So we’re using Touchstone blog to launch a new Economic Dashboard, giving a quick way to see trends on many of the main economic indicators since 2008. Every month, we’ll update the charts, so we can plot any progress the country is making towards recovery, or help make the case for policies that will make a difference.

You can view historical charts for unemployment, vacancies, part time work, wages, inflation measures and much more, as well as pulling up the stats snapshots from previous months. We’re also making a widget version available to other sites who’d like to display the graphs and stats on their own pages, and you can use the dashboard to generate your own widget codes.

Whatever your viewpoint, we hope having a quick overview of the state of the labour market and wider economy is going to be a useful resource for those wanting to join the debate about how the country can rebuild after the crisis.

View the Economic Dashboard

Congratulations to our very own Nicola Smith, who scooped the Work Foundation’s Workworld Media Awards “Blogger of the Year” title at last night’s ceremony. The award, which was presented by Will Hutton and Lord Puttnam is a new category for the 24 year old work, business and economic media awards, but was hotly contested, with a shortlist comprising Owen Walker of the FT’s SchemeXpert.com and the always excellent Stefan Stern for his work at Edelman and FT Blogs (and who has a post up today on the new category’s implications for journalism).

In particular I commend his round-up of links.

So here’s a few pictures instead from the opening session:

The audience - some listen, some tweet and some do both

Brendan Barber opens Netroots UK

Sunny Hundal speaks to Netroots UK

False Economy's Clifford Singer talks social media

Next Left's Sunder Katwala on the opening panel

Polly Toynbee at Netroots UK

Somewhat to my surprise I was the opening speaker in the lively first plenary session on the cuts campaign.  This is the gist of what I said. It’s a mix of my powerpoint slides – and what I said to link them up – and therefore a bit jerky.

First any campaign needs to have clear shared objectives and a strategy about how you achieve them. We should not start with activities, but devise ones that fit with the strategy, accepting that you need flexibility and must continuously re-evaluate the circumstances in which you find yourselves.

For the cuts campaign, it’s a matter of identifying the coalition’s two key decisions and devising ways of getting them to retreat from these. These are:

• To eliminate the deficit within four years
• To do so with 80 per cent of cuts to 20 per cent of (mostly unfair) tax increases

Where do we start from?

A majority still buy the coalition narrative about the need for cuts. In polling conducted straight after the spending review:

• 52% backed spending review cuts – 39% opposed (ComRes for BBC Oct 21 10) l
• 51% thought they were about right or not far enough – 39% thought they went too far (ComRes for BBC Oct 21 10)
• 59% agree that Labour bears most responsibility for the deficit (ComRes for Indy Oct 21)

If we summarise public opinion:

• most voters think that the cuts are necessary … but
• they are beginning to be worried about impact, speed and scale  and
• they no longer think they are fair

These graphs are taken from YouGov polls where they have been asking the same question since the election. The graph shows the net result (eg the percentage who who think the cuts are unfair is taken away from the percentage who think they are fair.)

Those who think they will suffer directly from the cuts

Those who think the cuts are good for the economy

Those who think the cuts are fair

This all suggests that first, we need to turn this from an abstract, distant argument about what is best for the national economy into an emotional and personal story about what is happening to me, my family, people I identify with and my community.

And second, we need to get people to see their own personal experience as a reason for changing national policies, and not as an unfair exception within a broadly correct framework. In other words they need to move on from “don’t cut us, cut something else instead”. 

 We should be honest about some of our weaknesses:

• We don’t yet speak for a majority and there is therefore a danger of endlessly mobilising a minority.
• Unions need to guard against being seen as a vested producer interest.
• Coalition narratives about “Labour’s bloated and feather-bedded public sector” and “welfare scroungers” are strong with some.
• And while there is strong support for fair tax policies, the idea that growth is the best way to shrink the deficit does not have such purchase.

The government also has key weaknesses:

• We’re not all in this together

“The most worrying finding for the Conservatives was the perception that they would, in a crunch, stick up for rich and privileged people.” This quote is from Cowley and Kavanagh’s book on the election. (HT Sunder)

• There is no electoral mandate for big cuts. Here is just one broken promise:

“What I can tell you is any cabinet minister, if I win the election, who comes to me and says: ‘Here are my plans’ and they involve frontline reductions, they’ll be sent straight back to their department to go away and think again.” David Cameron

And their are clear pressure points on the government:

• The Fairness narrative (tax v cuts; tax dodging/UK Uncut; and  cuts divide the country (as long as the government gets the blame for the division- which is a key test for all proposed action)
• Electoral legitimacy  (particularly for the Lib Dems, but these deep rapid cuts were not put by either coalition party to country
• Is it working?  (The measure of that should be whether unemployment goes up or down) 

What does all this mean for a campaign?

This is a long term campaign, and we need to start from where people are. This means stressing what is likely to involve people, which is the fairness of the cuts that personally affect them. It means starting from the elements of the alternative that already resonate such as the Robin Hood tax and tax avoidance, but also putting great emphasis on local campaigns in coalition held seats. 

It’s a mistake to think that we should be building a single top-down unified campaign. Different groups of people will want different ways into campaigning both on-line and in their off-line lives. People have multiple identities – and they are not simply a trade unionist, or a resident of their community, or a voter for a particular party – and the more we can engage them across those different parts of their lives the more we wil draw people into support and active campaigning that spreads the message even further.

But fewer and fewer accept that we are all in this together, and a big majority expect to be personally affected by spending cuts.

Resistance is therefore growing. The student campaign against higher tuition fees may have been dismissed as middle class self-interest by some, but quickly broadened to include a defence of educational maintenance allowances and in any case is about fees for future students. Campaigns to defend science spending, school sports and children’s books have secured at least partial victories.

Yet tactical retreats by a government carefully attuned to the media mood do not add up to any fundamental reshaping of government policies. So how do we take a broader campaign forward?

We should start by learning from the past. The most significant u-turn carried out by the last Conservative prime minister was the end of the poll-tax.

This had to go when it became clear to government MPs – even in their safe seats – that it offended the deep British sense of fairness. London riots may still be the media’s stock pictures for the poll tax,  but he campaign was won in the constituencies of middle Britain when voters stood up and said no in numbers that were quickly taken back to Westminster by MPs in fear of their seats.

These cuts are even more unfair. The poor and those in the middle will pay a heavier price than the rich. Those in banks and finance who caused the crash  are quickly getting back to a bonus-as-usual culture that floats free from the misery that their excess has imposed on too many of the rest of us. Ordinary voters have to pay their VAT, big corporations and the super-rich consider large parts of their tax bills optional.

Yet while the poll tax is a good starting point for the campaign – particularly in its emphasis on fairness and local campaigning – we live in a very different world today.

The mainstream media is less dominant. Political parties are smaller. Trust has declined. The kind of social infrastructure in which my generation began our political lives is still around – with unions as a prime example. But alongside this, particularly for the young, a new more mobile and networked world has grown, with perhaps the UK Uncut protests  as the prime example.

The challenge for the cuts campaign is how best  we can combine the two. The energy, immediacy and  informality of the new networks has just a valid contribution to make as the reach, resources and different style of us traditional campaigners. The real test is whether we can meld them together in a way that reaches out beyond both to put the maximum pressure on government MPs.

This is why the TUC hosting today’s Netroots UK conference and why we have made a strong commitment to False Economy.

I hope the starting point today will be mutual respect for our different styles. Unions certainly recognise that none of us should be trying to stitch together a new organisation. Instead we are setting out to build a movement that will take many forms – autonomous local groups, online campaigns and more traditional – yet still vital events – like the TUC’s March for the Alternative on March 26th. While doubtless there will be initiatives that are counter-productive, and some that simply don’t work, giving people as many routes as possible into a broad movement must be the right approach.

Some said the last general election would be the first internet election in the UK. They were wrong, but the anti-cuts movement is perhaps already proving to be the UK’s first great web campaign.

Netroots has been an important part of the progressive movement in the USA.

I’m proud the TUC is playing its part in bringing the same kind of initiative to the UK.

I’ve got the first blog post on the site setting out in more detail what the site is all about.

The site is encouraging people to post information about cuts, provide testimony about their effects, link up and help local campaigns and make the case for alternative routes to deficit reduction.

We are particularly proud of the launch video featuring Sam West.

FalseEconomy has no pretensions about being a new organisation or providing leadership to the campaign against the cuts.

Instead it recognises that the campaign is developing as a bottom-up grass-roots campaign. I seem to remember writing sometime after the general election that while that had not turned into the internet election that many had predicted, it may well be that the campaign against the government’s cuts would be the first great UK internet campaign.

The way the student and anti-tax avoidance protests have snowballed (to use a topical weather analogy) in the last few weeks demonstrates that potential.

That’s not to say that more formal organisations (rather like the stuffy old TUC) no longer have a place. Indeed False Economy may be where this comes together with the new campaigning.

We have always said that the strength of the cuts campaign will depend on its ability to build the broadest possible alliance against the cuts programme. That will mean working with all kinds of formal organisations (as we did at the rally on the eve on the Spending Review) and will do so at the March for the Alternative in March.

But it will also mean recognising that the kind of informal and spontaneous campaigning that social media make possible is now a permanent part of national life. By its nature, it’s not going to be drawn into formal alliances. But while some of it will doubtless miss the point or engage in tactics of which we would not approve it’s now going to be an important form and voice for opposing the coalition’s programme.

I thought quite a bit about whether to include these stories in Cuts Watch. There’s quite a strong argument for doing so, generally speaking we report there anything that looks like a cut – as we note elsewhere

In our Cuts Watch feature, we are trying to list all the expenditure cuts flowing from the mistaken policy of making cutting the deficit the main economic priority, rather than securing the recovery. This is not to pass judgement on the merits of the individual area of expenditure. Cutting the ID cards programme is a victory for TUC campaigning, cutting back Building Schools for the Future is a disaster for education and the wider economy, but both would be included in cuts watch.

But I’m increasingly sceptical about reports of defence cuts. As I’ve noted elsewhere, the MoD has a long history of leaking scare stories whenever there’s cuts in the offing. What’s more, this list – cutting units and equipment the average patriotic reader might be expected to have heard of and care about – reads as if it was compiled by a committee thinking up stories that would appeal to editors desperate for stories on the bank holiday at the end of the silly season.

It’s still worth reporting these stories, but as an ordinary posting, not as part of Cuts Watch.

PS

If these stories are genuine, there ought to be security concerns – there’s a D-notice on

details of the state of readiness and operational capability of individual units or formations whose involvement in such operations is current or may be imminent

Of course, no-one’s going to be hauled off to chokey for these reports – they’d just have to say where they got them from. But it does indicate how cautious we ought to be about relying on any of them.

Join us from noon tomorrow on ToUChstone blog for live coverage of the budget, in association with Left Foot Forward, Liberal Conspiracy and other progressive bloggers.

And then throughout the afternoon, our team will be giving their specialist takes on the impact of the Chancellor’s announcements.

the blog/news site that aims to report, monitor and analyse the impact of the savage public spending cuts that are about to hit Britain to cope with the fallout from the banking crisis. 

It’s already got some interesting and useful posts.

Join us here from noon onwards for live coverage of the 2010 budget.

We’ll be commenting on it as it happens, in collaboration with Left Foot Forward, Liberal Conspiracy and LabourList, and other guest commentators. Come along and give us your 2pworth.

We’ll also be monitoring the hashtag #budget2010 on Twitter and republishing some of the tweets we find interesting, so don’t forget to tag anything you tweet today.

And then later on throughout this afternoon, our ToUChstone bloggers will be writing on what Alistair Darling’s budget proposals mean for their own specialist subjects.

Join us, the blogging teams of Left Foot Forward, LabourList and Liberal Conspiracy, and special guest commentators this Wednesday from noon for live blog coverage of, and reaction to, Alistair Darling’s budget speech in the Commons. We’ll be scanning Twitter for opinion as it happens, so make sure to use the hashtag #budget2010 to get involved.

And stay with us on ToUChstone blog throughout the afternoon on Wednesday for specialist reaction on how the budget will impact on some of the big political and economic issues of the day.

We’d like to wish a very happy Christmas and New Year to all our readers here at ToUChstone blog. It’s been an interesting year for us as the blog has grown and diversified, and we’ve enjoyed sharing our blogging journey with so many people, old acquaintances and new.

Our Christmas card this year marks thirty years of the Amnesty International (UK) trade union network. During 2009, we’ve taken steps to strengthen the links between the work of the TUC and Amnesty. Unions and human rights go way back though. Indeed Amnesty International founder, Peter Benenson, had actually worked many years earlier for the TUC, and had been sent to Spain in the early 50s to observe the trial of some trade unionists persecuted by the Franco Government. (His complaints to the judge were so effective the case against them was, unusually, dismissed and they were set free.)

And sadly, there is no shortage of issues where we need to collaborate to defend people’s rights. Currently it’s on campaigns about the repression of trade unionists in Iran, LGBT rights around the world, and the terrible situation facing unionists in Colombia, where just being involved in trade unions exposes people to arbitrary arrest, harassment and even murder.

Some people wonder whether trade union rights are human rights at all, but they are – the core labour standards of the UN International Labour Organisation include freedom from forced and child labour, freedom from discrimination at work and freedom of association and the right to free collective bargaining. These are fundamental human rights, as the Declaration of Philadelphia made clear in 1944.

If you’ve a spare few minutes, please use them make a difference this Christmas by visiting the Amnesty website’s union section, where you can take part in campaign actions supporting some of our colleagues in Iran and Zimbabwe.

So here’s wishing everyone at home and abroad a well-earned break and a peaceful, prosperous and safe new year.

Welcome to our liveblog of Alistair Darling’s 2009 Pre-Budget Review. This feature is being produced by Left Foot Forward, in association with ToUChstone blog, Liberal Conspiracy and LabourList. We’re starting around 12 noon, and will be following the Chancellor’s announcement, discussing the implication of his decisions from a progressive viewpoint.

Also joining us via Twitter will be a number of guest commentators, including Labour MP Kerry McCarthy, PPC Rachel Reeves, Green councilor Rupert Read, CentreForum economist Giles Wilkes, The Resolution Foundation’s Low Earners project and Landman Economics Director Howard Reed.

We’re using the great CoverItLive.com system to manage the event. You don’t need to register to get involved once we’re live. Just type in your name and it will work like a normal webchat – type a line and submit it as a comment at any point. We’re moderating the event, but we’ll be getting to everything very quickly so you shouldn’t notice.

Brendan has set out what we see as the three tasks he needs to pull off in a post here, and tomorrow we’ll be using the blog to analyse the PBR and its implications in more detail.

Join us from 12 noon onwards for a live chat on the PBR, produced in association with leading progressive blogs Left Foot Forward, Liberal Conspiracy and LabourList, and featuring many expert guest commentators.

Then throughout the afternoon, our ToUChstone blog team will be posting up their own post-match analyses, on what the report means for their particular policy briefs.

Billed The Left Foot Forward Progressive PBR, it will include other guest commentators and reader discussion through chat on the site and via Twitter (address your tweets @leftfootfwd to get them noticed by the moderators).

We’re looking forward to it. And in the meantime, just pop your email address in this form, choose an interval, and it will remind you of the event at a convenient time (safe to use – the emails aren’t being stored for anything else).

And after the event, don’t forget to check back here on ToUChstone blog, where we’ll be publishing our ‘post-match analysis’ reactions to the different themes contained in the PBR.
 

The TUC believes that the deficit is not an urgent problem but it is one that will need to be dealt with over the medium term.  In our submission to the Treasury ahead of the PBR, we argue that any measure designed to reduce the deficit needs to meet five criteria.  It must be:

• effective: any measure must genuinely reduce the deficit;
• progressive: the costs of any measure must fall to those most able to pay;
• proportionate: any measure must meet the reality of the challenge posed by the fiscal problems rather than any exaggerated or understated claims;
• limited in its economic consequences: any measure must not prolong the recession of threaten recovery;
• just: the costs of any measure should not fall on those who bear no responsibility for the financial crisis and recession that has caused the fiscal problems.

Our concern is that the leading contenders for addressing the deficit – major public spending cuts, a big rise in VAT or a big rise in income tax – fail when judged against these criteria.  A transactions tax, we felt, did meet most of these criteria.  I accept not everyone will agree with that conclusion but given that we are in a tough fiscal situation, there must be a certain obligation on those entering the fray to identify their alternatives and explain how they meet these criteria. 

Of course, they may not agree with the criteria but then they need to explain that position as well. 

Who knows, we may end up with a constructive and creative discussion rather than the usual snarky blog fight.  Hope springs eternal …