Politics And Polls

[andrewducker]

Just looking at an interesting set of polls here, following up Ed Milliband's election as leader of the Labour party (that's the leftest of the three major parties we have in the UK, when it comes to financial things).

Thankfully, I'm glad to see that AV is now back as more popular than FPTP, thanks to him throwing his weight behind it. I hope that sticks. There are an awful lot of don't knows though. Interesting to see that the only part of the population who are strongly anti-AV are the over 60s and Conservatives. I wonder what the age profile for the different parties looks like. Anyone got stats? Also interesting that the mass of the don't knows are in Social Grade C2,D and E - 39% of them have no opinion. I wonder if that will stick, or if they'll develop an opinion as the voting gets closer.

But I'm more interested to see that 2/3 of the country think that people at the higher end should pay more in taxes - including 53% of Conservative Party supporters (the rightest of the three major parties we have in the UK). I was expecting Labour and Lib-Dem members to be in favour of higher taxation, but I wasn't expecting the Conservatives to also have a majority in favour to.

Also, 72% in favour of higher minimum wage, including 59% Conservatives, and 74% in favour of a higher levy on banks, including 71% of Conservatives.

It seems that the Conservatives have been shifted leftwards when I wasn't looking, at least over some matters. Which is good, in many ways.

In other news Nick Clegg has come out and said something that I've seen on a variety of smaller blogging sites about the spending review:
"Even after all the decisions that we have to take which are difficult ones, we'll still be spending more money at the end of the period than we are now."
Because it seems that the majority of the "cuts" are cuts to proposed spending increases, and not cuts to current spending. Anyone got anything further on that?

Oh, and I'm broadly happy with the stuff that Ed Miliband has been saying. Distancing himself from the Iraq War, ID cards, and other anti civil liberty stuff from the previous governments agenda and coming back with a left-wing liberal agenda. While his voting record doesn't agree with his stated opinions, I'm hopeful that his future actions will line up better with what he's now saying. I shall keep my fingers crossed.

Comments

[marrog.livejournal.com]

I can see the argument though, that what you're doing is redressing the balance at a governmental level so that businesses don't have to - their highest paid employees are subsidising their lowest paid employees rather than them having to take responsibility for redressing that balance themselves. It's practical, but it does leave a sour taste in the mouth.

I take it then that you're a fan of working tax credits also, incidentally?

[matgb]

I would rather they weren't needed, and the system is horribly bureacratic (we're eligible, but haven't claimed yet, the forms are offputting to me).

And yes, sour taste, but I'm very much in favour of "stuff that works" instead of "stuff that makes me feel good", if doing something that seems nice is actually counterproductive, but doing something that seems nasty actually helps, and the evidence is fairly conclusive, then I'll go with the nasty thing that works.

FWIW, this is a very similar issue to the National Insurance "jobs tax" thing in the run up to the election, the Tories overstated it, but I did some digging then (National Insurance: are the Tories this useless?) and it looked like just the planned 1% rise in employers NICS would cost about 100,000 jobs by the end of the Parliament. Not a huge number, but it was a tiny amount of money, the proposed "living wage" isn't a tiny number, and I really don't like the idea of 500K+ people unemployed in order to make me feel nicer, even if the idea of it does make me feel nicer.