Hopi Sen

This excellent Labour Uncut article by Kate Williams about appearing in the BBC’s Nick & Dave show, explains why I generally hate audience participation politics programmes, from Questiontime on down.  Go and read it, then come back here and I’ll tell you stuff that I think.

By the way, this has been niggling at me. That Nick’n'nDave show was called “Face the Audience“. This is one of those titles that when you read it,(rather than just letting your eyes slide over the words) makes no sense whatsover. Who doesn’t “face the audience“? Is there some hitherto unknown tendency for TV politicians to turn their back on the audience*? The only famous person I know of for whom a programme called “Face the Audience” might present a challenge is Miles Davis, and he’s been dead for twenty years. I know they meant “Meet the Public“, “Confront the Sans-Culottes” or “Cower before the mutinous mob” but really “Face the Audience“? That’s just lame.

/Rant

Now I’ve got that titular bugbear off my chest, let me expand on why  audience-based shows suck. It’s because the producers already know what they want out of the programme they’re making. Like Big Brother the people or questions are pre-cast, selected and shaped. (Either that or it’s the most amazing statistical co-incidence that the last question on QT is always an “and finally” item, sending us off with a nice warm cosy laugh.)

Get asked to appear as a member of the public on a TV panel show, and you’re naw an “angry mum” or “exasperated businessman”, probably identified as such by a producer to the poor underpaid researcher tasked with finding an audience that will keep things lively for half an hour.  You’ve got a job to do, and you better do it.

Your task is to create moments of tension that shows the politician in question struggling to engage with your simmering resentment about the thing that concerns the class of people you represent. Ideally, your resentment will fit with a pre-existing political story so it can be presented as “Moving the Story on”. As in “The Prime Minister was confronted today by a voter concerned about the thing we’ve been talking about for the last two days” The politician will then be rated on how well they deflect, manage or build on your resentment.

It’s not real – it’s fake real.  I’ve no idea how TV could do it better. I just don’t like it.

*Actually, from watching election campaigns, you might think there is such a tendency. But the audience seen behind politicians on TV during speeches aren’t an audience. They’re meat puppets placed there by people like me because you can’t see a real audience in a direct camera shot.

Mind you, we wouldn’t dare put a real audience behind our candidates. You can’t trust real people not to do something stupid. If we could replace the meat puppets with RealVotersTM lifelike animatronic dolls with replaceable multi-ethnic heads, we would. We just don’t have the advanced meaningful nodding technology yet. I wanted to mention this because I have a tendency to go on about media manipulation of political coverage without pointing out that we try and do the same thing, except usually we’re not very good at it. We don’t have the money, or the time really.  Checking the background shot is basically all we can do, and we f that up a lot. At least I did.

Oh, and also I’m resentful about the meat puppetry, because despite working for the Labour party for eight years, I was never once asked to be an audience behind the leader. This is about the most damning indictment of your own personal dress sense and attractiveness that exists for a junior political operative. “You’re too gruesome to be seen behind the leader”, is what it says. The judgment of your peers burns, I tell you.

It’s a reference, not a typo.

Anyway, I’m not going to talk about it, not because I don’t have opinions, but because if if you take a pinhead and then place it next to Jupiter, you have a rough approximation of my knowledge of the game of foopball compared to anyone who has played it or coached a side for a living.

The one truly interesting thing about ex-players commentary on the World Cup has been the occassional glimpse of the yawning chasm between my unerstanding of how football is played, and that of those who’ve played it with skill, and how impossible it is to translate that gap into words.

This means usually the ex-players or managers are very careful to talk to the audience like slow children, but every now and then, they forget, often during obscure-ish games, and you see how they actually think about football, and it sounds like a totally different language.

It is easy to copy the basic phrases of the public language and get their basic meaning. Any fule can utter the phrase “We need to have Gerrard in the hole”. What we can’t do is understand the private language. We can’t translate how difficult a task might might be, what challenges lie there and what makes one player suited perfectly for the role, another not. When an unknowing ear hears these discussed, it becomes gibberish or merely incomprehensible.

There is a parallel with the coverage of politics (Yeah, I was going somewhere with this. No surprise, really). Politicians and those that cover them intimately have their own private phraseology, too, which we use constantly, without even noticing. We make fine grained judgements about this politician or that, we pick up tiny nuances of their approach and style.

Yet our public language is larded with phrases fit only for children and the hard of thinking. The political equivalent of saying he’s “got a good engine” or “can play box-to-box”.

Politicians and those that cover them don’t think their audience are stupid. It’s just that like experts in any field they don’t know how to translate the challenges and impossibilities of their profession to those who do not live and breathe it.

I take two things from this. One – that whoever cracks that translation job will have a happy and prosperous career in front of them. Two- that politicians should shut the hell up about football.

Iain Duncan Smith said “The purpose of my life here is to improve the quality of life of the worst off in society. If somebody tells me I have to do something different then I won’t be here any longer.”

George Osborne said “”If over the coming couple of months we can find further savings in the welfare budget, then we can bring that 25% number down. In the end, that is the trade-off, not just between departments but also between the very large welfare bill and the departmental expenditure bill”.

Oh, and here’s what Geoorge Osborne did already.

The Blue bits are Labour, the Pink bits are the Tories. This does not include impact of Service, in year Tax credit changes or housing benefit cuts on the poorest.

If IDS meant what he said, he should probably be writing his resignation letter now.

The art of war opposition lies in the use of stealth as much as full frontal attack, according to Sun-Tzu-Rentoul

At least now I know what to call my AB-provoked forthcoming budget strategy magnum opus. It will be titled “The pretence of Open-mindedness”. This is basically what I try and offer readers whenever I post on serious things.

One of the odd elements of this Budget is how it demonstrated George Osborne’s further development of the Brownian art of budget news management and presentation.

Where the thickets of a Gordon Brown budget were all about the business tax increases and tax clawbacks that helped pay for the headline goodies for the poor and working families, the first Osborne Budget is all about the hidden tax increases and clawbacks for working families that help pay for the headline tax breaks for businesses.

So, as Anthony Painter points out, the future for Lone Parents with children over five who don’t work is pretty bleak – onto JSA and a year later losing ten per cent of their housing benefit, while child benefit is frozen and VAT goes up and benefits rise only by CPI. It’s a lot better if they find work, of course – but unemployment will be higher than it would otherwise be, so how easy will that be – especially as this move makes the labour market more competitive?

The FT expands on the point :

“the measure will basically knock £10 a week, or £500 a year, off the income of a JSA claimant living on £67 a week.

For those without kids or the ability to rely on the income of a partner, even though the various clawbacks on Tax credits are worth a lot more than the headline increase.this will mean they’ll struggle to stay in their homes.”

This will save £100 million from those without work in an economy with two and a half million unemployed.

Even for those in work, the picture gets dark fast – As I mentioned yesterday, one of the big issues of this budget is its stealth Tax credit changes. The increased speed of the taper on Tax credits and lower cut off point means that those families on £23,000 a year or more will get no Tax Credits from 2012. As thisismoney point out:

“Detailed figures hidden away in Budget documents show that from 2012, those with joint incomes worth more than £23,275 will lose their tax credits.

Treasury sources have admitted that 5.7m families will not be able to claim a penny of the credit from 2012, leaving just 1.3m of the country’s poorest households benefiting from the payment. “

Of course, this does not get mentioned much by the Chancellor, who prefers to dwell on his increase in the Child Element element, to make up for the freezing of child benefit – It’s a stealth tax credit grab.

Nor is Mr Osborne’s budget above being blatantly misleading. In their charts on the distributional impact of Budget changes, the treasury includes the effect of Labour measures like the 50% rate, while ignoring the impact of steath tax credit changes on working families – thus giving the impression that the distribution of the changes announced yesterday is even, when the impact of yesterday’s budget fell hardest
on the poor and middle income.

This begins to inform us about the type of Government we are dealing with. It is one that is more than prepareed to create a misleading impression of the effect of it’s own policies. That makes it a dangerous opponent, but it also highlights what Osborne is afraid of and seeks to hide – the gap between the Prime Minister’s progressive rhetoric and the Treasuries conservative reality.

Now, none of this answers the big challenge for the left. To properly exploit that gap, we need to provide a better answer to the question “Well, what would you do instead?”

More on this anon, I hope.

It has come to my attention that a lot of moderate centre-left types are Doctor Who fans.

This is the source of the only reasonable explanation for recent mysterious events. It is a picture of the wall of the Chancellor’s office, taken last week.

I can only surmise that the Liberal Democrats fell into this “crack in time” during the Budget negotiations, and so disappeared as a distinct political party, leaving behind only the strange, faint echo of vaguely familiar ministers announcing Conservative policies.

If you’re on the left, there are three interesting things about the Budget. The first, obviously is that yes, Tory governments really do raise VAT whenever they can*. Vince was right.

The second key point is the OBR commentary. The budget document itself goes out of its way to say how unimportant the OBR projections are, but the OBR projects lower growth, higher unemployment and higher inflation as a result of this budget. Yummy. It even states that it expects the output gap to be greater at the end of this It’s pretty rare for a government to come out and say that this is what it’s budget will do.

The third area to probe is Tax Credit changes. Pages 40-41 disply where the pain and gain is. The Tax credit changes look like a real thicket – so I want to look in more detail at the Child Tax Credit changes before talking in more detail.

It looks like the Coalition is increasing the amount paid out in tax credits and claiming that this is more than compensating for freeze in child benefit uprating.

However, there are lots of changes to the Tax Credit system which negate that. On first reading it looks like the Child Benefit saves c£600m, the increase in Child tax credit costs £1.8bn, but the other cuts to Tax Credits save the government almost £3bn. (p41 of Budget statement -2012 onward). However, when you get to p69 where the impact is shown, these “stealth” reductions of Tax credits don’t seem to be modelled.

If I were a Labour strategist, I’d be looking for a way to brand these as “stealth Tax credit grabs”, PDQ.

For example, the disregard for in year income changes is plunging, which anyone involved in the history of Tax Credits knows will mean a lot of people who just got a better job getting letters from HRMC demanding the return of monies paid out. There’s also less going to parents of very young children – which by itself accounts for half as much saved as from no increase in Child benefit.

There’s also going to be a disregard for income falls, so if your income falls by £2,500 in a year, you get nothing extra in compensation.

Oh, and just in case you’re wondering – very little of this comes from those on over 40k, c£150 million or so, about 5% of total savings.

So three interesting initial points.

On a day like today, it is good to have something to think of that goes beyond the narrow political and economic trials of Britain.

So here’s an obituary of a better man than I am from Slacktivist, once again proving itself to be the best blog in the world. It puts our World cup “heroes” right in their place, too.

I am delighted to be asked to be the semi-official blogger for the South East London Hustings on July 12th. It’s an 8pm start at Greenwich Theatre. If you’re a party member you should be getting ticket info from your CLP.

The aim is for this hustings to be the “people’s hustings”, so the organisers are looking for as much member involvement as possible. Which is why I’ll be in the audience blogging and tweeting away like a dervish.

So come to the hustings if you’re in Lewisham or Greenwich, and do say hello to me, whether virtually or in reality. I’ll be saying what I think, but as on most things, I’ll probably be wrong, and you’ll be much better informed than I and able to correct my errors!

Elections have consequences. Today we see an awful lot of briefing on the Budget, the most interesting of which is “Treasury insiders” briefing that their own budget will result in higher unemployment and lower growth.

“Treasury ministers accept that the new and independent Office for Budget Responsibility will mark down the growth and jobs forecasts as government spending falls and taxes rise.

But insiders who have seen the forecasts said that because the OBR will assume this is just a temporary shortfall of growth, the effect will be to increase spare capacity in the economy (!!!!!!! – HS), creating room for a faster growth forecast just before the next election.

Conservative aides expect that the OBR’s assumption that deficit reduction has only a temporary effect on the economy will take the edge off Labour attacks that rapid deficit reduction will undermine the recovery.

Treasury insiders also pointed out on Sunday that a simple Budget day comparison of the forecasts before and after the spending cuts would not be fair because the OBR’s pre-Budget forecast last week was artificially too high. “

The FT misses a story on that last line, not least because it establishes a new world record time for briefing against an independent body you created. The “artificially too high” line is just left hanging there. Does Osborne really believe that the OBR projected growth rates are too high? If so, does that suggest to many people that a good strategy is to deliberately reduce them further?

So what should Labour do in response?

1. There is an alternative The Conservatives and Cleggite Lib Dems will be desperate to estabish that this is unavoidable, harsh medicine.

To rebut that attack we have to suggest the outlines of an alternative. That choice needs to be built on creating growth, so we therefore need to be talking about measures to support private sector job creation and these can’t be simply extensions of State Aid. I’d be looking at capital and R&D tax allowances, the creation of special enterprise zones in high unemployment areas, increased support for high skill employers for training, and infrastructure investment in transport, research and housing provision.

4. We need to get to Jobs, Jobs, Jobs. Here’s the big political divide for the next year: We need to create jobs to grow vs. We need to slash spending to grow.

But we only get to that argument if we can show that fiscal plans are sustainable. The OBR gave us a huge hand with that, with its projections for future interest rates, debt spending and employment. We should sieze on that opportunity to produce alternative economic models that show lower unemployment and higher growth within a sustainable fiscal framework.

That means we have to be responsible on spending commitments in the public sector, which leads me to suggest

3. Hold fire on Pensions and Pay – The right question for Labour isn’t whether public sector pensions and pay should be restrained, it’s whose public sector pensions and pay should be cut.

There is a huge difference between protecting the interests of part time care workers and junior police officers and that of senior management. In my limited experience, there is very little gold plating of pensions at the lower end of public sector employment.

4. Doing Welfare reform right costs We should also be strongly in favour of Welfare reform to reduce long run costs, while opposing blind short term cost savings. The Treasury is already eyeing Transfer payments as a way to reduce expenditure fast. After all, if you’re going to create an extra couple of hundred thousand unemployed, DWP budgets will rocket.

At the same time, all IDS’s work at the centre for Social Justice involves an implicit recognition that short term higher costs for familiy and social intervention pays off in the long run in lower costs. There will be a huge battle to come between DWP and the Treasury here. We should be on the side of the DWP. There is no point in artificially embracing short term pain, when the correct way to reduce long term costs is to support families in the short term.

If I were to advise a medium term Labour strategy it would be along the lines of – We can’t take growth for granted, so we need jobs, jobs, jobs, so boost the private sector (especially outside London) to create them, to pay for which requires public sector restraint, but focus should be on reducing long term costs, not cutting to get an accounting saving, which causes real pain without saving real money.

Ironically, the OBR could provide the right hook to implement this strategy while showing fiscal responsibility. We should consider demanding that the OBR be moved to the Commons with a broader remit, so that political parties can develop costed spending plans while seeing their impact on unemployment, costs and growth against the central projection. Indeed, we should argue that MPs should be allowed a chance to road test confidential fiscal projections on various scenarios.

I’m sure various Lib Dem MPs would welcome this opportunity to develop their understanding of the economic consequences of short term cuts.