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To be able to defend his Budget, Osborne must cut Defence spending

Mar 19

Posted by Jeff in Defence, Economy | 3 Comments

It is easy to fall into the trap of low expectations from budgets. Any one individual typically only ever hears the details from their own Chancellor and not those from other countries. This dulls the imagination of the range of ways in which taxes can be spent, a sort of mental paralysis that I fear parts of the UK is currently in the grip of.

For example, did you know that you get 2 days paternal leave in Greece but 12 months in Germany? Or that Finland recruits its teachers from the top 10% of graduates (and all must hold a Masters degree in Education)? Or that Sweden spends more on pre-school childcare than it does on Defence? Unthinkable in the UK, but already a reality in parts of Europe. Also in Sweden, nursery care is capped at 3% of a family’s salary. 3%. That’s enough to make some British parents sob hot tears given how many thousands of pounds many of them fork out on day care each year.

I wonder what we do here in the UK that our fellow Europeans look at in wonder. Don’t all rush to answer at once…

So, for my own benefit, I wanted to compile a breakdown of different countries’ budgets to get a feel for how much each spend on health, education, defence etc across Europe. Sadly, this proved too difficult an exercise, but I was able to pull together some useful lists showing spending as a percentage of GDP for certain countries (see list below).

These lists show that the UK is not the worst country in Europe in terms of value for money, but it is a far cry from being the envy of the Continent. Even our hallowed health spending on the NHS is middle of the road, as is our spending on education.

The spending on welfare was surprising, given we are close to the bottom. This certainly calls into question (moreso than already) the wisdom of the bedroom tax and the other harsh cuts to social security. Incidentally, if you aren’t marching against the bedroom tax in Glasgow or Edinburgh, you probably need to question what you would March against.

That said, the relatively high level of debt that we are exposed to within the UK does highlight George Osborne’s lack of options in terms of levers to pull to boost growth. We are, whichever way you want to look at it, in a bit of a pickle relative to other countries out there and I don’t envy Osborne the task ahead of him tomorrow.

The one area where we are top of the pops is Defence, the only area of spending that has no direct impact on quality of life at a civic level. I admit I was surprised that this level of spending is low in absolute terms relative to other government expenditure but it’s clear that this is where there is the greatest scope for savings, our budget’s area of least resistance if you like.

Reducing the £46bn cost of Defence to German levels would save £21.2bn/year, to Swedish levels £24.8bn/year and to Irish levels £35.4bn/year. That’s an expensive set of nuclear weapons that will never be fired and a pricey permanent seat on the UN Security Council. How many nursery place could those savings pay for? Cuts to this budget don’t even necessarily have to involve significant job losses given the £46bn works out at a massive £670k per person employed by the MoD.

Achieving Sweden’s success by investing more in our children than in weapons can be achieved in two ways, spending more on childcare or spending less on other areas, like Defence. Maybe it’s time we gave the latter a go.

Lists of countries ranked by various spending, employment and debt:

Education (%age of GDP)
Denmark – 7.8%
Iceland – 7.4%
Norway – 6.8%
Sweden – 6.6%
Belgium – 6.0%
Finland – 5.9%
France – 5.6%
UK – 5.5%
Austria – 5.4%
Netherlands – 5.3%
Portugal – 5.2%
Ireland – 4.9%
Germany – 4.5%
Italy – 4.3%
Spain – 4.3%

Defence (%age of GDP)
UK – 2.6%
France – 2.3%
Portugal – 2.1%
Italy – 1.7%
Norway – 1.5%
Finland – 1.5%
Germany – 1.4%
Denmark – 1.4%
Netherlands – 1.4%
Belgium – 1.2%
Sweden – 1.2%
Spain – 1.0%
Austria – 0.9%
Ireland – 0.6%
Iceland – 0.1%

Health (%age of GDP)
Netherlands – 12.0%
France – 11.9%
Germany – 11.7%
Denmark – 11.5%
Austria – 11.0%
Belgium – 10.8%
Portugal – 10.7%
Sweden – 10.0%
UK – 9.8%
Iceland – 9.8%
Norway – 9.7%
Spain – 9.6%
Italy – 9.4%
Ireland – 9.4%
Finland – 9.0%

Public Social Expenditure (incl Health) (%age of GDP)
France – 32.1%
Denmark – 30.5%
Belgium – 30.0%
Finland – 29.0%
Austria – 28.3%
Sweden – 28.2%
Italy – 28.1%
Spain – 26.3%
Germany – 26.3%
Portugal – 25.0%
Netherlands – 24.3%
UK – 23.9%
Ireland – 23.1%
Norway – 22.1%
Iceland – 16.4%

Pensions (%age of GDP)
Italy – 15.4%
France – 13.7%
Austria – 13.5%
Portugal – 12.3%
Germany – 11.3%
Belgium – 10.0%
Finland – 9.9%
Spain – 9.3%
Sweden – 8.2%
UK – 6.2%
Denmark – 6.1%
Norway – 5.4%
Ireland – 5.1%
Netherlands – 5.1%
Iceland – 1.7%

Debt
Italy – 126.3%
Portugal – 119.1%
Ireland – 117.7%
Belgium – 99.0%
Iceland – 94.1%
Spain – 90.7%
France – 90.0%
UK – 88.7%
Germany – 83.0%
Austria – 74.3%
Netherlands – 68.2%
Finland – 52.6%
Norway – 49.6%
Denmark – 47.1%
Sweden – 37.1%

Employment Rate
Iceland – 78.2%
Norway – 75.3%
Netherlands – 74.7%
Denmark – 73.4%
Sweden – 72.7%
Austria – 71.7%
Germany – 71.1%
UK – 69.5%
Finland – 68.1%
Portugal – 65.2%
France – 64.0%
Belgium – 62.0%
Ireland – 60.0%
Spain – 58.6%
Italy – 56.9%

I have literally no idea what you’re talking about

Mar 18

Posted by Aidan in Holyrood | Comments off

The McCluskey report on press regulation in Scotland is flawed for an innumerable number of reasons, some of which have been set out by LoveandGarbage, Alex Massie, and esteemed comrade editor James amongst others. It’s a creaking pile of uninformed, unenforceable, overreaching, illiberal, misconceived nonsense that has been quickly disowned by the people who commissioned it.

What really struck me, and I confess a particular long standing interest here, was the continued utter misunderstanding of the nature of the internet.

Now, the current internet is not The Internet that I grew up on. For one thing, capitalising it looks a bit odd now, even though it’s a single, unique entity and so should be a proper noun. For another it’s vastly more centralised and that means there are clearly defined and easily accessible points of control, at least for the small walled gardens that the majority of people live on.

When I was a lad we had a truly decentralised, unstoppable, designed to keep pace with cockroaches in the event of nuclear war, discussion system called USENET. It’s a master piece of robustness in the face of attack which also means that it’s hugely difficult to design a censorship system for (although the folks on news.admin.net-abuse.* tried their best with the Breidbart Index), and that’s not taking into account the various sub-networks what would probably today be called the “dark USENET” if folk knew what USENET was.

Even the web, that bane of the Proper Internet, was pretty open. There were a multitude of places you could host things, but mostly you found someone with a box wired into some reasonably connected router with a peering agreement or too, maybe a frac-T1 if you were lucky (and your dad used to kill you before you woke up) and hey, bonsaikittendotcom.

These days… not so much. You’re an authoritarian government? You call up Google, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook or… you probably only need to call them actually. If something isn’t doing the rounds on the uninformed echo chamber that is Twitter  it’s probably hosted on some server sitting in the Amazon Web Service cloud and if you can’t find it via Google it may as well not exist.

McCluskey’s failure to grasp anything that’s happened in the last 20 years is depressing but pretty predictable – the Digital Economy Act with its talk of “intellectual property addresses” highlighted just how wide spread fundamental misunderstanding about the Internet still is. What worries me more is that we have essentially squandered the most important technical revolution of the last two centuries and placed it in the hands of  half a dozen companies most of whom make all of their money from advertising and who operating in a single judicial system. As we’ve seen in Egypt this makes them extraordinarily vulnerable to pressure, and there’s a risk that view of the internet held by people like him and Ted Stevens is becoming truer over time not because they are altering their views but because the way we use the internet is heading in that direction.

Some carrots and sticks for the media

Mar 18

Posted by James in Holyrood, Media, Westminster | 9 Comments

8340743611_3d8f22e6e9_zAs a society, our substantial problems with the news media include these two. For one, large chunks of them have behaved irresponsibly and illegally with regard to phone hacking and other offences.

For another, they’re dying off, especially the broadsheets. The Scotsman and the Herald and their Sunday sister titles are now not even being treated as national titles anymore, at their own request.

The year-on-year figures are atrocious: by December last the Scotsman was down to just over 32,000, and almost twelve months ago the Sunday Herald was barely at 26,000 – not even half of one percent of Scots bought a copy. Less than 5% bought the Record. I won’t be forgiven if I don’t point out that the P&J is somewhat bucking the trend (and the i), but there’s not much comfort there.

The reasons for the decline are well understood, in broad terms, and the consequences of dwindling readership are bleaker than might be assumed. Dwindling numbers of titles will be even worse, should that start happening nationally. I made some arguments about the causes and the consequences back in 2009: #1, #2.

The London tabs in particular are facing the first of two further sticks: existing court cases. That reflects the fact that newspapers are already regulated, in many senses, or at least circumscribed by law. Nothing that happens today could have stopped hacking, for instance, which entailed existing criminal acts for which jail terms are in some cases being served. Nor, as far as I can see, would it have brought longer sentences for such acts. Bribery of public officials, like the plod we also see going down in small numbers: that’s obviously also already an offence by both parties and should be enforced properly.

The second stick was actually two rods aimed at a broader target than just the miscreants: the Leveson/McCluskey proposals. To no-one’s great surprise, the latter of those rods has just been dropped by the SNP as quickly as they picked it up, not that that will resolve the political problems they face over media regulation.

As for Leveson, it’s a secondary question whether the system is voluntary or compulsory, by royal charter or statutory underpinning. The question should be will it deliver on the public interest here?

And putting the public interest first might point us in a different direction. The public have a legitimate interest in a whole number of “services” provided by newspapers, including those which provide the reasons for readers choosing to buy an individual paper (including entertainment and the reinforcement of readers’ own prejudices). Some of those interests are essentially only enough to justify individual purchases, but some of the “services” are genuinely socially beneficial, notably investigations.

Bare facts are free and easy to find. Analysis is freely available too, and sometimes better than the papers. For all that Lesley Riddoch, Iain McWhirter, Euan McColm, Alan Cochrane etc are first class, whether or not you agree with them, plenty of newspaper comment falls below the level set by bloggers like Kate Higgins, Peat Worrier or (for a bit of Westminster insight) former Labour spad Damian McBride.

But investigative work by the media generally is largely still with the papers, much as the quantity and quality could be much improved. And the benefits of the work that does get done are felt whether or not you buy a copy. You may never have bought a Telegraph in your life, but I am grateful to them for the comprehensive way they shed light on the casual greed and corruption of the MPs’ expenses system. God knows what the overall effect of Rob Edwards’ work is, closer to home, but you can bet it includes a cleaner Scottish environment and officials more afraid to act in secrecy and attempt to deceive the public. Free speech is both right in principle and an essential part of civic society’s autoimmune system.

So let’s start with a carrot. It’s not impossible to devise a kind of support system for a responsible media that might help protect both journalists’ jobs and that public interest in their work. The Norwegians have one system of both direct support and tax breaks, designed to protect their cities’ second papers from competition (h/t @thesocialforest). The French have supports too, briefly set out here.

It wouldn’t be beyond the wit of our legislators to devise a system that might work, although the Norway system costs more than £100m per annum, which would be a hard sell even with any self-interested media support that might be forthcoming.

You could set a rate for sold copies of papers plus a rate for page views – both have to be relatively accurately audited already to meet the needs of advertisers, so policing that shouldn’t be too hard. Freesheets are harder, admittedly. You could also make it proportional to each newspaper’s original non-paid-for content. You could make the funds available only for specific purposes or with specific conditions – the aim is to see journalism kept afloat, not the owner’s yacht.

It’s a big carrot, and I’d combine it with a very different and more limited stick, again guided by the public interest. There is such an interest in the good behaviour of the media, and it extends beyond that which can be constrained by the courts. Notably, we should be able to expect accuracy. Where a court (or even a semi-Leveson arbitration setup) finds that a paper has made a clear factual error to someone’s detriment, they should be required to print (and display online) the correction on the same page. Same page online means linked to just as prominently as the original piece, and for the same duration, on the front page (if appropriate) or whichever section pages the original featured on.

Another carrot to retain and enhance is the legally distinct status journalists enjoy – for example, qualified privilege, as discussed here. There are probably additional protections of this sort that could be considered, given again the public interest in papers being able to “publish and be damned” – with the caveat above about factual accuracy.

These moves might be combined in various ways: commit to correcting factual errors in that way and get the subsidy, for example. However, there is another problem of under-regulation, too, one which is being studiously ignored. Media ownership remains concentrated in the hands of a narrow elite of rich conservative men, with the odd honourable exception, and the print media continues to be used to promote the interests of rich conservative men. Even in these days of dwindling circulation, this matters. Papers do continue to set the agenda, amplified in many cases by social media.

This has to end. This form of ownership may even contribute to declining circulation – although many people enjoy reading papers which continually argue against their readers’ economic and political interests, others do not. The opportunities for that same elite to bend the laws in their favour are greater, yet the nature of the ownership class militates against their journalistic employees investigating them or their editorial employees running those stories – just think how long Robert Maxwell got away with it. What’s more, it’s the newsroom front-line that’s doing time for hacking and corruption offences: why not make owners accountable for criminal acts at their titles, too?

And it’s still extremely hard for newcomers to get into the sector. We need a return to tougher quotas for media ownership. It’s a problem that’s interrelated with hacking, as this great piece by Justin Schlosberg sets out. That won’t necessarily do more than divide the papers amongst a wider set of rich conservative men, so, more radically, Dave Boyle’s ideas on cooperative media ownership probably deserve proper consideration (declaration: he’s a mate).

So, in short, here’s a different model of media regulation and support, driven by the public’s legitimate interest in papers’ operations: support by circulation, compulsory fair corrections, protection for journalists’ legitimate investigative and reporting activities, and moves to tackle the distorting problem of papers being treated as rich men’s playthings.

Much of this, especially on ownership, would be seriously popular too, at least until the editorial special pleading began. The status quo looks like managed decline, at best, and these ideas may seem absurd. Let me have others, if you think that, or tell me why you think the survival of the papers doesn’t matter, wrong-headed as I’m convinced that is.

Political parties must trust voters

Mar 17

Posted by Andrew Page in Parties, Society | 3 Comments

Whenever a political party finds itself in a self-created crisis, the common diagnosis is that its ills are a product of the public losing trust in that party. This is true of the Conservatives in the 1990s, of Blair’s Labour Party in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion and the Scottish Liberal Democrats following their electoral annihilation in 2011.

The notion that parties suffer as a direct result of public losing trust in them is a compelling one, not least because it contains a great deal of truth. But such an analysis is a superficial one that observes the symptom rather than the cause.

The loss of faith in political parties – and in politics itself – is simply a by-product of politicians losing faith in the people they represent. Party structures are often archaic, products of old ways of thinking, inward-looking and relating only to an ever-decreasing number of party faithful and untrusting of public opinion. If that is what political parties remain, then it is little wonder that people will lose faith in what they offer.

When parties become disconnected with voters, it is because the vital conversations are not happening. And they don’t happen because, whether they realise it or not, parties don’t trust the public. Only last weekend, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg suggested that even the party membership could not possibly understand something as complex as the Justice and Security Bill. This condescending attitude, the assumption that mere voters can elect a government but cannot be trusted to grasp policy detail, is not an uncommon one. It is evident in Clegg’s dogged defence of coalition, George Osborne’s obstinacy in sticking to economic plans that are evidently not working, Jeremy Hunt’s patronising and frankly insulting assertion that NHS reforms are being carried out in the public interest, and (until 2011) in a misguided refusal to allow Scots the opportunity to vote in an independence referendum. This is a far from exhaustive list of examples.

When politicians don’t trust the public, they become defensive. Very defensive. It’s not an attractive trait in someone elected to serve the public. Generally, it does little to win votes. Clegg’s refusal to do anything in response to the public verdict on his party reflected in recent elections – other than to “take it on the chin” and stubbornly carry on – is further evidence of an unwillingness to listen to and trust the voters’ expressed views, and again does very little to aid his or the party’s appeal.

Political parties must learn to trust, in order to be trusted. How does this happen? Any political party aspiring to future success needs to think beyond innovative campaigning methods, however useful new approaches to political evangelism might be. Instead, parties need to root themselves in people’s experience, move beyond the tribal political landscape to engage and listen, become a focal point for a vibrant, open, national conversation and be able to bring people together to argue, collaborate and negotiate.

Party politics is closed for many. There is very little public participation. But as the voluntary sector and pressure organisations such as 38 Degrees and Unlock Democracy have shown, this isn’t for lack of interest. What these organisations recognise is the centrality of relationship to conversation. Political parties, on the other hand, are too focused on delivery. Clegg is particular is keen to play up the role his party have played in “delivering” on various fronts. All that matters for him is that something measurable occurs which can be claimed as an achievement. That, however, is not how the public works. They care little for management speak. Instead they prefer approaches that suggest compassion, understanding and empathy. The managerial language itself is a product of a misguided attempt to convince those that don’t trust to do so, without ever showing a willingness to trust what the public are saying.

As a growing number of popular causes demonstrate, the public are not shy about expressing their concerns, fears, aspirations and hopes. This is changing our politics, but perversely many of the newly politicised don’t see conventional party politics as their natural home. The reaction of parties to such groups, especially single issue campaigns, is often one of suspicion – thus reinforcing the mutual inability to trust.

Top-down approaches and obsession with “delivery” is born out of an inability to trust and in turn breeds distrust. This is the politics of the past. Not only do parties have to start trusting people, but those people have to feel this to be true.

The instinct to direct, control and lead the conversation speaks of a mindset that cannot trust voters; an imperial mindset that, even in the 21st century, believes that a disconnected cabal knows best. The desire to control and command does not lend itself to trust others, or indeed to being trusted. Neither do such inclinations do much for furthering positive relationships, whose centrality and importance to fulfilled living is self-evident. A political party that trusts the public will not only listen but be receptive. It will seek to empower rather than control. Its identity will stem from experience of engaging with voters, rather than vice versa. It will promote relationship above delivery; working with people rather than for them. Such relationships will inevitably be challenging but they will also be supportive.

In the 1980s, the SDP realised this. The SDP trusted people, perhaps insufficiently – but they were quick to style themselves as an alternative to the politics based on mistrust of “ordinary” people. The SDP failed to break the allegorical mould either electorally or culturally, but a new approach was pioneered: trusting people to stand up for their own interests. Perhaps the sad demise of the SDP is one reason why trusting voters didn’t catch on – it seemed there was little electoral advantage to be gained from it.

The SDP (and, for that matter, their Alliance partners) knew that voters respond more positively to discussion about the kind of society we want to create rather than precise policy details and programmes for government. They dared to suggest that people were more important than manifestos and political institutions – something also identified by Alex Salmond’s SNP who were elected to majority government in 2011 in spite of, rather than because of, their key political objective.

Why should politicians trust voters? Firstly, because they need to abandon the false belief that it is politicians, and political parties, that wield power. This notion is faintly ridiculous today, not least in the aftermath of a global recession. Secondly, when today’s political parties all have a problem with diversity and rapidly shrinking memberships, trusting voters and daring to engage positively with them will bring much needed vitality and freshness into the political sphere. And thirdly, because if parties refuse to change they will inevitably die.

Labour mistakenly placed its trust in PR consultants, managers and professional politicians. For all the talk of “the Big Society”, the Conservatives show insufficient willingness to do things very differently. The Liberal Democrats are focused on “delivery”, lacking the insight to recognise that the attitudes at the heart of this emphasis are entirely at odds with their claimed ethos of empowering society. The SNP is no stranger to centralising instincts and its victory in 2011, while admittedly the product of voters trusting the First Minister more than his Labour counterpart, was the result of a brilliant campaign to achieve an immediate need rather than an indication of longer-term change of political culture.

A parent or teacher hopes that they can, via their efforts, help a child to fulfil his or her potential. They place trust in the child. It is through such relationships that the child in turn learns to trust. This is a simple metaphor but it applies to modern politics. A politics that is above this reality of human relationship and interaction does not deserve to survive. As the desire for love is everywhere, so is that for democracy – even those cynical about politics support democracy. That democracy must be deepened rather than demeaned, expanded rather than diminished as people are enabled to positively impact the world in which they live.

That is the reality, and it is one central to party development. People treated as strangers and outsiders are not trusted, and thus it is no surprise when they don’t trust in return. Learning to trust could be either the key to a revival in electoral fortunes or for securing future success. But electoral good fortune cannot be an end in itself. Trevor Jones once told Liberal Assembly “I love those votes!” but times have moved on and we must be more focused than ever on the voter rather than the vote. Real pluralism demands quality conversation between political parties and the public – with support groups, charities, trade unions, service users and non-partisan political groups.

Political conversation in recent decades has essentially been a matter of politicians presenting their pre-conceived schemes to the public and asking for their approval. That arrangement is no longer fit for purpose. Our political parties must learn to lead democratic conversations, trusting the public to do what politicians themselves do: talk, debate, argue, negotiate, find solutions, work together, look forward, consider options and make plans.

Trusting is never easy but, if our democracy is not only to survive but be strengthened and revitalised, it is essential. Who is up to the challenge?

Leveson – a nightmare scenario for the SNP

Mar 14

Posted by Jeff in Constitution, Media | 14 Comments

A few months ago, First Minister Alex Salmond made the decision that the Scottish Government would decide how the Leveson proposals would be implemented in Scotland. No doubt with half an eye on the independence referendum, the opportunity to build a Scottish solution to a UK problem was simply too good to miss.
 
Today, given the Prime Minister has abandoned Leveson discussions with Labour and the Lib Dems, there will be a vote on Monday on whether Leveson will be underpinned by significant statutory legislation, as Miliband and Clegg prefer, or whether the press will get their own way with a Royal Charter, under Cameron’s proposals. The vote is expected to be very tight and the SNP may well hold a balance of power that it does not want.
 
Going by Evening Standard Paul Waugh’s calculations:
 
For a Royal Charter:
 
315 votes – Con + DUP + Ind
 
For statutory legislation:
 
314 votes – Lab + LD + Plaid + Green + SDLP + Alliance + Respect
 
 
As a matter of principle, the SNP does not vote on devolved matters, which Leveson patently is. However, if the six SNP MPs abstain on Monday, as they did for similar principles on the Equal Marriage vote a few months ago, then they will likely be handing David Cameron an important victory and opening the Nationalists up to charges of being Tartan Tories and helping ‘Salmond’s best buddy’ Rupert Murdoch.
 
 
It’s a bit of a nightmare lose-lose scenario, and the least worst solution is probably to vote alongside Labour and the Lib Dems, not to mention the McCanns.