The House of Lords

The House of Lords has voted to reject George Osborne's proposed ending of tax credits. Osborne has, in response, promised to look again at the policy but at the same time has fired a clear warning shot in insisting that the Lords have acted unconstitutionally. They will, he has just said, 'be dealt with'.

But who is behaving unconstitutionally in this situation? There have been conventional limits to the House of Lords' actions, but in this instance, I think, they have behaved quite properly. Because here's what the Government could have done:

1. Put the axing of Tax Credits in their election Manifesto

There is a constitutional principle called the Salisbury Convention which states that Bills voted through by the Commons which were mentioned in the governing party's manifesto cannot be struck down. But the Government did not do this. There is no hint that tax credits were to be abolished in the manifesto. Indeed there are two mentions of these tax credits ('the tax credits that top up low wages' it boasts, p. 30); both of these references in the context of denying them to migrants, which plainly implies that they are to be continued for everyone else.

2. Not actually promise to keep them during the election campaign

In fact, David Cameron went further. On the BBC Question Time leaders debate on 30 April 2015, David Cameron was asked by an audience member if he would cut child tax credits and he replied:

No, I don’t want to do that – this report that was out today is something I rejected at the time as prime minister and I reject it again today

David Dimbleby reiterates: 'clearly there are some people who are worried that you have a plan to cut child credit and tax credits. Are you saying absolutely as a guarantee it will never happen?' Cameron tries to parry this by insisting that the Coalition have increased child tax credit, but Dimbleby presses him: 'And it’s not going to fall?' Cameron's answer is unequivocal:

It's not going to fall.

The context for this exchange was that the Government did announce that they were going to make £12bn of welfare cuts, but they refused to be led on what they were. The Liberal Democrats, who had stopped them cutting these tax credits before, knew this was potentially on the table and tried to force the Government to admit what it was up to. Hence these questions. But it's clear: Cameron explicitly denied he would cut Child tax credits. This was exactly what they didn't want to pledge but it explains Osborne's policy which cuts working tax credits while limiting child tax credits for new claimants. It observes the letter, though not the spirit, of Cameron's pledge.

3. Cut tax credits as part of the Budget

Since the Parliament Act 1911 (following the battles over the 'People's Budget' in 1909-10), the principle has been established that the Lords will not vote down Finance Bills. If Osborne had included the cut to tax credits explicitly as part of the Budget, it would indeed have been constitutionally very difficult for the Lords to reject it. But he didn't. Now he's trying to claim that cutting tax credits was financial legislation and therefore should not have been opposed. But that's absurd: almost all parliamentary bills have some financial ramifications. To claim that bills with financial aspects cannot be opposed would be to say the Lords can't amend anything. But why did Osborne not put them into the budget? Because he knew how much scrutiny a Budget gets. There's a substantial debate, covered live on the broadcast media, pages and pages of analysis. It would - quickly and publicly - be seen for the highly controversial policy that it is.

4. Cut tax credits as part of a Bill

So, this is complicated. What the Lords were voting on was not a Bill. There was no Tax Credits Bill 2015 before them. What they were voting on was a 'statutory instrument', a kind of secondary piece of legislation. The Tax Credits Act 2012 establishes powers for a Government to amend bands and levels of the tax credits, without the need to create a separate Bill. When they want to amend tax credits, the earlier legislation allows them to create a simpler 'statutory instrument' which is then voted on in the Commons and Lords. It's significant because statutory instruments are intended to be minor, technical amendments; they get much less parliamentary time for debate, because, it is imagined, they would usually be waved through.

But the abolition of tax credits is no minor, technical thing. The Child Poverty Action Group has produced a study of what these cuts will means for a range of families and incomes. A farm worker on £20,906 will lose £2,247.62 in 2016/17; a childminder on £16,779 will lose £1,958.73. A library clerk on £18,524 will lose £2,080.88. And so it goes on. Overall, the Group calculate that 3.2 million low-paid workers will lose an average of £1,350 a year. These are not technicalities; this is the forcing of millions of people further into poverty. If the abolition of tax credits had been introduced as a Bill, there would have been more parliamentary time to air these concerns, to bring out fully to horror of what George Osborne is trying to unleash.

***

There's a pattern here. What we notice in each of these instances is a Government is trying to introduce a policy with the minimum public scrutiny, almost in secret. They didn't mention it in their manifesto; they brushed over it in the election campaign; it wasn't made explicit in the Budget; it was rushed through parliament. This is a Government with the thinnest mandate: less than a quarter of the electorate voted Tory. They need to win the argument; persuade people; take people with them. If they had presented the policy honestly and won the argument, the Lords would have been hard-pressed to defeat it. But instead the Tories tried to sneak their cruellest legislation through, using technicalities, threats and three-line whips. They hoped we would find tax credits so confusing that we would hesitate.

There are plenty of things wrong with the House of Lords, but, for now, they have performed a valuable service in putting this covert and deceitful policy right in the glare of public attention. They are quite right to have opposed it.

French Without Tears

So I've been writing about Terence Rattigan's plays for twenty-five years now and what I love is that he still has the capacity to surprise me. There are plays of his that I would rank among the finest plays of the last century and it would be fair to say that he wrote some plays I don't care for at all. I'll be very honest and tell you that I've always secretly thought French Without Tears to be a very interesting play but one that was rather dated and probably not actually very funny.

I am so wrong. Paul Miller's revival of the play at the Orange Tree is deliriously funny from beginning to end and achieves this not by imposing anything on Rattigan's words but simply - as all the good productions of the last 25 years have done - by stripping away the period trappings, keeping only what is necessary for the play to make sense, and finding in its rhythms and beautiful observations of character and language what is true and telling. And what emerges from this fresh, vigorous, pacy production is a very, very funny play indeed. Funny from the opening lines to the very last with constant genuine great gags throughout. Rattigan shuffles all his characters, putting them in every possible combination to wring every last drop of laughter from them. Miller and his young cast do not miss a note - the play is just a riot.

If you don't know it - and why should you? - the play is set in France in the home of Monsieur Maingot, to which a group of Englishmen have been sent in order to be taught French. The problem, if it is a problem, is Diana, the sister of one of the younger men. She is, as one character puts it, 'rather fast'. She's a promiscuous man-eater and the men are terrified of her to the same extent that they desire her. She begins the play attached to Kit but when Commander Rogers arrives she decides she must have him too. When confronted, she admits or pretends - we can't tell - that it's always been Alan she wants. The play ends with Diana threatening to go back to London, in pursuit of Alan who has decided to throw away a potential career in the Diplomatic Service in favour of becoming a writer (this was indeed Rattigan's own wish).

The play shows Rattigan's theatrical influences; there are Chekhovian moments (as the characters imagine what the world a hundred years hence will think of them) and there are frankly Zolian moments too (as they speculate on whether human beings are really just animals). There are moments of great farce but there are also moments of real tenderness, particularly around the character of Jacqueline, M Maingot's daughter who is, for much of the play, silently in love with Kit. You sense, even here, a playwright exploring his own talents, roaming the stage finding unexpected depths, moments of sudden intensity and feeling.

The Orange Tree turns out to be the perfect place for French Without Tears, for three reasons. First, it's a very intimate space, which gives the actors a chance to play the scenes lightly and quickly. Second, it's in the round, so nothing needs to be cheated out front and the playing can be truthful and intelligent. And third, because we surround the action, the theatre becomes a pressure cooker in which the pattern of tension and laughter is explosive; last night the theatre boomed with laughter all the way through.

And there's something else interesting about this production. Paul Miller has directed the play before, for English Touring Theatre, in 2007, which I saw on tour when it came to the Richmond Theatre, just round the corner from the Orange Tree. It was a terrific production, robust but fluent. In that larger theatre, though, its energy seemed harder to maintain; it was always at risk of dissipating. Here the humour catches light but what also became much clearer and sharper was Rattigan's careful exploration of male sexuality and, in particular, the way the heterosexuality of these characters shade into homosociality or something even more profoundly homosexual. It is, without effort, a very queer play.

Aficionados of classic-era Doctor Who will remember the great scene from The Ribos Operation in which a space traveller called Unstoffe is thrown together with the disgraced heretic Binro. Binro was once a scientist who believed that the planet of Ribos revolved around the sun, which produced its long seasons of Ice Time and Sun Time, and that the stars were not ice crystals but suns around which revolved other planets. For his pains, he was punished and his hands were broken. When Unstoffe tells him that he is from one of those other worlds and that Binro is right in all he has said, Binro is able to die happy. In 1994, I wrote my introduction to the Nick Hern Books edition of the play and, reading it then, I was very struck by the patterning of camp humour, transvestism, gender confusions and general queerness, as well as the very witty observation of male fears of desire. They formed the basis for my analysis. To be honest, I am not sure if I thought this was a performable interpretation or merely a textual one. A month ago, as I revisited my argument to write a short article for the Orange Tree's programme, I was genuinely unsure whether maybe I'd just misread the play. Tonight I feel a bit like Binro the Heretic to discover that I was right. French Without Tears is one of the great queer plays of the twentieth century wrapped up in one of the great comedies of the twentieth century.

Miller has emphasised these elements with great subtlety and discretion. The transvestism of the Casino night (either side of the interval) is given full absurd value; Alan and Kit's confusions about sexuality, particularly in Alan's description of the perfect woman ('she will have all of the masculine virtues and none of the feminine vices') are allowed to resonate, and Kenneth Lake, Diana's younger brother, is allowed to have a sweet, moving, unacknowledged crush on Alan through the length of the play. The cast are mostly pretty new to the stage. but they create an immaculately balanced structure: the mild hysteria of Alex Bhat's sardonic Alan is countered by Williams Belchambers's Commander Rogers, calm and mature, with a hint of the juvenile. Joe Eyre' Kit Neilan is a high-intensity performance, as he whirls ever more in the paradoxes of love with style, which contrasts with Tom Hanson's Brian Curtis, all affable cynicism and relentlessly unaccented French. Diana Lake is, in some ways, a rather unforgiving part; she's less fully written than the men, but Genevieve Gaunt (pictured) fills her out, flirtatious, elegant, cheeky, and clearly smarter than all the men put together. Gaunt's confidence with the role released the humour in the play's most basic mechanisms. By the end she could just enter the room at the right time to get a laugh. And just when you might think the play's lightness could pall, Sarah Winter's Jacqueline created an intensity of emotion that gave the whole play and production heart. 

Binro the Heretic was played by Timothy Bateson who had the distinction of being the first Lucky in Waiting for Godot on the British stage, taking the role at the Arts Theatre in 1955, in the production directed by Peter Hall, one of the productions that announced the change in British theatrical fashions that made Rattigan seem old-fashioned. Now we know how to get rid of any old-fashioned taint to Rattigan's work: treat his plays as serious proper plays with persistent and sophisticated things to tell us about who we are. This is the best Rattigan production I've seen since the National's After the Dance. It's staggeringly good. It's riotously funny. Eighty years later, Rattigan's first big hit is a hit again.

Budgetary Responsibility

What does ideology mean? Confusingly, it has two connected but distinct meanings. First, it means a structured and coherent set of political ideas. Using this definition we might talk about a Marxist ideology or about ideological Euroscepticism or indeed liberal ideology. We might talk about classic ideological conflicts between Left and Right. 

But there's a second sense in which the word is used, which means something like passing off your own political idea as not a political idea at all. Let's call the first sense 'ideology' and the second 'ideology'. In this second sense, ideology is precisely managing to give the impression that you don't have an ideology. Everyone else has an ideology, not me. I'm just speaking plain old-fashioned common sense; I'm accepting the centre ground; I'm just saying what you're thinking.

According to ideology, ideology is a bad word. It suggests dogmatic adherence to a possibly extreme set of ideas; it sounds unpragmatic and inflexible. And this is probably now the main  usage of the term ideology; it's what other people have. Tony Blair famously presented himself as a non-ideological politician. David Cameron, as the authors of a recent book have suggested, describes himself and is described as a 'non-ideological, practical, "whatever works" type of politician'. As Terry Eagleton put it, people are unlikely to describe their own ideas as ideological in the same way that one tends not to refer to oneself as 'fatso'. To have an ideology is to deny that you have an ideology.

But this is disingenuous. For two reasons: first, everyone is ideological, a bit. Ideology is not an extreme thing; a commitment to free speech is an ideological position, albeit, in this country, not a very extreme one. Just because you may take your policies from various points on the political spectrum - as Blair and Cameron have both done - doesn't stop you having an ideological framework in which these all make sense; second, ideology is a kind of self-denying mask, behind which may indeed lurk an extreme political attitude. Blair was pretty centrist on many things but beneath the guise of his ordinary-bloke pragmatism he introduced some fairly left-wing things, like the minimum wage. And David Cameron presides over the most economically right-wing government we've ever had. He and Osborne are children of Thatcher. They see themselves as completing her project - and by that I mean, they are trying to do all of the things that even Thatcher thought were too extreme for the 1980s, like demolishing the BBC for instance and privatising the NHS. They are, by action if not conviction, far more right-wing than she was. And yet their political stance presents itself - daringly! astonishingly! - as centrist, as non-ideological.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the current scrap over the Charter for Budget Responsibility. This document was produced a year ago, alongside the Chancellor's autumn statement.

Not many people seem to have bothered to read the Charter but, friends, I went into that jungle and I'm here to tell you what it says:

• It sets out a 'fiscal policy framework'.
  • it sets out some bland objectives to 'ensure sustainable public finances' and 'support and improve the effectiveness of monetary policy' *[3.1]
  • It says how this will happen - and this involves such extraordinary innovations as
    • setting a Budget each year [3.6]
    • taking advice from experts (Office of Budgetary Responsibility [OBR]) [3.7]
    • indicating targets for the future [3.15]
• It then sets out in a bit more detail how the OBR will operate

And that's it. Also it's pointless, for four reasons:

1. The Charter, even if it is adopted into law, can be amended [1.4]. Section 1(4) of the Budget Responsibility and National Audit Act (2011), which brought the Charter into being, says you can amend the Charter, provided that amendments are published in good time and voted on in Parliament. So quite rightly it's not a permanently binding document. Of course it isn't.
2. Its rules, even the specific ones set out below, are only deemed to operate 'under normal circumstances' [2.3]. What are 'normal circumstances'? The document does not say and obviously any Chancellor who wants to break these rules will be able to find some evidence of abnormality to justify a change of policy.
3. What happens if you miss your targets? You have to explain yourself to Parliament [3.30], just as the Chancellor has to do every year anyway. There are no sanctions, no real consequences to the Charter being breached.
4. And while it does say that it needs to listen to the OBR, it also specifically notes that it can also ignore the OBR [3.7].

The Charter is basically a bit of clutter that gets in the way of the already-overcomplicated Treasury process and will no doubt be abolished within a decade or so.

But the bit that's caused all the furore comes in 3.2 & 3.4 which set out these specific aims:

a forward-looking aim to achieve cyclically-adjusted current balance by the end of the third year of the rolling, 5-year forecast period. [3.2]

[a] cap on welfare spending, at a level set out by the Treasury in the most recently published Budget report, over the rolling 5-year forecast period, to ensure that expenditure on welfare is contained within a predetermined ceiling. [3.4]** 

Now, first of all, remember the four reasons why this doesn't matter. But, yes, it does seem to try to lock a government into aiming for a balanced budget in the middle of the cycle. 

Well that sounds alright doesn't it? Deficits are clearly bad things. We need to live within our means! We need to balance the books!

Have you got an overdraft? Ever used it because you know you've got money coming in soon but need to spend money now?*** Yes, you have, cos that's what an overdraft is. And what you are doing there is running a deficit. Let's assume you're spending this money on fairly respectable things like shoes and food; you might well say you are investing in yourself to make you more able to earn more later on. In such circumstances, you are wisely going into deficit. So deficits are often perfectly fine.****

If the Government builds a bunch of hospitals, it may well go into deficit for a bit. But building a hospital has two great benefits: (a) the long-term benefit of being able to treat more sick people and make them better (which is good in itself but also releases them back into the economy) and (b) the medium-term benefit of giving salaries to hospital-builders who then spend their money, putting it into the economy to do more work and stimulate growth. It's a good thing to do in a recession, because it gets people off the dole (reducing government expenditure but also raising morale, improving health, etc.) and stimulates the economy. If you cut during a recession, you would expect to see the opposite: unemployment rising, low morale (hence things like riots), blossoming NHS waiting times, and low growth.

(Now where have I heard of that happening...?)

But this Charter is sort of trying to stop governments investing. This is because of the ideological commitment of the Chancellor to small government, even if it wrecks the economy (and, let us remember, we are precariously climbing out of recession, but its the slowest exit from a recession in recorded history).

But the key thing is the title: The Charter for Budget Responsibility. The title is what this whole stupid saga is about. It's all part of an ideological move to redescribe conservative economic ideology as nothing more than 'budgetary responsibility'. Who's in favour of budgetary irresponsibility? No one.***** It's redescribing the objectionable as the unobjectionable. It's the very definition of ideology.

And of course, because it's a George Osborne idea, it's nothing to do with running the country, it's a trap for the Labour Party. If they support budgetary responsibility they tie their hands and commit themselves to Tory policies. If they oppose it, they look like 'deficit deniers' (another wholly ideological phrase). It's the legal continuation of everything the Tories have said about Labour since 2010: that Labour can't be trusted on the economy because the huge national debt was run up by excessive welfare spending, which is such an obvious falsehood, I genuinely admire Tories who can make the claim without blushing.****** 

Labour have fallen into this trap a bit. So powerful has the Tory line about Labour and the economy that even a dyed-in-the-wool Keynesian like John McDonnell, thoroughly opposed to Osborne economics, made it his duty at the Labour Conference to come across as a boring, respectable, bank manager type and declared 'we accept we are going to have to live within our means' and that he would be supporting the Charter for Budgetary Responsibility. In the fortnight since then, he seems to have realised this is absurd and so, at a stormy meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party, he yesterday announced a reversal of policy.

Well, he could have managed that a bit better, but ultimately, of course, Labour should oppose it. How can the Labour Party sign up to something that is basically a declaration in favour of Tory economic policy? This is exactly the idiocy that had Labour MPs whipped into abstaining on the introduction of £12bn in welfare cuts this July, on the basis that it would make Labour look more fiscally responsible. No. Supporting Tory policies like this makes them look like they have no principles except the desire to get into power. Who wants to vote for that? It's quite right that Labour see this Charter for what it is: ideological warfare and nothing less.

The problem is that 'budgetary responsibility' means nothing without an ideology to support it. Osborn would like us all to think that welfare and investment are bad for the economy and this is his way of getting us to think that way. But it's not true. Welfare and investment are not bad for this economy. Its this economy that's bad for us.

---

NOTES (NOTES! ON A BLOG! MADNESS!)

* These are actually weasel words; specifying that 'the effectiveness of monetary policy' is a core aim is cheeky because, in this context, it reflects a view, prevalent on the right since the early 80s, that the best way of running a stable economy is simply by adjusting the money supply (that's what monetary policy is) and not through public investment, so it's implicitly marginalising public investment.
   Or, as John McDonnell has taken to calling it, 'people's quantitative easing' which is quite clever because 'quantitative easing' is an instrument of monetary policy (increasing the money supply). By rebranding public investment (building schools, hospitals, motorways, etc.) 'people's quantitative easing' McDonnell is trying to make a stimulus policy look like monetary policy, though it kind of doesn't work because people who don't know what quantitative easing means, don't get it, and people who do, see through it.

** Also, let's note that [3.25] the Government can annually adjust what it is including in its definition of Welfare. It's like me saying I have a predetermined cap of FIVE 'bezzie mates' and, if I make a new great friend, I can just demote someone else.

*** Having said that, comparisons between government and personal finances are always bullshit. I don't get tax income, governments do; I can't print money, governments can; my expenditure doesn't go up when people become sick or unemployed, government expenditure does.

**** A note just to clarify the difference between a debt and a deficit. With apologies to the note above, if I get a mortgage, I have taken on a debt. If I can make my regular mortgage payments, I'm fine. But if I fail to make those payments, I am in deficit. Debt is not a bad thing; most people could never buy a car or a house or go to university without it. Deficit is only a bad thing if you can into a spiral, as in the people who take out a pay-day loan to make a mortgage payment and then they can't pay off the payday loan and the situation just gets out of control. A Government like ours really is never going to get into that kind of spiral. Over the last 60 years, UK annual growth has averaged 2.48% which means that both deficits and debts have tended to diminish over time.

***** Okay, me, at the beginning of the month.

****** It's straight out of the Tony Blair playbook. If you remember, for a generation, the Tories had a terrible reputation on the economy, because of Black Wednesday, when sterling was bounced out of the ERM. New Labour pounced on this because they knew it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to challenge the Tories on the economy. And, look, I dislike the Tories as much as anyone, but actually coming out of the ERM was pretty swiftly rather good for the UK economy. Yet the mud stuck.

Privy

Jeremy Corbyn's been at it again, that security-threatening, terrorist-sympathising, Britain-hating ideologue. What's he done this time, Dan? He's insulted the Queen. He's rebuffed her invitation to join the Privy Council, the monarch's advisory body. He's snubbed her, as The Telegraph put it. Alan Duncan, MP and Privy Councillor since 2010 (pictured above in Privy Council fancy dress), puts it so well:

The Queen has always put herself above politics, but Jeremy Corbyn seems to want to put his politics above the Queen.

An anonymous member of the Council explained just how grave the situation is:

Firstly it is deeply insulting and secondly it is not grown up – not to go to see the monarch is just extraordinary [...] what this really means is that he is not prepared to put himself in the position of a serious leader who can be trusted.

It's astonishing! It's extraordinary! Nothing like this has happened before!

...Apart from on 19 September 2001, when Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith snubbed the Queen by not attending his first meeting of the Privy Council.

...Or 10 September 2002, when Michael Fallon, Minister for Business and Enterprise, and Justice Minister Damien Green both turned down their invitations to Privy Council.

...Or 15 December 2010 when Europe Minister David Lidington had apparently better things to do than show up and kiss hands.

...Or that infamous pair of vicious body-blows delivered by Deputy Chief Whip Sir John Randall against the person of Her Majesty when failed to attend Privy Council on 9 June and 21 July 2010. 

...Or the notorious incident on 9 June 2010, when Chris Grayling, Grant Shapps, Nick Herbert, and Theresa Villiers, Ministers for Work & Pensions, Communities, Justice, and Transport all rebuffed the Queen with a Privy Council no-show.

...Or indeed on 14 December 2005 and 14 February 2006, when a certain David Cameron twice snubbed the Privy Council.

There are around 600 Privy Councillors. Roughly a third of them did not attend the first meeting to which they were invited. Roughly 99% of them are absent at every meeting. The Privy Council is a daft historical relic. This is a non-story. Can we grow up please?

Tragedy

In his unctuous conference speech, David Cameron said this about Jeremy Corbyn:

Thousands of words have been written about the new Labour leader, but you only really need to know one thing: he thinks the death of Osama bin Laden was a 'tragedy'. No. A tragedy is nearly 3,000 people murdered one morning in New York. A tragedy is the mums and dads who never came home from work that day. A tragedy is people jumping from the towers after the planes hit. My friends – we cannot let that man inflict his security-threatening, terrorist-sympathising, Britain-hating ideology on the country we love.

Jeremy Corbyn thinks the death of Osama bin Laden was a tragedy? That sounds really bad. And indeed the same claim has been said repeatedly in the Tory press (for example here, here, and here). But what did he actually say? He was on Iran's Press TV and was asked what he thought about the shooting of Osama Bin Laden by US Navy Seals and this is what he said:

Well I think that everyone [accused of a crime] should be put on trial. I also profoundly disagree with the death penalty, under any circumstances for anybody. That’s my own view. On this there was no attempt whatsoever that I can see, to arrest him, to put him on trial, to go through that process. This was an assassination attempt, and is yet another tragedy, upon a tragedy, upon a tragedy. The World Trade Centre was a tragedy, the attack on Afghanistan was a tragedy, the war in Iraq was a tragedy. Tens of thousands of people have died. Torture has come back onto the world stage, been canonised, virtually, into law by Guantanamo and Bagram. Can't we learn the lessons from this? [...] The solution has got to be law, not war.

He's saying, very clearly, that Osama bin Laden should have been put on trial. It's a tragedy that due legal process was bypassed in favour of military intervention. 

The question is, did David Cameron know that he was misrepresenting Jeremy Corbyn so egregiously? If he didn't, then he's ignorant. If he did, he's a liar. So which is it?

POSTSCRIPT: 

This shocking footage just in!

#contextisall