Labour Party

Defying The People On Europe

Samuel Hooper2 Comments
Not so fast. First we need to preserve democracy by translating the referendum question into Cornish.
Not so fast. First we need to preserve democracy by translating the referendum question into Cornish.

 

Labour peers in the House of Lords have filed more than fifty amendments to the EU Referendum Bill as it makes its way through the committee stage in a transparent and bold-faced attempt to filibuster the bill, defy the clear wishes of the British people and to save their hapless leader, Ed Miliband, from having to take a firm and unambiguous stance on the issue.

The Telegraph reports:

David Cameron’s plan to give the public a vote on membership of the European Union could be defeated within weeks after Labour peers tabled dozens of outlandish amendments that could halt its progress in Parliament.

More than 50 amendments were tabled for the committee stage of the EU Referendum Bill, including holding a petition of a million voters, posing the questions in Cornish and giving prisoners the vote, the Telegraph has learnt.

As a private member’s Bill, it has a limited time to pass through Parliament. It can only be debated on Fridays and must be approved by both houses by February 28.

Dirty parliamentary tricks such as this have been used by all sides at one time or another, but it is dispiriting to see them deployed against a bill that merely seeks to return power to the people on an important issue of sovereignty such as this. There is no need to wait for a petition of a million votes before proceeding, we know that a vast number of people support a referendum. Neither do we need to pose the referendum question in Cornish, Klingon or any other obscure language. And topics such as the re-enfranchisement of prisoners currently serving custodial sentences deserve their own hearing and debate, not just to be used as ammunition in childish political games.

I remain genuinely torn on the issue of Europe. Whilst I see the EU in its present form as nothing but a scandalously wasteful talking shop in pursuit of a closer union never formally sanctioned by the citizens of any of its member states, the issue of a potential British withdrawal would be very thorny. Though none of the worst-case scenarios peddled by the pro-European scaremongers are anything near accurate (all of our trade with the EU vanishing overnight, sudden diminution on the world stage among others), there are real questions that need resolving around the realistically achievable options for future relations between a seceded Britain and the remainder of the EU. At its most basic, we need to know the terms on which Britain can continue to remain a part of the common market and free trade area whilst subscribing to as little as possible of everything else that the EU has taken it upon itself to do.

When they are not busy accusing eurosceptics of being little Englanders or xenophobes, those on the pro-European side of the fence are forever issuing mea culpas, saying that of course the European Union has flaws and needs reform, but that the only way to tackle this is from the inside as a fully engaged player. But the day to press for such reform never seems to come, or when it does come Britain finds that her interests on a key point do not align with other key players in the union, resulting either in gridlock and inaction or another painful debit from the “give” column in the give and take of our membership, the price, we are told, of being part of the club.

I am exceedingly unwilling to spend another year, yet alone another 5-year stretch between general elections, being fobbed off in this entirely predictable manner. Yes, what happens if Britain crosses the Rubicon and votes to leave the EU is of tremendous importance for our country, and those on the “leave the EU” side need to flesh out this part of their argument more fully in order to be more convincing to those such as myself who are genuinely torn. But the fact that these questions have not yet been fully addressed is no reason to delay the referendum, in the same way that contempt and distrust of the British people is also not a legitimate reason.

I often get the sense from the words and actions of the Labour Party that they are convinced that they know what is best for me far better than I do myself. But nowhere is this self-righteous superiority combined with ruthless determination to promote their vision of Britain over all others more evident than in the current manoeuverings of the Labour peers in the House of Lords.

The people deserve their say, and if Ed Miliband cannot muster the courage to take a public stance one way or another, he should at least call off his ennobled lackeys and prevent them from impeding the wheels of British democracy any further.

On Welfare Denialism

Samuel Hooper1 Comment
One real gem of an idea nestling in between the usual stale nonsense.
One real gem of an idea nestling in between the usual stale nonsense.

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Yesterday we were treated to the spectacle of Work & Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith promising to “slash Britain’s benefits bill” by picking around the edges of the problem and denying benefits to immigrants who do not speak fluent English, a transparent piece of Daily-Mail-pandering that sows despair in the hearts of anyone who wants to seriously reform Britain’s welfare system.

This was a triumphant case of grabbing headlines whilst accomplishing nothing courtesy of the Conservative Party, but it turns out that Labour were not to be outdone. Today, it was the turn of Rachel Reeves, the shadow Work & Pensions Secretary, to put on the Tough Love hat and have a crack at the welfare problem.

Almost anticipating the backlash and onslaught of scepticism, The Guardian hide the story well away in the depths of their online news site, reporting:

Labour would force jobseeker’s allowance claimants with inadequate maths or English to go on basic skills courses as a condition of receiving their benefit, Rachel Reeves, the shadow work and pensions secretary, will say on Monday .

It is estimated that one in 10 of Britain’s 250,000 monthly new JSA claimants have inadequate maths or English, two skills critical to finding work. Nearly 20% of those with repeat claims have problems with reading or numeracy. Labour said the pledge could be funded from the existing skills programme.

Much as with the Tory announcement on welfare, there is nothing inherently wrong with this idea. If a significant proportion of repeat benefits claimants have low literacy or numeracy skills that could be holding them back from gainful employment, then it is probably right and proper to take action to address this skills gap. If, as Labour claim, the testing could be funded with existing money then so much the better. But while there is nothing wrong with the proposal itself, there is everything wrong with unveiling it as a major announcement or in any way a serious attempt at policy change.

Dan Hodges, writing in The Telegraph, spares no time in shooting down the proposal and exposing it for what it is:

Reeves’s speech was trailed in this morning’s Independent. “Her mission is to create a ‘fair and affordable social security system’, with ‘sticks and carrots’ to get the unemployed back to work, which will be good for them and for taxpayers,” wrote the newspaper’s political editor Andy Grice.

That’s not Rachel Reeves’s mission. Her mission, handed to her by her leader, is to make the country think she is planning “tough” reform of welfare, whilst at the same time reassuring the Labour movement she is not preparing any significant reform at all.

“It is hard, but it is also fair. You can call it tough love,” said Reeves. No you can’t. Setting someone a maths test isn’t tough, or loving. It’s a maths test. At her school did they say “right Rachel, you’ve got an hour of PE, an hour of Geography and then an hour of tough love”?

He then rightly contrasts the awesome size of Britain’s welfare bill (here he separates out pensions) with the puny scale of the measures that Reeves is proposing:

Is there anyone anywhere who thinks a maths test will come anywhere near addressing the current crisis of welfare, or if you prefer, the crisis being created by the attack on welfare? It is a nonsensical policy. Saying “the big problem with the welfare system is very few claimants have good numeracy skills” is like saying “the biggest problem with the welfare system is very few claimants have Indian elephants as pets”. It’s true, but it’s irrelevant. Teach them better maths. Teach them better English. Teach them to lightly fry chorizo and play Bach. What impact is that seriously going to have on the nation’s £100 billion welfare bill?

Hodges (who, in course of the past year, has become my favourite Labour-in-exile commentator) believes that Labour would do well to stop talking about welfare altogether, for fear of making themselves appear even more incoherent and opportunistic than they do at present. I would be tempted to agree with him, but for the presence of one genuinely good and revolutionary idea in Reeves’ speech, the proposal to award higher level unemployment benefits to long-term or higher rate taxpayers for the first months of their claim, so as to provide a “soft landing” for those newly out of work.

The Guardian reports:

In her biggest speech since taking on the portfolio, Reeves will also confirm she is seeking to strengthen the contributory principle by exploring how long-term taxpayers can receive a higher-rate allowance for the first months that they are unemployed.

This is laudable, and something that I have myself supported for a long time. Such an action would return the concept of unemployment benefits or Jobseeker’s Allowance to being viewed as a kind of insurance rather than an ever-present and unchanging right.

Why should it be that someone who has worked over a period of years, perhaps in a well paying job, and has contributed many thousands of pounds to the treasury should, on losing his or her job, receive exactly the same allowance as a young person living at home who managed to fall out of eleven years of compulsory education without any qualifications? For the newly-unemployed high earner, jobless benefits may be a way of scraping together enough money to keep making rent, mortgage or bill payments while they scramble to find new work. For the unemployed eighteen year old, that same money may be nothing more than beer tokens to be redeemed at the nearest Wetherspoons pub.

Of course this is a generalisation and of course we cannot individually means test the level of benefits awarded to each claimant based on their individual circumstances – nor would it be the appropriate role of government to attempt such a thing. But surely it is not so outrageous to restore a link between the amount of money contributed in taxes over the years by a new claimant and the amount that they are awarded in benefits? Is that not part of “making work pay”, as well as making sure that capable but overstretched workers (probably with limited to no savings) in today’s precarious economy don’t fall off a complete financial cliff if they happen to lose their jobs? If I sound at all bitter when I discuss this, it is because my argument comes from my own bitter experience.

So overall, another day of great frustration on welfare. Labour have joined the Conservatives in seeking to tinker around the edges in pursuit of cosmetic change and tabloid approval, while the crux of the problem remains conspicuously untackled. The only shining light in the whole tired song and dance, the newly-broached idea of giving higher allowances to higher-contributing taxpayers, was proposed by the party I least suspected to ever endorse such a thing (how on earth did Iain Duncan Smith let Ed Miliband steal a march on him like this?) and while it is truly refreshing to see this being advocated by a major political party in the UK, it is almost sure to die a slow death under withering barrages from the far left proclaiming it “unfair” and “discriminatory”, and another step on the road to a “two-tier Britain”. So clearly and vividly do I see the imminent death of the proposal that it is very hard to generate enthusiasm about its announcement.

From a Conservative perspective, it should also be troubling to David Cameron and to Tory supporters to see Iain Duncan Smith join Michael Gove as the second Conservative minister to be completely outmanoeuvred by their Labour counterpart. With Gove it was the Labour proposal to license teachers and enhance their professional standing and standards, and now with Duncan Smith the Tories were nowhere to be seen when Labour suggested tiered unemployment benefits according to contributions.

In the first years of the coalition government we were continually told of the revolutionary new ideas and policies being cooked up by ambitious Tory ministers determined to enact real change and make their mark after eleven stultifying years of New Labour’s centralisation and standardisation efforts. In 2014, innovation and revolutionary ideas are hard to come by anywhere at all in British political life, but where it does exist, it is not emanating from the Conservative Party.

This should worry anyone who does not want to see the spirit of Gordon Brown in the guise of Ed Miliband reoccupy 10 Downing Street next May.

Labour’s Credibility on Education

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

 

When someone in a position of power or influence makes a series of errors so calamitous, profound and grievous that they do real and lasting damage, and fails to ever acknowledge those mistakes or to make any kind of apology, one tends to disregard what they have to say on that particular topic in future. Think neo-conservatives on starting wars in the Middle East, the Labour Party on the economy and Dick Cheney on absolutely anything.

But when someone owns their past mistakes and appears to have learned from them and grown as a result, it is quite different. And so it is with the Labour Party and their approach to education policy while in opposition. Sure, they haven’t undergone a Road to Damascus conversion and mended their ways entirely – the suspicion that their preoccupation with equality of outcome lurks behind everything remains quite strong – but nonetheless I want to give credit where credit is due. And today, credit belongs to Tristram Hunt, Labour’s shadow Education Secretary.

This kudos comes on two fronts. Firstly, the Daily Mail reports that Hunt is repudiating some of Labour’s past educational priorities and actions whilst in government, in terms of pushing as many children as possible to just cross the “no longer an idiot” threshold for the benefit of statistics and league tables, but then failing to challenge them any further:

Labour created a culture of low expectations for state school pupils, Tristram Hunt, the shadow education secretary has admitted.

He said it was a ‘great crime’ that the last government had failed to pushed children more than simply aim for them to achieve a C grade at GCSE level.

He also admitted that exams had been dumbed down in recent years, saying ‘yes, there are elements of grade inflation’.

This is actually quite a significant admission from someone in the shadow cabinet, and the refreshing bravery deserves recognition. The enshrining of the “good” GCSE result as being a grade falling within the A* to C range has certainly created a perverse incentive to push as many laggardly students up into the bottom threshold whilst neglecting the needs of those who had the potential to achieve much more.

This willingness to look as past initiatives and admit mistakes in the field of education policy now makes Labour much more credible on this topic, and they have immediately stolen a march with their new proposal to license teachers in a bid to drive up professional standards. The Guardian reports:

In a sign of how Labour hopes to outflank education secretary Michael Gove on teaching standards, Hunt is to revive a plan the last government abandoned on the eve of the 2010 general election.

Teachers would have to show they are meeting the high standards and would be required to undergo training to update their skills.

Under Hunt’s plans, teachers would have their lessons assessed by other teachers in a system overseen by a new Royal College of Teaching.

As a society we often pay lip service to the importance of education and good teachers, but when it comes to standing behind that commitment, too often we have been found lacking. We claim to admire good teachers and value them, but do not compensate the best of them anywhere near adequately, and do not expect them to adhere to the professional codes of behaviour (as encapsulated by ongoing training and recertification) that are common in many other prestigious lines of work.

Indeed, Tristram Hunt goes on to make this very point:

Hunt insisted that his plans would raise the standing of the teaching profession. He said: “This is about growing the profession. This is about believing that teachers have this enormous importance. Just like lawyers and doctors, they should have the same professional standing which means relicensing themselves, which means continual professional development, which means being the best possible they can be.”

The fact that these proposals are coming from Labour and not the Tories also confers a immediate advantage in terms of winning backing from the teachers unions, which would be essential to their smooth rollout if ever the proposals became law.

And crucially, from a purely political perspective its puts the Conservatives in the awkward position of having to either reject a potentially very sensible proposal to improve educational standards, or to adopt it and face cries of plagiarism. Rather despairingly, one has to wonder why Michael Gove’s Department of Education didn’t manage to think up a policy proposal such as this on their own.

Outmanoeuvered.
Outmanoeuvred.

 

If Labour ever showed the wherewithal to perform a similar trick on the subject of economic stewardship – admitting their past fault for growing the state to unsustainable levels and proportions of national output, thus making the pain of the recession so much worse for those people more reliant on the government, and acknowledging that some rebalancing is not only necessary but desirable – then the Tories might really be in trouble.

But I imagine there is a greater chance of it snowing in hell than there is of Ed Balls following Tristram Hunt’s lead any time soon.

Edumacation, Edumacation, Edumacation

Samuel HooperLeave a comment
Higher education, solved.
Higher education, solved.

 

The Guardian trails a new Labour proposal for “debt-free degrees” for up to 50,000 students per year, an idea which may well end up in the Labour party’s 2015 general election manifesto. The Guardian’s political editor, cheerleading the idea, claims that this scheme will “tailor university education more closely to the needs of business and young people”. Of course, it doesn’t take long for the enquiring mind to begin picking holes in the concept.

From the top:

Under the scheme, people in employment will be able to study for a degree relevant to their existing and future work, with the costs being paid jointly by government and their employers. The degrees would carry no fees and the in-work students would receive a wage or training allowance from their employer during their period of study.

There is a world of difference between a short course designed to brush up an employee’s computing skills, or even a slightly longer and more involved course in a field such as project management, and the rigorous demands of a university degree. Whilst an employer may see the immediate short-medium term benefit in paying for their staff to undertake the former on company time, it would be a generous boss indeed who would take the dual hit of lost working time and course fees to fund a whole degree.

The costings for the proposal are worked out with the astonishing level of detail and realism that we have all come to expect from Labour under Ed Miliband’s leadership:

Denham, who will outline the plans in a lecture to the Royal Society of Arts on 16 January, says the government’s financial contribution will be found by redirecting money currently spent on writing off unpayable student debt from fees and maintenance loans, and on student grants.

I have read this sentence through several times, and if it makes any more sense to a reader than it does to me, I would love to have the translation in plain English. You don’t “spend money” writing off debts from unrepayable student loans. And if John Denham, the policy’s champion, is suggesting that the £3bn shortfall between expected and actual repayments on student loans over the course of the next parliament can be easily resolved by tracking down students who have moved abroad and shaking them down for money, or by waving a magic wand and making graduates suddenly earn income above the £21,000 threshold so as to become eligible to make repayments, then I will take this as just another sad sign that Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition has no grip on economic reality or the way that public finances work. Whenever we are told that the money for some policy “will be found by redirecting money currently spent on…”, I take it as seriously as I would if Denham told me that he would fund his policy through “efficiency savings”.

There is then, of course, the question of the nature and value of these new degrees, were they to be taught in the classroom. If, as the Guardian claims, they are to be closely “tailor[ed] … more closely to the needs of business”, the degrees are likely to be highly specialised, with much less transferability to other fields of work than more generalist degrees. Indeed, any sensible employer acting in their own interests would be almost certain to demand this – if you are going to pay for someone to get a degree, it is in your interests as an employer to make sure that that degree will be of maximum use to the employee whilst they are working for you, and as little use to them as possible when they come to take that degree and use it elsewhere – so as to act as a deterrent to leaving.

But seeing only the positives, Denham imagines that business will embrace the idea of paying for their employees’ qualifications:

Denham says the proposals will prove attractive to many businesses as they will save money on recruitment and retention, having trained handpicked staff. They will also save on in-house training costs. Employers and students will also be able to shape the courses to ensure they are relevant.

But apparently under the precursor to this policy, employers were expected to contribute £3000 towards tuition costs, and would also be expected to pay a wage or training allowance to their employees as they studied “intensively over two years” or longer. I find it hard to imagine that any savings on recruitment, retention or in-house training will be sufficient to make incurring these expenses an attractive option.

The Guardian further joins the Labour Party in proclaiming that the new policy proposal is in direct response to demand from industry and the private sector, as the article continues:

The ideas are likely to be welcomed by business groups. Last July the CBI said both universities and businesses needed to be more imaginative in the way they provided high-quality education that was relevant to the country’s economic needs, and affordable for young people.

The accompanying link in the Guardian article in support of this assertion does not work, which is probably no accident. Although the CBI and others are right to acknowledge that the standard A-levels and three-year degree route is not sufficient to meet the recruitment needs of the British economy in 2014, this is a long way from a plaintive call for the kind of policy that John Denham wants to enact, and it is sneaky in the extreme for the Guardian to shoehorn in this unrelated quote from the CBI’s policy director:

Katja Hall, CBI policy director, said: “The UK needs to vastly increase the stock of workers with higher-level skills to drive long-term growth and stop us falling behind our competitors. We need to tackle the perception that the A-levels and three-year degree model is the only route to a good career.

Acknowledgement of this simple fact by the CBI is a good and obvious thing. Of course rewarding and well-paid careers can be achieved through many routes, and alternatives to the standard path should always be sought and encouraged where they could be of greater benefit to people. But to take this broad and nonspecific statement made by the CBI last year and try to bend it in support of a specific (and particularly ill-thought out Labour policy) is manipulative and disingenuous.

It does not bring me great joy to pick apart a policy supposedly intended to address a real problem – a significant and growing skills gap between the demands of industry and the abilities of those entering the workforce. But this proposal appears completely unworkable to me. In order to get business to embrace it in any large number, it seems to me that the the conditions would have to be so onerous – in terms of the narrowness of  the degree (more akin to a vocational qualification) and the period of time to which the employee is beholden to work for the employer following graduation – that no student in their right mind would sign up. And if Labour do get into government in 2015 and enact the policy in a way that is remotely appealing to potential students, the cost to the employer would be such that very few firms (aside from those wishing to curry special favour with the government in order to achieve other ends) would be likely to subscribe.

If anyone finds my thinking to be flawed, or can argue that this Labour proposal is anything other than an empty, unworkable vessel designed to launch the phrase “debt-free degree” into the public consciousness ahead of the next election, I would be very keen to hear from you.

Use the comments section, as usual.

Labour Party Conference 2013 – Reflections

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

The economy was fine and everything was splendid until 2010 when the Tories came into power, according to Chuka Umunna, Labour's point person on Business

 

After listening to the various speeches at the 2013 Labour Party Conference this morning, I believe I have detected a theme running through almost all of them.

I don’t mean the usual Labour tunnel-vision and denial of their role in wrecking the British economy and increasing the size of the British state to freedom-crushing, unsustainable levels – that has already been well documented, on this blog and elsewhere.

Nor do I mean the incessant moralising, the endless strictures about how anyone who holds conservative views must be rich, heartless and hold the “common man” in contempt, or the assertions that skepticism about pooling national sovereignty and submitting to an ever-increasing burden of regulations emanating from the European Union somehow equates to a longing for isolationism and a desire to cut off trade and ties with with the world.

I refer instead to the mindset that for every problem, there is a government solution waiting to be proposed, seconded and carried at a Labour conference.

The smug cloud has already enveloped Brighton and is rapidly encroaching on the rest of the country.
The smug cloud has already enveloped Brighton and is rapidly encroaching on the rest of the country.

 

There has been an increase on the number of workers on zero-hour contracts in these tough economic times. Gasp! Outrage! Zero hour contracts must be inherently terrible, a product of evil British businesspeople who want to make money on the backs of the poor, and must be outlawed immediately.

A British soldier was violently beheaded in a terrorist attack on the streets of London. Outrage! We need new laws making it a specific offense to attack military personnel, because if only the general laws against beheading people had been supplemented by additional laws prohibiting the beheading of service members, this heinous crime would not have been committed.

Watching the Labour party assemble for their yearly conference is like observing a group of weary, jaded old codgers assemble in a meeting hall to bemoan the state of humanity, how far it has fallen, and what they must do to forcibly drag the rest of us back up to their lofty levels of enlightened tolerance and progressivism.

How thoroughly depressing it must be to perpetually think so little of the human capacity to do good that the only solutions you can ever imagine are found in new regulations preventing people from being themselves, and transferring agency from the free individual to the faceless, bureaucratic state.

And of course, the answer to the societal problems that Labour bemoan can never be found in reducing the power and scope of the state, or empowering individuals to take more responsibility for themselves. It is as though the Labour party is incapable of taking the laissez-faire, hands-off approach to the people that they rightly champion in the social realm and applying it to the economic realm.

And that’s a great shame, because I feel sure that increasingly, the real divide in British politics will not be between the traditional left vs right paradigm, but between people who see government as the answer to everything, and people who are heartily sick of not being able to live their lives freely without continual badgering and preachy interference. Right now, neither party is ideally positioned to capitalise on this shift, but if today’s conference speeches are anything to go by, Labour has much more ground to make up.