Yes, this is funny. But oh, for fucksake. Put council houses on EBay. I am not kidding. This is the pitifully vacuous snackthinking the mother of parliaments has to offer.

Meanwhile, remember all that tebbly tebbly serious chinstroking about party financing and the difficult position of Labour’s link to the trade unions? Here’s random Twitter guy making total sense.

Lobbying scandal shows once again that union funding of Labour is the cleanest money in politics. Open, transparent and democratic.

— Carl Roper (@RoperCarl) June 2, 2013

Yes. Yes. This point needs to be made much more. It’s money given by normal! citizens! voluntarily! administered by people they elect! to do it, for basically clear and sensible aims! If you’re against this, there is something wrong with you.

Mind you, I’d like to know why Lord Laird seems to have missed a trick in not using the offer of freebies to the South Pacific to recruit people to his pro-South Korean solar industry lobby group. Probably the same reason he missed the opportunity to go by Lord Laird in London and Laird Lord in Belfast.

I already dealt with this on twitter, but I thought I’d hammer home the point.

Mr Bailey, who was paid a salary of £60,000 to advise the Prime Minister on youth, crime and race issues, is the first insider to raise concerns about the elite backgrounds of those in the inner core of No 10.

His appointment after the 2010 general election was lauded as a sign of the inclusive nature of Mr Cameron’s office, a view which took on particular importance after the summer riots of 2011.

However, in January he was moved quietly to the Cabinet Office, becoming the Government’s “youth and engagement champion”. His appointment to the new position was not publicly announced.

Mr Bailey is being paid substantially less for this part-time role — £36,000 a year — and is only on a one-year contract. He does not have his own desk or office, but a source in the Cabinet Office insisted that if he needed a seat he would be “accommodated”. Last night, it was unclear what exactly Mr Bailey’s new role involves.

Note that it’s possible to at once be an adviser on “youth”, “crime”, and “race”, as if there was no distinction between the categories. To be black is to be a criminal; to be young is to be a criminal; to be young is also, syllogistically, to be black. Don’t ask me, ask David Starkey, of course.

This reminds me a bit of a walk I took down the south side of the Thames through Docklands not so long ago. Even the best buildings, it struck me, were characterised by one thing. At eye level, the first thing you see is always a chunk of security hardware, fencing, cameras, locks. It was much observed at the time that paranoia was a big part of the ethos. David Cameron is the most old-fashioned yuppie-ish of prime ministers, and I think you can make a case that he’s still haunted by the prospect of undifferentiated street-arabs massing to knifecrime him.

But then. When we look at our enemies we also see ourselves. I think this post of mine responding to Starkey holds up quite well, in which I argued that hating the young had become a sort of acceptable version of racism, and that some of the disadvantages imposed on them were such that we would immediately recognise them as such if being young was a race.

Perhaps the prime minister does need a new youth, crime, and race adviser, then. The previous incumbent offers us a valuable lesson:

“Shaun believes that the bottom line is that him being of a different class is probably equally, if not more, important than him being black”

But the more important point is that the rest of us need a new prime minister.

A bit more UKIP. There are two groups of people who think the Labour Party should take UKIP seriously: the Blairite former-regime loyalists, and some of the radical Left.

Group one is easy: for them the answer always seems to be nice cuts and flogging immigrants, and what was the question? Further, they were always obsessed by unpopular populism and this is just more of it. And any opportunity is good enough to fight the real enemy, pursuing their grudges inside the party.

Group two, though, is harder: if you wanted to sum up UKIP’s message, wouldn’t it be something like We hate you fucking people? Or as my grandad on my dad’s side would say, well into the 1980s, several times a day: It’s that bloody Harold Wilson! Polling of ‘kippers, famously, showed that they don’t care much about the EU and they’re not libertarians, unlike their leaders. What does stick out seems to be conservatism as an identity, mostly defined by hating anything associated with the Left except perhaps the NHS. In many ways, it’s the symbols, tone, and style that are doing the work, not policy content.

So I don’t really understand why any of the radicals think they can convince them, given that their unifying ideology is basically loathing anyone who might be on the Left. I do have a theory that a lot of people on the Left imagine themselves in the great world-historical struggle against fascism all the time, and this of course requires a regular Hitler-hit. (In that, they are at one with the History Channel Bloke ‘kippers.)

There is a small industry developing in articles about why Labour should take UKIP seriously. Here is one, and now, here is another! I do not think Labour should take UKIP seriously.

Why should they? UKIP voters are basically very like Tories. Nottingham University’s politics blog makes an important point here and here, which is that there is a great deal of overlap between BNP voters, UKIP voters, and Conservative voters. In all, 80% of BNP voters were essentially deciding between the BNP and either UKIP or the Tories. Also, the BNP and UKIP were more like each other than they were like any other party.

Eric Forth MP remarked that there were millions of white, middle-class, bigoted people in Britain and they deserved representation, which he endeavoured to provide. Less excitingly, there is a pool of bigots in the UK that sloshes around between the Conservatives, the BNP, and UKIP. A couple of years ago it had sloshed into the BNP. Now it has sloshed into UKIP.

As a result, I am not at all convinced that there is a substantial Labour-UKIP swing-group, but even if there were, would it actually be worth pursuing? People who think UKIP should be taken seriously think that hypothetical Labour-UKIP swing voters should be offered political goods of some sort or another. The problem here is that the social group most opposed to bigotry is basically the Labour activist base. Swapping activists for a few low-engagement voters, at the expense of real political concessions, seems…unwise.

Further, the notional Labour-UKIP voter is someone who is presumably worried about core Labour issues, like wages and public services and unemployment, but who is also a bigot. For some reason, the answer to this is apparently either to appeal to bigotry, or else try to reason him out of the bigotry. The first is undesirable and costly, and how likely is the second?

Apparently the problem is that this (still very hypothetical) chap is expressing inchoate protest, and it’s a pity he’s doing it via UKIP. But if some of the bigots are protesting about basically Labour things like wages, there is a simple answer to this: ignore the bigotry and address the Labour stuff, which is what we ought to do anyway, and which might actually appeal to a majority of the public. This also avoids arguing in conflict with the party’s message elsewhere.

My advice would be “filter the noise, and concentrate on line and length”. This here is sense.

Now, if there is a party which needs to take UKIP seriously, it’s the Tories. UKIP voters are, as previously noted, very much like Conservative ones, the local elections were predominately held in Conservative country, and so were UKIP’s successors. UKIP and Labour are enemies, but UKIP and Tories are competitors. It’s always possible that the bigot pool will slosh away from UKIP again, but assuming it lasts, the Tories have to choose between trying to out-compete UKIP and trying to co-opt it.

They could compete in two ways – directly and indirectly. Direct competition would be to crank up the bigotry, attack the flaky element, and generally engage the enemy more closely. This would basically mean a core-vote strategy, probably losing people off the left edge of the party as much as it gained on the right.

Indirect competition would be to write off the bigot pool and replace it with centrists, perhaps trying to keep the coalition permanently in being or absorb the Lib Dems. In a sense, I wonder if this has already happened.

Co-opting UKIP would be something like the arrangement between the German CDU and the CSU. The CSU is distinctly more rightwing, differently so, and more bigoted. It doesn’t operate outside Bavaria, and the CDU doesn’t operate in Bavaria, and the two function as a permanent coalition in federal politics. UKIP doesn’t represent a defined region, but perhaps it could represent a defined period in time. Rather than representing people living in Bavaria, it could represent people who are living in the past. There are those who would say the CSU also provides this service. This would permit the Tories to hive off some of the embarrassing ones to UKIP, while keeping their votes on confidence and supply.

That said, CSU pols get to run Bavaria, no trivial job, and also to pick up some reasonably important (but usually not first rate) federal ministries. There is no Bavaria for ‘kippers, so presumably they would need to be offered more meat in government. Otherwise, they might end up being more like the National Party in Australia, not much more than a historical oddity and a glorified farm lobby. Perhaps what they really want is devolution, something they usually rail against?

A pretty good piece comparing the MMR scare with the Reinhart-Rogoff paper. I think there are a couple of interesting points that don’t make the cut, though.

First of all, there’s the power of plot and story, tragedy and comedy.

Anyone, after all, can have an Excel fart, and I doubt you’ll find many people in the biological sciences who haven’t had an embarrassing lab cockup, especially with something as ticklish as PCR analysis 10 years ago.

But Reinhart & Rogoff’s pratfall seems to have carried the idea that there was something wrong with their work, and with austerity economics more generally, far beyond the limits of economics and far beyond what any more considered criticism could achieve. Holtz-Eakin decides he never liked it anyway. US Democratic pols, the ultimate weathervanes, turn Keynesian. It’s a pratfall, a bit of physical comedy, after all. Further, it speaks to the myth of the emperor’s new clothes. The fact it was discovered by an unheralded student and popularised by a relatively obscure blogger only lends punch to this.

Interestingly, the pratfall seems to legitimise more serious criticism, far from distracting anyone from it, like one of those anti-tank shells with two charges, one to trigger the reactive defences, one to penetrate the armour plate. In the same way, the steel scab ripped off the inside of the tank hurtles around inside doing more damage. Why did R&R leave out some of the data points? Why was the weighting scheme so odd? Why didn’t they make any effort to test for reverse causality? Why did they take so long to let anyone else replicate the result? Why was it a mere technical suggestion now, when they repeatedly claimed it was evidence for action this day in the political arena? Why did they avoid ever letting it near a peer-reviewed journal?

Probably the fart will be what is remembered in 10 years’ time, but that’s more than enough.

The MMR scare spread because it engaged a similar dramatic force, which was tragedy. And all that could stop it was farce. It wasn’t Blairite emoting and spin – God knows there was plenty of that to go around – and it sure as hell wasn’t rational reassurance. It’s far better known that Wakefield was enormously conflicted financially, than that he took over his PCR experiment, exquisitely sensitive to contamination, from a student who knew how to do it properly and who never actually detected measles viruses in the samples, and astonishingly enough got the result he was after.

Another point is pretty simple: reverse causality makes fools of better people than you or I, let alone economists. Both Wakefield and R&R were trying to explain phenomena that occur close together in time, and convinced themselves that this implied causality.

And of course, simple patterns fool us all. The idea that triple vaccination was “too much” had that big simple quality of conviction, as well as seeming to resolve the tragedy. Similarly, the idea of individual thrift, that endlessly cited credit card, was good to think with as part of an economic drama in which we all got over the foolish years of hyper-consumerism – perhaps the myth here is the prodigal son?

That said, the Tories have pratfallen enough that the news takes on a faintly sick and pornographic tone. It’s like the oddly huge misshapen kid given to bizarre and violent emotional meltdowns running up to kick the ball…but for some bizarre reason he’s trying to balance a bucket of jelly on his head…while carrying a rusty tentpeg…running Internet Explorer 6…and already sobbing with rage. Nothing good can happen, and it feels unfair to watch, but you fear to look away in case some combination of elbow, peg, ball, IE6, and jelly comes your way, but surely you should check your privilege, and also you don’t want to get stuck with the clean-up…but you can’t ever look away.

The only people who get away with pratfalls are clowns, and they get away with everything.

Well, ha ha. Godfrey Bloom, ‘kipper (and subject of a TYR profile back in 2004) is concerned that his party is full of obsessives, weirdos, and people with terrible amateur schemes. Bloom’s rant is worth quoting:

My experience thus far is that as soon as more than 2 people get in a room progress completely stops. Even where we have experts of our own they disagree….The charm and frustration of Ukip is we have doctors who fancy themselves as tax experts, painters and decorators who know all about strategic defence issues, and branch chairmen, retired dentists, who understand the most intricate political solutions for the nation.

Of course it is; it’s a political party. That’s what they’re like, for good or ill. Anyone who has ever been an activist knows that sinking feeling of oh Christ, they’re all completely mad and that’s our lot, God knows what the others are like. Politics attracts eccentrics. On the other hand, as Powell & Pressburger had Roger Livesey argue before God in A Matter of Life and Death, the problem isn’t the rights of the common man, it’s the rights of the uncommon man. Mediocrity is not among the inspiring goals of humanity.

Bloom’s proposed solution is deeply depressing. It is also revealing, both about the man and about the broader society. He wants to have thinktanks tender for the job of writing their policy. An RFP will be issued, and the lowest-bidding wanktank will scoop the job. Seriously.

We do not have the resources to write serious papers on major subjects, why reinvent the wheel? Why not buy policy ‘off the shelf’, where it is close to our own small government, low tax, libertarian position.

If Nigel, or indeed any of the ‘frontbench’ spokesmen talk of welfare or tax, the endorsement of such institutions is a very strong shield from the sort of dismissive left wing interviewers with whom we usually cross swords.

Imagine Nigel in a hostile (oh yes it will be) interview with a ‘Paxman’, being able to say “Yes it will work, our policy has been completely vetted and endorsed by……..” fill in the blank, Civitas, IEA, IOD, BMA, RCN etc…”

I think this is fascinating. First of all, we’ve had the Eric Pickles notion of the council that meets once a year to pick contractors to do everything according to its taste, but here we go a step further – we pick a subcontractor to decide what our tastes are. It’s in the nature of thinktanks that the provider with the most external funding can offer the lowest rates, so we’ve cut out the middleman and let the donors determine the policy content directly.

You could make a libertarian case that this is perfect; money is speech, the market will decide. But note that Bloom isn’t even arguing that. He feels that thinktanks are a source of legitimacy as well, a dignified as well as an efficient part of the constitution. Which thinktank is largely irrelevant – he suggests both the IEA and the Royal College of Nursing! – so it is clearly enough to invoke thinkiness itself.

Of course, this is another step in the direction of the party system as a barrier to representation, rather than a means of representation. It is necessary to screen out the preferences or ideas coming from those untidy eccentric weirdos, the people, and replace them with congenial wanktanks.

It is probably no accident that UKIP is moving in this direction after it managed to end up with the most aggressively stimulative economic policy in Britain. They want to give the Bank of England a dual mandate to target unemployment as well as prices, they want to have a flat tax which would probably mean a considerable drop in tax revenue, and they want to spend on every damn thing you can think of. More motorways? Yes! High speed rail? Yes! More of it! Just not where it’s going now! Nuclear power everywhere! £30bn worth of flood defences! A 70-ship navy with a third aircraft carrier? Yes, why not? Higher pensions? Certainly!

All of this is meant to be funded out of the EU budget contribution, but surely nobody believes this. The only way any of this could happen would be an epic fiscal and monetary stimulus. That must not happen. So, wanktanks. I think they might keep the pedigree dog thing.

My initial response to today’s Labour policy rollout was as follows:

@labour_partisan also, another way of hating the young.

— Alex Harrowell (@yorksranter) April 7, 2013

Thinking about it, though, this isn’t necessarily so. Presumably the idea is that people build up additional entitlement by paying their class III National Insurance contributions over the years – you may already have guessed that contributions-based unemployment benefit is very much not a new thing – and the young’uns rely on the job guarantee element to, uh, guarantee them a job. Yer man has correctly spotted that there is potential for a disaster like the NI married woman’s stamp here, but that bit of it can be fixed.

Now I can see a rationale for this. It’s not before time for Labour to realise that flogging the 50+ long term unemployed to get jobs is…beside the point and a bit cruel. And if you think unemployment is bad for you, you presumably don’t want the youth to marinate in it for years.

But I do have an objection, which I owe to Ian Brown of the Stone Roses and specifically to a Melody Maker interview of way back when in which he held that cuts to unemployment benefit, and more specifically, to some of the fringe benefits the system used to provide were going to kill British music.

After all, citing another long-forgotten music interview, this time on R1, I recall Tony Wilson describing how he failed to sign the Roses to Factory Records. Someone recommended them to him, and persisted until he agreed to schlep out to some dreadful pub near Wythenshawe, where, he said, weighting his words precisely, “I had been told they were the greatest thing…and I saw something like..the goth Doors. And I did not ask for the goth Doors.”

I’m not sure quite what he meant, although perhaps the intro to “I Wanna Be Adored” feels a bit like that. But you can have the experience by just listening to the first three songs on “The Complete Stone Roses”, the ones everyone skips over on their way to “Sally Cinnamon” and beyond. Really, whether Wilson was right in his characterisation or not, he was right in his assessment.

So what happened? Well, they went off and spent the next three or so years practising and listening to weird records, and of course practising. This is technically known as “labour search efficiencies”, here is a nice Mike Konczal post making the empirical case, and it is an excellent reason to doubt the wisdom of keeping the cash for the old fellas and posting the young’uns into whatever jobs the revived FJF creates as quickly as possible. Stuffing someone into the wrong job is a deadweight-loss to society, as well as to the individual. Further, a hell of a lot of people exit unemployment via informal channels, whether that’s word of mouth/mates’ rates job searching, starting a bogus hair salon that actually takes off, etc. I worry that the constant keying up of search requirements and surveillance is getting in the way of this.

After all, as Quentin Crisp said, “It’s no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, ‘Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.’ By then, pigs will be your style.” You’re more likely to do a successful career change when you’re young, and therefore, there is a case for flipping the policy on its head. There’s also a case for having a different policy, of course. But we’ve got a while to go and we may as well, you know, think.

Liam Byrne is still an arsehole, though. I do like the Austrian lump-sum option from Koncz’s link.

So I’ve been reading Clausewitz. In the original German. It took me months – *humblebrag*. Anyway, if the government were to fall next week, what should Ed Miliband do right now?

It seems to me that quite a lot of thought is going into the long term. There’s a complex of ideas around changing the structure of the economy and particularly of some bits of finance, summarised (by me) as the radical consensus, by Chris Dillow as supply-side socialism, and not really summarised into anything by Ed Miliband yet.

But you’ve got to get to the long term. All the planning about sparks and regional policy is going to take a long time, and a great deal of administrative grip and focus, to deliver. For some time, I’ve not been worrying much about whether the Tories will lose when the general election comes. I’ve been worrying about the Zapatero/Hollande scenario; Labour wins but gets boxed in by the powers that be. Another scenario is the Obama scenario; it just takes too long, the Tories rally and adopt a strategy of total rejectionism.

The concepts from Clausewitz that are relevant here are successive and concentric action, and the more famous concentration in space and time. According to Clausewitz, strategy consists in choosing successive actions that lead to the achievement of an aim (Ziel). The selection of the aim is determined by the purpose (Zweck), which is always fundamentally political. Actions that are concentric in space – or in function – tend to support each other and to lead to greater concentration of strength, while eccentric ones tend to disperse it.

Our scenario is as follows; there is some sort of sudden crisis. The government falls and parliament remains hung for the time being. The Lib Dems are shaky and flaky, but the powers-that-be are very much in place. The danger is that commitments will be entered into, and opportunities missed, that will Zap us into Hollandaise sauce down the track.

In this situation, it is necessary to choose policy options that can be implemented quickly, ideally before the election, and that support and create future options rather than closing them off.

I would argue that there are perhaps three. The first is the macro-economy. If, for example, a Labour government sticks it out to the recess and comes back for a mandate in a few months’ time, and the economy is visibly improving, this will make everything else enormously easier. And even George Osborne concedes that there is a huge opportunity here. From the ‘Tater:

At the Treasury’s pre-Budget meeting at Dorneywood, he was much taken by presentations which suggested that a normal recovery would start in the summer.

Those close to Osborne also cite Treasury numbers which indicate that the economy is in better shape than the headline numbers suggest. If you strip out North Sea oil and gas and financial services, there was no double-dip recession. Indeed, with these two sectors taken out, the economy has being growing at between 1 and 2 per cent for the past two years.

Well, if you strip out all the bad stuff, of course it looks better. And the appeal to Friedman Units deserves all the contempt it gets. But there is more of a point here than you might think. Oil & gas and the City are not the only problem sectors. The labour/consumer sector and construction are awful as well. This, however, implies that other sectors (business services, automotive) are doing much better. There is scope for recovery if we stop kicking ourselves in the balls.

Also, there is probably more emerging consensus for a Keynesian response than there was even in 2008-2009. Here’s Bloomberg, Jon Portes of NIESR, and the plain people of Britain, who now like policies more if you associate them with Ed Balls than with George Osborne.

There is a tide in the affairs of men and all that. And if there were to be a fresh tide of flight capital out of the Eurozone, I think it would be better in gilts than puffing up the banks or chasing London property prices.

Keynes was joking about burying money and digging it up, of course. Everyone loves “infrastructure”, and I am convinced that much of the problem with the austerity programme was that it hit capital investment so hard. However, big infrastructure projects take a long old time to get going.

I therefore propose that any stimulus be targeted on housing. Housing is a highly salient issue, a relatively quick-starting form of investment, one that gets to the pocket of the electorate. And of course there is the coming LHA cuts/Bedroom Tax crisis. As we all remember from June 2010, declaring a crisis is a powerful political tool. If you agree with Daniel Davies and myself, housing policy may even have been the key issue in the British economy since the 1980s.

Council house building would be good, but it’s still slow. On the other hand, because it’s decentralised, it can start quicker. (Getrennt marschieren, vereint schlagen.) The Simple Plan could start much faster, and wouldn’t necessarily need much additional central government borrowing. Neither, though, would need an act of parliament.

And even UKIP have some good ideas sometimes. Here’s Nigel Farage arguing that the Bank of England should move to a dual mandate, like the US Federal Reserve’s, which would require it to target employment (or growth) as well as inflation. Section 11 of the Bank of England Act 1998 states that the Bank’s objectives are:

1. to pursue price stability
2. subject to that, to support the economic policy of HMG, including its objectives for growth and employment

Section 12 states that the Treasury can define what price stability is, i.e. the inflation target, and what the policy is by sending the Bank a letter. If the letter included buying £100bn worth of new housing bonds, as the CEO of Greggs suggests, well, that’s better than a pasty tax.

And finally, I feel that only fools would go for an election post-Leveson without getting the Leveson proposals passed. We should pass them. Not only that, we should direct the Office of Fair Trading to carry out a wideranging competition review of the media, and GCHQ’s Communications-Electronics Security Group to audit the mobile networks’ lawful interception logs.

None of this is long-term. It shouldn’t be. But the point is to use successive, mutually supporting actions to advance aims that lead to our political purposes.