Minimum Income Standard - 8 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.

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.

Jon Cruddas: an opportunity wasted - 16 comments

Warning: this post contains criticism of Jon Cruddas. One of the difficulties that arises when spreading the writing of a post across a day two days is finding public opinion shifting against you, making it seem all the more churlish to appear to pick upon a decent bloke. This awareness does motivate me, what with my being a human being, your sufferance of my occasional rants on these pages, and the target being a Labour MP who has impressed many. Nonetheless, I try to criticise when I think it's due, and I'm happy to publish and be damned. So, onward.

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Having read Liam Byrne and Bill Rammell's earlier article ("An utterly false choice"), I can see why Jon Cruddas might have been riled, but I found his response [via Stuart] equally gloomy reading.

The earlier article seemed content for electoral politics to be pitched at the voters most likely to tilt a General Election Labour's way, with little criticism of the legitimacy of the ambitions and priorities of a few (lucky) slices of that society being made the priorities for a future government, ignoring such trifling concerns as freedom, equality, justice, or the democratic aspirations of the rest of the electorate.

Unfortunately, rather than savaging the original piece for these obvious omissions, or finding some way to engage the entire Labour movement in a plausible crusade against poverty and injustice worldwide (two priorities for any Labour Party, surely), just about all Jon could conjure up with was a vapid appeal to "traditional" values. At no point did we learn what these traditional values are, how they equip us to reduce poverty and meet future challenges, who these "traditional" voters are, or what their needs are, let alone whether those needs are best met by those traditional policies. Does "traditional" really boil down to the following?

Everything anyone remotely likely to vote Labour don't like about politics today, and any favoured policy from the past that is no longer in current use, for whatever reason.

Sorry, but anyone who insists upon using terms like "core" voters (no less silly a term than "swing" voters), and "Labour values" is being abstruse, whether deliberately, or otherwise. It denies potential voters the opportunity to judge candidates and parties on the basis of the policies they might actually carry out, and the chance to judge the accuracy, applicability, plausibility, and likelihood of success of those policies. Sure, there's no General Election in the offing, but there's no harm in a politician who wants to be remembered for their policies to act like there is.

References to "core" and "traditional" remind me of the futility of searching for ideological purity - in our case, the mythical "Real Labour". It's a label more often adopted than bestowed. It's not hard to suggest groups in society - the poorest, for starters - who should expect the most attention from a Labour programme. To what extent their concerns tally with traditional Labour voters (who I'm not yet convinced aren't, in fact, substantially more middle class than is believed), I don't know, but the policies Labour should be pursuing are what work particularly well for the disadvantaged, whether the policies are old or new.

Perhaps this is unfair - there is a little politics in Jon's piece:

Too often the second-term Labour government ... [arrived] at policies such as differential top-up fees that not only owed more to free-market dogma than our traditional values but were also deeply unpopular among swing voters.

This is unhelpful in several ways. The need to address higher-education funding dates back to substantially before 2001, with several different funding/fees options on the table, and this need was felt within the Labour Party just as much as elsewhere, so it's hardly accurate to claim the current policy just materialised. And, hang on, why would a government overly concerned with swing voters stick to a policy that, so it is claimed, fails to deliver those middle class votes? Could it be that there was an impulse behind the policy that Jon's analysis fails to spot?

Appending "dogma" to "free-market" is (I regret to say) a fairly common rhetorical trick on our side, used either to restrict discussion to comfortable or agreeable arguments, or to signal one's statist credentials to supporters, masking off huge areas of policy exploration - for example, road pricing that simply asks drivers to pay the social cost of their driving, then let's them alone - at a stroke. Funnily enough, support for university fees is one of the few policies I've held consistently over the past decade or so, even back to the days when I might have used similar language, but one problem with traditionalists is their tendency to cherry-pick those "traditions" that suit them. For example, I can't help feeling "If you have the means, you're going to have to make a pretty good case before we subsidise you with taxpayer's money, but we'll give the most help to those who most need it" is a better established expression of Labour values than "All potential students have a right to free higher education, whatever the cost, whatever their means; and taxpayers have the corresponding responsibility to pay, whatever their means." You might not agree with my choice, but at least you didn't slap "dogma" on the one you didn't like.

The idea that we need lectures from Rammell, the minister for top-up fees, on winning back aspirant voters frankly beggars belief.

We could, of course, turn that around and say:

The idea that we need lectures from Cruddas, the Member of Parliament for Dagenham, on winning back "traditional" voters frankly beggars belief.

In fact, that's pretty generous: Rammell, after all, was tarred with "minister for top-up fees"; he no more "lectures" than Jon does (though I've already stated that I strongly dislike the inferences of Rammell and Byrne's piece); and besides, Rammell didn't - to my knowledge - make any claims about the popularity of the introduction of (deferred) higher education fees, nor should that be a priority for any Education Minister.

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I don't have a problem at all with Jon's housing suggestions, but if he can make a difference in that area, wouldn't it be more sensible for him to position himself to take on a future housing portfolio, rather than gun for a Deputy Leadership job that would deny him a direct input?

Likewise - and I'm tailing off a little, here, so bear with me - I don't have a problem with the suggestions about political activity...

They think this is modern, but actually today's voters are more likely to respond to active, campaigning parties that are properly rooted in their local communities.

... insofar as anyone disagrees with that. The statement isn't wrong, or harmful, it's just lost its value through overuse. Saying it might meet our fairly low expectations, but showing that you have a unique solution, or a unique ability to achieve an existing solution, is what will restore value to the fine sentiments.

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I don't think I'm simply being pedantic here: having the opportunity to write for a popular and influential publication should be an opportunity to appear sensible, thoughtful, accurate, interested in the truth - and what works. Coming across as close-minded, and with a preference for warm, woolly, catch-all terms, doesn't seem to me to adequately reward the reader for their time.