Fit to work, but can't work

The FT reports:

"More than two-thirds of applicants for sickness benefits are being rejected under a new testing regime, casting doubt on the validity of 2.6m existing claimants deemed unfit for work.

According to data seen by several welfare industry figures, up to 90 per cent of applicants are being judged able to work in some regions and placed on unemployment rolls rather than long-term ill-health benefits."

About 65 per cent of applications for incapacity benefit were approved until it was replaced last autumn – suggesting the chances of passing and failing have been reversed under the new ill-health benefit, the “employment and support allowance”."

Between 2010-2013, all existing claimants of incapacity benefit will have these tests.

Lord Freud, the Tory spokesman on welfare, said, "“These are remarkable figures. The tragedy is that it has taken so long to tighten the system, with the effect that hundreds of thousands of people have been locked into long-term dependency.”

Just think this one through...

The first result of this new policy is that people will receive lower benefits, because Jobseekers' Allowance pays less than Employment and Support Allowance. So the new system is taking money from some of the poorest people in our society. (£95.15/week for the higher rate of ESA, compared to £64.30/week for JSA).

According to Freud, that's fine, because rather than being 'locked into long-term dependency', people will be empowered to be able to get a job, and being in work is better for your health, not to mention your bank balance, than being unemployed.

But at a time when unemployment is rising, it is a simple matter of fact that the overwhelming majority of these people won't be able to get a job. Paying people Jobseekers' Allowance and requiring them to look for work does not, in fact, create new jobs. Although one side effect is that it will increase the unemployment figures by up to 1.8 million (if the rejection rate of existing claimants is the same as that of new claimants) over the next four years.

The irony is that the taxpayer doesn't even save any money from reducing the benefit bill. Carrying out these Work Capability Assessments costs money, over £1 billion. Then Job Centre Plus advisers have to be paid to give Work Focused Interviews to people claiming JSA. After six months, private companies get be paid to enrol them in the Flexible New Deal, and paid again to help them search for jobs (and paid again should they actually find a job, and paid again if the person stays in the job for 6 months or more).

There's clearly a problem with the current welfare system, and many people receiving sickness benefits could, in the right circumstances, work. But the welfare reforms won't create the jobs which people with health problems could do. Instead, they are taking from the poor and giving to public sector bureaucrats and private companies which are dependent on corporate welfare.

According to Lord Freud, the way to make people independent is to pay them less money and require them to comply with whatever their adviser tells them to do. It's a very odd definition of 'independence'.

Tories and fascists

'Letters from a Tory' linked to Nick Griffin's radio interview about how the EU should start sinking boats in the Mediterranean to stop people from Africa coming to Europe. It's not hard for any decent person, whether Labour, Tory or whatever, to criticise this evil, racist, stupid and ineffective idea.

Or so you might have thought. But at the first mention of immigration, he and his chums appeared to have forgotten that Tories are meant to be against the "left wing" BNP. Here's their response:

"In olden times people arriving to live in your land and take your resources were called invaders. We killed them. I bet every invading army has had a fair few economic migrants hoping to profit from their entry into new lands but that doesn’t change the characteristic of invasion!"

"Whether or not sinking ships is the answer I’m not too sure. Perhaps we could build some walls in order to keep the undesirables out? There’s certainly no historical precedent suggesting that this would be a flawed idea….."

"Well, yes, but they didn’t have feeble asylum systems and ridiculous human rights laws back in those days."

"Stop making the UK the land of milk and honey for the invaders and they will stop coming and many will leave."

"Very over the top statement but in essence he’s right. We have to put a stop to it. I obviously don’t believe that people should murdered but I do believe that we need to stem the tide of refugees coming to Europe...Britain, the shining example of democracy and free speech has now become an anal, totalitarian state because we are not allowed to say anything. We are even being forced to employ foreigners in the name of equality. Is that anyway to run a business? I would not employ someone who is likely to run straight to the equality commission because of a silly joke or a word said in anger...We can’t all afford BUPA and private schools! It’s got to stop and now!"

**

And the best bit of all? The individual who left that last comment is "an expatriate in involuntary exile in Spain. I decided to leave my beautiful country because it no longer felt like my home and if home is where you hang your hat or sombrero, then it may as well be somewhere warm. I will return when my country has been restored with all it's rights and freedoms!"

Newsnight: fair and balanced

Conservative Home is very angry about Newsnight having four "lefties" and no "righties" on its new 'Politics Pen' show.

These "lefties" are:

Deborah Mattison, Gordon Brown's opinion pollster

Matthew Taylor, Tony Blair's former adviser on political strategy

Greg Dyke, who voted Liberal Democrat in 2005, warned that if Labour were elected then 'democracy was under threat', and is currently an adviser to the Conservative Party on the UK's creative sector

Digby Jones, the former Director General of the CBI, who was approached by the Conservative Party about being their candidate for Mayor of London, who described trade unions as 'backward looking and not on today's agenda' and Labour as 'always in thrall to the unions', and who wouldn't join the Labour Party even when Gordon Brown appointed him as a minister


What Newsnight have done is picked a balanced panel with four members of the meritocratic elite, in order to give an idea about what the political establishment think about different options for public spending savings. They are drawn from quite a narrow ideological range, but that's rather the point.

It would be different and quite fun to get, say, Daniel Hannan, John McDonnell, Frank Field and Sir Patrick Cormack as the panel, but there's nothing wrong with Newsnight deciding it is more interesting to get a panel of people in the political mainstream and then different people from other perspectives putting forward proposals.

And anyone who thinks a panel with an adviser to the Conservative Party and an anti-union businessman is an example of 'all lefties and no righties' should find something more important to whine about.

Agreeing to disagree

There's been a small example in the past week of how things could go really badly wrong in the future for Labour.

Last week, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Fabian Society published some research about public attitudes to inequality. Government minister John Denham gave a speech in response to this, suggesting different ways that Labour could persuade a majority of people to support the goal of increasing equality. This got reported as Denham rejecting of '1960s egalitarianism'. Denham then got denounced by Labour activists, including Roy Hattersley.

By yesterday, columnists were writing about how this showed a split pitting "Old Labourites, Compass, Jon Cruddas and a growing number of party activists...against...Denham and some powerful Blairites, still in government: Mandelson, Miliband, Jowell – not to mention those like James Purnell, who have left", in a battle for Labour's soul.

On this particular issue, this is a fight where just about everyone in Labour is actually on the same side. It isn't a right v left fight - champion of the Labour Right Luke Akehurst and Susan Press, chair of the Labour Representation Committee, agree on the central role that increasing equality has for Labour. And the research evidence is extremely clear. About 20% of people are 'traditional egalitarians', and about another 50-60% could be won over to support more equality but are currently sceptical.

So what is needed is to shift the way that we argue for equality in order to appeal to a wider audience. At the same time, we need to acknowledge that while the 'traditional egalitarians' aren't a majority, there is no way of building a majority without their enthusiastic support, and they mustn't be taken for granted.

There are two main challenges to this. The first is that the media loves to report 'splits' much more than people having civilised discussions to find common ground, and will twist people's words to try to provoke a fight. And the second, and much more important, is that different people in the Labour Party don't trust or get on with each other enough at the moment to be able to have a civilised kind of conversation.

For example, when I see a government minister quoted saying something stupid or obnoxious, I tend to assume that it is because they are trying to suck up to right-wing newspapers, rather than that they have been misquoted. This is because over the last few years government ministers have built up a track record of reliably saying stupid and obnoxious things to try to suck up to right wing newspapers, whether on housing, welfare, immigration or any other issues I care about. I know I'm not alone in this. Similarly, I know some comrades who get similarly exasperated when they hear Jon Cruddas or John McDonnell or suchlike on the telly criticising the government.

What this suggests is that any kind of discussion about Labour's future - what ideas to adopt in the future, how to build an election-winning coalition of support, which policies to keep and which to abandon - will quickly degenerate into an unproductive shouting match between different factions, conducted and analysed in the national newspapers to the general disgust of the electorate.

But it doesn't have to be this way, and it mustn't be this way. I hardly ever say this sort of thing, but some of the discussions on the internet hint at a better way. Online, Luke and Susan can agree about equality, and Hopi, Paul and Duncan can have a thoughtful and productive conversation about political economy, despite coming from different 'wings' of the party. David Miliband's John Smith memorial speech is an example of the kind of thoughtful contribution that we could do with more of.

Dropping post office privatisation, ID cards (in effect), and building more council housing are all good steps in the right direction. Government ministers need to get better at avoiding the temptation to take the piss out of lefties when doing announcements, and us lefties need to give the benefit of the doubt to what seem like genuine attempts to think about new ways of achieving our aims, even if it takes us out of our comfort zone.

In the 1980s, Labour tore itself apart over great issues of principle where there were big and fundamental disagreements. It would be both tragedy and farce if over the next few years we ended up tearing ourselves apart again over issues which, fundamentally, we all agree on.

Stateless and clueless in Somalia

The Mises Institute is "the world center of the Austrian School of economics and libertarian political and social theory." As part of their mission to bring libertarian political and social theory to a wider audience, they have a website which analyses current affairs from a libertarian perspective.

For example, they have an article called "Stateless in Somalia, and Loving It', written by someone who works in financial services, which explains that "Somalia has done very well for itself in the 15 years since its government was eliminated. The future of peace and prosperity there depends in part on keeping one from forming."

This article contends that the problems Somalia faces is because the United Nations and similar big government types keep on trying to force Somalia to have a government, whereas in fact Somali culture is tribal and is based on customary law which is like the laws of nature, so democracy would not work. Furthermore, while media sources such as the BBC report on famine, disease and civil war, they neglect to mention that Somalia's telecommunications industry is apparently flourishing.

One of the features of the Mises Institute's website is that it allows its readers to give all of its articles 'tags', which generate a weblink which describes the content of the article so that people who are interested can read other, similar articles.

So you can read the full libertarian analysis of how Somalia benefits from not having a government by following any of these links:

http://mises.org/tag/hilariously wrong
http://mises.org/tag/libertarianism debunked in one article
http://mises.org/tag/who needs a governement when we have cellphones
http://mises.org/tag/send all libertarians to somalia

Meritocrats and spending cuts

Steve Bundred, the head of the Audit Commission, wrote an article on Sunday calling for a freeze in public sector wages as a 'painless' [sic] way for the government to make savings.

There are a number of excellent criticisms, pointing out the unfairness of this, that it would be bad for the economy, that it shows a complete lack of political judgement, and that Bundred is abusing his position.

I was trying to work out what Bundred's article reminded me of. At one level, it is just the latest example of a particular sort of class warfare, where wealthy and powerful people call for middle and working class people to suffer financially and get worse services. There will be a lot of this in the run up to the next election, and it is not a great surprise to see the head of a quango choosing to repeat Conservative Party talking points in order to curry favour with the people who may be responsible for deciding whether he keeps his job next year.

But an even better explanation was provided more than 50 years ago, in a book called 'The Rise of the Meritocracy'. This book predicted the rise of people like Bundred, those who owe their vast income and power to their intelligence and effort, and whose lives are totally separate from the majority of the people. As one review explains: 'It is part satire, part a look into the future, and part a warning about where we are.

This book is written in a future Britain 2033 - which in many regards does not look that different from the present day. There are no real differences between the parties. The Labour Party as we understand it has been abolished. Education is everything in terms of getting on. Tests and measuring ability are the governing credo.

And yet this future world is not a fairer or happier place. Instead, those who are the winners in this world do so because of a narrower and narrower notion of 'ability' and 'merit' - which they see as virtuous and because they are somehow better. Seeing their individual success as a validation of their skills they see their lifestories as a success, and those who do not make it a failure.

Funnily enough, power, money and politics congregate around this 'new class', while the excluded majority are leaderless and have no political party to represent them in the way the working class was once represented by Labour.'

When Bundred refers to wage freezes as 'painless', he isn't thinking of cleaners or nursing assistants struggling to afford the weekly food shop, he is thinking, as meritocrats do, about numbers on a spreadsheet.

And when he writes about how wages have stagnated for many workers in the private sector, the underlying aim is to turn the 'little people' against each other depending on who their employer is - it doesn't begin to occur to him that wage freezes and job losses are the direct responsibility of his fellow meritocrats, and that maybe it is they who should bear a greater burden for helping the economy recover.

The 'Rise of the Meritocracy' is by far the most prescient of the dystopian novels from the middle of the last century. We're not at war with Eastasia or Eurasia, society isn't sorted into alphas, betas and so on, and Big Brother is a telly programme, not our leader (and no one loves it any more). But we are governed by an elite which think of themselves as having got to the top thanks to their intelligence and effort, and government ministers openly proclaim the aim of making Britain into a 'meritocracy'. The key thing to remember is that what is good for the meritocrats isn't the same as, and is often the opposite of, what's good for the rest of us.

Red Toryism - illiterate, ignorant and incomprehensible

Philip Blond, the so-called 'Red Tory', has just written an article setting out his new Big Idea for reducing poverty, which is about 'recapitalising the poor'.

These Big Ideas come along quite frequently, and there is quite an easy and quick way to test them out. Simply pick one policy area that you know about and see if the author's suggestions and analysis suggest they know what they are talking about. If so, read on, if not, bin the rest.

So here is Blond's 'Red Tory' approach to social housing:

"Councils have used their housing stock to generate cash income for benefit dependency for generations. By constantly raising rents, councils have created housing that the working poor cannot afford. Some sort of redress is required – a capital or asset credit, financed by a council bond, should be applied to those whose long-term benefit has, in effect, subsidised council receipts. This credit should be a tradable asset that, when conjoined with other new ventures such as community shares or social investment, can generate an asset effect for those whose routes out of poverty are presently so curtailed."

Leaving aside the atrocious writing style, this is total and utter drivel, even by the extremely low standards of most discussion about housing policy. Council rents are lower than rents in the private sector, whereas Blond appears to think they are 'unaffordable' for working people. The reason why very few working people can get a council house is because of the massive shortage of supply, not because of a conspiracy by councils to raise rents so that only people on housing benefits can afford the rent.

Based on this nonsense, he has a totally incomprehensible suggestion whereby councils will borrow money and give it to those of their tenants who have been on housing benefit for a long time. People will then be able to trade these capital credits, and this will give them a route out of poverty. They will get this (presumably) instead of housing benefit/Local Housing Allowance, because the idea is to move from spending on welfare to 'investment'. The kindest thing it is possible to say about this idea is that it doesn't address any of the problems that social housing tenants actually face.

Blond's other ideas seem at a first glance to be equally nonsensical, and he's been churning this sort of stuff out for months. But really, there is nothing to see here which is even worth beginning to engage with.

Tories fall out over section 28

You know those people who say 'Labour and Tories, they are just the same'?

I think they should read CentreRight.com, the voice of the conservative grassroots, more often. Here's a topical article called, "I don't apologize for Section 28":

It begins "I am entirely comfortable in the presence of homosexuals" and then goes on to explain that "alas, tedious though it is, I shall be forced to defend Section 28 as the liberal Conservative measure that it was".

"As virtually all of you will know, Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 was introduced in direct and specific response to a situation in which gay liberation activists managed to get themselves elected to local authorities and in particular to the Inner London Education Authority. These activists then used their political position to force school libraries to carry literature directed at five and six year old children teaching them that it was perfectly normal to be raised in a family with homosexual parents."

"Most people at the time thought (and indeed, I'll bet most people today still think) that they do not pay their taxes to the local authority so that it can promote alternative lifestyles or force their schools to promote alternative lifestyles."

***

I find this sort of 1980s revivalism ("some of my best friends are homosexuals...but Something Must Be Done about the gay activists flaunting their alternative lifestyles, stealing our taxes and corrupting our children") quite funny to read and mock. But it is only funny because these people have been defeated so are not in power and can't impose their bigoted and hate-filled extremist agenda. There are some even more revolting arguments in the comments (as well, to be fair, as some outrage and disgust at this kind of prejudice). It's worth remembering, next time you hear that all the main parties are just the same, that there is still a live debate within the Tory Party about whether section 28 was a good idea or not.

Minimum Income Standard 2009

I wrote last year about a really interesting piece of research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which asked people to decide how much someone living in Britain today needs in order to be able to live on.

They have just released the updated version, Minimum Income Standard 2009. There are some really interesting and important findings:

- The minimum cost of living is rising at twice the rate of inflation, making it harder to live on a low income this year than last year.

- A single adult with no children now needs to earn at least £13,900 a year before tax to reach the minimum standard. This is a £500 rise from 2008; nearly half of this extra income is needed for the rising cost of food.

- About one in four people are living below the minimum income standard for Britain, and this is increasing as unemployment rises.

- The minimum cost of living has risen by 5%, contrasting with official inflation figures of 2½% (CPI) and -1% (RPI). A low-paid worker whose earnings were linked to the retail prices index could be 6% worse off this year, relative to the minimum cost of living.

- Job loss can leave you with less than half the income that you actually need to live.

You can read the whole report here

And you can check whether how your income compares to the minimum income standard here