The end of Swiveleyesation as we know it?

Another magnificent coinage by the great Steve Bell:

Yesterday Malcolm was attempting to find some kind of historical context — or, failing that, the comedy of errors — which has led to the present Great Tory Bad-Hair Day.

Today Benedict Brogan writes his Morning Briefing for the Telegraph blogs, and sweepingly assumes it’s all water down the sink. Happy Days are Hair Again. The skies above are clear again. So we’ll sing a song of cheer again:

Well, almost:

Cast your eyes along the waterfront this morning after the night before and you might conclude that things are fairly dire for Dave. He’s suffered another major rebellion (I know, I know it was a free vote, but he still failed to persuade his colleagues to follow his lead), there’s lashings of backbiting, and he’s been reduced to sending a pleading ‘Dear Mr Loon, I still love you’ letter to his members, something even American commentators have picked up on as a bad look. Nick Watt, a keen reader of Tory runes, spots a sea-change in attitudes to Dave among MPs and raises the prospect of a move against him in The Guardian, with more letters going in to Graham Brady. As I mention in my column, grown ups inside No10 realise that they are stuck with a number of what they refer to as ‘legacy issues’, from not winning the 2010 election to the gay marriage idea.

The rest of Brogan’s musings stretch for, but don’t quite reach a Panglossian optimum:

Much of what has excited us in recent weeks will have passed the voters by, and after tonight’s vote gay marriage will be on its way to becoming law, and passing out of the current political debate. With the economy slowly improving and Labour wallowing, the Tories surely should be able to claw themselves off the rocks. This will require a fair wind, and a commitment by Mr Cameron and those around him to sharpen up. It also means not surrendering to the bullying disguised as advice from those agitating against Dave, whether it’s David Davis or Lord Ashcroft. The recess starts today, a good opportunity for everyone to calm down and for the PM to have a think about how he organises himself from now on.

[For the record, Voltaire in 1759 is parodying Leibnitz of 1698: not many people know that.]

Legacy issues

Such was the vein into which history-mining Malcolm was driving his shaft with yesterday’s piece. Let us then consider what rich ore Brogan has found:

Gay marriage served as a stark reminder of just how far removed Dave’s world view often seems from his troops. As The Guardian notes, the inter-generational divisions in the Tory party were particularly stark. Sir Gerald Howarth, the former defence minister last year knighted on the PM’s advice, warned in yesterday’s debate of an “aggressive homosexual community” in the country. Edward Leigh lamented that the “outlandish views of the loony left of the 1980s” had become “embedded in high places”.

Really? Really! It’s all those gays? Hardly!

Brogan concludes by passing us and the tar-baby onto Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times. Ganesh asserts it’s 2010 and All That:

… the election that should detain David Cameron is the last one. The prime minister’s estrangement from his party has many causes – the inexhaustibly vexed question of Europe, the same-sex marriage bill he takes to Parliament this week – but the rancour really set in with his failure to win in 2010. This original sin led to coalition with the Liberal Democrats, a political miscegenation that turns Tory stomachs, and broke the unspoken covenant that allows a leader to be as autocratic as he likes as long he delivers. Last week, a prime ministerial ally was reported to have disparaged the party’s grassroots as “swivel-eyed loons”. “Arrogant losers” tends to be the rejoinder.

Ganesh then reprises the course of the 2010 Tory election campaign, concluding:

For all the campaign’s haplessness, the Tories ended it with roughly the same poll lead over Labour as they began it. Mr Cameron was still preferred by voters to his party. The campaign was a non-event, as they usually are. The real reason for the Tories’ failure had more to do with the economic insecurity that nagged at voters when shown blueprints for austerity by a party they already mistrusted. That the economy was slithering out of recession at the same time hardened their risk aversion. Fiscal clarity made for bad short-term politics, and yet the blame has somehow gone to other, softer aspects of the Tory offering.

The Conservatives did not fail because they were seen as high-minded metropolitans, but because they were too redolent of the same old Tories. They had changed too little, not too much. The people who should have been vindicated by 2010 were the modernisers. But their chronic passivity, their lordly distaste for a fight, has allowed a misremembered version of that election to become the definitive history. This is undermining Mr Cameron and shaping a future in which only the ideologically orthodox can lead the Tories.

That is indeed the “high-quality journalism” that the FT prudently reminds low-life, thieving types (like Malcolm, shamelessly ripping of those extracts) needs paying for. [Again, for the record, Malcolm happily pays for the print edition, especially at weekends, if only to pre-empt what he knows the Sundays will regurgitate as original thought.]

Two small details (1):

Those televised debates (and Cameron’s foolish participation in televised debates that he flunked) really screwed up the opinion polls. In a different context (to which we may come in a moment), Malcolm was reviewing just how the 2010 polling went. The answer is not very well:

Got that? The main impact of the televised debates was to flatter the LibDem vote by anything between 3% and 6% (which amounts to gross “data artifact“), while under-rating Tory support just slightly, and Labour’s quite significantly. One might feel that Cameron & co. have been blinded by those errors ever since.

Two small details (2):

On their perception of the election result, and of the “reliability” of the LibDems, the Cameron & co. “modernisers” entered their Mephistophelean pact with Clegg & co. — two capitalist combines monopolising the market for their short-term profit. Let’s have another 18th-century great intellect’s view on that:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (see page 111 in this e-text)

An alternative history

Wind back to Friday, 7th May, 2010, with the last of the 649 results coming in (the 650th, a safe Tory seat — Thirsk and Malton, was delayed by the death of a candidate). This is what we saw:

• Tories: 305 (and bound to be 306);
• Labour: 258, plus Caroline Lucas, the Green for Brighton Pavilion, and Sylvia Herman, likely to attend infrequently but then vote with Labour (so call it around 260);
• Lib Dems: 57, plus Naomi Long for Alliance in East Belfast (so 58 at a pinch);
• DUP: 8;
• SNP: 6;
• SDLP, Plaid Cymru: 3 apiece.

The Speaker is neutral, though votes for the government in a tie, and Sinn Féin are non-attenders (so, n=650-6). A cynical calculation is the cash-strapped sand bruised Labour and LibDem contingents aren’t too keen on a quick re-run; but, more to the point, there are at least a score of odds-and-sods turkeys there who can’t afford to vote for Christmas (sayn n=650-26). The most basic “working majority” would be, in practice, well short of the nominal 326 (the calculation above suggests 312 at most)— and Dave’s Tories are within a spit of just that.

So, in the short term, Dave’s Tories could talk the talk, cobble a “confidence and supply” arrangement with even the DUP (306+8=314), and walk the walk through until a second election in the autumn. By which moment Tory coffers, uniquely among the main operators, would be topped up by the grateful and expectant clique of bond-traders and hedge-funders.

A second election, please note, that could have been contrived by losing a vote of confidence on some populist issue (immigration?). A second election, too, in which the Tory economic record would be buffed up by the tail-end of Alistair Darling’s economics (it was only in the autumn of 2010, thanks to Osborne’s austerity, that the UK economy went into flat-lining).

In short, had Cameron done the right thing, the Tory thing, he would now likely be sitting on a secure Tory majority, and figuring his way to calling the next election at his choosing, on his terms, and not on those of the LibDem dictated Fixed-term Parliaments Act. He would also have enjoyed the benefits of a greater patronage for Tory backbench nonentities, not having to service the self-esteem of LibDem nonentities.

All the Tory back-benchers, and the wannabes out in the cold have done that math. The iron has entered their souls.

One last thing

We were looking there at how the polling companies had cocked it up. Enter the new-boy on the block, Survation. Ben Brogan (see above) gave that a nod in passing:
The fightback could just start here. Though from a low base if you believe a new Survation poll in The Guardian. It has the Tories down to 24 pc – just two points above Ukip.

Look closer, and we find The Guardian, doesn’t give Survation more than the time of day.

Andrew Sparrow counters with the YouGov/Sun numbers:

Last night Survation released a poll showing the Tories just two points ahead of Ukip.

Here are the figures.
Labour: 39% (down 1 from YouGov in the Sunday Times)
Conservatives: 31% (up 2)
Ukip: 14% (no change)
Lib Dems: 10% (up 1)
Labour lead: 8 points (down 3)
Government approval: -34 (up 5)

Finally, let’s hear it from Anthony Wells (whose shock-factor is also set to minimum):

Survation have put out a new poll, the topline voting intention figures are CON 24%(-5), LAB 35%(-1), LD 11%(-1), UKIP 22%(+6). The 22% for UKIP is the first poll to show them breaking the twenty percent mark.
In many ways the high UKIP score here shouldn’t come as a surprise, for methodological reasons Survation tend to show the highest levels of UKIP support so if ICM have them at 18% and ComRes at 19% I would have expected Survation to have them in the low twenties. Striking it may be, but the increase in UKIP support is actually in line with what weve seen elsewhere, just using a method that is kinder to UKIP.
More interesting is the drop in Tory support, down five points on Survation’s poll in April. The poll was conducted on Friday and Saturday so at least partially after the “swivel eyed loon” story broke (it came out in Saturday’s papers, so broke about 10pm on Friday night). All the usual caveats I apply to any poll showing sharp or unusual results apply. Sure, it might indicate a shift in support, but just as likely its a blip – wait to see if it is reflected in any other polling. As Twyman’s Law of market research says “anything surprising or interesting is probably wrong”.

As Wells implies, there, swallowing Survation might not produce the glorious summer the Kippers expect. More likely, “up like the rocket, and down like the stick”: UKIP is hardly the best-presented pyrotechnic in the box.

Swiveleyesation may endure yet.

Figuring it out

The classic Thomist angels-on-a-pin-head is updated by the constant debate on UK unemployment numbers. Today (despite the Thatcher-fest) should inspire a new outbreak:

UK unemployment rose by 70,000 to 2.56 million between December and February, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has said.

It meant the unemployment rate for the quarter was 7.9%.

The number of people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance last month fell by 7,000 to 1.53 million.

Also, the ONS said average regular pay, excluding bonuses, rose 1%, the lowest since records began more than a decade ago.

The number of people in work fell by 2,000 in the latest quarter to February, to just under 30 million, the first time the figure has dipped since autumn 2011.

The ONS data also revealed that 900,000 people have been out of work for more than a year, an 8,000 increase on the three months to November, while the number of unemployed 16 to 24-year-olds rose by 20,000 to 979,000.

Despite the increase in unemployment, the total is 71,000 lower than a year ago. There has been a 62,000 fall in the number of people in part-time jobs, to just over eight million, with a 60,000 increase in full-time employment, to 21.6 million.

As day follows night, the ConDem understrappers have to see all that as “good news”:

Employment Minister Mark Hoban welcomed the fall in the number of people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance (JA), and especially the drop among young people.

Only in a parallel universe is the ministry for unemployment named so perversely. Hoban seems to hail two glad tidings:

1. That the numbers failing to claim “JobSeeker’s Allowance” (it used to be unemployment benefit, and was seen as a right which was paid for by deductions from paid salaries while in work) are down. What that amounts to is many are being dissuaded from claiming their due benefits because of the “skiving” hysteria generated by government propaganda.

2. “… especially the drop among young people.” What drop? In the number of claimants, presumably — see (1) immediately above. The Office of National Statistics are reporting an increase! 18-24 year olds up 20,000 in the quarter, and up 1.5% over twelve months. This is the actuality:

A coolie economy

Beyond these numbers lies a harsher truth. The British are being educated into a low-wage, low-productivity economy. Cheap labour is making investment and industrial improvement unnecessary. Last month the Financial Times‘s Brian Groom was getting closer to the real problem:

Output per hour worked fell 2.3 per cent in the final quarter of 2012 compared with a year earlier, fuelling concern about the UK’s poor productivity since the recession of 2008-09.

The figure was down 0.5 per cent compared with the previous quarter and was the sixth successive quarterly fall, according to data from the Office for National Statistics.

John Philpott, director of the Jobs Economist consultancy, said: “The figures for manufacturing productivity are very worrying. Output per hour in the manufacturing sector has now fallen for five successive quarters and in Q4 2012 was 5.2 per cent lower than a year earlier.”

He added: “Such a sharp and prolonged fall is in marked contrast to much of the period since the start of the recession in 2008, during which time manufacturing productivity has generally increased.”

Weak productivity has resulted in an overall rise in unit labour costs despite a squeeze on wages, although this has slowed since the past two quarters.

Other figures show that earnings are growing at just 0.8% over the year, while consumer prices are running at 2.8% (and predicted to rise further to 3.5% by the middle of 2013). Lest we forget, the great ConDem economic miracle (founded 2010) was going to be founded on:

•  a shift from public- to private-sector employment (going nicely, thank you: public sector redundancies continue apace); and
• Britain’s economy would power ahead on consumer spending.

At this point, let us bear in mind a painful fundamental:

Productivity is a key economic indicator used to measure the efficiency and competitiveness of an economy. It is a key factor determining the underlying ‘trend’ or ‘potential’ rate of growth of an economy over the medium-term.

Excuses! Excuses!

Ah, but it’s been the bad weather! Snow! Sun! Drought! Flood! €-crisis! Royal wedding! Locusts in Belgravia! Olympics! Jubilee! Earthquakes in Dorset! (Take your pick, as Gids Osborne does at each reiteration).

Except reality peeps through this dense fog of dissimulation, as Abigail Hughes and Jumana Saleheen ever-so-polititely explained in their study for the second quarter bulletin of 2012. This, without fanfares, gave us the quite shocking comparison of Labour productivity across countries (see right).

It doesn’t need any great expertise in graphicity to spot that, in the years of the Labour government, British productivity was consistently improving and outstripping the competitive economies. Since the crisis, all that has gone into reverse.

Meeow!

The usual explanation of why production and productivity are falling, while employment hasn’t yet plummeted, is “labour hoarding”. Employers, not necessarily out of loyalty to their employees, keep a larger work-force than they currently require. That has a logic: no business, in straits, is without a Micawber belief that Something will turn up; and reliable employees are not a commodity to be dispensed with lightly. Others place weight on a woolly notion of “intangible investment” (that amounts to improved R&D and ‘software’) — something with all the odour of a ‘thought experiment’, an economist’s version of Schrödinger’s cat.

As night follows day

One thing was inevitable: Lynne Featherstone MP would be chirruping her approval of ‘Gids’ Osborne’s money-grubbing:

Great news – the amount you can earn before being taxed will rise to £9,440 this year. That’s £600 less tax to pay for working people, since the Liberal Democrats entered Government in 2010.

Nice of Ms Featherstone to gross up four years of tax to produce a nice number. Bet that took a load of expensive research.

But, not so!

There’s the extra VAT for a start. Since the Tory policy, pre-2010 Election, was definitively no increase in VAT, may we assume that the extra 2½% impost was a LibDem addition to ConDem domestic economics? In any case, we see Division 10 on Monday, 28 June 2010, and Ms Featherstone voting for the increase.

Shall we add in the other taxes — the kind of things Leona Helmsley reckoned were only for “the little people”?

May we start with energy tax?

Over three years, energy costs were up by nearly a quarter. A typical household bill of £1200 in 2011 will by now have devoured the entirety of that £600 tax relief. And, if it were a pensioner couple, half the winter bonus went too. Let’s not overlook that green energy tax, which is paying hundreds of millions to the wind-farmers, and 6% return on capital — half of the bunce straight out of the pockets of those working people close to Ms Featherstone’s heart.

Or what about transport tax?

In 2010 a single journey, zones 1-4, on the London Tube was £4. Today the cheapest fare, anywhere — even a single zone — is £4.50. The comparable zone 1-4 fare is £5.50. That’s an increase of 37½%!

Do we hear Ms Featherstone complain on our behalf?

“The spare room subsidy”

Then there’s the iniquitous Bedroom Tax — exactly the imposition on those lower-income working people for whom Ms Featherstone’s LibDem heart bleeds.

Even LibDem Voice (as recently as 19th March 2013) recognises it does not pass ‘the Fairer Society test’. Apart from the headline article, by John Coburn, we see on the comments some real Lib Dems in full agreement.We’d gladly hear Ms Featherstone contest Tony Greaves’s point:

The “bedroom tax” – what all the Housing Associations I know are calling it anyway – is a typical policy devised and imposed by people who would never live in social housing, who would not apply any such restrictions on themselves, who have little understanding of what it is like to live on a low income (that is to say be poor), and have little knowledge or understanding of how social housing actually works, or the circumstances in such local communities.

It is a thorough disgrace and just one of the whole series of government attacks on poor people and people who are not as fortunate as themselves and as their civil service advisers.

Did Ms Featherstone ever vote against this Bill? Oddly, whenever major small-l liberal issues make it to a Commons vote, Ms Featherstone appears invariably otherwise engaged. Hard work being bottom of the ministerial pecking order at the Department for International Development.

Reg Varney in a fright wig

A juicy morsel there, and about the most repeatable, from the Daily Mash, on Ms Featherstone’s previous gender-issue outing.

Let us celebrate that Ms Featherstone found the time and energy to put aside her other endeavours to demand — to demand! — that The Observer sack Julie Burchill. Since Ms Featherstone is pernickety about citing her ministerial commitments, lest she offend collective solidarity, this must fall under her DFID responsibilities, along with counting her air-miles. So, perhaps Ms Featherstone could contradict, with examples, Nick Cohen’s claim:

I have worked through the worst days of Bernard Ingham and Alastair Campbell’s manipulation of the media, but I have never before heard a minister in a democracy call for writers and editors to be fired for publishing an opinion, however offensive and controversial it may be. That the minister in question calls herself a “liberal” means that Featherstone is not just a menace but a hypocrite too.

Slapping it on the plastic

There’s a large section of Cameron’s speech today devoted to the topic of debt. Par for the course, you say: it’s the bog-standard Tory incantation.

Except it wasn’t all about the dreaded public debt:

We will not be able to build a sustainable recovery with long term growth unless we fix this fundamental problem of excessive government spending and borrowing that undermines our whole economy.

Second, we had over-indebted households borrowing from over-indebted banks.

Banks lent more than they could afford to — spurred on by an irresponsible banking culture that rewarded short-termism and unmanageable risk-taking.

And households borrowed more than they could afford to — spurred on by an assertion that we had ended boom and bust.

So, when the crash came we didn’t just have over-indebted banks, over indebted households and a big budget deficit, we had the most over-indebted banks and the most over-indebted households as well as the biggest budget deficit of virtually any country, anywhere in the world.

All conveniently in the past and the past tense.

Err, really? Consider Philip Aldrick in the Telegraph:

Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that the average indebted household increased their non-mortgage borrowings by £400 between 2008 and 2010, to £3,200. In total, households’ financial liabilities rose 10.3pc from £85.9bn to £94.7bn in just two years…

Howard Archer, UK economist at IHS Global Insight, said: “It seems reasonable to suspect that household debt has risen further. While employment has been resilient, people’s purchasing power has been squeezed by extended weak income growth and elevated inflation.”

He added that the debt burden was likely to hold back the recovery.

“Increased debt levels highlight, along with extended squeezed purchasing power, why consumer spending remains so limited compared to pre-crisis levels,” Mr Archer said. “The extended need for consumers to deleverage is likely to limit the upside for consumer spending for some time to come, and hence constrain overall growth prospects.” …

Mr Archer claimed conditions for households had worsened since the period the survey covered. “Another recent survey from the ONS shows that the economic position of households hit a five-year low in the first quarter of 2012 … [and that] in the third quarter of 2012 real income per head was still 2.4pc below the peak level seen in mid-2009,” he said.

Which means that Cameron is correct that private debt has been a drag on any recovery: the whole 2010 rosy prognostication was based on an assumption that consumer expenditure and, therefore, private debt would carry the economy to the blue horizon. But he is whistling in the dark: not just because (see Archer above) he hasn’t got the statistics on private debt, but more to the point because it has patently increased, rather than been paid-down, since 2010.

“I’m an estate agent. Trust me!”

The Lady in Malcolm’s Life coughed and spluttered her way to and from a City appointment. She brought back the Evening Boris Standard.

Page 2 has a post-Huhne pop-survey (dignified by Ipsos-MORI) on page 2. This tells us:

• 41% of interviewees “generally trust” (and 57% distrust) business leaders to tell the truth;
• which is more than 24% who trust (and 70% who distrust) estate agents;
• and more than the 23% who trust (and 70% who distrust) MPs in general.

Since the bottom of the reliability pile involves “Politicians generally” (18% trusted, 77% distrusted) it would need a keen logician to untangle in what ways the general public differentiate them from their sub-set “MPs in general”.

Remember and despair: one in four of our fellow citizens trusts the snake-oiled property shark.

At a single bound …

… we leap to page 59 for the letters, and the main focus is the “Mansion Tax”. As we might expect from the Evening Boris Standard, this is the usual balanced viewpoints:

• a no-no from “Trevor Abrahmsohn, Glentree Estates”;
• a no-no-no from “M Truman, Taxation Magazine”; and
• a severe snipe from “Andrew Pearmain, author, The Politics of New Labour“.

We shall not, on this occasion, pause to marvel that a magazine (a glossy?) survives on the topic of licensed mulcting alone, nor a self-proclaimed “author” who needs his magnum opus soldered to his moniker. Well, perhaps for just a moment of mockery.

Let us instead hang on the words of Mr Abrahmsohn. Here is one with considerable North London street-cred (though it’s more “avenues” and “gardens” in Abrahmsohn’s refined world):

Meet the man who holds the keys to Billionaires’ Row

He has sold the world’s most expensive house and rubbed shoulders with the political elite – but life was not always so glamorous for the keeper of keys to Billionaires’ Row.

His office on the edge of Hampstead Garden Suburb, adorned with letters from prime ministers and press cuttings from national newspapers, is a far cry from the shabby hotel room in Golders Green where Trevor Abrahmsohn forged his reputation as estate agent to the globe’s glitterati.

Armed with nothing but a temperamental phone line and a photocopier, the 58-year-old went on to enjoy 35 years selling “trophy mansions” on The Bishops Avenue to Saudi princes, Chinese businessman and Russian oligarchs.

That’s a recent puff-piece from the Ham & High.

And, finally, we have Mr Abrahmsohn’s missive to the Evening Boris Standard:

Mansion tax will never happen

Labour’s announcement of a mansion tax and reinstatement of the 10p tax band yesterday is headline-grabbing before the Eastleigh by-election. What are we to make of the two Eds’ integrity, given they were thew joint architects of Labour policy at the time Gordon Brown abolished the 10p band?

If Miliband had any sense, there is no way he will actually implement a mansion tax that would alienate an important element of middle-class Labour support. In the London property market, the likely £2 million threshold is hardly a fortune: perhaps buying a two-bedroom flat in a leafy, but not super-prime, inner London area, and there are plenty of properties in this bracket that were bought for relatively little years ago.

A mansion tax would have a profound effect on the dynamics of the market: a lot of people would sell up and court cases would be certain as others try to revalue their property. Foreign investors have already been hit by the Coalition’s clumsy levy of 15 per cent stamp duty in the last Budget, and a mansion tax would only magnify their problems; why are we trying so hard to repel them? A far more plausible, consumer-friendly approach is to bring in a range of higher council tax bands above Band G.

Trevor Abrahmsohn, Glentree Estates.

Kettling the pot

Spot the mutually-conflicting assumptions and statements there. Malcolm will tick just three.

For what it’s worth, the average price of a two-bed flat in NW11 (Mr Abrahmsohn’s home patch of Golders Green) is around £400,000. Only in five tight super-prime, inner London areas — W1 (Piccadilly), W8 (Kensington), SW3 (Chelsea), SW7 (South Ken)  and the Brompton Road (SW10) — would one readily hit on a £1 million plus two-bed pad. Those are not areas of solid middle-class Labour support.

Moreover, doesn’t any decent heart bleed for the misfortunes of those foreign investors who plump Mr Abrahmsohn’s portfolio? Malcolm regularly passes down the eternal building-site that is The Bishop’s Avenue (a.k.a. “Billionaires’ Row”). Its very existence involves tearing down perfectly-good (and hardly-offensive) granges, and erecting, in their place, over-sized but tawdry glass sheds — which, in turn, are gone in half-a-decade or so for something even more glitzy and ghastly.

There is a sound — nay, urgent — argument to be made for reforming the Council Tax. It was designed by Michael Heseltine as a regressive tax. It has become far more oppressive with subsequent postponements of revaluation — most recently, and seemingly twice, with malice aforethought, by Eric Pickles. What Abrahmsohn also elides is the distinction between national and local taxation: Council Tax is just that, local.

Bottom line

We should be looking at how we tax property. Since it is even more static than parked cars (which we tax and fine), it’s not rocket science to evaluate its worth and slap a duty on it. The over-inflated property market in London and the more-bourgeois areas of the South-East is ripe for plucking. Only the most self-interested Tory fails to recognise that. Doing so (and improving transport links) could and should encourage “trickle-down”, first to those crumbling areas adjacent to London, then further afield.

Once we’ve agreed the need, it’s only method that matters. Miliband and Balls have taken aboard the ‘mansion tax’, with due acknowledgements to the likes of Vince Cable. Why not go a step further, and snuffle around site-value/land-value taxation? Which was amply dealt with recently by George Monbiot in The Guardian and taken further by Alex Hern in the New Statesman.

If nothing else, it’s guaranteed to raise the Abrahmsohn blood-pressure.

A tale of two graphs

Here’s the same information, taken from the same source:

1. As presented by the Daily Mail:

 

To be fair, this is largely as it is represented by the Resolution Foundation.

2. As presented in the Independent:

 

Which tells the story better?

Particularly when the rest of the Resolution Foundation graphics are taken into account:

“2013 has started strongly”: discuss

Films with a Scottish base get a strong showing in the list of 49 best British films of all time, chosen by Barry Norman for the Radio Times. Deservedly, I Know Where I’m Going, Whisky Galore!, and Local Hero are all there. So is Gregory’s Girl, to which we return after the comic relief.

Philip Aldrick does a magnificent job frightening the un-lasagna-ed horses in his piece for the Torygraph.

What he is about is anticipating:

In its three-monthly Inflation Report, the Bank will warn that inflation will remain above the 2pc target until early 2015 but that the economy is too weak to cope with any attempt to bring prices back under control, through either interest rate rises or an unwinding of its £375bn quantitative easing (QE) programme.

It will also say that the pace of growth will be slow and that, although the major risks are receding, they remain a big threat, particularly from a resurgence of the eurozone crisis.

That sure saves us all from having to read the Report, when it is released. Prescience, a guided leak, or an ouija board?

Switching to another source, Aldrick manages one of the more remarkable definitions of “growth”:

According to the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, 2013 has started strongly. It has estimated that growth improved from -0.3pc in the three months to December, to zero in the three months to January.

Somehow that reminds Malcolm of a bit of dialogue from Bill Forsyth’s 1981 film, Gregory’s Girl. Gregory is faffing his first encounter with Dorothy:

Gregory: …. I hurt my arm once, at the joint. Can’t get it any higher than this. [He raises his left arm to shoulder level.] I used to be able to get it away up here, no bother. [He raises the same arm high above his head.]

The pointless grump of a downtrodden man

There is, none too far from Redfellow Hovel, a parked car. It is big, long, black, sporty, Mercedes and a recent model. To Malcolm’s untutored, and definitely non-petrolheaded eye, it looks distinctly expensive — the kind of hardware that costs as much as a three-bed home in many parts of this fragmenting kingdom.

The Merc-monster has been there, unattended, a couple of days now.

Quite a bit transpired, yesterday, when an anonymous white van also arrived. The van contained the the heavy mob from the collections agency. They had come to chain up said Merc-monster because a string of parking tickets were outstanding.

Seeing Malcolm hard a-blog, the more elephantine of the heavy mob rang the door-bell of Redfellow Hovel. Did Malcolm know anything about Merc-monster?This Malcolm decoded as, “Is it yours? We have a tidy account for you to settle. Then we can head off to the pub.”

Most definitely no, never seen the thing before. Shouldn’t be there. etc.

While his mate was dealing with the chain on the Denver Boot, Mr Pachyderm explained why this was under way (hence the information three paragraphs previously) and then fished out one of those telephones that contain major computing power. He was then able to display in Malcolm’s face a name and address. Again Malcolm decoded, “Does this name and address chime with you?”

Well, actually, in a dim recess of the less-visited parts of Malcolm’s cortex, it did, but the synapse didn’t instantly connect.

Only later did Malcolm recognise the connection. The name waved electronically before him seemed to lack a title. Not “Mr” or “Dr”, but “Sir”. It is — perhaps by coincidence, the name of a prominent and publicly-honoured architect, of the modernist tendency, who has scattered the landscape with some exotic structures.

The gravy train

Well, Malcolm has no envy that such talent has earned so well to afford the Merc-monster, and to pay so promptly the inflated fines (by the evening, Mr Pachyderm and his mate had returned and doffed the chains).

On the contrary, such a show of wealth is part of modern Britain.

As is the lack of opportunity for others, and the failure for wealth to percolate downwards.

Consider the story by Patrick Wintour in today’s Guardian, Labour to use US research to shape election campaign. In the print edition that comes with a nice little line-graph. On-line we have to settle for:

Labour is drawing on research by the New Democrat Network (NDN) central to the Obama re-election campaign to shape its own election thinking.

The research was described by the Obama campaign as its North Star. It tracked three trends in the US economy between 1992 and 2009, showing how two – higher growth and higher productivity – had not been matched by a rise in living standards for the majority.

The Resolution Foundation thinktank, the leading voice on UK living standards, will next week produce its own State of the Nation report showing how long it will take to return to rising living standards in the UK even if growth returns. Labour will also launch its own exercise – “the condition of Britain” – next week, its policy review chief, Jon Cruddas, has revealed.

Padded out with some choice quotation, there’s also this:

It also indicates that the crisis of living standards predates the City-induced recession of 2008.

“The reason this is happening is because of rising global competition, the defining new economic challenge of our time,” Simon Rosenberg, the head of the New Democrat Network, said in a recent interview.

“In the actual experience of the American economy, there has become an enormous gap between the upper one-third and everyone else.”

The chart hung in the Obama campaign office, along with a caption derived from a focus group participant: “I’m working harder and falling behind.” That same line was repeated by the president in a campaign stump speech.

So some have Merc-monsters, and can ignore parking fines, on the assumption that it’s only money (and expenses can be set against taxes). The rest of us have to obey the rules and muddle along as best as we can afford.

There are two ways of looking at this.

On one refined level we can take the research and graphics of — say — the Financial Times, to show just how dismally the ConDem government have perpetuated the Great Depression of 2008-2018 (as in the graph — Malcolm likes simple graphs — right).

Along with that, we can take the wit-and-wisdom of the Office for National Statistics, who tell us the same, with numbers attached:

Incomes squeezed more than in previous recessions

Real national and household incomes have been falling due to a combination of the recession and high inflation. That is the analysis published today by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) as part of the Measuring National Well-being Programme.

The data describes an economy that has been stagnating:

• In the second quarter of 2012 net national income (NNI) per head in real terms was 13.2 per cent below its pre-recession level in the first quarter of 2008; a sharper fall in economic well-being than the 7.0 per cent fall that GDP per head data indicate.
• In the second quarter of 2012, real household actual income per head was 2.9 per cent below its peak in the third quarter of 2009.
• Household incomes have generally been eroded by price inflation, for example in September 2011 inflation peaked at 5.2 per cent whereas the annual rise in household actual income per head was 1.9 per cent in the third quarter of 2011.
• At the end of 2011 national debt was in excess of one trillion pounds, the first time on record, and equivalent to 65.7 per cent of GDP.

Or we can simply look, it is hoped with compassion, at the plight of millions of Britons, trapped in falling incomes, rising costs, lower wages, poorer expectations and increasing misery.

At the start of the ConDem government, David Cameron was buoyant that we could, and should measure “well-being”. And so, at a cost of £2 million and two years later, we were treated to guff like:

Responses by 165,000 people in the annual population survey reveal the average rating of “life satisfaction” in Britain is 7.4 out of 10 and 80% of people gave a rating of seven or more when asked whether the things they did in their lives were “worthwhile”.

Any bets we’ll not be hearing comparisons this year? Even that the ONS be told, quietly, to forget the whole thing?

Or, of course, the ConDems could scatter Merc-monsters across the land, warbling up-lifting ditties (and not the kind of uplifting that Mr Pachyderm & co involve themselves in):

With a hey, and a ho, and a hey-nonny-no,

These pretty country folks would lie

In springtime, the only pretty ring time,

When birds do sing, Hey ding a ding, ding.

Sweet lovers love the spring.

This carol they began that hour,

With a hey, and a ho, and a hey hey-nonny-no.

“Welfare tax”?

Go to the BBC video of yesterday’s Prime Minister’s Questions.

Enjoy Miliband winding up Cameron on the Bedroom Tax.

Remember: in Cameron’s world, it’s not a “tax”, it’s a “benefit”. That was his effort, responding to Miliband’s first question. What is the “benefit” of losing £25 a week? That was enough to shock Malcolm — and got to Steve Bell as well:

Indeed the crude brutishness of Cameron’s manner made Malcolm miscue. So back to the BBC video.

The crucial moment comes about 7 minutes and 15 seconds in. Cameron is waxing loud and lyrical about Miliband’s policy deficiencies (though why Labour needs to be lumbered with detailed policy commitments this far out from a fixed election date is another matter).

Malcolm believed he heard Cameron say:

What this Government is doing is building more houses and controlling welfare bills. But, frankly, the question is one he has to answer, too. If he opposes the welfare tax, if he opposes restrictions on increased welfare, if he opposes reform of disability benefit, if he opposes each and every welfare change we make, how on earth is he going to get control of public spending.

What the Hansard reporter heard (or was persuaded was said) is subtly different:

The Prime Minister: What this Government are doing is building more houses and controlling welfare bills. Frankly, the question is one that the right hon. Gentleman has to answer, too. If he opposes the welfare cap, if he opposes restrictions on increased welfare, if he opposes reform of disability benefits and if he opposes each and every welfare change we make, how on earth is he going to get control of public spending?

Fair enough: on about the third hearing, Malcolm concedes Hansard is probably right, and Malcolm’s hearing is adrift. Still, the message lingers.

What is fiendishly wrong here is that people in social housing are being punished for disability, or for wanting to stay in long-established homes. They are also being caned because:

• wages are criminally low, and are being driven even lower by deliberate government policies;
• rents in the private sector are too high, and still rising.

Let’s take those in turn, and refer to two items in this current issue of Private Eye:

1. Giz a job

SURF, Scotland’s independent regeneration group, which aims to improve health and wellbeing in deprived areas, received 400 applications in response to an advert for a part-time admin job. Chief Executive Andy Milne also received an email from the folk at Liga UK, who were keen to let him know that they were a “government-funded training provider who help young people gety into the workplace”.

Liga helpfully suggested that Milne consider converting the paid job into an “apprenticeship” placement. After all, it suggested, “If you do take on an apprentice for this role, you only need to pay them £100-£270 per week.” Liga UK also offered a further inducement of the £1,500 placement fee from the government.

What Ligaq failed to mention was that if SURF agreed to shove the poor recruit out of the promised job, Liga could also claim an apprenticeship placement “success” and pick up its own fee. Milne asked Liga why on earth the government would want it to displace a real job with an apprenticeship. He is still waiting for an answer.

By no coincidence, just a week ago Channel 4′s FactCheck Blog ran the rule over:

… the latest stats on apprenticeships in England today, which show that more than half a million people began a placement in 2011/12.

That is costing the government (i.e. the tax-payer) around £1.4 billion — yes, billion — in 2011-12. Moreover, nearly a fifth of these placements run for six months or less. Such turn-over must be money in the bank for the likes of Liga. Moreover, as FactCheck adds:

… a few months spent learning how to stack shelves and a three-and-a-half year stint at Rolls-Royce both count as the same.

2. Gimme Shelter 

Welfare reforms brought in by the coalition were already bringing down rents, said a confident David Cameron in January last year. “What we have seen so far, as housing benefit has been reformed and reduced, is that rent levels have come down, so we have stopped ripping off the taxpayer.”

But have they come down? It seemed unlikely at the time, although it reflected a widespread belief in government that the local housing allowance (the form of housing benefit paid to private renters) was somehow causing rent inflation.

A year on, and with more housing benefit cuts due in April, rents are stubbornly refusing to go anywhere but up. A report from Shelter based on the government’s Valuation Office Agency figures says rents have risen 2.8 percent in the past year. That’s faster than the 1.7 percent rise in house prices and comes at a time when wages are at a standstill.

Several areas saw double-digit rises, including an eye-watering 10.8 percent in one local authority with which Cameron should be fa,iliad: West Oxfordshire, home to his Witney constituency.

This Shelter survey, The Rent Trap, is on-line. It covers only English local authority areas (as, indeed, does the Tory party’s world-view).

Daily Cess

For going on quarter-of-a-century the great Arthur Christiansen steered Beaverbrook’s Daily Express to  a commanding position in the English middle-market: sales of 2 million in 1936, three million in 1944, and four million in 1949. In those days, the Express had a finger on the pulse of social group C2,  and a boot on the throat of Tory ministers. Much as Malcolm loathed the ‘Empire First’ thundering, he had to admire the magnificent machine that was the Beaver’s  paper for the purpose of making propaganda. When Robert Allen wrote his 1983 memoir of the Express, he was able to entitle it — with good reason — Voice of Britain.

No need to boast

On 27 January 1953 Christiansen circulated his editorial staff with a typical instruction:

Ban the word “exclusive” in the Express. Our aim is to make everything exclusive. Therefore we have no need to boast.

He wanted the news (never “stories”) to be told straight, in context, and in plain straightforward English: he would have scorned word-play and punning headlines. Above all he demanded accuracy and fact-checking:

We fell into a bad error yesterday and had to carry a Page One correction on a story. While I seek to encourage members of staff to establish their own contacts in every field of endeavour, I must insist that they use the services of our specialists in checking their information.

When comes such another?

The Black Lubyanka — that magnificent Art Deco block (as above) — is now the base of another merchant bank. The last news operation in those parts was Reuters, which debunked to Canary Wharf around eight years ago. As early as 1967 Michael Frayn foresaw saw the end coming:

Fleet Street now is just the dull, busy thoroughfare that connects the City to the West End.

The Daily Express, four owners and eighteen editors later, is a poor, pathetic rag. It sells a smidgeon more than half-a-million copies daily, and is little more than an advertising sheet for Richard Desmond’s other interests (Channel 5, the dubious “Health Lottery”, and links to his other unsavoury businesses).

Gross misrepresentation

So let us celebrate today’s front-page screamer:

Or, if you prefer it in text:

DAVID Cameron last night promised to deliver a tax cut for millions of British families by 2015.

The Tory pledge to introduce an income tax allowance for married couples will be in place by the next election, senior Government sources confirmed.

It will mean an extra £150 a year for households across the country and will provide some welcome cheer amid the economic gloom.

Got that? None of the other UK news-outlets had quite that line:

The government will not introduce a tax break for married couples in next month’s Budget, it emerges…
However legislation is expected to be introduced before 2015 to allow couples to transfer part of their personal tax allowance to their partner. [BBC News]

No concessions for Tory right in PM’s push for gay marriage.
Tax breaks for married couple ruled out in March budget. [The Guardian]

Mr Cameron dashed Tory hopes of a tax break for married couples in next month’s Budget.
A senior Government source said the Prime Minister had delayed the manifesto promise yet again after talks with George Osborne. [Daily Mail]

The Conservative 2010 manifesto and the Coalition Agreement said ministers would introduce a tax allowance for those who wed, but the Government said yesterday that the policy would not feature in next month’s Budget. [Daily Telegraph]

Cameron will not offer marriage tax breaks to placate anti-gay marriage Tories, says Government source
Pledge was made in Tory manifesto and coalition agreement [The Independent]

From Liberia, where he was co-chairingtalks on global poverty, [Cameron] made clear that … [h]e would defy ministers and MPs pressing for tax breaks for married couple to be included in next month’s Budget, instead of waiting until later in the Parliament to introduce them. [The Times, £]

And even:

David Cameron has slapped down traditionalists in the cabinet opposed to proposed gay marriage laws by saying he would not introduce tax breaks for married couples in the March budget [ConHome]

Or, to explicate the obvious:

• nothing in this Parliament;
• a ‘pledge’ in the Tory 2015 manifesto, which is a direct lift from the unredeemed one of 2010;
• and even then only a tax-allowance concession worth precisely nothing to most of those couples who are both working.

That grumbling is the noise of disconsolate Tory MPs.

Listen carefully and you’ll catch Arthur Christiansen, rumbling in his Holland-on-Sea eternal rest.