Why the debate on the deficit is dumb
The debate about government borrowing shows how backward our political class and media are. It's being conducted within the wrong framework. It’s about what the parties will or will not do, when in fact it should be about the range of policies they are considering.
To see what I mean, here is my view of the deficit, which I suspect is reasonably mainstream among economists.
We haven’t a hope of cutting the deficit significantly by policy measures alone; Osborne‘s proposed measures aren’t just a tiny fraction of borrowing, but are a tiny fraction of the forecast errors for the deficit. Our only chance of getting the deficit down seriously is to grow our way out of it.
This requires that the private sector start borrowing again, which means that policies that “encourage saving”, such as the raising of the pension age, might actually raise the deficit.
continue reading… »
The BBC’s “fawning” interview with Osborne
The BBC was accused of a “fawning” interview with shadow chancellor George Osborne by Ben Bradshaw.
The culture minister said on Twitter:
Another [sic] wholly feeble and biased Today programme rounded off with a fawning interview with a Tory pundit!!
A BBC spokesperson said:
Suggesting your political opponents are somehow getting an easier ride from broadcasters is something that has always been part of politics.
The shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt, without a hint of irony, told the Guardian that Bradshaw was interfering in the BBC’s day-to-day coverage:
He seems to be aspiring to Alastair Campbell’s role rather than that of a culture secretary.
Only a week ago Hunt himself said the BBC should recruit more Tories.
New site tracks and exposes Tax Havens
The Tax Justice Network this week launched the world’s biggest website for the study of “secrecy jurisdictions” – those shady little corners, more commonly known as “tax havens”, where the rich and well connected hide their ill-gotten gains, or clean dirty money on its way to legitimate western bank accounts.
Secrecyjurisdictions.com is a massive, on-going research project.
It collects key data on the world’s 60 secrecy jurisdictions and aims to “map the faultlines” of the global financial infrastructure (including the “pinstripe army” of lawyers, bankers and accountants).
These are the people that enable tax evasion, terrorist financing, organised crime, the looting of developing world assets and a whole host of other evils to take place.
As the website overview states:
Secrecy jurisdictions facilitate illicit financial flows stemming from three overlapping sources: bribery, criminal activity and cross-border trade mispricing. Secrecy jurisdictions and those operating through them undermine development for the poorest countries, and create a criminogenic environment in which all sorts of crimes can thrive and feast on the fruits of law-breaking.
Secrecy jurisdictions facilitate a wide range of crimes such as tax evasion, non-payment of alimonies, money laundering, terrorist financing, drug trafficking, human trafficking, illegal arms trading, counterfeiting, insider-dealing, embezzlement, fleeing of bankruptcy orders, all sorts of fraud, and many more.
…
Financial opacity undermines the rule of law and destroys trust in markets. Loss of trust seriously damages market efficiency, raising the cost of capital and wrecking confidence in democracy.
Its purpose is to serve as a resource for those seeking to bring about positive change in the international financial system.
That change is desperately needed.
Global Financial Integrity has estimated that each year, developing and transnational economies experience $800 billion – $1.06 trillion of outflows due to illicit financial flows.
Each year, the developed world gives these economies just $100 billion in aid. By facilitating illicit financial flows, secrecy jurisdictions are at the heart of global poverty, as well as a wider web of corruption, crime and financial abuse.
This is an early step in global attempts to clean up the international financial system, to create a better world.
More information can be found at the Tax Justice Blog, and at Tax Research UK.
Why would a Tory not want a landslide?
contribution by Plural Progressive
This from Jonathan Freedland on the Guardian website:
Nicholas Boles, head of David Cameron’s “implementation team” and one of his inner circle of advisers, has just said he hopes the Conservatives will not win by a landslide at the next general election.
In a moment that recalled Francis Pym’s notorious 1983 admission that he thought landslide governments dangerous – a statement that prompted Margaret Thatcher to sack him as her foreign secretary – Boles told a Guardian’s fringe meeting this evening that he hoped Cameron would win next year by a “decent, but not over-large majority”.
Why would a Tory activist from the “Notting Hill” set of Westminster Tories (George Osborne, Michael Gove, David Cameron, Ed Vaizey etc.) not want his party to have a landslide victory?
A bit of background. Nick Boles was the founder and Director of the Policy Exchange think-tank up until 2007 when he stood down upon becoming the candidate for the safe Tory seat of Grantham and Stamford. He was previously the candidate for Labour-held marginal seat of Hove in the 2005 General Election.
continue reading… »
When Boris met Dave: let’s not go there
Simply branding David Cameron a posh tosser worth worth thirty million quid – and that’s what he is, of course – is not enough to constitute a serious electoral strategy. Even if it were, New Labour no longer has the credibility to pull it off.
Yet the government seems to be relying on crude toff bashing as some kind of political Vergeltungswaffe, capable of reversing the fortunes of war even in the dying months of the conflict.
When Boris met Dave, tonight’s C4 docu-drama on the teenage adventures of today’s top Tories, will be only the first doodlebug to land on the plucky British electorate, as a party that in its modern form is essentially an Old Fettesian creation moves into full-on anti-Old Etonian overdrive. But hey, I never did get these obscure public schoolie feuds.
Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here. I’m a Marxist; for me, politics is all about class. The interests of the vast majority of society, who live by selling their labour power, are directly opposed to the interests of the small minority who live by exploiting it.
continue reading… »
Little Lolitas?
[This entry comes with a trigger warning for mention of rape and abuse involving young girls. A longer version is online at Penny Red]
Thanks to a new book, ‘The Lolita Effect’, a kiddy-sized pole-dancing kit marketed to six year olds that got attention on both sides of the pond and, of course, Miley Cyrus, the ‘sexualisation of young girls’ is in the press again. Cue a great deal of handwringing and think-of-the-children-isms in the same international press that, this same week, gave a good deal of coverage to child-rape apologists.
All of these stories are just begging, just laying back like the wanton little semiotic nymphets they are and begging to be illustrated with faux-naive photos of young girls in suggestive states of undress – or, more frequently and legally, parts of young girls. Merely, of course, to demonstrate how awful it all is.
Western society has a curious doublethink going on over young girls and sex.
continue reading… »
What about those people on the margins?
Whilst the media spotlight has been shining on the sparkling big-teethed smiles of Tories in Manchester this week, I have been living with a family in the shadows. Yasmin and her 13-year-old daughter are asylum seekers from Bangladesh.
They invited me to stay with then in their Bolton home, just ten miles away from the conference, to write about family life on the poverty line.
Life on benefits for Yasmin is not a choice; it’s a legal obligation. She is desperate to work, but like all asylum seekers who are waiting to have their claims processed, she is forbidden to do so by the Home Office.
As I write, the signs of relentless cost cutting are scattered all around me. By the kitchen sink there is a small pot of diluted washing up liquid to make it last longer. A small jug sits in the bathroom, helping to make the most of their deliberately shallow baths. She knows about efficiencies.
continue reading… »
Controversy around MEP Kaminski grows deeper
Controversy around the Polish MEP – who leads the Conservatives new EU grouping – is growing deeper.
Writing in the Guardian yesterday Edward McMillian-Scott pointed out that the main argument made by Tories for a new EU grouping is hypocritical – Kaminski supports the Lisbon treaty.
Kaminski himself – against whom I stood and won re-election as a vice-president in July – has supported the Lisbon Treaty in public and private. As one commentator who has followed the issue writes, “Kaminski – wait for it – likes the Lisbon Treaty. He admires it. He thinks it protects national sovereignty. He wanted Ireland to say yes to it. He is completely at odds with the Tories on it.” Hardly surprising given the praise of his former boss, Polish President Lech Kaczynski, for the original reform treaty since “basically Poland got what it wanted“.
Furthermore, he pointed out, Kaminski also supports the European Common Agricultural Policy, which is hated by Tories.
He also alleged that Kamisky misled people about his earlier political history:
Michal Kaminski tried to cover up his membership (see his Wikipedia editing history for 25 June), later pretending that he was a schoolboy member. But he was caught out by an NOP spokesman, who told the Daily Telegraph that he was an activist from the ages of 17 to 20, his formative political experience. Even now, he is pictured on the homepage of the NOP website, which comments that no good comes to those who try to dissemble about their past.
He further exposes parts of Kaminski’s past:
Kaminski now parades his pro-Israel stance, appearing in Manchester as a guest of Conservative Friends of Israel. But in 2001, he campaigned against an apology for the Jedwabne pogrom in July 1941, when hundreds of Jews were rounded up by their neighbours and burnt in a barn, a massacre so notorious that a play, ‘Our Class’, based on it opened in London recently. As noted by former director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research Antony Lerman, the reports about Kaminski have been shown to be true; and he observes that being “pro-Israeli” does not necessarily mean that someone is incapable of holding antisemitic views.
Journalists continue to unearth his past, highlighting Kaminski’s attempts to twist and turn. An interview with the Polish paper Nasza Polska shows that Kaminski had said that Poland should apologise only if “someone from the Jewish side will apologise for what the Jews did during the Soviet occupation between 1939 and 1941″. There were three million Jews in Poland before the Holocaust. Some of the few survivors later worked with the victorious Soviets to identify the Nazis’ Polish collaborators: wouldn’t you?
Leading Polish daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza politely skewers Kaminski with the recent comment that he “is not officially and completely an antisemite or homophobic, but at some point he recognised that these things can help him politically”. His repellent party, according to Tel Aviv University’s Stephen Roth Institute, contains radical nationalists and ex-members of antisemitic organisations. It is allied with Radio Maryja, a nationalist Catholic radio station and a key force on the far right, which gives airtime to antisemitic ranters.
And yet the Tories are desperately trying to avoid any more focus on Kaminki’s past, while pretending that the new grouping was necessary for them to continue with their agenda in Europe.
Last month Anthony Lerman also countered the view that Kaminski was not anti-semitic simply because he was pro-Israeli:
It’s not difficult to explain why Pollard would get this so wrong, and I’ll come to that in a minute. But what stood out most starkly in the article was the following: “Far from being an antisemite, Mr Kaminski is about as pro-Israeli an MEP as exists.” The idea that being “pro-Israeli” inoculates you against being an antisemite, or that it means that you are incapable of holding antisemitic views, is simply false – both as a theoretical proposition and as a statement of fact. But said by Pollard, at this point in time, such a statement comes as no surprise.
More: Carl Packman – Excellent work on that dubious figure Kaminski
Worldwide, left has gained in the financial crisis
The Financial Times has an article called ‘Global Insight: Europe’s left is failing’, which asks:
But why should the left be doing so badly at precisely the time when raw and unregulated free-market capitalism has precipitated a global financial crisis? State intervention and regulation are returning with a vengeance. Yet the parties of the left are getting none of the credit for saying: “We told you so.”
But is ‘the left’ really doing that badly in response to the global financial crisis?
In the past month, left and centre-left parties were re-elected in Norway and Portugal, and gained power in Greece. In their worst result since the 1950s in Germany, the left mustered 46%, compared to 48% for the right wing parties.
continue reading… »
Politkovskaya award goes to Iranian women’s group
I’m sure the chatter on the wires and the blogs is about Hillary Mantel winning the Booker Prize for ‘Wolf Hall’.
However, there’s another prize being awarded tonight. It’s the Anna Politkovskya Award, and goes to a woman human rights defender. Previous winners include the Afghani MP Malalai Joya, and Natalia Estimirova, who was herself killed earlier this year.
This year’s winner has just been announced. It is the One Million Signatures Campaign for Equality, which petitions to end discrimmination against women in Iran.
Activist Leila Alikarami has collected the award on behalf of the campaign. I’m just hearing about their activities now, but they’re clearly a worthy winner. A reminder, if we needed one, of the diversity of opinion and politics in Iran.
The Anna Politkovskaya award is run by the RAW in WARcampaign.
You can read articles through the front page, via Twitter or RSS feed. You can also get them by email and through our Facebook group.
» The real agenda behind Telegraph’s abortion investigation
» How Scotland Yard monitors prying bloggers and journalists
» When disabled people want to work – employers can hold the back
» Revealed: the reality behind Workfare and why it doesn’t work
» Job snob? No, I’ve got the T-shirt
» Why country-by-country reporting matters to our wellbeing
» If Unions want to become stronger, they need to modernise
» Why work “reforms” in Spain are a warning for workers across Europe
» Five things you need to know about the NHS bill
» Bigger. Fatter. Gypsier. More Racist.
» Laziness levels in Britain getting lazier, wails government
|
62 Comments 15 Comments 23 Comments 8 Comments 24 Comments 19 Comments 16 Comments 83 Comments 203 Comments 85 Comments |
|
LATEST COMMENTS » Chaise Guevara posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » Chaise Guevara posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » Oliver posted on Job snob? No, I've got the T-shirt » the a&e charge nurse posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » Hannah posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » mr_hopkinson posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » Amy Finlayson posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » the a&e charge nurse posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » pagar posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » Oliver Conner posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » pjt posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » Lee Griffin posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation » JIm posted on Workfare - what does the evidence show? » BendyGirl posted on Workfare - what does the evidence show? » Liza Harding posted on The real agenda behind Telegraph's abortion investigation |
