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Barclays may have won an injunction against the Guardian, but once documents are out they are out in the age of the internet
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Nigel Stanley
The Institute of Directors are always keen to stress that they do not just represent the well paid directors of Britain’s top firms. And of course there are many directors running small and medium companies who probably look at the huge bonuses and pensions available in the biggest companies with the same mix of awe and outrage as the rest of us.
But the IoD have got stuck in an anti-public sector groove. Not content with continuing attacks on public sector pensions – where there is at least a difference between public and private sectors – they are now manufacturing a difference between wages. Somehow I imagine this is going to feature in tomorrow’s right wing newspapers.
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Adam Lent
The news on unemployment is unremittingly bad as very widely reported today. Worklessness on the ILO headline measure has breached 2 million and there has been an expected but shocking spike in the number of people claiming unemployment benefit (which is more up to date than the ILO figure). Redundancies are also up and vacancies are down. This all comes after we published data a few days ago showing that the ratio of jobseekers to vacancies stood at 10 to 1. It was less widely reported that this compares to a ratio of 4 to 1 this time last year. All very grim.
But we are also being told that earnings data released today shows that the recession is now feeding through to pay rises with average earnings only rising 1.8% on the year in January down 1.3% on the previous month. It has been claimed that sterling has fallen in direct response to this. But the data is very misleading.
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Adam Lent
This is very significant. After endless denials by corporate Britain, one of the world’s biggest banks has finally admitted it deliberately avoided tax to the tune of £500 million. It has confessed that it had a department within the bank dedicated to establishing the avoidance schemes. That Department has now been closed down.
For those who have been campaigning hard on this issue and have had to listen to all the denials, dismissals and ridicule from big companies, this is massive proof that they were right. No-one will believe that RBS was the only offender – the onus is now on other big companies to come clean.
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This new blog is a welcome contribution to left economic commentary.
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Nigel Stanley
Adam’s opposition to big economy protectionism has proved controversial in some quarters. Yet it seems to me that protectionism is the mirror image of “I’m not a racist but they come over here and take all our jobs”. And in turn is related to calls to fight unemployment through a shorter working week.
All of these come from what economists call the ‘lump of labour fallacy’. This is the idea that there is a fixed amount of work to be done and the key questions are how to share it out and who gets to do it. But the amount of (paid) work done in any economy is dependent on the demand for the products of that labour and that is determined by many, many factors.
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Nicola Smith
There is much debate about where responsibility lies for the banking crisis, but until yesterday it had not occurred to be that it might be the fault of co-habiting couples. But then I read about the views of Tim Montgomerie at Conservative Home, who writes that:
“The proximate cause of the banking crisis was the increase in couple cohabitation and the banks supine acceptance of the government’s promotion of “every choice of lifestyle”. The banks lent money to couples who were unlikely to stick together.” – Nick Gulliford has posted the above thought on the thread below Michael Fallon’s indispensable Platform article. It’s a very uncomfortable thought but I bet Nick is partly right. All the stats point to much greater instability in cohabiting relationships. I’d certainly like to see the data.
If only more people were married we could have avoided the sub-prime crisis? I think not.
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Economics
Global Recession: Are EU leaders about to make the biggest political mistake of the century?
Adam Lent
Alongside all the economic horror of this ‘Great Recession’, the next big risk is that it becomes politicised in unexpected and unpleasant ways. We have already seen this on a small scale in Iceland and Latvia but there may come a tipping point when substantial sections of electorates and populations across the world turn to more extreme political forces in short order. As people grow more despairing of the economic crisis and less willing to accept mainstream leaders’ claim to have the situation under control, this is a very real possibility.
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Adam Lent
The BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, is spot on when he predicts a loud but largely misleading debate between the main parties about public spending cuts as we head towards the next election. Labour will claim the Tories are planning indiscriminate and swingeing cuts if they get into office while also claiming to be making major ‘efficiency gains’ themselves to bring the public finances back into line. And the Tories will argue the Government has wasted money like a drunk on Friday night since 1997 meaning Cameron et al. will have to inject a serious dose of fiscal responsibility back into the public finances.
What we won’t get is a serious debate about what is driving the debate itself.
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Owen Tudor
The CBI has entered the G20 fight by publicly opposing a crackdown on tax havens and bank bonuses. They are calling for corporate greed to be ignored so world leaders can concentrate on sorting out the mess that corporate greed caused.So now we know where the battle lines over the G20 will be drawn – do we put profits first, or people? If you want to put people first, come on the March for Jobs, Justice, Climate on 28 March.
Martin Broughton, CBI President and chairman of British Airways, told the Financial Times today that the London Summit on 2 April should focus on a global stimulus and opposing protectionism. But it needs to do more. Tackling tax havens and bank bonuses, as well as global poverty and climate change, would be a crucial signal that the G20 is serious about going beyond mere sticking plaster, business as usual measures.