Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

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Eurabia: No such thing

Friday, January 8th, 2010

The Brookings’ Institution’s Justin Vaïsse takes apart the Eurabia myth in this excellent short piece inForeign Policy.

He points out the concept’s stylistic links to fear of “Eurocommunism” in the 50s and general anti-European and anti-internationalist sentiments on the American right, and correctly positions Melanie Phillips as “on the fringe far right” in European debate.

Here’s some of the good stuff:

If these books insist so much on the future, it is because current [evidence for Muslim take over is] unimpressive. According to the higher range of estimates by the U.S. National Intelligence Council (NIC), there are already as many as 18 million Muslims in Western Europe, or 4.5 percent of the population. The percentage is even lower for the 27-country European Union as a whole. The future will certainly see an increase, but it’s hard to imagine that Europe will even reach the 10 percent mark (except in some countries or cities). For one thing, as the same NIC study indicates and demographers agree, fertility rates among Muslims are sharply declining as children of immigrants gradually conform to prevailing social and economic norms. Nor is immigration still a major source of newly minted European Muslims. Only about 500,000 people a year come legally to Europe from Muslim-majority countries, with an even smaller number coming illegally — meaning that the annual influx is a fraction of a percent of the European population.

Finally, though the Eurabia books describe Europe as committing “slow motion suicide”, reality begs to differ — and increasingly so. According to demographers, in 2008, fertility rates in France and Ireland were more than two children per woman, close to the U.S. (and replacement) level; in Britain and Sweden they were above 1.9. And though in the 1990s European countries set an all-time record for low fertility rates, figures are now rising in all EU states except Germany.

Posted in Books and articles, Europe, Nationalism & Internationalism, Politics | Comments Off

Inflated expectations

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

It’s the first birthday of the Other Taxpayers’ Alliance today, and they have an amusing “Which”-style comparison guide if you aren’t sure which one you ought to support.

The original TaxPayers’ Alliance were quoted in a blog post I was reading earlier, from Thomas Byrne, who said, by way of an argument for cutting top public sector salaries:

While there is no systematic data on executive pay in the public sector, there is strong evidence that it has increased rapidly in recent years. For example, the number of employees earning more than £50,000 across local government has increased eleven-fold since 1996, compared with a three-fold increase in the economy as a whole over the same period.

This is an excellent statistic in that it is both easy to grasp and completely misleading. I commented on Thomas’s article to set out why:

I think you need to be careful with the TPA’s figures on local government pay compared to private sector pay.

Consider a population of 110k people. 10k work in local government, 100k work in the private sector.

The local government people are generally low-paid because of years of spending cuts under a Prime Minister we shall call for the sake of argument Thaggie Matcher. Let’s say that they are distributed in bands so that 30% earn £10k, 40% earn £20k, 20% earn £30k, 8% earn £40k and 2% earn £50k

The private sector people are generally paid more. Only 15% earn £10k, 30% earn £20k, 35% earn £30k, 20% earn £40k and 10% earn £50k.

Now assume that inflation means that everyone who earned £40k and above now earns £50k and above. Without affecting the relative wealth of the population, the number of local government people paid over £50k has gone from 2% to 10% – a fivefold increase. Meanwhile the number of private sector people paid over £50k has gone from 10% to 30% – a threefold increase.

Are local government workers better paid now relative to private sector workers? No, the pay differentials within and between the two sectors are unchanged. In fact, 30% of private sector workers are paid more than £50k, and only 10% of local government workers are, so private sector workers are much better off on average.

But by using an arbitrary cut-off point that caught fewer LG workers than private sector workers at the starting point, any increase that affects all employees equally will show a larger percentage increase in the LG workers than in the private sector ones.

Posted in Current affairs, Local Government, Politics, Research | Comments Off

Democratic, decentralised and difficult

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

I attended an interesting seminar yesterday afternoon, hosted by the 2020 Public Services Trust. The topic was the future of citizen-centred public services.

The two principal speakers both brought innovative ideas and a real vision, which is more than can be said for a lot of these public policy seminars. Ben Jupp, from the Cabinet Office, and Christian Bason from the Danish reform institute Mind Lab, set out a vision that I might crudely summarise as:

  • We need to understand that public service goes wider than the things funded or provided by the state – in other words, the hospice movement is part of the health service, even if it isn’t part of the National Health Service

  • We need to combine greater user empowerment, productivity drives and a better understanding of user pathways to identify waste in the system
  • Future services will be provided in a radically decentralised way – well below town hall level
  • Citizen/citizen and citizen/state relationships are the most important element of this new mode of public service

There’s a lot to like in this vision of decentralised, democratic public service, particularly if it brings about the alchemical “better services at lower cost” that we’re all hunting around for.

I don’t think it’s a simple or risk-free transformation, though. The questions that occurred to me were:

  • Public service delivery is something that goes wider than taxpayer funding, but it is also something that is fundamentally political. How can decentralised local organisations be made accountable and representative to their users and those who pay any taxes that fund them?

  • Are we acknowledging the problems of Whitehall managerialism only to create them over again at local level?
  • How do we create the active and informed citizens needed to co-create and co-produce these services? It feels like the change needed – though a good change – is either a years-long cultural transformation programme, or devolution to a group of super-engaged people running local services.

I don’t have any easy answers. I want to see more democratic and less managerial service delivery – which is what both Ben and Christian were describing. I want fair and comprehensive public services. I buy the vision and the potential. My only nagging worry is that in a world where we’re living with the consequences of the efficient markets fallacy, we should be wary of stumbling into an efficient citizen fallacy.

Posted in Current affairs, Local Government, Politics | Comments Off

Brighton's openish primary

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

According to the local paper, the promised open primary in marginal Brighton Pavilion will require voters to turn up in person.

Presumably put off by the high cost of the postal ballot used in Totnes, the Tories have hired a room in a seafront hotel, where (if you book in advance) residents of Pavilion constituency can turn up and choose between six potential candidates.

Cost reasons aside, I’m a bit surprised that the Tories are turning down the free publicity they would get for running a higher-profile race in the city. The open hustings (as they should be called) are taking place a week today – no time for the media to publicise and examine the candidates, and so no time for the winner to establish a public profile.

It does raise the question for me of what ‘open primary’ really means. I doubt that many people who aren’t Conservatives will drag themselves down to the seafront on a windy November night. It’s not likely that even 1% of the 80,000 Pavilion voters will turn out – so in what way, other than purely technically, is it open?

Posted in Constitutional Reform, Democracy, Elections, Politics | Comments Off

Social Media and Councils

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

I spent the afternoon at the LGIU’s Social Media and Councils event in London, where I was on a panel talking about democratic engagement. I didn’t use any slides at the time, but I’ve just pulled together some slides covering the points I made.

Four rules for councils' democratisation work

Posted in Democratization, Events, Local Government, Politics | 2 Comments »

Politics is bad! Politics is good!

Monday, October 26th, 2009

You don’t often look to the London Evening Standard for inteligent political comment – it’s owned by the Daily Mail, after all – but today it provides an example of interestingly stupid political comment.

Page 2 has an article about immigration policy, which shockingly reveals that Labour’s immigration policy was – I don’t know if I can bear to write this – written with political considerations in mind. Yes, amazing as it may seem, the Standard is attacking politicans for taking political points into account when making a political decision.

In fact, the point is even stupider than that, suggesting that the Government made immigration policy more liberal in order to “rub the Tories’ noses in multiculturalism”. This doesn’t sound like good politics in a country engaged in a hysterical bout of paranoid racism about immigration, but no matter – the usual anti-immigration voices are wheeled out to say what an evil travesty it all is.

So, the Standard thinks politics is bad and sordid, right? Wrong.

On the very next page, the Standard attacks the EU for seeking to appoint Tony Blair as “EU President” (sic) “in secret and without a vote”. Again, the warhorses answer the bugle and tell us how this is a travesty of democracy, and evil and anti-democratic. If only it were political! If only there were a popular vote!

Of course, the last thing that the UK press really wants is more EU democracy – that would mean the EU moving significantly closer to being a fully empowered democratic state. They ought to be happy with what they’ve got: a normal fudgy EU appointment process which they can present as a step on the road to serfdom.

But then again, why would the media feel the need to be consistent? They expect politicians to be consistent in their views for twenty years, or else be accused of slippery hypocrisy. They themselves, however, have such little respect for their readers that they feel no need to be consistent from one day – or one page – to the next.

Posted in Media, Politics | Comments Off

Telephone numbers

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

There has been a lot of noise in the French press recently about a wave of suicides at France Telecom. Just the other day I got an iPhone newsflash from Le Monde telling me of the latest one.

It’s welcome therefore to see René Padieu, an academic statistician at INSEE, stepping into the breach and pointing out that the suicide rate amongst France Telecom employees is actually lower than the national rate of 19.6 per hundred thousand. Le Point reports:

[Padieu] condemns ‘media hysteria’ and makes a connection with a supposed ‘wave of suicides’ in the police during the 1990s, linked at the time with work stress and police officers’ carrying of guns. “A colleague of mine carried out a statistical study, and showed that the suicide rate in the police was no higher than before.” As for the France Telecom case, Padieu points out that the suicide stories all came out after a union set up a ’stress observatory’. “When you set yourself to look for something,” he concludes, “you’ll often see it appear.”

Padieu is also a member of Pénombre, a very worthwhile organisation that aims to improve the way statistics are used in public debate.

Posted in Current affairs, Politics, Research | Comments Off

Still not the Rainbow Nation

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

I see from the news that the British National Party is considering taking on non-white members, after a meeting next month. I wonder which way they will go – and if they do let non-whites in to the party, whether (a) any will join, (b) it will change the party line from racial towards civic nationalism, and (c) whether it’s proof that electoral success has a moderating effect on parties at the extreme.

Posted in Current affairs, Politics | Comments Off

The Polish Other

Monday, October 12th, 2009

Charles Crawford’s recent Blogoir challenges the idea of “Polish anti-semitism” that we’ve heard so much about recently.

In doing so, he touches on the wider point that the left’s attacks on the Conservative alliance with eastern European right-wingers are being expressed in rather sweeping terms. Accusations of anti-semitism against Michal Kaminski are too easily eliding into accusations of anti-semitism against those ker-razy Poles and Latvians – even Stephen Fry chipped in on Channel Four news with a shamefully foolish remark implying that the Nazis built the concentration camps in Poland because that’s where the anti-semites were.

It’s absolutely not a problem for commentators to attack Law and Justice (Kaminski’s party) or Kaminski himself. They’re fair game. To imply, however, that L&J or Kaminski are representative of mainstream political thought in Poland is wrong as a matter of plain fact, and risks falling into the lazy habits of the right-wing press, where foreign politics is funny or horrifying with nothing in the middle.

In fact, Polish politics, mutatis mutandis, is similar to British politics, and indeed politics in any other European country. There is a centre-left party in the Party of European Socialists (or whatever they’re called this week), and a centre-right party in the European People’s Party, where the Conservatives will be once they get past their self-indulgent loathing of the Lisbon Treaty.

It’s sloppy and patronising for the left to put Kaminski in the central European mainstream. It’s also bad politics – the strongest argument against the Cameron Euro-alliance is the very marginality of its other member parties.

Posted in Current affairs, Democracy, Europe, Nationalism & Internationalism, Politics | 3 Comments »

What is a post-bureaucratic state?

Friday, October 9th, 2009

I can’t do better than to point you both to Will Davies’s excellent post on the nature of the Conservatives’ “post-bureaucratic state”, and Paul Evans’s response, which adds the concept of democratic legitimacy through widening political participation.

Posted in Constitutional Reform, Current affairs, Politics | Comments Off

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