal welfare state.

Instead, we need to understand the priorities of middle and lower income people in Britain, and how a welfare state built on the principles of universality can best help them. In some cases, that will mean accepting that some services or benefits which were universal should be removed or means-tested. But in other cases it will mean setting up new universal services or benefits.

Families have born the brunt of the Tory cuts - new schools & playgrounds scrapped, playschemes cut, Child Trust Fund scrapped, free school meals extension scrapped, and now Child Benefit cut.

So how could a universal welfare state best support families?

Lesley Smith:

"A week of slightly synthetic outrage has been fun. And watching the Tories slug it out even more so. But if we want to even things up for the children of single parents, child benefit isn’t the most effective spanner in the box. If we wanted to cease punishing single parents and their children and get them out to work we’d make child care costs properly tax deductible. And not through a tax credit system seemingly devised with the sole purpose of preventing people qualifying or deterring them from finding out."

Nick Pearce:

"The other big policy bet that we need to make is to prioritise the extension of free and affordable childcare. Where such childcare exists - chiefly in the Nordic countries - women have employment rates that are commensurate with those of men. True, employment in these countries can be quite gender segregated, but if more women work, inequality overall falls and the risk of children growing up in poverty is substantially mitigated."

Childcare subsidies help increase productivity and economic activity (parents have to take fewer days off / leave work early when childcare arrangements fall through). They also increase employment opportunities - cost of childcare is a major barrier for parents in getting a job. The cost of childcare is also a huge proportion of income for many middle and lower income families.

In addition, the current system is broken. Many families can't afford the cost of childcare, many childcare providers (especially in the voluntary sector) are at risk of collapsing, and there is low takeup of existing subsidies.

Thirdly, it is a way of modernising the welfare state. The Beveridge settlement was based on women staying at home and looking after children. A 21st century welfare state can't be based on the prejudices of last century liberals.

So the existing means-tested system doesn't work, introducing a universal system would save middle income families thousands and help unemployed people get jobs, and it is a reform which would recognise the realities of the modern world. Perfect conditions for the introduction of a universal system, just as the NHS addressed the failings of the means-tested healthcare system back in 1948.

If we made childcare free or capped the costs so that it was genuinely affordable, it would make a massive difference to most families. It would be a powerful alternative to the Coalition's attempts to make families bear the vast bulk of the costs of the economic crisis. It would help people into work and boost our economy.

But as the greatest champion of universalism said, "the language of priorities is the religion of socialism". If we're going to put forward substantial and popular extensions to the welfare state, then we have to accept that we won't be able to spend £1 billion on benefits for the richest 15% of families.

Labour should improve the child benefit cuts, not oppose them

2010-10-06T12:22:00.004Z

This time next week, Ed Miliband will make his debut as Leader of the Opposition at Prime Minister's Questions.

I wonder if the child benefit fiasco presents an opportunity.

Over the next week, Labour's team could do a quick piece of policy work refining the government's proposals to protect the people who are hit hardest by Osborne's proposals and remove the anomalies where some families on £80,000 will get the benefits and others on £45,000 won't.

Then at PMQs, Ed could ask Cameron whether he would agree to alter his policies to protect middle earners by accepting Labour's improvements. If Cameron refuses, he looks like he is putting party politics ahead of sensible policies and doing what's right for middle income families. If he accepts, it makes it much harder to claim that Labour is just opposing every cut and won't set out alternatives.

I think this is a better option politically than pledging to reverse these cuts and flying the flag for universalism. Come 2015 or whenever the next election is, Labour isn't going to go into the election pledging to spend £1 billion on giving cash handouts to the richest 15% of families, and in a fortnight there are £12 billion in welfare cuts plus untold billions more in cutting public services which will be higher priorities to oppose and pledge to reverse.

Shorter George Osborne welfare cuts

2010-10-04T19:43:00.004Z

Poorly designed child benefit cuts which take away benefits for some families on £44,000 while giving them to other families on £86,000: £1 billion.

Giving party activists something to cheer by cutting benefits for homeless families in temporary accommodation: £150 million

Not having to explain where the other £13 billion in welfare cuts is going to fall: priceless.

There are some things money can't buy. For spinning savage cuts to the poorest, there's Tory Party conference.

DWP: no one lives on benefits as a "lifestyle choice"

2010-09-29T14:23:00.004Z

You may remember George Osborne claiming earlier this month that "people who think it's a lifestyle choice to just sit on out-of-work benefits - that lifestyle choice is going to come to an end. The money won't be there."

So I asked the Department of Work and Pensions how many people are currently making the lifestyle choice to live on benefits. After all, the Chancellor of the Exchequer had just announced that this was a massive problem, so I assumed they would be working on their new strategy to ensure that in future no one would make the lifestyle choice to live on benefits.

I just got the answer from the DWP:

"To qualify for a particular benefit an individual must meet the conditions that the government specifies. For example, the conditions for receiving Jobseeker's Allowance are that an individual must be available for, and actively seeking, work. The entitlement conditions for receipt of benefit are set out in the relevant social security regulations for the benefit(s) concerned. There is no condition in regulations that allows someone to receive benefit as a lifestyle choice."

So according to George Osborne, the key aim of welfare policy in future will be to stop people taking the lifestyle choice to live on benefits. According to the Department responsible it is already the case that no one can receive benefits as a lifestyle choice. What ~~an utter, utter embarrassing shambles~~ a fantastic example of joined up, effective government.

New poll: Swing voters back "Red Ed" Miliband

2010-09-26T11:18:00.005Z

Congratulations to Ed Miliband, who won the Labour leadership with a fantastic campaign.

He now faces the challenge of changing the Labour Party and making sure that it wins over the support of people who chose to vote Tory or Lib Dem in 2010. To achieve this, he should listen very carefully to research from one of Britain's foremost electoral strategists.

Lord Ashcroft.

Ashcroft has just released research called "What future for Labour?" It includes data from more than 2,000 people who voted Labour in 2005, but who deserted the party in 2010. The results are absolutely staggering.

One argument that obsesses political commentators is whether Labour should move to the left, or whether this would be electoral suicide. Amongst swing voters, 31% would be more likely to support Labour if it moved to the left, and 32% would be less likely. A plurality, 37% "are not sure what is meant by 'moving further to the left'".

A better example of an out of touch political elite would be harder to find. While right-wing newspapers shriek about "Red Ed" "lurching to the left", nearly 2 in 5 swing voters have no idea what they are talking about, and the rest are split evenly because those who think this would be a good or bad thing.

What about some of the specific policies which Ed Miliband and others put forward during the leadership campaign?

71% of swing voters back a graduate tax as a replacement for student fees
77% back a 50% rate of income tax on earnings over £100,000
63% want to scrap Trident
84% support increasing the minimum wage to more than £7/hour
81% support a High Pay Commission to restrict high salaries in the private sector
86% back a Mansion Tax on homes over £2 million
79% want to renationalise the railways

84% think that bankers are largely responsible for the current economic situation, and it is not fair that ordinary people have to bear the brunt of the cuts
77% think that people on higher incomes should have to pay significantly more taxes to minimise cuts in the public sector
65% would be more likely to vote Labour if they pledged a massive expansion of apprenticeship schemes to provide opportunities for young people

In terms of their values:

72% think that government should try to make society more equal, even if this means reducing living standards for those at the top
64% think that private companies should never have any part to play in delivering public services such as health and education
86% think that private company boards should have to include workforce representatives to ensure workers have a voice in key decisions affecting them
81% think higher education is a right, not a privilege
82% think that Britain should aspire to be more like Scandinavia, and less like America

This research does not show that swing voters are all secretly Labour Party lefties. They are hostile to immigration, want people on benefits to have to do community work, support tax breaks for people who use private healthcare, oppose legalising cannabis, are hostile to strikes, want Labour to apologise for the mistakes that they made in government, blame Labour for the necessity of making cuts, and are supportive of the coalition's attempts to reduce the deficit.

But Lord Ashcroft's research highlights a key dilemma for Ed Miliband and Labour. He won the leadership despite the opposition of newspapers, all of which endorsed his brother, and his success was due to his ability to adopt mainstream policies, from Iraq to the living wage, which most people supported, and his ability to articulate them with conviction and passion. The same challenge will present itself at the next general election. Those of his policies which swing voters strongly support are all ones which the political elite hate.

He will be advised and tempted to show the Westminster Village that he is not "Red Ed", that he shares their prejudices and won't "lurch to the left". But the evidence shows that most swing voters are at worst indifferent to the prospect of Labour moving to the left, that they want Labour to change, and that policies like a mansion tax, living wage and High Pay Commission are all fine examples that would help to show how Labour has changed for the better.

How Ken can win

2010-09-24T14:53:00.004Z

Here's a few stats which show what a difference good local campaigns make, as well as the task facing Ken in defeating Boris in the London Mayoral elections in 2012.

I've looked at five London constituencies which Ken lost in 2008, and which were close fights in the General Election in 2010 Labour and the Tories. In some of these, Labour ran weak local campaigns with poor candidates, in others, they ran strong local campaigns with excellent candidates.

Across London, Boris led Ken by 44% to 37% in 2008.

In both Brentford & Isleworth and Harrow East, the Labour candidates had received a lot of criticism over their expenses.

In Brentford & Isleworth, Boris beat Ken by 44% to 37% (identical to the results across London as a whole), whereas in 2010 the Tories beat Labour by 37% to 34%.

In Harrow East, Boris beat Ken by 49% to 36%, whereas in 2010 the Tories beat Labour by 45% to 38%.

In both cases, Labour closed the gap between 2008 and 2010, but a similar performance across London in 2012 would see Boris narrowly re-elected. However, the picture is very different if you look at three other marginal constituencies.

In Ealing North, Boris beat Ken by 41% to 39%. In 2010, Steve Pound crushed his Tory opponent 50% to 30%.

In Hammersmith, Boris beat Ken 41% to 40%. In 2010, Andy Slaughter saw off a well funded Tory campaign by 44% to 36%.

In Westminster North, Boris beat Ken by 46% to 38%. But in 2010 Karen Buck beat one of David Cameron's personal friends by 44% to 39%.

Andy Slaughter, Karen Buck and Steve Pound all backed Ken as Labour's candidate for Mayor. If Labour can learn and replicate the secrets of their successful campaigns across London, Ken will be back in City Hall in time for the 2012 Olympics.

Philip Blond vs the centre ground of British politics

2010-09-24T10:35:00.004Z

The Scotsman reports that:

"DAVID Cameron’s “philosopher king” will be one of the first people to meet the new leader of the Labour Party, The Scotsman has learned.

Philip Blond, whose book Red Tory is credited as the inspiration of the Prime Minister’s Big Society, has been actively wooed by both the Miliband brothers, David and Ed, during their leadership campaigns.

Labour leader tomorrow and will then hold a meeting on Sunday with Mr Blond and members of his Res-Publica think-tank at the earliest opportunity in a bid for Labour to win back the centre ground of politics.

Like Mr Cameron before the election, the Lib Dems and the two leading Labour leadership contenders see Mr Blond's ideas about mutualisation, community ownership and localism as the best way to win the centre ground of politics and change Britain positively as the money in the Treasury runs out.

A source close to Mr Blond told The Scotsman: "He and ResPublica have had several approaches from the two Miliband camps. They know that his ideas are the only ones in town at the moment if you want to reshape things from the centre ground.""

*

My advice to the next Labour leader is as follows:

If you have political advisers who tells you that Philip Blond represents the centre ground of British politics, then fire them[1].

Instead of spending an hour listening to Philip Blond's drivel, cancel this meeting and use the time more productively by going out canvassing. You will get a far better idea about the real "centre ground of politics" by talking to a totally random selection of people about their ideas and priorities.

There are all kinds of flotsam like Blond gathered around the Westminster Village trying to make a living by persuading powerful people to listen to their daft ideas. One of the ways that the Labour Party needs to change is by ensuring that our leaders spend a lot less time listening to those people, and more time out and about listening to ordinary people who don't hang around in Westminster.

[1] Even as I wrote that, I felt bad about suggesting people who work for the Labour Party should be sacked. Instead of being fired, they should be offered the opportunity of retraining as a local organiser, where they will have the chance to do something useful for the party instead of being actively harmful, and where they can learn something about the actual "centre ground of British politics".

The world's worst benefit scrounger

2010-09-22T09:03:00.003Z

There's been a fair amount of coverage of Keith Macdonald, the "Sunderland Sh***er" who has fathered ten (or more) children with ten different women, and "outrage" that this will cost the taxpayer more than £1.5 million.

Matthew Sinclair, director of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: ‘This is a disgusting abuse of a benefits system that is supposed to look after those who have genuinely fallen on hard times. It is shocking that someone can be so indifferent to their responsibilities.’

If you believe the newspaper reports, then Macdonald doesn't sound like a particularly nice guy. But if you think about it, he also sounds like the worst "benefit scrounger" ever.

Of the £1.5 million (which is the total amount which will be paid out over 16 years), the amount which will go to Macdonald is £0.

Or, rather, because he is getting £5 per week deducted from his benefits, this turns out to be a benefits scam where he actually loses money.

So 100% of taxpayers' money, plus roughly 7% of Macdonald's benefits, goes to his children and their mothers, to help feed and clothe them, keep a roof over their head and provide the basics which every child in a civilised society needs when growing up. The cost to me as an average taxpayer is something in the order of one penny per year per child, possibly a little less. And I'm meant to find this 'disgusting'.

Macdonald's oldest child is ten years old and the youngest are babies. What actually is disgusting is that, in their desperation to undermine the welfare state so that their wealthy masters get to pay less taxes, the Taxpayer's Alliance and journalists for right-wing newspapers are quite prepared to try to ruin the lives of these young children.

Behind the bluster, spin and outrage, the ultimate aim of these right wing groups is to ensure that the government takes money away from children whose parents committed the unforgivable crime of being poor. That's far more outrageous than anything that Kevin Macdonald has ever done.

A quick history of the Big Society

2010-09-21T10:45:00.005Z

Every time I read a well meaning Labour activist argue that "Labour needs to move beyond the belief that the state can do everything and develop a response to the Big Society", it makes me sad.

Here is a quick history of events which contributed to the development of the Big Society:

In the 1970s and 1980s, radical/loony lefties set up a wide range of communuity groups to empower people and deliver a wide range of innovative services. The Tories and their Right Wing allies denounced them in the most vicious terms.

Between 1997 and 2010, Labour created space and put in place policies to enable literally thousands of voluntary groups to flourish, with huge new opportunities to deliver services and to improve local neighbourhoods. The Tories ignored this, because they were more interested in banging on about immigrants and tax cuts.

In 2009, a small group of public relations professionals at the top of the Tory Party - none of whom had any experience of voluntary action - announced something called the 'Big Society', a vague, top down initiative which attempted to claim credit for the insight that voluntary groups had a role to play in delivering services and improving communities.

In 2011, thousands of voluntary and community groups will be wiped out by the savage cuts which the Tory government is inflicting on us.

An even shorter history of the Tories and the Big Society:

First they denounced it.
Then they ignored it.
Then they claimed credit for it.
Then they cut it.

*

That's all very well, the anguished Labour activists might reply, but how to respond?

First of all, don't repeat Tory spin. There isn't anything new about the idea of getting local voluntary groups to deliver services, organise communities and all the rest of it, and it is interesting that the Tories were so out of touch with civil society that they thought that they had come up with a new idea. The person who did more than anyone else over the past thirty years to enable voluntary groups to flourish was Gordon Brown. One of the first acts of the coalition was to axe a scheme which let voluntary groups hire young, unemployed people doing exactly the kinds of jobs which the Big Society aims to create.

Secondly, oppose savage and unnecessary cuts to the voluntary sector. David Cameron said last week that local charities should not face spending cuts, while slashing budgets to local authorities by 30%. If the government really believes in the Big Society, it needs to give voluntary groups time to explore how they could sustain and develop their work with alternative sources of funding - from individual donations to social impact bonds, payment by results and all the rest.

Withdrawing government funding and then expecting groups immediately to be able to find other sources of funding (including some such as social impact bonds which have never actually been proven to work in practice) is totally unrealistic. A much better option would be to continue government funding for voluntary groups at the same levels for a further two years, giving them time to plan and develop alternatives.

Thirdly, support the government when they do the right thing. The review of regulations will probably come up with some sensible ideas, such as reducing overly onerous requirements on Criminal Records Bureau checks for staff and volunteers. Just because Labour did a lot to help voluntary action, there were some things that the last government did wrong.

Lastly, the main problem with the Big Society, despite its rhetoric, is that it is a top down initiative, developed by a few wealthy and powerful people who have little understanding of social action. In its place, we should build up a response from the grassroots. We should start with the knowledge and expertise of the people who work and volunteer in local communities, using this to inform our policies and actions in everything from how to tackle poverty and increase the number of good jobs, to how to provide better quality services, to improving health and living sustainably.

Labour should expel Woolas

2010-09-14T08:51:00.003Z

Labour MP Phil Woolas is currently on trial in response to accusations that he made and published false statements of fact in relation to the personal character or conduct of his Liberal Democrat opponent at the last election.

I would be quite surprised, based on the evidence provided so far, if Woolas were found guilty in strict legal terms. But even if he manages to escape prosecution, the campaign which he chose to run and the leaflets that he put out were vile and disgusting racist filth.

The Labour Party constitution says that when someone's behaviour is "bringing the Labour Party into disrepute through behaviour that is prejudicial or grossly detrimental to the Party", they should be expelled. You only have to look at the leaflets, or at newspaper headlines like "Ex-minister 'tried to stir racial hate'" to see that Woolas has brought the Labour Party into disrepute.

I hope that once the trial is over, the Labour Party sends a clear and principled anti-racist message by withdrawing the whip from Phil Woolas and expelling him from the party.

Freedom of Information request

2010-09-13T13:24:00.001Z

Inspired by George Osborne:

Dear Her Majesty's Treasury,

I would like to know:

1. What definition does the Treasury use to determine whether someone has "made the lifestyle choice" to "sit on out-of-work benefits"?

2. Who is responsible for deciding whether or not someone has made the lifestyle choice to sit on out-of-work benefits?

3. How many people are currently "making the lifestyle choice to sit on out-of-work benefits"?

4. How long does the Treasury estimate it will take to ensure that the money will not be there to fund this "lifestyle choice"?

Yours faithfully,

Don Paskini

Privatising welfare wastes money

2010-09-13T09:51:00.003Z

An absolutely devastating report from the Public Accounts committee should make all political parties rethink their approach to reforming welfare:

"The Pathways to Work programme was launched nationally between 2005 and 2008 to help reduce the number of incapacity benefit claimants through targeted support and an earlier medical assessment. It is delivered by contractors in 60% of districts, with Jobcentre Plus providing the service in the remainder. By March 2010, the programme had cost an estimated £760 million. The numbers on incapacity benefits reduced by 125,000 between 2005 and 2009. Pathways contribution to this reduction has been much more limited than planned...

Private providers have seriously underperformed against their contracts and their success rates worse than Jobcentre Plus even though private contractors work in easier areas with fewer incapacity claimants and higher demand for labour...

Contractors have universally failed by considerable margins to meet their contractual targets for helping claimants who are required to go through Pathways. They have performed worse than Jobcentre Plus areas, although recent improvements have narrowed the difference. Despite being paid £100 million in 2008-09, providers claim not to have made a profit from their contracts. The Department agreed to pay £24 million in service fees early in view of contractor cash flow problems, although we consider the need for this was questionable given the large size of some of the organisations involved. The Department had an objective to build a healthy market, but has failed to develop an adequate understanding of the supply chain. It has not monitored how well prime contractors are sharing rewards and risks with the more than 80 specialist sub-contractors involved, and we have concerns that effective small private and voluntary organisations working in local communities are being asked to take an unfair share of the risk by prime contractors."

Lib Dem MP: why cutting benefits is not regressive

2010-09-06T12:13:00.005Z

Lib Dem MP John Hemming, with the latest attempts to explain why the Budget was not regressive:

"There are changes which are intended to get shifts in behaviour. These should not affect the disposable income of the households and should not be treated as either progressive or regressive. These also do not apply to all households that live on benefits. "

"Arguing, however, that people should downsize is not in itself regressive...People who fund their own housing move down market when short of funds."

Hemming's argument here is that cutting housing benefit for people on low incomes is "intended to get shifts in behaviour", and that "people should downsize when short of funds". Therefore, he argues that cuts to housing benefit should not be defined as regressive because people can downsize to cheaper properties, and the cuts are intended to change their behaviour by forcing them to get a job.

I thought the people who are in denial about the consequences of the Budget had scraped the barrel with Nick Clegg's arguments that the IFS hadn't taken into account future policies which the government might choose to introduce, or that the Budget was progressive because cutting corporation tax would create loads of new jobs. But the idea that cutting benefits doesn't count as regressive if it is intended to change people's behaviour, and anyway cutting housing benefit is not regressive because poor people can always move to cheaper housing, is a new low.

Here's Patrick Murray, who was a Lib Dem councillor in charge of housing, and who has had personal experience of being homeless, explaining the real consequences of the policies which Hemming is defending:

“The complex arrangements governing the calculation of housing benefit have been changed, leaving many people with less benefit to pay the rent in the private sector homes that councils have placed them in, in an effort to cut expensive temporary accomodation. Many will become homeless as a result.

What happens then? Well, they come back through the council’s doors, and are put in even more expensive temporary accommodation, immediately negating any potential savings from this move…

…The result of the current Coalition policies will be more over-crowding, more misery, and more people sleeping on our streets. And that should not sit easy on the conscience of any Liberal Democrat.”

Ed Balls' Jobs Plan won't work

2010-09-03T11:06:00.003Z

Ed Balls is calling for "the Right to Work", voa a new guarantee to ensure that anyone unemployed for more than 18 months is given a job or work placement – an extension of Labour’s successful Future Jobs Fund and Young Persons Guarantee. This will mean creating 200,000 jobs and work placements for people out of work for over 18 months.

He's right to consider the question of how we could make sure that anyone who wants one can get a job, but this is the wrong answer, for the following reasons:

1. His sums don't add up.

It cost £1 billion to create 80,000 jobs through the Future Jobs Fund. It is not possible to create two and a half times as many paid jobs for a quarter of the cost. Unless...

2. His "Right to Work" doesn't mean the right to paid work.

The reference to "work placements" means that some of these jobs might be unpaid work experience placements. Giving people the "right" to work for free is a Tory policy, undermines the minimum wage, and doesn't help people into sustainable employment.

3. These jobs won't reach the people who need them most.

This was one of the lessons from the Future Jobs Fund. The Future Jobs Fund was meant to create jobs for people who couldn't find anything else. But in fact, the kind of "Big Society" jobs, usually involving opportunities for training and professional development and often paid at the Living Wage, were better than many of the other jobs on offer to young, unemployed people. So nearly all of them went to graduates and people who had experience of working in the past, rather than people who had never had a job.

In addition, these will have to be very specific sorts of jobs. For example, they will have to be accessible to ex-offenders who couldn't pass a criminal records bureau check. And they would have to be flexible enough for people who have mental health problems and who are able to work on some days, but not on others. Developing jobs which long term unemployed people can do takes more time, effort and resources then Balls has allowed for.

4. He wants to force people to take these jobs, but that won't work.

In true New Labour style, Balls wants to combine "the right to work" with "the responsibility to work", where no one is out of work for more than 18 months. This tough talk may sound appealing, but the consequences are potentially very troubling. For example, thousands of sick and disabled people are currently appealing against decisions by private contractor Atos healthcare that they are "fit for work". Compelling people who are suffering from cancer, or who have severe mental health problems, into these jobs is cruel and counter-productive - they won't be able to cope, it will make them more ill, and it will create extra problems for the employer.

*

This policy shows the strengths and limitations of Ed Balls. He is definitely asking the right questions, and coming up with new ideas about how government can help people.

But in this case, the weaknesses of the policy come from the fact that it isn't rooted in the reality of people's lives. The attempt to coerce people will be counter-productive, and it takes more resources than Balls realises to guarantee the right to work.

Why I'm voting for David Miliband

2010-09-02T12:42:00.003Z

I think it is an enormously encouraging sign that the so-called "heir to Blair", "continuity New Labour" candidate for the Labour leadership believes in:

- an economic strategy which aims to halve unemployment
- a living wage
- doubling the bank levy
- a mansion tax on the wealthiest homeowners to reverse housing benefit cuts
- withdrawing charitable status from private schools to pay for an expansion of free school meals
- defending universal benefits
- marriage equality for same sex couples
- a comprehensive strategy to rid the world of nuclear weapons
- training 1,000 future leaders to campaign in their communities
- building more affordable homes and creating more green jobs as part of an industrial strategy to reduce Britain's dependency on the City of London

*

There are all sorts of ways in which the Labour leadership contest could have turned into a total disaster for the party, but it has been good humoured and actually showed how much common ground there is within the Labour Party. Some disappointments - Andy Burnham has been hopeless on the health service, Ed Balls on immigration and Diane Abbott's campaign has been a bit feeble. Both Ed Balls and Diane Abbott have a lot to contribute to the Labour Party in the future, but I don't think either would be a very good leader.

The analysis of why Labour lost and how the party needs to change has had some odd outcomes. Ed Miliband's argument is that Labour needs to appeal to more working class voters. Yet I think the people who will find him most appealing are more affluent, liberal-minded voters (like the people who form his activist base). In contrast, I can't imagine David Miliband appealing much to the people who supported Tony Blair but don't like Labour, but his Movement for Change is the best initiative of any of the campaigns at increasing the number of working class voters who will go and vote Labour.

I think Ed Miliband is going to win, and his team have run a very good campaign. With less money, less experience and a relatively unsympathetic media, he's managed to articulate the values which most of the electorate share, and (with an assist from his brother's more inept supporters) to portray his main opponent as an out of touch "right wing" candidate, despite the lack of policy differences. At the next election, Labour will face better funded, more experienced opponents who have most of the media backing them, so Ed Miliband's skills in this regard are well worth noting.

But while I think Ed will be an excellent leader, I'm actually going to vote for David. I thought he was an excellent Cabinet Minister, in local government and in education, and I think he's got the skills to be a very different kind of leader from Tony Blair or Gordon Brown - one who will use the talents of people from across the Labour Party rather than just a small clique. As mentioned above, the actual policies that he believes in are very different from those of Blairites such as, um, Tony Blair.

When he is elected leader, Ed Miliband will come under the most terrific pressure from the opposition, media and Blairites over his supposedly radical and left-wing policies. If David were elected leader, the main pressure which he would face would be to win over and enthuse the people who supported his brother or Ed Balls. To unite the Labour Party, Ed Miliband would need to appeal to the Right, David to the Left.

And therefore it is David, not Ed, who would have the best opportunity to change the Labour Party and achieve their and our shared goals - to build a grassroots movement to win the next election, end mass unemployment and close the gap between rich and poor.

People and things that are more popular than Tony Blair

2010-09-01T12:16:00.004Z

Reading Tony Blair's analysis about why Labour lost the election, I was reminded of a piece of post-election analysis done by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research:

They asked, amongst other things, the following question:

"I'd like to rate your feelings toward some people and organisations, with one hundred meaning a VERY WARM, FAVOURABLE feeling; zero meaning a VERY COLD, UNFAVOURABLE feeling; and fifty meaning not particularly warm or cold. You can use any number from zero to one hundred, the higher the number the more favourable your feelings are toward that person or organisation. If you have no opinion or never heard of that person or organisation, please say so."

The Labour Party got an average score of 44.8, with 38% positive and 47% negative.

Gordon Brown got an average score of 39.3, 33% positive, 55% negative.

David Miliband got 41.9, 21% positive, 37% negative.

Ed Miliband 39.9, 15% positive, 36% negative.

Ed Balls 35.6, 14% positive, 43% negative.

The European Union scored 41.4, immigration to Britain scored 37.5, Israel scored 38.7, and the Palestinians scored 45.6.

Tony Blair scored 36.2, with 25% positive and 60% negative.

So more people who voted in the 2010 election had negative views of Tony Blair than of Gordon Brown, either Miliband brother, Ed Balls, the European Union, the Labour Party, immigration, Israel or Palestine.

Higher benefits, more jobs

2010-08-27T12:30:00.003Z

Right-wing think tank boss Neil O'Brien writes that:

"If you give people more benefits, they will be better off today. But if that encourages them to stay on benefits, rather than find work, they will be poorer tomorrow. "The question to ask," as Nick Clegg wrote, "is what its dynamic effects are, particularly across the generations. How does it increase opportunities? Will it unlock the poverty trap or deepen it?""

Let's have a look at what these dynamic effects might be.

Between 1996 and 2009, benefits for lone parents were increased substantially. So according to the Clegg/O'Brien theory, we would expect more of them to be encouraged to stay on benefits. Over the same time period, benefits for single adults of working age decreased in real terms. The same theory would suggest that this would mean that more would find work.

Here's what actually happened:

In 1996, during a time of economic growth, 45% of lone parents were in work. In 2009, when Britain was in severe recession, 57% of lone parents were in work.

In 1999, 30% of single adults without children were "workless". In 2009, 29% of single adults without children were "workless". If you look at a longer time period, the value of out of work benefits has nearly halved over the last forty years, and unemployment has more than doubled.

If you give people more benefits, they will be better off today. But what the evidence shows is that higher benefits also helps people to find work and be better off in the future.

If you are a millionaire politician, this might be hard to understand, particularly when it is politically inconvenient to grasp the point. But it's not that difficult.

If the government pursues a strategy of class warfare, of demonising poor people and cutting their benefits, then people will concentrate on day to day survival, on trying to keep a roof over their heads and coping with ill health and all the other problems that are caused when you don't have enough money to live on. In consequence, they will find it harder and harder to get a job or stay in work. And, in any case, there will be fewer jobs in their community as benefit cuts suck money out of the local economy.

In contrast, if the government provides everyone with a decent safety net and enough money to live on, then more and more people will be able to think about more than just getting through to the end of the week. They'll get the confidence to apply for jobs, they'll be in better health and even have a little bit of money to spend on studying and developing their skills. They'll see their friends and neighbours getting jobs and help each other to be able to lift themselves out of poverty.

This isn't some wild-eyed theory, this is what actually happens in the real world. And Clegg's comments and those of his right-wing supporters just show, yet again, that they are the ones in denial.

David Miliband's dilemma

2010-08-25T18:32:00.004Z

Jonathan Cox, one of the organisers of David Miliband's "Movement for Change", argues that:

"To build a movement you have to put the development of people before policies. So the answer to the rejuvenation of the Labour Party’s grassroots is not to adopt other organisations’ campaigns and turn them into Labour campaigns, but to invest in the development of our members and harness their desire to tackle local issues."

This is an attempt to resolve the dilemma at the heart of David Miliband's campaign. On the one hand, Miliband (like his brother) believes that Labour needs to rebuild from the bottom up, involving tens of thousands of people in campaigning for Labour and shaping the party's priorities. But at the same time, many of his most influential supporters are determined to make sure that they keep control of deciding the priorities of the Labour Party, and to achieve that are briefing the newspapers about the dangers of "pandering" to Labour Party members and the importance of remaining in the radical moderate modernising centre.

I don't think the formulation of "putting people before policies" addresses this conflict. For example, community leaders trained by London Citizens identified a cap on interest rates and an amnesty for illegal immigrants as two of their top priorities - yet these are exactly the sort of policies which powerful vested interests and political opponents would claim show Labour 'lurching to the left'.

The examples that Cox gives of the Movement for Change in action are of autonomous action to address local injustices, such as cuts by a local council, or getting a developer to tarmac a road. But these are the kinds of campaigns which could be (and often are) led by groups of any political persuasion. Most local injustices pose bigger political dilemmas than this. When local community leaders called for tough regulations on buy to let landlords, David Miliband and allies of his such as Hazel Blears listened to civil service advice that sought instead to minimise "excessive regulations". How do campaigns against local cuts, or for more social housing or youth facilities fit with Miliband's economic policy of halving the deficit over the next four years? How does this approach avoid the Lib Dem franchise problem, where local Lib Dem parties campaign on whatever they think is popular, with essentially no reference to the policies of the national party?

And this line of thought leads to the most troubling section of Cox's piece. He mocks the idea that people join the Labour Party "to pass resolutions at GC", but he doesn't suggest any other mechanism by which the knowledge and ideas of local Labour members and activists can contribute to shaping the policies of the Labour Party. Passing resolutions at a GC isn't my idea of a good night out either, but there doesn't seem to be any way in which the Movement for Change either has influenced, or could influence, the policies which the Labour Party would adopt if David Miliband were elected leader.

I think the Movement for Change is a fantastic idea, and I fully support investing in developing the skills of Labour's grassroots members and supporting them to take action to improve their local communities. But it is important to recognise that there isn't anything particularly new about any of this. The Labour activists who have spent years in developing the skills of grassroots leaders and campaigning against local injustices are exactly the ones who some of David Miliband's anonymous supporters warn against "pandering" to.

To win the leadership election, I think that David Miliband needs to follow through on the logic of the Movement for Change. It's no good focusing on "people not policies" if the only people who get to shape the policies of the Labour Party are a small elite at the top of the party. Labour's future housing policies need to be shaped more by Movement for Change leaders like Liza Harding, and less by people like Hazel Blears.

The libertarian guide to strengthening the family

2010-08-24T20:57:00.002Z

Shorter Eamonn Butler, Director of right wing think tank Adam Smith Institute:

State pensions and the NHS weaken the bonds between us and lead to the break up of the family. Older people would receive better care and there would be wider social benefits if we cut back the welfare state and made pensioners dependent on their families for their income and healthcare.

Grrr

2010-08-20T13:41:00.003Z

Two very annoying local by-election results last night:

In one, Labour didn't even stand a candidate, even though we got 360 votes last time we stood, and the Tories only won with 466 votes.

In the other, we lost by 26 votes to the Tories, and only delivered one leaflet (which went out after the postal votes had already gone out).

One is in a constituency which has a Labour MP, and the other is in a seat which we lost by fewer than 400 votes. Not good enough.

Elected police commissioners: an opportunity for lefties?

2010-08-20T09:44:00.002Z

The government are planning to introduce directly-elected police commissioners. It is easy to see the problems that this might cause. It will politicise the police, and could open the door to authoritarian right-wing populists or even fascists being elected to run police forces. After all, fighting crime is traditionally perceived as an issue where people favour right-wing solutions, with right-wing newspapers promoting fear of crime and ever more authoritarian policies.

But I think there is an opportunity here, and that lefties should develop strategies to win these elections and show how our ideas are better at reducing crime. There are several reasons why this might be possible.

Firstly, the policies of the Coalition government are likely to see crime increase. They are sacking police officers, making people unemployed, closing schemes which help ex-offenders, scrapping pilot projects which would help survivors of domestic violence, cutting benefits for the poorest and most desperate, shutting down activities for young people, removing regulations on slum landlords. Any one of these policies would probably see crime increase, all of them together is likely to have a devastating impact.

Secondly, there are plenty of good examples of leftie policies which work in cutting crime. From setting up City Safe Havens to providing diversionary activities for young people, Neighbourhood Policing Teams to Domestic Violence Prevention Orders, charities helping young prisoners and their families to regulation for private housing, the Left is fizzing with ideas which are rooted in real, grassroots experience about how to cut crime.

Thirdly, our approach to cutting crime fits well with our grassroots campaigning approach. Running community campaigns to raise funding for youth activities in places where families can't afford to go on holiday, persuading shopkeepers to sign up to become City Safe Havens, volunteering for local charities - these are all things which many lefties do anyway, elections or no elections. These elections are likely to have a low turnout, by getting involved and backing candidates who share our values, we can make sure that people get into the habit of voting and see the benefits of doing so.

Fourthly, when they are given the chance, people like the leftie approach to cutting crime. I saw some of the Participatory Budgeting events which the Home Office ran recently on letting local people choose how to spend money to cut crime. Given the choice between CCTV or funding an outreach worker for street drinkers, they picked the latter. Youth activities scored higher than graffiti removal - just because people read the Daily Mail doesn't mean that they won't support good ideas.

And lastly, it is a really powerful way to show how Labour has changed for the better. Although crime fell dramatically under the last Labour government, most people didn't believe the stats. These elections offer the opportunity for us to make a real difference to people's lives through grassroots-led, effective campaigning on one of the most important issues affecting people.

Facts show Darling is wrong on borrowing

2010-08-17T16:58:00.002Z

Alastair Darling:

"We rather lost our way. Rather than recognising that the public were rightly concerned about the level of borrowing, we got sidetracked into a debate about investment over cuts.

"By failing to talk openly about the deficit, and our tough plans to halve it within four years, we vacated the crucial space to make the case for the positive role government can play.

"You will only convince people you've got the answers if they believe you know what the question is in the first place."

British Election Survey Facts:

"It’s the economy I – Concern with the economy dominated the issue agenda. This should have been a major opening for the major opposition party – the Conservatives.

It’s the economy II - the Conservatives did not capitalize on the economy as well as they might have. Emphasizing austerity measures as the cure for Britain’s economic woes failed to generate voter enthusiasm.

It’s the economy III – the Conservatives’ emphasis on government debt did not resonate especially well. Only one in ten of the BES CIPS respondents ranked government debt as most important in a list of 8 issues and two-thirds did not rank government debt as one of their top 3 most important issues.

*

Alastair Darling may well think that there should have been a greater emphasis on cutting the deficit then there was. But this is just another example of "To win again, Labour must do as I've always said", and it is worth noting that the fact that Alastair Darling and the Treasury think that something is important does not mean that the majority of people agreed with them.

Opposing the Tories on welfare

2010-08-09T15:57:00.002Z

John Woodcock continues the series of "To win again, Labour must do as I’ve always said" with an article about how Labour must be the party of radical public service reform.

He argues that "we were at our best in government when we showed we were resolutely on the side of the users of public services and when we avoided being captured by the concerns of the producers of those services, valid though those concerns may have been" and that "if the British people detect that we no longer have the zeal to embrace real and difficult change to our schools, hospitals, and welfare system, they may not show any great zeal for renewing their embrace of us."

In the case of the welfare system, I would certainly agree with this. The Tory minister Lord Freud has said he would like the welfare market to mirror that of the supermarkets’, with about four dominant providers each given multi billion pound contracts to run services in different regions of the UK.

The people who use these services will be compelled to go to the welfare provider in their area, and will be fined if they don't. Following on with Freud's supermarket analogy, this would be like the government giving Tesco's a license to run all the supermarkets in the North West of England, and then fining people if they didn't do their shopping at Tesco's. A more blatant example of a government being "captured by the concerns of the producers of services", at the expense of their users, would be hard to imagine.

That's even before you consider that one of the main companies which is likely to win some of these contracts has had to pay back thousands of pounds after an investigation found examples of benefit fraud, and that one of their sales reps apparently accompanied David Cameron on his trip to India.

So when Lord Freud announces the government's plans for the Work Programme, which will favour the producers - including convicted benefit fraudsters - over the users of this service, I agree with John Woodcock that Labour should come up with an alternative of radical reforms which put the people who use employment support services first.

I just wish that John Woodcock had been around at the time when some idiot Labour minister and his special advisers had the chance to introduce welfare reforms which would have put the users first, and mysteriously and incomprehensibly instead decided to hire David Freud to do a report on welfare reform, even though by his own admission he 'knew nothing about welfare'.

Ending the housing crisis

2010-08-05T10:28:00.004Z

The latest subject of the government's Two Minute Hate are people who live in council housing when a government bureaucrat thinks that they should move out.

I think it is sheer fantasy to suppose it is any kind of solution to the housing crisis to evict people from their home if they get a decent job, or if they are a lone parent who meets and chooses to live together with someone they love. But I can also understand why someone having to cope with sky high rents and a bad landlord in the private rented sector might wonder what all the fuss is about and feel that council tenants have it easy. This is what happens when you have a residual, heavily means-tested public service only for the poorest - it is easy to divide people who need the service against each other and cut it.

Let's try and sketch out an alternative:

The only people who benefit from the current housing crisis are slum landlords, who charge low paid workers extortionate rents, and get billions of pounds in handouts from the government in housing benefits.

Communities all over the country have been damaged by landlords who don't look after their tenants or maintain their properties. Meanwhile, thousands of people who aspire to live in council housing, or to own their own home, have been denied the opportunity to do so, and many are living in overcrowded or unsuitable accommodation.

At a time when the costs of construction are at their lowest in years, we have a housing shortage and mass unemployment. Savers who are trying to put aside money for their retirement are incentivised to invest in property, driving house prices higher, while British businesses are desperate for loans to help them grow.

None of these problems will be sorted out by the current government's policies of driving poor people into debt by cutting housing benefit while scrapping regulations which would protect tenants from bad landlords.

Instead, we could get people off benefits and into work by building the new council homes that people need. This would create thousands of skilled working class jobs, and help young (and not so young) unemployed people learn a trade. Building these homes would mean that, as in many other countries, people on lower and middle incomes had a genuine choice. Those that wanted to could buy their own home, while others who preferred to rent from the council or privately could do that as well. Rather than ghettos where only the poorest live, council housing would have a wider mix of people.

Meanwhile, the economic and housing crisis means that the boom times should be over for bad landlords. New regulations - supported by good landlords and tenants alike - could be introduced, and private sector rents could be capped and reduced, to make renting more affordable and cut the housing benefits bill. And savers who got into property speculation to try to provide for their retirement could be given incentives by the government to invest their money in British business, helping them to get the credit they need to grow and employ more people.

Expensive in the short term, but there would be colossal long term savings. Rather than spending money on unemployment benefits, governments handouts to wealthy landlords and the costs of picking up the pieces and supporting families who are homeless or living in overcrowded housing; we'd be spending the money on people doing necessary jobs, preventing the problems caused by bad housing, and encouraging people to invest in British businesses.

If nothing else, it has to be better than pretending that everyone can (or even wants to) own their own home, that social housing should be only for the most needy, or that the best use for your savings is to invest in property - and then trying to distract people from the consequences of this by blaming council tenants for causing the housing crisis.

Demos poll: only 15% want to be part of "Big Society"

2010-08-03T15:51:00.007Z

Here's what the think tank Demos said about their latest piece of research:

"Labour’s next leader needs to support public sector cuts and embrace the ‘Big Society’ agenda if they are to be heard by the public."

And here's what their polling showed that people actually thought about the 'Big Society' agenda:

If you can't read that, the poll found that 35% of people said that "I'd like to be more active in my community but I don't have time what with the pressures of work and family", 19% 'it's not my job to look after my community, that's what we pay our taxes and elect politicians for", and 15% "I enjoy being active in my community and get involved whenever I have the time and feel it is worthwhile to do so". 25% picked "none of them", with 7% "don't know".

Funnily enough, these stats weren't included in Demos' press release. They've got a lot of media coverage for their claims that Labour needs to support cuts and back the Big Society, but their own polling doesn't support their claims. If a think tank commissions opinion polling, I think there is something quite dubious about only picking the results which fit with their prejudices. It makes me wonder what other inconvenient facts they decided not to release.

Government still clueless on welfare

2010-07-30T11:29:00.002Z

The government claimed to announce "The biggest overhaul of the country's now-''antiquated'' benefits system in decades" today.

In reality, they released a report which notes that some think tanks have produced ideas for reforming benefits without saying which ones the government prefers, asks roughly the same questions as every other government consultation of the past decade on reforming the benefits system, and notes that it would be nice if the administration of the benefits system were more efficient.

Things which aren't mentioned include:

1. What the cost of the different proposals mentioned in the report would be.
2. What levels the benefits would be set at, and hence what the impact on poverty would be.
3. Anything about increasing the number of jobs.

Three ideas to reduce the deficit

2010-07-30T09:07:00.003Z

Three ideas for how the government could save money without affecting frontline services or raising taxes:

1. Hire more tax inspectors.

A government report in 2008 calculated that cutting 600 staff saved £74 million in lower staff costs, but led to a loss of £204 million in tax. On average, each member of compliance staff has a tax yield of £640,000 after employment costs each year. There is over £20 billion in uncollected tax and £25 billion in tax evasion which tax inspectors could help to collect.

2. Introduce rent controls.

The government spends more than £20 billion on housing benefit payments, much of which goes to private landlords. If they reduced the rents that landlords were allowed to charge their tenants, then the housing benefit bill would be cut.

3. Stop paying private companies to harass cancer patients and wounded ex-soldiers.

The government pays a company called Atos healthcare to carry out medical assessments to see whether people are able to work. The more people that Atos healthcare assess as capable of work, the more money they get from the government.

However, up to 70% of their decisions get overturned at appeal, and every appeal costs the government extra money. If the government only paid Atos healthcare money when they got their assessments right, it would reduce the amount they paid the company, and save money on having fewer appeals.

*

Each of these policies also has other benefits. Hiring more tax inspectors would reduce unemployment and ensure that there are fewer tax dodgers. Rent controls would save tenants in the private rented sector money and help make sure people are better off in work than on benefits. And paying Atos healthcare money to do their job properly and assess people accurately would make life a lot less stressful for many sick and disabled people who have wrongly seen their benefits cut.

What should Labour's economic policy be?

2010-07-29T15:17:00.003Z

One of the first big challenges for Labour's next leader will be to set out their response to the Coalition's comprehensive spending review, and in the process define Labour's new economic policy.

Although this hasn't been a big feature of the leadership campaigns, it is possible to identify four main options which I've heard suggested:

1. The Blairite one set out by Pat McFadden. Continuing the economic policies set out by Alastair Darling and prioritising increased investment to increase economic growth while halving the deficit by cutting spending on public services, public sector pensions and welfare benefits by around £60 billion.

2. The Gordon Brown/Ed Balls strategy of maintaining higher levels of public spending on current priorities and reducing the deficit more slowly, aiming to stabilise levels of debt at c. 90% of GDP rather than 70%.

3. The leftie approach of massive cuts to targeted areas of spending such as defence and prisons, maintaining or expanding other areas of public spending, and raising income tax, corporation tax, capital gains tax, council tax, introducing new taxes such as a graduate tax and a mansion tax, while creating jobs through a Green New Deal.

4. Reject orthodox economics and the idea that the deficit is a problem entirely, and argue for an alternative based on an entirely new kind of political economy such as Modern Monetary Theory.

*

The leadership contest has been very good natured, but economic policy is where there is the potential for real divisions to arise within the Labour Party. The next leader needs to have a mandate from members for whichever economic policy they plan to pursue. The policy needs to be understood and backed by Labour's members and supporters, as well as credible and able to stand up to robust scrutiny. Not an easy task.

I would do anything for voting reform, but I won't do that

2010-07-28T21:30:00.003Z

Things which the lib dems are prepared to do in order to get a referendum on voting reform:

Raise VAT
Cut housing benefit and increase homelessness
Cap immigration
Sack hundreds of thousands of public sector workers
Support Michael Gove's ideological experiment with schools

Things which the lib dems are not prepared to do in order to get a referendum on voting reform:

Hold two separate votes, one on the Tory plans to gerrymander the constituency boundaries, and one on whether or not to have a referendum on voting reform

How to win the referendum on voting reform

2010-07-23T09:23:00.003Z

The campaign in favour of the alternative vote is looking for ideas to promote the campaign and persuade people to vote for voting reform in the referendum next May.

Their current message is to call for 'fair votes' to change the 'broken system' and elect a Parliament that really represents us. Similarly, opponents of reform are trying to tap into the same anti-politics mood by claiming that voting to change the electoral system will mean that the government is decided by dodgy backroom deals between politicians, rather than in democratic elections, that it is a waste of money to be fiddling around with the voting system, and that you will have to pay more taxes. They will also note the fact that it will give more power to Nick Clegg.

I don't think electoral reformers can win a campaign where both sides compete in doing anti-politics campaigning and trying to appeal to voters who hate politicians, but where the No campaign has lots more money and media support to get their message out and the Yes campaign is led by Nick Clegg. The Yes campaign also has a problem that there is a mismatch between what it says the problem is (out of touch politicians, a broken Parliament, the need for fair votes) and their proposed solution (let people write 1, 2, 3 on their ballot paper rather than put a cross by their preferred candidate).

Instead, I think that the main argument of the Yes campaign should be that the Tories want people to vote No to electoral reform, and therefore you hate the Tories or have been affected by any of their cuts, then you should vote Yes. It shouldn't be hard to come up with a poster campaign and other communications to support this simple and effective message.

Approximately 80% of people in Scotland and Wales hate the Tories, and people in these areas will be going along to vote for their parliamentary elections on the same day, so if you can get them to put a vote in for electoral reform while they are at the polling station for their main business, plus people in other parts of the country who hate the Tories, plus people who are really passionate about changing the voting system, you get a coalition of support which probably outnumbers people in places like Surrey who go along to vote No because they read in the Daily Telegraph that the alternative vote is part of the plan to make Britain part of a European Super State.

I appreciate that it would be difficult for Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems to front a campaign which is built around slagging off their new Tory chums, but I regard this as a positive feature of the campaign strategy, not a problem.

Taxpayer's Alliance: cut benefits for the poor, more benefits for the rich

2010-07-22T08:44:00.003Z

The Taxpayer's Alliance have a new report out about how to reform welfare. They claim to have spent a lot of time on the report, and it includes detailed calculations for things like the computation of negative income tax (if rG – T >= 0, then N = M – rG + T and so on). It is an attempt to simplify the benefits system and improve financial incentives for people to take a job, while reducing the overall cost of the system.

The way that it seeks to do this is by making lots of middle and lower income taxpayers considerably worse off. There are pages of pseudo-scientific gibberish and hand waving designed to obscure this point, but the report couldn't find any space to set out, for example, how many people would see their income reduced or by how much under their plans. But using their figures, it is clear that very many families with children would see huge cuts in their income, as would anyone in an area where housing costs are high.

They are very keen to claim that one problem of the welfare system is that it looks at relative poverty (defined as 60% of the median earnings), and that instead we should look at measures of absolute poverty. For all the work they put into their research, however, they didn't realise that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has already done a lot of this work, developing a "minimum income standard based on what people said is needed to achieve an acceptable standard of living in Britain today". Instead, the Taxpayer's Alliance use examples about how to measure absolute poverty taken from America. (It is worth noting that more taxpayers were involved in the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's research than in this or most other pieces of Taxpayer's Alliance research).

When the Joseph Rowntree Foundation asked people how much people in Britain needed to have an acceptable standard of living, the people came up with an amount which is far higher than the amount that the four (wealthy) authors of the Taxpayer's Alliance report think is enough for millions of people to live on.

Just one small example of the principles underlying the Taxpayer's Alliance proposals to reform welfare. They appear unconcerned with the problems caused by slashing support for families with children, or making people homeless when they can no longer pay the rent. But they are very concerned about the lack of support from the welfare state for people who have assets over £16,000, and propose to scrap asset tests which reduce benefit payments for people who have lots of money saved.

So someone who has tens of thousands of pounds in the bank and who owns one or more homes will be entitled to receive more than £6,000 through their "negative income tax", the same as someone who is out of work and who doesn't have a penny in savings. And if you think that is fair, you are probably rich enough to be one of the tiny number of people who the Taxpayer's Alliance actually speaks for.

Building the Big Society in Croydon

2010-07-15T12:24:00.002Z

Nice to see Tory councillors doing their bit to help build the Big Society in Croydon:

"Last night, Croydon Council ratified a 66 per cent drop in funding for the voluntary sector over the next four years at a town hall meeting.

There were scenes of anger outside as more than 120 volunteers protested against the swingeing cuts.

Out of 47 organisations previously funded through the Council’s corporate funding budget only six will get £625,000 worth of council grants through the Stronger Community fund which has replaced it.

Councillor Vidhi Mohan, cabinet member for communities, told the meeting: “This is a radical new approach to the council relationship with the voluntary sector.

“We have been consulting with the voluntary sector for the past few years on this.”"

Spending challenge

2010-07-13T15:42:00.003Z

Lib Dem Voice, 11th July:

"By asking the public for their ideas and recommendations for public sector cuts, the Coalition Government has intelligently put the Labour party in an uncomfortable place...what do Labour do? Join the coalition in developing a mature and non-partisan approach to the national crisis or side with the union paymasters? Either way, Labour is staring into the abyss."

Hmm. Spending public money on a website where people can suggest ideas for public sector cuts. What could possibly go wrong?

The Other Taxpayers' Alliance explains what happened next:

"The government's Spending Challenge website, launched on Friday, invites us to send our ideas for cuts. "A team has been put together right at the heart of government," claims the blurb on the homepage, "and their job is to make sure that your ideas and comments are taken seriously."

Which is deeply worrying, because for the most part the contributors to Spending Challenge give the impression that they have moved there directly from the Daily Express comments board. Many entries have little bearing on government doing "more for less" and instead reflect personal hobby-horses, like the ubiquitous "Bring Back Capital Punishment". Others are exercised by "benefit scroungers", such as the contributor who wants to sterilise young girls who "just breed at will".

One of the most popular tags is "immigration". Entries here tend to fall into one of two categories:

racist ranting written entirely in lower case
RACIST RANTING WRITTEN ENTIRELY IN CAPITALS

The former includes a post, "there is only one way to save money", which states:

"now i am not a racist person but this country has had problems since the early 60's we need to decrease the number of immergrants in the uk i walk dow the street only to see hundreds of illegal immergrants that cant even speak english and i mean polish and muslims mainly and most of themare working in our local shops and local call centres."

*

So it turns out that the Coalition government's idea of a "mature and non-partisan approach" to cutting public services is "wasting our money on providing another platform for racists on the internet".

"Cameron is George Bush mark 2"

2010-06-29T15:48:00.004Z

Tim Montgomerie, in wingnut magazine Standpoint:

"Cameron would not like the comparison, but his agenda has been much more similar to, if not influenced by, George Bush 1999-2000. Both men have attempted to redefine what conservatism is in the post-Thatcher, post-Reagan era. Both have tried interesting new definitions. Cameron knows that a conservatism that is only about the economy cannot be elected in the UK. In 1997, people deserted the Conservative Party, not because they had not done well out of Margaret Thatcher and John Major but because they felt too many people were being left behind. Blair wanted to humanise the settlement of the Thatcher-Major years. Cameron has been wrestling with that and if you look at the way he has emphasised education, in particular faith-based and voluntary groups, diversity of candidates, putting different faces to the forefront, it was very similar to what Bush was trying to do to the Republicans in 1999-2000."

Learning from the Germans

2010-06-28T16:14:00.002Z

A thought experiment:

English football is run in the interests of very wealthy people. Ticket prices are extremely high and unaffordable for many families on middle or lower incomes. There are even regulations which tell football supporters that they are not allowed to stand and watch their team play. Fans of top teams pay huge sums of money to watch live football, money which goes to multi millionaire footballers and owners of football teams. Those who choose instead to watch football on the telly pay hundreds of pounds per year to Rupert Murdoch. Many clubs have seen their budgets for investment slashed, and their revenues spent on servicing the debts which their owners have run up. A tiny fraction of this money trickles down from the millionaires to grassroots football clubs, and clubs at all levels of the game have been caught in a financial crisis, with many threatened by closure.

German football is run in the interests of the supporters. Ticket prices are kept low so that supporters can go and watch, and can even stand if they want. Regulations mean that at least 51% of every football club is owned by the supporters, unless a company can show that it has invested in the club for at least twenty years. Those who choose to watch football on the telly have benefited from the most competitive free TV market in the world. German football clubs made a profit, rather than running up debts, thanks to lower spending on players' wages. In recent years, German clubs have massively increased their investment in youth academies, and the national team has benefited from the liberalisation of the immigration laws in 1999, to the point where they proudly talk about how they are the "multicultural" or "liberation" generation. The Bundesliga is more unpredictable and exciting than the Premier League, and we all know what happened on Sunday.

*

English society is run in the interests of very wealthy people. The cost of housing, child care and social care is unaffordable for many families on middle or lower incomes. There are all sorts of petty regulations which tell ordinary people what they are and aren't allowed to do. People pay huge sums of money for basic services which goes to multi millionaires. The media is dominated by a small cartel of multi millionaires, most notably Rupert Murdoch. The government is slashing its budgets for investment, and our revenues are spent on servicing the debts which the bankers have run up. A tiny fraction of this money trickles down from the millionaires to grassroots community groups, and charities and small businesses have been caught in a financial crisis, with many threatened by closure.

If we want to improve our chances in the next World Cup and stop many of our clubs from going bankrupt, we could learn a lot from the Germans. We could organise the game around the convenience of fans, rather than the Glazers and other multi millionaire owners. We could slash ticket prices, and scrap petty regulations on supporters. At the same time, we could impose new regulations to stop rich people from buying football clubs in order to asset strip them and stop them from paying their debts by squeezing fans dry. We could break up media cartels and increase the amount we invest in our young people, as well as welcoming people from all around the world who have chosen to come to live and work here.

But it strikes me that these same principles which have made German football better than ours - putting ordinary people first, making sure it is affordable to go and watch a football game, regulating the anti-social activities of rich asset strippers, investing in developing young people and being proud of multiculturalism and tolerance - are also ones which are more generally applicable to how to improve our society.

Government adviser: "cut unemployment by locking people up"

2010-06-17T12:39:00.003Z

Meet Lawrence Mead, the new adviser to the Tory/Lib Dem government:

"For difficult cases, such as fathers who do not work and fail to make child support payments or ex-prisoners on parole, the sanction for not working would be jail...

The key intellectual insight for Mead when he began his assault on the American welfare state was that what changed behaviour was not economic incentives but tough government talking. "It was authoritative statements from people in authority that mattered. We should not [incentivise people] to work. We hope [they will]. We say it because you are supposed to do it, we expect you to do it...

Such sentiments have a whiff of 1930s Germany, something the Twittersphere buzzed with when welfare secretary Iain Duncan Smith said: "Work makes you free" – the same words hung over the entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp. "I have faced this accusation," says Mead. "Hitler was non-democratic, whereas work requirements claim a popular mandate."

Government should cut unemployment by locking the poor up, and the problem with forced labour schemes of the past was that they didn't have a popular mandate, says government adviser.

And the Lib Dem supporters read this (for it was in the Guardian), and they were confused that this far right wing drivel had not been condemned by Lib Dem MPs or by civil liberties campaigners. After all, they remembered their leader saying, just two months ago, that "civil liberties and individual freedoms are part of the DNA of the Lib Dems" and condemning Labour for its authoritarianism and for locking so many people up.

So they went back to the barn, and read the statement of Liberal Democrat principles. And it turned out they had misremembered. For the statement of Liberal Democrat principles had been changed, and now read - "civil liberties and individual freedoms are part of the DNA of the Lib Dems, except for those who do not work".

And the rest of us looked from Tory to Lib Dem, and from this Coalition government back to Maggie Thatcher's government, and found it increasingly hard to tell the difference.

Reality based policy development

2010-06-11T12:34:00.004Z

Shorter Social Market Foundation:

"The Social Market Foundation is a leading UK think tank, developing innovative ideas across a broad range of economic and social policy. The recommendations we put forward are practical and designed to provide politicians with workable solutions to current and developing policy challenges.

The government needs to come up with a convincing and fair plan to reduce Britain's financial deficit. We therefore recommend charging people 20 quid to see the doctor, and privatising all the roads and charging people to drive on them. To protect the least well off, we also recommend cutting Housing Benefit and disability benefits by £3.7 billion.

We think that these are eminently practical solutions, and, no, none of us have ever had a job outside of Westminster which involves contact with the public, why do you ask?"

The true story of the football team which three contenders for the Labour leadership used to play for

2010-06-11T09:05:00.011Z

It sounds like a piece of satire, but you absoutely must read the true story of the football team "Demon Eyes", written in 2008 by FT journalist George Parker. Demon Eyes were an amateur football team which played in the Thames League between 1998 and 2001, which was founded by James Purnell and Tim Allan, and which David Miliband, Ed Balls and Andy Burnham all played for.

Here's a couple of excerpts:

"By 1998, Demon Eyes were cutting their teeth in the Thames League, where anyone bluffing as a footballer would be quickly found out. The games were bruising and expletive-packed. The fact that the Market Road pitches were knee-wrecking surfaces "like green concrete and covered with sand" gave the games an added physical edge

In this abrasive environment, Demon Eyes twice won promotion, rather undermining the claim they were a load of soft middle-class boys playing at being lads. In 2001, they reached the apogee of their success, winning Thames League Division One.

Tales from the dressing room suggest a degree of toughness and determination that might explain why Demon Eyes players have progressed from the Ralgex-infused gloom of the Market Road changing rooms to the height of politics or their other chosen professions

Hugh Sleight, editor of the football magazine Four Four Two, recalls team members before the match talking about theatre or broadcasting. "It was not like any other changing room I had been in." But once on the pitch Demon Eyes started living up to their dark name. In a league where over-the-top tackles and mouthy behaviour were commonplace, Demon Eyes were notorious. "In all truth, we had a reputation as a fairly unpleasant team to play against," recalls Andy Burnham. "We all backed each other up quite a lot. It could get quite fruity."

Liam Halligan, a Financial Times journalist in the 1990s, recalls: "Most of them didn't have any touch - they couldn't really play football, but they tried. They ran their arses off. And it was when we were playing the really hard-nut teams, when the chips were down, that they fought hardest."

David Farr, artistic director at the Lyric Theatre in west London, says James Purnell, now work and pensions secretary, was typical of the team's fighting spirit. "He was a very capable and solid central defender. He could be very physical."

Andy Burnham was also a "very physical" centre forward, while David Miliband, foreign secretary, was already displaying his diplomatic class, a cultured presence in the centre of defence with "a good eye for a pass". However, colleagues remember that he was able to "shout very loud".

Ed Balls was a more occasional player but colleagues remember him as a rampaging centre-forward with a good line in abuse - sometimes aimed at fellow players, sometimes the opposition, more often at the referee. The team's willingness to challenge authority made them unpopular with the referees who gave up their weekends to officiate. Sleight recalls: "You could tell these people were involved in a lot of debates. They seemed to think if they had a better argument than the referee they could persuade him to change his mind."

One long-time Blair aide, who was regarded as the team's best player, could be relied upon to blow a fuse. Goodhart remembers one "perfectly friendly match" in which the aide ended up punching another player.

On another occasion a West Indian referee - accustomed to Demon Eyes' players moaning at every decision - masterfully disarmed his critics. As future cabinet ministers screamed abuse at him, he gave a laid-back, Caribbean-accented response: "That's right boys. Let it all out. Don't take it home with you."

Playing against Demon Eyes was like watching the Labour party up close. For them it was a case of win at all costs. Demon Eyes had a policy of claiming for every decision, even when it seemed to us that they had blatantly kicked the ball into touch. They knew that the standard of refereeing was variable and they were happy to exploit that. Nor, it seemed, were they averse to leaving their foot in or feigning injury if they needed to waste time.

What stood out - and really grated - was the strong whiff of arrogance and privilege that surrounded the team. Built more like rugby players, as half the team appeared to be, they motivated themselves by shouting "Winners!" every time the ball was launched in the air. It was part Will Carling, part David Brent.

Demon Eyes punctuated their games with comradely cries such as "Come on, Timbo! Win the game for us!"

"I agree with Diane"

2010-06-09T15:45:00.004Z

There is a token candidate for the Labour Party leadership who struggled to get enough nominations to stand and who has no chance of winning.

His name is "Andy Burnham".

Ed Balls has more support amongst MPs, but he can't win either, with his 61% disapproval ratings.

Diane Abbott, in contrast, is a serious contender. She occupies the centre ground in policy terms - anti-Iraq war, anti-NHS privatisation, pro-equality and in favour of reducing the deficit by taxing the rich rather than cutting public services. Even before she gets a bounce from all the favourable media coverage, polls show her as the top choice amongst the general public, and she could easily end up topping the poll amongst Labour members and trade unionists, who between them have two-thirds of the votes in Labour's electoral college. It's also difficult for her opponents to criticise her when they will want the second preferences of her supporters.

She's got weaknesses - no ministerial experience, very little support amongst MPs and not much of a campaign team or organisation. She could easily make a gaffe or end up running a ridiculous campaign and end up as a bit of a joke. But she's arguably starting from a stronger position than Harriet Harman had at close of nominations for the Deputy Leadership.

One of the things which we learned from the first leadership debate back in April was that the leaders of the Labour and Tory parties had absolutely no idea how to respond to an articulate populist politician making centre-left arguments. It will be interesting to see how the Miliband brothers and the fringe right-wing candidates, all of whom have ministerial records to defend, respond to Abbott. My guess is that we will hear a lot of "I agree with Diane".

And let's remember the lessons from Labour's deputy leadership election. Jon Cruddas won all the policy arguments just by making some reality-based soft left arguments, and Harriet Harman got elected with the argument of "I agree with Jon + I've got experience of being in government + I'm a woman'. We saw then that there was a clear gap between the opinion of most Labour MPs and the members and trade unionists. Many MPs and Westminster insiders, for example, thought that Hazel Blears was a strong candidate with mainstream views, who connected well with "ordinary people". Amongst the wider party, Hazel Blears was a joke candidate who supported marginal and ridiculous policies and got a derisory result. I can't imagine that gap between MPs and the wider party has closed much over the past three years.

Abbott's challenge can only be a good thing for the Labour Party. She is an articulate and populist candidate who will put forward leftie arguments which the people in charge of the party have ducked out of debating for all these years. We'll be able to find out which leftie policy ideas capture the public's support and which ones belong in the dustbin of history. Her candidacy will persuade more people to join up and get involved. It kills off the movement to try and make Labour the anti-immigrant party. And whoever emerges as Labour's next leader will have sharpened and developed their campaigning skills, and be all the better prepared to help Labour win the next election.

Throwing money at the problem of poverty

2010-06-08T15:25:00.002Z

Frank Field:

"Over recent decades, the Left and centre-Left’s answer to poverty and inequality has been to spend more money, to redistribute from richer to poorer. Yet this central social democratic ideal is being tested to the point of destruction...Few people would argue that the solution to the complex social and economic problems Britain faces is even higher spending. "

Yeah, only a few crazy Left wing people would argue for spending more money on tackling poverty! Crazy Left wing people, like, um...

Tory Secretary of State Iain Duncan Smith's Dynamic Benefits Report:

"The change in benefit withdrawal rates, earnings, and employment resulting from these proposals would increase the total annual benefits bill by £3.6 billion."

Right-wing think tank Policy Exchange:

"People on welfare should be incentivised to take up work by raising the ‘disregard’ (the
amount of money that someone is allowed to earn before they start losing benefits) to
£92.80 for all benefits. This would mean that anyone on the minimum wage who works for
16 hours keeps everything that they earn. This would give over 2.8 million people a better
reason to work.

Raising the disregard would cost £5.1 billion."

And, er, Frank Field:

"A welfare reform bill that looks forwards instead of backwards would centre on two measures. Large numbers of citizens with impeccable work records are going to be sacked. They will then find out that their continuous National Insurance contributions gives them a princely £60.50 a week benefit. That is precisely the sum an individual gets who has never worked.

A relevant welfare reform bill would lay the basis for linking the size of this contributory JSA to a claimant's work record. Somebody who has worked continuously for five years would get double the payment and somebody, for example, working ten years would see the insurance benefit tripled."

Whether it's spending £3.6 billion more on giving unemployment benefits to people who are working from Iain Duncan Smith, paying £92.80 in benefits to everyone working 16 hours on the minimum wage from Policy Exchange, or paying some unemployed people more than £180 per week in Jobseekers' Allowance from Frank Field, the principle that reducing unemployment and poverty requires more spending isn't even controversial, and has been accepted on the Right just as on the Left.

It is a bit troubling that the government's new star adviser on poverty doesn't seem to have realised this.

Hey, Clegg, leave them kids alone

2010-06-06T12:22:00.005Z

Shorter Nick Clegg:

"It would be a huge mistake for the "centre-left community" to oppose our plans to cut jobs for young unemployed people, cancel the most successful savings scheme ever for low income poor families, cut the number of university places, take money away from schools, cut training for childcare workers, stop families on low incomes getting laptops, cut programmes which help children learn to read, cancel summer playschemes, close playgrounds, cut youth offending teams, and take away support which helps parents get jobs.

We have to do all these things, because otherwise it will be our children and grandchildren who suffer."

Affirmative Action for Special Advisers

2010-06-03T15:02:00.004Z

I am interested in Harriet Harman's suggestion that 50% of the places in Labour's Shadow Cabinet should be reserved for women, but I'm not convinced.

On the reasonable assumption that the Shadow Cabinet will (for the next year, at least) be made up of people who have had ministerial experience, that would mean choosing nine Shadow Cabinet ministers from amongst the eighteen or so women who currently have ministerial experience.

Some of these women, of course, would make very good Shadow Cabinet ministers, but I'm not sure that paving the way for Hazel Blears *and* Caroline Flint *and* Tessa Jowell to return to senior positions in the Labour Party is the most urgent priority for gender equality.

Top priority in securing equal representation for women within the top ranks of the Labour Party, instead, should be how to ensure that by the time of the next election, 50% of Labour's Shadow Cabinet are women. And I think the best way to do this is to build on one of Labour's existing positive action programmes.

Since 2001, Labour has run an informal yet very influential scheme called Affirmative Action for Special Advisers. Under this scheme, Oxbridge-educated men who have been special advisers to Labour ministers have been helped to secure safe parliamentary seats and then fast tracked to help them gain ministerial experience soon after being elected.

This programme has been so successful that there are more ex-Special Advisers standing for the leadership of the Labour Party in 2010 than the total number of women who have ever stood for the leadership of the Labour Party over the past hundred and ten years.

There are 81 female Labour MPs, including many exceptionally talented people from a range of backgrounds. By expanding the Affirmative Action for Special Advisers programme to these MPs, especially the newly elected ones, we will ensure that by 2015 or whenever the next election takes place, there will be a much greater number of women who have the experience needed to be effective members of the Shadow Cabinet, and that by the time it comes to choose the next but one leader of the Labour Party and the Cabinet ministers for when Labour is next in power, we will be able to choose from a much wider range of excellent candidates.

Making sure that the parliamentary Labour Party has roughly equal numbers of men and women, amongst MPs and amongst ministers, is an important part of the wider struggle for equal rights. It is by focusing on the medium term, rather than the next few months, that we're most likely to achieve real and meaningful change.

Savage cuts lose elections

2010-06-03T12:02:00.004Z

Vox EU has an article which seeks to prove that "it is possible for fiscally responsible governments to engage in large fiscal adjustments and survive politically. Moreover, acting on the spending side is no more costly that doing on the tax side". They've got a rather strange method of assessing this, which looks at how many changes of government occurred while the cuts were taking place.

I think that the evidence suggests the opposite - when a government slashes public spending, they are punished for it by the voters. I did a simple test, which was to take the examples given by the paper, and look at what happened in the first elections to take place after the cuts started.

Portugal 1980. Next election in 1983, right-wing coalition defeated, Socialist Party tops the poll.

Ireland 1987. Next election in 1989, "the result was a disaster for Fianna Fáil", forced to enter coalition with Progressive Democrats.

Netherlands 1990. Next election in 1994. "Landslide loss for the governing coalition of PvdA and CDA. The two liberal parties, VVD and D66 profited from this. As did two parties for the elderly, AOV and Unie 55+, and the socialist SP".

France 1993. Next election in 1997. Right-wing government "obtained its worst result in a legislative election during the Fifth Republic ."

UK 1993. We know what happened here.

Sweden 1993. Next election 1994. Centre-right government defeated, Social Democrats return to power.

Austria 1995. Next election 1999. Government parties lose support, the Fascists finish second.

So past experience in Europe is that governments which undertake large fiscal adjustments by cutting public spending lose elections. It's up to Labour to make sure that the Coalition doesn't make history by bucking the trend and avoiding defeat at the next election.

How do you solve a problem like student fees?

2010-06-02T11:37:00.002Z

Some time later this year, the Browne Review about higher education funding will report, and is expected to recommend that universities be allowed to increase the fees that they charge students.

I would be interested to know what the candidates for the Labour leadership think about this, as it presents a problem and an opportunity.

Until April 2010, it was reasonably clear what most politicians thought about this issue. Labour Party Lefties and Lib Dems opposed any rise in student fees, and indeed wanted to see them scrapped. Labour Party "Moderates" and Tories supported student fees, and were clear that any extra money for universities would have to come from increases in fees, rather than extra government money.

But now in the New Politics, the Lib Dems have discovered that it is all very difficult and are planning to abstain on whether or not student fees should be raised, and some Labour Party Moderates such as Ed Balls have identified public anger over student fees as one of the reasons that Labour lost the election, and hence something that Labour needs to reconsider.

What Ed Balls and others discovered, when they went canvassing for the first time in several years, is that tuition fees are a massive stealth tax on aspiration. New Labour had thought that the only people who cared about fees were middle class lefties and students (two groups which it always felt were worth annoying in pursuit of the "political centre ground"). Yet in fact, fees hit New Labour's "hard working families" hardest of all, as people on modest and middle incomes spend their savings on enabling their children to go to university in the hope that this would help them get a decent job in the future.

There will be people inside the Labour Party leadership, and lobby groups such as Universities UK, who will urge Labour to back an increase in student fees. They will argue that it would be irresponsible to deny universities the funding that they need, and it would show a lack of seriousness about the nation's finances to turn down the opportunity for universities to reduce their dependence on state funding.

But burdening aspirational middle income voters with unaffordable fees is wrong in principle and unsustainable in practice as a way of funding public services, and would also show how out of touch Labour still is with its supporters. It would also squander a chance to win over former Lib Dem supporters.

Instead, Labour's next leader should pledge to vote against any rise in student fees, and should develop an alternative way of funding post 18 education on a more sustainable and fairer basis. That would not only show that they've got the political judgement to deal with this difficult issue, but also show how they would cope with difficult policy challenges which go right to the heart of big political debates which we will be faced with over the next few years, such as how to improve public services while reducing the deficit, and how to make sure that the UK is a good place for people to study and invest in.

*

One other objection to subsidising the cost of higher education is that most of the benefit goes to people on higher incomes. One possible way to avoid this problem would be to give everyone an individual education budget, which they could use for any kind of education or training after the age of 18.

Whether that's covering the costs of an accredited course so someone who is out of work can get a job as a security guard; helping a student get a degree in Golf Course Management so they can find work in one of the UK's fastest growing industries; or allowing someone who has worked hard all their life to study Ancient Greek for the sheer love of Herodotos - the principle should be that everyone deserves an equal chance to learn.

Radical welfare reforms

2010-05-27T10:47:00.003Z

Under the new government, the cost of the welfare state will increase, unemployment will go up, and so will the number of people living in poverty. It is worth bearing this in mind when reading the spin about Iain Duncan Smith's "radical welfare reforms". Here's three reflections on his speech today:

1. Duncan Smith's big idea for getting people into work is to pay them more benefits. Under his plans, everyone who is in low paid work will also get paid Jobseekers' Allowance, and possibly also Housing and Council Tax Benefit. He hasn't yet managed to persuade the Treasury of the advantages of this policy (surprise, surprise).

In some ways, this is a good idea. It is an extension of the principle of tax credits, and a recognition of the fact that for most people in low paid work, their wages are not enough to live on. It is also revealing that the outcome of years of research by right-wing think tanks about how to reduce poverty came up with the conclusion that we need to give more money to people in poverty (rather than, say, to cut benefits).

But the cost will be much more than £3 billion. This is an expensive way of trying to reduce in work poverty.

2. Duncan Smith's welfare policies involve Big Government forcing individuals to change their behaviour through a mix of sanctions, financial incentives, and payments to external contractors based on performance against closely defined outputs.

There is a pretty massive gap here. Reducing unemployment and poverty can't be achieved just by the state and individuals - the role of employers and of civil society is crucial. As someone once said, there is such a thing as society, it's just not the same as the state. And the spirit of "we're all in this together" means that employers need to recognise their responsibilities and do their bit, rather than just relying on government and unemployed people to behave differently.

Reducing in-work poverty requires action on issues such as employers hiring workers on zero hour contracts and requiring them to wait by the phone to see if they have any work for them; and action to prevent employers requiring workers to do a four week unpaid work trial before starting work. Big companies which make billions of pounds in profit and even some anti-poverty charities don't pay their staff enough to live on.

Whether it is replacing minimum wage jobs with apprenticeships, or requiring unemployed people to do community work, the Coalition is actually increasing the number of people who are working, but not earning enough to live on.

3. The rest of Duncan Smith's policies - whether it is Christian fundamentalist moralising by advisers who thinks prayer can cure gay people; or forcing sick people into looking for jobs which don't exist; or massive corporate welfare payments to companies to meet poorly designed targets, are as vicious as they are ineffective.

I know that the media and politicians have this view of Duncan Smith as a Noble Man who cares about the Poor, but I don't think that view will be shared by anyone on the receiving end of his policies. By all means, Labour and lefties should welcome his conversion to the cause of increasing the wages of low paid workers, and should support him against the Treasury when the rest of his party resists the cost of what he is proposing.

But Labour should also draw on the expertise of MPs like Andrew Smith and Alastair Darling - the last ministers who reduced poverty and increased employment - and Kate Green, the former head of Child Poverty Action Group, to craft a genuinely radical set of welfare reforms. Britain needs a modernised welfare state where everyone looking for work gets personalised support to help them get a job, with reforms to council tax and other taxes which hit the poor hardest, with quality services including free childcare, and where employers recognise their responsibilities and pay all their workers enough to live with dignity.

Coalition axes 44,000 "Big Society" jobs

2010-05-24T11:23:00.002Z

The Future Jobs Fund helps charities by giving them money to hire young unemployed people to work on projects of benefit to the community. The young people get a job (paid at least the minimum wage), and the chance to develop their skills, and the charities get to hire workers which they wouldn't otherwise be able to afford. A perfect example, you would have thought, of the "Big Society" which our new government is so keen on, and of tackling youth unemployment.

So naturally, the Tory/Lib Dem alliance have just decided to get rid of the Future Jobs Fund. By next March, 44,000 young people who could have been working with local charities will instead be out of work.

In place of the Future Jobs fund, the coalition is planning to create apprenticeships for young people. Amongst the differences between the Future Jobs Fund and apprenticeships is that instead of receiving a wage of between £145 and £200 per week for their work, apprenticeships will pay £55 per week. Instead of 110,000 Future Jobs Fund jobs created each year, there will be half that number of apprenticeships.

In other words, to reduce the deficit, the coalition are planning to take at least £90 per week from young workers, and to cut their pay from the minimum wage to £2.20/hour. And those will be the lucky ones who can find an apprenticeship.

The very first chance that they got, this coalition decided that young people working on Big Society jobs was not an "effective" use of money and that it would be better if they were on Jobseekers' Allowance or required to work for their benefits. It is a chilling and vindictive cut which will cost all of us many times more than it claims to save.

Let's hear about housing, not yet more about immigration

2010-05-20T16:04:00.004Z

For me, the nadir of the Labour leadership election so far was Ed Balls explaining how he and David Miliband differ:

"We all have some similarities but we have some differences: David's been a foreign secretary travelling around the world … I was born in Norwich … [and] I'm a Yorkshire MP. I've had a different set of challenges. Being different's good."

Let's instead have a look at the policy differences which the contest has thrown up.

The "moderate" wing of the party, including both Milibands, Balls and Burnham, identify immigration, and (lack of) welfare reform as key examples of why people, particularly people in work on average or below average incomes, stopped voting Labour. This is an attempt to address the argument of Gillian Duffy that:

"There’s too many people now who aren’t vulnerable but they can claim, and people who are vulnerable can’t claim" and "You can’t say anything about the immigrants because you’re saying that you’re… but all these eastern Europeans what are coming in, where are they flocking from?"

Labour lefties have been pushing back against this argument. As the new MP for Wigan, Lisa Nandy put it:

"I am concerned by the view of some, that the way to respond to the insecurity we are hearing on the doorstep about issues like immigration is by perpetuating the solutions that have failed us in the past.

At best we have failed to explain how the immigration system works and failed to delve beneath the concerns people have raised with us to understand what lies behind the insecurity they feel.

And at worst we have used immigration as an excuse for our own social policy failures - nowhere more so than in the area of housing.

It is no surprise then that we are hearing our own language reflected back to us on the doorstep. Instead of legitimising or ignoring those beliefs and assumptions it is time we challenged them."

*

It's worth noting that the moderates haven't actually suggested any policy changes which they think are needed to respond to these concerns of the voters. It was perhaps revealing that when pressed on this, Balls suggested that the priority was for Labour to explain better about the points-based system which they introduced, along the lines of "if the voters disagree with us, it must be because they didn't understand what we were doing". The loathsome Phil Woolas has made this argument explicitly.

I think it is also worth noting, since a lot of this seems to have been prompted by "bigotgate", that there is no evidence that "bigotgate" actually damaged Labour's electoral fortunes. Between 28th April, when Gordon Brown called Gillian Duffy a bigot, and election day, the opinion polls showed Labour's share of the vote slowly increasing. Labour's vote might have increased more quickly without "bigotgate", but it is impossible to know.

In fact, the example of Gillian Duffy is quite interesting. Although she was concerned about immigration, she also felt that the local schools were getting better, and appreciated the help that pensioners had got. Indeed, she was planning to vote Labour after she'd spoken to Gordon Brown. And, of course, Labour gained Rochdale from the Liberal Democrats.

Regardless of which individual ends up being Labour leader, this is one policy argument that it is absolutely key that Labour gets right. If the Milibands, Balls and Burnham think Labour should change its immigration policies, then they should set out how and why.

But it would be much better if they took Nandy's advice and instead of trying to put a new spin on old policies, took the time to explain how they would change Labour's policies to sort out the vitally important issues which the last Labour government failed on, starting with housing.

Funding advice for the Lib Dems

2010-05-20T10:16:00.003Z

The Lib Dems are arguing that they should continue to receive 'Financial Assistance to Opposition Parties' funding, even though they are not in opposition.

This money is very important to the Liberal Democrats, as it represents nearly a third of their total funding (in 2009, 37% of their total funding came from taxpayers).

I know that some would make the points that it is totally and obviously indefensible for a party of government to receive money specifically meant for oppoisition parties; that this is hypocritical for a party committed to "cutting the cost of politics" to argue for this; and that if their leader thinks that public services and the welfare state need "savage cuts", we could start with savage cuts to state support for the Lib Dems.

But here at Paskini Consultancies, we reject these arguments as examples of the "old politics". In the spirit of the "new politics", we have instead come up with three ideas to help the Lib Dems save money and generate additional income:

1. In the past, the Lib Dems have employed lots of people whose job is to design, print and deliver leaflets featuring barcharts about how the forthcoming election is a "2 horse race", and "only the Lib Dems can beat the Conservatives here". While these employees have given good service in the past, there is clearly no need any more for this kind of work. To smooth the transition of these workers to other jobs, they could get advice on alternative sources of employment from noted welfare to work experts Iain Duncan Smith and Phillippa Stroud.

2. Similarly, the fact that many members of the Liberal Democrats have resigned and joined Labour, the Greens or the Conservatives offers opportunities to reduce the number of staff employed in maintaining the membership database. This could also lead to lower postage bills, as fewer copies of members' newsletters need to be sent out.

3. As for income generation, the Lib Dems should make greater use of their High Net Value supporters and MPs. Millionaires like Nick Clegg, Chris Huhne, David Laws and Lynne Featherstone probably don't really need their extra ministerial salaries, and could be encouraged to increase their contributions to the party. Extremely wealthy parliamentary candidates such as Chris Nicholson in Streatham could be consoled for their failure to buy their way into parliament with the opportunity to make more substantial donations. And they could also solicit additional donations from groups that campaigned for them for the first time in the 2010 election such as the Guardian newspaper and the Oxford University Conservative Association.

We hope these ideas are helpful, and encourage readers to suggest additional ways in which the Lib Dems can reduce their dependency on handouts from the taxpayer. Please note, however, that suggestions that they should receive and keep donations from convicted frausters are not helpful and not in keeping with the "new politics".

The case for nominating John McDonnell

2010-05-18T16:56:00.003Z

John McDonnell represents a constituency which was Tory from 1983 to 1997. One of Labour's key policies was massively unpopular in his constituency, involving hundreds of people losing their homes and the rest suffering a reduced quality of life. Yet the Labour vote increased by more than 4,000 votes between 2005 and 2010, and he was re-elected with a majority of more than 10,000.

His campaign mobilised large numbers of volunteers, including many who weren't members of the Labour Party. He has a large personal vote in his constituency, and I've met people from other, neighbouring constituencies who have been helped by him when their own MP didn't want to know.

His dad was a bus driver, he left school at 17, and after doing a variety of unskilled, low paid jobs, he helped run a care home for children before going into politics. His approach to local community campaigning is similar to the one which senior Labour ministers such as Liam Byrne are now calling for.

I don't think that John McDonnell will be the next Labour leader. But I think Labour has got a lot to learn from him, and I hope that he gets enough nominations to be able to stand.

The evidence shows that he is an outstanding constituency MP, and if every Labour MP elected in 1997 had been as assiduous, Labour would probably still be in government. Since Labour is currently reviewing how it needs to change, it would be very interesting to see how the public react to McDonnell and the policies that he supports - I would guess that some of what he says would be very popular, and other bits less so.

There are ancillary benefits as well. McDonnell is an excellent debater and is an opponent of the Iraq war from a working-class family. He is transparently not part of the political elite, and has a strong populist message. It would be interesting to see how the Milibands and Ed Balls would do in debates against him, and it would get them out of their comfort zone. A similar exercise in 2007 would have highlighted Gordon Brown's weaknesses as a campaigner, rather than Labour getting to discover these after appointing him. Labour's membership would increase, as well, as people who agree with McDonnell would join up to take part, including some of the millions who voted Labour in 1997 but stopped voting for us by 2010.

It would be good see a leadership contest which showcases the wide range of strengths, opinions and talents across the Labour Party. It would be good for the choice to include, for example, a Eurosceptic West Midlands MP like Gisela Stuart, and a leftie feminist like Emily Thornberry, both of whom have good grassroots and campaigning experience and an ability to reach out and broaden Labour's support. But at the very least, since John is willing to stand, I hope he is able to do so. It will be Labour's loss if he doesn't.

The unfairness of Ed Miliband

2010-05-15T15:44:00.004Z

Since the election there have been a slew of former Labour ministers keen to tell us that Labour needs to change by listening to the voters and their concerns. The speeches and articles are sprinkled with anecdotes from conversations that these ex-ministers had with voters in their constituencies. In many cases it is obvious that going and talking to voters had been a rather novel activity.

Ed Miliband's speech today, in which he announced himself as a candidate for Labour leader, gave two particularly obnoxious examples of this genre. On immigration, he announced that:

"But the truth is that immigration is a class issue.

If you want to employ a builder it’s good to have people you can take on at lower cost, but if you are a builder it feels like a threat to your livelihood.

And we never had an answer for the people who were worried about it.

When competition is driving down your wages and your pension rights, saying globalisation is good for you and for the economy as a whole is an example of what I mean about becoming a technocrat. Because it is a good answer for economists but it is no answer for the people of Britain.

So, for that voter in my constituency, and many others, we need to rediscover our sense of progressive mission."

And on what he charmingly calls "people at the other end of society":

"And if we didn’t do enough to enforce fairness at the top, nor did we do enough to enforce it at the bottom.

I am a great defender of the welfare state. It is what a civilised society depends upon.

But the night before the election I was in my constituency and I met a guy who had done well under Labour.

And he said, look, I am not voting for you.

I’ve voted Labour all my life but I am working all the hours that God sends to make a decent living, and yet, he felt, that there are people down the street who could work but were not doing so.

Now we know we did act on this issue, but perhaps too late.

We have hard thinking to do

We need to re-found the welfare state: not just on need, but also on the original Beveridge mission of responsibility and contribution."

*

Firstly, Miliband's responses to these concerns are waffle and drivel (what's a "sense of progressive mission" when it is at home? How should we "re-found the welfare state"?) But more than that, he treats migrant workers and unemployed people as unPeople, unworthy of mention except as a problem who need to be dealt with by the Labour Party adopting different policies.

In the cause, ironically, of "fairness".

This is the Margaret Hodge c. 2006 approach, where an out of touch government minister goes and visits the little people in the provinces for the first time in many years and finds that they hold different opinions from people at Westminster, and announces that something must be done.

It is not "fair" for wannabe Labour leaders to repeat right-wing rhetoric and call for their party to make life even harder for migrant workers and unemployed people, and as Barking in 2006 showed, it isn't effective either. "Addressing concerns" about immigration led to Labour ministers passing laws to lock children up and force people to leave Britain through the threat of starvation. Under any conceivable definition of a "progressive mission" we need a different and more humane approach.

Miliband should take his own advice, and learn from Labour's successful campaigns in the recent elections. In the areas where Labour were successful, they didn't spend their time going on about the need to change immigration policy or welfare reform. Instead they mobilised volunteers - from all sections of the community including migrants and unemployed people - to help people, take up and sort out problems, and do effective grassroots campaigning all year round, with hard-working candidates rooted in their communities.

Labour needs a leader who understands that this is what is needed, and who is committed to making sure that we campaign in every community and that our policies nationally reflect and draw on the experience of people at the grassroots. That's the way to make Britain fairer.

Lib Dems surrender to Tory Right on welfare

2010-05-13T10:47:00.002Z

One thing which caught my eye about the terms of the Lib Dem/Tory pact was that the welfare policy will be entirely run by the Tories. None of the ideas in the Lib Dem manifesto made it in, and Iain Duncan Smith will be the minister responsible, assisted (according to reports at the time of writing) by Chris Grayling and Lord Freud.

What makes this particularly regrettable is that the Lib Dems had some good ideas on welfare policy, and Steve Webb, their former spokesperson, is an expert in welfare policy and has lots of good ideas for helping people get jobs and reducing poverty.

(Of course, the fact that Webb is an expert and is left-wing is probably why he didn't make it into the Cabinet).

I don't think I need to explain why Iain Duncan Smith and Chris Grayling will push through a set of authoritarian, illiberal and ineffective policies which will be designed to stigmatise and punish people on low incomes while providing bigger handouts to private companies - it is not as if it is a big secret that this is what they want to do, indeed it is all written down in the coalition document.

What the coalition have got planned is much worse than what Labour was doing, even before you consider that it will be combined with savage cuts to public services. And every single one of the policies agreed by the coalition government are ones that the Lib Dems opposed just one week ago. It will lead to more people being enslaved by poverty, ignorance and conformity.

More than that, it is worth noting that at the elections last Thursday, the Executive Director for Duncan Smith's think tank, the Centre for Social Justice, as well as the founder of one of their leading so-called "poverty fighting charities" stood for election. And both Philippa Stroud and Shaun Bailey were pretty decisively rejected by the electorate despite lavish support from the Conservative Party.

If the Lib Dems had cared about welfare policy, then they could have insisted that one of their most able and effective ministers was given a job in the government. They could have made welfare policy a "red line" issue, and fought for their ideas, or at least modified some of the worst of what the Tories plan. Instead they chose to hand over control over the policies which affect the most vulnerable people in our society to Christian fundamentalists, homophobes and City bankers. And no one in the Liberal Democrat Party seems to care or object.