Friday, March 26, 2010 

Reporting according to your own biases.

Considering that this blog often focuses on general tabloid mendacity, it's worth taking a look at the reporting of the broadsheets on exactly the same release from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which features a graph on how the personal tax and benefit changes since 1997 have affected different incomes groups (PDF).

According to the Guardian, this shows that Labour's strategy has closed the income gap. The Indie says that "Labour 'has cost the rich £25,000 every year'", the FT went with "Rich hit hard by 13 years of Labour budgets", while the Telegraph decided upon "10m families have lost out in Labour's tax changes", with a subtitle claiming that "Ten million middle-income households have lost out because of Gordon Brown’s repeated tax rises, a study has indicated."

Admittedly, part of the reason for why the papers are likely to have gone with such different interpretations of the same material is that while a briefing accompanied the release of the report, the report itself doesn't directly explain the graphs in any great detail, although it does point out that it doesn't show how household incomes have changed over the same time period. This is the crucial part, and only the Independent gives (unless the FT goes into more detail in its actual report rather than just the cut-off us plebs are allowed to view without paying) the extra detail concerning these changes which provide the context in which to understand the IFS report:

However, taking into account all changes in income since 1997 – including growth in salaries, bonuses, rents and investment incomes – the UK is still a very unequal society, despite the Treasury's efforts, the IFS points out. Income inequality has risen in each of the past three years and is now at its highest level since at least 1961, according to the IFS.

Sevillista in the comments on Left Foot Forward furthers this:

It is being misleadingly reported.

What it is saying that the bottom 60% are paying less tax then they would have done if 1996-97 tax structures and rates were left in place, the upper middle are paying slightly more and the very top are paying significantly more.

What it is not saying is the rich are worse of – they are far better-off and have gained far more than everyone else (inequality measured by Gini has slightly worsened, post-tax incomes
of the top 1% have raced away).

Shoddy reporting. Labour in taxing rich more than Tories chose to do shock, but unable to stop inequality increasing


Newspapers in reporting the news according to their own political bias isn't perhaps the most shocking revelation, but that even the supposed serious press fails, with the exception of the Indie, to put it into actual context should be a concern to those who imagine they're being treated with anything approaching respect.

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3/26/2010 10:40:00 PM | | | links to this post

Friday, May 08, 2009 

More unequal than ever.

It's been completely overshadowed by other events, but what really should be the final nail in Labour's coffin was quietly slipped out yesterday: the income gap is now the widest it has been since records began. This should be the very knife in the heart of New Labour: the entire political deal which shaped the party was that even if the rich would be allowed to become filthily so, through subtle and stealthy redistribution the poorest would be lifted out of poverty, with child poverty to be abolished altogether.

Arguably, for a while it worked: the poor were not getting poorer, it was just the rich getting richer more quickly which prevented Labour's record from being noteworthy and successful. The latest figures however show that even before the banking meltdown, the poorest were having to make do on less, while the richest continued to benefit. As alluded to above, this should be the final straw: the whole reason that Labour supporters were meant to put up with the triangulation, the constant appeasing of the tabloids, the wars, the constant reactionary rhetoric on everything that the Home Office deals with and dealt with was because that below the surface, things were slowly but surely getting better for the most vulnerable in society. Now even Polly Toynbee at her most desperate cannot pretend that her nosepegs can keep out the smell that emanates from New Labour's corpse.

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5/08/2009 11:05:00 PM | | | links to this post

Tuesday, November 04, 2008 

Labour isn't working.

When your default world-view is cynicism, not much tends to shock you. Even by the modern standards of the Labour party, this is little short of astonishing:

Ed Balls, the children's secretary, and Yvette Cooper, the chief secretary to the Treasury, have launched an attack on the so-called London living wage – the £7.45 an hour recommended minimum for all workers in the capital. They claim it would be "artificial, inflationary" and not "necessary or appropriate."

...

But the children's ministry, which is a signatory to the Child Poverty Pledge, said: "An artificial 'living wage for London' could distort labour markets and prove poor value for money. Moreover, in seeking to reflect perceptions of the cost of living, this proposal could also raise inflation expectations at a time when increased vigilance is needed on inflationary risks. We do not believe it is necessary or appropriate."

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, utter crap. The real danger at the moment as has been argued by David Blancheflower and others is not inflationary pressures but unemployment and if anything, deflation (not stagflation, obviously. durrr).

Who on earth is New Labour attempting to appease with this in effect two fingers to the working poor? Why, that would be the CBI, the same organisation which opposed the minimum wage from the very beginning and complains every time the government dares to raise it.

To try and get your head around just how foolish this is, even the Tories support the living wage, or at the moment at least pay lip service towards it, as do the Liberal Democrats. Why then would any person in London or other major city on the minimum wage vote Labour when they don't even pretend to be on their side, and make such utterly dismal arguments to defend the indefensible?

The irony is that this comes just as Labour has attempted to mount a defence of its record on social mobility - which the Cabinet Office's report suggests has improved, at least very slightly, since 2000. Pollyanna Toynbee naturally noted this and swiftly determined that the Tories would it wreck this slight improvement should they come to power. This is on top of a recent report from the OECD which found that also, since 2000, inequality had declined. The criticism isn't that the government hasn't tried, it has, although it has often tried to do so without soliciting attention, but that it hasn't done anywhere near enough. For all the spending on tax credits, notoriously complicated, open to fraud and only available to those over 25, the benefits have been slight. This is why increasing attention is being paid to the citizen's basic income, along with the proposal to lift the lowest paid out of tax altogether. To do so though would mean taxing the higher paid a higher rate, and to judge by the complete lack of backbone being displayed towards the bankers that we now own a share of, there simply isn't the political will for any such drastic changes to be made. When a Labour government seems to be abandoning the very basic foundations of what the party was built around, you have to wonder whether there ought to be a prosecution attempted against it under the Trades Descriptions Act.

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11/04/2008 09:51:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, August 20, 2008 

The political equivalent of Soylent Green.


There are two ways to look at George Osborne and the Tories' latest kite-flying exercise, this time on social justice, equality and fairness: you can accept that it takes a great degree of courage when very few dispute that under the Conservatives inequality sky-rocketed to levels which hadn't been seen since the early 70s, that it's the Tories recognising their past mistakes and moving onto the New Labour agenda; or you can just be staggered by the chutzpah from a group of politicians that don't seem to have any limits to how far they will go to prove that they really, honestly, truly care about subjects which they previously had very little time for.

On the basis of Osborne's article, it's difficult not to come to the second conclusion. It's with a piece with most of the recent articles by the Conservatives that have appeared in the Graun - big on rhetoric, minuscule on actual policy. The one thing that Osborne's has going for it is that unlike Oliver Letwin, who managed to write over 600 words without naming one specific policy, he actually suggests what the Tories would actually do were they to win power. The problem is that we've heard it all before multiple times, and indeed, some of it is what Yvette Cooper covered in her piece on Monday.

Instead, what we have is mostly the same old mood music, the speaking your weight which so grates, especially when it comes from someone like Osborne. This week's Private Eye, quoting from the Conservative document "A Failed Generation", dealing with the idea that schools have to be the "engines of social mobility - where talent and hard work, not background, determine success" notes that the self-same Conservative shadow cabinet which supposedly drew it up contains no less than 14 Old Etonians. Osborne himself is an Old Pauline. It's the sort of education you require to be to able say, without moments of doubt, that "after a long and bitter ideological argument over two centuries, ... the free market economy is the fairest way of rewarding people for their efforts." The new Conservatives however, being caring and sharing, now accept that "unfettered free markets are also flawed."

It would of course be lovely if the Conservatives had came to that conclusion, even if did further constrict the ideological space the three main parties are fighting over. Yet this sudden acknowledgement that unfettered free markets are also flawed seems to be incredibly opportunistic: only last year John Redwood announced his unreconciled belief in the "trickle down theory" and also proposed removing all the current "red tape" surrounding mortgages, right at the time when the unsustainable lunacy of 115% or higher mortgages has brought the likes of Northern Rock so low. In any case, Osborne doesn't actually say what the Tories would do to tame the free market; he only mentions a "robust framework". Yet isn't that exactly the red tape which the Conservatives and business so despise? He mentions also flexible working and a charge on non-domiciles, but with again without providing any details on either.

The same goes for redistribution, which Osborne believes has failed. The Conservatives, the supposed party of radical economic reform, or at least since the days of Thatcher, again don't offer an alternative here. As has been argued before here and elsewhere, the best possible alternative policy is to abolish tax credits and raise the lowest earners out of tax altogether, at the same time instituting a basic citizens' income and raising the top rates for the highest earners, or at least those of over £100,000 a year, and also cracking down far far harder on tax evasion, which by some estimates costs more than £25bn a year in lost revenue, far above that on benefit fraud and through overpayments on tax credits. All Osborne is offering are the same crackdowns on the sick and the unemployed, with an ever harsher regime that that envisioned under Purnell.

Osborne though perhaps really drops himself in it by mentioning fairness between generations. While this is a dig at the huge borrowing, it also brings to mind another tax change which the Tories have promised, that on inheritance. Their raising of threshold to £1 million is one of the only few firm pledges which the party has made, and while it goes down well in middle England, where most seem to be the under the impression that they'll be paying while it only affects 6%, and will even less considering the drop in house prices and the subsequent raises which the government has introduced, it will also mean a further drop in the receipts that the Conservatives will have to work with, as well as backing background rather talent and hard work throughout the generations.

You know full well though that none of this really matters. The Guardian's comment pages have only become more bulging with Tories of late because they think that they need to be slightly less dogmatic than in the past in order to dispense with the fusty old image of themselves not caring in the slightest about things like social mobility. It's also designed to annoy their own grassroots, exactly as New Labour and Tony Blair so often did. He seemed happiest not when he was fighting the opposite party, but instead his own backbenchers, because it so delighted the right-wing press. Here was someone who was doing their job for them, even if the policies were perhaps a bit to the left of what they would like. The difference here is that the promises are so vague as to be meaningless. No one for a moment believes that if Osborne becomes the next chancellor he'll be making many more speeches to the Demos thinktank; no, this is just another step in the public relations battle, the phony war between Labour and the Conservatives over who can occupy the tiniest piece of ground you've ever seen, situated somewhere to the right of centre on the political compass. Russia and Georgia has nothing on this.

Once again, the political choice we are left with, at the exact same time when the politicians themselves so emphasise choice in every sector but their own, is little to non-existent. Would you like James Purnell for your welfare policy Sir, with his slightly less sinister grin and tight fist, or would you prefer Chris Grayling, with his forced smile and glint in his eye? The British political scene really is an unpleasant, claustrophobic place to be in when the most attractive party looks, from here at least, to be the Liberal Democrats. And even their leader and their policies look to be degrading into the same mulch. Soylent Green for you Sir? Honestly, it's delicious.

Update: This has been posted over on Lib Con, where there are more comments. Tom Freemania also has an excellent fisk of the Conservative document underpinning Obsorne's article and speech.

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8/20/2008 11:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

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