POLITICS CORNER

[Tardis]

Clegg flys to Davos as his party is engulfed in sex scandals.

Why would the LibDems want to keep secret the report into Mike Hancock?

[Bruff]

Well of course, as you know Stanley, an answer to all those questions would cast a rather inconvenient light on matters. There are many areas where this particularly shabby Government would rather 'hoodwink' than cast light.

Ask a Government Minister about the rise in food bank usage and the pre-programmed answer you'll get is that usage went up 10x under Labour. True of course - 4000 up to about 40,000. It's now at 350,000 plus, which true enough is not a ten-fold increase on 40,000. But only a quarter-wit like my MP and I imagine Pendle's, would be comfortable in using it with a straight face.

That well-known hoodwinker with respect to his educational record Work and Pensions Secretary Mr Iain Duncan-Smith, is today making a major speech on welfare as he would call it or, as I prefer, social security. It seems he will refer a lot to the C4 programme 'Benefits Street'. As some have pointed out, it says a lot about a person when they dutifully ignore the research of many charities and other groupings and take their 'evidence-base' from a heavily-edited reality TV show. But then again, as I think we must say, educational standards have slipped in this country - it was I think Mr Gove, that scourge of sloppiness and fan of rigour, who used as his evidence-base on one issue an advertising push by a PR firm for I think a travel company.

I digress. What Mr Duncan Smith will not say is that for example benefit fraud amounts to 0.7% of the total benefits bill (the public 'believe' it to be about 25% which is excellent news for Mr Smith, if not for the nation's understanding). He will not say that the amount claimed by 'immigrants' amounts to 3% of the bill (the public believe it to be 30%, which is additional excellent news for Mr Smith, if again not for the nation's understanding). He will not note that unemployment benefit is only 3% of the total bill. On housing benefit, he will not note that 7/8ths of the housing benefit bill is claimed by those in work or pensioners - if he mentions housing benefit at all it will be to highlight the outlier hoovering-up 20 grand as symptomatic of the whole. He will of course, not mention old-age pensions at all but will for effect include them, as appropriate but without acknowledgement, in the 'statistics' he will quote. For example, if he wants to note how much the benefits bill has gone up, he will include the old-age pension as usefully the increasing numbers of OAPs means the message he really wants to get across, the bill has gone up due to the feckless and the indolent, is better if misleadingly made. Rather than misleadingly there, we could tell it as it is and say it's a lie.

What this means is that if quite rightly one stopped all fraud, one looked at clamping down on the amount 'immigrants' can claim and hit unemployment benefit hard, you could only save a maximum of 6.7% of the social security bill - most likely the very most would be 5%. Or one quid in twenty. Or peanuts.

If you want to cut the social security bill in this country you must either hit the State pension and hit it hard, or legislate and enforce a true living wage, or intervene somehow to reduce housing costs or most likely all these. In protecting pensions, doing nothing on a living wage or on housing, you're left only with hitting the most vulnerable as collateral in going after the tiny numbers of genuinely feckless. Which strikes me as borderline sociopathic.

Richard Broughton

[plaques]

I wish the government would attack the loopholes in tax avoidance with the same enthusiasm they do with "benefit cheats". Pigs might Fly !

[Tardis]

Here's IDS's speech text in full:

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehous ... full-text/

He may not have the right solutions, that is yet to be proved, but many people believe what he is saying about the Left's answers to welfare dependency and as far as I'm aware Rachel Reeves has so far not put anything constructive forward (apart from english and maths lessons, neatly dodging teachers productivity) and even had to back down on her misguided attack on Vince Cable.

What I do know is that most people are only 2 pay cheques away from the people on #BenefitsStreet (I haven't watched it myself, as I do not watch live TV as I'm a tax avoider)

[Stanley]

Lovely post Richard. That's my understanding, thanks for expressing it so clearly. See this LINK for the good news that the incomes of 90% of people are rising faster than inflation. (Another LINK on the same theme) I'm not sure what planet Cameron lives on, it is certainly not the same one I have to deal with. I am a feather-bedded pensioner but the price of essentials is rising faster than my pension so I don't see how it can be true for those on less than 1% wage rise a year. Of course it has all been done by clever manipulation of the figures across a whole range of indices but doesn't alter the bottom line that for 50% of the electorate incomes are not keeping up with the inflation of essential goods and services. For instance, how do alterations in tax threshold affect people who don't pay tax? The inflation rate he uses is around 2%, nothing like the rate for the shopping basket of the poorest. Read yesterday's PE for examples of how capital expenditure is being taken off the books a la PFI in even more areas such as clever manipulation of the Student Loan Debt.
I sincerely believe that we are being attacked using the techniques laid out by Naomi Klein in her book 'Shock Doctrine'. You’ll have to read it for the full story but basically it is about using military, economic of societal crisis to engineer the course or ethos of a country. The Tory component of the Coalition set out in 2010 to roll back what they see as the break down in the way society works. Their aim is something close to 19th century laisser faire and this should be the target of opposition. Unfortunately I do not see any signs that they have even recognised the campaign, let alone formulated any policies to oppose it. I lived through a period in which after over a century of struggle the working class saw vast improvements in their lot. What I see now is the erosion of many of these advantages. Eventually it will result in the same struggles all over again.
One more thing, what is different now than in the march towards the 'New Economy' which failed so badly in 2008? It is still based on phantom money, debt and artificial financial manipulation by the financial sector.

[Tardis]

The one thing about incomes and prices are that they are historical figures. They show where things have come from over the last year

Anyone who believes that the country could lose over 7% of it's output and devalue the currency by more than 25% in one year would not affect prices is living in cloud cuckoo land. We import how much of our food, 45%?

The fact that housing costs have become such a considerable amount of a person's living costs is a sad indictment of the asset price bubble, the subsidisation of this through tax credits etc (why else would someone on £45k pa need extra money?), and the failure to reform the banking system when the opportunity presented itself

Industry has screamed for a more educated school leaver, yet the country has tumbled down the leagues even whilst Bliar and Brown poured money into unaccountable bodies and repeated the mantra "Education, Education, Education"

[Tardis]

Lots of letters in the paper about postal voting within the local Labour Party, but I'm not seeing much condemnation from those in the higher echelons of office in the same party. Lots from the LibDems and Tories

[Stanley]

They haven't printed my letter yet! Bit too left wing for them?

[Tardis]

Interesting discussion on Radio 4's World Tonight last night about the thriving black economy in the UK and it's impact on those GDP figures

[Thomo]

We can now all rest easy if this headline is believable "Balls Commits To Balancing The Nation's Books" Like a Knight in shining armour he is going to put everything right, Don Quixote perhaps, or just another load of Balls?

[Tardis]

We can now all rest easy if this headline is believable "Balls Commits To Balancing The Nation's Books" Like a Knight in shining armour he is going to put everything right, Don Quixote perhaps, or just another load of Balls?

Only revenue, not 'investments'

Good Borrowing & Bad Borrowing

[Stanley]

I had a long conversation with Tiz yesterday about the flooding in the Levels and what he thought the causes were. We agreed that the main factors were the abandoning of regular maintenance of watercourses by both the Environment Agency and local landowners and the policy of allowing the levels to flood to protect properties downstream. Typically, I noted this report this morning (LINK) that large amounts of expensive temporary kit have been thrown at the problem and the Minister will grace them with a visit. In effect a PR exercise to show 'something is being done' instead of a proper programme of watercourse maintenance throughout the year, a policy which was first adopted by the monasteries when they reclaimed the land centuries ago and which up to now has served the Levels well. I doubt if you could find a better example of expensive short term policy instead of tried and trusted long term management.
Meanwhile, in another part of the forest.... Remember David Cameron stating 'mission accomplished' in Afghanistan? I've just been listening to a report from Helmand Province where the British troops have handed over their strongholds to the Afghan forces and it makes grim listening. The Taliban are active all over the province and people are going to the Taliban justice system rather than local officials. The general picture is that the Taliban are taking over the ground where all those lives were lost. Take a look at what is happening in Iraq and you see a similar picture. Under Saddam it was one of the most secular of the Arab states, it is now a hotbed of extreme Islamic conflict and the end result looks like the break up of Iraq into the original three kingdoms of Mesopotamia. I was against both incursions and it gives me no pleasure to say that it looks as though all the people who protested against these mistaken policies were right. Bit of a cock-up really.....

[Stanley]

A man called Ian Grainger has just been interviewed down on the levels and he has slammed the government for abandoning dredging of the major rivers since 1995. In effect he's confirming everything that Tiz and I talked about yesterday. According to him, if the main rivers are dredged properly the local precept covers the maintenance of the minor watercourses and this was what was done till 1995 when in effect the Environment Agency gave up water management and concentrated on ecology. He was incandescent, lovely! I hope someone somewhere was listening to him.

[Tizer]

That's Ian Liddell-Grainger, MP for Bridgwater. He and his local colleagues, MPs for areas like Taunton, Wells, Somerton, Mendips, Yeovil etc, ganged up to criticise the environment Agency in Parliament. He's put the text of the Parliamentary debate on his web site and it makes very interesting reading, you can detect that incandescence:
http://www.liddellgrainger.org.uk/local/FLOODING.html

[Bruff]

Interesting. I'm no expert at all in any of this, but there is a persuasive (at face value) counter argument to among other things dredging here (which I read intially in The Guardian a week or so back):

http://www.monbiot.com/2014/01/13/drowning-in-money/

Richard Broughton

[Tardis]

Interesting. I'm no expert at all in any of this, but there is a persuasive (at face value) counter argument to among other things dredging here (which I read intially in The Guardian a week or so back):

http://www.monbiot.com/2014/01/13/drowning-in-money/

Richard Broughton

This is simple ecology, nothing unknown here. All you have to do is look at the beck after a rain storm to see how the water rushes off the surface rather than draining away. There's barely a tree around here, only poor grade grassland.

It is, however, only a part of the puzzle

Faster running rivers can lead to issues at estuary mouths and usually the loss of a great deal of silt

All these factors must be weighed, but if you build on a flood plain then you have to accept that at some point the area will flood

[Thomo]

I have been shouting "dredge the bloody rivers" for years now, and have seen and heard just about every possible reason for not doing so. If you compare the stream and river systems to pipes, and wish to increase the flow rate, there are really only two options, increase the pressure, (not possible with rivers) or increase the size of the pipe. For rivers this means dredging and removing any impediments to flow. Building flood defences as in embankments can be counter productive and should be restricted to protect small local at risk properties. When the lower reaches of our rivers were used for commerce they were constantly dredged, the majority of this activity has now ceased. A proper survey of the condition of our rivers and major streams would reveal where the trouble spots were, these could be dealt with first, then a comprehensive program of dredging and clearing of obstructions starting at the estuaries and working upwards. Costly no doubt, but also labour intensive, think of all the new jobs!

[PanBiker]

I echo all you say there Thomo, seems obvious to me that it is no coincidence that some of the worst flooding ever recorded in some areas of the country comes along 10 -15 years after dredging operations have ceased. Your right on the job creation too, in addition I would add that with over 3 million unemployed, there should not be a single pothole in our roads either. Bring back the lengths men and the thousands of workers previously employed in maintenance of infrastructure. This approach is not rocket science is relatively easy to implement and would address a lot of what is wrong with the country, take people off the dole and benefit the masses. Maybe a little too simplistic a view but would be more representative of the much lauded "Big Society" that the current incumbent politicians are so fond of.

[Belle]

Just a little aside on the flooding, Countryfile last night blamed the sheep farmers, apparently if all the hills were left to go back to scrub there wouldn't be flooding. Personally I am in favour of doing more of our own food producing, not less,

[PanBiker]

Deforestation of the hills has happened over hundreds of years and would take generations to revert back. Another contributing factor no doubt but a lot harder to reverse than dredging the rivers and maintaining the dykes. If the drain from your bath or sink is blocked it will not empty, simple as that.

[Bruff]

But the article I linked to above argues that dredging is a disastrous response - the word used is catastrophic. It's well referenced and so is in part more than one person's views.

It might be counter-intuitive but it has a certain sense to me. So are the arguments in the link wrong and if so why?

Richard Broughton

[Thomo]

This is a recent response to the problems in Somerset "Environment Secretary Owen Paterson has admitted that the Government could have done more to help residents in parts of the county worst affected by flooding, and that dredging of some rivers in the county should have happened". One of the problems here is that this type of flooding predates the Domesday Book in Somerset, and some of the areas are very near to sea level. I understand that the entire Country is slowly tilting towards the end of a line from Cape Wrath in the North to the lower end at Kent in the South, in short, the problem will not resolve itself. In the 17th Century the drainage of the Somerset Levels was organised by the Monks of the various Abbey's in the area, and that at that time there were two Somerset levels, the Lower, and the Upper, the Lower was only worked in the Summer Months and all permanent building was on the Upper levels. It would appear that at some point, this reasonable practice has been ignored. Since water will not flow naturally uphill, it can only be pumped, maybe the Dutch could come up with some ideas!

[Stanley]

Isn't it funny how people make things complicated. I'm a simple minded bugger and if dredging was OK for the centuries before 1995 and did the job, it's OK now and sod the environmentalists who don't live in a house that is under threat. I blew my top yesterday when I heard Patterson reassuring everyone that his department was consulting locally with 'the people who know about these things'. Strikes me they should have done this before. Classic example of interfering with a system that worked in order to save money. That didn't work did it.....

[Stanley]

I'm sat here listening to Lord Smith from the Environment Agency. He's avoided the question about dredging and is telling us how good his staff are. He's dropped his first brick by saying they started dredging in October and November the wrong time of year, it should be done in summer. In short he's refusing to admit that dredging is important and is filling in by telling us what we know already. No admissions about lack of investment in dredging and no mention of the fact that 500 staff connected with drainage and flood prevention are going to be cut. This is waffle and obfuscation, he is promising nothing, simply responding to the criticisms. I'm afraid he has done nothing to assuage the anger in the Levels. The message I extract from this is that the properties downstream outweigh the needs of the properties in the levels because of the numbers. I'm afraid the Levels are on their own....

[Tardis]

The Nats are within striking distance of a Yes vote, according to the most recent poll