Though Cowards Flinch

An Ipsos MORI poll in January 2011 had it that 11% of the public liked Ed Miliband but disliked the Labour party, while 20% did not like Ed but did like the Labour party.

In this period Miliband’s total “likeability”, according to the pollsters, was the same as Michael Howard’s in April 2008.

Over the period between October 2010 and February 2011 the proportion of the public who were dissatisfied with Ed almost doubled from 22% to 43%.

Furthermore, the polls picked up a lower “don’t know” percentage than is typical of an opposition leader. This means that many more people have an opinion on the leader of the opposition, today, and according to polls it has been negatively placed.

YouGov, for the Sunday Times, have today revealed another uncomfortable figure that shows Ed Miliband’s “well figure” of 26% equaling the lowest he’s seen.

The percentages for David Cameron have increased by 2% while Ed has dropped 4%. And yet, this month’s ComRes online poll for the Independent on Sunday and Sunday Mirror shows Labour to be leading the Tories by 4% – signalling no change for Labour, but a drop of 2% for the Tories.

The perception of Ed Miliband has changed very little over the year. While the Labour party tops polls, particularly now the cuts are starting to bite (despite the majority of the public, according to other polls, saying they agree with the Coalition’s economic policy – though whether they agree with this being frontloaded onto the frontline remains to be seen), Ed Miliband himself is not being trusted by the public.

More disagree today that Ed Miliband would be better protecting jobs than they did in April and January this year, and less agree today than they did in January and April.

On other points of note, most people agree that there is a class system today, while fewer see themselves as working class. Ipsos MORI made a damning statement looking at the Labour party vote in the last election saying a “working class” party, given the percentage of people who identify as such, and the percentage of those people who vote, is not feasible anymore. So perhaps the squeezed middle strategy was right, and so too the appeal against predatory capitalism?

Whatever your thoughts, it is not working for Ed, the figurehead of these moves.

Nothing other than concern can be said for these results. We cannot believe everything we read in polls, but they are the best indicator we have, and they are often very close to correct. We are where Gordon Brown was coming up to the election of 2010 a year later, even with a new leader, and a government doing unimaginable things without mandate. This is greatly worrying.

If it weren’t for the fact that these people are actually MPs and wield considerable and increasing influence over government’s apocalyptic social and economic policy, their absurd ravings would be entertaining.  As it is, it is genuinely disturbing that these people are MPs.

I refer, of course, to the first four MPs of the eight we are promised by Conservative Home, giving us their ‘insights’ into how to ‘turbo-charge’ economic growth. 

 We have already dealt with two of them.

The first, the Honourable Moron for Dover, managed to get the very first sentence of the introductory article wrong.  He claimed that the UK was in ‘bleak recession’ when the Tories came into power.  In fact the UK was in the third quarter of recovery, and the 1.1% growth in that quarter has outstripped by at least 0.5% growth in any quarter under the Tories.

The second is the Honourable Numptie for West Worcestershire.  She managed to spend the whole of an article supposedly about economic growth focusing on how best to impoverish people.  She praised the US soup kitchen model welfare, and said that teenage parents should be punished for the attitudes she acknowledged they don’t actually have. 

So who’s next up?

It’s the Honourable Thicko for Staffordshire Moorlands.   She reckons the best way to get growth going is to cut that 50% tax rate. 

Her ‘growing evidence’ for this radical policy? It’s an article in Moneyweek magazine, which she clearly hasn’t noticed is sourced from a Channel 4 news item. which revealed that around 84 more UK bankers were living in Switzerland in 2010 than in 2009.  She reckons this will cost us £53m in lost tax revenue.

Would it be too shooting-fish-in-a-barrel to point out that 84 is not a very big percentage of people in the UK who earn money enough to pay the 50% rate? 

There are roughly 300, 000 such earners in the UK, and 300,000 is quite a lot more than 83.  The increased tax rate on this 300,000 aims to raise around £2.5bn a year in extra tax.  Even with the range of tax avoidance possibilities available, that will be still quite a lot more than £53m.  Up to 50 times as much.   

Unless perhaps she thinks all 300,000 people on the rate will go to Switzerland.  After all, that may be where she skis, and it is very nice.

And finally, (for now, there are still four more to come), there’s Chris Heaton-Harris, the Honourable Prat for Daventry.

He doesn’t like regulation.  Especially EU regulation.  Especially things to do with workers’ rights.  His main source of evidence is the not-entirely-unbiased Open Europe:

Based on over 2,300 of the government’s own impact assessments, an Open Europe study (2010) found that regulation has cost the UK economy £176 billion since 1998, a sum roughly equivalent to the UK’s entire budget deficit.

It looks like Chris H-H may have got as far as the press release on this report. Otherwise he might have seen that this is a study of benefits/costs, not just costs:

We estimate the benefit/cost ratio of the regulations we studied at 1.58. In other words, for every £1 of cost introduced by a regulation since 1998, it has delivered £1.58 of benefits (page 1).

In fact Open Europe’s benefit/cost calculations differ from BIS’s, who give a 1.85: 1 ratio.  But let’s not quibble. Even they acknowledge that regulation, whether EU or domestic, has a net benefit. 

Chris H-H’s method is like me arguing that it costs me £500 a year in transport costs to go to work, without any consideration of the fact I earn money when I get there?   My 9 year old son has been studying the concept of ratios in Key Stage 2 numeracy, and gets it, but H-H is still clearly struggling with the whole thing.

And these people are in charge of the coming apocalypse…..

So the same GPs who are to be entrusted with the £80bn NHS budget from April 2013 may be stripped of their role in telling people whether they are too sick to work or not:

Employers would be able to ask the assessment panel, rather than GPs, to make independent decisions.

A new eight-part series at Conservative Home, the first sentence of which contained a glaring lie, is a valuable glimpse into the dark heart of the New Conservatism.

In a series of articles by MP on the right of the party, supposedly focused on how to ‘tutbo-charge’ economic growth, we get frightening but valuable insights in what is to come as the right of the party wrests control of social policy from the party’s remaining moderates.

Today’s offering is from Harriet Baldwin.  Her key policy proposal is based on the devolution of welfare benefits to local authorities (remember this is supposed to be about economic growth).  She uses the United States welfare model as evidence of  what can be achieved through localization of benefit rates. 

You know, the United States, where soup kitchens now proliferate.

This is scary indeed, especially Essex County Council is already leading the charge to the destitution of the poor.  I’ll be covering the coming roll out of this viciousness in a subsequent post.

For now, though, take a look at this piece of Tory logic from Baldwin, someone supposedly capable of sitting in parliament as lawmaker and guardian of democracy:

Although I have never met an out of work teenager who chooses pregnancy, the availability of benefits linked to the number of children could be seen as an attractive incentive to a 16 year old, who might not otherwise have many ways of earning more than £3.64 an hour.  With one child and a range of child benefits, rent and council tax paid, a teenage girl can have a net household income of over £9,000 per annum.

At a time when we need to focus amore [sic] support and help on getting young people into work, the incentives to work at the point where a young woman leaves education are not strong enough………….

How can the incentives be reformed so that fewer choose to have children at a point when they cannot support them without welfare?

You get this logic?  Baldwin accepts that she has never met anyone who gets pregnant in order to claim welfare, produces no evidence that they do, but then proposing reducing the benefits of teenage mothers just in case there might be some who get pregnant with welfare in mind.

The term policy-based evidence can’t do this justice;  Baldwin seems to have had a logic bypass en route to her determination to punish teenage girls (fathers don’t get a mention) for the motivations she admits they don’t have in the first place

This, readers, is what waits in the wings of the Tory party, scrabbling for power and influence, using the august tome that is Conservative Home as their soap box. 

Next up, this brainless numptie using a paragraph in MoneyWeek as the key evidence for her radical economic policy of making very rich people richer.

There have been a couple of posts up at Liberal Conspiracy recently, promoting or reporting on newly published Demos research into the views of online supporters of ”populist” groups and parties in Europe.  One research report covers the findings from all 11 European countries covered by the research, while another focuses on the English Defence League (RDL). 

I’ve now read the reports.  The Europe-wide report in particular contains assertions which are not supported by the data collected, and which actually make me wonder about the motives for the research, and in turn about Demos’s integrity as a self-avowed ‘centre-left’ think tank.

First, there is this statement:

It is clear that a significant number of Europeans are concerned about the erosion of their national culture in the face of immigration, the growth of Islam in Europe, and the blurring of national borders as a result of European integration and globalisation. (p21, Europe report)

 The data provided simply doesn’t back up this assertion.   Such concerns may be raised by those responding to the online survey, but they are clearly not representative of Europeans; they are affiliated to populist groups/parties, and that is how they come to be responding to the survey.  

Table 4 (p.60) makes itself makes it clear that they are not representative, with 48% of BNP supporters, for example, naming immigration in their top two concerns, as opposed to just 6% in the general population.  It makes no sense to jump from there to an assertion that ‘sigificant numbers’ of British people are concerned “about the erosion of their national culture in the face of immigration”, as even the 6% will not necessarily link their concerns about immigration to erosion of culture.

Then there is this statement:

Despite being referred to as ‘far-right’, many of these groups are not easily placed according to traditional political categories, often combining elements of leftwing and rightwing philosophy, mixed with populist language and rhetoric…..

On economic policy, however, the current economic climate has also heightened rhetoric beyond national cultural protection to include national economic interests, and workers’ rights — typically the language of the left. These groups are increasingly critical of the European Union, international capitalism and globalisation.

There is simply no data to back up the assertion that members of any of these groups can be readily associated with the left.  Yes, parties like the BNP may add the occasional leftish statement for marketing purposes, but this is irrelevant to the study findings; both reports stress that formal party statements bear little relation to their online activists views.

Being critical of the EU and globalisation is not a specifically leftwing trait, and the paper acknowledges that only 4% have any motivations associated with economics for joining these parties/groups (Europe report p.52). 

The EDL report states that 26% of EDL supporters place ‘lack of jobs’ as one of their two biggest concerns (p.21), but this is only slightly higher than the national average (19%), and is probably correlated to the fact that there are higher levels of unemployment in those surveyed than in the general population.  In any event, being worried about lack of jobs does not necessarily put you on the left.

More fundamentally, to peddle the notion that any of these groups can be associated in any way with the political left is ludicrous.  Left and left liberal thought is rooted, from Rousseau, through the Enlightenment and Marx to democratic socialism/liberalism, in fundamental principles of equality and respect for others. 

The left has debated long and hard about how universal principles of equality square with the right to cultural distinctiveness (Charles Taylor’s Multiculturalism: the politics of recognition providing the definitive summary of the debate), and the debate is not resolved.  The point, though, is that these are left-liberal concerns; while it is correct to point out the populist parties may “lay claim to the mantle of the Enlightenment, espousing support for the fundamentally liberal values of free speech, democracy and equality” (European report, p.26), it is incorrect to accept this claim at face value, because these groups’ actions on the ground show that they are NOT interested in these values.

So the question remains.  What are Demos thinking, such that one of the reports’ authors offer this advice in his Liberal Conspiracy article:

This may be uncomfortable for some left-wingers. But we will not engage supporters of these groups if we do not understand their concerns.

I can’t help feeling that “understand” here actually means to “accede to”, on the basis that these groups’ concerns are shared by a large number of the population (which the data does not show), and on the basis that they have some kind of leftist legitimacy. They do not.  These parties and groups are of the far-right, and need to be “engaged” with as such.

Sometimes you have to admire the Tories for their steadfast refusal to do facts.

This morning, the Tory MP for Dover opens what I’m sure will be a wonderfully reality-free excursion from 8 of his colleagues on how to “turbo-charge” the economy. 

The opening sentence for this grand exercise is:

In May 2010 the coalition Government came to office with the public finances shot through and the country in bleak recession.

He’s clearly not too concerned with the fact that in May 2010 was in its third post-recession quarter, and that the 1.1.% growth in that quarter is at least 0.5% greater than any growth since achieved under the Tories.

TCF brings you its latest rundown: Top 10 terrible Tory councils of the last 10 weeks.  We know you love pointless list.

The scoring process is very, very clever, and probably too hard for you to understand, but generally systematic evilness scores better than rank incompetence, which in turn scores more than individual stupidity.  There are extra points for hypocrisy-while-being-evil-or-stupid, and extra style points for crass stupidity beyond human reason. 

So without further do…..

10.  Kicking off a very decent showing for London Tory Councils, we have Cameron’s favourite borough, Kensington and Chelsea.  K&C make it in at number 10 with the news that they’ve misused millions of pounds on consultancy contracts, then got a firm of consultants in to tell them how badly they’ve misused the money, then held the meeting about it in secret because it’s not “in the public interest” for people to know how they’ve misused all the money.

This scores good points for large amounts of money wasted, but loses out because wasting money on consultants is not very imaginative stupidity.  Still, a decent effort.

9. Coming in at number 9 we have little old Mendip District Council.  The West Country Tories have been put forward for the list by David Edwards, who feels they should be in there on account of their “general, smug Tory incompetence”.  He’s not sure why they’re so smug, and how they manage to be quite so incompetent when they’ve outsourced most of their services anyway. 

Normally, generic smug incompetence wouldn’t get you into this list, but we’ve made an exception here because the Mendip Tories did try to get a wizard elected to Council, presumably in the belief that a Tory Council is a bit like Hogwarts, but with less good bin collections. 

No really, a wizard,who says he is able “to commune with both tree and sprite alike”. Not voters, though. He lost.

8.  Into the top 10 with a very late run is Trafford Borough Council.  They’re generally just run-of-the-mill shocking, but news that one of their Tories has been charged with seven counts of benefit fraud.

Now normally this kind of alleged criminality, however hypocritical, wouldn’t get you anywhere near the list, but there’s been special pleading from Matt Finnegan, who points out that Trafford should score higher for making this guy a Party Whip, charged with keeping up standards within his group.

7.  Those Shropshire Tories are in at number 7, with an impressively brazen attempt to clamp down on free speech, combined with a high level of condescension to their residents.   They score highly for celebrity factor also, having banned Sally Bercow from going into one of the day centres they are planning to close, despite her having been personally invited in there by a user of the centre.  They met in the car park instead.  Extra points go to the Shropshire Tories, as they’d done an assiduous practice run, by trying to ban journalist Kate Belgrave a few months earlier.

(Note, this is actually outside the time period, but I didn’t notice till now and I’m not changing it.)

6.  Plymouth Tories are in at a very respectable number 6, with their attempt to derecognise trade unions.  Good points were awarded for a total lack of understanding about what trade unions do, and slavish adherence to the rightwing line.

5.  Breaking into the top 5, just ahead of their right-wing nutter colleagues along the South coast, come Southampton’s Tories, intent on privatising the whole of the Council just months after forcing Council staff to take a massive pay cut (i.e. making the sale more attractive to the private sector).  Good points for the double whammy, though a little too conventionally 1980s-style to get higher up the list.

4. Essex Tories make a really good showing this time around, displaying great imagination with methods of making people destitute, and throwing some ex-leader rank hypocrisy in for measure.  

This all concerns Lord Hanningfield, ex-Council leader and now ex-prisoner, who has declared himself “destitute”, while knowing full well that his erstwhile colleagues are developing plans to make thousands of residents properly destitute by “localising” control of welfare benefits, then slashing both amounts paid and tightening eligibility criteria. 

Impressive viciousness combined with the ideological drive to become a Tory flagship for uncaring Conservatism and economic illiteracy.

3.  Storming in at number 3 are the famously Thatcherite Tory crew in Wandsworth.   They’ve come up with a scheme to throw you out of your home if you can’t get a job if, just for example, there aren’t any jobs.

Straightforward ignorance, combined with a sadistic streak always scores well, but Wandsworth’s Tories score especially highly because their new policy is in apparent total contradiction to the government’s policy of chucking you out of your home if you do get a decent job.

2.  What Wandsworth Tories have done, Barnet’s Tories have done better, and this gets them close to the coveted top spot.

Barnet have come up with a massively creative plan (item 7), under which people under 25 get chucked out of their home if they don’t get a job, BUT ALSO if they do get a decent one, with the limit for eligibility for a council home to be set at a little less household median income for the area (currently at £32,580 per year). 

They manage this impressive mix of total illogicality and direct discrimination against a specific age group within the same brief document, and it won’t be long now before young people desperate to stay in their home are either forced to work for free in,- ooh let’s say Tesco’s – or are trying desperately to earn less for their family.

1.  It’s got to be a pretty impressive tory entry to come in at number 1 on this, and do we have a treat for you.

Straight in at number 1 is West Lancashire Borough Council, who beating all previous tales of right-wing thuggery and bonkerness hands down with a startling display of ineptitude.

The Tories in West Lancashire have managed to completely ignore the fact that around about 20% of their landmass is likely to disappear underwater by 2015.

This will happen under Environment Agency plans to turn off two pumping stations and allow once-reclaimed but now rich horticultural land to return to unfarmable marsh.  This would cost thousands of jobs in the horticulture industry, and disrupt thousands of lives.  Even the dozy local Tory MP, who claimed at a meeting in early November that it was the first she’d heard of it (the consultation began on 29th September), has briefly woken up.

But not those West Lancs Tories. 

Despite having had an official representative on the Environment Agency steering group, they apparently haven’t noticed that a large part of their borough is due to be permanently flooded, and failed to put the matter on this week’s Cabinet agenda, or any other agenda (you’d have thought the Environment Committee might want a look?).  Meanwhile, in neighbouring Sefton the matter was fully discussed a month ago, and officers instructed on what to do.

Losing a fifth of your borough’s landmass without even noticing is, I think you’d agree, incompetent even by Tory standards, and this makes the West Lancs Tories number 1 in my book.

In the light of the newly released Quarter 3 Project Merlin figures, both the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph have finally picked up on the growing Project Merlin scandal,which we brought to attention last week.  The Telegraph now says:

The latest quarter’s £57.4bn brings the total up to almost £158bn, including £56.1bn to SMEs.

This awakening by the mainstream media is good news, although the BBC haven’t yet caught up.  Radio 5 yesterday (from 1hr 30mins 3o secs) featured an entirely unopposed interview with a Lloyd’s Banking Group representative, in which the interviewer failed to refer either to the fall in net lending or to the Bank of England’s Trends in Lending data, which show a downward lending trend overall.  This is despite the BBC’s own business reporter Robert Peston having picked up on some of the problems back in July.

Even better news, though, is that Labour has woken up to the growing scandal, with Lord Myners  mirroring TCF’s investigations very closely in his Lords question:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether data reported in the most recent Bank of England report Trends in Lending have contributed to their assessment of Project Merlin’s performance.

This is the nub of the matter.  Revealingly, Tory respondent Lord Sassoon did not reply to the specific question’s focus on the Trends in Lending data, either entirely missing or ignoring the point of the question.

We are, then, approaching the point at which Ed Miliband will be able to stand up at PMQs and ask Cameron why he misled the House in his original response on 2nd November.

And if that were all there were to it, then TCF’s job would be done.  But there’s more, and I suspect it’s more serious for the banks.

Consider this comment from an SME owner under the Telegraph article, referring to a point before Merlin:

Merlin always was a con trick. We had funding of c. 400,000.00 with RBS “renewed” in January 2011. The three accounts involved were closed and re-opened with new account numbers – hey presto : 440k new lending!

The FSB also criticised the practice of some banks of calling in business loans, renewing them, and calling them “new lending”.

Here’s a question: can there be an anti-capitalist conservatism?

It’s a question I will be thinking about in the next few months, and I’d be grateful to hear some thoughts.

John Gray, the author of among other books Black Mass, has noted, in his critical, yet supportive, piece on the recent spell of occupations, that demands of the established political class, from protesters should include:

not a full-scale retreat from globalisation … but a more restrained version of globalisation in which worldwide linkages grow organically, and different countries are not penalised for having different economic systems.

This should not be taken as support for government bureaucracy. Yuval Levin recently, in the US periodical National Affairs, tried to separate “capitalism from colossal corporations”. The real enemy to capitalism today is crony capitalism, which relies heavily upon corrupt government propping them up.

But a conservative anti-capitalism would go further still. Capitalism is a system that is in constant change, and seeks constant societal revolutions. And whereas socialist anti-capitalism seeks to replace society with a new social organisation, conservative anti-capitalism would want to put the brakes on, and reverse the tide to a more traditional system of days of old.

In the recent words of Daniel Ben-Ami, in his distinction of anti-capitalisms, Romantic anti-capitalism (as opposed to socialist anti-capitalism) “is essentially a reaction against modernity”.

There certainly is something in this, and it is coloured by post-Cold War perceptions of political systems. Before, conservatives knew where they stood when the economical game was fought between capitalism and communism. Today they may well maintain scepticism towards “anti-capitalism” as it tends towards leftist support for a more focal welfare state. But I suspect within good time we will start to talk about a dignified conservative anti-capitalism in itself.

It will be unique in its opposition to socialist planned economies, free-for-all corporatism and the constant change inherent to capitalism. It will distrust forced economic convergence between nations and be supportive of how John Gray has described the “worldwide linkages” grown organically.

There have been few articles on the subject, but for what there is already I’m assured that I’m not simply talking out my hat. But what do you think?

Jay-Z’s clothing company Rocawear have launched a T-shirt which reads “Occupy All Streets” blazoned on the front. A press statement on the shirt from the company goes:

The ‘Occupy All Streets’ T shirt was created in support of the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement. Rocawear strongly encourages all forms of constructive expression, whether it be artistic, political or social.

One leading occupier in the states, a chap called Grim, responded:

Jay-Z, as talented as he is, has the political sensibility of a hood rat and is a scrotum.

The thinking, perhaps, is that someone out there is attempting to squeeze a surplus on a real movement, with real aims, which aren’t to further a publicity campaign.

But to be sure, it is accepted that there is more to the protest than pure political expression.

I happened to be walking past St Paul’s one night last week when a guy at the microphone was announcing to the camp the intention of being recognised as a “work of art”.

Like with so many political statements, I always find myself wondering what Brendan O’Neill would think – and not because I respect him, you’ll understand, but quite the opposite.

He wrote a dreadful blogpost for the Telegraph regarding the occupation saying that “If Occupy London is such a radical revolt, why is it making the ruling classes smile rather than tremble?” The crux of the asserts that if this was a real protest, challenging the status quo, it wouldn’t be supported by, among others, Giles Fraser, Conservative Christian Democrat finance ministers in Germany and some leader writers of the Financial Times.

He, perhaps conveniently, forgets the avant-gardeist kookiness of the rich today. As Slavoj Zizek writes in every book he has written since 2008, even the Hollywood Aristocracy are anti-capitalist today, versed in Michael Moore documentaries and alternative, ethical consumerist lifestyles.

Indeed nobody wants competition less in their sector than the capitalists themselves.

The patronising smiles protesters receive in their consciousness-raising by the rich and well-off should be no reflection on the message and efforts of those camped out in St Paul’s. O’Neill is perhaps, once again, trying too hard to upset as many people as he can without submitting precisely what it is he thinks himself.

His point, however, about the very polite nature of the protest I did find interesting. This had especial resonance with me that night as I had just come back from a panel debate at the Frontline Club, discussing the riots, and in particular the Reading the Riots project – which my blogging colleague Paul Cotterill is involved with in Liverpool (scroll down here for his lovely picture).

I wondered if this was an example of a protest that would tick all the boxes for O’Neill; not polite, unceasing and bent on destruction.

As the conversation at the Frontline Club went, after devoted study, it looks as though there was something more to the riots than what David Cameron called “sheer criminality”. Something that, though not avowedly political in expression, was an expression of what Kenan Malik called “the atomization and “moral poverty” of the society” – something that is profoundly political.

The problem seems to me that, though the efforts of protesters are sympathised with, the establishment are able to ignore them and carry on as usual. The establishment, in fact, are often able to sympathise with it themselves – Vince Cable being one case in point – but safe in the knowledge that those issues will be largely avoided.

It is harder to ignore such actions as the riots – but should we really have to wait until this happens again? We might say that the “artistic” expression of protest is the peaceful and polite reminder before the violent storm. For reasons such as the riots, at a time when the measures of austerity are only just being felt, it would be most unwise for our politicians to ignore societal atomisation, or excuse its expressions as sheer criminality – something which I’m sure the Reading the riots project will provide a challenge to.