So Jim Murphy said it again on tonight's leaders' debate - Labour will vote against a Tory Queen's Speech under all circumstances. It is almost impossible to square that with Ed Miliband's claim on Thursday that there are circumstances in which he would refrain from taking office in order to avoid working with the SNP. I suppose technically there is nothing to prevent Labour from voting the Tories down and then declining to form a government themselves, but the direct outcome of that would be a second election within weeks (by July at the latest). They would be absolutely crucified for acting so irresponsibly, and we can safely assume it won't happen. Essentially, either Murphy or Miliband is lying to us. As ever in these situations, it's hard not to conclude that it must be Murphy.
If there's one thing that I find even more irritating than Jim Murphy's mannerisms, it's the grotesque spectacle of a Scottish Tory innocently claiming that her party must be opposed to proportional representation for principled reasons, because first-past-the-post is such a rotten system for them. Oh yeah, so that's why you had absolute power in Scotland between 1979 and 1997, without ever having got more than 31% of the vote? Hint : it's only a bad system for you if it doesn't work massively in your favour at UK-wide level. I think it's probably fair to say that quite a few Scottish Tories would have undergone a Damascene conversion on the electoral system if Scotland had voted Yes last year.
It's also, of course, complete garbage for Ruth Davidson to claim that Scotland voted heavily against electoral reform in the 2011 referendum. That's like claiming that a death row prisoner in America who is forced to choose the method of his own execution has made a decision not to live. People certainly voted against AV for incredibly stupid reasons, and they probably didn't understand the system they were voting against, but there was still a widespread instinctive appreciation that the option being put before the country was nothing remotely like the Holy Grail that the Liberals and the SDP used to fight so passionately for.
By the way, is it just me, or has the unionist media given up to such an extent that they can't even be bothered trying to spin this debate as "another win for Jim Murphy"?
* * *
It's possible that we may have at least one more full-scale Scottish poll to come before polling day - I was emailed within the last hour by someone who was polled by Panelbase this morning, and it seemed to be a Scottish poll. If so, I would guess it can't have been commissioned by Panelbase's usual newspaper client, because obviously the Sunday Times wouldn't be able to publish until after the election. So the client could be an alternative media outlet (such as Wings), or the SNP. If the latter, we may only see the results if it's tactically advantageous to release them.
I had to be in the chanty when he said it. Darn!
ReplyDeleteI completed a Panelbase poll this morning too.
ReplyDeleteReported in Times saying.
ReplyDeleteEd Miliband will not have the right to govern if he wins 15 fewer seats than the Conservatives in Thursday’s election, senior Labour party figures have warned.
They're just plucking numbers out of thin air now. Absolute garbage.
DeleteThey are laying a marker down. They are suggesting that's how far behind he will need to be for them to demand his head. I suspect he'll be dumped if he doesn't get the most seats. And when he is removed his successor will do a deal with the SNP.
DeleteSo we are looking at 3 new leaders before the month is out. Clegg removed by his constituents, and Cameron and Miliband by their respective parties. But will it be Boris or Teresa? Will the next Labour leader - freed from the influence of SLAB - be more of an English nationalist?
Would a proper PR system allow the SNP to stand in England?
I think Clegg goes irregardless. LD's can't begin to recover until he's been replaced and they start showing serious remorse for the coalition. The longer they try and defend it, the longer it'll take for them to be forgiven. It might not be fair, but it's reality and the quicker they realise that, the better.
DeleteAnd yes, that Times statement is complete bollocks.
Regardless. Or irrespective. "Irregardless" isn't a word.
Delete/pedant
Lol. but, even so, "Irregardless" makes a helluva lot more sense than 'fundilimundily'...
Delete"irregardless" is actually a word, it's just looked down upon. The "ir" and the "less" cancel each other out, so the user is actually saying the opposite of what they mean, presumably.
Delete/pedant
I cheerfully accept your correction, Rolfe. Touche sir.
Deletehttp://files.miffthefox.info/inflammable.jpg
Surely if the Libs are badly defeated, Rennie should go too?
ReplyDeleteSame for the Tories, if their vote goes down to a new low and/or they lose their only seat, should Ruth not do the honourable thing?
Scott and Goldie did in 2011.
As for Murphy - would he be as honourable as Ian Gray in the face of a heavy Labour defeat in Scotland?
Rennie has to continue purely because there will be no other MSPs or MPs left who want it.
DeleteMurphy will have to go if he can't hold his seat and if the loss of MP's is at the worst end of things. I think if Labour get over 10 MPs he will try to hold on as the alternatives are just not viable
If However there are less than 5 Scottish Labour MPs left I expect we may see not only a leadership change but possibly a split in Scottish Labour into 2 groups.
One group that continues to align to UK Labour and a new Scottish only group that either adopts a neutral or pro stance on Independence
Seems like it would be a case of shooting the messenger (or the piano player).
DeleteRuth Davidson is way more popular than her party, so getting rid of her would seem to have little benefit. Probably counterproductive to be honest.
Rennie less so, but I think it would be a harsh master who put the blame for the LD collapse at his door. Given how many past leaders/elder statesmen/coalition ministers he's got under his Scottish arm of the LDs, the guy is pretty much just a victim of circumstances.
Tavish Scott was a victim of circumstances as well, but he still resigned.
DeleteYou only want Rennie to resign because you're terrified of him. He's a political colossus. Admit it, you're shitting yourselves.
DeleteLast night we saw lots of finger pointing (again) about cutting of services to the needy in our society. Instead of all this 'he said this, she said that' nonsense, would someone explain where the money for Sturgeon's spending spree is going to come from since the ending of Trident is only going to scratch the surface of the predicted £7.5b annual black hole in her plans. The UK is as good as bust and the government has been keeping up with 'austerity speak' to calm the markets while taking us further and further into debt each year. How does borrowing more money as Sturgeon suggests get us out of the mess we're in because it has to be paid back at some stage in the future and if it's not the taxpayer who is to pay it back then we have to grow the economy at a much higher rate than we're currently doing. It's the private sector which has to grow to fill this gap - spending on the public sector doesn't generate growth - but she has failed in every debate to explain her growth strategy.
ReplyDeleteSince your a pro-independence website, will you explain her growth and spending plans with numbers because I for one don't like her ducking and diving when numbers are mentioned.
Thanks for that
Cheers
This is nothing to do with Independence or Full Fiscal Autonomy by the way - it is about changing the approach to public finances at Westminster.
DeleteSpending on the public sector DOES generate growth - emphatically so.
In the medium term the private sector benefits from improved infrastructure because it can either produce or deliver more efficiently as a result. The savings can then be invested in growing their business.
In the long term it benefits from better education and better health care as it has a more skilled and a healthier workforce. Business becomes more innovative and more efficient while dealing with less absence.
In the short term, it provides jobs which means that people are paying taxes instead of receiving benefits.
It is a no-brainer for anyone who is interested in long term well being rather than quick and dirty profit.
As a quick calculation if economic growth is greater than interest rates then the cost of borrowing can easily be paid for by the increased tax receipts generated.
So who in Westminster is going to implement FFA for Scotland then? As far as I am aware they all oppose it.
DeleteYour £7.5bn is a fantasy figure. Firstly, it relates to an IFS report based on FFA being in place from April this year. It isn't possible to retrospectively move to FFA from last month. Second, it assumes no change in the existing financial arrangements that are in place within the union at present. Third, it doesn't take account of the disproportionate level that Scotland makes to union costs in defence and other services. Fourth, it distorts the public funding element by comparing apples with pears. For example, in England, the cost of u over sites was transferred to private debt through the student loan scheme even though the money is originally borrowed by the UK government, lent at subsidised rates to students and will never be fully repaid by these students (if you like the IFS so much, you can find their report on it). Eurostat wanted these costs included in the national debt but the government declined. In addition, Scottish water is still logged under public funding unlike water companies in England and Wales contributing to the purported higher level of public spending in Scitland. I read somewhere the other day that if you removed water from the Scottish accounts public spending per head would be less than Wales. Public spending figures I came across recently show that Scotland spent £49 per person per year more than London although the Olympics, crossrail, London Super Sewer are not included in that figure.
DeleteAt the moment, the UK borrows money to fund its debt. Some of that borrowing relates to Scotland and an allocation is made for that debt to Scotland's costs. The proposal is that Scotland is responsible for its own borrowing and expenditure while paying the UK fir foreign office and defence. In both these cases I would insist on value for money if I had a say.
That should read 'the cost of universities was transferred to private debt'
DeleteThe £7.6 billion figure isn't a "fantasy" it's the same figure anyone would get to with some basic arithmetic using the GERS figures and existing oil revenue projections. For example in the last GERS figures for 2013-14 (which aren't a fantasy, they're based on what actually happened) the "gap" was around £4 billion. That was before the oil price drop so it's not hard to see how we end up at £7.6 billion.
DeleteIf we want to argue against estimates then that's fine, but there has to be some coherent counter-argument - not just rubbishing any figures that are produced with random qualifiers like "it assumes no change in the existing financial arrangements that are in place within the union at present".
The argument from the Yes side at present seems to consist entirely of arguing that any numbers anyone produces don't count, but offering nothing to actually back up the idea FFA is a good idea. I have nothing against FFA if it makes sense (it's not independence, it's just a way of distributing spending differently) but it simply doesn't add up and it's mystifying why so many people seem to want to argue for it regardless. What is it about slashing our own spending, but having none of the extra autonomy granted by independence, that's so appealing?
"...the predicted £7.5b annual black hole..." Since you've chosen to believe the IFS without explaining why:
ReplyDelete"The Westminster parties’ attacks on full fiscal responsibility (FFR) for Scotland and the IFS figures being presented unchallenged in the metropolitan media are so fundamentally flawed it is difficult to know where to start. Going back to fundamentals its worth remembering the whole point of a national economy is to create prosperity and security for the population and definitely not to grow the economy for the sole benefit of the financial markets.
Paying down the deficit as soon as possible through austerity has become an almost sacrosanct mantra in London City-centric, neo-classical economic circles. The Tory and Labour supporting UK press seem to have forgotten that the neoclassical, deregulation of financial markets, “let the rich get richer and wealth will trickle down to the poor” strategy failed with the banking crash and it failed completely. So Westminster’s semi-religious consensus on austerity brings new potency to the term flogging a dead horse.
Running a deficit is entirely proper, entirely necessary to protect businesses and people and to boost economic recovery after an economic crisis. When you operate a large deficit, over time you do need to reduce that deficit as a percentage of GDP. The argument in this election is over the speed of deficit reduction as a percentage of GDP. It is about finding the optimum balance between economic growth and social protection. If the people of Scotland thought running a larger deficit than the UK was such a bad thing then the Conservatives would be sitting on 49% in the polls, not the SNP.
The media use of colourful and entirely negative language in headlines is also very telling as scaremongering tactics are only deployed when you have no positive case to make. For example, to label an additional £7.6bn deficit (a highly disputed figure) as a blackhole demands an urgent policy reaction involving cuts or tax rises. However, if the front pages were to say that Scotland had committed to “£7.6 billion of prosperity and social protection borrowing” over and above the UK levels, then people might reasonably expect that borrowing to be paid down over a socially and economically responsible timeframe. For example, the IFS forecast being touted as bad news for Scotland actually predicts Scotland’s economy will grow by fourteen thousand million pounds between now and 2020 and this means that Scotland’s nominal deficit will reduce year on year as a percentage of GDP from 8.6% in 2015-16 to 4.6% of GDP in 2020. So the deficit is nowhere near the size of a problem as we have been led to believe by the scaremongering."
See part 2 below
"For example, to label an additional £7.6bn deficit (a highly disputed figure) as a blackhole demands an urgent policy reaction involving cuts or tax rises. However, if the front pages were to say that Scotland had committed to “£7.6 billion of prosperity and social protection borrowing” over and above the UK levels, then people might reasonably expect that borrowing to be paid down over a socially and economically responsible timeframe."
DeleteThe £7.6 billion is quite simply the difference between what our budget for spending is now and what it would be under full fiscal autonomy in 2015/16 if all else were equal (according to the IFS, using the GERS figures and oil revenue projections).
We're talking about two different methods for distributing our spending budget - one gives us £7.6 billion less than the other; it's not a complex argument to claim under the circumstances that unless there are huge unquantifiable benefits in terms of producing growth or creating a fairer society that the situation in which we get £7.6 billion more to spend is a better one for Scotland.
Quibbling about whether we call that a "black hole" or "prosperity and social protection borrowing" (and seriously, talk about misleading the public with doublespeak...) is irrelevant. It's a bad idea, there's no coherent argument for it and the SNP are rightly trying to push it off the agenda until the country's economy can better sustain it.
Cont:
ReplyDelete"If the goal of slower managed deficit reduction is aimed at social protection and stimulation of medium-term economic growth, then the slower paying down of the deficit does not create a blackhole but is sensible and responsible plan. However, that takes us to the second problem with the IFS’s Scottish deficit predictions and that is that the calculations are fundamentally flawed. The IFS admits that its five year reduction as a percentage of GDP does not take into account any additional growth in Scotland’s economy due to the impact of applying bespoke economic policies aimed at creating additional economic growth.Their rationale for not forecasting additional growth from FFR is that measures such as cuts to corporation tax and air passenger duty would, at least in the short to medium run, cost the government money and hence could widen rather than shrink the fiscal gap, even if they did boost growth.
This again is flawed thinking, there are ways around this, firstly as championed by Business for Scotland the 3% blanket corporation tax cut has been replaced by a plan to offer targeted tax cuts based on growth related business investments. For example, if a company qualified for a tax rebate as a result of increasing productivity, employing more people or generating significant export growth then the additional tax revenues from new jobs created, the lowering of demand for welfare, new export duties and additional taxation on sales such as VAT would all be collected before the rebate was due. This could largely offset the impact of such measures on the fiscal gap as well as creating additional revenues for the following year to build upon, thus increasing the revenue baseline improving the following years fiscal position.
Another big issue with the credibility of the IFS figures is that they seem to assume that oil prices won’t recover for five years. Frankly that is finger in the air economics and ridiculous. They predict North Sea revenues will average £0.7 billion a year till 2020, rather than the £2.6 billion a year it forecasted earlier this year. The mistake here is in not including several scenarios, one of which would include oil prices rising. Oil prices are incredibly difficult to forecast right now as the reason for the fall is geopolitical rather than structural. Increasing demand for oil, especially from developing Asian economies, is causing natural upward pressure on oil prices but every time that takes effect the Saudis open the taps to keep it artificially low, partly to punish America for not being aggressive enough with ISIS, to slow Americas shale oil production and to punish Russia for supporting Saudi Arabia’s opponents in the gulf. A return to normal levels of instability in the Middle East versus the current chaos, could change OPEC policy and see the price skyrocket, possibly generating a Scottish revenue surplus before the rest of the UK.
Screen Shot 2015-04-24 at 12.39.25It is worth noting that Brent crude hit $64.85 a barrel today, up 40% from its January low of $45 and that the price of oil has fallen by 50% five times in the last 30 years. So what is happening now is natural volatility and only a major problem for countries without the foresight to create a sovereign oil fund when the price was high. Tony Hayward, the former BP chief executive, said on Tuesday that oil prices are set to soar as Opec has taken just six months to stop the US shale oil boom in its tracks. Hayward said “Opec had shown itself to be the most successful cartel in history” and predicted oil prices would soon return to near $80 a barrel.
The goal of Full Fiscal Responsibility is to find the right balance between economic growth, social protection and deficit reduction. In contrast, Westminster’s ill-considered austerity consensus represents full financial irresponsibility."
Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp 24/4/15
https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/l9k3xmg2di/Economist_results_150427-Website.pdf
ReplyDeleteYouGov poll asked some attitudes towards Scottish independence. 52% - 39% of the Scottish sub sample think Scotland will be independent within 20 years.
"So Jim Murphy said it again on tonight's leaders' debate - Labour will vote against a Tory Queen's Speech under all circumstances. It is almost impossible to square that with Ed Miliband's claim on Thursday that there are circumstances in which he would refrain from taking office in order to avoid working with the SNP. I suppose technically there is nothing to prevent Labour from voting the Tories down and then declining to form a government themselves, but the direct outcome of that would be a second election within weeks (by July at the latest). They would be absolutely crucified for acting so irresponsibly, and we can safely assume it won't happen."
ReplyDeleteI have to say James, this is pretty odd reasoning. The idea that Labour would prop up a Tory government simply to avoid another election happening is pretty strange to put it mildly. You've said they'd be "crucified" for such irresponsible behaviour, but they'd be far more likely to be crucified by their own supporters for backing a Tory government in the first place.
If the Tories failed to form a government then Labour would put their own Queen's speech to parliament and it would be up to other parties (chiefly the SNP and the Lib Dems) to choose whether to support it or not. If the SNP voted against it they'd be bringing down a Labour government - something they claim they don't want to do. If they abstained it's quite possible depending on the electoral arithmetic that the Lib Dems supporting it would be enough.
Miliband's strategy is actually pretty sound - the SNP have backed themselves into a corner with their anti-Tory stance so there's a fair chance they'd back Labour's Queen's speech (or abstain) even without getting any concessions. The SNP will also likely have something to lose from new elections as it will be tough to top however many seats they win on Thursday.
And as it happens, there's nothing irresponsible about holding new elections: it's happened on several occasions in other European countries and in the UK there were two elections in 1974. In fact the idea of a fixed term parliament, irrespective of the distribution of seats, is far more irresponsible as it implies there's some merit in having a weak government for five years rather than holding another election.
I have to say, Wiltord, it's you that's missing the point entirely. In your first paragraph, you imply the choice would be between Labour forcing another election within weeks, or propping up a Tory government. Er, aren't we forgetting a third rather obvious option?
Delete"If the Tories failed to form a government then Labour would put their own Queen's speech to parliament"
Which directly contradicts both your first and your last point - ie. you're now conceding that Miliband was lying on Thursday when he said there were some circumstances in which he would refuse to take office.
"so there's a fair chance they'd back Labour's Queen's speech (or abstain) even without getting any concessions"
You simply haven't been paying attention. The SNP aren't claiming they would necessarily get concessions on the face of a Queen's Speech. The concessions would come afterwards, when Labour find they can't get their business through without SNP support. Five years is a long, long time.
James Kelly - exactly right. With the fixed term parliaments act , if SNP backs a labour queens speech as well as locking tories out it LOCKS LABOUR IN to a government. The SNP can then make life very difficult for that govt if it doesn't negotiate / do a deal. They cant bring it down, Labour would have to bring itself down (needs 66% of MPs to vote for dissolution) so tories would vote them down but if SNP vote FOR the govt then labour MP's would have to vote against themselves !!!!!!
ReplyDeleteThe SNP have not backed themselves into a corner. They have said they will vote against a Tory Queen's Speech, and vote for a Labour Queen's Speech. The SNP have also said they would not bring down a Labour government in a vote of no confidence. But a minority Labour government would have to negotiate with the SNP and all the other parties to get legislation passed.
ReplyDelete