Imagine a door-to-door salesman comes to your house one day to try and sell you a burglar alarm by telling you about the terribly high crime rate is in your area. You’re not convinced, so you tell him you don’t want one. A little while later that same salesman breaks into your house, nicks the TV and does a crap on the sofa.

Now replace “door-to-door salesman” with “David Cameron”, “your house” with “France” and “burglar alarm” with “financial transactions tax”, and you’ve pretty much summed up our government’s attitude to attempts to rein in the forces of global finance.

This was Cameron speaking a few months ago (bolded text my emphasis):

The danger, we have always believed, is driving transactions to a jurisdiction where it wouldn’t be applied. So a global tax would be a good thing, but in Britain also we have put in place stamp duty on share transactions, a bank levy.

…and this was him this week:

Boris Johnson and David Cameron today urged French bankers to quit Paris and move to London in a dramatic escalation of a row with the French president.

The Mayor joined the Prime Minister in calling for traders to escape Nicolas Sarkozy’s plans for a financial tax by setting up business in the Square Mile.

Mr Johnson said: “Bienvenue à Londres. This is the global capital of finance. It’s on your doorstep and if your own president does not want the jobs, the opportunities and the economic growth that you generate, we do.”

Hours earlier Mr Cameron condemned Mr Sarkozy’s plans for a new financial transaction levy. Speaking at an EU summit in Brussels, he stressed that the new tax could cost the EU half a million jobs.

He added: “If France goes for a financial transactions tax, then the door will be open and we will be able to welcome many French banks to the United Kingdom.”

So, in November you have Cameron telling us that of course a tax on bank transactions is a lovely fluffy idea, which we’d be only too happy to implement if only we could, but you see it just isn’t possible because all those nasty banks would move their operations abroad if we did that, and we don’t want that, do we? Then this week, he explicitly invites those very same nasty banks to move from France to the UK so they don’t have to pay the transactions tax which Sarkozy is threatening to bring in.

Cameron, in short, is explicitly trying to bring about the very thing which he previously said would make a transaction tax untenable, despite ostensibly supporting such a tax in principle. Which, perhaps not surprisingly, suggests rather strongly that his original commitment to it was somewhat less than whole-hearted. Whether this also applies to Cameron and the Conservatives’ attitude to other redistributive taxes is something about which I leave the reader to draw their own conclusions.

Cross-posted from Left Outside

I don’t think Labour really know that the game has changed. We will have an election in 2015 and there is very little chance of one before that. The move to fixed term parliaments means that Ed Miliband et al find themselves in a totally different position to someone like Cameron circa 2005 or Blair in 1994.

In 2005 Cameron suspected the next election wouldn’t be for five years – and he turned out to be right. But he nearly had to fight an election in 2007 against a newly inaugurated Brown. This is something he had to expect and prepare for from the day he was elected Tory Leader, because we all knew some sort of hand over from Blair to Brown was imminent and that this may have been followed by an election.

This meant that Cameron spent a lot time and effort trying to appear electable, trying to appear “in-touch” by visiting the arctic, liberal by hugging hoodies and as a better heir to Blair than Brown could ever be. All this was essential when Labour could have called an ambush election at any point.

Tean Miliband seems to be employing a similar tactic. Liam Byrne is fighting to appear tough on benefits claimants, Ed Balls is trying to sound more fiscally conservative, even Diane Abbott is doing her best to swiftly cover up her gaffes. The commetariat are also playing along, they want to know if he is too ugly to be prime minister etc. Cameron moved left while Ed is moving right.

All of this is stupid. As Sunny has been documenting, not only is nuance from Labour Wonks confusing the public, those who aren’t confused couldn’t care less anyway. I have a better plan for Ed, to be in operation for the next three years or so, or at least until a year before the election date. Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition should officially and unequivocally object, to everything, even good ideas, loudly and often.

First of all, this is essential to good governance. A noisy opposition ensures that a Government has to advance the strongest arguments for its policies and ensure the sharpest execution for fear of being lambasted. If all Tory mistakes are leapt on with gay abandon then the Tories will make sure they screw up less. Remember the incorrect list of schools Gove released last year? That is what happens when people are not terrified of screwing up.

Even where this policy would be a trap it is good policy. For example, Miliband will gain almost no votes by opposing capping benefits at £26,000, but he won’t lose any votes either because, and this is important, nobody is voting until 2015.

Any damage supporting bad policies or opposing bad policy while in opposition can be shrugged off because the opposition won’t have done anything because they can’t. Wrong calls can be disowned and vote winning stances embraced as manifesto fodder. A manifesto which won’t need to be published until 2015 because, I repeat, that is when the next election will be. Plus, by being the voice of opposition Labour would be able to build an activist base which will be important in getting out the vote and campaigning come election time.

By playing the old game, where an opposition has to be constantly on the alert for an election Labour are strengthening the Tories, and doing damage to people’s lives. They need to shape up and realise the rules have changed.

Fancy living on 62p a day? Thousands of families are going to have to do exactly that if the government’s Welfare Reform Bill becomes law, and the benefit cap comes in. Never mind the 100,000 children who’ll fall below the poverty line, or the projected 20,000 people who’ll be made homeless by it. Never mind that the spiralling cost of welfare has practically nothing to do with the behaviour of those on benefits and everything to do with the dearth of both private rented and council housing allowing profiteering private landlords to make their fortunes from tenants on Housing Benefit. Never mind that across the country there are between 5 and 6 unemployed people for every job vacancy, so trying to change the “psychology” of people in long-term unemployment (the avowed aim of the Bill) is unlikely to get very far in getting them into work while the economy’s still in the toilet. And never mind that £26,000 for a couple with three or more children (and who were almost certainly able to afford to have that many children until the financial crisis hit and drove the unemployment rate through the ceiling) really isn’t much when you’re living in a high cost area (like, say, the whole of Southeast England), and only seems generous when you disingenuously compare it with the individual – as opposed to household – income of someone in employment and don’t take into account any in-work benefits, as this innumerate moron does here.

No, none of that matters. And no, I’m not being ironic; that’s what the polls are saying. I wish they weren’t, but they are. There really is a lot of popular resentment at benefit recipients getting what they see as overly generous welfare payments. Dave Osler asks why the big three political parties (and Labour in particular, one assumes) aren’t full-bloodedly opposing the Bill and just tinkering around the edges with amendments. Polls like the one I link to above are almost certainly a big part of the answer. Labour’s response (and in particular that of Liam “are there no workhouses?” Byrne) to the Bill has been decidedly lukewarm, but if people don’t tend to take into account things like the varying cost of living in different regions of the country when they’re thinking about how generous a “fair” benefits system should be, then it takes political courage to try and get public opinion onside by talking about the real, deep-seated systemic problems which underlie the current high cost of benefits rather than simply capitulating to it. Mark Ferguson at LabourList makes a good start, but he’s not (yet) holding elected office, so it’s perhaps not so hard for him. Until the Parliamentary Labour Party regains a political backbone and realises that being Conservatives-lite isn’t going to get meaningful political change, proper opposition to bills like this within Parliament will be in short supply.

This is a guest post by Matt Mahon

Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe of the Met – played excellently on Monday by Iain Glen, fresh from the set of HBO’s Game of Thrones – was supposed to explain his ‘total policing’ policy at LSE on Monday. In fact, he flannelled for half an hour about the challenges facing the force, then quite comfortably fielded a mixture of questions. On the one hand, fawning entreaties for him to explain just how it is he copes with the self-same challenges that he had just defined, and on the other, increasingly hostile attacks, and later chants, from students and anti-racism activists. The most powerful of these came when Hogan-Howe was skirting around a question about deaths in police custody, and disparate sections of the audience began spontaneously naming some of the three hundred and thirty-three dead. Given that the subject of the session was ostensibly to discuss total policing, though, Hogan-Howe did a remarkably good job of saying very little in many words.

It’s clear that events of this type are spectacles in the purest sense. The aim of the talk wasn’t to advance any debate that might emerge, or even the content of the lecture that Hogan-Howe gave. Instead, the event itself is what mattered: a veneer of academic respectability is given to the Met, and to BHH himself, by the fact that he can appear to be engaging in such a conversation. His talk was a mixture of down-home wisdom and flat-out contradiction, though those questions which weren’t anodyne or purely polemic exposed some interestingly large gaps in Hogan-Howe’s own understanding of policing in London: for instance, he doesn’t seem to have a desire to explore the disproportionality of stop-and-search further than to ‘explain’ it by pointing out that more stops take place in BME areas. But beginning debate like this isn’t the point of the event, when there’s such apparent disconnect between the rhetoric at the top of the Met and the realities of public order and inner-city policing.

Hogan-Howe likened total policing to Johan Cruyff’s total football; everyone can fill everyone else’s positions. But as one questioner noted, the immediate implication of total policing is high barriers at protests and a massive increase in the ability of officers on the street to decide exactly how the law should be enforced. Public order policing at the moment is heading in two directions: firstly, an increase in the ability of officers on the street to determine exactly how the law is applied. The state of exception, the moment in which particular police officers are able to determine the law, has been particularised and extended with new police powers – as in the case of the imposition of section 60 orders, the ban on face coverings and the restrictions on protest materials outside the agreed route of a march. Secondly, there is an increasing tendency for officers to be placed in situations where the instructions that come down to them from on high force a logic of escalation on to situations.

This mixture of increased power and increased institutional pressures – and the ever more apparent inseparability of police policy from the demands of government of the day – makes it clear that Monday’s talk could never represent a forum for a genuine discussion of total policing. I could go further: Any explanation of total policing from the top cannot encapsulate what it may mean for activists and black youth whose relationship with the police is much less mediated by such rhetoric. Hogan-Howe may represent a nicer face of the Met, but he does not speak for them, or to us.

A podcast of the talk will be available here in the next few days.

Paul Kenny is right. The Tories will be rubbing their hands with glee at the current spat between Labour and the unions. But they won’t be doing so simply because Ed Balls’ now-notorious speech to the Fabian Conference is a sign that Labour support the government’s cuts agenda – while neither the speech itself nor Balls’ economic policy more generally are music to the ears of the left (Andy Newman has a good response to it), he didn’t say anything anywhere near as austerity-friendly as he was made out to have done by the papers, a point which Carl makes painstakingly clear.

No, what will be making Conservative Central Office very happy is the prospect of the week’s political news being dominated by Labour and the unions airing their dirty laundry in public, on the back of several previous weeks of rumours and gossip-mongering about Ed Miliband’s leadership. In the short term, that means less public and media attention on our still-screwed economy or the effects of the cuts on the vulnerable. In the longer term, and more seriously, it raises for the Tories the enticing prospect of a divided, weakened opposition.

Labour is currently around £10 million in debt, according to the latest available figures, and of the £3.5 million they received in donations in the third quarter of 2011, over £3.1 million – around 90% – was from trade unions. That figure might be higher than usual for Labour, but it’s pretty clear that the party relies very heavily on the unions for money. ( “Sources” apparently claimed to the Guardian that the real figure was less than 50% – but even if it was, a share of – say – 40% would still be pretty damned essential for a party as cash-strapped as Labour.)

So if Unite or the GMB (the largest and third-largest unions respectively) were to decide to disaffiliate from Labour, as seems possible, then Labour would – without wishing to get too technical – be financially screwed. So they’d be less able to effectively oppose the government (and yes, I’m well aware they could have been doing a hell of a better job anyway, but that’s by the by) and in particular less well-placed to campaign at the next general election, making it more likely that the Tories will win. If Labour takes a more leftwing line which placates the unions (which is most likely Len McCluskey and Paul Kenny are hoping their sabre-rattling will achieve), this will be the cue for the rightwing press to wheel out all the old clichés about Ed Miliband being the unions’ puppet (because adopting policies which please the millions of working people who voted for you and democratically choose to fund your party is tantamount to craven surrender to Bolshevism, naturally.) And if Labour doesn’t adopt a leftier economic policy and the unions still don’t disaffiliate, then we’re left with the status quo, only with the unions looking weaker and Labour having pissed off just a little bit more of their core vote. It’s not a cheerful trilemma.

This is an open letter to Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Bernard Hogan-Howe. We invite a response, which, if received, we will publish in full.

Dear Mr Hogan-Howe,

I attended your talk at the London School of Economics last night. Amidst the management-speak and froth, a single statistic that you mentioned caught my attention.

“Young black men are four times more likely than others to be stopped and searched under Section 1 [of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984] and eight times more likely than others to be stopped and searched under Section 60 [of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994]”

Alone these are startling words, but I would like to interrogate them a little further. Since the “sus laws” were repealed in the early 1980s, the police have needed “reasonable suspicion” to commit a stop and search under Section 1. But under Section 60 no such demand is made. Under Section 60, where for a specified time and area this law is put into action, any police officer is able “to stop any pedestrian and search him” without reasonable suspicion.

What does all of this mean? Well ultimately that the demand for “reasonable suspicion” is barely keeping the police force in check, but that when Section 60 is invoked something far more worrying is revealed: Police in London consistently believe that more young black men are involved in crime than they have reasonable grounds to suspect. That is, police officers consistently have an unfounded belief in the criminality of young black men, which is significantly affecting their conduct using the Section 60 Stop and Search laws. We can probably assume, too, that what is exposed about the police force by this statistic affects all areas of their work, and their contact with the communities of London.

The Section 60 imposed across London immediately after the riots in August can be seen as a test case. Walking around the streets of Camden, Islington, and Hackney, I saw police officers stopping and searching each and every young black man walking on main streets. As a white 25-year old male I wasn’t stopped once.

You also mentioned last night that you believe strongly in people’s right to go about their business unmolested. But what is clear, from the fact that 90% of stop and searches result in no further action, is that stop and search is being used punitively, and that it is being used punitively not against individuals but against communities of London divided along the lines of race. Every day, young black men in our city are molested going about their business by a racist force whose power to stop and search is being used as a means to harass and abuse young black people.

Where officers cannot, within their powers, arrest or charge young black people in line with their unfounded racist belief in the criminality of young black men, they are using their powers of stop and search as a means of punishment. You may, from your office, not consider it a great attack on personal liberty to be stopped and searched, but when it happens to you day after day, week after week, and on no basis but for the colour of your skin, then it is nothing but harassment.

We welcome a response from you on these matters.

The Coalition partners are at each others throats again. And, as always, there is no need for you to get up from your seat. This time it’s the royal yacht. Cameron and co. believe that the queen should get a new yacht for her diamond Jubilee. Clegg meanwhile, has made headlines by saying that she definitely shouldn’t get a new boat to play with.

We’re becoming used to this kind of coalition playfighting. On all big decisions taken by this government – the decimation of the public sector, cutting in a downturn, remaining intensely relaxed about mass unemployment – Clegg and Cameron stand completely side by side. Aside from the fact that Clegg is a free market Gladstonian, the Lib Dems are utterly in the pockets of their more powerful partners. They know that should the coalition breakdown, they would face electoral wipe-out.

Nonetheless both parties feel the need, from time to time, to reassert their particular political – or more accurately, cultural – identities. As such they try to have a bit of a punch up on issues that are of very marginal importance – like for example the royal yacht.

Last time around it was tax breaks for married couples. Cleggy got to show how very 21st century he was, when he poo-pooed the idea. “We should not take a particular version of the family institution, such as the Fifties model of suit-wearing, bread-winning dad and aproned, home-making mother, and try to preserve it in aspic”, he boldly asserted.

And thus Clegg gets to appeal to the only constituency he has left, namely lightweight metropolitan types – the kind who couldn’t care to much about dreary issues like unemployment, but who know that they hate “Daily Mail Readers”, and who think that Richard Dawkins is a hero.

Time to put this poor man out of his misery.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

So today brings news that former Labour Party official Luke Bozier is defecting to the Conservatives. Many people will be asking “Who the hell is Luke Bozier?”. Those who know of him may ask “Why did he defect?”. Meanwhile, those who’ve read his remarks about joining the Tories will be asking “On what planet does Mr Bozier reside?”.

In explaining his decision to swap sides, Luke tells us where labour has gone wrong:

I became a member five years ago, in the final days of Tony Blair’s leadership. Back then, New Labour was still the intellectual heart of the party. A pro-business attitude and a commitment to revolutionising our creaking public services made sense to me…

…Gordon Brown, unsurprisingly, turned out to be a terrible driver of the New Labour wagon. Most of his three years as leader and Prime Minister were spent defending his own position. As a result, we wasted the opportunity to continue Tony’s reforms and we were punished for it at the ballot box.

I mean, wtf? Clearly there is a debate to be had about why labour lost the last election. I may not agree with those people who believe it was all about the deficit but they do at least have a position which makes some sense. The deficit, after all, was a major issue in the last election. Personally I think the collapse of the economic system over which New Labour had presided, with the consequence that 2.5 million people were left without work, might have been a rather large factor at the last poll.

But to suggest that labour’s great electoral liability was its failure to push ahead with public sector reforms? I mean, really? And this from a supposed strategic genius! I can honestly say that I have not met anyone who stopped voting labour because they want, say, more schools with academy status. If anyone else has I would really, truly love to hear from them. I would, to say the least, be very surprised to encounter any activists who found that bringing choice and competition into the public sector was a big issue on the door steps.

On all sides of the party, there is a tendency for people to believe that the policies they support are also the policies that are necessary in order to win elections. Luke however takes this to a bizarre extreme. If this is the extent of his strategic prowess, then I am more than happy to see him teaming up with the Tories.

Shut the door on the way out Luke. And don’t forget to take out the garbage.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

So Michael Gove wants to make it easier to kick bad teachers out of the profession. In particular he wants those teachers “who can’t keep control or keep the interest of their class” to be moved rapidly into the “firing line”.

As with every single other profession – public or private – there is undoubtedly a small minority teachers who are doing poor job. Yet, yelling about the need to kick out those teachers whose classrooms get out of control betrays a naiveity about the character of many secondary schools, and represents an approach that will hinder rather than help education.

Not a great deal of time has elapsed since I last attended my London comprehensive. And looking back, I can remember passionate, able and deeply committed teachers, who, all too often, were treated despicably by a fair minority of students. I remember many very good teachers who struggled, on occasion, to control their classes. However good they may have been, they were nonetheless dealing with people whose capacity to behave unreasonably seemed unrestrained by habit, morality, or indeed fear of any of the sanctions that teachers had at their disposal.

What message is Gove sending to such students (and indeed their parents)? Well, the message appears to be “if you behave unreasonably, it’s your teachers fault”. Fast -tracking teachers for the sack – when their classrooms become out of control – gives, frankly, the most maladjusted students the whip-hand over those who educate them. The biggest disrupters will be further empowered to threaten their teachers’ livelihoods.

More to the point, it is a fantasy to imagine that dishing out more p45 can genuinely address the problem of out of control classrooms. It is obvious, not least after this summer, that such classroom problems are a manifestation of a more general inter-generational crisis. One does not have to buy into the right wing trash about a decline in morals/collapse of Christian civilisation narrative to be capable of observing this. Frank Furedi is right to argue that, as our activity in society becomes increasingly denuded of meaning, adulthood somewhat loses its point, and that, as such, a general collapse in adult authority is less than surprising.

Does this mean that we should be completely fatalistic about what we expect in the way of classroom control? Of course not. But it does suggest that the costs of Gove’s approach – in terms of the erosion of the educators authority – may greatly outweigh the benefits of getting rid of a few bad apples.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

So the stand off continues. Cameron et. al. are determined that any Scottish referendum should be a straight choice between independence and the status quo. Alex Salmond meanwhile, plans to give voters a third choice. The so-called “devo-max” option, would give the Scots autonomy on virtually every matter other than foreign policy and defence.

Salmond is right to argue that such an option chimes with a substantial body of Scottish opinion. Yet it is also a choice which would necessarily mean a very big change, not only in the way Scotland is governed, but also in the way in which the rest of the United Kingdom is run.

Without a doubt, devo-max would push the West Lothian question beyond its limit. Should Scotland be granted autonomy over nearly all domestic matters, the position of the country’s Westminster representatives would almost certainly need to be altered. They could not continue casting potentially decisive votes on the huge range of English only issues, for which they would not be accountable (since their own constituents would not be affected).

Yet resolving the West Lothian question is more troublesome than many people appear to realise. Typically, we hear calls for Scots MPs to be excluded from votes on English only issues. The difficulty, however, is that we could very plausibly end up with a Prime Minister and a cabinet that  could not command a majority of English MPs, and as such could not effectively govern in England. If the UK were made up of numerous small nations of roughly equal size, this would not be so much of a problem. Yet a PM who could not govern in a territory that accounts for five sixths of the population, would not be Prime Minister in any recognisable sense of the term.

In England the whole system of government that has existed hitherto – wherein the cabinet governs, as long as it maintains the support of a sovereign Parliament, would be turned on its head. We would likely end up with a system more akin to America’s “separation of powers”, where governing happens through the often adversarial interface between the president and Congress.

What this means is that, unlike independence, devo-max is not Scotland’s prerogative alone. If Scotland were to separate, England and Wales could maintain their existing constitution. The territorial extent of the polity would change, but the way in which the polity functioned would not. If, on the other hand, the Scots plump for devo max, things are different.  They would be asking to enjoy a particular relationship with the British state which would be impossible without a reworking of the entire constitution. As such, it is an option which cannot be determined in a Scottish referendum alone, but which clearly requires a constitutional convention of the entire United Kingdom.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net