Hang on. Word has got to me that David I-went-to-Eton-but-I’m-not-a-toff Cameron has decided his government needs to prioritise tackling benefit fraud. But guess what? Tax evasion costs the Treasury fifteen times more:
At £30 billion per year, fraud in the UK is more than twice as high as thought, with tax evasion costing the public purse over £15 billion per year and benefit fraud just over £1 billion.
Based predominantly on 2008 data, the National Fraud Authority’s first ever Annual Fraud Indicator found fraud against the public sector accounts for 58% of the total fraud in the UK per year.
Tax evasion is around 3% of total tax liabilities, while benefit fraud accounts for 0.8% of total benefit expenditure.
Of course this is the Prime Minister who insists that the ‘savage’ cuts he’s introducing aren’t ideological. Considering they are going to hit the poorest the hardest, it’s quite telling that he should decide not to bother tackling the tax evasion of the rich. Does the Treasury not need their money or is something else going on? Of course the answer is ‘yes’ – he’s learned he needs to abide by the compact John Kampfner details in his book ‘Freedom for Sale’ – do what you like, just don’t piss off the middle classes. They’ll tolerate all sorts of nonsense as long as it doesn’t affect them directly – Blair/Brown knew this in their authoritarian project, and Cameron’s applying just their logic to his own project:
We’re looking at every option – including tougher penalties for fraud, taking more people to court and more encouragement for people who know fraud is taking place to come forward.
But second, I also want modern technology focused on stopping these people.
That means more debt retrieval, more information sharing and more use of things such as credit referencing agencies to identify cases where circumstances just don’t match the claim being made.
There are, quite rightly, rules about data protection, but that doesn’t mean putting up with fraud.
Banks and utility companies use available data to check whether people are being honest about their circumstances.
Government should do the same. We owe it to you as taxpayers to make more use of this technology to protect your hard-earned money from fraudsters.
The companies will check details of benefits payments against records of household spending to identify people suspected of fiddling the system. Investigators could receive a “bounty” for everyone they catch as the Government attempts to claw back the £1.5bn lost each year to benefit fraudsters.
In the face of protests, Mr Cameron insisted honest people had nothing to fear from the proposed tactics.
If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear? Now where have I heard that line before?
“We’re not going to repeal it,” the new UK government’s Conservative culture secretary Jeremy Hunt told paidContent:UK.
Instead, the administration will wait to see how the act’s measures perform and, if alterations or something more is needed, take action later, Hunt said.
That means the graduated-response anti-piracy action – which would level education or warning letters against freeloading ISP customers, leading to possible account suspension – will remain in place, along with all the bill’s other measures (see our recent quick-hit guide).
But the proposal for blocking sites containing infringing material was never part of the act, it was part of a separate parliamentary process instituted by Labour in the previous government’s dying days; so it is unlikely to see light of day.
The section of the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government’s detailed joint plans about media contains no reference to the Digital Economy Act.
Opposition to the act during its bill stage was vociferous from some online quarters, and the campaign is still going even though the act is law. Some party members of the coalition Liberal Democrats appear to still favour repeal.
But many sections of the media and cultural creation industry will welcome the retention of measures that seek to protect their intellectual property.
It’s a painful reminder that the coalition won’t speak with one consistent voice – Clegg may be pushing civil liberties and rollback of the surveillance state, but he’s still in coalition with the Conservative Party. The Deputy PM may have insisted on repeal of the Act before the election, but it does appear to be something he’s traded off in the coalition agreement. It’s a good lesson that we must all vote for whom we want at election time, but must then get involved in civil society pressure groups in order for what we voted for actually to get implemented. Sadly it also suggests that the coalition’s claims to want to roll back state intrusion aren’t quite as total as they want us to believe.
Geoffrey Robertson asks whether new Home Secretary Theresa May (and indeed new Deputy PM Clegg) will see reason on Gary McKinnon’s behalf, following her party’s and the Lib Dems’ long opposition to his extradition:
The first acid test for Britain’s new government is not the economy, but whether it is capable of an act of simple humanity. Can Theresa May deliver on the repeated promise of Tory and Lib Dem leaders to end the torment inflicted by the state on Gary McKinnon, the hacker with Asperger’s syndrome, whom the Home Office wants to send to lengthy imprisonment and likely suicide in a US jail? His courtroom cruelty is scheduled to begin again on 24 May: the time has come to end it, once and for all.
So, over to May, then. Her main difficulty will be to override her Home Office advisers, who have for years fought an unremitting, expensive and merciless battle against this poor man and his indomitable mother. They will, perhaps, tell their minister that if she reverses the Smith-Johnson decision, the Americans might take her to court for judicial review. But this is unrealistic: the Obama administration is unlikely to challenge a decision of the new British government. And even if it does, it is unlikely to be successful. And even if that happens, parliament is sovereign and can sweep away any adverse court decision simply by passing the Gary McKinnon (Freedom from Extradition) Act (2010).
Of course the truth is even simpler than that. Alan Johnson admitted that he did have the power to stop McKinnon’s extradition – he was just loath to use it for fear of setting an unwelcome precedent. Theresa May has an enormous task on her hands, not just to prove to a sceptical public about her suitability to be Equalities Minister, but to prove that she’s less of a hostage to the (as Robertson puts it) ‘uncivil servants’ in her department than her immediate two (if not four) predecessors. If this coalition is to mean anything, if its civil liberties agenda is going to have any believability whatsoever then at the very least Gary McKinnon’s extradition should be halted. Given that what evidence there is wouldn’t stand up in court (and none is needed to extradite him to the US) no further action should probably be taken against him.
I’ve been wondering for a few days what the real, unique selling point of getting into coalition with Clegg was for Cameron. Was it out of weakness, given the right was calling for his head, after he failed to pull off a majority in the Commons? Was it because he could decapitate them after sharing the blame for the upcoming budget cuts? My personal opinion seems to be shared by a number of Tories, and is cross-posted from conservativehome:
“Cameron is deliberately using the alliance with the Liberal Democrats to reduce the power of the Conservative Right”
I’ve already published two sets of findings from the ConservativeHome Members’ Panel:
The third is something Cameron needs to nip in the bud:
I’d disagree that it’s something he needs to nip in the bud. It’s entirely possible that Cameron has acknowledged that a significantly right wing Tory Party still can’t win a general election outright in the UK. By going into coalition he can sideline his right wing nutjobs and tack towards the centre. Obviously that poses significant dangers for him, but pulling any sort of success off with the coalition may very well yet be his ‘Clause 4′ moment – the point at which he stared down the elements in his party who had prevented it from becoming electable in its own right. If Cameron has used the coalition to ‘seal the deal’ with his party (which he had blatantly not done going into the election), then it poses severe challenges for the incoming new Labour leader, be it a Miliband or a Cruddas. I’d be very interested in seeing what a Tory leader not in hock to the most extreme elements of their party could end up doing.
Of course we didn’t, but of course we can’t vote for a coalition – you can only ever vote for the one party you’d most like to represent you in parliament. So why the vicious diatribes are continuing is a complete mystery to me – we got the result we voted for, regardless of actual intent. But commentators are disagreeing, suggesting that the ConDemNation coalition is illegitimate and not reflective of the will of the people. From Johann Hari:
Elections are supposed to be an opportunity for the people to express the direction in which they want the country to travel. By that standard, this result is an insult. Don’t fall for the people who say the Lib Dem vote was “ambiguous”: a YouGov poll just before the election found that Lib Dem voters identified as “left-wing” over “right-wing” by a ratio of 4:1. Only 9 per cent sided with the right. Lib Dem voters wanted to stop Cameron, not install him. So before you start squabbling about the extremely difficult parliamentary arithmetic, or blaming the stupidly tribal Labour negotiators for their talks with the Lib Dems breaking down, you have to concede: the British people have not got what they voted for.
Clegg has betrayed progressives across the length and breadth of Britain. He had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to repair the century-old rift on the centre left and forge a radical and progressive alliance in favour of electoral and constitutional reform. I suspect Labour will now sit on its hands in any future referendum and the Lib Dems might be on their own campaiging for a “Yes” vote. Their new partners in government have already stated their plans to oppose any change to our dysfunctional first-past-the-post system.
Clegg has also betrayed the longer-term strategic interests of his party for crude and short-term tactical gains.
What neither of them calculates however is what the likely effects of forcing the Tories into a short-lived minority administration would have been. Getting blamed as the party which refused to underpin ‘strong and stable government’ would have been an appalling (and probably disastrous) moniker to enter an October election with, which remember the Tories could easily have fought and the Lib Dems not. It’s all well and good to decry the loss of a mythical ‘progressive alliance’ with Labour but a) that coalition would have been an unstable, minority alliance and b) has collective amnesia suddenly struck about Labour’s 13 year record? ID cards, abuse of the National DNA Database, attempts to lock people up without charge for 45 and 90 days, interference in inquests and the right to jury trial, destitution of asylum seekers and the detention of their children, the Digital Economy Act, Section 44 of the Terrorism Act, denying the vote to prisoners, the Iraq War, RIPA and SOCPA legislation – were ANY of these pieces of legislation and invasions of privacy, breaches of civil liberties and human rights ‘progressive’? I think not. Why Hasan, Hari and others ignore these points is a complete mystery to me.
I don’t like the Tories in Number 10 - I really don’t. But we have a Great Repeal Bill on offer, which is likely to include some, if not all, of Deputy PM Clegg’s Freedom Bill, and indeed have seen initial successes such as the end of ID cards and the National Identity Register, not to mention the end of detention of refugees’ children. Is it entirely likely that early, and ‘savage’ budget cuts will cause serious social and economic disruption over the next 12 months? Yes, and the Lib Dems might well damage themselves beyond repair by being directly associated with them, but given that Labour rebuffed their advances to attempt a coalition with them, I don’t know why there’s so much sniping at a party which at long last finds itself to enact large swathes of its platform. It was the best out of a bad set of choices. How on earth is that a betrayal?
So Brown has finally done the honourable thing and offered his resignation as a price for coalition with the Liberal Democrats. He’s offered an immediate switch to AV via legislation, and a later referendum on STV. So shouldn’t the Lib Dems join him in a minority coalition? Erm no.
How can the Lib Dems possible ally themselves with the party which unrepentently ushered in our surveillance state? Right through to last week they were crowing about just how authoritarian they needed to be, ironically for a country they insisted wasn’t ‘broken’. Could Clegg work with Alan Johnson, who is still defying the European Court of Human Rights on his department’s abuse of the National DNA Database? And what about the Home Office’s defiance of the Court on prisoners’ voting rights? Could Clegg work with Prime Minister David Miliband, who is still defending the government’s right to torture, and trying to prevent us knowing about it? Could New Labour ever walk away from ID cards, given that its ID strategy for the 21st century depends entirely on them and the real problem – the identity register?
Would a New Labour/Liberal Democrat coalition repeal New Labour’s Digital Economy Act? Would they shut down the Independent Safeguarding Authority? How on earth could New Labour ever agree to any aspect of the Freedom Bill whatsoever? Given that there are no moves visible (yet?) showing the demise of New Labour, how could this coalition be better than one with the Tories? Don’t say have it be led by Nick Clegg because that’s just not going to happen, despite his popularity. Unless New Labour dies or the Tories offer AV+ for the Commons at the very least, I can’t see a coalition of any kind working, at least not without destroying the Lib Dems. Brown’s manoeuvre was super, no doubt timed by Alistair Campbell and Peter Mandelson, but he really must not be the only stumbling block to working with the Labour Party.
Word has it that the Tories will try to declare themselves the winners even if they fail to win a majority in the general election tomorrow. The Constitution however has something else to say about that:
Despite the claims of certain media commentators and aggrieved Conservative politicians at the weekend, there has been no “new rule” dreamt up in the Cabinet Office for the event of a hung parliament. The constitutional position has long been clear: if no party secures an overall majority then Gordon Brown, as the incumbent prime minister, has the constitutional right to remain in office to try to form a government.
Constitutionally, a PM cannot be forced to resign because the opposition believes it has a better mandate to govern. But in practice, whether the PM stays in office and tries to form a government is dependent on the political circumstances in which he finds himself.
Britain’s system is unusual in that the prime minister does not have to resign if his party fails to secure a majority. Until a deal is done he would serve as a caretaker premier, whose powers and authority are limited by the rules governing electoral “purdah”. The constitutional conventions and precedents are designed to provide continuity – to ensure that at no time is the sovereign without a government.
The basic principle is that the government must command the confidence of the Commons. That is not the same as securing an outright majority – merely that no combination of parties can form a majority against it. If the incumbent PM has the confidence of the Commons then he can continue in office.
And this I suspect will be what comes into play on Friday. I still believe that Cameron will command the largest party in the Commons, but will fail to win a majority. I also think Brown and Labour will try to find a solution immediately to keep the Tories out. I’m not convinced they’ll find it – partly because Brown is an unpalatable partner for the Lib Dems (Clegg is known to hate him), partly because it seems highly unlikely that New Labour will agree to dismantle its aggressive, torture-supporting authoritarian state, just because its preferred coalition partner wants it that way. Would David Miliband really be a break from old politics? What about Alan Johnson?
The pressure on Brown from the Murdoch/Mail Axis of Evil will be merciless, the political pressure from the Tories themselves possibly much greater, and the will of the people thoroughly subverted. Cameron will do what it takes to run a minority administration, which through trampling on the Constitution and ignoring electoral reform, will within a short span of time destroy itself. Cameron and the unreconstructed Tories are on the wrong side of history.
Note how Hague answers a different question to the one answered. He suggests that Philippa Stroud hasn’t been suspended as Sutton & Cheam’s Tory PPC because isn’t in favour of discrimination against gay people, yet that wasn’t what was asked, nor is that what the controversy around her centres around:
Question: “If Philip Lardner, Conservative candidate for North Ayrshire & Arran was suspended after writing on his website that homosexuality was ‘not normal’, why hasn’t Philippa Stroud been suspended – she clearly thinks the same thing?”
Hague: “Well I hope she doesn’t think the same thing and she’s made the statement that I referred to yesterday about her current views, and about the suggestion that she is in favour of discrimination against gay people would be false. I think she has put that right.”
He clearly wants this story to go away, but what if this story is true? Don’t anyone let this drop. Religious extremism, despite what Hague wants you to think, is not the same as straightforward bigotry – it’s far more insidious, and at the heart of a new Tory government it would make the Thatcher years feel like a walk in the park.
Philippa Stroud is the Conservative Party candidate for Sutton and Cheam. She’s also the head of the Tories’ Centre for Social Justice, which guides the party’s thinking on social policies, and for this election its mania about the ‘family’. According to The Observer, Philippa Stroud is also the founder of an evangelical church which tries to ‘cure’ people of being gay:
Abi, a teenage girl with transsexual issues, was sent to the church by her parents, who were evangelical Christians. “Convinced I was demonically possessed, my parents made the decision to move to Bedford, because of this woman [Stroud] who had come back from Hong Kong and had the power to set me free,” Abi toldthe Observer.
“She wanted me to know all my thinking was wrong, I was wrong and the so-called demons inside me were wrong. The session ended with her and others praying over me, calling out the demons. She really believed things like homosexuality, transsexualism and addiction could be fixed just by prayer, all in the name of Jesus.”
Is this the party you want in government? One whose social policy thinktank is headed by someone who thinks this is ok? I mean why not just make a manifesto commitment to witchcraft? If David Cameron becomes Prime Minister on Friday, her views will be heard and acknowledged at governmental level. Would Section 28 just have been the tip of the iceberg for this thoroughly unreconstructed, nasty party?
And for that matter why hasn’t anyone interviewed her about this yet? And then there’s David Cameron, who professes to support gay rights, yet sees no problem with his MEPs voting against them. Last week homophobic Tory candidate Philip Lardner was suspended for his extreme, anti-gay views, yet Ms Stroud is allowed to continue as a PPC – could it be that ‘Dave’s’ support of gay rights goes only as far as his self-interest will allow?
Those of you so far entirely unimpressed with David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ general election meme (basically subcontracting the responsibilities of public services provision from the state down to the individual to save money and, well, the bother), this is for you:
Cameron says he is demanding spending cuts not because he has a theological belief in a small state, but because they are necessary to pay off the deficit – but this claim is undermined by the fact that he wants to strip funding from state programmes that actually save us money. Look for example at SureStart, the network of 3,000 children’s centres across Britain built under the current government. They are based on a fascinating series of discoveries. It has been proven that most poor children fall behind in language skills and stimulation long before they ever walk through the school gates – and they never catch up. The first few years of life are crucial for the formation of a child’s mental abilities. Get them early and give them intensive encouragement, with expert advice for their parents, and you can change their life.
This isn’t speculation. In 1964, they launched the first SureStart-style project in Michigan – and Dr Lawrence Schweinhart and a team of academics has been monitoring the kids ever since. Did it work? Well, they were 50 per cent less likely to become teenage mothers than their siblings who weren’t put in the programme, and by the time they were 40, they were 46 per cent less likely to have been to prison and 26 per cent less likely to be on welfare. Their incomes were 42 per cent higher. So for every £1 you spend on it, you save the state £7 further down the line. Yet Cameron, on becoming Tory leader, dismissed SureStart as “a microcosm of government failure”. Now he says he will keep it in some form, but already he says huge chunks of its budget will go to other things, and few expect it to survive long. If he can’t keep the single best policy for reducing inequality – one that costs less than nothing in the medium term – what shreds of progress can survive his rule?
Could an argument like this have played in last night’s leaders debate? Surely not – last night was about points scoring and sloganeering. But this is the type of inevitable outcome from Cameron’s policies if the Tories get into power. Granted Labour’s done very badly at joined-up thinking, let alone joined-up government, but this would be an absolute nightmare. He claims to be opposed to the increased gap between rich and poor which started on the Tories watch (haha), and accelerated under Labour’s – why then offer policies which will keep the process accelerating yet further? And for that matter why vote for them?
The popular press would have you believe it, but then again they have an agenda. Look deeper and look at what needs to happen next week more thoughtfully and you get a different outcome. From the Economist:
Our latest poll, conducted by Angus Reid Public Opinion, a Canadian pollster, suggests that there is still plenty to play for. It puts the Conservatives in first place among those certain to vote with 33%, followed by the Liberal Democrats on 30%, Labour on 23% and other parties on 14% (see chart, and for full details see here). After pondering the specific swing in marginal seats, the pollster reckons these results would leave the Tories the largest party, with 294 seats, but 32 short of a majority. Labour would have 174 seats, and the Lib Dems 150.
The poll confirms Mr Clegg’s commanding personal lead over his rivals.
And that’s all you need to know. Was Clegg ever likely to get the largest number of seats from his position in this first-past-the-post system? Absolutely not. But if Clegg really gets anywhere near 150 seats he’ll have done far more than he set out to do, and get proportional representation onto the top of the political agenda. I don’t doubt for a moment still that Cameron will press right ahead and form a minority Tory administration, but in rejecting PR (which he’ll do, and there’s no way the Liberal Democrat Party would ever allow Clegg to join in a coalition with him) he’ll ultimately destroy himself and govern with no popular mandate, at just the wrong time in history. The electorate remains incandescent with rage about the expenses scandal, still feels betrayed by a New Labour government which delivered far less than it promised, and hates politics and politicians with a passion. Calling Cameron the winner last night is meaningless, when the sentiment which Clegg tapped into three weeks ago is still very much in play, and still demands satisfaction.
David Cameron said it was irresponsible to scaremonger in this general election campaign. His hypocrisy knows no bounds:
The Tories say they’re offering ‘change’, yet they offer this party election broadcast, which implies that if you vote Labour or Lib Dem you might die! I mean what the hell is that noose?! But that’s not the only offensive part of this video. Rather than arguing about other parties’ policies they argue against the possible outcome, but in doing so they completely misrepresent their own responsibilities. ‘Behind closed doors politics’? So the ‘wash up’ was something to be proud of, or we’re supposed to forget that? ‘Indecision and weak government’? Really? I think you’ll find Germany managed to absorb an entire economically failed state, and has managed extremely strong government since 1949. And it’s just preposterous to suggest a hung parliament would kill the economic recovery…
To attack the Labour Party and Lib Dems as offering ‘undemocratic’ politics and dithering, should the Tories not win outright is an incredible slur on the electorate, who’ve expressed a clear dislike for politics as it’s been up until now. They don’t want the Tories’ half measure of being able merely to recall MPs – they want a system which is actually representative of their wishes and their needs. They want a system which is founded on cooperation and compromise rather than confrontation. That really would be an evolutionary step forwards for British politics, rather than just being dominated by the same old corporate interests which got their way with the Digital Economy Act.
They can’t help themselves, can they? After David Cameron’s inability to understand that allowing his MEPs to vote against gay rights, and Chris Grayling’s ‘unintentional offence’ at saying B&B owners should be able to discriminate against gay people, and Julian Lewis attacking an equal age of consent, it’s becoming utterly ludicrous to suggest that the party has shrugged off its ‘nasty’ reputation. It’s even more ludicrous for Cameron to suggest that the Tory Party is the natural home for progressives. Fortunately the Chairman of the Conservative Party in Scotland, Andrew Fulton has suspended Lardner from the party and ended his candidacy:
“The views expressed by Philip Lardner, the candidate for North Ayrshire and Arran, are deeply offensive and unacceptable and as a result he has been suspended as a member of the Conservative party. We therefore do not support Mr Lardner’s candidacy in the North Ayrshire and Arran constituency. These views have no place in the modern Conservative party.”
But as I’ve said before it’s one thing to talk the talk, another to walk the walk. It remains a party full of very nasty people. Should they really be the party of government next Friday?
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