Now then. Dave Osler has an interesting post about benefit fraud over at Liberal Conspiracy. Apparently, only 1% of benefits paid by the state are wrongly claimed. That still amounts to a billion pounds, but is obviously less than the billions spent on bank bailouts.
Crucially, it is also much less than the amount of benefits people are legally entitled to, but never actually claim (approximately £10.5 billion, points out woodscolt in the comments). Double crucially, it is a fraction of the money lost to tax evasion (£30 billion). Yet in our political discourse, it is benefit cheats who are blamed for the horrible amounts of money the government wastes. Could this be because diddling benefits is a poor person’s game, while tax evasion is a middle- and upper-class pursuit?
During the election campaign, I recall more than one political debate I had with friends and passers-by, on this problem. Like immigration, the issue is incredibly muddled. People often equate benefit-fraud with the separate issue of the state giving people too much in benefits. A story about a woman who steals £60,000 from the state in a benefit fraud is equated with the story of a man who claims housing benefit of £2.1m a year to live in Kensington are seenn as somehow part of the same problem. However, they are problems of a completely different order – The first is a case of someone breaking the law, who should be (indeed, was) caught and punished. The second is someone acting perfectly legally and in their own interests, within the system operated by the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea. We solve the first case by investigating criminality. We solve the second problem by forcing the borough into building more and better social housing (if indeed you consider humanely housing a group of refugees to be a ‘problem’). Housing policy, and the level of benefits paid to those not in work, seems to me to be an ideological argument, where Labour and the Tories have very different views. Meanwhile, everyone agrees that benefit fraud is wrong and must be stopped. Public discussion on benefit fraud doesn’t always make this clear… and the Left loses the argument as a result.
Tag: Politics (Page 34 of 57)
At the Plain Blog About Politics, Jonathan Bernstein reminds us that, despite the oceans of political coverage that seems to saturate the media, many people do not take an active interest in politics outside of election time.
If you asked [my Father] to name a NASCAR driver he’d probably look at you as if you were nuts…but if you named some of them, he’d probably recognize the names. The idea is that lots and lots of people have about that level of knowledge about most of what happens in politics. It’s just background noise. We, the people who write and read political blogs, and watch debates, and pay attention to politics even in the off season –we’re the minority.
Bernstein is writing about US politics, discussing former Governors and presidential hopefuls Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, two people who I bet few in Britain would recognise. Nevertheless, Bernstein’s cautionary tale is pertinent in the UK too – At election time, I remember being amazed that the Leaders’ debates could increase Nick Clegg’s popularity ratings so substantially. How had so many people not heard of him, or see him perform? In my world, he was on TV all the time!
Here’s Caitlin Moran on Twitter:
I’ve made a decision – I’m not going to find out who Justin Bieber is. He’s going to be the first “modern thing” I’m going to ignore.
This has stuck with me, because it was via this message that I discovered that a person called Justin Beiber existed. Whenever I have mentioned this to other people, they have, without exception, replied: “Who’s Justin Beiber?” which reassures me somewhat. If I am being culturally ignorant, then at least a lot of other people I know are too. There is a Facebook group called I bet I can find 1 million people who hate Justin Bieber. Perhaps I should start one called I bet I can find 1 million people who have never heard of Justin Bieber?
That Bieber is, in many circles, a hugely famous global phenomenon – worthy of single-serving sites, mash-ups and parodies – matters little to me. The most cursory research quickly reveals that I am not his target market. In such cases, admitting ignorance becomes something of a badge of sophistication. However, in other cases, the sudden exposure of my own ignorance leaves me more concerned. It is more embarrassing for me to admit that I had barely any knowledge of Alan Watkins’ career, or the output of Tony Judt, until people I follow began tweeting and blogging their RIPs. As a fully paid up agent for the liberal left conspiracy, Watkins and Judt were guys I really, really should have known about before they died. Instead, both names were part of the ambient noise around me (like Bernstein Snr and the NASCAR drivers). I’m grateful that at least the news of their passing found its way into my ‘streams’, and I can now set about reading Postwar.
Of course, knowing that there are influential people out there who you have not heard of is not very helpful, because of course, you don’t know who they are! This can be remedied by reading an entirely new or random blog, or just by picking up a weekly magazine that you might otherwise avoid. What might me more interesting, however, is considering who or what currently exists on the penumbra of your consciousness?
The answer that springs to mind is Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight Saga, which I first became aware of when I began to see young teensm on trains reading improbably thick paperbacks. Meyer’s series managed to become a global success story while I remained oblivious. Again, this is easily explained by the fact that I am not the target market. However, now that movies are being made and advertised on the public transport system, I would say that the saga, with its emo-vampire chic, is part of most people’s peripheral vision now. It is no longer ‘background noise’ as Bernstein has it, but rather, a collective cultural happening that infiltrates our awareness via a kind of osmosis.
I would say that there are a whole class of public figures – people like Simon Cowell, Cheryl Cole, Huw Edwards, and John Terry – who enter our thoughts this way. We know about them, and their notoriety before we even consider consuming their cultural oevres ourselves. Certain politicians fall into this category too. I would expect even the most uninterested and sullen of the lumpenproletariat to know who David Cameron was, and possibly George Osborne and Nick Clegg too. However, if they aren’t clear who David Willets or Danny Alexander are… well, I think that’s forgivable.
Here’s a statement released by the folks from the Democracy Camp at Parliament Square. Tomorrow they’ll be hosting a picnic.
Democracy Village has been an experiment in peaceful protest. We’ve achieved a huge amount. We’ve also made mistakes. The media has portrayed us as drunks, drug addicts, fighters and layabouts.
Here’s the truth.
We all are.
Whether you like a drink on a Friday night, smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, get angry, or can’t be bothered to tidy up, none of us are perfect. Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.
What we’ve done is put a microcosm of our society under the microscope, and many of you (and some of us) don’t like what we see.
Too many of us look the other way when we see something we don’t like; complacency is not an option anymore, we need to unite and face our problems together.
Here’s the situation that lead us to set up the camp in the first place:
Our taxes are currently financing war in Afghanistan, a country which has never attacked us, to the tune of £11bn. In so doing we’re reinforcing extremism and perpetuating the cycle of violence in an already unstable the world.
On top of that, our troops, young men and women who are working to protect us, are coming home in ruins – those that survive their injuries are hidden from view, can’t find work and are generally forgotten; chewed up and spat out by the very country they are fighting for.
An anecdote: At the end of one of our recent Talking Circles, where all our camp members have their chance to speak up about what’s on their mind, a young man from Rotherham took the floor and told us about his brother who was in the Army. He’d been serving in Afghanistan and had returned to the UK last December at the end of his tour of duty, only to be told he had to return to the front line due to lack of reserve troops. A week later, this guys brother got a phone call saying his brother’s jeep had been blown up by an IED – the guy almost cried as he explained how he’d had to identify his brother from a tattoo on his back as that was all that was left of him. He came up to me at the end of the meeting and said, ‘This is the only place where I feel anyone cares about how my brother died.’
Whilst we sit in our living rooms watching this distant conflict rage on, we’re also facing massive cuts in public services whilst big business and government rewards themselves with our money.
We’re losing our civil rights day by day, and have sleep-walked ourselves into the world’s most surveilled society, where anyone can be locked up with no charge for 30 days in the name of national security and peaceful demonstrators are arrested for sitting outside Downing Street.
Our parliamentarians, whether they start out with good intentions or not, are standing by or actively supporting terrible injustices at home and abroad, which have been pre-planned by undemocratic think tanks and unelected Whitehall mandarins.
Tony Benn recently said, “the politics of the present is in Parliament, the politics of the future is in Democracy Village and on the streets.”
Instead of sitting around complaining when things go wrong, let’s actually make a change. We believe it’s our duty to resist injustice, and permanently protesting outside parliament is the way we choose to do that.
We want to learn how to become more passionate and compassionate, heal the rifts that seem to be widening between our communities, and ultimately be proud of our country again.
We can do it. We must do it. We will do it.
Welcome to our new Prime Minister, David Cameron, and his deputy, Nick Clegg.
The above image was taken in M&S a couple of weeks ago. Then this morning, I read the Alain de Botton thinks we need a Prime Minister built on precisely these values:
But what we crave most is normality. However much we may want our intellectuals or artists to be passionate, strange, a little deformed and prone to outbursts of joy or fury, recent experience has left us in no doubt as to the dangers of eccentricity. We need a Prime Minister as imagined by the menswear range of Marks & Spencer.
Take Back Parliament rally, 8th May 2010. Photo by Lewishamdreamer on Flickr
*This post contains excessive alliteration, which some readers may find offensive.
Politics means different things at different times. During the election campaign, it was the politics of presentation: of a leader (and his lovely wife), and of a suitable narrative that you think chimes with the voters.
Now the election is over, we seem to be moving into the politics of game-play and strategy. The discussion centres around what Nick Clegg can force out of the tories, and how to bounce David Cameron into Proportional Representation. Associated with this are the recriminations over failed tactics. For an example, see @hopisen (his debates with @sunny_hundal yesterday were a good example of this kind of politics).
This kind of politics assumes an intransigence on the part of your political opponents, and it is useful to remember that this is not always the case. At this crucial juncture, we need a politics of persuasion too, especially on the case of electoral reform.
@ellielevenson: RT @ericjoyce A near-painful read, near-pathetic, read. RT @krishgm: Guardian group feeling guilty? http://bit.ly/aQoDWA
The above comments, discussing the Guardian’s Saturday editorial, sits within the second type of politics, the politics of strategy. But as a piece of persuasion, I think the article is very useful.
But the fact remains that victory, under the electoral system we have, means securing a Commons majority. Constitutionally, no other metric matters. If the Conservatives believe that share of vote and lead over the nearest rival should have some moral weight in deciding a winner, they have already conceded a vital point about the need for electoral reform: the proportion of overall support in the country as a whole matters. …
The Tories by contrast are confused about electoral reform. It cannot have escaped their notice that they have suffered as a result of the system they are determined to keep. It is Labour whose results are most inflated by systemic bias. The Tories insist that first past the post delivers clear results, when it has just failed to do exactly that. Conservatives have always grumbled that coalition politics means shadowy deals between parties cobbled together in dingy corridors. The opposite is now proven.
Now, I am not a Tory, but I think this sort of logic that might persuade them. These kinds of arguments need to be in the foreground. My three aspects of politics overlap here: A persuasive argument, presented right, can give your cause a strategic advantage. In this case, if the Conservative party become a little less cold to the idea of electoral reform, that’s a good thing.
There has also been some discussion over political power in the past few days. Here’s Laurie Penny, barging in on that Sunny/Hopi debate I mentioned earlier:
@PennyRed: @sunny_hundal @hopisen yes and no. I think there’s enough damage that only a real defeat, preforably temporary, can make us regroup.
@sunny_hundal: @hopisen @STEPearce @PennyRed I dint believe in power for it’s own sake. That is where labour is at and that is the path to hell
Its little comfort, but the politics of persuasion persists even when the party is out of power.
All of this is a way of saying, that while the Tories and Liberal Democrata hammer out whatever deal they can; while the Labour front bench has been told to keep quiet; and while Gordon Brown keeps a low profile, it would be a good use of Labour supporters’ time to help promote and grow the Take Back Parliament Campaign. The coalition has taken only three days to amass over 41,000 supporters, which is very impressive. However, I think it needs a broader base than the middle-class Lib Dem supporting demographic I saw at the rally on Saturday. This is a practical task that Labourites can take on right now, while we all twiddle our thumbs waiting for opposition.
Here’s my Flickr photoset from the Take Back Parliament rally (though I think Lewishamdreamer’s photos, one of which is reproduced above, are better).