Botched vote

Even before the Syrian crisis the question was, is Ed Miliband the most disliked leader in recent British history? No-hopers ranging from Michael Foot to Iain Duncan Smith failed to attract such odium, while the loathing directed at Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair was always balanced out by worship.

Ed Miliband, by contrast, is attacked from all sides. As Labour critics worry that his policies are imprecise and his vision hazy, David Cameron has seized on his opponent’s failure to project a clear public image, painting him as weak. Such objections are minor, however, compared with the widespread wrath unleashed by Labour’s role in blocking any chance of military action in Syria.

Blaming Mr Miliband serves, ironically, to bestow upon him the very power that his enemies claim he lacks. The country is crying out for statesmanship, and the Labour leader will have no better chance to silence his critics. Much as he might prefer to focus on British living standards, voters may judge the calibre of their leaders by what they have to offer the Syrian refugees fleeing with nothing and bound for nowhere. Both Mr Cameron and Mr Miliband are self-professed upholders of public virtue, explicitly committed to creating a better society. No wonder that the public, detecting a whiff of double standards, reviles the political classes.

Today Mr Miliband is making a keynote speech to the trades union conference, will this be strong enough to turn the tide? It was Mr Cameron who failed to get the vote passed the previous week, let's not forget.

The tail wags the dog

The unions have started to reign back their contributions to the Labour party and the Labour party now says that there was no impropriety at the Falkirk selection process!

End Syrian conflict

The G20 is in full swing and rather than discuss world poverty they are chatting about Syria, and chatting is about as strong as it gets. There are two sides, let’s go in and bomb the shit out of them and the do nothing side. Neither of these two sides are remotely close to an agreement.

Then I heard someone [whose name I have sadly forgotten] from the UN yesterday say that one way to stop the current aggression in Syria is to get the supplies of arms on both sides to cease supplying.

Well who are they?

For the government it is Russia & Iran and for the opposition it is Saudi Arabia & Qatar. Can the UN talk to these four countries and get them to stop?

Universal Credit

A devastating report from the public spending watchdog has said it [the IT programme created to control UC] has been beset by "weak management, ineffective control and poor governance". The National Audit Office said the government had embarked on the flagship project without knowing how it would work. We are back to the bad old days where projects are not given tests to prove whether they are worthy of development. Although it appears it is even worse than that and for the last three years the only reports coming out of the IT team have been good ones where all the bad news has been suppressed. How is this not corruption?

A lot of figures have been thrown round today and I do not have access to the inside details, but when a government body produces a report that states the left hand has no idea what the right hand is doing and the mind in the middle has given permission for a project to proceed where there is no path for it to follow, it beggars the question who knows what and why are you spending tax payers money on it?

The auditors found the IT system could not identify potentially fraudulent claims, meaning manual checks were needed on claims and payments. "Such checks will not be feasible or adequate once the system is running nationally".

Citizens Advice chief executive Gillian Guy said: "Even as Universal Credit is being rolled out, we still do not know what support will be put in place to help people to move on to the new system." <<< more disaster waiting to happen…

Monetarism lives!

Keynesians often regard monetarism as a relic of the 1970s, with no real presence in the modern world. In one sense that is true. But in another sense it could not be more wrong.

Bennett McCallum is a long time proponent of a policy rule that would adjust the monetary base in such a way as to stabilize GDP growth. Ideas have consequences. He published his proposal way back in 1980. Don’t let anyone tell you your plan is “politically unrealistic.” If it’s the right thing to do keep fighting for it relentlessly.

Japan is the only developed country where GDP growth in 2013 has recently been well above the 20 year trend, but to get there we would have to have the last 5 years again for another 5 years...

I used to support Jamie Oliver

Jamie Oliver has made the news a number of times this week, perhaps not unrelated to the fact that he has a new book out. On Tuesday he claimed the poor were spending their money on ready meals and large plasma televisions rather than on nutritious cuisine. On Wednesday he then lamented young British workers who were, he said, “whingeing” and “wet behind the ears”. He went on to unfavourably contrast them with their Eastern Europeans, who are apparently putting in 18-hour shifts without so much as raising an eyebrow.

Jamie Oliver’s curiosity as to why the poor appear keener on dining out at the local chippy than staying in and eating rotten bread and homemade potted duck received a great deal of [largely disparaging] media coverage. This is as it should be, for as George Orwell explained in The Road to Wigan Pier, “The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food.”

Jamie Oliver may well boast that when he was in his 20s “the average working hours in a week was 80 to 100”. The mistake is the corresponding assumption that the proceeding reduction in labour time and its replacement with leisure has been in any way a bad thing. As well as 100-hour weeks, for much of Oliver’s 20s there would also have been no minimum wage and prior to that no effective laws preventing employers from discriminating against disabled workers.

Working 100-hours a week is what happens when employment protections are insufficiently strong and employers excessively greedy. The fact that migrants from developing countries are often happy to work in scandalous conditions in no way makes those conditions acceptable. It means there is work to be done in educating migrant workers on what to expect in the workplace, as well as in schooling them in effective union organisation so as to take a bigger share of the pie from multi-millionaire employers like Jamie Oliver.

The special relationship

It is perfectly obvious now after the weekend that there will NOT be another debate or vote in Parliament concerning Syria. However, what is more concerning is the view that both sides of the Atlantic have of each other!

We in Great Britain seem to think that all bets are off and the Americans hate us. The reality it seems could not be further from the truth. Rather than the old fashioned “poodle” idea most Americans consider our relationship to be peer-to-peer, where it is natural to consider each sides argument. So the Americans  neither lead nor follow us rather they view our opinions and decisions and then consider their own.

Perhaps we should do the same…