What’s going on today.
Chris Dillion argues that it’s impossible to just “cut waste” from goverment spending:
The idea that waste can be identified well by a top boss is deeply dubious. It ignores two central facts of economics: the importance of limited knowledge and of incentives. The true knowledge of where waste lies is fragmentary and dispersed across millions of public sector workers. A Chancellor cannot aggregate this knowledge. Nor can he rely upon civil service managers to do so; these do not have incentives to cut their own departments or jobs. The upshot is that, as I’ve said, top-down management is a terrible way to cut waste.
Therefore the idea that it was ever possible for the new ConDem government to immediately identify and target six billion pounds worth of unnecessary spendings without making political judgments was always absurd, yet treated seriously both in Westminister and the Westminister orientated media. As Dillon shows, the first announced cuts are nothing but political — and there’s nothing wrong with that. Obviously, you can disagree with the choices made, but that you can’t cut spending without making these choices should not be controversial.
But absurd or not, it remains easier to sell cuts as efficiency savings — who could object to that — than as explicit political choices. That’s something the Tories (and everybody else) learned from the far more ideological battles of the eighties.
Not Tim Ireland, for understandable reasons:
Iain Dale actually tried to take political advantage of my being smeared as a paedophile while simulataneously libelling Tom Watson as a smear merchant. He went on to similarly exploit a man on the brink of suicide and the repeated publication of my home address. He did this primarily by lying about the context, the circumstances and the specifics of attempts to contact him about these matters, falsely giving the impression that he had made a valid complaint of harassment (which quickly evolved into an outright claim of ‘stalking’) and it was your man Adam Macqueen who popped up at the crucial moment on the website of another Private Eye writer, Louis Barfe, likening my correspondence with your magazine to the rantings of a “nutter on a bus”.
Tim has had a long and horrible smear campaign aimed at him in which Private Eye was a bit player, reacting to false information as I understand it and refusing to correct their mistakes since then. This started a longer discussion on various English lefty blogs about the general merits of the magazine. First Jamie:
I kind of gave up on it a while back. Not so much that, maybe, but I just lost interest in its contents. A lot of the gossip and such in it increasingly seemed to be driven by entirely private rivalries and vendettas. That was probably always the case, but I get the impression that the unloading of the silver handled bucket used to be postponed until it at least had some contents. In a way, that connects to Tim’s grievances. The Eye was always something of an in-group. Now it’s nothing much else.
Hislop’s glory years were the 80s and early 90s, when “Have I Got News For You” was in its early days and when he finally drove Punch into the ground and gained the monopoly on British satirical news. Now … well, now he is Punch, isn’t he? Lots of tired in-jokes, the same bunch of cronies editing the thing, imperceptibly shifting into a bunch of old blokes harrumphing at each other in a saloon bar. Basically, Top Gear for people who can’t drive.
but it was splinty who struck the cruelest blow:
On reflection, perhaps D2 is a bit harsh in saying that the Eye has transmogrified into Punch. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say it was a decompression chamber for Oldie readers looking for something a bit more sedate.
Ouch…
In the wake of the Labour leadership struggle, with various candidates grasping for immigration as the explenation for Labour’s defeat, Sunny aks for a progressive narrative on immigration:
here is the dilemma for the left. The public are not easily persuaded by facts. There’s no way of ‘educating them’. The right-wing media exists and it won’t stop printing false stories. And there are lots of traditional Labour supporters who have concerns about immigration (Labour was about 30 points behind in the polls on the issue).
And there is little evidence that those concerns translated into lost votes. Labour had lost millions of voters even before this election, mainly because of Iraq. Nevertheless, Labour was about 30 points behind. So what would a progressive narrative on immigration look like? How do you deal with people’s concerns without sounding like the English Defence League, the BNP or Andy Burnham? How does that narrative offer solutions and hope without encouraging people to be bigots or making them fearful of immigrants?
What’s the narrative? What do you say on the door-step? Thoughts?
Immigration is a red herring. Labour didn’t lose because of immigration, or of not being tough enough on immigration, or because of anything other than a) the shit economy and b) the general public’s slow realisation that New Labour is such a shower of shits even the possibility of a Tory government is no longer quite horrifying enough to keep on voting Labour, as the latter would just do most of the evil the Tories are suspected of wanting to do anyway. That’s it. Now for Burnham, Balls and the Millibands this reality is one that can’t be acknowledged, as they are all part responsible for this. Hence this ridiculous insistence that it was fear of foreigners that led to Labour’s defeat, when the sole good news of the election was the complete and utter defeat of the BNP and its message.
But we on the left do not need to share this illusion. Burnham et all are trapped by their New Labour assumptions, that mixture of private enterprise fetishism and social authoritarianism — we aren’t. We know that if there’s a conflict between “natives” and “immigrants” about council housing the problem isn’t too many immigrants, it’s too few council houses and the solution isn’t to deport more people, but to build more houses! Labour has had thirteen years to address the housing shortage, but chose to bung money at private developers in nebulous schemes rather than allow councils to build new flats, then blames things on those least able to defend themselves, fanning the flames for the BNP.
So what do we need to do? Sunny is wrong to say you can’t educate people — as the anti-BNP campaigns showed in this election, yes you can. This then is the first thing the left in and outside Labour needs to do, to learn from those campaigns and adapt them for use against Labourite bigots and racialist opportunists. We now have the proof that you can racists without pandering, so let’s us that.
The second thing is to hammer the economics. The crisis was not caused by immigrants, nor by the working classes, but one created by the very people New Labour has been courting in the past thirteen years. The core problem is not the migration of labour, but of capital, that people can live In England, work in England and make tmillions in England but do not have to pay taxes in England. That should be hammered into people again and again, together with the radical new idea that gosh, the state needs not be helpless when people need houses, or jobs, or schools or healthcare, but can actually make sure there is enough for everybody, as long as it is willing to actually do so and use its powers for good rather than for illegal wars and petty bullying.
With David behind the Times paywall from next month, there’s no point in continuing:
As CC says below, the Times is going to go paywall at the end of this month, and that seems to us like a natural point to bring “Aaronovitch Watch” to a close. Whatever the ease or otherwise of getting Aaro’s weekly column on the down-low, the fact is that with his disappearance behind the paywall he’s going to be a less influential and less important columnist – with the passing of New Labour as well, this was always going to be the case anyway.
In the wider “World of Decency”, I also feel that a historical moment has largely passed by. There are still imperial wars out there, of course, still ludicrous double standards on human rights and even the New Labour project is not 100% dead yet. And Harry’s Place and Normblog and all will presumably continue to be as ghastly as they ever were, while Nick Cohen is unlikely to shut up as he is to ever write a readable column again. And all of these baleful social phenomena will still have their crowd of cheerleaders from a soi-Decent Left perspective, with willyoucondemnathons and all. But, well, do you care as much as you did five years ago? I know I don’t. If we carry this thing on beyond its natural life, it’s almost certain to end up as another site about bloody Israel.
I’m not sure if Aaronovitch behind a paywall will actually matter all that much. His influence lies in the Westminister political and media cliques, who read The Times as part of their jobs, not with people reading him for free on the interwebs when they should be doing their real jobs. In any case Aaronovitch Watch will be missed, not just as a quick way to keep up with the English Decents, but also as a community — often the comments are the best part of the posts. But they’re probably right to quit now, as circumstances have indeed changed and the emphasis in both UK and US politics will be on economics, rather than foreign adventurism. It’s not just the Decents that have become irrelevant, but the liberal/socialist/sane tory coalition that opposed them is ending the end of its natural life as well. The wars on Iraq and slightly less so, Afghanistan were easy to oppose because we all agreed they were bad, if not always for the same reasons. With the economic crisis however you talk about core differences between liberals and socialists, if only on whether some measure or reform is enough to stabilise the system or whether or not a radical revision is needed.