The London Green Party's "fair fares" idea.

This idea has some appeal:

Our three key measures are:
* the phased introduction of a flat fare structure, making zones a thing of the past, with the immediate abolition of zones 6 and 4,
* justice for part-time workers, with a daily cap that matches the rates paid by monthly season ticket holders
* a new 'ONE Ticket' allowing changes across all modes to close the gaps for people who currently pay twice when changing from bus or train to the Tube as well as ensuring that people changing buses pay only once for their journey.

"It's not fair that people in outer London pay so much more to get to work in the centre of the city - especially as it's also easier for people in the centre of town to use even cheaper or free alternatives such as hire bikes, cycling or walking," says Sian Berry, the Green candidate for Mayor of London.

Instinctively, it makes sense to make people pay more if they travel longer distances, but with local transport, people aren't paying for the distance as such, they are paying to get to work, mainly in Zone 1 or 2, or to get into Zone 1 for an evening out or to go shopping.

Currently, annual season tickets cost this much:

Zone 1 only - £1,296
Zones 1-2 £1,296
Zones 1-3 £1,520
Zones 1-4 £1,860
Zones 1-5 £2,208
Zones 1-6 £2,364

That's pretty flat already - a journey within Zone 1 is probably less than a mile, from the outer reaches of Zone 6 into Zone 1 is about fifteen miles, but it only costs twice as much.

But people don't pay to sit or stand on a train or a bus. It's a burden rather than a pleasure.

You could easily argue that Zone 1-2 prices should be higher than Zone 1-6 prices. If Journey A gets a commuter into town in five or ten minutes, then that's a much better service that Journey B which takes three-quarters of an hour to get you into town. That's exactly the same as rents being higher nearer the middle of town - people are paying their landlord for shorter commute times; why not have them pay the body actually providing the transport?

But it would be interesting to see what happens if there were a flat season ticket price of averaged out £1,860 or something. I strongly suspect that the behaviour of people in Zones 2 to 3 would not change that much, they would just pay the extra £300 or £600. Perhaps a few people in Zone 1 would walk to work instead? I also doubt that a £350 or £500 annual saving would encourage many more people to commute in from Zone 5 or 6. The only way to find out is to do it.

Another thing worth mentioning is that Transport for London's income is roughly half ticket sales and half subsidies. Rental values are a function of ticket prices, so a subsidy to travel is a subsidy to landlords. If the subsidies were abolished, an annual season ticket would cost around £3,500 a year (wild guess).

That would push down rental values by the same amount, i.e. instead of a working couple paying £18,000 a year rent and £3,500 for two annual season tickets, they would end up paying £14,500 rent and £7,000 for tickets. This effect would be stronger near the centre and less so on the outskirts, so abolishing the subsidies would be an indirect and slightly crude form of Land Value Tax on London landowners, as well as being a corresponding saving for taxpayers everywhere else in the country. So win-win, I think.

Reader's Letter Of The Day

Things have come to a sorry pass when a Green Party candidate shows a better understanding of basic economic concepts like "opportunity costs" or "cost to the taxpayer" than the Tories (and just about everybody else).

From The Evening Standard:

Describing council rents as "subsidised" brings to mind cash payments to keep them low. But they're only subsidised in the sense that they're paying lower than private rents. It's like saying your energy bill is "subsidised" because you fixed a cheap deal.

Council tenants pay enough to meet the cost of building and maintaining their homes. Any up-front subsidy to build the homes is paid off in the long run through rents and benefit savings. Private rents are so high because the tenants pay the equivalent costs many times over, as landlords profits from rip-off rents and house price rises.

The unfairness isn't well-off council tenants enjoying a low rent that meets landlords' costs, it's private tenants being ripped off. We need rent controls and more social housing, not George Osborne's politics of envy.

Toim Chance, prospective Green Party mayoral candidate.

I'm a land value taxer and see things the other way round. Clearly, social tenants aren't paying the government for the real value of what they 'enjoy', but at least they are paying something, unlike private landowners, be they owner-occupiers, private landlords or land speculators.

Green Party on top form.

From Professional Pensions:

The Green party wants to halve the amount of tax relief given on pension contributions to fund a non-contributory ‘citizen’s pension’.

In its manifesto, published today, the party said tax relief amount to a "£40bn pound government subsidy" for a failed pension system.

It said: "The performance of the private pensions industry is dismal - the total paid out in private pensions each year is no more than the subsidy that the government gives the industry."

The Greens said they would halve the amount paid out in tax relief and would further limit the annual allowance to make the sure more of the subsidy went the low paid.

It's almost as if they have been reading this 'blog... (plenty of others from left to right have said the same thing, of course, there's no copyright in facts).

Friday night gearchange

The Green PBB is a wonderful spoof of a boyband video, and true to form, includes not one but two completely tacky gear changes at 2 min 20 and 2 min 37.



The basic tenet, that all the big parties are much the same is a valid point as well, of course, but Nigel Farage has been saying that for years.

At which stage we go around the clock: UKIP accuse the Greens of being the same as the big parties and the Greens accuse UKIP of being the same as the big parties etc.

"Critics have said it could cost £280 billion"

From the BBC:

Every adult in Britain would be paid a basic income regardless of wealth or earnings, the Green Party will say in a commitment to appear in its manifesto.

But Natalie Bennett, the party's leader in England and Wales, told the BBC a Citizens' Income of £72 a week would take time to implement...

Critics have suggested it could cost £280bn.

That depends how you define 'cost'.

The total amount nominally paid out (including lower amounts to children and double that amount to pensioners) plus running costs, fraud and error would be approximately £280 bn. Nobody's disputing that.

It would all be 'paid for' by scrapping an equal and opposite amount of existing state pension/welfare payments and tax reliefs (notably the tax-free personal allowances for income tax and NIC) and reducing running costs, fraud and error. (Housing Benefit and disability related benefits would continue for the time being) In other words, the cash 'cost' is exactly the same as the current system. That's the whole point.

It would take no time at all to implement; for pensioners and children we use the existing system as for state pensions and child benefit; existing welfare claimants continue claiming what they are getting (but in return they get a BR tax code so pay full income tax and NIC on all their earnings, if any).

The majority of adults who are in work just get an appropriately higher personal allowance (i.e. £72.40 x 52 ÷ 32% = £11,765) but no cash paid out (it nets off with the PAYE they would have had deducted). There's a bit of faff with people who less than the new higher personal allowance, but it is a lot less faff that the existing system, in particular working tax credits.

There will be a few winners and losers, but we are talking relatively few people affected and relatively small gains or losses. A really simple system like this is inevitably slightly less 'progressive' or redistributive than the current system because on the whole, low to middle earners are likely to gain at the expense of non-earners, but so what?

The only debates to be had are whether £72.40 per week is too low or too high; what to do with Housing Benefit; and whether we ought to start tinkering with 'transitional measures' for the small number of people who end up with less money in the short term.

Job done.

George Monbiot talks sense: Shock

Spotted by MBK in The Guardian:

So where do we look for the idea that can make hope more powerful than fear? Not to the Labour party. If Ed Miliband cannot bring himself even to oppose a bill which retrospectively denies compensation to cheated jobseekers, the most we can expect from him is a low-alcohol conservatism of the kind that doused all aspiration under Tony Blair.

Last week I ran a small online poll, asking people to nominate inspiring, transfiguring ideas. The two mentioned most often were land value taxation and a basic income. As it happens, both are championed by the Green party.(1) On this and other measures, its policies are by a long way more progressive than Labour's.

I discussed land value taxation in a recent column. A basic income (also known as a citizen's income) gives everyone, rich and poor, without means-testing or conditions, a guaranteed sum every week. It replaces some but not all benefits (there would, for instance, be extra payments for pensioners and people with disabilities). It banishes the fear and insecurity now stalking the poorer half of the population. Economic survival becomes a right, not a privilege.

A basic income removes the stigma of benefits while also breaking open what politicians call the welfare trap. Because taking work would not reduce your entitlement to social security, there would be no disincentive to find a job – all the money you earn is extra income. The poor are not forced by desperation into the arms of unscrupulous employers: people will work if conditions are good and pay fair, but will refuse to be treated like mules. It redresses the wild imbalance in bargaining power that the current system exacerbates. It could do more than any other measure to dislodge the emotional legacy of serfdom. It would be financed by progressive taxation – in fact it meshes well with land value tax.(2)

1) And YPP of course, although for slightly different reasons.

2) As I said in the comments:

Yup, LVT and CI is an intellectually coherent match.

The gimmick being that people in the middle pay neither tax nor receive benefits as the two sides net off to zero. So it's like feudalism on its head, instead of The One Per Cent collecting all the rent, interest and tax and people in the middle paying for it, the bottom half receive a small net payment from the people willing and able to occupy the best locations.

Short List

1. The leader of the Green Party of England & Wales was born in Australia.

2. The leader of the Australian Labour Party was born in Wales.

3. They are both women.

4. The leader of the Welsh independence/nationalist party Plaid Cymru is also a woman, but sadly appears to have no link with Australia at all.

Your challenge is to decide who's on the list and then to name or define it.

"There was no UKIP candidate, so I voted Green"

Our local UKIP branch chairman recently reminded me that there was going to be a Parish council by-election in my ward, but I assumed that he was going to sort out the paperwork and he assumed that I would. Suffice to say, I didn't get my name on the ballot paper.

I was doing my pre-Xmas tidy today, which consists mainly of opening unsolicited mail and chucking it in the recycling when I stumbled across the voting cards for me and the Mrs.

Oh dear, I thought, I even forgot to vote! But lo and behold, the election was being held today, so en route to somewhere else this evening, I fulfilled my democratic duty. I lit up my usual rollie on the way, which usually lasts me from my front door to the train station. The polling station is half way between my house and the train station, so I politely asked the two gentlemen sitting outside (the ones with the rosettes sitting on plastic chairs who ask for your voting card on the way out) whether there was an ash tray handy for me to park it.

I'm afraid not, replied the younger of the two, but I can hold it for you. Result. The chap behind the desk handed me my ballot paper and solemnly informed me that I could cast no more than two votes. Once at the polling booth (about two paces away from the desk and not even curtained off) I looked at the ballot paper and established that there were only three candidates on the paper - two Conservatives and one Green Party. Short of spoiling my ballot paper, this left me with little choice.

On the way out, I was duly assailed by the two gentlemen on plastic chairs, who went through the usual routine. I merrily handed over my voting card and answered their question. The younger man with the blue rosette gave me a sour look and handed back my rollie. The older man with the green rosette was slightly taken aback but said 'Thank you' anyway.

All your National Minimum Wage jobs are belong to us!

Fun Online Poll

Who will you vote for* in the 2010 General Election?

* Yes, I know that should be "For whom will you vote..?"

The voting system at EU elections - the 'multi-member constituency'

This week's Fun Online Poll shows a clear preference for multi-member constituencies (only a minority support staying with first-past-the-post, see in particular these results). As it happens, multi-member constituencies form the basis of the d'Hondt voting system which is used for the elections to the EU Parliament, due again next Thursday, 4th June 2009, so we can cover both topics in on go.

(AFAIAA, the EU elections work on the basis of party lists, but this is not necessary. We could tweak it that each party puts up as many named candidates as it wants and everybody votes once for a single, named candidate, with each party's seats being allocated to their candidates in order of the number of votes they achieved personally.)

It's quite a neat system, actually, but the way the system is usually explained, while correct, is rather tortuous, so here's my crash-course in forecasting the results for any particular UK constituency, using the likely vote shares reported by PoliticalBetting a couple of weeks ago*:

1. Set up a spreadsheet, with parties and their votes in the left hand column (total votes do not add up to 100%, but that's the way they were reported). You don't have to arrange them in descending order, but it makes it a bit easier later on.

2. Type in the numbers 1 to 6 across the top of the columns, which is enough to cover most constituencies (unless the leading party gets a much, much larger share of the votes cast).

3. Divide each party's votes by the number in the top of each column (for example, Lib Dem, get 14% of the votes, so the result in the column headed '4' is 3.5%. Whether you use 14% or 140,000 votes out of 1,000,000 is irrelevant).

4. Allocating seat is then easy - you just look for the biggest X numbers, where X is the number of seats in the constituency. I've allocated the first ten seats because the largest UK constituency at the EU elections (the 'South East', excl. London) has ten seats (pdf); Northern Ireland and the North East, with much smaller populations only have three each. I've shaded the ten biggest numbers grey to make it easier to visualise:

The Tories get the first seat (28%); Labour get the next one (20%); then UKIP (15%); the next two go to the Tories and Lib Dem (14% each); then Greens (11%); then Labour (10%); then Tories (9.3%); then UKIP (7.5%); and finally Lib Dem (7%, assuming they manage to just pip the Tories by a fraction of a per cent).

Final result:
Tories: 28% of the vote, 30% of the seats
Labour: 20% of the vote, 20% of the seats
UKIP: 15% of the vote, 20% of the seats
Lib Dem: 14% of the vote, 20% of the seats
Greens: 11% of the vote; 10% of the seats

This worked example produces a 'fair' result, but noticeably 'fairer' to the Lib Dems than anybody else (unless the Tories had just beaten them to the final seat, in which case the Tories would have been laughing), but that's the fun part - smaller parties prefer larger constituencies (the more seats there are, the closer the relationship between % share of the vote and % share of the seats) but it helps you, relatively speaking, if your party is awarded the final seat...

For example, in this constituency, it would have suited UKIP if there were only three seats (they would have achieved 33% of the seats for only 15% of the vote) and it would have suited  Labour if there were only six seats (they would have achieved 33% of the seats with only 20% of the vote). With the benefit of hindsight, the Tories would have preferred the constituency to only have five seats (in which case they would have achieved 40% of the seats for only 28% of the votes), and so on.

I expect to spend the evening of Sunday 7 June in front of the telly with a lap-top while I process all this in real time.

I trust that this is of assistance, and remain.

* The results published today are far more interesting...

Question Time: The EU & international terrorism

I don't normally watch QT, but Nigel was on yesterday so I gave it a whirl. Towards the end, either Caroline Lucas (of the Green Party) or Caroline Flint (of the Labour Party) was saying that one of the reasons the UK needed to be in the EU was because it somehow helped in the fight against international terrorism.

Hmm.

At the risk of generalising, as I don't have time or inclination to research all this down in infinite detail...

Let's look at places in Western Europe that aren't in the EU; that's the Isle of Man, Channel Islands, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland. Hotbeds of international terrorism? Nope. Austria joined the EU as recently as 1995, was it the epicentre of international terrorism before that? Nope.

Now, think about the countries where most terrorists live. The UK is probably top of the list due to its open-door immigration policies for people from Somalia and Pakistan, for example (and due to France waving them all through Sangatte), but Germany and Spain (and maybe The Netherlands) rank fairly high as well. If a terrorist with an EU passport rocks up at the border of another EU country, they more or less have to let him in (unless it's a dangerous lunatic like Geert Wilders, of course).

From the point of view of all the other countries, they'd probably be safer from terrorism if the UK left, to be honest, as then they'd be able to turn back people they didn't like the look of, even if they were waving a British passport.

It's the way I ask 'em ...

One reason to be suspicious of referenda is that the result can depend largely on how the question is phrased.

I doubt whether there is any huge groundswell of support for proportional representation (quite which type is the least-bad is another topic*) in this country (and I can't say that the topic excites me greatly), but if you turn the logic on its head and ask "If we had Proportional Representation, would you vote for... a) Either Conservative or Labour, or b) One of the other parties" it seems that only fifteen per cent would still vote for one of the two parties who have taken turns in running the country for the best (worst?) part of a century (and whose policies largely overlap).

Surely, if there were little or no support for PR (but it were introduced anyway) then those who oppose it in principle would be morally obliged to cast their votes for either Labour or The Tories to preserve the status quo? Or have I missed something?
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So the next question is, "If we had Proportional Representation, which system would you prefer?"

Vote here, or use the widget in the sidebar.
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* I'm all in favour of merging all existing constituencies into dual-constituencies. Everybody then gets one vote and can vote for one candidate (who may belong to a party or be independent). One seat per constituency is allocated on a first-past-the-post basis. The other seats are allocated as 'top-up-seats' to parties (or lists or alliances etc), so that each party's share of the total seat allocation ends up being proportional to their share of the national vote, with the top-up seats being allocated to unsuccessful candidates on the basis of how many votes they achieved personally. Everybody then has two constituency MPs whom they can badger, which gives us a bit of competition between them as to who better serves his or her constituents.

An ideal topic for a Fun Online Poll!

It strikes me that the choice is not so much between First-Past-The-Post and some form of Proportional Representation, but between a rotating two-party dictatorship and ... something else (whatever that ends up being).

If we end up not liking that 'something else', we can just vote for whichever of the two largest parties comes closer to our own views (and there's surprisingly little difference between them, actually).

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll: If we had Proportional Representation, would you vote for one of the two big parties or would you vote for one of the smaller ones?

Vote here or use widget in the sidebar.

Pilot ships and tug boats

Gregg Beaman (fellow libertarian Ukipper) asks, in the context of the Nulab rout in Henley:

As in 1997, when Blair trounced Major, and 1979 when Thatcher trounced Callaghan, there seems to be a fundamental change of mood in the country with the Conservatives benefitting. Are we destined to be stuck in a two party rotating dictatorship for good?

Probably yes. But that is not the point. If everybody who cared about anything just threw in the towel, or indeed threw in their hand with Nulab or Blulab, then we can say goodbye to democracy for good.

I see the two large parties as ships (albeit big, stupid, corrupt ships) that have to be guided and goaded into 'harbour' by smaller, more nimble vessels. The Greens, despite their relative lack of electoral success, have managed to brainwash everybody - Dave The Chameleon included - into this whole MMGW nonsense; quite what they gain from this is not clear to me, once it becomes clear that the whole thing is a scam. The BNP might be despicable, but the people who vote for them are not - the BNP primarily get the 'anti-politics' vote and, hopefully, as soon as Nulab-Blulab get the message that unlimited immigration and pandering to minority groups is not the answer (to whatever the question was) the BNP will fade from the scene.

And UKIP? We are chipping and kicking away at the EU. That the EU will one day implode is beyond dispute (I say this with neither glee nor sorrow), our job is to hasten that day. Whether UKIP will be able to benefit from the 'first mover advantage' when this happens is another topic. But no doubt Nulab-Blulab will divvy up all our brilliant policies between themselves and recapture the 'central ground'.

Ah well. Such is life.

* I can't be bothered thinking of an analogy for the LibDems, as they appear to have achieved the square root of f*** all for the past century or so. And LPUK are not on the public radar yet. Plus they have no sense of humour.

Siân Berry's drugs policies

I have ridiculed some of Siân's policies here and here, but in all fairness, the Green Party's drugs policies are pretty sound:

* Regulation and control over the sale of cannabis for medical and recreational use.
* A local democratic tax on cannabis sale, where the purchaser chooses a local project to receive a percentage of the profits.
* Licensed cannabis supply based on the Dutch coffee shop model.
* Decriminalising recreational drugs such as ecstasy and psychotropic mushrooms.
* Providing heroin on prescription as a route into a range of other consensual treatments.
* Improving information and health education relating to all drugs.
* A ban on advertising and sponsorship of tobacco, cannabis or other currently illegal drugs.

However, she doesn't mention cocaine or crack-cocaine. It's all well and good pointing out in your manifesto that "57 per cent of all crime and 80 per cent of burglary in the UK is to feed a heroin or crack drug habit", but if she says (quite sensibly) that heroin should be available on prescription, what about cocaine or crack-cocaine? Would they be available on prescription as well?

What she also doesn't mention is that the London Assembly has absolutely no authority whatsoever to implement such policies.

April fool

Anybody who votes for Siân Berry, Green Party candidate for London Mayor, who wants to give everybody free home insulation.

Er ... Siân, just remind me again, who's going to pay for it?