Tories under fire in the Guardian today for their non-dom tax plans, as it seems there may not actually be that many people to pay the non-dom charge. What surprised me most though was the tiny level of the charge - a fraction of what these people owe. Surely better to get as many as possible to pay a realistic tax rate (even if you want to be generous and give them some measure of a proportional discount for staying away) than to get lots of them coughing up peanuts? Read the rest of this entry »
Good spin for Redwood, getting the story of his wide-ranging policy review boiled down to just inheritance tax in the papers today, rather than coming over as an evil masterplan to work us til we drop, and then mortgage an unregulated timeshare to our remains. The structural flaws in the unreported iceberg seem to be getting bigger though, thanks to the Chancellor, the Work Foundation, the TUC, and even Railway Gazette.
Kicking off with the employment rights stuff that caused a stir earlier this week, the Work Foundation’s David Coates said:
“The UK is already a lightly regulated economy and there is no strong evidence to show that Mr Redwood’s proposals would increase our national prosperity. In contrast, it seems more likely that bad employers will exploit these measures to worsen the position of the most disadvantaged workers.”
The £14 billion saving from red tape looks pretty tenuous. Just dropping the minimum standards on employment rights won’t actually save money on the majority of jobs, for the simple reason that the majority of jobs exceed statutory minimum levels anyway. Redwood seems to have forgotten that there are a lot of decent employers out there, who wouldn’t want to jeopardise working relations by sinking to the depths that his changes would let them.
The people who would most likley see a reduction would be poorly paid, vulnerable workers with bad employers - the kind of people who need the protections most. There’s also less money to be saved in slashing the conditions of someone near the current minimum anyway - as meanness goes, it’s not even practical meanness.
Coates reckons Redwood’s economic analysis is pretty fundamentally flawed anyway:
“The OECD have made clear in their report, Going for Growth 2007 that the policy priorities for the UK are the reform of Incapacity Benefit, tackling basic skills problems, strengthening incentives for lone parents to return to work, investing in infrastructure and improving public service efficiency.
The deregulatory agenda has reached the end of the road. Other policy instruments must be used if the UK is to face the challenge of intensifying competition and rising skill levels in China and India, the emerging economic superpowers.
Most seriously, the proposals to withdraw from some key elements of European social policy are not consistent with the UK’s continued membership of the EU. Leaving the single market would do immense damage to British business. This would more than outweigh the supposed benefits of tearing up the Working Time Regulations “
The whole agenda on working time and the Social Chapter seems designed purely to pick a fight over Europe, regardless of its implications to the economy, and the TUC point out there even seem to be inconsistencies with Cameron’s earlier prononcements on flexbile and family friendly working, which draw heavily on working time rights.
And back to inheritance tax. It’s a middle England bugbear, even though it actually affects only a minority of the richest, and mainly the South East. The Express and Mail will get good campaign fodder out of it, but you could undercut much of the support by simply raising the exemption rate by another £100,000, and pegging it to house prices in the future. Straight off you’d lose most of the sting to voters without losing most of the income to the Treasury.
Myself, I’d rather see it left though, as it has a purpose wider than lining Darling’s pockets. Looking at the Express, you’d think this was the main thing holding people back from owning their own homes, but surely a braver case for it can be argued? Keeping assets from generation to generation entrenches income inequality, and is much more important a factor in taking home ownership out of most people’s reach. Waiting for your parents to croak just in order to get a house as part of a gated community in a sea of sink estates? Not the way I want to live.
I’m really coming round to how good this new Tory viral ad format is. I mean, loads of stuff must have doubled under Labour that they could make videos about. Got me thinking…
Nice note from Asabailey, viral marketing gurus and new Tory ad agency. I like their stuff a lot (my favourite of late has to be their Cannes Web2.0 song - more than a bit NSFW btw). Anyway, they’re showing the first of their new series of Tory attack ads on YouTube:
In response to Lord Saatchi’s most recent calls for the Conservative party to stop its “nicely nicely approach to advertising and PR” and to get back to basics, Asabailey have created this online viral and TV campaign to create debate between consumers and the media in the Midlands and the North of England, all as an early general election looks ever more likely.
Using real Mobile Phone style footage, and images of “life under Labour” the campaign highlights the darker sides of life in modern New Labour Britain and places the blame firmly at the feet of the current Labour government.
Call me old fashioned, but I thought it could be construed a bit of a cheek to bang on about teenage thuggery if you used to be in your own young ruffians gang. Or maybe Dave, George and Boris are able to understand the problem much better than Labour, having been there, done it (over) and so on.
Anyways, I thought I’d share it with you. Oops, silly me, now where did I put the original file… Is it this one?
Of the 27 members of David Cameron’s Shadow Cabinet, 12 have outside jobs with 32 directorships between them. The 120 members of the shadow government team hold 115 paid directorships or other outside posts between them. This means they rake in thousands on top of their £60,675-a-year MP salaries. Daily Mirror 15/08/07
This must be why John Redwood and George Osborne are so keen to bin the Working Time Directive. Poor things, they need all the hours they can get in the day to hold down all their other jobs.
An interesting argument I’d not considered before. Maybe the millions who would lose holidays under Redwood’s plans (down from already the shortest statutory paid holidays in Europe) should just stop worrying and get a few directorships instead?
Today’s Torygraph front page (look, I had to buy it for work, okay!), left me pretty speechless. The nasty party is well and truly back. Redwood and Osborne plan a new policy direction to launch on Friday, but it seems to be too juicy a story to keep wraps on.
The idea is that we could save a whole heap of money without a few little fripperies that no-one will miss anyway. Stuff like:
Health and safety at work
The Working Time Directive
data protection
Safe care homes
‘Best Value’ councils
Home Information Packs (yes, well…)
Food supplement regulations
Venture capital regulation
Money laundering restrictions
Mortgage regulation
Waste incineration regulation
Unfair dismissal protection
BBC services outside TV
I’m not sure whether to be happy about this. It gives us some pretty clear blue water to define ourselves against, makes Cameron look like a total charlatan for changing so dramatically, and will rally the Labour troops very nicely. On the other hand, it’s like something from a zombie film sequel - the stumbling nightmare has returned, and that is enough to scare me a lot.
Some of their points will go down better than they should with floating voters. Health and safety is very hard to defend against the braying anti-PC mob, as people don’t tend to notice the fact they haven’t lost any limbs recently. Likewise with the working time directive (everyone tends to think they’re the only ones working whilst everyone else is slacking off), even though this would really hammer millions of people in the worst jobs, who really need it to protect their vulnerable family lives from exploitative employers.
Maybe the things we need to focus on are the ones that scare people silly about their own financial situation. This might be moves to make it easier to fire you, or to transfer financial services regulation to some of the only people voters trust less than politicians - the banks. Add onto that a free hand for big finance, and the fact that without data protection regulation, the Tories’ sinister corporate pals will be able to snoop on you however they like. There could be a compelling argument about the Tories trying to hand us all over to the less trustworthy side of big business done up like a kipper.
Also good is the Liberal angle that the sums are wrong, topped with the fact they mightn’t be able to ditch the WTD without an almighty spat with the EU (they lost the legal argument last time they tried, so I don’t see how they can do it now. All that makes them look just a bit dim, and as though they’re playing to their true instincts rather than having genuine new ideas, or taking modernisation at all seriously.
Reaction to it going off half-cocked like this has so far been encouragingly bad, but it’ll be interesting to see how it plays across the Tory party. I wonder if this is going to get watered down come Friday?
Prospective mayoral candidate Boris Johnson is no fan of health and safety regulations, apparently regularly declaring his hero to be Larry Vaughn, the fictional mayor in Jaws, who refused to close the beaches after expert testimony and evidence of the first shark attack, leading to another free lunch for the film’s eponymous anti-hero.
Apparently the odd gobbled bather here and there is a small price to pay for the business freedoms that come with under-regulation. The latest gaffe from London’s would be gaffer is taken from a speech he gave last year at Lloyds of London:
“The real hero of Jaws is the mayor. A gigantic fish is eating all your constituents and he decides to keep the beaches open. OK, in that instance he was actually wrong. But in principle, we need more politicians like the mayor - we are often the only obstacle against all the nonsense which is really a massive conspiracy against the taxpayer.”
Wonder how many more safety reps are going to be out canvassing for Ken now?
Eek! Spotted at Charing Cross this morning - an advert for a new Kent housing development, with a logo I’m sure I’ve seen somewhere before.
Indeed, a quick shufty at their website seems to confirm it. “The traditions of yesterday”, “cricket green”, “all the benefits normally associated with a exclusive country club.” The pub is called the Spitfire, and the photos in the brochure aren’t exactly multi-cultural. Plus of course there are the whopping great gates at the front to “engender a private community”.
A gated village? In the Tory heartland of rural Kent? Egad! It appears that Cameron has given up all hope of winning the next election and instead is working on an emergency plan B - The construction of a top-secret Tory fortress, where the Cameroonies can hole up and plot their sinister revenge on the nation.
I was at 6th form college, in my A level politics class, when we heard cheering coming through the wall from the class next door. A few seconds later, one of the maths teachers burst into our classroom to announce “She’s gone!”. He was breathless, after he’d been on a tour of most of the campus already, wanting to be the first to bring the news to everyone. Off he went to the next classroom, and the cheering started in ours.
*Thanks to some quirk of RSS (or maybe my phone’s cacheing software), his post was displayed a week late, so apologies for my (characteristically) getting to this a long while after everyone else!
And on the subject of webcameron… Have you seen their new web-widget, which is finally live? It’s neat-o in a not tremendously useful way to the user, though it probably does wonders for webdave’s googlejuice, having all those keyword terms linking in from around the web.
I thought I’d put it here, but mainly because I noticed a bit of a ’separated at birth’ moment. Remember Dave the Chameleon, and his attempts to pinch policies from all and sundry? Well, funny how you never see them on the same site at the same time and all that…
The occasional scrapbook of a UK labor-geek.
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All of this obviously being my own thoughts and nothing you can pin on my employers present or past, my union, my local party, my mates, or anyone else you might confuse me with - most of whom don't agree with me about very much anyway.
Eek! Spotted at Charing Cross this morning - an advert for a new Kent housing development, with a logo I’m sure I’ve seen somewhere before.
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