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Buried under your own bad news

Oct 15

Posted by James in Westminster | 5 Comments

After May’s election, the Lib Dems argued that to stay out of coalition would undermine their arguments for a more consensual politics, and for proportional representation itself. It’s a strong argument, too. If fair votes ever come to Westminster, coalition will be one of the two typical outcomes alongside minority administration, as currently being road-tested by Alex Salmond without the impediment of Tavish Scott. For those committed to power-sharing, like Lib Dems and Greens, it might indeed seem irresponsible not to share power when you’re offered it.

However persuasive an argument that may have been, the specific offer made to them was to go in with ideological state-cutters, and that’s a very different choice. They didn’t decide to work with the Tories because “the numbers made it inevitable”, any more than the Tories compromised because they “felt the hand of history on their gonads, squeezing hard“. They’re working together because the Orange Book Lib Dems have always had more in common with the Tories than with Labour or indeed anyone else. It’s a snug fit, at least for a significant chunk of both coalition parties, and when you look from one to the other it’s already becoming hard to say which is which.

Aside from civil liberties, where the Tories alone were committed to a position significantly more sensible than Labour in any case, the combined result is very consistently right-wing, and it almost looks like they’re trying to alienate their voters. This has been a particularly bad week for the Lib Dems in this regard. Most attention this week has been focused on the tuition fees debacle. Yesterday, the Lib Dems’ education web-page looked like this, but today those commitments have gone. In their place is a page discussing the Browne report and the supposed wins of Vince Cable following it. In passing, to compound my reputation as a grammar snob, it currently also has a typo, like most education press releases.

If you pledge to your voters to abolish tuition fees knowing very accurately what the state of the public finances is, you can’t spin actually increasing them as compromise. Compromise might be a freeze on the current fee regime, plus a bit of wait-and-see on the economy. Abolition postponed. I wouldn’t have supported it, but it wouldn’t have led to the mass outrage at the Lib Dems seen so clearly on Question Time last night.

That issue has been exhaustively covered elsewhere, but it provided a kind of perverse cover for two other decisions which will certainly appall both activists and voters. A cross-party move was made to amend the AV referendum bill to include an STV option, backed by Caroline Lucas, Austin Mitchell and Douglas Carswell. An MP or two from every party sitting in the Commons backed it … except for the Lib Dems. If Tories feel free enough to rebel simultaneously against the coalition document and their party policy on PR, how come not one Lib Dem was prepared to stick to party policy that night? This issue has also been given a good go-over on the blogs, but surprisingly little mainstream media coverage, even from the wonkish political correspondents who could tell you your d’Hondt from your Condorcet.

The third move against Lib Dem party policy by their Ministers this week may, if anything, have been the worst. Their Orange manifesto included a proposal to sell off 49% of the Royal Mail, something all three of the larger Westminster parties have a peculiar desire to do, against both common sense and public opinion. Yet when Vince Cable set out the coalition’s proposals mid-week, that 49% had become 100%, and the Post Office network, scene of so many Glum Councillor-style Lib Dem photo-ops, would be “mutualised”.

I love true mutuals and co-ops. I can’t get enough. Fans owning their clubs. Bring it on. Credit unions. Absolutely. But “mutualisation” of a national monopoly/utility, as also proposed by the Lib Dems for Scottish Water, is just code for privatisation, which is why it’s also Tory policy in Scotland. Along with the plans now for 100% privatisation of Royal Mail, this goes way beyond the manifesto offered to the public by the Lib Dems.

The savagery unleashed on the Post Office and the vote against STV both got buried under the avalanche of criticism over tuition fees. It’s an extraordinary week, in short, one in which their membership may finally have started to realise that their leadership’s apparent lack of any real principles really will risk a complete wipe-out for them. Government approval dropped in YouGov’s tracker by 11% in one day. I assume the Lib Dems noticed.

This administration, the first coalition any English resident below the age of 65 will have lived under, is giving definition to the word coalition in the minds of many. Compromises one can understand – coalitions cannot exist without them – but the sheer volume of betrayals and u-turns are damaging the reputation of coalition politics as a whole. It would be entirely understandable if the voters felt increasingly reluctant ever to elect a coalition again, or indeed to support proportional representation, if it means more of this kind of let-down. It’s an irony, given the claim this deed was done in May to defend the principle of cooperation, and also to reform the Westminster voting system. It may kill both stone dead, along with the Lib Dems.

Unbelievably, graduates already pay tax

Oct 12

Posted by James in Education, Westminster | 12 Comments

It’s intriguing to watch when parties of government and opposition join forces to carry out a joint assault on some sacred cow or other. Take nuclear power. It’s now taken for granted Labour should be pro-nuclear, but in 2002 their White Paper declared that nuclear’s “current economics make it an unattractive option for new, carbon-free generating capacity” (pdf, p12). By 2006 they had changed their mind, and we had always been at war with Eastasia. Just the same with the Lib Dems. Less than a year before the General Election Chris Huhne was telling us “Our message is clear, No to nuclear, as it is not a short cut, but a dead end”, yet by last month apparently “there is an important place for new nuclear stations in our energy mix”.

In a couple of years no-one will really remember that either party used to be against nuclear power, and we’ll be saddled with a massive diversion from a low carbon future. The debate has “moved on”, and Government and opposition try to impart that fatalistic sense of fait accompli into the public consciousness. After all, if all three of the largest parties at Westminster want something, however insane, why bother resisting? Or indeed voting?

The boundaries of debate are now being closed down in another area – funding of higher education. In Scotland, the Lib Dems touted a change of name (from “tuition fees” to “graduate endowment”) and change in payment schedule (a delay) as abolition, a supposed achievement from their coalition with Labour. To be fair, when the political numbers stacked up for actual abolition came along in 2008, they voted with the Greens and the SNP to re-scrap them. Do it again and do it properly, as they say.

They then went into the 2010 UK General Election having given the NUS pledges not to raise fees – who have damning pictures ready should they sell out. I can see why NUS felt it necessary to extract this pledge, given their track record. This position, no increases, was already a substantial compromise on their outright abolition policy, but Nick Clegg had previously warned that he would ignore the party’s views on that.

Labour’s betrayal of students, of course, dates back much further, to those happy clappy early days of Blairism in 1997, when they not only brought in fees but also scrapped the residual grants for poorer students, an even more shameful decision and one with much worse consequences for equality. I was working at the time for St Andrews Students’ Union, not part of NUS and therefore free to campaign against Labour’s assault on equal access to higher education. Despite the reputation St Andrews has, in those days it was hardly the decadent administration some might have imagined. Again, against the stereotype, there were plenty of people there who counted towards the student poverty figures, and I ran surveys of them both before and after Labour’s changes were proposed. The demographics changed, the proportion working in term-time increased, and the anxiety about debt increased.

Now the UK government plans more changes as part of the cuts agenda, but the debate has been reframed. The choice now is between a graduate tax, we’re told, and the uncapped tuition fees beloved of highly paid university administrators. Even Jackie Ashley describes the former as “the only obvious alternative” to the latter, before urging Ed Miliband to back a hike in tuition fees instead of sticking to some supposedly principled graduate tax. Vince Cable’s rejection of the tax option is being portrayed as an inevitable move towards tuition fee increases. To be fair, given his current role, it probably is.

They’re trying to shut out those of us who think university tuition is a social good, that a good mix of arts and science graduates benefits the country enough to justify the investment. If you believe the intrinsic merit of education as well as the benefits it brings to the nation more than outweighs the expenditure, you’re an unrealistic, delusional “deficit denier” too. But neither fees nor a graduate tax can be regarded as acceptable. Fees simply do deter would-be students from poorer backgrounds, even where there are means-tests that can allow them to avoid paying. Above the poverty level, they are a factor in middle-income decision-making, but have virtually no impact on the wealthiest. And paying an additional tax after graduation on top of the debt incurred already will similarly skew admissions.

What’s more, a simple logical look at the situation shows graduates do pay more tax, but only where they earn more. It’s called income tax, and although it’s not particularly progressive, it does certainly ensure you pay more tax as your income rises. If a graduate gets a well-paid job in the City thanks in part to their degree, they pay more tax. If the same graduate decides to be a teacher instead, which their first degree will help, they’ll pay less, relatively. That sounds fair to me.

We can’t measure how much your income has been increased by education, but we can measure your income overall. Let’s just tax the latter, ideally more progressively (or look at charging business, given the way universities have come under increasing pressure to align with business’s interests). The total cost of UK higher education is currently just £7.8bn, not even a fifth of what we (largely) squander on so-called defence. It’s affordable.

Let’s be honest. Both of these measures, fees and a graduate tax, are rationing by price. Which means higher education will be disproportionately open for those able to pay, and it means a narrowing of access. Only if intelligence were somehow correlated to income would that perhaps be in the nation’s best interests.

We do need to ration, of course. We can’t afford for every school leaver and every would-be mature student to go to university, but the national interest is clearly aligned with taking the brightest and most committed. Rationing by ability, in other words.

There are problems with that too, most notably that the affluent pay for secondary education specifically designed to ensure that even the dim at private schools get university entrance-level qualifications, whereas the bright kids in poor schools have been failed long before they get to their Highers or A-levels. Those controversial measures to select students on more than just their exam results would have to be ramped up, no doubt to massive squealing from the Daily Mail. Or we could look again at Peter Wilby’s modest proposal from 1999 to admit students just from the top six in each school.

Choosing this alternative to a graduate tax or fees would incur another price. It would almost certainly mean a pause in, or even an end to, the long-term trend of rising numbers at university, the sacred cow that doesn’t get mentioned. So long as we’re looking beyond grades and taking the brightest from across the income levels, not just the pre-processed private school elite, that works for me. Even with organisation, unfortunately, it’ll probably require both Labour and Lib Dem MPs to grow a backbone. I fear a lot of damage will be to education done before that happens.

Update: yeah, Ian Bell made these points more concisely a month ago. Oh well.

Labour’s Shadow Cabinet

Oct 8

Posted by Jeff in Parties, Westminster | 5 Comments

Labour has announced its Shadow Cabinet and the results have thrown up some interesting match-ups. I decided I’d have a quick look at the ones that caught my eye.

Alan Johnson vs George Osborne

Wisdom vs youth, working class background vs Bullingdon Club, it is not difficult to see why this match-up appealed to ‘left of the left’ Ed Miliband.

It is, inverted snobbery cynicism to one side, a good choice as it keeps Ed Balls conveniently out of the way of the big, financial decisions and also ensures that the next most important job in the Shadow Cabinet is not held by someone with aspirations of being Prime Minister one day. I can imagine Alan and Ed will be an effective team together, if not quite formidable.

Ed Balls vs Theresa May

Theresa will have her work well and truly cut out in parrying Ed’s blows on domestic affairs. Throughout the Labour leadership campaign, Ed Balls showed that he can ‘think wide and deliver deep’. His Bloomberg speech was unquestionably impressive but he pulled the debate out into new areas generally and throughout and if he does the same with Theresa May, pulling her in different directions, he could do Labour a great service in this role. He just has to keep his ambitions on ice for a while.

Yvette Cooper vs William Hague

A bit strange to have one of Labour’s most impressive performers (and female at that) in a fairly invisible slot. Yes, Foreign Secretary is an important position, but Shadow Foreign Secretary is not. There is not much to disagree with between the parties in this field.

Jim Murphy vs Liam Fox

Labour’s highest flying Scotsman Jim Murphy gets a very juicy brief in the Defence role. I daresay he’ll be perceived as doing very well north of the border but not so well south of the border. Jim and Liam are, as far as I can tell, chalk and cheese. What will be interesting is whether Jim will bow to Scottish opinion and campaign against Trident more vociferously given how strongly in favour Liam Fox is, not to mention David Cameron.

Ann McKechin vs Michael Moore

In many ways I have no thoughts on this. I don’t know much, if anything, about Ann McKechin and I quite like Michael Moore, poor performances at BBC Question Time notwithstanding. So this is something of a blank sheet for Scotland, certainly a turning of the page, which may be a good thing as the debate on the Scotland Bill approaches. I suppose both individuals are in favour of Calman so where the dividing lines will appear from is anyone’s guess.

And, well, I think I’ll leave it there. I can’t say I’m too excited by Andy Burnham vs Michael Gove or anyone else on the undercard to be honest.

Fairy tales on the economy

Oct 7

Posted by James in Economy, Westminster | 11 Comments

The tooth fairy of the cutsThe Tories are making progress with their arguments over the economy. The message has trickled down even to primary school children. Yesterday, six year old Niamh Riley offered David Cameron her tooth fairy money after hearing about the country’s economic situation.

“I heard about it and I wanted to write a letter. I wanted him to get the letter with the pound to make the country better and pay for jobs.”

Is there a better way to sum up Tory economics than this? David Cameron, the personification of the vested interests of the rich, telling us the cuts must come first and taking money directly from children.

Actually, he rejected the pound, but that seems pretty inconsistent given this week’s assault on child benefit.

Jeff’s made the case here that their move is a good idea, despite the widely shared concerns about the fairness of the specific proposal. Don Paskini, one of Labour’s brightest bloggers, has argued that the winning tactics for Ed Miliband would be to tackle the specifics and accept the principle. Tactically, perhaps, but on the principle I disagree with both, however progressive it may appear to being taking money away from the well off.

I’ve got four reasons for this position, even assuming the specifics are sorted out. First, means testing is inherently expensive. The savings will be partially offset by the cost of paying civil servants to work out who shouldn’t get child benefit. Second, child benefit gives a massive swathe of society a buy-in to benefits. It’s an incredibly powerful message, that benefits aren’t simply for the “others”, the people they read about in the Mail with their massive taxpayer-funded houses.

Next, although some have used child benefit for fine dining or other decadence, many find their partner gambling or drinking away money that they need for childcare, and that’s not just driven by class or income level. Some parents with partners on bigger incomes are in exactly the same position, and child benefit gets a little way past that problem.

Finally, it doesn’t look like the result of any considered and comprehensive policy on the public finances. A responsible government would look at the debt, current spending and current revenues, and start to prioritise. What are the most vital or cost-effective parts of our public services? What are the most progressive ways to raise funds? What will the economic impact be of cutting staff numbers at a particular rate, or of raising additional funds in a certain way?

They should be identifying the most obvious waste – like vast defence boondoggles and the damaging Afghan war – and cutting them first. Child benefit for anyone simply isn’t anywhere near the cut-off on that list, , even those on the civil list (who perhaps for equity should also also have a £26k limit on their income). Next, they should be looking at the most progressive ways to raise more money without damaging the economy, starting with taxing banks and bankers’ bonuses, or looking at (bear with me) Land Value Tax. Again, increasing VAT shouldn’t have featured there. As the Lib Dems told us before the election, it’s one of the most regressive taxes going.

That information should then have been plugged into projections about the deficit to estimate the optimum approach for tackling it. One thing the Tories are right about is this: paying ever-increasing interest on the national debt isn’t a good long-term use of taxpayers’ money. At the end of a long bubble like Labour’s property/cheap oil boom the national finances ought to have been in credit, which would have made it easier to invest in the lean years as Keynes knew. Leaving those regrets aside, though, can the cost-cutting and revenue options there allow deficit reduction now? Probably not without incurring other social costs too high to bear. More likely in a year or two, probably, but it’s hard to say without all this information being provided.

We should have been shown a review of this sort, a Domesday book of the British public finances. It’s a big job, sure, but if that’s not what the Treasury is for, then what really is its purpose? Telling tall tales to children?

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Is it time the coalition gave single parents a break?

Oct 5

Posted by Jeff in Culture, Westminster | 12 Comments

It is looking increasingly likely that the biggest losers from the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition will be single parents.

The headline debate from the Tory Conference this week has of course been the rights and wrongs of cutting child benefit for those earning £44k or more. I personally think this is actually a good idea, generally speaking, and I was even surprised that individuals earning so much were eligible for such income. However, there is a clear inconsistency and unfairness to a single parent earning £44k and not receiving any child benefit while a couple earning £83k does.

David Cameron has so far been unable to communicate how this will be addressed which suggests that the problem has thus far been overlooked. I would expect some sort of compromise will be arranged but for now there is a clear demographic that is undeserving of specific punishment, if not ‘vulnerable’ in their own right.

On top of this slight, single parents will at some point during this parliamentary term see their tax payments go towards subsidising married couples. To be fair to the Conservatives, this will see them delivering a manifesto pledge (which is something that undemocratically many of their Government proposals are not).

It is the lack of flexibility of the Conservative proposals that worry me, the old-fashioned notion that the only way that a household should be is Dad, Mum, 2.4 kids and a big shaggy dog. Real life doesn’t work that way I’m afraid Dave. I know Conservatives are in favour of nuclear power, nuclear weapons but I didn’t think their dogma would also extend to an unswerving insistence on nuclear families.

And so I do hope that Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats can be a voice of reason in all of this. I understand that their position of junior partners does not give them sway in every policy and every deliverable that the coalition Government holds but surely, as it stands, this is an illiberal result.

Single parents, punished twice by their Government for simply not being cohabiting or married, is not how 21st century Britain should look.