Brendan Barber

Public sector pensions are under sustained attack. Hardly a day goes by without a claim from an employer group, opposition politician or right wing pressure group that they are unaffordable, out of control and unreformed. Worse, they often go on to suggest that there are quick and easy savings to be made by cutting or changing pensions in the public sector.

It is normally those of us who believe in a more equal society who are accused of the politics of envy. But there is a very definite attempt to stir up jealousy among private sector workers of fat cat pensions in the public sector. The trouble is that the arguments used are at best misleading and at worst scaremongering nonsense.

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Nigel Stanley

Today ONS has published the fascinating The effects of taxes and benefits on household income, 2007/08 – summarised here or in its full 38 page glory here.

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Richard Exell

New data suggests that the picture I painted earlier on in the month of steady progress in narrowing the disability employment gap was a little simplistic.

Nigel Meager, from the Institute for Employment Studies has pointed out that using the figures for a different definition of disability actually shows a decline in disabled people’s employment rate in recent years.

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Adam Lent

There’s a logical error here, isn’t there?

- The Taxpayers’ Alliance claims it “is committed to forcing politicians to listen to ordinary taxpayers”.
- The Taxpayers’ Alliance released a pamphlet today claiming that the 50p tax rate for those earning over £150,000 introduced in the last Budget will seriously damage the economy and is grossly unfair to the wealthy.
- Polls consistently found (PDF) that a large majority of ordinary taxpayers support the 50p rate and only a small minority oppose it (57% for and only 22% against in a Populus poll, for example) even after the very negative reaction of the press to the measure.

So which “ordinary taxpayers” do the TPA represent then who share their view that the 50p rate is a terrible error?

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• The top ten blogs
  Iain Dale is asking for nominations for the top ten political blogs, and this is stimulating much discussion (and self-promotion!). Here is Clifford Singer’s top ten – and we are very pleased to see that he has put ToUChstone in it. Looks like a good slate to us!

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Tim Page

In today’s Financial Times, Ralph Atkins reports that Peter Bofinger, economics professor and a top adviser to the German Government, has warned that Germany is pursuing a dangerous strategy in assuming a pick-up in world growth with restore the health of its export-driven economy.

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Nigel Stanley

I wasn’t very impressed with Vince Cable’s recent Mail on Sunday piece on public sector pensions. Yesterday’s article on the challenges of an ageing workforce is much more interesting – and anyone who can introduce the lump of labour fallacy to Mail on Sunday readers deserves high praise. His thesis that we need to change attitudes to people working longer and end compulsory retirement ages is winning support, not leaast from unions. The TUC welcomed the government’s review of the default retirement age, just as business organisations opposed it.

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Nigel Stanley

N.B. Written on Saturday – but didn’t appear for some reason

There’s less talk of green shoots in today’s papers after yesterday’s poor GDP figures. In The Times the middle class recession is back. Times are certainly tough in Maidenhead. Their case study picture (in the paper – not online) is captioned:

“Mrs Williams has taken to buying two-for-one offers at Waitrose”

But if the obvious depth of the recession and likely shallowness of the recovery is becoming apparent then it may be easier to resist the clamour for spending cuts.

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Nigel Stanley

The BBC’s flagship radio news programme Today has had a couple of interesting pieces on happiness in the last couple of days, including a report from Denmark, which regularly tops polls as the happiest place in Europe. They included a clip of David Cameron’s call for more consideration of general well-being than gross domestic product. Much of the modern interest in this flows from Richard Layard’s book Happiness in the UK and the positive psychology movement in the USA  spearheaded by Martin Seligman. Of course happiness has its critics too. Should there be a trade union perspective?

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• Why cuts could cause a new slump
  As the public sector is already the biggest employer in most areas, the danger is that such cuts could tip local economies into another recession just as the private sector is recovering. Chris Smith reports on a new Centre for Cities report which examines the impact.

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