Author: croydonconstitutionalists

About 10 years ago on holiday in New York I saw a bus advert which claimed hundreds of thousands of people were homeless in New York.  “I vote made up”, I remarked to the person I was travelling with.  They weren’t convinced and said that the people behind the advert can’t have just made the number.  I did some basic maths and believed that the number they had advertised meant every street would have about 50 homeless people on it.  Since we hadn’t yet seen anyone homeless and had been in New York a few days it seemed unlikely the number could be real.  They still weren’t convinced.  When we got back to the hotel I looks up the advert details, which sadly I can’t now find, but I remember the word homeless included people in homes.  Homeless for this advert (although not mentioned on the advert), included people in temporary accommodation, people with housing insecurity (whatever that means), and it even included some people in a home just waiting for a new one!

Looking for the advert mentioned above I discovered an article in the Huffington Post which started in New York “Roughly 1 in 10 children attending the city’s public schools are homeless”.  This came out at a staggering 114,659 children.  The same internet search showed a more widely accepted figure of 60,000 homeless in New York as a whole.  Somehow almost twice this number were homeless in public schools alone, clearly someone needed to go back to the classroom.  The article gets around this little discrepancy by including the temporarily housed.  This new category included people in domestic abuse shelters, hotels, and homes of other family members.  Whilst these arrangements may be far from idea they are not homeless.  Fixing the problem of homelessness probably starts by not making up the numbers.

Poverty or just poor statistics?

The former Croydon Advertiser posted a headline of “The 1,000 Croydon babies who will be born into poverty, abuse and neglect in 2019”.  Now Croydon has its problems.  It also has problem areas.  I’ve run for office in some of them and I know them well.  Yet the idea that nearly a fifth of the borough’s children lived in actual poverty simply doesn’t stack up.

The article refers to The Director of Public Health Annual Report for Croydon.  The 54 page report mentions ‘poverty’ 16 times, yet extraordinarily doesn’t bother to define it.  A dictionary definition of poverty is “the state of being extremely poor”.  That we have over 1000 children in families who are extremely poor would be an outrage, if it was believable.  To be extremely poor, you presumably don’t have a home, but these children and their families aren’t homeless.  Indeed assuming Croydon falls in line with national averages there are a number of ways these families which represent aren’t extremely poor:

• 98% of families own washing machines something my family didn’t have for much of my childhood.
• 93% 15 year olds own a smart phone, is that extremely poor?
• 86% of homes have central heating, again something not common as recently as the 1980s.

How can they be extremely poor and have more facilities than their parents, and many more than the middle class in their grandparents generation?

Of course despite not defining it, I suspect the report refers to relative poverty.  Relative poverty tends to refer to someone on less than 60% of median income.  They are considered in poverty because they cannot access activities and opportunities that average earners can.  In Britain the 5^th richest nation on earth, where GDP per capita is about 20^th or almost 200 nations, relative poverty is not poverty in any meaningful sense and average opportunities give a lifestyle far above average in any meaningful sense.

The report for the local council goes onto give examples like “more than a 1,000 babies born each year may be touched by the effects of poverty in their early years” without defining what this means.  It states “there were 864 Croydon children or expected children living in temporary accommodation”, again this probably not good, but it’s also not defined, temporary could mean almost anything.

The report also gives some rather meaningless statements like “adverse childhood experience can be anything from growing up in a crowded house to experiencing a trauma”.  Suddenly poverty gets linked to anything from having a few siblings to a trauma like having close relative pass away.  Neither of which are anything to do with poverty, or things we can fix.  The statics and numbers are meaningless, bringing up children in poor circumstances is a problem.  This report is in one London borough, but its essence is repeated time and time again.  Help should be targeted at those most in need, but can this be done, if problems are exaggerated to the point of meaningless?

“‘food insecurity’ is a meaningless phase use to describe anything and everything they want, except an actual lack of food”

The run up to Easter has seen the Extinction Rebellion block large parts of central London.  Their website has a section called ‘the truth’ https://rebellion.earth/the-truth/the-emergency/.  The ‘truth’ goes on to say “Globally, the past four years have been the hottest on record, and the 20 warmest have occurred in the past 22 years”.  Since the Little Ice Age temperatures have been rising but we also know that Britain was warmer in Viking and Roman times than it is today.

The ‘truth’ also goes onto to tell us that “People across 51 countries and territories facing crisis levels of acute food insecurity or worse, requiring immediate emergency action”.  Unicef however show malnutrition rates are thankfully collapsing – https://data.unicef.org/topic/nutrition/malnutrition/.  It becomes clear that ‘food insecurity’ is a meaningless phase use to describe anything and everything they want, except an actual lack of food.

Back to Brexit

No lesser place than the London School of Economics a university not unaccustomed to a left wing bias published that “The impact of the Brexit vote on the economy is now clear”.  What they decided was clear, was that “productivity and real wages, the UK is now in a much lower position” and as they explained “the UK’s GDP growth has slowed down”.  The Independent Newspaper also confidently told us that “Brexit has cost you £1,500 so far”. 

This however is against a backdrop of continued strong economic figures with higher wages, record inward investment, lower unemployment and higher GDP than the Eurozone.  How can these two sets of data coexist?  Once again the ‘left wing’ statistic don’t require the economy to have gone backwards, or performed worse than comparable economies.  It simply requires the economy to have not performed as well as the numbers these left leaning ‘experts; had decided on.

“Lies, damned lies, and statistics” today have an overwhelming source, from people whose politics, are to tax you more, control you more, give away our national sovereignty, and with it your democratic rights.  Whilst they also want to make sure you are scared of an impending environmentally and economic doom.  This group I have called the ‘left’, maybe the paternalist or globalists, is a term you prefer.  Whatever you call them, once they start quoting numbers, you can be damned sure truth has just walked out the room.

Michael Swadling Croydon Constitutionalists https://twitter.com/MikeSwadling

At a recent political debate I attended, someone who had campaigned in the Newport West by –election stated that Labour had won the election due to people being fed up with austerity.  At first this sounded wrong.  What austerity?  Despite the media and politicians saying otherwise we have been deficit spending since the start of the century, it’s hard to see how people can be fed up with something that hasn’t happened.

On reflection I realised of course he was right, or in a way both right and wrong.  He had been in Newport, spoke with the locals, and of course despite their Brexit, and leadership troubles Labour had indeed won.  We still hadn’t had any austerity, but people believed and felt we had.  Labour and an increasingly socialist Conservative Party had captured the language to lead people to believe government was cutting back spending.  The feelings were real, the economic blight was real enough, but the cause was misplaced.

A few weeks earlier on his LBC show Iain Dale had made me realise a problem we classical liberals face.  He had said that a problem Labour faced was they were not making the positive case, rather always a negative one.  I believe that is also a problem for the right.  The misdiagnosis of austerity, linked with the lack of a positive case for freedom being put.  The people of Newport West were suffering, they were suffering from not having a decent pay rise in a dozen years.  They were suffering from a lack of new enterprises to replace the heavy industry they had lost.  They were suffering from increasingly unaffordable housing now on average £187k compared to an average salary of £22k.  They were also suffering from public services under increased strain, due to poor planning, bad spending decisions, and trying to be all things to all people.

The problems the people of Newport faced were not due to lack of government but due to too much of it.  If a positive case could be made for how less government would improve their lives, what might it be?

Simply saying we have austerity, makes people think of terrific strain on our public services.  There have been cutbacks, but many areas like schools and hospitals have continued to receive increased funds.  Indeed the NHS is on course to receive even more than the extra £350 million a week made famous from the Vote Leave campaign.  As a school governor I see in the last couple of years as public sector pay has increased, schools struggled, until funding caught up.  In the years since the recession, spending and standards have continued to increase.  School still have had money, they especially have had cash to target at their most disadvantaged pupils.

A positive case for some actual austerity

A positive case can be made for some actual austerity.  Continued government borrowing sucks money out of the productive economy.  People and organisations with money, will simply lend it to government rather than an investment to start a small business.  A positive case might be that cutting back on government bright ideas for change, would allow front line staff to get on with their jobs.  These cost reductions in consultants and ‘change agents’ will in turn reduce the borrowing requirement and lead to more investment being available to the private sector.  Anything government does is forced on the payee and often the user of the service, anything the private sector does is your choice to pay for and use, or not.

“not issuing work permits to anyone who wants one, would see a constrained labour force”

Government enthusiasm for immigration, has seen a major increase in the working population.  As the number of jobs have grown wages haven’t increased.  In fact as concerns over Brexit have reduced immigration levels, wages have started to rise.  Real pay rises come from increased productivity.  A positive case for government doing nothing.  Government just by simply not issuing work permits to anyone who wants one, would see a constrained labour force.  Pay rates would increase, labour costs would rise, so firms will invest in productivity, skill and automation, rather than importing more cheap staff.  Go to North America and serving staff in bars and restaurants are skilled and decently paid.  That is because the owners can’t fill the roles with cheap imported staff.  That is an economy we used to have here and could have once again.

Regulations discourage business growth

Many of the new skilled jobs will be created by new business opening new markets, and creating new ways of working.  Why when the industrial heartland of Britain collapsed did many new companies not start up to employ the skilled workers now available?  Government just makes it too damn hard.  Regulations on everything from the colour of chopping boards to the power of vacuum cleaners stifle innovation.  Regulations like the requirement to publish the gender pay gap when a company has more than 250 employees discourage business growth.  Let’s follow the example of countries like New Zealand, which has been judged 1^st in the rankings to do business, due to its ‘regulatory architecture, procedural ease, and absence of bureaucratic red tape’.  Alongside Singapore (ranked 2) and Denmark (3) these are hardly countries in a race to the bottom on safety and standards.  New enterprises lead to new opportunities, competition for the skills of people and the chance for people to choose new careers.

“build enough homes for everyone, not just the selective groups, government deem worthy”

Housing regulations in the country have led to a perfect storm of high prices, too few properties, and an increase in expensive dormitory flats with ghost towns around them.  Where are the homes for new families?  Where are the new communities?  A massive deregulation of the housing market is needed.  Let people build reasonably sized properties on land they own.  Make them contain the services like car parking the homes need and contribute for general public servers.  In exchange remove the burden of so called ‘affordable homes’ that has led to poor doors being installed in so many new developments.  Housing will become affordable when we can respond to population changes, and free the market to build enough homes for everyone, not just the selective groups that the government deem worthy of so called ‘affordable’ properties.

“We are spending money on things people don’t want and not on what they do want”

Public services matter to people.  We have rising crime, fewer police and an overseas aid budget greater than our police budget.  The National Education Union says that the Government has cut £2.8bn from England’s schools.  Whilst I might question the validity of these so called ‘cuts’. Almost 3 years after voting to leave the EU we are still contributing £9 billion a year net. We could simply reclaim and reassign.  The Government says HS2 will cost £55.7 billion to build, whilst only £25.5 billion is being spent on all major road over 5 years.  We are spending money on things people don’t want and not on what they do want.  A clear positive case could be made to stop spending on things we don’t want, return half the money to the taxpayer, and spend half on projects popular with the people.  Government can’t be all things to all people home and abroad, it should simply do less and do it better.

Those of us who are classical liberals, libertarians, free marketers, or whatever name you choose, need to put a case to voters who are to the economical left of us, that less government will improve their lives.  Less government spending will free up money for investment, less regulation will mean more affordable housing, more job opportunities, more career choices and together with controlled immigration, higher wages.  Finally, the public services people care about will be freed from constant interference, receive increased funding, all whilst more money is put back into wage earners pockets.

Michael Swadling Croydon Constitutionalists https://twitter.com/MikeSwadling