As MPs debate and vote on the government’s controversial plans for welfare reform, Liberal Conspiracy is proud to present an exclusive interview with the man himself.

Here’s Sir William Beveridge, explaining what is wrong with the government’s plans and what should be done instead.

DP: Sir William, Thank you for taking the time to speak to Liberal Conspiracy. Do you agree that over the past seventy years, the welfare state has drifted away from the principles which you set out?

WB: It is very flattering to see how influential my report has proven to be, and that even now in 2012, it is still the starting point for discussions around social security.

But while I believe my work is as important as ever, it is worth remembering how different things are now. When I worked on my report, the British Empire had what was effectively a centrally planned command economy, and full employment. We assumed a society with one breadwinner supporting his family.

As for disabled people, the issues in 2012 are rather different from those in the 1940s. For example, the number one cause of disability at the time of my report was ‘Nazi bombs’. Now things are a bit more complicated.

DP: Let’s take the issue of housing, Liam Byrne said that ‘William Beveridge would be horrified by the £20bn bill for housing benefit’. Are you horrified by this?

WB: Oh yes. Terrible. Straightforward enough to solve, though. You’ve got a shortage of homes, and millions of people who are out of work. So what’s needed is a public works programme to get people working on building hundreds of thousands of new homes.

DP: Some would argue that we’ve got no money left and can’t afford that sort of public works programme, though.

WB: *Laughs* No money left? I thought your politicians wanted to get ‘back to Beveridge’, not ‘back to Snowden’! What kind of idiot would rather spend billions on keeping people idle rather than putting them to socially useful work to help combat Squalor and Want?

DP: This week, MPs are voting on the government’s welfare reform bill. Do you support their ideas?

WB: For a start, they really haven’t thought through the details of what they are proposing. Who is that dreadful little man?

DP: David Freud?

WB: Yes, that’s the one. I think a lot of the problems can be traced back to him. When I came to work on my report, I’d been working in this area for more than forty years and had been the leading authority on unemployment insurance for more than three decades. When Freud was appointed as adviser to the last government, he claimed to ‘know nothing’ about welfare and his expertise was in the field of investment banking. I don’t think that in sixty years time, politicians will be talking about ‘getting back to Freud’ on social security policy!

Since Freud was an adviser to the Labour Party, and now advises the Conservative/Liberal coalition, it is no surprise that the principles behind welfare reform are ones which – leaving the political rhetoric aside – all the parties agree on. The problem, though, is that many of these principles are misguided.

I’ll take one example. My report covered all citizens, having regard to their different ways of life and all-embracing in scope of their needs. If you listen to ‘experts’ these days, they don’t talk about ‘citizens’, they talk about ‘the stock’. You would think to listen to them that they were talking about animals, so far removed are they from the people whose lives they propose to legislate about.

And the consequences of their bill – far from slaying the Five Giants, it’s as if the government appointed the Giants to draft their legislation.

DP: So what should they do instead?

WB: They should look again at how to use the state to offer security for service and contribution, for example in guaranteeing full employment to tackle the scourge of idleness.

And as I wrote in 1948, there also needs to be room, opportunity and encouragement for voluntary action in seeking new ways of social advance. New measures are needed to allow citizens to develop their talents, not just be passive recipients of welfare.

For example, I saw the brilliant report which disability campaigners put together yesterday. They’ve got a far better idea about what needs doing, and any politician who wants to ‘get back to Beveridge’ should drop this welfare reform bill and listen to them instead.

I profoundly disagree with this advice. Even for the purposes of learning what not to do, Ed Miliband has far better ways to spend his time than listening to Jackie Ashley.

But I’m not sure that Dan Hodges’ strategic advice is any better than Jackie Ashley’s. Indeed, it suffers from many of the same flaws.

Dan Hodges argues that:

What Ed Miliband needs to do is make people feel safe. With him. And with his party.

They need to know he won’t push the economy back over the cliff by spending money he doesn’t have. That he’ll keep tight control of their borders. That he won’t take their money off them and hand it to a bunch of feckless benefit scroungers. That if there are rioters burning and looting their way down their street he’ll send in the water cannon to flush them back where they came from.

There is a leftie response is that this is a load of unprincipled, right-wing rubbish, and that if that’s what it takes to win an election, then Labour is better off losing. Let’s leave that aside for one moment.

At a time when distrust with politicians is at its height, Dan argues that Ed Miliband needs to persuade a majority of people that he’ll send home the immigrants, cut public spending, sort out the scroungers and use water cannon on the rioters.

So how’s he going to do that, then?

Ed Miliband doesn’t look much like a hanger and flogger. He could give a(nother) strongly worded speech about irresponsible welfare scroungers, like the previous ones which made such an impression and enabled him to connect with the public on this issue.

Maybe there could be a photo opportunity where he takes some money off a feckless scrounger and gives it to a deserving member of the squeezed middle? He could personally kick a bogus immigrant out of Britain? I’m struggling here.

“If only that David Miliband were in charge, he’d have put down his banana and personally shot all those looters with plastic bullets”, as the commuters travelling home from work don’t say.

Nor is this a new problem. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown promised to stick to Tory spending plans and not to raise income tax. A majority of the Great British public believed at the time of the 1997 election that Labour would put up their taxes. Labour hired thousands more police and cut crime. Most people thought that crime was rising and out of control. James Purnell designed a system which means that people suffering cancer lose their benefits if they don’t look for work, and a majority think that Labour is soft on scroungers.

It’s not even a problem unique to Labour. According to Lord Ashcroft’s research, no one believes that the Tories are protecting spending levels on the NHS – everyone knows that they are cutting it.

The people at the top of the Labour Party aren’t tub-thumping populists, and would look ridiculous if they pretended to be. But an approach which involves listening to people and then figuring out how to come up with concrete, achievable ways of sorting out problems and making things better is one which plays to their strengths.

At the very least, it has got to be better than taking strategic advice from newspaper columnists who spend more time listening to Westminster insiders than talking to voters while out campaigning for the Labour Party.

Right-wingers have criticised this initiative, saying the term ‘troubled families’ symbolises the neglect of the law-abiding majority, and that we should instead talk about (and punish) ‘problem families’. Labour’s critique is that spending cuts have removed many of these Family Intervention projects, and that this money won’t be enough to make up for the cuts.

But let’s start instead with a simple question. How and why are we spending £9 billion so badly on existing initiatives for these families?

The £9 billion which is spent on these ‘problem/troubled’ families is an average of £75,000 per family.

Very little of this money actually goes to the families. Instead it goes on things like court appearances, eviction notices, arrears notices, police intervention, child protection orders and parenting orders, and the salaries of a whole range of professionals who work in the public, voluntary and private sectors.

These professionals spend 80% of their time on servicing bureaucratic systems, and only 20% building relations with families. For example, looking specifically at one worker’s engagement with a teenager in one specific family, Participle were able to plot the following:

» 74% of their time was spend on administration – monitoring, tracking, filling in forms, data recording, reporting, creating a paper trail, attending multi-agency meetings;
» 12% of their time was spent supporting the teenager indirectly through liaison with other agencies, e.g. educational welfare, schools admission boards;
» 14% of their time was spent in the family home, and the majority of this time was spent collecting information and data to fulfill the reporting duties in the 74%.

‘Troubled Family Trouble Shooters’ will help put some families in charge of the services that they receive, and probably do more good than harm. But there is not a hope that they will turn round the lives of 120,000 ‘troubled families’.

The risk, as Community Links argue, is that “adding yet another ‘key worker’ isn’t the same as fundamentally reforming the operation of the 15 agencies who might be there already. In many ways, it sounds like it might be adding a 16th.”

So what would a lower cost, more effective alternative look like?

Services delivered with respect not only shape the experience and perceptions of those who use them, but can achieve wider goals more efficiently.

We need to acknowledge that that people receiving services know more about their own lives than the people delivering them, however necessary the professional expertise is in order to provide help.

That is a real challenge to the way that decision-makers and right wingers think. Billions of pounds are wasted because powerful people develop policies to deal with what they call ‘the stock’, the ‘hard to reach’, the ‘problem families’, the ‘welfare dependent’, ‘the underclass’ and so on.

They’ve built a vast form filling architecture in support of these flawed policies, and their discussions are about whether to chuck more money at it (‘the carrot’) or to develop new punishments for people who are failed by the system (‘the stick’).

David Robinson, founder of Community Links, tells the following story:

I was recently called by the mother of a child I know well. She was asking me to come to a family case conference. She read me the letter. No fewer than nine professionals were expected to attend so I asked why she needed me there as well. “Because,” she said, “I want someone who is on my side.”

We spend billions on “services” which fail to treat people with respect and fail to develop their capabilities. We should cut or redesign these services so that they cost less, and ensure that when families need it, they can get reliable and consistent support from someone who is demonstrably on their side.

Here are a few thoughts in response, explaining why I am not convinced by the case which they make.

1. I am not an economist, but…

The paper argues in favour of setting firm goals on tax, borrowing and spending, with the Office for Budget Responsibility getting increased powers to act as a watchdog, and calls on Labour to pledge to run a surplus on the public finances.

Leaving aside for a moment the politics of this, I am not convinced that this approach is going to be the most effective way of maximising wellbeing and social justice. Setting fixed rules for fiscal policy which are monitored by an independent (unelected) quango seems to me to be especially problematic at times of economic uncertainty. It is essentially impossible to predict what the key economic challenges will be in 2017, but it is easy to imagine a situation where running a modest deficit would make more economic sense than committing to running a surplus.

From a purely good governance standpoint, retaining the flexibility to respond to the economic situation as we find it seems more sensible than trying to put rules into place for many years into the future.

2. ‘Fiscal conservatism’ is an awful name

The term ‘fiscal conservatism’ suggests that conservatives are responsible with the finances. I don’t think it would help the Labour Party if they named their new economic approach after George Osborne’s key message. Hopi argues that they are supporting “good, small-c conservatism, not big-C Osbornomics”, which sounds to me like a bad case of getting onto the complicated side of the argument.

Talking about fiscal conservatism also cuts this idea off from its natural origins – the people who ran budget surpluses and combined this with social justice are the likes of Bill Clinton and Clement Attlee, not Ronald Reagan or Maggie Thatcher.

3. It is awfully vague

The paper argues that we need to “acknowledge that social justice is advanced far better by bold reform and well-targeted investment than public spending… welfare mechanisms are never preferable to a genuinely productive and balanced economy that raise the living standards of those on low and middle incomes”.

I find the assertion that there is a trade off between welfare mechanisms and a genuinely productive and balanced economy unpersuasive, and it would be nice to see some examples of these ‘bold reforms’ and ‘well-targeted investments’. Similarly, the authors call for ‘zero-budgeting’, questioning every line of public spending, but have no examples of what this approach would mean in practice.

4. Politically, it is very ‘courageous’

Supposing that Labour decided to adopt this plan in full at the next election. They set out plans to match George Osborne’s spending plans, but differ from the Tories by (say) pledging to take away bus passes and winter fuel allowances from better off pensioners, and to hold down public spending on the NHS and schools in order to invest more in a state investment bank and more support for entrepreneurs. This would involve short term pain for the ‘squeezed middle’ in return for the promise of longer term rewards.

Now, clearly, this manifesto would be suboptimal for leftie voters, but I guess Labour could hope that these voters would have nowhere else to go (I don’t personally agree with this strategy, but it is a plan). But the evidence from the focus groups (based on research published by Lord Ashcroft) is that swing voters think that there is very little that the government can do to improve the economy.

So the pitch to swing voters is that Labour would cut their living standards, in order to pay for policies which the voters think won’t achieve much. This is not an obvious election winner.

“we are not sitting back and just hoping that the Big Society springs up. We have established what was called the Big Society Bank, which is now called Big Society Capital. It will get £200 million from the banks under the Merlin agreement.

That will be making grants to small voluntary bodies, so that they can scale up; they can be bigger and they can do more things.”

Sounds good, right? It is just a shame that, back in May, the government agreed that:

“The BSB[Big Society Bank] will not be a grant-making organisation. Funds deployed will therefore seek both financial and social returns.”

No wonder the Big Society isn’t working. Cameron thinks that one of the flagship policies of his government is that they’ve got hundreds of millions of pounds from the banks to give in grants to small voluntary organisations, so that they can build up the Big Society.

Instead, these small voluntary organisations are being offered loans, which will ‘seek a financial return’.

Meanwhile, government cuts mean that voluntary organisations are losing hundreds of millions of pounds in grants.

It is rare to find writers either willing or able to combine the two, as Rowenna Davis does so well in ‘Tangled up in Blue’.

The book describes the political ideas behind ‘Blue Labour’, and does so with far more eloquence and clarity than any Blue Labour advocates have managed to date.

It also offers a ‘behind the scenes’ look, based on wide-ranging interviews with the key people involved, at the last couple of years of the Labour Party as it went from power to opposition, and a mini biography of Blue Labour’s founder, Maurice Glasman.

Sympathetic yet not uncritical in tone, the book starts by describing the three pillars of Blue Labour, and then tells four stories – how Maurice Glasman developed the ideas behind Blue Labour after the death of his mother; his involvement in Gordon Brown’s barnstorming speech to Citizens UK just before the General Election; the role of Glasman and the Movement for Change in Labour leadership contest; Glasman’s elevation to the peerage; and the conflicts and criticisms which his media appearances caused.

I found that I was impressed by Maurice Glasman as a politician, but unimpressed by Blue Labour as a set of ideas.

The creation of Blue Labour was a quite remarkable achievement by Maurice Glasman. There are hundreds of professional lobbyists working for charities, trade unions and business which achieved a fraction of the influence that Glasman managed to achieve in his spare time when not working as an academic, raising a family or advising London Citizens. Using only his skills in building relationships with people, he managed to make contact with and influence key people at the heart of the Labour Party.

It’s also clear that Glasman’s work was of huge value to Labour’s elite. He helped Gordon Brown find his voice and get across his values before the election, and built friendships with both Miliband brothers and some of their advisers and friends after the election. Rather than identifying as a “Blairite” or “Brownite”, “Left” or “moderate”, Glasman was happy to work and talk with anyone who would have a conversation with him. It is a sign of how dysfunctional Labour’s elite was during this time that this simple approach reaped such dividends.

As Tangled Up in Blue makes clear, however, a key weakness of Blue Labour is that it is an elite project, with no wider movement behind it or even informing it.

Indeed, Blue Labour in practice has reversed the principles of community organising. In community organising, the idea is to develop policies through one to ones with ordinary people, and then mobilise them to carry out actions on decision-makers. In Blue Labour, policy is developed through one to ones with decision-makers, with the aim of using the Labour Party to carry out actions on ordinary people.

In part as consequence of this, the overall critique and many of the individual policy ideas of Blue Labour just aren’t very good. One inspiration for Blue Labour was Glasman’s horror at the threat posed by the “Red Tory” buffoon Phillip Blond and the Big Society. Labour faces many challenges in returning to power, but I think we know enough by now to be able to state with some certainty that David Cameron’s Big Society is not the existential threat to Labour which Glasman believed it to be.

Blue Labour’s critique of the state has some similarities to the least popular and convincing bits of the Big Society.

It is hard to see the evidence that free healthcare has the negative consequences which Blue Labour claims for it. Moreover, far from state-funded services such as Sure Start destroying the ability of people to form mutual support networks, the exact opposite is true. There are countless examples of people who made friends with other parents who they met at Sure Start centres.

In a similar vein, Glasman supports James Purnell’s idea that unemployed people should be guaranteed the offer of a paid job after one year, with the threat of having their benefits withdrawn if they don’t take it. Even the most rudimentary power analysis of the kind which is taught in the very first session of community organising training should highlight the flaw with using the threat of destitution to force people into work in this way.

Glasman “controversially” argues that “no effort” is put into helping people with disabilities to build up their own solidarity groups, to organise themselves to develop their own agenda, and that this is more important than providing services or paying state benefits. He seems unaware of the fact that the state has put substantial resources into Centres for Independent Living and user-led disability rights groups, or of the fact that solidarity groups of disabled people take a very different view of the importance of state benefits and service provision than he does.

The case against Blue Labour, therefore, is an easy one to make. It is an elitist project set up by a gifted lobbyist. Its critique of the state is divorced from the experiences of ordinary people, and is a mix of the ignorant, the patronising and the poorly thought through.

That’s even before we mention the “say something stupid-apologise-say something else stupid” approach to public relations, all of which is detailed in the book.

Yet, for all of that, I am persuaded by ‘Tangled up in Blue’ that there are things to learn from Blue Labour, shorn of its wilder and wackier aspects.

There is something very healthy about the way that Maurice Glasman, a grassroots Labour Party member, was able to get senior people in the Party to listen to his ideas. This kind of relationship building, not based on dysfunctional ‘Blairite’ and ‘Brownite’ factions but simply on the desire to listen, learn and understand each other, is immensely valuable.

I’d recommend it to anyone interested in how political ideas are developed, and in the future of left-wing politics and the Labour Party.

It’s time to leave behind the 1% who want to spend their Saturday afternoons in protest after protest, direct action after action, while the right continue to do their worst to our economy and society…

More than anything else the problem with the modern left is that we’ve become very presumptive about what the 99% want. We are very good at nominating ourselves as their moral spokespeople. We know what people really want even if they don’t yet themselves.

Here’s why I don’t think it’s time to leave behind this 1%.

When they put their minds to it, “the modern left” is very good at doing exactly the sort of campaigning which Anthony and I believe is so important, as the following story from the 2010 General Election shows.

I get regular emails from the Labour Representation Committee, which tend to focus on radical conferences, support for strike action, information about building resistance to capitalism and the like (the one I got yesterday was titled “Occupy, Resist and Get Involved”, and includes details of twelve conferences, demos and rallies which are taking place over the next month).

But early in 2010, the main subject of these emails changed.

During the short campaign period of the six weeks before the election, the top performing local Labour Party was not one of those marginal constituencies into which Labour had poured its limited central campaigning resources and professional organisers. Nor was it one of the areas which have got a reputation for pioneering innovative and effective ways of campaigning.

John McDonnell had been elected for Hayes and Harlington, in West London, in 1997. In 1992, he had lost by 2 votes, since which he had expanded his majority up to over 10,500.

In the run up to the last election, the Tories were way ahead in the opinion polls, and Labour’s plans to expand Heathrow meant that significant numbers of his constituents were facing the demolition of their homes, or significantly increased levels of noise and disruption.

In addition, in the 2008 London elections, Boris Johnson had polled more votes than Ken Livingstone in Hayes and Harlington, with nearly 10% of voters backing the BNP.

The call went out to Labour Lefties across the land that John McDonnell was in danger. And so it came to pass that during the six weeks of the election campaign, local activists and John McDonnell fans from across the “modern left” put aside their work demonstrating, conferencing, resisting, occupying and direct actioning, and worked like absolute beasts and spoke to tens of thousands of voters.

The result?

In 2005, Labour won by 10,654. In 2010, after economic crisis, Labour’s collapse in the polls and the decision to demolish hundreds of homes for local people to build the Third Runway, Labour’s majority was…10,824.

The lesson from this story is not that Labour would automatically be successful if it adopted the policy positions of the Labour Representation Committee (the evidence for this case is rather limited).

Instead, it is that rather than “leaving behind” the people who take part in direct action and protest, Labour needs to think about how to try to get them to help out with election campaigning. Some of the people involved in OccupyLSX wouldn’t be interested in this under any circumstances, but even getting one in ten of those who turned up on Saturday could make a big difference.

One of the best places to find people who are prepared to campaign like beasts in the service of securing a Labour victory is amongst those who have strongly held left wing political beliefs and who currently dedicate a lot of time to acting on those beliefs in a variety of causes.

There will be plenty of times when lefties disagree with Labour, and where they disagree on particular campaigns or tactics.

But I believe there is considerable mutual benefit for both Labour people who want to beat the Tories at the next election and for lefties who want to build the 99% movement in keeping in touch, finding opportunities where they agree and working together, and reaching out to the majority of people one doorstep at a time.

The IFS found that rising poverty is a direct result of policy changes which are planned by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. There is an alternative, which is fully costed and which draws only on policies supported by these parties, which would mean that government policies do not lead to any rise in levels of poverty.

Here it is.

Firstly, let’s look at how the IFS estimates that government policies are causing poverty:

• The coalition government’s reforms act to increase poverty slightly in 2012. Those reforms increase relative child poverty by about 100,000, absolute child poverty by about 200,000, and absolute poverty among working-age adults without dependent children by about 100,000 (before housing costs).

• In 2013, our projections suggest that coalition reforms increase both relative and absolute poverty by about 300,000 children and 100,000 working-age adults without dependent children (before housing costs). The reforms explain virtually all of the predicted rise in absolute poverty between 2012 and 2013.

• Beyond 2013, reforms introduced by the coalition have a slightly smaller overall effect on relative child poverty, though we estimate there will be 200,000 more children in relative poverty in 2014, 2015 and 2020 than there would have been without the government’s reforms. This is because the introduction of Universal Credit, which significantly reduces relative poverty, is offset by the continued CPI-uprating of benefits.
…
The coalition government’s reforms to Local Housing Allowance are a significant component of the effect of the current government’s reforms on poverty in 2015 – without these changes, relative and absolute child poverty would be at the same level as they would have been without any of the government’s changes, and these reforms account for at least half of the effect of the current government’s policies on relative and absolute poverty among those of working age without children.

* * * * * *

There is no need for the government consciously and deliberately to increase the number of people living in poverty. They could adopt the “first, do no harm” principle, and scrap their poverty-increasing policies on uprating of benefits, Local Housing Allowance, time-limiting of Disability Living Allowance and so on.

Reversing these policy changes would cost around £13bn/year by 2014/15. As an alternative, the government could raise this revenue by introducing reforms to capital gains tax (£1.9bn), a tax on properties worth over £2 million (£1.7bn), restricting pension tax breaks for higher earners (£5.5bn), and reducing tax avoidance (£3.9bn). This package of measures would raise £13bn/year.

This fully costed alternative, which would cut the number of people living in poverty by hundreds of thousands, is drawn from a document called “the Liberal Democrat election manifesto 2010″.

There is a danger that the kind of research which the IFS has published creates a sense of helplessness, that nothing can be done to stop things getting worse for many years to come.

So it is worth being absolutely and totally clear that increases in poverty are a result of decisions made by politicians, and that even within the very restrictive limits of “policies which these politicians have supported during the past eighteen months”, there is an alternative which would prevent these increases in poverty.

Reversing the decisions to increase poverty, and instead asking those with the broadest shoulders to contribute a little more, is not a panacea and won’t solve all the problems which the IFS report shows that the UK faces. But the principle of “first, do not harm” is an important first step, and one which current government policies fail.

Professors Andre Geim and Konstantin Noselov were awarded the Nobel Prize for physics for the discovery of a substance called Graphene.

In his speech, Osborne pledged to “fund a national research programme that will take this Nobel-prize winning discovery from the British laboratory to the British factory floor.”

Last year, Geim and Noselov were amongst signatories to an open letter which warned the plans to curtail the number of migrants coming to Britain from outside the European Union “would damage our ability to recruit the brightest young talent as well as distinguished scientists into our universities and industries”.

The letter added that: “International collaborations underlie 40% of the UK’s scientific output, but would become far more difficult if we were to constrict our borders. The UK produces nearly 10% of the world’s scientific output with only 1% of its population; we punch above our weight because we can engage with excellence wherever it occurs. The UK must not isolate itself from the increasingly globalised world of research – British science depends on it.”

“Without money we won’t be able to attract good people here,” Novoselov also told the Guardian. “The impact is going to be that good scientists will go abroad, especially the young people.”

There are plenty of other Chucklevision bits – my favourite being the call for a big new IT system for Jobcentre Plus which would analyse claimants’ information about jobsearching to sort the hardworking from the feckless.

But it would be a mistake to engage with the pretence that this report is intended as any kind of valuable contribution to the public policy debate about how to tackle unemployment. Instead, it needs to be recognised that it is a product of the wingnut welfare dependency culture.

A quick definition is probably in order here. The wingnut welfare industry stretches far beyond Policy Exchange, as can be seen by the existence of non jobs such as “National Grassroots Co-ordinator” of the Taxpayer’s Alliance.

In the USA, the Wingnut Welfare Industry has grown to such an extent that ‘Wingnut Welfare Queen’ even gets its own entry in the Urban Dictionary:

a low-talent, self-appointed pundit of the right, male or female, of the type who have become prominent in large patches of media, Washington D.C. think tanks and the Republican Party, and who depend on some mix of right-wing money, praise or contacts to boost and further their careers. Putting the “wingnut” in Wingnut Welfare Queen means the media figure will be not just predictably or reliably conservative or ultra-conservative, but doggedly and irrationally so.

In proper social research, researchers learn from unemployed people, from people who run programmes and a range of other experts. This evidence helps to test hypotheses or develop learning to inform policy problems.

A wingnut welfare report, in contrast, starts with the conclusions (in this case as invariably about making life more difficult for poor people) and then looks for quotes, polling or reports which might justify these conclusions.

As Judy Sebba from the LSE argues,

Studies of think tanks by researchers such as Diane Stone show that the networking that Ball and others identify rarely takes them out of the immediate Westminster area (or Washington DC in the US). Hence, far from educating the public about evidence they are characterised by closedness and exclusivity. They do not subject their work to review by others and so the quality of their outputs are not assessed. Most worryingly, the media present the work of think tanks as credible sources of research and facts without any checks being in place.

There are other negative consequences to ‘wingnut welfare’.

The authors of this report are educated people, who presumably have some skills of value in the real economy. Instead, they have taken the lifestyle choice to produce shoddy reports. As Paul Krugman notes, the wingnut welfare dependency culture guarantees decent employment even for appallingly poor levels of performance.

So what is to be done about this industry, which creates a dependency culture, rewards failure, and allows people who could contribute productively to take the lifestyle choice not to?

I have a modest proposal, based on Flying Rodent’s insight that people who know what they want should get it – good and hard.

This means writers of such shoddy reports should get to experience what would happen to others if their policies were put into practice.

So one of the authors might get to experience life on £65 per week on one of the “workfare” schemes which their report recommends, and then find out what happens when the major new IT system which they’ve argued for goes wrong and the computer decides that they haven’t been trying hard enough to look for a job and need to be sanctioned.

Meanwhile, the other could be told that he hasn’t got enough points by a Jobcentre advisor who takes a dislike to him, and gets to try and cope with no money – safe in the knowledge that his punishment is supported by a majority of people in a poll which he commissioned.

It would be nice to see those who lecture others about “personal responsibility” taking their own advice. It’s time to consider radical changes to end wingnut welfare as we know it.

FDP politicians might have assumed that things couldn’t get any worse. But in recent elections in Berlin, the FDP lost all of their seats in the state parliament, and were overtaken by the Pirate Party, which won 9% of the vote and fifteen seats.

Opinion polls since the Berlin elections have seen a total collapse of the FDP vote – down to just 2% – and the rise of the Pirates. The Left Party (die Linke) has also lost support to the Pirates, who in the most recent poll were backed by 7% of Germans.

The Pirate Party’s main policies are around defending civil rights and privacy in telephony and the internet, and increased transparency of government by usage of open source government. They are part of an international movement, which also has strong levels of support in Sweden, where there are two Pirate MEPs, and Somalia.

It is probably too much to hope for something similar in Britain, where voters take revenge on Nick Clegg by replacing him with a Pirate. But we can hope.

To understand why, let’s look at how this policy actually works in reality. Some local authorities already give greater priority in their allocations to people in work – Manchester and Newham, for example. At the margins, this will mean that a small number of people in work will find it easier to get council houses.

But in Newham alone, there are 70,000 people on the waiting list for social housing. The average wait for a two bedroom flat on the fourth floor or above of a tower block is eight years – and for most other types of property it is longer. Meanwhile, most people in housing need live in privately-owned accommodation, where rent costs are higher and where nearly half of all properties are below the Decent Homes Standard.

So the debate about principles behind allocations policies involve anguished and passionate debate about exactly where to put the deckchairs on the Titanic. It is also a deeply divisive debate – pitting people whose share the need and desire for a decent home against each other.

Within the framework which Ed outlined of taking on the vested interests on the side of ordinary people, it would have been both possible and better to set out a direction which unites people in housing need around policies which would make a difference in the real world. This direction would have, for example, committed Labour to building lots more homes (and taking on the vested interests which stop this happening), and cutting welfare payments to bad landlords who rake in millions from the taxpayers to rent out homes which are filthy and dangerous.

There was a similar problem with the bit about “producer” and “predatory” capitalism. This analysis seemed to have rather limited roots in the experiences of these “good” businesses which Ed was keen to praise. Before and after the speech, Labour should have lined up people who run small businesses who had hired apprentices to help them win government contracts, and business people who are engaged in “good” business practices to explain why they are backing the proposals in Ed’s speech, how they are disadvantaged by the asset strippers who are killing jobs. It would have been a lot harder for the vested interests to go on the telly and radio and whine about how Labour is anti-business if they had to debate against Labour supporters with business experience who explained how Ed’s ideas would help in the real world.

I suspect the difficulty is that the people developing the policy and writing the speech didn’t know or involve any business people who would have been prepared to get involved in this way…which rather highlights the flaw with making this the centre piece of the speech and with the policy agenda.

There is an easy comfort zone for Labour to fall into. Supporters can argue about whether it was right to boo Tony Blair, or about what the right balance between need and desert might be in a theoretical welfare state, or about the extent to which Ed Miliband’s approach is a “Blue Labour” one. I can feel the attraction of wasting hours on each of these subjects, on all of which I have strong views.

None of this, however, will help to build on Ed’s central insight or achieve anything productive. The established and conventional wisdom isn’t working for most people, and over the next few years this is only going to become more apparent. Therefore, as Ed understands, Labour needs to think differently and more radically. But this doesn’t involve deckchair rearranging on housing allocations policy, or theoretical musings on the nature of capitalism.

Instead, it needs to start with the problems that people face and their ideas about what needs to be done, and demonstrate how Labour’s values offer solutions and chime with people’s real world experiences. This doesn’t need to happen (and it can’t happen) overnight, but it is a much better and more productive use of time over the next few months for Labour supporters than forming a circular firing squad and taking aim at each other.

Ashcroft argues that voters “struggle to see” the connection between deficit reduction and economic recovery, and that, “It seems to many that we are pursuing deficit reduction at the expense of growth and job creation (and other things they think are important) rather than as a means to it.” This will be rather a surprise to Westminster bubble commentators who regularly assert that voters’ top concern is the deficit.

Amongst the other findings:

- Labour are ahead of the Tories on “shares my values” and “on the side of ordinary people”, whereas the Tories are felt to be stronger on “willing to take tough decisions” and “competent and capable”.

- The top issues for voters are jobs and the economy, NHS, immigration, deficit and education. Issues such as “reducing welfare dependency”, Europe and the environment are lower priorities.

- Voters felt that Labour had the best policies on the economy and jobs, NHS, education. The Tories were ahead on defence, crime, immigration, the deficit and Europe, though their advantage on crime was much lower than in previous surveys. Voters backed the Lib Dems on one policy area – the environment.

- David Cameron was preferred as best Prime Minister to Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg.

The full results can be found here.

It proposes a range of new taxes on the rich to help fund a multi billion pound expansion of the welfare state. It calls for tough new regulations on landlords to protect renters.

And it calls for Labour to recognise the failure of the neoliberal ‘what can be measured can be managed’ approach to delivering public services, in favour of promoting the ethos of public service and allowing workers to have the time and ability to build relationships with the people who use their services.

The name of this socialist call to arms? The Purple Book.

While reading the Purple Book, I also had a look at a very interesting piece by Graeme Cooke – a former Special Adviser to James Purnell who is now at the ippr think tank, about how the political challenges which Labour faces has changed since 1995. Amongst other points, this piece echoed the Purple Book’s call for a major expansion of the welfare state to provide more support for people who care for others.

I also saw a blogpost by Matthew Taylor, Tony Blair’s Chief Adviser on political strategy, on the failings of ‘New Public Management’, contracting out and the use of market mechanisms. Together with the work of the Resolution Foundation, run by Gordon Brown’s former Deputy Chief of Staff, these bring together the current thinking on the part of the self-styled Labour ‘moderates’.

Of course, there is a lot in the Purple Book for lefties to disagree with. Having ploughed through hundreds of pages of this stuff, there are a number of themes which emerge:

Firstly, there is a deep desire to define their ideas against the left. The rhetoric is all about the modernisers who are aiming to free the Labour Party from its left-wing, tax and spend comfort zone. This gets pretty tedious pretty quickly, particularly once you look at the gap between the ‘moving on from the big state’ rhetoric and the actual policy content, as we’ll see.

Secondly, there are some big gaps in what gets discussed. The authors acknowledge that there is very little if anything on climate change, transport, energy or foreign policy. The focus is very much on “modernising social democracy in one country”.

Thirdly, the mindset is still very much one of people who are used to being in government – top-down and technocratic. Liam Byrne’s chapter claims to be inspired “more by his constituents in Hodge Hill than by Westminster” (and is then largely based on discussions which he had in Harvard learning from Amartya Sen), but that is the exception rather than the rule.

This is a book by and for Westminster insiders in both tone and content. This results in far too much discussion of elite issues such as primaries and elected mayors.

Fourthly, a lot of the new ideas involve people writing about things which they believe are desirable but don’t really know anything about. So there is a lot about the need to support the private sector, but it is pretty obvious that the authors of these paeans of praise are political hacks whose interaction with the private sector is that they go shopping sometimes, rather than people who have run their own businesses.

Patrick Diamond’s chapter on public sector reform manages not to mention the role of public sector workers. Tessa Jowell’s bits on “community commissioning” are well intentioned, but not very aware of the challenges and trade offs involved. Tristram Hunt’s entire chapter goes horribly and wretchedly wrong once he stops writing about the history of the Labour movement and tries his hand at public policy and political strategy. And the less said about Frank Field’s chapter, the better. The odd bit written by people who are practitioners and know what they are talking about, such as Cllr Paul Brant’s chapter on local government, stand out all the more clearly.

The limitations of all this are mostly clearly evident in their big new idea for public service reform, “Underpants Gnome Mutualism”. This is a three step process – 1. turn public services into mutuals, 2. ???, 3. Profit! So we learn, for example, that if only Sure Starts had been mutualised, then they would somehow have been immune to public spending cuts, and as part of fighting terrorism, the Preventing Violent Extremism funding should be handed over to a non-government mutual.

And yet, as the introduction to this review hints, in amongst the leftie-baiting rhetoric and underdeveloped proposals, there is quite a lot here to like. A lot of the new thinking by the “Purple Bookers” should have lefties nodding in agreement, and while they’d never admit it, in many cases their analysis concedes that leftie critics of New Labour were correct. Back in 2003 when lefties were campaigning for regulations on bad landlords, Blairite ministers said that new regulations weren’t needed and were “anti-aspiration”. Now Caroline Flint – Caroline Flint! – is leading the charge to regulate all landlords and require them to meet the Decent Homes Standard in order to get housing benefit payments.

The Purple Bookers want to reduce tax relief on higher earners’ pension contributions, and instead prioritise helping people on low incomes to save for retirement. They want a land use tax and to allow local referendums on raising the higher rate of tax. The centre piece of their policy agenda is to make childcare and social care affordable for all. Their support for the “relational state” which cares about people rather than numbers is an implicit rejection of the cruelty of the Work Capability Assessment.

For all the big talk about the vital importance of fiscal responsibility and support for the political strategy of not opposing George Osborne’s deficit reduction plans too vigorously, the Purple Bookers have very little idea of what they think government should stop spending money on. There are a couple of half-hearted bits about abolishing the Communities and Local Government department and transferring its functions to local authorities, and creating one Department of the Regions instead of different departments for each of the devolved nations.

But there are no serious plans to scale back the range of activities which government funds. Indeed, if you add up all the proposals put forward in the Purple Book, the Purple Bookers plan to increase public spending on the welfare state, and pay for this by taxing the rich more.

Similarly, Graeme Cooke’s analysis of the changing ideological landscape and future political priorities refers to the need to prioritise full employment, address stagnating wages and build more homes – exactly the same priorities as those set out by Labour leftie Owen Jones in his piece on winning the support of working-class voters.

There are two competing impulses at the heart of the Purple Book.

The first is for this to be a symbolic statement, designed to impress elite opinion-formers about Labour’s “seriousness”, and fight the good internal fight against the left. It uses buzzwords such as “mutualism” as rhetorical devices rather than out of any understanding of their role, and has the odd obnoxious jibe at people who receive state benefits or are otherwise “undeserving”. This is what we might call the ‘Peter Watt’ impulse.

The second impulse aims to come to an assessment of what New Labour did wrong, how things have changed over the past decade and a half in the world beyond Westminster, and how Labour needs to change as a result. If Matthew Taylor wants to develop an alternative to New Public Management and McKinsey; if Tessa Jowell is serious about more services being delivering by community groups rather than private companies and Graeme Cooke wants to develop the public service ethos, build more homes and aim for full employment; if Gavin Kelly wants to secure a greater share of national income for people who work by hand and by brain; if Liz Kendall wants to expand the welfare state and Rachel Reeves to tax higher earners to pay for decent pensions for low paid workers… – then there’s a lot for us lefties to support and contribute to the development of.

But there is more common ground then the spin would suggest between Labour’s moderates and the left. We can’t expect them to admit that they were wrong and we were right, but we can show them that many of the ideas and priorities which they are calling for are ones which we share and know a lot about how to implement in practice.

These entryists are worse than Militant were in the 1980s, because at least Militant believed in something whereas these people just want to march the Labour Party round in circles. But like Militant, we don’t know who their leader is. And their diabolical plans to sideline Labour Party members and trade unionists are already influencing the Labour Party leadership.

Now you might expect that over here at Liberal Conspiracy, we’d deny all of this. But, actually, it’s all true.

We, and our fellow travellers, have done all the terrible things that Dan Hodges accuses us of. And we can now reveal who the secret leader of the New Entryists actually is.,…

Before revealing our leader – the Peter Taaffe to Sunny’s Derek Hatton – let’s briefly consider a few of the possible objections to Dan Hodges’ argument.

Sure – many of the people who he’s concerned about acting as entryists, such as the anarchists or the custard pie throwers, have no interest in the Labour Party and never have done. And that his definition of “flat earthers” would include many of the trade unionists and Labour Party members who the New Entryists are apparently trying to sideline.

Furthermore, it’s worth noting, as Dan does, that involving new people in the Labour Party isn’t entirely destructive. New thinking can be good, and these new activists can help Labour become more effective at campaigning, and thus make it more likely that Labour can win the next election.

Let’s also remember that the key skills of community organising – recruiting volunteers, increasing turnout, listening to people and building their skills – are ones which are also key skills for election organising.

But none of these minor quibbles alters the fundamental point. As Dan puts it:

Make no mistake, they’re in among us. And making their presence felt. Ed Miliband’s flirtation with reducing the influence of the trade unions. The re-writing of clause 1 of the constitution. The rise of blue Labour. The embracing of movement for change. These are all being strongly supported, and in some cases driven, by those who crossed to Labour in the last 16 months.

A substantial charge sheet, with one common theme which leads us directly to the shadowy leader of the New Entryists.

He is:
- The man who was backed by the overwhelming majority of those in the Labour Party who want to reduce the influence of the trade unions.

- The man who planned a “clause 1 moment” as one of his first acts after gaining power.

- The man whose speeches were written by Maurice Glasman, founder of Blue Labour.

- The man who set up the Movement for Change.

- The leader of the New Entryists, Flat-earthers, Liberal conspirators, Ivory tower intellectuals, New politicos, Community cultists, and Direct action die-hards.

David Miliband.

Their ideas were reported in the Independent last week and on the Progress website.

It hasn’t been published yet, but we got hold of a copy and thought we’d have a look at it.

Thomas and Kellner argue that commuter belt voters want to see lower taxes, less crime, better public services, that they are less concerned about traditional Labour issues such as poverty and social justice. They are more hostile to trade unions, but sympathetic to co-operatives.

Thomas concludes that “a clearer co-operative alternative to the Cameroon’s[sic] ‘Big Society’ and which speaks to the ‘age of anxiety’ is more likely to resonate now than at any time in Labour’s recent past”, and that “If Labour is to win next time it will need an organisational focus and political narrative that recognises the importance of the commuter belt.”

Here are three key weaknesses of this warmed over “Blairism plus co-ops” argument:

1. Pre-conceived conclusions not supported by the data

Reading the pamphlet, it is pretty clear that the research started with the conclusions and worked back to try to find some data to support these. For example, one question asks people about what three or four things would most improve their lives and those of their families. “Fewer regulations and less red tape for business” comes out as the third lowest priority of these amongst the options provided, and a lower priority for commuter belt voters than British voters as a whole, below issues such as “raising the minimum wage”, “cheaper fares”, “higher taxes on the rich”, or even “a return to ‘family values’ and less divorce”.

Red tape
In the very next table, however, “reducing red tape” gets included in a list of the key issues where people are asked to consider, alongside jobs, taxes, public services, crime, immigration and the standard of living. These results are then averaged to show that “the Conservatives have a clear advantage” on what people think about the future. This “clear advantage” would have disappeared entirely if instead of asking about “reducing red tape”, the research had asked about one of the issues which people cared more about.

Trade unions
As for the anti-trade union arguments, Thomas and Kellner’s own research found that most people in the ‘commuter belt’ actually think unions ‘provide a useful service for their members’ (49% yes, 28% no). And the same ‘commuter belt’ people think unions ‘have a relevant role to make Britain a fairer place to live’. (45% yes, 34% no). Other research suggests that trade union officials are more trusted than business leaders, politicians, journalists (2011 MORI Veracity Index) (38% vs 29%, 19% 14% respectively) and decades of polling data show that trade union industrial action is incredibly low down the scale of priorities for voters.

Cooperatives
In contrast, Thomas’ conclusions about public attitudes to co-operatives aren’t based on any polling data. He doesn’t have the confidence in his own arguments to ask the same questions about co-operatives as he did about trade unions. As ever, massive alarm bells are set off when he refers to the need for Labour to develop an alternative to the Big Society. His research didn’t ask whether or not “commuter belt” voters were looking for an alternative to the Big Society, or whether – like every other piece of research has found – they regard it as a ridiculous idea.

Taxes
There are also some strange conclusions from the evidence. The research finds that people want lower taxes “on people like them”, and better quality public services. The pamphlet concludes that voters “are even less enthusiastic than the rest of the country about higher taxes on the rich”. But this question wasn’t asked, and it is reasonably obvious that raising taxes on the rich would be one way of raising revenue to cut taxes for middle income earners and/or improve public services.

2. Why should Labour focus on “commuter belt” voters?

Thomas argues in some points that winning over commuter belt voters will also help Labour to win over voters in other marginal constituencies across England. At other points in the same pamphlet, he argues that “commuter belt” voters have different priorities from voters across England. Either of these might be true, but they can’t both be.

Thomas wants Labour to devote more resources to focus on the commuter belt. But Outer London and the Home Counties do not form one homogenous block. Even in 1997, Labour did not win a single constituency in Surrey, for example.

It would be one thing to argue that voters in marginal constituencies are hostile to the poor and trade unions, so therefore Labour needs to change its approach. It is quite another to do an opinion poll involving wealthy people in safe Tory constituencies, and base a political strategy on their responses.

3. Research being done for the wrong reasons

The report concludes that the organisations that reduce workplace insecurity have no real political value in working out how to improve living standards. It argues for taking campaigning resources away from the areas which Labour needs to win and putting more into areas where Labour cannot win. And the priorities of the author – from cutting red tape to developing an alternative to the Big Society, are not remotely related to those of voters.

The basic problem with this kind of research is that it is being done for the wrong reasons. It is designed to confirm what Gareth Thomas and Progress think Labour should do, when they should be using it to challenge and rethink their ideas. The former Labour voters in their own focus groups are saying things like:

“[Labour is] Confused – it recognises the problems but is still too fearful of the right-wing media”

“[Labour] Has a tradition and values which should still be valued and campaigned for”

“[Labour] Lost its way under Blair/Brown. I hope it is rediscovering its role as party of the many, not the few”

Addressing the politics of anxiety means ditching the old anti-union, pro-rich prejudices which drove these voters away, and listening to what they are really saying, not only the things which are comfortable to hear.

• The Work Programme will get around one in four adult Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) clients into work,
significantly below the rate needed to meet the DWP’s expectations for minimum performance;
• Providers will fail to meet the minimum performance expected of them by the DWP by around 30,000
jobs over three years;
• Providers will also undershoot what the Government anticipates would have happened if no welfare
to work scheme existed at all, suggesting that the Government’s analysis of this ‘policy-off’ scenario is over-optimistic;
• Based on FND performance levels, over 90% of Work Programme providers will be at risk of having
their contracts terminated by DWP even by year three of the scheme;
• This under-performance means that funding per jobseeker will be significantly less than anticipated,
threatening the financial viability of providers.

In order for the government to save their flagship jobs programme, Social Market Foundation recommend that the government increases the payments to providers, publishes the data about how they are performing, revises the assumptions about how many people will be able to get jobs now that the economy is weaker, and investigates the impact on sub-contractors to make sure that they aren’t forced out of business.

*

It is no great surprise that a department led by Iain Duncan Smith and Lord Freud managed to introduce a multi billion pound jobs programme funded on the basis of wishful thinking and over optimistic predictions. It is still pretty extraordinary that the Social Market Foundation is predicting that fewer people will get jobs as a result of the Work Programme than government believes would have done if no welfare to work scheme existed at all, and that within three years the programme will bankrupt more than 90% of all specialist organisations which support people to get jobs, unless the government gives them more money and lets them reduce their targets.

A copy of the full report is available here.

She argues that a failure to stigmatise unemployed people has helped cause a social crisis, and that setting up family therapy centres and stigmatising the poor will persuade neoliberals to support higher wages for low paid workers.

I’m sure the intentions are good, but I don’t agree with any of this. Here’s four key weaknesses of the “tough love” approach:

1. Calling for things which are already happening

Orr writes, “There was outrage when the last Labour government floated the idea of residential centres for young mothers who chose to start families without being able to provide material support to them. Maybe this should be looked at again.”

These residential centres already exist. So the starting point for Orr’s discussion could instead be “how do we sustain and expand these valuable services which are threatened by cuts in public spending”.

2. Insisting on a top down “one size fits all” support service, and misunderstanding what makes particular charities so effective

Orr wants to sweep away a wide range of support services for families, and replace them with “family therapy centres” as the one single “correct” way to support families. I admire the work which Kids Company does, but there are all sorts of problems with looking at the work that one charity does and imaging that everything would be better if only everyone did it their way.

As per the Anna Karenina principle, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. This means that a service which is right for one family isn’t necessarily going to be right for another one. This in turn means that we need a diverse, personalised range of support services from which families can choose the right ones to meet their needs and build their capabilities, not a one size fits all approach. What would happen, under Orr’s approach, for those families whose needs aren’t met by the family therapy centre approach?

It’s always very tempting to see work done by a particular charity and imagine that problems would be solved if only their work could be institutionalised and replicated. But there are specific challenges with trying to scale up work which relies heavily on one charismatic individual like Batmanghelidjh. Would Kids Company work well if people were required by law to engage with it, rather than its services being voluntary? Is there any evidence that its impact is greater than that of other kinds of support services? Would it still be as effective without the inspiration of its founder?

3. Paying more attention to right wing rhetoric than reality

Orr writes that, “the left has to face the fact that living off the state, when you are able-bodied, able-minded, educated and young, is something that does need some stigma attached to it.” Her premise is that the attitude of avoiding stigma in the design of public services has caused a social crisis. This is a staple of right wing rhetoric, as is the idea that services need to be “tough” to be effective.

However, if Orr spoke to anyone who is unemployed, or who is a lone parent, then she would know that there is an enormous amount of stigma to “living off the state”, and abundant evidence about how this stigma causes poor health amongst many other social problems. She’d know that there are parents who don’t get the help which they are entitled to and need because the “tough” rhetoric has scared them off. And she’d know that a generation of politicians using right wing language around “living off the state” has been part of the problem, not part of the solution.

It is revealing that Orr is worried that if the services that she calls for were “too nice”, then “everyone would want their kids to go to them”. Heaven forbid that the poor should value and want to use support services without needing to be threatened!

4. Absence of any kind of political strategy

Orr believes that if “the Left” adopts a “tough love” approach which admits that all family services except those provided by Kids Company are ineffective, that we can’t possibly increase funding on youth services, and that it is emotionally and culturally healthy to stigmatise people “tough love” approach, then the Right will support increasing public spending and accept the need to raise wages.

This is at best wishful thinking. Past experience suggests that the Right will respond to this by gleefully proclaiming that this proves that they were correct all along, and continuing to roll out and fight for the maximum implementation of their policy wishlist. The Right won’t be persuaded to support more social spending or higher wages out of the goodness of their hearts, but will only do so if we argue for these causes and persuade enough people to support us.

*

So, what does this tell us about a better way forward in place of “tough love”? We might start with the following four principles:

Firstly, we should understand, support and expand effective support services for families which already exist, and oppose government attempts to make things worse by cutting them back.

Secondly, we need to go further and develop a wider range of personalised support services, not just one approach which treats all families in the same way.

Thirdly, we should listen to families living in poverty, rather than forming our ideas about what should be done to them from right wing language and beliefs which simply aren’t true.

And fourthly, we should argue that wealthy people (like Deborah Orr) need to contribute more in order to make sure that we can reverse cuts to the police and tackle the social problems which face our society.

In response, the “Do Something Nice for Ashraf” website was set up by people who were disgusted by the shameful way that he was treated, to raise money to do something nice for him.

This appeal has now closed, having raised more than £22,000 which is, as the organisers say, “a cracking effort from everyone”.

Do Something Nice for Ashraf is one of the main online efforts to help victims of the riots. You can donate to others, including the House of Reeves furniture store, Aaron Biber and Siva Kandiah.

Civil Society interviewed her yesterday, and here’s what she had to say about the relationship between spending cuts and the riots:

“Youth services were “at breaking point” even before cuts to their funding and were unable to provide the support needed to prevent this week’s riots, according to Camila Batmanghelidjh.

Speaking to civilsociety.co.uk, the founder of youth charities the Place2Be and Kids Company (pictured) said young people need to feel as if they “belong somewhere” where positive behaviour matters.

“If organisations that kids can belong to have been diminished through the cuts and there’s no secure base or a healthy group for kids to belong to then they’ve got nothing to lose.

“The services were at breaking point anyhow, and to be honest with you, most of them didn’t have sufficient resources to deal with these types of kids in the first place.

“Lots of the youth provisions had become very dangerous because they were too understaffed and the kids’ destructive and savage behaviour set the agenda.

“The counter-action coming from these agencies couldn’t be strong enough because it was too under-resourced.”

She added that the government should lay down a vision for disenfranchised young people which should be wide-ranging but should include additional resources for charities.”

*

Conservative Home argues that Right wing politicians will only gain a political advantage from these riots if they “win the battle” and defeat “the idea that cuts are to blame for our social crisis”. The New Statesman thinks that “it is too simplistic to blame the coalition’s cuts for the riots”.

But there’s nothing “simplistic” about the analysis of people like Batmangheldjh, which comes from years of experience of working directly with vulnerable young people. And rather than thinking about how his party could exploit the riots to win support, Tim Montgomerie and other Tory politicians should listen to what she is saying.

This is meant to be part of “a new centre-left agenda for welfare”. He says it would “give priority to universal services, rather than universal benefits”, and aim to provide “fewer but clearer and more substantive offers that really mean something to people – rather than lots of little things that often don’t”.

But they are deeply misguided on some ideas.

National Salary Insurance sounds unobjectionable, as far as it goes. I don’t really see why someone who earned £40,000 per year before losing their job should be allowed to borrow more than someone who earned £8,000, but that would require a relatively minor tweak. And some of ippr’s other suggestions, including free universal early years services, and the right to a paid job for everyone who is unemployed for a year or more, are straight from the Paskini welfare reform agenda.

The bad
In order to pay for this, ippr are suggesting that what they call “little things which don’t mean much to people” are withdrawn, such as free bus passes for pensioners, and that means testing of universal benefits are extended.

Free bus passes for pensioners are probably one of the most popular parts of the welfare state. Describing them as “little things which don’t mean much to people” is a one sentence electoral suicide note, and it is really rather troubling if Purnell thinks that taking bus passes off pensioners in exchange for jobs loans is an example of the centre left “regaining the initiative on welfare”.

The ugly
There are also some ideas which highlight a deeper confusion. ippr champions the idea of mandatory weekly appointments at the Jobcentre, which would be a total waste of money, and extensive use of sanctions to get unemployed people to do what they are told to.

They claim their agenda will challenge “those on the left who simply want to defend every aspect of the current system or deny that irresponsibility in the welfare system exists”. Having slain that straw man, Purnell and ippr could perhaps instead develop their thinking by engaging with lefties who have a wide range of ideas for welfare reform.

These include the people who responded to the Broken of Britain “welfare by the people, for the people” discussion which Sue organised; Community Links’ “need not greed” campaign, the idea of the Community Allowance , and many more.

Every popular welfare policy, from the NHS to the minimum wage, free bus passes to child benefit, started life as a leftie cause which Very Serious People said was unrealistic and could never be implemented.

The apology
It would also help if James Purnell acknowledged that he got a lot of things wrong during his time as Work and Pensions Secretary, and apologised to the people whose lives were ruined as a result.

Some of what he did was very good – setting up the Future Jobs Fund and ensuring that child poverty didn’t rise overall during the recession, to take two examples – but the man who re-hired David Freud and introduced the Work Capability Assessment deserves to get a very sceptical hearing when outlining new ideas for welfare policy.

Where, above all, I think Purnell went wrong during his time at DWP was in trying to win the approval of right wing journalists as a way of preventing criticism. This strategy didn’t work then and won’t work now.

We don’t need a welfare strategy which robs Peter the pensioner to pay Paul the out of work plumber. Instead, we need to do more to listen to the people who understand the welfare state best because they are living in poverty, and to plan ahead so that we don’t just address existing problems such as housing benefit payments to slum landlords, but also future problems.

And rather than defining themselves against the left, ippr should work with lefties to help develop new and popular ways of building a welfare state which helps everyone to live with dignity.

My analysis is that the fundamental problem with Blue Labour is not Lord Glasman’s ideas about immigration, nor even Glasman’s “hand grenade” style of debating.

Instead, the problem is that they aren’t behaving in a way which is true to their values.

Blue Labour’s central argument is for “resistance to commodification through democratic organisation”. As Glasman says, all the rest is mere commentary. They believe that this goal can be achieved by organising people, developing the skills of local leaders to build strong relationships which unite people.

And yet, if any of the people involved in Blue Labour have done any organising in the past year, they’ve kept awfully quiet about it. Instead, they’ve written pamphlets, spoken at seminars, given interviews to the newspapers and held meetings behind closed doors with Ed Miliband and his advisers. In other words, they’ve adopted a strategy of trying to achieve change from the top down through lobbying elites. And they’ve proven beyond reasonable doubt that they aren’t very good at it.

Which raises the question about why Blue Labour won’t use community organising and mobilising people to achieve their aims and convince the Labour Party leadership to adopt the approach which they claim to champion.

It isn’t a very encouraging vote of confidence in community organising if its advocates spend their time writing pamphlets, making speeches in the House of Lords and in policy seminars and chatting to Daily Telegraph journalists, rather than building relationships with local leaders and mobilising people.

At times it seems like there are two different people – Maurice Glasman, the experienced community organiser whose thoughtful contributions draws on years of experience of organising and the relationships that he has built; and Lord Glasman, who randomly pontificates to journalists on the issues of the day based on nothing but his own personal opinions, acting as a kind of second rate Neal Lawson.

So what Blue Labour’s advocates need to do now is be true to their values and spend their time on democratic organisation, not elite lobbying. Don’t have cosy chats in private with your old Oxbridge chum Ed Miliband – summon him to appear in front of an assembly of people who your leaders have brought together to respond to your agenda publicly. Don’t talk to journalists who want to do a profile to give them cheap headlines out of your lack of media awareness – invite them to watch and report on the power of organised people resisting commodification. Don’t pontificate in the newspapers about what you think working class people might want to hear about immigration – build relationships between working class people and develop their skills so they can lead.

Blue Labour will become interesting at the point where local Labour candidates start winning elections after adopting a Blue Labour approach to organising, or where a local Labour-run council starts doing innovative things to promote democratic resistance to commodification, or when a local Labour Party runs and wins community-led campaigns to achieve social change thanks to the efforts of leaders trained in Blue Labour’s approach.

The bit of Blue Labour worth salvaging is not “Maurice Glasman and friends telling us their interesting contributions to Labour’s elite policy debate”, but “Showing us in practice how building relationships can organise democratic resistance to commodification”.

- Introduce “top up fees for schools”, where parents pay around a quarter of the average costs of educating their children, and allow private companies to set up new schools, receive money from the government and make a profit.

- Scrap the pupil premium and Sure Start, reduce the number of nursery places within primary and infant schools, scrap free early education for 2-4 year olds and childcare vouchers, and instead “encourage more private sector provision”.

- Scrap the NHS and replace it with Singapore-style private health vouchers.

- Reverse plans to link the state pension to earnings, and scrap the winter fuel allowance, TV licenses and free bus passes.

- Privatise all social housing stock, and make flat rate housing benefit payments which pay less attention to the cost of housing in different areas.

- Remove tax credits from part time workers, to encourage them to work full time in all the new jobs which the private sector will create.

- Scrap all railway lines which don’t currently make a profit, and phase out all subsidies for bus travel, on the grounds that “Such transfers can be challenged on economic grounds, however, because they redistribute resources from productive individuals to non-productive individuals, thereby hampering the creation of wealth.”

- Introduce VAT on public transport fares, and deregulate the private taxi market so that people who used to use the bus to get around can instead travel by low cost taxi.

- Privatise the motorways and introduce road pricing to charge motorists to use them, and give residents in urban streets the “right to buy” their roads.

- Take an “anti-interventionist” approach to climate change, for example by cutting government spending on tackling climate change but instead imposing VAT on food.

This summary barely scratches the surface, and the full report is here. It is a kind of Encyclopedia Wingnuttia which brings together every half-baked, utopian, daft right-wing libertarian idea into one handy reference guide.

The IEA argue that “in light of public opinion the proposals in our report no longer look so “radical” or “brave”; these are mainstream ideas backed by supporters of all parties.” This is based on a polling question which asks people, “If the Government were to reduce its spending to 30% of national income, the Government would have less money to spend, but each household would get a pony and pay around £7,500 less tax on average. Would you support or oppose this reduction in government spending?”

While we hope that the Tory Party will listen to the IEA and adopt their manifesto in full at the next election, what is perhaps most interesting is that when right wingers talk about “government waste”, it turns out that what they mean are things like the NHS, free nursery, primary and secondary schooling, trains, buses and free use of motorways.

This is intended as a warning about how the UK can’t compete internationally with other countries which have lower tax rates on the wealthy.

But he does acknowledge that there is an even higher priority than tax cuts for Scottish British tennis stars:

I am not saying that the 50p rate is the only problem: if we were to cut taxes now, it might be best to start with VAT to get people shopping again.

That echoes the argument made by Ed Balls – that what’s needed is a temporary VAT cut to put more money in people’s pockets, increase consumer confidence, cut inflation and boost the economy.

Boris Johnson is desperately trying to distance himself from the Tories, one minute appealing to his base of wealthy right-wingers, the next backing Ed Balls against George Osborne on tax cuts.

I guess one consolation is that the more time he spends posturing and winding up his rivals for the Tory leadership, the less time he’s got for his other hobbies of putting up tube fares and sacking police officers.

“Public sector workers who have been made redundant should work unpaid as volunteer managers for charities, according to Francis Maude, the Minister for the Cabinet Office.

Speaking at a session hosted by Christian charity Oasis in London on Wednesday evening, Maude said many charities had plenty of potential volunteers but were unable to involve all of them because there was a shortage of volunteer managers.

“There will be a diminishing public sector workforce,” he said. “I want to help train some of these people to be organisers and managers of volunteers. There is nothing more frustrating than seeing charities with too many volunteers they can’t use because there is no one to manage them.”

Maude did not say whether the government would fund any training, but said the suggested roles would be unpaid.”

Last August, Francis Maude was asked about what voluntary work he does. He replied, “that is a very unfair question”. It is not known if Mr Maude or any of his colleagues have offered to lead by example, quit their jobs and work as volunteer managers without pay.