MPs will be voting later today on whether there should be a referendum on changing our current first-past-the-post electoral system to one based on AV.

This is not an area where there is any TUC policy – other than the motion at our Congress last year calling for us to stimulate a debate. This we have tried to kick off by publishing the Touchstone extra on electoral reform.

But in this spirit, here are some thoughts on what AV might mean. Read more »

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It is a strange logic that concludes that a financial crisis that started in the top echelons of banking should be resolved by freezing the pay of nurses, teachers and social workers. Yet since early last year a growing clamour of voices, led by much of the press and then followed by many shades of politicians, have called for public sector pay freezes to resolve financial instability caused by the economic crisis. As part of this process there has been a widespread misreading of the official earnings statistics to try to show that all public sector workers earn more than all private sector workers. Read more »

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• GMB: Providing For Future Generations Of Pensioners
  Ace GMB report on public sector pensions

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Pledges from developed nations signing the Copenhagen Accord add up to a mere 19% cut in CO2 below 1990 levels. This is well short of the range of CO2 emission reductions – 25 to 40% – that the UN says is necessary to stabilise global temperature increases. Still, apparently there’s no need to be ”irrationally alarmist”, as Benny Peisner puts it. The blogmeister at Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation keeps sending me bulletins on how bad the science is.

As Peisner said in his heated exchange with Observer science editor Robin McKie yesterday: “In all likelihood, we will not know for the next 20 or 30 years who is right or wrong on the scale and impact of global warming…the debate has become irrationally alarmist.” To me, the phrase “in all likelihood” means “I am virtually 100% certain”. What, we’d like to know, is this based on, actually?  Read more »

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Back when cuts mania was all the rage during the conference season of 2009, only the TUC, others on the left and serious commentators like Martin Wolf argued that cuts came with major economic consequences.  The TUC argued particularly strongly that to start measures to address the deficit when the economy was still fragile threatened a double dip recession.  These views were of course rejected by the small state right in the form of the Institute of Directors, the Taxpayers Alliance and the Conservative Party itself. Read more »

   Filed under: Politics, Public services, Public spending, Recession | 3 Comments »

Last year, the newspapers were full of stories about pay freezes and cuts; the employers’ organisations picked this up, of course, and tried to persuade us that this was happening to everyone. Or, that if you were a public sector worker, it should be. The reality has not been this simple. Read more »

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• Bad Conscience: Pensions and Public Opinion
  Terrific post on public sector pensions from Paul Sagar

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When Ofgem talks about power companies “sweating assets” you know something is up. So may I welcome Ofgem to the TUC’s energy podium, for a long-overdue meeting of minds?

Ofgem, February 2010: “The unprecedented combination of the global financial crisis, tough environmental targets, increasing gas import dependency and the closure of ageing power stations has combined to cast reasonable doubt over whether the current energy arrangements will deliver secure and sustainable energy supplies” (Project Discovery, 2010).

TUC, October 2006: “Faced with the new energy challenges of climate change and energy security, the UK’s liberalised energy market lacks the foundations on which to deliver the massive new investment required in low carbon and carbon-free energies” (TUC Executive Committee paper). Read more »

   Filed under: Energy, Environment | 1 Comment »

One of the Opposition’s key job creation policies is a National Insurance ‘holiday’ for new businesses; they claim that it would create tens of thousands of jobs. But we’ve been here before, last time there was a Conservative government, and it only managed to create just over 2,000 jobs.

At last year’s Conservative conference George Osborne announced that any new business started in the first two years of a Conservative Government would not have to pay employer’s National Insurance Contributions on the first ten employees it hired during its first year. Predicting that it would create 60,000 jobs over two years, he boasted, “This is just another example of the Conservatives being the party of jobs at a time when Labour are the party of mass unemployment.”

Read more »

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Three climate change deniers have now graced the BBC’s Question Time panel in recent weeks. The latest (28 January) was Nigel (Lord) Lawson. Lately they’ve also had Melanie Phillips and David Davies. The BBC’s QT website tells us Lawson is “founder and chairman of the Global Warming Policy Foundation and is a well-known climate change sceptic.”

“Copenhagen will fail – and quite right too”, he said when his Foundation was launched. This would be funny if it wasn’t serious. Check out his Foundation’s website, trashing the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Read more »

   Filed under: Environment | 1 Comment »