The Budget Blame Game

Writing on his blog, Tory MP Douglas Carswell has claimed that unpopular measures in the Budget resulted from civil servants rather than Ministers taking decisions on issues like the so-called Pasty Tax on hot takeaway food and tax changes for pensioners. It’s a view that has been widely reported – Carswell appears to be arguing that Ministers need to get a grip on the Budget to make bold proposals.

It seems to me, as a former Civil Servant actively involved in a number of Budgets before my retirement last year, that this is likely to be excuse-mongering of a strange and low kind. If it’s true, though, the implications are pretty significant.

Yes, it’s undoubtedly true that officials – both in the Treasury and in other Departments – have measures that they have long advocated, usually for  good reasons (I can certainly see how the VAT purists in the Treasury might have been gravely offended by the messy situation on tax on takeaway food, a mess that itself looks like the outcome of a political compromise).  It is routine for Departmental Ministers to write to Treasury Ministers with their list of budget proposals – a process that itself sits at the peak of routine discussions between Departmental and Treasury officials.  Many of these are rejected, for a variety of reasons.  Space in the Finance Bill is always limited – there are always measures, often quite technical and uncontroversial, which Ministers and officials regard as desirable but are ruled out of the Bill on the grounds of space.  Measures were constantly reviewed and may be changed or dropped at any stage in the process.  Ministers frequently asked for work, often at very short notice, to evaluate different options.  Draft clauses – and notes on clauses – for the Finance Bill were drafted and scrutinised. The Budget and Finance Bill was always intense and exhausting – and my involvement was not normally with headline proposals.

But the point about the Budget process is that, certainly in my experience, it has always been intensely political.  Ministers and Special Advisers have always taken the lead on shaping the Budget, with officials often exploring combinations and ranges of options up until the weekend before the Budget announcement.  The idea that Civil Servants’ pet schemes could slip through without Ministers noticing is – or was – absolutely inconceivable.

Unless, of course, things have changed and the process in which I participated under Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling has been largely dismantled – and for such a thing to have happened would have been as a result of Ministerial rather than official action. The Budget and Finance Bill culture is too deeply ingrained in Whitehall for there to be any other explanation.  Essentially, for Carswell’s explanation to be accurate, it would mean that Coalition Ministers had taken their collective eyes off the ball and to have withdrawn from active participation in the process in a way that is, frankly, inconceivable.

So what is the substance of Carswell’s claim? The implication appears to be that, if this is more than excuse-mongering, Coalition Ministers have lost their grip on the Budget process to an astonishing extent.  I have no inside knowledge of what this year’s Budget round was like, but the idea that high-profile tax changes could be made without serious Ministerial scrutiny suggests that Ministers have abandoned even the most basic disciplines of Government.

Although excuse-mongering still looks like the most plausible reason for Carswell’s comments, the alternative – that Treasury Ministers have lost their grip and are badly out of their depth – seems all too plausible.  Not just on the basis of almost every interview that Danny Alexander gives, but because repeatedly this Government, having sacked enormous numbers of experienced civil servants, has shown time and again that it just cannot do the basics of government.  I’ve posted examples before – for example here and here – and remain convinced that this is a Government that is more interested in ideology and politics than governing, a government that values ideological narrative above empirical reality and is simply not interested in the serious business of evidence-based policy-making.

If Carswell’s comments are a piece of political excuse-mongering, it’s a piece of low politics that probably doesn’t matter very much.  Kicking decent public officials who can’t answer back is cheap and cowardly, but that’s Tories and Liberal Democrats for you.  If it’s actually an honest view of what went on in Whitehall before the Budget, it’s an astonishing insight into the sheer incompetence of Osborne and his Ministers.

Seven months of Hell

Following today’s disruption of the Oxford v Cambridge boat race by one Trenton Oldfield swimming in the Thames, the President of the Oxford University Boat Club tweeted angrily:

Finally to Trenton Oldfield: my team went through seven months of hell, this was the culmination of our careers and you took it from us.

Hell? What right have you got to talk about Hell?  After all, you chose this path.  And your careers are far from over – your more lucrative, privileged course through life has barely begun.  Within twenty minutes’ cycle ride of your University, you will find single mothers who have had a fifth of their income removed by this coalition; disabled people who have undergone the humiliation of inquisition by ATOS just to keep their benefits; young people forced to do unpaid labour in supermarkets, eliminating their dignity and taking jobs from their peers. Young people dependent on EMA to stay in education, who have lost that and their prospect of employment too.  And in the suburbs of Oxford you will find quietly desperate people, often elderly who saved for a decent sufficiency in their old age, only to have it removed by the gambling habits of your erstwhile peers, now drawing their bonuses in the city. And even in quiet corners of your own university you will find desperate people, self-medicating against depression and breakdown.

You are part of the elite of one of the most privileged university communities on the planet.  A university that, should you choose to do so, will allow you to move smoothly into privileged, well-paid employment without the need to contemplate the hell of the world that is the reality for those around you who do not enjoy your privilege.  People who may be every bit as clever or skilled as you are but perhaps have not had your advantages. But of course, in your youthful arrogance, they are invisible to you.  And your path to further privilege, let’s face it, will not exactly be obstructed by your participation in that totemic establishment event, the Boat Race.

I hold no brief for Trenton Oldfield or his beliefs.  But before you talk about hell, learn to look around you.  Your hell, such as it was, was a hell of choice directed towards a defined end.  The hells in which your invisible peers live are no such thing.

And, perhaps, one day, you will realise that there are bigger, better, more important things than two boatfuls of students racing on a river. Welcome to adulthood.

Local rag in freedom of speech fury

A small storm is brewing in the media world in Brighton, with a claim that the monopoly local paper, the Argus, has threatened the Brighton Green party with “consequences” after a Green Party member set up a Twitter account and website criticising and ridiculing its standards of journalism.

The full story can be found here.  As this piece shows, the final straw was the Argus splashing a story about a prominent Green activist and Councillor, Ben Duncan, tweeting, at the height of the post-Budget furore,  that he did not “give a fuck” about pasties.  Like so many people, he recognised that this was a non-story – the real effects of a deeply regressive budget being hidden behind a pseudo-debate about hot pies.

The issue is not just the Argus’ obvious political bias – frequently its content appears to consist of little more than topped-and-tailed Tory press releases, and at times it’s not possible to get a cigarette paper between the Argus’ view of the world and the easy populism that it local Tory MPs’ stock in trade.  For example, on the difficult and emotive issue of local travellers’ sites, the Argus appears happy to follow the local Tories’ inflammatory line, without reflecting the serious attempts being made by the Council and other agencies to produce a long-term solution; it reports a call by Tory Councillor Dawn Barnett for local people to stop paying their Council Tax - and hence to break the law – without a word of consideration of the  implications.

A wider issue is the quality of the Argus’ journalism.  It’s undeniable that local papers are under the cosh financially – it’s so much cheaper to do churnalism, happily recycling the material produced by others.  The work of the police, ambulance and fire service press offices is of course particularly useful in this respect.  Accuracy and detail are not things that one readily associates with the material that Argus journalists write – I remember one story (and I wish I could reference it) which described a large fire in a Sussex town, causing all sorts of chaos, which failed to name the town concerned.  Elsewhere detail is often vague.  Brighton is one of the most laid-back cities in Britain – but even minor events habitually lead to “fury” and “chaos”.  A toxic combination of cost-cutting and political bias appears to have led to the abandonment of the most basic journalistic disciplines.

And, faced with criticism, the Argus is not slow to resort to threats and bluster.  Not long ago, it threatened legal action after a Council officer described it as “the local rag” – which I would have thought was at the mild end of the range of appropriate epithets.  I once had a run in with the Argus in which I sent them an email criticising their failure to report a community arts event in which primary schools from across the County had participated, and received no fewer than three angry emails back.  Moreover, the Argus is no stranger to the attentions of the PCC.

So it’s not surprising that the Argus should react in the way it has to @EveningAnus.  It’s often regarded as a third-rate product, hypersensitive to any form of criticism (and deeply secretive, it appears, about what are rumoured to be sliding circulation figures).  But, if the report is accurate, threatening the collective punishment of a political party over the actions of one of its members is something of a new low.  It is fascinating that commercial media seem so quick to resort to threats and moral blackmail in the face of an individual exercising his freedom of expression – the moral hypocrisy being exposed day after day at the Levenson inquiry seems to extend even into the stagnant backwaters of local churnalism.

But there’s a wider issue here – what is the point of local papers in a digital age?  If I want to find out about, say, crime in Sussex, I just need to go to the Sussex Police website, or follow the informative and useful Sussex Police Twitter feed.  Local papers do not report any more, it seems – reportage involves money, effort and journalistic craft, none of which appear to be things that the local media as a whole are willing to provide – they simply collate.  Churnalism rules – so why not go back to the original sources.  Local news is often accessible more easily through local blogging and Twitter, and without being filtered through the political bias of the local paper’s owners or editor.

Meanwhile, the apparent inability of the Argus to take a bit of criticism without resorting to bluster and apparent threat speaks volumes about its values.  I’d have thought a confident, successful local paper would have reacted very differently.