Main message from the Queen's Speech: "Bash the Poor and Destroy Solidarity"

Wednesday's Queen's Speech had one main message: bash the poor!

One should not expect anything different from a triumphalist Conservative adminstration confronted by an impotent opposition - not that they would have done much different if they had been in power any way!

Today's complacent Telegraph has lots of facts, but little sympathy for those who will suffer. Interestingly, the front page focuses upon how Labout "could lose tens of millions" due to the proposed change of union political contributions from 'opt-out' to 'opt-in'.

"Unions must heed the voice of the people" preaches the Telegraph leader with great pomppsity: "Pensioners and share-holders are hard-working and decent people who are entitled to a clear choice about whether to fund their leaders' self-serving political agendas, which generally entail bankrolling the Conservative Party". Can that be right? No, of course not - for that would mean that the "voice of the people" should have a say upon how company bosses bankroll the Tories. That of course is nonsense. Companies are above ythe law. And the Telegraph did not write what I have written. However, change "Pensioners and share-holders" to "Union members", and change "Conservative" to "Labour", and they did write just that.  They do not ask: why should one law apply to trade union members, and another to the same people when they own shares?

One would think that the amounts involved were large: £7.4 million from 1.1 million members in the Unite union. But this is just £7 per member - could this be right?  Well yes, it is.

The Torygraph does however have a point when it argues that the proposed restriction on Union funding "is what Britain voted for". It was in the Tory manifesto, so one must expect some attempt at implementation. But even in this month's rout of Labour, it is doubtful if a majority of Union members would have voted Tory. So the proposal may have a majority, but not in the right constituency.

The Tories are extending the Thatcherite narrative that "there is no such thing as society": it is all atomised, individual decision-making. Adam Smith would have been proud of them. But there is no 'gioding hand'. How sad it is that working-class solidarity is so weak that it cannot stand up to legislation such as this or to the lure of a discounted house. The Cons will destroy any sense of community that is still left in society.

Crambe.blogspot + Hudson

Crambe
http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=3267428&partId=1

'The man wot knows how to get up the steam'

.Title (series)Political Sketches
DescriptionNo. 850. Portrait of George Hudson, whole length, standing at centre in profile to right, holding a piece of paper in his left hand over a pulpit at right, on which lies a scroll lettered with 'North Midlan[d]'; an armchair at left. 22 December 1845

bibbyeconomicsolutions.blogspot

bibbyeconomicsolutions
http://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/24014550541/getting-the-biggest-bang-for-the-buck-in-fiscal

I like the idea of 'loans for all'. It combines equality with financial prudence, and is probably better than 'helicopter money' because it is repayable and fiscally neutral. EXCEPT, what about 'bad debts'? This could be yet another burden for the poor - and another bonanza for lawyers and financial advisers!

'Earn £1 million before you are 57'

Today's Telegraph (p.11) carries the same story in typical Telegraph manner - decontextualised factoids without political comment (which might be too painful)

"The average worker has earned their first £1 million by the time they have reached 56 years and six months old, according to research", we are told: "HAS earned THEIR first million" - what sort of grammar is that? Degendered grammar, that's what! It leads us to believe that this must average of males AND females. (Last week our long-distance coach tannoy told us "your driver will assist you as much as THEY can", thus adding quantitive to gender confusion.)

Further down we learn that "women need to wait around 19 years longer than men to reach the £1 million milestone, with the typical female worker being aged 69 years and seven months old by the time she has done so, compared with an average age of 50 years and eight months old for men, Prudential found". Aha! So it is a Prudential "gee-whiz" factoid, no doubt designed to provide them with cound-bit publicity rather than to provide us with insight or edification.

It is of course the same old story about inequality, dressed up in a new and unlilely statistic: "time taken (from birth) to earn an arbitrary sum of money". 

'Do I EVER earn a million?', many people will ask. Probably not, if you are in my generation which started on £20 per week or less. So presumably these figure are inflation-linked, or more likely based upon recent figures, thus using cross-sectional averages to produce longitudinal composites. (That is, IF a new-born baby earned what people are earning today, this is what would 'on average' happen.) I've nothing against this form of reasoning - it is what most life-tables are based upon after all - but I would prefer some transparency rather than just a "gee-whiz" figure.

I would also prefer something that gets away from gender inequality and focusses more on CLASS inequality, which is far more pervasive and far more pernicious - and far less discussed. For example, what are the quartiles and deciles of this new "time to £1 million" statistic?  I THINK WE SHOULD BE TOLD!!  Of course, Prudential are only interested in the top tail, so perhaps it is best for them to keep quiet.

There IS a 'touch of class' lower down the report, where different industries are compared: the "time to £1 million"  is about 41 years in finance, but "someone working in the accommodation and food service industries would need to work until the age of 94 typically before they earned £1 million, the research suggests". (Or, more likely, they would NEVER get to £1 million - which underlines some of the stupidity of this 'research'.)

An important factor much-overlooked in these accounts is the obvious one that the typical finance-manager wold earn NOTHING for at least half of their 41 years (please note and acclaim my PC use of the non-patriarchal pronoun - many finance-managers are women; indeed, when I ring up, they ALL seem to be women!) So perhaps we should take 20 years off the earning years of each compariuson group. Thus a truer comparison of finance workers versus those in accommodation and food industries is not 41 years versus 94 years, but 21 earning years versus 74 earning years, or even more allowing for the fact that unskilled workers generally start work at a younger age.

Is this 21:74 ratio a true measure of class inequality? Probably not, because each of these averages subsumes a great diversity, including class and skill diversity.

Finally, at the end of the report, we learn that this publicity is also a 'puff' for the Tories, as it quotes Nicky Morgan, Minister for Women and Equalities saying: 'I'm delighted that the gender pay gap has fallen to its lowest rate on record, and been virtually eliminated for women under 35 working full-time. However I want to see the pay gap fall further. This includes supporting more women into the highest paid careers and helping them progress up the career ladder.

'We have announced in the Queen's Speech ... that we are extending free childcare for parents of three- and four-year-olds from 15 to 30 hours a week during term time to make it more affordable for working parents. This is in addition to introducing shared parental leave and extending the right to request flexible working, to ensure more women can balance having a family with work.

'We will also require larger companies to publish the difference between the average pay of their male and female employees.'

This last sentence may be the most important of the whole piece - I wonder if they will  be publishing quartiles and deciles so we can look at the IMPORTANT inequalities?"