Ed does some explaining

Always keen to explain himself to the faithful is Ed

For example "On the welfare sanctions revolt"- For the benefit of those who may not know what "the welfare sanctions revolt is" that is a reference to 40 Labour MPs defying the party whip and voting against the jobseekers (back to work schemes) bill when it got its second reading in the Commons in the middle of March, when the Labour Whips, on Ed's say so, had ordered Labour MPs not to vote against this emergency government legislation aimed at blocking compensation payments for people who were illegally sanctioned for not taking part in work experience programmes.
  
    I think it’s useful to explain the decision we made.

Explain away Ed ....
  
    I’m concerned, Liam is concerned, about the people who are wrongly sanctioned.
 
"Wrongly sanctioned - as in "had a sanction applied to them that was say, illegal, because there was no legislative basis for it"?

    We’ve got to protect that – we did that by protecting people’s appeal rights.
 
So you made sure that anyone who felt they had been wrongly, unfairly or even illegally sanctioned "could appeal against it".  By not voting you did that?  Well done you.
  
    Secondly there’s an issue around the massive increase in sanctions. Iain Duncan Smith denies there’s targets – it turns out there are targets – we’ve got to have an independent review of that.
 
So you are determined to get to the bottom of this "targets" business;  are there, or aren't there explicit or even implicit targets whereby "any excuse will do as a reason for dishing out a sanction"? ... By not voting you ensured there would be that fully independent review? Well done you.

    But then you come to the question “Should we vote against all of the sanctions that have been applied under the work programme?”, almost all of them since 2011, and I didn’t think that was right.
 
Now I am not entirely sure I follow that line of thinking Ed - In the Appeal case that you are apparently referring to the Judges didn't say "sanctions per se are illegal" they said "the sanctions issued under this particular scheme were illegal, because the scheme hadn't been correctly drafted".

You have said it was important to ensure there was a right of appeal for people who are sanctioned, you said you are concerned about the rapid rise in the number of people being sanctioned and believing this is the result of operating to some "sanctions" target yet, when it came to the matter of someone having appealed against the way the system was used against them, and the Courts having sided with that person and declared that their being sanctioned was illegal, because the scheme hadn't been properly and legally drawn up, and actually anyone sanctioned under those non existent powers had been illegally sanctioned and would be entitled to receive any JSA that had been withheld from them, illegally, you and your party obligingly "abstain" - never mind vote against - so a government Bill can be rushed through to make sure all those illegally sanctioned people get nothing, and then excuse that by claiming that it was important to endorse the idea of sanctions and their use.
  
    And I take full responsibility for the decisions we made. I think Liam [Byrne] is doing an excellent job. I think he is both emphasising responsibility – which does matter to us – but also showing the importance of compassion in the system. And that’s why he’s campaigning as he is on the bedroom tax. As for the colleagues who took a different view, I understand why they were angry about what the Tories had done, but I felt we took the right decision and I still feel we took the right decision.”
 
Righty oh Ed.  So just to be clear - people can appeal against being sanctioned and having their benefits removed, and the Labour party is fully behind them having the right to appeal but if they succeed the Labour party also fully supports the appeal judgement being ignored, and if necessary changing the law retrospectively to make sure it is, and they still get nothing.  Yeah, come to think of it, that is cockeyed enough to be immediately recognisable as a well thought through policy line.
   
If Labour do get in in 2015 I think we can safely assume they'll take up and run all these schemes they are forever declaring are wrong and unfair much more effectively than the present shower.  

Polishing a turd

Bob E brings us an update on how the Blue & Red Wings of The Daily Mail party are competing to see who can be 'tougher on welfare scroungers'. From The Guardian:

The government's welfare reform minister has suggested lone parents, sickness claimants and other people on benefits are too comfortable not having to work for their income, saying they are able to "have a lifestyle" on the state...

"The incapacity benefits[sic], the lone parents, the people who are self-employed for year after year and only earn hundreds of pounds or a few thousand pounds, the people waiting for their work ability assessment then not going to it – all kinds of areas where people are able to have a lifestyle off benefits and actually off conditionality," the Conservative peer said...

But what is this - could it be a turd attacking a turd? It is!

Liam Byrne, the shadow work and pensions secretary, said: "The nasty party is well and truly back. This government has comprehensively failed to get Britain back to work and frankly it's a disgrace that ministers now choose to kick people when they are down rather than even pretend to offer a helping hand."

Suffering from Short Memory Syndrome again, is our Liam, it seems ... someone ask him who first gave this person, sorry nasty person, a platform to have his nasty views translated into government policy? I wonder if that Beeb hagiography from 2009 gives us any clues..?

Sir David was hired by ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair to draw up a review of the welfare system, and in 2007 proposed opening up the system to the private sector as well as requiring lone parents to seek work earlier.

His suggestions were initially shelved amid reports of opposition from Gordon Brown, but he was hired again by Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell in 2008 to work on a welfare green paper. That paper called for measures to get more disabled people and lone parents into work, and was backed by the Conservatives while outraging many on the Labour left.

In response, the Tories promised a "full-blooded version" of Sir David's proposals, and criticised the government's implementation of them as "half-hearted". Should the party form the next government, Sir David will now be in an even stronger position to make sure they are true to their word.
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It's also worth noting at this stage how these myths create themselves. The Tories originally proposed - quite sensibly to my mind - to cap Housing Benefit at a very generous £400 per household per week, this then turned into a general cap of £500 on all benefits.

Clearly, short of outright fraud, no workless household receives anywhere near £500 a week in cash benefits*, so they then declared that Housing Benefit would be capped at £500 minus cash benefits received, which also seems more than fair. The landowners squealed at this loss of lovely subsidies. The Guardianistas were waving shrouds at the tops of their voices. My view was if a simple policy proposal like that can simultaneously piss off two groups of rent seekers, it's got to be a good thing.

So far so good, but there now appears to be a general assumption that all welfare claimants receive more than £500 a week in benefits, see e.g. Metro Reader's letters (21 November 2012, pages 14-15), which is quite simply not true. I quote:

I find it immoral that someone who chooses to drop out of school at the age of 16 and spend the rest of their days being looked after by the state can have £500 a week handed to them, while another young person who decides to stay on in education and go to college or university while holding down a part-time job, is lucky if they can make more than £400 a week.

While I have every sympathy with people who do the right thing (scrapping taxes on income and having universal benefits would help them enormously), the proverbial 16-year old school leaver is "entitled to" Employment and Support Allowance of £56.25 a week, a nice cosy place on a housing waiting list and all manner of grief and hassle.

* Entitledto tells us that e.g. an unemployed couple with three kids gets £111 Income Support, £165 Child Tax Credits and £47 Child Benefit per week = £323 per week. That leaves £177 a week for rent, £770 a month, which happens to be slightly more than the overall average rent paid for private housing in the UK.

Youth unemployment

Labour politician Liam Byrne had the temerity to claim on Radio 4 this morning that youth unemployment had increased by one million rather than to one million under the Tories, as the figure is one million this would imply that there had been no youth unemployment when Labour were in government.

Far from it.

As the chart from here shows, things had been getting steadily worse since 2001 or thereabouts (under Labour), there was a huge leap in 2008 (under Labour) and the number has 'only' increased by about 100,000 under the Tories.That increase will not come as a surprise to anybody who can remember the rules of thumb that a 1% hike in VAT leads to an increase in unemployment of 100,000 (so all things being equal, the 2.5% increase eleven months ago = 250,000 jobs lost, which the extra 2% NI makes worse); and that unemployment increases fastest for new entrants to the jobs market, i.e. for 16-17 year olds, chart from here:There's another interesting chart over at Migration Watch giving another possible explanation, bearing in mind there was net migration last year of 252,000.

Liam Byrn-onomics

From The Metro:

Cuts in housing benefit that come into effect today will help reduce private sector rents, the government claims. The maximum housing benefit payment will be cut from 50 per cent of average rents to 30 per cent to save £1 billion from the £22 billion annual bill...*

With 40 per cent of all private rents paid for by housing benefit - 4 million homes** - Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith believes the move could reverse rent rises. 'What we do has a big effect on the cost of the rental market,' he said in an interview with Metro.

'Many workers commute for three hours a day to get to work and back,' he said 'while thos on benefits are living in homes they could not dream of affording in Chelsea and Kensington and it is simply not fair.'

Shadow work and pensions secretary Liam Byrne said the system needs to change by insists landlords won't cut rents in response to the changes.

IDS is hamming it up a bit, but by and large he talks sense. Housing Benefit is a rent subsidy, and as housing is in fixed supply at any location, all the subsidy is push up prices, in many cases beyond that which a normal worker (who does not qualify for housing benefit) can afford it (in effect, the rate of tax on that worker's income is in excess of 100%).

Now, my dear Faux Libertarian chums - do you agree with IDS' predictions or with Liam Byrne's predictions? Which of the two understands the free market better?

Consider this - a tax is the opposite of a subsidy, so if you agree with IDS, you agree that reducing a subsidy reduces the rent and the reduction in the subsidy is borne by the landlords almost in its entirety. So conversely, increasing the tax on housing (i.e. Council Tax or the income tax rate on rental income) cannot possibly increase total rents (rent + Council Tax) and any tax increase is borne in its entirety by the landlord (similarly, reducing the tax on housing does not lead to a reduction in rents); unless you genuinely believe that a tax and a subsidy (which are opposites) can have the same effect on the prices charged.

* Not actually true - the total cost of Housing Benefit paid to private landlords is about a third of that, call it £7 billion, which explains why this measure will only save £1 billion or so.

** Not true either, about 3 million households rent privately, so 40 per cent of that is 1.2 million.

More Tory gimmicks, Labour lies

From the BBC:

The public could be offered discounted shares in state-owned banks under a "people's bonus" plan outlined by Tory shadow chancellor George Osborne. Mr Osborne told the Sunday Times: "The bankers have had their bonuses. We want a people's bank bonus for the people's money that was put into these organisations."

It was expected people would be offered shares worth between a few hundred and few thousand pounds at a discount on the market price, the paper reported. There could be extra discounts for young people, low-income families and parents saving for their children...(1)

"The man who would be chancellor wants a new generation of mass share ownership," said BBC business correspondent Joe Lynam, "And he wants to create a new culture of saving rather than borrowing."(2)

... Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liam Byrne said: "When it comes to the shares in the banks the public expect us to focus on getting their money back.(3) That means selling them at a time and way that maximises their value, not an irresponsible and expensive political gimmick."

RBS and Lloyds shares are currently worth about a third of the prices paid by the government.(4)

1) Hang about here. Taxpayer's money has been used to prop up banks, how about giving taxpayers x shares in RBS or Lloyds for every £100 tax they pay in the next couple of years, that seems to be the fairest way of repairing the damage.

2) I'll come back to the 'savings culture' later on, this is more lies and spin.

3) That's the beauty of plc's - it doesn't matter who owns them. If I, as a taxpayer, get given a few hundred RBS or Lloyds shares (see 1), then it's my decision whether and when to sell them. As like as not I'd dump them on Day One, but others may wish to hold on to them, and if they later sell them at a profit, well good luck to them :)

4) OK, the government cheerfully and deliberately pissed £30 billion of taxpayers' finest up the wall to try and keep the credit and house price bubbles inflated (rather than letting the banks sort themselves out via debt-for-equity swaps), does that not smack of 'expensive political gimmick' to anybody? Sure, the Tories don't really know a way out of this, but they've been given the shitty end of the stick - there is no longer a 'right' answer (short of doing what I said in 1) above).

History repeating itself ...

Bayard left this comment on my post "If David Cameron had a pledge card...":

'Twas ever thus. Twenty or so years ago my mother was on the County Council and she was always complaining that the Tories "fiddled around the edges", making lots of little cuts to lots of little budgets, but leaving all the big stuff untouched. Maximum perceived action, minimum actual effect.

Which links in nicely to George Osborne's latest bright ideas:

The Conservatives would start to cut public spending straight away if they won the General Election, shadow chancellor George Osborne has said... he said spending on advertising and tax credits for people earning more than £50,000 would be cut. He also identified child trust funds for better-off families as an area where savings could be made.

Sure, we can save maybe a billion quid by scrapping government advertising. A good start. But the 'savings' to be made by cutting tax credits and child trust funds (whether or not you agree in principle) for 'higher earners' (as defined) would amount to £10 million or £100 million (total Tax Credits paid out £15 billion-odd, times random small percentage), and you'd have to net off the extra admin and hassle of clawing it back. So, having had years to think about it, he's come up with plans to reduce the annual public sector deficit by slightly less than one per cent.

Liam Byrne is on top form, managing yet again to contradict himself several times in one short soundbite:

Responding to the speech, Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liam Byrne said in his "rush to cut spending, George Osborne would put the recovery in grave danger (1). But until he says how he'll do it (2) and whether he'll match Labour's pledge to halve the deficit in four years (3, 4), his speeches must be taken with a huge pinch of salt (5). This is yet another Tory speech which raises more questions than it answered (6)"

1) Does he seriously suggest that a sixth-of-one-per-cent reduction in government spending going to "put the recovery in grave danger"?

2) George Osborne did say exactly what he was planning to do.

3) Clearly, George isn't planning to "halve the deficit", which would mean reducing government spending by £50 billion to £100 billion (depending on what assumptions you make about future tax receipts).

4) From (1) we get the impression that Liam doesn't want spending to be cut. But then he suggests that his own government is going to cut spending by fifty times as much, see (3), suggesting that he does want spending to be cut. Has Liam made up his mind on this?

5) This government has managed to run out of salt, we're having to buy it back off the Germans.

6) See (2).

Twat Of The Day

Liam Byrne has risen to the exalted position of Chief Secretary to the Treasury, so it would be reasonable to expect him to have a basic grasp of bookkeeping, yes?

Nope:

Liam Byrne said Mr Cameron's comments would "set alarm bells ringing up and down Britain... He said he wants deeper, faster cuts than Labour, but then deepened the mystery about where the cash would come from. He said he wants to cut the deficit faster, but yet again he says nothing about how he'll do it."

Thus successfully contradicting himself three times in the space of three sentences, as well as betraying a complete lack of understanding about anything whatsoever.

Celebrating Britishness!

A lot of heated debate was inspired by this twattish suggestion. 

The weather was much too nice today to pursue our favourite leisure activity of watching telly all day, but in case it turns nasty, you can always turn on UKTV History and watch The World At War. Solid. For another two days. It's repeated on UKTV History +1 in case you miss anything.

And if the weather stays fine, how about helping some newer arrivals acclimatise by taking them to a beer garden or something, while Her Indoors accompanies their daughters on a shopping spree to buy some mini-skirts?

"Minister in British day blunder"

Priceless!

Scroll down to the end ...

The TUC is campaigning for a new bank holiday in late October, to break the run of 16 weeks without a holiday between August and Christmas.

This is one of those rare occasions where the TUC have got it spot on! How about 21st October?