Shadow minister attacks ‘gimmicks’ while…
We get an email today from a PR company. It states:
PHOTO/INTERVIEW OPPORTUNITY
SHADOW MINISTER FOR UNIVERSITIES AND SKILLS, ATTACKS ‘GIMMICKY’ GOVERNMENT AS HE GETS HANDS-ON WITH PLUMBING APPRENTICES IN SOUTH LONDON
DATE: MONDAY DECEMBER 14
TIME: 10am
LOCATION: Pimlico Plumbers
Pimlico House
1 Sail Street
London
SE11 6NQDavid Willets MP, Shadow Minister for Universities and Skills, will attack the Government’s ‘gimmicky’ approach to apprenticeships, when he swaps the world of politics for that of u-bends, to rolls up his sleeves and work alongside apprentices at a South London plumbing firm.
Respect to David Willets for genuinely rolling up his sleeves and being interviewed / photographed.
Absolutely no gimmicks there at all.
The supposed criminality of black people
There’s a paradox raised by the reaction to “Rod” Liddle’s mostly incorrect claim that “the overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community.”
The paradox is this. When it comes to tax, the right are keen to stress that people respond to incentives. And yet when it comes to crime they seem coy about incentives, and prefer to talk about “multiculturalism“ or genes.
The paradox is especially strong because economic theory is much clearer on the link between poverty and crime than between tax rates and tax revenue.
This is because in the case of taxes, the income and substitution effects work in opposite ways. The substitution effect causes people to prefer leisure over work when taxes rise, whilst the income effect causes them to want to work more to recoup lost income. However, with crime the two work in the same direction. The income effect causes a poor person to turn to crime to raise money, whilst the substitution effect means the unemployed have more time with which to commit crime, and lower penalties – no danger of losing one‘s job – for doing so.
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Here’s how we regulate bankers
Know much about credit default swaps, do you? How about the Libor curve, how’s that playing out these days? I hear good things about those interest rate options. Maybe I should get me some of those.
Banking, frankly, is hard. We might like to think it’s just a bunch of suited monkeys pushing papers at each other. But a lot of it’s really, you know, complicated and stuff. These are bright guys. The rest of us (“taxpayers”, lets call us) can’t even begin to understand what they do. Hector Sants says as much. And he should know. He’s the chair of the Financial Services Authority.
Let’s be honest – the only people who have a hope of really understanding banking are the bankers. If we don’t want the events of the last two years to ever happen again, they’re the ones who are going to have to change things. After all, if we can’t do it, and the government can’t do it, the only answer is self-regulation.
They’ve shown scant interest in changing anything so far, of course. Indeed, if the crisis has taught them anything it’s that they can wreck the economy, take our money, plunge us into the deepest recession in 70 years, and still pay themselves enormous bonuses at the end of it. So – how do we get them to exercise some self control?
Here’s my suggestion. We give them whatever they want.
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A further blow for ID cards?
Could you keep a £61 billion secret? Its not always easy, says Chancellor Alistair Darling in his interview with Mary Riddell for the forthcoming Fabian Review, extracted in today’s Telegraph.
He was, he says, “living on the edge for a while. There were many days when I knew that unless the Bank was making [covert] interventions [such as the secret loans of £61.6 billion to HBOS and the Royal Bank of Scotland], then literally banks would have had to shut their doors and cash machines would have been switched off.
People should be in no doubt that the world banking system was on the brink of collapse in October 2008 … It was [irksome] to have people sniping at the edges, saying: ‘You should have done this or that’ when I couldn’t disclose what I was doing. I couldn’t have said: ‘By the way, the banks are about to collapse, but I’m doing something about it’, because the very act of saying that would have been disastrous.
The interview was conducted just before the pre-budget repot. The newspaper finds enough significance in a passing comment on ID cards to make a ‘Darling signals death of ID cards‘ news story of it.
This is the entirety of Darling’s discussion of the issue.
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Watch: Monckton v Gore – climate change rap!
[via Kevin Blowe]
Immigration: the scandal of child detentions
When Labour’s best political boast is now more or less that they won’t be as brutal as the Conservatives will, it’s well worth remembering how the government treats some of the most vulnerable in society.
Not content with having expanded the prison population to such an extent that as soon as a new wing or establishment is built it is almost immediately filled, it also seems hell-bent on continuing with the detention of those whose only crime is to be the children of asylum seekers who have had their application for refugee status rejected.
Not that the government itself has the guts to be personally responsible for their detention. Probably the most notorious detention centre in the country, Yarl’s Wood in Bedfordshire, is run by SERCO.
In the last report on Yarl’s Wood, the chief inspector of prisons Anne Owers noted (PDF) while Yarl’s Wood should seek to improve the “plight of children” who were being held in the centre, they were “ultimately issues” for the UK Border Agency.
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Tory economic attacks keep missing target
Most of the time, the mainstream media acts like a baying mob with rarely a sense of nuance or self-reflection.
For example over the last few weeks we’ve seen journalist after journalist echoing the Tory line that Britain was in danger of having its credit rating downgraded because of its so-called “mammoth debt” (a narrative now taken up by the liberal press too).
At any other time the Tories would be furious at someone constantly trying to downplay the strength of the British economy. But when they’re doing it that’s ok.
And so it came to pass that Boy George’s constant dire warnings about the economy’s creditworthiness came to nothing.
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Jobs for all? Really?
One really good thing that James Purnell did when he was a government minister was to set up the Future Jobs Fund.
The Future Jobs Fund subsidises employers to create jobs for young people who have been looking for work for a year – the subsidy is roughly enough to employ someone for 25 hours/week for 6 months. In the day job, I’m hoping to employ a couple of people in January through the Future Jobs Fund.
Purnell and Graham Cooke have a good idea that the Jobs Fund should be extended to include older people, so that eventually everyone who has been unemployed for a year should have a guaranteed offer of a job. Their reasoning, that the government should become employer of last resort, is spot on.
Two concerns – firstly, the Future Jobs Fund has only just started up, so before extending it we should probably find out things like whether it actually works in practice (e.g. what percentage of people complete six months, what happens to them when the funding stops, is it beneficial for employees and employers).
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Right-wing notions of ‘middle-class’
The pre-budget report has triggered an entirely predictable swirl of reactions from the usual suspects. According to Andrew Porter in the Telegraph, “middle classes [are] to be hit hard”, echoing Tory criticism that Labour’s pre-budget report is tantamount to none other than “class war”.
The Daily Mail calls it “Clobbering the middle earners”, adding elsewhere that “Darling vows to hammer middle classes”.
So let’s look at what those warped minds think the middle classes are and let’s see what this looming “hammering” may consist of.
continue reading… »
Bloggers required to sign libel reform petition
English PEN, Index on Censorship and Sense About Science are urging bloggers to sign the National Petition for Libel Reform.
English libel laws as they stand threaten the freedom of speech of all. They have stopped debate around gangsterism, corruption, the funding of terrorism and the promotion of ineffective medical treatment.
In early November, English PEN and Index launched their ‘Free Speech Is Not For Sale’ report. It detailed the chilling effect of English libel law on freedom of expression in the UK and across the world.
Together with Sense About Science they will launch a public petition for libel reform on 9 December.
The petition is being backed by members of all the major political parties. The justice secretary, Jack Straw MP, is considering reform of our libel laws and members of the Conservative front bench have indicated that they may consider reform if there is strong public support for change.
The Liberal Democrats are already committed to substantial reform.
Allen Green, a solicitor who also writes the Jack of Kent blog and has already signed, says:
Libel law currently inhibits and distorts important debates about public health, public safety, the conduct of powerful corporations, and even the conduct of police officers. The sheer ease with which a libel case can be brought creates a disproportionate burden for defendants. People are simply deterred from saying things about important matters which would be useful for others to know. This cannot be right.
Get behind the campaign at LibelReform.org so that bloggers can express their views without fear of legal retribution. Sign the petition to send a clear message to our politicians that reform is popular and necessary.
From a press release
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» Even by economic standards Hester’s £1m bonus is unworthy
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» Have Labour realised the election is more than three years away?
» Violence in the office
» Want a more responsible capitalism? Reform how pensions work
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