False comparison

I caught a bit of yesterday's Wales debate on BBC Parliament yesterday evening. Labour backbenchers were lining up to ask set piece questions about Tax Credits, which Peter Hain smugly answered as follows (Hansard, Column 860):

Tax credits have made work pay (1), lifted hundreds of thousands of people out of poverty (2), and encouraged people to get off benefits and into work (3).

1) Maybe Tax Credits do 'make work pay', but surely the main reason people go to work is to earn money? So it's the employer who 'makes work pay' by, er, paying wages.

2) Don't forget that the income-tax free personal allowance is only £6,475 (and the National Insurance threshold is even lower than that), so you start paying income tax and National Insurance (total 31% of your wages) long before you have reached a level which could be fairly considered to be 'out of poverty'. So the impact of this is the equal and opposite of 'making work pay' and pushes as many back into poverty as Tax Credits claim to lift out.

3) What he means is "encouraged people to get off out-of-work benefits and on to in-work benefits", if we see Tax Credits as a benefit rather than negative tax. Let's agree that people working rather than not working is usually A Good Thing for the sake of this discussion.

There is little correlation between Tax Credits and tax paid, but as ever, let me point out that a single earner claiming the 30-hour Tax Credits rate who is earning £195 a week is paying £23.45 a week in income tax and National Insurance and is, in theory, entitled to £23.14 a week in Tax Credits (TBMT, Table 1.1b).

That seems a bit of a long way round to me - would increasing the tax-free personal allowance/National Insurance threshold to £195 a week (or £10,140 a year) not be a better place to start?

More free publicity for the BNP

From the BBC:

"Mr Hain has written to BBC director general Mark Thompson arguing the BNP was "an unlawful body" following a court ruling on its membership policy. The BBC said it would respond to Mr Hain's letter "in due course"...

... in his letter, Mr Hain, a prominent anti-apartheid activist before becoming an MP, said the decision should be reconsidered in light of a legal case about ethnic restrictions on the BNP's membership rules. The party has agreed to amend its constitution after the Equalities and Human Rights Commission sought an injunction, claiming the BNP was breaking the Race Relations Act by restricting membership to "indigenous Caucasian" people...(1)

As well as Mr Griffin and Mr Straw, panellists are expected to include Conservative peer Baroness Warsi, Lib Dem home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne and playwright and critic Bonnie Greer (2).

*Ahem*

(1) The BNP's membership policy may well be in breach of the RRA (even though it can't be in breach of the Equality Bill because that is not enacted yet) and hence unlawful, but that does not make the entire organisation unlawful.

(2) Maybe I should write to the BBC myself and claim that my application to be Bonnie Greer was turned down because I am neither American, a woman, nor 'of African descent', in which case Ms Greer is also an 'unlawful organisation' and should be prevented from attending. Anyway, how many votes did she get at the last elections?

Man with orange face is let off the hook

Damn.

"Peter Hain resigns from Cabinet"

... "after his deputy leader campaign donations were referred to the Met Police."

That looks vaguely promising, but no doubt he'll be chairman of some quango or other on £100,000 p.a. for doing sweet f*** all within a few weeks. Or maybe they'll ship him off to the EU?