mudhook

David B Smith, professor of business and economic forecasting at Derby University, has suggested that the national minimum wage should be revisited.

In an article for the Economic Research Council ‘Does Britain have regional justice or injustice in its government spending and taxation?’ he argues rightly that the economies of the regions of Britain differ and therefore the effect of the same government spending and taxes varies from region to region; and, contentiously, therefore that government interventions, including social benefits and the minimum wage, should vary to fit those differences.

The argument is that, for example, national-level unemployment benefits and welfare benefits in areas of high pay mean people are much better off in work than on those benefits; however, in regions with low pay those benefits may be a disincentive to work; indeed, government transfers of resources to less favoured regions may counterproductively discourage an enterprise culture. I think this is a telling argument and should be explored further.

However, I think it is not just a matter of regional economics; these are people’s lives and pricking the poor and ill to make them more economically productive is an ethically difficult project. There would have to be observable gains for individuals to make it acceptable. The effects of reduced benefits are likely to vary for individuals: for the able idle a cut might well get them into work. I am at a loss to see how a cut will encourage a drug addict or alcoholic out of his distress and into work; for him benefits are a response to his illness not a cause of it.

Smith also argues convincingly that the point at which the minimum wage is uneconomic, pricing out employment, varies from region to region. Those areas with high productivity and high living costs in relation to the average should get a higher minimum wage. And, conversely, the minimum wage should be cut in low pay, low productivity areas.

That means that in the southwest region, including Cornwall, the minimum wage should be cut.

At present the minimum wage is £5.35 an hour for an adult, say about £214 gross a week. I think knocking £15 a week off that in Cornwall and the southwest region is hardly likely to have any discernible effect on people’s behaviour except to make poor people poorer and heighten their perception of social injustice.

I agree there is a case for saying that in London, for example, the national minimum wage is too far low as it does not take into account the economic circumstances of life there; that is the regional injustice. Pay in many jobs already takes into account the noticeably higher cost of living in London. However, I disagree that the minimum wage should be cut from its present level anywhere. It is at a modest level and a cut would be a real-life injustice for working individuals.

I do not believe a modest minimum wage is in reality an economic monster. Yes, increases in it can have an effect on the viability of businesses and the ability of businesses to employ people. However, the government has been cautious and astute in increasing it and in consequence it has not so far damaged the economy. That is the way to go: affordable economic justice. There is also desirable social solidarity in a national minimum, the nation’s ad imissimum of earned wages. The early claims of Conservatives that it was an economic folly that would damage the economy and businesses and employment have proved unfounded and now the Conservative party support it, though that may be due to political realism as much as economic observation. Interestingly, the Liberal Democrats initially toyed with regional-level minimum wages rather than one of national uniform level.

Is anyone listening to Smith’s challenging arguments? The article ‘Gordon Brown to vary minimum wage over UK’ in the Sunday Telegraph for 22 July 2007 suggests that the Labour government is looking at regionalising the minimum wage, varying it from region to region or even locality to locality to reflect the realities of the local economy. That would be a major shift in economic and welfare policy. However, I think the title in the newspaper is bolder than the article which is somewhat indefinite.

It occurs to me that there is, of course, another possible and contentious change: the regionalisation of national pay rates, taking into account local pay in the private sector and the ease or difficulty of recruitment and retention of staff. The Cornishing of current national pay for professionals in, say, education, health, and local government would be downwards. Would it apply to Cornwall’s MPs?

See here for a post on average pay in Cornwall and (un)employment.

Andrew George, the Liberal Democrat MP for St Ives, Cornwall says in the Western Morning News for 26 July 2007: “The simple principle should be established that decisions which affect one community and no other should be taken in that community and not by others outside it.” He was responding to the news that the government has accepted Cornwall county council’s proposals for a unitary council.

On the face of it, most people would agree with this localism. Local people should decide local issues not people far away who are do not know at first hand the issue and do not have to live daily with the decision. Even the European Union believes, it says, in subsidiarity, the idea that a decision should be taken at the lowest possible level of relevance and competence. There’s even a saw about the principle: The wearer knows best where the shoe pinches.

There are, however, serious difficulties with the simple principle. Let me look at a few.

(1) It is difficult to identify items which affect only “one community and no other.” Issues and decisions tend to leak all over the place. One of the arguments against English votes for English affairs is that of interdependence and consequential effect. As Cornwall, even a devolved Cornwall, would not be self-financing, all local decisions in Cornwall depend upon money from other communities, a point made by some exasperated people in England about the spending decisions of the Barnett-financed devolved parliaments and assemblies in Scotland and Wales.

Who pays the bills for local decisions? Not the locality, most cannot afford it. In a way all decisions affect everyone because everyone pays. (Actually not every adult pays; some people receive but do not give.)

I suppose we are talking about not absolute independence but the degree of independence and the degree to which that the decision impacts upon the daily life a particular community rather than others.

Whether and where to build a car park or lavatory and what fees to charge are suitable for local decision; their impact is overwhelmingly upon the local community (and its visitors) hardly at all on people many miles away. The cost is relatively modest.

However, building a school involves significant money in land and building costs and subsequent running costs and well-educated children matter to us all. Others will therefore have an interest.

(2) I think that by and large local people or local councils do not take as broad and long a view as people, like central government, who are immersed in complex interdependent decisions and who usually work on broadly benthamite principles. Local decisions are about the immediate practical issues and effects not universal principles, all trees and no wood.

Despite the chatter about community the localist emphasis is often on me rather than us. Local decisions are not likely to be so liberal as centralised decisions: read this depressing account of the response of the locality to the most deserving and respectable of people. Ask would any affordable housing for first-time buyers get built in Cornwall if people in the locality made the decision and there was no national insistence? What then are the prospects for any provision for the vulnerable and the socially difficult: how many rehabilative hostels would get permission if it depended solely upon locals and not national guidance? Where would one build the less desirable but wholly necessary facilities of life such as sewage works, incinerators, and factories if every local population everywhere had a veto?

(3) An aspect of (2) is what we have come to call the post code lottery: different quality of services in different areas, even some areas lacking the services provided in others, all on the irrational basis of human geography. Nothing about need, only the dictate of the most assertive and demanding of local opinions and local elbows. The sharp elbow model of redistribution, a model which in many places gives very little to a whole galaxy of people - single mothers, aspirant first time house buyers looking for affordable housing, and people living untidy lives.

If locals in Cornwall decided what priority of health money and treatment should be given to people, would not those with locally out-of-favour illnesses get little? In Cornwall with a larger than average proportion of pensioners how would HIV and alcoholism and drug addiction fare against arthritis and mobility problems? The national service sets national rules which try to ensure a reasonably fair shot for everyone.

(4) Of course by localism politicians often mean not the affected immediate locality and its inhabitants taking decisions but a broader community: the district or the county or even region rather than the hamlet. In Cornwall it might turn out to be people of Wadebridge and Bodmin deciding what happens in Penzance and Camborne, or vice versa, though this is an outcome Andrew George opposes.

(5) Localism also tends in practice to mean not decisions by the people but by their claimed representatives. And this in turn means a well-organised group can unduly influence council decisions; the ideal picture is of a community coming together to decide what it wants and in what order. In reality localism can be government by the noisy and those sharp elbows, the prejudices and preferences of local people who are assertive and articulate, rather than by the people though that applies to national government too.

A simple principle? No, it isn’t.

Additamentum 1 August 2007 Permission for the service forces accommodation at Ashtead was unanimously given by councillors today.

See also this later post: If you can’t do it right, make it shiny

The government has decided that Cornwall will have a unitary council.

As I have pointed out in several posts a large majority of people in Cornwall who voted were against the unitary proposals of the county council. Whatever one thinks about how local government in Cornwall should be reorganised, this government decision is impossible to reconcile with the expressed views of people here. It is impossible to reconcile with the government’s own requirement for unitary proposals to succeed as set out in its letter to local authorities of 26 October 2006: “it will be necessary for any proposal to have support from a range of key partners, stakeholders and service users/citizens” (paragraph 3.5). Well, 81 percent of citizens voting against in the district polls is not support. In its approval statement of several unitary proposals the government referred to promised savings and they presumably outweighed any votes. In truth, the government conducted the reorganisation project on the basis of consulting the providers and only nodded unconvincingly to the users, the people, thus abandoning the Thatcher principle of the customer matters.

The government has treated local people with contempt, as people whose views are irrelevant and can be disregarded. This is likely to further alienate some people in Cornwall from government and politics. Why vote, the government always wins; why vote, if most votes are ignored?

The reorganisation of local government in Cornwall is not urgent. It is one of those issues where a big conversation between government and people is appropriate, where government should take time to try to convince people of the sense of a unitary council if they believe that council is the best way forward, take time to talk to people and listen to people, and take time to explore all the arguments. To ride roughshod over people’s views after a few weeks, however much the government may think those views uninformed or unwise, is not going to persuade people that democracy is flourishing. The new council will begin overshadowed by a lack of democratic legitimacy. It is not the people’s choice.

A new report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), Poverty, wealth and place in Britain 1968-2005, has looked at patterns of inequalities across Britain over those years.

The report identifies four classes of households: Core poverty households; Breadline poverty households which include the core poverty households; average households, neither poor nor wealthy; Asset wealthy households which include the exclusively wealthy households; and Exclusively wealthy households.

The poverty and wealth data from SASI for the report can be seen here; the data also enables us to see how Cornwall fares compared with other places. There are 641 parliamentary constituencies analysed for the JRF report. For example, these are the rank positions for the Cornwall constituencies in the year 2000 in terms of core poverty, where the lower the number, the worst the poverty:

St Ives 294th out of 641

Falmouth and Camborne 299th

North Cornwall 367th

Truro and St Austell 396th

South East Cornwall 403rd.

The ranks for breadline poverty are similar.

What do these figures suggest? That Cornwall is not at the bottom of the poverty league in Britain; that there are around two to three hundred constituencies which are ranked poorer. This supports the findings from other surveys which I have discussed in these posts:

Free school meals

Is Cornwall poor

Victim Cornwall

and Suffering Cornwall.

The evidence from all these surveys suggests that there is both wealth and poverty in Cornwall, these are spread unevenly around the county so that generalisations about Cornwall are of limited use, most people in Cornwall are not poor or deprived, and no part of Cornwall is the worst place for poverty and deprivation in England. However, the large economic measures of GVA and GDP for the county are well below the England and EU averages though improving, and pay for many is low but house prices are high.

The Cornwall constituencies fare noticeably well in the JRF wealthy categories because of the value of houses in Cornwall.

Incidentally, in view of the recent comments on Islington and education spending by the Libdems, note that the two Islington constituencies ranked 17th and 21st in the core poverty league, very much worse than the Cornwall constituencies.

Did modern humans - that’s you and me - originate in a single place in Africa or were there several originating places? Paleoanthropologists have not been of one mind about this. However, the latest research points unequivocably to a single African origin for all of us. Read the letter in Nature from Andrea Mandica et al here. There is a Reuters report here too.

Whatever miniscule and irrelevant genetic differences nationalists cry up, English people and Cornish people all come from the same place and the same people in Africa. All humans are the same people.

[‘The effect of ancient population bottlenecks on human phenotypic variation,’ a letter from Andrea MANICA et al in Nature 19 July 2007, volume 448, pages 346-348.]

I shall update this post from time to time. The original post was dated 23 January 2007.

Cornish nationalists use petitions to promote their views on the political status of Cornwall and Cornish ethnicity. Here I shall try to keep an eye on what they are signing up to on the web, along with other petitions about Cornwall. Unless stated otherwise, these petitions are on the pm website. The website does not say which signatories live in Cornwall.

There are today about 410 000 adults in Cornwall.

It looks as though most online petitions about Cornish political issues do not attract many signatures and none, so far, have got more than a thousand (about 0.25 percent of the adult population of Cornwall). As a means of rallying and demonstrating support these online petitions are failures.

Ended petitions

Cornwall, the fourth nation
A petition, which ended on 20 January 2007, called for the recognition of Cornwall as the “fourth nation of Great Britain.” It got seventy three signatures, about eleven percent of them women (based on forenames).

Cornwall separate
When it ended on 15 February 2007 a petition which said the duchy of Cornwall should be “a separate state within the UK” had attracted 276 signatures, of which about a fifth are from women judging by the forenames.

Stop building unaffordable housing in Cornwall and elsewhere
This petition ended on 30 April 2007 with thirty five signatures.

Determine own government
The petition called for Cornwall to determine its own future government and ended 5 June 2007. There were eight signatures on closure.

Extant petitions
The number of signatures in mid-April, three months ago, are in parentheses.

Independent Cornwall
A petition ending on 8 January 2008 calls for “the Celtic nation of Cornwall” to be granted “independence.” On 19 July 2007 it had fifty nine signatures (50).

2011 census
On the pledgebank website there is a petition which began on 15 January 2007 and ends in 2011 saying that unless there is a tick box for Cornish ethnicity on the 2011 census the signatories will no complete the census form. The signatories’ pledge is conditional on another one thousand people signing up. At 19 July 2007 there were 393 signatories (255).

Deliberately not completing a census form is an offence here under the Census Act 1920, section 8 (1).

1549
There is a petition asking for the 1549 uprising, which the petition calls the “Cornish genocide,” to be recognised. It ends on 1 February 2008 and on 19 July 2007 it had forty six signatures (37).

5 March Bank holiday
A petition to make St Piran’s Day, 5 March, a bank holiday had 849 signatures on 19 July 2007 (762). It ends 30 January 2008.

Assembly
On the petitiononline website there is an undated petition calling for a vote in Cornwall about establishing a Cornish Assembly. At 19 July 2007 it had 931 signatures (890) and a random look in March suggested that about two-fifths of the signatories were not electors in Cornwall.

Keep and restore full facilities at Penzance and Hayle hospitals
This petition, which ends on 19 January 2008, had 213 signatures at 15 June 2007 (206).

Allow Cornwall to be known as a duchy not a county of England
This had fifteen signatures on 19 July 2007 (11), and ends on 9 August 2007.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
By way of contrast the following crossparty petition signed by more than 38 600 people was presented to the House of Commons on 29 November 2006 by Andrew George, the MP for St Ives:
“The People of West Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly declare our support for the cross-party (and non-party political) campaign to oppose any plans to reduce or close hospital services at St Michael’s or Penzance; express our dismay that NHS money is being used to build up and support private hospitals while the Trust is contemplating the closure of the excellent St Michael’s Hospital; object to the waste of money on administrative gimmicks rather than frontline public services; demand an Independent Review of hospital services and for fair funding; support an increase in emergency as well as acute and diagnostic services in the West of Cornwall” (Hansard 29 November 2006 column 1184).

Perhaps we can see in the difference in the number of signatures, making every allowance for the different circumstances of collection, a comment on what the people of Cornwall are really interested in. Perhaps petitions with signatures collected on the street and so forth get a larger number of backers - though a few petitions on the website have thousands of supporters.

Incidentally, a petition to keep Cornwall “as part of England” had at closure on 24 March 2007 forty signatures.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________
I looked at five of the nationalist petitions which together had 360 signatories at the time. Some people are legitimately signing more than one petition; judging by identicality of names forty seven people have done this, making up between them 113 signings.

Remember the post on the different takes between Andrew George, Liberal Democrat MP for St Ives, and Ann James of the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Primary Care Trust (CIOSPCT) on trusts’ intentions about the future of West Cornwall hospital at Penzance?

The CIOSPCT and the Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust have now published their plans for West Cornwall hospital: they include an A and E department led by a doctor not a nurse, the continuation of a high dependency unit, a CT scanner in early 2008, more outpatient services, and new specialist sugeons. All of this is good news for people in west Cornwall.

Now we know who is right in the dispute. Game, set, and match to Ann James.

Andrew George, the Liberal Democrat MP for St Ives and the Scillies, has been criticised recently for continuing to support a unitary council though 89 percent of people in Penwith (basically the mainland part of the constituency) opposed the proposals in a council poll. The latest salvo is a letter in this week’s Cornishman from a Penwith district councillor describing his view that a unitary council would (or is it could) be functionally equivalent to a devolved Cornish Assembly as “utter rubbish.” That is too harsh. As I have explained, the unitary Libdems believe a unitary council could gain extra powers; there is nothing that I would call evidence that backs their view, the government has not come out and said aloud that extra powers are on offer, and the Mebyon Kernow party has produced evidence that they are not; but the Libdem view - hope, plan - is not irrational. See this post from March.

The government will shortly accept or reject the unitary proposals. If it accepts them, we shall then see who is right about drawing down extra powers; if it rejects them, we shall presumably never know.

There is another dispute. George has challenged the optimism of hospital campaigners about the soon-to-be-published plans for West Cornwall hospital in Penzance and he fears that there are plans afoot for “the most significant single downgrading” of the hospital and that claims of victory in a campaign to protect the services of the hospital are premature. He details his concerns: see here. His concerns appear to be shared by a leader of West Cornwall Healthwatch, a local lobby.

A statement from the chief executive of Cornwall primary care trust, Ann James, criticises him very strongly indeed. She says, “Mr George’s suggestion that we will let down our local communities is completely unfounded. Once again, rather than speaking to us directly about his concerns, Mr George has chosen to go to the media about a meeting he did not actually attend and which he has reported on totally inaccurately. We believe this is at best irresponsible.”

“Totally inaccurately” and “irresponsible” are vigorous charges. When the trust puts out the details of its proposals for West Cornwall hospital next week we shall be better able to judge who is right.

So there are two local items awaiting imminent resolution and the MP has taken a decided and contested view on both.

The results of the consultation with people in Cornwall through leaflet and questionnaire by Cornwall county council are now available in a report by PFA, Bodmin on the county council website.

There were 665 unique responses but the leaflet was not delivered to some areas.

The report begins with a warning: “the many and varied responses received on the questionnaire are open to subjective interpretation.” As I explained in this post, perhaps that is what the county council wanted in choosing this sort of consultation rather than a straightforward yes/no vote on their proposals. However, PFA have helpfully produced quantified answers.

On the first question about support for a unitary council if it is financially sound, 49 percent said No and 34 percent said Yes. On the other two questions about more local decision making there were comfortable majorities in support.

Thus, most people – well, 49 percent – opposed the unitary council proposals or the principle of a unitary council.

In its response to the report Cornwall county council does not mention the 49 percent of opponents though it does reproduce the figures, more comfortable for it, of the other two questions.

This isn’t a response; it is the politics of an ostrich.

The county council has put up another response to the unitary issue on its website, a leaflet called Towards one Cornwall . Here it is casually dismissive of the
71 000 people in Cornwall who voted in the district polls. It does not, of course, mention the 49 percent opposed to the unitary council in its own survey; rather it says “the vast majority of people have been confused by the conflicting messages” about the unitary council. Oh come now, voters are well used to conflicting messages in any election and well able to make up their minds. I do not believe the county council would be talking condescendingly like this if the majority had supported the proposals. Perhaps we see here a new Liberal Democrat approach: an end to all elections because the voters get confused.

Of the 81 percent vote in the district polls against the unitary proposals, the county council says it “carefully considered” it and then dismisses it as insignificant. This is shameful.

It really isn’t worth spending any more time on Cornwall county council. It has thoroughly discredited itself through the high-handed way it has handled the unitary issue and the Liberal Democrat party finds itself seriously tainted by all this.

This is an extraordinary account about an attempt to arrange a civil partnership ceremony in Cornwall. The registration service should investigate and publicly explain. In the meantime I wish the couple well.

click here