Do Not Treat My Politics as Any Less than Yours

As anyone who has read this blog down the years will not be surprised, I am pleased that Jeremy Corbyn has been elected leader of the Labour Party.  After the May 2015 election I did not have any expectation that the Labour Party will be re-elected.  The demographics are against them and as has been quoted before, the British public is Conservative and only occasionally votes Labour.  Indeed the New Labour it voted for was simply a pale blue version of the Conservative Party with a better publicity machine.  Corbyn is refreshing because he puts forward an attitude that many, if only a large minority, have felt have been missing from British politics (though clearly not the politics of Greece or other European countries) for so long.

It is not surprising that the right-wing media have attacked Corbyn on every basis from what songs he might sing to who he slept with forty years ago to his fashion sense to made-up policies they think sound poor.  In some ways I welcome that fact as it does suggest that they see him as a genuine threat to their distortions and scares peddled to the population.  If Andy Burnham had won, I doubt he would have attracted a fraction of the attention that Corbyn has done.

'The Guardian' feels that Corbyn and his camp could have rebuffed false accusations if they had had their 'media machine' set up quicker.  In some ways, however, I am heartened by the fact that it was not.  To feel an obligation to rebuff every last accusation as soon as possible is simply to play the game of the right-wing; it shows that you feel that you can be harmed by them, rather than ignoring the rubbish thrown at you because it is in fact nothing more than rubbish, often fabricated and always plastered with indignation.

Corbyn is facing a man who left a child unattended in a pub and has no grasp of how 95% of the UK population live.  Even when he is pictured on public transport, it is clearly faked.  Corbyn looks like he belongs on the underground train, travelling home from work, looking tired, like literally millions of other Londoners.  Part of the problem are the Blair years.  The Blairite government made themselves masters of media manipulation.  However, they also made themselves vulnerable by seeming to care whether one MP stepped off a very narrow line about a policy.  They created a context in which it is felt that unless an entire political party is full of drones mouthing exactly the same words on everything it has somehow failed.  This makes it very difficult for genuine debate to occur not just over the big issues but also the nuances within them.  That does not aid British democracy.  Why is it acceptable for the Conservatives to have a spectrum of opinion from people wanting immediate exit from the EU to those who want to stay in forever and yet even moderate differences on the issue are seen as a 'failure' by Corbyn.  I suppose because we lack a left-wing media.

The anti-Corbyn campaign has been so relentless that it is unsurprising that it is picked up unquestioned and every crumb used as gospel truth by a lot of the population.  I work where people generally have to have a decent level of education to be employed.  However, I have been harangued by the fact that Corbyn wants to wreck the UK economy by scrapping the Queen and he will abolish the Army the moment he comes into office.  Even then, to me such policies seem pretty rational alongside ones such as compelling schools to become academies and allowing the private sector to take over handling prisoners and hospitals.  Given how shoddy and expensive the British railway system is, why is it not shouted down whenever anyone suggests it is not re-nationalised?

I do not expect people to agree with me.  This is a democracy, there are different parties and there is a range of views within every political party no matter how the Conservatives and the media portray it.  Yet, Corbyn politics in a matter of a week have been made to appear illegitimate even to discuss and at best something very naive.  No other political leader has reinvigorated a movement in this way for decades.  Perhaps Sir Keith Joseph and following in his footsteps, Margaret Thatcher did for the Conservatives and that was forty years ago now.  Yet if I ever say anything positive about a Corbyn policy people titter as if I am foolish.  I would be happier to accept them being angry about my approach.  However, the right seems to be winning as it did in the 1980s by simply making Labour policies not seem a threat but simply not worthy of even considering and viewing anyone who proposes them as 'loony'.  It worked before, so I should not be surprised that it is working now.  It is exasperating for a number of reasons.

I could stand in a French or a Greek workplace and outline political views at odds with the people around me and they might disagree perhaps vocally, but they would not look on me as a child; they would not strip me of my right to hold that opinion.  To do so in Britain is a form of censorship which is in fact akin to the approach of dictatorships, not that of other mature democracies.  A further point is that I could state that the world was created in 7 days in 4004 BC; that dinosaur bones were laid in the strata by God to show man the passing of all things and that one day the righteous will be lifted into the skies during the Rapture and no-one would be allowed to laugh or ridicule my views without risking a disciplinary action for discrimination.  I subscribe to a political stance which is rational and in my view would be better for the bulk of people living in my country than the current policies.  Yet, because those very few who control our society and economy feel threatened by such views, they have schooled their minions in the population to ridicule and simply dismiss even the expression of that view.  Is it any surprise that people say Britain has only a partial democracy?

Five Years of Terror

Given my interest in politics the outcome of the election was less of a surprise to me than to some others.  I know that the 'conversion rate' of Conservative votes to seats has always been much higher than for Labour, so the supposed 'neck and neck' polling would mean more seats for the Conservatives; Labour needed a clear lead in terms of votes ever to stand a chance of gaining an equivalent number of seats; many commentators missed that fact.  There is also the issue of the 'shy Conservatives'.  Unlike with supporters of other parties, a percentage of Conservative voters, this time perhaps 5% of their voters on the day are unwilling to admit that they are going to vote for the Conservatives.  Unsurprisingly even Conservative literature reckoned they would win 303 seats rather than the 331 they attained.  Those howling for opinion polls to be banned should consider that fact.

The other thing is that elections in the UK are won by fear and myths.  This has been the case since 1992 if not longer and was boosted by the spin doctor era of the Blair governments.  In 1992 the myth was about the Labour taxation plans.  In 2015 the myth of the Labour 'over-spend' of 2005-10 causing the deficit, rather than the fact that it came from having to bail out reckless banks.  The myth of over-spend is now so well established that many people will not accept any other view and demand that Labour apologise.  They do not read the actual history, they simply absorb the myths spread by the right-wing newspaper.  Such approaches have actually been more successful than direct support for the Conservatives.  I anticipate comments here saying that I am lying because the myth has become the 'truth' no matter what history actually shows.

The fear this time was the SNP.  This seems to have been effective in increasing the turn-out sufficiently to win a lot of seats by a narrow margin that Labour could otherwise have taken.  This leaves Labour in a very difficult position.  In England they probably need to return to Blairite policies but in Scotland where there has been an abrupt shift in the opposite direction, to the left wing, they will need a completely different pitch, indeed possibly a separate centre-left party.  The Conservatives' scare tactics and myths rather than any policy are what secured them the win.  It is ironic that leading Conservatives have said the campaign was 'positive'.  As I have read commentators note, if this was a positive campaign then Heaven help us if anyone thinks of doing a negative one, perhaps George Galloway and the opponents of Esther McVey gave us a feel for the supposedly positive campaigns of the future.

How does this bring me to the terror I have been feeling today?  The reason is that I am a member of 'working poor'.  Despite having a full-time job, I do not earn enough to pay rent on a single room in a shared house and cover my bills in terms of my car, internet, food, etc.  Only my book sales keep me from going into further debt each month.  My salary is the same as it was in 2009 but obviously the cost of living has continued to rise.  My girlfriend who runs her own business and as a result is dependent on housing benefits to pay her rent.  Her efforts to get work in supermarkets has failed despite completing the third stages of recruitment processes.  As a result of being 'working poor' we are incredibly vulnerable.  I have been fortunate to have been in work since 2012 but know that with current employment law I can be terminated with a month's notice and my income dry up.  There is a good chance my employer will then try to block me receiving unemployment benefit as has happened before and according to Job Centre staff is common these days.  Seeing no sign of this alleged economic recovery benefiting anyone I know or encounter, there is a good chance my job will go as the economy continues to stutter.

What is more frightening is the promised £12 billion benefits cuts that Cameron has promised.  There has been no indication where these will fall, but it seems that child benefits will be cut.  It also seems likely that housing benefit will be cut as more money is taken away from local authorities.  It seems probable that my girlfriend will struggle to pay her rent.  Labour had promised controls on rent and increase the rights of tenants to stop what has happened to me in my life with landlords simply tossing us out with minimal notice when they feel a need to sell the house or it turns out they have been failing to pay his mortgage.  They promised freezes on utility bills which have continued to rocket leading to fuel poverty.  There are also no attempts to ban the locked-in contracts which on  two occasions has meant having to keep paying when the internet service has died or face a charge of £65 to have it fixed or £180 to have it removed.  

It is clear that poverty will increase; as the hare-brained school policies are liable to continue, then opportunities for ordinary young people will be closed off.  The next few years are going to be terrible for the bulk of the population.  In such a situation it seems that prejudice and exploitation will continue to rise.  I have tried suicide before and have failed but today's results and the era it ushers in is the one that that is encouraging me to consider it once more.  I have a good job and yet a bleak future is all that lies ahead of me.  For those who are disabled or dependent on benefits, it is going to be utterly horrendous.

What If Proportional Representation Been Used in the May 2015 UK General Election?

In previous postings, I have looked at how UK general elections since 1922 would have turned out if the 'first past the post' system in place in the UK had been replaced by proportional representation.  I did this most recently for the 2010 general election: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/what-if-proportional-representation-had.html

The 2015 election is certainly an interesting one for this consideration because the different between the proportion of the votes each party won compared to the proportion of the seats they won, has probably reached its most extreme.

There are a couple of well-known factors in UK elections which were apparent in 2015.  First is that the 'conversion rate', i.e. how many seats a party gets compared to how many votes they received, has always been highest for the Conservative Party.  The Labour Party and to an even greater extent, the Liberal Democrats, often have tens of thousands of 'wasted' votes that win them no additional seats.  In this election, such vagaries can be seen at the extreme.  The SNP (Scottish National Party) gained 1.45 million votes which won them a total of 56 seats.  In contrast, UKIP (UK Independence Party) won 3.861 million, more than double what the SNP got, but only won 1 seat.  This explains UKIP's sudden support for the introduction of some kind proportional representation.  This is despite the defeat of the proposal of adopting the Alternative Vote (AV) method in the referendum of 2011.

The other known factor is the 'shy Conservative'.  The factor that, in opinion polls, people who are liable to vote Conservative, are much less likely to say they will than supporters of other parties.  This explains the fact that the Conservatives received 2% more of the vote than polls had predicted.

Before I launch into the analysis, there are some caveats.  These calculations are made on the basis of direct proportion, so assuming constituencies with equal populations.  The most simple approach is used rather than ones such as AV which alter the proportionality to some extent.

In addition, I assume that, unlike, for example, in Germany, there is no bar on how few votes a party can get in order to win a seat.  In (West) Germany only parties that achieve above 5% of the vote have been allowed to sit in the Bundestag.  This has meant the absence of numerous small parties at national level and effectively a two-party system since 1949.

The first figure is the number of seats the parties would have gained in a simple proportional representation system.  The figures in brackets are the actual number of seats that the party gained is shown in square brackets.

Note, one seat - that held by the Speaker, was not really contested.  The current Speaker is a Conservative but he does not vote with his party.

2015: 650 seats [Conservative Government]

• Conservatives: (36.9%); 240 seats  [331]
• Labour (30.4%); 198 seats  [232]
• UKIP (12.6%); 82 seats [1]
• Liberal Democrats (7.8%); 51 seats [8]
• SNP (4.7%); 31 seats [56]
• Green (3.8%); 25 seats [1]
• Plaid Cymru (0.6%); 4 seats [3]

Northern Irish Parties:

• DUP (0.6%); 6 seats [8]
• Sinn Fein (0.6%); 5 seats [4]
• UUP (0.4%); 4 seats [2]
• SDLP (0.3%); 2 seats [3]
• Alliance (0.2%); 1 seat [1]

In Northern Ireland a form of proportional representation is used anyway, which is why the figures are not massively different. The adherence to different sides of the Unionist/Republican debate in different constituencies also makes it tricky to predict.

As always, I caution that, of course, with a different system in place, other parties may have come forward.  As a result there might have been a different range of parties on offer that there were in our world.  If we look back to the 2010 election, if then there had been proportional representation then, UKIP would have had 20 seats in Parliament.  Whereas with our system UKIP only gained 2 seats and then only in 2014.  Similarly, back in 2010, with proportional representation, the Greens would have got 7 seats and now would have 25.  Thus, representation in the House of Commons would reflect the trends that have been so commented on in recent weeks, but, because of the system in use, have not come to fruition.

Under proportional representation, Labour would have won 198 seats in 2015, compared to 189 in 2010.  This would still reflect Labour's difficulty in increasing their support, notably in England.  In 2015, voting for Labour did rise a little over that of 2015 but this was heavily counter-balanced by Labour's losses in Scotland.  In our 2015 election they declined in number of seats, a net loss of 26 seats.  The 48 seats they lost compared to their representation in 2010, were not only located in Scotland but in England as well.  With proportional representation system, despite a modest rise, the failure to break through the 200-seat mark might have been enough to see off Ed Miliband even more than the poor performance did in our world.

Proportional representation would not have altered the severe decline for the Liberal Democrats; they would now have a third of the seats they had back in 2010.  However, they would have retained 51 seats rather than just 8.  In this alternative, it would have still be likely that a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition would have been formed back in 2010, though then with the Liberal Democrats three times stronger than in our world.  Persisting with this scenario into 2015, they may have gone back into coalition, but, unlike in 2010, alone, they could not have secured either the Conservatives or Labour a majority.

Even with proportional representation, the often-envisaged Labour-SNP-Green coalition would be no more feasible in forming government in 2015 than in our world.  Indeed, the SNP would only have 31 seats rather than 56, so would be weaker by far than in our current parliament.  Thus, with proportional representation in place what seems would have been the most likely government would have been a Conservative-UKIP-DUP coalition to give David Cameron a small majority.  Given that they had lost two-thirds of their seats as a result of the election (though a better result than losing over four-fifths in our world), the Liberal Democrats, are likely to have been reluctant to have participated in this more right-wing coalition being formed in 2015.

The first-past-the-post system has given the SNP 25 out of 56 of the seats they won.  It  has denied UKIP 82 seats and the Greens 24 seats.  As Douglas Carswell, the lone UKIP MP now, noted, this has meant, combined, 5 million voters for these parties have been denied something even approaching the level of representation they might expect.  In large part those seats have gone to the Conservatives and SNP.

The analysis of how different proportional representation would have impacted has shown that the scenarios discussed in recent weeks were not massively misplaced.  This is because, as I have seen frequently mentioned, polls measure the anticipated proportion of the vote.  As yet, the only good way of predicting the share of seats is the exit poll which, this time was only out by 15 seats, and that neglected the persistent 'shy Conservative' difficulty.  Given that one of those Conservative seats was won by a majority of just 27 votes, it was pretty decent estimation, though, of course, insufficiently close to silence those who at every election howl for the banning of 'inaccurate' polls.  In this case, they worked very much in the Conservatives' favour by making their warning about the advance of the SNP sound convincing and getting out their core voters especially in the very tight marginals that Labour had to take in order to approach winning.

P.P. 11/05/2015
This time round, the BBC has done similar analysis: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32601281

drawing on work done by the Electoral Reform Society using the D'Hondt Method of proportional representation approach.  Their figures are not radically different to mine Conservatives: 256; UKIP: 83; SNP: 31.  However, their work corrects my views based on my previous analysis regarding 'conversion' rates.  This shows that only this year, 2015, have the Conservatives needed fewer votes than Labour to win a seat.  Contrary to my sense of what was happening in 1997, they needed about 30,000 more votes to get a seat compared to Labour.  Now Labour needs about 6,000 votes per seat more than the Conservatives.  This does suggest that the party on track to win gains the better conversion rate.  I wonder what the impact of boundary changes will make on this conversion rate.  For UKIP the rate is running at over 3.5 million votes per seat, 100 times greater than for the Conservatives.

More UK Government Harassment Of Diabetics

As I have mentioned before on this blog, I have Type 1 diabetes which comes about because of a disease or a failure in the body, typically before middle age rather than Type 2 which tends to arise from obesity or old age.  For some reason the current government is particularly hostile to diabetics.  As I noted in 2013 we are treated as if we are drug abusers and if involved in a car accident that was not out fault we can be arrested and the perpetrator let off: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/diabetic-driver-discrimination.html   The difficulty the police have with diabetics was re-emphasised recently as new laws are coming against drugged driving.  Diabetics are being told to carry medical 'evidence' or face being arrested as if we were abusing heroin or cocaine.  This is ironic because, unlike drug abusers, diabetics are highly aware that with care they can maintain good health and prolong their lives, so they tend to safety-minded rather than reckless.  In one step, however, people with a disability (diabetes has been considered a disability legally since 2005 in the UK) are now assumed to be on the same level as criminal and drug abusers.  I might as well have a letter from my doctor tattooed on to my body to ensure that even if I am beaten unconscious by the police who decide to stop me, the medical evidence cannot be lost.

Anyway, today's posting is about something slightly different.  Britain has long been proud of its state-run health service and its welfare system.  However, there has long been a concern that provision should only go to 'deserving people' and that both run the risk of abuse from 'scroungers' and 'fiddlers'.  Diabetes is one of ten conditions which means you get free prescriptions.  The reason for this is that I take four injections per day of two types of insulin and I take four other sets of tablets.  Each prescription lasts me twenty-eight days (when the doctor gets it right, sometime they only prescribe a fortnight's worth).  At the current rate of £8.05 per item I would be spending £629 (US$968; €849) per year just on the medicines, this does not include the needles for the two insulin injectors or the blood test strips which tell me my blood sugar levels and which I have to use 30 minutes before every time I drive and then every 2 hours of a journey, so getting through a pack of 50 a week very easily.  An acquaintance of mine in the USA has to keep down a good job to fund his Type 1 diabetes and it eats into the money he has for rent and food, the costs there are so high.  The UK prescription charge is a fixed rate not what I would have to pay to buy this medication and appliances on the open market.

With the drive of the coalition government to reduce public expenditure to the level of the 1930s they are incessantly trying to hunt down and charge people who are defrauding the system, that is unless they are high salary tax avoiders or bankers.  Today Diabetes UK reported that many legitimate diabetics were being fined for apparently trying to defraud the NHS (National Health Service) by claiming exemptions from prescription charges.  It was stated in the news that most of those affected were people diagnosed before 2000 when the need to renew your exemption certificate every five years was introduced.  Before them you had a certificate for life because at present Type 1 diabetes is incurable.  The NHS Business Services Authority said it was down to the individuals to make sure that they complied with the rules as they now stood.  What was neglected on the news was that even people who do still face fines.

I have had Type 1 diabetes since the 1980s.  In 2000 I was told by my pharmacy in East London that they could no longer serve me without an exemption card so I got one and have renewed it every five years since.  I have a current one at the moment.  However, even this has not spared me for receiving a fine of £96.60 (US$148; €130).  The letter was very threatening and starts from the assumption that you are guilty.  There is only a tiny section which tells you how to contest the charge laid against you.  If you do not pay within a month they add another £48-50 on to the fine.  Obviously I rushed to contest the fine, though of course they were not there on the weekends.  They finally admitted that they were wrong. 

Apparently the problem arose because they had an old address for me and that did not match the one I was now using.  I asked them how it came about that they did not have my latest address.  Every time I move house I have to register with a local doctor and from there my new address goes on to my NHS file and is not only used by the local surgery but also hospitals in the surrounding area so that they can call me for associated checks on my eyes, my feet and my diet.  I could not understand why they did not receive the same information as I had been at this address for seven months already.

It turns out that the NHS Business Services Authority is not connected to the NHS records system so every time you move you have to inform them separately.  All they do is compare fee-exempt prescriptions coming in against a list they hold and if something does not match then they send out a fine.  What this seems to be is a private company doing something for the government as so often is the case these days.  It does not bother with the processes in place and simply applies its own rules, funding itself from the fines it gathers.

There is a further unpleasant aspect to the Business Services Authority's approach and that it utterly disparages the staff working in pharmacies.  As I collect a prescription from mine every two to four weeks, I am well known in there.  However, every time I go in, I have to produce my exemption card and it is checked by the staff even before they accept my prescription.  Clearly however the Business Services Authority has absolutely no trust in the assiduousness or the capabilities of the pharmacy staff even when dealing with patients they are very familiar with.  Their whole approach is an insult to these professionals.

One can imagine that similar cases will come forward from those with one of the other nine conditions that have been treated in the same way.  I do fear that given this government has overseen two steps to harass diabetics what will happen in the next five years if the Conservatives are even part of the government let alone if they have a majority.  This is despite Prime Minister David Cameron having had a disabled son.  What will he next steps be?  To ban diabetics from driving even though no-one has shown any evidence that they are any great risk and certainly not more than the speeding Clarkson-wannabes who apparently are in full health?  Will the next Prime Minister choose to follow the path of Winston Churchill in the 1900s and seek the sterilisation of those deemed to be at risk of 'sullying' the Great British blood?  By 2020 will I find myself at a risk of not simply an unwarranted fine but a summons to an institution to house me where I will never return from and will be lost to 'complications'.  Remember the Nazi regime killed 70,000 disabled people even before they started the Second World War.  Diabetes is an 'unseen' disability so if people with it are suffering harassment what can be expected for those with more visible conditions?

P.P. 24/03/2015 - The Penalties
Just to sum up how horrendous the prejudice is against diabetics these are the penalties now in force that I will suffer as a Type 1 diabetic if someone decides to crash into me.  In contrast, they may walk away with absolutely no penalty.  This comes from the UK government official website:

"Prescription medicines

It’s illegal in England and Wales to drive with legal drugs in your body if it impairs your driving."

However, if you are involved in an accident that was not your fault they still can arrest you as if it was, because as a Type 1 diabetic you are no longer considered to be like normal people.

"If you’re convicted of drug driving you’ll get:

• a minimum 1 year driving ban
• an unlimited fine
• up to 6 months in prison
• a criminal record

Your driving licence will also show you’ve been convicted for drug driving. This will last for 11 years."

So all I need to spend time in prison and get a criminal record is to have one of those Clarkson-deluded speeders shunt me.  If this is not discrimination against a minority, I do not know what is.

Life After Europe

This is certainly a topic I know more about than many others as I used to teach on European Integration and even got to grips with the complexities of farming subsidies.  I do not need to tell you that the key political development in the UK of recent months has been the success of UKIP, a right-wing party primarily aiming to have Britain leave the EU.  Receiving around a quarter of the vote and going from 8 to 147 councillors in the local election has unsurprisingly attracted attention.  Though it is important to note that there are 165 Independent councillors and that the Conservatives have 1116, i.e. more than Labour, the Liberal Democrats and UKIP put together.

Of course UKIP’s impact has been greater than simply the number of councillors it has.  It has again exposed the long-running fracture in the Conservative Party over the question of the extent to which even if the UK stays in the EU it actually participates in the political process.  This is because the Conservative Party has two main wings, one which is primarily business focused and welcomes being part of a vast free trade system and the other which is more nationalistic and simply baulks at the perception of giving any degree of sovereignty to any non-military organisation.  This fracture has not really troubled the Conservatives since the closing days of John Major’s administration in the mid-1990s, but is now back in force.

In recent days David Cameron has been compelled to accelerate the movement to a referendum and without anyone really noting this it has quickly mutated from being about redefining the relationship with the EU to the now trumpeted ‘in/out’ referendum.  Cameron has had to play some politics because he is coalition with the most pro-EU of the British political parties, the Liberal Democrats.  Labour has had an ambivalent attitude towards the EU through its history.  This is because back in the 1950s and 1960s it was seen as a project brought forward by conservative, largely Catholic, businessmen.  It was only in the 1980s when with the pressure that working people were facing in Britain and the EU’s introduction of labour and social policies that most, though not all, Labour members began to see a benefit in the EU, as it is now known.

One reason why Cameron is under so much pressure from UKIP is because, whilst it is primarily a single-issue party, it has also managed to adopt a populist stance that taps into a strong sentiment in British society personified by the presenter Jeremy Clarkson, who in fact has been the most successful ‘political’ author of the past decade.  Cameron has been weak on the populist side of Conservative support right from the start as I noted as far back as October 2010: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/camerons-blunder-with-electorate.html  The nostalgia for a kind of edited golden days of the 1970s when people were apparently free to damage themselves through speeding, not wearing seatbelts and smoking, is very strong in Britain.  Cameron, unlike both Margaret Thatcher and John Major, has never even attempted to speak to those Conservatives in Britain who are not wealthy, but in fact, make up the majority of the people who vote for them.  This is why Nigel Farage is succeeding where Jimmy Goldsmith and his rather elitist Referendum Party which was also anti-EU did not thrive.  Farage may flirt with racism but he manages to do it on the ‘down the pub chat’ basis of ‘I’m not racist but …’ which less alarms the bulk of voters than the more explicit rhetoric of Nick Griffin and the BNP.  Cameron, though elitist has a modern outlook which is all about high-tech global business.  However, that is not the world that the bulk of Conservative supporters feel comfortable with even contemplating.  Britain is a country which lives in the past and any attempt to move away from that, especially when people feel insecure in terms of jobs and the economy, is to make yourself unpopular: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2007/05/britain-land-that-time-forgot.html  This is why it may benefit Ed Miliband to adopt the trappings of ‘Old’ Labour at least to appeal to a sector of working people who liked the certainties of the past but with a more labour-focused approach.

Anyway, there are loads of commentators with more time to explore these issues so I will move now from the current political turmoil to look longer-term.  It is clear that there will be an in/out referendum.  Even if Labour comes to power in 2015 they will find it difficult to resist the head of pressure for this.  It is something that the bulk of the population have wanted for decades and had to accept assurances that it was not possible.  Now Cameron has opened the door, it cannot be closed again.  All politicians have to face the fact that the vast majority of the British public loathe the EU.  Many of the reasons for this loathing are based on misinformation which has been provided by the media decade after decade.  However, the support for UK membership of the EU is limited to business people who like the free trade aspect and the ability to bring in cheap labour legally from Eastern Europe and middle class people living in South-East England who own property in France or lower middle class people from Essex and Liverpool whose parents retired to Spain.

One key myth about the EU is that it compels Britain to accept regulations that hamper the freedom of Britons to be exploited and to have their environment wrecked.  The EU only got into social and labour legislation in the 1980s but it has meant better conditions for maternity leave and eventually for limiting working hours.  These things are seen as hampering the potential success of British business which feels compelled to work on a cheap labour, long hours approach with workers accepting lower wages as they compete for jobs against cheaper workers from Eastern Europe.  The ironic thing is that in terms of health and safety legislation countries outside the EU have gone down the same route.  In issues such as farming and fishing quotas Britain has always enforced these far more rigorously than the more pro-EU states like France, Germany and Spain.  It is the British government that has made these rules apply.  Yet, the propaganda portrays that the assertion of regulation comes from Brussels.

As Tony Benn has long noted, the EU does not have a democratic structure.  The European Parliament which all UK electors can vote for, is seen as the ‘government’ of the EU, in fact does not create legislation and is little more than a talking shop.  EU business is carried out by the Council of Ministers, the prime ministers and in some cases foreign ministers, of each of the member states.  It is no more than a club of democratic leaders.  Thus democracy is not direct, it is filtered through whoever is in power in each state.  Yet, this is not the perception that has been peddled to the British over all these years.  Of course, to a large extent, this is irrelevant, because the British even now we have a coalition government which is sort of working, we dislike other countries negotiating with us, we just want them to do what we say and leave us alone.

All EU members have nationalism and bigotry, it is an element of the modern nation-state.  However, the lack of travel by young British people and the general inability to speak foreign languages: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2007/05/british-and-foreign-languages.html  exacerbates the situation in which the only view of the EU is the one that comes from the BBC and is heightened by ‘The Sun’ and ‘Daily Mail’ even when people bother to read them.  It is far easier to make a scare about immigrants taking jobs and school places than explain the opportunities of the EU.  The sustained rise in the cost of living in Britain is making British people more and more insular.  It is expensive even to travel within the UK let alone abroad.  As a result, increasingly it is only the children of those who own houses in France that are experiencing neighbouring cultures and they are generally pro-EU already.

In the next decade, perhaps as early as 2017, maybe even before that, there will be a referendum regarding the UK leaving the EU.  There will be an overwhelming vote in support of immediately leaving.  There is no question of this given the extensive hostility to the organisation.  What will life be like once Britain is out of ‘Europe’?

The first thing is that trade would be affected.  I know this from working part-time in an import/export business which brings in goods from the USA and China as well as EU countries.  With EU countries the company pays not import duties and customers in those countries similarly can get their goods at the price they see on the website.  The moment the UK is outside the EU, this will stop.  However, we are fortunate that there is a drive for international free trade so leading to a reduction of tariffs and so the impact on British trade would be less than if we had left the EU in the Thatcher years.  Overall 48% of the UK’s exports in goods and services is with the EU; of all the EU states the UK is least dependent on trade within the union, but currently there is a trade gap with Britain importing £6.1 billion more items from the EU than it exported to these countries.

According to the Confederation of British Industry, the USA with over 300 million people takes 17% of the UK’s exports, but Germany with 80 million takes 9%, France (65 million) takes 6.6%, the Netherlands (16 million) takes 6.9%, Eire (4.4 million) takes 6.1%.  Thus both per capita and as an overall figure, the EU is the largest consumer of UK exports which would now not have free trade with.  You could argue that we could replace this with exports elsewhere.  This is certainly the case, but we need to move quickly.  Between them India and China have 2.3 billion people but only 2.0% of UK exports go to China and 1.2% to India; 1.1% go to Russia and only 0.1% to Brazil, the other two burgeoning ‘BRIC’ countries.  The USA only provides 2.8% of Britain’s imports whereas Eire sends 9.4%.  We have a large trade imbalance with the BRIC states with China providing 9.4% of Britain’s imports, India 8.0%, Russia 4.0% and Brazil 4.1% despite how little we sell to them.

Yes, it is likely the EU would remain Britain’s prime trading partner, even after we had left but access to the EU marketplace would be harder.  In addition, US and Japanese investors are already concerned that their manufacturing in Britain would now be the wrong side of the free market ‘wall’ and it would be better to move to a country remaining within the EU.  This might be of benefit to an independent Scotland.

Leaving the EU would provide a set-back for British trade that is clear.  However, this would fit in well with the populist UKIP attitude and to attract business and produce competitive exports, the UK would rely on cheap labour costs and deregulation.  Former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Lawson, has argued that EU regulation is hampering the financial companies of the City of London, always a strong element in Britain’s export of services, from making as much profit as they can.  The City of London while it may see itself as an autonomous element of the British economy is in fact currently integrated into it.  The separation is moving far too slowly.  This integration was why reckless activities by its bankers impacted so heavily on high street banks and the general public: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/myth-of-alternative-to-bank-bail-out.html  The cuts in welfare and other spending are a result of insufficient regulation of the UK banking sector and we need, not simply want, more regulation if ordinary people are going to be spared suffering once again from bankers pushing to make even more stupendous profits.  Regulation does not have to come from the EU.  However, this disengagement from the EU does seem to be increasingly linked by other extreme right-wing policies.

The one factor that probably wins greatest support from those seeking to leave the EU is the barring of the immigration of EU citizens, in particularly those from Eastern Europe.  This is where the populist view goes against that of the business community who love cheap labour that can be used to push down wages for British workers too and reduce overall costs.  The impact on the construction, catering and care industries as a result of the loss of these people would be great.  In 2011, there were 2.7 million people in England and Wales (not including Scotland and Northern Ireland) who came from other EU states, this included 579,000 from Poland and only 79,000 from Romania.  The peak for migration from Eastern Europe was in 2007 and the monthly figure is now a quarter of what it was that year.  The economic crash of 2008 naturally made the UK far less appealing.

The balance across the country is uneven; 27% of Polish immigrants live in London as do 56% of Romanians.  In the mid-2000s, 10% of the population of Southampton was Polish but this fell sharply after 2007.  The majority of citizens of other EU countries, 59% are from states which were in the EU before 2004, for example at any one time 300-400,000 French live in London making it the city with the sixth largest French population in the world.  There are around 270,000 Germans, 54,000 Spaniards and over 100,000 Italians.  This can be compared with the 761,000 Britons living in Spain permanently with a further 229,000 living there for part of the year; 150,000 live in France; 120,000 live in Germany and 29,000 live in Poland.  In total around 1 million British people live in other EU states though there are seasonal fluctuations; 660,000 Britons live in the USA.

With Britain leaving the EU, the rights of all these people to live in the UK would suddenly go.  This does not mean that there would be mass deportations because Britain does allow some immigrants even from outside the EU to settle here still.  What would make an impact is what laws restricting provision for immigrants would be introduced either before or after the exit from the EU.  Currently there are plans to limit the access of Bulgarians and Romanians to free health care and policies like this, it seems likely, would be quickly extended to other EU citizens with Poles being the top of the anti-immigration supporters’ list.  In such a climate many EU citizens would choose to leave anyway.  There was a fall in the Polish population in 2008 at the time of the economic crash, particularly noticeable in some towns.  The impact would be very varied across the country with London experiencing the greatest changes.  There are likely to be tensions especially for cases of the children of EU immigrants who have only lived in the UK or for people who have been living here for many years.  The large increase in immigrants from other EU states came in 1992 meaning that some will have been in the country for over two decades.  How would families in which one parent is British and the other an EU citizen be treated?  Expelling one, might mean the other going too.

Immigrants are always people with ‘get up and go’.  If you have worked in the civil service you will be familiar with working alongside multi-lingual French, Spanish and German workers.  The stereotype of the Polish and Lithuanian builder is based on a degree of fact as are Eastern European waiting and pub staff.  Thus, these sectors which employ a sizeable percentage of especially skilled or cheap foreign labour will suffer most.  There do not seem to be loads of UK people waiting to fill these posts and it seems that ahead of the exit a training campaign would have to be introduced to get young British people ready to fill the lower paid posts or see numerous shops and cafes close; certainly all the Polish grocery shops would disappear and again it is not as if there are Britons waiting to fill those slots.

A further challenge would come if there was a ‘tit-for-tat’ approach from EU states and Britons found they were no longer welcome living in Spain or France and either would be ordered to leave or face increasing restrictions of the kind these states’ populations would be encountering in Britain or that we already see for expatriates in Australia.  Spain would be foolish economically to expel Britons, but they may leave anyway in this new climate.  New locations, notably Turkey, still outside the EU, might become increasingly attractive in the post-EU era.  The difficulty for the UK is that whilst the bulk of immigrants coming into the UK are young and economically active, the bulk of emigrants are retired.  Thus, their return would not only not contribute much to the economy but add a new burden to health and social services.  It is actually of benefit to have so many old Britons looked after by Spain and Cyprus.  It would be interesting to see how the UK’s relationship with the Republic of Ireland would change.  There is a special relationship between the two countries which mean that Irish have more rights than other EU citizens.  This might shift once Britain left the EU and Eire remained in.  There are over 600,000 Irish living in Britain, again focused in specific areas including London; they are the only nationality group which has continued to see a fall in their numbers in the UK in the past decade before and after the economic crash.

Overall on leaving the EU in the following years around 2 million people might be compelled to leave the UK, primarily from London.  In general these would be economically active tax payers who up until the break had been living in the UK legally.  There is likely to be some influx of retired people coming back from EU states but also workers from Germany in particular.  Some would argue that this would solve unemployment in the UK in one go.  However, it ignores the number of businesses run by migrants that would close and the fact that many Britons are not skilled or willing to take the jobs that migrants fill.  Ahead of the exit British teenagers would have to be schooled in accepting posts as cleaners and waiters and be trained in construction and administration in order to fill the gaps left by the missing EU citizens.  Once the EU citizens had been removed, which group would the government turn on next: Commonwealth immigrants?

This represents the changes on a very clinical basis, and that is what people like UKIP want.  However, it would be far messier than that.  Anti-foreign attitudes would be crystalised and people suspected of being from another EU country even if this was not the case, would come under pressure.  Thousands of people in the UK are descendants of immigrants from Poland in the 1940s and from Italy, France and Germany going back decades; who would draw the line between them and more recent arrivals from these countries?  Some people would seek to buy false identities and hide from the authorities.  The policy would also dent the economies of certain districts especially in London, exacerbating the impact of the decline in EU trade on the UK economy as a whole.  Along with the people expelled, would go all the funds that these EU citizens have in the UK.  Of course, as in all these things, wealthy French or Germans or even Poles, could buy exemption, the government is always nationality blind when dealing with the rich.  It would represent the largest organised removal of people in Europe since the end of the Second World War which is unlikely to make Britain look good on the world stage.

Following the UK’s exit from the EU there would certainly be economic and social upheaval.  Britain’s exports and imports would fall and there would be gaps in towns from where EU citizens had been removed.  Attitudes would become insular and xenophobic, something that the UK does not need more of.

What would be the greatest impact for ordinary people?  Well, aside from the economy going downhill further, it would be the difficulty of going on holiday or even a ‘booze cruise’ day trip to France.  If you want to know the difficulties that would occur just ask an Australian or South African who has the right to permanent residency in the UK.  Just to go for a two-week holiday in France requires them to spend eight hours at the French Embassy in South Kensington.  They are interviewed; their children are interviewed separately and you have to battle with the officials to be allowed to have a parent present even with a five year old (this is based on my experiences in assisting a South African planning a trip to France).  They have to produce proof that they have a job in Britain and if they are self-employed, need a letter from their Chamber of Commerce.  Of course there are loads of forms to fill in.  The visa is only valid for six months so if you want to holiday in France again next summer you have to go through the whole process again.  From the Kent coast you can see France, but who is going to bother trying to go to visit it if you have to spend all of this time and expense even for a short visit.  As it is, the French and German embassies are going to be full of business people trying to get visas to visit to carry on at least a little trade with EU states.  No school trips to France or Germany any longer, it would just be too hard to organise.  I guess this severing of the UK (or perhaps by then England, Wales and Northern Ireland – ‘Ewani’ – we need a term for this grouping) from the EU, is the ultimate goal of UKIP.  We can then all speed around not seeing anything much beyond a Britain whose economy would be in further recession and prone to insularity and xenophobia.

Student Inflow/Outflow

This is something I guess been aware of since when I first moved to southern England in 2005, but has come home more to me now that for much of my time I am living in West London.  For some reason around where I am living are lots of educational institutions from primary school right up to universities and so simply travelling to work I see a cross-section of our being-educated public of all ages.  Of course, for the moment all of them, even the university students are on their summer holidays (though universities seem to be all Americanised now with semesters rather than terms and they have always had vacations rather than holidays).  However, I noticed that this did not seem to make the university campuses any quieter, in their place are literally thousands of young people who seem to range from about 12-16 years old.  Saying that I have seen some Chinese students who look about 9-10 years old.  That might be the case, I imagine a British mother would be loath to send their child 8,000 Km for the summer, but I might be wrong.  Anyway, the bulk of them seem to be teenagers.  The nationalities I can make out have included French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese and some East Europeans, I am unfamiliar with East European languages so could not tell you whether they were Poles, Czechs or Russians, perhaps from the Baltic States.  It is heartening that the immigration policies that threatened to kill the language school trade in the UK have been bent sufficiently not to choke off this important industry.

Anyway, each university seems to have been colonised by a one or more language schools run by energetic young staff in bright teeshirts for the summer.  I guess this works well for all concerned.  The school gets a purpose built teaching space and accommodation with a convenience store and cafes that all universities seem to have and the university presumably gets lots of fees at a time when the campus would normally be empty.  It also seems to employ lots of young graduates as organisers and language teachers at a time when any jobs that can be created especially for people under 24, are desperately needed.  Though I did not really notice it at the time, I now realise I have witnessed the same occurrence in Hampshire and Devon too.  Madly I had forgotten the two students who lodged in my house last year, I somehow put them in a different box, perhaps because I was only seeing one of them rather than large clusters and generally I am not in areas where students or tourists go.  I guess that it is simply the draw of London and the scale of the operations in the capital that make it more apparent, maybe simply my route to work.  One point to note is how uniformly dressed so many of these students are, fitting in very much with what Niall Ferguson was saying in his series earlier in the year, that a teenager from Beijing now is a replica of one from Madrid in the clothing and electronic equipment that they have.

I have no idea how much it costs for a 14-year old to be sent from Beijing or Madrid to London for a number of weeks, I guess they come for a fortnight, perhaps it is more.  From what I can ascertain and referencing the other examples I now recognise I have witnessed, they seem to get teaching in English all morning and then trips out to the standards of British tourism, everything from Bath and Stonehenge to Windsor Castle and the London Eye.  Shepherded around I guess they never really encounter the London beyond the campus bounds.  It is probably a good thing.  Students are never particularly popular even with 42% of British 18-year olds attending university and these groups are certainly noisy as any cluster of teenagers is.  What is apparent is their wealth.  Sending anyone from China to the UK costs money and these students all seem to have the latest smartphones and fashions.  I guess it is something that only the rich middle class parents of various European countries could afford and that is rather alarming, because it shows that even the UK's middle class is lagging behind its neighbours and the Chinese in what is affordable to do.  This is of course no surprise given that the real incomes of 90% of the UK population have slid in the last 40 years.  Perhaps it would have been affordable in 1975 but not now.

I would like to think that in western Paris or western Madrid there are hundreds of British teenagers there for a fortnight or a month and being drilled in French or Spanish (let alone western Beijing learning Mandarin) mixed in with some sports and some sight-seeing, but know it is not happening.  How do I know?  Well simply because I read 'The Guardian' newspaper.  It is not the font of all knowledge but if you want to get inside the heads of what the Europeanised (and this is what marks 'The Guardian' out from 'The Times' and 'The Daily Telegraph' which are pretty Little England in attitude) middle class aspires to be doing you read 'The Guardian'.  I can see no features on packing your 14-year old, let alone 10-year old off to Paris for the summer (unless it is to relatives) to learn a foreign language. 

Partly, as I have intimated above, it is the cost: the fact that the British middle class is falling in terms of disposable incomes because very few in Britain are willing to insist on a greater share of the prosperity that heads of companies are clearly benefiting from and did not even before the credit crunch was allowed to happen.  I know that these days the middle class holiday is camping in the UK, something once left to the unimaginative and those with no money to go abroad.  The other factor seems to be the 'parent fear' that has taken parents by the throat and sends them into hysterics the moment they lose eyeline with their child let alone mobile phone contact.  More examples of this were revealed to me this week with accounts of a colleague at a child's birthday party with mothers running around frantically the moment one of their children was lost in the crowd (given there were 50 children in attendance, that was no doubt easy).  The middle class has never relished packing their children off to holiday camp the way that their US equivalents have always done, they have never trusted anyone to look after their children and even their trust in teachers has slumped, hence the terminal state of even term-time school trips.  The upper class, of course, have been happy to bundle their children off into the care of others almost from the moment they are born and certainly once they turn 8.  Even if somehow, middle class real incomes rose, you would never see the equivalent of what I witness with French children (France is nearer to where I am living now than Yorkshire) happening with their British counterparts.  The woman in my house worries over the 5-minute walk it would take her 9-year old son to reach school and has already ruled out him going on any trips which involve him sleeping away from home, not that she or I could afford to pay for him to go.

Does it really matter if there is an imbalance in the flow of teenaged language students?  Is it not better for the British economy that more are coming into the UK, spending money here, rather than it being balanced up by an outflow.  The cost in my view is human.  If we go back to Ian Duncan Smith's speech earlier in which he encouraged British employers to take on more British young people, the retort from the CBI was to ask why would any UK company want to do this when it could employ better qualified East Europeans with a real work ethic compared to ill-qualified British people with an attitude of looking out for what they can get from a company.  I have no desire for British young people to be compelled to forelock-tugging lackeys, but it does seem that there are skills that they are not getting to compete with people from other parts of Europe.  It is not only people from Eastern Europe, apparently around 300,000 French people live in London alone, more than the entire population of Southampton; 123,000 Poles over the age of 16 live in London with 398,000 in other parts of the UK. 

Now, I know many people from other parts of the EU returned to their home countries when the recession kicked in and we have not returned to the figures of 2007, but it does suggest there is something that enables such migrants to get work in the UK.  It may be that they are cheap labour, but even then 16 year olds have always tended to be cheaper to employ.  One clear thing is that the migrants have the confidence to get up and come into the UK and find work in a language which is not their own.  How many British 18-year olds or even 21-year olds with a degree in their backpack do that?  A key challenge is that they do not speak the language, another is that often they have not ever been in another country, these days, not even on holiday let alone to study.  It seems ironic that the Conservatives (and New Labour who are/were minimally different to them) with their occasional forays into attempts at discrimination, are in fact further reinforcing the conditions that hamstring British young people.  They have pandered to the tabloid media which have hyped up the fear that a child out of your sight is being abused by a paedophile.  They have allowed companies to distort the distribution of profits so whilst bosses' salaries have rocketed the real incomes of 90% of employees have continued to slump unabated.  Thus, they have engineered and are sustaining a situation in which a 14-year old from France or Spain or even China is getting the intellectual and personal skills to find work across the world and yet their British counterpart is closeted at home learning nothing beyond the distance between their home and the park.  Thus, when I see another coach disgorging a fifty or so teenagers ready for some weeks of language school, I do feel depressed knowing that if I was in one of the other capitals of Europe I would not be witnessing the equivalent with British students.

Creating More 'Working Poor' In The UK

I know that my belief, that the current prime minister has an agenda to push the structure of British society back to the pattern it had a century ago, is not widely held.  However, even if you do not believe that changes to the education system, taxation and benefits are not designed to cut off opportunities for ordinary people and to protect access by the elites to such opportunities, especially in terms of education, the change in society is happening anyway.  I noted back in 2008: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/07/unemployment-as-whip.html and in 2009: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/09/cracking-whip-of-unemployment.html that there was a desire among employers to increase unemployment because they felt that the period of prosperity of the previous ten years had led to pay rising too high and workers not being sufficiently grateful for the jobs they had.  This has come about now and you can see it in the reduced salaries being offered.  Back in 2001 I worked on projects in an office, I had no staff to supervise and was paid £24,000 per year (now equivalent to €27,800: US$38,100) and on that salary was able to rent a 2-bedroomed flat in walking distance of my work (for £500 per month) and to buy a small second-hand car and go on holiday once per year.  I was not in a position to buy a flat.  By the time I left that job in 2005, I was earning £31,000 per year.  In my last job that finished in 2010, I managed two offices and for that was paid £42,000 per year (€48,700; US$66,700), which allowed me to drive a larger second-hand car and in combination with another person, to pay the mortgage on a three-bedroomed house in southern England.  It did not permit me to go on holiday at all.

Now, as I look for work, still, as an office manager, I find that salaries are lower even than what I was being paid simply to be an office worker back in 2001.  I will take Southampton as an example.  It is a large, rapidly growing town of around 230,000 people, located at the western edge of the South-East region of England.  Using the official Department for Work & Pensions website to look for jobs, I found that last month the average salary for an office manager is now £23,000, though with some explicitly office manager posts paying as low as £12-18,000.  If you want to earn £24,000 then you need not only to have had office manager experience but also to speak fluent Spanish and Chinese.  If you can speak fluent Chinese there are opportunities for you around the world at the moment, not simply managing an office in a dull second-rank town in England. It is worthwhile comparing the salaries with the rents in the local area.  Southampton is a cheap town to live in.  You can rent studio flats (i.e. without a separate bedroom, you sleep in the living area) for £350 per month (compared to £525 per month as the norm for a studio flat, just 21Km away in Winchester).

Now, if you were starting on £12,000 per year before tax, then over a third of your pre-tax income would be going on simply renting a room.  You can pay £280 per month if you are willing to rent a room in a shared house or as a lodger.  Even if you get promoted and take the £18,000 then it is still a fifth of your pre-tax income, just on housing.  This does not include your food, utilities and travelling costs.  So, with such a job you can cover your expenditure, but with no hope of a holiday or buying a car or ever owning a flat on that kind of income.  Banks generally lend you around three times your income, meaning even at the top salary for that office manager role you would only be lent £54,000 about enough to buy a one-bedroomed flat or a two-bedroomed static caravan in Southampton. 

Perhaps I am being hard, because it is possible to live on such salaries, but I have left out all the other costs of life bar accommodation and in the UK it is easy for a single person to spend around £30-40 per week on food, taking another £1500-2000 out of your earnings each year.  In addition, you have to remember this is the salary for the office manager, I have no idea what the staff that manager supervises must be earning.  The only people who can take such jobs are those who live at home on nominal rent to their parents.  I guess such young people are really the only ones companies are interested in which is why, at 43, I have been unemployed for so long.  What is frightening is that David Cameron has sworn to make sure that you will always be better off in work than on benefits.  With salaries dropping away so fast, the only way to achieve this will be to reduce benefits to pauper levels.

Another factor is that working hours are lengthening.  In my search for an office manager post, I found they all expected you to work 08.30-17.30 rather than the traditional, '9 to 5', i.e. 09.00-17.00.  This means a 45-hour week, or 40-42.5 hours if you remove lunch breaks rather than the 35-37.5 hours per week that were becoming the norm even in the 1990s.  This means the hourly rate in fact falls by an eighth, over what it would have been.  Many jobs now include a caveat about the need for evening and weekend working, effectively a get-out clause to compel you to work, in fact, any hours the employer deems necessary.  Of course, we have to accept such conditions because the alternative is unemployment with a low level of benefits. 

On one hand, advertising and social pressure encourages us to consume and aspire to better items and owning our own houses.  However, with incomes falling this becomes even more of a fantasy than ever.  The only item of clothing I have purchased in the last 18 months was a £14 pair of shoes from Asda to wear to interviews and this was only because there was a hole in the sole of my other pair that let in water no matter how much cardboard I put in the bottom.  How can I aspire even to buy some new clothes let alone think about a new car or a holiday or a new mobile phone?  I have had to leave the house I owned to return to the rental sector because I cannot pay a mortgage and am likely never to be able to do so again; meaning my poverty when I retire is now guaranteed. I am not a person without qualifications.  I got a degree when only 6% of the population attended university.  I have years of experience and professional training.  What hope is there for people with less than that?

I have noted before how that UK society seems to be being pushed to resemble ever more that of the USA.  The cutting back of the National Health Service is moving us in the opposite direction to what the Obama administration is seeking to do with health care and more towards the kind of privatised health system that his Republican opponents vigorously insist on.  We also seem to be moving very rapidly towards having the 'working poor' forming a significant part of our society.  In the USA working poor are defined as being people who have worked at least 27 weeks of the year but whose income falls below the poverty level.  In the USA in 2005, 2.8 million families (made up of 12.2 million people) had a household income of 100% less than the poverty level; in addition, 9.6 million families with work, about 29% of them, were earning 200% less than the poverty level, a level at which they are deemed not to be self-sufficient of welfare or charity.  To give you an idea of the level, self-sufficiency was deemed to be an annual family income of US$39,942 (currently equivalent to £25,120) for a family of four. 

In the EU poverty-in-work is defined as being 60% of the median, not mean, income.  In the UK, median income for men in 2010 was £538 and for women £439, thus poverty is earning less than £322 per week if you are a man and less than £263 per week if you are a woman.  Being paid £322 is equivalent to £16,700 per year.  Thus, the office manager job discussed above, means that your pay is at poverty levels, if you are man, until you rise £4,000 above the basic level.  By definition, all the workers you manage will be in poverty and remain in it in that position.  In 2010 it was stated that 1.7 million children in poverty in the UK were in families that had work, with 1.1 million in families without work.  There were 2.1 million working families in the working poor category and it was anticipated that 8% of the population, around 4.8 million people, were at risk of falling into this category.  We are not talking about people on benefits or retired, they are further categories of people in poverty, these are people actually in jobs but earning so little that they are deemed to be poor.

There has been rhetoric around the 'squeezed middle' especially from the Labour Party.  However, with a lack of regulation of companies' behaviour and, certainly, no attempt to shift pay levels above the minimum wage, to any higher level, there is no clear idea how they will be able to do anything to alter the situation for ordinary people.  I know Labour would shy away from setting salary levels as it would seem too much like wages and incomes policies of the 1970s, which they now find embarrassing.  Ironically, those policies were to keep down pay rises, whereas now we need to see pay rising.  Raising the threshold at which you pay tax is one approach, one favoured by the Liberal Democrats before they went into government.  However, to a great degree this takes pressure off employers who can continue to pay low salaries to everyone (except the top executives, of course).  I have outlined an idea of having the highest salary in a company always kept to a certain ratio to the lowest and I believe that, without at least indications of minimum expected salaries right up the structure of companies, then you will never eliminate the tendency in the UK for pay to pushed downwards for most workers whilst it rises inexorably for the already wealthy. 

You could argue that leading economies need cheap labour to prosper and this is one reason why China is booming at present, as, for every high-earning fashion company executive in Shanghai there are thousands, probably tens of thousands of very low-paid textile workers.  Before the minimum wage was introduced to the UK in 1999, there were complaints from companies and the Conservative Party that it would lead to job losses.  However, this never appeared and this is for a number of reasons.  One is the large profit margins that so many companies maintain selling or providing services in the UK.  Another is that the pay of high executives is so high that even cutting it back by a few percent frees up sufficient funds to pay a lot of low-paid staff.  Another reason is that paying decent pay levels benefits the economy.  Anyone who lived in a poor area, as I did in 1999 in East London, noticed immediately how small businesses benefited from the minimum wage.  Some people saw their weekly pay almost double and they went out and spent it on the basic things that they had previously gone without.  There are a lot of low paid people so a change in their income makes a bigger impact than shifting that of the far fewer high-paid people: there are only so many white goods you can fit, even in a mansion, and only so many meals you can eat.  I certainly believe that the UK's supermarket chains would not have prospered to the extent that they have done if the minimum wage had not been introduced.

There seems to be a lack of basic knowledge in government about how a capitalist economy works.  The UK economy was at its strongest, not in the 1920s and 1930s, times of high unemployment and low wages, but in the 1950s and 1960s with periods of very low unemployment and rising incomes.  The UK economy will continue to be weak now, as long as the numbers of working poor remains high and, especially, as it rises.  These people will lack the ability to consume the products that keep so much of our extensive service sector running.  Of course, the UK does not manufacture much these days and imports large quantities of food, but even selling foreign goods keeps companies like Tesco, one of the cornerstones of the UK economy, thriving and, in turn, employing more people.

Poverty makes people desperate, they are far more likely to become corrupt or steal from their employers.  You can see this in countries with capitalism but a great disparity between rich and poor.  Try travelling on public transport in India or Tunisia or seeking planning permission in many South American states.  The UK has corruption, but generally in the public-facing civil service and most companies, it is very limited.  However, if you increase the number of people in work who cannot afford to live even a meagre life, then you are driving them towards corruption.  Countries like China deal with it by having a harsh, totalitarian police state.  You might think this would be an option for the UK, but interestingly, the Conservatives, to their credit, have begun to reverse the assault on human rights that was seen under the Blair and Brown governments and, ironically, to compel cutbacks in police numbers. Thus, the UK will have an economic pattern that promotes corruption but does not have the police strength to suppress it.

I believe that the current governement's stance is to encourage cheap, malleable labour of the kind employers of the 19th century could draw upon and dispose of at will.  I quite anticipate that characteristics of 19th century employment, such as tied accommodation, even live-in servants, will begin to re-appear.  I have already noted that dated modes of living such as lodging are on the increase once more.  You may contest that Cameron and his gang have any intention of retro-engineering UK society.  It does not really matter if you accept it or not.  What is more crucial is that, if the numbers of working poor continue to rise, then domestic consumption will be pitiful and the UK will be condemned to a weak economy into the coming decades.  Capitalism works on the basis of supply and demand, if you choke off demand as poverty does, then the cycle begins to break down and small numbers of ultra-wealthy people have far less impact than millions of comfortably well-off ones.

Electoral Reform/Deform?

As many readers know we are rapidly approach local elections (5th May 2011) for about a third of the seats on local councils in Britain.  This year for the first time since 1975, the UK also has a referendum.  It is on whether we should change from the so-called 'First Past the Post' (FPP) system of elections to the Alternate Vote (AV) approach.  This was part of the deal that the Liberal Democrats made with the Conservatives when they went into coalition with them almost a year ago.  The Liberal Democrats, as I have shown on a couple of occasions on this blog, have long failed to turn the number of the votes their candidates receive into anything even approaching an equivalent number of members in the House of Commons.  They have long been supporters of electoral reform, moving voting to the Westminster Parliament (well, the bit of it which is elected, the House of Commons; the House of Lords, the upper house is totally unelected) towards some form of proportional representation (PR).  Proportional representation is seen as being 'fairer' as it more accurately reflects the level of support each party receives.  With the FPP system if a candidate receives just one vote fewer then they do not win the seat, even though they may have had tens of thousands of people voting for them.

In the world around 43 countries (of those which are democratic) use FPP, many have had connections to the UK such as the USA, Canada and India and it was adopted in Taiwan when it moved to democracy in the 1990s.  Some countries have a partial FPP system, such as France where there are two rounds and only candidates receiving a certain percentage of votes move into the second round.  However, the bulk of EU countries use a proportional representation system.  This has sometimes elicited xenophobic hostility from the British who see PR systems as foreign and 'unstable'.  In particular, Weimar Germany 1918-1933 and Italy since 1945 are held up as examples of countries for which PR has led to political instability and short-lived governments.  In a patronising way some have even portrayed PR methods as being too complex for the average British voter given how low turn out is at elections.  For example, most UK constitutencies see only 35-40% of the electorate turn out for local elections and 50-70% for general elections.  These arguments have lost lots of ground in the UK in recent years.  The current coalition which has lasted almost a year has shown that actually coalitions can be strong as (West) Germany has demonstrated since 1949.  In addition, for all elections to the European Parliament, the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the Northern Ireland Assembly, a form of PR, the single transferrable vote (STV) system has been in use since these bodies were introduced over a decade ago.  I know turn out is low for European Parliament elections, but combined this does mean that many people in the UK population have had some, and many of these, regular, interaction with STV.  Anyone who has been to university will be familiar with it as I know from personal experience that students' unions have been using STV in their elections for over thirty years.

The AV system (used in many Australian elections where voting is compulsory), as even people who support PR acknowledge is a hybrid.   Like STV you rank If someone wins more than 50% of the vote on the first count then they win the seat just as is the case now.  In many constituencies, despite what the No campaigners for the referendum campaign are arguing, this is what will happen.  If no-one gets 50% or above then the second choice votes of the candidate who came last are counted, i.e. the people who put a '2' rather than a '1' by the candidate and so on.  Of course, this quickly eliminates all the minor and obscure parties; supporters of whom are unlikely, despite what the campaigners say, to have rated the larger parties much.  Ultimately, it will generally come down to the redistribution between the larger parties.  Of course, once any candidate goes over the 50% mark the process stops; this is a difference to STV.  It means, in fact that in most cases, the candidate with the highest number of votes in the first round will simply pick up sufficient to go over the 50% mark.

The No campaigners argue that this will mean that someone who received 3rd place in the number of votes on the first count could potentially win.  Yes, this is possible if they first three candidates are close together.  The reason why they fear this is that historically some Labour supporters would 'tactically' back the Liberal Democrat if they thought they stood a chance of getting in, in that district and some Conservative voters might too.  Thus, it is assumed that the Liberal Democrats may receive lots of '2' votes from both Labour and Conservative supporters and so may get in, in more constituencies.  Of course, it would not affect the 'heartlands' of any party where the majority is usually clear, but it will impinge on marginal seats which are the ones parties pour most effort into.  The one factor that makes AV more palatable to traditionalists is that whilst providing a slightly better reflection of the support for parties, it still returns one representative from each constituency.  Strangely, this is now enshrined as an important principle for British politics, despite the fact that the UK had constituencies returning more than one member of parliament up until 1950.

Things have changed through the formation of the coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, as this has disgruntled both Labour supporters who previously would have voted Liberal Democrat and, of course, many traditional Liberal Democrats have abandoned the party.  In fact, from the Barnsley by-election, it seems the Conservative might benefit from UKIP supporters giving them a '2' vote, if not in a Labour heartland like Barnsley but in other more uncertain locations.  All PR encourages people to give support to smaller parties, thus we might see Greens gaining votes from across the political spectrum, from people, who in the past would not want to 'waste' their single vote on a Green candidate.  Of course, for Labour and the Conservatives any advance of smaller parties, even the Liberal Democrats, weakens their traditional position.  This is why, despite promising electoral reform before the 1997 election, once in power Tony Blair abandoned the ideas and only had the Jenkins Commission and then ignored its advice through all his time in office.

I do not think the vote for AV will succeed.  I would prefer that we went to STV as is the case for so many elections already in the UK.  By having the referendum on the same day as the local elections David Cameron, a clear opponent of any adjustment of the FPP system, has muddied the waters.  Britain is a very apolitical country with few people taking interest in politics these days let alone the electoral system, even though these are factors in them losing their jobs and public services.  They actually tend to blame other people like immigrants, than the politicians whose policies have impinged on them, but that always seems to be the way in the UK.  Other referenda, such as in Canada have had insufficient turn-out to bring about change in the electoral system.  Given how few people vote in local elections, I think the same will happen here.  The failure of the referendum will allow David Cameron to dismiss for ever any discussion of changing from the FPP system.  This is important for Cameron as he has ready plans which will make it easier for the Conservatives to remain in power indefinitely.  By abolishing 50 constituencies and redrawing boundaries, called gerrymandering, something the Conservatives of Westminster Council were very adept at doing in the 1990s, will make it hard for anyone but the Conservatives to win a majority of seats in parliament for the foreseeable future.  Just as Tony Blair seemed eager to reduce civil liberties in the UK, Cameron's mission appears to be to reduce democracy, in the broadest sense of the word, through both reducing opportunities for ordinary people and also to make it harder for any other party except the Conservatives to come to power.

My life has seen the steady erosion of liberty and democracy in the UK and it appears to be proceeding now even brisker than ever.  It is a pity that AV will not come in, but in many ways the whole set-up is just a blind for the damage that the Conservatives seek to impose on British democracy.

P.P. 21/04/2011
This morning I received the first piece of publicity about the referendum, a leaflet from the No campaign.  I was interested by its approach, which suggests the No camp are unnecessarily nervous, because the lines it takes are very much about scare mongering.  Of course it starts with 'keep one person, one vote' probably the most equitable issue about sticking to FPP.  Interestingly it says 'none of your taxes have been used to print this leaflet', well, the Yes campaign can say that too, but there is a sense that it is suggesting others would use tax money.

Inside the cost is the first issue that is raised is the cost.  It is argued that the cost of AV is £250 million broken down into a number of components, first, £91 million for the referendum, despite it being piggy backed on local elections in many towns.  Next is £130 million for electronic counting machines, which actually have nothing to do with AV.  Northern Ireland uses STV (as does Scotland and Wales) which is more complex than AV and yet they still count by hand as it makes clear on the website of the Electoral Office for Northern Ireland.  FPP votes could be counted by electronic machines, but the UK has chosen not to use them.  Thus, there is no connection between electronic machines and AV.  The final cost is £26 million on explaining the new system to the voters.  I have no idea where that figure comes from.  Given that every part of the UK uses STV for at least one election, I see no reason for this cost.  We did not have training in STV when it was adopted for European elections.  As the publicity points out, this £250 million could pay 2,503 doctors, presumably for a year; 6,297 teachers; 8,107 nurses; 35,885 hip replacements or 69,832 school places.  So, the party which is most opposed to AV, i.e. the Conservatives, will not then be cutting public spending budgets?  Oh, yes, in fact they are and by much more than £250 million.  Let us compare that £250 million, even if AV did cost all that to other current expenditure.  By 20th March 2011, the UK had spent £55 million on firing 110 cruise missiles at Libya; every sortie by a Tornado costs £30,000 just for fuel and the loss of a single Tornado would cost the UK £50 million to replace.  As for the war in Afghanistan, that now costs the UK £4 billion per year (£10.95 million per day).  So, to save £250 million we only need to not fight in Afghanistan for 23 days, less than one month.  The No campaign says, when many people are facing job losses or pay freezes should the money be spent on a 'politicians' fix'.  The argument against this is quite simply with PR it is unlikely we would have had such policies in the 1980s let alone now.

The next argument is against the technical aspects of AV which I outlined in my posting above.  The No campaign argues that 'the votes of the least popular candidate decide who wins the election', that is a false portrayal, as in fact that candidate is eliminated, it is the other votes, for other people on those ballot papers which actually decide who wins.   Yes, someone who was in 2nd or 3rd place at the first stage may go on to win, but they, at least will have a majority of the support from the constituency. 

The No campaign argues that the views of BNP supporters will be counted again and again. It is unlikely, unless all candidates are so far from the 50% line (and in many constituencies there are only 3 candidates anyway) that so many lower preferences will have to be counted.  As this referendum has simply come down to a Yes/No, there has been no discussion of different aspects of AV, for example the '2' votes carrying less weight than the '1' votes, the '3' votes less than the '2' and so on.  Given that it has been deemed by the government and many campaigners that the electorate, who, as I remind you, already use STV for many elections, cannot possibly understand the system, there is no discussion of the actual form AV might take in the UK.

The section entitled 'AV is Unpopular' is very misleading.  It shows a map of the world and coloured in green for countries who 'Don't use AV' and purple for 'use AV'.  The countries using it are Australia, Fiji and Papua New Guinea, all according to the pamphlet are unhappy with it. In fact many states of Australia use STV.  The misleading thing about the map is that many of the countries shown in green of course would not use AV because they could equally be coloured as 'Don't use democracy'.  Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Burma, North Korea and, of course, China where a quarter of the world's population lives, are shown as 'Don't use AV'.  Well, of course they do not use AV, because they are (or until recently) dictatorships.  It also neglects the fact that, as noted above, that over 70 countries shown as 'Don't use AV' actually use STV, a more proportional form of voting, far removed from the FPP system, including India where around 21% of the world's population lives; Brazil (3.7%) and Russia (2.7%) and 23 members of the EU including Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece and Poland, use STV.  The French system, whilst not precisely identical to AV is very close to it, and more similar to it than FPP.  The suggestion is that if you do not use AV the only alternative is FPP, whereas, in fact, most democratic countries have gone for something very different and more proportional.

The final element of the publicity is down right hilarious.  It turns history on its head.  Having said that the Liberal Democrats, correctly, are the only party which is wholly behind AV (many Labour and some support it Conservatives support it, though ironically not the BNP), then they associate it with the unpopularity of Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the Liberal Democrats.  The publicity says 'AV leads to broken promises', saying that Clegg reneged on his promises not to allow job cuts, a VAT increase, the raising of university tuition fees and the cuts in public spending.  However, I ask how did AV lead to this?  AV is not in place.  We had these broken promises under the FPP system which is how the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition came to power.  Interestingly, there is no mention of David Cameron and the Conservatives, the strongest critics of AV and the party with its virulent monetarist approach which has brought about all these cuts.  They, of course, kept these policies secret before the election.  Clegg is portrayed as only supporting AV as a way to save the Liberal Democrats at the next election, despite the fact that the Liberal Democrats have been pressing for electoral reform since the 1990s and one reason why they fell out with Tony Blair, was, after his huge electoral win in 1997, he was no longer willing to consider electoral reform despite what he had been promising the Liberal Democrats 1994-7, in preparation for a potentially hung parliament in 1997 when he possibly would have formed a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, and so, as David Cameron has had to face now, also allow a referendum on electoral reform.  If this was the case, would not the Conservatives be ardent supporters of it too?  Even loyal supporters of theirs have begun defecting to UKIP. 

The argument is simply that AV would give more seats to Liberal Democrats and so there would be more hung parliaments and more deals involving the Liberal Democrats.  This totally ignores the democratic principle, the Liberal Democrats, even now are heavily under-represented for the amount of support they have constantly commanded at elections.  In addition, ironically, without the Liberal Democrats then the Conservatives, would, at best from their view, have a minority government now and would not be in a position to implement these 'broken promises' policies which they argue are necessary for the country's welfare.  This line of argument is utterly bizarre and turns chronology upside down.  It also neglects the fact that the Liberal Democrats actually want STV and have only been compelled by their comparative weakness to accept AV.  It seems incredible that the No campaign can twist facts around so extremely and somehow make it appear that Clegg alone is responsible for the harsh policies we are suffering.  With AV this situation, in fact would have long been avoided.

David Cameron has cleverly buried the issue and the only electoral 'reform' will be his gerrymandering of constituencies to ensure a Conservative majority at the next election and the foreseeable future.  In the meantime we are being patronised by campaigners who think that the British electorate, pretty used to STV, lacks the intelligence to engage with AV and so can be told distortions.

P.P. 23/04/2011
I have now updated last year's posting looking at the impact of PR on the 2010 general election to also consider how the situation would have turned out if AV had been in place: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/05/what-if-proportional-representation-had.html

P.P. 07/05/2011
As I had anticipated, AV was defeated in the referendum, though by a wider margin than I had envisaged, 70%:30% on a 41% turnout of electors.  It is interesting that in some districts, however, in Glasgow, Cambridge and parts of London the method received a majority 'Yes'.  This was exactly the outcome that David Cameron not only hoped for but engineered through the timing of the referendum.  In addition, he was aided by a very misleading 'No' campaign, notably supported by the 'Daily Mail'.  I was sickened by its headline today 'The Day British People Stood Up For Democracy'.  That is downright insulting to people fighting for democracy across North Africa and the Middle East at present.  Despite how the newspaper portrayed it, the referendum was not about saving or abolishing democracy, just different ways of running elections in a democracy.  However, to the 'Daily Mail' even to suggest a minor challenge to the way things have always been done is an a grave affront.  The system that is retained means that votes of around 50-60% of voters are disregarded in any general election.  You can argue, that anyway, the UK is little better than a semi-democracy given that, still, the upper house of parliament is entirely unelected.

Of course, the view that our method of choosing and running government is the best in the world is one that is held widely.  However, it seems with the coming changes to constituencies even this is going to be eroded further and I suspect that the 'Daily Mail' will make no complaint as Cameron builds a system that allows the Conservatives to remain in power for decades.  Cameron as a unionist will bitterly oppose the steps by the SNP, now with a clear majority in the Scottish parliament, to move towards independence for Scotland.  However, ironically, if he permitted it, then he would eliminate on average 40 Labour MPs from the Westminster parliament, making his goal of an elective dictatorship that much easier.  AV was probably the last chance we had to see off the further erosion of democracy in the UK by ensuring that even with the constituency re-arrangement there would be a greater chance of a wider range of parties being represented in parliament than will now be the case.

In many ways I wish the 'Daily Mail' would just be honest and say that actually it does not support democracy and would prefer a Conservative authoritarian state to be imposed, because then at least we would not have to see such hypocritical headlines.  I have long noted the erosion of civil liberties in the UK under the Blair and Brown governments.  Whilst this had seemed to slow up in recent months, Jan Culik, lecturer in Czech Studies at University of Glasgow, writing to 'The Guardian' this week noted how the police approach towards potential protestors at the royal wedding last week, was the same as that used by the Czechoslovak Communist regime in the 1970s and 1980s.