I watched this horror film yesterday. It was a decent grisly semi-zombie film about a deadly virus. I found it gripping and better than many such films, in that the flaws weren't obvious. But still, if I were in that situation... I know script-writers are writing about other people, but it'd be nice to have a character like me once in a while.
SPOILER ALERT!
First up, there's some scene-setting. The 'hot' schoolteacher has his hamster cage and can't fit it into an overhead rack. I've not seen anyone ever offer to help someone else with baggage, not even when it's a hot woman, and nor have I seen a hostess who didn't know where the space was and needed a big guy to come and point it out.
But that's such an awkward situation, with some bustle, that I'd be watching. The man was causing trouble, and I'd have been watching, especially if I'd been allocated a seat near the back, as I always am because I'm too cheap to pay to sit near the front, although I prefer it.
I may not see as well as I used to, but I'd have noticed the man get bitten. I'd have been upset at all the animals on board, cat and hamster cage.
I'd have been too polite and awkward to do anything about the man as he became more ill, and if I'd been at the back, maybe he'd have attacked me rather than running down the aisle when he finally caved in.
I'm a strong man, so I might have survived with some pus on my face once everyone leapt to help. If he'd run down the aisle, I'd have gone to help, but only once he'd attacked someone for sure.
At that point it'd be nice to say I'd be so scared I'd just hide in the loo for the whole flight, but I'm not one for drastic action. I'd be worried and already thinking about the bite, but that's not realistic. A nervous breakdown is more likely, so I'd not do something obvious, except clean myself up very thoroughly if necessary.
The bodily fluids would worry me, and the smell would be bad, so I'd probably take the opportunity to breathe through a cloth if I could. As all the passengers had jumped up to help, I might grab the man's seat belt. With his hands secured, fastening the belt would add an extra restraint that I'd value. It's strange that they didn't try to seat him sooner. Having seen that he tried to bite the person he attacked, I'd not want to get too close.
At this point the pilots were being told to land and the authorities guessed that the disease was on board, because that's how they knew to send homeland security. Since the authorities had already investigated the laboratory, and had evidence of the trials, they knew enough to know that the pilots were in no danger with the door sealed. They'd therefore tell the pilots more information and to keep the door shut. The pilots would therefore be safe. They'd not land and then taxi up to a deserted terminal, but wait for the hazard team to get to the plane.
With the infected man secure and the authorities likely to be on their way, the teacher might get worried, but without his rats or a gun, which are all still in the hold, he's just a man. The best he can do is try to get bitten himself to ensure the disease spreads, but with the authorities outside that'd just be suicide, and a whole new story. I'd certainly be watching him after the bite, because getting himself bitten would be very suspicious indeed.
But let's assume we've got off the plane with the big guy bundled in the loo by the pilots and we find the exit locked. At this point I'd be very sure that the authorities know we've got a bad disease and I'd therefore give greater weight to the hamsters' bite. I'd voice my concerns and if the little boy heard he'd share that they were rats, and that would be that. We'd corner the zealot and turn him over to the authorities. I'd also try to wedge the door shut behind us if at all possible. If the pilots can't keep the man in, they're done for anyway.
I would pick up a crowbar or something as a priority, no matter what the other passengers thought. It seems unlikely that the authorities would turn the power off as long as they knew that they could trap us, but at this point I would, despite being law-abiding, be tempted to smash a window and jump out (being careful not to cut myself). I dislike cats, and as the rats were vectors, I'd be even further away from it. If I did smash a window, I'd probably get caught by someone out on the runway, restrained and isolated and eventually survive.
But let's say I came downstairs with everyone else and we found that all the doors were sealed and the man told us about the terrorist lockdown protocol. At this point I would veto any return to the plane's hold. The authorities would be listening to the radio and would most likely have told us more, rather than the silent, forbidding presence they were in the film, but they'd be a more likely source of help than braving big man in the loo and the rats that I already pretty much know are infected. If I'd overheard the man's conversation with the air hostess about changing the world, I'd suspect him for sure. I've never seen anyone seduce air hostesses before, despite the reputation; they're usually very prim and proper. I'd assume some attempt to get in with the staff.
But if everyone went back anyway, I'd assume them all to be lost. At this point I'd catch the terminal man and ask for a padlock and lock myself in a cage with a crowbar. The place would need to be well-sealed enough to keep the cat out. I might even let some others join me, but I'd keep them quiet. We can't be hunted by humans if they don't know we're there. We would wait for the authorities to find us.
But if there's no cage and the cat has bitten someone and escaped, I'd be advocating for that person to be restrained, using clothing if necessary. Not mine, as I need that to help protect from bites. After all this, the authorities would probably be arriving, but if I get cornered with a crowbar I'm not sure a sequence of mindless zombies would present much challenge. I hit hard.
How can we make it a scary film, rather than a quick story of a threat well-dealt with? Well, that cat is important. Let's say the rats stay in the cabin and the man lets them out when big guy is restrained. That could easily turn a sensible man like me into the raving zombie that's going to bite everyone else; I'd not let him get close with the cage, but a rat could scrabble around and bite my ankle or leap over a chair.
If the rats get out they lend a bit of chance to proceedings, as they're small enough to go anywhere. They'd easily get out onto the runway and spread the infection widely. In fact, I'm surprised they didn't in the film once they were released.
Once the rats were deliberately released, though, I'd definitely bolt for the loo with my bag and any water I could bring, and hide there for days, or until I was napalmed to death.
I have little sympathy with the characters; they did too much wrong. It spoils the film a bit.
Monday, 31 August 2015
Conservative commitments- 21, 19 fails
The minimum wage is £6.50.
Increasing it to £6.70 is a 3% increase, which is not much given that we still
have inflation in some areas. It’s not a promise to help the working poor in
any particular way. Raising it to £8 by the end of the decade is about 4% per
year. Yes, these are necessary and useful promises, and probably slightly above
growth and inflation, but not groundbreaking. It could be worse; they could be
promising to scrap or lower the minimum wage.
But if the
Conservatives wanted to help low-paid workers (and bolster demand in the wider
economy, cut government expenditure on tax credits and remove market-distorting
subsidies on low wages) they could offer the living wage, of £7.65 per hour.
That would be an 18% increase, so the Conservatives are 1/6 of the way there.
Right direction, wrong amount.
2013 figures are that 4.8 million
people earned less than the living wage. The low pay commission estimates that
there are 1,386,000 minimum wage jobs. If
we assume that all these people work 40-hour weeks, we find that keeping the
minimum wage too low costs poor people £3.3 billion in total per year, well
over £2,000 per person. There are plenty of other people earning less than a
living wage but not the absolute minimum, so the overall suffering is much
larger.
Conservative commitments - 20, 18 fails
Good idea. Let’s do it and then go further.
Maybe some age pay gap data. Who knows? We could talk about how companies and
society can explain the pay gap, but there’s still no harm from publishing
data. I regard this policy as a good thing.
Conservative commitments - 19, 18 fails
Another sublimely hypocritical
policy that ought to be in a comedy, not in reality. The Conservatives think
that essential public services shouldn’t be disrupted by action based on
undemocratic mandates. They define this as achieving at least 40% of the votes
of everyone who could vote, as well as a majority of the people who do vote.
The Conservatives
were elected with 37% of a 66% turnout, which is
24% of the electorate. According to their own beliefs, they have no mandate to
interfere with health, education, fire and transport (the areas they want to
subject to their new rule about strike action).
You could stop
reading there and not miss much, but there is more detail. The Conservatives
call this an important step to ‘rebalance
the interests of employers, employees, the public and the rights of trade
unions.’ Given that employees have already seen none of the economic growth
of the last 15 years, the Conservatives should probably have written ‘further
unbalance the interests’. This policy betrays the ideological antipathy
Conservatives have to organized labour. As right-wingers in favour of
deregulation and unfettered competition they should be lifting restrictions on
unions, not creating more.
Speaking of
which, the manifesto promises numerous other tweaks to regulations affecting
unions. Some seem sensible, such as tackling ‘intimidation of non-striking
workers’, but without further information this could as easily be a Trojan
horse that limits the right of strikers to protest rather than protecting
non-strikers.
Conservative commitments - 18, 17 fails
This is one of the more outrageous
sets of policies that the Conservatives are trumpeting. If we enslave someone
we can claim he’s no longer unemployed, but it’s not something to be proud of.
Conservative policy seems to be aimed more at taking advantage of young people
than helping them. This policy is intended to be a major part of this
aspiration: ‘We will aim to abolish
long-term youth unemployment’ (from the manifesto pg 18).
Firstly, the unemployment figures
are widely known to be inaccurate. There is gaming of the system by contractors
such as by sending people off for training on the one day a month that the
unemployment census is taken. But even without this ‘legal dishonesty’, there’s
the problem of underemployment. Surveys show that many people in part-time
work, temporary work or who are self-employed actually want full-time jobs. For
example, zero-hours contracts can give people only a few hours of work a week,
but even if a person gets zero hours he still counts as employed.
The second aspect of
underemployment is that we have many people over-qualified for the jobs they
are doing. For example, a worker with a master’s degree working on the tills at
the supermarket is underemployed.
If we include estimates for these
problems, youth unemployment is at record highs.
That’s just the background. The
main help referred to by Conservative policy is ‘We have abolished the jobs tax – employers' National Insurance
contributions (NICs) – for the under 21s’. This might help, but as NICs are
a minor cost of employment, probably not a major issue. Additionally, youth
underemployment stretches beyond 21 year-olds. However, there must be some give
and take: ‘it is not fair …that 18-21
year-olds … should slip straight into a life on benefits without first
contributing to their community’.
If you don’t let them get a job
and contribute, it’s hardly fair to blame them for not contributing. This
statement demonstrates a shocking lack of understanding of the situation of
many poor and young people. Benefits are required at the beginning and end of
people’s lives. We don’t scrap all post-natal care because babies haven’t
contributed anything to society; we understand that they probably will but
aren’t yet able to. Blaming the poor for being poor ignores a lot of factors
they can’t control at the best of times, but blaming people who haven’t had a
chance to contribute for not taking that chance is unacceptable.
Benefits aren’t something that
people earn; they exist specifically for the people who are not earning. If
they were merely a safety net for those who have been earning, we might as well
scrap them and expect people to save their money themselves. I know some
Conservatives might approve of that. If we do want to scrap benefits and leave
the poor to die in squalor, we should do so for all the poor. Discriminating
against young people specifically is forbidden in law. Perhaps we should
prosecute the Conservative party for discriminating by age.
I don’t know the rules about which
young people can claim jobseekers’ allowance, but ONS data show 729,000 unemployed
people aged 18-24, of whom 261,000 are full-time students. This compares to
3.87 million in work. Similarly, 3.2 million were in full-time education, 3
million employed and only 468,000 of the remainder unemployed. Unemployment
rates don’t tell the whole story, though. Even if large numbers of young people
were unemployed (and government figures might well be wrong) it wouldn’t necessarily
mean that they are lazy people who need fewer benefits. It might mean that
there are no jobs. It is very common for junior roles to go first when
companies shrink, or for last-in, first-out rules to be introduced. People cut
back on training and support, as long-term investments, when times are tight.
This means that a whole generation of youngsters will miss out on the personal
development given to people still in work, and it seems somewhat harsh to
penalize them further.
I can’t be bothered to calculate
the cost of the NIC reduction for those in work, the ‘savings’ of lower
benefits from a ‘youth allowance’, the personal cost of lower wages from
enforced apprenticeships, or the value of the free labour from enforcing
community service. The basic point remains that these are all reducing the life
quality of young people and creating savings for businesses or for government,
with no coherent justification for treating young adults differently from older
ones.
Conservative commitments - 17, 16 fails
We have already helped small businesses by … reducing
the burden of employment law through our successful tribunal reforms (manifesto pg 19)
By this they mean forcing victims to pay
large amounts of money in order to bring a claim. Reducing the burden means, in
this case, pricing poor people out of the law. Yes, the law is a burden, but we
don’t charge the estates of murder victims for the trial. These new fees are
not refundable, and not awardable in damages. They therefore do not only
discourage frivolous claims but also legitimate victims. Any reasonable
government would aim to extend the rule of law to everyone, rather than omit
the poor. There is some remission of the fees, but if a person has savings of
over £3,000 the fees are definitely due. This is a low threshold and an
incentive against saving, which the government otherwise wants to encourage.
It’s especially harsh on the young, who might be in low-paid jobs but
nonetheless saving for a deposit on a home. Perhaps means-testing should look
at overall wealth, not savings, but that’s a different issue.
The Courts Service apparently charged
£25m in tribunal fees, but fee remission excused people of £4m of that (pg 79
of Annual Report). This £21m
contributed relatively little to the overall cost of £1,700m, but did decrease
the number of claims by 77%. It might be the case that
over half of all cases received were frivolous, but I think we’d have heard
something about it if that were the case. I couldn’t find any hard evidence
(distinct from recent speculation) but I did see a couple of old articles
suggesting that ¼ of cases might be frivolous. If all frivolous cases have been
deterred, that still leaves tens of thousands of people denied justice because
of cost. What cost can we put on justice? Well, justice is a good thing in
itself, but if we look merely at the median tribunal award (more relevant to
cases scared off by fees than the average), we see that it’s about £3,000. The
drop in claims is 143,000, of which maybe 95,000 were probably not frivolous.
That’s a total monetary cost of justice forgone of £290m, so it’s no surprise
that business welcomed the new fee system.
Conservative commitments - 16, 15 fails
I really don’t know enough about
them. 3 million training courses sounds like a large deficit in the jobs market
which we might otherwise have noticed. On the one hand, government-subsidized
training for employers sounds like the government paying for job skills that a
company should plan and pay for; on the other hand, education is expensive and
a national good, and the government might legitimately contribute to it.
On balance, I
think that job-specific education is much less of a national good that is the
government’s business. Good general education creates engaged, well-informed
and cultured citizens who make a country a better place. Good job-specific
education earns the employer and employee more money.
One thing I can
say is that apprenticeships are demand-led: the government offers funding but
the apprenticeships themselves need employers, trainers and apprentices to come
together. Another 3 million is ambitious. Furthermore, apprenticeships are flawed because they are a legitimate way
of offering below the minimum wage. At the moment, many are simply excuses to
pay young people too little; apprenticeships are a form of indentured
servitude, forcing people to work in otherwise illegal poverty in order to get
training that they should be getting as a normal part of a job.
In this sense,
apprenticeships are part of a raft of policies that punish the young and force
them to earn less and take on more responsibility than the older generation.
Further education
institutions are also annoyed that apprenticeships are getting a lot of funding
when large cuts are being made to FE. Apprenticeships are a limited and narrow
type of education that are not applicable to all types of work. We left the
apprentice and master system behind when we moved away from guilds and feudal
government. If the government were really devoted to education and skills, FE
would see funding as well. Instead we have indentured servitude of the young.
We had 850,000
apprentices at last count, costing the government almost £1.5bn. Another 3 million at the
same average cost, if they were to be found, would be 3 million people earning
below the minimum wage and costing the government £5.3bn a year. The
Conservatives idly predicted that this new
policy will cost £300m a year. Only 1760% wrong.
Conservative commitments - 15, 14 fails
This aspiration is actually a
summary of a number of commitments which are better addressed separately.
Let’s focus on
the manifesto: ‘To achieve this, we will
back British businesses: cutting red tape, lowering taxes on jobs and
enterprise, getting young people into work, boosting apprenticeships and
investing in science and technology. With the Conservatives, Britain will be
the best place in Europe to innovate, patent new ideas and set up and expand a
business… Backing business also means helping our farmers and our rural
communities.’
This doesn’t say
anything about how farmers will be helped. Is this referring back, again, to
rural broadband (an ongoing, mismanaged and not wholly Conservative project)?
Is it about the Common Agricultural Policy of the EU, which the Conservatives
want to leave or renegotiate?
Is Britain the
best place to patent new ideas? This must refer to the patent box, a tax loophole the
size of the Marianas Trench which will ensure that innovators and lots of other
people too pay no tax while big administrative burdens from tax paperwork pile
on their accountants and HMRC. Or perhaps HMRC won’t be able to do it all, and
will not fully investigate everything, ensuring that it is a bigger loophole.
Germany agrees with me, and the government has agreed to close it.
Apprenticeships come up later, as do specific
tax proposals. For now, let’s note that lowering income tax (tax on
employment?) is unlikely to affect employment. There are not lots of people who
could earn over £12,500 but have chosen to be unemployed. The unemployed are
often looking for starting or low-wage jobs and would take them no matter the
tax rate.
But really, it’s
the red tape that annoys me, and here we do get down to unprovable differences
in economic belief. The Conservatives think that regulation is a bulwark
holding back the unstoppable and inexorable tide of business growth, and they
think that business growth inevitably leads to job creation. I think that if
these powerful forces were so keen on job creation, they’d do it with or
without regulation. I also think that regulation is appropriate to prevent and
control market distortions and prevent undesirable behaviour. For example, it
might be profitable to employ workers for 16 unbroken hours a day, and a
company that did so might grow and want to employ more. But those working
conditions are not healthy, so we prevent them even though that prevents growth
of that business.
It’s a long
economic argument, and I think the Conservatives are wrong for a number of
reasons, the most basic being that you need to create demand for what
businesses are offering before they will choose to expand. Focussing on minor
barriers to expansion demonstrates considerable doubt about the power of
markets to overcome obstacles; a doubt that is curiously absent in other
right-wing beliefs which trumpet the markets as the solution to most problems.
We should be focussing on creating demand, not barriers to supply.
Alternatively, if red tape is such a problem, the Conservatives should try
cutting red tape for government and see how much more efficient it gets. With
over 1,000 tax reliefs, HMRC has a lot of red tape. Perhaps we should get rid
of all those and see the efficiency of tax collection improve. But let’s be
honest, at least this one actually needs an argument before we conclude that
it’s wrong.
If we return to full employment, it’s worth noting that economists don’t use
this to mean 100% of people in work. Although people use it differently, we can
have ‘full employment’ and still have qualified people who can’t find
appropriate jobs. Full employment is used to mean a situation when increases in
aggregate demand don’t increase supply, but instead increase prices. Some
people fear that full employment would therefore lead to high inflation. It
would be nice if the Conservatives mentioned such arguments and their
rebuttals, or gave any indication that they understand and want to explain the
technical meaning.
Nonetheless, the supporting
policies for this aspiration are minor even if one does think that they push in
the right direction, and we know that we’ll never get full employment, so in
that sense the promise to abolish unemployment is another public relations
policy that is fundamentally dishonest. So although the economics supporting it
is wrong rather than utterly wrongheaded, it’s another failure.
Conservative commitments - 14, 13 fails
As with other commitments, infrastructure
is a good idea. We need more and better infrastructure. But as any fool can
see, offering to throw £20bn/year away isn’t such a good thing. This pledge
means nothing without the detail of what will be bought for the money. I might
as well say ‘my government would spend £550bn on government spending’ and
expect the votes to come pouring in.
Thankfully, the manifesto gives greater
detail, so don’t take the above criticism too seriously. £38bn will go on
railways. HS2, for example, will deliver a slower service than we currently
have at a cost of £50bn (which will be double that by the time it’s done, or
else there will be so many reductions in the size of HS2 that the service will
be even worse; it is common knowledge that ‘many of
the [government-run] projects incurred a cost and time overrun of over 100%’).
When I say slower, I mean that it will be 20 minutes faster than current
services (but will be finished in 2026 by which time we might expect to have
better normal trains), but that it will take people to a station 20 minutes
away from Birmingham centre, where all the transport links are. People will
have to spend time changing and then travelling.
HS2 has also experienced numerous changes
in justification, a sure sign that it’s a political project in search of a
reason to exist. At first it was business time and speed (business time because
people can work on HS2). Then everyone pointed out that people can work on
normal trains, especially in 1st class. So HS2 became about speed,
and I’ve just scotched that argument. Now it’s about capacity. To increase
capacity we don’t need a high-speed line; we need a high-capacity line. Any new
track would serve the same purpose at a tiny fraction of the cost. The
estimates of increased need for capacity are doubtful at best; they rely on
inflated predictions of economic growth, including growth that HS2 is expected
to cause. Let’s remind ourselves of the
cost: I expect £100bn over its lifetime. That’s over £1,500 for every man,
woman and child in the country, and perhaps £5,000 for every taxpayer. It won’t
be free once done, either; it’ll still be more expensive than normal rail. It’s
intended to boost the economy in the north; instead we’ll be paying lots of
money for London to suck more economic activity from the north.
As for the rest of rail, well, wasn’t
privatisation supposed to ensure that we got private investment improving our
railways? We shouldn’t be investing any government money in the railways
because we sold them off specifically so that other people would do that.
I see £15bn promised for road investment.
Investment I take to mean new roads, not maintenance. Given that oil prices will rise in a few years, that we need a greener economy and that
evidence shows that road building just creates more traffic rather than
reducing congestion, this is likely to be not only a waste, but actively
damaging to the environment.
There’s £500m for making vehicles
zero-emissions; a commitment better achieved by a more free-market solution
such as taxes on emissions, and £200m for cycling safety. £200m is utterly
pathetic. Cycling ought to be a major target for urban transport, reducing
pollution (both lung-destroying and climate-destroying), congestion and danger,
and making people fitter, healthier and happier. Yet it is less than 1/80th
of car spending and 1/190th of train spending.
Finally, there’s a commitment to faster
internet. This long-standing commitment (so not really a new pledge) has
recently been subject to an NAO report that found that it had been very poorly
implemented. I wonder if rural areas really will get the broadband that they
need. Many farmers were angry that they were told to file online with the RPA
when they don’t have internet access, and I experienced that myself on some
recent farm visits.
The final part of this
commitment says ‘We will also release more spectrum from public sector
use to allow greater private sector access. And we have set an ambition that
ultrafast broadband should be available to nearly all UK premises as soon as
practicable.’
So the commitment to superfast internet isn’t about installing nationwide
optical fibre or providing computers for everyone (easily doable with the HS2
budget). It’s about releasing public assets for private profit.
In
summary, then, we will spend £200m on the right general thing, but probably on
silly things like subsidising 10m cycle lanes (see box 1), £500m on a nice
thing, but with a goal which could be better achieved with a different policy,
and the remaining £99bn on waste.
Conservative commitments 13 - 12 fails
A new fundamental principle of fiscal policy will ensure that the government will always run a surplus (manifesto, pg 9)
This runs counter to all sensible
economic thought. Countries are not like individuals. Individuals need to cut
back when they don’t earn as much. Sadly, countries suffer from a feedback loop
in which cutting back prevents them earning as much, and so they actually need
a surplus in good times and a deficit in bad times.
This policy is, yet again,
an economic fallacy that will gain emotional traction with uninformed voters,
rather than an open attempt to inform voters of the truth and act responsibly. The
OECD directly says ‘inappropriate
fiscal rules, such as simple balanced budget rules, can be destabilising’. See
point 11 about austerity and the problems of cuts to government expenditure.
Conservative commitments - 12, 11 fails
This would be
unarguably a good thing. I’m not sure how you crack down on tax avoidance; it
is, by definition, legal (tax evasion is illegal; tax avoidance is using the
tax system to minimise one’s tax burden).
Sadly, this is a
promise without weight. The Conservatives so far have done precisely the
opposite, despite making the same promise, so it’s most likely that this will
continue. For example, the much-vaunted agreement with Switzerland to disclose
bank accounts was voluntary and included a long delay, ensuring that even those
who volunteered had plenty of time to rearrange their affairs. Yet that
agreement was sold as a major achievement. The tax gap was £95 bn a year in
2010 and the Conservatives have clamped down on it over 5 years, reducing it to
the tiny amount of £122 bn a year. HMRC’s own estimates, which are
woefully poor, and one might expect to be biased to show HMRC in a good light,
admit to a tax gap of £34 bn. This compares to DWP’s estimate of benefit fraud
(on all benefits) as being £1.2 bn.
This policy aspiration
is near enough an outright lie. There will be no crack down and there will most
likely be new tax loopholes and avoidance opportunities. It is another appeal
to voters to make the Conservatives appear to be keen on justice and the rule
of law (principles that in other areas they vigorously pursue) when history
tells us that they are not. If ever there was a ‘something for nothing
culture’, it is in the world of tax reliefs, in which people expect not only
lower tax rates than everyone else, but even tax credits (i.e payments).
The detailed manifesto commitments are minor, but do
look to be sensible. If we could trust the Conservatives fully to honour this
policy, it would be a great thing, although it wouldn’t catch much of the tax
gap, which needs far more rigorous policies. Sadly, the evidence is that they
are more committed to tax avoidance than they are to law, order, justice,
fairness or manifesto commitments. Those aspirations only apply when the rich
will not suffer as a consequence.
Conservative commitments - 11, 10 fails
It’s necessary for
every manifesto to have overall ambitions that help summarise the aims of other
commitments. This is one such aspiration. On its own it is worthless, but I
recognize that it is a necessary part of communication.
I do think we’ll find,
however, that it’s not a plausible ambition. The Conservatives promised to
eliminate the deficit by 2015 and failed. They will do so again by 2018. This
policy is more dishonest vote-buying, promising the impossible without good justification
or explanation. Such an extreme promise requires extreme evidence to support
it, and that simply was not provided, even in all the supplementary policies.
I also find it
surprising to see that the Conservatives claim that this will be the first surplus
in 18 years, when Gordon Brown did have a surplus (if briefly) during the
Labour years. It shows that there is huge variability in the figures depending
on how you add them up and what you exclude. I wouldn’t trust either major
party to have it right.
We can’t
cost this promise precisely because there’s no detail. The aim to run a surplus
will instead cost the economy, as the Conservatives focus on austerity even
harder to make up for their tax cuts. The true cost of austerity is
social: unemployment, long-term poor prospects, especially for the young, with
perhaps 5% higher poverty rates due to greater inequality. Even on its own,
GDP, terms, austerity has failed, reducing growth and not helping the debt to
GDP ratio. The total cost has been estimated at a cumulative £25bn/year. That means that it
will be much larger by now; the TUC estimates that the total will be £374bn by
2016. The OBR puts it at 5% of GDP or a total of £70bn, although it tends to be
favourable to government. These are losses to GDP, meaning that people’s salaries
are lower and there is less employment; only 40% or so might come from
government, so it’s a loss of £10bn/year for every year of austerity for
government spending. That makes the general commitment to austerity of vital
significance to the country, even though it directly affects no-one.
Conservative commitments - 10, 9 fails
The Conservatives are,
of course, the party of free markets… when it suits them. Rail services have
been privatized and are run by independent private companies. Yes, the
franchise contracts give the government the ability to regulate some fares
(off-peak fares and commuter costs, but not the ability to determine what times
are off-peak). If the Conservatives were dedicated to free markets and economic
principles of good governance, they would propose not to use this ability, or
even to sell it to the rail companies (allowing them to buy their way out of
the obligation to obey).
If
unregulated business is the universal good that policies such as ‘one-in,
one-out’ on red tape imply, then the rail operators should be free to raise
prices. They would increase prices until enough people stopped using the
railways that they lost money, and everything would be gloriously efficient.
I have
no doubt that most people can see a few reasons why this is a bad idea; there
are plenty of them. Rather than try to list them all, I’ll simply point out
that every justification for this policy is simultaneously a nail in the coffin
of ‘regulation is always bad’.
I do
have one point to make, though, which is that the cost of travel is not
isolatable from the wider economy. If travelling is kept artificially cheap,
our housing market will be distorted, with people more willing to buy new
houses in the suburbs rather than reuse and refit central buildings and live
more densely. Similarly, suburban living tends to involve more car use in
addition to efficient rail travel, and this affects pollution and emissions.
The
distortion in travel has knock-on effects across the whole economy. This is why
it’s important to get every policy right.
As for
other parts of their rail-fare policy, they’re equally foolish. Part-time
season tickets will disrupt rail pricing because unregulated prices are so much
higher than season tickets that part-time season tickets will often be cheaper
than single journeys. In a way, this might help expose the farce of our rail
system and make the operators back out, but it will probably just make them
claim even more subsidy from government.
Finally,
investing millions in fitting out trains is exactly what privatization was
intended to achieve. The whole point was that British Rail had under-invested
and private companies would have a profit incentive to invest. That the
government is doing it shows just how parasitic rail franchising is.
The cost of this policy is put at £80 per commuter per year. About 30 million people are in work, so if I ignore self-employed people etc. and assume that they’re all commuters, and that about 45% of commuters will be affected by the freeze, this policy will cost about £1 billion. The rail companies aren’t charities, and will get that money elsewhere; either from government subsidy, or from leisure travellers. That means expensive holidays, fewer visits to see your family and so on.
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