We’d like to wish a very happy Christmas and New Year to all our readers here at ToUChstone blog. It’s been an interesting year for us as the blog has grown and diversified, and we’ve enjoyed sharing our blogging journey with so many people, old acquaintances and new.

Our Christmas card this year marks thirty years of the Amnesty International (UK) trade union network. During 2009, we’ve taken steps to strengthen the links between the work of the TUC and Amnesty. Unions and human rights go way back though. Indeed Amnesty International founder, Peter Benenson, had actually worked many years earlier for the TUC, and had been sent to Spain in the early 50s to observe the trial of some trade unionists persecuted by the Franco Government. (His complaints to the judge were so effective the case against them was, unusually, dismissed and they were set free.) Read more »

   Filed under: Blogging, Human rights | 1 Comment »

Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling gives his 2009 Pre-Budget Report tomorrow (Thursday 9 Dec).

Brendan has set out what we see as the three tasks he needs to pull off in a post here, and tomorrow we’ll be using the blog to analyse the PBR and its implications in more detail.

Join us from 12 noon onwards for a live chat on the PBR, produced in association with leading progressive blogs Left Foot Forward, Liberal Conspiracy and LabourList, and featuring many expert guest commentators.

Then throughout the afternoon, our ToUChstone blog team will be posting up their own post-match analyses, on what the report means for their particular policy briefs.

   Filed under: Blogging, Pre-Budget Report | 1 Comment »

The TUC call to use a tax on major financial transactions to help reduce the public deficit has created a minor blog bust-up.  But one important point at risk of being overlooked here is the question of what might be the alternatives to a transaction tax. 

The TUC believes that the deficit is not an urgent problem but it is one that will need to be dealt with over the medium term.  In our submission to the Treasury ahead of the PBR, we argue that any measure designed to reduce the deficit needs to meet five criteria.  It must be: Read more »

   Filed under: Blogging, Public spending, Tax | 5 Comments »

Today we launch a new Touchstone initiative – the first Touchstone Extra.

These will be new downloadable papers available as pdfs. Unlike the Touchstone pamphlets we will not be producing hard copies, but it will provide enough space – ie more than a blog-post – to present original research, develop an argument and provide the background reasoning.

We are very pleased that the first Touchstone Extra is by Stewart Lansley, the author of the Touchstone pamphlets on the super-rich and middle-income Britain. In Unfair to Middling:  How Middle Income Britain’s Shrinking Wages Fuelled the Crash and Threaten Recovery Stewart continues his analysis of the position of middle earners. He charts the decline in the share of the economy going to wages – particularly for middle and low earners – and argues that the wages squeeze helped cause the financial crisis by both increasing demand for credit among those trying to keep up and freeing excess profits to be used for speculation by the finance sector.

We will also publish a Touchstone post by Stewart on the pamphlet.

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It’s Blog Action Day today, and over 8,000 blogs are coming together to spark discussion around the issue of climate change.

I’m spending the day in Brussels, at a co-ordinating conference of unions working on environmental issues. A European Union spokesperson has just told us that CO2 reduction pledges are so far adding up to a 17% cut, which is around half of the fall in emissions we need globally by 2020. Read more »

   Filed under: Blogging, Environment | 4 Comments »

• The top ten blogs
  Iain Dale is asking for nominations for the top ten political blogs, and this is stimulating much discussion (and self-promotion!). Here is Clifford Singer’s top ten – and we are very pleased to see that he has put ToUChstone in it. Looks like a good slate to us!

   Filed under: Blogging, Web links | 3 Comments »

The TUC Touchstone pamphlet, Life in the Middle, received wide media coverage on its launch last week. There were half page analyses in the Financial Times and The Guardian and news reports in The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Express and The Daily Mail and a very detailed analysis on the BBC website.  The Daily Express and Daily Mail also dedicated full page columns by their lead political columnists to the pamphlet, The Daily Mirror’s Kevin Maguire covered it and The Observer also had a column on Life in the Middle describing the pamphlet as “rich and fascinating” .  Read more »

   Filed under: Blogging, Inequality, Labour market, Middle Britain, Tax | 2 Comments »

   Filed under: Blogging, Budget 2009 | 1 Comment »

Stumbling and Mumbling has an entertaining filleting of Guido’s most recent attack on the Chancellor.

Just occasionally the TUC has got some stats wrong, but hardly any one ever notices. Indeed I did a quick bit of mental arithmetic the other day and underestimated some job loss figures. This one was spotted by a journalist, but that’s rare.

Whether this is because we are right most of the time (at least when we do sums) and people take our word for it – or whether they simply lack the numeracy is an open question.

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   Filed under: Blogging, Pre-Budget Report | Comments Off