John Hudson

The Adam Smith Institute (ASI) hit the headlines last week with their claim that the 31st May marked this year’s ‘Tax Freedom Day‘. For those who missed it, ‘Tax Freedom Day’ is calculated by dividing the country’s total tax bill by its national income and then converting the percentage - 42% this year - into calendar days. According to ASI the resulting date marks the theoretical point in the year when we stop having to work for the government, rather than for ourselves. And, of course, the aim of the ASI in calculating it is to make us begrudge the amount of effort demanded on our behalf by the state.

Public finances are regarded as a notoriously dull issue but Tax Freedom Day captures the imagination because the thought of working five months of the year simply to pay tax can even give a firm advocate of the welfare state reason to pause for thought. Eamonn Butler, Director of the ASI, used the opportunity to compare Gordon Brown unfavourably with a medieval baron, arguing ‘the average serf in the Middle Ages only had to work four months of the year in the service of even the most rapacious feudal lord’.

As was to be expected, the right wing press lapped it up. The Sun were outraged that Gordon Brown had ‘effectively gobbled up every penny we have collectively earned for five full months’ in order to pay for his ‘lavish spending sprees’. The Evening Standard celebrated it as the day ‘employees will finally stop working for Gordon Brown today and start earning for themselves’. In The Times, Stephen Pollard told us to ‘Crack open the Krug’ to celebrate, but then had second thoughts and said ‘far from celebrating, we ought to be commiserating with each other. Last year, we could start keeping our own money three days earlier; when Labour took office in 1997, Tax Freedom Day fell on May 25′.

Freedom is a complex term with many contested meanings but it hardly makes sense in this context, not least because the vast majority of the money Gordon Brown has ‘gobbled up’ comes directly back to us or to our friends and family. But by expressing tax in days of work it Tax Freedom Day not only gives a very complex issue a simple personal dimension, it also emphasises the least popular dimensions - tax and work - of an equation that needs to be balanced with the public goods that emanate from them. What, then, if we were to perform the same trick with public spending? Rather than suggesting a feudal burden we need to be freed from, perhaps the figures might highlight how well we collectively use our time to support our families and serve our local communities?

For instance, it turns out we each work just one day a year to fund our public libraries, museums, galleries and concert venues. That seems remarkably good value to me - put like this it doesn’t seem too much to ask. Similarly, we might want to spend more than a mere 32 seconds a day of our time funding medical research - heck, why not go for a whole minute?

No doubt it’s the welfare state that the ASI are really objecting to, but if we break social spending down into discrete programme headings then the billions Gordon Brown is ‘gobbling’ for his ’spending sprees’ seem more like modest contributions of our time to help family members or close friends and neighbours. Consider the biggest single item of social security spending - the state pension. It turns out we work just seventeen days a year to provide income for our parents or grandparents. Is that too much to ask? Perhaps ASI staff don’t get on with their elder relatives, but it seems a bit much to begrudge them the rewards from one-and-a-half days out of every calendar month. Perhaps they have more pressing needs for their money - like the Krug they keep cracking open?

It’s a similar picture for schools, where just under a day month is worked to fund our primary and secondary schools. Most parents would view this as an absolute bargain. While the NHS commands a much bigger chunk of our time - some 25 days this year - this still compares very favourably to the private sector driven system in the USA that swallows over 50 days a year of collective effort in order to satisfy its cash hungry insurance funds.

Almost all of us will, at some point, make use of our public schools, hospitals, libraries, museums and state pensions and even if we do not use them at this particular moment in time then it is likely someone in our family will be. Personalising public spending by converting it into days of effort worked towards supporting ourselves or our own families helps reconnect it with the people in our own lives we are supporting. It also reveals the often paltry investments we make in some key areas of direct concern to us. For instance, we might want to spend more than just fifteen minutes a day working on environmental protection.

Of course, while primarily acting as kind of intergenerational savings bank, the state also acts to redistribute income between the rich and the poor and it is probably this that the ASI objects most strongly to. However, if we use the same methodology to demonstrate how long the nation works to fund the incomes of different social groups then it actually makes the case for redistribution remarkably well.

According to the latest published data (for 2002-3), the richest 10% of the country commanded 32% of our national income while the poorest 10% received just 1%. These figures are stark, but if we convert them into days it turns out that the country as a whole worked until April 25 to pay the incomes of the richest 10%. Unlike the taxes taken by Gordon Brown, I imagine much of this money really was ‘gobbled up’ in ’spending sprees’. Curiously enough, it is less than a week short of the full four months of income only the most rapacious feudal lords asked us to hand over in the Middle Ages. Meanwhile, the nation worked just four days to produce the income of the poorest 10%.

Even after Gordon Brown intervened to redistribute some of this cash the picture changed little: in a picture reminiscent of a Dickensian tale we only turned our attentions to the poorest 10% on Christmas Eve - working a paltry eight days to raise their income - and while the richest 10% generously gave up two weeks of national effort compared to their pre-tax incomes they still asked us to work the first 101 days of the year for them.

Put differently, it wasn’t until April 12 that we had finally reached the theoretical point in the year at which we stopped working for the rich and started working for ourselves. Let’s call this ‘Fat Cat Freedom Day’. However, far from celebrating, we ought to be commiserating with each other. It used to fall so much earlier than this in the past.

What a great phrase… from Martin Dodge of UCL in a Guardian article about firms tagging workers to improve their efficiency.

Workers in warehouses across Britain are being “electronically tagged” by being asked to wear small computers to cut costs and increase the efficient delivery of goods and food to supermarkets, a report revealed yesterday.

New US satellite- and radio-based computer technology is turning some workplaces into “battery farms” and creating conditions similar to “prison surveillance”, according to a report from Michael Blakemore, professor of geography at Durham University.

The technology, introduced six months ago, is spreading rapidly, with up to 10,000 employees using it to supply household names such as Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Boots and Marks & Spencer.

Under the system workers are asked to wear computers on their wrists, arms and fingers, and in some cases to put on a vest containing a computer which instructs them where to go to collect goods from warehouse shelves.

The system also allows supermarkets direct access to the individual’s computer so orders can be beamed from the store. The computer can also check on whether workers are taking unauthorised breaks and work out the shortest time a worker needs to complete a job.

In his 1986 classic The Cult of Information, Roszak warned us that information has ‘been divorced from its conventional meaning, [and is] up for grabs… for the information theorist, it does not matter whether we are transmitting a fact, a judgement, a shallow cliché, a deep teaching, a sublime truth, or a nasty obscenity. All are ‘information’.

Though this was in the context of a critique of many of the rhetorically driven ‘information revolution’ theses, the phrase often comes to mind when I’m surfing the web… or, indeed, marking student work. The web (and ‘Googling it’ in particular) seems to be the first port of call for so many research efforts these days. Not a problem per se, but it means that being able to sort a sublime truth from the nasty obscenity becomes a much bigger issue when so much of the information is published without any process of peer review or quality assurance.

Two totally unrelated stories illustrated this well for me recently.

The first was a bit of fun really, but said something important about the nature of the press perhaps. Bored by lack of football news following the end of the season in England, some supporters of my team — Sunderland — decided to make up a transfer rumour. They posted bogus claims on various fan sites that Czech international Jan Koller was in negotiations with Sunderland — and equally bogus claims that the news was on his current (German) club’s web site — and then sat back to see if the media would bite.

Within hours the local paper ran the story on its back page (’Cats want Koller - AMBITIOUS Sunderland want to sign giant Czech striker Jan Koller [...] But enquiries are still at the very early stage for the Borussia Dortmund forward…’). The following day the best selling tabloids picked it up, including The Sun (’Cats eye giant Jan - Sunderland want giant striker Jan Koller to fire them to Premiership safety. The Black Cats are having talks with Borussia Dortmund in a bid to tie up a £1.5 million deal for the 32 year-old Czech.’) and The Mirror (’KOLLER & TIE-UP - SUNDERLAND want giant striker Jan Koller to boost their chances in the Premiership. The Black Cats are in talks with Borussia Dortmund in a bid to tie up a £1.5million deal for the Czech international.’).

All lies, of course, and sourced initially from fan sites with made up quotations being reproduced and false certainties and facts inserted by some very lazy journos, probably on the basis of the local paper story being fed to the PA and embellished to fill out the gaps.

Less than 48 hours after starting the rumour, the global television media were on the case with the player’s agent had to contact Sky Sports News to deny the claims appearing in the press: ‘These stories are a major surprise and I think someone is dreaming up stories’. If only he knew…

The second story concerns more serious subject matter - the nature and extent of climate change - and was uncovered by George Monbiot:

For the past three weeks, a set of figures has been working a hole in my mind. On April 16th, New Scientist published a letter from the famous botanist David Bellamy. Many of the world’s glaciers, he claimed, “are not shrinking but in fact are growing. … 555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980.” His letter was instantly taken up by climate change deniers. And it began to worry me. What if Bellamy was right?

Of course, he wasn’t:

So last week I telephoned the World Glacier Monitoring Service and read out Bellamy’s letter. I don’t think the response would have been published in Nature, but it had the scientific virtue of clarity. “This is complete bullshit.” A few hours later, they sent me an email.

“Despite his scientific reputation, he makes all the mistakes that are possible”. He had cited data which was simply false, failed to provide references, completely misunderstood the scientific context and neglected current scientific literature. The latest studies show unequivocally that most of the world’s glaciers are retreating.

So Monbiot e-mailed Bellamy a few times to find out where the figures came from - turns out it was a site called Iceagenow.com. Here the figures were slightly different (55% of the 625 mountain glaciers under observation rather than 555) and were sourced as coming from ’21st Century Science and Technology’, which got them from www.sepp.org, which said they came from a 1989 issue of Science. Monbiot continued his search for the original source:

I went through every edition of Science published in 1989, both manually and electronically. Not only did it contain nothing resembling those figures; throughout that year there was no paper published in this journal about glacial advance or retreat.

So, it wasn’t looking too good for Bellamy, or Singer, or any of the deniers who have cited these figures. But there was still one mystery to clear up. While Bellamy’s source claimed that 55% of 625 glaciers are advancing, Bellamy claimed that 555 of them – or 89% – are advancing. This figure appears to exist nowhere else. But on the standard English keyboard, 5 and % occupy the same key. If you try to hit %, but fail to press shift, you get 555, instead of 55%. This is the only explanation I can produce for his figure. When I challenged him, he admitted that there had been “a glitch of the electronics”.

So, in Bellamy’s poor typing, we have the basis for a whole new front in the war against climate science. The 555 figure is now being cited as definitive evidence that global warming is a “fraud”, a “scam”, a “lie”.

As Mark Twain once said: ‘A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes’. (Or did he? This one could run and run…)

An article on John Hutton - who will be the minister responsible for overseeing the culmination of the 2005 e-government target - in yesterday’s Guardian Online.

As it points out, there are over a dozen ‘mission critical’ projects underway at the moment. Moreover, it seems likely - despite Blair’s reduced majority - that the ID cards bill will feature in the Queen’s Speech.

Blunkett’s move to the DWP will, no doubt, add impeteus to this: while crime, migration and terrorism issues are those connected most commonly with the proposals, Blunkett tried at the Home Office to sell the idea of an ‘entitlement card’ and it seems likely that he’ll look to follow this agenda at the DWP too - if nothing else as a route into tackling benefit fraud.

Caught the end of a question on one of the BBC’s political programmes a few days ago in which the presenter was asking a minister to explain a recent research finding that public sector spending accounted for the clear majority of the GDP in some of the UK’s regions.

This sounded an interesting piece of research, so I’ve been trying to track it down… unfortunately:

(i) no sign of it on the BBC site
(ii) A Google News search brought no solid reports on it

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The wonders of the web… in following the e-trail from Mulgan’s Prospect piece I came across an interesting article he had written while head of policy at 10 Downing Street that offers an insider’s view on policy transfer.

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Geoff Mulgan, former head of policy at 10 Downing Street, has a piece in this month’s Prospect outlining what he sees to be the Lessons of Power.

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Just finished reading Paul Pierson’s new-ish book [Pierson, P (2004) Politics in Time: History, Institutions and Social Analysis. Oxford: Princeton University Press.] Have put together the review below for Policy World:

Paul Pierson, Avice Saint Chair in Public Policy at the University of California at Berkley, is probably best known to social policyists for his contributions to the debate on welfare state resilience and retrenchment, notably his 1994 book Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher and the Politics of Retrenchment and two more recent edited collections European Social Policy: Between Fragmentation and Integration (with Liebfried, 1995) and The New Politics of the Welfare State (2001).

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An interesting little spat about the importance and impact of think tanks is going on within (a section) of the policy wonk community.
Rob Blackhurst, formerly of the Foreign Policy Centre, has published a piece in the New Statesman titled ‘The sad decline of the policy wonks in which he argues ‘The British policy wonk has never been more in demand’, but that ‘enslaved by corporate sponsors, [the think tanks] no longer have a significant influence on the political parties’.

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The IPPR North seminar last week - ‘Opportunity Society - Improving Social Mobility in the North’ - which featured David Miliband as the key note speaker.

A brief report for the next issue of Policy World:

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