Nigel Stanley

Much coverage of the G20 finance ministers’ meeting has concentrated on disagreement between the anglo-saxon US and UK about how to regulate bankers’ bonuses.

It’s perhaps too easy to see this as UK bad, rest of Europe good. Anatol Kaletsky suggests that the increased capital requirements backed by US and UK governments cause France and Germany real problems as it would force into the open toxic debts in mainland Europe that have remained hidden, and that they were talking up bonuses as a diversion.(Though of course you could have both action on bonuses and capital requirements).

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Owen Tudor

The gloves may be off over international development. For several years, the Conservatives have shadowed Labour’s excellent record on overseas aid – in particular agreeing to maintain the policy of reaching the UN target for overseas aid volumes of 0.7% of Gross National Income, even though overseas aid was cut under the last Conservative Government. This was all part of re-branding the Conservative Party as a ‘nice, not nasty, party’.

But last week, the Tory bloggers and think tanks have gone on the offensive, attacking the money which the Department for International Development (a Labour invention, don’t forget – under the Tories, overseas aid was a subsection of the Foreign Office) gives to NGOs. But they still aren’t keen to appear that nasty, so Christian Aid, Save the Children, CAFOD and so on were mostly ignored in the blogs and the press releases. The nasty-right concentrated their attack on … yes, you guessed it, the trade unions!

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Stewart Lansley

In the ToUChstone pamphlet, Life in the Middle, I argued that the term ‘middle Britain’ has come to be commonly used by the political and media classes to describe a group that sits in the upper half of the income distribution. Indeed ‘middle Britain’ has increasingly become shorthand for the professional middle classes. Yet an objective definition of the term ‘middle Britain’ would be the social group clustered around the mid-point of the income distribution, the point statisticians call ‘the median’.

In addition, people have been found to have a very poor idea of where they rank in the income hierarchy. To find out how good individuals are at placing themselves, the TUC made a ‘MiddleBritainometer‘ inviting respondents to guess where they stand in the pay league. Over 2000 people have responded and their guesses can be compared with their actual position in the pay league in the results posted here.

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John Wood

Our MiddleBritainometer has been doing a great trade since we launched it. I’ve just been looking at the stats it’s thrown out, to see how close people are on average to guessing where they fit on the UK incomes spectrum.

Basically we’re not that great at it. On average, people placed themselves worse off than they really were by 15.6 percentage points.

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• Value of benefits falling – TUC
  A Lib Dem backs our call for a bigger JSA

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Richard Exell

This recession has encouraged some half-witted arguments, but one of the worst is the notion that, because young people are facing the worst prospects of any age group (undoubtedly true), therefore older workers should ‘stand aside’ to ‘make room’ for them (complete b*!!*<#s).

There may be an obvious reason why I am more aware of the fatuity of this argument now than I was during the 80s or 90s recessions, but there are good trade union arguments as well as personal ones.

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Nicola Smith

Michael Portillo’s article in last Sunday’s Times is in agreement with Charles Murray‘s belief that welfare benefits create a dependent underclass. Portillo tells us that:

We ought not to be handing out benefits as a matter of right. They should help people through misfortunes, not subsidise slobbery. They should go to the deserving, not the undeserving. They should pull people up, not push them down….perhaps, at least, we ought to assume that fit young people are not entitled to anything. If a few young men from sink estates are not heroes in Afghanistan, why should we presume that all the others are capable of nothing at all

Only last week the Conservatives gave us a deeply misleading analysis of unemployment under Labour, and Chris Grayling implied that preventing people from ‘building a life sitting at home on benefits’ would improve employment rates. This is an argument against state intervention to tackle rapidly rising unemployment and in favour blaming unemployed people for being too lazy and feckless to get a job.We are seeing the start of a deeply regressive and offensive attack on people who are living in poverty.

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John Wood

Dragons’ Den’s judge and Chairman of Ryman stationers Theo Paphitis has a big piece in the Daily Mail today: “Why ALL bosses should copy me and ban Facebook from the workplace“. He laments that every technological revolution has a downside, and that the internet’s wonders in the field of stationery retail have been accompanied by “an orgy of self-indulgence and exhibitionism”. The only way for employers to protect themselves from staff writing about their cats during the working day is apparently a blanket ban on using Facebook at work.

I’m guessing this ban doesn’t extend to the “back room team” who maintain Theo’s own neatly manicured Facebook profile, fan page, group and so on, but even then I can’t help thinking Theo’s in need of a bit of a poke over this one.

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Richard Exell

It is good to see that the Government is moving to improve the guarantee of jobs for long-term unemployed young people.

The Future Jobs Fund has already supported the creation of 47,000 new jobs, and the announcement of extra places (including apprenticeships) in retail and other industries is excellent news. This approach should be adopted as the model for all the Government’s employment programmes. 

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Tim Page

Here in Rome, at the ETUC Collective Bargaining Summer School, trade unionists from across Europe are sharing their experiences of the economic crisis, along with strategies to respond to it.

Our German colleagues, from the DGB, reported this morning that unemployment in Germany is now above 8%, with 3.4 million out of work. Men are most affected, because they are more likely to work in industrial sectors, and Southern Germany, where export-oriented industries are concentrated, is suffering the most. However, the rise in unemployment has been modest, given that industrial production has fallen off a cliff. This is due, mostly, to the success of the short time working scheme.

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