Palin resigns ... what does it mean for 2012

Sarah Palin is to resign this month as Alaska governor.

What does it mean for the 2012 Presidential race?

My snap thoughts. Perhaps the following:

1. Palin is running for the GOP nominee. The 2012 race is on. Though this is hardly the way to counter the massive lack of experience and credibility nationally problem.

2. Even so, she is right now the Republican frontrunner for 2012: the candidate of the right. Others may struggle to match her for profile and money. (Let's hope it doesn't go to her head).

3. The Republicans are in big trouble if she is the nominee. (Nb: leftie media bias here).

Let me take my partisan blinkers off ...

Let's see. Yes, the GOP are in big trouble if she is the nominee.

4. The GOP establishment might like to stop her - but who is the party establishment now anyway? How many battalions do they have? Can they see off the base?

5. Perhaps the search is on for 'anybody but Palin'. She could self-destruct of course. But if she is in it, it will be a strange and angry race.

For somebody (Mitt Romney? who else?) to beat her, they may have to make major concessions to the Palinistas to unite the party.

So perhaps what it means, above all, is rather good news for the campaign to re-elect President Barack Obama.

Nailing the Mail vision of a broken Britain

Roy Hattersley has missed the point. John Denham was not arguing that equality was dead or that the Labour party should stop fighting inequality in our Fabian seminar this week.
But he did argue passionately that if there was a greater understanding of what the great British public thought about living in a more equal society, it would help create strong policies with more public support.
He felt that it was important to win public support for the idea of making Britain more equal. And you only have to look at the sort of comments which are posted on the bottom of Hattersley's article on The Times website today to see what kind of resistance there is to the concept of "equality". It prompts an outpouring of vitriol from those who believe any change in equality legislation leaves them worse off.
There is also a strong sense of that being in the middle is the worst place to be, and that helps builds this anger about any vision of equality. Using its gloom-and-despondancy headlines as bricks, the Daily Mail builds the sense that the middle class are being bombarded on all sides by legislative missiles that slice away at the comfort in their lives, and make their everyday challenges tougher.
By cleverly placing all their readers in the now angry middle the Mail creates a bond between the retired plumber in Blackpool and the City trader in Tunbridge Wells - the definition lassoes them all in - and makes them think they are a regiment of the ignored, under seige, and pits them against the outsiders - the poor, the "scroungers", and very rarely, the rich.
But those massed in the middle by the Mail are not living in the same income bracket and are often living very different lives. The Mail's anti-egalitarean vision is pitched perfectly at catching a large proportion of the public and suggesting a highly negative view of society, "a breakdown Britain", is being delivered by unfair "equality" policies to their doorsteps.
While the Mail is busy weaving this convincing tapestry for its millions of readers, the Labour party and supporters of a fairer society have been much less successful at pitching the actual story - that those people who live in countries where the income gap is narrower, where everyone uses state services, where people of different salary levels live as neighbours have better health, experience less crime, and yes, counter to the dark Mail vision - have a better quality of life.
This is the story that the Labour party has not told well. Few people connect the idea of "equality" with cutting crime, but they should.
And this was part of what Denham's argument -- if you don't get the story out, backed up with facts and figures, that people living in France, Spain, Denmark have a better quality of life and you might want that too, then you can't persuade the public to support your mission to bring that better society to Britain too.
The question is: why is the Daily Mail's vision winning, and how do you tackle the fear and anger it creates?
When Fabian researchers held discussion groups in four different UK cities, they found that although initially members might intuitively be against arguments for greater equality in the abstract, when the consequences and the quality of life evidence was outlined, they became highly supportive of a vision of a society where life improved for everyone, a life based on Hattersley's egalitarian principles.
Richard Wilkinson makes those arguments about the cost of an unequal society astonishing well in his new book, The Spirit Level, but as Denham is aware the people who are reading the Spirit Level are not the ones who you have to convince, the ones reading the Daily Mail are.

Bankers weren't worth it: the proof

BBC economics brainbox Robert Peston sets out pretty clearly and conclusively why the enormous change in banker's rewards from 1986 to 2006 were not earned or merited - and what could be done about it.

If Peston says so, who dares to differ?

It is worth reading in full. He draws on the figures presented by Andrew Haldane who heads financial stability - a good idea, for sure - at the Bank of England. After the crash it can be seen that bank returns in this era of super returns have provided returns broadly similar to those of the overall non super-reward economy and to the history of bank returns before everybody thought they would do well to promote the idea that the rules on returns and rewards had fundamentally changed.

It was a leveraged gamble - which did well for a while before the roulette wheel landed on black. These were "casino profits" not management skill, says Peston, But the system of super-rewards provided an incentive not to spot the danger, but rather to ramp up the gamble.

The problem is this:

The evidence is clearly for change.

But many in the City feel that the speeches about lessons learned and restoring trust may have done their bit, especially as the media heat off since the focus moved on to Parliamentary perks. (A vox-pop on Newsnight said something like the public understand plasma screen TVs rather more tangibly than telephone number bonuses which are right off the scale of ordinary experience).

Alastair Darling is talking tougher in telling the bankers to get real in his interview in The Independent this morning.

Adair Turner is proposing a range of sensible reforms.

Is the culture really going to change - and how? Or does business as usual still looks like the most likely outcome.

Redistribution and 'recapitalizing the poor'

Phillip Blond - I think we may have written about him before on Next Left? - has an interesting article in today's Guardian on encouraging wider asset ownership. In a previous post, I argued that the Red Tory commitment to 'recapitalise the poor' was lacking in policy content. Blond is now setting out some of that content.

There is much to think about in the piece, but one issue which will loom out for anyone on the left is Blond's attempt to distance the Red Tory approach from 'redistribution'. Towards the start of the article, Blond writes:

'Assets must...come from somewhere, and since redistribution and expenditure via the state has such a poor record in alleviating dependency, a fresh approach is required.'

This is one of those 'Blondisms': a sweeping statement, possibly with a nugget of some truth in it somewhere, but nevertheless massively oversimplifying a complex reality.

Indeed, Blond himself can't really believe what he has just said. For at least some of his own proposals do involve redistribution. Take his proposal to fund matching deposits into the Child Trust Fund accounts of children in low-income families by cutting Child Benefit to more affluent families. That's redistribution, no?

Or take his very intriguing proposal to use the return on the future sale of state-acquired banking assets to fund 'investment vouchers' for those on low-incomes. Someone opposed to 'redistribution' by the state would seek to distribute this return back to society in a way that gives people a benefit in proportion to the tax they pay (so the rich, insofar as they do pay more tax, would get more). Blond's proposal quite rightly opposes this, and aims to focus the gain, in the form of new assets, towards the bottom of the income scale. Great: but that is, implicitly, redistribution, no?

So if Blond isn't really opposed to 'redistribution', what is the point of that emphatic rejection of 'redistribution' towards the beginning of the article?

The answer, one suspects, is to close down any consideration of taxes on wealth and/or wealth transfers. Blond is not opposed to redistribution as such, but to redistribution which takes this form.

Many people have enjoyed substantial unearned capital gains on their housing wealth in recent years (notwithstanding the recent downturn). Very low levels of taxation of gifts and inheritances enables this wealth to stay locked up in some families to the exclusion of others. If you want a society in which there is a much more equitable spread of assets, it is reasonable to pursue a two-pronged policy of taxing unearned accumulations of wealth combined with measures to promote ownership among the asset poor. One might even link the two, by softly hypothecating things like inheritance or capital gains tax to asset-building policies like the Child Trust Fund.

But of course, the Conservatives want to raise the threshold at which inheritance tax is paid to £1 million. Despite the good efforts of Ken Clarke, this unjust policy seems to have become totemic for them.

And, so it would seem, Red Toryism obviously isn't quite red enough to challenge it....

Pride and prejudice

LabourList is celebrating Gay Pride, and will be guest edited through the weekend by my colleague Richard Lane, wearing his LGBT Labour exec hat. (And perhaps there is still time for Gordon Brown to take Tom Hampson's advice and join Sarah on Saturday).

I think it would be a good thing for fundamental issues of gay rights and gay equality to be entrenched, and not in dispute in mainstream party politics. We may well be getting there.

So David Cameron's apology for the Tory party over section 28 is a welcome symbolic move. To a large extent, he is asking his party to take the quintessentially conservative approach of adapting to change once it has happened, even where they opposed it at the time. This is much less difficult than advocating change before there is a consensus for it, but it still matters.

Civil partnerships have not seen the sky falling in - and a conservative as well as liberal argument can be made for them.

But different things can be true at once. There has been a great deal of change in just the last few years, but this remains work in progress across British society. And this rather weak and confused commentary published on ConservativeHome opposing David Cameron's apology and arguing that section 28 was quintessentially liberal and in no way homophobic perhaps exemplifies Ben Bradshaw's warning that not all of the Conservative Party are comfortable with a liberal approach to gay rights.

Those Conservatives promoting might well themselves acknowledge that cultural change can not be finished overnight, and while their political opponents should be vigilant, we should welcome and support positive change too.

A broad consensus might enable the UK to play a strong role in supporting international campaigns for gay rights as human rights, as promoted by InterPride and Human Rights Watch.

David Miliband writes about this in Pink News, which I am sure would be supported across the political spectrum.

It is interesting to see the BBC's report of how the Indian supreme court's decision yesterday has been warmly welcomed by much of that country's media, though there is not yet any deep social consensus on the issue.

But as the Human Rights Watch report last month showed, there are many other places where solidarity and support for campaigners in promoting change in their own countries is needed - from central Europe to Africa and Latin America, and from Iraq to California.

The new Tories; same as the old Tories?

The Guardian has an interesting news report on a new ConservativeHome poll of Tory prospective candidates in winnable seats.

Bad news for the idea that all MPs ought to use the state education system for their children. (Education select committee chair Barry Sheerman suggested David Cameron's intention to opt for state schools could establish a cross-party consensus on this).

Unfortunately not: 9% of Tory candidates agree with that, and 91% disagree. (And 91% also oppose the goal of 50% of school leavers going to education).

The Guardian also suggests very weak support for the party's policy of protecting international development spending.

But there are two ways in which Conservative next generation opinion is probably significantly different than in the past.

The strength of Euroscepticism in the party is striking and has grown considerably over a generation or two:

Asked if a Conservative government should retain Britain's current relationship with the EU, only 7% agree. A total of 46% agree that some powers should be repatriated and 41% think there should be a fundamental renegotiation of Britain's membership of the EU.

Most surprising of all, what happened to Tory Unionism? 47% of Tory candidates say they would not be unhappy if Scotland became independent, against 53% who disagree.

Rethinking equality doesn't mean ditching it

"A rejection of inequality - both absolute, relative and of opportunity - is absolutely core to who we are. But we will be more successful - not just electorally but in challenging unacceptable inequality - if we adopt and own a different, more nuanced view of fairness and equality" said John Denham.

He was making clear that his argument for the left to rethink its politics of equality and fairness in response to the Fabian Society's research for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation is somewhat more nuanced than it may have appeared from yesterday's Guardian report.

That is followed up in other newspaper's today, though once again, the reflex to reach for an outdated Blairite-Brownite analysis of every issue obscures much more than it illuminates. Indeed Denham's case for a broad coalition strongly reflects the strategy of 'progressive universalism' which Gordon Brown and Ed Balls pioneered at the Treasury: Something for everyone, but most for the worst-off.

The Fabian Society has spent most of the last five years "bringing equality back in". That has helped to shift the government's position from Tony Blair's agnosticism in 2001 about whether "the gap" mattered, even though his government was committed to ambitious attempts to reduce relative poverty. (And some Conservatives now say they accept relative poverty - inequality - matters too). So I naturally agree when Luke Akehurst insists that a more equal society is Labour's animating mission. Luke's pro-equality advocacy, from one of the proudest champions of New Labour, demonstrates that the idea that whether we stand for equality or not is what divides Labour's left from its right or New Labour from Old is far too simple. (Of course, historians will know that it was Tony Crosland's Fabian Old Right who put equality front and centre - and the Tribuneite left which saw that argument as selling out socialism).

Given that we want a fairer and more equal society, then there are two important challenges in Denham's argument about what that means and how we get there.

Firstly, a purely (or primarily) needs-based conception of equality has minority support. About 22% of the public favour this. And this is a relatively older, more working-class demographic, likely to decline in future. Most of the public believe that fairness and equality depends on rewarding effort and merit. (But it is worth noting too that traditional free market anti-egalitarian arguments are also a minority: with about 20% public support).

Secondly, it is unlikely that a needs-based egalitarian argument can convince people simply by better explanations of the facts or more convincing communication strategy.

It is a question of strategy as to the balance to be struck between working with the grain of public attitudes and where to challenge these. Of course, the point of politics and campaigning is to shift attitudes and opinion. Denham's argument is that conceptions of fairness are pretty robust and deep-rooted: attitudes and opinions do shift, but he suggests that this is often in response to a sense of whether those fairness values are being honoured or breached. .

So Denham says that:

What the research shows is that popular sentiment supports a tough, hard headed, but at the end of the day, compassionate version of fairness. One that does not turn its back on those in great need, but one that also insists that effort should be rewarded, and that society should be fair to those who play by the rules.

This sense of fairness is based on the idea that there is a set of obligations and opportunities that should underpin British society. When people say 'it's not fair' it is usually because they believe that the balance of duties and rewards, of right and responsibilities, has been upset.

But I think it would also be a mistake to see this as primarily tactical advice. Denham is making a principled argument too. He does not believe that the idea of fairness as reciprocity is an alien one which the left should reluctantly accomodate: he believes it is the left's own tradition of fairness. (He has been making this argument about the public fairness code for some time, and can legitimately claim that it is much bolstered by the new research.

So the claim about post-1960s egalitarianism is the warning that left risks neglecting the extent to which reciprocity has been a central part of its egalitarian case.

These are important arguments. And Denham was keen to stress that incorporating them could give Labour greater space for egalitarianism.

Digging further into the nature of that opportunity may be the key to understanding a 'beyond New Labour' egalitarian strategy. The Fabian research does a good deal to explain why New Labour adopted the strategies that it did. But it casts light on the limits of the New Labour strategy too, and some of its negative and unintended consequences.

While it is important to be clear about the core arguments for equality and fairness, we should also be careful of setting traditional egalitarians and Denhamite 'reciprocity social democrats' too sharply against each other in building coalitions for a fairer society.

Firstly, most "traditional egalitarians" are not hostile to the very principle that some inequalities are merited. Most are not for some unattainable vision of absolute equality of outcome (which has almost never been advanced by democratic left thinkers though it is often critiqued by their opponents). Rather, they believe that current income and wealth gaps are much too wide, and would favour a reversion to a gap between the top and bottom of society, or organisations, where wage differentials were much closer to 10-1 or 15-1 than to 150-1 or 705-1.

Incidentally, median public opinion on what pay differentials are merited favours about those differentials too. So the public believes that principles "fair inequality" would be much less inequality than we currently have, though Denham stresses the important point that they are often as interested in how the inequality came about as in how much inequality has resulted.

Secondly, we all trade off different conceptions of need, merit and entitlement. There are some spheres in which needs-based egalitarianism is dominant. We have built a strong consensus for providing healthcare on the basis of need, for example. And the dominant public belief in some merited inequality in income is combined with a needs-based sense of what the basic minimum for all should be. (The Joseph Rowntree Foundation's separate research on minimum income standards, just updated, shows where public attitudes are on basic minimum income standards are in 2009).

Thirdly, the Fabian research suggests that it ought to be possible to build broader coalitions, where traditional egalitarians can make progress by engaging with other conceptions of fairness.

The research identifies four clusters of opinions:

The traditional egalitarians make up around 22% of the population. They favour a needs-based approach, being sympathetic to the poor and sceptical of the rich.

The traditional free marketers make up 20% of the population. They believe that those at the top and bottom have got what they deserve. This was Margaret Thatcher's argument for more inequality as being fairer.

The "Angry Middle" make up 26%. They are hostile to the claims of the bottom and the top, believing that the hard-squeezed middle is suffering from free-riding at both ends.

The post-ideological liberals 32% do not have negative views of those at the top, though may pragmatically support some redistribution. They do not share punitive stereotypes of those at the bottom either.

That pattern of attitudes offers some challenges, but also some good news, for anybody seeking broader support for egalitarian strategies.

Traditional egalitarians might often shy away from engagement with the 'angry middle', whose voice the Daily Mail captures so well. But there is clearly broad support to scrutinise fairness at the top of the income scale. Helping the poor is tougher: but the middle will often agree on anti-poverty measures which reflect reciprocity and with strategies of progressive universalism, where there is broad inclusion with most help going to those in most need.

Meanwhile, there is a good deal of response from the liberal agnostics to evidence about the consequences of inequality, and across society, to broader quality of life concerns, such as the increased pressures of excessive materialism (as Jenni Russell discussed in her column on Sunday).

Another important area is to open a wider debate about the barriers to fair opportunities, why they exist and how to break them down. Again, there is broad support which can be unlocked for measures to address starkly unequal opportunities, but only if a discussion about fair chances is opened up which gets beyond individualised explanations.

Traditional egalitarianism is too narrow a base to build broad social coalitions to significantly reduce inequality. Yet it is just as important to note that the research also suggests that traditional free market anti-egalitarianism would rather too narrow to resist a pro-fairness and greater equality coalition for the common good.

A winning coalition for a fairer and more equal society needs to build alliances: we need cross-class alliances to break down entrenched class disadvantage; challenging various dimensions of disadvantage, such as race, will be most effective where we have a politics of the common good, which speaks to the values and interests of us all and within which the most disadvantaged make the biggest gains.

I think that traditional egalitarians will need to engage with the evidence and interrogate the arguments which John Denham makes.

Rethinking the case for equality may be necessary.

The prize for doing so successfully remains a fairer and more equal society.