The FishTank

Archive for June, 2010

Since last week’s budget the Guardian has been awash with sob stories about those adversely affected by the coalition’s money-saving measures. Some have been people in a state of denial – convinced that the thousands of pounds of benefit they receive for a house in inner London is not a large sum of money, or that all was milk and honey before the credit crunch; others have been ill-informed – claiming that VAT rises will affect those on the lowest pay more than those with money to spend, or that the public sector and the economy are one and the same thing; still more have been wilfully misunderstanding – describing measures designed to help people move to follow work or to work longer as if they were measures to force them to do so. All, however, have been united firstly in being written by obvious Labour voters and secondly in being written by victims not of the coalition, not of the bankers, but of New Labour.

Take one case in today’s Guardian. A single-mother, divorced, formerly working full-time to raise her one child, finds herself suffering from stomach pains and other stress-related symptoms. Her doctor advises her to give up work – advice she follows without reluctance as it gives her more time with her child. She still makes money from writing, but for the most part she is better off from the benefits that pay her rent and cover her council tax. Now her writing job is being axed and her benefits reduced. She has, she says, done all the right things, but is being punished for it.

Only, of course, she hasn’t. Because for every mother like her there are dozens of young women who have no child, not because they don’t want one, but because they are realistic enough to understand that even if they could afford to raise them, they would have to work long hours and hardly see them. They could, like the columnist, have chosen to do it anyway, but they have chosen to put it off until it is viable – if it ever is. Some, particularly on the left, would characterise these people as selfish, declining to have a child because they give their own lives precedence, but isn’t it is vastly more selfish to have a child you can’t support?

And then there’s the stomach pains and the weight loss. Some people are martyrs to conditions such as this. Irritable Bowel Syndrome, M.E. – complaints both real and imagined blight many in our highly charged modern lives. But the doctor’s advice, if reported accurately, was wrong. Stress in the workplace is not a reason to stop working – it is a reason to look for another job. That a person would choose to give up work, knowing they will be dependent on the State, clearly not intending to return to the workplace any time soon, this is a symptom of a culture fostered by New Labour – a culture which, left unchecked, will destroy our society.

Of course, that statement left unqualified probably sounds as exaggerated as any in the Guardian’s pages, but consider forty years ago. During the 1970’s, there were many households where people struggled to make ends meet – industrial unrest and rapidly rising inflation meant that putting food on the table was a genuine concern. Some fathers – mine included – worked such hours that they barely saw their children, and job security was incredibly uncertain in the teeth of the three day weeks and wildcat strikes that dragged a struggling nation to the IMF. People lost jobs and responded by looking for new ones. Reality was stressful, but few claimed that stress was debilitating enough that they shouldn’t have to work. And the reason for this was because the State – whether under Labour or Conservative governments – gave short-shrift to the workshy. You kept working not just because you ought to, but because you had to.

Underneath this unrest, meanwhile, the British economy was transforming. Low-skilled heavy industry jobs like steel-working and mining – the heart of many of the industrial disputes – were slowly but surely losing their competitive edge. Strikes and skyrocketing wage inflation meant that the country simply couldn’t afford to keep the industries going. When the Miner’s Strike of 1984 brought the coal industry to collapse it was the end of an era. It was also the start of a new one.

Because one of the things that militant unionism did was to breed a sense of entitlement. Miners who were paid higher than average earnings for a relatively unskilled job could have retrained and got other jobs. Many did, but many more chose to martyr themselves to long-term unemployment rather than take less money in a job they considered beneath their dignity. They weren’t thrown on the scrapheap – they climbed on it for themselves. And Labour, despite Clause IV, signed up to this new agenda of unionised inactivity. If voters could be persuaded that Conservatism was about keeping the poor under the heel whilst the rich got richer, then both the working class and the new underclass would be their natural constituency. So, when the Conservatives tried to do something about the increasing abuse of the welfare state by workshy teenage mothers, Labour threw reality aside and attacked the Government as the nasty party. When spending was restrained in the face of recession, Labour accused the Conservatives of deliberately setting out to attack the poor. They built a vote round those who chose a life on benefits and those gullible enough to believe it was Conservative policy to ruin the poor for the sake of the wealthy.

In office, the project picked up pace. New Labour might not have invented the idea of reclassifying the unemployed, but they built on it, moving millions from unemployment to incapacity benefit, creating the myth that those who lost their jobs in the mines were somehow disabled as a result of that loss. They introduced tax credits, taking money from the poor and making them fill in reams of paperwork in order to get it back. They might have claimed the money came from the rich, but the 40% top rate of tax – only lowered there in the late 1980’s – didn’t rise until after the credit crunch, and capital gains tax – now seen as a tax on rich property owners – was lowered on Gordon Brown’s watch. Far from encouraging people to self-reliance and industry for the good of the country, Labour actually went as far as to encourage – or at least allow – doctors to write off perfectly healthy people as disabled, increasing the underclass and – as they thought – their vote share as they went.

And so it might have continued were it not for the credit crunch. The danger in 2008 was not of us becoming a second Greece, it was of us becoming a second Sweden – a country with punitive taxation and an addiction to benefits, where anyone who has the capacity to prosper flees, leaving the remainder to fund their welfare state by exporting raw materials. It might work with a nation of 8 million people – it would be a disaster in a nation of 62 million. The credit crunch rewrote the script: the deficit had been at its highest in 50 years before the crunch, but nobody had batted an eyelid. With the collapse of Northern Rock, attention turned quickly from the state of private banking to that of public finance and the necessity of retrenchment.

What would have happened without that crunch? We can only speculate, but it’s not unreasonable to assume that Labour could have won the 2010 election and gone on to increase the deficit close to current levels over the course of a parliament. In that time, more and more people would have become trapped in benefit dependency. Eventually taxes would have risen, and each time they did it would have reduced our national competitiveness, more so if other countries were also free from recession. The Guardian wouldn’t have seen it that way, of course: the same culture shift that has made people think it’s fine choosing to live off benefits has made pariahs of anyone who refuses that choice and prospers. The rich are there to be soaked – unless they’re popular celebrities – but just as in the 1960’s and 70’s jobs and businesses would have left, the tax take would have fallen and the deficit risen. Eventually, tough choices would have been forced on the government – or possibly even taken for them by the IMF. And it’s the IMF who have mooted the idea we should remove VAT exemptions on food and baby clothes – measures that genuinely would hurt the poor.

One thing the Guardian has got at least partially right is that Conservatives have embraced austerity as an opportunity. Osborne was quick to change the agenda, his age of austerity speech another masterstroke from an often underestimated politician. As with much of their reporting, however, the Guardian either missed or chose to ignore the point. The Conservatives are not, as the New Labour dogma has it, striving to attack the poor and the needy to enrich their friends in the city. As the only party to genuinely understand the market the Conservatives know what will happen if matters are allowed to continue as they have been. They alone appear to understand that business is mobile and that soaking the hard-working to support the workshy is a recipe not for a neo-Edwardian age of happy idleness, but a slide into poverty, potentially losing us our place in the G8 as other countries follow China and Brazil in rising above us. This shift in international league tables may seem unimportant, but it is symbolic of a deeper truth. For people in a country to get better off, the country as a whole has to get better off. For this to happen, businesses have to open more markets and export more products. And that means we have to be a good place both to find workers and profits. If we want to encourage businesses to set up in this country, to pay us taxes and give us jobs, we have to reassure them that they won’t, in a few years time, be facing increasingly punitive taxation in order to support a growing legion of people who have decided that work is fine for people who like that sort of thing, but not for them – they enjoy watching daytime television with their children too much.

In the end it is always possible to find people who consider themselves hard done-by after a budget. Every shift in spending or taxation creates both winners and losers. The Telegraph were as biased as the Guardian when they campaigned about the rumoured rise in capital gains tax, but they appear to have accepted George Osborne’s decision with good grace. The Guardian are, however, obsessed with attacking the coalition’s budget. It is as if this were an unjustified smash and grab raid on the poor in a time of surplus. With the exception of the 10p tax debacle, I don’t recall their ever looking so hard for losers in Labour’s budgets. But that’s the thing, really. A credible newspaper would be one which could differentiate reasoned critique from political bias and you can’t expect that from a paper which has spent thirteen years living off of public sector job adverts, can you?

The invitation for the right honourable John Hutton to head up a review of public sector pensions for the coalition has caused considerable disquiet with the less-than-honourable John Prescott. At the same time, sundry Millibands and Darlings are accusing the Conservatives of lying about the state of the public finances in order to pursue an ideologically-driven cuts agenda. Pundits in both Lib-Dem and Conservative camps also seem determined to colour every action of the new government with the betrayal of their party. As the new politics causes an outburst of the old tribal instincts it’s worth considering if it is really right that politicians should be so driven by ideology.

The simple answer would, of course, be no. It is, after all, ideology that prevents Labour from accepting any reduction in the size of the state – no matter how ruinous the cost of keeping the gravy train on the rails. It is ideology that drives some outspoken right-wingers both in the Conservative Party and the Telegraph to see any moves to raise Capital Gains Tax as wrong. And can the unions, insisting that there should be no cessation of bread and circuses if it means less of either for their members be anything other than ideological in nature? When ideas come from ideology, reality it seems departs stage left or right depending on preference.

The trouble is, of course, that ideology in its simplest form is a set of shared values that informs policy. It was Margaret Thatcher’s belief in individual reliance and meritocracy that led her to champion the private sector industries that strove for efficiency and profitability over those who thought they could just strike until the rest of the country picked up their wage bills. It was that same belief that led her to extend people the right to buy their own council house – liberating them from a dependence on state provision like no government before. Whilst those of a left-wing bent will still complain about both of these policies (less about the latter than the former, it has to be said) they cannot argue with the fact that in the pre-Thatcher decade it was the continual strikes by inefficient unionised industries that regularly brought governments to their knees and caused an inflationary spiral that made non-unionised workers worse off. By 1983, the average mine-worker was earning 25% more than the average manual worker in other industries and, had Thatcher blinked, there’s no saying how far that differential would have gone before the miners finally brought the country cap in hand to the IMF. It was Thatcher’s ideology that helped her to face down the miners, but her ideology was informed by the grim reality of the decade prior to her premiership. It wasn’t until she did something that wasn’t informed by her ideology – the poll tax – that she finally fell.

For Labour, meanwhile, it was ideology that kept them from office. Ideology had built the party, championing the rights of workers in an age of vastly unfair industrial practices. By the 1980’s, however, that war had been largely won and formed the basis of political consensus. The party were left clinging to the fragments of ideology they had never successfully enacted and that, as time went on, were becoming increasingly irrelevant and unpopular. Michael Foot’s 1983 manifesto, which called for large-scale nationalisation, nuclear disarmament and leaving the EU, struck the public at a time when most people spent their summers in Europe on package holidays whilst recovering from the memory of three day weeks, power shortages and widespread industrial unrest. Nationalised industries meant unionised industries and in an age when nationalised British Rail were banned from using the simple slogan ‘We’re Getting There’, promising the same fate for any remotely profitable business was political suicide. It wasn’t until Tony Blair parted definitively with the nationalisation agenda – succeeding where Hugh Gaitskill had failed forty years earlier and ditching Clause IV – that Labour finally became electable.

New Labour was, of course, a party without ideology. Whilst some of the old guard – people like John Prescott – still talked the old rhetoric (if you can use the word rhetoric in Prescott’s case) the party had for the most part moved on from the politics of envy and decided it was fine to be rich. Some of them even joined the ranks of the landed during their tenure. It was an era less divisive than that which went before – it was also an era less decisive.

New Labour’s fundamental weakness, ignoring Iraq, ignoring the sleaze that mired their final years, was that without a set of values on which to form policy they were forced to chase headlines as a way of appealing to people. Promises were made, ignored and made again because the short memory of the media made it more beneficial to make grand gestures than actually to realise them. Targets were imposed on public services because the intentions sounded good – even if the results didn’t. Money was lavished on the poor without any consideration of where it would ultimately come from. It was one grand party, but when it ended a bitter Gordon Brown found himself holding the empties and trying to work out if he could claim enough back from them to pay the cleaning bill.

Because let’s be clear, for all his failings, Gordon Brown was not entirely the architect of the current mess. He was chancellor for most of its generation, but by all accounts his legendary arguments with Tony Blair were invariably about the balance between Blair’s largesse and Brown’s prudence. When Blair was driven out and Brown assumed the top job, his weak popularity rating made it politically impossible for him to do the right thing and fix things. He was forced to continue bread and circuses for the sake of survival and because, tarnished as he was with his predecessor’s failings, he couldn’t establish himself as an agent of change. Change had to come from elsewhere, which is why Cameron was right to make it the central tenet of his election campaign, but a public wary of another ideological vacuum to follow Blair were hesitant to endorse his particular brand.

And where are we now? We have a government formed from two parties who have been forced to look for their common ground and make that their ideology. Now, more than ever, the party of government has to be aware of what their policies are intended to achieve, rather than simply how they play to the public. It’s not a form of neo-Thatcherism, but a retrenchment narrative based on a belief that a profligate state is as damaging to the poor as it is to the rich. To keep both parties happy and the coalition intact it is vitally important that every policy decision is judged against the core values in their agreement document. And if they are not only consistent, but intelligent and – let’s be honest – lucky, the public will see the country turn the corner and thank them for their efforts. They will see tribal gain-saying from whoever occupies Labour’s leadership as increasingly irrelevant, cheap party point-scoring rather than a considered view of what is good for the country at large.

In the end ideology does have a place in politics. It matters that a politician understands what he is trying to achieve, that a party shares a common ambition for their policies. But it also matters that a politician can see beyond the coloured rosettes and take on other points of view. A hard-right Conservative like Michael Howard would have been as constitutionally incapable of forming a coalition as a left-leaning Lib Dem like Charles Kennedy. A government led by a ideologue like John Prescott would be as damaging now as a government led by Michael Foot would have been in 1983. David Cameron and Nick Clegg are not devoid of ideology, but they are ideological realists, prepared to sacrifice some of their outlying views for the sake of a shared narrative that benefits their country. It’s a mature, sensible politics as needed by our times as Margaret Thatcher’s combative, unblinking politics were needed by hers. In asking the help of Labour MPs with similarly broad minds, what Clegg and Cameron are doing is not simply using the talent available to them (an important consideration given the amount of new blood in the Commons at present), it is also sending a clear signal that the coalition is not about power at any price, but about finding the right answers to problems the previous government – more concerned with tomorrow’s papers than those twenty years hence – were all too keen to sweep under the carpet.

A report published today suggests that the Government should lower the drink-drive limit from its present 80mg blood alcohol to 50mg. The BBC, in an editorial, goes further, suggesting a complete ban – to save confusion. Is their conclusion – that just one death due to drink-driving is too many – really justification for such an attack on civil liberties?

Of course, some of the commentariat don’t see it in this way. From the comfort of their urban existence, they see no reason why anybody should need to drink and drive. After all, that’s what tube trains and black cabs are for. If, however, you live in a rural village, with no trains, where buses are like the yeti during the day and non-existent at night, where even taxis don’t run after 6pm, the choice is between drink-driving and never going out for a drink. In fact, for civilized society it’s the difference between drink-driving and never going out for a meal. Country pubs up and down the country rely on a steady stream of customers who like a meal with some wine and who are sensible with it. If the statistics suggested that every driver who shared a bottle of wine with his spouse was likely to kill someone there’d be no question but that a ban was necessary. But, of course, they show no such thing.

Statistics on driving deaths aren’t actually all that detailed. From what data there is, however, we can see that not only are there now fewer road deaths than at any time since 1923 – and that’s fewer in total, not per capita – but that of the 2,538 or so recorded in 2008, only 430 were caused by people driving over the legal limit. Only this statistic tells us less than we really need to know. For the purposes of justifying a lower limit or a complete ban we would need to know how many of the other 2000 or so deaths were caused by people who’d been drinking but were under the limit and, significantly, how many of the 430 either knew or cared whether they were over the limit. These two pieces of information are critically important because on them hinges the entire justification for a change in the existing regime.

Let’s take the first point first. It would be little more than propaganda to suggest that every road death was caused by alcohol, but we can look at data on weather, sex, road type and time of day/week and draw some conclusions. Firstly, most road deaths are male. This is no surprise: even in our modern, equal society, there are still more miles driven by men than women, particularly on the extra-urban A roads where over half of all deaths occur. In addition, male drivers are more likely to be aggressive and to speed. Even so, the small numbers (1825 in 2008) suggests either that most men are extremely lucky or that the sex is less than universally bad behind the wheel. Deaths are also vastly more common in the 17-25 age band than in any other, suggesting that it is when aggression is coupled with youthful inexperience that it is most likely to make a lethal cocktail.

But is that cocktail alcoholic? Clearly not in all cases – after all, if 643 road deaths are of 17-25 year olds and only 430 road deaths involve drink-driving, it would suggest that no older people were involved in drink-driving deaths. This is unlikely, but if it were true it would suggest drink-drive deaths could be eliminated simply by raising the legal age for alcohol. What’s more likely is that youthful impatience, aggression and inexperience leads to speeding and dodgy overtaking – certainly a common cause for deaths on our local roads.

Looking at the time of day, roughly a third of all road deaths occur during commuting hours. This is hardly surprising, tired or frustrated drivers and busy roads make accidents vastly more likely. Since most people don’t have a liquid breakfast or spend their last hour or so at work getting tanked up, however, it can be assumed that these deaths are unlikely to be alcohol-induced. There are spikes on Sunday lunchtimes and Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights, but these will, for the most part, be from the 430 drink-drive deaths already noted. There are also a fair distribution of deaths during both day and night on weekdays. The night ones are bound to involve a number of people who are driving tired or who have poor night vision, the day ones could readily involve some of the 557 pedestrian fatalities, particularly the 156 children under 16, many of whom may have stepped onto busy roads at an inopportune moment. Whilst it isn’t impossible that deaths at these times would involve alcohol, it is unreasonable to assume that they constitute a significant proportion. After all, those who drive drunk at 3am on a Tuesday morning or 4pm on a Wednesday afternoon are unlikely to hold down a job long enough to fund either a car or a drinking habit. Statistically, it is more likely that these accidents are caused by either the darkness or children with poor awareness of traffic. Banning the school run or imposing a curfew would undoubtedly save some of these lives, but only the most hardened anti-car groups would dare argue for either.

So, looking at the statistics overall, the clear suggestion is that whilst drink-drive deaths do occur at obvious drinking hours there is little evidence that the complete death toll involves a great many undiagnosed alcohol-related deaths. The risks of drinking up to the existing limit would seem to be overstated. There are other measures that would significantly reduce the number of road deaths – raising the minimum age for driving, for one – but nobody seems to be proposing these. Clearly, that one life saved isn’t that important.

But what about the second question? What if those 430 drink related deaths only happen because the drivers don’t know they’re over the limit? This is hard to judge statistically, but ask yourself just how credible it is. A man goes into a bar and drinks until it closes. He drives home and has an accident on the way. How likely is it that someone who has consumed perhaps 6-8 pints thinks he is under the limit? Or the two women who demolish a whole bottle of rose wine each before getting into their hatchback and driving off? Would you seriously believe that anyone would consider 750ml of wine to be less than the legal limit? Generally when people exceed the limit enough to be dangerous they do it by a wide margin. We are not talking someone who shares a bottle of wine and has slightly more than half of it, but someone who drinks heavily because they enjoy it and then drives dangerously because they think they’re good at it. The miscalculations of a man under the influence driving a vehicle at speed can be lethal, but it’s the attitude not the alcohol that is the defining factor. Would an absolute ban stop them? Has a ban on driving whilst on a mobile stopped anyone? The sheer likelihood that a person can ignore a law and get away with it means that a complete ban will have little or no effect. Arresting them after they kill someone will make as much difference as arresting them after they kill themselves. And without creating a police state that’s the way it will nearly always turn out.

So, if a complete ban won’t stop those who already exceed the limit and won’t have an appreciable impact on deaths caused by drivers who aren’t exceeding the current limit, what will it achieve? Apart from closing down country pubs and restaurants across the country, massively increasing unemployment and public resentment of the State, pretty much nothing. Labour undoubtedly commissioned this review, as they always did, to tell them what they wanted to hear and to give them an excuse for another erosion of our rights. It remains to be seen whether the coalition have ears for the same, but for a party who has made rolling back unnecessary impositions of the State their calling card it’s hard to see how they could square the findings of this report with that narrative.