I misunderstood the first headline

From The Dail Mail, via MSN:

Minister calls petrol crisis a lesson in abandoning fossil fuels

I initially thought that somebody had seen sense and admitted that the petrol crisis is a good lesson in the futility and nigh-impossibility of abandoning fossil fuels, but I was sorely disappointed:

Environment minister Zac Goldsmith has said the ongoing petrol crisis is a 'good lesson' in the need for the dependence on fossil fuels to end.

But hopefully I haven't misunderstood the second headline, hinting that IDS actually cares about welfare recipients::

Ex-Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith launches a last ditch attempt to save £20-a-week Universal Credit uplift as he urges Boris Johnson to keep the extra cash in place over the winter.

Go IDS! If they want to cut the welfare bill, the first priority must be to phase out Housing Benefit for private tenants.

To all intents and purposes, the UK already has a UBI system

Here's a list of the main benefits and how many million claim each.

The categories overlap to some extent (some pensioners still do paid work, lower paid employees get WTC etc). The total number of claimants/recipients must be less than the total UK population, not more! And clearly there must be a million or two people who get nothing, but I struggle to think who they might be or why they are singled out.

The cash value of most of the working age benefits to one individual is in the order of £3,000 - £4,000 per year (transferable personal allowance is a lot less, SM/PP is much more, but for a shorter period, disability-related payments are much higher but those would be in addition to UBI, that's a job for the NHS not the DWP). Each has its own rules, rates and allowances, but they all come to the same thing. Seriously, why do they keep up the pretence, apart from creating jobs for civil servants?

Click to enlarge.

Well, yes and no.

From The Guardian:

It’s not true that Sweden offers an escape from the public health catastrophe.

Whether you count the March-April death spike as a 'public health catastrophe' or not is up to you, but whatever you call it, Sweden seems to be out of the woods and back to normal, with an average of about 3 covid-19 related deaths per day since the end of July, that's not even a bad 'flu season. What's done is done.

I only wish it did. But, and this is when conservative commentators, politicians and conspiracy theorists look away, Sweden offers an escape from the social catastrophe now engulfing us.

And why do we have a 'social catastrophe'? In the short term, it is because of the lock down, that's clearly an economic catastrophe, which has led to a social catastrophe.

You never hear the Telegraph or the Mail say that we need Swedish levels of sickness benefit to ensure that carriers stay at home and quarantine. Or Swedish levels of housing benefit to ensure that they aren’t evicted from those same homes.

The knights of the suburbs do not insist that the hundreds of thousands who will be thrown on the dole in the coming months need Swedish levels of unemployment benefit and an interventionist Scandinavian state to retrain them.

That's circular logic. If Sweden had done full lock down, they simply wouldn't have been able to afford their high levels of unemployment benefit and retraining programmes. They can only maintain this because so few people lost their jobs. The UK did full lock down, lost hundreds of billions in economic output, with related loss of tax revenues, put a million people out of work and wasted tens of billions in Furlough Scheme payments and other welfare payments. Conversely, if the UK had done a much softer Swedish style lock down, very few people would have lost their livelihood, so there would be little need for retraining programmes, and we could have afforded a more generous welfare system (like a UBI).
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It's also a diagonal comparison. It's the Guardian's job to slag off anything vaguely right-wing, fair enough, but what the nominally Conservative government is doing is pretty much the opposite of what the right-wing press are calling for. And the article doesn't bother addressing the actual topic in hand, whether Sweden was right to do a very soft lock down.

It's not a left-vs-right thing either, I commend Prof. Sunetra Gupta's article in The Evening Standard. She always looked at this from a scientific stand-point and said that lock downs were pointless back in April or May:

Professor Sunetra Gupta, who has been a leading critic of the cost of lockdown, says she welcomes the return of schools as children “if anything... would benefit from being exposed to this and other seasonal coronaviruses”.

Gupta, who is a professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford, told The Londoner that alongside huge social and educational benefits, the “evidence is mounting that early exposure to these various coronaviruses is what enables people to survive them”.

She rejected being bracketed with libertarian lockdown sceptics, saying her opposition came from the left. “I personally think that only thinking along the lines of eliminating coronavirus, without giving heed to the consequences on the disadvantaged young and globally, is a dereliction of our duties as global citizens”.
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Finally, there's this:

By not locking down in the spring, Sweden had a more protracted outbreak with far more deaths per capita than its neighbours. Admittedly, its death rate was not as bad as Britain’s. But then no European country had a death rate as bad as Britain’s because no other European country put the village idiot in charge.

Yes, we have the village idiots in charge, but the UK does not have the worst death rate. We are third-worst behind Belgium and Spain and only slightly worse than Italy or Sweden (ignoring micro-states).

Muddled argument for contributory benefits

Ryan Bourne writes a largely sensible article about immigration in City AM, marred by this diagonal comparison:

Indeed, the cost of immigration quotas can be seen with a simple example. Suppose an entrepreneur wanted to come to the UK and had the potential to build a business worth billions. Ludicrously, if he was number 100,001 that year, he’d be kept out.

That is the crassest diagonal comparison I have heard for ages and has no place in a sensible discussion. You could counter it with some nonsense like this:

Indeed, the benefit of immigration quotas can be seen with a simple example. Suppose an violent extremist wanted to come to the UK and had the potential to blow up a building worth billions. Conveniently, if he was number 100,001 that year, he’d be kept out.

There is a killer argument against Citizen's Income that says welfare payments should be contributory, i.e. you can only claim unemployment benefit if you have been working and paying tax for a minimum period and then are made redundant. This is economic nonsense but has a lot of political appeal. Worse still, it is cancelled out by the equal and opposite notion that welfare payments should be means tested, which is also economic nonsense with a lot of political appeal. (I suppose means-testing in turn is largely cancelled out by tax breaks for 'savings' which are also economic nonsense with a lot of political appeal...).

Anyway, returning to the article...

Ideally, this would mean lowering barriers to migration as broadly as possible but making the UK’s welfare system more contributory to avoid any welfare draw factors.

Complete bollocks.

Outside the EU, we can merrily restrict welfare payments to UK-resident British Citizens only (including or excluding immigrants who have been naturalised) or to those who have lived (or indeed worked) here legally for a set number of years, or make up any other conditions that keep the electorate happy. This test can be applied to non-contributory/universal benefits like a Citizen's Income, the right to vote or to use the NHS 'for free' etc.  just as much as it can be to contributory benefits.

Flowchart: Free early education, Working Tax Credits/Childcare element, Employer Supported Childcare or Tax Free Childcare?

In my capacity as number-cruncher for the Citizen's Income Trust, I have spent this weekend trying to get the bottom of all the overlapping schemes which various government bodies administer. To simplify things in my mind I had to create a flowchart.

The joke is that whichever route you take and whichever of the three boxes at the bottom you land in, you end with with benefits/discounts worth about £90/week for every child aged 2 to 4 at a registered nursery or child minder. Only instead of bumping up the Free Early Education to £90/week and calling it a day, they split it up into smaller amounts, all with their own conditions attached.

Why do they make it so complicated? Don't answer that.

"Downing Street defiant over generous EU benefit plans"

From the BBC:

The government has promised to push ahead with plans to simplify access to benefits for EU immigrants, after a European commissioner praised the UK for openly advertising itself as a "soft touch".

Downing Street said powers to deport homeless migrants and cut rights to unemployment and housing benefits would not come in "for several years while we thrash out the details" and that for the time being, immigrants would be entitled to top-whack welfare payments after a mere three months.

Work restrictions on Romanians and Bulgarians will be lifted in January.

Earlier, Employment Commissioner Laszlo Andor advised Romanians and Bulgarians to "remain optimistic". And Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding said freedom of movement was "non-negotiable" for citizens of EU states and that other Member States with less generous rules would be expected to follow the British example.

Re: The Effects of Taxes and Benefits on Household Income, 2011/12

From City AM Forum:

NEW figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS)* have led the Daily Mirror and some political commentators to wax lyrical about our "unfair tax system".

The killer stat, from the ONS's annual The Effects of Taxes and Benefits on Household Income survey, was said to show that the poorest fifth of households paid 36.6 per cent of their income in tax, while the richest paid 35.5 per cent – an apparent slam dunk to the progressives who argue our tax system is not redistributive enough.

One commentator went as far as saying that Britain was "heading towards the flat tax nirvana so beloved of the right"...

The key point is that the progressivity of a tax system cannot be considered in isolation from benefits, because benefits are essentially like a negative tax. Thought of in this way, we can calculate effective tax rates, which measure the net contribution for the average household in each group as a proportion of their earned or original income.

Doing this we see that the poorest fifth of households on average actually face an effective tax rate of -49.9 per cent, while the richest fifth face an average tax rate of 33.5 per cent. This shows that, for every £1 earned in income, the average household in the poorest quintile is transferred another 50p in cash benefits, while the average household in the top decile pays 34p in tax. In other words, the tax and cash benefits system is very progressive.

Yes of course, a good point well made.

Tax = negative welfare payments. Welfare payments = negative tax. Pretending that tax and welfare payments are something different is like pretending that your restaurant bill has nothing to do with the food you just ate.

But he overlooks two things:

1. There is a difference between overall average rates (which are of course negative for households on welfare) and marginal rates on earned income (or savings).

Because of savage means testing, lower earners face the highest marginal rates of up to 100% on earned income (the so-called poverty trap), middle earners have the lowest marginal rate (about 50%) and higher earners pay a marginal rate of about 65%.

Basic maths tells us that with a flat rate tax combined with flat universal benefits, everybody would have the same marginal rate but the average rate on the bottom quintile would be negative and the average rate on the top quintile would be a couple of per cent shy of the marginal (flat) rate.

Having looked at the figures, it is not difficult to devise such a one-page tax/welfare/pensions system which would leave few people significantly better or worse off than they are now - so this achieves the "right wing nirvana" of a flat tax with the "left-libertarian nirvana" of universal benefits.

2. He blithely leaves the rental value of land out of the equation and assumes that taxing earned income instead of the rental value of land is just normal or sane**.

For example, he adds back the value of non-cash benefits (NHS, education) to calculate an overall average tax rate of 27% on the top fifth of households. His welfare figures include the value of social housing (or Housing Benefit) so why not factor in the non-cash value of untaxed rental income which two-thirds of households (i.e. owner-occupiers) consume, net of privately collected tax (mortgage payments), which would reduce that average 27% even further, quite possibly down to zero?

And why not factor in the privately-collected tax (ground rent) which tenants have to pay on top of their publicly collected taxes, which would easily double that 27% rate?

* Summary here. As the ONS points out: "On average, households in the top two income quintiles paid more in taxes than they received in benefits, while households in the bottom three quintiles received more in benefits than they paid in taxes."

** While the Mailexpressgraph crowd are happy to wail that the non- and low-earners receive far too much in benefits/don't pay enough in tax (for some reason, old age pensioners don't count as non-earning welfare claimants), their argument against Land Value Tax is that some low earners would end up paying more in tax/receiving less in benefits (which is true for low earners who live in expensive houses, that's their decision). So again, total Homey DoubleThink there - they see something as a problem, you offer a good solution and they dismiss it out of hand.

Nick Clegg: Incorrigible fucknut

On the topic of the Tories' proposal for a Married Couple's Allowance worth £150...

Mr Clegg said:

"I have never understood the virtue of a policy that basically says to people who are not married: you will pay more tax than people who are married(1) or, more particularly, married according to the particular definition of marriage held by the Conservative Party.(2)

"If you have got hundreds of millions of pounds to spend on tax breaks like that then I would much rather spend it on all working families to improve the tax breaks we are going to give them on childcare, for instance. We have offered, from 2015, tax-free childcare for working parents worth about £1,200 per child. I would like to see that expanded.(3)

"Instead, for reasons that I have never quite understood, the Conservatives want to basically say to a widow...you are not going to benefit from a tax break even though you were married and you lost your husband.(4) A woman who has been abandoned by her husband suddenly doesn't get the tax break even though she believes in marriage.(5)"

The £150 MCA is a stupid Tory gimmick of course, that is the first thing to be pointed out. Most people (two-thirds?) are married anyway, they will end up paying two-thirds of the extra tax needed to fund it, so actually they will only be £50 better off than now.

1) In the tax system, there are a lot of marginal situations where married couples are at a disadvantage (relative to unmarried ones) and plenty of marginal situations where married couples are at an advantage, and nobody knows what the overall net plus or minus of all these tax breaks/burdens is. The £150 is quite simply not big enough to clearly tip the balance in favour of marriage.

But the welfare system is absolutely and completely biased against couples, particularly married ones. If the Tories had any brains, that is what they would be focussing on.

2) Woah! Spiteful! We had the gay marriage debate a couple of months ago and it was nodded through (word on the street is, it's an EU thing which all governments have to nod through) by a majority Tory government. And on the whole, the Tories made it clear from the start (at a time when only "civil partnerships" existed but not "gay marriage") that gay couples would get the MCA as well.

3) Irrelevant. It's always easy finding An Even Worthier Cause. I'm sure that there are stories which tug the heart strings even more than the thought of a "hard working family only getting £1,200 tax-free childcare" and so on, until we finally establish The Single Most Worthy Cause Of All. Should the government should only ever spend its entire budget on that Single Most Worthy Cause Of All?

4) Ah yes, but widows get something called Bereavement Allowance, which is like dole money for widowed housewives. This starts at £32.49 week, so is worth a lot more than the proposed Married Couple's Allowance. And the fine details of the scheme have not been outlined, it's just a mad idea to keep the back benchers happy, and there's nothing to stop there being a rule that widows can't continue to claim it. And widows can claim all the same goodies as other single women (if they have kids).

5) Ah yes, but an "abandoned woman" (how come nobody talks about men being abandoned?) can claim all manner of benefits, just like any other single woman, which she wouldn't be able to claim if she were still married. These can be worth tens of thousands a year. And she'll have the whole machinery of the state on her side screwing every last penny out of the errant husband, more or less at no cost to her. The value of these benefits are worth rather more than £150 a year to her, I think you'll find.

I can offer a total reassurance that, er, it is absolutely correct

Over at Labour List Mark Ferguson put up an early morning piece designed to correct an impression that might be forming in the minds of the party faithful on reading the morning's newspapers:

Ignore the media spin, this is the welfare speech Ed Miliband will actually give today

The media previews of the speech, beginning early this week, has had many Labour activists dreading what Miliband might say today. This morning’s papers also give a somewhat lop-sided take on what the speech is likely to be focussed on – which may, it must be said, be due to the party’s desire to get the words “tough” and “welfare” in the same headline

So let me set your mind at ease – Ed Miliband is not accepting the Tory narrative on welfare, quite the opposite. This is a speech about getting people to work, making sure that faith is restored in the benefits system, stopping welfare bills spiralling out of control year on year...

Update: Post "the Speech" Declan Gaffney also has a post at Labour List:

Labour’s welfare cap is a largely symbolic gimmick – but it works as a communication device

Policy wonks might be well advised not to probe to deeply into the detail of a policy which is essentially symbolic in intent. Whatever fiscal stance Labour adopted were it to form the next government, the idea that it would not have to make further reductions in spending is implausible.

Better to get that message across now, both to the public and the party faithful. And as a communication device, the cap really can’t be faulted.

 and then later.

This reframing of a toxic welfare debate deserves to be warmly welcomed. Less welcome is the unimaginative spinning of the speech in the very terms Miliband rejects – exemplified by today’s Mirror coverage.

So, a communication device that can't be faulted, except in the way it has been interpreted by Labour's cheerleader in chief red top. The largely symbolic gimmick is not working quite as intended then, eh Declan?

The fiscal multiplier in action

From City AM:

THE PLANNED cut in national insurance payments for employers is making one in three small- to medium-sized companies more optimistic about hiring staff, according to figures out today.

Chancellor George Osborne said in his March Budget that the government will waive the first £2,000 on employers' national insurance bills from April 2014. The so-called employment allowance is set to save companies £5.9bn between 2014 and 2018 and a third of employers will no longer pay national insurance contributions, according to government estimates.

Why would it encourage small businesses to take on a significant number of additional employees? If anything, it's a big incentive for a small employer to stay below the £2,000 threshold, which is quickly reached - that would only cover the Employer's NIC on one employee paid £22,000 per annum, on two paid £15,000 or on three paid £13,000. Beyond that, the marginal cost of employing people is exactly the same as it ever was.

But most galling is this bit of fiscal multiplication right at the end:

National insurance, a tax paid by both workers and employers, funds certain state benefits, pensions and the NHS. The coalition has attempted to reform the levy since being elected three years ago.

Does it f-ck!!

From memory, NI raises just over £100 billion a year. State pensions are £90 billion a year, the NHS costs well over £100 billion a year and there's another couple of £ billion for contributory Jobseeker's Allowance. So it covers pensions and a bit of working age benefits but it certainly does not magically pay for the NHS as well. It wouldn't even pay for the NHS in isolation.

And no, the coagulation has not "attempted to reform the levy", they cheerfully bumped up the total rate from 23.8% to 25.8% of gross earnings and left it at that. Sod the employers and employees, those nasty grubby little people who have to engage in free exchange of goods and services in order to make a living.

They are today Gus, it even got a mention at DPMQs

Writing at Labour List yesterday Gus Baker – in his own words a “lawyer in training” who is also a BECTU official covering Disciplinaries and Grievances and co-founder and co-director of Intern Aware – posed the question Why won’t Labour talk about the job guarantee scheme?

“Imagine” writes Gus “if the Labour Party came up with a policy that proposed ending long term unemployment, whilst simultaneously rebutting charges that the party was ‘soft on welfare’” and later, referring again to Labour’s apparent reticence to be much more vocal about an obvious “win – win” policy, “It makes no sense that Labour is ignoring the best idea that the party has had in decades. It’s time to speak up”.

So what exactly is the Job Guarantee Scheme?  Well, the most often quoted explanation is that it  will ‘offer’ the long-term unemployed a guarantee of a six-month job by dint of giving businesses a subsidy to hire people on a temporary basis, at the national minimum wage for six months, with those unemployed refusing a job under the scheme having their benefits docked.  

Initially the guarantee would apply to adults – in this context those aged over 24 - who had been out of work for 24 months or more, with Labour seeking to reduce the “unemployed for” qualifying period to 18 or 12 months during the course of a Parliament.  The costs of the subsidy, which Labour originally calculated as £1 billion per annum, would "be met by reversing the government’s decision to stop tax relief on pension contributions for people earning over £150,000 being limited to 20 per cent”.

In his article Gus admits that “The Jobs Guarantee scheme is not a panacea for all of the UK’s problems, but capping the amount of time that people could be unemployed in Britain would do no end of good. The hopelessness that people often feel when out of work could be ended by setting a date at which they would be guaranteed good quality, decent work. The political potential of the scheme is enormous”.

And on the face of it, £1 billion for the JGF seems like a much better deal than the £5 billion Work Programme.  Today, perhaps seeing an opportunity to "speak up" Labour’s Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Liam Byrne commenting on today’s (un)employment figures says “bring in Labour’s Compulsory Jobs Guarantee to get anyone out of work for more than two years back into a job; a job people must take or lose their benefits”.

So, to go one step further than Gus, why won’t the present administration ditch the Work Programme and replace it with their own “Jobs Guarantee” scheme?   They don’t have to call it that, and they claim to be in favour of “what works”?

"Now listen up Ed, me old Not Red pal, the boy on your side that is clearly leading the way back into government

is that well clever geezer and Iain Duncan Smith tribute act Liam Byrne.   He knows that the only way you can convince the electorate to put you into Number 10 is to promise to be even more of a means testing fixated bunch,  to promise to tax the incomes of the lower paid even more severely - you can bring in a "living wage" so the party can be seen to be looking after 'the ordinary working man' but if you do you must make sure that anyone getting it is subjected to having so much of it taken away that they'll be even worse off than they were before it came in - and you really must make it absolutely clear all the time that unemployment is all the fault, and only the fault, of the unemployed themselves, ***the lazy, shirking buggers.   Oh and Ed, when you are in Number 10, just remember, "it was the Sun wot done it" ok?"

Update : there's now some documented proof that Liam, with a little help from Iain (or vice versa) has already done some sterling groundwork, and the message is definitely getting across ...

"For a truer picture..."

Woodsy42  left a comment on "Huge families on benefits are no myth... oh, hang...":

"There are 160 families on out-of-work benefits with ten or more children."

I find this very difficult to believe. It's less than one per town. For a truer picture, how about looking at the number of large families that require benefits because, even if someone works, they could not have afforded those children without benefits?

I've linked to my data sources, if anybody wants to have a crack at the numbers, feel free to do so.

But the cost-benefit calculations are all very marginal and there are so many judgment calls to be made that you could come up with pretty much any answer you want, you could come up with a reasonably plausible answer anywhere between "a third of all children" and "hardly any".

And this cuts both ways, I could just as well ask:

For a truer picture, how about looking at the number of retired people (especially early retirees) claiming taxpayer funded pensions (state or public sector) who would still be working and contributing if those pensions weren't on offer?

or...

For a truer picture, how about looking at the number of buy-to-let landlords collecting national wealth privately who would still be working and contributing if we taxed land rents instead of taxing earned incomes?

"Never mind living on £53 a week. How would IDS cope with the system?"

Over at systemthinkingforgirls.com:

Now that the petition calling for Iain Duncan Smith to prove he can live on £53 a week has been handed in to the Department of Work and Pensions by Change.org, we should start planning his experience of claiming benefits in more detail. Because it’s not just about the amount of money, is it? It’s also the absurd, unfair and unpredictable bureaucracy that goes with it at a time when you are least able to cope with it.

What follows is the experience I think the Jobcentre should arrange for him.

Day 1

• His benefits should be stopped suddenly for no reason...

"Labour to introduce compulsory but entirely notional National Insurance hypothecation scheme to fund "out of work" salary insurance loan fund for normally hard working families only"

Or “Crisis Loan Scheme for those with ‘the right sort of NI history’”

As they see it “"In other words, the social security system would add a new function: smoothing household income to help people to cope with the loss of a wage, keeping them out of the hands of payday lenders and loan sharks, while reclaiming the money once they are back on their feet."

What it will be in practice

“called "national salary insurance" and developed by the IPPR thinktank – people with sufficient national insurance contributions would be entitled to receive up to 70% of their previous income, capped at £200 a week [nb that £200 including any other “out of work benefits” being received], for a period of up to six months, to help prevent them falling off a financial "cliff edge".

More details here Labour plans student-style 'salary loans' for the unemployed   and here Why Labour is right to consider a salary insurance scheme  for anyone who wants to see how many words you can expend describing “a crisis loans scheme” as if it was something entirely new and exciting and different.

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.  

OK so users will be limited to the one supermarket

but the lucky (aside from needing emergency handouts) people of  Birmingham will be able to benefit from the ASDA Price Guarantee!

So if they could have brought their strictly regulated allowable goods cheaper elsewhere ASDA will surely refund the difference like they advertise on TV ... or will that only apply to decent people using cash, or proper debit and credit cards.

Asda has partnered the UK's biggest local authority to provide emergency welfare to some of the country's poorest people.

Birmingham council, which represents around 1 million people, said that from 1 April Monday it would give out crisis welfare payments in the form of prepaid cards that could be redeemed only in Asda supermarkets.

The Labour authority said the cards – which Asda said were similar to their gift cards – would restrict spending to a list of predetermined goods, which would exclude tobacco, alcohol, phone-related expenditure and fuel.

How jolly public spirited and splendid of ASDA, eh to facilitate this 

Asda said: "We responded to an approach from Birmingham city council, which was looking for a simple way of delivering social fund payments to claimants.

"Making money available via Asda gift cards rather than cash is a safe way to ensure claimants have access to a huge range of products at low prices, and is an efficient use of the public purse."

And nothing whatsoever to be gained by ASDA in having this "locked in to only using us" scheme obviously.  

So why did Labour controlled Birmingham decide to go with ASDA?

Asked why Birmingham was restricting choice by partnering only with Asda, a council spokesman said the chain had been "the only main supermarket in the city willing to work with the council".