Get Back...You Dogs

Ian Duncan Smith does not like the term 'bedroom tax' .

His offended sensibilities notwithstanding ("nonsense!"), the bedroom tax is now in common parlance for the much derided change in housing benefits due next month. The policy, voted for by Conservatives and Lib-Dems, means a 14 percent cut in benefits for anyone in social housing on housing benefit with a spare room.

It makes no difference if the room is occupied by foster children or less regularly by children from separated parents or even members of the armed forces on active duty.

On the Andrew Marr Show he showed his notorious tetchiness citing "a million empty bedrooms". His limited power of argument was further exposed on LBC. It does not seem to occur to IDS nor his acolytes that these million rooms are in a million homes. The policy appears to suggest the lower classes should be able to pack themselves into houses regardless of family ties and relationships.

The choice facing these families is stark and false: to accept the cut or move house when no-one is suggesting there are sufficient numbers of smaller rentable property available. Polly Toynbee in the Guardian expressed it in manageable terms, "in Hull the bedroom tax hits 4,700 families with a spare room, and only 73 small properties free". I would have thought the cost of moving would negate any financial 'advantage' in any event.

IDS's department has also instigated a forced labour programme for young unemployed which was deemed unlawful last week by the Appeal Court (IDS reportedly "astounded") in a case brought by Cait Reilly, a Geology graduate compelled to stack shelves in Poundland. In a display of exemplary Philistinism, Duncan Smith elevated the social contribution of shelf stackers above Geology graduates. His spiteful sniping at those, "who think they are too good for this sort of thing" may be driven by his own lack of a degree.

And almost as an aside, he referred to the human 'right to family life', in respect of deportations as if it were some deviant ploy rather than the cornerstone of society.

IDS may be talking tough to placate the Chancellor who think he has a soft middle and is due a demotion. No matter, the result is to consider and treat people like ignorant, selfish and contemptible commodities.

The Wrong People

Time is relative, particularly in politics.

In nearly five years, given favourable General Election results for Cameron, there will be a referendum on whether UK remains in the EU. Yet there is no real clarity on where the country will be in 12 months yet, the Tory front bench would have us believe the PM has played a masterstroke which will be paying political dividends way over the political horizon.

Not only do I doubt it, I would suggest the whole phoney edifice of Cameron's tough eurosceptism will unravel before the manifestos are published in Spring 15. The reasons why Dave chose to make his tactical speech were manifold but none of them included personal conviction nor the national interest.

He wanted his speech to sate the hunger of the Minotaur that is his backbench. It won't. Events will change the poltical weather, they will demand more and he won't be able to conjure anything. This is the end game now even if it is half way through the Parliament.

Cameron wanted to kill off the threat of UKIP by this speech. It won't. They are now an established political force with a charismatic and seemingly omnipresent leader (pictured). They will do well in local elections in May and very well in Euro elections a year later.

There are many other issues on which the right of the Tory vote prefer Farage over Cameron such as immigration, law and order and gay marriage. Dave may be tempted to woo their vote further but knows it means for Labour to appear more mainstream, all Ed Milliband has to do is stand still.

The whole issue of the eventual vote depending on the outcome of negotiations lacks the broad message which will be easily digested by the electorate. I can't envisage much uproar on the shop floor and in the pub over the Euro arrest warrant. The unilateral position by Con UK plc is also likely to be easily outflanked by other EU leaders. Why should la belle France, for example, agree to new rules on industrial competition which can only harm its own relative competitiveness? She won't.

The economic "freedom" which the PM is seeking includes the right to work in excess of 48 hours a week. The Foreign Secretary, William Hague, said in a less than convincing display in explaining the detail,  that such restrictions were harming the working of the NHS in his constituency (Richmond, N. Yorks). He was suggesting that staff on the minimum wage would be "free" if they were able to put in ten or twelve hours a day 6 or 7 days a week. Some might call that drudgery.

It all seemed so different when Dave became leader in 2005. He would redefine the "nasty" party, the party which, like the Republicans in the US, was only against things. Hoodies would be hugged, a mature debate on drug reform, an environmental policy meant voting blue equalled turning green, or whatever the slogan was.

The waving of dispatch papers yesterday and ringing endorsement from Douglas Carswell and Liam Fox may make Cameron feel he may yet unite his troops. He won't. And for the voting public he has finally rid himself of those last pesky modernising credentials which made him different in the first place.

Return to Strife

When people ask what good the last Labour Government (1997-2010) actually did, the list is embarassingly short. But at the very least one can reach for those unimpeachable few first term measures including the minimum wage and family tax credits.

These policies meant, for the first time, the key constituency of "hard-working families" could guarantee a full week's work would be worth £200. The effect was two-fold; to give people the mimimum standard of living and also to eradicate the "benefit trap" where it was only marginally better to work on low pay than be unemployed.

Not so says the Secretary of State, Iain Duncan Smith who claims tax credits themselves created, "a sorry story of dependency, wasted taxpayers' money and fraud." Smith paints a highly misleading picture of the purpose of the policy as if it were all the money was spent on dossers and couch potatoes. Anyone receiving the benefit will not recognise themsleves as part of the shirkers but the hard workers. And won't be voting Tory neither.

Smith's tirade to the Daily Telegraph appears driven by some bitter Victorian ideal that any financial help creates sloth in the working classes. His rhethoric also chimes with Chancellor Osborne's attempts at social division by implying anyone receiving any benefit is languising in bed with the curtains drawn while the rest of us are out there striving. The Conservatives have also sought to use the same means to justify slashing housing benefit when 90 percent of the recipients are in work simply struggling with exhorbitant rents.

When Tory Chairman, the aggravating Grant Shapps, was asked on Five Live yesterday what we could look forward to from the Coalition in 2013 he actually referred, with all bravery, to IDS's Universal Credit. It is Whitehall's worst kept secret that this rollout is an utter disaster in the making. The briefing by HM Treasury officials has already started. The policy doesn't add up, people can only apply online and the IT doesn't work. As one indicator of the chaos insider IDS's department, the relatively straightforward benefit cap of £26,000 per family has been delayed again, again, Sneaking the news out by written Parliamentary statement four days before Christmas is a sure sign of disharmony and diconnect between Ministers and officials.

So for all IDS's pernicious bluster, he make be due a great fall. He finishes his hateful article by claiming "Labour used spending on tax credits as an attempt to gain short-term popularity. They knew what they were doing – it was a calculated attempt to win votes."

If he is right on that point and is detemined to continue his philosophical opposition to help supporting milllions of already squeezed families then he will have single-handedly cost his party the next election.

Enough Already

You know when you are having a row with your partner or relative and you allow yourself to take the heat of the argument way beyond its origins? All you can then achieve is causing infinitely more aggravation and antipathy out of all proportion to the rights and wrongs of the dispute.

So it is with Andrew Mitchell's bitter confrontation with the Met Police about what was and wasn't said when he lost his temper with Protection Officers outside No.10 gates several weeks ago. It has escalated to the point where the former Secretary of State and short-lived Chief Whip has declared unilaterally and rather pompously, given his status as an ordinary MP, that he has "no confidence" in the head of the Met, Bernard Hogan-Howe.

If he wanted to get himself re-instated to frontbench politics then I would suggest picking a losing battle with the nation's top copper is not the way to go about it. Of course, the latest reports would suggest the 'evidence' around this case has been constructed to put Mitchell in a worse light than was originally merited. The PC who posed as a member of the public and appeared to corroborate the other officers' testimony was mischievous and perhaps motivated by swingeing cuts in police numbers and pension entitlements.

But Mitchell admits he f-worded these officers and so the public are never going to percieve a great injustice has been done. We are like neighbours witnessing a terrible row through a thin separating wall. We do not consider the merits, we just want the cacophony to stop.

Running to Stand Still

David Cameron's deeply embarrassing speech to CBI on Monday showed him to be more of a fawning amateur than a dignified PM.

He constantly brown-nosed the yawning audience of tailor made business suits and put on a pitiful display of frustrated urgency. He is no actor. He lacked confidence in his words and himself as he pretended he was just as ruddy sick as they were about all this blinking bureauracy.

He was so self-conscious of the impression he wanted to give (fast-moving, fast-talking) he looked more like a nervous new junior Minister out of his depth than an international statesman. His role was essentially to suck up to big business and to announce all the usual procedures to be followed when setting up new enterprises can go to hell, as long as new jobs are created.

He kept talking about finding a "spirit" (buccaneering, deal-making, hungry) when such a spirit, is a collective human creation which evolves spontaneously and cannot be expected to appear on demand. Even from such a powerful PM.

He also listed, with faux anger, the numerous barriers to progress which amounted to the minimum safeguards to prevent unfettered business from building roads through national parks and flattening communities to build even more supermarkets.

Dave derided consultations (asking the people affected), impact assessments (measuring what would happen to other businesses) and even audits (ensuring the money is spent correctly). "We don't need all this tick box stuff, " he fulminated. In other words, business interests should supercede the public interest.

He saved a special word for Judicial Reviews - that pesky process, administered by independent judges, which checks whether illegal decisions have been taken. It was Virgin's JR which revealed DoT's severe staff cuts had knobbled their ability to run a fair bidding process for West Coast Mainline.

"These are not how we became one of the most powerful, prosperous nations on earth." Well, no and I would suggest Victorian managerial style is not something we would all want to return to. In those good old days, corporate takeovers typically required sending platoons of troops on gunboats and availing ourselves of poorer nations' natural resources. That ship has sailed.

Cameron had already turned his urgency counter up to 11 but then went even higher by declaring Britain at war (economically) so it was completely justified to rip up the rule book just like we did when the Luftwaffe's planes were raging overhead.

All speechwriters should realise when they have to invoke Adolf Hitler then they have gone too far. PMs should also be more assured than raising panic when simply stronger leadership is required.

Knife at a Gunfight

When you are called to appear before a Congressional hearing or Parliamentary Committee what is the worst accusation you can face? That you were obstructive, wilfully ignorant? No, worse, by far, is to be deemed, “not serious”.


And so it was with Andrew Cecil, Public Policy Director for Amazon Europe when he was summoned before the Public Accounts Committee in Westminster to explain why his company pays next to no corporation tax in the UK.

His brief from his Amazonian masters was quite clear: maintain the line that the UK is simply one element of a European wide business based in Luxembourg. But his preparation clearly did not include identifying the ‘elephant traps’ which the committee, chaired by the formidable Margaret Hodge, may have sought to lure him into. Cecil clambered out of one and immediately fell into another in quite simply the most embarrassing, shambling performance I have ever seen in committee.

Business leaders often come ill-prepared to select committees and the assumption is that private industry only engages with Parliamentary scrutiny begrudgingly. It is as if the mere act of questioning their actions affords them a sense of superiority by dint of their role as “wealth creators” over these grubby public servants. The transparency of that business operation and its responsibility to pay its due to its ‘host’ nation were the points under examination here. How annoying then, for these pesky democratic representatives to be asking such damn impertinent questions.

In fact, the questions which were, on the face of it, the most straightforward seemed to the hardest for the hapless, bewildered Cecil to answer. Of the 9Bn Euro turnover in the European operations what was the sales volume for the UK? First, Cecil said he didn’t know then that it was not usual to disclose those confidential figures. He would have to check back. So who exactly was the holding company for Amazon Europe? No, didn’t know that. What, really? What’s your job title again? This incredible assertion was understandably followed by much spluttering and exclamations, “ridiculous...pathetic.”

Ms Hodge, was clearly losing her cool and when he asked to “check back” on the next six or seven questions she just flipped, “You come to us with absolutely no information…pretend ignorance…I don’t know what you take us for.” After that kind of lambasting, you don’t seek solace in strong drink: you find the closest bridge and throw yourself off.

What is so deeply dispiriting is that these tax arrangements similar to Google, Starbucks and most recently some UK water utilities were exposed by newspaper reports. The Government is always crowing about how it is cracking down on tax avoidance despite laying off thousands of tax inspectors. These are just weasel words: the truth is that officials inside Her Majesty’s Treasury know full well what level of tax these huge companies are paying yet there appears no urgency to seek to upset the status quo.

As if we needed reminding, the nation’s lower and middle classes are groaning under wage freezes, wholesale slashing of public services and support benefits. To see millionaires and multi-nationals blithely refuse to face the same rule book and neither are they compelled to do so, is a rank injustice.

Successive Governments in the UK and many other countries have allowed the creation of an effective “accountocracy” where the creation of favourable jurisdictions mean multinationals can rely on the benefits of a nation’s infrastructure and skills of its workforce and then suck up all the profits for its owners.

Besides calling the more “credible” senior executives from the tax haven of Luxembourg, the Public Accounts Committee must next call in the finance ministers and ask what they intend to do about it.

I fear the answer will be the familiar lament: all bluster and do bugger all.



Failure to Comunicate

Mitt Romney, for all his serial gaucheness, did not forget to be gracious in defeat.

But that may be one of the last moments of dignity for a while for the GOP who are a wasted party with high ambition but low prospect of gaining executive power.

The previous victory for President Obama prompted a tsunami of hysterical drivel from the right merely entrenching themselves in their own bitterness and winning over no independents.

For example, there was Glenn Beck calling Obama a racist and organising a huge march on Washington on the anniversary of Dr King's great speech. This time around there was Donald Trump calling for "revolution" against the "tyrany" when he couldn't do the math and thought Obama had lost the popular vote like Bush did in 2000.

But aside from the blind anger there was an explicit strategy. Minority leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell (pictured), was honest enough to admit his sole aim was not to pass laws for the good of the country but to make Obama a "one term President." Guess that didn't go so well Mitch, eh.

The Republicans have a severe dependency on white, male, Christian, middle and upper income voters and it is a dwindling constituency. President Obama won hands down with women and latinos as well black, Asian, Jewish and gay voters. The latino caucus incapsulates the GOP's dilemma perfectly: a group who would be natural Republicans but who are turned away by demonising immigration policy such as the series of semi racist measures carried out by Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona and Congress's stonewall blocking of a pathway to citizenship for millions.

There is also a matter of party discipline which feels very laissez faire. Certainly any major party in Britain who had a candidate who would put the words "rape" and "legitimate" together would be sacked in minutes. But in Missouri Todd Akin actually stood as did Indiana's Richard Mourdock who thinks sexual violence is part of some divine plan. A bit of centralisation and muscle to control the party's image from these whack jobs would be one positive step forward for the Republicans.

But fundamantal reforms do not seem likely yet. The party has been rushing headlong to the right for over ten years and don't appear to have a rear view mirror on history. They are like the crash victims still stumbling silently from the car wreck.