A Big Thank You

Just a quick post to say a big thank you to Conrad Molden who painstakingly designed the new blog image for me.

How to create your very own storm in a teacup

This is a piece I wrote in around November last year about the way papers use figures to create an impression that is not necessarily correct. I love this kind of analysis of tabloid stories, before believing these financial stories they should be subjected to this kind of scrutiny. The additional research took me 15 minutes on my laptop and a calculator.

The tricks of the trade revealed!

You will need:

• One pithy headline along the lines of: ‘NHS waste slashers waste £1m on treats’; ‘£5k on puddle piddle’; or something pithier like ‘You Wasters’ (Sun 11/10/10).
• One set of numbers along the lines of: (insert interchangeable public body) spent x on y in just z months! (The exclamation mark is crucial).
• One explanation as to why aforesaid interchangeable public body is full of thieving bureaucrat bastards who should be sacked for squandering our hard-earned tax money on y.
• One hack journalist to put all this bile together (easy really isn’t it).

This is the oldest tabloid ploy in the book and one that has been used ad infinitum recently by the press; stories about government profligacy sell almost as many papers as Jordan’s new boob job. What the papers are relying on here is people’s general inability to conceive of relative levels of finance. The hope is the readers’ thoughts will run thusly: ‘£5k is a lot of money to me, therefore an organisation spending this much money on something in which I do not immediately perceive merit must be a waste’. What this doesn’t take into account is the overall budget of the Quango/council/space program in question and much of this scandal mongering would simply fall apart if subjected to closer scrutiny. Take for example the accusation that the ‘NHS waste slashers waste £1m on treats’ referring to the Commissioning Support for London body (CSL). In fact the receptions and conferences decried in the article were necessary spending. The article in question provides an example of a delegation of health department officials visiting from Singapore, for ‘exchange of information’. The Singapore health service is being used as a model by the government for NHS reform. Furthermore, the £1m should be considered in the context of a total budget of £28,856,000. It accounts for 3.24 per cent of its overall budget, small fries really.

Next, to the claim in the same article that the NHS spent £274m on ‘spin doctors’ (the non-tabloid translation of this is Management Consultant, and the raison d’etre of these people is potentially explained by exactly this kind of nasty article about the NHS). This may or may not be money well spent but the annual budget of the NHS for 2009/10 was £110bn making this expenditure 0.24 per cent of the annual budget; perhaps too high, but hardly scandalous. And finally, on to my favourite of the lot: the photograph of the puddle. There is no cryptic wordplay involved here, it is, as the saying goes, what it says on the tin: a very artistic picture of a puddle. The photograph of the puddle cost £5,000 of a total budget for The Government Art Collection of £551,000; a ratio of 0.9 to the body’s total budget. This is my favourite because of the dismissive ‘well this is crap’ attitude on which the piece relies. The phrase ‘one man’s junk…’ springs to mind. Characterising all of this as frivolous spending is what the tabloids, particularly the Sun, from which all of these examples are taken, make their money on. To return to my initial argument about merit perception this is an exquisite case of this kind of subjective mentality at work. The photograph of the puddle may or may not represent the work of a tortured soul destined to be the next Andy Warhol; however, what does the Sun intend that the Government Arts Collection agency do if not purchase art? Even if this is an unnecessary government department it has to carry out its function.

I hope this article has shown, as it was intended to, that thought, and a little number-crunching, can reduce this kind of ridiculous article to its dubious component parts. What may on the surface seem like a pointless spending choice can often on closer inspection prove to be a necessary function of a public sector body. Hospitality and conference events allow bodies to network and in the case of the CSL (above) they allowed the body to conduct important research into different healthcare models, allowing the execution of the primary function of the agency. This is not then, wasteful spending. As for the other examples, perhaps these are not the best examples of government spending, but context is everything. As a fraction of total spending these units are not the luxuries they might appear to be. The reliance on a narrow inability to see the difference between average household expenditure and the budget of a government agency is what makes these stories work. There is a reason why none of these articles reveal the percentage of overall expenditure for which the items accounted: it is not a very impressive statistic.

Why Voter Memory Might Do It For Labour

Pollsters are obsessed with age and how it affects voting patterns. Trite observations about age and conservatism are common. So is it true that the way we vote changes in our golden years changes? I don't think so, and here is why. As has been pointed out in Andrew Neill's recent program Posh and Posher Britons used to vote based on deference. Public school educated, plummy types did well because of an innate respect people had for them. Since the 60s all that has changed. People are no longer so deferential, and very few people accept that they have 'social betters' at all. Instead voter memory is the way we should be thinking about future intentions. The over 40s remember the three-day week and the election of Mrs Thatcher. They also remember Labour's disastrous manifesto of 1983, and the Sun headline asking the last person leaving Britain to turn off the lights if Neil Kinnock won the general election. This age group votes in much greater numbers for the Conservatives than Labour. A very different story prevails among the under 35s. This group remembers the tail end of the last Tory government, Black Wednesday, and the Labour landslide of 1997.  More importantly, under 35s remember the years of prosperity under New Labour. The next vivid memory of this age group will be spending cuts and higher taxation; under 21s particularly will have this particular memory of the coalition. Polling on who is to blame for the cuts increasingly suggests that the narrative that they are Labour's (or the banks') fault is wearing thin and the public blames the coalition.

Cameron's narrative of the election was of spendthrift Labour who were in thrall to bureaucrats at local councils and quangos. This doesn't really tally with voters' experiences of 1997-2010 and may be one possible reason for the lack of a conclusive Conservative victory. The detoxification of Labour's brand under Tony Blair may be another. The Conservatives still have a long way to go on this front, but Labour, who have gained the image of a party who are genuinely able to govern, may benefit greatly from voters' positive memory of their time in power. Despite the move to distance the party from New Labour under Ed Miliband, voters do take Labour seriously as a party of government: this may be the greatest legacy the party has been left by Blair and Brown. Conventional wisdom holds that voters' memories are short, this is false. They are selective, not short. However, people will remember when times were good and when times were bad. If Labour wins a few key strategic victories in the next two years, in the way Thatcher did before 1979, then it could entrench its image as a safe governing party in a way it has never been seen before.

First Shadow Out of the Cabinet

And it really is a shadow...
The much written about exposure of Andy Gray and Richard Keys as sexist broke last week, and has been condemned so widely that I'm not going to bother to add my voice to the clamour. But scouting around the internet produced interesting responses to this story. Lots of men responded to this story with a kind of perverse logic which seems to have gained traction in recent years: 'Men may be sexist, but women are sexist too, which means they have no right to complain'. This is first and foremost a gross misrepresentation. Female culture (although this sort of generalising should really be avoided) does not have any sort of inherently anti-male strain in the way male football-orientated culture does. One only has to watch the utterly moronic Soccer AM to see the truth of this. Women are much less likely to talk in a derogatory manner about men than vice versa.

One comment I saw argued that Gray and Keys did nothing wrong because advertising is sexist against males! This is quite obviously bonkers. Reducing an argument like this one to its core components runs something like this: 'while sexism against females is wrong so is sexism against males, so rather than attempting to stop either kind of prejudice we should merely accept the 'status quo' and continue to allow women to be leered at and men portrayed as slobs in adverts'. As we are all taught at a young age: two wrongs make a right! We definitely should not allow people to take the easy way out, characterising oneself as a victim in order to maintain the status quo is cowardly. If sexism against women is wrong then it is right that sexism against men should also be acknowledged as wrong too. However, clearly women suffer more at the hands of gender prejudice. Attempting to rationalise men as being victims too just undermines the seriousness of sexism as a social problem.

Welcome

Hello and welcome to 'The Shadow Cabinet', a Labour blog which will begin posting in the next few days. After 13 years in power, an election loss, a change of leadership in the Labour Party, and the entrance of the Lib Dems into a centre right coalition, the left is looking a bit rudderless. Lots of opposition and not much proposition. The purpose of this blog will be to analyse major political stories and try and come up with some new ideas on how to brand the left's anti-coalition message.