Randomly Selected Article or Link

I find the story of Farepack's collapse heart-rending. Whilst I'm none too fond of the notion that Christmas is something that should put such a burden on families that they feel they have to save up for a whole year to give their families a decent time (I believe a decent time should depend on the people and the spirit of the festival not the material goods that go with it) those who have chosen a savings scheme, rather than a spend-now-pay-afterwards credit card Christmas, have been doing the really responsible thing. And they've been left completely in the lurch.

Not only that but Farepack also allowed people to become their "agents" and collect from friends and other family members, so there's bound to be a bit of resentment in some households.

Presumably Farepack would have to have been a licensed deposit taker? And regulated as such by the Financial Services Authority? Their collapse should I hope, be dealt with as firmly by those authorities as any - Barlow Clowes springs to mind. I know running a business can be a fine balance between keeping the confidence of your customers and dealing with what might have seemed at the time - in June or July when they knew they had some cash flow issues - like little mid-year difficulties that they were confident they could get over. But it's not as if we are talking about sophisticated investors here who might have been watching for signs of trouble, just people paying into a relatively simple conceptually savings scheme that would guarantee them some fun over Christmas.

So it seems to me that HBOS do have some responsibility here. They were issuing warnings months ago to Farepack, and must have known the nature of their business and their customers. To allow it to go on till mid-October, when there's really little chance of people being able either to get what payout from an insolvency they might end up with before it was needed for Christmas or rustling up the same amount of money to replace what they had paid in and now lost, seems almost callous.

Farepack and similar schemes started life seventy and more years ago as mutual savings schemes. Maybe they've got too big to have the kind of care about their customers and the local savings club did of its members. Would that we had more credit unions that conscientious savers could have used instead. After all, how difficult can it be - you collect money over a year, put it all on deposit, even make a little interest for the members in doing so, and then all club together and go shopping in bulk, and start again the following January.

I hope someone steps in and offers these hapless but responsible people some material comfort at what promises to be a pretty miserable time of year for them.

In her defense of the surveillance state (sorry if I've misunderstood but that's what it sounds like!) at CCTV conspiracy mania is a very middle-class disorder there's one little sentence that gives it all away. She says:

There is a sad lack of voices to praise the benign state these days.

Maybe that's because there is no such thing as "the benign state", now or at any point in history that immediately comes to mind.

So I figured I would restart blogging with some feedback on what turned out to be an excellent South Central Regional Liberal Democrats' conference on Saturday here at Oxford Brookes University. Given that I see the place every day my motivation to get there in time for nine-thirty speeches on a Saturday morning was not great, and I actually arrived a few minutes into the first keynote speech by Evan Harris.

Some in the party and elsewhere give Evan a hard time I hear, but I have a lot of time for him. I get the impression he works his proverbials off in his constituency and has a penchant for minority interests which suits me. But listening to him on Saturday and then later hearing Vince Cable they between them seem to epitomize what one might call the "old" Lib Dems - leftist, statist, more interventionist - and the "emerging" Lib Dems - more liberal in every sense.

Evan restated his support for the fifty pence tax rate and bemoaned the federal conference at which it was removed from party policy, Vince emphasized that the new tax policy, trying to focus, as Churchill said, on not just "how much have you got" but also on "how did you get it", was in fact the most redistributive set of tax policies on the table from any party.

Harris's main point, as I understand it, was that the fifty pence tax rate sent a signal, even if it did not in fact promise to raise terribly much, that we were prepared to take more from the highest earners if need be to lift the poorest out poverty. It is a simple message to be sure, and easier to communicate than the "new" idea that we should be more carefully targeting tax on externalities and unearned privilege, but not one that adds to the progressiveness of the overall tax system one iota.

But Evan is exactly the sort of person we want to attract to our book the ALTER executive are putting together to launch centenary celebrations of the 1909 People's Budget. We want to show him how rigourously applying what we have been calling the "liberal economic tradition" will in fact raise the lot of the poorest by increasing the returns to labour, by rooting out corporate welfare, and by allowing genuine competition to bring down the cost and increase the quality of all sorts of goods and services some take for granted are best delivered by the state. In short that there need be no dichotomy between "social" and "economic" liberalism.

I don't quite know how I have managed to go through the last nearly forty years without seeing "Cathy Come Home" until tonight.

Especially with my interest in housing provision.

Have things improved? We've certainly demolished most of the women's hostels shown in the film. But what about absolute numbers in inadequate housing? The film quoted, I think, a million households in 1966. Government figures currently show just under a hundred thousand household accepted and in temporary accommodation.

But take Oxford. They are shown as supporting 742 households in temporary accommodation. But four thousand and more are on the housing register. So let's say there are nearly 600,000 households in inadequate accommodation. Then there's the estimate from Crisis a year or so ago, of the "hidden homeless" - those not on registers, "sofa surfing". They estimated another nearly 400,000 individuals.

As the last lines of the film said - "homelessness was seen as a temporary problem after the war, but the problem appears to be with us for the foreseeable future". Forty years on, it appears still to be a timely prophesy.

There used to be a rather insulting saying about PR systems that "if the Irish could understand it why shouldn't we". The Times' leader article today proves they still can't:

Vote of No Confidence -Times Online:

This is the nub of the issue. The current electoral system has the drawback of giving the largest single minority at Westminster an extremely large share of political power. Yet proportional representation would mean that much smaller minorities would wield undue influence, as without them it would not be possible to form a stable administration. Would this constitute progress?

It is not surprising, therefore, that the official Review of Voting Systems could not work up any enthusiasm for overhauling the current system. What is more intriguing is why the 110-page report has not seen the light of day until this morning. There has to be the suspicion that Labour, aware that at some point it might need the assistance of the Liberal Democrats to survive in office, is unwilling to offend its potential partners by publishing a document which is so damning of their pet project. Sustaining a dubious deal at a later date is surely the worst argument for PR.

Drawback? Drawback? It's a fecking democratic outrage, that's what it is! How can anyone vest so much power in an individual like a Blair, a Brown, a Cameron or, one day again, a Campbell on the mandate, at the last count, of just a quarter of the voting age population? It's almost as repugnant as that other scenario that sees a Chavez, Mugabe or Hussein elected on huge rigged votes. Come to think about it, even Mugabe is more sophisticated than that, allowing his opposition to win seats in parliament but reserving a presidential right to appoint as many more as will give him a decent majority (but then Blair had his peers I suppose, just to make sure). No, I take it back, Mugabe would just love the British system.

As to whether any particular form of PR would produce a situation in which "much smaller minorities would wield undue influence" that's so much tommy rot too. They cite Scotland's teething problems with PR, but it hasn't prevented a minority government being formed at Holyrood, and looking abroad, is Germany some unstable state? The Netherlands? Or that economic powerhouse of the EU, Ireland? Or any of the other big democracies that use fairer voting systems? Italy is corrupt from top to bottom it seems and Israel's very birth as a state almost made sure that certain minorities would hold undue influence.

Let's not forget that when "we" had the opportunity to sit down and draw up constitutions and electoral systems for two effectively new countries after the war, Japan and Germany, we didn't choose to foist our decrepit system on them, and look at how they have by and large shone since then.

But for me, the irony of this sort of whining from organs like the Times is that surely they would normally be crying out for less government. If PR delivers a legislature in which little can be done wouldn't that be a good thing, especially for lovers of the status quo? No more far reaching change wreaked by a minority party with a huge majority in the legislature and total control of the executive. A situation where all parties would need to agree in order to do anything significant - that's real democracy, surely.

For me, there is the tantalizing prospect, most of all, that we would see the bigger parties dissolve into their constituent parts - Cameron Tories and the Libertarian Right, Old and New Labour, Orange Liberals and Social Democrats and we would all get a chance to prioritize the traits we want in individual candidates. Of course I simply loathe Westminster and the overbearing presence it has in our lives, but for me, second only to dissolving Westminster and Whitehall altogether would be a system that makes it as hamstrung and impotent as possible, only able to do something when all our various persuasions of politicians actually agree on it.