Tom Clark
@prospect_clark
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Contributing Editor, @prospect_uk . Principal Editor, @ResFoundation . Stints: @jrf_uk ; @guardian ; @theIFS . BROKE out now:
Back in the West Riding
Joined June 2009
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Pinned Tweet
1/
Social class is inherently baffling -- a known unknowable
But it turns out there IS a way to measure it ...
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Only 14 MPs need to switch sides for there to be a majority for a referendum
Suspect that is doable
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An established British ventilator manufacturer on Newsnight saying:
- no extra orders in yet
- if orders come now, they won’t arrive for quite a long while
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Many a hard-up family has just spent a whole week’s money on the food & drink to lay on a state-sanctioned 3-family feast
Not just a “media” frenzy about this U-turn
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2005 — Lab vote share in England, 35%
Lab seats in England, 286
2019 — Lab vote share in England, 34%
Lab seats in England, 180
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Devastating
@UNICEF
league table on changes in child poverty over 7+ years up to 2021: UK in the bottom spot
Report:
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Cummings, who is proudly non party political, is sacking Conservative Cabinet ministers’ advisers and now proposes to sack a sizeable number of Conservative MPs, without reference to Conservative members
Can the Conservative party retain self-respect if it puts up with him?
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I’ve been looking into post-Brexit trade patterns for something & had previously found the story quite twisty
But this new crunch (from a Dutch think tank) makes it look simple — and appalling
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If it’s Rishi Vs Liz, one type of “diversity” we will not be getting is educational
It’ll be Oxford PPE Vs Oxford PPE
After a brief interruption by Oxford graduates in other disciplines, we’ll be back to the order described by Andy Beckett here
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Surreal news at 10 report from Burnley — zero hour contracts, broken trains and “now, at last, the people expect to be listened to”
Don’t think it mentioned that local voters had just swung behind a party that has been in power for 9 and a half years
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This is a more important point than it sounds — personal branding helps to make folk heroes (& in this case it goes along with a criminal thug's personal rebrand, since it involves the use of a diminutive of a name that's not even his own)
Puzzling to hear BBC Home Affairs Correspondent repeatedly referring to "Tommy" rather than "Tommy Robinson" on
@bbc5live
just after 11am. Not sure BBC usually adopts first name terms with people in this situation
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Just caught up with the remarkable story of how Therese Coffey (then DWP) fought tooth and nail to stop you reading this
@NatCen
research report on disability benefits which the govt itself commissioned (h/t
@DrFrancesRyan
&
@patrickjbutler
)
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And so the great revolt of the people of England prepares the way for the smooth transition of power from one Etonian to the next
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Wow, FT editorial column comes out and says what everyone on the left has been saying about the last four decades for, well, the last four decades!
You begin to wonder whether the sea change which was properly in 2008 could be on the way at last
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1.
Brexit: the reckoning
17 months into Britain’s brave new trading world, the hard facts are arriving
I've trawled through the data & studies: here’s what I found in a 5-minute read
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1/ Yes
@YouGov
did well last time with their model, but having just spent the evening with a whole bunch of pollsters and political scientists, the interest this one exercise is attracting worries me
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Any Labour MP that couldn’t swallow May’s deal but is now exhausted enough to consider Johnson’s would do well to read this
Tory MPs like
@GeorgeFreemanMP
who could only just stomach May’s deal and wanted closer alignment should do the same
If we're moving towards a fudged NI backstop Brexit deal with a standard UK free trade agreement, thread on the economic effects
tl:dr Johnson's is a much HARDER Brexit than May's
- UK government thinks this will end up making us ALL £2,250 A YEAR POORER
Read on for why
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Is the suspension of parliament a Weimar moment for Britain?
It sounds dramatic. But that is the judgment of
@RichardEvans36
— one of the country's most distinguished historians
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Bloody hell, the fab
@MatthewParris3
quits the Tories
"It’s the scepticism I miss, the “sounds fine and dandy but will it work in practice?”, the “steady on”, the “but what will it cost?”, the dislike of zealotry & the healthy suspicion of the crowd"
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No 10 now briefing that “significant cost to the taxpayer” of staging the EP elections should weigh heavily as we decide if/when to leave
Don’t know the exact figure, but it must be in the low pennies per head
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Society is locked down, but your mind can roam freely
Welcome to
@prospect_uk
’s PAYWALL HOLIDAY
Everything published in 25 years entirely free to browse — you don’t even need to fill in a form!
I’ll append a few favourite pieces
Enjoy!
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presumably, that’s a working men’s club in Barnsley he’s stepping out from
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The biggest problem of all?
"Wealth persuading poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power."
@mrjamesob
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1.
Trump is today disowned as an aberration
In truth he is the culmination of how the US Right has been going for years
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Now 2018’s
#orwellprize
journalism winner,
@carolecadwalla
for her tireless work on how tech & money have bent our politics
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Gove fluently explaining how we’ve taken back the control to remain “fully aligned” with a club we’ve quit
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Outside No 10, Day 1: “I am announcing now – on the steps of Downing Street – that we will fix the crisis in social care once and for all with a clear plan we have prepared”
Today: the big reveal on that plan.
Turns out it is “a long-term problem” requiring ... a “solution”
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As £50bn Brexit bill is roughly £1,000 for every British voter. How wd last June have gone if that price tag was on the balllot paper?
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Interesting how content-free the story is ... there are just these abstract “things” — “Brexit,” the “deal”, people who hate them, people who like them, MPs who will & wont back them
No discussion of any substance about what any of it will do at all
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Thousands of votes are in, and it's time crown Prospect's Top Thinker 2020
It's Keralan health minister
@shailajateacher
Get to know her & read the full results here—big shifts on race & gender in this year's top 10
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2/
That is quite a contrast and one I think worth pausing on, although such is the sectarian madness of the Labour party that simply highlight information like this is somehow seen as "making excuses"
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With-holding Royal Assent being floated - last done in 1708, before the office of prime minister existed
Hesitant on use of word “coup” so far, but this truly would destroy Parliamentary Sovereignty
Times splash:
No 10 battle plan for next fortnight includes some extraordinary measures:
* Not asking for royal assent if rebels succeed in passing A50 extension bill
* PM will refuse to resign if he loses confidence vote
* Filibustering in Lords
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The corrupting effect of having so many landlord MPs in Parliament brings mind the distortions that flowed from so many MPs being East India Company stockholders a couple of centuries ago
BREAK: Michael Gove has caved to Tory landlord backbenchers and watered down the Renters Reform Bill
The Bill will be returning to the Commons after Easter Recess
Letter to Tory MPs here ⬇️
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Quite a correction
When they said “2/3 asylum-seeking kids are lying about being kids”
They meant “2/3 of those asylum-seeking kids whom the authorities suspected were lying turned out to be so”
The Sunday Express has now corrected their false claim about unaccompanied asylum seeking children and admitted that they misrepresented the facts, after IPSO upheld my complaint.
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Mix of lefties, Europhiles & not obviously aligned concerned citizens blocking the junction outside Parliament: all chanting the slogan on this poster: “save our democracy, stop the coup”
Parallel small pro-Brexit protest was circling
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While the PM opines there has been too much focus on how the wealth is shared in Britain,
@jburnmurdoch
uses global data to show:
a) our rich our doing well & our poor are doing badly
b) middle Britain is also, by international standards, sinking
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If you think politics can’t get any more bonkers, a one-para summary of the career of Francois Mitterrand provides a useful corrective!
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@TPpodcast_
@election_data
17/
The bone-headed tribal resistance to PR also needs to go—and urgently. It's a point of principle, but for anyone who is not keen on Bo Jo's hard Brexit, it is also about self-interest: look at
@StephenDFisher
's analysis of the map if you doubt it
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Watching News at Ten a spectacular corrective to the anti-Brexit echo chamber on Twitter.
To apolitical voters, the main impression tonight will simply be that the PM has pulled off something “they said couldn’t be done”
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10/
But it is deeper and more cultural than that — votes have been shifting left in more educated places, and right in less educated ones. (A point David Runciman if
@TPpodcast_
has been making since the referendum )
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5/
All politics is relative, so Labour is bound to pay a heavy price for this.
But still, to lose over 100 English MPs off what is roughly a six-point swing between these two years is extraordinary.
Suggests problem is not only about the number of votes, but where they are
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Show me what the mainstreaming of poverty looks like
“Food banks opening their doors at 8AM so people can pick up a parcel on their way to work”
My
@guardian
story: Trainee nurses, shop assistants, factory workers... in work poverty driving record food bank use food banks,
@TrussellTrust
research shows
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Meg Russell of
@ConUnit_UCL
clear ... this is extraordinary
1. longest prorogation in decades
2. suspending in time of crisis
3. a PM who has only faced the Commons for one day is triggering
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The report looks pretty innocuous, but does state one blindingly obvious reality -- that, at current levels of benefits to meet the specific costs of disability -- some claimants were "unable" to "meet essential living costs such as food and utility bills."
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Osborne making the case for the Conservative govt to introduce a fiscal stimulus
When the markets were collapsing much more deeply in 2008 but it was Labour in govt, he opposed fiscal stimulus on the basis that “the cupboard is bare”
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Find this so strange ...
Schools really don't work remotely, and so are an obvious priority for an early return
A lot of office work can be done very effectively remotely, so why rush to recreate crowded tubes?
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George Osborne’s “two-child” policy broke the link between mouths to feed & support received which traces back to the Elizabethan poor law
Instead, it treated children as a consumer good
The effects were grimly predictable & here they are h/t
@resfoundation
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A breathtaking study in a parody of process
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In the end, the select committee quite rightly ordered NatCen to hand it over & published it itself
A totally avoidable farce. Only explanation I can think of is to maintain absurd pretence that current rates of benefit don't leave some in hardship
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There were multiple back-and-forths to try & stop a committee of the MPs (whom we all elect) from seeing analysis (which we all paid for) into a system (which we all also pay for, and is meant to be there for all of us)
One example here
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Harold Wilson's infamous "£ in your pocket" devaluation in 1967 was from $2.80 to $2.40, just under 15%
So far this year, the £ has fallen from $1.35 to $1.08 (even after bounce back from overnight record), just over 20%. And most of this decline under the brief Truss tenure
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On Labour seats it’s worst since 1935, but on votes it certainly isn’t — 1983, 87, 2010, 2015 all worse
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Keep this 1929 cartoon in mind when you hear ministers argue that because there’s a bit of a squeeze on wages on, we now need a bit of a squeeze on benefits too
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Long view on today's labour market stats is price-adjusted average pay is down £35/wk since Feb 2008
A drop from £532 to £497 over 182 months' of data
Few would have guessed possible (without a revolution!) -- except those who knew the US horror story
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Another way of putting it -- average pay was also, just like today, £497 in November 2005
That's 18 years ago
A whole childhood come & gone without the tech transformation of the era doing anything for typical wages
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Nice to have cricket on, but my 5-year old full of questions as he’s literally never seen it on telly before
Absolutely mental the way we have allowed these things to go behind paywalls
Perverse economics too: broadcast is technically a public good & we’ve made private
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@TPpodcast_
@election_data
@StephenDFisher
20/
While the challenges are daunting, these are fluid times, and things can shift fast. The new Conservative coalition, just as much as the old Labour one, is decidedly fragile
I'll shut up with my "cheer up" piece from yesterday
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Until this year, a govt being defeated on anything by a majority of 41 would be a huge story
Being defeated on a constitutional question amid a ministerial mutiny involving the chancellor?
That’s today; should be huge
But like the slow-boiled frog we’ve stopped noticing
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4/
The single biggest difference with that year is, of course, that the Tories are hugely up (by 12 points of UK-wide ballot). And this does represent a real shift to the right, because the other big change has been a corresponding collapse of the centre in the form of the LDs
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Queues like I've never seen out the polling station in hackney
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3/
It goes without saying Labour will go nowhere unless it can (to borrow the title of the 2005 manifesto) go "forward, not back" under the existing rules of the electoral game
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@rafaelbehr
7/
Votes were bound to pile up in student towns and diverse inner-cities, where they would bring in few extra seats
At the same time they were always likely to fall away in towns and suburbs where there is more of a premium on patriotism
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Murdoch likes to think of himself as a hard-nosed “realist”
But, as
@MatthewdAncona
elucidates, he’s indulged the contesting of reality to the point where Fox’s only feasible strategy is peddling paranoid fantasises. (& don’t assume it can’t happen here)
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2016, 2017, 2018, 2019: Benefits frozen as prices rise
Benefit uprating last year? 0.5%
Benefit uprating this year? 3.1%
Inflation right now? 9.9%
Just beggars belief that anyone could even THINK of holding the safety net below prices in these circs
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Brilliant “war-gaming” of how minority government would unfold by
@GeorgePeretzQC
The opposition front bench would do well to read this once a month until next election—so it really sinks in
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I’m not sure I can ever recall a fiscal event falling apart in moral terms quite like this before
Everyone can see prices rising, and (almost) everyone knows that a decision to make the poor poorer in the face of that is wrong
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@TPpodcast_
14/
So, looking the electoral map, the first conclusions I'd draw is that the next Labour leader, from whatever wing, will have an exceptionally difficult job to do in trying to revive the old coalition. Members should not vote on faction, but look for creativity & talent
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As Labour produces an anguished, wordy motion on Gaza, it's worth recalling that just a fortnight ago the control-freaks running the machine were suggesting that MPs sticking their neck out for a ceasefire would risk expulsion, as if any debate were illegitimate
Our political parties would be reduced to narrow cults if the sort of intolerance Johnson showed on Brexit (“vote my way, or you’re out”) became routine. And yet…
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@TPpodcast_
13/
Forget Labour's partisan interests. For the good of society as a whole, it has to be hoped that a Trumpian politics of resentful and rageful nostalgia does not forever displace an older spirit of solidarity our own former mining communities
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Imagine clocking the explosion of tents on British streets & concluding that the real problems that needed solving were the charities providing tents & the people resorting to sleeping in them
🚨NEW. Suella Braverman pushes to restrict tents for rough sleepers, and proposes making it a civil office for charities to give tents to homeless via
@FT
with
@LOS_Fisher
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@TPpodcast_
@election_data
@StephenDFisher
18/
Before you can get PR or other reform you have to make progress under current rules, which means getting over the old tribal refusal to co-operate with other parties
Even before we get to Scotland, the 2005 alliance isn't coming back, still less that of 1945. You need help!
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6/ generally in polling just now there is heavy reliance being placed on “weighting” -
@p_surridge
told me earlier she’d seen some raw data recently that showed the two parties neck and neck
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Glancing up at the telly, for a moment I wondered if the “coup” had taken a literal turn
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Trump's Tweets today all say the same thing — this would be a great election if all these pesky votes didn't keep getting in the way
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1/
Fiasco: the inside story of the the Brexit talks
By the forensic and formidably well-connected
@pmdfoster
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Two clues about this divergence c/o
@drjennings
’s excellent thread
Brexit really has inflamed it
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1 of 2/
Word in from a despairing John Major :
“For generations, Britain’s word – solemnly given – has been accepted by friend and foe. Our signature on any Treaty or Agreement has been sacrosanct. ....
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Sat next to Roger Bannister at a dinner two years ago. Utterly charming & full of stories. At 1952 Olympics he doubled up as anonymous
@thetimes
stringer. Didn’t win, so in writing up his own race said “Bannister, who was not at his best”
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This is a staggering change—after 50 years, it implies an economy roughly a third smaller than it would have been
Two years ago, the long term growth rate was thought to be 2.5%. Now it is 1.6%
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Incidentally, the one policy most guaranteed to make poor youngsters poorer over the next few years is the 2-child limit -- as this
@resfoundation
chart shows, if it isn't scrapped things poor kids in big families won't stand still, they will sink further
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1.
Fresh from crunching all the numbers for the BBC
@StephenDFisher
explains what they mean
And it’s good news for Labour — in ways the media have missed
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Just realised the basic pensioner safety net is now worth THREE TIMES that for young adults
Pen Credit guarantee £182.60/week
JSA under 25 £61.05/week (or equivalent UC on calendar month basis £265.31)
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2.
Pence, McConnell and Cruz disown him now
But they backed him for years before this week
And they backed him as he sort to subvert the election
They are not friends of democracy
They can't blame a mob for rejecting a democratic outcome which they have also rejected
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7/ now relying on raw data is not a good idea. But there is an opposite risk in weighting and calibrating too much: you end up with your own assumptions, rather than your sample, driving many of your numbers
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@TPpodcast_
11/
The cultural front is going to be fraught for ANY Labour leader who wants to try and hold on to its metropolitan voters and members, while also reconnecting with all the communities it lost on Thursday
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Extraordinary irony that this year should end with Boris Johnson in serious trouble for TELLING THE TRUTH
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1.
We're weeks from a seriously hard departure from the EU
Few saw this sort of exit coming after a 52-48 vote
So
@jillongovt
&
@anandMenon1
have a murder mystery for you
Who Killed Soft Brexit
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@AyoCaesar
@nikadubrovsky
@davidgraeber
Devastating. I’m so sorry: I’d literally contacted him yesterday to ask if he might do something with us, having picked up he was unwell over the summer. Nobody else on earth would be able to write the thing I had in mind in the same way
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Here’s a few summary stats on just how much more at risk of destitution the “single disabled” group are
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One statistic dominates every argument about inequality: the Gini coefficient
But now Anne Case (who opened our eyes to the rocketing death rates of poor Americans) and Nobel prize-winner Angus Deaton explain how it often misses everything that matters
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Given the whole point of the lockdown is to stop the infection spreading from place to place, travelling when you KNOW you’re infected would seem to be an aggravating factor, right?
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@TPpodcast_
@election_data
@StephenDFisher
19/
The most important lesson of the lot is probably to look outward — thinking about how things look outside your own local community and immediate circle, and not squandering energy on spats within your own tribe
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'Yes, there is a steep climb ahead. But I tell you this: the view from the summit will be worth it.'
David Cameron, October 2009
Peter Brookes has summed it up perfectly. What a mess we're in.
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4/ Lesson 1 of 2015 is that it’s no use having more data if you’re data is biased. Back then, inspired by the cult of Nate Silver & his state-by-state stuff, we had loads of constituency polls and seat-by-seat projections that turned out to be tosh
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OK, so we now need photo ID to vote, but what sort of photo ID?
Worth a close look, as looks like could be psephologically equivalent to shoving the voting age back up to 21
"Rushing through the introduction of voter ID in Great Britain is more than just problematic, it is indicative of an alarming pattern of recent democratic backsliding".
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12 years since the bankers' crash
Today the outgoing chancellor was a Deutsche Bank man
The new one came up through Goldman Sachs
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Want to resolve that old pesky question about apostrophes after names ending in S? Definitely don’t ask London Underground
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And, admittedly, I point this out as a PPE grad myself
But in a world gripped by so much political & economic tumult, it would surely be better if minds trained in different ways at different places were occasionally given some sway
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Yesterday’s top headline: terrible hurt supposedly caused by a metaphor about dogs
Today’s: terrible hurt supposedly caused by a metaphor about suicide vests
In the midsts of a great practical political crisis, we’re incapable of arguing about anything except words
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