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Low Carbon Investment An Inconvenient Loot

Dec 15

Posted by Jeff in Economy, Environment | 2 Comments

From The Guardian, Chris Huhne on news that the Conservative manifesto promise of a Green Investment Bank may end up being a mere fund:
“Fiscal credibility is key. But we also have to decarbonise the economy. Governments by definition do not have one objective. We are able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Therefore we are able to have low carbon investment and fiscal credibility. That is what we have to combine and that is what we’re going to do.”

I would much rather that our Environment Minister, fresh from another disappointing round of talks in Cancun, would say that decarbonising the economy is key but fiscal credibility is also necessary.

I like that phrase ‘low carbon investment’ and its double meaning though. Is Chris saying that the Government is investing non-specific amounts in low carbon solutions or is he saying that the carbon fighting investment itself is “low”? Both could be true and both appear to be applicable. Is Chris Huhne backpedalling because he needs to find an inconvenient loot?

It is the procrastination from really addressing Climate Change and coming up with radical, overdue solutions that concerns and baffles me. Public habits remain the same save for some token recycling when we can be bothered, many windows remain single-glazed and community-based heating solutions remain a distant prospect. I do hope that the trappings of Government office haven’t resulted in the Environment Minister taking his eye off his objectives but when Chris says that it is fiscal credibility that is key rather than the urgent need to act on emissions and then goes on to compare the greatest threat to humanity as ‘chewing gum’, well, I wonder.

A Green Investment Bank is absolutely the correct way to go about funding the huge investment required for environmental and sustainable solutions as it will allow a focussed objective that commercial and corporate institutions do not hold beyond maximising a return for their shareholders.

Money doesn’t grow on trees of course but with electricity charges (and taxable profits) moving sky high again, petrol prices (and taxes) reaching new peaks and popular domestic air travel overripe for a levy, then there is scope for direct taxation being used to fund the solutions that will save us money in the long term, including a Green Investment Bank. This is not to mention that most Green projects represent a good return on private investment anyway.

The message for the supposed ‘Greenest Government Ever’ is – don’t write green cheques that you can’t cash. It remains to be seen whether a Green fund will result in real low carbon investment or just low ‘low carbon investment’. So far it doesn’t look good.

Unicameralism Rules OK

Dec 14

Posted by Jeff in Constitution | 21 Comments

There are two groups, not entirely mutually exclusive, who are desperately trying to ensure that the UK clings on to two relics of a bygone age – the First Past the Post Westminster voting system and the House of Lords. When defended in isolation, the arguments can sound persuasive but when defended together, it becomes increasingly clear that each entity could quite easily cancel each other out and the country wouldn’t miss them. Quite the contrary.

James talked in his last post of the four different groups competing in the AV referendum but I would like to suggest a fifth – those who would vote against First Past the Post in order to assist in doing away with the House of Lords.

The most common defence of the House of Lords is that there is nothing cheaper to take its place. Those who claim this are wrong. Having nothing in its place is considerably cheaper, 100% cheaper in fact.

After all, why do we need a House of Lords? Just because it dates back to the 1300s and we’ve gotten used to it, it doesn’t mean we still can’t just pull the plug on the arrangement despite its supposed merits:

The House of Lords as an Upper Chamber has the primary purpose of scrutinising Legislation proposed by the Lower House through the form of debate and through proposing amendments to legislation. Governments in recent years have used the Upper House as a variant of the Select Committee process to finalise legislation before presentation for Royal Assent.

The House of Commons already scrutinises legislation and I daresay that Select Committees do a more effective job of being a, well, Select Committee. For those concerned about this halving of our political Houses, don’t worry, there is already a term for this state of having one parliamentary chamber – the delightful Unicameralism. Were the UK to drop the House of Lords then it would be joining such appealing company as Sweden, Denmark, New Zealand, Finland, Singapore and Norway (ok, and China, Iraq and Iran. What’s your point?). Devolved Scotland, if you want to see it that way, is also already practising Unicameralism.

The next argument advanced by the grey and the crusty who wish to save the Lords may then be that a Government with an unassailable majority should not wield such power, which leads me on to the next part of this two-step solution – introducing proper PR.

Were we to have proper PR in the UK then we wouldn’t need unelected Lords to check the power of our Governments as the existence of eight or nine political parties, all negotiating and compromising with each other with an engaged public watching on, would ensure that controls were inherent in the system to ensure legislation was always sufficiently refined.

Obviously we don’t have the option of full PR on our badly limited voting slip on May 5th but there is surely little doubt that voting Yes to AV is a more positive statement that one wants a more proportional voting system than voting No or abstaining.

There is even an incentive for the many proponents of independence to involve themselves in this idea of pushing for Unicameralism supported by PR through voting for AV. A stronger Yes vote north of the border on May 5th would show that Scotland is more open to the idea of a proportional system than our southern neighbours, just one more example of a more ‘leftie’ philosophy that makes us distinct within the United Kingdom. A ‘Yes’ majority in Scotland and a ‘No’ majority in the rest of the UK would be enough on its own to make many Scots wonder why we don’t just take such decisions for ourselves when Scottish majority opinion is at odds with UK majority opinion, a feeling that will surely already be incubating along after the General Election result.

We don’t really know who our peers are and we don’t know what they do but their position is protected by an out of date First Past the Post system that is patently unfair and undemocratic. MPs and Lords alike talk a good game about House of Lords reform but the reality is that, at most, only 7 people out of the 1,391 Members of both Houses are arguing for scrapping that second Chamber – SNP and Green MPs.

To become Unicameralists we would need to work around a unilateral Cameron, a duplicitous Clegg and wait out a long election-free 4.5 years that the current coalition awarded itself. Voting Yes to AV is the best way to consign historic practices to history.

Who’s who in the four AV campaigns

Dec 13

Posted by James in Elections, Governance | 10 Comments

Yes to slightly fairer votesA normal referendum campaign has two sides, and in fact the law more or less requires them to do so, but the truth is almost always more complex. Votes on Europe integration in Ireland and elsewhere have seen No campaigns unite trade unionists with right-wing free-marketeers, for example.

Similarly, the No campaign during the 1997 Scottish Parliament referendum campaign brought the “black-hearted unionists” of the Tory party together with some anti-devo Nat fundamentalists, while the Yes campaign was backed by the mainstream of all the non-Tory parties here, superficially united but with very different objectives.

The AV referendum is going to be particularly complicated because of the consequences it has for any future moves to PR. Very few are passionate about AV, and attitudes to PR are therefore a much determining factor for positions on the AV vote. That’s not true for everyone, though, ensuring there are four main campaigns.

Yes to AV, yes to PR. For this group, AV is a stepping stone to fair votes, or at least they believe rejecting AV will hamper future PR efforts. By far the largest chunk of the #yestoav campaign falls into this category. The Lib Dem activists mostly fit here, although their MPs voted unanimously against a PR option being put. The Scottish Greens and the Green Party of England and Wales are here too. Plenty of the leftier Charter 88 end of Labour are here, and so too are UKIP for “balance”. Probably 98% of the #yestoav campaign.

Yes to AV, no to PR. These are the AV true believers, and the smallest by far of the four main campaigns. Very few prominent names are here: I count John Rentoul for the media, and Jack Straw and Peter Hain for Labour.

No to AV, no to PR. This is the overwhelming body of opposition to the vote. Here can be found the overwhelming bulk of the Tory party, plus the Labour dinosaurs like Beckett, Blunkett, Reid and Forkbender. This is the establishment position, the two-party-state-forever crowd. They think they’ve found a way to damage PR by attacking AV’s non-proportionality, implying they are somehow pro-PR. Probably 98% of the #notoav campaign.

No to AV, yes to PR. This is another small group, though bigger than the AV-but-not-PR enthusiasts. It includes a fair few Wallist Greens and indeed even the Green Party of Northern Ireland. Their arguments are that this is indeed a “miserable little compromise“, and that if it’s passed the momentum for change will dissipate – “we just had a vote on this, didn’t we”? Douglas Carswell and Dan Hannan, two of the Tories’ most independent thinkers, are here too.

There are of course other campaigns, including the quixotic Bella Caledonia “spoil your ballot for independence”, possibly joined by the Cornish, and those who will vote no to give the Lib Dems a bloody nose and perhaps split the coalition. I understand all these objectives, incidentally, while disagreeing with these campaigns’ conclusions.

Those other smaller campaigns are certainly not open to persuasion on AV itself or PR, I suspect. However, I’d urge the No to AV, yes to PR crowd to look again at their unholy allies. If the referendum is lost, who will be heard? You, with your complex arguments about how this has protected future moves towards PR, or them, the Labour and Tory establishments, crowing as First Past The Post is saved forever?

Welcome to Tescoville – population 1,999.99

Dec 11

Posted by Jeff in Culture | 11 Comments

This story may well shock you as much as it shocked me. I had always assumed it was the stuff of sci-fi, an Orwellian nightmare but ‘Tesco-towns’ are apparently on their way. It is a concept that will take some selling; perhaps a catchy jingle (‘aisle be there for you’) or whizzy gadgetry with one’s Clubcard able to open the door to your flat but, however it is packaged up, barcoded and rammed into our communities, I like to think there will be protests to be had.

I make no secret of nor apology for my deep distaste for Tesco despite ceding that I probably go a bit overboard, and also fully accept that free markets and a Capitalist system will inevitably lead to the biggest companies with the strongest financial muscle being able to boss their particular markets. One of the main problems, though, is that Tesco seems unable to stay within its traditional marketplace. World domination beckons and, to that unblinking end, every little extra product helps. After all, with Tesco you can bank, post, get a new phone, buy your clothes, get a credit card, process photos, take out a Tesco mortgage (to pay for your Tesco home), take out a loan for a car, get car insurance and fill it up with Tesco petrol and so much more, all for cheaper than most other competitors thanks to the organisation’s crushing economies of scale.

Many take a fairly laissez-faire approach to this state of affairs, which is their right of course, but it’s important to remember that it’s our country and it’s not a case of anything goes for towns, villages and communities the country over.

It is this people power that I hope will prevent too many Tesco-villes from sprouting up. Well, that and a decent solution to the housing shortages we face either side of the border.

These mini-villages of apartments, schools and parks ‘shackled’ to the depressingly homogenous Tesco stores that are being planned across the UK come at the worst time. With the shortage of housing blighting the country at the moment, many families will have little choice but to have large supermarkets as their nearest neighbour and noisy delivery lorries as their early morning wake-up call. The Good Life it ain’t. What would Wurzel Gummidge say?

This is a map of Tesco stores in London from 2008:

It is a busy smattering of outlets that could be replicated up and down the UK and, right now, there are 21 protests against new Tesco stores in Scotland alone. The marvellous Tescopoly website can provide more detail if desired.

There are some lovely villages, inside and outside of big cities, that make do just fine without large supermarkets hoovering up the trade in everything from televisions to microwaves and from fast-food dinners to booze. These need to be the template for future plans going forward – vibrant high streets with a pulse, a life, a character that Tesco from Cheshunt cannot provide.

And here is where my protest falls down and, to add insult to injury, David Cameron’s rhetoric makes sense. No-one is forcing people to go into Tesco stores. Its popularity is not due to some odious conspiracy that I would like to think exists, but because the supermarket chain is, well, popular. I could make the point that that popularity is artificial because we all work such long hours that we have little choice come 7:30pm/8pm but to go to the only place that is open to buy our dinner and I could also claim that it is the biggest superstores that will go on getting bigger because they can keep prices lower than the fledgling competition out there but, hey, that’s capitalism for you. I’d shop at a Butchers, Bakers and even a Candlestickmakers if they stayed open past 5pm but they don’t so it is to the big superstores that I go.

David Cameron has called continuously for entrepreneurs and while most, myself included, would immediately think of manufacturing or technology with such a call, perhaps it is the more bread and butter areas of simply getting your daily shopping in where we need to think afresh. Can I complain about Tesco if I’ve not bothered my behind to help chip away at its dominant market share? Well, obviously I can (witness the above) but that’s the easy way out.

We do live in a free world and I fully accept that large megastores are an unavoidable byproduct of that appropriate way of life but my concern is that, with strong, vibrant communities largely a thing of the past and many micro-populations unable or uninterested in joining together and deciding how they want their high street to be, either through purchase power or planning processes, then many of us will be worse off.

Tesco-towns, if they do bring their American-style presence to the UK, could be described as many things but I suspect ‘idyllic’ won’t be one of the applicable adjectives. This is a shame but it is up to us, the meatballs are in our court.

Student funding – there’s plenty of blame to go round

Dec 9

Posted by James in Education, Westminster | 10 Comments

The Lib Dems are rightly the focus of ire today and for this session, even if one sees it as deliberative democracy in action. However, the list of parties who’ve got it wrong on fees is much longer than that, and it seems unfair to let the others off the hook.

1989 protestsThe Tories were the first to attack access to higher education. In 1989 they began whittling the grant system for poor students away and replacing it gradually with loans, and a generation redoubled their loathing of them.

Adam Tinworth has some classic protest pictures from that period here.

The new New Labour Government in 1997 then squarely broke a pledge to students and their landslide voters. Their manifesto said: “The improvement and expansion needed cannot be funded out of general taxation. […] The costs of student maintenance should be repaid by graduates on an income-related basis, from the career success to which higher education has contributed.” A graduate tax, in other words, roughly equivalent to Labour’s current plans.

1997 protestsBut Blunkett and Blair then used the Dearing report to bring in fees and abolish grants (despite the latter having specifically been against Dearing’s recommendations), and this move became their first major let-down in office. As noted here before, the newly oppositional Tories fought the proposals alongside non-NUS universities, although I was advised by a senior Tory MP “never to trust us if we get back into government”.

Enough space has been spent pointing out the Lib Dems’ inconsistency here and elsewhere, and I won’t add to that, except to say that anyone unsure of the scale of their hypocrisy should watch the start of this ironically-titled broadcast very carefully.

The SNP have historically been supportive of students, but even here there are straws in the wind suggesting a shift. They have a green paper coming out next week on higher education, and Mike Russell gave an ambiguous quote in advance. “What we won’t do is have upfront tuition fees”, he said, before promising “major changes”. Given that we currently have no fees at all in Scotland, thanks to a vote by SNP, Green & (ironically) Lib Dem MSPs, students would be forgiven for anxiety about what those “major changes” might be. A return to fees paid later, the old Lib Dem/Labour position? A new graduate tax, however hard that would be to shoehorn into the current powers of the Scottish Parliament?

2010 protestsJust to return to the principles, education that’s free for all is not a holiday camp perk for the middle classes. Neither fees nor an additional graduate tax are required so students pay society back – if they earn more, they pay more income tax back, and graduates in employment contribute through their work, whether it’s for the private sector, for voluntary organisations, or for the public sector. That’s what Labour’s 97 manifesto said, effectively.

Access to higher education should be on the basis of academic potential and desire to attend and learn, not income level, and anyone who argues that no-one has been deterred by fees is simply wrong in fact. That’s not just the right for individual students – it’s also what the country needs. It’s an unequivocal social good for the brightest and keenest to go on to further and higher education, irrespective of their wealth or their attitude to indebtedness.

As a St Andrews graduate, I certainly knew plenty of people who went to university because their parents were rich and it was expected of them, and I also know plenty of people who didn’t go to university because the opposite was true. That was the era before fees, when it was bad enough already.

All three of the Westminster parties of government have got this wrong in the past. Much as it would be in the Greens’ short-term interest to be the only party committed to free higher education based on academic ability, not to pay, I do hope the SNP won’t go the same way next week.

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