Category: National politics

Today the Church of England bishops are making a totally political intervention on welfare reform, writing a letter to the Sunday Telegraph. They are attacking the uprating of many benefits by only 1% for three years after last year’s 5.5% rise. This is a harsh measure for harsh times to be sure but the workers who pay the taxes to pay these benefits and have seen their income frozen for 4 or 5 years will perhaps be less charitable than the bishops.

The bishops cite a family of four with one earner earning £31,200 losing £424 a year by 2015 under the changes. The bishops fail to mention that most or all of this will be offset by increases in income tax thresholds. Is it Godly to tell half the story? It is a measure of how bent out of shape our benefits system is that someone on this kind of pay is so ensnared in that system. The poisonous legacy of Gordon Brown’s tax credits. This family should be paying virtually no tax and receiving virtually no benefits instead of being on the dumb tax credit merry-go-round.

Ridiculously the bishops say the change will hit the poorest the hardest with about 60 per cent of the savings coming from the poorest third of households and only 3 per cent will coming from the wealthiest third. They don’t seem to think it is bizarre that any comes from the wealthiest third! It is a benefits system after all. Doing the math 37% comes from the middle third. Aaargh! If the benefits system was properly constructed 100% of the pain would fall on the poorest third surely? But then if it was properly constructed there would no need for these cuts.

The bishops fail to mention God, Jesus or Christianity in their letter. What are they for?

The banking arm of the Church of England, the Church Commissioners for England, is constructed as a charity that holds £5 billion in long term investments. If the church was that stressed it could liquidate some of its investments maybe and actually live the Gospels rather than talk politics?

At first glance the Church does not seem to be a sound source of financial advice. For the last year they reported, 2011, their income was £148.3 million and their expenditure was £242.3 million. With a 63% deficit of their own perhaps we should ignore the bishops?

Interesting to see the image that Labour has chosen to go with its One Nation slogan and line about the impact of government policies on families. It is a stock photo that Labour has bought from an agency that has already sold it to at least two organisations dealing with debt issues:

• Left-wing think tank Resolution Foundation
• Californian family law firm McNally & Associates, P.C.

The choice of image is interesting. No ethnic minorities. No alternative family models. Stereotypical gender roles with mother engaged in childcare and father working on the family finances. The father’s wedding ring in the foreground, left of centre, is consciously the focal point of the image.

The mother figure looks a little tired and washed out and is simply dressed. The father figure has a (literally) blue collar, sleeves rolled up look but this household is firmly middle class, even wealthy by national comparisons. They live in a fully modernised house. Note recessed lights and fire alarm sensor in hall ceiling, modern kitchen unit below mother’s elbow and custom made dresser behind father. The house is immaculately decorated and well furnished. Someone has gone to a lot of trouble to bring out the period features. The period house is comparatively large comprising at least two floors (you can see the stairs) and is large enough to have a kitchen dining area. The fire alarm sensor indicates that they have had a loft extension (the building regs force you to put in a fire alarm when you go up another floor). Most people would have to be high rate tax payers to live in this home, certainly in the South. The middle class values are underlined by the display of the children’s artwork on the stairs over the mother’s shoulder.

Maybe Labour comms people think that this is how the majority of Britons really live. What are they trying to say? Does One Nation mean: “Hello white, married, wealthy people. We care about you.”

The Hacked Off Leveson petition stinks to high heaven. The BBC reported the launch of the petition on Friday (complete with convenient link) and then relentlessly promoted it on Radio 4 news programmes for the next two days. I could not think of a better way of targeting the woolly-headed, bien pensant left. And it was all for free!

The BBC puffed it on the Radio 4 PM programme on Friday when it was 16,000. It made it the lead item on the Friday 7pm news bulletin, a totally disproportionate editorial decision, when it was at 24,000. The BBC pushed it again on the Radio 4 Saturday lunchtime news when it was over 50,000. As of the time of writing it stands at 125,000.

It is worth noting that the BBC did not report Swedish MEP Cecilia Malmstrom’s One Seat petition until that reached one million. Similarly with Peter Roberts’ road pricing petition. It is also worth noting that Robert’s petition successfully used the No 10 petitions site which asked people for their addresses as well as e-mail addresses and then asked them to confirm back that they were real people from their e-mail inboxes. The Hacked Off petition just asks for a name and e-mail.

This morning the Daily Mail is reporting that the Labour party has been using its e-mail lists to push the petition too (after first trying to use Leveson as yet another vehicle to suck up the e-mail addresses of the vulnerable). I wonder how respectful of that private data it will be when election time comes around? On Friday Miliband was saying sign our petition but had switched to backing the BBC endorsed Hacked Off petition on Saturday.

Hacked Off is partisan and represents a very narrow sectional interest. The way it and the Media Standards Trust are trying to skew the debate on Leveson is inimical to our democracy.

Some people can tell you where they were when John Lennon was shot or Elvis Preseley died. I can tell you where I was at 11am on Black Wednesday. 20 years ago exactly I was sitting in the office of the treasurer of the Co-op Bank in Cornhill in the City waiting to meet him. The treasurer’s PA very politely told us that there was a flap on and that he couldn’t see us – it was the 2% rise in interest rates from 10% to 12% announced by the Bank of England in an attempt to stave off the currency crisis that was smashing the ERM to bits.

For fifteen years after Black Wednesday the UK enjoyed steady, low inflation growth under both Conservative and Labour administrations. This benign period in our economic history was only bought to an end by the global liquidity crisis that hit the UK in waves from 2007 onwards although many people didn’t notice for a couple of years. Since then we have had five years of hard times. The financial crisis and the consequent loss of confidence quickly turned into a fiscal one as markets realised that the UK had been living beyond its means even in the good times thanks to Gordon Brown’s 11 year experiment in systematically adding to Labour’s payroll vote of state workers and benefit recipients. Labour was bequeathed the best modern inheritance of any government. The Coalition was bequeathed the worst. As John Major was saying on the Andrew Marr Show this morning we may be at another turning point right now. Let’s hope so.

Teachers are due to start “industrial action short of a strike” on 26th September in support of their dispute with the Government over pay, jobs, pensions and workloads. Apparently the unions don’t want to affect pupils and the idea is that the action is “pupil, parent and public-friendly”.

I spent five minutes this morning reading this document produced jointly by the NUT and NASUWT. It gives 18 pages of detailed instructions of what teachers should (not) do (I thought teachers resented reading lots of long guidance documents). The document gives you an insight into to quite how militant and out of touch the teaching unions are.

Some of the instructions given to teachers by their unions as a part of this “industrial action short of a strike” are:

• Members should not attend any meetings outside school session times which are not within directed time and where there is no published directed time calendar for the academic year which has been agreed with the NUT
• Members should produce only one written report annually to parents.
• Members should not carry out classroom observation in any school which refuses to accept that there will be a limit of a total of three observations for all purposes within a total time of up to three hours per year.
• Members should send and respond to work-related emails only during directed time.
• Members should refuse to cover for absence.
• Members should refuse to undertake supervision of pupils during the lunch break.
• Members should not organise or co-operate with any arrangements for observation which involve pupils commenting on the work of teachers or being involved in decision making about teachers’ roles, responsibilities, pay and promotion.
• Members should refuse to invigilate any public examination, including GCSEs and SATs.
• Members should refuse to undertake administrative and clerical tasks … such as collecting money from pupils and parents, investigating a pupil’s absence, bulk photocopying and preparing, setting up and taking down classroom displays.

Can you imagine any area of private commerce where this kind of behaviour would be tolerated from adult employees let alone so-called professionals?

Teachers really let themselves down with this nonsense. 73% of NUT members didn’t even vote on this industrial action. The militants have taken over and they make teachers look foolish, difficult and childish frankly.