For what doth it profit a man......

Vince Cable has been heard singing in his bath, the old Bob Dylan song with added Lib Dem lyrics...

"Tell me, how many promises can one man break, before he's a Tory stooge..."

In today's Guardian, Julian Glover ( who bills himself as a Lib Dem but spouts the Daily Mail line without any obvious restraint in his weekly Guardian column) has the proposition that equality is a bad thing, or as he puts it

.."a fair society may be one in which people have the right to strive for inequality"

The article is in response to a report by the Equalities and Human Right Commission which broadly champions more equality and less inequality.

Glovers response is to challange the definition and vagueness of "fairness" and to suggest that economic equality is not  a suitable goal for a fair society.

"Its definition of a fair society is one that champions the constant reduction of unequal outcomes..."

"I think the EHRC has a wrongheaded idea of fairness. It measures the extent to which people's lives are different, and then calculates the action needed to make them more the same. The assumption is that equality is what we all want."

I have to say that IMO Julian has got his philosphical positioning a bit wrong. I would say that  a.... "society in which people have the right to strive for inequality.." ...is a free society.

A fair society is a free society in which that freedom is balanced by others striving for (and being free to strive for) a more equal distribution of the economic wealth. And, it seems obvious to me, if a society is too unequal, then it will become much less fair and, eventually, much less free.

Last month I blogged about The Spirit Level, a book that...

"....has a simple, but politically explosive, theme: that greater inequality is the cause of many modern problems and, by logicical implication, that greater equality can be the solution to many of the problems of western societies..."

Of course, if Julian reall was a "liberal", he would know, or at least instinctively feel, the truth of that already....

Red Faced - Red Top

George Pascoe Watson is cock of the walk. As the Political Editor of the Sun newspaper, he is the biggest beast in the corral. His support and opinion can make or break politicians and their parties.

So when he comments here that Alan Johnson will definitely not be Shadow Chancellor, it carries weight.

Except... two minutes after reading his tweet, BBC TV confidently announced that Allan Johnson is the new Shadow Chancellor, quickly followed by this non-apology from the bold George...

This may seem a trivial matter, but people like Pascoe Watson survive and prosper on their contacts and the reliability of the information they can get from those contacts. There has been much discussion recently about the "red top" tabloids, especially the Sun, losing their dominant influence over public and political opinion.

Getting it so wrong so publicly in this type of issue won't help restore that dominance.... and a good thing too.

The Return of the Undeserving Poor.....

Two days ago I posted this, about the Tory Child Benefit fiasco. I ended the post like this;

"All the Conservative cries of "fairness" are just a diversion from their long term ideoligical nirvana: less tax for the rich, more wealth for the few, keep the middle classes in a balance of comfort and fear, add a few crumbs of conscience money to make it look as if you "care", and let the poor manage how they can."

I almost added a flourish about the "return of the undeserving poor", but I thought that it would be too ridiculous: even the Tories wouldn't be so crass as to talk like that...
 
Imagine my surprise when watching Newsnight that very night and I saw a senior LibCon Minister, Jeremy Hunt, use exactly that language. Mr Hunt said: "If you are on benefits you shouldn't have children, or any more children. Us posh folk are giving you charity and you better be grateful and well behaved. Just watch it."
 
I paraphrase of course, but that's the sense of his opinions. Cold charity and like it, the Tory gruel throughout the ages.
 
In the twenties my dad and his brothers, being too proud to wear the boots they got from the  parish, went to school barefoot. In the interim we have (should that be had?) made some progress and distributed benefits according to need, not by judgement against some middle class moral strictures about the deserving and undeserving poor. Now the finger-wagging parish, in the shape of our ConDem coalition, rears its head again. Dare I mention the workhouse?

Stormy Weather....

Left Foot Forward had this assessment of Cameron's speech within minutes of its completion. Devastating. Maybe the Tories should be glad that, in the words of a Tory minister quoted in the Guardian, it'll be forgotten in a week....

Anyway, to substance: a criticism from many economists of the speed and depth of the Tory cuts has been that they risk a "double dip" recession, i.e., having been coaxed out of a short recession by an expansion of the money supply, the economy reacts to the sudden austerity by sinking back into negative growth. Recession returns.

The magazine Public Finance reveals figures released today by the National Institute for Economic and Social Research show that growth has slowed dramatically.

"Latest economic figures have shown a marked decline growth in the third quarter of 2010, with the onset of government austerity measures cited as a factor in slowing the economic recovery.


"Data released this afternoon by the National Institute for Economic and Social Research showed that growth for the three months up to September stood at 0.5% – less than half of the unexpectedly high figure of 1.2% for quarter two." 

Under Doctors Brown and Darling, the ailing economy struggles to a frail recovery...but now the there's a new team of doctors. They're cocky and confident, but much less experience, and their Patent Coalition Medicine seems to be choking the patient. Pulse down, circulation sluggish, a double dip beckons the patient...having rallied briefly, it's eyes flutter....

Now more data about a faltering housing market from the Halifax via Left Foot Forward (again). Of course constantly rising house prices is not necessarilly a "good thing". But as a harbinger of the dreaded double dip they are part of a growing body of evidence that those who think that too much austerity is dangerous could be right. And Georgey Boy could be wrong....

The real cuts are still to come by the way....

Whaur's yer Arc o' Prosperity noo?

In past years Alex Salmond was fond of pointing to our Irish cousins across the water and crowing..."Look how bonnie they look, well fed and everything... Scotland could be just like Ireland, y'know, if only the English would get off our backs..."

Today Fitch, the credit ratings agency, relegated Ireland's rating to A+, meaning even more pain and trouble for the Irish economy and its prospects of recovery..... 

In 2007, Eck also favoured less banking regulation.......from The Times, 7th April, 2007;

"....We are pledging a light-touch regulation suitable to a Scottish financial sector with its outstanding reputation for probity...."

What can you say? The man's a comic genius.....

At least as funny as Spike Milligan and the Pakistani dalek..... if not quite so grounded in mundane reality...

Why not just raise income tax?

A YouGov poll in the Sun newspaper finds that 83% of respondants think that cutting Child Benefit for the better-off is fair, which is a puzzle given all the negative publicity and violent reaction to the policy since it was sprung on the Tory Party conference on Monday morning.

Can the policy really be so popular among the public and yet cause so much panic among its progenitors? TBH, I don't know: maybe the question was posed in a particular way that elicited a particular answer, maybe it was asked before the objections to the policy became common currency in the debate. Maybe it is a true reflection of public opinion. Who knows?

Meanwhile the reaction of the  Tory Party leadership is to flip-flop over the very same subject, believing the announcement to have been a mistake or at least mismanaged. After taking flack from its biggest supporters in the Daily Mail and The Telegraph, the Conservatives have panicked. In the face of a barrage of criticism of the impact of the cuts on single earning families where one parent doesn't work and looks after the kids, they are now promising to introduce a married couples tax allowance, a policy which is not in the coalition agreement and which the Consrvatives only ever envisaged being applied to standard rate taxpayers in any case. They seem to have forgotten the best political advice in the circumstances: if you are in a hole, stop digging!

Anyway, why did the Tories choose to design this particular policy in this particular way? Why go to all the bother of making some families eligible for the benefit and not others, introducing even more anomolies into the system and alienating those parents, many of them middle class Tory voters, who chose to stay at home and look after their children?  If you want to bring in the extra £1billion that the change will generate, and you want the better off to pay, why not just tax the higher rate taxpayer at 0.5 p or 1p more, whichever amount will get you the money you need? 

The answer is of course and as always with the Tories, ideological. The cuts are being sold as "fair", taking from the rich not the poor, which is unremarkable and inoffensive. But the real signficance is that they undermine the principle of universality... the belief that "we're all in this together", that comes from all groups in society receiving the same entitlement to benefits.

Create a benefits system that applies only to the poor divides the rich from the poor even more. It emphasises the differences in wealth that already exist and makes another separation between "us" and "them". The Conservatives believe that a system that applies only to the poor will, over time, become a poorer system. And such a system will be less regarded, easier to neglect and underfund, more like the poor law systems of late Victorian and Edwardian times.

Ironically, for all the selling of this policy as "fair", the Tories real aim is to creat a more unequal society and a less fair society. That's the Tories' prize. Fairness doesn't come into it. And that's why they will not raise taxes for higher earners, even although that is the obvious way to get the money they need. They are against it precicely because it would be fairer and more equitable. All the Conservative cries of "fairness" are just a diversion from their long term ideoligical nirvana: less tax for the rich, more wealth for the few, keep the middle classes in a balance of comfort and fear, add a few crumbs of conscience money to make it look as if you "care", and let the poor manage how they can.

Tory Heaven. And welcome to it.....

BTW, a funny Paxman interview... when did Theresa May, Minister for Women and Families, learn of Georgey Boy's cuts to Child Bernefit...? Priceless. Poor Terry, she looks even more blankly stupid than usual...