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James Purnell discusses Conservative plans for welfare reform on OpenLeft
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Chris Dillow looks at how many more really want to work than are counted in the latest unemployment figures.
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Left Foot Forwards analyses today’s unemployment stats
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Pensions & Investment
Conservatives repeat TaxPayers’ Alliance distortion on local authority pensions
Nigel Stanley
The Conservative Party have just issued a press release headed “Town hall pensions now costing local taxpayers nearly £300 a year”. It’s not on their website yet.
In it they say:
Analysis by Conservatives estimates that the yearly cost is now equivalent to £281 a year by council tax paying household in England and Wales. By contrast, the average council tax per dwelling is £1,175 – so the equivalent of a quarter of every bill effectively bankrolls pension costs.
This claim that a quarter of council tax goes to paying local authority pensions is a straight repeat of one made by the TaxPayers’ Alliance. It was misleading then, and just as misleading now.
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Philip Pearson
It’s Blog Action Day today, and over 8,000 blogs are coming together to spark discussion around the issue of climate change.
I’m spending the day in Brussels, at a co-ordinating conference of unions working on environmental issues. A European Union spokesperson has just told us that CO2 reduction pledges are so far adding up to a 17% cut, which is around half of the fall in emissions we need globally by 2020.
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Nicola Smith
Yesterday saw some media discussion about the interim findings of the Government’s review into the discrepencies between ILO unemployment levels and the claimant count. Full-time students are not eligible to claim JSA, and over 250,000 define themselves as unemployed, so this will be part of the distinction and the Government are right to point it out. But I think it would be wrong to conclude that unemployed people in full-time education are not a concern – the reason they are classified in this way is more than just a tick box error.
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Adam Lent
I imagine other Touchstone contributors will want to comment on this announcement. But just to say quickly here what a truly terrible decision it is.
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Polly Toynbee explodes the myths about public sector pay on CommentIsFree.
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Another CommentIsFree highlight: Sunder Katwala has another go at the TPA
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Nicola Smith
Today’s unemployment figures suggest that rapid recent rises in unemployment may be behind us. Between June and July ILO unemployment levels actually fell by 1000, from 2,470,000 to 2,469,000, although on the quarter there was still a significant rise of 88,000. This quarterly rise is much less than the increases we saw earlier this year, but remains historically high. And there is also some very bad news, as long-term unemployment is now showing sharp increases – 599,000 unemployed people have been out of work for over 12 months, a quarterly increase of 72,000 and an increase of 32,000 between June and July – the largest since the recession started.
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Nigel Stanley
Almost every attack on public sector pensions makes much of the difference between average public and private sector pay. And attacks on the public sector from the shrink-the-state right such as the TaxPayers’ Alliance are full of accusations of public sector feather-bedding (though a few Saturday nights working in an A&E department or behind the counter at a Job Centre Plus would be a good development opportunity for TPA staff). In my commentary on Digby Jones’ recent remarks I promised to look in a bit more detail at private and public sector pay trends. So here goes.
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Adam Lent
The Director of the Taxpayers Alliance has mounted a stout defence against the claims made by The Guardian recently. But I find this sort of thing irksome:
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Giles Wilkes is the chief economist of CentreForum, the LibDemish think tank. His blog is new to us, and well worth a read.
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