Owen Tudor
I’ve expressed scepticism before about the Government’s commitment to meet the UN target for overseas aid by 2013, and now the news that Defence Secretary Liam Fox has raised concerns about the pledge suggests that we are seeing the beginning of the end for that commitment.
Philip Pearson
For want of listening, the greenest government ever has taken some heavy flack in the past week. Hard on the heels of Jonathan Porritt’s audit of environmental progress in the first year of the coalition as “unavoidably depressing”, FoE called on Chris Huhne to resign if the government fails to back new binding climate targets for 2027. And manufacturers with high energy costs are warning of serious job losses, leading Vince Cable to argue that more ambitious climate targets were anti-competitive.
The TUC supports ambitious climate change policies. Motions to Congress make clear that consultation with stakeholders is a vital part of the just transition to a low carbon future. None of which commits us to throwing jobs away.
Richard Exell
Blink and you’ll miss it: the government hasn’t exactly gone overboard to publicise the Department for Work and Pensions’ new report on qualitative research into the experience of people taking part in the Future Jobs Fund. We know the sort of report the government would have liked to get: back in June last year, when they cancelled the FJF, they called it “ineffective” and Ministers trash it at every opportunity.
This means that Customer Experience of the Future Jobs Fund by Janet Allaker and Sarah Cavill is actually quite a brave report. I’m always rather impressed when academics, writing research for the government, who presumably want further contracts, follow the evidence even when it leads in a direction Ministers won’t like. This study, based on interviews with people who took part in the programme, found that the quality of jobs on the FJF was often high, that Jobcentre Plus (which the government thinks is not up to running the Work Programme) generally managed it well and that the programme had been a huge help in getting jobs. Altogether, Allaker and Cavill’s conclusion will not be one that Ministers want to hear:
John Monks
My eight year stint as General Secretary of the ETUC ends shortly and I will return to the UK to try to make sense out of a new role in the House of Lords. I leave with mixed feelings – regret at leaving active engagement in the exciting European project, coupled with pleasant anticipation about working once again in London.
I leave with a sad sense that neither the EU, nor the UK for that matter, is in good shape, indeed worse than when I arrived 8 years ago – not quite the epitaph for my stewardship that I intended.
Anjum Klair
TUC analysis shows that the Scottish industrial heartlands of West Dunbartonshire and East Ayrshire have overtaken inner London boroughs to become Britain’s worst employment blackspots.
Owen Tudor
The Government is keen to suggest that if they hadn’t taken the decision to cut the deficit so hard and so fast, we would be in the same boat as Greece and Portugal. As Duncan Weldon’s blog reveals, actually it’s because the coalition chose to cut so deep and so fast that we are now looking more and more like Greece and Portugal.
Chris Wright
Wage stagnation continues. On the back of last week’s report from the NIESR, and Mervyn King’s comments in January on the lag of incomes behind inflation and living costs, the Institute for Fiscal Studies today raised the prospect of average incomes for the current financial year falling to 2004-05 levels.
While this dents the Coalition’s plans for a speedy economic recovery, it adds further weight to the case for an alternative strategy based around wage-driven growth.
Owen Tudor
A new report by IPSOS-MORI for the City of London finds that the main reasons banks locate somewhere are proximity to clients and availability of skilled labour. The business environment is a third reason, and regulation and tax are one element of that, but even there, it is predictability that banks want, not a specific level or type of taxation. So the common concern thata Robin Hood Tax in the UK would lead to banks deserting the City of London and taking jobs and tax revenue with them is a fallacy, as the Robin Hood Tax campaign and the Financial Times (rarely on the same side of an argument) have argued before.
The Executive Summary spells it out:
it is clear from this research that three main sets of factors are most commonly central to business decisions to locate in a given financial centre: proximity to clients, the business environment (and, at present, particularly the stability of regulation) and the availability of skilled talent locally
Owen Tudor
It’s often suggested that the EU bailouts for countries like Greece, Ireland and Portugal are a solidarity gesture for profligate peripheral countries when in fact they’re rescue operations designed to prevent contagion (ie the domino-like impact of one government going bust on all the others) and prevent the collapse of northern European banks who lent to the governments now in trouble. So EU bailouts, funded by northern European taxpayers, are not so much solidarity as self-help – or showing solidarity with northern European banks, rather than southern European governments.
Put like that, the position of parties like the True Finns, who have capitalised on the false image that the prudent rich are bailing out the profligate poor, look like turkeys voting for Christmas. Banks must be really worried the True Finns will triumph, and derail the bailouts – and if they’re scared, then that’s our opportunity, as the Finnish social democrats proved last night by making their support for Finland’s agreement to the bailouts conditional on the introduction of a Robin Hood Tax.
John Wood
“Give us your ideas for a new Bank Holiday” runs the heading on DCMS’ latest press release. I was pleasantly surprised to see that, as the TUC have been suggesting for quite some time that adding a new bank holiday to the UK’s calendar could help end our embarrassing honour of having the fewest public holidays in Europe.
However, on closer inspection, Tourism and Heritage Minister John Penrose’s latest wheeze is not actually a “new bank holiday” but rather a recycled old one – the tease! He’s running a “pre-consultation” on whether we should move the May Day bank holiday, and if so, where we should stick it.