I think the street party was nevertheless counter-productive in its tactics.

By that I’m not referring to the claim it brought out sympathy for Nick Clegg. I just think it makes more sense to target Conservatives than Libdems on this issue.

The first reason is simple: there are plenty of Libdem fans of UKuncut who supported it over tax evasion and avoidance, who now feel increasingly alienated. And believe me there are still many (shy) Libdem supporters who hate Labour and Conservatives more.

UKuncut may decide it doesn’t care about alienating them, which is fair enough. But my point is simply that they are there.

The second point is more substantive. UKuncut reason that Libdems are more susceptible to public pressure in the Coalition, and may eventually put a brake on some of the Conservative-led welfare cuts. Some even think public pressure may force the Libdems out of the Coalition pre-2015.

I’ve written previously on why it makes less sense for Libdems to abandon the Coalition before 2015. It would only happen if public opinion turns so strongly against Cameron that staying within the Coalition harms their chances even further nearer to 2015. This is possible but unlikely.

But the main problem is that the Libdems are fairly supportive of the welfare cuts. Broadly their constituency doesn’t rate welfare as a key priority and there are other issues Libdem voters find more pressing. Nick Clegg will focus on social issues such as gay marriage, financial benefits such as raising the tax threshold, civil liberties and the environment to rally his base.

Welfare cuts won’t come into the Libdem equation, mostly because a majority of voters believe that some benefits cuts are needed. The leadership is too cowardly to pick a fight there and saving its political capital for other fights.

You may argue that this perception needs to be challenged and you’d be right. But that can only be done through highlighting particularly bad examples of how cuts are affecting people (disabled people, soldiers etc) – not by able-bodied people having a party outside Clegg’s house.

I’ll still happily defend yesterday’s action. I just don’t think it was a particularly effective tactic. And it might be better channelled at Tory MPs instead.

Addendum: I accept there were disabled people there too. But that wasn’t the impression from pictures (which is how most people will hear of it) and it didn’t revolve around them. My point is about how events are framed; this wasn’t like people on wheelchairs chaining themselves in Oxford Circus.

I’m jealous. Every Wednesday, I watch members of parliament ask hard hitting questions and get brutally honest answers from the prime minister with some raucous, yet good natured, cheers and jeers from the MPs.

And I wish, as an American, that there was something similar in the states. The PMQs are entertaining in and of themselves and I enjoy the little differences between American and British English.

The language quarks and entertainment value aside, PMQs get at the heart of democracy: debate.

The live and lively back and forth of PMQs is unlike anything in America. While there are debates between candidates in a campaign and within Congress, they aren’t as frequent or as brutally honest as PMQs.

The closest thing Americans have in frequency is the White House press briefing where the President’s press secretary takes questions from the media and the only time Congress and the President get in the same room, let alone ask questions of the government’s leader in an open forum, is the annual State of the Union address.

Also, whether David Cameron is calling Ed Miliband Balls a “muttering idiot” or Milirand is making the prime minister look like one, these off the cuff remarks give insight into the people behind the party whether the insight centers on their personality or what motivates their policy positions.

If a US Congressman is so inclined, Americans get a glimpse of who their Representative is at a town hall meeting, but they’re rarely televised and most other outreach is too scripted and stale to better understand what the elected official truly cares about and why.

PMQs are good fun and a valuable tradition for a democracy. I’m hoping that America develops something as engaging and impactful, but in the meantime, I cheer ‘hear hear’ for them!

Yesterday, parents and children went into a Tottenham Carpet Right, sat down in middle of the shop and read out stories to protest Harris Carpets (parent company of Carpet Right) taking over their Primary School.

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(faces of kids have been blurred. Pic via @SeemaChandwani)

An earlier Guardian story has background.

As reported in the Independent on Sunday last week, Westminster’s arguments about hydraulic fracturing being the panacea to all our energy problems are now starting to buckle.

While this doesn’t mean fracking won’t happen in England, it does give a serious boost to campaigners who now know they are winning the argument – even against a government who seem hell-bent on scuppering efforts to move to a low-carbon, renewable energy-powered economy.

But despite the good news across the water, here in Northern Ireland, fracking is alive and well and enjoys support from ministers in the Northern Ireland Executive.

Arlene Foster, the Democratic Unionist Party minister responsible for energy, is determined to see fracking occur in NI. The scenic areas of Fermanagh, the North Coast and southern Antrim (where Belfast’s water supply largely comes from) have become exploration grounds for shale gas, thanks to Foster’s department (PDF).

It emerged late last year that Foster’s husband owns 56 acres of land in Co. Fermanagh where fracking could take place. Foster did not declare this despite being previously asked in the Assembly if she had any personal interests in fracking.

The Green Party called for Foster to resign over the appearance of a possible conflict of interest. Despite trying to act like the Greens and the media were barking up the wrong tree, the DUP big guns were rolled out to defend the embattled Minister.

First Minister Peter Robinson appeared on the BBC’s Hearts & Minds programme, clearly not entirely au fait with the situation by referring to ‘frackling.’ Foster even used her speech at a DUP conference to declare her interest in gas extraction by noting that she owns land in Brookborough, ANOTHER area of Fermanagh.

This isn’t the first time Foster has appeared to have these conflicts of interest either. In 2007, as Minister for the Environment, she was caught up in another row over scrapping a proposal for a visitor’s centre at the Giant’s Causeway and approving another proposal from Seymour Sweeney, a property developer and member of the DUP.

Despite all this controversy, it rumbles on. Communities are organising across the province against fracking. A motion in the Assembly condemning fracking was narrowly passed despite the DUP’s objections. Northern Ireland continues to neglect its huge potential for renewable energy, and the DUP dismisses fracking opponents as unconcerned about ‘keeping the lights on.’

The DUP are more anti-science than the Conservatives could ever be. In a country where donations to political parties are kept secret (for security reasons, allegedly) and where 104 out of 108 Assembly members are in government, accountability is worryingly scarce.

It’s hard to see how the desperate, inane, ‘It’s Our Time’ campaign by the NI Tourist Board squares with attempts to destroy our most scenic countryside. This is a rare occasion where maybe, just maybe, you’d rather have direct rule ministers in charge.

There’s been a lot of fuss this week about Jenny Jones’ support for Take The Flour Back, a revival of mid-1990s anti-GM activism. On one side, so the story goes, you have plucky scientists just doing research, and on the other side you’ve got anti-science vandals and woo-merchants.

The truth is rather different, but to be fair to the skeptic firing squad, some of the Take The Flour Back logic was poor. They’re worried that one of the genes inserted at Rothamsted is ‘most similar to a cow’.

I should declare an interest, or at least some history – I was convicted in Edinburgh in 1999 for an anti-GM protest, and acquitted on appeal in 2003.

You regularly hear that one side of this fight makes emotional arguments and the other relies on science, and that’s true.

We brought scientific expertise into court to talk about the existing evidence of gene flow, instability of the genome from retroviral DNA insertion, and issues with specific genes, including those used as antibiotic resistance markers, or to express the BT toxin, or to confer tolerance to herbicides made by the same companies.

At that time, we also raised concerns about corporate control over the food chain, and the consequences of that were already being seen in America, India and Brazil. The arguments against us mostly implied we sought to take food from the mouths of starving children in the South, and described us as Luddites. Despite this 180° distortion, their PR megaphones had some success reversing the roles and pitching themselves as the rationalists taking on the emotional and ill-informed opposition.

They also successfully narrowed down what science should be to appeal to a group who should have been amongst our chief allies – actual scientists, even including some who’d describe themselves as environmentalists. This appeal spread even to some parts of the left who ought to have been anxious about corporate control of the food chain even if biodiversity seemed a frivolous concern for them. They didn’t want to look like Luddites, especially if somehow these magical new products could end hunger.

Specific experiments aren’t necessarily intrinsically good science, for all sorts of possible reasons. Is the methodology robust? Has a subset of the results been cherry-picked to suit funders? Can the results be statistically significant? Have extraneous factors been minimised? Should it have been done double-blind? Fundamentally, for the GM field trial question, is it ethical?

Ethics isn’t something alien to science, some hippie obsession. It’s embedded in good science. Academic research has to pass the universities’ ethics committees, and it’s easy enough to think of research that would fail without having to Godwin the debate.

And GM field trials tell you only one thing more than GM trials in secure labs – how those crops interact with their environment. Lots of those interactions are already demonstrated, and proving them again is hardly worthwhile.

For pollinating crops, we know that genes will spread. But wheat is largely self-pollinating, the defenders of the Rothamsted experiment tell us, and that should be good enough. Don’t bother your pretty little heads about that word “largely”. But the science is against them – including this wheat-specific research. We know that traits like herbicide tolerance spread widely, to other conventional crops, to organic crops and to weedy relatives.

And it’s not just wind or insect pollination that leads to gene flow. Back in 1999 we argued about horizontal gene transfer through soil bacteria, too, and that’s happening as well: “the successful transfer of transgene-borne antibiotic resistance genes to bacteria might be unavoidable according to a plethora of scientific data“.

More alarmingly still, from the same paper, “several commercial [GMOs] contain antibiotic resistance genes that are still under the control of bacterial promoters as remnants of the bacterial vectors used to construct the [GMOs].”

The most important question for the defenders of field trials is this – what happens if problematic gene flow takes place from your trial, and how would you seek to rectify it? There is as yet no recall button, especially when (as with herbicide tolerance or the BT gene) an inserted sequence has adaptive qualities, and until there is it’s simply unforgivable to plant GM crops in the wild, especially fertile ones.

Science and its technological implementation
I am resolutely pro-science, although I have no post-school scientific qualifications. I admire Ben Goldacre’s regular destruction of myths, dodgy research, and woo groupthink. To take the alternative medicine debate, I don’t believe in homeopathy or acupuncture or iridology. Or anything that’s not been properly scientifically tested and found effective.

But, going back to the distinction between science and technology, and returning to the atom, Rutherford’s research was elegant and admirable pure science, while Oppenheimer’s role on the Manhattan Project was at best an ethically dubious development drawing on that research. We gained a lot from Rutherford’s work, but Oppenheimer’s legacy has hung over the world for more than half a century. I have no problem with the discovery of PCBs in the lab, but if I could go back in time and monkeywrench efforts to put them into the environment I would.

I’m not even anti-GM. We were promised secure vats of GM bacteria churning out medicines or other resources. Go for it. Let’s see it. Start with treatments for the diseases of the South which have proved so uneconomic for the drug companies. I’ll be right there, and I’ll do you your glowing press release for nothing.

But field trials of GM crops are bad science. It’s time for the skeptics to look again at that actual science, rather than just lauding field trials as obviously valuable research.

In fact, if they want to support good science rather than this irretrievable externalisation of risk onto the environment and the food chain, they should get their hands dirty with us.

—
A longer version is at Better Nation

But I have a special interest in the Robin Hood Tax, so the question which asked whether voters would support or oppose “a tax on financial transactions by investment banks” was particularly interesting.

It’s not surprising that overall, 61% supported the tax (half very strongly) with only 19% against (mostly in the “tend to oppose” category).

So of those who expressed a view one way or the other, that’s three to one for the Robin Hood Tax – surely an idea whose time is rather overdue!

Some of the other figures in the survey bear reflection. Not one single category of voters analysed showed more opponents than supporters, and every category bar one saw at least 50% of the sample in favour (see below for don’t knows). There are some groups where support is staggeringly overwhelming: the highest majority for the tax is 75% among people who voted Lib Dem in 2010, followed by 72% support among current Labour voters (up from 68% of those who voted Labour in 2010 – possibly due to an influx of disillusioned ex-Lib Dem voters?) Even in London, where we are consistently told that a Robin Hood Tax would damage the City, there is a 58%:26% majority for the tax, more than two to one if the 17% of don’t knows (lower than any other region) are excluded – although in the Midlands, Wales, North and Scotland, support is far stronger, reaching 69%:11% north of the border.

The polling data (and I’m conscious that a single online poll, even one with over 1700 respondents, only provides a snapshot) suggests that Robin Hood Tax supporters do still need to address some problems – mostly the relatively high level of don’t knows (at 21% overall it was the highest don’t know of the seven policies polled, although not hugely above some of them). Don’t knows are particularly concentrated in some groups though – especially interesting is the 33% of don’t knows among 18-24 year olds (although this group produced the highest DK answers to all policy proposals, the proportion was still higher for the FTT than for most other policies). And at 43%:25%, younger voters seem the least supportive of the tax – which is unusual for an issue that has had such salience on social media, with cultural and pop stunts and so on: although it may be that asking about a financial transactions tax rather than the Robin Hood Tax was the cause.

There is a slight gender split, although men (64%) and women (58%) are pretty similarly supportive. But only 13% of women oppose the tax, compared to 24% of men – largely because 29% of women said they didn’t know (another target group for campaigners, therefore). Similarly, although social classes ABC1 (60%) and C2DE (62%) suggest that support for a Robin Hood Tax is not a huge class issue, opposition to the tax is down at 12% among the second category, compared with 23% among better paid voters. Again, though, this seems to be because don’t knows where higher among C2DEs.

The highest opposition to the tax was among current and past Conservative voters, although even Conservative voters back the tax by 53%:30%, so it seems that Cameron and Osborne are not even supported by their own voters on this issue, reinforcing our view that they are acting solely in the interests of their friends in the City when they oppose the EU FTT so frantically.

Footnote: the Robin Hood Tax campaign asked similar questions in a slightly smaller poll recently (and got similar answers), and the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) is polling people in more than a dozen countries around the world, so we might get comparative figures soon.

Now, Mehdi is a friend and I think he’s right to say Obama hasn’t gone as far as many progressives would like.

But if we’re going to criticise the US President and lump him with the Republicans then the points should stack up.

Mehdi’s main hook for the piece is this:

Take the case of JPMorgan Chase. Official records show that the bank’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, a major Obama donor, has made at least 18 visits to the White House since the start of 2009, meeting the president himself on at least three separate occasions. So should we have been surprised when Obama heaped praise upon the bank and its now-disgraced boss, in an interview with ABC last week? “JP Morgan is one of the best-managed banks there is,” he said. “Jamie Dimon, the head of it, is one of the smartest bankers we’ve got, and they still lost $2bn and counting.”

But it was a classic bait and switch. The President was saying, look this guy is seen as the smartest around but even his bank can’t keep its shit together. Mehdi deliberately ignores the second (and key) part of that quote:

You could have a bank that isn’t as strong, isn’t as profitable managing those same bets and we might have had to step in. That’s why Wall Street reform is so important.

That hardly looks like someone ignoring Wall Street reform.

Mehdi later adds:

Upon taking office, Obama spoke grandly of the need “to change Wall Street’s culture”. It hasn’t changed at all. Banks are still too big to fail (and, for that matter, jail) and bonuses continue to rise uncontrollably.

This is only partially true, lefties here are almost uniformly ignorant of what the Dodd-Frank act has meant so far. I suggest reading this definitive piece in NY Mag about it. I quote:

The Dodd-Frank financial-­reform act, much maligned, has already begun to change the shape of the financial system—even before a number of its major provisions are proposed to go into full effect this coming July. Banks are working hard to interpret Dodd-Frank’s provisions in a way most favorable to them—and repealing Dodd-Frank is a key piece of Mitt Romney’s campaign platform.

To comply with the looming regulations, banks have begun stripping themselves of the pistons that powered their profits: leverage and proprietary trading. In the wake of the crash, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs converted to bank holding companies to tap the “discount window,” the Fed’s pipeline of cheap funds that gave the banks an emergency source of liquidity. That move seemed smart then, but the stricter standards required of banks have now left them boxed in.

With all the major banks unable to wager their own funds on big bets, there’s a growing sense that the money that was being made during the Bush boom won’t be back. “The government has strangled the financial system,” banking analyst Dick Bove told me recently. “We’ve basically castrated these companies. They can’t borrow as much as they used to borrow.”

Look, I’m all for criticising Obama when necessary. He has been terrible on civil liberties and national security. He could have gone further on bank reform too.

But using quotes out of context and pretending Obama has barely done anything is simply not true.

The poll of 1,047 London adults, including 523 women, asked female Londoners about their experience, if any, of unwanted contact or attention ? such as, for example, wolf whistling, sexual comments, staring, exposure ? of a sexual nature in public spaces over the last year.

- 42% of women aged 18-34 have experienced unwanted sexual attention of some kind over the past year
- 21% of all women have experienced unwanted sexual attention
- 4% of all women have experienced unwanted sexual touching

The survey also asked female Londoners the same questions about their experience when on public transport in London and again found alarmingly high levels of sexual harassment.

- 31% of women aged 18 to 24 have experienced unwanted sexual attention while on public transport
- 24% of women aged 25 to 34 have experienced unwanted sexual attention
- 14% of all women aged 18 and over have experienced unwanted sexual attention in the past year
- 5% of all women have experienced unwanted sexual touching

EVAW Coalition Co-Chair Professor Liz Kelly said: “We need investment in public campaigns on transport and elsewhere saying this behaviour is unacceptable, and training for transport staff about how to respond to it.”

The responses on Twitter were surprised it was only half

@sunny_hundal the only #wtf about it is that the survey results weren’t 9/10. It literally happens to every woman.

— Helen Jones (@absinthetweets) May 25, 2012

@sunny_hundal I am honestly surprised that it’s only half.

— Jennie Kermode (@jennie_kermode) May 25, 2012

@sunny_hundal @absinthetweets Even so, pretty sure it’s happened to virtually every young woman I know.

— Sarah Graham (@SarahGraham7) May 25, 2012

@SarahGraham7 @sunny_hundal @absinthetweets Been a regular occurrence for myself and most friends since about the age of 14, if not before.

— Polly T (@pollyyy) May 25, 2012

As he points out, that is effectively a transfer of funding from ‘Labour areas’ to ‘Tory areas’. But it doesn’t get to the bottom of what exactly Lansley is up to with his argument.

Lansley is in fact correct to say that age is the principal determinant of healthcare need. As people approach being dead, their call on health services increases dramatically.

What you can’t then do is argue that the government should therefore skew the whole of the healthcare budget towards areas where there are higher concentrations of nearly dead people.

This is because most of the healthcare budget is NOT spent on those bits of care related to people being nearly dead; the biggest part of the budget is in fact spent on that percentage of the population which happens to need it at a point or points in their life before their nearly dead point.

Take a look around any hospital. It’s got people in it who are clearly not nearly dead, and who are receiving healthcare which is, on he whole, more expensive to provide than the care provided to the nearly dead.

But those not-nearly-dead people receiving the more expensive healthcare are only a smallish percentage of all of us not-nearly-deads. So lots of people rarely or never need healthcare (at least until they’re nearly dead, and sometimes not even then). The whole point of the NHS is that they contribute anyway, so that the NHS exists if they do need it at some point.

Andrew Lansley seeks to bypass the incovenient fact that healthcare is needed more in poor areas by the not-nearly-dead-but-more-near-dead-than-teir-peers-in-richer-areas.

The problem for those opposed to such chicanery is that it can be an easy sell to compliant papers, precisely because the first part of his rationale is undeniable.

The challenge for the Left therefore, in addition to opposing the specifics of Lansley’s plan, is to set out how it forms part of a wider strategy of Tory deception.

On Wednesday night BBC Newsnight did a short piece on housing benefit and welfare reform. Its reporter Allegra Stratton briefly interviewed (7m14s in) a young woman for the piece.

In the short interview, very little is said about the context to the woman’s situation – she is only asked about why she wants a house.

Then Stratton says: “we both know people who are living with their parents… they don’t have a job and… they have fights – that’s what happens.”

Later, directly to the camera, she adds: “The government is thinking of saying to young people: if you don’t have work, don’t leave home.”

Most likely you thought the young woman was unemployed. But she wasn’t.

Watch the interview

Update: Allegra Stratton also asked Shanene: “Do u think you should have had your daughter,” she tells me, but that question was not shown. Why is that even asked?

Still absolutely fuming about the way I was portrayed on national tv last night. A day of mundane tasks at WORK is not helping

— Neney (@Nenes_Life) May 24, 2012

She then added in a series of tweets:

To set the record straight, I work for tower hamlets council, I’ve worked since 16 and I only get help towards my rent because it is so high.

I pay the same amount of as paying a mortgage, full rent on a council property, or someone living outside of london, they top up the rest.

It happens that I’ve worked in retail for years up until now so never qualified for a mortgage and wasn’t handed a cushty council flat.

The council offered to pay my deposit if I found my own accom as it was part of a scheme the had at the time. Unfortunately u can’t get much.

In london for under 4 figures a month, but wanting to bring my daughter myself and raise her my way, I took it.

Bar studying, I’ve always worked (sometimes both).

I got a call from my supervisor asking if I’d be happy to be filmed at work to show the side of the working single parent/ young person.

Of course I’d be happy to do that, being a working mum is something I’m proud of… Its not been all plain sailing.

I did not expect to be personally scrutinised, have judgements made about my choices and asked why I didn’t choose to get rid of my child.

Things happen in life and you have to do your best, I feel that I have and was mortified to be portrayed that way on tv.

No one judges me more than I judge myself, claiming benefits was something I struggled to come to terms with and motivated me to work more.

Unfortunately being employed isn’t enough. For me, this is a means to an end.

I don’t agree with nor expect freebies and handouts but at least help the people who are willing to help themselves

I was interviewed for the bbc and when the piece was aired it was edited to make me seem like a jobless ponce!

I am the taxpayer! And come to think of it I get in HB as much as I pay in tax working full time so really I fund what I get.

I think she has a complete right to get angry.

Shanene Thorpe is now making an official complaint to the BBC.

(hat tip @Epipsychidion86)

UPDATE: Shanene has started a petition to demand an apology from the BBC too.

But important as the severity of the double-dip is, the wider issue is the longer term stagnation of the UK economy.

It’s against this background that the FT featured a whole range of ideas to boost growth. But will the government listen?

It ideas – from boosting infrastructure spending (favoured by NIESR’s Jonathan Portes) to the a ‘balanced budget expansion’ (argued for by the SMF) to more inventive and expansionary monetary policy (the preferred Plan B of the IMF).

Nick Clegg yesterday signalled that he supports a ‘massive’ expansion of investment – something the TUC would certainly support but until we get concrete details, it’s hard to get too excited by this intervention. Clegg made similar calls in the past which haven’t materialised.

The TUC has long argued that the government was under-estimating the impact that austerity would have on the wider economy.

Of course events across the Channel have had an impact, the rise in the oil price pushed up inflation and a refusal by banks to expand credit (especially to SMEs) is holding back growth. But when other factors are providing such a headwind to growth, the case for the government to be doing more to support growth is stronger not weaker.

Initial projections from the OBR in June 2010 turned out to be incredibly optimistic. The chart below compares what has actually happened to GDP since Q3 2010, the path then expected by the OBR

(slight caveat the OBR in June 2010 only provided quarterly forecasts until the end of 2011, for Q1 2012 I’ve simply pro-rataed their full year 2012 forecast):

GDP has grown by 4.1% less than the OBR expected during this period – a huge miss. We can debate what is to blame till we’re blue in the face, but it’d be more productive to spend time trying to reverse stagnation.

Given the evidence that the economy is not as strong as they hoped, they should think again. To continue with a plan devised almost two years ago, even as the economy underperforms and stagnates isn’t building credibility, it’s simply reckless.

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A longer version of this post is at the TouchStone blog

There are straightforward processes available to sack lazy/incompetent workers which, if you follow them correctly, take less than six months from when you first notice the problem with their work and don’t lead to complicated legal action.

I’ve personally dismissed people in this way. Anyone denying that is either lying or has no idea what they are talking about.

There are straightforward process available to sack people for gross misconduct which, if you follow them correctly, can be actioned on the same day, totally resolved within a week, and don’t lead to complicated legal action. I’ve personally dismissed someone in this way. Anyone denying that is either lying or has no idea what they are talking about.

If someone you have sacked having followed the correct procedures then takes you to tribunal, you can call a pre-hearing review where the judge determines there is little or no case to answer. Should they wish to pursue the case, they’ll have to pay a hefty deposit and will ultimately be liable to pay your costs when you lose. Anyone denying that is either lying or has no idea what they are talking about.

Where cases make it as far as losing at a tribunal, it is inevitably for one of two reasons:
1) the person was fired without reasonable cause (whether for race/whistleblowing/management petulance/whatever)
2) the person was fired with reasonable cause, but the company failed to follow the simple procedures that you need to follow in order to fire somebody with reasonable cause.

Anyone denying that is either lying or has no idea what they are talking about.

In unionised and/or public sector workplaces, the procedures may be more complicated; I’ve got no idea how they work, having never worked as a manager there. Ditto Scotland, although I think most employment law is reserved to Westminster.

But none of that matters for Beecroft’s purposes, because the procedures followed in these situations are not the ones laid down in statute law, and hence wouldn’t be changed by anything that Beecroft dictates.

As Channel 4′s Fact Check has noted, this is a claim the Prime Minister likes to repeat, even though it has been disproved a number of times; yesterday’s figure simply updates similar data he quoted last year.

This is surprising, because a closer look at the relevant statistics reveals a story that is less flattering to the government.

The election took place in the middle of the second quarter of 2010, which ran from April to June. And it is true that in latest figures – for the final quarter of 2011 – private sector employment was 634,000 higher than it had been in the first quarter of 2010. Public sector employment was 381,000 lower.

But let’s look at the figures for each quarter from the ONS and how they change:

That extra 314,000 private sector jobs in the second quarter of 2010 is important to the argument here.

Without it, the government’s private sector job creation total falls to 320,000 – less than the 350,000 public sector jobs lost.

Fact Check have had a great deal of fun with a straight face, trying to work out how many of the 314,000 jobs were created in April and early May of 2010 and how many in late May and June. But of course, the government cannot plausibly claim responsibility for any of the increase that took place that quarter – if the change had been in the other direction we can be sure they’d have blamed it on Gordon Brown.

Why does the PM continue to draw our attention to figures that actually highlight one of his government’s failures? It’s a bit of a conundrum – any suggestions?

YouGov still lumps UKIP in the ‘other’ camp, and mentions Libdems as the third party.

But ignoring the instances they are level-pegged, UKIP was narrowly ahead of Libdems more times than vice versa.

The graph is below. A larger, interactive version with the numbers is here.

.

Related: Why Labour and lefties shouldn’t worry about the rise of UKIP

It follows from this the NHS should devote a greater proportion of its resources in areas with the largest elderly populations.

But the evidence doesn’t stack up. Furthermore, it looks like the funding is being shifted for political reasons.

I’m using two data sources here: population estimates for local authorities in England, for people over retirement age; health deprivation indices for each local authority. Both are from the Office of National Statistics’ Neighbourhood Statistics website.

If Andrew Lansley is correct, we should see a correlation between the number of elderly people living in each local authority and their health needs.

That’s the theory now lets look at the facts, starting with the comparative illness and disability ratio, which is a general measure of the prevalence of ill heath and disability for each local authority.

But the evidence does not bear this out.

This graph is far from showing a positive correlation between the size of the elderly population and the prevalence of ill health and disability.

The same goes for acute morbidity, i.e. emergency hospital admissions

We find the same pattern when we look at both the overall health deprivation index (-0.19) and the potential life years lost, which is a measure of premature mortality (-0.27).

In other words, basing NHS resource allocations on age alone is a very poor method of determining local funding levels as it.

When Clare Bambra, Professor of Public Health at Durham University, ran the numbers and looked the impact that Lansley’s age-based funding regime would have on regional NHS resource allocations, she found that the winners and losers fell into a very familiar pattern.

This will lead to a considerable shift of health care funding away from the neediest, poorer areas of the North and the inner cities and towards the least needy, most affluent and most elderly areas of the South. It also means more money for Conservative voting areas and less for Labour voting areas.

How considerable a shift? Well, based on current per capita funding allocations Bambra came up with these estimates for the impact that a shift to age-based funding would have on existing NHS regions.

Age-based funding would give Kensington and Chelsea a boost in funding of around 16% while Richmond and Twickenham could expect an increase of just over 30%.

Meanwhile, Tower Hamlets would see its funding cut by 19-20%%, as would Newham and Hackney, while the worst hit areas in England would be Knowsley, Liverpool, Manchester and Stoke-on-Trent, all of which could expect to see anything from a fifth to a quarter of their current funding heading south – literally.

By using age to determine allocation of health funding, Andrew Lansley is not-so-subtly shifting money from poorer, Labour areas to richer Conservative areas, even when there’s no evidence that people in latter areas have higher health needs.

—
A longer version of this post, with methodology and details is here.

Christian Concern are a deeply homophobic and bigoted organisation. Its director Andrea Williams believes homosexuality is sinful and the world is 4,000 years old. Christian Concern has also called for “corrective therapy” for gays in the past.

It has campaigned against Sikh and Muslim people doing religion programmes at the BBC because of their background, and wants abortion banned completely.

Did Philp Blond know about Christian Concern’s past? Does he think it’s right to appear on a platform hosted by them?

His argument was also bizarre.

at Christian concern #marriage conference – going to argue that gay marriage is homophobic and neither gay nor straight should endorse it

— Phillip Blond (@Phillip_Blond) May 23, 2012

Same sex marriage is deeply hostile to gay and straight people and indeed to sexuality itself, this is what I will argue at#marrage

— Phillip Blond (@Phillip_Blond) May 23, 2012

Same sex #marriage means particularity of homo and heterosexual relationships no longer recognised, says @Phillip_Blond

— Christian Concern (@CConcern) May 23, 2012

“destroys gay identity and heterosexual identity” – @Phillip_Blond on same sex #marriage

— Christian Concern (@CConcern) May 23, 2012

@Phillip_Blond says ‘deeply aggressive nihilism’ underlies push for ss #marriage

— Christian Concern (@CConcern) May 23, 2012

(hat tip @bc_tmh)

UPDATE:
Phillip Blond told me via Twitter that he was unaware of Christian Concern’s past, but this didn’t seem to bother him too much.

I also said they believed in corrective therapy for gays. He replied that I was misrepresenting their position. I’m afraid this is either ignorant or highly disingenuous.

Christian Concern’s CEO Andrea Williams herself write about corrective therapy for gays, and its sister organisation Christian Legal Centre is currently defending a Christian therapist who claims she can help gay men go straight.

Does Mr Blond still believe I’m misrepresenting CC’s position? I also asked if he believed in corrective therapy for gays, but hasn’t replied.

Earlier in the year I noticed that by the 4th January, Channel 4 news had reported the deaths of 4 women as a result of domestic abuse. This was a lot higher than the usual reported number of 2 women or 1.5 women a week. London-based charity NIA.

The Twitter account @OneinFour noticed this too, so they started to count the number of women and girls who were murdered throughout the year as a result of domestic violence.

111 days into the year, and the number had risen to 33. One woman or girl every 3.3 days. And today, just over a month later, the number has risen above 40.

When I write about rates of domestic abuse, I’m often met by people quibbling over the statistic that 2 women a week are murdered by a male partner or ex partner. It’s alarmingly high – it’s too high for some to believe it’s real. In every case that has been counted this year, the primary suspect or the person who has been charged with the murder has been a male relative, partner or ex partner.

One of the murders reported today is of a girl who was raped and killed by her abusive boyfriend. She was 17-years old.

The background to this year’s murders has been a slew of government cuts and the recession. Clear links have been made between the recession and rates of violence against women.

Refuges are reportedly turning away 230 women a day. Funding to domestic abuse groups has been cut by 31% over the last year. Specialist services have had 70% cuts.

As government cuts result in further refuge closures, the answer to the question ‘why doesn’t she leave‘ is becoming ‘because she has no-where to go‘.

But we also need to remember that the issue isn’t just refuge cuts. The issue continues to be that some men choose to be violent towards women and girls.

The attempted murder of a woman this week has been described as an ‘isolated incident‘ by police. But it isn’t an isolated incident. It is part of the pattern of the 40+ murders of women and girls this year.

And when it comes to prevention, this rhetoric that domestic abuse murders are ‘isolated incidents’ is part of the problem. We need to stop seeing domestic abuse murders as ‘one offs’.

We need to start joining up the dots and recognise the pattern that links these deaths is male violence against women. We need to start tackling the causes of violence against women and girls, and we need to start funding prevention, as well as support, services.

It’s probably fair to assume that among those who see little choice but to subject themselves to usury will be people that have lost their jobs and do not have recourse to more reasonable sources of credit than wonga.com.

With mass employment so good for business, no wonder Beecroft would like to make it easier to sack people. Among the proposals contained in the review of employment law he has recently completed for the Coalition is so called ‘no fault dismissal’.

Don’t like that black bloke in the ad sales department? Worried that the girl in accounts just got married and may be planning to have kids? Health and safety rep keeps on demanding that you stick to health and safety rules?

Never mind decades-worth of laws designed to give women, trade unionists and ethnic minorities some sort of job security. If Beecroft gets his way, employers will be able to give them their P45s, no questions asked, provided only they stump up a minimal pay-off as well.

The scheme truly is bonkers, and to his credit, business secretary Vince Cable quickly said as much. Beecroft has responded furiously, throwing the worst insult of which he can conceive at Cable: the man must be ‘a socialist’, he concludes.

For the record, he isn’t. There is nothing in Cable’s political track record – including his stint as a Labour councillor – to indicate that he has ever advocated common ownership of the means of production. He is actually a generic social democratic, of the kind that could find a home in any British mainstream party.

As for the suggestion that he is anti-business, let us remember that prior to entering parliament, he held a relatively senior position at oil multinational Shell, not an outfit famed for extending positive discrimination towards Trots and treehuggers.

In short, Beecroft’s outburst tells us more about the thought processes of the rabid right than the ideological complexion of Cable.

Yet this is the sort of person the Coalition is looking to for policy inspiration these days, and what’s more, he seems to enjoy ample support on the Conservative backbenches. Nice.

Alexander Hamilton, all round dude, argued that the only solution to the debt problem was to nationalise the debt, give the central state some taxing powers to pay it off, and to ban individual states from running up large debts.

As discussed by Martin Wolf, something similar could work in Europe.

However, the thirteen colonies had just been brought together by defeating the evil British (mwahaha), whereas Europeans are down each other’s throats, blaming one another for another fine mess.

On the other hand, the basics, are probably in place in the EU in a way they never were in the US prior to the 1800s. A pact to prevent member states from running deficits has already been instituted (although this could be rendered a dead letter law, were it to become politically necessary to ignore it), and a national currency already exists (for now).

All the EU needs is some incredibly unpopular tax and fiscal reforms and it would be half way to becoming a United States of Europe. Three things cause me to be tolerate this idea more than my gut tells me to.

One, European leaders want power, and continental scale is necessary for geopolitical clout, Germany will soon be too puny, Europe united never will. Europeans used to own some continents but they lost them last century, so a plan for Europe’s leaders to all share the same one may appeal as a Plan B.

Secondly, Currency Unions tend to become countries or break apart, there seems little appetite for either course of action, but one will come to pass eventually. Three, since Bismark, Napoleon, Charles V, Charlemagne, hell, for a long time, there has been a political impetus towards greater European centralisation, that logic didn’t vanish in 1945.

So, yeah, Alexander Hamilton, best start reading up.

The new strategy took shape in Downing Street earlier this month, as senior ministers grappled with adouble dip recession and how to respond to the election of François Hollande, the French Socialist who captures a pan-European craving for a new approach.

Having snubbed Mr Hollande on a visit to London in February, Mr Cameron now portrays the French president as a fiscal moderate pursuing sensible growth policies. Mr Clegg goes even further: “I personally massively welcome the arrival of Hollande on to the scene.”

The Downing Street meeting, chaired by Mr Cameron, agreed to a midterm shift in the coalition’s emphasis from austerity to growth, backed by a new push to get the economy moving.

…more at the FT

The IMF says plan B should involve the Bank of England cutting interest rates from their already record-low level of 0.5% and chucking some more newly minted money at the economy through the process known as quantitative easing. Only if that fails to do the trick does the Fund think the chancellor should resort to fiscal policy – decisions affecting tax and spending – to boost demand.

As far as the Fund is concerned, deliberately increasing borrowing in an attempt to stimulate demand is plan C not plan B.

The IMF is advocating a monetary stimulus first, followed by (if that doesn’t do the trick) a fiscal stimulus. And their preferred form of fiscal stimulus would be an increase in investment funded by cuts/tax rises elsewhere.

All very interesting, but I was somewhat surprised that the IMF argued for monetary stimulus first over a fiscal stimulus.

I’d argue that a monetary stimulus can certainly be helpful but at a time when the banks aren’t lending and the monetary transmission mechanism is broken there is always the worry that it fails to address the challenges in the real economy whilst boosting activity and profits in the financial sector (Aditya Chakrabortty’s column in today’s G2 is very good on this phenomenon).

But at least the IMF has implicitly, by recommending one over the other, recognised that monetary and fiscal stimulus are not the same thing (even if I disagree with them on which is more useful in the short term). This recognition is sadly lacking from much of the current government’s rhetoric.

George Osborne is fond of arguing that his tight fiscal policy allows the Bank of England room for monetary stimulus. The government seem, again implicitly, to argue that monetary and fiscal stimulus are close substitutes for each other. It doesn’t matter if the government is cutting back as the Bank can extend support.

Even in ‘normal’ times fiscal and monetary policy will impact upon different sectors in a different way.

Yes, any active policy to increase demand is to be welcomed at the moment – but we shouldn’t pretend that monetary easing will automatically offset fiscal tightening.

—
A longer version of this post is here

After a short exchange I ended with roughly this (it wasn’t a private discussion): “Pippa you’re a good journalist. Why do you need me to tell you what to do? All I want is for Boris’s claims to be fact-checked… especially on knife crime and council tax.”

I was promised the Evening Standard would do something but it never materialised. This isn’t a whinge about Standard bias again, but an illustration that Boris needed every bit of support like this to push him past the finishing line.

The establishment loves Boris.

His loyal fans have been able to build a myth around him along the lines of: ‘Boris can attract voters other Tories cannot’, or ‘he is an unashamed Conservative who can unite Tories unlike that terrible centrist Cameron’. Both are delusional. Rather, his political career came within a whisker of ending abruptly.

Consider the context of the campaign. When was the last time a candidate lost against someone, and came back after four years to win against the incumbent? In the United States neither of the major parties would allow it.

There are other factors too. Boris ran a well financed campaign with support from City millionaires. He had the complete support of the Evening Standard, the Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, The Sun and others. Ken could only count on reluctant support from the Guardian. While journalists could create faux controversies around Ken (‘riddled with gays’, his taxes etc), Boris escaped scrutiny and criticism despite similar hypocrisy.

Boris Johnson’s greatest achievement has been, as the author Sonia Purnell put it succinctly, “the simple avoidance of disaster”. He played to the right-wing gallery with his columns in the Telegraph and tirades in support of bankers, but his policies were largely a continuation of Ken’s settlement.

His claims – the Boris Bikes and investment into transport – were secured by Ken Livingstone. His pet projects barely featured: cheap travel over the Thames (was shot down), an airport in the Thames Estuary (shot down) and a cable car over Victoria bridge (wildly over budget).

And is he really an unashamed Conservative who can bring new voters into the fold?

This is perhaps the greatest myth of them all. Londoners have almost always ignored national political party swings in their votes. Ken initially won as an independent and later as a Labour candidate. In 2008 he easily outperformed Labour’s vote but was way behind its popularity in London this time.

In fact that was Ken’s key mistake: assuming voters could be persuaded it was a referendum on national politics. Ken did not anticipate potential pitfalls (his taxes), was slow to respond to controversies (around Jews) and did not exactly set the world on fire with innovative policies.

Boris capitalised on all of those mistakes, but ran an even worse campaign. There was no unifying theme, his ‘list of achievements’ was bogus, his promise to save families £450 through council tax cuts was simply made up. When he tried to hijack the official Twitter account, it backfired and set off panic at City Hall. His own voters did not trust him on key policies such as transport or know of an achievement that hadn’t been set in motion by Ken.

Boris should have done much better. That he barely scraped through against an already-lost candidate just illustrated his own weakness.

You thought wrong, buster.

Unlike 99% of journalists I actually took some time to scan through the long, rambling, incoherent and ideologically dogmatic booklet.

Here are five amusing bits I spotted.

1) The Qu’ran makes an appearance too, and contradicts TPA philosophy (pg 99):

Islam recognises private property and discourages the excessive accumulation of wealth by a minority group in society. In his farewell pilgrimage, the Prophet of Islam said that “O People, just as you regard this month, this day, this city as Sacred, so regard the life and property of every Muslim as a sacred trust. Return the goods entrusted to you to their rightful owners.”

Well I suppose they could always quote the Bible to justify a smaller state. Oh wait…

2) Cornelius Vanderbilt, an entrepreneur from the 1800s makes an extended appearance (pg 91):

He began at the age of 16, with $100 borrowed from his parents, by running a sailing ferry from New York to Staten Island, charging far less than rivals. He then undercut the New Jersey state-protected monopoly steamboat line, running his boat the Bellona with the slogan “New Jersey must be free” flying from the masthead.

He operated a series of steamboat ferries to Philadelphia and up the Hudson, charging one-quarter of rival fares. Finally, he turned to running railways more cheaply than his rivals. He delivered to consumers an enormous benefit that would otherwise have eluded them – affordable transport. Here is what Harper’s Weekly had to say about his steam ships in 1859…

Very interesting, I’m sure. There’s more too… don’t ask why.

3) Sexual Jealousy is apparently behind everything (pg 92).

So no wonder we dislike inequality. No wonder we want tax to take that money off a Vanderbilt before he grabs all the best women. In the end, it is not necessarily because we think he stole it, though there are still a plenty of zero-sum Marxists out there, and it’s not because we think the government is better at spending it, though there are still plenty of demand-managing Keynesians out there; and it’s not even because we think tax is a decent redistribution system – who can really think that when confronted with all the middle-class benefits that flow from the taxpayer? No, it’s at least partly plain old sexual jealousy at the root.

Ermmmm… ok!

4) “Provocative” author is how one of the contributors Matt Ridley is listed as. He has written books on evolution, genetics and society.

Matt Ridley is also a known climate change denier, who has been taken to task for getting some basic facts wrong in a book on the subject

Not really surprising that the TPA is working with climate-change deniers. And yet they try and take the high moral ground on getting all the facts right.

5) Self interest groups are bad! That’s according to the report itself (pg 126).

That fits with Olson’s argument in The Logic of Collective Action that more concentrated special interests are better able to organise and lobby, at the expense of the latent majority’s interests.
…
As a result of the logic of collective action, countries with more active special interest groups tend to grow more slowly.

I think it’s rational to describe the TPA as a self-interested lobby group that works at the expense of the majority, right?

As Rick Perry would say: “Ooops”.

2. Choose a NHS provider, not a private one when you get your choice of operation. Under Labour legislation you have the right to insist that you are given the choice of opting to be treated by the NHS. So, if your operation or consultation letter arrives with no NHS choice, you can insist on being given one. This will keep demand/custom within the National Health Serivce and make it harder for Lansley to justify flogging it.

3. Join your local LINks (soon to be Healthwatch). This patient driven body will oversee the functioning of the new health service, and how it operates in its first year 2013/4 will set the tone for its future. It’s crucial that we hit the ground running by getting defenders of a public NHS onto those committees.

4. Join your local Clinical Commissioning Group. I am happy to report that we have secretly placed quite a lot of activists within the CCG structure. They feed back regularly on proceedings at the CCG monthly meetings. The intelligence link they provide, as well as action to upcoming commissioning decisions will greatly aid our efforts to prevent Serco/Virgin and others from gaining contracts.

5. Join your local NHS Trust. Membership is free and open to all. There are incentives such as access to discounts and free quarterly magazines. You have the right to stand for the Trust Board and you get a vote in those elections.

6. Make a complaint to the Co-Operation and Competition Panel It is not wrong to consider making a free of charge appeals to the CCP to review commissioning decisions for local NHS Trusts.

7. Join a Trade Union. Less than half of health sector employees are in Trade Unions. This makes the job of unions defending staffs interests more difficult. GMB have shown excellent leadership in sticking up for their staff who have suffered bullying in Derriford Hospital and Great Royal Western Hospital in Swindon. They certainly make the union dues well worth it.

8. Blow your whistle. We are relying on you to keep the information flow going. Thus far, the feedback from staff, patients and activists has been outstanding. They have helped flag up threats to staff, wages, patients, hospitals etc. If you witness wrongdoing, we need to hear about it. You can be guaranteed that your identity will be kept secret. Not one whistle blower has been unmasked in any news story I have covered.

9. Become a share holder in private health companies. I am in the process of buying shares with Serco, and I intend to do the same for the other top 10 healthcare companies. This enables us to attend their AGMs and become a nuisance from the inside. It could lead to practical benefits such as forcing healthcare companies to be transparent about their salaries or quality/performance standards. The reason this is especially critical is because private health companies do not have to answer Freedom of Information legislation, nor are the obliged to follow Department of Health guidelines on whistle-blowing.

In his first meeting with new French President, Francois Hollande, Cameron made it clear the UK would veto any European moves towards a financial transaction tax (or Robin Hood tax).

This position is in stark contrast to opinion, as new polling from the Robin Hood Tax campaign shows most Britons think the financial sector is not paying its fair share.

The survey of more than 1,000 people across England, Scotland and Wales, carried out by Ipsos MORI for the Robin Hood Tax campaign, found that more than three-quarters (77%) of the British public think the Government has not done enough to ensure we are “all in this together”.

71% of those adults who believed the government had not done enough thought banks are “not being asked to pay their fair share”.

By comparison 67% felt that high income earners were not paying their fair share.

People are tired of seeing their schools and hospitals cut while a sector that relied on taxpayers money to survive gives lottery-sized bonuses to bankers whatever their performance.

More than two-thirds (68%) of adults thought financial donations to the Conservative party affected their decisions on regulation and taxation of the City of London.

The Robin Hood Tax campaign is calling on the Government to back international moves in Europe and beyond for a financial transaction tax (FTT).

Extending the UK’s current tax on share transactions to bonds, currencies and derivatives could raise an additional £20bn to tackle poverty at home and abroad and fight climate change.