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The left’s choice

April 26, 2012 1:01 pm

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George Papandreou’s victory was spectacular. Facing the failed New Democracy Government under Kostas Karamanlis, a party that in just a few years had run out of competence, ideas and steam, PASOK secured a landslide in the 2009 legislative elections. The party had been rejuvenated through a primary for its leadership and it was ready to provide a new direction for Greece. By the end of 2011, not only was Papandreou no longer leader of the party but the party itself was no longer leading Greece, now simply a member of a coalition run by the technocrat, Lucas Papademos.

The economist, Simon Kuznets, one claimed there are four types of economy: developed countries, underdeveloped countries, Japan and Argentina. Perhaps there are four types of democracy too: majoritarian, pluralist, Italy and Greece. So we shouldn’t read too much into PASOK’s fortunes in looking at the political affairs of elsewhere. However, as an extreme example, it is rather more revealing for the fate of the left than we would like to admit. It hints at the tough choices that all parties of the left will face over the next decade or two – both in the UK and across Europe.

Across the English Channel, the French are about to elect a fairly social democratic President if the polls are right. Similarly selected as his party’s nominee by a primary of voters, equally as straight–laced and understated as Papandreou and facing a right-wing candidate who is held largely in contempt by the people, Francois Hollande is on the verge of victory. He has a distaste for the rich in an everyman sort of way but he’s fairly mainstream in other regards. It will be claimed that an Hollande triumph marks the beginning of a new left dawn – as was claimed back in 2009.

In reality, something rather different may be happening. There will be victories for the left just as there will be for the right. The centre-right may do rather better in the forthcoming Dutch elections for instance. Elections take place in particular contexts within a wider global situation. All we can say is that the centre-left is in opposition rather more than it is in Government currently. To a degree, that will change as it seems about to in France. Then what?

The whole point of the left is to advance social justice. Winning elections is a necessary element of achieving that – of course it is. It’s what happens afterwards that really matters, however.

In the good times the trade-offs are lessened. In tough times choices have to be made. It is sometimes possible to get through an election campaign without making tough choices. It is absolutely not possible in Government. Any failure to prioritise will be cruelly exposed. Have your cake and eat it is not a governing philosophy for the post-crash world. And nor is ‘let them eat cake’.

There are three broad governance options for today’s left and the choices made between them will determine both political success and the degree to which social justice is advanced. They are redistribution, investing in a new economy and deficit reduction. Hollande seems to prioritise redistribution first and then deficit reduction. This is the mainstream social democratic choice. It’s perfectly reasonable. It seems to be roughly where Ed Balls is also. Certainly, Hollande’s emphasis on growth over euro-masochism is welcome – a greater degree of breathing space within the European fiscal pact will be welcome.

Interest rates on French debt – in the context of a much lower deficit than the UK – crept up slightly this week perhaps in connection with a likely Hollande victory. Nonetheless, Hollande has made his choices and the credibility of his plans will be tested in office.

In a revealing interview with Prospect’s James MacIntyre, Ed Milband appears not to have made his choices yet. To a certain extent that is understandable at this stage but it was further emphasised in his interview with Evan Davis on this morning’s Today programme. The problem is that there aren’t sufficient resources to lower the deficit, increase redistribution and invest in a new economy to any significant degree. Even if this line could get Labour through a general election, which is unlikely, it would soon be exposed in Government.

In times of plenty, sound public finances, redistribution and investment in the productive capacity of the economy can be simultaneously achieved. Those times will not return for a decade or two. This decade will be dominated by public debt and the next decade will be dominated by the costs of an ageing society. Choices will have to be made. This is why Miliband ends up trumpeting pretty micro (though welcome) policies to reduce utility bills and train fares. They reflect the degree to which he is constrained by the lack of prioritisation.

A post-social democratic left would make a different set of choices. It would prioritise investment in infrastructure, education, business, science and innovation and deficit reduction over redistribution. This is a different route to social justice – aimed at reducing the need for the Government to step in to redistribute. It would be a very brave choice to go for redistribution and economic investment over deficit reduction. Financial markets would be likely to put a stop to that choice very quickly.

In a characteristically apocalyptic blog post, Newsnight’s Paul Mason argues that we are experiencing a crisis of the centre. Centre-right and centre-left are becoming one and fail to combat the extremes – reminiscent of the 1930s. It’s not science fiction. If politics becomes about deficit reduction and nothing else then people will begin to seek an alternative. Equally, if the left promises nothing but the goodies – redistribution and a new economy – without meeting its fiscal responsibilities then it will soon find itself in trouble. Again, people will seek an alternative – as they are in Greece.

At the same time as the French head for the polls on May 6th, there is a parliamentary election in Greece. The latest opinions polls put PASOK on around 15 percent – around 28 percent less than they got in 2009. Euphoria at their 2009 victory soon passed. The hard reality of governing in tough times soon asserted itself and the party collapsed. France is not in the same bind as Greece. But nor is it free of some deep and fundamental challenges. In many ways, the UK context is a tougher one than that of France.

Winning elections is one hurdle. Governing in a way that is both credible and advances social justice is the next. It will only be achieved by making tough choices – sooner rather than later.

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  • wmacvean7

    so why should I vote for you 

  • Fericmaccmoon

    labour forever

  • Redshift

    I really don’t agree with this and not because we won’t have to make difficult choices about what to spend money on but because taxing the rich (either in the way Hollande is proposing or indeed we are with our bankers’ bonus tax to fund youth jobs) to fund programmes like building infrastructure, housing, etc is simultaneously redistributive AND an investment in a new economy.

    In short, I agree we have to be clever about what we spend money on, but I really think you are throwing up a false dichotomy.

    • http://www.facebook.com/people/Mike-Homfray/510980099 Mike Homfray

      Agreed.

      Also, Greece is something of a special case, given that paying taxes had become essentially optional. I realise that some of our Tory contributors would cheer this option, but it does go to show the importance of sound collection procedures and closing the loopholes

    • http://twitter.com/anthonypainter Anthony Painter

      It’s a largely definitional point you are making. By redistribution I mean government consumption and transfer payments. As the article makes clear, building the new economy involves investment in those things you mention (in fact, they are mentioned in the piece with the exception of housing which I meant to include). Will that be redistributional? I don’t know. Hopefully, but at the very least it should increase incomes – that’s the purpose of it. So the trade-off stands.

      • Brumanuensis

        Are you thinking along the lines of Dean Baker’s book ‘The End of Loser Liberalism’?

        • Anthony Painter

          To the extent that markets are not free and we shouldn’t pretend they are. Whether I’d take on board the particular interventions he’d advocate I’m not sure. I’d need to read it more fully. He argues that markets should be geared towards particular outcomes. To a certain extent there’s something in that but the best interventions are those that ensure people have greater power – skills, information, networking, space for collective action, use of collective resources such as transport or digital infrastructure. If power is spread in the market-place then we have to be in there as well – the question is how to do that without creating havoc. I think it can be done with business rather than in antagonism.

      • Redshift

        ‘Will that be redistributive?’

        Yes.

  • Daniel Speight

    And yet redistribution and deficit reduction are not necessarily incompatible just as growth and deficit reduction aren’t either. Why such a fear of redistribution among these Blairites? Surely one of the major faults with the Blair’s governments is that they did so little on equality. All the way through to the early 70′s the Gini coefficient of income equality was improving in both Britain and the US. After it reversed direction. Maybe it’s about time we measured ourselves by this number again.

    • http://twitter.com/anthonypainter Anthony Painter

       Which ‘Blairites’?

    • http://twitter.com/anthonypainter Anthony Painter

       Which ‘Blairites’?

      • Daniel Speight

         Am I wrong to lump you there Anthony? If so I apologize.

        Redistribution and the Gini coefficient? Does it mean anything to you Anthony?

    • GuyM

      Time has moved on, the UK of the 1970s is not the one of 2012. There are not millions of jobs for non skilled workers and we live in a world with a large highly mobile skilled workforce that has both a free labour market in the EU but also a “capitalist” global economy to move in.

      You talk of redistribution and gini, but two factors in particular lead me to believe you won’t solve it:

      1 Assortive mating. People who marry into their own class in the UK has risen to 58%. The report I read on this concluded this was the biggest threat to income and other “equalities” in the UK, but there is nothing you can do about it.

      It also reinforces point 2

      2 Dual income families. With assortive mating, more women in the workplace and the like there is a growing trend for families to have two professionals rather than one.

      The difference between a working class household with 1 male worker and a middle class household with 1 professional worker is far far less than the current set up of many working class households with still only 1 worker and middle class households with both husband and wife both working in profesional roles.

      I’ll use my own situation as as example.

      My wife and I are both science grads and both employed professionals. We were both from middle class backgrounds and married like for like. I made a point in my 20s of not going out with working class south london girls,  they weren’t my type. So assortive mating reinforced the educational and work experience benefits in our children.

      On salary, both my wife and I earn good salaries, taxed at 40% but below the £100,000 mark where allowances get removed etc. But that means household income is over the £150,000 mark that one employee would be hit with 45% tax.

      No showing off here, simple facts only to raise this question. If you were seeking to redistribute away from people like myself and my wife and try to widen the social capital we have and use which I presume you feel reinforces inequalities, how do you prevent like marrying like and two professional income households skewing household income distribution levels in the UK?

      I would actually be interested to read some left wing views on how you’d combat this new reality?

      • JoeDM

         Very good point.

        We know that the left would love to tax more.   What’s the betting that if/when Labour return to power,  following the failure of the current bunch of wets, they reintroduce taxation of  joint income?

        • GuyM

          Taxation on joint income is the only way I could see them attacking the issue of two income professional households, but it would be so regressive in terms of women’s rights and so clearly aimed at people in the 40% band (which would cause all sorts of problems with aspirational couples) that I can’t see them ever realistically having the nerve to try it.

          If nothing is done of course then disparity of household incomes only increases, not only during working years but also in retirement. Both my wife and I will have occupational pension schemes in our own right when we retire.

          I can’t see either assortive mating nor two income households impact upon income equality easing in anyway.

      • Brumanuensis

        Have you not perhaps thought that assortive partnering is a lagging, rather than a leading indicator? As inequality increases, groups become increasingly ghettoised and there is less cross-pollination than in a society where people broadly use the same services and occupy the same public spaces. In the Victorian era, whilst people generally married within their own class, it was hard even for a rich family to avoid direct day-to-day contact very poor groups. Today, it’s comparatively easy. The draw-back is that as people from different social backgrounds interact less and less, so mutual understanding declines. Social mobility decreases as certain social groups monopolise contacts and professions, decreasing access for those outside of them and in the process creating cartels. As a result, society withers on the vine and the public sphere deteriorates. Look at the impoverished quality of our political class relative to 30 or 40 years ago. Politics has become a hobby for middle-class professionals, in way that would have been unimaginable during the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. The thought of someone like John Major becoming Prime Minister now seems absurd, as much so for Jim Callaghan.

        Could you give a source for your statement that working-class households are generally headed by a single male earner?

        I find your comment about making a point of ‘not going out with working class south london girls’ rather sad, in the pejorative sense of the word. My mother was a working class south London girl. She was the first member of her family to go to university, where she met my father, who was from an affluent upper-middle class background and had been privately educated. Thankfully, he didn’t have the same sense of snobbery towards my mother that you appear to have towards anyone ‘beneath’ you.

        • GuyM

          Lagging factor or not, the stats indicate assortive mating is getting more prevalent.

          In terms of social ghottisation, I agree, I don’t live near, work with, socialise with or mix with working class people. There is no need, which is the way of things in the 21st century.

          Re. the working class households, you mistake my point, it’s not so much a “male single earner”, but a “single earner”, which often is a woman. But the research I read did indicate that single earning and even no earners households was more heavily concentrated in lower class, low income households.

          Re. the working class girls, I didn’t want to go out with a girl with a “saff london” accent. I was also sure I’d only marry a southern middle class (by profession, not necesarily by family) graduate. I didn’t want to go out with let alone marry anyone who wasn’t an independent professioal work wise, couldn’t hold intelligent conversation and had a totally different social background.

          I simply couldn’t have paired up with a girl who left school at 16, worked in a call centre and whose tastes ran to fake tans, reality tv and soap operas.

          The fact assortive mating is up to 58% seems to indicate at the least passive acceptance of my criteria.

          Anyway, however you look at it it’s a fact that assortive mating and dual income households skew the lefts fixation on income equality and I can’t see how you deal with it.

          • Brumanuensis

            “In terms of social ghottisation, I agree, I don’t live near, work with, socialise with or mix with working class people. There is no need, which is the way of things in the 21st century”.

            …

            “Anyway, however you look at it it’s a fact that assortive mating and dual income households skew the lefts fixation on income equality and I can’t see how you deal with it”.

            There’s the problem and also the roots of a solution.

            One households, I think the dual-earner statistic will more likely reflect that single-parent households are more likely to be poor and middle-class households more likely to be centred on a married couple (see the IFS’ research on the alleged benefits of marriage: it’s mainly down to educational background).

            On assortive mating, you’re right, it is a tough one to fix. It’ll need to be fixed though. Societies with gulfs between their members don’t stay stable in the long-run. If you want people to start going out together and relating to one-another, you start building communities of common interest. We could start by following Aneurin Bevan’s advice about social housing:

            “[The] lovely feature of the English and Welsh village, where the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street… the living tapestry of a mixed community”.

            I won’t insult your intelligence by pretending you’ll agree with that point. Im sure you’ll like your new neighbours though ;)  

          • derek

            Hi Brummy, I’m taking it that your from Birmingham.I’ve been in new street station a couple of times, pure chaos and a few years back Birmingham held the British pipe band championship, I’ve forgotten the name of the park which is was held in, a big park with a few lochs or should I say lakes, Had a great time there. very colourful, vibrant place with an accent that just makes you laugh, every second word seems to be extended, any way I wonder If you would know the park we attended?   

          • jaime taurosangastre candelas

            @ Brumanuensis,

            “assortive mating” – what a dry description for love (not your’s I realise).

            But anyway, I don’t know how or why it needs to be “fixed”.  It sounds creepily socialist to even think so, with  mandatory “mating clubs”, where Guy’s daughters get bussed to Liverpool to meet state-approved potential partners.  It is almost the opposite, but the same as arranged marriages that Indian families use to keep their blood and “caste” pure.  Perhaps the elite can have their party cadre “mating clubs” with entrance strictly vetted like the Soviets had special department stores, or the Young Conservatives?

          • GUyM

            Exactly, it can’t be “fixed”.

            In earlier days advice for girls used to be to “marry well”.

            Nowadays graduates seem to know that times are tight and are easier if you marry a similar level of professional so you get the dual incomes.

            Like oft marries like, it’s always been the way and more so now as there are very good economic reasons for doing so.

          • GUyM

            It can’t be “fixed”.

            And you can’t forcibly restructure what are predominantly middle class areas where millions live in neat little rows of middle class houses.

            Villages are a different point, but there aren’t that many living in them and anyway as I understand it a problem at the moment is affluent “townies” buying proerty up in the commuter belt so local people’s kids can’t live there.

            I’d gently suggest that whatever way you look at it, assotive mating and two income households, especially “dinkies” are social realities you can’t change.

  • Brumanuensis

    I do agree with what Paul Mason said about the ‘crisis of the centre’. Perhaps we should think of the so-called decline of the European left as a decline of the European centre-left. The far left is doing relatively well out the crisis. Melenchon polled about 3 times the score of the Communist candidate in 2007; the Greek Communists have rallied and in the Netherlands, the Dutch Labour Party looks set to lose seats (down 6, from 30 to 24), but the Socialist Party, on current polling, would double their number of seats (from 15 to 30). So in a sense, the social democratic left is being eaten away at the edges.

    I don’t feel very sorry for PASOK incidentally. They were dealt a bad hand, but they played it dreadfully. Monti at least showed some spine in standing up the ECB and the EU, but Papandreou just capitulated abjectly. He should have recalled Keynes’ remark ‘if you owe the bank £1000, you have a problem; if you own the bank £1,ooo,ooo, the bank has a problem’. No-one was going to let Greece go bust, so he should have used it for leverage.

    I think it would help if you elaborated on what trade-offs you think we should make.

    • Brumanuensis

      I’ll just add I think this section of Mason’s piece was chilling:

      “There were two “moments” in the defeat of liberal centrist politics in
      Germany, Austria, Spain etc. in the 1930s: the first, where polite society
      realised the working classes were swinging to the right and left, but
      patronisingly reassured themselves that the world of Jazz, surrealist poetry and
      foreign holidays could never end. That is, they said to themselves: the workers
      are clinging to the past, but we, avatars of a more liberal and progressive
      future, have economic history with us, which points only in the direction of
      liberalism and economic co-operation.

      The second moment of fatalism came at the shock of fascist or far right
      election victories: “the people have stupidly ignored our advice, there is
      nothing to be done, let’s emigrate or retreat to our country homes” etc.

       In Greece economic crisis has
      led to social collapse

      I simplify, even here, of course. But the parallels are clear: right now much
      of the political centre, the media establishment etc. in Europe has adopted that
      late Jazz Age fatalistic disdain: they voted for him/her? How troubling, how
      irrelevant”.

      The question we must ask is: what will happen to European politics if, having been promised ever-rising living standards, the public realise this will no longer happen naturally and start to get angry. Who will they turn to in their anger? Who will they turn against?

  • trotters1957

    You don’t  mention that Germany will most likely vote Merkel out and so we will have social democrats in the two main Eurozone economies. The whole atmosphere will be different with the slash and burners out of Paris and Berlin.

    You still cling to the neo-liberal logic here, it’s failed us.  ”Tough choices” etc seems to mean more austerity from where I’m sitting.

    Lets think better than this, no-one will vote for this timid excuse for economic policy.

  • Peter Barnard

     
     Anthony Painter,
     
    A few comments, if I may :
     
    (i) “there aren’t sufficient resources …” ; the resources are there, Anthony (think 2.5 million unemployed and British companies sitting on about £750 billion of cash, if reports in the business sections are to be believed). What is lacking is confidence.
     
    (ii) the “problem” of ”the deficit” has been blown out of all proportion (ie the key ratio is public sector net debt : GDP). For sure, we couldn’t tolerate 11 per cent of GDP deficits, but Labour’s last budget did show declining deficits up to 2014/15, and these were entirely manageable. It’s ironic that the latest OBR forecast for the ratio PSND : GDP for 2014/15 is higher than Labour’s forecast in its last budget (76.3% vs  74.9 per cent). Both ratios are a breeze in the park compared to the ratios that have been seen in the past
     
    (iii) Labour folk should really stop paying obeisance to “financial markets.” Apart from the fact that the Labour party is supposed to represent the “labour” element of the three factors of production, I would have thought that there have been enough examples of the financial markets making an absolute cods of things in the last 25 years that the credibility of people operating in the financial markets – and their cheerleaders in the Conservative press – would now be shot
     
    (iv) “ageing society” – yep, there are going to be a lot more pensioners around in 2035 (about 3.5 million, according to the latest ONS population projection) but this ignores another key ratio : those of working age vs total population, and this declines slightly from 61.8% in 2010 to 61.0% in 2035. In the early 1970s, the ratio was 58% (all those economically-dependent children …) but I never heard anyone say, “My God! All these children! What are we going to do?”
     
    Labour needs to find the testicles to challenge the “conventional wisdom” post-1979. The right say that “they have won the argument” but we should be saying, “That may be so, but look at the bl**dy consequences.”
     
     

    • http://twitter.com/anthonypainter Anthony Painter

      Let me answer in turn….

      1. Yes, but how you generate confidence is the question. Not sure business will respond with confidence to the Government taking the foot off the brake and slamming it on the accelerator.
      2. Labour’s last Budget was March 2010. It’s now April 2012. Quite a lot has happened since then. And besides, it is about the deficit – if you aren’t on top of it then you will soon have a debt problem as well. The deficit is a key indicator when it comes to assessing fiscal sustainability.
      3. Someone has to fund the bonds you issue.
      4. Age-related expenditure will increase significantly in the next decade. Chart in this IFS briefing shows it quite neatly. http://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/5630 We are looking at a 3% or so rise as a proportion of national income in the 2020s. That’s almost £50billion a year extra in today’s money. This is an issue. Hence my line:

      “This decade will be dominated by public debt and the next decade will be dominated by the costs of an ageing society.”

      You ask us find our testicles. It seems that some have become stuck with gazing at their navel in search of them….

      • derek

        ”
        2. Labour’s last Budget was March 2010. It’s now April 2012. Quite a lot has happened since then. And besides, it is about the deficit – if you aren’t on top of it then you will soon have a debt problem as well. The deficit is a key indicator when it comes to assessing fiscal sustainability.”

        And for all the austerity and deficit reductions plan “A” we’ve entered in to another recession, the economy is flatlining, bumping along the bottom and GDP is contracting, so your point 2/ is an indicator that the key to fiscal recovery can only come from investment in jobs and demand.

      • Peter Barnard

        I think  that we’ll have to agree to differ, Anthony.

      • trotters1957

        Navel gazing is what people do when they have no idea what to do next. Your article gives no hope just more austerity light
        The commentariat still have not grasped the enormity of what has happened.
        The system has failed and the elites are sitting back picking over the bones before the rest of us realise. The decadence displayed is obvious but if you don’t want to see it, you won’t.

        Clever guys like you Anthony should be coming up and promoting new ideas not repeating these failed policies.

    • GuyM

      But a lot of that 2.5 million unenemployed is hopelessly badly skilled for the jobs needed in the 21st century.

      You used to be able to lose a few hundred thousand down pits or in shipbuilding, but those non skilled manual jobs are just not there in the UK anymore.

      Whether you like it or not as things stand a large part of the country is basically unemployable.

      • derek

        Total nonsense, the banking sector is in turmoil and the idea that a society in nowadays can only be made up of white collar staff is ridiculous. If we think about the equipment need for the NHS, which you might describe as worthless but nevertheless a necessity, throw in transport, railways, mechanics, builders and the list of job are endless. We’ve just got a couldn’t careless government who deem unemployment as a necessary move. 

        • Peter Barnard

          Well said, Derek.

          A great source of employment in the next twenty-five years will be skilled people to take care of the elderly because there are going to be 3.5 million more of them by 2035.

          Also, by 2035, the population will have increased by ten million (plus 18 per cent) with commensurate basic needs and demands.

          • derek

            Thanks @Peter, and if we think about the new laptop, the new mobile, the new safer car, better winter tyres, new washing machines and so on, the ENGINEERING potential is enormous. The question seems to be. Who will see the vision?

          • GuyM

            None of those are jobs for unskilled labour.

          • derek

            Training, apprenticeships can have an uplifting result for everyone?

          • GuyM

            I don’t think many employers want to waste revenue and income on semi literate youth with poor attitudes.

            If you wish to waste your time doing that good for you, I don’t.

          • derek

            That’s the problem. Does the CV do what it says in practical motion?time and study results always favour the practical dexterous persons.

          • GUyM

            Not in my industry it doesn’t, knowledge industries require knowledge.

          • derek

            And knowledge doesn’t come out of thin air? it’s accrued through time, visual and hearing  traits.

          • GUyM

            Knowledge comes from being intelligent enough to do the job and learn as you do it.

            Someone who is “good with their hands” only is of no use at all in my industry.

          • AlanGiles

            Well, the young people I employed from those “dreadful” council estates didn’t have “poor attitudes”. I am fairly easy-going, but frankly even I wouldn’t employ a middle-aged men who sat on his arse 
             all day, ponificating and attitudenizing on a website devoted to a political philosophy he didn’t even endorse. Using your employers time and money to demonstrate on a daily basis what a d!ckhead you are to me constitutes “poor attitude”.
            My lads actually worked and produced things and were a useful part of the team – and the one thing they were not was tedious snobs.

          • GUyM

            As I’ve already said I believe, I’m on gardening leave at the moment, so my time is mine for a couple more weeks.

            After that I expect to be hiring quite a few people in the coming months and I’ll keep to the same criteria I’ve always used, which you know very well.

            But that’s my choice, not yours.

          • jaime taurosangastre candelas

            Derek, 

            the problem is not with the engineering, which I agree with you is something a high skills UK can and should do, but we will increasingly compete with equally skilled Asian countries’ engineering as well as Europe and the USA.  It is with the cost of production.  All of the items you mention are only economically viable if made in large numbers on assembly lines, and it is very hard for Britain to compete with Asian countries on that basis, particularly as the raw materials are increasingly also sourced from Asia so do not travel too far to the Asian factories.

            What to do?  Cut the minimum wage to £0.25 an hour?  That would not be popular.  It is only the large and expensive items that we can realistically compete with Asia – things like cars that cost a lot to transport to Europe.  Even that is diminishing.

            But, if one day I feel confident enough in my family’s future to spend an unreasonable amount of money, I will buy an Aston Martin DB9 car, as it is the most beautiful thing on the road.  It would be a huge indulgence, but would support British industry.  And I will leave it to my daughter, who has the guts and delight and highly developed spatial skills to enjoy it.  My son would drive it at 55 mph, which would be a waste.

          • derek

            @Jaime, I have never tried to compete your your intellect and I’m happy that your brain is of a large mass with overdrive but I make the simple observation that the world has billions who live without the basics, in real hard poverty, I don’t know for sure but I’d guesstimate about 1 billion in the Americas, 800 million in Europe and 5 billion in Asia, massive numbers, all need to be feed and catered for in this 21st century. Lets start the process to be a world without poverty. 

            @Jaime, what a car of choice! stunning, one of my favourite cars but there’s money to be made by the numbers, if we have the capacity to build and feed the world with all it’s resources and needs then lets do it by class for all.  

          • jaime taurosangastre candelas

            Derek,

            your numbers seem a bit large to me (world population is about 7 billion all up, and 6.8 billion in poverty to me seems too many), but there are a number of organisations who do monitor this.  Try War on Want or Oxfam – they will probably have some data.  We used to have Jobless Dave on LL as a source of insight, but he’s gone quiet.

            I do realise that if I buy a DB9 I will also have to buy a LandRover Defender for my boy – he was distraught when my wife traded her’s in for a Discovery.  Poor lad is only 6 and it is like he is bereaved of his true love.  He’ll make a fine second row forward one day, with that attitude to agricultural machinery.

          • derek

            @Jaime, in my younger days we used to kick about the disco scene, looking for the girls, one of the mates had a porsche 911 hope that’s the right spelling? but never seemed to get a girl, OTOH, another mate called horse had them queuing up, it puzzled 911 for years?  

          • jaime taurosangastre candelas

            If I decode your anecdote correctly, Horse may well have been popular with the girls as a young man, but in his middle age he won’t be able to arouse their interest so much, or even his own.  Blood pressure and constrained capillaries are cruel in those respects…  Send him down to the gym and get him running off that middle-aged gut so that he can recapture his mojo

          • derek

            Well, he was a miner, Polkemet  pit, he’d take his Saturday girl home on his 50cc moped, I never talked to a girl that didn’t say it was the best ride of their life. Last time I saw 911 he was heading for caracas. Someone told him that the ration of boy girl was 5 girls to one boy.

          • http://www.facebook.com/people/Mike-Homfray/510980099 Mike Homfray

            Import controls. Obvious. This is why the market doesn’t work – its a race to the bottom.

          • jaime taurosangastre candelas

            Import controls on finished goods will probably spark retaliatory export controls on raw materials and components.  For your washing machine assembly line in Liverpool, from where are you going to source your rare earth minerals and strong magnets that are critical to building electrical machines, if not from China, if China stops exporting them to you?  China would be quite happy to sell you a washing machine for £1000 after import controls.  You might not be quite so happy doing your washing by hand.

          • GUyM

            Trade wars here we come…..

            Go read up on comparative advantage in international trade.

            As I said on another thread the UK may have had the raw materials to build railways and ships 150 years ago, but it doesnt have the rare materials and even a lot of the common ones modern manufacturing requires.

            Having spent a few years in the commodities market I have to say you underestimate how inter-dependent the world is in terms of trade.

            A protectionist trade war will cost UK jobs and depress living standards.

          • Brumanuensis

            I think your son sounds like a sensible fellow, Jaime.

            A-propos of something, I found this article interesting: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17827741

          • derek

            A Hamilton mark II? or an over Zealous DaD? Brummy.
            Harris and Tweed will always be a good textile material. I bet Jaime has a tweed jacket.

          • Brumanuensis

            I do like tweed. A friend of mine is very fond of Harris tweed.

            I can’t possibly comment on your first question Derek. I’d have to examine the evidence first hand, like any good empiricist.  

          • jaime taurosangastre candelas

            Thank you Brumanuensis,

            He’s a good boy, brave as a lion and solid and dependable.  He likes engines and noise which is fine for a 6 year old.  He’s playing touch rugby with other boys 2 years older, and looks like a good player.  He is completely different from his sister, which is one of the great pleasures of parenthood.  She is the dare-devil, and is brilliant with hand and eye sports.  I think she would be a good pilot which she is interested in.  I bought her an aerobatic flight as a passenger for her 12th birthday and she completely loved it, especially the flying upside down along the runway which had my wife and I holding our hearts as we watched it.  Maybe one day she will be an RAF pilot.

            There are pleasures in life that transcend anything else.  Children are among them.

          • Brumanuensis

            My eldest nephew is quite similar, although he seems to prefer bikes to cars. Not having any children of my own, I can’t speak first hand of the joys of parenting, but certainly the joys of being an uncle are very clear. 

            He’s a little young for rugby, but I’ve taught him batting technique for cricket and seems to have excellent timing on his shots.

            I wanted to be a pilot when I was younger – a touch younger than your daughter is. My eyesight was – and is – too bad however, so it wasn’t to be. A friend did once recommend that I try gliders, but  I haven’t had a chance to try them out yet. 

          • GuyM

            No money to pay for it Peter and most “elderly” do very well on their own, it’s a minority that need care home support.

            Plus if you really want a semi literate dumb 22 year old school drop out looking after you in your old age then good luck to you.

            Whatever happens no one is going to be paying high salaries for tens of thousands of carers.

        • GuyM

          “The equipment need for the NHS”?

          You mean reasonably high skilled manufcturing? I’m sure the 20% of school leavers with the reading age of 11 year olds and no qualifications will easily fit into skilled manufacturing jobs.

          There is a world between the old manual labour jobs that soaked up unskilled labour and what is needed in the 21st century.

          A lot of the 2.5 million simply do not have hte necessary skills to be employable in the vast majority of jobs and unskilled labour jobs are in short supply.

          • derek

            Guy, I don’t think you really understand that intelligence comes in many forms.I find it repulsive to suggest that our society should write of the 20% of non achievers deemed by your fraternity as under par. Go and ask a mechanic, an electrician, a joiner, a brickie, a painter the last time they thought about quantum physics.

            Tomorrow patients will have state of the art equipment in their own homes, maintained and serviced by quality engineers.

            You talk our youth down, I’ll talk them up!!!!!

          • jaime taurosangastre candelas

            I’ll agree with you on that, Derek.  I can’t work out plumbing or the boiler, and I am not good with a drill (enthusiastic, but inaccurate and cause a lot of mess before ringing for a professional).  I am very glad that we have skilled tradesmen who exchange their time and skill for my money when we need something beyond the very basics doing in the house.  A fair exchange, I think, and I am glad of them.  Hopefully, if they ever need me in my professional capacity, they would think the same.  

            And we all sit down the same way on the toilet to defecate.  No one is too special to do that.

          • derek

            Thanks @Jaime, we can go further and be grateful for the till operator or the local farmer, the shelve stacker, the road sweeper, the bin collectors and that special fish supper with that wonderful Irn Bru. We all arrive in to this world naked and we all need a tit to suckle on.It just seems this government are titless in governance.

          • GUyM

            I write off in my industry people who can’t read and write to a reasonable standard.

            I doubt many manufacturers (and I have worked in manufacturing) want unskilled semi-literate trainees when there are better qualified alternatives.

            I was having dinner with an ex colleague who is MD of an IT consultancy this week. He was making the point that there was a massive problem with a lack of IT skills in UK school and college leavers, even those who attain BTEC qualifications and the like.

            He recruits from abroad as, in his own words, being an SME he doesn’t have the money or time to train people to do what the course they have taken should have done.

            Private business is not obligated to take UK youth and train them.

            In the same way I haev never wanted to take young workers and train them in my area, they ahve to come able to contribute from day 1, not day 200.

          • derek

            I think I’ll take you up on the paragraph ”
            He recruits from abroad as, in his own words, being an SME he doesn’t have the money or time to train people to do what the course they have taken should have done.” 

            There would be a language barrier, a difference on knowledge base due to different training resulting in poor quality goods. He simply doesn’t want to invest in good quality training that pays off in the long run, in short, he business will go bust because he failed to have good material planning and projected graphic stability.

          • jaime taurosangastre candelas

            Don’t be so sure Derek.

            There is a new college being set up in the Phillipines to train nurses to American, Australian and British standard nursing courses, taught by expatriate teachers, plus languages.  It plans to train 9,000 nurses a year, and place them into those countries’ hospitals.  In addition to the qualifications, it is planning to give them specialities in one of five care domains that cost the NHS (and Australia and the USA) a lot of money, and more ward experience than British nurses get in their training.  The costs are expected to be lower than domestic nurses.

            I don’t know if the NHS will recruit any of these nurses, but on the face of it the chances are high.

          • derek

            @Jaime 
            , I’d love their to be a mandatory uptake of languages from primary to secondary. I’m really dead against under paying and taking the chance of losing the wonderful British nursing creation of caring and patient care, we mustn’t allow the NHS and medical practice in general to become a conveyor belt like business, our humanity should drive the goodwill of rewards for all, the last thing we need is a worrying nurse who has complication at home and doesn’t concentrate because of those circumstances.

          • GUyM

            Derek, there are vast number of people in the EU who speak better English than some of the UK youth coming out of colleges.

            Half the people I’ve recruited over the last few years are foreign and not one has anything other than good English.

            If you hire a DBA or junior developer with a training course thsat includes Java, SQL, Pascal, System Architecture etc. you expect them to have at least the basic skills in those areas.

            You don’t expect to hire a DBA and immediately send them on a SQL course because they can’t code. Sorry but that is a cost business is not going to cover.

            You need to get real as to what is reasonable for business to pay for and what isn’t.

      • Trudge74 as alexwilliamz

        I’m sure could employ them as fund managers and investment bankers. They’d also work for a lot less too.

        • GuyM

          Given most investment fund managers tend to be highly skilled maths graduates and that a lot of the unemployed can’t manage their times tables I’ll give it a miss thanks.

  • Peter Barnard

     
     Guy M,
     
    You really show your ignorance when you say, “You used to be able to lose a few hundred thousand down pits …”
     
    I now live just a few miles from Gresford where 265 men lost their lives in a mine disaster in 1934. It is still remembered in Gresford.
     
    Those men were devastatingly and literally “lost” and you, as you fiddle-faddle around in your IT world, regaling us all with your 21C “skills,” are not fit to tie the boot-laces of those and hundreds of thousands of men like them who risked their lives every day to provide something on which this country absolutely depended.
     
    Winston Churchill remarked that “I thought the miners were stupid, until I met the mine owners.” I wonder what he would have thought had he been able to meet you?
     
     
     

    • derek

      @Peter Barnard, thank you for that eloquent phrasing and wording.In my neck of the woods it would bring a tear to a glass eye. It that doesn’t move Guy, nothing will? Brilliant @Peter. 

    • GuyM

      It’s a turn of phrase Peter and not one I’m going to give up on because some lefty fakes emotional fury.
       
      Unskilled labour had more optinons where numbers of people who had to be found jobs could be “lost”, whether than was mines, shipbuilding and similar industries.
       
      You laud the manual working classes, I don’t. I’ll take the company of those in the IT world over miners anyday of the week thanks.

      • Brumanuensis

        I don’t think anyone disagrees that the decline in UK manufacturing employment has limited opportunities for lower-skilled workers. However I think it’s pretty crass to describe miners and ship-builders as ‘unskilled’. They worked, as Peter points out, in dangerous professions, often for low pay. They deserve respect, maybe not in the sense of looking down on IT workers, who play a valuable role in any economy, but because their work built communities and served this country well for many centuries. If you think the Tyne shipbuilders, or the modern day workers at Devonport, are ‘unskilled’, then I don’t know what ‘skilled’ means anymore.

        • treborc1

           Not all miners were unskilled or in fact uneducated, many people like the nurses  of the sixties seventies and nineties were very well educated, highly skilled and yet low paid,  doctors would not  be described as being idiots yet many earned not a hell of a lot more then a bin man, many working in the council offices IT departments are not paid a great amount of money now, but they have little choice if they wish to live and work in the areas they were born.

          • Dave Postles

             NACOD.

          • treborc1

            yep.

      • AlanGiles

        Guy your snobbery is reaching ever greater heights – or perhaps plumbing the depths would be more appropriate.

        You sound like one of those old generals in the first world war who dined and drank while thousands of men went over the top – lions led by donkeys was the term used about them, and the more you go on here on LL the more of an ass you make of yourself.

        You are without doubt the most offensive poster on LL, and frankly I wish the editor would put you on pre-moderation, so at least he would be aware of some of your more repulsive outpourings.

        • treborc1

          Come on you want to moderate him, just ignore him.

        • GUyM

          Whereas your insults directed at Blairites are all sweetness and light eh Alan? Back to your hypocritical ways once more, must be your age kicking in again.

      • RedSetter

        This is obviously a joke.

      • http://twitter.com/robertsjonathan Jonathan Roberts

        Guy, for heaven’s sake. Debate with a little respect.

        Miners worked their nuts off, doing a difficult job in difficult circumstances. At the end of their working lives many came out with debilitating illnesses such as Vibration White Finger or Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (whilst some were later compensated, many died long before the compensation scheme was set up).

        In my experience, salt of the earth working class people like them were every bit as decent, intelligent and ‘worth knowing’ as any of my predominently middle-class friends.  Of course we choose who our friends are, and are likely to have a ‘type’ of friend, as much as we might have a ‘type’ when it comes to members of the opposite sex – but come on, a bit of respect eh?

        • GUyM

          “Respect”?

          He knew exactly what my point was, that “lost” lost meant in terms of numbers of manual labourers lost from otherwise unemployment.

          He dived in with his usual level of crapola and made his statement about the “IT world”, so he got some back in return.

          I suggest you take your advice to Barnard and not me as I don’t give a …

          • http://twitter.com/robertsjonathan Jonathan Roberts

            Guy I’ve backed you up on here loads of times. I’m well versed with the games and silliness of some people on this site, as are you.

          • GUyM

            I know you have Jonathan and I know how the game works on LL.

            But I’ve never backed down in real life and I won’t here either. People like Barnard are interested in taxing me as much as they can and forcing me into one of their little nightmare lands of socialism.

            He knows what he wants and he knows I know what he wants and that I oppose it. There’s no common ground at all between myself and Barnard and neither of us likes the other.

            So if he wants to be mouthy then he can take it back in return. I’ve oft said we “aren’t in it all together” and I’d not lift a finger to help people like him no matter what.

            I nearly voted for your sort of policies a few years back, but I’d not vote for Barnards “dreams” even if the only alternative was the BNP.

          • http://twitter.com/robertsjonathan Jonathan Roberts

            The idea of true socialism is dead and has been for a long time – which is why so many of its believers are so angry and behave in such a disrespectful and rude way on sites like this.  Best is just to ignore it.

            For what it’s worth, I think political debate now is much less over left/right than it is authoritarianism vs libertarianism.  I believe people are fundamentally free and that the larger the Government, the less free the people.  Indeed, the concept of ‘liberty’ used to be a core socialist principle, now it has been lost under an authoritarian belief of state control.

            Nonetheless, not everyone can pull themselves up by the bootstraps – some people don’t even have boots.  That in itself is an obstacle to freedom, and thus requires some sort of proactive Government intervention.

            Whilst socialism is a threat to your freedom, the threat of poverty and joblessness is a threat to our society as a whole, and must be combatted.  Miners just wanted to do an honest days work, and when their mines were closed (many rightly so), Government should have stood in and helped job creation in areas where unemployment rocketed.  They didn’t, they left entire communities to die quietly – and this is where much of the anger over that period is derived.

          • GuyM

            I’d largely agree, why no political party is a natural home for me anymore.

            I’m economically very conservative, socially very liberal and from a personal freedom from government I’m firmly libertarian.

            All of those though puts me very firmly against “socialists”, but came very close to having me vote for Blair.

            Which I guess makes me wonder how all the Blairites and hard leftists can manage to be in the same party with each other.

          • http://twitter.com/robertsjonathan Jonathan Roberts

            yes. it can be rather difficult, as Blairites and hard leftists across the country will testify to.

          • Mike Homfray

            What you have described is the position of the Orange Book Liberals or Tory modernisers plus the very extreme Blairite ultras. The Coalition largely reflects this ideology which is why I find it odd that Labour supporters who favour it remain in the Labour party. Particularly as their failed experiment is so clearly over and the trade union element of the party will ensure it doesn’t regain it’s former dominance

          • treborc1

             As we are with you new labour lot.

          • AlanGiles

            Guy. It is not just that specific post, but your constant references to “the lower classes”and the contempt  and disdain you have for people you consider to be socially inferior to yourself, the way you refer to anybody who doesn’t share your views as “the enemy”

            Jon and myself have had many disagreements, but I would never call him the enemy nor would I try to pretend he was my social inferior.

            The IT industry is hugely important, and will become more so, but remember, all the people working within it, they had to start somewhere

          • GuyM

            Just like your constant insults and attacks on those who politically you don’t agree with, especially wings of your own party?

            You are trying to tell me that attacks based upon politics are ok, but attacks based upon social class traits are not?

            As for socialists, I do regard them (and you included) as the “enemy” Alan. You would rob my family of a lot of income to fund an ideology I detest. If that doesn’t make you an enemy I don’t know what would.

          • AlanGiles

            Guy you are becoming obsessed. I am not being deliberately offensive, but have you seen the number   of times you repeat that we are “enemies” and we are all out to rob you? – after a time any shock value you might have intended loses it’s savour altogether. We all know by now you think we are all lower (or middle) class, unwashed, ignorant,  uncouth, theives, militants, Trots, communists, not fit to lace your boots.

            Why keep repeating it?

            As regards my attitude to people I disagree with personally: I always try (after a frought start) to be as friendly as possible with Jon, because, despite our differences, I am sure he is a totally decent sincere man, who always engages with humour and a degree of warmth. The same cannot be said of (for example) Rob Marchant, and The Purple Booker. At least RM has to be given credit for posting in his full name: The Purple Booker made a thoroughly libelous fremark yesterday suggesting I wished to engage in oral sex with George Galloway! – whatvere you think of me and my views (and I sometimes regret when I have been less than aimiable to a fellow poster) at least I do have the guts to do it under my full name and not snivel like a coward behind a pseudonym

        • AlanGiles

          Well said Jon, we don’t always agree but this time I am with you 100%

    • Brumanuensis

      That was F.E. Smith on the mine-owners, Peter. Apologies for being pedantic. Admittedly he was a close friend of Churchill’s.

      Link: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/F._E._Smith,_1st_Earl_of_Birkenhead

      • Peter Barnard

         Brumanuensis,

        Not at all, Brumanuensis (F E Smith) - I can live with that and thank you for improving my knowledge a smidgin.

         
         
         
         

    • treborc1

       Today in the News is of course the queens visit to Aberfan in the valleys, a place in which Labour were put to shame by taking all the collections and charity  donations to clean up the mess made by mining, and to his credit Tony Blair paid back.

    • treborc1

       Today in the News is of course the queens visit to Aberfan in the valleys, a place in which Labour were put to shame by taking all the collections and charity  donations to clean up the mess made by mining, and to his credit Tony Blair paid back.

    • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_ZPXYLRVP4XOIGGDJWAL6HUO7U4 David

      Naughty naughty Peter: I think you know perfectly well from the context that he is not (unless I am completely misreading his words) referring to them losing their lives, but of “losing” them from the unemployment figures.

      • Peter Barnard

        I didn’t think that Mr M was being that callous, David, but I do take exception to the casual way that he referred to men and jobs in the coal-mining industry – I was brought up in South Yorkshire in the 1950s and knew a lot of coal miners.

  • Daniel Speight

    A post-social democratic left would make a different set of choices. It
    would prioritise investment in infrastructure, education, business,
    science and innovation and deficit reduction over redistribution. This
    is a different route to social justice – aimed at reducing the need for
    the Government to step in to redistribute. It would be a very brave
    choice to go for redistribution and economic investment over deficit
    reduction. Financial markets would be likely to put a stop to that
    choice very quickly.

    It seems that you feel that we can only expect redistribution via some sort of back door mechanism, although you haven’t explained quite how the reduced need of the government to redistribute comes about.

    Earlier in the year over at labour-uncut you reviewed Jeffrey Sachs book, The Price of Civilization. (I thank you for reviewing this book as otherwise I would probably have missed it.) In your review you said -

    “A different way of doing things is desperately needed. It is not just about a different ideology, but also new institutions, a different way of thinking, of doing business, and of running an economy. At this time of enormous opportunity for change, the left has responded with sanctimonious triumphalism and off-the-shelf Keynesian social democracy. And so default neo-liberalism is winning. It doesn’t have to be this way.”

    And yet aren’t you falling back into the very neo-liberal answer that has caused the problem to begin with. Pleasing the financial markets saw us in a race to the bottom in offering lower top-rate, corporate and capital gains taxes and ends up being an un-winnable contest. Breaking out of this straightjacket is urgently needed and perhaps we are seeing signs of this from the French Socialist Party. Doesn’t Sachs point out  in his book that we need to turn away from the low tax regimes bought to us by the likes of Thatcher and Reagan by using taxes on the wealthy. The redistribution factor is built into any income based tax system.

    Of  course I have not even dipped my toe into how we would need to rebalance the economy with its reliance on the City, bequeathed to us by our previous four prime-ministers. Without that problem we would be much more on par with France and Germany in dealing with the economy. (Yes, it is a problem that we de-industrialized while France and Germany didn’t, but some of the Asian Tiger economies show that it’s possible to leap over missing stages in industrial development. With the right incentives we may be able to overtake our neighbours with 21st. Century industries.)

    • http://twitter.com/anthonypainter Anthony Painter

       Thank you for drawing attention to my review of The Price of Civilization by Sachs. It makes a good accompaniment to this article:

      http://labour-uncut.co.uk/2012/01/10/sunday-review-on-tuesday-the-price-of-civilization-by-jeffrey-sachs-betterness-economics-for-humans-by-umair-haque/

      As does my chapter in Labour’s Business:

      http://laboursbusiness.org.uk/h/2012/02/14/business-as-if-it-really-mattered-building-institutions-fit-for-a-future-economy-anthony-painter/

      It is not ‘neo-liberal’ to think that we have to sort out the deficit as one of the aims of the next Labour Government.

      • trotters1957

        “It is not ‘neo-liberal’ to think that we have to sort out the deficit as one of the aims of the next Labour Government.”
        Yes it is.You are emphasising the need to keep interest rates low as the main aim of policy, that is pricisely  neo-liberalism in a nutshell.

        Why don’t you know that?

        • GuyM

          Whereas you’d prefer incresaed interest rates?

          Meaning increased costs for business, the government spending more on financing its debts and homeowners struggling with mortgage payments and anyone with credit card debt struggling with repayments.

          A sure way to kill consumer spending even more than now….. but interest rates rises are innocent little things arent they?

          • trotters1957

            23 postings on one thread. Very impressive.
            Where did I say high interest rates are attractive?
             
            Just not the only tool in the box.

          • Dave Postles

             ’23 postings on one thread.’
            You should be working for Supergroup – you know when to add and when to subtract!

        • Anthony Painter

          Hmmmmmm.

          • trotters1957

            Tsssssssh

      • Daniel Speight

        It is not ‘neo-liberal’ to think that we have to sort out the deficit as one of the aims of the next Labour Government.

        No, but to talk of redistribution being a problem in tackling the deficit is wrong. I think Sachs has it correct in saying that we need to take more in taxes from the wealthy to balance budgets. In fact he is suggesting going further than me. Whereas I would like to see higher taxes on the income of the wealthy using top rate income taxes, capital gains taxes and higher corporate taxes, Sachs suggests that taxing wealth itself may be an answer. It seems to me that François Hollande is looking at a path similar to what Sachs writes about, and maybe even Obama has thought about recently.

        • Anthony Painter

          Well he’s talking about the US. He also advocates an increase in sales taxes, a reduction in healthcare spending and closing the primary deficit within five year so let’s not be selective. Wealth taxes seem like a sensible idea to me but they won’t get us out of the trade-off in our context.

          It’s not that redistribution is a ‘problem’. It’s that there are choices to make. Personally I see more mileage in servicing the engine than taking a taxi when the vehicle breaks down. Hence my preference for economic investment over dealing with the failures of our current economic model.

          • trotters1957

            “Hence my preference for economic investment over dealing with the failures of our current economic model. ”

            Cart before the horse.(or taxi)

          • Daniel Speight

            Well he’s talking about the US.

            Well he certainly was, but that shouldn’t be offered as an excuse to it having no useful ideas for Britain. Anyway you didn’t make that point in your review did you? I do wonder if we read the same book.

            Sachs makes higher taxes on the rich the core tactic in repairing the structural deficit and the damage done by neo-liberal policies. The minute you start to use taxes in this way you are taking part in redistribution of wealth because you making the wealthy pay for it rather than the poor. (Note to some of our more Tory commenters: you really shouldn’t feel bad about the wealthy being hit in this way. They’ve had a good run since the late 70′s.)

            Sachs does seem to think we can cut the deficit and invest in infrastructure and such by bringing in higher taxes on the rich. Do you agree with him Anthony? Myself I was impressed by his book while at the same time feeling sad that we had no such gurus in our British Labour Party putting up such ideas. (I could be wrong on this and would be happy to be corrected on it.) Possibly your review was a little lightweight as I never saw any disagreements with Sachs discussed.

          • Anthony Painter

            In that review I say:

            “Both Jeffrey Sachs and Umair Haque have constructed a credible alternative argument – one is aimed at US politics, though is relevant this side of the Atlantic too.”

            And;

            “His case for new welfare outlays reflect a different baseline for the US compared to the UK.”

            Play it straight Daniel.

          • Daniel Speight

             Maybe I’m not getting my point across that well Anthony. In this book Sachs very much looks to higher taxes on the rich to pay for both investment in infrastructure and to clear the structural deficit. If my memory serves me well he talks about raising government income of 3% of the US GDP by doing this.

            It seems to me that in different degrees both François Hollande and Obama are looking down this path. In your post you seem to be saying that this is not an option for a future Labour government as cutting the deficit and investment should be prioritised. (I therefore take it that for you higher taxes on the rich shouldn’t be in their plans.)

            If I have this correct I have to ask why in your review you didn’t say that you disagreed with the major point Sachs was making? I know from personal experience that writing a thousand words to a deadline can be difficult. Were you caught in a similar spot?

          • http://twitter.com/anthonypainter Anthony Painter

            Different contexts…..we already have a high sales tax, fairly high taxes on high income, our healthcare is already very efficient and our welfare state is more generous. The difference is explained purely by the different baseline. Which is why I wrote in the review:

            “His case for new welfare outlays reflect a different baseline for the US compared to the UK.”

            For the 3rd time…..

          • Daniel Speight

             No we do not have high taxes on top incomes. We are still in the Reagan/Thatcher years. 45p is not high. We have been in a race to the bottom with corporate taxes and income taxes. Our capital gains taxes are low.

            You want to talk about his increased welfare spending, but Sachs main point is that the deficit is destroying any chance of sorting out America’s economic problems. (Very comparable to ours.) He sees the answer to closing that deficit as higher taxes on the wealthy…

            for the umteenth time…

            Why will you not put forward your argument against Sachs ideas on using taxes on the wealthy to fix the structural deficit. If you don’t agree with him just say so.

  • https://mikestallard.virtualgallery.com/ Mike Stallard

    “They are redistribution, investing in a new economy and deficit reduction.”
    Redistribution – more tax on higher earners. Yes. But they aren’t saints. How will we manage to gauge success? If someone spends their life scrimping and saving and denying their children presents and education, just so they can start up a new company or make the company they work for into a success, if they do this, then what is in it for them if they have all their money taken off them and given to the bludgers? Why not go straight onto incapacity benefit like everyone else? Or are you saying that working so hard is natural and jolly good fun?Investing in a new economy – OK who does the investing then? How about Mr Faceless-Beureaucrat who knows absolutely nothing but nothing about what goes on outside her/his cosy office comfortably furnished with the promise of a lovely pension and a place in the House of Lords so long as she/he takes absolutely no risks and follows the other sheep?Deficit Reduction – great! But which politician is going to cut back on people’s rights? Who is going to kick the crutches from the vulnerable? Who is going to remove the blind man’s livelihood? Who is going to deny the single Mum money for her tiny babes?Nobody is facing all this. So well done for raising the bar a little.

  • AlanGiles

    Can’t find a better place to put this, but to take away the taste of inhumane snobbery further down the thread, here is the latest news of Raspberyy Pi, who some of us on LL were talking about a few weeks ago:

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17857189

    I hope I might not be obver-egging the pudding, but I have a real feeling that this device (I  have absolutely no connection with it financially btw), could give as big a shot in the arm to the young as the early Sinclair 8 bit machines did – also, there seems to me a “cottage industry” building up round this like those early days, with entrepeneurs providing products to increase the vialability of the product – the device comes uncased, so there for one example is an opportunity for somebody to come up with a good case for it.

    Like the Sinclairs, this product has come along at a time of high unemployment, and was the springboard for a lot of younger talent to start their own businesses, and develop skills they never knew they had (because they didn’t get many opportunities in the corporate world)

    • http://twitter.com/anthonypainter Anthony Painter

      Excellent. I’d recommend people take a look.

      You may be interested in the new school I’m Chair of. Hackney UTC is a university technical college which gives kids the chance to specialise in digital or health technology. 

      It’s the first of its kind in the country and is opening in September. Coding will be a major part of the curriculum:

      http://hackneyutc.co.uk/

      • AlanGiles

        Thanks for the info Dave and, - Anthony – what a worthwhile project. I am all for the technical college which was such a great help to those of my generation, and I am sure the time is ripe for their return – my very best wishes for it and your success

        • Anthony Painter

          Thank you Alan. We hope it can become a real contribution to local life and the local economy.

          • AlanGiles

            I’m sure it will. It is in a very disavantaged area of East London, even though it is so close to Docklands. I am sure it will go from strength to strength

      • Dave Postles

        Just reiterate Alan’s commendation – hope it’s really successful.

    • Dave Postles

       A lockable case has already been produced for it – but I will have to check back through my recent Linux magazines to find the details.  NB an installable OS has been developed from RedHat/Fedora; interestingly Canonical apparently would not cooperate on the firmware to produce a Ubuntu-derivative for the Pi.

      • Dave Postles

         http://marcoalici.wordpress.com/

        3D-printable case for Pi.

        • Daniel Speight

           I do hope that the Raspberry does get another generation of kids writing code. I’ve been thinking of getting one to build a HDMI media streamer with hard disk, wireless and remote all hanging off its USB port;-) Will I ever get time or will I end buying some fancy DVD player or already built media streamer? What was sad is the boards are being made in Asia.

          • Dave Postles

             Pi
            The wait is long.  I’ve been on the list for ages.  There is also the prospect that future build may revert to this country.  The fixes have held up final distribution.  There is an opinion out there that short-run, specialized builds may revert to the west because proximity to the customer eases production issues. 
            An alternative is the Tonido Plug.  I have one of the first generation Tonido Plugs which runs on my ethernet ring and has an external HD attached for NAS.  I am not using it to the full, since it has a full OS and apps.  The second generation of Tonido Plugs are even more sophisticated.  They also have twice the RAM of the Pi.  The price is higher, but not astronomical.   

          • Daniel Speight

            That’s interesting Dave, but it was Pi’s HDMI output that tweaked my interest, plus the thought of getting hands on again with some coding. Must be the hidden child in me;-)

          • Dave Postles

             Understood, Daniel.

  • RedSetter

    Although GuyM complains piteously about the status quo he offers no suggestions in respect to potential solutions to our nation’s problems. I would be really interested if he could spare a moment or two to outline the programme he would recommend to improve our situation if the opportunity present itself. Instead of moaning and wringing your hands and blaming everything on “the left” please give us a précis as per what you would suggest what the government of the United Kingdom could do to improve matters.

    • GuyM

      Eh… I’m quite happy with the status quo actually. Soon to be a dinkie with decades hopefully of income for wife and I to come.

      I long ago gave up any pretence to having either answers or an interest in imposing those “answers” on others (why I gave up politics).

      Nowadays all my interest reaches to is voting for whichever party is going to bother me the least, nanny me the least, tax me the least and expect me to “engage” with society the least and arguing the toss on LL and a few other places when I’m bored.

      Invariably that means watching out for the nasty tendency of socialists and socialism to try and do all those things.

      • RedSetter

        What an odd attitude. Criticism about everything and solutions proffered about nothing. Kind of like denying people water and then convincing yourself that you’re better than them because to take two baths a day and are cleaner as a consequence. I’m disappointed actually. I really am. Based on your voluminous comments, often 10% to 20% or more of all comments published on certain threads, I imagined you were a man of convictions who possessed some semblance of an econo-political philosophy of some sort. The fact that your intellectual stall is as bare as the shelves in Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard is dispiriting.

        • GuyM

          Solutions? Low tax, small state, government that minds its own business whenever possible.

          As to my posting, it’s about to take a large dip, gardening leave ends soon and then more important things to be doing.

          • RedSetter

            Same, ole, same ole, then as far as politics goes. I wish you luck with your lawn, flowers, fruit and vegetables.

          • GuyM

            I’m presuming you don’t know what “gardening leave” actually is?

          • RedSetter

            Ah! I assume you mean you’ll be going back to work. Sorry. I thought you must be a man of independent means.

          • GuyM

            Certainly will be going back, to a nice big job roll with a huge directorate to manage in a very interesting area as well…. my my LL would be shocked.

  • Anthony Painter

    Where are all the women in this conversation? Seriously.

    • AlanGiles

      I think it is probably the sometimes aggresive tone of the posts which  deter women – and before anyone says anything, I know I am just as guilty as several others.

      There is a sort of verbal/cyber “arm-wrestling” which goes on here sometimes – perhaps we shouldn’t rise to the bait, but sometimes……….

  • GuyM

    Just as an aside I did laugh a lot when I saw the advertising banner headers on LL:

    “Where is the stock market headed. If you have a £250,000 portfolio…”

    Curtesy of Fisher Investments.

    I wonder if your average Labour voter has a £250,000 investment portfolio…. how very champagne socialist :)

    It seems that one answer to “the left’s choice” is around how to manage your capitalist investment funds.

  • Daniel Speight

    A few threads below you can see an argument between Anthony Painter and myself about how he reviewed a book, The Price of Civilization by Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs seems to be a well respected and well known American economist and Anthony Painter gave this, his latest book, a good review. I would hate to think that the argument below misses the chance to spread the word that this a book well worth reading. It seems that we just don’t get much of this quality of writing from the British left.

    Despite Wikipedia quoting the Wall Street Journal’s review saying: “Yet at its core “The Price of Civilization” is not about taxes or economics. It is about the “pursuit of happiness” as one academic understands it.”, taxes are very much what it’s about, and particularly taxes on the wealthy.

    Sachs tackles the deficit by going back to basics. Here in British politics we use the deficit as basketball tossing it backwards and forwards with cries of ‘deficit deniers’, ‘too far, too fast’, and such. Sachs, obviously talking about the US economy, breaks down the deficit question to its raw numbers. He tests how much could be saved by cutting public spending even at its most draconian and shows you still can’t get a balanced budget by cuts alone. So his logic is if you can’t do it by cuts the only other way is by taxes. He then studies how much the tax on the most wealthy has changed since the neo-liberal revolution of the Reagan/Thatcher times. His answer to the deficit then becomes heavier taxes on America’s most wealthy.

    Now like many I used the deficit escape clause that many of us use. It’s the ‘growth will take care of the deficit’ argument. It’s really a false argument as it predisposes that we can get back to extremely high growth in the near future. Hindsight tells us that much of the recent past’s high growth was not real, its foundations being built on sand. Up until just the last year I like many steered away from the taxes as they are such a toxic subject, but now a certain realism is coming to the fore. We have both François Hollande and Obama beginning to point in this direction while billionaires like Warren Buffett say they are under-taxed. It’s a shame that the two Eds in Britain haven’t even hinted that there may be a way of cutting the deficit without hurting the poorest in society, but in a way they can be forgiven. If not stated carefully the press will play the ‘Labour tax and spend’ card. Still, remember many of us were way ahead of Ed Miliband on News International and the Murdochs and he eventually came around. (Tom Baldwin, Labour’s press guru, was telling the shadow cabinet to avoid linking phone hacking with the BSkyB deal just a week before the dam broke.)

    So I think I had better give a few quotes from the book to wet your appetite.

    With a chronic budget deficit of around 6 percent of GDP, tax revenues will have to rise. It is high time that super-rich taxpayers picked up much of this cost. The top 1 percent of American households now collects around 21 percent of household income, which amounts to around 15 percent of GDP. These households pay roughly 31 percent of their income in federal taxes, so that their net-of-federal-tax income is around 10 percent of GDP. In 1970, the top 1 percent collected around 9 percent of household income, or 6 percent of GDP, and paid roughly 47 percent of that in federal taxes, for a net-of-federal-tax income of around 3.3 percent of GDP. The post-tax income of the richest 1 percent of the population has therefore increased by more than 6 percentage points of GDP since 1970. Most of the population has been squeezed, while the rich have enjoyed a bonanza. It’s time once again for those at the top to contribute more to solving the nation’s problems.

    Here’s another.

    For thirty years, tax increases have been vilified and rejected at the polls. That might continue, but if so, America’s days as global leader and prosperous economy are numbered. For thirty years, almost all proposals for initiatives to upgrade the infrastructure and improve education for the poor have been crippled by inadequate budgets. Let me suggest three reasons why a new political majority might mobilize around a program of reduced deficits and increased public investment.

    And I have to apologise for saying in a few threads below that Sachs was after 3% of GDP from these taxes when it seems it was 2%. That’s just my failing memory I’m afraid.

    The combination of higher income taxation and wealth taxation would thereby raise at least 2 percentage points of GDP from the very top earners. But even if they had to pay another 2 percent of GDP, there would certainly be no need to shed tears for the rich. Their net-of-tax income would remain around 10 percent of GDP, a share of national income two-thirds higher than the 6 percent of GDP in 1980.

    So certainly food for thought from Jeffrey Sachs.

    Now quickly back to my argument with Anthony Painter. Although he didn’t say it in his review, he doesn’t agree with Sachs over using tax to cut the deficit. I will just quote a paragraph from his Labour Business piece which show this better than his ‘two out of three ain’t bad’ piece above.

    In response to the rising tide of inequality enabled by the concentration of market rents, the left, in its well-meaning way, has sought to redistribute further. Tax increases for the wealthy, high pay commissions and welfare expansion have become the responses. All this largely misses the point. What we are experiencing is an institutional breakdown: industrial age institutional logic does not support the service economy well. The redistributive response has political limits: tax and transfers can only deliver so much before the political compact breaks down. Just willing political impediments away is insufficient no matter with how much gusto‘common good’,‘the good society or ‘restoration of virtue’ are incanted. We have to be institution builders.

    Of course Anthony Painter is correct in that investment in the future is important. And he is correct in that it will need government leadership and encouragement; (I think this is where Painter feels he parts company with neo-liberalism). But that will not be enough. If he really thinks it will then show the numbers like Sachs has done for the US. Let him tell us just how deep he is prepared to allow cuts to go in Britain and what level of unemployment would be acceptable. Even more than this, should we allow the Gini coefficient of income equality to widen even more in Britain or should it now start to close again after this thirty-odd years of a neo-liberal experiment.

    It’s very easy to a one trick pony. Mine obviously is the importance of what the Gini Coefficient is telling us. Anthony Painter’s is new forms of technical education, not a bad theme to have at all. But there’s more than one horse in this race to fix the deficit. To rely on the neo-liberal nag while hoping for a large enough payoff from what investment can be afforded doesn’t look like it will fix the problem.

    The best things about a policy of higher taxes on the wealthy is that we are not alone in countries looking at this answer so not thereby isolated and caught in the death spiral of lower taxes. Most of all it puts clear blue water between Labour and the Tories, something that has been needed for too long.

    • Alexwilliamz

      This is something I think many on this site believe has to be the way forward, not as some kind of simplistic rob from the rich to give to the poor narrative as the tory trolls will attempt to paint it, but as a rational recognition of the needs of a healthy society in which each and every citizen can have a constructive role in. I will continue to maintain that it is in the wider interest of the rich as much as for the poor for such a process to take place. For those rich people who moan about the state choosing what to do with their money, apart from my own belief in the apropriation of what I would consider as social goods, it should be remembered that the rich have a far greater opportunity to engage in politics and to influence it.

      • Daniel Speight

         Alex the title of the book is well chosen. It’s a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a long dead American Supreme Court Justice. “Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.” 

  • Daniel Speight

    Are you really not going to answer Anthony or have you just missed it?

    From below:

    No we do not have high taxes on top incomes. We are still in the
    Reagan/Thatcher years. 45p is not high. We have been in a race to the
    bottom with corporate taxes and income taxes. Our capital gains taxes
    are low.

    You want to talk about his increased welfare spending, but Sachs main
    point is that the deficit is destroying any chance of sorting out
    America’s economic problems. (Very comparable to ours.) He sees the
    answer to closing that deficit as higher taxes on the wealthy…

    for the umteenth time…

    Why will you not put forward your argument against Sachs ideas on
    using taxes on the wealthy to fix the structural deficit. If you don’t
    agree with him just say so.

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