There'll be no cuts to frontline services under a Tory government, says Cameron

No - that's certainly not what the government will say tomorrow as it unveils its comprehensive spending review.

But our current Prime Minister could hardly have been clearer on the final Sunday of the General Election campaign, speaking to Andrew Marr to make his final week pitch to the British public.

The widely reported promise on which Cameron sought a mandate was very helpfully captured and summarised in a report from Tim Montgomerie of ConservativeHome, to which we are indebted for our headline: "There'll be no cuts to frontline services under a Tory government, says Cameron".

There were certainly commentators and advisers warning David Cameron that trust depended on warning about the spending cuts he was planning to introduce - advising that he needed a ensure one prominent "to camera" moment where he explicitly sought a public mandate for what he planned to do in power, and which could be played back and referred to as the government outlined its proposals.

Instead, what Cameron told Andrew Marr and the nation was that he could make every saving necessary by cutting waste; indeed that he would personally veto any ministerial plans to cut frontline services to reduce the deficit:

"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. After 13 years of Labour, there is a lot of wasteful spending, a lot of money that doesn't reach the frontline."

The quote could be of some use to David Cameron, since he now seems to have amnesia about what he did and did not ask for a mandate for. He told his party conference that "the result may not have been clear-cut when it came to the political parties. But it was clear enough when it came to political ideas".

The idea of the "high-spending" state had been defeated, Cameron claimed, neglecting to mention that he had neglected to mention this to the electorate at the time.

It is certainly true to say that no party can claim to have been straight about the public finances at the last General Election.

Neither David Cameron - still less Nick Clegg, who vociferously agreed with Labour through the election campaign on the timing, pace and scale of spending cuts - can claim any electoral mandate for the spending cuts they will propose tomorrow.

How do you solve a problem like Ken?

UPDATE: 3.45pm.

Ken has been persuaded to make clear his strong support for the Labour candidate Helal Abbas, and his second preference for the Independent Rahman (contrary to many reports which had somehow got the idea that he preferred Rahman).

His statement reads:

Ken Livingstone said:

"I am disappointed by the way the NEC handled the selection in Tower Hamlets and I am sure that under Ed Miliband's leadership things would have been handled differently.

'However, my position is clear: I fully support Labour candidates in all elections and I am calling for Tower Hamlets residents to use their first preference vote for our candidate Helal Abbas.

'A second preference should be used for Lutfur Rahman to keep the Tories out."

***

London's Mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone has set the cat among the London party pigeons by choosing the week of Thursday's Tower Hamlets Mayoral Election to campaign alongside Independent candidate Lutfur Rahman, having earlier suggested he was neutral between Rahman and the official Labour candidate Helal Abbas.

The London Labour party is rightly focusing on the Tower Hamlets election itself.

But, by the end of the week, what (if anything) might the party decide to do about Ken?

Here are five possible options for Ed Miliband, Harriet Harman and the Labour party National Executive Committee.

1. Apply the rules to Ken in the same way as to anybody else

Prima facie, this would mean suspending Ken as a candidate to investigate whether he has backed a candidate against Labour. And, should the NCC found he has indeed done so, reopening nominations to seek a new Mayoral candidate.

Rather inconveniently, several councillors and party members have been suspended for backing the Independent candidate who Ken gave every impression of backing too. As that is what would almost certainly happen to a Tower Hamlets council candidate or GLA candidate who had done exactly the same thing (if to less public or political effect), this approach would have the virtue of the rules being applied equally to everybody, and nobody being bigger than the party, even Ken Livingstone.

Many may think that those are important principles for the party. David Prescott for Labour Uncut sees no alternative.

But there are two difficulties, which are likely to be insurmountable political obstacles to such an approach. Sunny Hundal at Liberal Conspiracy cogently describes this option as political suicide for Labour.

One issue is the history of Ken, the Labour party and the Mayoral selection: one would be removing the candidate who was the clear choice of London members. The leadership (though the issue is hardly of their making this time) would be accused of returning to the bad old days of top down New Labour which (unfairly) would not allow Livingstone a fair shot at the candidacy in 2000.

And the 2012 political fallout would probably see Ken running as an independent. Deja vu all over again, though quite probably with a different result as, this time around, it is probable that both Ken and an alternative Labour candidate would struggle. Boris Johnson's chances of being re-elected would be boosted.

2. Pretend Ken has not broken the rules

This is perhaps the most likely approach. It might indeed be the most sensible way for the party leadership (which did not invite this problem) to seek to make it a 72 hour wonder, and to avoid turning a London and twitter/party blogosphere story into a very major national political issue.

A sophistic defence of Ken is available - as Sunny Hundal outlines: that inviting a rival candidate and TV cameras for a walkabout three days before the election did not entail endorsement. That could be argued, on a technicality, even if the intention of the action was to give the opposite intention to any sentient voter in Tower Hamlets.

Perhaps Ken was just suggesting (in this 'new politics' world of pluralism) that Rahman was well worth considering for a second preference (though it is unfortunate that he is, on camera, dissing the official Labour candidate).

This could simply involve pretending nothing ever happened in Tower Hamlets involving Ken. An alternative approach may perhaps involve a (tepid) statement of support by Thursday from Ken for the Labour candidate (perhaps along with praise for his other favoured candidates too), again perhaps focusing on their joint efforts to avoid (the hypothetical and implausible) threat of the Tories and LibDems prevailing in the Mayoralty.

These would be a face-saving device to make the best of the situation now, albeit leaving some egg on everybody's faces.

(A stronger and less apologetic version of this "Ken did nothing wrong" defence involves arguing that Rahman is "a Labour candidate". That is the position of Jon Lansman of the Left Futures blog, but it could hardly be the position of the Labour NEC, which suspended Rahman. Nor does this have any basis in party rules. However, Adam Bienkov at Tory Troll makes the valid point that nobody comes out of the Tower Hamlets selection "shambles" well, excepting defeated candidate and stalwart GLA member John Biggs).

3. Admit Ken has breached the rules; acknowledge a political choice to overlook this

This may be somewhat more candid than option (2), though amounting to much the same thing in terms of its practical consequences.

This approach could facilitate the opportunity for the leadership to disapprove of Ken's actions in the Tower Hamlets election, which have gone down badly with local party members and London party activists, though perhaps also stating the "let Livingstone be Livingstone" reality (which Labour surely knew when it took Ken back into the fold) that Ken is always going to have a defiantly independent streak.

That makes him a difficult colleague, when he is in the party, but it is also part of his political strength and appeal. The defence would primarily be a largely political rather than principled one: that doing otherwise would damage the Labour Party's Mayoral campaign and help the Conservatives, and that Ken is ultimately an asset to the party.

Some sort of token sanction might be applied. This may depend on the candidate's willingness to cooperate. Any sort of apology to activists and members is unlikely, particularly if a half-hearted statement would not seem sincere. The Livingstone campaign may have some longer-term interest in building bridges to mobilise their activist base.

4. Reopen the Mayoral selection - allowing Ken to run as a candidate.

This would be a dramatic (and extremely unlikely) move.

This would have the virtue of both applying the rules, yet also avoiding a 2000-style stitch-up, by suggesting that it would be for Ken to show he still has the confidence of London party members.

Such a contest could be Ken against Oona King again, and perhaps a broader field too. All of the usual credible - Karen Buck, Jon Cruddas, David Lammy - and non-credible names could be discussed once again. This would risk being a distraction for the party, with the Tory candidate already in the field as well as City Hall.

Another reason it won't happen is the financial cost, which is largely the reason that the Mayoral campaign was held alongside (and so overshadowed by) the party leadership contest.

5. Sanction Ken on the NEC - but allow him to remain as the London Mayoral candidate

Like (2) and (3), this again involves explaining why the rules do not apply equally to all party members in this case. This requires an explanation of why a lesser sanction is preferred to a greater one, though again the explanation is a political one.

The most plausible sanction might be for the NEC to decide to suspend Livingstone's NEC membership, perhaps for a year of his two year term.

The NEC principle would be a "rule-makers shouldn't be rule-breakers" one. (Again, in this scenario, Livingstone certainly ought to be allowed him to stand at the next NEC election to gauge if he retains the support of members, even if the CLP section is intended primarily for lay party members more than frontline political celebs).

Again, there would have to be a "Ken is Ken" acknowledgement of the strengths of running a de facto "Independent Labour" candidate under party colours, as the most likely way for the party to defeat the Conservatives in London.

This approach might be the toughest of the realistic (non-nuclear) scenarios open to the party leadership. Again, it might be difficult to apply in practice if the candidate was resistant.

***

So those would seem to be the party's options. (Unless you have another to add to the selection).

So who would want to be Ed Miliband and Harriet Harman, apparently facing a series of no-win imperfect choices?

And, if you were, which option would you choose?

Ken comes off the fence ... against Labour

This blog was not so impressed, at the start of the month, with a remarkable exercise in Tower Hamlets' fence-sitting from Labour's London Mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone.

Well, it does seem that Ken has now made his mind up ahead of polling day this week.

The BBC reports that the Labour London Mayoral candidate has been out campaigning (for the TV cameras) with the anti-Labour Independent candidate for the Tower Hamlets Mayoralty, Lutfur Rahman.

Ken is a newly elected NEC member, the Labour governing body which usually throws party members out for less. The BBC reported that a Labour party spokesman tonight said only that the London Mayoral candidate backs Labour candidates everywhere, including in Tower Hamlets.

It is a very difficult race to call. Much may depend on the turnout. Ken's gesture could give important momentum to Rahman in the final week.

Yet there is very much all to play for.

The bookmakers Ladbrokes have Labour's Helal Abbas a slight favourite - at 4/7 on - with Lutfur Rahman at 5/4 against. The Conservatives - despite Ken's fear that they could come through the middle - are out at 33/1. (The local Labour party has been pretty solidly behind the Labour candidate Helal Abbas since the NEC decision).

As The Guardian's Dave Hill, who is continuing to offer the most comprehensive coverage, wrote at the start of the week:

This contest is a big deal. Winning control of the "Olympic borough" and its billion pound-plus budget is far more important than prevailing in most parliamentary by-elections and hugely important for Labour.

Anybody who wants to help back the Labour candidate in the last 48 hours can get in touch with the campaign office is at 349 Cambridge Heath Road, London, E2 9RA which is open for canvassing and leafleting from 10am until late every day until the election. You can ring 0207 729 6682 or email abbas4mayor@gmail.com for further details.

On the politics of the top rate - and taking a minority view

Unlike most people in Britain, I am not in favour of the top rate of income tax being increased from 50p to 60p on earnings over £150,000.

The ComRes/Independent on Sunday poll today shows that this is a minority view.

The top rate of income tax at 50p in the pound on earnings over £150,000 a year should be raised to 60p in the pound

Agree 54%

Disagree 29%

I disagree, because I think 50p is the right level for the top rate.

Despite taking a minority view on a 60p rate, I do think its right to have a higher tax rate in the top 1-2% than on earners 15% from the top earning £40k. So I was, at least, on the popular side of the argument when Alastair Darling decided that circumstances - a decision supported by 57% and opposed by 22% in a snap Times/Populus poll, and with YouGov funding support at 68% and opposition at 20% just afterwards, despite all of the headlines claiming the Chancellor had departed from the centre-ground with only large majorities of the public for company, as the tax myths of the imaginary centre all got a noisy airing.

The government rightly points out that those earning £40k+ are in the top 15% of earners in the income distribution (though it seems to have done too little work on the distributional impact of child benefit changes on single and double-income households to answer simple factual questions about it).

It is anticipated that George Osborne will want to propose to reverse the current 50p rate at the end of the Parliament, either in his final budget or to promise to do so in his next election manifesto alongside a package of measures aimed at different electoral segments.

He has surely made reversing the current 50p rate harder for himself.

The government has spent the last fortnight telling the media and voters that those paying the top rate of tax on £42k are (relatively) better off than they think (or feel). It is surely going to be harder for them to ever prioritise the reversal of a tax change which sees the top 1% of earners at £150K+ contribute just a little bit more.

***

Personally, I do think it would be worth investigating beginning the 50p rate 1% further down the income distribution (at £100k) is worth looking at, particularly if this can explicitly be done to protect middle to upper income households on 30-60k from taking a larger hit from deficit reduction.

Still, I predict 50p at £100k is likely to prove a soft shoe shuffle one step centre-leftwards too far for Ed Miliband and Alan Johnson.

But they might note with interest that broad majorities do not think the top 1% to 2% are paying their fair share. In particular, I think this reflects a widespread public perception that none of the "never again" sackcloth and ashes pledges from the banks after 2008 led to any noticeable change.

This will fizz up again with bonus rounds before Christmas and in the Spring. That is why tripling the bank bonus levy (which is 0.04% in the UK and 0.15% in the US) would strike the majority of the public as an eminently reasonable and moderate proposal, and why many of its own supporters - not only on the LibDem benches - think the government has set the level much lower than it could have done so.

***

The yield of the 50p rate is not enormous - the Treasury calculated its 2009 changes at the top to be worth £2.4 billion a year.

Noisy claims that the 50p rate makes nothing or loses revenue appear implausible (and are clearly not shared by George Osborne). That would, however, be a more plausible risk about a 60p rate - the IFS previously estimated that an overall marginal rate of 56% would maximise revenues from high earners in the UK.

50p at £100k would bring in a larger number of high earners 2% from the top of the income distribution, who would be rather less likely to have options to realistically consider exiting the UK tax system than those earning £250k-£500k+.

However, the FT has reported that the much hyped exodus to Zurich had not occurred and was much overdone. Relatively few other newspapers seem to have bothered to report the actuality, having all carried the megaphone 'warnings' from those who then decided to stick around.

Compare 'Banking exodus fears over 50% tax overdone' (£), FT 17.5.10, with 'Accountants warn of 50p tax exodus' FT 19.9.10 and 'Tax rise may spark entrepreneurial exodus' FT 5.12.10, and the similar stories carried in every newspaper.

The latter FT reported a survey finding that a significant reason for the non-exodus of top executives was that they could typically earn twice as much after tax in the UK than they could in Switzerland, such was the relative size of the UK's financial market.

Of course, this blog would much rather live in Britain than Switzerland, and it would seem to rather miss the point of being super-rich to think that having oodles of cash should somehow change your mind about that.

Happy birthday Oscar Wilde, the Fabian anarchist

"Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing. And when humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias."

Thanks to the Google home-page's celebration I saw that today is Oscar Wilde's 156th birthday today, though he lived to see only 46 of them himself before his early death 110 years ago.

Wilde has become a famous name to whom many witticisms - whether his own or those of others - can be attributed. He wrote some unperformable plays, but his best are as funny as anything on the English stage. His novel The Picture of Dorian Gray seems to become more contemporary as time passes. Politically, Wilde is now primarily a symbol of the gay rights movement, the best-known symbol of the cruelty of a Victorian era which saw him imprisoned, broken and dead at 46.

That means that his broader attempt to contribute to political thought have largely been forgotten. Yet Wilde was also a Socialist, if of an unusual kind: a Fabian anarchist whose ideal was that "socialism itself will be of value because it leads to individualism"

It is not surprising that Wilde found his fellow Fabians too conservative in their demands, too willing to play the long game in pursuit of a gradualist transformation over time. As with HG Wells later, the individualism of the artistic vision does not always sit well with the collective pursuit of political change.

And Wilde's complaint that "the problem with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings" would still find many sympathetic ears in the Labour party today.

His own socialist anarchism was set this out most fully in his 1891 tract, The Soul of Man under Socialism (which can be read in full from the Google Books website).

The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact, scarcely any one at all escapes

...

With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

Hence too his attack on poverty and on the limits of its altruistic and charitable relief.

The virtues of the poor may be readily admitted, and are much to be regretted. We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it.

All of this should be done without coercion, and pretty much without any government by the state at all.

It is clear, then, that no Authoritarian Socialism will do. For while under the present system a very large number of people can lead lives of a certain amount of freedom and expression and happiness, under an industrial barrack system, or a system of economic tyranny, nobody would be able to have any such freedom at all. It is to be regretted that a portion of our community should be practically in slavery, but to propose to solve the problem by enslaving the entire community is childish. Every man must be left quite free to choose his own work. No form of compulsion must he exercised over him. If there is, his work will not be good for him, will not be good in itself, and will not be good for others. And by work I simply mean activity of any kind ...

But I confess that many of the socialistic views that I have come across seem to me to be tainted with ideas of authority, if not of actual compulsion. Of course, authority and compulsion are out of the question. All association must be quite voluntary. It is only in voluntary associations that man is fine.

One may not get too far looking to Wilde for political economy, or for any detailed account of the means to achieve his ends.

On his advocacy, the abolition of private property and the mechanisation of all unpleasant work, such as sweeping roads, to create the possibility of an admirably if implausibly artist-centred view of the world.

Yet there are broader resonances and echoes in his idealistic demands for an important foundational liberal socialist project today: that, if what matters is freedom, then a primary mission of our politics is to create the conditions in which we have the ability to decide for ourselves the central meaning and purpose of our own lives. This autonomy needs to be distributed widely, fairly and equally across our entire society, if such opportunities for self-authorship are not to be crushed and denied, whether by poverty, or by other forms of legal or public coercion such as that which Wilde himself experienced.

As Wilde writes:

'Know thyself' was written over the portal of the ancient world. Over the portal of the new world, 'be thyself' shall be written.

***

More broadly, I believe we can and should champion Wilde as one of the many voices who symbolises of the enduring pluralism of Fabian traditions - an antidote to the caricature of a purely statist project, painted grey-on-grey, where the Webbs' busy devotion to socialist duty could never leave any time for trivialities or aesthetic pursuits. This has been a caricature used by Fabian themselves to redress the balance, most effectively in Tony Crosland's liberal Fabian complaint against the idea of ""total abstinence and a good filing system" being the route to a socialist utopia. Yet the challenge was itself within an enduring Fabian tradition.

It is well known that Fabians were influential in founding the Labour Party, the London School of Economics and the New Statesman. Less often remembered is that Fabians - especially Harley Granville Barker and Shaw - also led the campaign to create a National Theatre.

In terms of political philosophy, there are points of connection between Wilde's anarchism - and earlier visions of a socialist aesthetic, such as those of William Morris - and the later mutualist traditions of those like GDH Cole which feared that social democracy could end up becoming a creed of bureaucracy and centralisation.

Wilde should be celebrated as one voice from these more mercurial and inchaote traditions within the Fabian fold. These could never claim to emulate the concrete institutional and political achievements of the Webbs, in writing Labour party constitutions and offering blueprints for the welfare state.

These competing traditions did not really try. But they can provoke thought too - in their insistence that the socialist left has always been about a variety of traditions of both moral and mechanical reform.

Utopias are unfashionable. They can be dangerous, certainly. They are often now feared for the more pragmatic reason that they could prove a distraction from what can and should be done now. Yet vision and gradualism need not be fundamentally opposed either. Demands for the seemingly impossible - votes for women and the working-classes; the end of mighty Empires and struggles for human rights; the transformation of attitudes on race and sexuality; demands to end social institutions like the Workhouse and create others like a universal NHS - have often changed the script about what proves politically possible in the real world.

There is no reason to accept that they can not do so again. So part of Wilde's value is in staking again the claim for utopia to remain part of the political map.

Two cheers for the pupil premium

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg wants to get onto the front foot this morning, announcing details of the Coalition's plans for a "pupil premium" to increase the resources spent on pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds.

This is a good idea, which deserves support.

Though all is not necessarily precisely as presented.

Firstly, the "premium" idea or policy is not an entirely new one, though it is being packaged as new. As Polly Curtis reported for the Guardian earlier this week, the Coalition's new plan in fact involves increasing the resources to the existing schemes to increase funding per pupil for those on Free School Meals.

Gove is understood to have settled the method of paying the premium: in the short term, it will use the existing system of allocating extra money to children receiving free school meals. But more money will be granted to some schools, to iron out regional disparities.

Increasing the existing premiums further is a good idea.

Secondly, funding. How much? And where is the cash coming from and going?

The newspapers have been briefed about £5 billion to £7 billion, by counting the next three to four years cumulatively. As Radio 4 presenter Evan Davis tweeted before his interview with Clegg this morning:

They (and we) are calling it £7 billion. But that is over four years. I call that 1.5 to 2 billion a year ... Didn't Gordon Brown get some stick for cumulating spending totals over several years?

Nick Clegg quickly acknowledged this in his interview, saying the £1.5 - £2 billion increase would rise to £2.5 billion in the final year.

That's real money, suggesting the effort to overspin it is an unnecessarily contentious distraction.

Where the cash is coming from remains initially unclear, beyond that the funding will come partly from shifting resources within the (shrinking) DfES budget and partly from outside it. The balance of the sources of funding is to be revealed later. The Guardian reported too that some of the DFES resources will come from cutting central funding for youth clubs, after-school music, art and child safety projects.

A new development outlined by LibDemVoice this morning, and not previously mooted before this week's student fees u-turn,is "a new form of student premium" to be part of the premium policy. This does bear the hallmarks of making policy on the back of the envelope, so it may be some time before we know clear whether the resources for this are coming from the university funding reform, or whether this is now part of the previous "pupil premium" package (which was always expected to be at around the levels announced today for the schools, but not universities, element).

Nick Clegg said this morning that of course he did not deny making the student fee pledge but that "having looked at it" he now realised that a focus on social mobility depended on prioritising earlier investments in life chances. It is hard to believe he has not been aware of the evidence for that proposition for several years, but it does imply that he should oppose cutting back on the schools policy.

**

Thirdly, the overall impact on educational inequality

The government needs to ensure that the pupil premium is more than a headline soundbite. It needs to be part of a coherent educational strategy which improves educational outcomes generally, including a core focus on narrowing the attainment gaps between disadvantaged pupils and their peers.

The central issue in deciding whether the overall educational strategy - and the range of other policy interventions which significantly affect education outcomes - will narrow or exacerbate existing educational inequalities is whether other policy choices pull in the same direction as the pupil premium, or go against it.

This was the focus of the recent Fabian/Webb Memorial Trust report "What's fair? Applying the fairness test to education" (full PDF available online), which offered an analysis of the record the Labour government, as well as the challenges for the Coalition which has committed to the goal of narrowing the attainment gap. (Guardian summary).

One of the most contentious current issues is the free schools policy. Michael Gove is evangelical about this being a driver for greater social mobility. Nick Clegg and Sarah Teather also argue that this will reinforce the pupil premium.

The majority of LibDem party opinion takes the opposite view, beign concerned that the risk that the policy will exacerbate inequalities may be greater than its potential to reduce them. At the moment, the weight of evidence appears to be with Clegg's critics.

Free schools in Sweden have certainly not been as successful as their advocates hoped. The Swedish version of Ofsted suggests they have not driven up standards, and have been more likely to increase segregation than to reduce it.

Closer to home, the early evidence is that the Coalition's new academies are more likely to be focused on relatively advantaged rather than relatively disadvantaged pupils, in contrast to the academies created by the last Labour government.

As the Fabian report set out "The proposal to turn schools rated outstanding into academies – if they request it – will be "bound to benefit a far greater proportion of less disadvantaged schools, since only a small proportion of schools recently judged as outstanding can be categorised as having a disadvantaged intake".

If there is a shift of resources to these schools, it will therefore tend to pull against the impact of the pupil premium, rather than reinforcing it.

As important are non-education policies which could have a significant impact on the school outcomes of those who the pupil premium is designed to help.

For example, I would highlight the unintended educational consequences of some of the proposed housing benefit changes - in particular, the crude and one-size-fits-all proposal to reduce benefit levels by 10% after 12 months, regardless of personal or family circumstances. Simon Hughes and Boris Johnson have joined the Labour party in expressing serious concerns about the social impacts of these proposals.

Many families affected by this rule are likely to have to move homes - perhaps tens of thousands of people - and this will often involve school age children having to move schools as a result. Where that happens, it would seriously disrupt the educational chances of an already disadvantaged group who Clegg's pupil premium is designed to help.

So Clegg, Gove and Teather ought to ensure there is a good, independent study of the possible impact on educational attainment and inequalities of the housing benefit proposals.

Given the government's commitment to narrowing the attainment gap in schools, as demonstrated by the pupil premium, it should also give serious thought to not applying that policy to households with school-age children who would otherwise have to move homes and schools. The principle of the pupil premium certainly demands that the government demonstrates that it has put in place robust plans to avoid the potentially positive impact being badly outweighed by the impact of other policies.

***

If they were to ensure that the educational inequality goal does inform relevant policies in education and beyond, then the pupil premium would be worth three cheers from all sides of the political spectrum.

This morning, we will have to confine ourselves to a more cautious two.

Liam Byrne to lead Labour policy review for Ed Miliband

Liam Byrne, who has shadow cabinet responsibility for shadowing the cabinet office, had been asked by leader Ed Miliband to lead a policy review for the party.

Along with Andy Burnham's role as election coordinator and Alan Johnson's appointment to the key role of Shadow Chancellor, the appointment further highlights the new leader's focus on party unity, including offering key roles in Labour's political strategy and policy development to party figures who supported other leadership contenders.

Byrne spoke about the role at the launch of the new Policy Network pamphlet 'Southern Discomfort Again' by Patrick Diamond and Giles Radice in Westminster on Monday afternoon, where Byrne joked that his election to the Shadow Cabinet by a single vote left him well placed to talk about the challenges of tight elections.

Byrne acknowledged that the historic record of Labour policy reviews had been "mixed", offering the classic revisionist formula that these had worked best where the party had been clear about values but open-minded about the means by which these should be pursued.

Noting that the Kinnock era "meet the challenge, make the change" policy review had come with its own song of that title, Byrne said that he was unable to promise that this would be emulated.

...

Byrne is widely respected in the party for his detailed engagement with questions of electoral and political strategy. Byrne voted for David Miliband for the party leadership, but has been among those leading Labour figures - along with John Healey and John Denham - to pay most attention to the "squeezed middle", a challenge which Ed Miliband has identified as central to an effective future Labour political and electoral strategy.

In particular, Byrne thinks there are important analogies with the (deeper-rooted and more long-standing) problem of stagnant middle-incomes in the United States, which President Obama's Middle-Class Taskforce is seeking to address.

He has blogged that:

We have nowhere near the same kind of problem as the US, but our hard-working classes have been surrendering their share of UK plc’s profitability for a good five years now. The TUC has an excellent study here. For me that means Labour’s next leader needs not one economy plan but two. How do we speed up growth – and how do we give Britain’s hard-working classes a bigger share of the pie?

Incidentally, it can be seen that the need for a broad electoral coalition across AB, C1 and C2 and DE voters has seen an evolution in the New Labour shorthand of "hard-working families". Byrne now talks of the need to deliver for the "hard-working classes", which could be seen as a 'traditional values in a modern setting' attempt at a convergence of new Labour and old.

Rather more substantively, that small shift in terminology does signal a renewed interest in political economy, and a willingness to ask questions about who gains from growth which were not part of New Labour's discourse. New Labour argued that the case for flexible labour. Byrne does not resile from that, but notes that recent years have seen markedly increased gains to capital and falling returns to labour, particularly since 2004 in the UK.

Byrne noted that the falling share of national earnings to labour meant that£23.4 billion less was passed out in wages in 2009 than would have been the case had wage labour received its post-war average of 73% of national earnings.

He sees this as an important driver of frustration about both welfare and immigration, particularly on those earning between £20,000 and £30,000 a year.

The policy challenge is to devise the strategy not just to generate growth and for ensuring that it is fairly shared, which does not follow automatically. The public and political legitimacy of a relatively open economy also depends upon this. This call for "fair shares from the recovery" is, beyond campaigns for a living wage, likely to form a significant pillar of Labour's emerging thinking about the party's future political economy. If fiscal pressures make it is harder to pursue the model of public investment and redistribution, then social democrats are going to want to look harder at how and why economic gains are distributed as they are in the first place.

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There is very little detail yet about the form and nature which the policy review will take. The leader has appointed Peter Hain as chair of the National Policy Forum. (Hain was an early Ed Miliband for leader supporter).

The party is also beginning to consult about its highly opaque internal policy-making structures. These are widely viewed as in need of a very significant overhaul if they are to be fit-for-purpose and trusted by party members and supporters as offering credible ways to have a voice which counts in significant policy and political debates, but there is less agreeement on how to get this right.

Former special adviser Paul Richards wrote for the Progress website recently of both the tactical and substantive case for a policy review:

The best thing Ed can do is avoid detailed policy prescriptions until 2013 or 2014, and the most effective way to do that is to announce a policy review. This should involve the party and its affiliates, and embroil the new shadow cabinet in a whirl-wind of consultative activity. Unlike the ill-starred Labour Listens campaign in 1988, which involved shadow cabinet ministers telling small public meetings what was good for them, this time we can use the full range of consultative methods to tap into modern Britain's concerns.

I made a similar point in the opening editorial commentary in the Fabian Review, just before the leadership result was announced.

Labour’s new leader would do well to look at how Blair – just as Cameron did – introduced himself to the public in broad brushstrokes, resisting demands to flesh out policy detail too early. (It is necessary later, as Cameron rather neglected.) Gordon Brown’s speeches were always ‘policy rich’ from his first days yet never articulated what his overall argument for ‘change’ was about.