Crowdfunding Politics And The Public Sector

In Lipstick on a Pig, I looked at why facilitators will triumph over institutions in the markets for retail financial services. I'm now working on the next book in the series that will demonstrate similar outcomes in the public sector. Political parties, unions, government departments, churches and the European Commission are all in the frame. Do they exist to solve citizens' problems, or to solve their own problems at citizens' expense?  

Thanks partly to the Leveson Inquiry and a vengeful Rupert Murdoch, we're building a great picture of self-interest, greed and fear of transparency in key parts of the UK public sector. Riding hard on the heels of Horsegate - which perhaps typifies the alleged link between politics, journalists and police - we've of course had the allegation that Peter Cruddas, former Conservative Party Treasurer, claimed that a donation of at least £200,000 would get you to dinners with David Cameron and George Osborne, as well as the opportunity to get your policy concerns fed into the "policy committee at number 10." Cruddas claimed "my job is to get the donors in front of the Prime Minister." The Tories say "No donation was ever accepted or even formally considered by the Conservative Party" on the cruddy basis that Cruddas was suggesting (my italics). Cruddas has resigned. 

You might also consider that the Cruddas Affair has overtones of the 'Cash for Honours' allegations. And clearly politics is Big Business because campaigning, in particular, is expensive.  The UK's political parties spent over £30m on the 2010 general election (down from over £40m in 2005). And that's nothing compared to the estimated $6bn that will be spent by candidates trying to win the coming US election (as opposed to $5bn last time around).

But let's not confuse the activities of the party officials with those of party MPs and Peers who are acting in their capacity as UK government ministers. The party people can't speak for the government. The Cruddas Affair, like the Cash for Honours idea, smacks more of a lame attempt at positioning the allure of political influence as bait on the real - and less controversial - hook: the chance to hobnob with other wealthy donors in a grand setting. You could equate the plight of anyone who climbs aboard that bizarre bandwagon to investors in Madoff's ponzi scheme or 'stupid Germans from Dusseldorf' who offered insurance against sub-prime mortgage defaults. The truth is you may not need to pay any money at all to get policy suggestions into a committee at number 10, depending on the quality of the suggestion. And the sort of people who could afford large cash donations could also simply pay lobbying firms to push their pet policies around Whitehall and Westminster to greater effect. They might even simply buy lunch.  

All of which tends to suggest that the managers of political parties have little genuine interest in policy at all, let alone solving the problems of ordinary people, and are instead merely preoccupied with choosing socially attractive candidates and wealthy fools to pay for their election. 

But enough sunlight appears to have shone into this murky world for the political leaders, at least, to realise that offering to pimp the PM or sell a peerage won't really bring in the dosh. Nervously, they are casting around for an alternative. As recently noted in the Guardian, all three UK political parties last year dismissed recommendations by the oxymoronic Committee on Standards in Public Life to limit political donations to £10,000 per donor per year, require union members to opt-in to their subscriptions being used to fund the Labour Party, to provide £3 of public funding per vote, and to allow tax incentives for small donations. Now Labour have suddenly suggested that a cap of £5,000 would be sufficient, while the Tories want a cap of £50,000 - which happens to double as a membership 'fee' for their clubby "Leader's Group" though "50 City donors" gave them more than that in the year to June 2011 (isn't it notable that these figures are stale by time of publication?). 

In other words, the major parties lack confidence that an open, transparent appeal to ordinary citizens will yield the necessary war chest. Could this be because they don't believe their policy offering is compelling enough to persuade enough citizens to part with just a few pounds each...?

This myopia has parallels with the political approach to the UK bank lending crisis. Even when 'welcoming' the evidence that ordinary people are directly funding each other's personal and business plans, the politicians still cling to the notion that Big Money will eventually pull through. As a result, they refuse to make the formal changes to the tax and regulatory framework necessary to level the playing field for non-banks, implying that this whole mass-collaboration thing is somehow just a sideshow. 

Of course, as discussed in Lipstick, the same malady affected many other 'institutions' who've lost out to 'facilitators' whose primary focus is solving others' problems instead of their own.  Just ask the ad agencies whether they think their clients find Google and Facebook more compelling recipients of advertising expenditure than the traditional media.

Refreshingly, some officials like the Bank of England's financial stability director, Andy Haldane, concur:

"In the UK companies such as Zopa, Funding Circle and Crowdcube are developing this model. At present, these companies are tiny. But so, a decade and a half ago, was Google."

And none other than the current UK Chancellor said in 2007:

“With all these profound changes – the Google-isation of the world’s information, the creation of on-line networks bigger than whole populations, the ability of new technology to harness the wisdom of crowds and the rise of user-generated content – we are seeing the democratisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. … People… are the masters now.”

On April Fools Day, I suggested that smokers and drinkers might target the excise duty they pay on beer and cigarettes at specifichealth services. I wasn't being entirely facetious. There's no reason why a majority of voters shouldn't find it compelling to direct specific elements of their taxes or savings to specific public services, projects or even political parties. But enabling that to happen would require a little more ministerial interest in granting formal regulatory status to direct finance platforms. 

Will the lure of campaign crowdfunding prove too tempting to resist further? The Tories could offer dinner with Cameron at the Olympic Stadium.

 

Inverting The Insitutional Narrative Part 2: Telling It Bottom-Up

In Part 1, I suggested that to properly understand our motives at the ballot box the election narrative needs to be told from the bottom-up, not top-down.

How is that going?

False outrage in the headlines of certain newspapers is merely a top-down attempt by those institutions to influence how people vote (I won't dignify that rubbish with any links). And while pieces from Dispatches and Charlie Brooker genuinely expose the party leaders as institutional machines, they do nothing to reveal what individual people actually care about.

Ironically, Gordon Brown and the TV media came close to revealing what individuals think when he was caught expressing his annoyance off camera when a Rochdale resident expressed her own views instead of letting him list his government's achievements.

So what do people actually care about? And how does that resonate with candidates?

The team at TheyWorkForYou have bothered to find that out. By doing a quick survey yourself you'll find out the most common issues in your constituency and where your candidates stand - at least those candidates who've bothered to respond (1156, when I did it). Tellingly, the Guardian's report on this initiative focused on the Tories' refusal to complete the survey rather than people's issues, which were dismissively and condescendingly referred to as "everything from CCTV cameras to gay parenting."

Sadly, VoterPower have also done the analysis to explain just how little most people's votes actually count in the UK electoral system:

"The average UK voter only has the power of 0.253 votes. This is because most of us live in safe seats, where the outcome is pretty much certain regardless of how we vote... [for example] 57.60% of those who voted in Hammersmith in 2005 did not vote for the winning candidate. These votes count for nothing in the First Past the Post system."

There's clearly much work to be done before we'll see Politics 2.0!

Photo: 'expectant crowd' via BBC.

When Top-Down Meets Bottom-Up

Gordon Brown's exchanges with a woman from Rochdale today are emblematic of both the decline in faith in our institutions and the root cause.

While speaking with Ms Duffy, the Prime Minister focused entirely on making his own political points rather than listening to her issues, rationally expressed, including a parting compliment on local education. And his annoyed, off-camera reaction to her persistent attempts to get a word in edgewise was to mistakenly dismiss both her and her genuine concerns as "bigoted".

Ms Duffy's personal reaction to the Prime Minister's comment was "disgusted" and "upset". "They have no idea how we're living in this country," she said.

Already, the vicious cycle of public reaction has begun, taking the government, politics and politicians with it.

Photo from Plugin.com

Hung Parliament - More Pressure?

Many people would like to have rolled out the tumbrils for the UK Parliament in the past year, but a 'hung' Parliament is of course something quite different. And 38 Degrees is rightly running a poll to see if people want to hear more about the pro's instead of being heckled by The Sun and other mainstream media about the con's. I've said that I do.

Esentially, a hung parliament exists where no political party has a majority of seats. So either several parties agree a coalition and form a majority government, or a single party must form a minority government and horse-trade with the others on key issues. If neither works on critical issues, like budget approval, there would need to be another election.

The BBC has tried to explain it, but gets mired in speculation about numbers. A short Wikipedia entry has just been created. It links to the BBC explanation and a Q&A by the Institute for Government, an apparently politically neutral think-tank, which is also concerned about the unduly negative portrayal of hung parliaments in the media:

This has been reported quite negatively and has generated predictions that unstable and ineffective government would be the result.

However, as argued in 'Making Minority Government Work' by the Institute for Government and Constitution Unit, this need not be the case. Indeed, minority or coalition government can even have advantages, though ministers, the opposition, the civil service and the media would all have to adapt their behaviour to make it work.

This sounds promising. Basically, all politicians would have to behave much more reasonably and responsibly to try and forge consensus, and the media would have to refrain from senselessly branding the process as unstable and chaotic. After all, the democratic process should be messy rather than engineered from the top down in a nice orderly fashion. A dynamic, open system which encourages broad engagement by all stakeholders cannot realistically appear neat and linear.

I suspect that the biggest driver of the negative airplay - particularly at The Sun - is that Gordon Brown would remain PM, and would be the first to be invited to try and form a government. Given his record for clinging desperately to power to date, one does wonder whether we'd ever be rid of him.

However, while the fear and loathing of Swinegate has exposed Parliament to more public scrutiny and produced a little more accountability, it seems we have a long way to go in educating the politicians that citizens come first. And a hung Parliament seems a great way of keeping the pressure on.

The Elephant In The Room Makes It A Grim But Simple Choice

The electoral "elephant in the room" is exactly how the next UK government will eliminate the country's £90bn structural deficit - the core part of the £167bn in overall public borrowing we can't pay off in the usual ebb and flow of the public finances.

Everyone is rightly speculating about the likely mix of higher taxes, spending cuts and the role economic growth will play if each political party were elected. But the detail will change and is ultimately a distraction for election purposes. The short answer lies in the basic party philosophies.

In essence, Labour believes the public sector is the economy, and the private sector - including individual taxpayers - is there to support the public sector economy for the common good. That's why they keep saying that tax cuts (i.e. lower public income) and reduced public spending would 'take money out of the economy'. Therefore, Labour's primary goal is to suck an extra £90bn out of the private sector into the public sector in the coming years, over and above 'normal' levels of taxation. Job done. Curing public sector waste and inefficiency are secondary, and not even necessarily 'nice to have', particularly for the unions who've contributed substantial sums to the Labour party.

By contrast, the Tories/LibDems believe the economy comprises both the public and private sectors. Which is why they keep saying that avoiding a rise in National Insurance will boost economic growth by leaving money with individual people who'll spend it to greater effect - more quickly and on local goods and services - than wasteful government departments who spend vast sums on overhead but ultimately produce nothing. So, while the Tories/LibDems would also need to hike taxes to some extent, they would primarily focus on reducing public sector waste and inefficiency to minimise the amount of money that has to be diverted from productive private sector activity into the public sector. Where those two parties differ is that the Lib Dems want the public sector to do much more than the Tories do, which is why the Lib Dems are always coming up with random additional taxes to pay for it all.

However, life is what happens while you're making plans. Labour's immediate problem is that the private sector is already stretched thin, conserving cash to repay private debt and rebuild savings in light of concern for the future. That's why they talk about delaying plans for the National Insurance hike (and no doubt other increases) until the economy's had a chance to recover, while the Tories/LibDems talk about reducing public sector waste and inefficiency now, to avoid the need for Labour's planned NI increase and minimise future tax rises.

So it's a straight choice, but a grim one. Higher taxes in the coming years and little change in the public sector under Labour. Public sector reform with a bit more cash in your pocket under the Tories, and somewhere in between under the Lib Dems.

All Washed-Up, Ready To Go

The despicably secretive, double-dealing frenzy of the UK Parliamentary 'wash-up' is an especially disgraceful and cretinous process in the hands of the current shameful, scandal-ridden crew. That they went ahead and wallowed in it shows they've learned absolutely nothing about how to rescue their institution from the desperately low esteem in which it is held. As they huddled in their dirty little corners to snuffle out a deal, few spared a thought for the millions of individuals who put them there or the mandate they were granted. Parliamentary reforms were ditched as they cosied up to the copyright moguls and helped themselves to the tools of leak suppression.

We can only hope that this insidious wash-up process and the tawdry deals it produced will adorn the funeral pyre of this miserable, tragic saga in global political history.

"Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation . . . In the name of God, go".

Oliver Cromwell, 1653.

Kool Aid!! More Kool Aid!!!

The UK election battle is raging. From the plains of Helmand Province to the door of Number 10, where Gordo clings to power like a crazed gibbon hugging a tree. He'll have to be carried out of there, gibbering and drooling in a locked cage, if Dave and that other guy are going to get him out at all.

It's hot and dangerous work. New Labour goons roam the surrounding streets in ugly bands, some desperate to get their hands on  private loot  to fill the empty public coffers, others offering themselves for hire like cheap mercenaries. While deep down in the bunker, amidst the clamour and roar of media briefings, timeshare-style cold-calling, billboard banter and sound-bite skirmishes, staffers scream "Kool Aid!! We need more Kool Aid"!!! Dreading that without opiate, they and the masses will stop believing.

It would be time to flee, if the unions hadn't seized control of the roads, railways and the airways. So we're stuck in the battle zone, cowering behind any solid object we can find, rags stuffed in our ears against the hideous din. Only the insane and the very brave will risk the lethal dash to the polling booth.

On May 7, we'll know how those numbers stack up.

Billboard Banter Beggars Belief

While amusing, the political poster saga must be very poor value for money - not a great message for anyone interested in fiscal responsibility.

Each expensive billboard is ripped off and subverted online in front of more eyeballs than will see the original, for free, within seconds, by people with entrenched voting positions. So both 'sides' must see 'their' billboard as tired and out of date, swinging voters would remain unconvinced and the 3 million who've not registered to vote must instantly be reminded why.

"A Conservative spokesman said that their alternative version of the poster would be going up on the same 11 digital poster sites being used by Labour - 10 in London and one in Manchester."

Accept That We're Ruined, Plan How To Rebuild...

Following this morning's Spectator Business function - and the subsequent damp-squib budget announcement - you could not help but conclude that the UK's public finances are in ruins, yet politicians on all sides want us to wait until after the General Election before they begin to take any action (the Lib Dems would wait til 2011). They're in denial, and anxious that the electorate remains in denial too.

But there is no point waiting for the politicians. We're missing a golden opportunity. The election should not be about expressing anger and blame for New Labour's systematic destruction of the public finances. Instead, the election should be a choice between competing visions for how to rebuild the economy. All sides must be forced into saying how they would do it.

To make the most of this opportunity, we must first resign ourselves to the parlous state of our finances and accept the world has changed.

So let's accept that Britain isn't simply 'facing economic disaster'. It is one. Britain is not 'in decline'. It has fallen. There is nothing more we can do to 'save the country's finances', because there are none to save. Politicians can't make 'savings' here that may be 'spent' there. As Liam Halligan pointed out, the only choice is between more appalling over-expenditure, or less of it.

Let's also accept this wasn't an accident that might somehow rectify itself. Patience Wheatcroft (now at the Wall Street Journal), rightly points out that David Cameron has been too nice in merely saying Gordon Brown has merely failed to repair the roof. He should've been constantly and furiously berating Gordon for "removing the roof tile-by-tile": grabbing pension money, auctioning mobile spectrum for insane prices that damaged telco balance sheets, concealing public infrastructure costs in government-guaranteed PFI programmes, growing the public workforce by 20%, and deliberately borrowing more and more so that, in the bitter end, the Bank of England was forced to print £200bn.

But Cameron blew his chance. The time for anger and blame is over. We have to resign ourselves to the fact that we are stuck - our kids are stuck - with a £170bn public deficit, £80bn of which is a seemingly immovable millstone...

In planning how to proceed, we should not be distracted by hand-wringing about "cuts" and "higher taxes", and the timing of those. They must happen. But there are other critical issues that remain unaddressed. For instance, where is the incentive for investment in new export markets to redress the ever-widening trade deficit and the fact our biggest export market (the Eurozone) is in a similar, and worsening economic state? The UK must have some strengths and opportunities, and we need the political leadership focusing on those rather than playing for time.

Rant ends, for now ;-)

Gordon: Retail Bankers' Hero To The End

Funny that Gordon Brown has chosen the last possible minute before his last ditch General Election to announce that UK banks will finally allow credit cardholders to repay their highest rate charges first - especially when President Obama let this cat out of the bag in May 2009.

When finally implemented, this long overdue requirement will apparently save UK cardholders up to £500 million a year. So it's far less amusing that Gordon Brown appears to have been rather passive on the issue of excessive bank overdraft charges, worth £2.6bn a year. The 20% of overdraft customers with a claim have had to wait years while the Office of Fair Trading has fumbled around in the courts at taxpayers' expense before meekly announcing a 'wait and see' approach to the problem earlier today. No last minute offer of regulation from Gordon there.

Of course, the end of 'negative payment hierarchy' on credit cards is an affordable goodwill gesture for banks. They aren't really in the business of lending money anyway, as the Bank of England found in its February Trends in Lending Report. They're in the business of hoarding it to 'repair their balance sheets' (which largely seems to involve paying bonuses and lobbying for regulatory restraint). By the same token, however, now is not a good time to lose billions in overdraft fee income, regardless of the fact that cash-strapped customers need it more, or that it's a rounding error on the bailout costs to date.

In other words, Gordon Brown is not really committed to ensuring fairness, even when there's a General Election on the line.

Dear Gordon

Thank you for my tax code for 2010-11. May I say how delightful it is - nay, what an honour and a privilege it is - to be given the opportunity to donate further to your profligate public expenditure programme. With any luck, some of my money might even go towards your last personal expenses claim!

Best
SDJ

The Natural Economy - Sustainable Capitalism

In this age of economic and environmental meltdown, it's worth considering what "sustainable capitalism" means to you. And whichever way you plan to vote (if at all) in the next UK general election, Zac Goldsmith's book, The Constant Economy, is worth reading as part of the process.

Goldsmith rightly cites as "an extraordinary statement" Neil Armstrong's belief that 'the important achievement of Apollo was that it demonstrated that man was not forever chained to this planet'. There may be few better examples of man's apparent contempt for his environment than incinerating vast quantities of fossil fuel to escape it. Perhaps this is harsh, but the Apollo missions do seem to mark an acceleration in what we now recognise as a wasteful, exploitative energy binge.

The Constant Economy provides a concise summary of what we've learned since the Apollo years about both the scale of our environmental problems and potential ways to address them. Importantly, Goldsmith calls for greater focus on addressing the root causes, rather than merely some of the causes or the symptoms. A key starting point is actually valuing the various elements of our environment and including that value in our growth and accounting metrics.

I hope I don't do Goldsmith or his book any injustice in listing the gist of most of the policies below. It would be interesting to see them voted upon in much the same way as Power2010 is deliberating over a list of wider policies to develop a Top 5.

1. Tax pollution, waste and the use of scarce resources - inappropriate or polluting agriculture should not be subsidised;

2. Promote more direct democracy - ballot initiatives, referenda and recall initiatives;

3. New food technology (like GM) should not be able to be released without proof they do no harm;

4. The public sector should buy sustainable, local produce;

5. Food growing should be part of the school curriculum;

6. Agricultural subsidies should reward farmers for land management that benefits society, but is unrewarded by the market;

7. Planning policy should favour walkable town centres and maintaining the viability of independent shops;

8. There should be a stronger code of practice for supermarkets with more than 8% market share;

9. There should be less prescription and red tape for primary producers who meet quality standards;

10. Nations (particularly EU member states) should be able to insist that imported food meets the same standards as locally produced food;

11. Antibiotics should only be used to treat sick animals, rather than boost meet yields;

12. We should identify and promote GM-free produce/regions;

13. We should create more marine protected areas to aid re-generation of fish stocks;

14. We should ban the use of destructive fishing methods;

15. We should limit industrial fishing catches;

16. There should be higher standards for fish farms;

17. We must establish the truth about oil reserves, and extraction costs vs price;

18. We should require power generation to occur closer to where it is needed, and facilitate community-level generating capacity; appropriate micro-generators should be a permitted development, rather than require planning permission;

19. There should be a "feed-in tariff" to ensure the export price of sustainably-generated electricity stimulates investment in the alternative methods;

20. We should encourage the formation of renewable energy investment funds;

21. Reduce subsidies for fossil fuels in favour of renewable energy;

22. Invest in high speed rail and hold off on airport expansion;

23. Make green cars cheaper;

24. Encourage only biofuels that generate a net carbon saving, are not generated at the expense of valauble habitat or at the expense of food production or security;

25. Transport policy should favour cycling, buses and a school bus system;

26. Promote technology that reduces travel;

27. Protect the greenelt and gardens;

28. Ban building on floodplains;

29. Fill the million empty UK homes;

30. Incentivise building in the right place - improving an existing building should be VAT-exempt;

31. Subsidise energy-efficient homes, including smart-meters and water efficiency;

32. Create building standards to replace prescriptive regulation about how to build;

33. Taxes, subsidies and public procurement should promote a zero-waste economy - take-back rights for appliances, paid recycling, reduce landfill, recycle building material, promote long-life goods/buildings, combined heat and power systems;

34. We should contribute to a forest fund to support conservation by countries with forests;

35. Buy sustainable timber, starting with the government;

36. Implement carbon pricing.

Which 5 Policies Should Be The Power 2010 Pledge?

Vote now for which 5 policies that will form the Power 2010 Pledge.

I voted for:

1. a fully elected upper house;

2. fixed term Parliament;

3. proportional voting, not first past the post;

4. hold elections on the weekends, not Thursdays;

5. caps on political donations;

6. MPs to control the Parliamentary timetable, not the government;

7. the right to vote to recall your MP if he/she is doing a poor job;

8. a ban for a reasonable period of time on MPs taking a job directly related to their work in Parliament;

9. reduce the use of statutory instruments to avoid Parliamentary debate;

10. more 'free votes' in the Commons, rather than voting along party lines;

11. stronger Parliamentary select committees to scrutinise government activity (or lack of it);

12. public consultation should involve a deliberative step involving members of the public;

13. local mayors elected by local residents, not councillors;

14. scrap the ID card programme.

The Great Aussie Firewall - The Game

The Guardian reports on the latest response to the Australian government's efforts to control the internet.

Will The Eye Tweet?

As the Trafigura saga demonstrated, Private Eye is a good source of news items that resonate with the Twittersphere. I'm an occasional reader of the Eye, but begin to lose the will to live after consuming exposé after exposé of profligacy, greed, corruption, stupidity and otherwise shameful behaviour - albeit leavened by excellent cartoons and some very funny columns.

But if the Eye would only drip-feed choice pieces into Twitter, I fancy it would attract a lot of new online subscribers and achieve plenty of productive change at the same time.

No doubt, I am committing some howling error in the minds of the Eye's intelligentsia, but I don't care. Perhaps the Eye's cynicism prevents it from recognising a real opportunity? It would be interesting to know the rationale for why the Eye won't tweet.

PS: 20 Oct. Private Eye now tweets! twitter.com/privateeyenews

Britain: No Pain, No Gain

Here are my takeaways from the Spectator Business breakfast debate, sponsored by DLA Piper in the City this morning. The issue was whether political paralysis is the major obstacle to economic recovery. The speakers were MPs Vince Cable, Frank Field and Philip Hammond, along with Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator, and financial columnist Neil Collins. Martin Vander Weyer, editor of Spectator Business, was in the chair.

The politicians concede there is a £90bn structural deficit, that is currently driving unsustainably high public borrowing. They agree a clear mandate is required at the next election if the new government is to be able to administer the 'tough medicine' required to reduce or eliminate that deficit. Technically, they disagree on the detail of how and when to disconnect the economic life support systems currently in place (quantitative easing etc). However, they say little of this is actually 'discretionary stimulus', so their debate doesn't really amount to much. Most of the stimulus is the result of monetary policy that is out of their control and is being well-handled by the experts, even if no one is sure how beneficial it will turn out to have been. However, concern remains that not enough of the stimulus is resulting in finance for solvent borrowers.

Households are in no position to absorb much pain in the short term, due to the £1.4 trillion consumer debt mountain. That would seem to rule out a return to the 'bleak and blunt' Thatcher budgets of the early '80s. So it appears we're in for a long period of monetary and fiscal responsibility. In fact, there will be an 'Office of Fiscal Responsibility', to put an end to the farcical gamesmanship around growth and other fiscal estimates at budget time.

Politically, shrinking the structural deficit will require policies that demonstrate everyone is 'sharing the pain'. Realistically, even the Tories have only found £3bn in potential cuts, so higher taxes are a certainty. The Tories say the 50p top tax rate will be a temporary measure that may not raise enough taxes to make a difference, but will show the 'rich' are sharing the pain - in the same way MPs are being told to repay whatever the Legg inquiry finds they owe, even if they disagree with the reasoning. All agreed that the electorate will not accept much pain while there's a perception that big bonuses are being awarded in the City (or the pubic sector retains generous pension entitlements).

The financial regulatory framework will be restructured, probably to ensure that riskier wholesale banking activities require so much reserve capital as to make them either prohibitive or at least sufficiently low risk for the taxpayer. It's suggested that the protectionist elements of the current EC attempts to regulate hedge funds etc will be successfully resisted by UK MEPs, making it 'irrational', or at least premature, for any funds to leave the UK/EU... good luck with that.

Public sector pensions are going to be cut. Heathrow won't be expanded, and there's a big issue about how the delivery of Britain's energy needs can/will be funded.

While the election provides an opportunity for change, its timing is delaying political focus and agreement on the detail of how to reduce the structural deficit and balance the competing economic and social interests. However, the paralysis goes well beyond the politicians to financial and economic experts and the media.

Against this backdrop, there is concern that confidence in the British economy amongst the investment community may evaporate.

Without real agitation by individual voters, I doubt we will see any real economic detail from the politicians until some time after the general election. Even then, any detail we're given prior to the election will be subject to change after it.

I created the word-cloud of this post at Wordle.

Those Squealing MPs Are Back!

Isn't it reassuring to see the piggies back from yet more holiday, fighting every effort to have their snouts hauled out of the trough?

My personal favourite is the one squealing about 'subjective judgements' in the legal review of her own expense claims, but not the subjective judgements made in how she actually filed them. As a chief architect of the Nanny State she should've known better. Experience how subjectively angry this makes you feel, by staring at the defiant face below for 30 seconds. Then exercise your own subjective judgement at Power 2010.

Gordo Got You Down? Try Power 2010!

If you aren't thoroughly disillusioned with UK politics and hell-bent on doing something about it, I don't know how much more mayhem it will take.

The good news is that even Gordon Brown admits he has to unwind his vast public sector binge of the past twelve years. The chips are really down.

But as the great HST himself said, "when the going gets tough, the weird turn pro".

So now is the time to ensure we get to keep and invest in what's important.

Enter Power 2010, a campaign chaired by Helena Kennedy and funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust.

Like MySociety, Power 2010 uses the internet to enable you to share your thoughts in a way that politicians cannot ignore without being called to public account. It doesn't matter whether Parliament is sitting or not. The internet is always on, 24-hours of disinfecting sunlight shining into the Westminster pit.

So please share your ideas now, at http://www.power2010.org.uk/page/s/yourideas.

Web Filters To Block All Australian Content

The United Nations Safe Internet Committee (UNSIC) announced on Thursday that its web filters would no longer accept any Australian content. A spokesman explained: "The Australian government warned us that it has lost control of Internet content, and we should not accept any further Internet content from its servers until the problem is resolved."

When asked for the Australian government's response to those who believed in an open, neutral Internet, the UNSIC spokesman added, "Talk to the hand".

Posted via email from Pragmatist's Posterous

How To Find An Extra £8bn - Fast!

They've been desperately downing the Kool Aid in Downing Street, those who are left. No more polite chat while queuing for the tea urn during cabinet meetings, cup and saucer in hand. Now they're swarming around it at each serving, ripping the lid off and plunging their cups in.

And while we are highly amused by Gordo's ghastly predicament, we are no longer to be distracted from his latest, clunking sleight of hand.

The TaxPayers' Alliance has all the gory details, but at the heart of the matter is the fact that the UK will now officially have two sets of books, as the FT faithfully reported in mid-May while we were still goggle-eyed by certain accounting matters of a more personal nature.

One set of books will be produced under international financial reporting standards to fulfil the Treasury's "promise" to record PFI projects against government's capital expenditure totals; and another will be prepared under European standards, which doesn't bake in the cost of PFI.

I do not need to point out which set of books the Treasury uses for budgetary purposes... Nor do I need to remind you that even the off balance sheet deals are getting bailed out with taxpayer's money.

So, for a start, 60% of PFI projects will remain off balance sheet. But that's not all:

Nick Prior, head of government and infrastructure at the consultants Deloitte, said: "This clarification is extremely welcome for the future of PFI and PPPs. Government departments should now be able to bring forward projects that have been delayed because of uncertainty over budgetary arrangements."

That's £8bn worth of "uncertainty" to me and you, but not even a line item for Darling, if and when he gets up on his hind legs to deliver the next budget.

Let's hope MPs don't forget to mention the fact...