Alex's Archives

Boris the Eurorealist?

admin / May 13, 2013 / Politics / Permalink

I think it’s more than 18 months since I last blogged about politics and Europe. But today I found myself almost agreeing with something Boris writes in his Daily Telegraph column on the Tories’ referendum ructions. That doesn’t happens very often. So that got me thinking.

The main point I made back in October 2011 in Finding an antidote to Europhobia was that someone other than Nick Clegg needs to be making the positive case for Europe. And doing it sooner rather than later. If pro-Europeans are coy and wait until we are in referendum season then the atmosphere will already have been so badly poisoned by the radical Right’s outbreak of irrational Europhobia that any sort balanced assessment of the case for the EU will be impossible. That seems to me to hold as true today as it did then. Indeed, it is clear that Europhobia has already spread considerably during the intervening period.

Boris’s piece today has attracted most attention because he draws an unflattering comparison between the “sloth” of the British worker and the productivity of the German worker. I’m sure the use of the word was calculated, but it was rather gratuitous and distracted entirely from the point he was seeking to make.

On the face of it Boris’s column is a call for a more balanced discussion of the pros and cons of membership of the EU. His is a self-styled cool head when all around him appear to be losing theirs. He’s behind Cameron in his bid to renegotiate the UK’s relationship with the EU down to one of “free trade and political cooperation”. His main point is that the threat of UK exit has to be credible if the renegotiation is going to deliver change.

The piece is perhaps a bit smarter than it first appears. But then Boris is not as daft as he looks. Continue Reading →

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Uncertain terrain: issues and challenges facing housing associations

admin / May 11, 2013 / Housing / Permalink

I was asked to produce a brief note setting out some of the context and challenges facing housing associations.

The note was to inform thinking as part of a strategy discussion taking place somewhere in England.

I took that brief note and elaborated upon it a bit.

Given that the discussion was couched in pretty broad terms, it may be of interest to others. So I’ve posted the resulting document on Scribd and you can access it here beneath the fold.

Continue Reading →

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On inconsistencies in policy thinking

admin / May 10, 2013 / Politics / Permalink

Last night I was working my way through the parts of the MoJ’s consultation paper on Transforming Legal Aid relating to competition in the market for criminal representation. This is a fascinating and contentious document. The legal profession is especially exercised by the proposals to restructure the market for criminal legal aid provision so it favours bigger providers and removes the right of the accused to choose a legal representative. Jerry Hayes tried, parenthetically, to highlight the issue on BBC Question Time last night, but he’d rather lost the audience by that point as a result of his earlier highly questionable comments on rape.

Anyway, I’ll blog on the legal aid market properly when I get the chance. But buried in chapter 4 of the consultation document is the following: Continue Reading →

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Keeping up with the Bristol Bloggerati

admin / May 7, 2013 / Bristol, Other gubbins / Permalink

Bristol has a lively bunch of bloggers. Keeping up with what’s being posted can be a bit of a struggle.

We now have a new resource in the form of www.bristolblogs.com. Bristol Blogs brings together more than 80 different feeds from bloggers in and around Bristol, blogging about life and events in the city and about a huge range of other topics. The site is already up and running. It is currently carrying over 3,500 posts.

My posts appear under the academia and politics headings. But you know where to find me already. Why not visit the site and find out what everyone else is talking about?

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Participatory inequality and the rise of populist politics

admin / May 5, 2013 / Politics / Permalink

It’s been a fascinating and frustrating few days in politics.

On Thursday lunchtime I discovered that Claus Offe, one of the world’s most famous political sociologists, as giving a lecture entitled Participatory inequality in the austerity state about a hundred metres from my office late on Thursday afternoon. I thought it would be interesting to trundle along.

As it turned out “austerity state” made for a good title but was not hugely central to the talk. The talk focused on two well-known problems.

First, participation in the institutions of liberal democracy is in decline across the western world. It isn’t just the proportion of the population who bother to vote that is in decline, seemingly inexorably. In fact, voting holds up better than most of the other indicators you might look at, such as political party membership or other more active forms of political engagement. Britain is not at all unusual in now recording less than 10% of the population as being political party members. That is now the norm. Political parties are now more likely to be guided by polling, focus groups and a rather desperate pursuit of the swing voter and the mythical middle ground than they are to represent a set of values to which millions of people actively subscribe.

Second, the decline in participation is not uniform. It is sharpest among the young, those on lower incomes, with fewer skills and lower levels of education. Hence Offe’s reference to participatory inequality.

The challenge is that the system is locked in to a self-reinforcing, path dependent process. At least that is how I’d describe what Offe was saying, even if he didn’t quite put it in those terms. As participation declines, it makes sense for politicians to offer policies that appeal to those who are still most inclined to vote – older, better-educated and better-off households. That in turn means that voters in other social locations – the poor and unskilled workers – perceive politics to be a game run primarily for the benefit of the rich, and hence disengage further from the process. Continue Reading →

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New housing ideas from One Nation Labour?

admin / April 30, 2013 / Housing / Permalink

Under the heading A One Nation programme with new ideas to begin turning Britain’s economy around yesterday Ed Miliband outlined six bills that would appear in Labour’s alternative Queen’s speech. It is good to see him offering some policy detail, at last, but to what extent are we being offered new ideas?

The focus of the housing component of his statement was the private rented sector, which in one sense is new. The idea that the political battle to be fought over housing was going to be fought over private renting is one that would have made no sense a few years ago. And whether it is the biggest problem facing the housing system at the moment, given the broader context of poor affordability for a nation of frustrated aspirant home owners, could be debated.

Leaving that to one side, what did he offer? Continue Reading →

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Rebalancing towards renting

admin / April 26, 2013 / Economics, Housing / Permalink

One of the central conclusions drawn from the Global Financial Crisis was that the UK economy was too dependent on financial services and unproductive investment in the property market rather than the real economy. So the economy needs rebalancing.

One of the main issues facing the housing market is that households overwhelmingly aspire to owner occupation, even as the chances of accessing the tenure become increasingly limited. House prices that seem to defy gravity, stagnating incomes, and difficulties in meeting deposit requirements mean that thousands of households have to reconcile themselves to renting privately for the long term. That the whole system is a mess hardly needs saying.

Is addressing the broader economic rebalancing agenda compatible with addressing the dysfunctional housing market? Is it possible to rebalance the economy without persuading households to spend less on housing and invest elsewhere instead? Even framing the question like this implies that households have a choice over incurring large housing costs, which of course is not the case for many people.

Unravelling the dependence of the UK economy on financial services and property investment is no easy matter. It took many years to back ourselves quite so tightly into this corner. How is policy handling the complexities of the agenda?

On the housing side we could argue that things are not going hugely well. Efforts to increase housing supply directly are modest, while efforts to increase supply indirectly by assisting with housing costs – notably the Help to Buy scheme – have been widely condemned as wrong-headed. On the economic side, the government has clearly made some efforts in the direction of rebalancing both sectorally and regionally, but these are initiatives that are going to take years to have serious impacts on the productive capacity of the economy. Whether the government is pursuing the rebalancing agenda with sufficient vigour is debatable.

That brings me to a curiosity. Continue Reading →

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Bungalow build

admin / April 23, 2013 / Housing / Permalink

Over the last few years Policy Exchange has been a prolific contributor to the debate over the direction of housing policy. As regular readers will know, I have not always been entirely complimentary about those contributions. In particular the PX regularly exhibits an unhealthy fixation with the planning system as the source of Britain’s housing supply woes. I’m not aware of anyone who thinks the planning system is perfect, but to lay the blame entirely at its doorstep is too simplistic. I suspect PX knows that full well: its work on other aspects of housing supply shows a more sophisticated understanding of the interlocking problems that have led the system to its current parlous state. I can only assume that it is somehow constitutionally obliged to have a dig at “top down, centralised planning” in all housing-related publications.

Planning is again the bogeyman in the most recent brief PX publication on Housing and Intergenerational Fairness, produced for Hanover. But its invocation is rather incidental and a little half-hearted. The discussion treats planning as both more inflexible and less contextualised than it is. That is the case regarding the discussion of density. Planning systems may well have specified (re)development at higher densities. But that is not a timeless given. It is part of a broader agenda driven by concerns for sustainable, compact cities rather than sprawl and long-term energy dependence. It is not simply caprice on the part of planners.

Anyway, the critique of the planning system is not really central to the contribution the new publication makes to the debate.

On my reading the piece makes three useful contributions. Continue Reading →

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