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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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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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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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The political economy of Help to Buy

admin / April 20, 2013 / Housing, Politics / Permalink

When the Chancellor announced his two-part Help to Buy scheme in the Budget last month it was met with a chorus of disapproval. Representatives from the mortgage and construction industries – who, of course, have a financial interest in seeing the scheme implemented – were positive about it. Pretty much everyone else thought it was a pretty dumb idea.

When I reviewed the scheme at the time I noted:

Just about the only perspective from which this initiative makes sense is carrying through on an absolute determination not to add directly to the public sector deficit, but not minding too much if the guarantees get lost amongst everything else in the public debt.

So it probably makes perfect sense to the Treasury.

Otherwise, the scheme has almost nothing to commend it. The economic illiteracy it displays is remarkable. The fact that, coming from the current occupant of No 11, this is no great surprise is perhaps equally remarkable.

The debate has now been joined by the Treasury Select Committee in its report on the 2013 Budget. What comes through clearly from the paragraphs of the Select Committee’s report is that they are not hugely impressed with the Help to Buy scheme. But it is perhaps even more clear is that the Committee is not at all impressed with the quality of thought – or lack of it – that underpins the scheme. They finish their discussion of the scheme with a list of 17 questions they would like the Treasury to answer (para 182). These questions address topics of an absolutely fundamental nature. They are the basics that need to be in place before it is possible to conduct a sensible appraisal of the wisdom of spending more than £15 billion under the Help to Buy scheme. You get the unmistakeable sense that the Select Committee is frustrated, and not a little alarmed, that the Treasury is as yet unable to provide clear answers to even the simplest of questions (Para 177: “As far as can be understood from the Chancellor’s evidence, …”).

Most of the issues covered by the Select Committee report have already been discussed. And the pattern of industry support for the scheme contrasted with scepticism elsewhere repeats itself.

One important further dimension the Select Committee adds to the debate – apart from further weight behind the criticism – is a form of the slippery slope argument. Continue Reading →

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The policy con is on: Welfare and workfare in Cameron’s Britain

admin / April 13, 2013 / Politics / Permalink

The Conservative party views welfare reform as one of the most popular policies it has pursued through the Coalition government. But welfare reform has been subject to sustained critique. Even the use of the term “welfare”, rather than more neutral descriptors such as “social assistance” or “social security”, has been subject to criticism. The change of discourse sends subtle signals about the values underpinning the system and the status of those who rely on it.

This book brings together a collection of the essays focusing on the Coalition Government’s welfare reform agenda that I have posted on this blog since July 2010. It covers social security reform, housing benefit changes, workfare, poverty, the minimum wage, and the divisiveness of the Government’s policy narratives around “welfare”. I have been particularly interested in the use and abuse of language and the disconnection between policy discourses and available evidence. The essays are arranged chronologically, tracing the agenda as it has developed. Continue Reading →

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Who is social housing for, and who should it be for?

admin / April 10, 2013 / Bristol, Politics / Permalink

Yesterday I participated in a consultation event organised by Bristol City Council. it was designed to start a debate locally about the revision of social housing allocations policy. My talk, which ranged rather more broadly than simply allocations policy, is a bit too long to include in a blog post, so I have bunged it on to Scribd. It can be accessed below. Continue Reading →

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Curbing the welfare hate

admin / April 6, 2013 / Politics / Permalink

We’ve now had three years of the blue-tinged contingent of the Coalition perpetrating a sustained attack on social security recipients – those slugabed skivers – in the name of curbing the deficit. Yesterday’s post at the Guardian again maps the profoundly negative tone of the language that has accompanied the agenda. This has had serious consequences. It has further poisoned the debate and eroded empathy. In moving the agenda forward the Conservatives have been aided and abetted by their junior Coalition partners, at the cost to the party of many members and supporters.

Resistance to this agenda has gained limited traction. In part this is because the Government believes that when it seeks to curb the generosity of social security it has the majority of popular opinion on its side. In part it is because the mainstream media has done a feeble job in engaging critically with the Government’s agenda, or even holding the Government to basic standards of honesty. There has been very limited scrutiny of the way the high-flown rhetoric of “making work pay” and ensuring “fairness” has been matched by the squalid detail of policy implementation. And in part it is because Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition has been unutterably useless at actually opposing anything.

But are there signs that the complexion of the debate is changing? Continue Reading →

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Evidence or otherwise on Housing Benefit reform

admin / March 31, 2013 / Politics, Welfare State / Permalink

The mainstream media seem finally to have cottoned on to the fact that our welfare system is to undergo substantial change tomorrow. I mentioned a couple of months ago that the changes around the so-called bedroom tax were, belatedly, attracting broader media interest. And the media are connecting the deathly dry changes to the regulations to real life stories of hardship. They’ve also started to join up the dots to realise that it could well turn out that April is, indeed, the cruellest month.

Some of us have been banging on about the potentially negative implications of these changes for some months, if not years. It is good that they are now achieving some serious public profile. But it is a bit late to head off the chaos that could well follow their implementation.

What precisely will follow the raft of changes during April is a bit of a moot point. Will the prognostications of catastrophe be correct? Or will the Government’s much more sanguine view be borne out? Clearly, it is an issue of great significance.

It emerged as a key area of contention in the report on the impact of housing benefit reform published by the Public Accounts Committee last week. Continue Reading →

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On local governance and elected mayors

admin / March 26, 2013 / Bristol, Politics / Permalink

On Friday we published a report on the prospects for an elected mayor in Bristol. It is the first report from the Bristol Civic Leadership Project. The prospects report was based primarily on views collected from around Bristol prior to the mayoral election in November. It drew on the respondents to the Citizens’ Panel, a survey of civic leaders, and workshop discussions with stakeholders. The aim of the report was to set out a baseline of information on people’s expectations for the arrival of mayoral governance and, where possible, on the back of that evidence to draw some lessons about avoiding pitfalls associated with changing governance. It aimed to do no more nor less than that.

The broad message of the report is that many people were not hugely positive about the performance of the city council under the Leader and Cabinet governance model used prior to the move to an elected mayor. Many were therefore positive about the prospects of the move to a mayor – they were expecting the governance change to have a positive impact on the governance of the city and on the city itself.

The main group who took a different stance were city councillors. Councillors tended to be more likely to be positive about the (then) existing model, and correspondingly more sceptical about the benefits of the arrival of an elected mayor.

I noticed that there was a bit of negative comment about this report on Twitter on Saturday. I thought it would be worth reflecting on some of that comment. Continue Reading →

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