Small country big divide
A journey across England underlines the political and economic division in our small country.
I was a guest last week on Any Questions, hosted by the Workers Education Association in Newcastle . The other guests all tweeted their followers to get them to listen or send in questions, but I’m not that organised and sadly my tweeting is now restricted to an automatic notification of new blog posts.
Judge for yourself but I achieved the three key objectives I set myself:
- Mention the RSA
- Don’t make a fool of yourself
- Be reasonably politically balanced
I was helped in the final task by being sandwiched between Tory blogger Iain Dale and former Gordon Brown pollster and RSA speaker Deborah Mattinson. It may have simply been that her answers were better but Deborah was easily the most popular guest with the audience. The WEA is an organisation with roots and branches in the labour movement but even so the audience reaction underlined that the North East is systematically more left wing than most other parts of England.
It is also – and of course the points are related – the region whose economy is most dependent on public spending. So the future for the region is of deep and painful cuts which will be implemented with little or no public sympathy.
I have long thought that the North East needs to think boldly about how it can boost public service productivity both to improve services but also to exploit the commercial potential of cutting edge public services (after all, education, health care and security are all fast growing global markets). I tried to get something off the ground with ippr North but it turned into a damp squib. A more recent attempt to develop a project with a high tech health company specialising in remote heath care also came to nothing.
I know there is interesting work taking place in the North East, particularly through its universities (notable for the high level of regional collaboration). But the danger is that the region succumbs to a feeling of victimhood and victimisation in the challenging times ahead. I wonder whether the RSA in the North East can do anything to foster a more creative and positive response?
Some little tweaks to the blog…
A reader recently suggested some improvements to the blog, and we listened:
- Recent posts and recent comments widgets are now on the sidebar
- Retweet button on all posts – so please spread the word on Twitter
- The search now covers comments and comment authors – try typing your name in the search box to find blog posts containing your comments.
Feel free to suggest anything else to help improve this blog.
A comment on the ‘regressive’ budget
Channel Four on-line news contacted me about today’s IFS report showing that the Coalition’s budget measures are likely to be regressive. Of course, I wouldn’t say anything to Channel Four that I wouldn’t say to my loyal, clever and beautiful blog readers…..
Last November the RSA/2020 Public Service Trust published a pamphlet called ‘The Fiscal Landscape: Understanding contributions and benefits’. The top lines of this report were that:
* Taking tax, benefits and public services together public spending is very redistributive. One estimate is that on average across the lifecycle low income families with children are net gainers by nearly £13k pa while high income families are not losers by nearly £5k pa.
* The pivot point (the point at which people pay more that they receive) is higher up the income scale than might have been thought. Only between 30 and 40% of people pay more to the state than they receive.
* The pivot point for pensioners is even higher with fewer than 20% of pensioners paying more than they receive.
This is why it is very hard to reduce public expenditure without impacting more on the poor than the well-off. This is even harder when – as the Coalition has – you have made a blanket guarantee to protect the income levels of all pensioners.
And there is another factor too. If the Government were, say, to reduce the value of free health care to a rich family through cuts to the NHS this would represent a very small proportion of its family income. But the same cut would represent a much bigger proportionate reduction in the social income of a low income family.
Putting to one side the debate about the June budget, George Osborne will face a difficult choice in the October spending review. Either he genuinely makes the package progressive in its impact (which will mean hammering middle class entitlements) or he accepts that a cuts package is bound to be regressive (which threatens the Coalition’s centrist credentials).
The classic case in point is the proposed pupil premium which is intended to direct more funds to the poorest pupils. There are already several mechanisms in place which ensure poorer pupils have more money spent on them so the premium will have to do more redistributive work than the existing framework. But if overall pupil funding is flat this either means a generous premium – which will have to involve taking money away from better off pupils – or a small premium – which will be insufficient to compensate for the overall regressive impact of a cuts package.
This is very hard stuff. The Coalition needs to be clear in its aims, its policies and its message (a hesitant spokesman for the Treasury had at least three competing defences on the Today programme this morning).
But whilst sympathising with the Chancellor’s dilemma, there are two things I would advise the Coalition against strongly: don’t over-claim at budget or spending review time (something which dealt a heavy blow to Gordon Brown’s credibility), and don’t slag off the IFS (which is highly respected for its rigor and objectivity).
Baby boomers and enlightenment
The combined occasion of the first tranche of post war baby boomers reaching retirement and fifty years since the beginning of the sixties is leading to much debate. Today’s Observer features a long essay by Will Hutton with additional comment from a range of distinguished 60somethings.
Writing an essay on the sixties for Radio 4 and reading David Willetts’ excellent book ‘The Pinch: How the baby boomers took their children’s future – and how they can give it back’, I spent some of my holiday sitting round the pool with fellow middle aged guests debating the thesis that the generation born after the second world war has exploited its demographic power to the detriment of future generations.
The general consensus seems to be this: in the sixties the baby boomers won important freedoms – from oppression and prejudice based on gender, race and sexuality - but in making the case for individual rights, the era also laid the basis for an aggressive individualism which tore up social norms and tore down social institutions without thinking responsibly about how and with what they might be replaced.
This is a huge generalisation and pretty damning of a whole generation and historical period. It misses out, for example, that as well as sex, drugs and rock and roll, the sixties was a period of huge creativity in the third sector with many of today’s major charities being established, along with whole new movements such as housing associations (today’s bureaucracies seem far removed from the grassroots self help idealism which often drove their formation).
I don’t want to annoy the Radio 4 people by revealing my thesis ahead of broadcast, but anyone who attended or has watched my 2010 annual lecture won’t be surprised to hear that I focus on the kind of freedom the baby boomers seemed to want and the problems with it as a concept. Indeed there is an interesting resonance between the questioning of ideas of freedom, justice and progress which we have put at the heart of the RSA’s 21st century enlightenment idea and the themes of much of the baby boomer debate.
All of which is largely an excuse to plug the RSA Animate of my lecture which is now online. The Cognitive Media people have done another great job and although – like any author – I find it hard to see my great words edited down by nearly two thirds I am assured by several people that 11 minutes is ‘even more powerful’ (‘well, if you put it that way’) than the original thirty.
Moorish rationalisations
When you hear someone say ‘there are several reasons’ or ‘there is a number of factors’, do you respond pragmatically or with suspicion? I tend to assume the speaker actually has one reason and several rationalisations or that no factor is strong enough on its own so he’s hoping if he throws a kitchen sink of dodgy arguments together, they will make the case. To be honest, I’m talking about myself. As a master of rationalisation I am always suspicious of my ability to stack up the arguments to justify doing whatever I want. I am very fond of the exchange between Jeff Goldblum and William Hurt in the Big Chill:
Hurt: ‘isn’t that a bit of a ratioanlisation’
Goldblum: ‘Don’t knock rationalisations – they’re more important than sex’
Hurt (disbelieving): ‘More important that sex?’
Goldblum: ‘Sure, have you ever gone a week without a rationalisation?’
All this is by way of excusing the fact that I have just gone a longer period without a post than at any time since I began blogging over three years ago. There are several reasons and a number of factors:
• I am on holiday
• I have had other things to write: a piece in the FT today (in my own name not my RSA role), and a lecture on the sixties for the BBC
• My computer internet link is very erratic
• I can’t think of anything interesting to write about
• I feel increasingly uneasy about writing a blog when I read so few of the excellent posts produced daily by other bloggers (sadly Bloggers’ Circle – my idea for a peer reviewed amateur bloggers digest – has joined the list of internet site tumbleweed).
The problem with taking a break is I miss all the people who comment on my site (including those who clearly disapprove of me). I am worried you will forget about me while I’m away and that when I return to regular posting I will be shouting into an abyss of indifference.
So, there was only one thing to do. Choose a subject which I know people enjoy and then let my readers do the work. My most successful subject over the years has been jokes. So this week’s competition – for which the winner will receive an excellent bottle of wine (a gift after doing a talk to some public affairs types) – is for holiday puns. But, perhaps ill-advisedly, I’m setting the bar high with my own corker:
‘ I find that when I have visited one 13th century tower in Majorca I just have to visit another one. They are just so Moorish’.
Beat that!
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