Not outrageous enough?

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It takes a very special kind of delusion to look at an electoral defeat and claim that what it actually shows is overwhelming support for the losing party. Donald Trump has it in spades, of course, and is clearly keen to apply it to the results of elections in countries other than his own. Last week, as part of his ‘welcome’ for Keir Starmer, he praised the ‘real winner’ of the election, one Nigel Farage, bizarrely claiming that Reform had won more seats than they were allowed to have. From a man whose one and only election victory (to date) was achieved under an electoral system in which he won fewer votes than his opponent, a degree of confusion is perhaps to be expected.

But we have our own adherents of the idea that a defeat is really a victory much closer to home. Wales’ very own RT Davies, for example, declared this week that Wales is ‘inherently Conservative’, the evidence for which is presumably to be found in the number of seats won by Conservatives in the General Election in July. Zero is, I suppose, a nice round number, and the beautiful roundness of it can easily distract attention from its mathematical significance. He also said that, “The Welsh people reject the extreme liberal ideology of Labour, Plaid Cymru nationalists and the Lib Dems”. I’m struggling to identify which part of the mainstream Tory ideology so enthusiastically swallowed by at least two of the named parties is ‘extreme’, but that’s an aside. The evidence for this rejection is clearly to be found in the fact that the remainder of Welsh constituencies, after deducting those taken by the Tories, were won by the three parties he named. Zero for the Tories and a total of 32 for everyone else is the clearest rejection of everyone but the Tories that a Tory leader could wish for.

Perhaps he’s not mathematically-challenged at all, he just believes that election results are like some strange form of double-entry book-keeping, where every debit has to be balanced by a credit somewhere else, and the rest of us are simply looking at the ‘wrong’ side of the balance sheet. After all, a number which looks like a debt to a customer always looks like an asset to the bank. I’m not sure that I’d want him as a banker, though. Even when it isn’t rhyming slang. It’s more likely that he comes from that school of thought which believes that if you repeat an untruth often enough it ends up being believed. It’s an approach which has a long and disreputable history, but as Trump demonstrates, daily, the more outrageous the statement, the more effective it can be. Maybe RT’s problem is that he simply doesn’t have it in him to be outrageous enough. Everyone, or so they say, has at least one redeeming feature – being insufficiently outrageous could be his.

Does Starmer understand how privileged he is?

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In his attempt to make his use of a millionaire’s apartment for four weeks, at an estimated value of £20,000, appear reasonable, Starmer has appealed to the sense which any parent would feel of wanting to do the best for his children. Superficially, it’s an entirely reasonable argument. Having a hoard of reporters virtually camped in the street outside someone’s house is clearly disruptive, and any caring parent would want to avoid disruption to study in the approach to a set of key examinations.

There is a problem, though. Whilst a throng of reporters might be a problem more-or-less unique to the leader of the opposition, it isn’t the only form of disruption which can occur. What, for example, of the child trying to study whilst extensive roadworks are taking place in the road outside?  (Or perhaps the building of a new housing estate, a new prison, or a line of pylons; all things which Starmer has told us people must simply put up with.) Is that somehow less disruptive? Perhaps the parents of that child should just have a word with their friend the multi-millionaire and borrow his pad for a month. Except that most of us don’t know any millionaires, let alone the ‘multi-’ variety.

We know that children born to well-educated, wealthy (or at least comparatively so) parents consistently perform better in school, including in examinations, than poorer children. They start life with a whole range of advantages not available to others. In his attempt to portray himself as just a normal, caring parent wanting to do the best for his children, what Starmer has done is to highlight another of those advantages: knowing the right people. He has also managed to show just how different his idea of 'normal' is from the reality facing most parents.

Chickens, eggs, and confused Chancellors

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There is a report today that the Chancellor is pressurizing the Office of Budget Responsibility to use planned but not yet implemented planning reforms to change its estimate of the rate of UK growth. If they agree, then she will be able to spend more money without breaking her own arbitrary fiscal rules. It doesn’t mean that there will actually be any more money, of course; merely a forecast of extra government revenue at some future date. If they agree to roll over and do as she asks, she will then spend that extra non-existent money on investment in the UK economy. Planning and implementing the spending will, as it always does, precede the actual receipt of the money (always assuming that it is eventually received), and in the short term, that spend will be presented in the accounts as though the money has been ‘borrowed’, even if it’s actually simply been created out of thin air by the Bank of England.

There’s nothing new or unusual about that as a process, it’s what always happens, no matter how much the politicians attempt to deny it. Government spending always precedes government revenue. But here’s the twist: spending the extra money will expand the economy (i.e. create economic growth), thereby validating, to a greater or lesser extent, the original assumption about higher growth. The cause of that growth may not be the one stated when it was first built into the assumptions. But in terms of the outcome, that’s unimportant. Government spending creates economic growth, which eventually leads to increased government revenue.

She could, of course, achieve the same thing by simply adjusting the arbitrary fiscal rules to which she is working. She is, however, too confused about the order of chickens and eggs, and too deeply imbued with Treasury and Bank of England orthodoxy. Maybe it doesn’t matter too much (unless the OBR refuse to play ball), because as long as she abandons her obsession with insisting that the income must precede the expenditure, she does actually stand a chance of achieving the magical growth on which everything, apparently, depends. Whether it’s the right type of growth, in the right places, is a question for another day…

Sacrifice on route to the promised land

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Marx (and for once I really do mean Karl rather than Groucho) wrote that “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce”.

Some of the most powerful political speeches made during my lifetime were by Martin Luther King, who told us that he had a dream about the future possibilities. The peak was perhaps his final speech, in which he said that God had allowed him to go up to the mountain and look over. And that he had seen the Promised Land, before adding, very prophetically as it turned out, that “I may not get there with you”. He was shot the following day.

Yesterday, Starmer told us that he too had a dream, and that he too had seen the promised land. But getting there will take hard work and sacrifice. Based on his government’s actions to date, that sacrifice will be made mostly by the old, the young, and the vulnerable. In a tragic perversion of King’s rhetoric, underlining the first part of what Marx said, it’s not so much a case of “I may not get there with you” as of “You may not get there with me”. I’d really like to believe that it won’t turn out to be equally prophetic.

The generosity is all one-sided

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Any display of excessive generosity towards a decision-maker is always likely to look suspicious, even if there is no obvious or immediate way in which his or her decisions are likely to benefit the donor. In dealing with gifts and hospitality in the context of business relationships with suppliers, the key word that was always drummed into me was ‘reciprocity’. That is to say that no gift or hospitality should be accepted if it was of a higher value than I would be able to offer, and wherever possible, reciprocation should actually take place. So, gifts such as calendars or desk diaries from suppliers or would-be suppliers were acceptable, but bottles of whisky or cases of wine were not. And if a supplier took me to lunch after a meeting, it was expected that I would take him or her to lunch after the next. It’s low level stuff, and even then can never completely erase a potential perception of buying favours, but it's a clear enough rule, and it was always fairly easy to understand where the lines were drawn.

It's that reciprocity which is completely missing in the relationship between donors and politicians. If Starmer were spending thousands of pounds on Christmas and birthday gifts for Lord Alli, it might just about be possible to say that they were simply very generous friends. There is, though, no suggestion that that was the case – and if it had been, I’m sure it would have been wheeled out as a defence by now. Whilst we’ve had a grudging decision that Labour ministers will no longer accept gifts of clothing from donors, that is just a small part of the freebies being accepted. It’s true, of course, that there’s nothing new in this. Politicians (of all parties) have been accepting freebies such as accommodation and tickets to events for years. But ‘everybody’s doing it’ is acceptable as an excuse only until it isn’t. The expenses scandal some years ago, affecting politicians of multiple parties, shows how the line of acceptability can and does move.

The line has moved again, even if only slightly, with the decision to not accept gifts of clothing, but Labour’s politicians still seem to be lining up to argue that ‘no rules were broken’, and that the key thing is ‘transparency’, even if transparency about the purpose of gifts was notably lacking in the cases of Rayner and Reeves. Reeves came up with the line that she wasn’t into clothes or shopping, so when a good friend offered to do the choosing and shopping on her behalf, she readily accepted. It’s not a bad answer – to the wrong question. The issue isn’t who did the physical work of choosing and shopping – she’s lucky to have a friend who can be trusted to do that for her – but why the friend ended up doing the paying as well. It’s a question which the answer neatly and completely sidesteps. In any event, simply not breaking the rules cannot absolve those receiving hospitality and gifts from considering for a moment whether doing so is ethical or might be perceived to be a little dodgy. Getting donors to pay for something else other than clothes may conform to Labour’s new rule, but if the effect is to put the same amount of additional spending power into the same pockets, it changes nothing; it merely relabels the same donation.

Donations have always been an important part of political funding in the UK, and short of a system of state funding of parties, they will continue to be so. Maybe it’s just that there is more reporting and visibility, but there is certainly an impression that the extent to which those donations and gifts are going into individual pockets rather than just into party campaign funds seems to have increased. As far as we can tell, there is no obvious quid pro quo for the generosity of Lord Alli, but the question that the recipients should have been asking themselves is a very simple one: ‘if I were not Leader of the Opposition / Deputy Leader / Shadow Chancellor, or even just MP, would I be getting this hospitality or gift?’ There can only be one honest answer to that question, and no amount of transparency or rigid conformity to ‘the rules’ can change that. At some point, maybe not yet because the stench isn’t strong enough, the rules will be changed. That reciprocity test would not be at all a bad place to start.

Spotting the fatal flaw

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Apparently, there is a plot afoot to change the policy of the self-styled ‘Welsh’ Conservatives to support abolition of the Senedd. I wonder when or even whether they will spot the fatal flaw: the Senedd doesn’t have the power to abolish itself. It doesn’t matter one iota what the ‘Welsh’ Conservatives think, because the issue is reserved to Westminster, meaning that only the English Conservative and Unionist party could enact abolition (assuming they ever get back into power). A ‘Welsh’ party asking its English masters to abolish the Senedd wouldn’t exactly be a good look, even if that probably wouldn’t worry them greatly.

If they’re serious about this, they should probably start by demanding more devolution – specifically that the power to abolish the Senedd be devolved to the Senedd. However, they may find that that would accidentally confer a range of other additional powers on the Senedd, albeit that they might in consequence receive a surprising degree of support from pro-Senedd parties. Otherwise, ‘all’ they need to do is (1) ensure the return of a Conservative government in England and (2) persuade the people of Wales, with their consistent and repeated pattern of rejection of the Tories, to vote to abolish their own parliament by electing a Tory majority to the Senedd under an electoral system which makes a single party majority highly unlikely. It’s probably not the sort of cunning plot over which we should lose a great deal of sleep. But Tory self-destruction might make for a good spectator sport.

Yes, but which women?

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The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has said today that she wants to use her time as the UK’s first female chancellor “to improve life for women”. It’s a worthy aim, and one in which, in principle, I wish her every success. There is much to be done still. I can’t help wondering, though, which women she has in mind, and how general her concern is. It’s clearly not for those over pension age, whose lives she’s already decided to make worse by reducing their disposable income. And it’s not those on low incomes who have more than two children, who she has already decided should remain in poverty, with no relief in sight. And clearly, it’s not the women of tomorrow either, if they happen to be girls growing up in a household impacted by her decisions on benefits.

Given that her remarks were associated with promoting the Investing in Women Code, and that the Treasury has backed up her remarks with statistics suggesting that, despite being a majority of the population, women “…represent only 21% of business owners, with less than 6% of active equity backed companies founded by women”, we can make a reasonable stab at guessing which subset of women she’s actually talking about. It is clearly a travesty that women are so under-represented in that particular sphere, but it’s also the case that the minority of women who are represented will tend to be the more well-off and better-educated overall. What one might call middle class. There is no doubt that this is an issue which needs to be addressed, and not all business founders and leaders become rich, but it does look as though the target group whose lives the chancellor wishes to improve are those whose lives are already better than average anyway. People a bit like the chancellor, perhaps, reflecting once again her detachment from the real problems faced by many, problems she is making worse. The aim is a worthy one, and the initiative deserves to succeed. But if the aim is to improve the lives of women more generally, it isn’t exactly the most obvious starting place, and it’s being undermined by other decisions which she has taken and is threatening more of.

Can Wales learn from Estonia?

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There was some speculation last week about whether the UK government would take up an opportunity to fly criminals to Estonia so that they could serve their time in an Estonian prison rather than an overcrowded British one. The speculation didn’t last long. But the question that I found myself wondering about wasn’t so much whether the UK should seize the opportunity as why the opportunity existed in the first place. Why are there so many unused places in Estonian prisons that renting them out looks like an opportunity?

The numbers aren’t enormous anyway. With a population of less than one and a half million (too small to be a country at all, according to many unionists) Estonia only has around 3000 places, and a majority of those are occupied by people incarcerated by Estonian courts. Any difference it could make to the UK’s current problems would necessarily be marginal. Conditions, though, tend to be better than those in the UK, although that would be an obvious problem for the UK’s tabloids who seem to dictate government policy on the issue.

Asking why Estonia has spare places leads us to a question about why the UK is imprisoning so many people in the first place. Debate on crime has become something of a contest between the two main UK parties to see which can promise to imprison the greatest number of people for the longest periods for the greatest possible range of offences. And demands for ‘justice’, and ‘bringing people to justice’ often sound more like a demand for retribution and punishment; true ‘justice’ is a rather more nuanced concept. Punishing people who have transgressed against the rules which society has laid down (leaving aside here any question as to whether those rules are themselves fair or reasonable) is one reason for imprisoning people, but prison is only one possible means of punishment. Locking up persistent offenders may prevent further offending during their period inside, and that’s a second possible reason for using prisons. Rehabilitation and re-education is a third, but the extent to which that happens in overcrowded, underfunded and understaffed prisons is limited to say the least. Then there’s deterrence, but the extent to which lengthy sentences deter people from committing crimes is debateable. Many crimes are ‘spur-of-the-moment’ rather than preplanned, and deterrent only works if potential criminals are carefully analysing the potential outcomes before deciding to commit a crime. And that analysis would necessarily also include the chances of being caught – when criminals know that understaffed police forces will simply fail to investigate many crimes, the power of deterrence is significantly weakened. We also know that many of those incarcerated have real problems with mental health or substance misuse, for neither of which are there adequate services available, and for neither of which is imprisonment any type of solution.

We know that sending people to prison has a number of consequences for both the individuals and their families. But it also has economic consequences – not just the costs of keeping people in prison, but also the economic loss if people lose their jobs and stop paying tax, an effect which can last long after release, during which time the benefits bill also rises. The impact on families can be severe; absence of a parent coupled with a reduction in household income can seriously affect children’s life chances, even if the family remains together post-prison. Sometimes, there is little alternative to a custodial sentence, but the political trend seems to be increasingly seeing it as a first resort rather than a last resort. Coupled with a reluctance to spend money on buildings or facilities for anyone in need in society – let alone for criminals – the Labour-Tory impetus to be seen to be tougher than the other leads inevitably to the sort of crisis which we now face.

It doesn’t have to be that way, though. Improved mental health and drug abuse services would help to avoid many crimes, and alternatives to imprisonment would not only reduce the costs but also help to maintain cohesive families. Perhaps there’s even a revenue opportunity for Wales opened up by the Estonian approach. If Wales were independent, or even if criminal justice were fully devolved, we could adopt an approach leading to reduced use of prison sentences, maybe even leaving us with spare capacity to rent out to the prison-obsessed English government.

Left hands and right hands

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The new UK government isn’t the first to talk about wanting to change the NHS from a sickness service into a health service, with more emphasis on prevention rather than cure. And it won’t be the last. Nor will it be the first to talk the talk but fail to deliver – and yesterday’s announcement by Starmer has impending failure written all over it, for at least three reasons.

The first is that many of his proposals – worthy and sensible though they might be – are necessarily long term. For sure, tackling obesity and reducing the consumption of sugar and junk food will reduce the demand for health care, but even if assorted campaigns and new legislation to do those things are both implemented consistently over many years and succeed in achieving their aims (and neither of those things are guaranteed), the impact will be negligible at first, only building up to a significant level over a decade or two. They do nothing to address the crisis facing the NHS now, which doesn’t have the resources to tackle that crisis.

Secondly, whilst they are entirely correct to be placing more emphasis on primary care in the community, there is a little problem of chickens and eggs. In previous attempts at health reform, we’ve seen health boards cutting the numbers of hospital beds on the basis that care would be better provided in the community. But what we’ve not always seen is a corresponding increase in the provision of that care in the community. Any approach which depends on cutting first in order to free up the funds for the required investment in community care is inevitably going to make the problem worse in the short term – even if they do eventually get around to improving the community care element, rather than just banking the savings. The investment needs to come first, but the statement that there will be no new money until after the reforms have been implemented is setting the whole approach up to fail from the outset.

Thirdly, it looks a lot like silo thinking, as if the NHS can reform itself in the desired ways in isolation from all other policy decisions. What they say they want to achieve needs a ‘whole-of-government’ approach, and it won’t work if other departments (and especially the Treasury) are pulling in a different direction. The most obvious and immediate example concerns the effect of poverty on health care. We know, from study after study, that poor health and poverty go hand in hand. It isn’t just a case of poverty ‘causing’ poor health; it isn’t quite as simple as that. But a lack of money can limit lifestyle choices – giving people a choice between heating and eating, for example, can lead to people choosing the cheapest rather than the healthiest options. Educational level is another factor in such choices as well, of course – and we know that the level of education is also closely associated with levels of income.

Taking a deliberate decision to withdraw funding from some of the most vulnerable pensioners without assessing the impact, and taking a deliberate decision to leave hundreds of thousands of children in poverty are not decisions taken by the health secretary. But they are decisions which will directly impact the demand for health services in the very short term. By a margin which it is impossible to calculate accurately, they will make things worse. It is, or should be, the job of the PM to ensure that his ministers are working to a joined-up agenda, but allowing one minister to take decisions which will increase the demand on health services whilst instructing another not to increase the supply of those services underlines that it’s not a job which he is currently performing.

There is a lot for which he can justifiably blame his predecessors, but none of that excuses deliberately making things worse.

Defining what news is

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There is an old adage in journalism that ‘man bites dog’ is more newsworthy than ‘dog bites man’. The point, of course, is that it’s the unusual which is of interest, not that which happens daily. But defining what is usual or what is expected is not always an easy matter; it depends on our frame of reference and our expectations based on our own priors and prejudices.

The Guardian today headlines one story as ‘Up to 50 Labour MPs could rebel over cut to winter fuel allowance’. The framing presents that as being unusual and unexpected. But the converse is that other Labour MPs are going to go along with the government proposal in the vote this week. There was a time when, based on the man bites dog analogy, the headline would have been ‘350 Labour MPs to vote for reducing pensioner incomes’. It would have been news – unusual, out of the ordinary, surprising even.

Starmer chooses to hide behind the formulation that he can guarantee that the annual increase in the state pension “will outstrip any reduction in the winter fuel payment” and Labour MPs are being encouraged to repeat the same line. Well, yes, that’s true – but it’s mathematically flawed. An increase of £400 less a cut of £300 is, indeed, still an increase – but the net increase is less than the rate of inflation. The bottom line is still that a Labour government is deliberately planning to reduce the living standards of most pensioners, and no fudging of the figures can disguise that intent. It says a lot about what the Labour Party has become that voting to reduce pensioner incomes is regarded as normal, and the unusual, the ‘news’, is that a handful of Labour MPs might decide to sit on their hands.

Wishing carefully

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The problem with being tough for the sake of being seen to be tough when taking a decision is that the more people criticise, the easier it is to underline just how tough the original decision was. All those people piling in to offer advice to the Chancellor on why her decision on the winter fuel allowance was silly, unnecessary and downright mean are merely reinforcing her original motivation which, I suspect, was nothing to do with saving money and everything to do with deliberately taking an unpopular decision just to show how tough she could be. The suggestion by the Guardian’s economics editor that she would be wise to reverse a “mean and politically inept” decision is absolutely right, but irrelevant if performative meanness is the objective.

Here on planet Earth, reviewing a decision taken in haste without a proper analysis or understanding of the likely consequences would be seen by many as a sign of strength and wisdom, but on planet Westminster, a U-turn is axiomatically a sign of weakness, regardless of how sensible it might be. I suspect that nothing will make her change her mind: whilst continued noise merely strengthens her resolve, silence would remove any pressure on her to change course. The sensible thing to do is demand change, but demanding change makes it less likely, and not demanding it makes ‘no change’ a certainty. “That’s some catch”, as Joseph Heller might have put it.

Maybe the deliberate leak of the fact that the pension is likely to be increasing by £400 a year next April because of the triple-lock will be enough to silence the mathematically challenged, although the more aware will realise that that was going to happen anyway, and a triple lock which protects the basic pension is meaningless if the government then claws most of the increase back elsewhere. Quite apart from the fact that that increase won’t be received until after the bills which the fuel allowance is intended to mitigate have already been paid. Adding prestidigitation to toughness might look like an expansion of Reeves’s otherwise limited skillset, but only if we don’t see the hands moving.

There has been one suggestion that Reeves should simply reframe the proposal as a measure to address a perceived imbalance between generations, and use it to appeal to the young. Blaming one demographic for the problems of another is certainly continuity Toryism of the sort which seems to appeal to Labour these days, and might even work electorally. It doesn’t, though, help to achieve a harmonious and balanced society and its practical (as opposed to political) impact is negligible.

The government have now promised that there will be a formal vote on the question next week. Perhaps Reeves will have a change of heart and back down; perhaps enough Labour MPs will find that they do indeed have a backbone and vote against it. But the likeliest outcome currently appears to be that the government will use its massive majority to win the vote, and that large numbers of Labour MPs will find themselves voting for something which will reveal only that party loyalty triumphs over conscience and principle. Those Labour MPs who’ve demanded a vote may yet come to understand the meaning of being careful what they wish for.

Not criminal enough. Yet.

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With the elimination of Priti Patel from the Tory leadership race, the party has lost what, on the face of it, appeared to be one of their best chances of continuing the run of selecting only the naughtiest of candidates for the top post. Being sacked for conducting her own foreign policy and being found to have bullied civil servants (even if let off by her then boss) are the sort of misdeeds which ought to have elevated her to the top of the list given her party’s recent predilection for rogues and rule-breakers. She might have been pretty nasty in her period as Home Secretary and rather too fond of Farage, but amongst the Tory Party membership those were supposed to be assets.

Whilst May’s naughty doings – or at least the ones she owned up to – were limited to running through a farmer’s wheatfield, her successor set the bar high for those who would follow. And Johnson, of course, did indeed set a really high bar. Being sacked for lying – twice – being involved in a (failed) plot to beat up a journalist, making up stories for newspapers, to say nothing of being fined for breaches of his own Covid regulations: it was a tough act to follow. Whilst his successor, Liz Truss, had what has subsequently been revealed to be a somewhat tenuous grip on reality, to say nothing of a weird obsession with cheese, she really couldn’t compete. That was probably one of the factors in the brevity of her tenure in the role. Sunak did rather better, being fined for both breaching the Covid regulations and the seat belt law, even if his household benefitting from non-dom tax rules didn’t amount to a crime in the eyes of the law (I wonder who made, or failed to change, the law?).

Given Jenrick’s past record in relation to the Covid regulations (even if he somehow escaped a prosecution or fine) and granting what some might think was dodgy planning consent to a Tory donor, he is justifiably leading the field after the first round of voting. It’s not exactly on the Johnsonian scale, and may owe more to the so-far apparently clean character of the competition. But if any of the other four are serious about wanting the job, they need to either come clean about any past misdeeds, or get out there and start committing some. They can hardly expect the diminishing Tory membership to vote for someone who might turn out to be a fine upstanding citizen after all. Any expectation that they can win on that basis is showing a colossal misunderstanding of the values of the party they seek to lead.

£16,000 is a whole pile of new shirts

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There is an old joke from the Soviet era about Brezhnev showing his mother around his world. He showed her his enormous office and his luxury Kremlin flat, and then took her by chauffeur-driven limousine to see his country house on the outskirts of Moscow before showing her pictures of his dacha on the Black Sea coast. When he finished, his mother said, “It’s all very well, Leonid – but what happens if the communists ever get back into power?”. It’s not only dictators and would-be dictators who can be swayed by the trappings of office; it can happen even in so-called democracies like the UK.

Boris Johnson was, of course, famous for the extent of his freeloading on ‘friends’. From holidays to weddings, from wallpaper and furnishings to somewhere to live: all were fair game for a man rarely known to pay for anything very much himself. It’s an attitude not limited to Tories, however; Keir Starmer also seems quite happy to enjoy the benefits of the job as well as accepting a range of gifts and freebies from friends and supporters, as Owen Jones discussed in the Guardian last week. It’s not on the same scale as Johnson, nor does Starmer seem to suffer from the same degree of casual indifference to properly and accurately declaring things. There is no suggestion that any rules have been broken, to use the much-loved response of politicians caught doing something which might look a little bit dodgy to some people. But that merely outsources the issue to those drawing up the rules.

It does raise some questions of judgement. Why does someone being paid £128,000 a year need someone else to buy him £16,000 worth of ‘work clothing’? (Even more pertinent to many of us, how would one even set about spending that much on clothes for the office anyway?) And whilst there’s no suggestion of corruption – no hint of any direct quid pro quo – why would someone even want to buy shirts for such a well-paid friend? There is a somewhat shadowy area between a corrupt relationship and a wholly professional one, and expensive gifting falls right into it.

It’s the same issue which led to the downfall of Vaughan Gething here in Wales. It isn’t about being corrupt, it isn’t about doing favours for the donor, and it isn’t about breaking any rules. It is about the potential perception that someone who gives expensive gifts to someone in, or with the potential to be in, a position of power might just have some sort of unvoiced expectation associated with it. It’s about whether someone on a high salary who doesn’t even have to fund his own clothing out of it might have at least a little difficulty in understanding how much difference a loss of £300 in income might make to a pensioner on a low income. Above all it’s about why someone in that position can’t even understand why anyone might ask questions about such gifts. Judgement is about more than following the rules.

Monsters under the bed

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Apparently, the whole structure of the UK’s economy was in dire peril of complete and immediate collapse unless the government implemented means testing for the winter fuel allowance. Yes, the money markets were all demanding a raid on the income of pensioners, and threatening a run on the pound, increases in interest rates, and an economic crash if their demands were not acceded to. At least, that’s what the leader of the House of Commons told us yesterday, so it must be true.

The funny thing is that most of us know people who have the odd few pounds invested in premium bonds or other government savings products, and none of them seem to have been clamouring for an attack on pensioner income. Nor as far as I am aware were the pension funds who own so much of the government’s ‘debt’ demanding that those who benefit from their funds should have their income arbitrarily and suddenly cut. I doubt that those companies who also own part of that ‘debt’ were really demanding that the spending power of 10 million of their customers should be cut. And it seems highly unlikely that those foreign governments who own part of the ‘debt’ in order to facilitate trade with the UK cared much one way or the other. Those money markets of which the government is so terrified end up looking more akin to the monster residing under the bed of a small child than a real and present danger, particularly when the savings involved are, at best, marginal.

But the phrase ‘at best’ is doing a lot of work there. Apparently, the government believe that stopping the payment of the allowance to all pensioners who aren’t receiving pension credit will save around £1.4 billion a year. That’s a lot of money for any of us as individuals, but little more than a drop in the ocean for the UK government. And stung by the criticism, the government are mounting a campaign to persuade those who are eligible for pension credit but not currently receiving it to apply now. We can fairly easily calculate that the cost of restoring the fuel allowance to the roughly 880,000 households involved will be somewhere around £200 million. Add on several millions for the cost of the advertising campaign, and the saving is reduced to a little over £1 billion. Still worthwhile if you’re looking to cut government expenditure? Not so fast.

If all those 880,000 households claimed the full amount of pension credit to which they are entitled, the bill for pension credits would increase by up to £2.1 billion. The same pensioners are currently not claiming housing benefit to which they are also entitled – another £1.3 billion. So if the government’s advertising campaign is a runaway success (and that’s what they say they want), they will have spent an extra £3.6 billion in order to save £1.4 billion. It could be, of course, that they are not being entirely truthful in saying that they want people to claim pension credit, and expect their campaign to fail. Government ministers being less than truthful is hard to believe, I know, but we can’t discount the possibility. On the other hand, if we make the assumption that they are being honest, that leaves us with an inexplicable mathematical quandary. Failure to make the £1.4 billion cut would lead to economic collapse, but spending an extra £2 billion plus would not. Labour’s grasp of basic arithmetic turns out to be no better than that of their predecessors.