Category: National politics

In this morning’s Sunday Times columnist Rod Liddle makes the same mistake as Labour’s Chris Bryant in relation to the whole James Blunt, public school, privilege thing.

Bryant’s original language was pretty unpleasant:

… we can’t just have a culture dominated by Eddie Redmayne and James Blunt and their ilk

His comments were somewhat ironic given that he himself is a product of elite public school Cheltenham College, one of the Rugby Group of public schools.

No-one seems to have spotted the silliest part of Bryant’s original comments. He said:

Where are the Albert Finneys and the Glenda Jacksons? They came through a meritocratic system.

Albert Finney attended Salford Grammar School and Glenda Jackson (Labour MP as well as actress) attended West Kirby County Grammar School for Girls so Bryant is dead right about a meritocratic system. But, it is one that has been systematically dismantled and not replaced on any scale until the Coalition came along and allowed Michael Gove to push through his school reforms. The harsh fact is that it is hard to excel without a demanding education and that applies to the Labour party nowadays as much as any other walk of life.

Rod Liddle himself cites John Osborne (public school Belmont College), Richard Burton (Dyffryn Grammar School and Oxford University), Terence Stamp ( Plaistow County Grammar School) and and author David Storey (Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Wakefield) as “working-class heroes” making the same mistake as Bryant himself.

There is a pattern here isn’t there? Attainment in any field is often based on a demanding education. Making sure more people get one of those is the main point and the driving force of Gove’s reforms.

The Howard League, an excellent prison reform charity, has been highlighting prison suicide today. Their headline “82 prisoners took their own lives in 2014 “ speaks for itself. Simple, stark, tragic.

It is interesting how this has evolved in the media. You can understand the Guardian going with “Prison suicide rate at highest level since 2007″. The Guardian is nakedly partisan so the spin is to be expected.

The BBC says “Prison suicides in England and Wales at ‘seven-year high’”. Who are they quoting? The Guardian? The original Howard League press release did not make the point explicitly. The BBC is just recycling the Guardian’s line.

What are the real numbers?

You can pull a good history out from here and the latest 2014 figures are in the Howard League press release.

The worst recent 5 years for prison suicide were 1999 (91), 2002 (95), 2003 (95), 2004 (96), 2007 (92). I think we can load those on Tony Blair can’t we?

Average prison suicides 1998 – 2010 inclusive (13 years) = 79

Average prison suicides 2007-2010 inclusive (4 years) =68

Average prison suicides 2011-2014 inclusive (4 years) = 69

On this basis the current Coalition record is better than the Labour record. It is only fractionally worse than the four years immediately preceding the Coalition.

It is perhaps best to look at suicide rate per 1,000 prisoners.

The suicide rate has ticked up worringly but the rate was higher in 9 out of 13 Labour years when there was more money.

This morning the left-leaning media (which includes the BBC Radio 4 Today programme unfortunately) are all over Oxfam’s “research” into inequality. It is tosh of course.

The fact is that the poor’s wealth is not measured very well (by Credit Suisse from where Oxfam got its base data) and if you owe money – for instance you have just bought a house, you have some personal debt and have a good job and are paying your mortgage – your net worth is small or negative although you might be doing great. You can be poor but on track to accumulate wealth in later life. In fact most people go through a cycle of being poor when young, they accumulate wealth in homes and pensions and then they shed it again in old age. Mixing this data on a global basis is meaningless.

The numbers, which Oxfam clearly does not understand, are dominated at the top end by the price of stocks and shares (equities), which are volatile and cyclical like the prices of most financial assets. You can search Oxfam’s report in vain for any reference to these underlying forces which drive their spurious conclusions.

This picture from Oxfam’s report shows relative wealth of the Top 80 on the Forbes list compared to the bottom 50%.

Not surprisingly perhaps the global equities graph precisely tracks Oxfam’s graph showing the wealth of the world’s 80 richest people whose wealth is typically dominated by equities holdings in companies that they have created themselves.

Going back to Oxfam’s chart it would be nice if a poverty “charity” would explain why the bottom half has got poorer recently (even if they are richer than they were before the earlier part of this century according to the chart). Is it due to appreciation of the Dollar against poorer countries’ currencies? Is it due to poorer people taking on more debt? Does it mean some particular groups have gone backwards? Which ones? Does this research accurately measure poor people’s wealth?

It is one thing Oxfam not understanding what drives extreme wealth but it is inexcusable that Oxfam cannot explain poverty. Oxfam seems to be uninterested. Meanwhile does anyone really believe that Bill Gates and his fellow top 80 are the problem?

Apparently Labour don’t want their activists talking about the economy. No wonder. The Coalition’s employment miracle has simply not been talked about enough and in particular the revolution in youth employment that has happened under this government.

The youth claimant count in Ealing has halved. It stood at 1,780 in May 2010. The latest figure on the government’s NOMIS database is 850 in November 2014. If you look at the quarterly data going back to May 1994 the November 2014 figure is the lowest for 20 years.

Whether you look at Ealing, London or the whole country, the youth claimant count is below the pre-crash low. We really do need to stay on the road to a stronger economy.

Yesterday morning, to mark the anniversary of the post-war Labour government, a man called Matthew Ward published this “infographic”. He calls himself “Historian, edutainer & broadcaster”. He clearly is a Labour supporter. He clearly is no historian. Three of the claims on this infographic are bogus. Four of them are rather weak.

Let’s go through them.

Yes, the Attlee government “created the NHS”, if by that you mean nationalising the existing health infrastructure. The Atlee government built no new hospitals. It wasn’t until the sixties that the NHS commissioned new hospitals. The Labour government merely took existing local authority and charity hospitals into public ownership. The Conservative model put forward in their 1944 white paper was based on local authorities taking the lead – probably a more sustainable model and certainly a more accountable one. A free at the point of use national health service was settled Conservative policy by the end of the war – Labour rammed through a centralised model ignoring the 1944 model agreed by the wartime coalition and widely discussed in the country.

Did he build the welfare state? The modern welfare state took 200 years to build. Liberals, Tories and socialists all played their roles. A key component was Lloyd George’s National Insurance Act 1911. Vast progress on welfare was made by Tory hero Lord Shaftsbury in the 19th century. Yes, the Attlee government pushed forward the ideas of the coalition government as enunciated by Beveridge. To claim the welfare state for Attlee and Labour is way too much. See my next point for instance.

It is utter nonsense to say Atlee introduced child benefit. In those days it was called Family Allowance and it was introduced by the 1945 Conservative caretaker administration. The legislation passed on 16th June 1945, the operational date being set for August 1946, to be implemented by whichever party was then in power. The legislation was put forward by Leslie Hore-Belisha, a Conservative minister, of Belisha beacon fame. Atlee came to power on 26th July 1945. Sure he didn’t stop Child Allowance but the course was already set. At the very best, poor history from Mr Ward.

Legislation on womens’ property rights dates back to 1870. The idea that Atlee’s government played a large role won’t fly. The Married Women (Restraint upon Anticipation) Act 1949 was a fairly minor and technical addition to the law which removed a legal protection for married women which had become redundant. Putting this on a list of Attlee’s achievements does rather make you think it needs padding.

It is freaking outrageous to claim that Atlee “introduced free secondary education as a right”. This was put in place in the famous 1944 Education Act. Pushed through by Tory hero RA Butler. Ward is talking nonsense here.

The UN claim is preposterous too. The UN Charter was adopted unanimously on 25th June 1945. Again before Atlee came to power on 26th July 1945.

Given that the wartime coalition had already promised Indian self-rule the granting of Indian independence doesn’t seem like a great leap. Implemented by socialist hero Lord Mountbatten (not). I admire the patriots who fought for Indian independence. The idea that any post-war British government could have denied them is laughable.

Bought public services back into public ownership – this seems to be some kind of approbation for nationalisation. Yes, he nationalised the railways. The majority of the Attlee nationalisations were rolled back from the eighties and are unlikely to be ever repeated. Let’s give Attlee those two.

Achieved full employment? The war achieved full employment, a state that continued into the 1970s. The graph is clear.

Atlee’s record was nationalise like crazy. Most of it has been rolled back and very few serious people argue we should go back. His enduring achievement is the NHS which was the settled consensus of the time and clearly the child of the wartime coalition led by Conservative Winston Churchill.

At the Labour party conference last year Ed Miliband promised to freeze energy prices for 20 months from May 2015 until the end of 2017. This may have looked like a good wheeze at the time but the consequences of this foolish pledge are now becoming clear.

Yesterday Ofgem called out the energy companies on the apparent anomaly of falling wholesale energy prices not flowing through to lower consumer prices. It is not at all surprising. If you were running an energy company with variable costs and the prospect of a 20 month price freeze you might be forgiven for not giving up your margin now.

You only have to look at what is happening in Iraq overnight to see that the energy companies might be unwise to let their consumer prices drop whilst Miliband’s price freeze policy is in place.

The most significant phrase in Ofgem’s press release yesterday was “In a competitive market …”. The trouble is that since Ed Miliband’s intervention on energy prices the market has got less competitive. This market is already heavily regulated and susceptible to government policy decisions. Miliband’s promise to freeze prices next year overhangs the market and the political risk is not going away for the energy companies until the election is out of the way. So Miliband has got his energy price freeze a year early and it is hurting consumers.

The left keeps up its deluge of bent data. I saw this from the Fabian Society today. One look told me it was nonsense. I wondered why they chose those data points – 1997 and 2012.

The 1997 point was chosen because it is the earliest date in the reference data provided by the Department for Communities and Local Government. I guess 2012 was the latest data available – since superseded. The 2012 number on the chart is now out of date. What happened in between?

So according to the Fabians housing affordability wasn’t much of a problem as the ratio doubled from 3.54 in 1997 to 7.23 in 2007 under Labour. It climbed every year for ten years and peaked in 2007. But, it has been stable and below the level inherited from the Labour government for the last three years and it is a big problem now? Really?

I should be out in East Acton (the ward I am fighting in Ealing) canvassing and I will be shortly. Meanwhile I just wanted to call out Labour leader Ed Miliband for his personal efforts to nail on Labour’s big NHS lie.

Miliband says:

Services are closing, waiting times are growing, and billions of pounds are being wasted on a reorganisation that nobody wanted.

Ed Miliband and the rest of the Labour party know that the largest financial driver in the NHS is the Nicholson Challenge. This is a policy put in place in 2009 whilst Andy Burnham was Secretary of State. Labour knew it had to control NHS spending after years of real growth so it put the Nicholson Challenge in its 2010 manifesto on page 4:3.

The Coalition promised to protect NHS spending, which it has, but the Nicholson Challenge was already built into NHS spending plans in May 2010. Since May 2010 the Labour party at every level has simply renamed their own Nicholson Challenge policy as “Tory cuts”. This is Labour’s big NHS lie. The same, or an even worse, financial settlement would have been given to the NHS if Labour had won in 2010. Locally the NHS North West London “Shaping a Healthier Future” outcome would have been the same.

Miliband also alludes to the cost of implementing the Health and Social Care Act 2012. The bill looks like being £1.5 billion according to independent sources so calling it billions is something of an exaggeration. A one off cost of £1.5 billion is tiny compared to the £20 billion EVERY YEAR that the Nicholson Challenge is trying to take out.

There is no sign whatsoever that Labour is proposing to find £20 billion to make Nicholson go away. And not surprising: this sum is not far short of all council tax collected every year or all business rates collected every year. It is a truly large sum of money. Labour is using its own policy to knock the Conservsatives and it has no plans to unwind it.

Why is Ed Miliband talking about rent controls? The obvious answer is that people are worried about the cost of living and those renting particularly so.

Why is housing in general expensive, whether you are renting or buying? Because we have more people who want property than we have property. The demand side is obvious and one of the reasons that the UKIP message is resonating so strongly right now. Labour’s big 2008 crash pushed private housebuilding into a nose dive. But what is the long term picture for housing completions in this country? You can find out by going to the DCLG housing completions stats.

If you add up housing association and council house completions to work out how many social houses were built since the war you will find that the worst ten years was the period 1998-2007.

The worst year for council house completions was 2004 when just 130 were completed in the whole UK.

The worst year for housing association completions since these overtook council housing as the preferred way of delivering social housing was 2003 when 17,620 were completed.

Ed Miliband thinks we are stupid. He really does.