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:
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.
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%.
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.
Brendan Barber
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.
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).
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.
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.”
Richard Exell
It’s been fun to see the Daily Mail getting into a tizzy about “judge-made laws” in the superinjunction brouhaha. But they have got a point - I found myself nodding in agreement when they wrote:
It is also wrong for judges to usurp the function of our elected representatives by effectively writing a privacy law of their own.
I agree, its a worrying sign when the judges invent new laws out of thin air. I’m looking forward to the Mail’s editorial condemning Torquay Hotel Co Ltd v Cousins (1969) and the Taff Vale Case (1901).
Richard Exell
What works at cutting inequality? New figures show that we already do a great deal – and suggest how we could do even more.
There’s sometimes a terrible fatalism about inequality – most people agree that Britain is unequal and that this is a problem, but many believe that this is inevitable. This sense that nothing can be done about inequality is encouraged by Ministers who like to emphasise the large sums spent by the last government, and then add “but it didn’t do any good.”
