The Red Box

This week’s Budget is a metaphor for how we are governed. An Oxbridge man in a grey suit opens a red box and tells us how much we will be spending on beer next year.

The Chancellor combines magic, theatre and power. The magic is in the announcements, made so that we focus on the hocus-pocus not on the real stuff. This year’s announcements included the small beer of a penny off a pint off the tepid brown stuff.

This penny off beer is meant to work with the young and with “working people.”  This is theatrical parody – because these ideas fit with our stereotypes of the manual labourer (he is always a man) in the flat cap walking home in some idyllic Hovis-loaf Yorkshire village and stopping off for a pint with his mates in The Prince Edward. It is a theatrical, or better an ad-agency view of how Britain works, reassuring middle England that everything is normal.

The penny is also part of the magician’s show, the distracting handkerchief being waved in your face as the magician palms the Ace of Spades. 

Watch the magic penny!

The maths is simple: the British Beer and Pub Association tells us that we drink 31.5 billion pints a year. A penny off each pint means we will save £315m on our beer. Gosh. That sounds like a lot!

That is the magic. While we focus on the homely image of the smiling working man saving a penny on his after-work pint, Giddy George Osborne has lifted 100 times as much out of our pockets as he has put in. Because in the same budget he announced spending that imply a £30.5 billion cut in total Government spending between 2015 and 2018, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Who will bear the brunt of this? With £13 billion being taken out of welfare expenditure it will be the poor who suffer the most. Our honest working man in the Hovis-loaf village will suffer. So will his wife and his children. And, to step away from the stereotype, so will the single parents, the homeless people, the women working in zero-hour contract jobs, the sick and the lame. To be clear, these cuts are steeper (despite Giddy’s promise of jam sometime around 2019) than in any three year period up to now. If you thought the poor were already suffering, wait until these cuts hit local councils, bus services, pre-school support and social services.

The red box waved in our faces as the grey-suited man leaves number 11 Downing Street is the magician’s handkerchief. It distracts us for a moment, reassures us that we live in a country that does things as they have always been done, where history can repeat itself. And the flourish of a reduction in beer duty is in the same vein, a hypnotic flash of brown that blinds us to the big picture – the drab grey of a Government that will cut another pound of flesh from its poor to feed to its friends in the City.

It is time for Scotland to move away from this parody of a Parliament, to craft budgets that help the poor without the suffocating theatrical tradition of the magical Gladstonian Red Box.

Sir Jeremy has lost £16k

You are Sir Jeremy Heywood, Cabinet Secretary. You turn up late this morning for work after celebrating, last night, a reunion for old boys of Hertford College, Oxford.

Your boss, David Cameron, docks one month's wages for your tardiness. That is £16,249.62. Spiteful Cameron added that if Jeremy was late again, he'd dock three years' wages - over half a million pounds.

How would you feel if someone took £16,249.62 out of your wages?

Because that is what is happening, not to poor Sir Jeremy, but to the really poor and destitute in Scotland.

Today's The National reports on a study carried out by Dr David Webster of Glasgow University with the Public and Commercial Services Union - whose members run the benefits offices.  The study reports that an analysis of the most recent Department for Work and Pensions data reveals £355 million in Jobseeker's allowance across the UK was stopped in the year to September 2014. In 2009/2010, £11 million of JSA was sanctioned.

That is a 3,500% increase 2010-2014. Hundreds of thousands more people going without money.

The union says: "We believe this massive rise goes a long way to explaining why sanctions have been so closely linked to the increase in the use of foodbanks."

Across the UK 568,430 people were sanctioned with anything from one month to three years of benefits being stopped. As a proportion, that could mean almost 60,000 people in Scotland.

These cruel sanctions illustrate why we live in a broken state. We should care for our poorest and most destitute people. Not cut them off from even the most basic benefits.

The Theory of Change

How do we change the lives of people in Scotland, for the better?

The Theory of Change is a way of describing how change will happen. Viewed as a road map for change, it starts from where we are  now, aims at a better place in the future, and lays out the routes for getting there.

Where we are now is not good.

Whether you prefer the statistics and maps of the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation, or to walk the streets of Glasgow, you'll see poverty, and increasing poverty.

So how do we make change, for the better?

The model provided by the Theory of Change starts with a series of data and assumptions about how things are now. It then lays out different routes - "interventions" - that lead to a better place. So we start with the data in the Scottish Government's Policy Briefing that there were 880,000 people living in absolute poverty in Scotland in 2012/3, and then work out what we are going to do about it.

Charities in Scotland are each applying their own Theory of  Change. Last Thursday's report from the Poverty Alliance showed charities such as the Trussell Trust are intervening with food banks. Their rationale is that we can relieve the most desperate effects of poverty by providing food, and while you are doing that, providing nutrition advice, cookery classes and emotional support. Seventy percent of Scotland's 167 food banks are providing emotional support for their clients.

Meanwhile, Save the Children in Scotland has a different Theory of Change. Their "Eat, Sleep, Learn, Play!" programme, launched in 2012, provides essential household items such as beds, cookers and pushchairs, to families with young children living on a low income. The rationale of Save the Children is that by meeting families needs during the important early stages of development, families can improve the quality of their children's' lives and help them fulfil their potential.

Save the Children also campaigns. So does the Child Poverty Action Group in Scotland, whose principal rationale is to "work to get a better life for low-income families in Scotland through campaigning and lobbying."

Risk is implicit in a Theory of Change. If your rationale for ending or at least reducing poverty is to provide food banks and emotional support then your downside risk of failure is going to be linked to delivery; how many people can we reach from our food bank? Upside, you know that if you get a package of food into the hands of a poor family then you have fed them for the day, or the week. 

If you campaign and lobby then your risk of failure is high. You are trying to get the system to change - to get politicians to listen to your message and to translate it into policy. That is very hard to achieve. Despite years of campaigning and lobbying, poverty is still endemic in Scotland. The Scottish Poverty Briefing shows that one in six families in Scotland lives on less than 60% of the average wage. There is a substantial, in fact demonstrable, risk that campaigning does not work - it does not translate into Government action.

So why bother with the politicians?

Because while the risk of failure is high, the outcome if you succeed is enormous. If you could persuade a future Government to give up Trident and spend the money on the poor, or, better, increase taxation on those on higher incomes to provide greater shares for those on low or no income, then you would dramatically transform the lives of almost a million people in Scotland. This,in Theory of Change, is "system change."

Politicians are just the pawns in this Theory of Change chess-game. We need them to move across the board in the right direction (not just to protect the Kings, Queens and Knights of our society.) So when you vote in May, vote for system  change. Vote for the party that will change the system in Scotland, for the better.

1.James, Cathy. Theory of Change Review. London: Comic Relief, September 2011. http://www.actknowledge.org/resources/documents/James_ToC.pdf.
2 Image from http://www.relativ.co.za/relativ-impact/theory-of-change-workshop/
3 Scottish Government, St Andrew’s House. “Poverty Briefing.” Website Section, December 18, 2014. http://www.scotland.gov.uk//Topics/Statistics/Browse/Social-Welfare/IncomePoverty/povertybrief.

For Richer, for Poorer. And a Tartan Trident.

If you take a bus down Ferry Road in Edinburgh you will move from wealth to poverty as you head west. Or you can just stand in Stewart's Melville (private) College's playing fields and chuck a stone west to Pilton. You will be throwing your stone from an area ranked as amongst the least deprived into an area that is the most deprived, according to the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation.

Edinburgh, deprived

This week two reports have talked about poverty.

What Do We Know about In-Work Poverty? [1] shows that most poor people (52%) in Scotland live in homes where at least one person has a job.  Worse, the proportion of poor children in homes with an adult in work has increased from 40% in 1999 to almost two thirds today.

What is going on? Doesn't a job give you an income? Well yes, and poverty is of course related to work (the rate of poverty amongst households where no-one is in paid work is of course higher.) But people in low-paid jobs - earning less than £7.40 an hour - have double the poverty risk of all workers. Low-paid women are especially vulnerable; mothers returning to work are more likely to end up in low-paid jobs, says the report, which highlights the almost 20% difference in wages paid to men versus women in the private sector.

Scotland comes off badly in the low-pay stakes compared to other countries: 19.5% of employees in Scotland were low-paid in 2011 compared to say 14% in New Zealand or 15% in Spain.

Low-wage work is a dead end - workers are less likely to be offered training, and more low-paid workers become unemployed than their better paid colleagues. So families are juggling low-pay, no-pay and benefits and it is, above all, the children who suffer.

Meanwhile, Oxfam has shown in Wealth: Having It All and Wanting More [2] - published this week in time for Davos - the link between wealth, business and tax. The richest 1% own 48% of global wealth - and the trend is upwards, for the rich. The pyramid is skewed so the richest fifth of the population own more than nine-tenths of the wealth, meaning that the rest of humanity, the 80%, scrabble over just 5.5% of global wealth.

Cleverly, Oxfam shows that the businesses that our wealthiest people invest in are the same businesses that spend the most on lobbying on budget issues, particularly lobbying to reduce taxation. Thus there is a vicious circle in which wealth is held by a very few, who ensure via their businesses that taxes…for those few rich…remain low. This explains why David Cameron and Giddy Gordon Osborne have been so reluctant to do the obvious thing - tax wealth, to reduce the poverty gap.

This is stupid economics. As the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) has shown [3], a child growing up in a poor household is likely to have a poor outcome - to become a poor adult - because of a range of issues including stress and poor health. CPAG has calculated the cost - to all of us - of allowing poverty to take hold. The cost of allowing 110,000 children in Scotland to be affected by in-work poverty could be £1.1 billion. 

£1.1 billion! We could almost afford to buy our own Tartan Trident for that…

1 What Do We Know about In-Work Poverty? A Summary of the Evidence (Social Research Series. Edinburgh: The Scottish Government, January 21, 2015. http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2015/01/3233/downloads)

2 Hardoon, Deborah. Wealth: Having It All and Wanting More. Cowley, UK: Oxfam International, January 19, 2015. http://www.oxfam.org/en/research/wealth-having-it-all-and-wanting-more.

3  Farthing, Rys. Local Authorities and Child Poverty: Balancing Threats and Opportunities. London: Child Poverty Action Group, July 2013. http://www.cpag.org.uk/content/cpag-publishes-cost-child-poverty-every-local-authority-and-constituency.

Horsemen of Hypnosis

England appears hypnotized. How else can one explain the inaction, inertia, blindness, sleepwalking? The country is heading into a perfect storm which will make the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse look like a Sunday School picnic.

Here they are;

The Pestilence of Poverty

Are England's ruling class aware of poverty, outside their own back door? This is the scandal of the wealth gap - the UK's near-to-worst position (24th in 2011, ahead - just - of Israel, Turkey and Chile...) in the OECD list of countries ranked by wealth gap.

We know from charities and from walking the streets that there are far too many people who have little or nothing. And from walking streets not many blocks away, too many with too much.

Britain, and especially the privileged bubble of Westminster has created a society of two tribes. The Rich Tribe is comfortable in its cars and its brand-name shops, while Sebastian ('he's something in the City, darling') squeezes the max out of his salary and bonus package. Its politicians are happy to reduce benefits and tax the spare rooms of the poor because they never consciously encounter the Poor Tribe.

The people who cross this tribal divide are the philanthropists. Not just the high profile people of wealth, but the thousands of people who know that poverty is not another world and who give their money to good causes. But there are not enough philanthropists to fill the growing wealth gap. And some day the Poor Tribe are going to have had enough. 

There will be an explosion in the streets of Britain.

The War Horse

It is Poseidon's weapon of choice. It sits sizzling just 25 miles upwind of Glasgow. And it is costing you, and you, and you a King's ransom. The UK parliamentary committee that met to approve its upgrade reckon £80 billion over the next twenty years... but that's one of those defence spending estimates that has a habit of increasing, maybe doubling.

And yet the English public seem blind to the atomic war horse that is Trident. Most will spend most of their working lives paying for it through their taxes. Some, the million Scots living downwind of Faslane, may one day sniff it in the air. But only a tiny number seem to care. Think how many schools and hospitals you could build, equip and run for £80 billion!

The Financial Famine

Yesterday's Financial Times reminded us that the UK is horribly in debt, and that the debt is getting worse each year, despite awful cuts to social services. ONS says that the debt is now £1.4 trillion. This year it is likely to be £100 billion more.

Britain is sleepwalking into the red, with a government that is meant to be good at financial management. But this is a neo-liberal government that refuses to the sensible thing (tax wealth to pay the debt.) Instead it has announced tax relief on wealth, and further cuts in benefits for poor.

One morning we will wake to the news that a trader in the Far East, a new Soros, has decided that the UK economy can't support the debt and that the pound is worthless. When that particular horseman arrives he'll be galloping, and the apocalypse will be fast. The collapse of the pound ('if only we'd joined the Euro when we had chance!') will mean hyperinflation and massive social unrest. A very British apocalypse.

The Death of the World

The palid horse of Death also approaches, across the Channel. It is the Death of Britain's world, and the rebirth of Little England. The people of England seem to have become afraid of anything foreign, starting with the 'terrorists' and now encompassing the EU and its massed ranks of 'immigrants.'

England, exporter of migrants to her colonies where they were supposed be a civilising influence, now fears migrants who might civilise the Motherland. Students are now blocked from entering the UK to study here. Entrepreneurs and new corporate recruits (the CBI complained last week) are facing delays and refusals at our borders. And Prime Minister Cameron has flown the dangerous kite that he will attempt to remove the right of EU citizens to move to and work in any Member State. His kite string will snap in the combined storm of protest from Germany and France over this core principle of the EU.

But this fourth horseman appears to be invisible to many in England. To the UKIP supporters and the loonie right of course, but also to Conservative and Labour voters. Can these Little Englanders not see the illogic of their position? 'We emigrate' equals 'good'. 'They emigrate' equals 'bad'. Really? 

And do they not see the dangers? Targeting immigration means targeting immigrants and that smells, quickly, of racism. And of course Britain will be expelled from the EU - even if England does not vote the whole UK out - if it persists with this folly.

 

Hypnotic Men on Horses

Why are the people of England blind to the four horsemen? It seems to be an almost perfect disconnect between the English and their politicians. A disconnect made obvious by the contrast with Scotland, where these topics were aired and discussed for the Referendum and continue to be the subject of writing, thinking and discussion afterwards.

But for hypnotised England the clip-clop of hooves is already audible. We just don't know which horse will come in first; poverty, and social turmoil when poor people finally sicken of the cuts? The a massive sell out of sterling when the markets discover that our debt is unpayable, ever? A 'tragic accident' at Faslane? Or the loss of Britain's largest trading partner? Or will all four Horsemen arrive together in a perfect storm?



Whatever. It's coming. Someone, please: wake up England.