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.

Forelock-tugging time?

How does this sound for a realistic policy on home rentals? —

In addition to restoring security of tenure to every decontrolled house, we are appointing rent officers and rent assessment committees for fixing fair rents. The new Act also gives basic protection to almost everyone in his home, including the lodger and the worker in his tied cottage. Today it is a crime not merely to evict without a court order but to harass or to persecute anyone in order to force him out or force his rent up.

It’s from the 1966 Labour Manifesto. The preamble to that seems almost more pertinent in the present context:

The 1957 Tory Rent Act inflicted injury on hundreds of thousands of families by decontrolling their homes in a period of intense housing shortage. Labour was pledged to annul this social crime.

Back to the future

Malcolm reflects on that, if only because his entry into leftist politics was at a time (the end of the 1950s) and a place (Norfolk) when tied cottages — particularly for farm workers — was a very live issue.

In case anyone missed it, it’s about to come back again. Hidden behind Caroline Spelman killing off the Agricultural Wages Board is her other announcement: the Agricultural Dwellings Housing advisory committee would also be dissolved. All of which might, being generous, make sense if the workers on the land had the clout to negotiate a proper wages-and-conditions agreement. But, of course, it will always be cheaper for the agribusinesses to import cheap immigrant labourers and house them in caravans and Portacabins. With, if not the complicity, at least the active encouragement of the supermarket chains.

Only a cynic (perish the thought) would draw a direct line between a “free market” in former tied cottages, a chronic shortage of affordable housing, Iain Duncan Smith’s “welfare reforms” and ‘Gids’ Osborne’s budget, promising second homes on the back of government loans.

Duncan Smith, lest we forget, is possessed of a a £2m+ Tudor home (with ample spare bedrooms, five acres of gardens and a swimming pool), by courtesy of a very wealthy wife, heiress to the Cottesloe millions and 1,300 acres of Buckinghamshire.

It goes with the squirarchical mind-set

In the next few days anyone in social housing with that mythical (but Big Brother designated) “spare bedroom” faces a cut of 14% in benefits. Oh, no! It’s not a tax! Anymore than cutting the 50% tax rate for multi-million earners (those deserving bankers and plutocrats) is a benefit!

Let’s take Mr and Mrs Whatsit, who have lived in social housing for thirty-odd years, since they married. There they raised two strapping sons, who have done well, moved out, and left that “spare room”. As a result Mr and Mrs Whatsit, both heading towards retirement, but young enough not to come under Iain Duncan Smith’s oh-so-generous OAP waiver, are faced with a major cut in their income, or the unlikely prospect of finding smaller accommodation — there are 180,000 families in the Whatsits’ position, but just 70,000 one-bedroom flats available.

Now, here’s the suggestion: why was there not an incentive — rather than a fine — to persuade the Whatsits to move? Especially since we now know that Osborne has squoodles of money available for second homes:

The Budget included a £3.5bn Help to Buy programme under which the Government will provide up to 20 per cent of a deposit and the buyer only 5 per cent for a new-build home. The Government made clear that could not be used to buy a second home but failed to do the same for a separate scheme to underwrite £130bn of mortgage lending for any property.

But, then, when did a functioning Tory prefer to persuade rather than to coerce?

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.

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:

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.

1% of austerity. 99% of low calculation

The British Sundays know what — pending a major disaster — next week’s stories should be.

It’s all about The Make Labour Look Like the Party for Skiving Fat Slobs bill, as Andrew Rawnsley explains:

This is the legislation that will put a 1% cap on increases in most state benefits over the next three years. Nominally, this is being done in the name of collective national belt-tightening and fairness. The country is brassic. Working people, in both the private and public sectors, will have been very fortunate if their incomes have kept pace with price rises over recent years. Many have seen their living standards badly corroded. It is therefore only just that those drawing benefits should also suffer a period of retrenchment. That was the argument rolled out by Iain Duncan Smith last week as he prepared the pitch for the vote. But there has always been a partisan purpose to this measure, which has never really been disguised since George Osborne announced it in his financial statement last month. The state pension is excluded from the squeeze, even though the elderly have generally done relatively better than any other group over recent years. But, then, there are more pensioners than there are unemployed and pensioners are much more likely to vote.

It is doubtful that legislation was actually necessary. Putting it to a parliamentary vote was a cunning device to create a dividing line – or so the chancellor hoped – that would put the Tories on the side of hard-working “strivers” and force Labour to choose between endorsing a benefits squeeze that many in its ranks would see as a betrayal of its core values or looking like the defenders of idle “scroungers”.

On the other hand, as the Observer‘s front page headline story (by Daniel Boffey) notes:

Half a million soldiers, nurses and teachers will have their income slashed under the coalition’s benefits crackdown, according to a new report. The chancellor’s sub-inflation rise in benefits and tax credits over the next three years will hit a whole range of the country’s most trusted professionals.

Up to 40,000 soldiers, 300,000 nurses and 150,000 primary and nursery school teachers will lose cash, in some cases many hundreds of pounds, according to the Children’s Society. The revelation appears to contradict the government’s stated intention to target shirkers and scroungers, and will raise the temperature of the Commons debate and vote on the plan on Tuesday.

Which suggests that Cameron and Osborne are betting the farm on casual opinions from focus groups being more viable than righteous anger among millions of ripped-off middle-class voters. Hmmm … could make 2015 tricky.

In the shrubbery, something very nasty stirs …

The Sunday Times [£] goes even further. The editorial shrieks:

2013: THE YEAR WE CRACK THE WELFARE STATE

If that seems grotesquely and Murdochian neoCon, the content equally suggests such a superficial impression is not unfair:

The coalition’s record, as it will new presented tomorrow, is not bad. Financial storm clouds have not gone away and the risk is of a loss of Britain’s triple-A credit rating, but the country has moved away from the fiscal edge. Michael Gove’s school reforms are welcome and have further to run. A different health secretary has taken the heat out of changes to the National Health Service. Crime has fallen by 10% over the past two years despite spending cuts and tension between ministers and police. Yet this is also a government prone to drift and bouts of incompetence, as we saw last year.

Fortunately the Sunday Times, even at the expense of  half-a-dozen tired  clichés and the odd very partial statistic, is ever-present to insert anally a poker alongside any missing backbone. Let’s not pause to think:

• Have Gove’s “reforms” worked? Is education really on the up?
• Is the “heat” out of the NHS?
• Has real crime (and opposed to “reported crime” — reported and recorded, that is, to fewer desk-sergeants and closed police stations) actually declined by such a conveniently measurable amount?

No, let’s be swept along by the Sunday Times editorialist’s flow:

British people are not averse to change and know that the size of the state in general, and the welfare state in particular, has to be reined back. Welfare changes should be simple and fair. When the chancellor decided to take away child benefit from most higher-rate tax-payers, he thought this ticked both boxes. But while HM Revenue & Customs has made the best of a bad job, the change is anything but simple. Some of those who are losing out would also question its fairness.

Of course, had those “losing out” read Saturday’s Times, avoiding any unfairness would have been made pellucid clear (cut your hours, up your pension contributions, do a fiddle with your partner …). Note, too, no blame can — in this definition — fall on the putative 18th baronet Osborne of Ballintaylor and Ballylemon — he of the “omnishambles” budget. He was merely “ticking boxes”. The devil is in the detail, and HMRC’s implementation.

Onward and … err … upward?

The mid-term review will signal the government’s intent of implementing the Dilnot commission’s recommendation of a cap on individual liability for care costs, although Treasury worries about the long-term bill mean the cap is likely to be set at more than double the £35,000 that the commission had recommended. A white paper on pensions will pledge a new single-tier pension but is already setting hares running about big increases in the retirement age in decades to come.

Gosh: isn’t all that positive inducement to vote Tory in 2015? Particularly when the ST‘s front page (and page 2) has it that:

Elderly people will have to pay £75,000 towards their care home bills before the government steps in to provide financial help.

Lest we forget: the essential issue at stake in care of the elderly is that homes have to be sold to pay care bills. £75,000? Just lift it out of the bank? Well, perhaps not:

On average, a Brit has the grand total of just £2,205 sitting in the bank. This is peanuts – it equates to just 1.7 times the average monthly take-home pay…

There are, of course, some people who save lots. They’re called the rich. ING has a model of the distribution of savings across the UK population, and after about the 95th percentile, it starts to really take off. It was ever thus, of course, but I’d bet my cash Isa that just as income inequality has grown markedly in the past decade, so has savings inequality.

When unemployment is so high (although the jobless figures are becoming meaningless these days), when wage growth is zero or falling, when inflation is at 2%-3% (and with VAT rising), then the idea that the ordinary ­person could or will be saving more was ­always a stretch of the imagination.

We can, but naturally, skim lightly over such pinko propaganda (it was Patrick Collinson in the Guardian, and as far back as those cliff-edge days of January 2010).

For the sake of brevity, the ST‘s paragraph on Duncan Smith’s universal credit can be passed: it’s going to be a total cock-up, we all appreciate, but provided we keep the perpetrator’s name in the frame, we also know whom to blame — and it’s not going to be Dave or Ozzie if the ST can help it! And so, to a happy conclusion:

The public mood has shifted on welfare but will still become impatient with a government that displays incompetence, let alone presides over a disaster. It is important to get this right. Indeed, it must be one of the biggest priorities this year.

As opposed to a priority of government being not getting it right? And, of course, we well recognise that, this last Leveson year, the whole Murdoch Empire has been shown to be admirably competent, on the side of the angels, disaster-proof, and “right” — as here, far right. After all, across the water, the WSJ, on Rupert’s order, picked Paul Ryan as Romney’s running mate, and then spent the campaign ignoring all the polling evidence. Not to mention Fox News.

Austerity: economy, parsimony, and judgment

Malcolm doubts it one of the best-known or quoted (or, as more often, misquoted) bit of Edmund Burke, though it deserves to be. It’s Burke at his vituperative and vitriolic best.

Malcolm hat-tips Hugh Dalton’s Principles of Public Finance, all the way from 1922. And that, hardly coincidentally, from very early in the text, page 7 of volume 1: — Dalton, like most economists and moralists, like Marx and Joyce in their different spheres, being one of those many authors of whom it is easy to tire, even in the first chapter.

Therefore, a well-composed word to the wise (and a dearth of cliché) from Edmund Burke, Collected Works, volume V, page 229. Burke has it in for his Grace of Bedford, swaddled and rocked and dandled into a legislator. Bedford had criticised the payment of a state pension to Burke — and Burke had no compunction is contrasting his public service to those of the Russell family, who had become great and good by pandering to Henry VIII.

Burke saw an overgrown Duke of Bedford machinating to oppress the industry of humble men, and to limit, by the standard of his own conceptions, the justice, the bounty, or, if he pleases, the charity of the crown.

Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense and great expense may be an essential part in true economy. Economy is a distributive virtue and consists not in saving but in selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no comparison, no judgment. Mere instinct may produce this false economy in perfection. The other economy has larger views. It demands a discriminating judgment and a firm sagacious mind.

A Nelsonian eye

Fraser Nelson, at The Spectator, always gives good value, even when one needs violently to disagree. Actually, says Malcolm, that’s the best journalism: it makes one think, one has to ponder counter-arguments, and we all benefit from rubbing against the grain.

Here is the man himself:

Ed Miliband has adopted a rather simple strategy: do nothing, and wait for your opponents to screw up. It’s lazy, but undoubtedly effective. The Tories are playing along perfectly. The last week has given plenty ammunition for his new theme — which he repeated during his union Sponsored Walk yesterday — ‘they think they are born to rule, but they are not very good at it.’

There are five short(ish) paragraphs of that: Nelson believes in making his play, and leaving us to it. Good for Fraser — presumably he doesn’t pay himself by the line.

Labour-loyalists night be warmed by this died-in-the wool Tory’s conclusion:

Now, I think an Ed Miliband victory would be a calamity for Britain — he has no policies and his ‘predistribution’ nonsense suggests naïveté of the most dangerous kind. But recent weeks have done nothing to change the balance of probability pointing — just — to Ed Miliband sending Christmas cards from No 10 in just three years’ time.

There’s partisan loyalty and there’s realism: it looks as if Mr Nelson gets them both there. The telling headline, in Spectator tasteful red,  is:

Ed Miliband’s winning strategy

Malcolm took his dissection kit to that Nelsonian introduction:

Ed Miliband has adopted a rather simple strategy: do nothing, and wait for your opponents to screw up.

Well, yes. All administrations fall foul of time: the gilt wears off, the guilt sets in. The rate of polling attrition is usually measured at 1% per annum or so. It’s just that this shower accelerate the process immeasurably. Or, as Uncle Bill Shakespeare had it:

Thou hast described
A hot friend cooling: ever note, Lucilius,
When love begins to sicken and decay,
It useth an enforced ceremony.
There are no tricks in plain and simple faith;
But hollow men, like horses hot at hand,
Make gallant show and promise of their mettle;
But when they should endure the bloody spur,
They fall their crests, and, like deceitful jades,
Sink in the trial.

Ooh, err, Missus. From 1599, and still rings a bell.

Moreover, the whole ideology (not a good word ever to use in any British political context) of this ConDem coalition was to come in with a Plan, and in a fixed timetable to deliver it. Such sweet innocence.

As soon as any sensate being heard debt reduction, constitutional and electoral systems, welfare simplification, ‘eddicashun’ , Old Uncle Tom Cobley ‘n ‘ all, would all be sorted in a fixed time scale, eyes misted over. We all muttered, “Like hell’.  The more a government attempts, the less it will achieve — simply because targets are not that accessible, and the Great British Public simply do not like change. They are, and always have been small-c ‘conservative’. As it says on that eighteenth-century church bell in Essex:

Success to the Church of England, and no enthusiasm!

Apart from anything else, a fixed five-year parliament, with a definitive election date and closure set for May 2015, was guaranteed to work against the economic cycle. It denies the administration the one clear advantage it has always had — to go to the electors at the moment of its choosing. Those over-educated, but politically-illiterate public-school boys hadn’t understood Shakespeare’s pragmatism in Henry V, being dazzled by the initial flashy, bumptious rhetoric:

we’ll bend it to our awe,
Or break it all to pieces: or there we’ll sit,
Ruling in large and ample empery ..

It’s lazy, but undoubtedly effective.

Rubbish. The hardest job in British politics is to lead an Opposition — particularly a Labour one, in conflict with the bulk of the press, and the ever-surging power of Murdochery:

• The first aim is to establish a personality — and Miliband has done that against a sustained onslaught from the capitalist press barons. Who now speaks lightly of ‘Red Ed’? Even Miliband himself makes a joke of it in his recent Conference speech.
• Second base is to control the party: the amazing thing is how little dissent there has been in the Labour Party, given that drubbing through 2008-10. Compare the situation in 1980-82. If there was any doubt over Miliband’s grasp it was that he deliberately courted the booing of union extremists at the Hyde Park Rally yesterday.
• Third base is to win the weekly jousting at Prime Minister’s Questions (so taking ownership of the thirty-second clip on the evening news bulletins). Over recent months Miliband has succeeded, against all the odds, in matching , confronting, annoying and seeing off Cameron. As long as Cameron cannot control his inner Flashman, he is doomed. Last week’s PMQs was a total disaster for him. Not only did Miliband draw blood over Mitchell as ‘toast’, Cameron offended conservative and parliamentary principles (certainly those of ‘good manners’ and noblesse oblige) by his dismissal of Chris Bryant:

Do you know what? Until he apologises, I am not going to answer his questions—[ Interruption]

Even Tory polemicists regarded one that as ‘possibly unwise’. So, next:

• The Home Run is when the Tory press, as Nelson does here, start to see the light:

The Tories are playing along perfectly.

Not just the Tories. The LibDem element is pulling its weight.

The magnificent, magisterial Andrew Rawnsley, doing today’s Observer opinion piece, listed the heads for being mounted on spikes:

I can’t help feeling a tiny spasm of sympathy for the fallen chief whip. In the bumper book of cabinet resignations, a volume to which the coalition has now added four entries, this is a most bizarre chapter. One of his colleagues asks: “Should someone have a 30-year career destroyed because of a seven-second outburst?” You know, that’s a reasonable question.

There are strong arguments for why certain members of this cabinet ought to resign. Creating a complete mess of the reform of Britain’s most important public service would be a sound reason to leave ministerial office, but Andrew Lansley is still in the cabinet. Becoming intimately enmeshed with a media corporation to a degree that would be unacceptable even if that company were not also the subject of a criminal investigation would be another powerful reason for a minister to quit, but Jeremy Hunt is still in the cabinet, as, for that matter, is David Cameron.

Breaking a solemn manifesto pledge not to increase tuition fees could be regarded as a compelling reason to resign, but Nick Clegg and his Lib Dem colleagues are still sitting around the top table. In comparison, briefly losing your rag with a police officer seems to sit at the very trivial end of the spectrum of resignation-worthy offences, the more so when the officer involved had long since accepted an apology and the police had said they were taking no further action.

True enough. Indisputably so. Except that’s not the measure of this particular cock-up. As Malcolm was saying elsewhere:

General opinion now has it that such Mitchell outbursts were not previously unknown. So the answer might be “prevention rather than cure”. Note how, after “Thrasher”, we have the emollient Sir George — whom I’d regard as an inspired choice. 

My complaint above, and previously, is not whether the PM handled it badly (and he did), but what went wrong with the whole Downing Street operation. Any decent PR operator (hmmm … can we think of one?) should recognise when, if and how a “bad press” moment is containable. From the beginning this one wasn’t.

Similarly, once ‘Gids’ Osborne was rumbled over his shimmying into First Class on Virgin Rail, he should have had the sense to busy himself publicly with impressive paper-work.  Quite honestly, it didn’t matter if he were marking up form for the Profab Windows Handicap at Bath. Just look busy, puzzled, committed, engaged, involved in the public good. He didn’t: instead he allowed himself to be snapped, shoulders adjacent, with the pouting Polly, apparently watching an entertainment on an iPad (as right).

Which brings us to:

The last week has given plenty ammunition for his new theme — which he repeated during his union Sponsored Walk yesterday — ‘they think they are born to rule, but they are not very good at it.’

 And that is the bottom line here. For Miliband, by comparison, is getting good at it. Compare Osborne’s rail trip (and the public image thereof) with this:

The pendulum is swinging

Miliband may be über-Geek, but sooner, rather than later, the nation will finally tire of public-school amateurs.

A chapter of “accidents”?

They were a group of lads (all of Malcolm’s vintage), working out of RAF Wittering . That was the base for ground-attack aircraft (duck as you raced up that bit of the A1!) — hence ‘Hedgehoppers’. Because they were military, they had to be “Anonymous”. And, also hence: Hedgehoppers Anonymous:

And they were good. Far, far better than many of the catch-penny beat groups that “made it” longer.

Indelible

For those of a certain age, of a certain disposition, that lyric stays imprinted:

It’s good news week:
Someone’s dropped a bomb somewhere,
Contaminating atmosphere,
And blackening the sky.

It’s good news week:
Someone’s found a way to give
The rotting dead a will to live,
Go on and never die.

If the first stanza/verse explains why these guys were out-of-kilter with the 1960s RAF, the next one remains omni-present.

Take the last few hours

The Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell story has been one that kept giving for the Labour opposition. There will be broken hearts among the Labour Party tendency that Mitchell finally went for the political equivalent of a Darwin Award:

The prime tenet of the Darwin Awards is that we are celebrating the self-removal of incompetent genetic material from the human race. Therefore, the potential winner must be deceased, or at least incapable of reproducing. The traditional method is death. However, an occasional rebel opts for sterilization, which allows her more time to enjoy the dubious notoriety of winning a Darwin Award.

The bitter-sweet joy is that it took Mitchell this long: a month of poisonous news-stories, which will not have finished with his resignation. The other barrel is loaded with his last-minute as International Development Secretary decision to award £16 million to President Kagame of Rwanda (The rotting dead a will to live):

Downing Street approved the controversial decision last month by the then international development secretary Andrew Mitchell to restore British aid to Rwanda in spite of fears about the human rights record of the president, Paul Kagame.

As Mitchell faces criticism over his decision to grant £16m in aid on his last day in office, it emerged that the move was backed jointly by No 10 and the Foreign Office (FCO). Hours after his decision last month Mitchell took up the post of government chief whip.

What remains inexplicable is the double standard whereby

• President Omar Hassan Ahmad Al-Bashir  of Sudan  was indicted by the International Criminal Court,

while

• Kagame travels the world scot-free,  unindicted and, by the UK government, well-rewarded (at least until the next discreet volte-face).

But then David Cameron has been well-serviced (not least courtesy of Andrew Mitchell) with juicy photo-ops and news-clips in Rwanda.

Credit where it’s due

As Mitchell departs, Sir George Young is slotted, seamlessly, into his place.

Sir George Samuel Knatchbull Young, 6th Baronet, has been around the block somewhat. He did well enough under John Major (as Financial Secretary and then Transport Secretary) but was one of the decent, unpushy Tories who seemed to miss out when the ConDem coalition was formed. He was Leader of the House (surely the one job for which he was made)  until, as it seemed, he was made redundant in the Great Cameron Re-shuffle — to provide a fig-leaf for the defenestrated Health Secretary, Lansley.

Now he is back; a gentleman to the marrow. Where ‘Thrasher’ Mitchell was supposed to intimidate, the Bicycling Baronet will charm. Where Mitchell swore, Young will soothe. True noblesse oblige.

For once it is an inspired choice.

But we haven’t finished with the rotting dead

Just when Mitchell was going for the seppuku solution, “Gids” Osborne was rubbing in the message of We’re not all in this together:

George Osborne is reported to have stumped up an extra £160 for a first class train ticket after being told he could not sit in the restricted area with his standard class fare.

ITV News correspondent Rachel Townsend said she was travelling on a train to Euston when the chancellor got on at Wilmslow, in his Tatton constituency, and tried to get away without paying the extra charge.

Townsend made perfect use of Twitter to report that journey under the hashtag#getGeorgeinstandard, as an aide to the chancellor reportedly tried to persuade the conductor to let her boss stay in first class away from, for want of a better word, the plebs.

What goes missing there is the female “aide”, who apparently had to sort out the penalty fare (as well as her own?). This from the BBC:

The story was broken via a series of tweets by ITV reporter Rachel Townsend, who works for Granada Reports in the North-West of England.

She said: “Very interesting train journey to Euston Chancellor George Osborne just got on at Wilmslow with a STANDARD ticket and he has sat in FIRST CLASS…

“His aide tells ticket collector he cannot possibly move and sit with the likes of us in standard class and requests he is allowed to remain in First Class.

Malcolm’s emphasis: there are indeed some to whom privilege comes unnaturally natural.

Tin-foil hats at the ready!

Feel free to go all conspiracy-theory at Huffington Post:

Ummm … decisions! decisions!

Underneath the arches

Osborne was hurried, shielded, escorted out of the side, goods, entrance of Euston Station to avoid the welcoming party of assembled press vultures and a few Labourites. Should “Gids” Osborne think he is out from under, he should reflect on a fellow traveller who also tried to take the easy way through.

Further north, there’s  York’s historic Micklegate Bar, one of the four medieval entrances through the ancient city walls. Anyone who has been to York will recognise it as the gate near the railway station, where the A59 from Harrogate and Knaresborough joins the A1036 road from Tadcaster. Most likely the Roman legions, hiking up Ermine Street, came this way. The present Micklegate (from Northumbrian Anglian micil: great or large in size, bulk, or stature — there may be a clue there) has been in situ these seven hundred and odd years. Ignorant modernists find it clearly prefaced with a height warning: 8ft 6in. Even so, this afternoon a delivery lorry attempted the impossible.

God luck to both the lorry driver and “Gids”, as they talk their separate ways out of their present embarrassments.

And the latest from London …

The broadsheet columnists whistle a certain hit from the 60′s as they conceive appropriate stories for the weekend editions.

A faint hurrah for the Tory squire?

It’s not the flavour of the week, thanks to Chief Whip Mitchell and his “fucking plebs”; but at some time we’d need to unscramble the Cameroon nouveau-riche from the Old Tory decayed gentry.

It’s implicit, indeed endemic, in some of the strained relations within the ConDem coalition. Was “Gids” Osborne really known as “Oik” in the Bullingdon Club, because he was not an Old Etonian, and as a wallpaper-heir didn’t have quite the same depth of pockets?

Mitchell, son of a wine merchant and minor Tory politico, has definite roots in “trade”. His rise to affluence was through Lazards and lobbying for overseas contracts. Definitively “new money”.

Pritt-y neat

Mitchell, let us remember, came out of the Great Commons Expenses row with some aplomb, but the claim for a glue-stick (all of 13p) stuck to him. He was a beneficiary of a DV3 tax scam: the Dickens and Jones building in regent Street was bought for £65 million, and sold to a subsidiary of the same lot for a thousandth of the amount, thus avoiding 4% (over £2.5 million) in stamp duty — the resale of the lease a year later, at a 300% profit, must have greased the Mitchell wheels, too. He also got away with a sordid bit of lobbying for a cocoa company which, by no coincidence, contributed to his constituency office and to central Tory funds.

Forelock-tugging time

Some time back there was a rather tasty piece by Peter Oborne on the Telegraph site.

His major premiss is that the Cameroons have lost touch with the natural Tory base. He sadly never got round to the Turnip Taliban, who featured the September before the General Election:

White men are the only group left in our society about whom it is safe to be offensive. There is, however, a subset about whom it is not just safe to be rude, but whose humiliation is actively encouraged. We had a prime example this week in Sir Jeremy Bagge, 7th Bt, Old Etonian, Norfolk landowner and leader of the so-called “Turnip Taliban”. Sir Jeremy was depicted as the would-be nemesis of Liz Truss, selected for South West Norfolk despite her adultery with a Tory MP. In these guises he was ripe for savaging, to give the Tory party another fatuous chance to yell: “We’ve changed!”

For some years, people like me have been telling people like Sir Jeremy, with sincere regret, that they are not welcome in the Conservative Party. It exists now principally for people who used to vote Labour. The Conservative Party positively encourages the persecution of such types as Sir Jeremy. How dare he be rich, live in a big house, speak with a plum in his mouth and expect to participate in politics in this day and age? Doesn’t he understand that democracy now excludes people like him?

Surely there’s no great need to identify that as Simon Heffer in mid-froth. The little tizz in South-West Norfolk was merely a sortie in the war that the Cameroonies played over the deselection of a swathe of second-homers and moat dredgers, neatly replacing them with A-listers and media-friendly types. While the “flippers” (Gove, Lansley, Osborne …) escaped the Cameron axe (unlike Cameron’s wisteria on expenses), Sir Peter Viggars went down in hoots of derision for his £1,645 duck-house.

Back to Oborne

This was the bit Malcolm particularly liked:

Tory activists are for the most part virtuous and decent people who have not been drawn into political activity by dogma, ideology or personal interest. More often than not, their party membership is just one facet of a wider engagement with their local community, whether as church wardens, charity workers or presidents of the rugby club.

To be sure, they tend to be relentlessly provincial, but they are the backbone of Britain, the hard workers and strivers who pick up the pieces and make sure their communities work. For New Labour and its cohort of media admirers in the BBC and elsewhere, they have long been an easy target for satire and misrepresentation.

OK let’s ignore the “dogma, ideology” conceit — we are, after all, speaking of the Stupid Party. The gybe against the Beeb has to be passed over as standard operating practice when catering for the “Disgusteds of Tunbridge Wells” who buy the Torygraph. The rest of that stands up quite nicely. And such folk, in the raw, are quite admirable. Without them Women’s Institutes and church roof appeals would be lost-and-gone-forever.

And people of quality know better than to scorn “plebs”.