The prize freeze is a great headline but its only part of the complete overhaul of our energy sector that Labour is proposing

It was great to be in the hall at conference in Brighton last week during Ed Miliband’s fantastic notes-free speech. He got no fewer than three standing ovations DURING his speech – for his commitment to implement Andy Burnham’s plan for integrating mental health and social care with the rest of the NHS I don't think the media and public have woken up to how radical this could be!); for his commitment to lowering the voting age to 16 and for his pledge to repeal the bedroom tax. Yet the media, pre-briefed on much of the above, focused on the surprise announcement: the freezing of energy prices until January 2017.

Immediately the Tory press and energy industry came out with their predictable message of doom and gloom: it was illegal (yet they regulate prices much more rigidly in other EU nations), it would cause ‘blackouts', it would deter investment in renewables and it was, of course, a Marxist plot cooked up between Ed and his father back when Ed was in his teens. Clearly, this is drivel. Thankfully it seems, according the latest polls, the public have seen through the blue fog of lies and love the idea, hence the change in the Tory's stance from hysterical (Schapps and Pickles) to the more nuanced – ‘energy companies haven’t behaved well, prices are too high, but this isn’t how to deal with it’ (Gove and Cameron).

The public’s passion for this policy is hopefully a sign that they are acknowledging that under Ed Miliband our party’s mission will be to stand up the vested interests (Murdoch, bankers, energy companies, developers who sit on land and payday lenders to give some examples). That said, we can’t be complacent, the reach of the Tory press is still considerable and makes up the majority of newspaper readership. Their message will be a consistent battery of fear mongering bile.

We shouldn’t be put off spreading the word about this policy though; its immediate simplicity is striking and helps us sell it on the doorstep but it is very thought-through if people do want more information. Firstly it won’t cause ‘blackouts’, the energy companies themselves – within minutes of Ed’s speech finishing, were running adverts on Google saying: ‘Don’t wait until the election, freeze your prices until 2017’. 3 of the big 6 are now offering this deal, yet Centrica (who own British Gas) aren’t. Centrica make the biggest profits and yet invest the least of the big 6 companies – and no prizes for guessing who is shouting loudest against the freeze. They can afford this freeze, they deserve this freeze.

Don’t get me wrong. Britain’s energy infrastructure needs massive investment and we have declining capacity and increasing reliance on imports but this is precisely because of the decades of underinvestment from these private energy firms. This prize freeze is only temporary, it is designed to cover the time it will take to pass an Energy Bill through Parliament that would legislate for comprehensive reform of the energy market. Such an Energy Bill would focus on breaking the ‘vertical integration’ i.e. the people owning the plants can’t be the same as those selling the energy. This, combined with a target for decarbonisation by 2030, would open up the production market to smaller renewables firms (i.e. increasing investment in renewables!) and also opening the market to new players willing to work on lower profit margins in order to gazump the others by offering households and businesses lower prices.

This is the message we need to get across to anyone on the doorstep who is having doubts about the feasibility of the proposals:

1) This is absolutely genuine, Labour will definitely freeze prices from the May 2015 to January 2017;

2) This is a pro-business intervention - it will save non-energy sector businesses millions which may well lead to lower prices and/or new jobs in other sectors;

3) We agree investment in new power stations is vitally important, particularly renewables, but that just isn’t happening under the status quo. Therefore we would:

a. Commit to a decarbonisation by 2030 target to give renewables investors assurance that the UK is the place to put their money;

b. Use the 20 month period of the price freeze to change the way the generation market works so that it is focused on high levels of investment and more open to new entrants, particularly renewable producers like solar farms, wind farms and tidal technology;

c. Also use the price freeze to change the way the sales-side of the market works so that its easier for new companies – or even not-for-profit organisations - to enter that market and offer lower prices by working on lower margins rather than affecting investment in generation which will be a completely separate market;

d. The Energy Bill would also tie all providers into providing a much more simple, easy to understand tariff system; and

e. It would also abolish Ofgem and put a really tough new regulator in its place.

The constant refrain pre-conference was that people wanted to hear Labour’s policies. Well on energy Labour have a really comprehensive offer. I haven’t even mentioned that Labour would harness the public sector’s energy use to encourage investment in renewables by committing the NHS, schools and Whitehall departments etc. to use green energy and also giving serious borrowing powers to the Green Investment Bank that would further support investment in this area.

We need to let the public know that Labour is the only party that will lower their bills, instigate the investment that is needed to secure our energy supply and be the only serious green choice at the next election with a fundamental understanding of our collective responsibility to future generations to develop renewables now.

Jimmy Carr is the just the tip of the iceberg and as the world faces austerity its time to tackle the tax havens

Oh Jimmy. I really enjoy Jimmy Carr’s multiple TV appearances, presenting slots and of course stand-up performances so yesterday’s Times expose, revealing he paid about £30,000 tax despite earning a £3,300,000 fortune last year, was painfully disappointing.

The centre-right and right-wing papers have clearly enjoyed, quite rightly, laying into the hypocrisy of this man, clearly on the liberal left of things politically, committing such a heinous sin (and to be fair the Guardian is delighted that Gary Barlow OBE is now implicated in a separate tax avoidance scam) but beneath the glee that can be sourced from embarrassing a hypocrite there is genuine anger on the right and left.

Tax evasion and this kind of ‘aggressive tax avoidance’ angers traditional Tory voters, the kind who want out of Europe, want no immigration etc., just as much as it does the kind of lefty who holds a sit-in in a state-owned bank. That’s why David Cameron is so confident in being able to attack Carr on this issue. As Cameron himself says, it is an affront to the vast majority who pay every penny of tax they owe at the full rate (often grudgingly for Tory voters who think taxes should be lower) and then have to fork out £30 of their disposable income to see Carr or Barlow et al only to see them earn extraordinary sums and then pay less in tax - proportionately, over a year - than they do in a monthly pay packet.

Yet much as the Tories trumpet their planned General Anti-Tax Avoidance law I simply can’t believe they will really be able to deal with the problem. Legal but ‘aggressive’ tax avoidance measures cost the country £7bn according to the Times – that’s a whole lot of cuts not needed any more, in fact its more than all the cuts the Coalition made in their first year in power. If they can make it all back despite the significant reduction in HMRC staff that they are making, I’ll buy a hat, pay the 20% VAT, and eat it.

More importantly and less likely to be tackled is corporate tax avoidance and illegal personal/corporate tax evasion. Tax campaigners often cite the figure £40bn for the amount of tax they believe is being evaded by corporations, combine that with the £7bn personal, ‘aggressive’ tax avoidance that’s over half of the cuts being made by the Government not needed. Yet the Conservatives won’t tackle this for two reasons. Firstly, 25% of those who make up the Times Rich List are Tory Party donors, there’s little doubt that many of these protect their fortune through ‘aggressive’ avoidance and illegal evasion. Many of these will have worked in the City of London, the UK’s dark tax-haven secret. I’ve just finished Nicholas Shaxson’s book Treasure Islands: Tax havens and the men who stole the world, it is essential reading for anyone who cares about people not paying their tax and some of it's most startling revelations revolve around the lobbying power of the City of London and the City’s cosy relationship with Britain’s Overseas Territories – Jersey, Isle of Man, the Cayman Islands etc. – that are the epicentre of the off-shore, dark web of tax evasion. If these men, its mostly men, have such a hold on the Conservative Party then they can never seriously challenge the status quo, of course their biggest donor Lord Ashcroft was a non-dom who paid only £30,000 a year to the British tax man despite his considerable donations to the Conservatives.

The second reason the Conservatives will never challenge is less seedy but just as depressing: its really, really difficult to stop tax evasion. Shaxson highlights the way in which the global super-rich shift their money around the various, often centuries-old tax havens to minimise their contribution to our public services to just a smidgen. To be fair to the Tories even if they took a radical ideological shift to the left and began re-shaping our tax system and investing in more tax inspectors to catch tax evaders they might make inroads into ensuring tax due to Britain is paid but they still wouldn’t be able to do it without concerted global effort. If Cameron is serious about tax evasion he should use forums like the G20 and the UN to create a UN convention on taxation, ideally setting out globally agreed minimum rates of taxation on profits, incomes and wealth but at the very least setting out an agreed global framework for taxation across borders and back this up with a UN tax unit dedicated to investigating and charging tax evaders under international law.

I’m pretty sure this Jimmy Carr stuff will blow over within a month or two, hardly likely to permanently damage his career but what the Times have done, publicly humiliating tax avoiders and evaders is the right way to go. That said, we won’t get anywhere just restricting our ire for individuals, the press must do more to reveal and confront the fundamental problems posed by tax havens. Tax havens, including those within the UK’s direct sphere of influence, are not only the host to money avoiding the clutches of the taxman, they are home also to the dirty money of serious organised criminals and dictators. Tackling tax havens would deliver a huge net gain not just for our Treasury but for the governments in the developing world, who’s less technically proficient tax systems are regularly screwed over by large companies and dodgy politicians thus stunting their growth and making them dependent on aid. We would also strike a serious blow to organised crime, indeed a 'war on tax havens' would do far more to win the ‘war on drugs’ than anything the Mexican army struggling to do right now.

The party leader who stands up and makes the point about the pernicious effect such havens have on the lives of the 99% worldwide would be brave but would surely also gain great warmth and credit from voters. As the quality of public services, the cost of public transport and the reductions in benefits really begin to bite the public are only going to get more angry about those who don’t pay their fair share, lest us forget the Government’s most unpopular move since taking power has been the cut to the 50p tax rate. So which politician is going to stand up to the ultimate vested interest? As that loveable fictional dodgy Brit Del Boy used to say: 'He who dares wins'.

Same old Tories - how David Cameron is copying Margaret Thatcher's policy of speeding up the painful process of creative destruction

Anyone who is a member of the Labour Party can easily reel off the story of 1980’s Britain where the rise of China, India and other economies elsewhere began to drive the deindustrialisation of the UK and yet Margaret Thatcher’s policies deliberately sped up the process and did nothing to support the communities and individuals affected by the radical change befalling them. Yet despite many shouting ‘same old Tories’ about many of this Government’s policies few seem to have noted that the legacy of their ‘too far, too fast’ cuts programme is already becoming clear – a second period of hyper-speed creative destruction in one of our key industries, putting millions of jobs at risk.

The industry I mean? Retail. The retail sector employs 1 in 10 workers in the UK (3m people) and generates roughly of 8% of GDP. Yet look at any nearly any High Street across the country and you’ll see an ever-increasing amount of empty shops, 14.3% of shops are empty according to the British Retail Consortium. People will argue that net loss is not that bad because in 2011 5,268 shops were closed, 5,094 opened (net loss just 174) but this ignores two important devils in the detail.

Firstly the type of shops closes and the type that are replacing them. Out go your traditional, middle of the road retailer to be replaced by one from either end of the scale – ‘pile ‘em high, sell them low’ poundshops and other bargain retailers or their opposite number, the John Lewis-market boutique retailer. This phenomenon is so symbolic of the nation’s current economic situation and enforced by this Government’s policies. The many are cutting their debts or have less money due to their hours being cut back, their job being lost or just reductions in working tax credits etc. whilst the richer residents are protected by low interest rates and the very rich given a 5% tax cut. The result on the ground is that the middle of the road stores, with an eye on quality as much as low prices, a use of nice displays and higher staff numbers are the first to go, sharply replaced by the bargain basement retailers selling products with less frills and thus much lower costs. Surely this is a good thing? It is, to an extent, for customers who can offset their personal financial woes with these savings on consumption costs, yet in many cases – particularly clothing – quality will be lower. It is particularly bad however for employees, remember those 3,000,000? That number is dropping, rapidly, because these replacement shops – with less care for tidy displays, less concern about queue length and customer complaints – don’t need as a many employees, and of course it is these budget retailers who are the most enthusiastic users of the Government’s unpaid work experience scheme.

The second key point that hides beneath the not-so-bad veneer of net shop opening/closure figures is that we are seeing an increasing gap between poorer areas and wealthy areas. I’ve seen this first hand, here in Newbury there are closures but at the other end of town a whole new mini-shopping precinct has been opened, yet in my old university haunt of Newport, South Wales, it really is more of a ghost town. This is borne out in data collected for the Daily Telegraph back in February:

More than one in three shops are vacant in Margate, Kent, and Leigh Park, Hampshire. On the other hand, many parts of London such as St John's Wood as well as Cambridge and St Albans have fewer than one in 10 shops vacant.
(H.Wallop, Daily Telegraph, 7/2/2012)

Just like in the 1980s where whole towns, cities and even regions were based on the mining and manufacturing industries that had existed there since Victorian times were beginning to close down only to be egged on the Thatcher Government causing rapid closures, rapid job losses and thus rapid social decline – this is why the Conservatives are still seen by so many as ‘the nasty party’ and why they are unelectable in the urban centres of Wales, Scotland and the North of England. Worst of all Thatcher offered the victims of unemployment little in the way of re-training. As I said in the start deindustrialisation was obviously coming, indeed already happening when Thatcher arrived in power, we shouldn’t gloss over the role that unreasonable wage demands from Trade Unions played in speeding up the process too, but with this radical change being so obviously on the horizon educational resources should have been focused on these areas most at-risk to support people with the transition to a new ‘knowledge economy’. This didn’t happen, instead the process was sped up, no support was really offered.

The decline in physical retail is inevitable, internet shopping has been taking an increasing share of the market for over a decade now. Without the cost of buildings and sales staff prices can be much lower online without compromising on quality. Yet rather than realise this and beginning to put in place a serious strategy to offer re-training, careers guidance and support for displaced retail workers this Conservative-led Government is making the same mistake again. Doing nothing to stem the rapid decline of physical retail that has been sped-up by the recession, indeed they are speeding up the decline with their economic strategy that is cutting demand out of the economy while it is too weak to withstand such cuts. The new National Careers Service - in reality a new website and phone service offering careers advice - is a weak response, whilst it isn't a long-term solution Labour's proposed cut in VAT would at least improve spending on the High Street to stem the tide, let's not forget Osborne's first move as Chancellor was to raise VAT to the record high of 20%.

We are seeing a pattern, Thatcher sped-up the decline of manufacturing and mining, Cameron will now oversee the death of physical retail, both will then bemoan the social collapse that ensues – Ed Miliband is right, the ‘nasty party’ is back, but Labour need to win over the 3m retail workers by highlighting what is happening sooner rather than later. Like the plaudits awarded to Ed Balls for predicting the Tories would push us back into recession are showing, ‘I told you so’ can be quite the vote-attractor...providing you have a plan to sort it out.

Ed is right to highlight low turnout - there is much to be done to improve public engagement with politics

As an Ed Miliband supporter I’ve been pleased to see Ed’s reaction to the local election victories. Not overzealous celebratory rhetoric but instead a calm recognition that only 30% of the electorate (in the areas which held local elections) actually turned out to vote for anyone, thus Labour’s 38% of the vote was actually 38% of 30%. My maths skills are terrible but I think that works out to about 11.4% of the total potential voters actually came out to vote for Labour.

Sorry to put a downer on the jubilation but these are the harsh facts we need to appreciate. Ed’s speech to the Progress Conference today was equally stark, pointing out that anyone attending is hardly representative of ‘the people’ as those who engage in politics nowadays are a quirky minority whilst the majority will be out shopping, watching sports or indeed working today. These are the people Labour needs not only to engage with to win but these are the very people who Labour was born to represent, it should be the ‘people’s party’ and it won’t realise that lofty position again without giving these people, ‘the 99%’, a good reason to think that Labour is the party for them.

Like anything in terms of Labour policy at the moment things are rather opaque but I’m enthused to hear Ed talk about the need for Labour to become much more localised and involved in the daily grind of community issues. I couldn’t write my first post-election blog and not dedicate a sentence to congratulating my great friend Tom Bond on his fantastic victory, becoming a Labour councillor for Rogerstone ward in Newport, South Wales – this was on the back of weeks of constant campaigning and it was the sale of the local fields and a set of cars constantly blocking a road which were the main concerns on the doorstep, followed by the state of the city centre. Labour needs to use these council election gains to deliver real improvements in people's daily lives, visible improvements for towns and cities across the country where they have been entrusted with power. Every Labour council, indeed every Labour ward should have a ‘1-year on’ plan setting out what it aims to achieve within its first year of office. Equally every Labour councillor should pledge to go door-knocking at least a few weeks every year, listening to people’s concerns throughout their term in power rather than just when elections roll around again. Showing people that voting Labour reaps results and embedding our councillors as key figures in the local community are vital parts of the rebuilding process.

I’m also delighted to hear that Ed Miliband has announced Labour CLPs will be mobilised to get out on a massive voter registration drive. An estimated 6million people are not registered to vote in their actual place of residence, a disproportionate amount have low-incomes – these should be Labour’s core vote, reaching out to them, registering them and then, crucially, staying in touch with them will bolster hopes of Labour restoring the ‘people’s party’ mantle and sweeping to victory in 2015.

The lowest turnout age group is 18-30. After being ceremoniously ditched by the Liberal Democrats the student vote is up for Labour’s taking but it must get out to every single campus and listen to concerns and genuinely reach out to the student population rather than the clunky pledge to reduce tuition fees to £6,000 that was announced at conference last year (a pledge which wouldn't actually reduce students monthly repayments and instead would benefit higher earning graduates). The biggest problem for Labour is that the courting of the student vote often distracts from the wider problem of reaching out to all young people, i.e. those not yet old enough to vote but who will be in May 2015 (there’s about 2.4million of them), those who aren’t yet at university (on gap years etc. or more politically interesting: those who missed out on a university place), those who have already left university and are looking to get a job/onto the housing ladder and most importantly those who didn’t/won’t go to university. The ‘youth vote’ is a diverse grouping. Politicians failure to quite appreciate this has no doubt led to much of the apathy amongst this age range - Labour needs an ’18-30 voter engagement strategy’.

Just one interesting area for development was the little noticed Young British Talent Showcase, hosted by Eddie Izzard at the Labour conference in Liverpool last year. This invited anyone 16-24 with a business or science idea, a community project or an art, media or design talent to send it in, a top 3 were selected (by someone in the Party?) and then judged ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ style on the day. I haven’t seen anything about this year’s conference but it should be repeated and promoted asap to get as many entries as possible. This kind of opportunity could be localised with local Labour parties organising non-party events like talent shows, quiz nights and comedy nights that are for all the family in every community hall all over the country. Further to that Labour should be approaching 6th forms, colleges and universities to offer the opportunity to make posters for different campaigns and to make campaign videos for each candidate at the next general election to played on the new local TV stations the government is planning as well as on YouTube. These kind of opportunities will revitalise Labour’s ability to campaign at little or no cost and make campaign materials more in-tune with young people.

Finally, Ed Miliband should call on the Government to establish a Royal Commission to look at:

• Whether online voting could securely be implemented;
• Would moving votes to Saturdays or spreading them over 2 days would improve turnout?
• Should we extend the franchise to 16 and 17 years olds?
• Should there be a single date for all local elections nationwide (as exists in Scotland and Wales)?

Ed Miliband is absolutely right to remark on the low turnout and utilise it as a moment for genuine change, he must now ensure he does everything he can to act on his convictions and reach out to ‘the people’ long before 2015.

The time is perfect for Culinary Arts to come to the fore in the National Curriculum

First it was taught as part of Home Economics but as that faded out of fashion. It re-emerged as part of Design and Technology, deigned ‘Food Technology’. Now I believe the time is just right for cooking classes to move again – to the Arts.

Food Tech rightly tries to teach pupils about nutrients and hygiene, absolutely vital elements of their learning but frankly the majority of this should be covered in primary school Food Tech lessons and picked up again in more detail at GCSE for those who want to take the subject on to this formalised level. The best way of improving the nation’s health (and bank balances) is to make sure young people are able to cook for themselves, weaning a generation of the ready meals. We need young people to be enjoying cooking and doing as much of it as possible.

Jamie Oliver has worked with EdExcel to introduce a new set of basic Level 1 and Level 2 Home Cooking Skills courses which pupils are now able to take alongside their Key Stage 3 and GCSE study. However the scheme is voluntary, thus often the pupils most at risk of suffering poor nutrition and being unable to cook for themselves will still be the ones missing out. Jamie is heroic in his pursuit of improving life for the next generation but he can’t do it alone, at the very least Government should be making this a mandatory part of schooling.

Yet we can go further. With celebrity chefs like Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsey all over the TV at the moment, not to mention the revived popularity of Masterchef, young people are more enthused (or could be) than ever before about cooking and cooking well – we should seize the moment and introduce Culinary Arts at Year 7.

The first step would be to ensure the teaching of basic cooking skills happens in Primary, even if this requires formal assessment alongside SATs to ensure that schools take this responsibility seriously. This is important to get right so that by the time pupils reach secondary school every pupil understands the basics of the kitchen. This would then provide a basis for Culinary Arts to be taught at Key Stage 3, building on the popularity of celebrity chefs and TV cooking competitions to encourage pupils to really experiment with food and develop affordable dishes that go beyond the basics. We need every child to be cooking a meal at least once every two weeks throughout Years 7, 8 and 9 of their school career – if this was a reality children would learn how to make over 50 different meals before they even begin a GCSE syllabus. The best pupils would go on to take their Culinary Arts to new levels, creating a new generation of world-class chefs.

Some will question my focus on cooking, suspecting I must be some kind of amateur chef myself. The sad truth is I enjoyed Food Tech lessons but wasn’t very good and by the time I reached university I didn’t know how to cook anything for myself - cue embarrassed questions to my peers about how to cook things as simple as bacon, a period of quick-fire self-teaching and a religious adherence to reading the on-packet instructions. I now really enjoy cooking but I’m no expert. I argue for better Food Education because I think all young people should leave school able to cook because the health benefits for the nation are potentially fantastic.

If we can teach young people to enjoy a varied diet, to cook hygienically and eat healthily we will improve their livelihoods (and the livelihoods of their children) all whilst reducing the obesity burden on the NHS and welfare bill and stop hampering businesses with long-term absence due to health problems. It’s a total win-win, so let’s lose the pretentious and/or naïve view that Food education is a nice but not totally necessary add-on to the curriculum confined to learning the very basics and lets embrace it as a genuine subject of creative and social worth.

We must all resist regional pay at any cost but Plaid Cymru's policy is awful

Regular readers of this blog will know that the focus of my writing is Westminster politics but today I feel compelled to write about an issue born in Westminster but one that will have a horrific impact on the Land of my Father…Wales. In my last post I made it quite clear that regional pay for public sector workers, as suggested by the Chancellor in his recent budget, would be an absolute economic disaster for everywhere outside the South East and London; for Wales where the gap between public and private is one of the largest in the UK the effects would be even worse.

Some early estimates are suggesting that in practice regional pay would mean the public sector pay freeze lasting 20 years in Wales – two decades of hoping that private sector wages rise roughly in-line with inflation and whilst that same inflation eats into the real terms wages of nurses, teachers and social workers across a nation with some of the worst health inequalities, educational outcomes and other deep social problems.

Regional pay is not just wrong on the moral basis outlined above, it poses practical problems, some of which Carwyn Jones, the fantastic First Minister of Wales noted in the Assembly last week: will it be based on place of work (most likely) and therefore we could have a nurse working in North Wales earning far less than his/her neighbour, another nurse who happens to commute to high-paying Chester. The alternative would be basing it on where people live but I’m pretty sure that causes legal problems and anyway it would simply reverse the problem with people being paid less for commuting.

The key failing of regional pay however is neither its moral failings nor its practical problems – it is the economics of the idea. As I outlined in my last post it is the problem that it will make a further dent in regional economies at a time when it is needed least. Reducing public sector pay will not help the private sector thrive in Wales; instead it will mean less disposable income to be spent in the retail, services and leisure sectors. The idea that private sector businesses will run to Wales in droves to offer jobs to the talented public sector workers now feeling underpaid is wrong-headed – bad infrastructure and acute social disadvantage leading to poor educational outcomes and a under-skilled workforce are far more likely to be the kind of things holding the Welsh economy back. The notion that leading staff in the public sector will become disgruntled with their ever-decreasing pay over the years and eventually quit to use their talents to start up their own businesses instead may well to actually come to fruition, but should we really celebrate the loss of talented individuals from the services designed to solve the systemic social problems of Wales that I’ve outlined?

So, I’m completely against this awful idea of regional pay in the public sector but I also think that if the UK Government go ahead with the plan then I’m afraid the Welsh Government will have to grin and bear it. Plaid Cymru’s radical new leader has already shown her own economic ineptitude and highlighted her party’s lack of competence on public spending. Leanne Wood was doing so well when in her first week she persuaded the Welsh Conservatives (along with the Lib Dems and Labour Government) to create a cross-party consensus saying no to regional pay. Yet Wood lost it when she stated that if the plans went ahead then the Welsh Government should demand responsibility for setting public sector pay in Wales (so far sensible)…so that it could maintain public sector pay at current levels (rising in-line with inflation year on year). Oh dear.

The problem with Wood’s plan is that under the Barnett Formula (which is the calculation deciding how much funding the devolved governments of Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland get from Westminster) any savings the UK government makes from implementing regional pay across England will not be used to boost public spending in other areas but will instead be part of the cuts programme. Thus, this reduced public expenditure in England will be passed on, proportionately (ignoring the failings of the Barnett formula which means Wales gets £400m a year less than it should), to the devolved administrations. Under the plan Wood outlined the Welsh Government would then be committed to paying public sector wages in-line with the South East of England (as is the case currently) but with only enough cash to pay them the regionally adjusted rate (i.e. much less). The result would therefore be further cuts to other areas of public expenditure and/or job cuts in the public sector.

Wood is suggesting that if Plaid Cymru were the largest party in the National Assembly her Government’s response to regional pay would be (providing the UK government agreed to devolve responsibility for public sector pay to the Welsh Government – which the Conservatives, sensing the impending disaster would certainly accede to) have 45 children per class so that the remaining teachers that haven’t had to be laid off can keep getting good pay.

Regional pay is a policy that must be resisted at all costs, how the Unions can fight it whilst keeping the public on board is the challenge now. The support of the UK Labour Party as well as all the cross-party resistance from the three non-England UK nations might help to kill it off but Plaid Cymru’s response is at this stage unhelpful, defeatist and downright awful.

Scotland and Ireland know what they’re doing – England and Wales should celebrate their patron saint’s days

An economic downturn more severe than anything seen since The Great Depression is perhaps not the best time to be talking about reducing the national productivity rate but with life being ever harder for so many it is about time to give everyone a break – so c’mon let’s take the day off for St. George’s Day. No, I’m not talking about some kind of national mass walkout on April 23rd, but something more permanent instead - making St. George’s Day a bank holiday.

Business leaders will bemoan calls for an extra bank holiday but they should talk to their mate Boris Johnson. The Tory Mayor of London who defends bankers and calls for the 50p tax rate to cut as a matter of priority also agrees with me – on St. George’s Day in 2010 he called for a national holiday on April 23rd each year to allow Englanders to celebrate being English. John Cruddas, the Labour MP, who regularly calls on our party to engage more with the concept of Englishness, also backs the idea. Both are right, English identity is currently confined to sports matches and the racism of the English Defence League – the threat of the latter means its hugely important all parties come together with a strategy to give the people of England the freedom to engage with and indeed celebrate their Englishness. I’ve written before in support of a Parliament for England to rebalance the post-devolution UK, a bank holiday is a far simpler and less contentious idea for Tories, Labourites and Lib Dems to rally around.

England wouldn’t be alone in celebrating their patron saint in this way. Northern Ireland has had a day off for St. Patrick’s Day for decades and Scotland has had St. Andrew’s Day as a public holiday since the St. Andrew’s Day Act 2007. Plaid Cymru constantly demand St. David’s Day become a bank holiday and I urge the Welsh Labour government to heed the call. St. David’s Day is celebrated to a much greater extent than St. George’s Day is, but it could be turned into a grand annual celebration in the vein of its Scottish and Irish counterparts. Turning St. George’s Day into a grand celebration could help Cameron’s Big Society vision – I can see village fetes, street parties and carnivals to celebrate the day, that is after the twenty-somethings celebrating the night away the night before arise from their hangovers.

On the point of drinking the bar industry, still in recession, would love the boost this extra celebration would bring. The idea of a St. George’s Day bank holiday even got a mention in the Government’s Tourism Strategy on the basis of the boost it would give to seaside towns and National Parks etc. when families decide en masse to fill their new found late April long weekend with a traffic-jammed trip away from the cities. The Government haven’t since mentioned the idea but under their plan the May Day bank holiday (two weeks later) would be moved forward. There’s a worrying bit of ideological thinking behind the idea to scrap a day, internationally recognised, for celebrating the labour movement, but even if May Day had no significance why not give us the extra day instead of shifting the pack? Sure, two long weekends in (not-quite) succession might seem excessive (Government's alternative proposal was to celebrate the far more obscure Trafalgar Day – 21st October – a Major-era idea which surely should have died along with the Cones Hotline) but we should remember no country in the EU has less public holidays than the UK. Only the Netherlands matches our stinginess and whilst other nations have an excessive amount (Cyprus and Slovakia have 15 a year!) but even Germany, the country with the economy all parties collectively look towards longingly at the moment, has 2 more than the UK does.

So there really is no excuse not to excuse the majority of workers that extra day off to celebrate St. George’s or St. David’s Day, times are tough but an extra day will not be a death knell for our economy, it might even give some suffering industries a much-needed boost. So let’s back the Government if it goes ahead with a St. George’s Day bank holiday, but fight for it to be an extra day, not a early May Day.

Lord Smith's review of the film industry was more than welcome but it didn't go far enough

For an ex-film student whose career path has veered away into politics a Government commissioned independent review of the film industry brings a nerdy excitement, so you’ll be surprised that I have taken so long to mention Lord Smith’s review that was published five weeks ago – you’re quite right, this is a blog post well overdue.

Cutting straight to the chase I give Lord Smith’s review a score of 8/10. It makes all the right noises and could improve the British film industry but it lacks the radical edge I (always) would like to see. Amongst the 56 recommendations for Government there are plenty of great ideas:

Tightening the laws around videoing a film in the cinema

I thought this was a trivial offence until I read that 90% of pre-DVD release piracy is carried out this way, apparently the current legislation requires proof of intent to distribute the recording – the review recommends making it a simple offence to record. Seems a sensible proposal to me.

Broaden access to films in remote and rural areas by providing equipment and facilities to local film societies and community halls

A nice proposal and fits with my instinct that we should be reinvigorating village halls by making them hubs for a range of cultural activities. If Cameron is serious about the Big Society he should take this forward alongside support for parish councils to put on a year-round programme of entertainment.

An annual ‘British Film Week’ and a nationwide film festival

‘British Film Week’ is a fairly airy fairy proposal but if its combined with a nationwide film festival and embraced by the industry it could see a real celebration of classic and new British filmmaking on television and in cinemas. I’d like to see this ‘British Film Week’ scheduled in the week leading up the BAFTAs to help encourage big stars from here and Hollywood to come to the UK early in the lead-up to the awards to join in and highlight the celebrations. We could also consider shifting the London Film Festival to coincide with it.

Better coordinated film education

This recommendation was hyped up by the media as ‘calls for film education in every school’ when it is in fact a call for the BFI to have a comprehensive set of film education resources available for teachers. With Darren Henley’s review of Cultural Education due out this week and likely to recommend increased film education in schools and with the National Curriculum Review on-going there is the distinct possibility that learning about film will no longer be an opportunity confined to those who study at schools offering A-level Film Studies.

We need to be teaching young people about film in the same way we do about literature and we also need to be using film (both fiction and documentary) in class to help aid understanding of other subjects such as history. Likewise with increasingly cheap basic film and editing equipment we should be encouraging young people to produce their own short films just as we require children to write stories in English, encouraging experimental audio-visuals in art classes or as group-made documentary presentations for other subjects like geography or science.

A ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ with major broadcasters

Possibly the most radical element of the report, this was a swipe at ITV and Sky for not investing in making or buying rights to broadcast British films and states that if Government can’t improve things by polite coercion it should legislate to put requirements on a minimum level of investment into licensing agreements.

This is so important, Film4 is one of Britain’s biggest producers and BBC Films is another vital source of co-finance for filmmakers in this country yet ITV and particularly Sky simply don’t pull their weight. Mr Murdoch is hardly at his popular right now; it’s the perfect time to be demanding that Sky contributes to the future of British cinema for cultural and economic reasons.

So all good news but here’s two further steps I’d like to see on top of these initiatives:

Reduce bureaucracy 

A slashing of red tape and deregulation might not be common on this blog but I’m as adverse to unnecessary rules and paperwork as your blue-blooded Tory – the difference is often our interpretation of ‘unnecessary’.

No-budget student filmmakers and low-budget productions are the entrepreneurial start-ups of the film industry and just as Government’s want to encourage new small businesses by reducing the regulatory burden of starting one up we shouldn’t be getting in the way of budding filmmakers. We need to reduce the cost to low budget productions of filming in public spaces both in terms of the fees requested by councils and the time burden of requesting licenses. Countless other regulations could be eased without making productions unsafe.

Distribution

The Review has some worthy ideas on improving distribution for British films but really goes nowhere near the radical step required to break the stranglehold on multiplex screens that the dominating Hollywood distributors have currently. We need a big British rival distributor paying the way for British films to get into cinemas and advertising them alongside the Hollywood productions – we could do this by giving BBC Films a distribution arm. We know British films can be a success at the box office – 2011 was a tremendous year and The Woman in Black sits atop box office charts this week – only be getting smaller British films to a wider audience will we ever start to bring in the serious cash that will allow more regular ‘blockbuster’ productions to be funded and produced in the UK.

We have serious film making talent in this country, the Lord Smith Review takes a lot of wise steps towards improving our respect for British film heritage with more film education, continuing to develop our highly skilled workforce and improving investment in British film but ultimately until we make it easier to make films in the first place and then ensure those films can compete for audience share with the Hollywood pictures then we will never fully utilise the enormous potential for our film industry. With the Government desperate for growth it must recognise the potential for growth to come from film, an industry which creates jobs for all kinds of workers (builders, electricians, catering as well as actors, editors and on-set technical crew). They must be bold in embracing the film industry and taking radical steps to support this growth, even if creating a state distributor rankles with their ideology.

We can't rely on parents if we want all children to experience culture

10 points for timing goes to Visit Birmingham who’ve released a new report on cultural opportunities for children just ahead of the Art Council’s Annual Meeting (Tuesday) and amid continuing delays to the release of the Government commissioned independent review of Cultural Education led by Darren Henley.

Visit Birmingham surveyed 2,000 parents of 5-12 year olds from across the UK; it paints a sad picture for many children. 4 in 10 never taken to an art gallery is the headline yet this isn’t a total disaster, far sadder to hear 25% have never been to taken to the theatre. I don’t know what Darren Henley’s Review is going to recommend but I hope it takes heed of this vital point: 50% of the families surveyed said they didn’t spend much time teaching their children about culture because they feel that it is the role of schools to do so.

There is no point pontificating to parents about where they should take their children, vouchers for attractions and other micro-schemes might help improve the figures but there will always be a hardcore of parents who don’t engage because they themselves never had such experiences thus creating a never-ending cycle of cultural apartheid in our society. Its no coincidence that the children with the least cultural experiences are the same as those coming from the most vulnerable and deprived social groups and locations. I’m the first to say we that the pendulum of parental responsibility and the ‘schools can sort every social ill’ has swung too far to the side of the latter but we must be realistic in this instance and utilise schools as the hub of cultural opportunities for young people.

We need to have more school trips. In fact we need to introduce a new ‘Bill of Rights’-style charter setting out the kind of cultural opportunities every child must experience via school at each age. Such a charter must include ensuring every young person in this country has visited London at least once by age 14 and visited another EU country by age 16. We also need to improve the quality of cultural experiences offered by schools, introducing pupils to the theatre shouldn’t mean a trip to the pantomime, it should mean introducing them to the musical theatre of the West End which has far more potential to inspire young people who would otherwise never be introduced to such an experience – it can then lead to trips to see local theatres for more ‘serious’ productions. Part of the improving of school trips could involve Ofsted visiting sites which want to be considered as ‘school trip venues’ and rating them in the same way as schools – highlighting ways they can improve, sharing best practice and listing providers so schools can see where trips would be an effective learning experience for their pupils, schools should still be able to organise visits to other venues but it would at least be a useful guide.

There is more that can be done in schools too. A lot of secondary schools have an annual school play or musical - this shouldn't be the preserve of the middle class schools in the Shires but a requirement for every school across England. Pupils should learn about their local communities and the history of their surrounding towns. We should utilise the ever-lower cost of video cameras to encourage pupils to make video presentations and short films to illustrate their learning across a range of 'traditional' subjects. Labour did great things in increasing after-school activities via the Extended Schools programme but more can be done and cuts to the Creative Partnerships programme which brought poets, artists etc. into schools should be reversed ASAP.

British culture – our theatre, our art, our film, our music – are a great strength for our nation. The more we can inspire and engage young people by ensuring everyone is equitably introduced to a range of cultural experiences will improve educational results and help us create a more harmonious and understanding society. We’ll await the Henley Review and Government’s response but I fear it will cost quite a bit more cash to improve the way we do cultural education – I hope the Government can be convinced this expense would be a genuine investment in early intervention not a ‘waste of taxpayers money down the drain’ as some in the media may find it too easy to dismiss it as.

Direct aid should be the cornerstone of international development policy

That old argument has reared its ugly head this weekend, Conservative MPs wondering why we, at a time of austerity all-round, are still raising spending on international development aid. The argument usually centres on the fraud and corruption rife in developing nations and thus the poor record of getting aid to those for whom it is intended rather than going missing whilst the recipient country’s President sits back in the comfort of his new gold-plated and diamond encrusted throne. There is also the (very strong) argument that we are sending aid to nations who don’t need it – aid to China only stopped in 2010 and now the Government of India has admitted they had to be bullied into accepting aid from the UK.

Thanks to David Cameron joined Labour and Lib Dems in giving his party’s backing to raising aid in-line with the targets set out at the 2005 G8 summit, the Department for International Development (DfID) have been quietly getting on with their fantastic work whilst other departments are constantly in the press as they slash services and shed staff. Yet this cross-party consensus is allowing any discussion about efficiency of DfID’s work to be dominated by right-wing Tory backbenchers. Labour certainly shouldn’t call for a reduction in aid (I would cut up my membership card if they did) but its not right-wing to ask could this £9bn be spent more effectively, its just common sense to make sure money isn’t lost to corruption or wasted in bureaucracy but instead going straight to the front-line: the 1.7billion people worldwide living on just $1 a day.

The holy grail of international development is for aid to be no longer needed as countries utilise aid to develop their economy so that the nation becomes self-sufficient. Each nation is different in its needs depending on their stage of development, some need us to help eradicate widespread illnesses which decimate the workforce, some need help in getting every child into school to educate the future workforce and some need support to build infrastructure – trains, roads etc. to help their economy grow and to encourage foreign investment. All of such spending is vital but there is an emerging model for development that Governments around the world need to embrace – direct aid.

Direct Aid, the charity programme, is the lead proponent of the movement, basically people in developing countries are given mobile phones which can receive cash (donations) directly from Direct Aid, they then take this mobile phone to their nearest shop who transfer the money from the aid recipient’s phone into their store’s account and then give the aid recipient either credit or cash in return. DfID are already directing more cash to such schemes but such a transparent, accountable scheme getting cash directly to those most in need should be expanded, rapidly. We should dedicate 50% of all international development spending to direct aid and argue the case for every developed nation to do the same, contributing to a single UN-backed fund.

Half of the worldwide aid total is about $62bn, dedicating this sum to the 1.7bn living in absolute poverty would only secure $37.64 a year to these people – clearly not enough to raise them over the $1 a day threshold of $365 (around £231) a year however it would certainly lift many over or closer to the threshold. Private donors, often put off by the multitude of varying charities, would have a government-backed single international fund to contribute to. Governments such as the UK could let all taxpayers know how much of their annual total taxes paid has contributed towards the fund – improving transparency (and perhaps quashing some of the anti-aid debate) but in many cases encouraging people to top-up their statutory (tax) contribution with their own private donation. Doubling the fund with private donations would clearly life many millions more over the absolute poverty threshold.

This shouldn’t be where the buck stops. The point of these direct cash transfers is that they create demand in economies where there is none – the basic problem being the fundamental fact that the poor have no purchasing power. Any major policy shift towards mass direct cash transfers should be accompanied by negotiation with the government’s in developing countries about bilateral free trade agreements to first open up their markets without the disincentive of tariffs etc. and then negotiation between developed nation governments and their major corporations about how they can move into these markets to deliver goods to these newly expanded markets – for example supermarkets for the aid recipients to spend their cash in and, crucially banks to support entrepreneurs in the aid recipient nations to build their own retail/services businesses.

Getting the major supermarkets (as an example, many other service providers could move in) would lead not only to quality food for the masses with all the health benefits this would bring but also many thousands of jobs which help life people beyond ‘poverty plus a pound’ (as Nick Clegg) calls it, these people in work and businesses making profits would both lead to increased tax revenue for aid recipient nations to begin building up their own social security/welfare state safety nets for their poorest citizens and improving infrastructure to encourage further private sector investment.

David Cameron and all leading politicians should be praised for their continuing commitment to the world’s poorest people but all of us who believe in this moral imperative must make the public case for aid, the task would be a lot easier if we could improve transparency and guarantee cash is going straight to those who desperately need it.

We must embrace technology in education or bore another generation

At our seminar on the use of technology in education on Tuesday morning (13th Sept) I was reminded that despite this government’s seemingly condescending attitude towards what Michael Gove may well regard as a ‘fad’, there is still appetite among the teaching community, the computer industry and many policymakers (not least the fantastically passionate Lord Knight [Labour] and Lord Lucas [Conservative]) for the increased use of technology in schools. This is great to see because if we want young people to be engaged in learning in a world where information is so readily available we need to adapt our schools system to support and encourage young people to use technology to embrace and deconstruct this wealth of information – not keep them stuck on the textbooks and silent, repetitive working of old.

Let’s be clear many schools are utilising technology in exciting ways, perhaps none more so than Neil Hopkins, headteacher of Rosendale and Christ Church Schools who used his contribution to the seminar to demonstrate a film made by a 2-year old as part of the Early Years Foundation Stage. Neil’s point was vital to understanding how far we have come even since I was in school (I finished 6th form in 2005) – the kids and their abilities to utilise the latest technology are far too often well ahead of those ‘teaching’ them.

The idea that the kids know better than their teachers is somewhere between bitterly painful and horrific for teachers to hear. Yet let’s be clear, when I took GCSE ICT I was on course for an A* because frankly showing how to make a Powerpoint, use Word and build a spreadsheet in Excel really isn’t difficult, I’m not being arrogant, I’m actually something of a technical failure compared to many of my peers yet according to the curriculum I was advanced, top of the class…what a load of rubbish. I finished with a B because I was completely disengaged and my botched together Year 11 coursework in between chatting with friends throughout the lessons - both those in the class and those halfway across the school in another ICT class via a primitive chat room that the school’s lead technician somehow found nigh on impossible to block (and when he did we just used another website). I regret not working harder in those classes and securing that easy A* but I’m more ashamed of our education system which deems such mediocrity in 21st century understanding as ‘excellence’.

While Michael Gove lauds the importance of Latin and Boris Johnson hails ‘the classics’ I fear this Government’s National Curriculum review, with its already announced focus on facts and figures, will push us backwards when we need a sharp kick up the bum forwards or else the next generation will be unfairly and unnecessarily handicapped against their peers in other nations. So if the Government aren’t going to do anything about it what should Labour say (and if graced with the power of Government in 2015, what should they do) about it?

Firstly we need the Government to work with hardware and software developers to create a kitemark of excellence for products. A ‘School Ready’ logo to go on laptops and software packages that denotes that is has passed a minimum quality standard for use with a full range of school work – schools can then use this framework to take full advantage of the technology which each student should have available to them. Lord Knight recognised that as more and more people access cheaper computers, and the number who don’t have home access reduces, these pupils become harder to reach. There are no easy answers to this problem but computer vouchers for the poorest parents combined with the confidence a universal quality kitemark could offer those parents when redeeming the vouchers would probably go a long way to ensuring all children have access to a computer in their home within 5 years.

Secondly we should recognise that most young people have good basic computing skills by the age of 11 and those who don’t really should so that they don’t fall behind. Computer literacy is as important to employers as literacy and numeracy (and will only become more so) and as a result should be added to the core measures on which primary schools are judged when sending pupils off to secondary school. All those skills that I was ‘taught’ in Key Stage 3 (years 7 to 9) and at Key Stage 4 (GCSE level) should be taught in Key Stages 1 and 2. I know the Labour government improved ICT in primary schools with pupils even starting in the Reception year – this has to be the case and the SATs (or ideally a replacement of them – though that’s for another blog) should reflect pupils’ abilities to use spreadsheets, make presentations and type. ICT in secondary school can then be dissolved and the timetable time that would free up could be used to introduce Basic Computing (i.e. programming, understanding the mechanics of a computer etc.) and Multimedia (shooting/editing films, graphic design) as Technology subjects for all pupils.

Finally, by ensuring higher pupil computer literacy by age 11 secondary schools (but also primary schools as part of the development of that computer literacy) can utilise pupils’ abilities in a more practical setting to enhance their learning whilst making it more enjoyable and liberating too. I remember making a 2-minute documentary for my sociology homework in Year 12; it was praised by the teacher who used it to teach our successors on the course (it may even still be in use to this day!) It was more fun than writing a short essay, required teamworking skills (as nearly all film making does), I engaged in the subject and created something that informed my peers. This kind of creative use of technology is becoming easier and easier for schools to accommodate thanks to the fact that cameras and editing software are cheaper than ever, it will be easier still if pupils are given the chance to experiment with the technology as part of the curriculum.

Lord Lucas, wonderfully off-message for a Conservative peer, denounced the idea of a set of facts to be drilled into pupils and instead said, quite rightly, that teachers should guide pupils to use the internet intelligently to research and delve deeper than the curriculum into areas that interest them. My reading ability was greatly enhanced by the fact that my mother didn’t force me to read a set list of ‘books I should read’ but instead bought me adult-age books about Doctor Who and football, this principle can be applied across subjects, helping engage pupils who would otherwise be bored by education.

If this utopia of 21st century education is to be achieved the Government must also commit to developing and funding a teacher CPD (continuing professional development) programme which would allow teachers across all subject areas who aren’t used to modern technology (particular things like video editing) to gain the basic understanding they need to ensure they can confidently embrace the use of technology as a liberating teaching tool. Equally we a greater focus on IT skills in the primary Key Stages computer literacy must be added to the qualifying exam for teachers.

With all the Government’s talk of the creative industries being the future of growth, the need for more engineers to build green infrastructure and the need to develop a British Silicon Valley you wonder if Michael Gove was copied into the policy announcements. England’s education system must focus on using technology and improving multimedia skills if it is to develop the skilled workforce to meet the full potential of the these industries and match, if not out-do, our neighbours in China, Brazil, Japan etc.

Let's not forget Clegg's betrayal

On the day that the London School of Economics warns that the Government has pushed tuition fees past the acceptable threshold for many prospective students and will likely see university applications drop by around 7% from 2013 onward I’m reminded of the dastardly work of Nick Clegg during the formation of the coalition government.

Clegg and his Liberal Democrat party courted the student vote intensely. Their centre-left manifesto put them in-line with many young people’s aspirations and the headline-grabbing (though always unfeasible) promise to scrap tuition fees was a cherry on the top, designed with the express intent of woo-ing young people, many of whom were voting for the first time, to vote for him and his party.

I watched as Clegg visited my university town of Newport where I was passionately campaigning for the fine socially liberally-minded Labour MP Paul Flynn. I remember seeing university friends of mine rushing down to see this politician who promised to be different from the old two parties who had dominated UK politics since the 1930s. So many students fell for his charms and fell for his promises.

Yet Clegg, with all the power of kingmaker, with Cameron flailing on the ropes, desperate for power following his inability to secure a majority against a deeply unpopular Prime Minister didn’t deem those students’ votes worth fighting for once they were cast, instead these votes and the opinions behind them were cast aside. The tuition fee policy was never considered as one of Clegg’s 'red lines'. Electoral reform, an important issue but one which was tellingly destroyed (most probably because of its pathetically small change from our present system) back in May’s referendum, was put as a priority ahead of the policy to which each Lib Dem MP signed a personal pledge and publicly courted student votes on the back of.

So did Clegg just brush off students’ concerns in exchange for power (and to be fair, a few Lib Dem policies being implemented)? Well not that that is particularly excusable but actually its worse. Documents unveiled by the Guardian in November last year showed that Clegg, Cable and others within the party’s senior ranks knew the pledge to abolish tuition fees was completely unfeasible 2 months prior to the General Election campaign. Clegg knew if, by some miracle he won enough seats to form a Lib Dem majority government he still wouldn’t be able to scrap tuition fees, yet he signed the pledge and took the photo opportunity with the then NUS President Wes Streeting, he toured the university towns and cities and swept up student votes on the back of deceit.

Remember this is the same Clegg who campaigned on cutting the deficit in half by 2014 (the same as the Labour plan) and then swung behind massive cuts to public spending once in Government – thus all those who voted Labour and Lib Dem on the basis of a slower and less socially painful pace of deficit reduction were also discarded in favour of the minority (37%) Conservative vote who wanted slash and burn economics to rule the roost.

By suger coating the Tories with the odd ‘nice’ policy I worry Clegg is now not building credibility for his party as he hopes (any one but the deluded Clegg can see they’ve lost any real hope of that) but instead he is continuing Cameron’s policy of detoxifying the Tory party. Clegg’s legacy could therefore be to help put a Tory majority government in power in 2015 to cut further, to privatise the schools system (something Clegg himself notes that Michael Gove wants to do and something the people of Chile have been out on the streets en masse protesting against happening in their own country) and privatising more of the NHS too.

Clegg took the hopes of a young generation, young people who wouldn’t have normally voted, excited by the prospect of genuine change and then threw it back in their faces. I thoroughly hope Clegg gets what he deserves in 2015 – to be booted out of his constituency seat by the student vote and other disgruntled former supporters, never to be seen again anywhere in politics beyond the bargain autobiographies section of the book store.

We should know who our MPs are meeting

In a bid to quell the public anger at the close links between politicians and News International David Cameron ordered all Cabinet ministers, including himself, to publish a list of all meetings with members of the media held since the General Election. Ed Miliband was quick to follow suit with his own list. The lists were not very flattering; particularly to Michael Gove, the Education Secretary who met regularly with Rupert Murdoch himself, yet this was the end of the initial storm and public interest was waning but this was a really important moment. We now will know every time a senior politician meets with the media.

Knowing this information makes politics more transparent, we can see the desperate attempts to woo powerful newspaper owners and make the connections between these meetings and subsequent policy announcements. We should be encouraged that this Government have decided to build upon and improve Freedom of Information legislation - Government is opening up like never before. This is a great thing for democracy but lists of media meetings should be only another step towards the kind of genuinely transparent government that the Wikileaks generation demands and that true democracy deserves.

Firstly such rules should be widened to cover all MPs, secondly the list of meetings should not be stopped at media barons and senior editors. Powerful interests beyond the control of the common man lobby our leading members of Government on a daily basis, often with disastrous results, most notably – the banking sector who demanded de-regulation prior to the banking collapse of ’08. MPs should have to publicly list meetings with everyone apart from members of the public – that means business owners, environmental groups, trade union leaders, farmers’ groups, parents’ groups, students’ unions all of whom will try to influence our MPs. Not all of this activity is bad of course but it should be made public so that voters can see who their MP and their government are meeting with before taking decisions that effect the lives of their constituents and the nation.

This simple step would be far more effective in cleaning up politics than the oft-called for list of lobbying firms, indeed it might even be more effective than introducing a more proportional voting system – though I’m not going to stop calling for that.

Why Cameron’s blind faith in the Big Society and markets to solve all our problems won’t solve anything, so where should Labour stand on society, markets and the state?

To put one’s faith just in the one of market (Thatcher), society or the state (Marx) will fail. Indeed even two components i.e. market and society (Cameron’s approach) is destined to fail. To succeed it must be a combination of all three of these components on which our nation must rely.

Firstly markets do have their benefits. The market will efficiently match demand with supply, provide choice, spur innovation through competition and, if competition is effective, prices will remain low and quality high. The market alone, however, has its faults. Competition creates winners and losers, profit-margins are highest when providing products for those with full pockets thus leaving poor quality or nothing at all for those without – fine when we’re talking about luxury goods (indeed a spur for those who aren’t earning enough for these luxuries to work harder) but not good when it comes to the essentials such as a healthcare or education. Libertarians would shout: “Food is essential, doesn’t the market work for food?” It’s a good point but food, on the whole, is cheaper to produce and provide than a leg operation or a year’s schooling so profit can be made even at affordable prices. Another downer for markets is that that investors demand ever higher return on their investments thus forcing down wages for their low-skilled workers, yet equally competition ensures talented workers can always take their talents elsewhere and indeed are often lured away by the offer of higher pay from a competitor desperate to use their abilities to improve their company performance. Nonetheless no Labour politician should be seeking to smash up the entire private sector in a lust for Communism, the positives of good capitalist markets, as I’ve outlined, not only out-weigh its downsides most of the time and wherever it doesn’t the state can intervene by setting minimum quality standards for products and break up monopolies or prevent them from occurring via the Competition Commission to ensure choice and low prices. Vince Cable was right when he said that capitalism, left untouched, will ‘eat itself’, in that the winner will take it all and form a monopoly, Labour must argue it is more pro-market than the Tories - by intervening to ensure more competition (to raise quality and lower prices) as Ed Miliband has begun outlining with regard to the energy market.

The state’s role can, should and indeed does go further than regulation of the market. The state should provide the safety net for individuals ensuring those who are failed by the market, or by society are given opportunity to thrive again – those not served well by markets in their pursuit of profit must not be left behind. The state must ensure that all who work a full-time week are paid enough to play a full part in society, whilst this is currently achieved through a mixture of the National Minimum Wage and tax credits as a top-up, a more effective way would be to raise the NMW to a ‘living wage’. Conversely government must support micro and small businesses to pay these wages through a tax credit – redistributing profits from the large corporations to pay for the staff at the corner shop. Essentially this would mean that part of corporation tax would be a tax on profits for the sake of ensuring competition.

The state must protect its citizens in health (NHS), crime (police), emergencies (emergency services) and terrorism/foreign attacks (Ministry of Defence). It will be a more effective state if it invests in preventative, early intervention policies – supporting new parents and educating all young people effectively to ensure they have the skills for employment or entrepreneurship and the skills for life – including an understanding of healthy living to avoid illness as far as is possible, an understanding of personal finance to avoid uncontrollable debt and an understanding of relationships and social skills that help improve mental wellbeing. These measures will help keep down crime, keep down spiralling costs of the NHS and keep down unemployment benefits and all the support that follows bankruptcy. These measures also support a more effective market – developing a skilled and talented workforce. Providing childcare to support parents to work more is obviously also a benefit to the market and as such the market should contribute to the state’s work in these areas via a percentage of corporation tax hypothecated (earmarked) for the purpose of the Sure Start, schools, colleges and universities budgets. I’ve written why I believe in hypothecated taxes previously but in short it makes people more likely to pay if they know what it’s paying for.

A state that effectively supports its businesses is a state that invests in infrastructure. Building high-speed rail and new branch lines makes labour more mobile and flexible – a positive for the market but also for the individuals providing ticket prices are subsidised for lower earners. A railcard, available to anyone earning under £25,000 (or more or less, depending on the scale of the subsidy you want - such specifics are not the issue for here and now) which cuts a percentage of season ticket costs off would help make rail a more viable option for low to middle earners and not only increase more environmentally friendly rail use but encourage more of these individuals to look further afield for employment opportunities. Should such labour mobility result from this scheme these investments would begin to redistribute income more equitably throughout all parts of the country, breaking the South East and London’s monopoly on wealth, as workers can commute to London from further afield and businesses can move to other parts of the country knowing commuters can come the other way too. Such redistribution would not be via the state and its’ cash transfers (in the form of tax credits or regional development funds) but through the market, albeit with a helping hand from the state.

Society’s role? The Big Society tries to do too much and fails, like unregulated markets or big state monopolies as opposed to ‘the good society’ which reacts to the work of the market and the state and fills the gaps. The bonds of family, friendships, neighbours can do what the state cannot afford and does so with a personal touch the state could never match. These gaps are where the market finds no profit. Here the Third Sector (charities, religious groups and social enterprises) can provide personalised, top-up support that builds on the safety net of the state and allows individuals to take advantage of, not fall victim to, the market. The state must also continue to support society – through Gift Aid and other tax breaks for charities, through support for funeral costs and through well-funded carer’s allowances to support those who look after elderly relatives and the disabled. The state should also work with charities and non-profit companies to provide services utilising the personalised touches and niche expertise they can provide. There is no doubt much more the state can do to support society and in this sense David Cameron should be commended for his focus on the Big Society, but society should not be lent on so the state can withdraw – the good society stands on the shoulders of a strong and supportive state, finds those who need extra help or are slipping through the net and delivers unto them the care and support they need.

There is a fourth component, and its one I have written about a lot recently – the individual and their personal responsibility. Many argue that an active state is anathema to personal responsibility, sapping the need to work hard by plying the idle and feckless with benefits. Whilst it’s true that some literally live off state handouts the situation is far more complex - low wages are no incentive to work especially if the idea of one’s personal responsibility to work hard and contribute hasn’t been passed on by hard-working parents. The benefit system certainly needs simplification and credit (no pun intended) where its due, the Government’s new Universal Credit goes some way in sorting out the perverse incentives that lead to people not working or not working as many hours as they could because their benefit entitlement trumps their wages, yet a living wage would still be more effective, though again, credit where its due, as will the Government’s moves to raise the income tax threshold to £10,000.

If it wants the state to become an enabling state, that supports personal responsibility whilst still providing a safety net; Labour must move away from policies of cash handouts to more substantial (and perhaps in the long-run more affordable) guarantees. Housing benefit was invented with good intentions, to help people who couldn’t afford rent – a liberal alternative to mass social housing yet its costs have soared since its introduction exploited not by dodgy miscreants at the murky bottom of our society (as the Daily Mail would have you believe) but by the market and its profit-hungry landlords. Whilst the Tories will now cap housing benefit in the belief that landlords will lower their rents accordingly, this will not happen because of the chronic housing shortage in the UK, just as with tuition fees, where there is demand the supplier will still charge the most they can get. The guarantee of a basic, state-built home should be restored (in other words mass social housing – though not necessarily all in one place like the estates of old). This brings a stable base for all from which personal responsibility can be built, with tenants paying for their rent to the Council or housing association on a monthly basis and those who can’t (for example the unemployed) protected by temporary reductions in rent (provided they look for work) and for those who are working but don’t pay up? A fine and future rents removed directly from their monthly or weekly income through PAYE, like a student loan. The state’s role should only be at the bottom of the housing ladder, again as a safety net; as people earn more and go over the local household earnings average they should be given the option of buying their home (without the need to build up a hefty deposit) or moving elsewhere (either way, into the private property market) – with any revenue from the sale of the social house ring-fenced for the building of replacement social housing stock. This a far more supportive and humane response than the Tories’ plan to time limit social house leases.

A stronger nation will emerge when the individual, the market, society and the state work in tandem, complimenting one another and avoiding the damage that an excess reliance on just one or two components brings. Labour must defend the role of a strong, active state but it must also realise it may need to utilise that state very differently to support both individuals and the market to thrive. Just because the state isn’t operating as efficiently as it could doesn’t necessarily mean it should withdraw from that particular area, it just means it needs to act differently. Labour must also remain cautious of the limitations of the state to avoid the failures of the past – respecting the qualities that society, the state or individuals themselves can bring to life and the nation.

The hole at the heart of high society that's breaking Britain

In quick succession the mighty powers that rule our nation have been routinely exposed as liars, cheats and thieves.

In 2008 it was the bankers and the crash of the global financial system swiftly followed by the continued paying out of multi-million pound bonuses. In 2009 it was the politicians and their dodgy expenses claims and in 2010 it was Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats betraying a whole generation of first-time voters by ditching their tuition fee plan in exchange for the trappings of power. Now in 2011 it is the tabloid media, hacking away at the very concept of human decency. We’ve never liked bankers, politicians or journalists but these three groups, who hold all the cards of power in this nation, have been exposed as being completely and utterly detached from the rest of us the (more than) 99% of the population whose lives are at the mercy of their actions.

What the News of the World (and it seems other papers) has done in chasing a good, juicy story is despicable. Yet whilst this particular behaviour – deleting messages on the phone of a murdered teenager to make space for more frantic messages, thus giving the hope to her family that she may still be alive – is painfully disturbing to all of us, the morals of the tabloid press were hardly saintly and untainted before this. The pages of the Daily Express, The Sun and the Daily Mail have long been filled with hypocritical ranting about ‘moral outrages’. In the case of the latter they bemoan sexualisation of children, called for ‘lads magazines’ to be banished to the top shelves whilst putting topless girls on page 3 of their own publication, easily picked up at the front of the supermarket or left to be read by anyone who picks up a copy left on the train. All of these tabloids attack the modelling industry for encouraging teenage girls to aspire to ‘size zero’ figures only to highlight celebrities like Katy Perry or Britney Spears ‘piling on the pounds’ in photographs taken by pararazzi whilst they just enjoy what is supposed to be a private holiday. The Victim’s Commissioner has taken the tabloids to task for their hounding of Chris Jeffries, the innocent landlord of the late Joanna Yeates. They say it’s about trying to find justice for the murdered girl, in truth it was about inverting the concept of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ all in the ruthless pursuit of selling more newspapers.

The newspaper industry has ignored the morals and ethics of a good society, stirring up divisions (immigration, benefit cheats) simply to increase sales. Worse still they go beyond the point of improving sales to take on a political role, trying to cajole readers into voting for particular parties, often the ones who will protect their livelihoods best.  Think of how they ditched Labour as it began to raise the top-rate of tax, they had been down with Blair because, as we know, New Labour was ‘intensely relaxed about the super-rich’. From the journalists earning great above-national-average incomes up to the media owners who pick up mega-bucks annually these people are completely disconnected from the 95% of the population (and their readership) who earn less than £65,000-a-year. This is best displayed in the right-wing tabloids constant demand for George Osborne to scrap the 50p tax rate whilst a great many of their readers probably think the idea of those earning more than £150,000 a year paying 50% tax on the income they earn over that amount is a pretty fair idea (indeed polls back this as being Brown’s most popular decision as Prime Minister).

This disconnect is the wider point that underlies all of this self-centered, short-termist and uncaring activity, from bankers to politicians, tabloid journalism and beyond to footballers, pop stars and FTSE 100 Chief Executives. The income and wealth gap between the rich and the rest in the UK is at the highest level since the Victorian times and this gap breeds the kind of heartlessness that allowed bankers to trade electronic money with no care for the risk, politicians to claim for duck houses and profit from the sale of houses bought with taxpayers money and now newspaper editors to authorise the phone-hacking of dead children and the families of those who died as a result of war and terrorist attacks. This heartless high society, acting without care for the greater good, spun particularly out of control these last few years as it is now apparent that they have become such a tight-knit, interconnected group. The media moguls too close to the politicians and influencing policy, the politicians too close to the bankers, all to happy to trade laissez-faire regulation for the banks so long as they could proclaim ‘growth’ and spend the tax revenues on education and health. In the latter case at least Gordon Brown was motivated by a genuine want to improve the livelihood of the population, but the sad truth is that he was far too close to the bankers, fell for their charms, gave them whatever they wanted because they were driving his boom that in 2008 went catastrophically bust.

Why does this wealth gap cause heartlessness? Because it creates genuine gaps between the population, leading to disconnect. It goes wider than the dirty triangle of senior politicians, top bankers and media moguls. Adele, the pop star, might have a beautiful voice but her outspoken attack along the lines of ‘why should I have to give away half of my millions in tax’ was crass. While millions of people who are struggling to pay for food, energy, transport and their own tax bills scrape together money to buy tickets to her gigs she says is angry that for every £2m she collects this year £1m goes to subsiding public transport that SHE doesn’t use. How self-centered. She doesn’t use public transport so why should she pay tax to pay for it? I wonder how many use public transport to get to her gigs? Yet more importantly she ignores how her money will go beyond transport to pay for teachers, for policeman, nurses and doctors, child tax credits and aid for starving populations in Africa. Footballers are worse, threatening to leave because they are getting ONLY £100,000-a-week instead of £150,000 a week. £100,000-a-week! That is nearly four times the national average annual pre-tax income…every week, heaven forbid they don’t get another two times the national average income on top. It’s an everyman for himself attitude. Disconnected from a concept of social solidarity? Yes, but disconnected from the fundamental values that should bind our society together? Just ask John Terry, who upon parking his car in a disabled bay is reported to have said: ‘I can afford the fine’.

This disconnect rips apart our society. Cameron and his friends at the right-wing tabloids told us we were living in ‘Broken Britain’, talking about sink estates, welfare dependency and crime, now he tells us there’s no money left to fix it so we need to do it ourselves. How dare David Cameron talk of the Big Society, about strengthening communities? The strengthening we need is together as a nation, 99% of whom earn less than £150,000 a year against the unfairness of those earning £7m a year for singing, for playing football, for banking, for running a company. I’m not talking about Communism, or implementing a Socialist Workers’ Party manifesto but I am talking about responsibility and morals. I’m talking about the world of difference between reasonably earning £2m for being the very top of your game and being paid £7m or £8m as is the case now, and thinking about where that £5m difference could go (i.e. higher wages for the rest of the company’s employees).

I’ve long called for a higher National Minimum Wage and defended the 50p tax rate, I often propose ideas or solutions, policies I wish could be implemented to make a better, fairer UK, Europe or wider world but I have no comprehensive answer or quick-fix to solve the moral corrosion and rotted core of the top of our society. We are indeed living in ‘Broken Britain’ but it is the lack of responsibility, loss of morals and no sense of fair play at the top that is the cause as much, if not much more so, than scroungers and layabouts at the bottom.

In America, a society even more unequal than our own, morals have become perverted by another powerful pillar of society, one that has far less power in this country. The religious right, as evidenced by those who speak on the God channel, have adopted neo-liberal economics in the name of responsibility. The concept of the welfare state is, in-line with the thinking of the right-wing tabloids here, a recipe for dependency and nothing more. They have forgotten the very core of the Bible - where is their critique of greed? When Jesus threw the ‘money-changers’ out of the temple, I don’t think he meant he’d be absolutely fine if these ‘thieves’ carried on trading as they were as long as it was outside of God’s house and I certainly don’t think he would have believed such activity was the only reasonable route to prosperity for all mankind after all, he fed the 5,000, not fed himself 5,000 fish. At least here we have the Archbishop of Canterbury who understands this.

We need to crush this extreme greed at the top because it sets a horrendous example to the rest of us. Too many young people aspire to be ‘rich and famous’, often for no discernable talent. Too many dodge tax or steal wherever they can. Too many people harbour self-centred attitudes, focused on ‘what do I get?’, all too happy to spout their rights but take leave of their responsibilities. Yes, certainly this last point, has long been the concern of the right, but the solution of bringing together the community is flawed if it is based solely on the super-local as the Big Society suggests. We are a nation, in fact geographically not a very big one, it is time we behaved like one. Its no good bringing together the council estate or bringing together suburbia or the village in splendid isolation whilst a select few hide behind their gated communities shut off from those whose hard-work helps them accumulate their vast wealth. To correct our broken society we need to all come together and unite around that very basic idea that ultimately we are all humans and we are the same, we must share this country a little more fairly and if we can work out how to do so everyone will be happier not just that top 1%.