Category: National politics

I was pretty certain last night when Nick Clegg was challenging David Cameron to confirm or deny his “80% of immigrants come from the EU” claim that Clegg was talking nonsense. Apparently it is more like 40%. Clegg was using some Economist numbers that talk about foreign born workers.

So get this, Clegg was beating up Cameron with the stat that the vast majority of foreign born workers are from the EU whilst the majority of immigrants are from outside the EU. In other words too many non-EU immigrants aren’t working. Clegg was unwittingly underlining what many people fear; we are encouraging too many people to come here and enjoy our benefits system, often at the cost of the poorest people in our society.

Figures here.

I am sorry but the least credible thing proposed during this evening’s leaders’ debate was Nick Clegg’s emergency deficit summit.

He proposed gathering all of the parties’ chancellors and vice chancellors along with the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority (FSA). I am sorry but this is 9/10ths nonsense.

First off the only vice chancellors in British public life are the chief executives of our universities who usually take the title of vice chancellor. I can only imagine that Clegg was referring to the Chief Secretary to the Treasury and his or her shadows. The Chief Secretary’s role in our government is number 2 to the Chancellor and involves negotiating with government departments about budget allocations, public sector pay, welfare reform, and procurement policy.

Clegg has clearly not thought through how to tackle the deficit and this statement shows that he is making it up as he goes along. The main role of the Bank of England nowadays is monetary policy and the control of inflation, not fiscal (tax and spend) policy. The FSA is almost totally irrelevant to sorting out the deficit. The FSA are a finance industry regulator – why not bring the water regulator into the conversation? What a jerk?

The idea that you will come to a swift conclusion about what to cut or what taxes to raise by bickering with your political opponents is just risible. The players in this conversation are the next government’s Treasury ministers with the spending ministers around the Cabinet table supported by their senior civil servants who will already have presented their ministers with a list of possible savings as soon as they arrived at their new desks. Clegg doesn’t know what he is talking about.

I hope that Nick Clegg’s set dressers cleared up after themselves when they filmed last night’s party political broadcast on behalf of the LibDems – to make their point the LibDems made the Houses of Parliament and a couple of other attractive cityscapes look a mess. The rubbish, like just about everything else about the LibDems, is fake.

The main theme of yesterday’s broadcast was broken promises. Clegg says: “the trail of [other parties’] broken promises can come to an end”. As an eternal opposition party LibDem manifestos typically aren’t much read, but the 2005 manifesto made this promise about the European constitution/Lisbon treaty:

We are therefore clear in our support for the constitution, which we believe is in Britain’s interest – but ratification must be subject to a referendum of the British people.

The referendum promise was one of the few things in their 2005 manifesto that the LibDems could have fought for. They didn’t.

Clegg talks about fair politics and says: “no more dodgy donations to political parties”. The LibDems have refused to return the £2.4 million proceeds of crime given to them by Michael Brown. Whatever you think of union donations to Labour and Michael Ashcroft’s donations to the Tories it is hard to argue that the money was stolen. The LibDems continue to benefit from the dodgiest donation in British politics.

You only have to look at the LibDem leaflets on your doormat to know that the LibDems are the least honest party in British politics.

I am afraid you will not find me doing much blogging over the next 10 days. Any spare minute I have will be spent knocking on doors in Northfield. I won’t embarass the lady by naming her but I met an ex-Labour candidate from Ealing who resigned in 2006 yesterday. She said she couldn’t vote for us because she was a Labour party member but she said “You are doing a good job”.

The LibDems’ star will start to dim as soon as everyone thinks through their policy prescriptions, which are lightweight to say the least. Let’s take university tuition fees. Never afraid of being populist they aim to overturn one of the few brave things that Tony Blair did – ask people who are going to get a lot wealthier to pay for their higher education.

The LibDems say in their manifesto:

We will scrap unfair university tuition fees so everyone has the chance to get a degree, regardless of their parents’ income.

Scrap unfair university tuition fees for all students taking their first degree, including those studying part-time, saving them over £10,000 each. We have a financially responsible plan to phase fees out over six years, so that the change is affordable even in these difficult economic times, and without cutting university income. We will immediately scrap fees for final year students.

Their figures on page 100 show the cost of this concession rising year on year to £1,765 million by 2014/5. The trouble with this proposal is that the universities are in dire need of more income and they have already started asking for the uniform tuition fee to be uncapped to allow universities to be able to charge varying rates. If you look at the totality of university financing (figures below provided by the Higher Education Statistics Agency here) you will see that the LibDems’ £1,765 million in 2014/5 is only 6.4% of university income in 2008/9. The £685 million they are talking about in 2010/11 is only 2.7%.

The real problem with the LibDem’s proposal is not the relatively small increase in government spending that it implies. The main problem is that it makes the universities more dependent on the state at a time when the state cannot afford to be generous. This proposal will lead to fewer, worser universities or fewer students or both. In addition if we set the price expectation for a university education at zero and make it effectively a social service we will end up with more under-motivated students who think that university life is a pleasant interlude between school and work. Tuition fees are very useful for focussing the minds of young people and those of their parents. We need young people to be working hard at university or working hard in, er, work, not goofing off on the state. Believe me they do even under the current regime – ask any student.

I can’t quite believe the Westminster village’s response to Thursday’s leaders’ debate and the polls that followed. I missed the first part of the show as a result of being in the last cabinet meeting before the election. I hated the format and felt that the way it was chopped up made it very un-engaging.

Up until now I have been largely happy to ignore the LibDems as an irrelevance. I did not take the time to read their manifesto before all of the excitement of the last few days. Judging by the outcome of the leaders’ debate you can only conclude that Tory leader David Cameron made the same mistake.

I have started myself to look a bit more carefully at what the LibDems are saying. I love the idea of a £10K starting rate for tax and indeed I have suggested it myself in the past, here. The way they want to pay for it though is one third fantasy and one third dangerous.

On page 100 of the manifesto, where they lay out how the £10K starting rate will be paid for, they identify £4,625 million of anti-avoidance measures. Well actually they don’t identify any they just pluck a number out of the air and stick it in a table to make their number add up. Anyone who is in business or has to deal with the tax authorities for any reason knows that this is a fantasy. For 13 years Labour has been relentlessly tightening up the tax system. Remember IR35? I get the taxman chasing me for tax on bits of interest I forgot I received.

The largest measure to pay for the £10K starting rate is an elimination of tax relief for pensions at the higher rate. This has to do £5,455 million, the largest share, of the work. This measure has to raise three times what the much talked about mansion tax has to raise.

This measure is dumb at least three times over:

• this measure hits ordinary people and ensures that they will have a straightened old age. High rate tax payers aren’t just the “rich”. They are you and me when, hopefully, we get on in life and get promoted or do well in business. We might be struggling to pay off debt and get on the housing ladder in our twenties – pension contributions postponed. We might spend our thirties and forties raising children and paying the mortgage – pension contributions postponed again. Just when we get our heads above water and need to start seriously thinking about how we fund our retirements and along come the LibDems to further bash our already damaged pensions system. Anyone over 40 voting for this measure needs to be altruistic – it will really hurt
• this measure will encourage consumption and reduce investment and the savings ratio. I assume that the LibDem figures imply £27.5 billion of pension contributions put in question every year. A large chunk of this is going to leak into consumption rather than savings every year as people decide to spend money now, taxed at 40%, rather than save with a 20% tax and then pay 20% income tax in the future
• finally, are we going to see a debt funding crisis? The biggest purchaser of gilts has to be the UK pensions industry which is suddenly going to see £27.5 billion a year of contributions put at risk!

I am sure that a lot of people are going to be spending more time looking at the LibDem’s manifesto and that there will be more holes to find. More later.

Today’s letter in the Guardian from 50 totally objective teachers who in no way represent any kind of producer interest is only an opening shot in a soon to come blast of anger and agitation from a workforce that fails our country in a huge way. It seems to have been organised by a group called Progressive Education Network (PEN) which is sponsored by Estelle Morris the refreshingly honest Labour education minister who resigned because she thought she was not up to the job. I don’t think it is a stretch to call these people a Labour front. They endorse Labour policy and throw cheap insults at the Tories such as “boutique experiments”, “naive educational tourism” and “flatpack free schools”. They say:

The educational landscape presently evolving is already a powerful force for change. It is led by a group of professionals who collaborate for the good of children, who have a shared vision for the whole system and think beyond the boundaries of their own schools. So please, no return to year zero.

No mention of one in four pupils leaving primary school unable to read or write properly and about two-fifths of 16-year-olds failing to get five good GCSEs, including maths and English even under a system of significantly dumbed-down exams.

I guess the teaching lobby needs PEN as a vehicle for sounding reasonable as their unions are so extreme and militant. They hate SATS of course which hold them to account and are planning to boycott the 2010 tests as soon as the election is safely out of the way. They hate the Tory free schools proposals too as they might just challenge their monopoly of mediocrity.

The Tories have a clear vision for education and an excellent spokesman in Michael Gove to promote that vision. One of the reasons our country is not more successful is that the Tories failed to get a grip of education in the eighties. They must not fail this time. Michael Gove will have a busy summer.

We all know the key moments in our political history. Labour’s biggest moment came in 1945 with the khaki election election which ushered in the NHS but also came with Hartley Shawcross’s stunning quote “we are the masters now”. Very Animal Farm. In 1979 with Britain at its knees Margaret Thatcher came to power kicking out yet another failed Labour government and 18 years later Tony Blair swept to power as a generation became tired of the Tories. Would the election of David Cameron on May 6th be another such turning point?

On the strength of the two manifestos, Labour’s published yesterday and the Tories’ published today, I think yes. Is the state going to solve all of our problems? No. There will always be new problems and the state is simply not nimble enough to stop doing the old stuff. Too often what you get with the state is bigger, worser. It is only us that can solve our problems and that is a messy, tiresome business and many would rather leave it to someone else but we cannot outsource all of our problems to the state. Cameron’s brave and sunny invitation for us to take part deserves to be accepted.

Today Gordon Brown launched the Labour manifesto at the soon to open Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham. Cabinet Office guidelines specifically preclude using government facilities, including NHS ones, for party political purposes, see here.

I remember local Labour MP, Gisela Stuart, being interviewed around the time of the 2005 general election and saying that it was easy to campaign for Labour as they were building Birmingham’s first new hospital since the war. She really does not know what a dumb statement this is and repeats it prominently on her website:

Edgbaston houses the brand new University Hospital, Birmingham’s first new hospital in 70 years. When it opens in 2010, this hospital will provide state of the art medical care to hundreds of people throughout the West Midlands.

Think about it. Under the NHS, which celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2008, the second largest city in the UK has never had a new hospital.

I can only imagine that Gordon Brown himself came up with the strap line for the Labour election campaign: “A future fair for all”. What a load of mangled nonsense? What is wrong with: “A fair future for all”. Don’t we traditionally put adjectives in front of nouns in English? Gordon Brown has the strangest linguisitic habits and I can only imagine that he came up with this slogan and resisted all attempts to iron it out.

If you enjoy being patronised then click on Labour’s little video below. I know they are promising to lower the voting age to 16 but do we need to be infantilised like this?

I will flip through the Labour mainfesto later but the Conservatives has already identified 102 broken promises from the 2005 manifesto here. In 2005 they promised:

We will not raise the basic or top rates of income tax in the next Parliament (p.16)

Since then Gordon Brown abolished the 10% rate, Alistair Darling has added new 45% and 50% tax rates and forzen allowances. They are making the same claim again today. Once bitten, twice shy I think.