Last night I was a panellist on BBC1’s Question Time, in Stoke-on-Trent. You can watch it, via the iPlayer, here.
It was my fourth appearance on the BBC’s flagship news-and-current-affairs debate show and it is always an amusing experience to be one of the five panellists. I must say that I was quite impressed with the Tory peer and Next boss, Simon Wolfson, who wasn’t the swivel-eyed, bash-the-poor, corporate fatcat some on the left might have assumed him to be. However, right-wing recorder and barrister Constance Briscoe – who seemed to think I was a politician! – had firm views on most issues but few facts.
My own approach is to try and always inject facts and figures into these debates, which tend to be distorted by misinformation, ignorance and prejudice. (“How do you know all this?” a bemused David Dimbleby asked me towards the end of the show, in only a semi-serious tone!)
But television isn’t the best medium for reeling off lists of statistics or data (which is one of the reasons I left TV to become a print journalist in 2009).
That’s why I thought I’d briefly outline some of the facts and figures I didn’t have time to provide, or elaborate on, last night.
On the financial transaction tax:
Wolfson claimed that the a financial transactiont tax (FTT), or “Robin Hood tax”, would end up funding Brussels and not the UK. Nonsense.
The International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the Gates Foundation have all released studies showing that unilateral transaction taxes are feasible and raise funds for individual countries (the Robin Hood Tax campaign says a 0.05 per cent tax on transactions could raise £20bn for just the UK alone!).
Here in Britain, we already levy unilateral taxes of this sort: for example, the Treasury imposes a stamp duty of 0.5 per cent on all transactions involving UK shares. This raises £3bn per year.
On Tory funding and the City:
David Cameron has repeatedly accused Labour leader Ed Miliband of being in “the pocket of the unions”. Why? Because the trade union movement is the biggest donor to the Labour Party.
Yet, as I pointed out last night, using Cameron’s own logic, he and his party are in the pocket of the bankers and financiers. Why? Because the Conservative Party relies on the bankers and financiers for more than half of its funds.
According to research conducted by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism:
Since Mr Cameron assumed the leadership, the Conservative Party has become twice as dependent on City funding: from 25 per cent of its total donations to nearly 51 per cent in 2010.
Guess what? Wolfson and Tory MP Claire Perry had little to say on this subject. Surprise, surprise!
On unemployment benefit:
One audience member raised the issue of compassion towards the unemployed (in reference to the British Social Attitudes survey this week which revealed that more than half of Britons believe unemployment benefits are too high and that they discourage those out of work from finding new jobs). Briscoe employed all sorts of dubious metaphors (“sponge”?) in order to make her point that “we spend far too much time subsidising people who don’t want to work” (she couldn’t, however, tell me how many people on unemployment benefit “don’t want to work”).
Yet unemployment is worth less than ever. As my colleague George Eaton has noted (using ONS figures), Jobseeker’s Allowance (currently £65.45 a week for a single person aged 25 or over) is is worth just 10.9 per cent of average weekly earnings (£600.90) – compared to 12.2 per cent in 2000, 16.6 per cent in 1985 and 19.2 per cent in 1970.
Then there is the issue of jobs – there aren’t many to find! As I said, there are now 5.7 unemployed people for every job vacancy, which is the highest figure on record since October 2009. How do you squeeze five people into one job? And how does slashing JSA create jobs?
On housing benefit:
One audience member raised the issue of unemployed people and housing benefit. But as Shelter’s chief executive Campbell Robb has pointed out:
The vast majority of housing benefit claimants are either pensioners, disabled people, those caring for a relative or hardworking people on low incomes, and only 1 in 8 people who receive housing benefit is unemployed.
Those of us on the left, who call ourselves progressives, need to ensure that these points are raised, discussed and circulated, online, on air and in print. The spread of conservatism, and conservative economics, relies on ignorance, not evidence.
Yet, as the most famous conservative of all, Ronald Reagan, once remarked:
Facts are stubborn things.
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