Bloggers4Labour Social VI ? - 5 comments

It's been a while since we last met up, but I think a Summer social event would be a good idea. No canapés in the Guardian offices for us, just a drink and a chat in the pub: what could be finer?

As usual, it'll be open to each and every Labour blogger, as well as not-necessarily-Labour friends of this site.

Venue: we've 'done' London a few times now, and Brighton and Manchester once each. How about this: given that I also need a holiday, if you'd like to suggest an alternative UK venue that you reckon will bring in a few B4L-ers, please suggest it in the comments.

Possibilities include: Birmingham, Oxford (still?), somewhere in Yorkshire, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cardiff.

Dates: tbc, but within the next month.

Let me know what you think, below.

P.S. If you ever fancy hosting your own event under the B4L banner, wherever you are, let me know and I'll try to help you organise it.

Minimum Income Standard - 6 comments

I might have a bit of a track record on minimum-income proposals, but this one sounds just great (via).

I complained a couple of weeks ago about the Government's targeting of the official '60%' poverty line, and the lack of criticism of that target by bloggers and commentators. Don Paskini mentioned in the comments that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (et al.) had something in the pipeline, and here it is.

A single person in Britain needs to earn at least £13,400 a year for a minimum standard of living, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) has claimed. [...]

According to the report, which took two years to put together, the spending power needed to pay for a basic but socially acceptable standard of living was higher than the official government calculated poverty line. [...]

"It is about having what you need in order to have the opportunities and choices necessary to participate in society," it said. [...]

Jonathan Bradshaw, professor of social policy at the University of York and co-author of the report, said that this was the first time the question of how much income was enough had been addressed.

Just suppose the Government committed to guaranteeing the relevant minimum income to each single person, lone parent with child, pensioner couple, etc. so that nobody could/need fall below, remodelling the tax and benefit system as necessary. Isn't that a strategy socialists ought to be supporting?

For me, the minimum wage - while useful on its own - doesn't carry one-tenth of the moral weight that a minimum income does, not least because it benefits the poorly-paid, not the poor. If I took an evening job that would normally have paid £4.00/hour, at the legal/going rate of £6.00/hour, then I'd (a) be earning a wage premium I didn't personally need; and (b) deny that premium to someone poorer. I'd also observe that if the wage rate was reduced to, say, £3.00/hour, two vacancies could be opened, not one.

It's all very well to call that an 'obscene' wage. It would seem so to me if those who took the two jobs could not then hope to earn the minimum acceptable level of income the JRF have identified. I wouldn't be so concerned if one applicant was a middle-class student with a comfortable family income, while the other was somebody topping up their income with a second job. They're down our list of priorities, surely.

This is why a minimum income is much more important than a minimum wage. Incomes (I'm excluding the effects of benefits, dividends, etc.) are the basis of a human being's existence. The battle against low wages is only a rough approximation of the real battle, and distract us from those for whom even minimum wages are insufficient, and those for whom minimum wages pay an undeserved benefit.

Once people have the imperishable safety-net of a minimum income, there's no longer any need to control wages. People will be able to take the jobs at the price employers are prepared to pay, or else tell them to get stuffed. Sure, there are 'dependency' issues here, but while they might decrease employment, uncontrolled wages ought to increase it. Nevertheless, those on the lowest incomes have bargaining power they didn't have before.

And just think what we could do to the benefits system, and tax rates...

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I really think the Labour Party should seize the opportunity to champion the Minimum Income Standard campaign. It won't do for the Department for Work and Pensions to say:

"This government is committed to a fairer, more inclusive society, providing opportunity for all. We have lifted 600,000 children and nearly a million pensioners out of poverty. [...]"

when - on that definition of poverty - those children and pensioners could slip back just because of a change in the nation's median income, and when the benefits of the Government's anti-poverty strategy are buried within those figures.

This looks like an opportunity to enact some really radical change: to reject the conservatism of those politically to our immediate left and right, to simplify the tax and benefit system, and to provide the kind of safety-net that our 'Welfare State' has patently never really provided.

Myers-Briggs Types - 1 comment

My employer has had the bright idea of organising a "card game" for everyone in the office, this Thursday evening. Intelligence reaches me that this is almost certainly boils down to a Myers-Briggs test, which is covered here at the Skepdic's Dictionary. See also this drivel.

I'm sure I speak for all B4L readers when I state that I'd really rather not undergo a pseudo-scientific test (if that's quite the right term) of this nature, and so I ask "How do I get out of this?" or, more realistically, "How can I render any results I produce unusable?". Presumably the worst possible situation would be to produce a 'clear' result (insofar as these results can be clear) that wasn't even 'me'.

If anyone has any suggestions or experience, please post them here, as I'm sure it's in the public interest that such testing is challenged.

Anti-capitalism and conspiracy theories - 1 comment

That I was surprised to read this:

That is why on this issue of Civil Liberties I will be voting and campaigning for David Icke in the by Election.

from a Labour blogger, is one way to sum up my reaction. This is a bit worrying, too:

There are plenty of us in the Party who have some similar views to David Icke [...]

And, here, we get to the root of it:

What interests me about Icke is his commentary on how Democracy is used as a cover for Global Capitalism's control of the media and politics, we are kept in the dark over so many things, from the environment, medical progress through to basic Human Rights and the surveillance of the Orwellian 1984 society.

Surely anyone who puts capitalism on a par with the (reptilian!) Illuminati is more to be pitied than condemned, but I wonder how far people who habitually talk about "corporate interests", and who employ the "You're only saying that because..." argument, have travelled down the same road. It's a complex world, but belief in conspiracies and all-encompassing forces that are beyond our ability to rationally assess them, even with all our political, economic, philosophical, sociological, and scientific tools, is not a rational decision: it marks a deliberate opting-out of the rational inquiry that created the world we know, and a deliberate step into the arbitrary, untestable world of cranks.

Perhaps it's a sign of the widespread ignorance of economics, philosophy, etc., that the only bits that register when people learn about capitalism concern size, scale, ubiquity, and so on, rather than how the economy works; the interaction of governments, firms, workers, consumers; alternative economic systems, etc.; let alone any material between Marx and The Economist. Lumping all economic issues under 'capitalism', and discrediting the discipline, not only limits our ability to (sensibly!) criticise capitalism, it also makes it more likely that future systems of distribution will be based around normative political principles, like 'need', 'desert', and 'right'; rather than liberal principles like 'desire', 'preference', and 'motivation'.

Moreover, to ascribe God-like powers to 'Global Capitalism' is the kind of thing we'd expect from someone on an island who has been introduced to other human beings for the first time, who might easily associate the unknown with the magical and superhuman. Perhaps it's a sign of the degree to which workers are alienated from the economic system: if they can't see that their boss is the slightly fatter one with the top hat in the office upstairs, he might as well be a Reptilian Zionist who does his work at the North Pole.

Whatever the reasons for its existence, the capitalism-as-conspiracy-theory argument needs to be stamped out, because it encourages people to support cranks; to read drivel, rather than the many fine works that make up the left-wing canon; to elevate motives above actions and ideas; and it also makes it impossible for them to conduct an argument with sensible people from the political right. As Orwell says in "Through a glass, rosily", while apparently taking a break from predicting surveillance-based societies:

[...] genuine progress can only happen through increased enlightenment, which means the continuous destruction of myths.

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Dermot's piece continues:

[...] belief in God has as much evidence behind it as David's thoughts about the so called Illuminatae being descended from giant lizards when you bring it down to basics.

What these basics are is unclear, but logic is not involved. No, there is no direct evidence for the literal existence of God, but that doesn't allow belief in the Illuminati to grab a piece of the support moral authority that organised religion has built up. Moreover, if evidence is irrelevant, there's now no reason not to believe in any competing viewpoint: every belief is now of equal value.

Here's another myth with a life of its own:

Yes, he [Icke] has some pretty bizarre beliefs, but then again Dubya and Mr. Tony invaded Iraq because God told them to [...]

Norm has dealt with this little misrepresentation already. I think it shows that, for some people, the fact that there might be genuine reasons (in this case, a desire to topple one of the worst dictators of the last century) for others to make a particular decision is no match for a far-fetched explanation that is more politically convenient for the observer.

If one's instinct is to give oneself credit for disinterested actions ('I did it for England'), but deny it to one's political opponents ('they did it out of greed'), that demonstrates to me a combination of: moral dishonesty, alienation from others, and political calculation.

Of course it tells us nothing about which version of events is actually, or likely to be, true. Cynics are probably right more often than optimists, but the person who prefers to be right seeks a debate on honest terms, and doesn't poison the well for others.

Impossible Targets II: Closing the Pay Gap - no comments

Via Action Without Theory, I read that Michelle Stanistreet (who works at the Daily Express, of all papers), is standing for Deputy General Secretary of the NUJ, and has this to say:

Despite the fact that the UK has had equal pay legislation for thirty years the average pay of women is still only 82 percent of the average for men. [...] The government says firms should do equal pay audits - but they don't have too. The law should be changed to make it compulsory.

(The BBC has since posted this since I wrote the bulk of this post.) Anyway, three different points, there. Starting with the last point, I think there's an indisputable case for the Government or an independent body to audit pay across all firms, as it's in the spirit of the existing anti-discrimination legislation, and is the best way to cut off discrimination at source. We know that some companies offer different wages for employees who differ only in their gender: for example, to cover their losses if they have to support a female employee in maternity. Companies naturally try to find 'alternative' ways around these commitments, but I think it's a perfectly reasonable extension of the rights of parents not to be discriminated against by employers, and for the Government to enforce the law as it stands. I suspect few on the left would disagree on this ideological and practical point, nor not be happy to defend the costs of the scheme to the public.

Besides which, forcing employers to account for all their workers, however poor their conditions, must be a good thing.

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Logically, "the UK has had equal pay legislation for thirty years" is unrelated to "the average pay of women is still only 82 percent of the average for men". The aim of that legislation was not to equalise pay rates across the economy between men and women, or any other selected groups, but to ensure equal treatment of individual employees within particular workplaces. Since those workplaces neither individually nor even in aggregate reflect the entire population in all its diversity of employment, we can't jump from "we pay Alice the same rate as Bob" to "average female wages/income must equal that of men".

Before we look at the evidence, what about the principle? To be honest, I don't think I care whether men and women - across the entire economy - earn either the same average wage or income. Though the kind of people who audit companies don't have to be so crude, us lot use average income as a statistic to guide us to instances of exploitation, injustice, and thwarted ambitions. Those are the things we care about, not the average itself, surely?

Why should anyone care whether I earn more or less than a (putative) twin brother? You would expect us to make different decisions over a lifetime, have different luck, different preferences, and so on, so the comparison would be irrelevant. You'd expect my sister to have career- and life-preferences that were even further from mine. By all means interject with cries of 'gender socialisation' and 'false consciousness', but bear in mind that the male-female-equal-pay crowd is not the preserve of Marxists.

Perhaps you believe that my sister simply ought to earn the same as me. Firstly, this is far from a mainstream view. Secondly, what if one of us marries someone who earns twice what the other does - should the family income of one sibling be equalised with the other's instead? We're talking about wages/incomes here, not the benefits system. I doubt Michelle would want to commit to something of this nature.

Can we agree that if Z is the difference between male and female average pay, then Z = E + D, where E is the exploitation factor to be targeted, and D is a factor that reflects difference in attitudes and preferences between the sexes (I'm assuming luck, etc. is evenly spread)?

Some appear to believe that Z = E, and that clamping down on discrimination will eradicate the pay gap. Makes sense: men and women are the same, aren't they?

My claim is that clamping down on discrimination - as we should - will still leave a substantial D, and thus a substantial Z. It depends partly upon the type of job: the lowest skilled jobs, those with the lowest attractions and levels of commitment, should have very low difference between the sexes.

However, because men and women select different types of job for themselves, we cease to be able to compare. Perhaps a City trader should earn no more than a teacher. But until the day the traders are hanged from lampposts from one end of London Wall to the other, and the public service ethos is rewarded, the differential is there, and simply selecting your job increases the overall gender pay imbalance, irrespective of any discrimination. The evidence does indeed show that men are far more likely to become traders - and less likely to become teachers - than women, and there's nothing that equal pay legislation can do about that.

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What of the facts? Thomas Sowell's Economic Facts and Fallacies sits before me. His rebuttal of the "discrimination is the reason for pay differentials" argument is comprehensive rather than elegant, and he hammers away at it for 31 pages, but this is a pretty clear conclusion:

[In the USA] Comparing never-married women and men who are past the child-bearing years and who both work full-time in the twenty-first century shows women of this description earning more than men of the same description. As far back as 1969, academic women who had never married earned more than men who had never married, while married academic women without children earned less, and married academic women with children still less. For women in general - that is, not just academic women - those single women who had worked continuously since high school were in 1971 earning slightly more than men of the same description

This being before the era of affirmative action. The reason, of course, for comparing never-married individuals is to strip out the effect of pregnancy, home-making, and so on, until only gender is left. That's not to devalue pregnancy or home-making, but to emphasis that these are voluntary things, and to identify how important gender itself is. If the above is true, women who put their career first cannot then be lumped together with women who don't.

Now, I don't have equivalent statistics from the UK, but I suspect that those who cling to the 82% figure don't have much more in their locker, either.

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So is eliminating the gender pay gap really impossible, then? Of course not: as we've seen, once you compare like with like, a different picture already starts to appear. Forcing employers not to conceal pay rates, separately, is also a good thing. However, as long as we stick to the existing statistics, then unless gender employment preferences and/or the country's employment structure changes dramatically, only increasing compulsion - or breaking the spirit of existing equality legislation by favouring perceived losers - will eliminate the apparent gap:

Under plans to make workplaces more diverse, Ms Harman wants to allow employers to appoint people specifically because of their race or gender.

The proposals would only apply when choosing between candidates equally qualified for the job.

But it means, for example, women or people from minorities could be hired ahead of others in order to create a more balanced workforce.

I shouldn't complain, working as I do in an office which is 95% male, but even if you can prove the existence of sexism or racism, introducing new sexism and racism to tackle the existing problems just exacerbates illegitimacy rather than confronts it, and it stokes up resentment for the future. Let's treat people as individuals and kill off 'Identity Politics' once and for all.

Impossible Targets: Poverty - 2 comments

Harpymarx has reminded me about the campaign against poverty, which was popular a couple of weeks back, before the David Davis business took off. My criticism of the use of 'relative poverty' is simple enough, and has been stated enough times, but I don't think it's pedantic to repeat it when bloggers and politicians uncritically use a measure that is effectively impossible to target, giving and receiving praise for accidental successes, and condemning worthy failures.

We continue to use 'relative' statistics, but the language of absolutes, confusing ourselves and forcing Governments into the ludicrous position where policies deliberately aimed at improving the life-chances of the poorest are unlikely to have any impact on the standard 'poverty' measure, which is determined - not so much by (a) national income/GDP-per-head, which Governments at least have a chance of influencing - but median income, something which combines the difficulty of (a), with the added complexity that comes with the continually varying distribution of incomes and (possibly also) housing costs.

This is a recipe for confusion and disappointment, that means that no advance in the fight against poverty is ever permanent: one bad year can cancel out five good ones if the statistics turn that way. There are plenty of other reasons for criticising the use of the '60%-of-mean-net-disposable-income' measure', not least the fact the State provides up-front services for free, that the poorest can use without drawing from their limited funds. It might only be a safety-net, but this reduces the moral weight of purely income-based poverty measures.

Yet the Government clings - so it may take credit in good years - to a measure of poverty that makes its child-poverty-elimination target impossible without the kind of radical restructuring of society that would bring incomes closer to the median. But the Government clearly doesn't believe in such a restructuring, and the various charities and pressure groups are hardly going to antagonise donors and activists by associating with radical redistributive politics. In that woolly world, the aim is always to 'persuade' the Government to 'do more', perpetuating the idea that there is a magic lever to be pulled. Thus it's unfair for Harpymarx - undoubtedly a backer of such redistribution - to condemn the Government for missing its own poverty targets, when they must know that (a) a deterioration cannot in itself be a sign of bad faith, and (b) that the impact of worthy measures like Sure Start can only be assessed by a closer look at the statistics than the mainstream media and casual bloggers will normally provide.

As Tom Freeman pointed out last year, there are many alternative measures of 'well-being' that are absolute, comparable, and also moving in the right direction. It must be impossible for Labour to abandon the official poverty measure now, and assuming the Tories are in power within two years, the dropping of poverty targets will make it irrelevant, but if the pressure groups have any sense they will propose a new 'quality of life' index that it is feasible for a future Government to target, that combines an absolute 'fundamentals' element, a relative element that reflects equality of opportunity, and a 'social well-being' element.

Of course one cannot write about Government targets for the poor without a little disgust that such things are necessary at all.

Extremist politics - no comments

Muslim convert 'recruits' inmates:

A former British National Party activist who converted to Islam in prison is trying to radicalise young prisoners, the BBC can reveal.

I'm deliberately avoiding use of the term 'fascist', but doesn't this tell you all you need to know about those whose currency is political hate, whether on the 'left' or 'right'? Once the contempt for the mass of the population is there, trivial political and religious differences like these can easily be rationalised away.

Steve Gough, vice-chairman of the Prison Officers Association (POA), said the organisation had been worried about the situation for a number of years.

"This shows what we've been saying. If you can get someone that's so right wing converted then a normal prisoner is going to have absolutely no chance," he said.

Which is probably about the same amount of faith in the human race I'd expect from a Prison Officer.

David Davis' resignation - 11 comments

Call me wet behind the ears, but I've been surprised by the amount of hostility directed at David Davis, who (for the benefit of future readers) resigned today as Shadow Home Secretary - even from those who ought to agree with him in their opposition to the 42-day detention plan.

He's an MP, elected to support his party, and to express his own views, and the concerns of his constituents. Clearly he's already addressing points (1) and (2), and it's apparent that he's prompting a by-election to address point (3). Seems perfectly reasonable to me. Besides, elections are a Good Thing, and democracy has no price, so to talk of 'frivolity' and 'wastes of taxpayer's money' shows a grotesque attitude to democracy. It isn't a risk-free strategy either: seats only appear to be 'safe' until a remarkable independent candidate comes along and turns the election on its head; and as I keep saying, vote tallies start at zero and increment, they don't decrement - party majorities are no more that statistics.

If these initial reactions are anything to go by, Labour's big guns are going to take a depressingly contemptuous line. Take this, from David Blunkett:

David Davis's behaviour is a pure piece of political theatre [...] This is childish and immature and it is not worthy of a major political party to engage in such theatre.

As good an advertisement as I've heard not to enter party politics (if one were needed). Thanks, DB.

Equally tawdry, I feel, would be the decision not to field a Labour candidate at the forthcoming Haltemprice and Howden by-election. That would be a decision bound to salt the earth for the local CLP and the PPC, who might well pay the price at a local level for years to come. Whatever our individual views, Labour, nationally, has made its decision, and so it must stick up for its policy, whether that allows it to hold its vote, or costs it a deposit. The Lib Dems are entitled not to stand if they fully support the Conservatives, but Labour can't withdraw too, leaving one side of the argument/electorate with no (mainstream) representative.

Returning to the democratic point: needless to say, the 42-day plan doesn't cease to be illiberal or (probably) unnecessary even in the event that the electorate does back it (the interventions of the loathsome Kelvin McKenzie and Rupert Murdoch are surely proof enough - via Phil), but if some good is to come out of this affair, it would come from Davis and the Lib Dems eroding that apparent public support, and changing public attitudes for the better.

Don't, by any means, take that as an endorsement, but the task for Labour activists during this by-election is the same as it ever was: to battle illiberal and conservative ideas and values, with liberal, cooperative, and socialist ones. It would be a shame if, in doing so, we couldn't hope for a Labour MP to be elected.