This weekend more stories have emerged about cuts in defence spending, featuring elements of the armed forces that are well-known to the public. Yesterday there were reports that the Ghurkha regiment is to be scrapped, today the newspapers featured reports that the Special Air Service is being forced to retire 40 of its most experienced soldiers and the Telegraph has revived a story about scrapping the Navy’s Harrier jump-jets.

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   Filed under: Blogging, Politics, Public spending | No Comments »

I have a post up at Left Foot Forward considering the mystery of DWP’s statistics on workless households. Over the course of recent weeks we have been told that 23, then 7 and then 4 per cent of households in London have never had a job, and that workless student households are part of a problem that the country needs to “tackle now”.  Could politicians be putting a party-political spin on statistical information?

   Filed under: Labour market, Politics | 1 Comment »

Download TUC’s Social Mobility Report

The last few days have seen both Conservative and Liberal Democrat Coalition partners emphasise their committment to improving social mobility. Of course this is a laudable aim – as Nick Clegg says, too many children’s life chances are determined at birth. However, it seems extremely unlikely that the Coalition’s policies are going to fix the problem that they are so keen to diagnose.

In a new TUC report, Richard has analysed the international evidence on social mobility. The findings are definitive: there is a very strong link between social mobility and equality. Any Government attempting to improve the opportunities of the poorest will first have to reduce the gap between rich and poor. Read more »

   Filed under: Politics, Social mobility | 1 Comment »

This week the Prime Minister has been keen to tell us about the massive savings that are available should fraud and error be completely removed from the administration of tax credit and benefit payments, promising that this would be “the first and the deepest” of forthcoming spending cuts.

Channel Four’s Fact Check does a good job of breaking the figures down, and pointing out the low probability of the entire £5.2 billion being saved. But the DWP’s recently published ‘draft structural reform plan‘ does even better, setting out the Department’s aim to ‘reduce fraud and error in the benefits system to a maximum of 1.8% of expenditure’.

A few quick calculations therefore reveal the scale of what is actually being promised. Read more »

   Filed under: Politics, Social exclusion, Welfare | 1 Comment »

So common has it become for the White House to blame all bad news on the last administration that a Washington joke claims that Obama is planning to name a newly discovered trench deep under the US, “Bush’s Fault”.

Much more of this sort of stuff from the Coalition and maybe we’ll soon see Gordon’s Fault opening up somewhere under Whitehall. Read more »

   Filed under: Politics | 2 Comments »

The dominant political issue for the life of this government is going to be public spending. Almost all their policies will flow from, or be constrained by, their overwhelming belief that we need to deal with the deficit by cutting spending and doing it quickly.

Some coalition supporters will do this reluctantly. They will recognise the damage that cuts can do to the wider economy, public services and social cohesion. Others are revelling in this opportunity to shrink the state – and certainly “not letting this crisis go to waste”.

Many outside government of course are deeply opposed, and the debate has already started about how best to resist the cuts. Already there are calls for events, campaigns and demonstrations. Today’s lobby against the cuts to new schools is an early candidate for having captured this mood most successfully.

But it is important to think strategically about campaigns if we want them to have a result. That starts with working out where we are now, where we want to get to and how we make that journey. Read more »

   Filed under: Economics, Politics, Public services, Public spending, polling | 4 Comments »

Sometimes, two separate news stories are presented in the same news bulletin and, taken together, make a wonderful statement about the world we live in.

This was my experience this morning as I watched BBC Breakfast. Today’s programme contained the worrying news that, according to figures from the university admissions service, Ucas, universities have received more than 660,000 applications and a record 170,000 students are thought likely to be denied a place this autumn.

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   Filed under: Financial crisis, Politics, Skills | 3 Comments »

Pat McFadden, the Shadow Business Minister, made a thoughtful speech to the Fabian Society this morning. He resolutely defended the last Labour Government’s economic record, questioned the Con-Lib decision to “cut faster and deeper than we (i.e. Labour) would”, rubbished the idea that the UK was in a similar economic position to Greece and made the case for active industrial policies in pursuit of growth. It’s well summarised by Sunder at Next Left.

It was all good stuff. The controversial bit came in the following two sentences: “‘Fight the cuts’ is a tempting slogan in Opposition, and there are indeed some that must be fought. But if that is all we are saying the conclusion will be drawn that we are wishing the problem away.” Read more »

   Filed under: Economics, Politics | 1 Comment »

Too good – if unoriginal - a headline to resist! Foreign Secretary William Hague has delivered the first of four promised speeches elaborating what he says will be a new strategic vision for Britain’s foreign policy. Most of today’s speech was old or borrowed, and little was identifiably blue. But there were some good new ideas too. But how will he pay for what looks like a very much expanded diplomatic function (the FT report started with the suggestion that he was bidding to protect the FCO from further cuts), and, crucially, will he be an Atlanticist or a European? I sense trouble ahead if he fails to answer the second question. Read more »

   Filed under: Europe, Globalisation, Politics | 1 Comment »

I suppose it isn’t surprising that opinion polls are showing that 49% of the respondents to the latest YouGov poll (field work: 13-14 June) say they think that the cuts are good for the economy, with 31% saying they’re bad.

It’s largely due to the fact that the government is still being given the benefit of the doubt by voters (45% in the same poll say they approve of their record so far, with only 25% disapproving). It’s also partly the way the cuts are being reported in newspapers and TV programmes – the debate is usually framed in terms of which cuts should be carried out, rather than whether they’re necessary at all. Read more »

   Filed under: Politics, Public spending | 1 Comment »

That’s the German one, by the way.  But as the Guardian report makes clear, the big issue is the rising unpopularity and perceived unfairness of Merkel’s austerity package.  Draw your own conclusions.

   Filed under: Europe, Politics, Public spending | 1 Comment »

I have a guest post at Left Foot Forwards on Vince Cable’s deregulation review.

Tim Horton has a longer (and probably better) critique at CiF.

   Filed under: Pensions, Politics | 1 Comment »