Politics

Politics
Tracking public opinion on the cuts

13th January 2012 — Filed under: Politics

Nigel Stanley

Regular readers will know that I have been following polling on spending cuts. YouGov regularly ask exactly the same set of questions. This allows us to track how public opinion is moving. While the precise wording of the question can make a big difference, especially in complex areas that are not the stuff of everyday conversation, tracking the same question can give a valuable insight into how opinion is moving as the same question bias will be present in every response.

I’ve not published any graphs for some time as public opinion was pretty constant for most of last year. People obsess over short term changes in voting intention, but these are often due to the natural variability in any survey or represent a short-term response to whatever is in the news. The truth is that not much happened on the opinion front for most of last year.

But there are some signs of a slight move. Unfortunately it goes in the wrong direction. But it’s not huge, and the government are still losing important parts of their argument, while still ahead on the need for cuts.

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Politics
Another Liberal Democrat principle discarded: Nick Clegg abandons Robin Hood

11th November 2011 — Filed under: Politics

Owen Tudor

This week Nick Clegg fell into line yet again behind a right-wing economic policy, endorsing George Osborne’s rejection of a Robin Hood Tax. The Liberal Democrat manifesto in 2010, which put “fair taxes” at the top of four policies on the front page pledged to

work with other countries to establish new sources of development ﬁnancing, including bringing forward urgent proposals for a ﬁnancial transaction tax

Nick Clegg himself had gone on record in February, just two months earlier, saying of the Robin Hood Tax (six minutes in):

It’s a great idea in theory….We should push for it internationally. I’m glad to see it now finally being considered by IMF and other international bodies. But aiming for the best which would be a Tobin tax across the world shouldn’t prevent us doing something now here at home.

Now, instead, he is telling the EU to forget a Robin Hood Tax, echoing everything George Osborne has said. We would welcome him back in Sherwood Forest whenever he decides to abandon his new rich friends in the City and return to backing the poor.

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Politics
The downturn, the recovery, Gordon Brown and the role of political leadership

28th October 2011 — Filed under: Politics

Tim Page

Well done Gloria de Piero, Labour’s Shadow Home Office Minister, for praising Gordon Brown’s leadership during the financial crisis on last night’s Question Time (21 mins in on BBC i-Player). Given that Gordon is about as popular as a toothache, I half expected the audience to boo or laugh, but the fact that this comment was applauded showed the sense of justice among the audience.

Without naming names, Barack Obama does much the same thing in today’s FT. Obama writes:

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Politics
Occupying everywhere: what does it mean for politicians (and unions)?

16th October 2011 — Filed under: Politics

Owen Tudor

Everyone – regardless of whether they’re involved – has their own explanation of the meaning of this weekend’s 950 worldwide “occupy” protests which have their roots variously in Egypt’s Tahrir Square, Greece’s Syntagma Square, Rothschild Boulevard in Israel and Wall Street in the USA. First prize in totally missing the point with breath-taking chutzpah must go to Foreign Secretary William Hague who told the BBC that he could understand popular concern about ”too many debts built up by states” – you’ll have noticed how many people at the Occupy events mentioned the need to pay down the deficit and engage in austerity policies (not)!

The numbers involved have not of course been huge (although 950 separate events on a single weekend does suggest some zeitgeist-style expression of shared concerns) and the almost studied reluctance to adopt a manifesto leaves a vacuum that many seek to fill, usually claiming that the demonstrators share the commentator’s concerns. But here are some first thoughts.

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Politics
Cameron’s very strange call

5th October 2011 — Filed under: Politics

Duncan Weldon

According to the advance briefings Cameron’s conference speech today will feature a call for households to ‘pay off their credit cards’. This seems an odd call to be making at a time when we now know that the economy hasn’t grown for 3 quarters and household consumption has fallen for four consecutive quarters. Indeed Q2 of this year saw the largest fall in household spending since the dark days of the recession.

I can’t think of a time that a major political leader has ever stood up and essentially argued – ‘we face a renewed risk of recession – therefore you should probably spent less’, if an opposition figure made the same case they would undoubtedly be accused of talking the economy down’.

But what makes this call doubly odd is that the Office of Budget Responsibility’s forecasts are premised on a large rise in personal debt. They forecast household borrowings to rise from £1,560bn in 2010 to £2,126bn by 2015, an increase of 36.3%.

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Politics
Miliband’s ‘tax bad businesses’ call: a Robin Hood Tax would help

28th September 2011 — Filed under: Politics

Owen Tudor

Labour leader Ed Miliband’s speech to Party Conference on Tuesday included a passage which called for bad businesses to be taxed differently from good ones, and there has been some comment on whether HMRC would now be in the market for moral philosophers to help them identify, and tax punitively, the ethically compromised. Of course, that’s not what he meant. The way to tax bad business is to tax the bad things businesses do, and there’s a ready-made solution already on the stocks. It’s being proposed by the European Commission today, and it’s called the Robin Hood Tax (oh alright, the ‘Financial Transactions Tax’). As the FT’s John Plender argues (£) today, a Robin Hood Tax would rebalance the financial sector by making long-term investment – one of the things that Ed Miliband identified specifically as good for the economy – more rewarding than the high frequency, algorithm-driven computer trading that causes stock market flash crashes and adds to volatility.

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Politics
The government is wrong on the riots

12th September 2011 — Filed under: Politics, Society & Welfare

Brendan Barber

Update: you can read a TUC analysis of the policy background to the riots here

Last month, as our cities burned amidst the worst rioting in decades, social divisions in modern Britain were laid bare. The violence and the criminality that we saw shocked us all, and none of us would seek to justify or condone it in any way.

And the victims were overwhelmingly frightened ordinary people in working class communities – with the police and emergency service workers called on to put their safety on the line to restore order.

The Prime Minister chose to describe these events as ‘criminality pure and simple’. But it isn’t so simple and what happened in August actually revealed deep fractures within our society.

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Economics
George Osborne’s narrative is collapsing

4th August 2011 — Filed under: Economics, Politics

Nigel Stanley

Most Touchstone readers will wince every time they hear a minister talking about ‘maxing out the nation’s credit card’. Those of us old enough to remember can hear the direct echoes of Mrs Thatcher’s housewife’s purse, which she used to justify what in retrospect look like quite mild cuts in spending.

Yet this simple narrative has worked for the government. A majority still believe cuts are necessary (even if they want them to be temporary and reject the small state ideology that drives a good part of the cuts/public service “reform” agenda).

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Politics
Boris Johnson’s undemocratic proposal on strike ballots

30th June 2011 — Filed under: Politics

Nigel Stanley

London Mayor Boris Johnson has renewed his call for industrial action ballots only to be valid if the turn-out is more than 50%.

Superficially that might sound just a bit democratic, but the reality is that it is simply about erecting a hurdle that will make official strike action extremely hard to achieve.

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International
Italians reject Berlusconi and his neoliberal policies in referendum

16th June 2011 — Filed under: International, Politics

Andrea Albertazzi

As well as a political blow to Berlusconi and his majority, the outcome of the Italian referendum on 12/13 June was a great democratic victory for the defence of common goods, health, and equality of citizens before the law. An overwhelming majority of 95% of voters said no to the privatisation of water, no to the exploitation of nuclear energy and no to the law that gave Berlusconi and his ministers immunity from trial proceedings.

Susanna Camusso, General Secretary of CGIL which endorsed the campaign for the referendum, said:

“there is no doubt that the government faces a political defeat. Italians have a different understanding about priorities and the policies Italy needs.”

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