The government's 'progressive' changes: the judgement

The Institute for Fiscal Studies are the experts' experts. Everyone respects their abilities. Is the new regime 'fair' or 'progressive'? They think not:

The cuts to welfare spending mean that benefits will be focussed more on pensioners and less on families with children. The radical reform to council tax benefit is probably the one that raises the most concerns ... The Treasury's modelling shows that the benefit measures announced yesterday will hit those in the bottom half of the income distribution more as a share of their income than those in the top half. We agree with this assessment. The Treasury also claimed that overall the tax and benefit measures yet to be implemented are progressive ... But this analysis excludes some measures that we think it is possible to make a rough estimate for.

Our analysis – published in August – shows that by including a wider set of benefit reforms announced by this government leads to the conclusion that the impact of all tax and benefit measures yet to come in reduces the incomes of lower income households by more than that of higher income households, with the notable exception of the richest 2% of the population who are the hardest hit. Therefore the tax and benefit changes are regressive rather than progressive across most of the income distribution. And when we add in the new measures announced yesterday this finding is, unsurprisingly, reinforced.

Who votes Tory? Not the poor, but an awful lot of pensioners who hanker for the days of school  flogging, hanging, fighting the Germans, spitting at black people and that nice Mr Macmillan.

OK, I'm being mean - but pensioners are the Tories' core vote. So bollocks to the rest of us.

You can't trust the Tories - in blogs or with the economy

Over at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the very serious men in grey suits are ripping the government's claims about the spending review to shreds. Faisal Islam, the Guardian's economics correspondent, describes it thus:

already the most devastating critique of flaky claims, policy inconsistencies, dodgy maths, i've ever seen by IFS

Laughter at the IFS briefing as it shows the most regressive looking graph in history vs the puny looking treasury version 

in response to Cameron and Clegg saying things like this.

People do not only think of themselves as recipients of benefits. There is also: "How much does it cost to get childcare? What kind of education is my child getting at school? What am I getting back if I am doing some low-paid, part-time work?" That is how people live in the real world, and in the real world it is the richest that are paying the most – about that there is not doubt at all.

Meanwhile, it's time to look to Nadine Dorries, one of the most appallingly unpleasant of the Tory Scum back benches. She fiddled her expenses but fell ever so slightly short of being charged, but the Parliamentary Commissioner's report takes her to task over her non-co-operative approach and generally relaxed attitude towards the truth. She responds with this astonishing confession about her blog, which the authorities used as evidence:

My blog is 70% fiction and 30% fact. It is written as a tool to enable my constituents to know me better and to reassure them of my commitment to Mid Bedfordshire. I rely heavily on poetic licence and frequently replace one place name/event/fact with another.

Right. I see. Or rather, I don't see. But here are a couple of extracts which might help us understand this menace to society:

Did you know that if every GP referred one less patient per year and requested one less diagnostic test, the NHS would save half a billion pounds in that one year?

Would you like to be that one patient? How does the doctor decide who shouldn't be treated because it's too expensive? Why doesn't Dorries know the difference between 'less' and 'fewer'? (And where's the source for this statistic?).

Try this:

The BBC will only receive the equivalent of a 16% cut over five years. That just isn’t good enough.

The BBC has done a very good job over the last thirteen years to support the Labour Government. They have facilitated the very process which has resulted in the cuts every family in the nation has to bear. The blood which will flow from the cuts is all over BBC hands too.

That's right. You heard it here first. The BBC caused the banking crash and made Labour rescue the banks and needs to be punished. 

It's like reading Ewar's Shropshire Star letters over and over again, before remembering that this woman is a Member of Parliament on the government side. 

The stupid, how it burns.

The morning after the night before

Good morning. I assume that, if you're in the UK, you're suffering from a massive politics hangover, having listened to the Chancellor explain that, while we're all in this together, the poor are going to have to pay for the deficit. Not the rich, not the banks, not corporations (their tax is actually going down), but the poor and the young.

Oddly, I was teaching King Lear yesterday. The story of an arrogant, deluded ruler with no grasp of reality who destroyed his country out of selfishness, greed and narcisssism chimed with the day's events, though I doubt that Osborne will ever come to a soul-destroying moment of realisation - he'll always be rich and he's never wanted friends.

How revolting it was to see Liberal Democrats, who campaigned as the 'nice' party, patting the Tory Scum on the back, clapping and laughing as Osborne reduced the state to a shell company for the rich and put the poor and disabled out of their homes. When the election comes, they deserve oblivion.

I couldn't stand it anymore and headed over to Shrewsbury for my regular fencing session. Weirdly, given I was in a terrible mood, it was one of those nights on which everything went brilliantly - I fenced lots of seriously good (and nice) people and beat them all. For the first time in ages, I chose my shots and they all worked. Perhaps cold fury is the key to effective fencing.

Stunning dishonesty

Sorry to go on about politics so much today, but the Chancellor's presentation of the Comprehensive Spending Review is the most important event of the next five years (even Thatcher's death, which will hopefully be sooner rather than later, is less important).

The government has announced that their plans are 'progressive', i.e. that the poor will fare better than the rich.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies, which is the go-to thinktank for judging this stuff, agrees. But not in a way that the Tory Scum will like.

Why is it overall progressive? It's progressive because of the tax measures Labour set out that the new government chose to keep ... The stuff we heard about today, the new stuff today, clearly is not progressive on the Treasury's analysis. It's only once you add it in to the things we heard about in June and the things Mr [Alistair] Darling had already put in the pipeline for next year that it becomes progressive.

Why will the budget be progressive? Because of the Labour plans the Tories are leaving in place: all their own ideas are nasty, reactionary, anti-poor ideas.

So the Tories and Lib Dems are blaming Labour (partially wrongly) for the deficit, then silently and dishonestly claiming credit for the few good things in this review. That's politics…

This is the kind of thing that Tories like doing: snatching food from paraplegics:

• £2bn by time-limiting the contributory element of employment support allowance to one year. ESA is the benefit brought in to replace incapacity benefit. So these are cuts that will hit the disabled.

no one will be hit harder than disabled people with a husband or wife that works. After just one year, they will now find themselves stripped of any independent income. 

£385m by cutting the childcare element of working tax credit. It will only cover 70% of costs, not 80% of costs.

So if you're poor but want to get out to work, you'll have to do more hours to pay to for childcare, see less of your kids, and so on in an interminable cycle of social decay. If you're disabled, you'll have to hope your partner feels like doling out the pocket money. And if you can't afford toilet handrails or a wheelchair, you can sit where you are and wear nappies. And like it. After all, you're reducing the deficit.

• £215m by extending "shared room", a housing benefit rule. This says people can only claim for the cost of a single room in a shared house. Originally it applied to claimants under the age of 25. Now it will apply to claimants under the age of 35. In other words, single people aged 25 to 35 won't be able to claim housing benefit for a flat.

Nice. Rising Damp institutionalised. Even though the majority of trendy flats don't meet the minimum requirements for decent living in public housing (the Parker Morris rules of 1961), the poor are going to be denied even that. Let's not forget that this includes a large number of people doing paid work in expensive cities. It'll be harder to have a private life, which gets more and more important as you get older. Because I studied for many more years than most, I lived in shared houses between 1993-2009. I liked the majority of my housemates, but it got harder and harder to cram my (cheap) possessions into one space, to share nasty kitchen equipment, cope with messiness and queue for bathroom space. Single beds and cold water are fine for a while, before life really starts, but quickly lose their appeal.

This nasty little rule removes dignity without a care. Imagine having a decent job in your thirties - perhaps as a university lecturer. You've lost your job because the Tories think literature and media criticism are subversive doss subjects. You sign on for your £40 per week and apply for housing benefit to cover your 1-bedroom flat, only to find that you have to move into a single bedroom to get any support. So you move to an even nastier area of town (perhaps where you started). Goodbye to most of your books and music, perhaps a bike, sports equipment, stereo, some of your clothes, most of your kitchen things, the sticks of third-hand furniture you've acquired, your TV. Hello to dirty bathrooms, poor heating, filthy kitchens, your housemates' choice of entertainment, the screams and bangs of several playstations booming through the walls. Your partner feels less inclined to come round and you stop inviting friends for dinner.

Before long, you're depressed, lonely and isolated. Jobs seem harder to get. Life becomes unutterably worse. Then the best to be hoped is that you go on an anti-Tory killing spree, but you probably don't have the energy.

• £135m by cutting the mobility component in disability living allowance for people in residential care.

Nice. You old people can just sit in those wee-sodden plastic chairs arranged round the edges of the room. What do you want to go out for? Eh? Shut up and swallow your tranquillisers.

the Warm Front programme, which helps the poorest makes their homes warmer, is going... 

the climate change department's budget is being cut 5% a year (about 20% over four years?)

Another delightful touch. We provide rubbish state housing or drive the poor into slums owned, then cost them more money and help damage the environment by cutting a scheme which a) provided jobs b) protected the environment and c) saved everyone (residents and taxpayers) money. Who needs to prevent climate change anyway? It'll help unemployed teens grow more dope, and the armies of the homeless won't need so many newspapers and clothes to keep warm.

 30% cuts to the budgets of both Sport England and UK Sport. These are massive and mean dismantling much of sport in local communities. These organisations are vital in plugging the gap in provision of proper sport in state schools and are fantastic examples of the kind of "big society" initiatives the coalition is supposed to want. 

Another fine touch. It's very clear: sport for the poor is meant to be something you pay Murdoch to watch, not something you do. If you're fat, it's your individual fault and you should eat less (which is going to be easy given the hardship people face). Now clear orff paupers, the polo team needs your playing field.

I was talking to my students today about the morality of sex work. Soon I'll be exploring the practicalities. As Adam said to me once, 'don't sit on your arse, rent it'. (Adam Smith would no doubt agree).

Sailing into choppy waters

It's the Comprehensive Spending Review today, in which the Tory and Liberal Democrat government institute nakedly reactionary social and economic measures under the guise of dealing with the deficit. The poor, the weak and the hardworking will suffer. The rich and their businesses will not. Organisations like the BBC are being punished for their (relative) independence and for offering an alternative to the world of Fox News, while Murdoch and his friends will be rewarded for their loyalty.

Are massive cuts in welfare, environmental protection, education, housing, transport, the arts etc. justified? Not if you ask Nobel Prizewinner for Economics, Joseph Stiglitz. He, like virtually all expert economists and most government, thinks we should be boosting the economy, not sacking millions of people.

Still, what does he know? Abolishing the state worked brilliantly for Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship (as long as you don't look too closely). Until it didn't.