Owen Tudor

A staggering and swaggering entry into the “they just don’t get it” category is the article by Czech President Vaclav Klaus in the FT today. He argues that the best way out of the current crisis is to deregulate everything. Sorry, I exaggerate. He actually only wrote that:

“The best thing to do now would be temporarily to weaken, if not repeal, various labour, environmental, social, health and other “standards”, because they block rational human activity more than anything else.”

Note that when people make such sweeping statements, they never specify which standards should go – the rules against drink driving, or use of asbestos, or sending children up chimneys? No, of course not, only the “bad” standards, like …. er…..something I overheard someone make up in a pub….

Thankfully, the Czech President is not in charge of the Czech Presidency of the EU. He’s in charge of important stuff, like whether to fly the EU flag or not (that’ll show those b-Euro-crats). Honestly, you couldn’t make it up!

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Owen Tudor

There should be another section on this blog to balance the “They Just Don’t Get It” thread. And it should be called “Yes We Can” – slogan of both Barack Obama and, of course, Bob the Builder. Because what Obama reminded us about throughout last year was that things can be changed (note the grammar – not things can change, but things can be changed, by us – collectively – doing things). There has been a lot of fatalism about both the course of the economic recession we face and the predominantly Keynesian responses, but neither was inevitable*. This weekend, the Financial Times argued strongly that we can affect both the length and depth of the recession and reminded me that we could do something tragically misguided.

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Nigel Stanley

Nick Clegg’s New Year media offensive overlaps with Brendan Barber’s message in some interesting ways.

His calls for Britain to emerge from the recession as a fairer, greener country, for a fairer tax system and to sort out banking chime with the TUC’s concerns.

He is also right to say that the UK’s economy has become unbalanced in favour of financial services. But he then goes on to call for the abolition of the one government department that has the tools – and what expertise still exists after so many years of neo-liberalism – to intervene in the economy in ways that will rebalance it.

That is not to call for a return to 70s-style picking winners, but it is impossible to see how we can rebalance the economy without a government department charged with carrying that through.

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Owen Tudor

Hazel Blears is reported by the Telegraph today saying that:

White working class people living on estates sometimes just don’t feel anyone is listening or speaking up for them. Whilst they might not be experiencing the direct impact of migration, their fear of it is acute.

I have to say that this is not what union members are telling us, although of course people in jobs are less likely to feel scared about the impact of migration than those who aren’t. But given what passes for the general political level of debate on immigration, it wouldn’t be that surprising if she was right – and the article does indicate that most people reporting these fears had little experience of actual migrants. A sensible response would include treating migrants and the people already here equally, rather than dividing them up.

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Adam Lent

The heartwarming New Year message from the British Chambers of Commerce is that the minimum wage should be frozen from October 2009.  I’ll write about this in more detail once I’m over the New Year revelries. But I had to say something about Tim Worstall’s piece calling for the same on the Guardian website.  Worstall is a fellow of the Adam Smith Institute and if you wanted a sign of how out of touch that breed of ideologue now is, you could do no better than this mind-bending sentence from the Guardian article:

Things in markets are worth what the markets say they are worth.

Worstall must inhabit a parallel universe where the inability of the financial markets to correctly price just about anything hasn’t led to a global economic crisis.  His comment pretty much sums up the deeply ideological and flawed nature of the rest of the article.  I’ll return to it soon.

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Nigel Stanley

Over time earnings tend to go up more than prices. This is why our standard of living rises from generation to generation (although technological advance has something to do with this too.)

So when the Conservatives decided in 1980 that they would only uprate the state pension in line with prices  it meant that pensioners would no longer share in rising prosperity. In most years pensions have fallen a little behind earnings – and over time that mounts up. Today the state retirement pension is below what people need to live on – and anyone dependent on it alone would almost certainly qualify for means tested benefits on top.

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