Epsom - Disabled must pay

Epsom and Ewell Borough Council met on Tuesday, and as per there was the usual raft of egregious decisions pushed through by the controlling Residents’ Association group. Examples of their scorn for those they allege to represent are almost becoming too legion to mention in full, but one really stood out this week.

On Tuesday, the RA pushed through plans to charge Blue Badge holders to park in Council car parks, ensuring that additional strain will be placed on the most vulnerable members of the Borough to help pay for the Council’s imagined deficit.* These plans were confirmed in the face of overwhelming opposition from local Residents, a petition of just under 1,000 signatures submitted to the Council, a campaign in the local newspaper, and strong feelings expressed by the disabled residents the Council saw fit to poll during their ‘consultation process’ (more on the failure of consultation here).

One Residents’ Association Councillor had previously resigned from the Group over the plans and duly voted against them along with every opposition Councillor. Even with these votes, and two abstentions, the motion was still carried due to the numerical advantage the RA has on the Council.

The main point raised by the RA in support of their plans was that there are other disadvantaged members of society that have to pay to use the car parks. This completely fails to recognise the differences between ‘disabled’ and ‘disadvantaged’, not least the fact that the disabled often have to use car parks where others don’t due to the difficulties of using public transport. In addition, it can often take a disabled individual much longer to pay for their parking as under both current and future plans they have to go to the parking office in person to pay/get any discount.

The new rules, which will come into effect, makes Epsom and Ewell one of the only 21 Councils in the country to charge the disabled to park. An incredibly regressive move.

I leave you with some rather unpalatable number crunching. During the meeting, one Councillor mentioned that the projected income from Blue Badge charging in 2010/2011 - £45,000 – is less than the Council spends on its newsletter - £54,000. Our Council obviously thinks it is more important to screw money out of the disabled than to stop telling us about it…

* One ex-RA Councillor made the excellent point that, despite a couple of years of declining revenue, the Council is still running a surplus, and has a significant emergency reserve in place to deal with any funding shortfall.

Balls to Keynes

One of the fascinating elements of the current Labour Leadership campaign has been watching the various candidates make their pitches for what the Coalition Government is doing wrong, and what they would do differently. Much has been made of the spending cuts that Cameron, Clegg et al. have instigated this year, and the risks it could cause in terms of a double-dip recession. None of the candidates, however, have gone quite as far as Ed Balls. In an article for the Guardian today, Balls continued to press forward with the notion that 'any' cuts are wrong. According to Ed, even Labour's plans to halve the deficit in 4 years were foolish.

Balls' article is founded solidly in the Keynesian economic mould with its (effective) critique of past recessionary spending constraints in the 1930s and 1980s. I would argue, though, that the whole-sale deployment of a Keynesian model which he seems to call for in his the final paragraphs of his article brings a risk equally as significant as the return to recession he sees as the danger with the Coalition's plans.

For a start, it is unclear as to whether Keynes ever envisaged his concepts being applied to public finances in quite such a parlous state as the UK currently faces. Pulling interest rates down and increasing government investment on infrastructure might bring about eventual economic recovery through Keynes' multiplier effect, but at what short and mid-term cost in the current climate? Previous fiscal stimuli deployed by the Brown Government created an anaemic recovery at best and the danger with advocating further spending, or markedly restrained cuts, is that the interest rates on leveraging current debt become unmanageable. It is all very well for Ed Balls to dismiss the UK falling prey to the same issues which affected Greece, but how can he know for sure? How can anyone in fact?

Indeed, the Keynesian spending multiplier only works when the additional liquidity placed in the market is spent on consumption goods. i.e. When individuals spend the money they have saved/gained, this drives demand and increases employment. Perhaps one of the reasons the recovery engendered by the recent fiscal stimulus was so weak is that in the current climate this simply isn’t something close to tax-payers’ hearts in the UK, particularly when the current financial crisis came out of individual debt caused by people living beyond their means. As President Bartlett had it in the West Wing, upon hearing that his own aide had spent an advance tax rebate on paying down debt:

"Would a trip to Banana Republic have killed you?"

It is also interesting to note that Labour's use of the Keynesian model has been imbalanced. Increased government investment in a down-turn is one half of the model. The other, however, is putting up taxes and cutting government outlay during a boom to suppress inflation. Tax rises there certainly were, but rather than constricting the rate of spending Gordon Brown as Chancellor seemed happy to continually increase it. Part of this can be explained by the political necessity of redressing years of Conservative prudence/underspend (call it what you will) on the NHS and Education, but it seems to have gone much further than that with the result that both the RPI and CPI rates of inflation have been on the up since 2001.

At the end of the day, it is clear that political ideology is at the heart of any economic argument, whether Keynesian or Classical/neo-classical. Labour prefer to advocate the Keynesian view of higher taxes during a boom and high government spending during a bust as it fits best with an economy largely controlled by the government itself. The Conservatives argue for a more Classical economic view, as this works best under the much smaller government they strive for. In his article, Balls side-steps the fact that Government spending is still set to rise during this Parliament. He merely points out that there are constraints being placed in areas that he finds unpalatable. Rooting his economic arguments in politics makes good sense where he has to differentiate himself from other senior Labour figures in the Leadership elections. It does, however, blunt the intellectual thrust of his argument and increases the likelihood that it can be dismissed as political points scoring.

Michael Gove - a Miserable man...

It seems that I was watching the Commons at the wrong time yesterday. Far from PMQs, the real excitement came during Michael Gove's apology to the House over the appaling errors in the list of school building cuts his Department had released on Monday (which really were awful by the way - does the Department of Education have to make such a habit of embarrassing its Ministers?)

The exchanges were bad-tempered to start, but reached a whole new level when Labour MP Tom Watson stood up...

An outburst that raises a number of points:

1. Tom Watson really should know better. Yelling and screaming in the House isn't the way to make your point, no matter how angry you are.

2. It seems a tad harsh to blame Gove for 'the hopes of hundreds of thousands' of schoolchildren, particularly given the fact that none of the schools involved have officially been promised the money at any time, pre or post-election.

3. Being as the Speaker only asked Watson to withdraw the term 'pipsqueak', does that mean the rest of his comment stands on the record? Gove might display a certain dry wit, but he's never really struck me as a miserable man...

PMQs - a flat affair

One thing was clear from today's Prime Minister's Questions. Labour backbenchers must be counting down the days until they have a new Leader. Not that I'm casting aspersions at Harriet Harman. Quite the reverse, I regularly stick up for her and I admire her tenacity in pushing forward issues she feels are important.

Rather it's the fact that PMQs under her leadership have become curiously flat affairs. For all her good points, Harman doesn't have the fleetest of feet when it comes to the back and forth that the occasion demands, and as a result often launches into sentences which seem to have no end. This uneven performance is often met by a strange half-silence from the benches behind her. It's as if the Labour MPs want something to cheer, but they don't get it.

It could be, of course, that Members are simply paying attention to the Leader of the House's pleas that PMQs becomes a more decorous affair, but personally I feel it's more likely that they don't really feel they have much to shout about under Harriet's stewardship. You can say what you like about Ed Balls, but he certainly gets the noise levels up.

In other news, after a couple of good weeks, I'm detecting a worrying slide by David Cameron into his predecessors' penchant for 'not really asking the question'. By all means dodge the partisan nonsense, but when backbenchers are asking reasonable questions on behalf of their constituencies, let's have an answer or offer of a written answer please.