Archive for the ‘General thoughts’ Category

Make sure you leave on time …

Friday, February 26th, 2010

Today marks WYPHD – not an obvious abbreviation is it? But it’s one that effects much of the population and many Young Fabian members. Work Your Proper Hours Day is the day when the average person who does unpaid overtime would start to get paid if they did all their unpaid overtime at the start of the year. A whole two months into the year – pretty shocking, eh?

And that is just the average. The TUC report today that there has been a further increase in the number of Britons doing ‘extreme’ unpaid overtime – that’s more than ten hours a week above contracted hours. Their WYPHD will be not until at least 26th April.

There’s 3 interesting aspects to this.

Firstly, speaking from my own experience and that of friends and colleagues, I suspect this affects a large proportion of young people – perhaps trying to impress in their first job after leaving education – and even more so Young Fabian members, a number of whom have jobs that will be stretched to fit the anti-social hours of parliament.

Secondly, the context of the recession. Whilst more people are working more hours than they are being paid for, unemployment is rising. Could the sum of a team’s additional hours put in actually be enough to create new jobs? Are young school leavers or university graduates struggling in the jobs market suffering more than they need to? It seems that during the recession there have been more temporary contracts being offered where once there may have been permanent jobs – is the nature of such work pressuring young workers to stay in the office longer to secure the prize of permanent employment, foregoing short-term health for long-term security?

Thirdly, and very importantly, there is a gender divide. The group with highest proportion of people working unpaid overtime, and the highest proportion undertaking extreme overtime, is single women. Level pegging in numbers doing unpaid overtime with single men is the group containing married or cohabiting couples without children. A majority of Young Fabian members who are working will fit into these categories. We can but speculate why it is that women are working more for free. Is it a greater work ethic? Or is it a way to show one’s value in a country still blighted by unfair gender pay gaps?

The TUC website has some other interesting stats. And the WYPHD site contains an unpaid overtime calculator and some games and novelties worth a quick look (during your lunch break?).

Plus, eagle-eyed news followers may notice that the long hours advice clinic has been put together by a Professor who has found fame elsewhere this week.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in General thoughts | No Comments »

The silent generation?

Monday, February 8th, 2010

Chris Dillow, of stumblingandmumbling blog, asked on Friday whether his is the lucky generation – benefiting from university grants, house price booms and the prospect of benefiting from government debt crises through higher annuities in retirement.

He also pondered the apparent lack of hostility from younger generations:

What surprises me here, though, is how little resentment my generation attracts from 20-somethings. If I were a recent graduate saddled with tens of thousands of debt and poor job prospects as a result of the decisions made by my generation, I’d be livid.
So why are younger people so quiet? Is it because they are just passive? Or is it that they have other forms of luck which my generation didn’t.

On the face of it, it would be hard to argue that our generation benefits from other forms of luck which weren’t available to previous generations. Nor do I think younger people are passive.

However, it is true that they are less inclined to be democratically active than has historically been the case.

It is possible Chris’ generation is a factor behind this. As the baby-boomer bulge begin to retire, they are likely to become more politically vocal, rather than less (assuming the historic trend of pensioners being more engaged with the political process, rather than less). This will make it harder, not easier, for younger generations to try and address some of the legacies of an extraordinarily lucky (selfish?) generation in the UK’s history.

Issues such as taxation, retirement ages, immigration (which can help replacement ratios), social security, and global warming, and their consequences, are likely to be left to our generation to manage, but with the baby-boomers calling the shots via the ballot box.

If so, our only hope is that they encounter distinct principle-agent problems. Or we find a way of introducing compulsory euthanasia*.

In the meantime, our efforts are focused on finding jobs or keeping them in order to be able to afford the impending fiscal timebomb…

* The Economist’s Schumpeter column this week tackles the issue of an ageing workforce, and how business might cope. The column highlights two new novels which tackle issues relating to an ageing population, and is from where the euthanasia idea is sourced:

MARTIN AMIS and Christopher Buckley are writers who are entering their silver years and are worried about the costs of an ageing population. Mr Amis, who has a new novel out (see article), recently compared the growing army of the elderly to “an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafés and shops”. Mr Buckley devoted a novel, “Boomsday”, to the impending war of the generations. They have both touted the benefits of mass euthanasia, though Mr Amis favours giving volunteers “a martini and a medal” whereas Mr Buckley supports more sophisticated incentives such as tax breaks.

Tags:
Posted in General thoughts | 2 Comments »

Don’t Belize all you read

Friday, February 5th, 2010

I met up last night with Kunal Khatri, formerly of the YF Executive Committee, who readers will remember as the excellent organiser and host of our pub quizzes last year. Hard to escape, we discussed the election and the potential impact the outcome could have on our respective day jobs. Amongst other things, we talked a bit about the polls, which have improved in the last couple of weeks in a much more convincing way than the Labour boost towards the end of last year.

I’m pleased with the direction of travel of the national voting intentions. But the point I made to Kunal was that the media are reporting a minimal amount of data from the marginal seats in comparison to these headline figures, coupled with comments about uniform swing and the likely balance of seats in the next parliament. The reality is that Labour can be narrowing the overall gap in intentions but that it could be making little difference to the outcome of the election if those people aren’t living in the right constituencies. My hunch was that were we to see more polling from the key seats, we’d probably find the Tories with a wider gap than the 7/8 per cent that has been accepted right now as roughly the difference nationally. Morale-wise, this close to the election – and given how the parliamentary party in particular has reacted to polls in recent years – it’s perhaps best that we don’t see such polls and stay focused on the task in hand …

However, there are some out there and today I’ve come across an interesting analysis by Anthony Wells for UK Polling Report of Ipsos-MORI’s aggregated data for 2009 (that is, all their polls combined), followed up on by Andrew Sparrow. What we see is the Tories – last year, so not accounting for the recent downturn in their fortunes – having a 5% larger lead (a somewhat formidable 21% lead) in Lab-Con marginals. The swing to the Tories in these seats is greater than the swing in safe Labour seats and quite significantly better than that in safe Tory seats.

In other words, they appear to be winning over voters where it matters. There’s one reason for that: a certain Lord Ashcroft. Which is why it’s so important his personal tax situation is clarified.

The lesson is that we mustn’t get complacent about the direction of travel and about the electoral system working in our favour. And we mustn’t stop the fight.

UPDATE: I forgot to include a link to some recent ICM polling of marginals for the News of the World.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in General thoughts | 2 Comments »

Running on empty: are energy companies the new banks?

Friday, February 5th, 2010

A somewhat dramatic headline over at The Guardian’s website – ‘Ofgem: UK cannot trust energy companies to keep the lights on’, referring to an Ofgem report released on Wednesday which proposes moving energy supply away from the competitive markets model.

Actually, the gas and electricity regulator’s Project Discovery is clear that such an option is the most radical of the potential reforms it suggests.  The Guardian reports that the carbon tax that Ofgem advocates as an incentive for the big energy suppliers to build new, more environmentally friendly, power stations, may appear in the pre-election Budget.  

We often hear of being taken to the brink of a shutdown – particularly during harsh winters – but what if the lights did go out?

Well, for one, I’m pretty sure the public reaction to the energy companies would rival that which Britain’s bankers have experienced in the last 18 months. Profits would be highlighted, bonuses lambasted, and the limits of regulation put under scrutiny. Nationalisation would likely be back on the agenda. But hopefully Britain’s commercial gas and electricity suppliers don’t see their business models as being in a similar vein to high street banks.

The view that the basic product they offer – the power we need to live our lives, both in business and in leisure - is so essential to everyday life that they can ride the storm is dangerous for us. Yet this is exactly what the banking world has succeeded in doing. You can’t immediately boycott your gas and electricity supplier the day after their sailing close to critical levels of supply has backfired.  So can they be relied upon to do the right thing?

It’s one to watch – but what is certain is the protests and hatred that would ensue. Not least because without electricity, 21st century Britain wouldn’t know what else to do other than take to the streets.

Tags: ,
Posted in General thoughts | No Comments »

Do MPs deserve a private life?

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

It has disturbed me recently to hear my friends laughing at EyeSpyMP.com. Does giving your life to public service mean that every aspect of your private life is subject to public scrutiny? I personally do not feel the need to know when my MP goes to the barber’s, has a pint or visits the loo.

Sally Bercow has now entered into the argument; pointing out that her movements have been followed despite not being an MP herself; but the wife of an MP and a resident of the Houses of Parliament. However, Mrs Bercow IS standing to be an elected representative; and not only this, she put herself firmly in the limelight by launching her political career with a tell-all story in the Evening Standard, and continues to Tweet on her day-to-day life as the Speaker’s wife. Does this exclude her to the right to keep some of her life private? I don’t think so.
She gave her interview in order to take control of what the press might publish about her past, a perfectly good strategy which appears to have worked. This is information that she chose to share with the world, this does not mean that she has to share everything in her future.

If want to have politicians in the future who are one dimensional, who have had sheltered lives, who have not experienced those things that the average person has, then we are going the right way about it. As due to this pressure from the press, and the now additional 24-hour, multi-faceted surveillance from the blogosphere, potential politicians will be faced with the choice of giving up their chosen career paths or to refrain from letting their hair down for fear that it will end up common, misrepresented knowledge within minutes, or in years to come.

The people we elect to run our communities and our country, and their families, deserve to be able to keep their personal lives private; indeed they must if they are to remain sane in the increasingly pressurised and crazy world of politics.

Posted in General thoughts | 2 Comments »

How much do we need to know?

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

Dominating most of the papers today is John Terry and stories of his relationship with another football player’s former girlfriend; his initial gagging order overturned by a judge who believed Terry more concerned with the loss of lucrative sponsorship deals than the invasion of his privacy.

Surely this is strange though, do we really need to justify our right to a private life? Surely the right to privacy is absolute and regardless of our motivations for wanting to maintain that privacy, it should be protected?

It is also being championed as a triumph for the freedom of speech, but is it not a slightly sad reflection on society that we revel in the fact that we get to read about a man cheating on his wife. Is this really the epitome of freedom of speech? Was this really information that we not just needed, but had a right to know?

Posted in General thoughts | 1 Comment »