Category: National politics

Yesterday’s Pre-Budget Report, see here, was not designed to be clear. My point from Sunday, The Fat Middle, was underlined in Table 1.2 on page 11. By all means try to soak the rich but the only way to make the books balance is to soak everyone who has levered themselves above the breadline.

This table (click to enlarge) lays out the tax changes covered by the PBR. It only covers half of the National Insurance rises but still tax changes for ordinary people total £8,160 million. The bank payroll tax on bonuses brings in £550 million. It may alienate the City on which London still depends. It may not make a large difference to the total tax take but still Darling can’t help himself. Posing, not governing.

I just Googled “PBR” to find the Pre-Budget Report so that I could make a few comments on this party-political broadcast dressed up as financial plan. The Labour spin machine is in full effect.

The first thing you notice is that two different parts of the Government are paying for Google AdWords. It would be nice if they paid for an AdWord that would take you to the document rather than the spin but no such luck.

The Directgov page fails to link to the actual document but you can see videos and webcasts and read the spun version which fails to mention all the twists. More of our money wasted.

How do you get to the report itself? Follow the link to the Treasury’s PBR website? No, this takes you to another glossy mini-site with a YouTube channel and all kinds of bells and whistles but no actual report. This same microsite comes 4th on the list of the main Google search – another trap for the unwary.

To find the actual PBR go to the main Treasury site, ignore the prominent link to the microsite, go to the PBR link in the right panel, click the Full report link and finally scroll down to the bottom of the page to get a link to the full PBR. What could they be trying to hide?

The two key words in politics this weekend are envy and aspiration as we run up to Wednesday’s Pre-Budget Report. This document will set the scene for the general election campaign to come and spell out the ground on which Labour will fight. We will hear much about punishing “The rich” and protecting “The poor”. We will have Tory toffs, bankers’ bonuses and spending cuts all conflated into a soufflé of Labour spin.

Gordon Brown, as ever looking for dividing lines, used the phrase “dreamt up on the playing fields of Eton” at PMQs (referring to Conservative plans to raise the inheritance tax threshold). It is all nonsense of course. The majority of our politicians are privileged by definition. This week blogger Working Class Tory listed the 60 Labour MPs that attended public schools and the 100 odd Labour MPs that went to grammar schools. Even these numbers are probably underestimates. They omit Brown himself who went to an elite school and lied about it, see here.

In the Sunday Times today they cover their YouGov poll of 2,000 people that has found that 52% of people think the Conservatives are still the party of the rich, against 31% who do not. Apparently 9 out of 10 Labour supporters and more than 72% of Liberal Democrat voters believe the party is still biased towards the better-off, against 14% of those who support the Tories.

The 52% are clearly not au fait with income distribution in this country. If you go to the relevant Department for Work and Pensions statistics you will find that 13% of households have income of less than £200 per week. 18% of households have and income of more than £1,000 per week. The Fat Middle (or 69%, more than two thirds) are just regular people. Not rich. Not poor. Coincidentally 69% is the level of home ownership in this country, figures here.

The Fat Middle drink in the same pubs, watch the same telly. They typically have jobs. Maybe those at the bottom drive second hand cars and those at the top go on long haul foreign holidays and ski trips rather summer packages to the costas. But these people all mix happily and don’t see the dividing lines that Brown so loves around them. Even then the figures probably understate the size of the Fat Middle because most of the rich are only rich for a small part of their lives. Similarly the poor are not a fixed rump even if the benefits trap does capture some. We all go through a lifecycle and spend our youth and our old age being relatively poor even if we manage to be rich-ish for twenty years from 30 to 50 say if we set up home with someone else.

If we think the rich are going to pay the bills we will be sorely disappointed. There simply aren’t enough of them. We did the experiment in the sixties and seventies. We taxed the rich and they invented luncheon vouchers and just about every scam you can imagine to avoid paying tax. When we reversed the experiment in the eighties the tax take actually went up as people figured they might as well pay 40% tax as try to avoid it.

Labour will major on the politics of envy over the next six months. The Tories need to keep the flame of aspiration alive. Most of us have a stake in the system and want to do better. We need to pull the underclass up towards us, not allow more and more people to be dragged down by the morale sapping lack of aspiration that Labour encourages to keep its benefits payroll vote up.

One of the things we have learnt about the modern Labour party is that they hate history. Probably because history usually proves them wrong. They certainly have no respect for it as yesterday’s party political broadcast demonstrated. It is full of hilarious inaccuracies such as mixing up Labour heroes Ernest Bevin and Nye Bevan. This seems to be an emerging pattern; remember Harriet Harman ignoring Labour’s first woman minister back in September. See the Guido Fawkes video below for more analysis.

Much of Labour’s video tries to appropriate acheivements that are not Labour’s own. Women’s suffrage – no Labour laws. Fighting fascism – everyone from the communists to the Tories pitched in behind a Tory war leader thank you. I could go on. It was touching though to see Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock rehabilitated. At the end they even try to own Britishness with the line:

So here’s to the fighters, the true Brits, the ones who never gave up, sharing the same commitment.

So those not similarly committed are not true Brits? If that is not bad enough I found the last line of the voice over quite sinister really:

We can succeed for Britain, because we must.

Apart from not making much sense, sinister? Yes, because that mindset let’s you lie and cheat and do pretty much any evil you like because you think the end justifies the means. How do you think Stalin’s purges and the gulag happened? How do you think Tiananmen Square happened? How do you think postal ballot rigging happens today?

Don’t forget your history.

This picture appeared on the Labour party home page today. Be sure that as Labour get nearer and nearer to political oblivion that they will get nastier and nastier. Playing the man will be a recurring theme. At least this is funny. Being led by a loser ain’t.

I promise you that the biggest news story over the next week is going to be BBC pay and expenses. In an extraordinary unforced error today the BBC published the pay and expenses of 100 of its senior staff. There is a lovely video of Konnie Huq and Caroline Thomson, Chief Operating Officer, here, discussing the disclosure. These people are so entirely out of touch that they will be surprised and hurt at how angry the public get about this issue.

The details are here. What is really eye watering is the penny pinching meanness of these idiots. Take Director General, Mark Thompson. Although he earns £664,000 per annum, with a total remuneration package of £834,000, he is still willing to claim over 60 times, pretty much every working day of the quarter covered in the report, for the odd few pence on a parking meter. I guess he got his expensive PA to do the paperwork. I suspect it cost the BBC £10-20 to process each of his claims for £1.20. What a complete and utter fool? I am speechless.

These idiots will feel the wrath of the public over the next week.

The Prime Minister made yet another attempt this morning to set the agenda. He came to Ealing to talk about immigration. Listening to the PM programme on Radio 4 just now he managed to register the third headline after stories on dementia drugs and swine flu.

His two main proposals seem to be a review of student visas and a probationary period for new citizens.

In a speech (see here for the insomniacs amongst you) of 4,300 words you will not find the words sorry, apology or regret. Typical. Apparently this speech is designed to take ground from the BNP so that they cannot call it their own. Brown will not achieve this without acknowledging fault. It was only last month that Evening Standard journalist Andrew Neather casually let the cat out of the bag, describing how government immigration policy had been formed around 2000:

But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural. I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.

Brown’s speech was delivered in the Nelson room of Ealing Town Hall. He used his speech to acknowledge local MP Virendra Sharma who had turned up to bathe in the reflected gloom. It was nice of him to pay a visit to the Town Hall. Last year he claimed £9,480 in allowances but only turned up to 7 of the 21 meetings he was supposed to.

On Wednesday night I went on Petrie Hosken’s show on LBC radio. They do a political hour at 8pm on a Wednesday. I was on with Ealing, Acton and Shepherd’s Bush MP Andy Slaughter and Hornsey and Wood Green MP Lynne Featherstone.

We talked about new (and unwanted by me certainly!) powers for local councils, MPs’ expenses, the successful appeal of Baby P killer Jason Owen and routine arming of the police. All very tabloidtastic.

One of the things we will see more and more of as Labour see power slipping through their fingers is that they will get nastier and nastier. Local MP (not for long) Andy Slaughter did his bit on Wednesday. This section stood out:

… they (David Cameron and George Osborne) have never done a proper day’s work, they have never suffered in their lives, they have never had any hardship… The Tory front bench is stuffed with old Etonians.

I don’t know how losing a disabled child very young fits into this view.

I told him he was talking nonsense and so it is. Not only nonsense but in his case sheer hypocritical nonsense. He failed to mention that he himself attended elite Hammersmith public school Latymer.

Yes, the Tory front bench is stuffed full of people from good schools as is the Labour front bench. Our “bog standard comprehensives” regrettably don’t provide enough members of either cabinet or shadow cabinet. Famously Harriet Harman went to St Paul’s Girls School. Blair went to the “Scottish Eton”, etc, etc.

Of course chief Labour dodgy story teller and dividing line drawer, Gordon Brown, has previous on this issue as on so many. When he said a couple of years ago that:

I’m an ordinary guy from an ordinary school who managed to get to university

he was, typically, not telling the truth. His old school, Kirkcaldy High School describes itself as a comprehensive school today but at the time that Brown went there is was a highly selective, elite school, the equivalent of an English grammar. With a history going back to 1582 Kirkcaldy had a public school ethos complete with a house system and rugby matches against old boys (which is how Brown had his sight damaged).

Expect to hear much more of this rubbish from Labour in the next few months.

The Nothing British campaign are today launching a campaign to get veterans to speak out against the BNP’s use of military images to effectively steal veterans’ service for their own cause. I couldn’t agree more.

See BBC report here.

At the Tory conference today William Hague was fuming about a claim made by the Prime Minister. Early in his speech at last week’s Labour conference Gordon Brown reeled off a list of Labour’s achievements:

You know because if anyone says fight[ing] doesn’t get you anywhere, that politics can’t make a difference, that all parties are the same then look what we have achieved together since 1997: the winter fuel allowance, the shortest waiting times in history, crime down by a third, the creation of Sure Start, the cancer guarantee, record results in schools, more students than ever, the Disability Discrimination Act, Devolution, Civil Partnerships, peace in Northern Ireland, the Social Chapter, half a million children out of poverty, maternity pay, paternity leave, child benefit at record levels, the Minimum Wage, the ban on cluster bombs, the cancelling of debt, the trebling of aid, the first ever Climate Change Act.

You can see the BBC video of Brown’s speech here (if you want). You can hear him claim the Disability Discrimination Act for Labour 1:38 in.

The reason Hague is peeved is that it was he himself who designed and passed this legislation in the mid-nineties as Minister of State at the DSS with responsibility for Social Security and Disabled People. The Disability Discrimination Act emerged in 1995, see here, and was amended in 2005, see here.

Does Brown think that Labour’s social achievements are so thin he has to nick some Tory ones or does he think that only Labour can make any social progress so the DDA must be a Labour achievement?

It would be easy to go through Brown’s list and deconstruct it – it does not stand much scrutiny. By way of example let’s look at Brown’s claim for peace in Northern Ireland, a process started by Margaret Thatcher, in spite of the Grand Hotel bombing, and carried forward by John Major. Tony Blair played a valued part in closing the deal on 10th April 1998 when the Belfast Agreement was signed. But to sustain his claim Brown has to explain how Blair got an agreement from a standing start in 11 months from an election. He didn’t and Gordon Brown is simply not telling the truth. Again.