Monday 28 March 2011

St. Ed-o's Fire

I'd never seen a Brat Pack movie before. Not that I was brimming with enthusiasm when the other half expressed her desire to watch St. Elmo's Fire on Friday night.

While the credits were rolling I thought I'd have a quick look at what IMDB had to say about this undiscovered (in my case) gem. The summary at the top of the page is quite superb:

"A group of friends, just out of college, struggle with adulthood. Their main problem is that they're all self-centered and obnoxious."

Seemed a pretty fair summation, though it was hard to give the film my full attention due to the hypnotizing nature of Rob Lowe's dangly earring.

This was not going to be the last example of people finding the real world hard that would hit our screens that weekend.

The news had included coverage of the 'People's Policy Forum' which Labour had organised in Nottingham earlier that day.

Ed Miliband and the shadow cabinet were there to listen to members of the public and to take on board their opinions and fill some of those much publicised blank pages of Labour policy.

It's hard to know whether Mr Miliband considered this meeting a success or not. Although he must find it comforting to address a large crowd of supporters there does not seem to have been many policy ideas, just a lot of burying of heads in sand.

In an excellent blog the Economist's Bagehot's Notebook reported that the meeting consisted of people he (is Bagehot a he?) described as wanting Labour to wave a magic wand and make the cuts go away.

Bagehot claims that there was no balance in the meeting and that the overall attitude was that 'all public spending was good and that private companies exist to pay more taxes'.

Suggested new policies included 'Robin Hood' tax on financial transactions and clamping down of tax avoidance (seemingly confused with tax evasion) to remove the need for any cuts.

To give Mr Miliband his due he did not pretend to the audience that this was the case. He told them that there was no way to completely avoid cuts in public spending. The problem here is that he is not being entirely straight with his audience. If he does not give detailed proposals saying what would be cut he allows people to believe that under Labour their job/benefit would be safe.

Even Rob Lowe's character would be shocked by this sort of denial of reality.

Bagehot also points out that part of Mr Miliband's job at this gathering was to lay the groundwork for his speech to the TUC March for the Alternative the next day.

As we saw, the key part of his short speech was presenting the demonstrators as the mainstream majority of the UK. Not actually outlining any alternative.

Coincidently (!) the same day the Guardian published the results of a poll it had commissioned on how people felt about Government spending plans.

Unfortunately for Ed the results weren't on message. Fair play to the Guardian for still printing them even if they tried a bit too hard to force an angle on the story making the stats more UK Uncut friendly.

So off Ed went to the March for the Alternative without having outlined any serious alternative and with his confidence surely shaken by the results of the Guardian's survey.

So what do you do when you're feeling a bit down? Big yourself up of course! And boy did Ed big himself up. In a no holds barred delusion fest he likened the protesters cause to anti-apartheid, civil rights and universal suffrage. To save a bit of space please see my previous blog for views on this sort of self-aggrandisement.

As pointed out by Sam Bowman on Twitter the Labour Party has drifted from supporting the working class poor to focusing on public sector workers. Despite their claims this does not create a fairer society. An example of this is that many of the people on Saturday's march were upset about potential changes to their lucrative public pensions. These pension schemes are unfair. People in the private sector who can not afford adequate pension cover for themselves are subsidising those who often earn more than them.

To paraphrase George Bernhard Shaw: by supporting this Labour are merely robbing Peter to pay Paul because Paul votes Labour.

By attempting to galvanize this sector's support Labour are concentrating on the material loss caused by the cuts and ignoring economic arguments. This is similar to how the Tories are putting to one side the moral arguments for a smaller state in favour of economic ones.

Perhaps the comparison with the Brat Pack was unfair. People are being deprived of things they had come to take for granted. However, the indignation of protesters misses the point. "What have we done to deserve this?" Alison Foster, a 53 year-old teacher is quoted as asking the New York Times. This harks back to the People's Policy Forum where the attitude of those attending was that of entitlement. "We are all entitled" starts Bagehot's article.

Nevermind the possible objections to such entitlement or the fact that no one had done anything to deserve the good times either. The fact is that there is no money to pay for them. Wishing that there was does or that this is all ideological does not make it so. It is time that the Labour Party lived up to its title as 'Her Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition' and gave us some details of what would be so different if they were in charge instead of hiding behind people's fear.

8 comments:

  1. "the Labour Party has drifted from supporting the working class poor to focusing on public sector workers"

    To be fair to Labour, attending a rally focusing on the public sector at a time when massive public sector cuts are to be made does not indicate that they do not also support private sector workers. If there was another rally in support of private sector workers which Labour snubbed then that would be a fair comment.

    "These pension schemes are unfair. People in the private sector who can not afford adequate pension cover for themselves are subsidising those who often earn more than them"

    If public sector workers' pensions should be cut on the basis that not all private sector workers have them, then by the same logic all public sector workers should have their pay cut to minimum wage and not increased until all private sector workers are earning above this.

    What is interesting is that until recently it was accepted that public sector workers were underpaid in comparison to private sector equivalents and that the pension compensated for this. Then, around the time when MPs first started talking about how it might be necessary to make cuts, new figures emerged apparently proving that public sector workers earned *more* than those in the private sector. Since then I've heard further claims and counter claims about the level of pay, that public sector pensions are both "gold plated" and "at best average", along with the usual Tax Payers Alliance-type accusations of "non-jobs" or "lazy/incompetent staff who know that can't be fired".

    Personally I think we should just go back to living in caves; at least you you knew where you stood then.

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  2. It's not Miliband's attendance at Saturday's march it's that the only noises coming out of the Labour party are that the private sector has to pay for the fact that public sector spending went up nearly 10 per cent under Brown. Brown based spending on a prediction that growth would never stop. Inevitably this was wrong.
    About pensions, I wouldn't say that people in the public sector are overpaid or underpaid or that there are non jobs. When I was growing up (I'm 32) public sector workers were paid less but that's not the case now. Now those on low wages are paying for the others' pensions without being able to afford their own. £32bn last year and going to rise each coming year. Not fair surely?

    Not a bad idea though. Council Caves or Mortgaged?

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  3. (Posted in two parts because I went over the character limit)

    You're right that Brown's level of foresight as to what might happen to the economy could be compared to a turkey thinking "brilliant! - Roadtrip!" as it gets into the back of a van on December 24th. I don't know how much the economy was actually growing by during the 'good' years so I can't say whether a 10% increase in spending was above or below how much the financial boom suggested was appropriate... But you would have expected a Scotchman to have at least put a bit aside in case of a rainy day.

    "I wouldn't say that people in the public sector are overpaid or underpaid"

    Fair enough.

    "When I was growing up (I'm 32) public sector workers were paid less but that's not the case now."

    That's quite a fast u-turn.

    My point is that these figures cannot be trusted. Both sides are biased, and there are so many factors to consider. Most low-end jobs in the public sector have already been outsourced to private companies meaning that the workers are paid less than they would be if they were in the public sector, but at the same time the inevitable contractual restrictions and profit margins mean that the services usually cost more. The fact that many public sector jobs do not have private sector equivalents to compare with. The oversized levels of management in the public sector. The lack of off pay-scale bonuses or benefits in the public sector (no company cars etc). The fact that national services are inevitably London-centric which means that London weighting has to be factored in. Etc, and so on.

    Given that small selection off the top of my head, and With all the bollocks that's been said in the press from various pressure groups and "think-tanks", it's hard to know what the real situation is. One telling point though is that until the credit crunch kicked in, many public bodies had recruitment problems. That seems to be at odds with the claim that the public sector is well renumerated.

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  4. Part 2:

    With regard to pensions, as I already said, to say that it's unfair for someone in the public sector to have a pension when others do not suggests that all public sector employees should automatically receive less renumeration for their work than anyone in the private sector. And is it fair that someone who has a contract for a certain level of pay and pension is told that due to the failure of another unrelated sector that contract will have to be changed? - 'Yes you've been paying £x into your pension scheme, as agreed, in order to receive £y when you retire, but we fucked up with the banks so instead you're going to have to pay £z extra per month'. Even if that is the only way for the country to survive without resorting to cannibalism, that doesn't actually make it *fair*. At the very least you should feel sympathy for those people whose pensions are at risk. It's worth remembering that after the bailout of the banks the high level bankers still received their bonuses because it was written into their contracts. They had had a legal right to it, even if they had no moral right to it. In this circumstance, public sector workers have a moral right to their pensions, even if the legal right has somehow been sidestepped. The least people could do is appear to be apologetic when taking that promise away. It's a shame that during the 'boom years' companies were able to spend that additional income on boosting profits instead of improving workers' conditions of employment - I don't quite know what the difference would be to the economy at this point, but when public opinion seems to be "I don't get paid a reasonable wage for my job, but a few pence of my taxes goes towards paying for your job, so I don't think you should be paid a reasonable amount either", there has to be something wrong with the society we live in.

    Re: caves - I think in today's economy you'd really want to own your cave outright. But while you are waiting to get on the cave ladder, the channel tunnel could be used as a sort of student house-share.

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  5. It's true that a lot of figures can't be trusted but the 10 per cent growth under Brown seems to be accepted by both parties. It's one of the reasons why the cuts seem so bad even though they're taking spending to 2007 (pre-Brown) levels.
    It's that lots of services have been moved to private sector that adds to the problem all right. These newly private sector workers were the sorts of people that were low public sector earners. Now they're still low earners but without public sector benefits. All the while they are paying for them through taxes.

    I'm only talking about my own experience here (I've worked for several London councils) but staff shortages has never been apparent. In fact quite the opposite. Though that may well be different in other parts of the country and in non-council areas of the public sector. And yes it has been a quick turn around in wages and deliberately so.

    I definitely feel sympathy for public sector workers who won't get what they signed up for. Though I doubt anyone near retirement age will be see a change. A new settlement will be worked out (almost certainly acrimoniously) and it won't leave people in a bad state. An average wage pension is more than many people get.

    I just think that those pension schemes were unfair to start with.

    Though as well as it being difficult to rely on statistics it's also impossible to speak in absolutes. Whatever happens/happened there will be some that are better/worse off.

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  6. And I think now might be the time for a property show based on caves. That might help me make my mind up...

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  7. 'A Cavern By The Sea' perhaps? Or 'Hollows Under the Hammer'.

    When I said "recruitment problems" I did not mean that there would be staff shortages, but that a large number of those people employed would be not permanent members of staff but instead would be agency staff or contractors (who of course were paid more than a directly employed member of staff).

    In my experience working in Local Government (also in London), prior to the current financial crisis the number of applicants to any given job would be so low that a choice of half a dozen applications to read through would be quite good. If you got double figures to choose between that would be a noteworthy success. Quite often everyone who applied and met the minimum criteria of the job would be offered an interview no matter how good their actual CV was because they were needed to make up the numbers in order to make the interview process look remotely fair. Jobs with no applicants were not unheard of. As a result it's not uncommon for 25-30% of the staff to be agency or contractors. I once worked in a team of seven people where only two were council employees.

    This has of course changed now and today some adverts can draw dozens of applicants, even though the pay has not increased.

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  8. Perhaps Relo-cave-tion, relo-cave-tion.

    I guess our experiences have differed quite a bit. I've always known a lot of temps at councils but they've been for short term projects or due to clever budget fiddling.

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