UK News

The private sector vs. definitions of fairness

– Ingrid Smith is Business Planning Editor,  Reuters Consumer Television –

Sitting in the auditorium of the London School of Economic’s Old Theatre earlier this month, I listened to Lord Turner pose the question – in rich societies is there a clear correlation between increased wealth and human well being?

An apt question indeed from the chairman of the soon-to-be-defunct UK Financial Services Authority, in light of the UK coalition government’s austerity review.

On the international stage, the OECD has described the spending review as “tough, necessary and courageous.”

In other quarters it is viewed as excessive by political pundits, such as Scottish Finance Secretary John Swinney. He argues the cuts are almost twice the level recommended by the International Monetary Fund for developed countries.

The predication by David Cameron’s government – and to a lesser extent Nick Clegg’s – that fairness was and is at the centre of their economic and welfare management of the country poses the unavoidable question – how is fairness being defined?

Lord Turner argues the average worker views economic fairness from a relativist’s perspective i.e. — ‘I’m happy to earn X for the work I do until I find out someone else is earning Y (where Y is more!).’

MPs and the property market: an uneasy pairing

Would you have an MP for a tenant? Not so long ago, those two letters placed after a person’s name were seen as a mark of respectability, but the unending drama of the expenses scandal has blown all that away.

New rules, brought in after revelations last year about MPs “flipping” their main and second homes to maximise allowances, stipulate that MPs can no longer buy second homes and claim mortgage payments on expenses. If they wish to claim expenses related to a second home, they will have to be content with renting one.

This has led to a flurry of activity by real estate agents in areas of London close to Westminster. With 232 new MPs taking their seats, many of whom represent constituencies outside the capital, the agents have scented an opportunity. In Kennington, a south London neighbourhood that is popular with MPs because it’s only a short walk or bus ride away from the Houses of Parliament, residents have been inundated with leaflets urging them to consider renting out their properties to members of the untainted new Commons intake.

Some of the leaflets seek to allay any fears of scandal that may dissuade prospective landlords fearful that a crowd of journalists could show up outside their property one morning or that they might find a photograph of it splashed all over the front pages. Don’t fret, the leaflets say, we know that there are new expense rules in place and we can guarantee everything will be above board.

But the whole issue of MPs and their housing needs continues to make news, and not of the kind that the estate agents will welcome. The revelation that the Liberal Democrat David Laws had been claiming for rent paid to a landlord who was also his long-term partner forced him to resign on Saturday from his prestigious post as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. This was a major blow to the coalition not only because the highly qualified Laws was widely seen as the right man to carry out painful spending cuts, but also because it lumbered the new government with the kind of sleazy baggage that it had been so keen to avoid. So much for the “new politics”.

On this morning’s Today Programme on BBC Radio 4, MPs once again found themselves the butt of jokes. The influential programme broadcast a clip by comedian Arthur Smith  in which he imagined showing a house-hunting MP around a property. Star features included a dimly lit lobby for illicit meetings, a television set up so that pay-per-view adult movies would show up on the bills as old episodes of Today in Parliament, a secret passageway leading to a spare room where a mistress or gay lover could be kept, and a study where “a member of your family can pretend to be working”.

MPs accustomed to hearing serious political interviews on Today will perhaps not have appreciated the humour. But it was just another reminder that they still have a very long way to go to shed the stigma of the expenses debacle.

Reality intrudes on new British political order

Britain’s new political order was on display in the House of Commons on Tuesday when Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg squeezed  happily between Prime Minister David Cameron and Foreign Secretary William Hague  on the government front bench.

The house was packed and in an excited, start-of-term mood. Everything was going swimmingly, with former Conservative minister Peter Lilley cracking jokes as he gaves what is typically a light-hearted response to the Queen’s Speech.

Lilley played around with the apt description of the Lib Dems, settling for allies as he mused that partners might imply an inappropriate degree of intimacy.

Lilley told the house it was his wedding anniversary and was greeted by cheers. But when he turned to themore serious  issue of coalitions, he made  it clear that he regarded the current arrangement very much as a marriage of convenience.

He said he would not support changes to the voting system that makes hung parliaments the norm and would campaign vociferously against a switch to the Alternative Vote system when a referendum is held. For the Lib Dems such a change is the bare minimum.

The tensions between Conservatives and their new Lib Dem friends are bubbling below the bonhomie.

George Osborne takes risk with rhetoric

George Osborne once said he spends more time thinking about politics than he does about economics.

Now that he’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, he probably needs to think about the latter a bit more.

Markets are likely to forgive him his first news conference at the Treasury today. But they may not always be so kind.

His warnings that Britain could end up like Greece were skirting the line when in opposition but could really put the frighteners on investors who are already very nervous about sovereign debt.

Ditto the comments on black holes. Politicians love black holes but the last thing the guardian of the nation’s public finances need to be telling potential buyers of UK government bonds is that the situation is even worse than they thought.

Markets are not stupid, Osborne said this morning. But while they may identify his comments as political rhetoric for now, they could just as easily take him at his word. And that could spell real trouble for the pound and gilts.

New politics? Looks like more of the same to me

When I interviewed David Cameron earlier this year after an event at Thomson Reuters in which he, George Osborne and Ken Clarke delivered their views on the economy under a “Vote For Change” banner, I suggested that watching three white, middle-aged men talking about what was good for Britain didn’t feel much like change to me. Cameron jokingly replied that Clarke, 69, would be flattered to be described as middle-aged.

The Conservative leader then shifted in his seat, sat up straight and talked seriously about all the hard work his party was doing to field more female and ethnic minority candidates. His new Deputy Prime Minister, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, talks repeatedly of a “new politics” and how this time politicians will do things differently.

True, we have a coalition for the first time since the Second World War — but, after that, the handful of ministers who will be running government don’t represent much of a change. Of the 16 senior cabinet positions Cameron announced on Wednesday, there are just two women — one of whom is also the only one non-white cabinet member.

And, true, one of the top cabinet jobs — Home Secretary (interior minister) — has gone to a woman but, as someone joked to me yesterday, the fact that’s she’s also minister for women and equality looks like a typing mistake. Her real title, they suggested, should actually have been ‘Home Secretary, and token minister of women and equality.’ Theresa May, the new Home Secretary, will struggle to shake off suggestions that she got the job not on merit but rather because Cameron and Clegg didn’t have a lot of senior female politicians to choose from.

In the parliamentary parties, I count 42 Conservative women MPs (14 percent of the total). The Lib Dems fare even worse: I count just six female MPs, little over 10 percent.

Tackling our debt mountain has got to be the new government’s first and top priority, but unless something urgent is done to improve diversity in senior political jobs — as is slowly being done in business — then all the talk of new politics will end up being nothing but wrapping for old government.

How long can the negotiations go on?

It should have been all over now. But no, we’re on day five and no one really seems to know which way things are going to go.

All over Westminster, people are looking tired. Journalists, politicians, aides and most of all the 24-hour news anchors.

You only had to watch Sky News’ Adam Boulton going at it with former Blair spin doctor Alistair Campbell live on air on Monday night too see that tempers are clearly getting frayed.

So how much longer? Nick Clegg says soon but nothing seems imminent. The LibDems are still talking with Labour. They may talk more with the Conservatives too.

“It’s too early,” said one Conservative source. “It”s finely balanced,” said a Labour one.

In the meantime, huge numbers of reporters are staking out Portcullis House, the new adjunct to the Palace of Westminster.

But it’s slim pickings. David Cameron walks through. So does George Osborne. But for now they’re just waiting too.

Irish lesson for Clegg: get coalition right or face oblivion

If the Irish experience of coalition politics is anything to go by, Nick Clegg risks a lot more than unpopularity if he strikes a half-baked coalition deal with the Conservative Party. He also faces electoral oblivion should he fail to win enough concessions and power to carry his grassroots supporters with him.

Ireland’s pro-business Progressive Democrats (PDs) — relatively loyal junior coalition partners in successive administrations led by former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern — imploded at the last Irish general election, winning just two seats in parliament. They subsequently disbanded altogether.

The losses suffered by the PDs mean Ahern’s successor Brian Cowen now relies on a handful of Greens to make up the numbers but voters have also punished them for supporting an establishment party that has dominated Irish politics for decades, inflicting heavy losses on the Green Party in local elections last June.

Ireland’s Greens have subsequently enjoyed something of a recovery in opinion polls but only after standing up to Cowen, threatening to pull out of the government, issuing ultimatums and wringing concessions out of him, none of which augurs well for Britain’s oft-stated need for a strong and stable government.

Clegg can take some consolation from the fact that one junior coalition partner to strengthen its electoral position after entering into government was Germany’s Green Party. Despite winning less than 7 percent of the vote in 1998, it secured key concessions such as a policy to phase out nuclear power and three ministerial portfolios, including the high profile post of Foreign Minister for its party leader. The Greens — currently in opposition — were the big winners in regional elections at the weekend in which Germans punished Chancellor Angela Merkel’s centre-right coalition.

If Clegg is to enter into government with a party that many of his supporters will feel they have expressly voted against, he will need a strong deal that he can sell to them and to secure a position in government from which he can wield real influence and demonstrate leadership.

If he wants to make a go of it, Clegg is hopefully seeking counsel from Germany’s former Green foreign minister Joschka Fischer  – who, incidentally, made his political bed and his mark in a left- rather than right-of-centre administration — and learning salutary lessons from the ruins of other less fortunate coalition partners.

Third-world voting system in UK? No, not really

The airwaves have been filled with comments from furious voters who were unable to cast their ballots last night. We Brits think we can go around the world lecturing other countries on how to hold democratic elections, they say. But we can’t do it ourselves! We’re no better than those third-world countries!

I certainly wouldn’t want to minimise the frustration of the hundreds of people who wanted to vote and were not given a chance because of administrative mess-ups. I would be absolutely livid if it had happened to me.

Still, it’s worth putting things in perspective. Despite the hitches, Britain’s election was extraordinarily well-run compared with what goes on in so many less fortunate countries around the world.

The last time I covered a major election was in Nigeria in 2007. Now THAT was a truly awful election.

In many parts of the country, polling stations failed to materialise altogether. Even the president of the senate, the third most important person in Nigeria according to the constitution, was unable to vote in his home state of Enugu for lack of a functioning polling station.

A friend of mine who was acting as an independent observer in the state of Kogi said she arrived at a polling station at 11am to find there were no ballot papers in sight. When she queried this, she was told that every single person in the ward had already voted. There was no one in sight and the result, giving a huge win for the ruling PDP, was already agreed.

In Delta state, the number of people reported to have voted for the PDP was greater than the total number of residents of the state.

Elections don’t get more exciting than this

It’s going to be a long night! Cliffhanger, nailbiter, whatever you want to call it — it doesn’t get more exciting than this.

Polls closed just over two hours ago and the exit polls show we are clearly in hung parliament territory. The Conservatives are projected to have the most seats at 305, but that’s 21 seats short of an overall majority.

Labour, meanwhile, are shown with 255 and most interestingly the Liberal Democrats with just 61, one short of what they got in 2005 — when they and everyone else were expecting a surge of support.

If the exit poll is proven right, even a Labour/LibDem coalition would be short of a majority.

Here in Kirkcaldy, Brown’s constituency, aides are keeping cool. The Labour projection is clearly better than the wipeout that so many were predicting just a week ago.

The Conservatives, meanwhile, are insisting they have the right to govern with this mandate. With Gordon Brown having first call on trying to form a government in the event of a hung parliament, it will be important for the Conservatives to establish hey should be in charge.

Adding to the complications of the night are reports of people being turned away from polling booths and thus being unable to vote. Whatever happens, expect people to complain the election was stolen from them.

Twitter users still agree with Nick

One the eve of the general election, our exclusive Twitter analysis of political sentiment shows that while the latest opinion polls point to a late rally by Gordon Brown’s Labour Party, users of the micro-blogging site still favour Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats over the other two main parties.

US market research firm Crimson Hexagon (on behalf of Reuters.co.uk) has been archiving all tweets on British politics since March 22 and analysing them for positive and negative sentiment. All parties have had their ups and downs, most notably in the aftermath of the first leaders’ debate (which led to a spike in support for the LibDems and the hashtag #iagreewithnick trending on Twitter) and Gordon Brown’s “bigot” gaffe in Rochdale,which gave us the highest percentage of negative tweets for any party during the campaign.

Just hours before the nation goes to the polls and with so many voters apparently still undecided, it’s worth taking a look at the latest numbers.

The graphic below shows positive tweets for each party up to May 4. The LibDems come out top on 20 percent, with pro-Labour sentiment on 12 percent and pro-Tory lagging behind on five percent.

The next graphic shows negative tweets for each party. Again the numbers favour the LibDems; negative sentiment for Clegg’s party is on just eight percent. Negative Labour tweets are at 16 percent. Meanwhile, despite a lead in the opinion polls, David Cameron’s Tories are the least popular on 25 percent. The highest percentage of tweets we have seen (a massive 42 percent) occurred when Gordon Brown called pensioner Gillian Duffy a “bigoted woman”.