Energy

The only "Tory" objection that can be found to the Chinese takeover of our nuclear energy is that the Americans might not like it.

So much for national sovereignty.

And the China to which we are prostrating ourselves is the China that is dumping her steel on Britain.

Truly, Jeremy Corbyn, this is your time.

Court Jesters

All satire is now of the Opposition.

There has to be some of that, of course. But all of it? Really?

Such are the backgrounds from which today's rib-ticklers are drawn.

Sounds of the Nineties

All the coverage of last night's Question Time has related to the lady with the tax credits, and that is understandable.

For a few months in 1992, the Conservatives sincerely believed, and lost no opportunity to say, that they were going to be in government permanently.

But the 1997 General Election was over, in Labour's favour, before the end of 1992.

Likewise, when the tax credits cuts bite, then the 2020 General Election will be over, in Labour's favour, before the end of 2015.

Just as there was no recession on the day of 2010 Election, but try telling anyone that, so there was no recession on the day of the 1997 Election, nor had there been one in years.

But try telling anyone that even now, never mind at the time. Mercifully, I did not have to try and tell anyone that at the time.

Instead, arising out of the events of the later part of 1992, we could tell people absolutely anything about "the Tories", and it was believed. VAT on food, charges for visiting the doctor, the withdrawal of the state retirement pension from people who were already claiming it, anything.

Yes, the withdrawal of the state retirement pension from people who were already claiming it. That one appeared in official Labour Party press releases, and it was discussed in all seriousness on the main television news bulletins. They all did.

Such was the culmination of four and a half years of torrential media and public abuse of the Government of the day and of its party.

By the spring of 1996, when it was clear that that Government was going to hang on for five years, I find it difficult to imagine that even the hardest of the then Ministers and party functionaries could have bared to have switched on the television, and I am by no means talking only about the political programming.

Absolutely any Labour Leader would have won by a landslide. Absolutely any Labour Leader did.

And it is all about to begin all over again. Arguably, it did so last night.

Meanwhile, there was another interesting and important feature of this week's Question Time.

Amber Rudd dutifully parroted the pro-EU big business line on behalf of the Government, while Rod Liddle expressed the profound opposition of the traditional working-class Left, while Simon Schama bemoaned that, in his liberal-Left academic way, he was looking more and more likely to have to vote for withdrawal rather than accept the terms renegotiated to the satisfaction of David Cameron.

Ah, yes. Europe, too. All this, and TFI Friday is back tonight. I feel quite young again.

Slipped Back Into A Pale Imitation

Tara McCormack writes:

It is extraordinary to look back at Western Cold War propaganda; the scaremongering posters and films in which America is under attack from a vast alien force abroad and undercover agents at home.

Very few intelligent people today would accept this propaganda as an accurate representation of reality.

It is easy to see in hindsight that much Cold War propaganda was designed to create a climate of fear domestically and drum up support for overseas militarism.

Nevertheless, one of the most profoundly depressing things about the British press today is how uncritically it parrots the official line when it comes to foreign policy.

Since the Ukrainian crisis, the British media seem to have killed off their critical faculties and burned the remains for good measure.

Even intelligent analysts and commentators have forgotten the lessons of the Cold War and have so easily slipped back into a pale imitation of a Cold War narrative.

When it comes to the coverage of Russian bombing in Syria, however, the British media have surpassed themselves. The reporting on Russian airstrikes in Syria has ranged from the idiotic to the dishonest to the frankly astonishing.

A headline in The Times a few weeks ago read ‘Putin defies the West!’. Clearly, Putin didn’t get the memo that Russian foreign policy is now controlled in Brussels and Washington.

Putin has been presented as a cross between Professor Moriarty, Fu Manchu and Joseph Goebbels – a master strategist and evil genius using smoke and mirrors to befuddle the West as he carries out his inscrutable campaign. ‘What is he up to in Syria?’ is the constant refrain.

Recently, I debated journalist and former US diplomat James Rubin at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, and he kept remarking on how inscrutable Putin was. No wonder a kind of grudging admiration for Putin occasionally creeps into the commentary. 

The problem is that this is utter nonsense.

First of all, consider the claim that we have no idea what Russia is up to. This has been a running theme since the Ukraine crisis, but this is an outright lie. Russia’s motives in Ukraine and in Syria are well known.

They are well known not because we’ve got a team of Kremlinologists scrutinising Russia’s obscure statements and mysterious behaviour, but because, as a representative of his government, President Putin has consistently told the West his intentions.

Now, we may not agree with Russia’s motives, but that is an entirely different point. The fact of the matter is that Putin is not hiding his intentions. And yet the media have never reported on it.

Noam Chomsky once argued that, in a democracy, things are often hidden in plain sight – this is a very good example.

Similarly, it is simply not true that we do not know what Russia’s aims are in Syria.

Russia is a long-term supporter of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, but is by no means averse to a post-Assad Syria; its main aim is to stop Syria from collapsing. 

This has all been openly stated by Putin – at the UN, for example, that little known secret forum, in an interview with CBS.

We may not agree with it, but to present Russian intervention as some kind of fiendish, unfathomable plot is simply laughable.

What’s more, consider the heated debate about the impact of Russia’s intervention on Syria. Who knew the British media were so concerned about the malign effects of bombing a foreign country?

You certainly wouldn’t have guessed it from the coverage of the US and its allies’ own year-long bombardment of Syria.

Nor do you get this impression from the media discussion of the British government’s desire to join in on the Western bombing.

The British media have completely ignored the disastrous effects of Western intervention in Syria.

The West has been attempting to bomb Islamic State positions while, at the same time, supporting jihadi groups such as the al-Nusra Front.

Our new ‘allies’ in Syria have links to al-Qaeda. Have we totally taken leave of our senses? More to the point, why isn’t this frontpage news?

And let’s not forget the US’s $500million plan to train up fighters – of whom about four or five remain. The Free Syrian Army is more or less a fiction, with little existence outside of the imagination of the State Department and the Foreign Office.

At the same time, the West is allowing one of the most disgusting and shameful acts of this crisis to go on unchallenged – that is, Turkey’s bombing of the truly heroic Kurdish forces, the only coherent, pro-West political and military force in Syria and Iraq that is attacking IS.

Where is all the coverage of the utterly useless, dishonest and misguided Western campaign in Syria? If this had a tenth of the coverage given to Russian bombing I think the public and political discussion in Britain would be very different.

The British media present Russian political elites as out of control and crazy, but anyone looking at Western foreign policy over the past 20 years would see that the West has been the single most destabilising force in world affairs since the Cold War.

We hear an awful lot about the biases of Russian state media, but the Western media have little self-awareness of their own failings.

Corrected Grammar

Two very important points were made late last night on BBC One.

On This Week, Alan Johnson pointed out that two people were already in prison thanks to the activities the great man, Tom Watson.

And on Question Time, Rod Liddle pointed out that in the areas that still had grammar schools (the English state schools system is the furthest in the world from "one size fits all"), the state primary schools were barely used by what we had come to call the middle classes.

They were instead paying to have their children coached, tutored, prepped and crammed for the 11-plus, in the commercial sector. Guess who then dominated the state grammar schools.

There is mercifully no chance whatever of the extension of that state of affairs to the country at large.

To Begin Unpicking

For a few months in 1992, the Conservatives bellowed that they were going to be in office until the crack of doom. And now, as Owen Jones writes:

It is a moment of anguish that should have caused discomfort in both No 10 and No 11.

“You’re about to cut tax credits when you promised you wouldn’t,” an anguished mother yelled from last night’s Question Time audience. 

“I work bloody hard for my money, to provide for my children, to give them everything they’ve got, and you’re going to take it away from me and them. Shame on you!” 

But what should really frighten the government is who she used to vote for: the Tories.

The “work penalty” – as some have begun calling the cuts to tax credits – will not just hammer poorer voters, who disproportionately tend to either vote Labour or not vote at all.

Victims include middle-income Britons and, yes, those who plumped for the Tories in May. That’s why David Cameron stood up on national television to pledge that tax credits were “not going to fall”.

Millions of working families – “hard-working strivers”, as the Tories sometimes label them – are going to be significantly worse off, even with other measures taken into account.

No wonder the government today stands accused of attempting to cover the impact of the work penalty. They are fully aware that middle-England Tory voters are among those who are going to start noticing their wallets getting lighter.

As one expert pollster points out, swing voters who are very likely to turn up to polling stations are among those being hit: the “quiet ones”, he calls them.

The message the Tories are sending them, he writes, is: “We know you’re working, but we’re going to penalise you anyway.”

And, as he underlines: “These are voters who do not forget … and if Labour is smart it will press home this point repeatedly. George Osborne is hurting the precise demographic groups which delivered him victory in May.”

Everybody agrees that if Labour is to stand a chance of regaining power, the party has to win back at least some Tory voters.

Its chances of doing so have been widely mocked. But here is how the party can do it: but only if it is savvy.

When I shared the video of the disillusioned Tory voter, some of the responses were less than sympathetic. She was berated for bringing it on herself and for having an “I’m all right, Jack” attitude.

This is political suicide. Tory voters having their tax credits chipped away desperately need to be love-bombed.

You are told you are doing the right thing. You are told that you are hard-working and you are striving. And yet you are being penalised.

Hundreds of thousands of those affected are self-employed people, a natural constituency for the Tories.

Winning over Tory voters looked like a forlorn task. It will be difficult, to say the least.

But the work penalty shows it may at least be possible to begin unpicking their electoral coalition.

In The Air

Be warned about Lockerbie.

All evidence points to the late President Hafez al-Assad of Syria.

That is why it is all coming out now.

Trot On

Is the SWP "infiltrating" Momentum?

What SWP? It exists only in London and on university campuses, and even there people almost never even have to go to the trouble of avoiding it.

The London media may scour and devour its material, and that of any number of similar factions.

But life in every city, town and village will remain utterly unaffected.

It would be nice if any of those media paid any attention to any of those cities, towns or villages occasionally.

Now, there's a little something for Momentum be getting on with.

Bad Grammar

Peter Hitchens is utterly unimpressed.

I know for a fact that when Nicky Morgan spoke to the Sixth Formers at the private Loughborough Grammar School in her constituency, she promised them a state grammar school in every town, because she thought that that was what it was.

Not all of the country ever did have grammar schools, or even secondary moderns. Even after the Butler Act, in some poor areas, there was no 11-plus.

You just stayed on at your elementary school until, depending on the year, your fourteenth or your fifteenth birthday. On that day, you were kicked out.

The expansion of the middle class, or at least of something that economically resembled it, was a compete one-off in the decades after the War.

The economy changed shape dramatically, and there were simply far more white collar jobs to fill. That will never happen again. It had nothing to do with the grammar schools.

And it was arguably not a real middle-class expansion at all, but a takeover of the bourgeoisie's income brackets, residential areas, and so on, by other people entirely, who had remained essentially unchanged.

Today's grammar schools lobby had absolutely no interest in this subject until their own economic ideology priced them out of the commercial schools market.

So they now want what they have lost to be provided out of general taxation. If they feared for one moment that the grammar schools might include anyone who would not have been commercially educated a generation ago, then they would want absolutely nothing to do with them.

Jeremy Corbyn went to a grammar school. A highly intelligent, thoughtful and articulate man who is known to be very well-read, he left that institution with two Es at A-level, and he never graduated from the polytechnic to which it sent him on.

He came up via the real old ladders of opportunity, which were powerful local government and powerful trade unions. We all know when those were destroyed. And we all know by whom.

In More Grown-Up Times

Neil Davenport writes:

Robert Peston, the BBC’s former economics editor who defected to rival ITV, has made headlines in recent weeks over his ‘defiant’ refusal to wear a tie or get a decent haircut.

Peston’s point is that he doesn’t like ties, nor visiting barbers, and that his clothes and appearance do not prevent him from doing his job properly – even though he regularly appears on television.

It’s a view that finds favour with a lot of people in modern Britain – especially those with tattoos and piercings.

There have always been well-to-do individuals who think they’re ruffling feathers by bemoaning formality in public life.

Tony Blair cultivated the ghastly open-shirt, no-tie look during his rise to power, and Sir Richard Branson claims he has never worn a tie at any high-level business meetings.

While their rejection of formality is intended as a ‘screw you’ to convention, such figures always come across like vicars in red trousers: it’s always a bit on the awkward side.

What’s more, when it comes to journalists such protests reflect a narcissistic desire to draw attention to oneself, rather than to the serious issues of the day.

This is the whole point of a flat, formal dress code.

It’s designed to make sure there are no distractions from the job at hand and to convey your respect for your position and your seriousness towards public life more broadly.

Far from the suit being a marker of privilege, it has always been a symbol of universal male citizenship.

This is why, in more grown-up times, a suit was proudly worn by everyone, from the PM to the working classes.

Indeed, for working-class men, donning a smart suit was designed to show that you were as good as anyone else in society.

Peston’s adolescent strop may look like a blow to stuffy dress codes; but actually his decision to dress down belittles his position and denigrates the public in the process.

Credits and Losses

At Prime Minister's Questions, Jeremy Corbyn was absolutely right to concentrate on the impending tax credits cuts, the coming work penalty.

When that kicks in, then the 2020 Election will be over. Labour will have won.

The 1997 Election was over before the end of 1992. Labour had already won, regardless of the Leader, and regardless of anything that the Government might do in the meantime. The nation's mind had been made up.

Likewise, the 2020 Election will be over before the end of 2015. Labour will already have won, regardless of the Leader, and regardless of anything that the Government might do in the meantime. The nation's mind will have been made up.

But from 1994 onwards, we had to make do with Tony Blair.

He was a reasonably good first term Prime Minister. Having been elected on a much more left-wing manifesto than people like to remember, he went on to implement quite a bit of it, such as the minimum wage and these very tac credits, even if he did never abolish the NHS internal market (as promised on the pledge card) or renationalise the railways.

After he had won a second term against no Opposition of any kind, however, he turned into the Tony Blair that we all now know. It was very sad. There was no Opposition in 2005, either, but any such would easily have beaten him by then.

Now, though, we are not merely making do.

The Vindication of Tom Watson

So, Leon Brittan was already being investigated before Tom Watson ever wrote to anyone about him.

One would call for the resignations of all of Tom's detractors, but that would result in the collapse of the national media, and then where would we be?

Where, indeed?

Tapped

The Wilson Doctrine has never had any legal force, and there has never been any reason to assume that the relevant agencies felt bound by it. But we all know against whom these actions are not being taken, nor will they be.

They are not, and will not be, taken against those MPs who are satraps of Saudi Arabia, the epicentre of terrorism in the world today. It is those MPs who are the threats to national security. But they come from the party that the spooks, like the hacks, have been brought up to regard as the apolitical default option. The first thing that cuddly old Geoffrey Howe did as Foreign Secretary was to ban trade unions at GCHQ.

After all, to spooks and hacks alike, that party is full of their close relatives, and their old mates from school. They were at university before they met anyone else, and even then they had nothing to do with such peculiar creatures.

To them, those creatures are the threats, simply by their incomprehensible existence at all. They could not name a foreign power with which those might have any connection in 2015; Jeremy Corbyn, already on a roll after having secured the cancellation of the Saudi prison contracts, is demanding to see Xi Jinping face to face in London next week, in order to berate him over his human rights abuses.

But none of that matters, whether to the hacks or to the spooks. They do not care that the present Government is flogging off great tracts of our infrastructure to the Chinese, to the point of paying the Chinese to take over our nuclear energy provision, because that is being done by good chaps from the party than which nothing, by definition, could be more patriotically British.

Such is also their view of this country's governing party's very special relationship with the Gulf tyrannies in general and with Saudi Arabia in particular. It's the Tories, so what could possibly be the problem?

What, indeed?

Trouble and Strife

Entitlement upon divorce should be fixed by Statute at one per cent of the other party’s estate for each year of marriage, up to 50 per cent, with no entitlement for the petitioning party unless the other party’s fault were proved.

Shifting Sands

Simon Jenkins tells it as it is.

But the prison contract with Saudi Arabia has been cancelled. Exactly as demanded by Jeremy Corbyn.

That is the real political story of the day, the week, the month. Ignore any other guff. This is a tectonic shift in British politics. Independence from Saudi Arabia is now on the agenda.

And the humiliation of Michael Gove is complete. Even compared to the time when he became the first Education Secretary ever to be sacked on the orders of the teaching unions.

Still, it is notable that the only things that Gove has done in his new job have been reversals of the policies of a predecessor who was even worse.

Savaged By A Live Wolf

Was Geoffrey Howe a nice man? Perhaps, in personal life, he could be. On the one occasion that I ever met him, in his extreme old age, he was utterly inoffensive.

But there is no excuse for the outpouring of implicit and explicit suggestions that he was economically and politically less harsh or damaging than Margaret Thatcher.

On the contrary, he was the key figure in the economic changes of the early 1980s. She was the spectacularly successful front-of-house act for what we now call Thatcherism. But he and Nigel Lawson were the brains.

Thatcher was a great entertainer, and, since she was clever enough to know what she was doing, she was culpable for its consequences. But no one ever accused her of having a brilliant intellect.

The trick was to be repeated by Tony Blair, although he understood far less, and by the people who made similar use of him as others had of her.

Thatcher's dependence on Lawson and Howe meant that she suffered a body blow when one of them resigned, and was gone within a week after the other had done so.

But by then, their damage was done.

A Different Vision of Fiscal Responsibility

Ha-Joon Chang writes:

Some have called it a U-turn; others have described it as a shambles. But John McDonnell’s volte face was the right thing to do, even though it meant losing face, big time.

On the eve of the Labour party conference, McDonnell surprised detractors and supporters alike by saying that Labour should vote for George Osborne’s new fiscal charter, which requires the country to run budget surplus in “normal times”.

Now McDonnell says his party should vote against it.

Admittedly, even when proposing to vote in favour of Osborne’s charter, McDonnell advocated a different vision of fiscal responsibility from what the chancellor was proposing.

McDonnell pointed out that running a budget surplus means taking demand out of the economy, so there is an economic illiteracy in wanting to run one more or less permanently.

He also argued that surplus should be run only on the current (consumption) component of the budget, and that deficit could – and should – be run on the capital (investment) component of it.

His view was that if you borrow to invest, the debt will more than pay for itself in the long run as the investment matures and raises the economy’s output, and thus tax revenue.

The shadow chancellor was also insistent that, even while reducing the deficit, he would do it in a more equitable way.

Rather than mainly squeezing the most vulnerable groups, as the Conservatives have been doing, the fiscal gap would be closed by raising taxes on the top earners and, especially, being much tougher on tax avoidance and tax evasion.

However, these are all part of the fine print.

Once you accept that you have to run a budget surplus in order to be “responsible”, you have, as an anti-austerity politician, already lost the debate.

You win a political debate by making people accept your vision, not by pointing out that you offer them better terms in the fine print – which they are unlikely to read anyway.

So if McDonnell is going to win the economic debate, he needs to change its terms.

He has to start by doing another U-turn on the statement: “We accept we are going to have to live within our means, and we always will do – full stop.”

Because this is simply wrong.  This view assumes that our means are given, and we cannot spend beyond them.

However, our means in the future are partly determined by what we do today. And if our means are not fixed, then the very idea of living within them loses its meaning.

For example, if you borrow money to do a degree or get a technical qualification, you will be spending beyond your means today.

But your new qualification will increase your future earning power. Your future means will be greater than they would have been if you hadn’t taken out the loan. In this case, living beyond your means is the right thing to do.

Now: if you are a government, your means are even more flexible.

Like individuals, of course, a government can increase its means in the long run by borrowing to invest in things that will make the economy more productive, and thus increase the tax revenue.

If a government invests in improving the transport system, it will make the country’s logistics industry more efficient. Or if it invests in healthcare and education, that will make the workers more productive.

More importantly, unlike individuals, a government has the ability to spend “money it does not have”, only to find later that it had the money after all.

The point is that deficit spending in a stagnant economy will increase demand in the economy, stimulating business and making consumers more optimistic.

If enough businesses and consumers form positive expectations as a result, they will invest and spend more. Increased investment and consumption then generate higher incomes and higher tax revenues.

If the tax take increases sufficiently, the government deficit may be eliminated, which means that the government had the money that it spent after all.

If Labour wants to re-establish its credentials for economic management, it needs to start by rejecting the “living within our means” mantra.

The idea may have as much obvious appeal as other examples of homespun philosophy, but it is one that is more fitting for 18th-century household management than for the management of a complex 21st-century economy.

Unless the Labour party changes its foundational belief in the virtue of the government living within its means, British voters will never be convinced of the finer points of Keynesian economics, or of the ethics of inequality, that John McDonnell is trying to make.

Where Power Lies

Aditya Chakrabortty writes:

Last Monday, as the prime minister rehearsed his Manchester conference speech, a story appeared in this newspaper that showed you who really runs this country – and how.

It revealed that one of Britain’s largest companies, AstraZeneca, paid absolutely no corporation tax here in both 2013 and 2014, despite racking up global profits in those years of £2.9bn.

At first glance this sounded like an everyday tale of Mega-Business Making a Mockery of Our Tax Laws, to be filed alongside Google, Starbucks – or this weekend’s disclosure that Facebook paid less to the exchequer last year than you probably did.

But this story is bigger. It’s less about accountancy than where power lies in 21st-century Britain.

Astra’s tax maestro is called Ian Brimicombe, and he is more than well-known at the Treasury: he is a trusted adviser.

Shortly after George Osborne took over as chancellor in 2010, his team began rewriting the rules on how big businesses are taxed.

To help, the government appointed senior executives from some of Britain’s giant companies to a “liaison committee”, comprising Astra’s Brimicombe, representatives from Tesco, Santander, BP and others.

Although the group was not widely reported, there was no disguising its purpose.

In the Treasury’s own blunt words, the businesspeople were providing “strategic oversight of the development of corporate tax policy”.

Corporation tax alone is one of the biggest earners for the government, worth over £50bn a year – and now companies with millions, even billions of pounds at stake were to be given direct say on how they should be taxed.

The Treasury set up working groups specifically to advise on taxing multinational business – fitted out with directors from 40 multinationals, all with extensive networks of offshore subsidiaries

In his book The Great Tax Robbery, the former tax inspector Richard Brooks records that a Vodafone representative was put on the group “deciding how to tax offshore financing of exactly the sort his company was running through Luxembourg and Switzerland for hundreds of millions of pounds in tax saving every year”.

The new regime for multinationals began in 2013.

Within five months, AstraZeneca had set up an unusual and intricate Dutch tax avoidance structure that would enable it to take full advantage of the new loopholes it had so helpfully advised on.

To call this a conflict of interests is to miss the point – it’s far too brazen for that. Osborne’s Treasury blithely invited in some of the country’s biggest businesses and asked them to help design their own tax regimes.

It’s like trawlermen asking fish to design their nets, or the Highways Agency allowing Jeremy Clarkson to set his own speed limit.

It might even be funny – if all these giveaways didn’t cost hundreds of millions amid a decade of belt-tightening.

In their original assessment, Treasury officials calculated that the relaxation of the controlled foreign company rules would cost the public around £840m by this tax year. That’s getting on for the equivalent of three brand-new, fully staffed hospitals.

The year 2013 also marked the start of the most severe cuts to social security, including the introduction of the bedroom tax. 

That particular cut has inflicted panic and upheaval on some of the poorest households in Britain, yet going by academic research it raises less half the amount given away to multinationals by the new controlled foreign company rules.

When the tax-justice campaigner George Turner submitted a freedom of information request last month to find out how much the new system was costing taxpayers, Osborne’s department told him it would take too much time to find out.

Turner persisted: what about the new patent box tax break, originally set to cost the public £900m? No luck there either.

So ordinary taxpayers may have kissed goodbye to £1.8bn in school places and Sure Start schemes – or they may have lost a lot more. We won’t be told what’s happened to our own money.

These tax breaks aren’t in aid of struggling small businesses or innovative new tech firms: they are going into the coffers of the biggest companies in Britain, with their platoons of lobbyists and tax advisers and their web of connections into Whitehall.

The year before the government brought in these new tax breaks, AstraZeneca was granted £5m to encourage it to expand its research site at Alderley Park in Cheshire – money that the local MP (one G Osborne of Tatton) played a key role in securing. 

Just five months later, the drugs giant announced it was closing the centre, with the immediate loss of 550 jobs. 

From 2007-14, calculates York University’s Kevin Farnsworth, AstraZeneca took £91.3m in joint public funding from the government’s Innovate UK research group. 

Britain is in the middle of a cold, austere decade. Ordinary taxpayers are having to tighten their belts – even while multinationals are being lavished with public cash. 

Osborne and Cameron tell tax-avoiding companies to “wake up and smell the coffee”, yet undercut the rest of Europe on taxes so as to lure Starbucks to put their offices in the UK. 

Tax avoidance is normally painted as big businesses finding and exploiting loopholes; but the Conservatives are now allowing those same outfits to design their own loopholes. 

“Upwards redistribution” is how the Berkeley academic Gabriel Zucman describes it: taking from ordinary taxpayers and giving to the very richest. 

Zucman is a sometime co-author with Thomas Piketty and his new book The Hidden Wealth of Nations is set to do for tax havens what his colleague’s did for wealth inequality: define and popularise the problem.

“Britain is now engaged in the most extreme form of tax competition anywhere in Europe,” he told me this weekend. “It’s trying to become a tax haven.” 

This is what economic competence now looks like in the UK: an officially driven attempt to turn a developed country into a competitor to the Cayman Islands, with lavish handouts for those who can afford it, and cuts for those who can’t.

The Work Penalty

Owen Jones writes:

It is George Osborne’s failure that makes him a politician Labour should learn from.

A deficit he never came close to clearing in one parliament as he had solemnly pledged; more debt than the sum racked up by all Labour governments combined; a plunge in workers’ pay with no precedent since Charles Dickens passed away; and reducing Britain to the sick man of Europe when it comes to productivity: and yet – look how he thrives, his abject failures transformed into against-all-odds successes.

He endured a humiliating chorus of boos at the Olympics but three years later helped to secure an unexpected, though small, Tory election victory.

Why? Because Osborne is very good at politics. He combines obsessive message discipline with the ruthless deployment of ruses that force his opponents on to the defensive.

The latest of those ruses was the fiscal charter, committing future governments to run surpluses. It has no sound economic rationale whatsoever.

It is simply a device whose sole purpose is to place the main opposition party in a bind: playing politics with the economic future, and indeed democracy, of Britain for pure partisan advantage.

John McDonnell’s initial support for the charter was certainly a surprise – though the shadow chancellor’s move was praised in some quarters for being counterintuitive, skilfully avoiding a trap.

A New Labour shadow chancellor would almost certainly have faced loud protests from the left.

But, just as it was said that only a Republican president such as Richard Nixon could improve relations with China, only a leftist with unimpeachable anti-austerity credentials could back the charter.

As it turned out, of course, the politics as well as the economics were unsound.

Embracing the charter meant provoking a backlash from within Labour ranks, from both the sincere and the opportunistic; and and it did nothing to improve Labour’s dire position in Scotland (indeed, quite the opposite).

For those perplexed about what is going on within Labour, it’s worth remembering the unique nature of what has taken place in British politics.

In normal times, a new party leader has years of ambition and preparation behind them, a professionalised team in place, experience of being a shadow minister, a significant support base in the parliamentary party, years of dealing with the media, and a network of sympathetic journalists.

None of this applies in the current situation. Most voters don’t take a daily interest in Westminster politics, and first impressions are difficult to shift – which is why Labour needs a clear strategy.

As a top priority, the party must have message discipline. Polling suggests a massive part of the electorate had little idea what Labour stood for at the last election.

Ironically, the party now has an ideologically defined leader, but the danger is the same for a different reason – this time because so many frontbenchers are pushing their individual policy lines.

The Tories backed every penny of Labour’s spending until after Lehman Brothers imploded.

But by repeating ad infinitum the myth – lie, even – that government overspending caused economic disaster, the Tories succeeded in rewriting history as well as provoking their opponents into pulling chunks of their hair out.

From now, every time a Labour spokesperson goes on air, they should be under orders to repeat the same line about the Tories’ disastrous economic record over and over, hammering away at the point that a recovery with poor foundations leaves Britain badly exposed to the next economic shock.

But Labour have to make “austerity” tangible too. The most Googled question during one of the leaders’ debates was: “What is austerity?” It is an abstract concept to many voters.

Contrast that with how the Tories frame their policies: comparing the deficit to a household budget (economically illiterate, but it resonates); describing the flogging off of social housing as “right to buy”. (Don’t you support people’s rights?)

And that’s why Labour has to throw every bit of artillery it has at the cuts to tax credits.

But it has to frame this properly: as the community charge became the poll tax, and cuts to the housing benefit of those deemed to have spare rooms became the bedroom tax.

Labour initially flirted with it, but surely it must paint the tax credits cuts as the “work penalty”. Putting the work penalty absolutely front and centre makes sense for a myriad of reasons. It is a term that makes “austerity” tangible, rather than an abstraction.

The policy inflicts hardship on millions of working households: 3 million families will lose an average of £1,350 a year, and many others will also suffer.

The number of low-paid households penalised is far greater than the number hit by the pernicious bedroom tax.

The number of workers driven below the living wage has risen in this parliament – so much for shifting to a “high-wage economy” – and is expected to surge over the next few years.

The work penalty fatally undermines the Tories’ laughable claim to be the party of working people.

Yes, the Tories and their allies demonise unemployed people – “skivers” and the like – but it is rather difficult for them to do the same to those they patronise as “hardworking families” who are “doing the right thing”.

It strips away support from many self-employed people, trashing the idea that the Tories are the party of the entrepreneur.

There is growing disquiet in certain quarters of the Conservative party, so focusing on the work penalty could open up the prospect of splits.

It will unite the Labour party: even an arch-Blairite cannot possibly back Osborne’s policy. And many of those who plumped for the Tories or Ukip will be repelled by the work penalty.

I don’t care if a shadow foreign affairs minister is invited on television to talk about Djibouti. Whenever a Labour spokesperson is interviewed, they need to shoehorn in the work penalty over and over again, until the narrative that the Tories are driving workers into hardship becomes common sense.

This must become the Tories’ new poll tax. If they begin to retreat, then they can be made to look weak. If they fail to give ground, they make themselves ever more politically toxic.

Momentum – the new grassroots successor to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership campaign – is manned by passionate young activists who don’t want the enthusiasm of the summer to dissipate.

Here is a campaign for them to make their own.

Let every opponent of this government bellow about the work penalty, and not stop until the chancellor’s ears begin to bleed.

The SNP's War On The People

Blair Spowart writes:

Last week, a video emerged online showing a group of teenage boys having their anti-state-censorship banner confiscated by the police.

Where was it filmed? Putin’s Russia? Whichever Middle Eastern country Amnesty International is banging on about this week?

Nope. It was filmed in Scotland. Modern, enlightened, ‘progressive’ Scotland, where the police and the government have developed a maniacal obsession with suppressing speech in and around football grounds.

As these boys found out, even protesting this state censorship has become a risky business.

The teenage boys in question, only one of whom was over 17, were part of a protest outside the Hamilton vs Celtic match last Sunday.

Organised by Fans Against Criminalisation (FAC), an anti-censorship association of pissed-off, mostly Celtic-supporting fans, the protest was against the repressive Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications Act. 

Passed by the ruling Scottish National Party in 2012, it allows fans to be arrested for any behaviour or speech deemed by the ever-wise officers of Police Scotland to be ‘threatening’, to ‘express hatred of a social or cultural group with a perceived religious affiliation’ (code for the fanbases of Celtic and Rangers, who hail from traditionally Catholic and Protestant areas of Glasgow respectively) and, naturally, any other behaviour ‘that a reasonable person would be likely to consider offensive’ (the ‘reasonable person’ presumably being whichever Police Scotland officer happens to be within earshot).

And so it was that, overnight, Scottish judges were given the green light to punish the beer-fuelled, oh-so-uncouth bellowing of Scottish football fans, in particular supporters of Celtic and Rangers, whose traditional chants are notorious for their ostensibly sectarian intent.

The act was passed off the back of a moral panic about sectarianism in Scottish football. The Scottish elite, staring with horror at the tribalism of the Old Firm rivalry, had a collective flashback to the 1970s and cried Something Must Be Done – despite the fact that real, full-on, frothy-mouthed sectarianism in Scotland was at an all-time low.

One recent survey found that, despite the traditional back-and-forth of pro-Union and pro-IRA songs on match day, only one per cent of Glaswegians today have had any serious experience of sectarianism. It really is just banter.

Yet hundreds have fallen foul of the law. Eighty-seven fans were convicted in its first year alone. Earlier this year, Scott Lamont, a Rangers fan, was jailed for four months for singing ‘The Billy Boys’, an old loyalist sectarian favourite, on his way to the ground.

This dreadful act of censorship was not the product of a genuine, grassroots clamour for a crackdown on bigotry, but rather was fuelled by the prejudices of the sniffy Scottish political set, which has a palpable fear and incomprehension of the lowly football fan.

What’s so remarkable about last Sunday’s act of state censorship is that the banner had no sectarian or offensive content at all. It read: ‘SNPolice Scotland. FoCUS on your Failings Not on Football.’

It was a nothing more than a nod to the SNP’s politicisation of Police Scotland, and a reminder that football fans are not, by default, potential criminals. Perhaps this was a mortal blow to these officers’ self-esteem?

The boys tried to enter the ground with the banner and, after being turned away, displayed it on railings in the nearby Morrisons car park facing the stadium. They’d even asked and gained the security guard’s permission.

Yet, as is clear from the video, the police spotted the lads and assumed, instinctively, that there must be some ‘dispute’ – that is, something in need of police arbitration.

Only in the context of the Scottish football ground, where fans are seen not as individuals but as an unpredictable pack of attack dogs whose passions must be reined in, could such a startlingly stupid assumption be made.

This is a new low for Police Scotland, and that really is saying something. It’d be a mistake to think that Police Scotland’s illiberal impulses are specific to football.

Despite a 38 per cent drop in stop-and-search since April 2013, Scots are still stopped and searched at four times the rate of the English and Welsh.

In 2014/15, the number of recorded searches on 16-year-olds in Glasgow was higher than the number of 16-year-olds living in Glasgow.

In 2014, without any parliamentary debate, 440 Scottish officers were authorised to carry firearms on routine patrol.

Clubbers, too, have felt the firm hand of the Scottish bobby. Last month, police showed up unannounced outside Aberdeen nightclubs with sniffer dogs and drug-test kits, knocking back clubbers who refused to cooperate and dragging off those whose swabs came back positive.

Before the closure of The Arches, a Glasgow clubbing institution, Police Scotland had demanded that an officer be called out whenever the door staff confiscated drugs. 

This was later framed as ‘wasting police time’ and, naturally, the evidence gathered during the nightly call-outs was used to justify Glasgow City Council’s decision to rescind The Arches’ late license, ultimately forcing the iconic venue into administration.

Of course, none of this is surprising under an SNP government whose compulsion to meddle, nanny and nudge is woefully under-opposed.

This is the government that is battling to bring in minimum pricing on alcohol, an illiberal measure that even EU bureaucrats aren’t sure about; that is trying to ban smoking in parks; that is planning to bully Scots into being ‘smoke-free’ by 2034; and that is pushing through a ban on GM crops. 

Most ominous of all, though, is the SNP’s dystopian Named Person scheme, due to come into force in 2016.

This will mean that every child in Scotland will be assigned a state-approved guardian – a so-called Named Person – to look over them until the age of 18. 

Essentially, parents will be forced to compete with the state for ultimate parental responsibility over their own children.

The legislation presupposes that the one-size-fits-all, state-dictated outcomes for children are superior to parental judgement, and if you, as a parent, dare to disagree, then, well, that’s just tough.

There are two things we should take from all of this.

First, as has been pointed out before on spiked, the relative lack of power of devolved administrations – especially those which purport to represent an ’identity’, as the SNP does – stunts their capacity for real, meaningful change, pushing them towards imposing authoritarian measures in an attempt to justify their own existence.

In their desperation to differentiate Scotland from the rest of the UK, to find their own, distinct voice within the British political firmament, and develop the ‘unique’ and ‘divergent’ Scottish political identity which might justify independence, the SNP has pushed through deeply illiberal policies of the kind that would have made Tony Blair’s New Labour think twice.

When all that matters is independence, the means justify the ends.

The second is that, in the act of doing this, the SNP has become the Scottish version of the very thing it claims to oppose: the so-called ‘Westminster elite’. 

Both in Scotland and across the UK, the SNP has been billed as a punchy, people-power alternative to London’s ‘out-of-touch’ political and media set. 

But don’t be fooled by the Scottish accents and shouty, anti-establishment veneer. 

Scratch the surface, look beyond the vacuous, stick-it-to-the-man posturing, and before long you’ll see that the SNP shares the same prejudices of its supposed Westminster enemies. 

From its crackdowns on football banter to its health hectoring to its undermining of parental authority, the SNP is motivated by the same misanthropic fear that drives much of its Westminster opposition: fear of the beer-fuelled, profane football fan; fear of the fun-loving clubber; fear of the parent; fear, in short, of the demos.

An alternative to the Westminster elite? Yeah, right. The SNP is a tartan-cloaked extension of it – only more effective and worse-opposed.

The SNP claims to believe in the Scottish people. But it’s not reflected in its record.

Because, after all, what would be the best way, indeed the only way, really to show trust in the Scottish people? Simple: take your speech-policing, fun-crushing, child-snooping policies and get tae fuck.

This Is Not Going To Go Away

Everyone has known about Leon Brittan for at least 30 years.

Anyone who grew up in an old mining area knows that references to the then Home Secretary's proclivities had to be kept out of the court records and the local newspaper reports when, as was routine, striking miners referred to them in the dock.

Private Eye also used to joke with impunity about his pederasty, and indeed about his pederasty with impunity.

Margaret Thatcher's idolised father was a notorious toucher up of his teenage shopgirls, and she went on to surround herself with Brittan, Savile (one of her very closest friends), Smith, Morrison (her closest political lieutenant), Hayman, van der Post, and all the others on whom she lavished honours and so forth.

Savile's knighthood was at her fourth attempt, when she finally overruled the entire vetting process.

That the Radical Right put out pamphlets demanding the legalisation of paedophile activity was mentioned in Our Friends in the North, which was broadcast in 1996.

Our Friends in the North is so integral to subsequent popular culture that one of its four stars is now James Bond, another was the first Doctor of this century's revival of Doctor Who, and neither of the others is exactly obscure.

That Thatcherite MPs were likely to commit sexual violence against boys with the full knowledge of the party hierarchy formed quite a major subplot in To Play the King, the middle series of the original House of Cards trilogy.

To Play the King was broadcast as long ago as 1993.

No politician or commentator of the generation that is now in or approaching its pomp could possibly have seen anything less than every minute of that trilogy.

This is not going to go away.

Oh, and of course, everyone in the media always knew about the Paedophile Information Exchange, too.

The Mail resurrected that ancient story in order to sit on the very current one of Patrick Rock, of whom astonishingly few people have ever heard.

Over, I feel, to the very great man, Tom Watson.

The Gift Horse's Severed Head

Matthew Norman writes:

At the 2006 Labour conference, The Sun’s political editor whispered a verbal billet-doux into Tom Watson’s ear.

“My editor will pursue you for the rest of your life,” cooed George Pascoe-Watson. “She will never forgive you for what you did to Tony.”

Watson had just orchestrated the demi-coup which forced Tony Blair to give a departure date, and his chum Rebekah Brooks was livid. Whether the intervening years have mollified her is not clear.

It could be that Watson’s subsequent pursuit of News of the World phone-hacking, which obliged her to resign as News International chief executive and stand trial, softened her heart.

Equally, it may not.

In those nine years, Watson has twice resigned himself (first for acting as Gordon Brown’s enforcer in the removal of Blair; later as deputy chairman over the MP selection scandal in Falkirk), yet now finds himself deputy leader of a party looking to him to save it from annihilation in the savage civil war made inevitable by Jeremy Corbyn’s election.

Until a few days ago he held a strong hand, having the potential to be Corbyn’s protector or assassin as expediency demands.

Then the tragicomic weakness of the Leon Brittan child abuse police investigation he encouraged the police to make was exposed, and the feud with Brooks was reactivated.

A leader in The Sun on Sunday, the replacement for the title Watson helped to close, reported his Commons statement that Brittan was “as close to evil as any human being could get”.

What it forgot to mention was that he was quoting an alleged victim, and the personal animus behind the vitriolic conclusion that “he has behaved contemptibly”.

He has done no such thing.

While under a clear duty to report accusations to the police, he did not excite the kind of hysteria – like Brooks when News of the World editor – that led a dyslexic mob to attack a female paediatrician mistaking her for a paedophile.

Nonetheless, by overplaying his hand, the man who teased James Murdoch for being a mafia boss has given his enemies a gigantic gift.

And these are not enemies who look a gift horse in the mouth. These are people who leave its severed head on the pillow while you sleep.

Whether Watson can survive this escalation of Brooks’ lifelong pursuit is not really the point.

The question is whether a serial resigner, whose bulldozer looks and juggernaut reputation mask a brittle and sensitive nature, has the will to endure the ensuing torment.

One In Four

Ruby Stockham writes: 

According to new data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the proportion of jobs outside London paying less than the Living Wage has increased to almost one-in-four.

Jobs paying below the Living Wage have proliferated around the country.

Between April 2008 and April 2010, the proportion of jobs paid less than the Living Wage in London remained stable at around 13 per cent, but it had risen to 19 per cent by April 2014.

There are only three years of estimates available for the rest of the UK, but the ONS says that the proportion of employee jobs paid less than the Living Wage rose from 21 per cent in April 2012 to 23 per cent in April 2014.

Northern Ireland had the highest proportion of jobs paying less than the Living Wage at 29 per cent. In the South-East of England, London and Scotland, 19 per cent of jobs paid less than the Living Wage.

Across the UK in 2014, there were about 6 million jobs paying less than the Living Wage, of which over half were part-time jobs.

Some industries stand out.

For example, in accommodation and food services in 2014, an estimated 65 per cent of employee jobs paid less than the Living Wage in London and 70 per cent in the rest of the UK.

55 per cent of London retail jobs paid less than the Living Wage, and 59 per cent of retail jobs in the rest of the UK.

Other industries also have high proportions of jobs paying below the Living Wage – for example, administrative and support services, arts, entertainment and recreation, and agriculture, forestry and fishing all had over one-third of jobs paying below the Living Wage in 2014.

Although there have been increases in both men and women earning below the Living Wage, the increases have been greater for female than for male jobs.

In 2014, the gap between the proportion of male and female jobs below the Living Wage was 6 percentage points in London and 11 percentage points in the rest of the UK. 

This works out as 3.6 million female employee jobs below the living wage in the UK in 2014, compared with 2.3 million male employee jobs.

The Conservative government has repeatedly claimed that it will ‘make work pay’, as it tries to brand itself as the new party of working people.

The soaring number of people being paid below the hourly rate necessary to meet basic living standards is difficult to square with this claim. Frances O’Grady, general secretary of the TUC, commented on the figures:

“The government’s Trade Union Bill will make it even harder for people to get fair wages.

“It will shift the balance of power in the workplace towards employers, making it harder to bring poverty-pay bosses to the negotiating table.

“If the government really wanted to deliver fairer pay it would be working with trade unions not against them.”

A Glimpse of the Nightmare

John Hilary writes:

I was recently granted a rare glimpse behind the official façade of the EU when I met with its Trade Commissioner in her Brussels office.

I was there to discuss the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the controversial treaty currently under negotiation between the EU and the USA.

As Trade Commissioner, Cecilia Malmström occupies a powerful position in the apparatus of the EU.

She heads up the trade directorate of the European Commission, the post previously given to Peter Mandelson when he was forced to quit front line politics in the UK.

This puts her in charge of trade and investment policy for all 28 EU member states, and it is her officials that are currently trying to finalise the TTIP deal with the USA.

In our meeting, I challenged Malmström over the huge opposition to TTIP across Europe.

In the last year, a record three and a quarter million European citizens have signed the petition against it.

Thousands of meetings and protests have been held across all 28 EU member states, including a spectacular 250,000-strong demonstration in Berlin this weekend.

When put to her, Malmström acknowledged that a trade deal has never inspired such passionate and widespread opposition.

Yet when I asked the trade commissioner how she could continue her persistent promotion of the deal in the face of such massive public opposition, her response came back icy cold: “I do not take my mandate from the European people.”

So who does Cecilia Malmström take her mandate from?

Officially, EU commissioners are supposed to follow the elected governments of Europe. Yet the European Commission is carrying on the TTIP negotiations  behind closed doors without the proper involvement European governments, let alone MPs or members of the public.

British civil servants have admitted to us that they have been kept in the dark throughout the TTIP talks, and that this makes their job impossible.

In reality, as a new report from War on Want has just revealed, Malmström receives her orders directly from the corporate lobbyists that swarm around Brussels.

The European Commission makes no secret of the fact that it takes its steer from industry lobbies such as BusinessEurope and the European Services Forum, much as a secretary takes down dictation.

It's no wonder that the TTIP negotiations are set to serve corporate interests rather than public needs.

At some point in the next two years, the people of Britain will be asked  whether they wish to leave or remain in the EU.

I am proud to be a European, and have no truck with the xenophobic scaremongering of those little Englanders who would close our borders.

I believe in a people’s Europe, a social Europe where we can work together with others across our continent – and outside it – to build a common future beyond the business interests of a tiny elite.

Yet the question we will be asked in the referendum is not whether we wish to remain Europeans, as if such a question could have any meaning.

Rather, we will be asked whether we wish to remain subject to the institutions of the European Union, including the unelected Commission.

As the people of Greece have learned through bitter experience, those institutions will not tolerate any reform or deviation from their blueprint of permanent austerity and corporate rule.

TTIP offers a glimpse of the nightmare that the European Commission has in store for each one of us.

Cecilia Malmström has shown the contempt with which she and her fellow commissioners view the European people.

We have been warned.

To add your signature to the European people’s petition against TTIP, or for more information, go to waronwant.org/ttip.

Family Values

Dan Bloom writes:

An ex- Archbishop of Canterbury has told the Tories to halt their tax credit cuts - because without welfare he couldn't have raised his family.

George Carey was born to a working-class hospital porter in London's East End before rising to the Church of England's most powerful post.

Now the dad-of-four has called on George Osborne to  stay his welfare axe to save families which were once just like his.

Lord Carey, 79, told the Mirror: "I well remember as a young and poorly paid clergyman needing the help of the state in the form of family income support.

"My wife and I would have struggled to provide for our family without it.

"So there is nothing new about government support for low-paid families. We must continue to support struggling families who try to do their best through hard work."

Lord Carey, who was Archbishop for 11 years until 2002, failed his 11-plus and left school at 15 to work as an office boy at the London Electricity Board.

Aged 20 he decided he wanted to be a Church of England minister and enrolled on a course at King's College London.

His early years were spent as a curate in Islington, North London, and he married his wife Eileen in his mid-20s.

In 1987 he was named Bishop of Bath before rising to the Church of England's most senior post four years later. Lord Carey added:

"I support the aim of the government to make work pay and put in place a reasonable cap on welfare payments.

"But I urge the government to reconsider these particular cuts to working tax credits that will hit many hardworking families very hard indeed."

His call was joined by fellow ex-Archbishop Lord Williams, who told the Sun on Sunday the decision 'ought to be common sense'.

David Cameron and George Osborne have refused to back down over tax credit cuts despite warnings from Tory backbenchers including Boris Johnson.

A study by the House of Commons Library said minimum-wage families could end up £2,000 a year worse off - even once the Chancellor's 'national living wage' is included. Tory grandee Ken Clarke today urged Mr Osborne to hold firm despite fears of a backlash.

The former Cabinet minister admitted the cuts would be 'unpopular' but told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show:

"My advice to George is put your tin hat on, get on with it. Don’t put it off because in the short term it is going to be unpopular."

Causing his newspaper to editorialise:

Long gone are the days when the Church of England was the Tory Party at prayer. However, the criticism of social security cuts from a former Archbishop of Canterbury will sting David Cameron and George Osborne.

Because George Carey is a figure who backs welfare reform and is often feted by Conservative supporters.

But when it comes to wage packet-filling tax credits, he recognises the unjust pain to millions of low-earning strivers of the scandalous Tory £4.4billion raid on Britain’s living standards.

Carey, son of a hospital porter, worked for the electricity board and relied on the welfare state when he was as poor as a church mouse

It’s always refreshing when somebody in public life doesn’t forget where they came from.

If the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer had an ounce of decency in their Bullingdon bodies they would scrap the tax credit cuts now.

The bill will fall anyway if wages rise, and claims would reduce the more was earned.

If they want to know where to find the money they need, the pair could always scrap an ­inheritance tax cut for the wealthiest something-for-nothing households.

The richest standing on the shoulders of the poorest is not a good Tory look.

Mr Cameron will be judged by his actions, not his words. His conference speech sounds more hollow than ever.