Come back Shirley Porter, all is forgiven
Posted on Tuesday 26 October, 2010
Filed Under Conservative Party |
3 Comments
DID the coalition go and make Dame Shirley Porter housing minister and I just missed the press release or something? I only ask after finding out about government plans to cut housing benefit, which could see one million people forced to move home.
The regulations surrounding this area of the welfare state are already of complexity sufficient to baffle a polyglot chess grandmaster with a PhD in neurophysiology, and the changes will not make them any simpler.
There’s lots of technical stuff in there about the thirtieth percentile of Local Housing Allowances that make my head hurt when I skim read summaries. It’s a Polly Toynbee thing, we non-social workers wouldn’t understand.
But all the rest of us really need to know is that poor people will be priced out of privately rented accommodation in many areas of London and other more prosperous places, and will either be pushed out to towns like Margate or Luton instead, or end up sleeping rough.
Welcome to Dave’s transport caff (and free school)
Posted on Monday 25 October, 2010
Filed Under Education |
10 Comments
POOR old Fraser Nelson seems genuinely mystified. The editor of The Spectator did ‘Any Questions’ on Radio Four last weekend, and it turns out that the audience was somewhat sceptical on the central plank of Tory/Lib Dem education policy.
‘When I said that free schools would give the poor the choice that only the rich can afford, the audience laughed,’ he laments. ‘This is precisely what the new schools would do – yet the very proposition was seemingly risible to those in the hall.’
But public cynicism is all too well grounded, if this morning’s Financial Times is anything to go by. The opening paragraph of a story on page four announces: ‘New “free schools” will be allowed to employ teachers without teaching qualifications and could open in pubs, takeaways, shops and houses without the need to seek planning permission.’
Read that again, slowly, so it sinks in. I had to. Nelson wants us to believe that free schools will offer all and sundry an education on a par with the one he enjoyed at £22,000-a-year Dollar Academy, the best school in Scotland in terms of exam results. The clue’s in the name, I guess.
Sunday reading notes: time to junk permanent revolution?
Posted on Sunday 24 October, 2010
Filed Under Book review |
22 Comments
I’M A two book a week man, in the way that some people are 20-a-day smokers or six pints a night boozers. While I have written the occasional full book review for this blog. and will continue to do so, this week and in future in intend to offer a few shorter notes on what I have been reading lately.
I have just finished Donny Gluckstein’s ‘The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class’, in which one of Tony Cliff’s sons offers a solid take on the subject matter described in the title. Citations from the German secondary literature are abundant, and there is some attempt to engage with recent controversies in the field.
What we get is largely a restatement of Trotsky’s analysis of German fascism, which surely ranks among the Russian revolutionary’s most enduring writing, and it is perhaps the only one of his major theories that Gluckstein’s dad did not thoroughly revise.
Accordingly, his offspring stays pretty close to far left orthodoxy on the question. Yes, Nazism was a mass movement of the petit bourgeoisie, mobilised by capital against an insurgent proletariat. No platform.
Osborne isn’t working
Posted on Friday 22 October, 2010
Filed Under Conservative Party, Economics |
24 Comments
SAATCHI & Saatchi’s ‘Labour isn’t working’ advertisement of 1979 is rightly hailed as one of the most effective political posters of all time. Just those three words, superimposed on an image of a queue snaking back from a dole office, were a major factor in the electoral success that year of Margaret Thatcher.
The propaganda drew its bite from the fact that unemployment had, for the first time in the postwar period if I remember correctly, topped the one million mark. To have that many people out of work was widely seen as a scandal. Thatcher trebled that tally in short order, but that’s another story.
Two days ago, George Osborne stood up in the House of Commons and announce that 490,000 public sector jobs will go. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development reckons that is an understatement, and that the real total could be more like 750,000.
We are moving into ‘pick a number’ territory here, but accountancy giant PriceWaterhouseCoopers believes that the knock on effects of the CSR will in addition kill 500,000 private sector jobs, with around 100,000 of them in the construction sector alone.
Comprehensive Spending Review: Labour’s secret counterplans revealed
Posted on Thursday 21 October, 2010
Filed Under Economics, New Labour |
17 Comments
I HAPPEN to have a copy of the briefing that the Parliamentary Labour Party issued to Labour MPs yesterday to tell them what to think about Osborne’s Comprehensive Spending Review.
It bills itself as ever so exciting, hush-hush, need to know basis, on the QT stuff. At the foot of each page, the following menacing words are written in italics: ‘PLP briefings are the property of the Labour Party. They are confidential and are for the use of registered members only. Any publishing or dissemination of PLP political briefing is prohibited and maybe unlawful.’
Seasoned journo that I am, I have been eagerly skimming through the document this morning so I can reveal the sensational critique and killer counter-arguments the comrades have marshalled to nail the ConDems’ evil plans to foster the return of Thatcherite misery. Sadly, I have to report that aren’t any.
Socialism in the sober decade
Posted on Wednesday 20 October, 2010
Filed Under The left |
21 Comments
WELCOME to day one of the sober decade. Even as I write these words, George Osborne is standing up in the House of Commons and outlining unprecedented public spending cuts that, one way or the other, will define an era.
The chancellor, as well as many commentators who share his small state ideological predilections, no doubt genuinely believes that hitchhiking down the road to Hayekville is the only viable way forward. The left – whom I of course number myself among – believe that we have seen this movie before.
Osborne’s package, we are entirely persuaded, guarantees a return to the mass unemployment, public squalor, and entrenched social problems that so scarred Britain throughout the Thatcher years.
But whichever camp proves correct, a new period in British politics opens as of now. The Comprehensive Spending Review cannot but have major consequences that no-one can immediately predict.
The myth of expansionary fiscal contraction
Posted on Tuesday 19 October, 2010
Filed Under Conservative Party, Economics |
21 Comments
IS IT possible for Britain to axe public spending by £83bn over a four-year period and nevertheless undergo substantial private sector-driven growth? The heir to the Osborne baronetcy wants us to believe that the answer is a resounding ‘yes’.
Ye of little faith should put aside your fears of a return to Thatcher-era public squalor and ruinous social problems. Unemployment, schmunemployment. In Osborneworld, all will be resolved by ‘expansionary fiscal contraction’, as the jargon has it.
Cuts, the chancellor has repeatedly argued, will ultimately boost business to the point where it will take up the slack left by the state.
The only snag is that governments can only pull this particular trick off little more than 1% of the time. But don’t take my word for it. Look at what the International Monetary Fund has got to say on the topic. I am grateful to a colleague for drawing my attention to chapter three of the most recent edition of the World Economic Outlook.
The class politics of Lord Wolfson and his pals
Posted on Monday 18 October, 2010
Filed Under Business, Economics |
37 Comments
GENUFLECTION to the opinions of those we have come to call ‘business leaders’ has formed an unquestionable norm of economic orthodoxy under every British government since 1979.
Trade unions are repeatedly castigated as vested interests. By contrast, the agenda of the wealth creators is routinely presented as ideologically neutral.
OK, these guys dodge a bit of tax here and there, and get to run a yacht or three. But what’s good for business is good for Britain. Now shut up, chill out, and be intensely relaxed as governments tailor each and every policy to the facilitation of people getting filthy rich.
Seen in this light, the letter signed by three dozen FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 chairman and chief executives, and published in the Daily Telegraph this morning, is more than just one statement of opinion among many. Their call for public spending cuts to come hard, fast and all at once will widely be regarded as carrying substantial weight.
That’s the thing about Eton
Posted on Friday 15 October, 2010
Filed Under Education, Society |
43 Comments
IT IS terribly bad form for a chap to come over all chippy about his education. Frankly, that’s the sort of stuff one would expect from a provincial Grammar School boy, and not a journalist, novelist and historian of the stature of Guy Walters.
Nevertheless, the Old Etonian has devoted a post on the Daily Telegraph-sponsored blog to make plain his umbrage at the way a book review in the Jewish Chronicle casually takes a pop at him for being an Old Etonian.
‘That’s the thing with Eton,’ he notes. ‘A good schoolfriend of mine once said that you can be prime minister, attempt a coup in a West African state, even be a king, but to others, first and foremost, you’ll always be an Eamonn. I can live with it, even if Mr Low can’t.
An Eamonn, I hear you ask? Well, ‘Eamonn Old Etonian’ is apparently the punch line to a posh knock-knock joke.
On the spurious equation of Ahmadinejad and Hitler
Posted on Thursday 14 October, 2010
Filed Under Blogging, International |
19 Comments
YES, I know it ranks among the biggest clichés in all of barroom philosophy. But let’s say they do one day invent time travel and you could go back to 1907 Vienna. Would it be ethical to seek out a penniless postcard painter called Adolph Hitler and kill him, thereby sparing history World War Two?
The short answer to what is known as ‘the grandfather paradox’ is that this would be logically impossible. If it could be done, Hitler would already be dead at that point. But minor considerations such as unachievability aside, the proposition is otherwise a no brainer to all save those who hold to a notion of absolute sanctity of human life. Sure, you throttle him and scurry back to 2010, to widespread popular acclaim.
I only raise this hoary old debating topic after reading the remarks of Israeli parliamentarian Aryeh Eldad, who yesterday argued for the assassination of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during a visit to Lebanon.
