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A new paper from the JRF looking at how to influence public attitudes to poverty
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Richard Exell
We publish this month’s Recession Report today, and the special feature is a look at what has happened to the relative value of benefits for unemployed people over the past 30 years.
Today, Jobseeker’s Allowance for a single person is worth just 10% of average earnings; this is less than in the 1980s and 1990s recessions.
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The German finance minister gets radical
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Nigel Stanley
It’s rather striking that the two most effective critics of the finance establishment are poachers turned gamekeepers.
When Paul Myners became a minister we got the usual Gordon crony accusations, and much doubt that someone who had worked in finance would be tough enough.
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Richard Exell
In the opening months of the recession, the public sector was relatively sheltered from job losses and this was frequently highlighted by right-wing newspapers calling for cuts: ‘sharing the pain’ was a common theme. If that is what they wanted, they must be very pleased with the turn events have been taking.
The University and College Union has revealed that 6,000 jobs in further and higher education are currently at risk – 45 universities and 55 colleges are cutting jobs now, 99 universities plan to cut jobs in the near future – 100,000 students could be affected.
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Owen Tudor
The fight currently underway in the UK – and other major economies – about cuts in the public sector, or what exit route from the Keynesianism of the recession, will clearly run and run all the way to the General Election (if not beyond). It’s at least as much about how big the state should be, and what role it should play in a market economy, as it is about practical economic responses to the current state of the global recession. Overseas aid often seems protected from the debate because all the main parties are at least formally committed to hitting the UN target of spending 0.7% of GDP on aid. But there is a major debate about how that money should be spent abroad, and yesterday in New York, Gordon Brown spelt out why public sector solutions to health were better than private ones.
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Adam Lent
We love David Blanchflower on this site and were singing his praises when everyone else thought he was nuts. Now he has stepped in to the cuts row with a scathing attack on George Osborne in The New Statesman. It’s really not turning out to be a good day for Slasher. This is Blanchflower’s view:
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Nigel Stanley
Not surprisingly the Guardian stressed the bad news for Labour in its report of its latest ICM poll(pdf) . But buried in the questions was this:
Politicians from different parties agree the government will have to make savings in the future to reduce the size of the national debt. Do you think the MAIN emphasis should be on:
- Raising taxes including the taxes you pay, or
- Reducing the amount of money being spent on public services, even if it affects those public services you use.
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Adam Lent
Nigel has posted Richard Lambert’s comments made on Radio 4 today. The CBI has been very careful not to join in with the ‘slash and burn’ hysteria of recent weeks. And now we know why. Britain’s biggest business association agrees with the TUC view that urgent and deep cuts are not needed and would damage the economy. Given that the Tories like to parade themselves as the party of business, this is a disaster for them. Hopefully, it will help end the mild insanity which has gripped press and politics over the last few weeks and led to absurd attempts by all concerned to look increasingly tough on public spending.
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Nigel Stanley
Richard Lambert of the CBI on this morning’s Today programme.
I would say two things, one is that changes in public spending take a long time to bite, the second thing is I think I feel, we feel, that the economy is too fragile right now for massive cuts in public spending so we think that the government should be giving a credible plan for getting fiscal conditions into shape but it shouldn’t be doing something tomorrow.”
