mudhook

In 1980 the Thatcher government broke the link between the state retirement pension and earnings and since then the pension has been uprated by the rate of inflation. Overall earnings generally run ahead of inflation and, although the Labour government has redistributed millions of pounds to targeted pensioners, the state pension is now worth less than if it had remained linked to earnings.

How much less?

A parliamentary answer says about £43 a week less.

The average state pension is now £97 and week and had it remained linked to earnings would be £140 a week. The current pension is 44 percent less than it would have been. The details are at Hansard for 16 June 2008 column 742W.

Cornwall has a disproportionate number of pensioners many of whom - but not all of course - have only or are primarily dependent upon a state pension.

Labour aims to restore the link in the next parliament and by 2012 if possible. I am unsure whether the Conservatives, the current favourites to form the next government, have signed up to this. It would be a handbrake turn for them.

Nor do I know why Labour in Cornwall isn’t shouting all this from the rooftops.

As we glide effortlessly into the unitary set up, let me recall the present political disposition of Cornwall.

In 2005 there were elections for the eighty two county council seats and a general election for the five seats; in 2007 there were elections for the six district councils, elections for the whole council in five of the districts and for a third in Penwith. The results of these give us the present party make-up of Cornwall.

Overall nearly 800 000 votes were cast in the three sets of elections. Here they are in percentages:

General election 2005
Liberal Democrats 44.4, Conservatives 31.8, Labour 15.9, UKIP 5, MK 1.4, Greens 0.7, all others 0.9

County council elections 2005
Liberal Democrats 39.2, Conservatives 24.1, Independents 19.5, Labour 10.5, MK 3.2, Greens 1.3, UKIP 1.1, all others 1.1

District elections 2007
Liberal Democrats 36.1, Conservatives 30.7, Independents 20.0, MK 3.9, Labour 3.5, UKIP 2.5, Greens 0.7, all others 2.6.

There are caveats.

These figures do not compare the same seats over time but different seats. The aim is to give a general county snapshot using the latest figures available in the three sets.

In the county and district elections some seats had more than one councillor elected and so people had more than one vote. The percentages are based on totals of votes not ballot papers. The “others” include unlabelled candidates, Liberals (a separate party from Liberal Democrats), two BNP candidates, and Veritas. Uncontested seats are excluded.

The votes cast for a party depend in part on how many candidates stand for that party though how many candidates a party puts up reflects its organisational and membership health and its estimate of its chances.

The parties perform differently in the seats and these overall figures, which represent general averages of real votes, do not reveal those differences. A couple of very popular candidates do wonders for a small party’s total vote and percentage and make it difficult to assess that party’s general standing with the electorate. These considerations suggest that in local elections at any rate some people do not vote only for a party.

The general election throws up very different results so here are the two local government sets in percentages of votes cast, county 2005 and districts 2007, more than half a million votes:

Liberal Democrats 37.9, Conservatives 26.9, Independents 19.7, Labour 7.5, MK 3.5, UKIP 1.7, Greens 1.1, Others 1.7.

Finally, these figures are about people’s choices. Seats won are a different matter, about power.

The next elections are in spring 2009 for the unitary council.

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Bewildered in the maze of schools: Alexander Pope (1688-1744) An essay on criticism

People in Scotland are getting for free a range of public services that people in England are charged for. In England prescription charges are presently £6.85 an item and only off-peak buses are free for people over sixty. In Scotland there are free eye check ups, free dental check ups, and the arrangements for free bus travel for the elderly are more generous. Tuition fees are paid by students at university in England but Scottish students at university in Scotland do not pay them (though there is in Scotland a one-off flatrate graduate fee of about £2300 payable on graduation). In Scotland there are generally shorter NHS waiting list times and smaller school classes; some drugs are available on the NHS that are not available in England; the arrangements for personal and nursing care are more generous.

The Scottish government has just started a six month pilot of free school meals in some areas for pupils aged five to eight and hopes to extend it all over Scotland. It has also announced that prescription charges will be abolished for everyone within the lifetime of the present Scottish parliament and aims to abolish the university graduate fee.

I don’t live in Scotland and it is up to people there and their government to decide what happens in Scotland.

However, these improvements are possible because the Barnett formula gives a much higher percapita amount of UK identifiable government spending on public services in Scotland than in England. The formula, leading to the higher spending in Scotland and the free or more generous services, is increasingly seen as unfair to England. For 2005/06 the percapita public spending in England (including Cornwall) was £6762 and in Scotland £8265 (and in Northern Ireland £9088, and Wales £7666). This formula is unfair and untenable. It should be scrapped and a new arrangement made for spending UK taxes in the four constituent countries.

For Labour, with a majority of the Scotland seats in the UK parliament and dependent on Scotland for its UK majority, this is an issue they will not tackle; nor will they tackle the related issue of MPs for Scotland constituencies voting for England-only issues in the House of Commons. The Conservatives sometimes rumble about Barnett unfairness but seem undecided whether to commit to tackle it. It is noticeable that the Liberal Democrat MPs for Cornwall complain about what they see as unfair public spending in Cornwall, point to the UK government, but do not mention the Barnett formula.

Slowly people in England are realising the unfairness of the present formula and the present House of Commons voting arrangements and eventually parties will not be able to ignore them.

The Times on 11 October 2007 quoted figures from the Centre for Economic Business Research that showed state spending by the constituent UK countries as a proportion of economic activity was lowest in England and significantly higher in the other three countries.

An earlier post on the Barnett formula is here.

Conservatives in the North Cornwall constituency have chosen an “open primary” meeting as the way to select their prospective parliamentary candidate. See here.

Three candidates have been selected by the usual party method and from these the parliamentary candidate will be chosen. As I understand it, any voter, whatever their own politics, in North Cornwall can pre-register with the North Cornwall Conservatives and then go to the meeting on 9 July and vote for their preferred Conservative candidate.

This open primary method potentially involves a wider public than just Tory party members and participation, or the possibility of it, may well encourage them to vote in a general election for the Conservative. Of course, people who do not support the Conservatives can presumably attend the meeting and vote for the candidate they think most likely to lose in a general election or the candidate nearest to their own non-Tory views. However, all the candidates are pre-selected by the party so there is a safety net for the party.

This open primary meeting, common in America, is a bold step by the Conservatives. They are pushing the frontiers of democracy forward and making the routine, closed methods of selection by other parties (and other Conservative parties) look old-hat and unacceptably exclusionary. It will be interesting to see how this works out and how many people who are not members attend but I, an enemy of Conservatism, admire their radicalism here and wish them well with their open primary meeting. They are, I hope, showing us the future of selection meetings.

At this point I should also say I think Gordon Brown’s reaching out to those outside the Labour party is a welcome inclusionary step. Democracy is growing up.