Nigel Stanley
I’ve had a couple of posts rather critical of the cuts package proposed by Vince Cable at the Lib Dem conference. It would be churlish not to report his excellent contribution to a TUC fringe meeting at the Lib Dem conference where he shared a platform with Brendan Barber to discuss the TUC’s Touchstone pamphlet, the Real Middle Britain.
Nigel Stanley
The public sector did not cause the crash but curbing the pay and pensions of public servants is the central part of the Lib Dem cuts package. The combination of a pay freeze and increased pension contributions would of course mean a cut in take home pay.
But according to today’s Guardian the Lib-Dems ‘would hope to protect, and even increase, salaries for lower-paid public sector workers by cutting the salaries of highly paid managers and by scrapping managerial jobs.’
Nigel Stanley
Vince Cable has rightly won wide kudos for calling the financial crisis better than any other UK politician. I write this from the Lib Dem conference where they know they have a real star – someone respected for both being clever and authentic. This is a rare combination in a culture that is suspicious of the clever.
But it doesn’t mean that he is always right.
His new cuts package , published by the pro-public service privatisation think-tank Reform is a case in point, and is the basis for Nick Clegg’s claim that the Lib-Dems now stand for ‘savage’ cuts.
Nigel Stanley
Pretending the nation’s economy is just like a household budget has always been a strong theme in the way that Conservatives talk about economic policy. People naturally generalise from their own experiences to try and make sense of frighteningly complex issues.
It’s a very useful concept for the small state right as it can always be deployed to argue for spending cuts and ‘living within your means’. It makes for the homely metaphor that was Mrs Thatcher’s stock in trade. But if any thing sums up Keynes in a single simple concept it is that the nation’s finances should not be treated like a household purse.
Owen Tudor
The global trade union movement has issued a ‘Pittsburgh Declaration’ setting out what they want from the G20 leaders summit this week. TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber will be in Pittsburgh, along with other G20 trade union leaders, to lobby the leaders and the people who run the global institutions like the ILO, IMF and WTO about jobs, justice and climate. The key messages are: the recession ain’t over till the jobs come back, and there can be no return to business as usual. We need greater equality between and within nations, and we need a sustainable economy that provides decent work and reins in climate change.
Owen Tudor
Demonstrating once again how indispensable it is in a crisis, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) has issued a report to this week’s G20 setting out the impact of Government interventions on jobs – at a time when unemployment globally could hit 241 million. Their bottom line (see press release) is that those interventions saved or created 7-11 million jobs in G20 countries alone, as against 25 million jobs definitely lost. But they warn also that if the recovery measures are removed too soon (as British Conservatives are advocating, for example), unemployment will lurch upwards again – the report says:
Expansionary fiscal measures to generate jobs and boost aggregate demand should be continued, and where necessary enhanced, until such time as private demand is sufficiently robust to sustain growth and employment.
Nigel Stanley
From Dear Lucy in yesterday’s FT
“I’m dreadfully bored and depressed in my job. I work for a big bank as a portfolio manager, and have nothing to do. I tried starting new projects but have been discouraged by management. So I spend my time writing a script and studying but the fact that I have about 10 hours of work a week is killing me.”
Portfolio manager, male, 28
Of course this doesn’t prove anything. There’s both rubbish and brilliant management in private and public sectors. But the belief that private sector management is inherently superior is surprisingly widespread, even though UK management is generally weak.
Richard Exell
There are five and a half million people who want work and either haven’t got a job or can’t work as many hours as they would like.
Last month I promised to keep a record of the “want work” figures each month. The unemployment figures are very important, but they don’t tell us the whole story about the misery of being out of work. Some people don’t meet the definition of an unemployed person, because they are disabled or students or looking after children, for instance, and they are classified as ‘economically inactive’. The employment figures typically show that one economically inactive person in four or five still wants work – there are currently 7,986,000 economically inactive people of working age, so this is a significant group of people.
Tim Page
Nigel is spot-on when he criticises the latest outburst from the Taxpayers Alliance in his blog article below. It is important that all serious commentators support the drive for fundamental science, including particle physics and astronomy.
Some good reasons can be found in ‘The Case for Space’, published by Oxford Economics in July.
Nigel Stanley
They may bark at the moon but they are not interested in studying it.
The TaxPayers’ Alliance have allowed favoured newspapers to preview their new report on quangos. So far so predictable. It’s not surprising that they attack the Health and Safety Executive, even though the HSE has little to do with many of the “health and safety gone mad” stories beloved of the right-wing tabloids. (Usually they are either myths or a market failure, when events or activities can’t get affordable insurance cover).
