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.

There's a Lot of Miles Between Tripoli and Islington

There has been little else but Libya on the news now for what seems like weeks. Part of the reason there has been so much coverage is that news hounds love it: big news, real news, hard news, good news. I mean bad news. You know what I mean.

Remind me how it all started, could you? Was it tuition fees? Or cuts to community groups? Has Gaddafi been laying off civil servants left, right and centre?

Oh no, hold on. I remember. It's the 40 years of brutal disenfranchisement, people being made to disappear, systematic use of torture to quell dissidents of a government that controls every aspect of their lives.

Those other things, the cuts and fees and that, they were why Islington town hall was 'stormed' in some 'direct action' last week.

As you can perhaps tell by the use of language such as 'storm' these protesters are taking themselves very seriously. They sense revolution is in the air and they are the vanguard.

Yet it is not really revolution that they're after. Laurie Penny's latest New Statesman article compares the struggle of anti-cuts protesters in the UK to those opposing Colonel Gaddafi in Libya. Part of her comparison focuses on how both groups are fighting for self-determination. That the causes are separated only by scale not substance.

Utter nonsense. There is no similarity in substance either. Protesters are using rights they have to demonstrate their unhappiness at their government's action. In Libya the government can not truly be called 'their' government as neither they nor any other resident had anything to do with its formation. I nearly said citizen instead of resident but that would imply they have rights which they do not.

In fact, if you were a bit of a wag there's a different comparison you could make. The protest groups in Britain are 100 per cent certain that their cause is just and that everyone agrees with and loves them. This means they are justified in taking whatever action is necessary to win. Who in the Middle East does that sort of self aggrandisement compare with?

In reality the protests in this country are about maintaining the status-quo. A status-quo that led to Britain having a massive budget deficit that could no longer be maintained once the world economy collapsed. Whether your vote for the Lib Dems was miscast or not (as of course it would have been under any electoral system) more people voted for them and the Tories than for Labour. Not that Labour wouldn't have been cutting away at expenditure either. They just decline to tell us where.

Being able to accept electoral defeat is part of living in a democracy. Campaign in the meantime and in a few years you'll be able to vote once again.

In Libya the people are braving terrible danger to try to gain the right to vote. That is the fight for self-determination.

But still, who cares? That's just my point of view, which I'm as free to write here as Penny was free to write her's in the New Statesman. And protest all you like. Go to council meetings, make your voice heard. You're allowed.

While doing so try to remember that this is the right that people in Libya are fighting for. Not a policy issue. If they lose the survivors won't be able to do anything about it. You will. You just have to wait till the next election. As there will always be another election in this country you could say that you can never be completely defeated.

How's that for solidarity?

Liar Liar Pants on Fire!

There seems to be quite a lot of hyperbole going around these days.

Sorry, did I say 'quite a lot'. I meant 'more hyperbole than there has ever been ever!'

If a football club loses a game they are in crisis. When it snows the country is in chaos. When a journalist writes something you don't like they're a ridiculous liars but what else could you expect from the likes of them!

It can be quite tiring hearing that everything that happens is the most extreme example of it's kind since records began but now that I'm more used to Arsenal losing and the snow has left us for the time being it's the inability to have a grown-up debate about the news that is irritating me the most these days.

Most of these attacks come from the blogosphere. Here people seem to spend a large amount of time reading newspapers that they know they won't agree with. This way they can then write a fatuous blog stating in no uncertain terms that everything in the paper is made up and only idiots read it.

The recent outrage and counter outrage over Harriet Harman's comments about heroic immigrants sending their dole money abroad is a good example.

Probably unsurprisingly this story broke in the Daily Mail with Tim Shipman giving us the 'facts' and Melanie Phillips telling us Harman is 'immoral'.

Fair enough wouldn't you say? A news article with a few comments, mostly from Tories but it's not like anyone is deceived as to the political slant of the Mail. Anyway, the story is about something a prominent Labour person has said so a Tory response is in line with standard journalistic practice.

Not according to the Angry Mob blog it isn't.

Angry Mob is a website devoted to pointing out the daily lies written by the Mail. In their article More Lies About Immigrants the Shipman article is portrayed as completely misrepresenting Ms Harman's statement. The key area of discussion was whether she was pleased immigrants were sending job seekers allowance back home or whether they were sending home part of their earnings which included benefits for low income earners.

Angry Mob was not interested in dissecting the Mail's argument that if you are on income support or housing benefit you shouldn't have enough money left over to send any home and that the real hero is the unassuming British tax payer who is now funding social security in Africa as well. They just claimed that the Mail made it all up and Ms Harman said nothing of the sort.

This is a shame because the Mail's argument is pretty easy to pull apart. If people are receiving benefit for being on a low income then they are employed, paying tax, doing a job no Brit wants to do. If they can scrape by and send a few quid home then they are epitomizing the selfless behaviour the Mail now believes is lacking in our society.

Whether you agree with that or not, it is the argument that could be made. It is certainly the argument Ms Harman would make. After all, she did say that people could be on child benefit or tax credits while sending money home. She does not think it immoral, she thinks it heroic and was brave enough to say what she thought.

Political debate is certainly not aided by pretending that everything is a distortion just because it is accompanied by some opinion.

Perhaps if we could all just grow up and have a discussion about the issues rather than believing that everything is some sort of conspiracy people might engage again with politics.

Not that Sort or Fair....

Fair is a strange word. It can mean a lot of things. From fair-dinkum to the fair sex the dictionary is packed with meanings for this four letter word.

You'd think that having a word with so many meanings would be very useful and I suppose it is. The problems start when the same definition means different things to different people.

George Osborne obviously has a different view of what is fair to Alan Johnson. Although it took a while to notice as Johnson seemed more concerned with cracking jokes during his response to yesterday's spending review.

Fairness is quite similar to irresponsible in that the two main parties seem to disagree over what it means. Yesterday in Parliament Ed Miliband branded the governments plans for cutting the deficit an 'irresponsible gamble' during the warm up act of PMQ's. Others might think it is irresponsible for the government of the day to run up a huge budget deficit.

Responsibility could also do with having its definition clarified. Yesterday Johnson seemed somewhat reluctant to accept that the previous Labour administration was responsible for the state of the countries finances.

Deciding to ignore the fact that it was the budget deficit that was being discussed Johnson made the claim that it was a "myth" that the last government was to blame for the global economic crisis. Not just any myth but "the most incredible myth" pushing Heracles in to second place.

Seeing as the Tories were unlikely yo have regulated the banks any better than them this could be seen as fair. Here he is implying that the new bogeyman of the left, the banker from Deal or No Deal, is responsible and that Labour's handling of the economy was sound.

The problem with this argument goes back to Gordon Brown promising that there would be no return to boom and bust. If there's never going to be another "bust" you've got nothing to worry about have you? Spend all you like. Unfortunately not everything is within a governments control. Whatever your definition of irresponsibility is bankers were definitely it.

The consequences of this are still a painful memory. That point when we all learned that numbers went higher than we previously thought and the government was giving that much away in sterling to people you wouldn't buy a used car from.

Labour seem to blame the budget deficit on the bail out and none of this nasty cutting business would be necessary if we weren't in so much debt because of it.

This isn't true. The deficit is how much the government has to borrow to meet its spending commitments each year.

Brown's administration was basing its spending on forecast growth. Essentially what this means is that the economy was getting bigger so we could spend more money. Even if the economy hadn't reached that size yet it was going to so why worry? After all, boom and bust was a thing of the past, right? Right?

Wrong. The global nature of the crash meant that no-one was safe. When the banks' irresponsibility caught up with them (and us) the economy shrunk, growth was recalculated and we could afford what we'd already spent. By spending so much money that it didn't have and relying on cheap foreign credit Britain was in a weaker position than it needed to be.

Labour's alternative to all these cuts is to trim the budget deficit rather than balance the books. This is exactly the same blinkered attitude. It would undoubtedly be okay as long as everything remained as it is. But if it doesn't, if there is some other international crisis Britain, would be in a truly terrible position.

The Observer's leading article last week urged Osborne to "think globally" before making cuts. Their argument is that the apparently inevitable trade war between China and the US will mean that Britain won't be in a good position to export goods and therefore the private sector won't be able to create jobs. Possibly true. However, a truly international perspective here would reveal that Britain had better get rid of her budget deficit fast.

The reason behind the tension between the US and China is that China has been manipulating her currency so that it can produce cheap goods for export. One of these goods is credit. This has boosted China's economy and weakened America's. Now America wants goods to be produced in the good ol' US of A and not to import so much.

This will all lead to a protectionist stand off that could affect on the price of global credit and cost Britain a fortune. It won't then be a question of what to cut, everything will be cut to the extent that yesterday's cuts will seem generous.

I'm sure that's the definition of something though not everyone will agree of what.