Hopi Sen

Ben Brogan fell for it, but David Cameron’s “Big Society” is a clever little three card monte. Want to know how to make 5,000 community organisers appear without committing any extra money for the voluntary sector, and not get called on the trick by journalists?

Well, here’s a lesson in the political benefits of a simple headline with a complex backstory. Get ready. This shizzle gets complicated, fast.

Step 1. Pay for 5,000 volunteers training by using income from Futurebuilders.

Futurebuilders is a scheme to lend money to charities and social enterprises so they can compete to get government contracts. You know, a big society, not a big state, that sort of thing.

Obviously, it has to go. It’s already lent its initial allocation of funds, so was waiting for its repayments so it could start lending again. Not anymore. In a typical top down, statist move, why not snaffle that income stream to pay for a pet project directed from the centre?

Use that money to fund your Headline.

Step 2. Replace Future Builders (and the planned Social Investment Wholesale bank) with Big Society Bank, which will do same thing as futurebuilders and the Social Investment Wholesale Bank.

But hold on – Charities and Social Enterprises would be rather upset if they lost access to funding that allows them to compete with companies and government departments to deliver social programmes.

Grrrr. got to make sure they don’t mind us doing this.

Now, the government has already announced that they’ll set up a Social Investment bank to help invest in the voluntary sector. So why not rename it the “Big society bank” and say it would also fund a group of intermediary bodies to do the same thing as futurebuilders?

As the Tory Big Society pamphlet puts it on page four “These intermediary bodies will use this funding to support the next generation of social entrepreneurs, and help more social enterprises to win government contracts….”. This is exactly what Futurebuilders does. So any charity that’s worried can be comforted with this.

Step 3. Fund “Big Society bank” from Dormant Bank Accounts, taking any extra money from the Big Lottery fund.

But, annoyingly, putting extra burdens on the Orwellianly named “Big Society Bank” without the possibility of giving it more money would be too obvious a shimmy. So where’s the money to come from?

Well, The Social Investment Bank was going to get £75 million from the Dormant Bank accounts fund. Huzzah – we can just get more from there!

But hold on, the Dormant Bank accounts fund isn’t a bottomless money well. The money that goes into it is already allocated – to the Big Lottery fund, where it will be used to fund youth projects in the volutary sector.

So any extra money that comes out of  Dormant Bank accounts will end up being money that doesn’t go to fund youth projects via the big lottery fund.

That’s where David Cameron’s money came from.

And that, my friends, is how a policy three card monte works. The money goes from one charity fund to another to another, just to make room for the funding of David Cameron’s latest stunt. If you did it directly- just taking the money from the Big Lottery Fund, journalists would notice fast

This way is much cleverer, because it’s too long and dull for journalists to unpick, but in the end, there’s no extra money for social programmes, Just a shift from charities choosing themselves what to spend the money on, to David Cameron getting a headline.

Now that’s a short change we can believe in.

I learned today that the American “Pledge of Allegiance” was both:

1) Written by a Socialist (though not a godless one)

2) Developed as part of a marketing strategy to sell flags and magazine subscriptions.

I am sure that one day this knowledge will be useful.

For now, I cherish it for its beauty alone.

(via Slacktivist)

Sigh. efficiency savings, eh?

Could they really think of nothing better than that to pay for it?

They’ve had four months, after all*.

Anyway, a quick pop quiz.

Which leader of a major political party said the following just under two years ago

“We all know that the easiest thing in the world is for an opposition party to stand up at an event like this and blithely talk about all the efficiency savings we will make in government: how we will streamline public spending, how we can close tax loopholes, how we can move towards a bright future of less spending and less tax with a few well-chosen cuts that miraculously deliver substantial savings without harming public service delivery at all.”

and…

“To make a long list of efficiency savings in advance of an election; to add them up to produce a great big total; to turn that total into debt reduction, spending increases elsewhere and a tax cut?

“People didn’t believe it, for the very good reason that controlling public spending is not about a one-off efficiency drive, it’s about a whole new culture of government.

“There is a simple fact which political historians amongst you will know very well. The government “efficiency drive” is one of the oldest tricks in the book. The trouble is, it’s nearly always just that – a trick.”

and

“I do not believe in simplistic lists of cuts. In naive over-estimations of potential savings. Or in cobbling together a big number in order to get a good headline.”

David Cameron: Against doing what he just did.

Get your archive clips ready, people.

It’s been a bit wordy round here lately. So I have reduced what I learned about Conservative fiscal policy this week to a four line meme.

It fits pretty well.

1. Say you’ll reduce taxes.
2. Don’t say you’ll cut any major spending programmes.
3. ????
4. Lower deficit!!!!

I was surprised last night. I read a Phillip Blond article in Prospect, and it was less asinine than I expected.

Rather than being mouth achingly stupid, it was merely utterly unrealistic and impossible as a platform for governing, which puts it with oooh, 99.9999% of articles written for political magazines.

Mind you, Blond didn’t make one mistake – a firm proposal that a Tory government should mutalise BA. (“Cameron should push a radical economic policy — mutualising British Airways…” ran the email I got promoting the piece). With what? I thought, Jellybeans? BA’s Market Cap is what, three billion. I can think of a few things we should be doing with three billion quid other than buying companies and turning their shares over to their workforce.

Anyway, turns out Blond doesn’t quite say this. Instead he just says mutuality provides a model for energy companies and BA, and leaves the thought hanging there, with no suggestion about what should be done with such a lovely model.

This is the tenor of the whole piece. Blond proposes a whole series of rather vague things that the Conservatives are never going to do, because they would cost a fortune (“a living wage for every familiy”), be incredibly impractical (“localise the banks”), would anger the city (“break up Tesco”) or totally self defeating (“extra tax raising powers to councils”).

The only plausible suggestion is using the bank capital gains we get when we sell our stake to support
entrepeneurship. Which would be fine, except for the fact that George Osborne has already committed the Conservative party to selling cut price shares in the Banks to private investors, so there wouldn’t be much capital gain.

The Osborne approach is more a Tell Sid policy than a Red Tory policy, whatever the populist window dressing. Do you remember the urban poor getting a particularly big stake in BT?

Anyway, reading Blond’s piece, you get the sense that this is a man who on being taken for a ride in a flashy sportscar by a new friend, notices that the brakes are failing and a cliff-edge is coming up. He glances nervously over at the driver and wonders if he can really trust him.

This article reeks of someone preparing to detach himself from upcoming disaster, but is jettisoning himself quite yet, just in case the brakes will be OK. Which reminded me of someone on my own side. Someone who rose by asssociating himself with the language and style of New labour, then continued to rise by turning on it when it became unpopular, thus ensuring a never ending stream of plaudits from comment editors and those whose tactical interest co-incided with his rhetoric.

So, I have worked it all out.

Phillip Blond is the Tory Neal Lawson, and I claim my five pounds.

I keep saying about the polls, “look at the trends, not the individual data points”.  Trends is where its at.

So I’m quite chuffed to have made the Orwell Prize longlist for the second year.   Apart from anything else, it’s nice to up for the same award as Gideon Rachman. He a propa jurnlist.

The full list of the nominations is below. I recommend going to read the ones you’ve not read before. Also, please to be mentioning (in the comments) the blogs you think should be on the shortlist, but aren’t, so I can read them too.

David Osler: Dave’s Part
David Smith: Letter from Africa
Gideon Rachman: rachmanblog
Hopi Sen: Hopi Sen
Iain Dale: Iain Dale’s Diary
Jack of Kent: Jack of Kent
Laurie Penny: Penny Red and others
Madam Miaow: Madam Miaow Says
Mary Beard: A Don’s Life
Morus: PoliticalBetting.com; Daily Kos
PC Ellie Bloggs: A Twenty-First Century Police Officer
Ray: The Bad Old Days Will End
Tim Marshall: Foreign Matters
Winston Smith: Working with the Underclass

This was a good budget. Perhaps unsusually, I thought the best bits were the bits that will probably get the least attention.

While the stamp duty holiday will  benefit me personally and (given the age and salary profile of most journalists and editors), get a lot of headlines, it is essentially a measure designed to ensure housing values stay steady. Fair, enough – but not where the real action is.

Instead, I’m more excited by what Alistair Darling talked about, in his understated way, as the Growth Agenda. 

Let me put it this way: the prime political challenge of the centre left for the next decade has to be the creation of around two million jobs. If we succeed in doing this, we will be able to pay down debt. If we succeed in doing this, we will be able to fund public services. If we succeed in doing this, we will be able to fund the research, development and technology that is needed for long term growth.

Doing that won’t be easy. People talk about export led growth, and that’s important. But everyone will want to export their way to growth. People talk about public works spending, but such projects can only do so much.

So, perhaps paradoxically for a left winger, it was the Treasury approach on supporting industry that most caught my eye: the bits of the budgets I got excited by were the tax relief for industrial investment being doubled, so it will be more cost-effective for companies to buy new machinery; the recognition that small businesses need help with their Business rates and flexibility on tax repayments; the focus on supporting commercial lending; the willingness to encourage entrepeneurs to build companies by reducing their capital gains tax.

This agenda can make a real difference – especially when allied to government and private sector investment in new technologies, a protected science budget, backing of industries like the video game sector and major infrastucture projects designed to boost private sector capability and compeitiveness - like Cross rail, Heathrow, High Speed rail, road investment and the Thames tunnel sewerage system (Don’t laugh. Sewers matter for growth. Ask a Victorian. Or a Mexico citian, or a New Delhian, or anyone else who lives in an emerging megalopolis).

Of course, most of these measures won’t make a huge difference to next years growth figures, but they have the potential to make a difference to job creation and GDP growth for years to come, which is what really matters for the economy.

Now there’s more we could do. I’d like to see areas like the North East be offered the chance to become a “special economic zone” for green technologies, with special tax breaks to encourage overseas investment. I’d like to see bigger programmes of support for FDI generally - especially in regions with high public sector workforces.  I’d also like to see even more emphasis of industrial research, on skills and on ways to drive up private sector R&D. 

Each of these moves would have a cost, and the cost would have to be met from within the current spending envelope.  Choices have consequences. These aren’t easy.  In fact, twenty years ago, anyone in the Labour party who took this sort of position would be assailed as a dangerous Thatcherite. Now, I wouldn’t be suprised if Jon Cruddas led the charge. These are interesting times on the left.

But wherever I’d like to go further, this was a Budget in the right direction on all of those issues.

What was remarkable, to me at least, was the Conservative response to the challenge of how to deliver growth.

Or rather, the lack of response. David Cameron uploaded a bucket of rhetorical manure on Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling. Fair enough, that’s his job. But that’s basically all he did. 

Cameron’s policy agenda seemed to be two fold - first saying that a Conservative  would deliver a lower deficit much faster than Labour would, while simultaneously pledging to “ease the tax burden” via tax cuts for the corporate sector. (No employers NI increase, cut in corp Tax*, etc etc).

How can he possibly hope to do both? He’s not really suggesting that corporation Tax is on the wrong side of the near-mythical Laffer Curve, is he? Even if he does have some secret plan that will allow him to painlessly reduce the deficit more quickly than Labour, while also protecting spending on the NHS and reducing corporate taxes, it’s simply stunning to me that a Conservative party has almost nothing more to say about how we deliver economic growth.

Sure, we got the odd grass-roots friendly soundbite about unleashing the spirit of enterprise, but little or nothing about how - aside from the aforementioned corporate tax rate cut (which in my view is a anti-growth step as it increases the tax burden on businesses investing for the future while reducing the burden businesses taking profits)*. 

What else was there? The bank levy Cameron announced on Saturday disappeared from his speech today. The National Loan Guarantee scheme is presumably still policy, but is more or less irrelevant in the face of changing events.  HSR? Heathrow?  Business rate? Investment funding for future growth? Nothing.

Even the Tories own Dyson report, which was vague but essentially benign, didn’t rate a mention from the Tory leader. 

If you listened hard to the leader of the Conservative party today, you’d have learnt a lot about how much he despises the Labour front bench, but almost nothing about what a Conservative Government would do to help people back to work.

There was only one party today with an agenda for economic growth via expanding the potential of our private industrial and manufacturing  sector. It was the Labour party.

*Originally this was to be  by a tax increase on manufacturers via abolition of Investment allowances and R&D Tax credits - since they’ve now reversed their policy on the R&D tax credit, it isn’t fully funded.

* Oh, and NICs. But NIC increase in 2011 won’t limit new employment anywhere near as much as the tories seem to think. It only starts at the £20k level, which is a lot below the level of most new hires, and even above that, you can do salary sacrifice for pensions which would neutralise costs for employers.

I’m becoming convinced that there are not one, but two General Elections that could be fought over the next few weeks.

The first General Election we could have would be about the interests of politicians. It would be about corrupt MPs, about expenses claims, about lobbying and about a system that seems to be about serving the interests of the political and financial elite, not the people.

Strangely, all the parties condemn the excesses and yet are stained by them, which means that this election would essentially be a referendum on the worst aspects of politics itself.

There will be those who want the election to be about one word slogans, about symbols, about tone. They will want to fight this first election.

The other election we could have would be about the interests of the voters. It would be about jobs, and taxes, and growth. It would be about industry, and capital lending and petrol prices. It would be about immigration, infrastructure and insecurity.

It would be about jobs, and growth, and VAT, interest rates and inflation. It would be a hard, concrete election about peoples homes and livelihoods.

Despite everything, I believe this second election is the one the voters are focussed on.  It is why I think the polls generally show a trend of narrowing Tory leads as people focus on the choice the country faces.

I want us to have that second election. If Labour were to lose that election, so be it, but it would be the right election for the country.

But we can only have the second, essential, election if we do everything to deal with the issues of the first.

Cleaning House is the way to prevent us having that first election.

The Budget -and setting out a policy focussed on economic growth – will be the key to winning the second election.

Excellent post here by Novocastrian Rob here about his faith and politics and people’s perceptions of same. I should probably out myself as the cocktail sipping blogger mentioned in the text.

As a humanist, I am immensely cheered when I find myself able to talk to people about their faith, because while it’s something I don’t posess, or even really understand, it’s fascinating to me how faith informs peoples choices and decisions.

Of course, the people whose faith I am jealous of are those whose faith is built on things like hope, charity, forgiveness and love for their fellow man and woman. When I meet people like that, I find myself wishing I had what they possess. 

Strangely, the faith I find myself most comfortable with is that which seems least faith-ful – a faith riven with questioning, self evaluation and a sort of internal interrogation of the soul. Rob describes his faith as a daily struggle, and that certainly chimes with me – I prefer faith laced with a healthy dollop of doubt and uncertainity.

It’s when people get a bit too confident that they know what’s right for everyone that I begin to get edgy. It reminds me why lapsed believers make such good communists.

Anyway, I mention Rob’s excellent post, because it’s well worth a read, but also because it gives me a chance to plug the best blog in the world – slacktivist, a blog that completely changed my attitudes about American Evangelical Christianity.  Humour, openness, acceptence, warmth,  self deprecation,  self questioning and the occassional dollop of righteous fury at bigotry, injustice and deceoption are all to be found there.

Read the posts, and hang about in the comments. You’ll be better for it.

 The Conservative party was thrown into chaos today when their plans for future “attack websites” to be used to focus online campaigns against Gordon Brown were leaked online.

Following the Conservatives previous “Crash Gordon” and “Cash Gordon” campaigns, the planned websites, developed by American consultants who charge $15,000 a site, were intended to seal the deal for the Conservative party via  personal attacks against the Prime Minister

The coming “Gordon” websites were as follows:

RashGordon – Gordon Brown accused of not changing his children’s nappy when they were young.

SplashGordon – Gordon Brown accused of disobeying the “No Bombing” rule in swimming pools.

NashGordon – Gordon Brown accused of favouring Ogden but disliking the Poetry of Hilaire Belloc.

TacheGordon – Gordon Brown accused of encouraging Peter Mandelson to grow that horrible moustache he used to sport in the eighties.

MashGordon – Gordon Brown accused of discriminating against fried and roast potatoes in favour of soggy mushy spuds.

OnthelashGordon – Gordon Brown accused of having it large on a stag night.

PashGordon – Gordon Brown accused of buying pashmina for Sarah, after they stopped being trendy.

Now these attacks have been revealed, it’s is unclear whether the Tory High Command will go ahead with them. Indeed, there are rumours that the initial “CashGordon” website is already being pulled.

 A senior Tory sauce said “We don’t want to talk about our plans for the future, because we’re not sure what they are yet, so we were relying on the personal attacks made for us by American consultants. Now they’ve been leaked on the Internet, I don’t know what we’ll do”.