Budget/Poverty thoughts - 5 comments

This is mainly a collection of Budget- and poverty-related thoughts, the former only about a week late, thanks to endless editing and the fall-out from my newly-reimposed discipline of 6.20 am wake-up calls. I'll also deal with a few points raised elsewhere, especially those I haven't seen answered satisfactorily.

Firstly, on the Budget, here's the Institute of Fiscal Studies's summary, via Tom Freeman, if you haven't already seen it:

• Sensible tax reforms with revenue recycled to minimise losers
• Higher-rate tax-payers unaffected, 65+s paying tax gain, hard to generalise about others
• Tax credit rises for low-income families generally exceed income tax losses
• Around a fifth lose, two-fifths gain, two-fifths largely unaffected
• As usual, low-income families with children gain, but still much to do to hit 2010 child poverty target
• Overall impression of Brown’s record unaffected
• Highly redistributive, especially to families with children and pensioners

Effectively replacing the 10% tax band with increased Working Tax Credits [WTCs] - that work rather like a negative income tax, and whose take-up is currently poor - still strikes me as odd. Neill Harvey-Smith at the rather fine Vote NHS blog argues that this is an unwelcome move away from individual self-reliance. In contrast to those welfare systems that operate a Citizen's Income (that is to say, none), dependency can only be prevented by carrots and sticks, within systems - such as our own - that are based upon reported or assessed need, and potential recipients who prefer to be self-reliant must miss out in many ways. To single out WTCs therefore seems to miss the bigger picture. I still can't say I entirely understand the idea behind the Chancellor's move; that being the case, does anyone have a possible explanation other than the cynical hope that take-up will be low and benefits unclaimed, that is ascribed to Mr. Brown by political opponents?

With all the arguments over benefits, lower tax bands, minimum wages, and withdrawal rates, let's not forget that being out of work - and being kept out of work, whether by macroeconomic policy, poor skills, a lack of mobility, high withdrawal rates, or wage floors - is the most damaging scenario the poor face, and we should not forget what we rightly argued in the 1980s and 1990s, that increased unemployment is not something we should lightly play off against, say, higher statutory minimum wages for easily-replaced workers.

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There's been a lot of recent attention given to the apparent increase in the number of children in poverty. What appeals most to me, politically, are significant increases in the quality of life and the number of opportunities opening up to the poorest and thereafter to others, working up through the wealth/opportunity/power scale. The "60% of median income" poverty line is a statistical measure, that guides policy but also distracts. It tells us nothing about opportunity, or power, or job security, let alone health or education, and it tells us things about higher earners, as any average must.

There must be statistics, but misunderstandings will arise when those who use the statistic argue with the majority, who determine poverty subjectively, using both senses intermittently, such as at this David Osler post. Using the 60% measure of poverty it is indeed almost impossible to escape it while on benefits. Probably only a recession, or a large increase in the basic rate of taxation can lower median income sufficiently to raise a single parent on benefits from being poor to 'not poor', and that without a penny of extra money being spent on them, but with prices continuing to rise. Undoubtedly a perverse way to escape poverty. And the more the effort to alleviate poverty is focussed on the most disadvantaged groups, the smaller the effect on the total number of poor.

If the term 'poverty' is to remain a condition that encourages Labour supporters to advocate the most urgent preventative action, it must be an accurate guide to the disadvantage that traps and restricts people and causes suffering, and to any injustices that bring this about - one which doesn't simultaneously try to measure income inequality. A measure like the Human Poverty Index, while including a relative income element, also factors in long-term unemployment, literacy levels, and life expectancy. A richer measure like this would be more likely to identify disadvantage, and potentially a figure could be calculated for each socio-economic group or income quintile. Of course there can be no substitute for looking for the Budget's effects on individuals themselves, particularly those at the bottom, to see how the people are affected materially, what problems the measures solve, what problems they create or leave standing, and how they affects the people's prospects and ambitions for the future. It might also encourage politicos to pay more attention to the effectiveness of public spending, rather than its scale.

*

I notice some bloggers have used the cut in the main corporation tax rate to introduce "city bonuses" to the conversation. I'm not going to whitewash that issue, but I feel I ought - once again - to interject to tackle a bad and misleading argument, before the two concepts become one in people's minds. So here's an alternative hypothesis: that companies employ workers, and might - as a result of the cut - be able to employ more in the future, for more hours, and for more money, just as companies are able to do in healthy economic conditions, and not in recessions.

Thinking of benefits as only affecting the poor, income tax the middle class, and corporation tax the rich, when they are - as are we all - interdependent, has (had) an unfortunate effect on left-wing attitudes to government spending in the UK. It might well be responsible for the popular idea on our side that - whatever you or I think about current rates - income taxes cannot be acknowledged as being close to "too high" while poverty and social problems remain, even though those same taxes affect most of us. I fear that this tax anxiety is not simply a product of the "Blairite" imagination, or (insert something about Murdoch), the real challenge being that both poverty and politically unsustainable taxes may coexist, and the issues of rising expectations and the effectiveness of public spending must be looked into, by those who are serious about tackling poverty but know they cannot do so from the Opposition benches.

Blog Costs - 2 comments

David Miliband has gone into more detail on the costs of running his Defra blog, but it's short enough to quote in its entirety:

Contrary to the repeated falsehood that this blog costs £40,000, here are the facts. The initial start up cost of the blog at ODPM was £6,000. The changeover to Defra cost £1,250 and ongoing technical costs amount to £900 pa. Since I write my own blogs, read comments, and don't have a shadow blogger the admin costs are low: one valiant official spends part of his time posting blogs and comments. It is estimated that this takes around 10 hours per month at an estimated cost of £300.

This is public money, so it's David's responsibility to make it as useful and revealing a resource as he can, but as regards the costs, these sound completely reasonable and not at all extravagant. Suppose you were commissioning a branded blogging system for your organisation, designed and laid-out, and backed by a suitable database: would you object to paying for development, installation, and testing that equates to, what, 10 man-days at a UK-based web development company? Annual running costs are also, without going into too much detail, not a million miles from what is paid for this site.

P.S. There is a Budget-oriented post coming - maybe later today?

The Knowledge - 4 comments

Sorry for the light posting; to give myself a bit more time to think of something to say about the Budget (comments here are thoughtful), or indeed anything else of importance in the world, please try to be satisfied with this:

Among the debris I collected from drawers at my former workplace was the following business card (you may speculate as to why I tore one end off) from Cozy's Bar & Restaurant ("The original City Wine Bar"), 11 Sun Street, London. Click for a larger version.



Kudos to the first reader to spot something a little odd about the map printed on the reverse - odd, given that I picked up the card in either Christmas 2005 or Christmas 2006, and it has an email address (AOL) printed on the other side. Anybody?

Power Bloggers II: a response - 7 comments

Fellow B4L-er Mike Ion has posted enthusiastically at Comment Is Free on the subject of political blogging, citing the extent of these bloggers' influence, and suggesting Labour's upcoming deputy leadership campaign indicates that Labour politicians are beginning to use blogging to engage ('meaningfully', no less) with potential supporters. You might be surprised to find that my assessments differ almost completely with Mike's. That's not pessimism on my part, I'm just optimistic about what can be achieved, and realistic about the value of what there is now.

I must say that if I was tasked with defending and promoting blogging, I wouldn't introduce well-known right-wing gossip blogs (with which you're already familiar) so soon into the conversation, not even to indicate the level of 'influence' bloggers have, nor would I substitute online media pundits for off-line ones by introducing ConservativeHome's Tim Montgomerie as a a "respected and influential commentator". Still, if blogging influence is to be measured by being given the opportunity to appear on Sky News at 2 am and read blogland title-tattle to a fuddled news anchorman in order to pretend one has important information the dead trees don't, then I'm happy to plough my lonely furrow - or rather, we are.

Debate is all well and good, but what this article doesn't address is (slightly going back to my "2020 Vision" points): how are arguments actually won online? How do you change minds? How can you bring the power of your argument to bear on a policy-maker? How does a politician actually assimilate 'feedback' in the real world, when talk is cheap, and voters can be strategic rather than honest? Blogging, as it stands, doesn't represent the slightest step towards a more participatory democracy: whatever progress has been made towards a more 'reasoned debate', the absence of any direct responsibility between on-line politician and blog-reading voter, and the limitations of the current blogging model - where politicians post and then respond to reader comments in the hope/belief that they are a guide to public opinion - just frustrate policy-making. Moreover the noise and anger of the most vocal political bloggers has fostered - so often - a poisonous atmosphere that prevents co-operation between people with different political views. This seems to be prevalent even among politicians as close to the electorate as local councillors - particularly so, from my experience, especially when Liberal Democrats are involved.

There have been some happy consequences of the upsurge in Labour-oriented blogging caused by the deputy leadership campaign. Activists from all sections of the party have clearly felt there is an opportunity to get their message across (at least, those with a matching candidate). It has also encouraged on-line community-building, with large Labour groups now developing on FaceBook. Best of all, activists are brought closer into the online Labour fold, as can be seen at Bloggers4Labour.

Nonetheless each glitzy deputy leadership themed blog site that appears represents tens of hours of some young designer's time that can't be transferred either to the wider movement, or to the delivery of policies. There's little evidence from around the sites of any great attempt to involve people online more substantially than the same old "post and comment" model, and I'm not at all convinced that the candidates, if polled, would honestly admit they knew what blogging was really about. Take away the RSS feeds and too often one is still looking at a "poster" site, packed with photographs, extracts from speeches delivered elsewhere, endorsements from "the great and the good", and destined to disappear or gather dust if the candidate fails to win through.

What this creates is a ghostly impersonality, when what would surely appeal more to voters is a feeling that a politician 'inhabits' the site, is watching and listening, is ready to respond honestly and frankly to questions and comments, and that the voice that responds really is that of the named politician, not that of a young acolyte. I don't want to discourage politicians from blogging, but when Mike refers it as being a "simple, efficient and effective means of engaging with [...] supporters", I think that misses the point of, and the seriousness of, the challenge - as well as being short of substantive evidence. The fact that supporters no longer need to fear email newsletters is a small prize indeed.

Blogging is a fine and worthy thing if you have a story to tell, want to explore ideas, resolve issues, crush bad arguments, and create links with other human-beings, but "politician blogging" is still in the Dark Ages. As is the 'new technology' that Mike cites (hand-coded HTML and messed-up templates in 2007?). Perhaps only when the 'web' of the future is unrecognisable, keyboards pensioned-off, and Blogger.com long-forgotten, will ordinary people be able to fully engage in an online democracy. I don't know (to use another predictable historical reference) what the "Great Leap Forward" is going to be, or how we're really going to make this democratic vision work and re-engage a disillusioned electorate, but (a) there has to be that leap, (b) YouTube clips sure as hell isn't it, (c) whatever it is, Nick Robinson will be telling us about "the mood amongst backbenchers" instead, while (d) Bloggers4Labour is as keen - on your behalf - as anyone to make it happen. We can almost touch it.

Aside: I notice Iain Dale has picked up on Mike's post. Read the comments, if you like your generalisations about "writers on the left since Orwell" broad and sweeping. And stupid. There are some nice touches from the left, though.

Update: Some sites I could have mentioned favourably: the serious-minded Ministerial blogs (David Miliband; the DWP's Pensions Reform, and Welfare Reform blogs), and My Society. Over to you, now.

Leaving Do (today) - no comments

If any sympathetic bloggers/readers are in the vicinity of Liverpool Street Station, London - specifically, this venue - today (20th), from midday 1 PM, feel free to pop in and make yourself known, as I shall be painting a small part of the EC2 district a kind of pink colour.

Seriously, if you do fancy it, drop me a mail to be informed of any last-minute changes of plan.

Update: make that 1 PM.

Power bloggers - no comments

I will be responding to this - just not right now, as it's my penultimate day at work and I'm trying to remember (for documentation purposes) what I've been trying to forget for the last 839 working days!

Speke by-election - 1 comment

This hasn't attracted much attention until today (considering Labour won...), but it was a very impressive one, back on March 8th, the result being:

Colin Strickland (Lab) 1,984 (gain)
Lynnie Williams (Lib Dem) 1,218
Steven Greenhalgh (BNP) 281
Cherry Fitzsimmons (Green) 68
Brenda Coppell (Cons) 54
Mark Bill (UKIP) 49
Turnout: 28.76%

Student Respect - 3 comments

Via NewerLabour (also here), here's what purports to be (though it could so easily be a spoof) an NUS election broadcast from the student wing of the "RESPECT Coalition" - probably (though I'll accept alternative nominations) the most brain-addling of the many fascist-apologising political organisations found on these isles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jEA92uJwKk

I may embed a video in here some day, but I'm certainly not going to start here. Please swallow whatever you're eating or drinking before viewing.

Update: some more Respect-oriented idiocy (not deserving of a post in its own right): Lena de Casparis' silly article at CiF on the injustice of Ugly Rumours' "War" track (complete with George Galloway cameo) not doing better in the charts. I listened to it so you don't have to, and even in today's "hit parade" this doesn't deserve to be higher than #21.

Thinking Blogger award - 1 comment

Sorry for not passing this on...



but something tells me this meme has run its course...

Trident - rehashed - 12 comments

It's a shame we're not hearing much from the supporters of Trident renewal, so the very least I can do is point you to this blog's coverage of the issue back in December, which attracted the merest murmur of interest back then, but seems pretty robust to me.

Just a quick point for supporters of an "independent nuclear deterrent/independent foreign policy": really? Is that a genuinely, commonly held view among opponents of renewal? That Britain ought to have, in an ideal world, the capacity to pursue its own foreign policy - perhaps even launching weapons - without recourse to NATO, the UN, or our American friends? That doesn't sound the right kind of approach at all for an internationalist - it certainly doesn't appeal to me - but perhaps this is just an argument of convenience.

I'm not saying that invalidates the case of the opponents to any great degree, but if it's a lousy argument, let's kill it, even if the Little Englanders have to leave the coalition.

Update: Once again, I've been vague - I've emboldened the bit I've inserted at the start.

Update II (14/03): Couple of very good posts on the subject. This from Rob Newman:

Nuclear weapons are vile things. They are weapons of mass destruction in the most literal sense. But the notion that if we have Trident it lies unused is false. If you have a nuclear deterrent, you are always using it. The very fact that it exists and is in your hands makes your enemies reconsider the notion that they can hold you to ransom. That may be, literally, MAD logic; but it is logic nevertheless, with historic precedent.

... and this from Chris Dillow on how a demand-revealing referendum could, more honestly, reveal (or, have revealed) public opinion towards renewal, by making people put their money where their mouth is. Some people need money to live, I hear you cry. But what if the government gave all citizens a fund of money to use under these circumstances, as part of - or in addition to - a Citizen's Income?

Google Gadgets - 3 comments

If you have a customised Google Home Page, you'll be familiar with Gadgets: mini Google calendars, mail views, maps, puzzles, clocks, timers, and so forth.

Well, it turns out that it's surprisingly easy to create new ones. The following simple Recently Recommended (yes, that again) gadget took no more than half-a-day from start to finish (which includes me wasting an hour or two on a rather dumb first version). It doesn't auto-update (though it could), but it does at least give you the latest each time you refresh your page. I'm sure you can think of other, more interesting candidates for gadget-isation.



Click the button below to add this to your own Google page.



Please test gently at first. I'll submit the gadget to Google's directory if all goes well, so please don't publicise until then. Do let me know if you see anything weird.

Thanks to everyone whose kind donations have seen their blogs immortalised in the screenshot. Only kidding - that's an unadulterated list, but it's a hassle to recreate the images, so you're stuck with them for the time being!

Cruddas fever - 1 comment

I've met Jon Cruddas (briefly) - he seems like a great guy, and I don't have a big problem with the fervour for his campaign that we're seeing amongst Labour bloggers, except when people are disproportionately using our recommendations facility to plug, frankly, just about any blog post that offers favourable coverage.

I know it's pointless to issue guidelines about recommendations, but the original vision was that it was the "best" articles that would attract votes, not just the ones you liked or that supported a particular faction or campaign that you were associated with. It's not a huge deal, but there have been some pretty blatant examples of this happening, and today's is just one of several.



I don't know whether these seven votes are the result of one person or several, and I'm sure it's nothing to do with the bloggers who appear above, but surely people can see that recommending posts (one of which consists of a single link) in this way is unethical, just as it is unethical to vote for your own posts. In the great scheme of things this hardly matters a jot, but we're not so vast and faceless a network that there aren't people who care about keeping things tidy, honest, and sticking up for those bloggers who plough lonely furrows but who still produce great posts.

Update (10/03 @ 00:50): whoever's doing this obviously isn't reading, as the last three recommendations have gone onto the same pile.

Guido 2.0 / Bullingdon - no comments

I've added a belated link to the Guido Fawkes 2.0 blog, and especially to the addictive Bullingdon Club card-matching game, which should thoroughly imprint the faces of that disreputable bunch of Tories on your souls.

Well, it's addictive until you discover your high-scores aren't being saved.

Minimum wage rises - 1 comment

Chris Dillow attacks the futility of today's announced increases statutory minimum wage within the current benefit framework (my bold):

[...] Of this £6.80 rise, they'll [those affected] pay £2.24 in income tax and national insurance. And they'll lose £2.52 in working tax credit and £1.73 in housing benefit and council tax benefit. That's a deduction rate of 95.5%. Details come from table 1.6d of this massive pdf.
For sure, I'm taking an extreme case - though isn't it scandalous that such ones exist at all? But a single childless person faces a deduction rate of 70%, and some lone parents one of 89.5%.
So, the benefits to many low-paid are tiny - smaller than the gains to the Treasury in many cases. And for this, the low-paid face an increased risk of losing their jobs or getting their hours cut.

If a government is going to enact laws that affect the employability of approximately 1.3 million workers, the least it can offer in exchange for making them less employable (all other things remaining equal) is a significant rise for those who don't have their jobs or hours cut. It seems to me that, while the poverty trap remains, minimum wage rises like this give us the worst of both worlds. I had intended a longer post on this topic, but suffice to say that this obsession with wages rather than incomes is costing the poor more than the low-paid.

Sorry for "giving succour to the enemy", but that's the price we have to pay for continuing with - and not scrutinising - ropey policies, when we have ambitions to make substantial improvements to people's lives. Perhaps also for dismissing welfare reform proposals out-of-hand, in order to promote our preferred alternative leadership candidate and preserve the tax and benefit model to which we're attached.

Hove Lib Dems saving the world - 1 comment

Brighton and Hove's powerful, 3-strong Liberal Democrat group (from a total of 54) took time out from assembling yet another leading questionnaire on the subject of rubbish and graffiti (distributed by the thousand to already-saturated residents) to issue a chilling warning to the electorate.

Though residents are already aware that any happiness they enjoy was only won through the tireless actions of Cllrs Elgood (no hat) and Watkins (hat), in the teeth of opposition from the stone-hearted Council, it was revealed that they were, ultimately, responsible for all life in the Brunswick and Adelaide ward. Tireless Liberal Democrat campaigning had won concessions from The Almighty, sparing the lives of all flora and fauna in the ward, and allowing the Sun to continue to rise in the morning and set in the evening. A highly suspicious-looking bar chart was then revealed, purporting to demonstrate the terrible toll that would result from Labour regaining the ward, as well as the "cataclysmic" effect this would have on the local litter situation, and the maintenance of the floral clock at Brunswick Square.

Anonymous commenters are believed to be already poised to ridicule the story on local Labour blogs, as part of an "inconsequential, unfunny spoof, designed solely to distract us from our mission to distribute enough bright yellow flyers on the subject of litter to make local landfill sites look like great big Suns."

For some local sanity, here's Brighton and Hove Labour's also-brightly-coloured, but rather more sensible and realistic web-site.

50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong - 4 comments

Richard at Baggage Reclaim reminds me that today is legendary Fall frontman, Mark E. Smith's 50th birthday.

The word "genius" is overused - and would in fact be completely inappropriate in Mark's case, but his cantankerous personality, bizarre politics, contempt for authority and establishment, and thirty-year legacy of weird and wonderful music remains an inspiration. I shall be listening to this in tribute.

I tried to find a recent photo in which he didn't look about 60, but that hasn't been possible for a good many years (plus I'm newly sensitive about image copyrighting), so here's Google's image gallery instead.

B4L building links - 1 comment

We're aiming to build closer links between Bloggers4Labour and other unimpeachable organisations - if you'd like to know who, why, how it's going, how to get involved, or have criticisms or suggestions, here's the thread on the Forum.

Labour bloggers mapped - 2 comments

Here's a new page that plots the locations of all Labour bloggers using Google Maps. Actually, we only have data for about 260 of the 440-something blogs, and for none of the ones I found using MpURL, but I aim to fill as many of those gaps as I can. It's fun nonetheless.



MPs are given blue markers, AMs/MSPs green, Councillors yellow, and everyone else red. I've created a few preset maps, and can add extra ones on request if you think they'll be interesting enough. Here's what we offer now:

• United Kingdom
• England: Brighton, Hove, & Portslade
• England: Lancashire (including Greater Manchester & Merseyside)
• England: London
• England: West Midlands
• England: Yorkshire & Humberside
• Scotland
• Scotland: Glasgow
• Wales