Enthusiasm for Big Society falls amongst charities

by Newswire    
June 17, 2011 at 9:00 am

A survey of charities by the National Association for Voluntary and Community Action has found that support for the Big Society has fallen over the past year.

Respondents were asked to rate their enthusiasm on a scale of one to 10 – with one being “very sceptical” and 10 “this is great”. The mean rating was 3.52, down from a mean of 4.85 in 2010.

The Big Society was relaunched for the fifth time last month with a speech by David Cameron. One day later, Lord Wei, the Big Society adviser, quit his role.

It is not yet known when the government will get the message and quietly drop the idea of the Big Society, but it seems unlikely that it will last as long as previous government flops such as the Traffic Cones Hotline.

Ed Balls’ speech: Will Osborne the Ostrich fly?

by Ellie Cumbo    
June 16, 2011 at 5:00 pm

It was a speech about risk that took several risks of its own.

Ed Balls opened his first major speech since becoming Shadow Chancellor in January not by attacking the Osborne plan, or presenting his alternative, but by revisiting the events that led to Black Wednesday nearly twenty years ago.

He went on to accuse the Chancellor of putting short-term political interests (such as a possible pre-election income tax cut) before the long-term health of the economy, and then proposed an emergency reverse to the VAT rise that could potentially lay him open to the same charge.
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How Cameron is ignorant of the real world

by Paul Cotterill    
June 16, 2011 at 3:00 pm

So Ed Miliband’s had a good PMQs, and all the Westminster bubble commentators, the Westminster bubble wannabee spin doctors and the Westminster bubble ex-wanabee-but-wanabee-again-soon-spin doctors are really happy that he got stuck into Cameron by exploiting the latter’s weakness in policy detail and implementation.

It’s almost as though that exactly what they thought he should do, although of course last week I think one of them thought the best way forward was to come clean about how Labour rubbish was and how great the Tories’ plans are for everything. continue reading… »

‘Benevolent Sexism’ – Sideshow or Battleground?

by Jennifer O'Mahony    
June 16, 2011 at 12:24 pm

Over on Telegraph Blogs today, Jenny McCartney is attacking a report on ‘Benevolent Sexism’, which basically entails very minor acts of goodwill that could still be construed as sexist.

McCartney’s problem is specifically centred around the following examples:

[C]alling women “girls” but not men “boys”; believing that women should be cherished and protected by men; helping a woman choose a laptop computer in the belief that it’s not the sort of task for which her gender is suited; and complimenting a woman on cooking or looking after children well because that is behaviour especially suited to a woman.

continue reading… »

Guess the most popular organisations in the UK

by Guest    
June 16, 2011 at 10:00 am

contribution by ClimateSock

Some data tables need very little introduction.

One such appears in the Ashcroft poll, from a question about attitudes towards various NGOs.

For clarity’s sake, I’ve grouped the responses into ‘support’ and ‘oppose’ in the table below:

You may draw your own conclusions, but here are a few of mine.

The most popular are two NGOs traditionally considered to be of the liberal left: Greenpeace and Amnesty International. It might be argued that, until relatively recently, all NGOs were largely leftish, so it’s not surprising that the longer-established ones are best known and respected.

There may be some truth in this, but the fact they receive very little opposition is striking given that Greenpeace in particular has a record of being very outspoken and skirting close to the edge of the law.

Two organisations that are very effective as political campaigners, Immigration Watch and the Taxpayers’ Alliance, have among the lowest public understanding of their mission. The Taxpayers’ Alliance in particular seem to be on major UK news programmes on a weekly basis, yet half the British public don’t know seems to know what they stand for.

This strikes me as an important lesson for small organisations that want to have a large impact, but don’t believe they have the resources to earn widespread name recognition.

I’m taken aback by the Fathers 4 Justice’s scores. For an organisation associated with superheroes on palace balconies, which has generated a couple of own splinter organisations (The Real Fathers 4 Justice, New Fathers 4 Justice), its ratings are exceptional. They’re also very consistent across different groups: women score it nearly as highly as men; Guardian readers are only slightly lower than Mail and Telegraph readers.

And on those lines, a couple of details about Greenpeace’s scores. While they do particularly well among Labour (79% support) and Lib Dem voters (78%), they don’t score badly among Tory voters (59%). Equally, their scores are very high with Guardian (90%) and Indy readers (84%), but they’re perfectly respectable among Mail (63%) and Telegraph readers (60%) too. Intriguingly, one of the groups who seem least well disposed to them (‘just’ 57% support) are those who are the most positively inclined towards David Cameron. Make of that what you will.

Obsession with affluence tore the soul out of New Labour.

by Éoin Clarke    
June 16, 2011 at 9:00 am

In Doncaster last year, more than 1,000 people were declared bankrupt. In Tony Blair’s backyard (Sedgefield) personal insolvencies grew 500% on his watch.  Whilst wages stagnated over the last 5 years, inflation has been volatile.   People made up the shortfall by availing themselves of consumer debt. Using ‘credit’, we were told, showed entrepreneurial spirit, since you were aspiring to accumulate wealth.

In fact, it wrecked Britain. If you didn’t have disposable cash you dare not say it, and so in Henley or Buckinghamshire people flaunted real cash, while in impoverished regions of the north of England people borrowed.
continue reading… »

Ed Balls to make “lost growth” his key attack

by Sunny Hundal    
June 16, 2011 at 8:26 am

Labour shadow chancellor Ed Balls will today make a key speech at the London School of Economics, putting the “pain” of “lost growth and lost jobs” at the centre of his criticism of the government.

Refusing to get drawn into the trap of deficit reduction, he will say: “[T]he test for the economy is not whether we avoid a double-dip recession, but how much pain is inflicted along the way”.

Because it isn’t the fluctuating quarterly growth figures that really hurt; it’s all the ground that we’ve lost over the past year – and are continuing to lose every day and look set to continue to lose.
…
If UK growth came in 0.5 percentage points below trend in every year of this Parliament, our country would be £58bn worse off in 2015 – that’s £3,300 for every family.

He will say that the test for the Treasury isn’t just better growth rates, but where the economy can make up all this lost ground in jobs and living standards.

The risk is that George Osborne will wreak long-term, as well as short-term, damage on the British economy by creating a vicious circle of permanently lower business investment, lower income and lower employment, which in turn requires bigger tax increases and deeper spending cuts to get the deficit down.

All at a time too when people are already suffering up and down our country – north and south. Life is already tough enough if you’re unemployed – and we need to help those people into work.

He will stress the need for an industrial policy to “provide incentives for technological and scientific innovation”.

Two points are worth emphasising.

First, Ed Balls is specifically avoiding getting into the deficit reduction debate trap that Conservatives are keen on pushing. The debate shouldn’t be about the extent of the deficit but how well the economy is doing.

Second, Balls will say he does not expect a double-dip recession or anything that drastic. What he does expect, as a result of ‘Plan A’ – is slow, stagnating growth for years.

Four years from now, he will want to turn around to voters and ask them if they felt better after years of Conservative pain.

At Netroots Nation in the USA

by Sunny Hundal    
June 16, 2011 at 8:00 am

Hello readers!

Your humble editor is currently in Minneapolis in the United States, attending Netroots Nation – the biggest annual convention of left-wing activists in the United States.

Check out the agenda – it covers just about anything political you can think of.

I’ll be speaking at an event at 9am, which will be streamed online.

Anyway, Don Paskini is managing site in my absence, as ever, with help from Ellie Cumbo and Jennifer O’Mahoney.

I’ll be back in a week!

Thousands of cancer patients to lose benefits

by Don Paskini    
June 15, 2011 at 4:09 pm

Research by Macmillan Cancer Support suggested that around 7,000 people who are suffering from cancer will lose an average of £94 per week as a result of the government’s welfare reform bill.

Macmillan will have access to data which isn’t publicly available in calculating these figures. But publicly available statistics from the Department of Work and Pensions’ website seem to support their figures.

As of November 2010, 3,250 people with the IB ICD (disease) code of “Neoplasms” were in the Work Related Activity Group of Employment Support Allowance. A further 9,480 were either at the Assessment phase or at an unknown stage of their claim, and hence are people who might be placed in the Work Related Activity Group in the future. In addition, a further 5,440 people who had submitted claims over the previous three months had the same condition, and over the next few years 1.5 million people who have claimed Incapacity Benefit will be reassessed and moved to Employment Support Allowance, which will include an unknown number of people suffering from cancer.

The government’s own figures also show that it is not just cancer sufferers who will be affected, as a total of 700,000 sick and disabled people will lose out.

David Cameron should have been aware of this issue, as leading cancer charities raised this issue back in February this year.

Even at this late stage, it’s not too late for the Tories and Lib Dems to do the decent thing and drop this cruel measure from their bill.

Oxfam’s reply to critics: Feeding the world isn’t easy

by Guest    
June 15, 2011 at 2:11 pm

contribution by Duncan Green

When you launch a big campaign like GROW, you generally get both good reviews and a few attacks, and since the advent of the blogosphere, those attacks have got more virulent.

This time around, we must be doing something wrong, because the handful of diatribes I’ve seen (do tell me if I’ve missed some) are actually disappointingly thin. But in case you’re interested, here are a few reflections and responses.
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