Tag Archives: Politics

Progressiveness and the Tribe

Posted on by
Reply

As a for­mer sup­porter of the Lib­eral Democ­rats, I found my sup­port lean­ing toward Labour due to the Lib Dems’ ongo­ing dis­as­trous coali­tion with the Con­ser­v­a­tive party.  But in truth, the Labour party are just a con­ve­nient polit­i­cal marker for some of my opin­ions on eco­nomic and social pol­icy.  What I really care about, I sup­pose, is progress – chang­ing things that are bro­ken, try­ing new ideas until we dis­cover some­thing that makes the coun­try work better.

But all three main par­ties now label them­selves as “Pro­gres­sive”. (I sup­pose “regres­sive” isn’t much of a vote-winner.)  The minor par­ties mostly have lim­ited agen­das that make it impos­si­ble to sup­port them to the exclu­sion of all oth­ers.  Who, then, do I vote for? The truth is prob­a­bly that none of the UK’s polit­i­cal par­ties are as pro­gres­sive as I would like, but more than that — a politi­cian being pro­gres­sive on my behalf isn’t really what I want at all.

I want to design the future.

Then I want to engi­neer the future.

Then I want to sit back and think “bloody hell, we made that.”

That’s what gets me out of bed and halfway across the county five morn­ings a week, what keeps me sketch­ing inter­faces and gets me through design meet­ings, what keeps me cod­ing and sol­der­ing and get­ting cov­ered in grease and salt-spray.

I’m not pre­tend­ing that I could engi­neer the future of this coun­try by myself, or that I should have any more of a say than the other sixty mil­lion of us, but I’d like to at least have some input besides a sim­ple vote.  As far as I’m aware, there exist only two ways of hav­ing this kind of input — sell your soul for a career in pol­i­tics, or be ignored on e-petitions.

All of this leads me to the con­clu­sion that hav­ing our voice heard and our expe­ri­ence utilised on our own terms is not some­thing that a nation state can offer its cit­i­zens.  Our voices are heard and our expe­ri­ence utilised by our fam­i­lies and friends; at our places of work — tribes of a few hun­dred peo­ple at most — but not on a national scale

Is there some use­ful way for cit­i­zens to help engi­neer their future at the state level, or are we rel­e­gated to hav­ing that kind of influ­ence only in our hundred-strong social tribes?  Are there any coun­tries that are sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter at this than ours, coun­tries that progress with heavy cit­i­zen involve­ment?  Am I dream­ing of an impos­si­ble soci­ety, and most impor­tantly of all, should I go to bed and sleep it off instead of fill­ing the inter­net with my ranting?

Whither the State Religion?

Posted on by
Reply

This so-far unloved peti­tion was shared with me on Face­book the other day, and while I can’t bring myself to sign it — I agree with most, but not the dis-establishment of the Church of Eng­land — it has got me won­der­ing why we still have such a thing as a “state reli­gion” in the United Kingdom.

Like I said, I have no objec­tion to the Church of Eng­land exist­ing (and like­wise its Scots equiv­a­lent).  I know many mem­bers, and I know it does good work.  What I can’t see the sense of, how­ever, is declar­ing it our country’s reli­gion.  It is the most pop­u­lar reli­gion amongst the peo­ple of this coun­try, and the reli­gion of our head of state, but noth­ing more.

We do not just live in a “Church of Eng­land” coun­try, or a Protes­tant one, or even a Chris­t­ian one.  We live in a Chris­t­ian coun­try, and a Mus­lim coun­try and a Jew­ish coun­try, a Sikh and Hindu coun­try, a Bud­dhist and Pagan coun­try, an Athe­ist and an Agnos­tic coun­try, a Pasta­far­ian and Sci­en­tol­o­gist coun­try (for bet­ter or worse).

There is an Eng­lish lan­guage, which there are some rea­son­able argu­ments in favour of requir­ing those who live here to speak.  Of course no-one in their right mind would sug­gest that peo­ple who live here adopt the “Eng­lish reli­gion”, so why have such a con­cept in the first place?  It can only serve as a small but nig­gling reminder to the nation’s Mus­lims and Sikhs that they aren’t quite as “Eng­lish” as others.

I find the num­ber of state-funded church schools quite odd too — in my town, there are only two non–faith schools, nei­ther of which we are in the catch­ment area of.  So I am pay­ing money in the form of taxes for my son to be taught as fact some­thing that is only an opin­ion, and one that I dis­agree with at that.

I under­stand the his­tor­i­cal rea­sons behind the sys­tem, why the Church of Eng­land exists and why the con­cept of a state reli­gion exists.  But is it not a lit­tle out-dated now?

I admit that this post comes across as flame-bait, but I gen­uinely can­not think of an advan­tage to hav­ing a state reli­gion, and I hon­estly wel­come any com­ments that offer a rea­son as to why the state reli­gion is use­ful to our society.

Why I’m Voting “Yes” to AV

Posted on by
17

A while ago, I blogged my indif­fer­ence to the Alter­na­tive Vote sys­tem, and pol­i­tics in gen­eral at that point, in a post enti­tled “Meh” to AV.  My main objec­tion was that AV would increase the like­li­hood of the coun­try being gov­erned by bland cen­trist coali­tions.  How­ever, now hope­fully some­what more edu­cated about the sub­ject, I am now given to under­stand that AV would in fact reduce the like­li­hood of coali­tion gov­ern­ments — and given how well our cur­rent coali­tion is work­ing out for all con­cerned, I sus­pect that a greater chance of out­right major­ity gov­ern­ments may be a good thing for Britain.

Over and above this, the biggest advan­tage of AV in my opin­ion is that it removes the desire to vote tac­ti­cally.  Thus far in my adult life I have res­olutely voted Lib Dem in my con­stituency, where they trail the Con­ser­v­a­tives with about 30% of the vote com­pared to 40% — not exactly close, but not far off.  As I find my incli­na­tions swing­ing toward Labour (15%), the exist­ing First Past the Post sys­tem means I now have a choice: sup­port Labour by vot­ing for them, or oppose the Tories by vot­ing Lib Dem.  (Not that that’s work­ing too well at the moment.)  The AV sys­tem gives me the abil­ity to prop­erly express my opin­ions: I’d like Labour first, the Lib Dems sec­ond, and the oth­ers not at all.

But in case none of that was con­vinc­ing, I sug­gest you attempt the fol­low­ing pro­ce­dure, which has thus far done me no harm in life:

  1. Fig­ure out what a bunch of stuffy old-Etonian toffs and/or big­oted racist dicks want you to do
  2. Fig­ure out what the oppo­site is
  3. Do that.

Whether it’s for fairer rep­re­sen­ta­tion, for bet­ter allow­ing you to express your opin­ion, to Stick it to the Fore­head Man, or just for the lulz — please join me in vot­ing “Yes” to the Alter­na­tive Vote sys­tem on May 5th.

In Praise of Disjointed Communities

Posted on by
7

Prime Min­is­ter David Cameron is set to make a speech on immi­gra­tion today which, to the very vocal dis­plea­sure of Vince Cable and doubt­less many Lib Dems, is designed to appeal to the core and right of the Con­ser­v­a­tive party. Accord­ing to the BBC arti­cle:

Com­mu­ni­ties have been affected by incom­ers who are unable to speak Eng­lish and unwill­ing to inte­grate, [Cameron] will argue.

“That has cre­ated a kind of dis­com­fort and dis­joint­ed­ness in some neigh­bour­hoods. This has been the expe­ri­ence for many peo­ple in our coun­try — and I believe it is untruth­ful and unfair not to speak about it and address it.”

Granted, I’m prob­a­bly far from the aver­age mem­ber of the pub­lic in my opin­ions, and cer­tainly I’m far from core Tory mate­r­ial. But I see that dis­joint­ed­ness as more of a good thing than a bad one.

Many years ago, I lived for a while in the vil­lage of Eas­ton, on Port­land. It was blessed with both a Chi­nese restau­rant and a Chi­nese take-away, as far as I am aware the only two on the island. When I was there, the restau­rant was staffed with Chi­nese peo­ple (or at least those of Chi­nese descent) — whether they lived on the island or not, I have no idea. But the take-away? Well, I guess they ran out of Chi­nese peo­ple. It was staffed entirely by Brits. 96.8% of the pop­u­la­tion are of white eth­nic­ity.

I come from, and have since returned to, Bournemouth. Just 30 miles away, it has a pop­u­la­tion more than 10 times that of the whole of Port­land. Dur­ing most of the year it is home to thou­sands of uni­ver­sity stu­dents; in the sum­mer it opens its doors to thou­sands more for­eign lan­guage stu­dents and a never-ending influx of tourists. I live in an area with a high Brazil­ian pop­u­la­tion. Ori­en­tal and Middle-Eastern shops are everywhere.

It’s part of the world in a way that Eas­ton is not.

By and large, immi­grants nat­u­rally pick up enough Eng­lish to get by — instead of impos­ing require­ments on their pro­fi­ciency with the lan­guage, how about we try to learn each oth­ers’ languages?

Instead of impos­ing some require­ment to “inte­grate” with soci­ety (pre­sum­ably that means read­ing the Daily Mail, drink­ing tea and moan­ing about the weather), why not cel­e­brate each oth­ers’ cultures?

More to the point, why not stop pre­tend­ing that there’s a sin­gle homoge­nous British soci­ety for peo­ple to inte­grate with in the first place? My com­ment about the Daily Mail was only partly in humour. How do you define such a neb­u­lous concept?

I don’t read the Daily Mail, and I rarely drink tea. My instinc­tive reac­tion to the phrase “Oh dear, it’s come over all cloudy again, hasn’t it? Typ­i­cal.” is an impo­tent rage as I realise that no mat­ter how much of a trav­esty of con­ver­sa­tion it is, in the eyes of the law, it’s still not cause enough to legit­i­mately punch some­one in the face.

Like most Brits though, I do love French food, Ger­man beer, Ital­ian cof­fee, chow mein, pizza and chicken tikka masala.

If I’m try­ing to make a point here, it’s this:

  • Every­one else’s cul­ture is just as good as ours

  • Every­one else’s lan­guage is just as good as ours

  • And by the way, every­one else’s food is bet­ter than ours.

Let’s stop cling­ing to an idea of British cul­ture that we can’t even define, and pre­tend­ing our way of life is under attack from Poles or Pak­ista­nis.  Let’s not be Easton.

There’s a whole world out there.  Let’s live in it.

When Science met Big Society

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday’s announce­ment that the Arts and Human­i­ties Research Coun­cil will, on pain of los­ing fund­ing, devote a “sig­nif­i­cant” amount of time to study­ing the notion of “Big Soci­ety” is frankly shock­ing. If it is indeed true, it smacks of incred­i­ble ego­tism on the part of the government.

The government’s money is the people’s money — if we’re not going to leave the job of decid­ing what to research to the actual researchers, why should the government’s whims be involved? If there were a ref­er­en­dum on it now, what pro­por­tion of the tax-paying pub­lic would label the Big Soci­ety as a steam­ing pile of shite that we shouldn’t be throw­ing any more money at?

Con­versely, how many of the government’s other sweep­ing changes — the pro­gramme of cuts (Warn­ing: least impar­tial sum­mary ever) that we are now sub­ject to, for exam­ple — have been the sub­ject of such hopefully-independent research?

A future UKIP gov­ern­ment promises to ban global warm­ing research, and apart from the cli­mate change deniers, I’m con­fi­dent the pub­lic would not sup­port that par­tic­u­lar aspect of gov­ern­men­tal med­dling in research. So why are we putting up with this?

(And on a related note, does any­one else think it’s a lit­tle odd to com­mis­sion research on a pol­icy after com­mit­ting to it?)

tl,dr: Hands off mah sci­ence, government.

The فراشة Effect

Posted on by
Reply

Two months ago, a young Tunisian vegetable-seller killed him­self in protest when offi­cials in his home town of Sidi Bouzid pre­vented him from sell­ing his wares on the street.

That was Decem­ber. Now it is Feb­ru­ary. What became known as the Jas­mine Rev­o­lu­tion swept through Tunisia, exil­ing its Pres­i­dent of 23 years and ush­er­ing hope for free­dom and democ­racy. Egypt fol­lowed, oust­ing Pres­i­dent Mubarak from his 30-year rule after a protest in Tahrir Square that saw more pro­test­ers’ chil­dren in impromptu day-care groups than molo­tov cocktails.

Unrest has swept the states of the Arab League. Protests have rocked Morocco, Alge­ria, Jor­dan, Syria and Yemen. Ten­sions are flar­ing once again in Iran. Bahrain ordered its sol­diers to open fire on their peo­ple. And tonight Libya lies on the brink of rev­o­lu­tion or civil war, the east of the coun­try report­edly under civil­ian rule as army units defect, police sta­tions burn and hun­dreds lie dead.

I won­der if Mohamed Bouaz­izi had any idea, back in Decem­ber, that his death would be the cat­a­lyst for the great­est unrest the region has seen in decades?

And I won­der how many other sit­u­a­tions, polit­i­cal or oth­er­wise, are sus­cep­ti­ble to the same but­ter­fly effect. How many other but­ter­flies are there out there whose sim­ple, local actions will end up tear­ing coun­tries apart?

“Meh” to AV

Posted on by
Reply

There are four months left before Britain goes to the polls to decide whether to adopt the Alter­na­tive Vote sys­tem, and already the #yes2av and #no2av cam­paigns are hot­ting up on Twit­ter.

Barely a year ago, I would have shouted “yes” with all my might — the Labour incum­bents were more into spin and sur­veil­lance than the redis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth, and the oppo­si­tion Con­ser­v­a­tives appealed even less. But AV would have helped the Lib Dems immensely, maybe giv­ing them a shot at power. As the party of the young, in my eyes maybe more a party of the Left than Labour was, I was all for the Lib Dems hav­ing as much of a chance as pos­si­ble to win seats in the House of Commons.

What a dif­fer­ence a year can make.

The Tories are dec­i­mat­ing the pub­lic sec­tor and some­how still believe that char­ity and the free mar­ket will make it all bet­ter. The Lib Dems are com­plicit and must be on course for break­ing the major­ity of their elec­tion pledges. Labour have a new leader who doesn’t seem to do any­thing apart from offer the occa­sional doom­ful pre­dic­tion about the coalition’s cuts.

The Greens would have me out of a job, UKIP are crazy, the BNP are evil, and I can’t bring myself to run as a Pirate Party can­di­date because I believe in far more than an end to abuse of copyright.

Who would I vote for if a gen­eral elec­tion were called tomor­row? Nobody.

In fact, the cur­rent polit­i­cal cli­mate has almost brought me full cir­cle on the sub­ject of the Alter­na­tive Vote. Under a sys­tem like AV, smaller par­ties are likely to do bet­ter. But with a three-(major-)party sys­tem, it’s unlikely to be the case that we’ll see a Labour-Pirate or a Conservative-UKIP coali­tion or any­thing inter­est­ing — it’s still going to be Convervative-Lib Dem or Labour-Lib Dem, even with AV. And all that does is con­tinue the last 13 years’ rush for the cen­tre ground.

The Tories are rush­ing for it so fast that they’re alien­at­ing half their party. The Lib Dems, in the­ory, define the cen­tre, and despite elect­ing the younger Miliband, the Labour party has yet to decide if and how it’s going to stop its New Labour love affair with ‘Mid­dle England’.

What we absolutely don’t need, for the sake of the next generation’s inter­est in pol­i­tics, is an unend­ing suc­ces­sion of coali­tions, each one indis­tin­guish­able from the last.

So if it could hap­pen, bring on the Labour-Pirate coali­tion and the Conservative-UKIP coali­tion. Any­thing to keep things inter­est­ing. But if it can’t — and unless the Lib Dems utterly toast their pop­u­lar­ity, it can’t — then let’s have the next gen­er­a­tion of Mag­gie Thatcher and Michael Foot, let’s have some peo­ple with real ide­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences fight­ing it out in the Commons.

Bring me some­one I can believe in.

Until then, “meh” to AV.

Dystopia Fetishism and the Fall of #Solidarity

Posted on by
1

Two weeks ago, I sat in this same warm office, look­ing out at the cold world out­side. And this is what I saw. I saw Lau­rie Penny’s Spi­der Jerusalem-esque piece for the New States­man, cov­er­ing the stu­dent riots, and I saw Wik­ileaks prepar­ing to dump 250,000 clas­si­fied US Embassy cables on the world. It all felt like a sud­den rush towards the hor­rid, glo­ri­ous dystopia that as a British cit­i­zen I am required to fetishise. (c.f. H.G. Wells, George Orwell, John Wyn­d­ham et al.)

One of those retains the abil­ity to stir up more trou­ble. The other, I fear, is now a lost cause.

Being approx­i­mately a social­ist, and hav­ing voted for the Lib­eral Democ­rats as I felt they were the only almost-credible party of the Left, I was almost warmed by the scale of the protests — not only were the Lib Dems’s bro­ken elec­tion promises not being taken lightly, but only six months in to a gov­ern­ment of the centre-Right, we were already see­ing the peo­ple up in arms.

The vio­lence involved in some of those protests, of which I of course do not approve, was referred to in the media at the time as being the actions of a “hard core” of pro­test­ers intent on stir­ring up trou­ble. The reac­tion of the pro­test­ers to that was often along the lines of “no, we all feel that strongly!”.

I won­der if they’ll be say­ing that this morning.

Last night, as it became appar­ent that the protests were inef­fec­tive at con­vinc­ing more than half of the Lib Dems to vote against the pro­posal, some pro­test­ers attacked a car car­ry­ing the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Corn­wall. Nat­u­rally, this made the front page of every news­pa­per in the coun­try (Guardian, Inde­pen­dent, Tele­graph, Mail, Sun, Mir­ror, nice pay­wall there, Times).

The Twit­ter hash­tag #sol­i­dar­ity has been used by the pro­test­ers and their sup­port­ers for a while now — I do hope some of that sol­i­dar­ity remains. But aside from amongst stu­dents, schoolkids and twenty-somethings who still fondly remem­ber their uni­ver­sity days, I sus­pect that sol­i­dar­ity just took a mas­sive hit.

The tabloid press was never going to be kind to stu­dent protests, but if they were qui­etly depriv­ing them of col­umn space before, by god they are not any more. The attack on Prince Charles’ car last night was one of the most impres­sive acts of shoot­ing one­self in the foot I have ever seen.

My great­est fear over the whole mat­ter, though, is the effect it has had on the young — the peo­ple whose edu­ca­tion was at stake. What have they learned over the last few weeks?

That break­ing into Mill­bank Tower, that light­ing fires and putting bricks through win­dows, that spray­paint­ing walls and break­ing down doors, that being ket­tled by riot police and attack­ing the Royal Fam­ily, isn’t enough. It’s not changed the minds of more than a dozen peo­ple inside the House of Com­mons, maybe none at all.

So what’s left to do? Give up hope and aban­don what mea­gre trust remains in our politi­cians, hop­ing that by the time the pro­test­ers reach mid­dle age they’re elec­table and their opin­ions haven’t changed? Or protest harder, get ket­tled more viciously, dream­ing of glo­ri­ous rev­o­lu­tion while all around the coun­try turns against them?

Dystopia is a great thing to expe­ri­ence for two hours of a film or two hun­dred pages of a book. But when you have to live in it, two weeks is about the point at which it stops being fun.

Alright Government, Hands Off Our Internet

Posted on by
Reply

And that is an ‘our’ that does not extend to those inside West­min­ster, because with a few notable excep­tions, MPs have shown an almost com­plete lack of under­stand­ing of the inter­net and how it works.

Guess what’s back from the dead? Our old friend, the Inter­cept Mod­erni­sa­tion Plan.

Between this crazy “log every­thing” scheme (in the name of com­bat­ting ter­ror­ism, nat­u­rally) and the barely-debated Dig­i­tal Econ­omy Act, the pre­vi­ous Labour government’s approach to tech­nol­ogy and the inter­net was at best mis­guided. And though I’m gen­er­ally left-leaning, I found some promise in the Tories’ and the Lib Dems’ pro-freedom, anti-surveillance agenda.

This makes it all the more sad that the new gov­ern­ment has gone against its coali­tion agree­ment and cho­sen to res­ur­rect the Inter­cept Mod­erni­sa­tion Plan as part of the Strate­gic Defence and Secu­rity Review. (Hey, at least I got my submarines.)

Let’s rehash some old arguments:

  1. Überdata­bases are expen­sive. Even if the effort of main­tain­ing them is farmed out to ISPs rather than cen­tral gov­ern­ment (and it will), the cost will be enor­mous. The ISPs will protest, and if they end up hav­ing to pass that cost on to their cus­tomers, we will protest too. It’s your Orwellian plot, if you’re going to intro­duce it, at least have the decency to pay for it.
  2. Who has access? That our ISPs can, to some extent, log our com­mu­ni­ca­tions is some­thing we sign up to in our ser­vice agree­ments. Who could ask for these logs under the Inter­cept Mod­erni­sa­tion Plan? Police with a rea­son­able sus­pi­cion, fair enough — it’s no dif­fer­ent from the cir­cum­stances under which they could get a search war­rant for your house. But when it’s all dig­i­tal, how do we ensure that ‘rea­son­able sus­pi­cion’ is never abused? And who else is allowed access? Gov­ern­ment depart­ments? Civil ser­vants? Schools? Hos­pi­tals? None of this is rigidly defined, and it needs to be.
  3. Data Min­ing is Evil. Can the police, or who­ever, request only spe­cific data from spe­cific times, or can they request all your data? All of sev­eral people’s data? At what point does it stop being a proper inves­ti­ga­tion and start being data min­ing for ‘crime prediction’?
  4. Ph34r t3h haxx0rz! The more data you put in one place, the more inter­est­ing a tar­get it is. And in the real world, enough civil ser­vants leave con­fi­den­tial mate­r­ial on trains already — they’re sure to down­load some of this data to a mem­ory stick and lose it somewhere.
  5. Signal-to-Noise Ratio. This is the inter­net. Accord­ing to one esti­mate, 97% of e-mail traf­fic is spam. And most of the rest must be from Zynga. How much of our Twit­ter bull­shit and Live­Jour­nal angst are you going to read? How much crap are you going to go through to find the super-secret ter­ror­ist plans, and at what point does apply­ing Bayesian analy­sis to our web traf­fic start to fall under the “Data Min­ing is Evil” head­ing (pro­tip: really quickly).
  6. Ter­ror­ists are Smarter than You. And so am I. So are most 14-year-old kids. We know all about SSL, PGP, prox­ies, VPN tun­nelling, TOR, IPREDa­tor, dark­nets and all the rest. And god for­bid the ter­ror­ists do their busi­ness in real life, in a base­ment some­where, rather than on Face­book. Because if they do (spoil­ers: they do), this whole plan is a giant money-pit that robs us of our pri­vacy and achieves nothing.

So Cameron, Clegg et al, please just let this one die. It was a bad plan to begin with, that’s why you promised not to do it. And before you come up with the next plan to foil online ter­ror­ist col­lab­o­ra­tion, please learn what how the inter­net works and what is and isn’t sen­si­ble to do to it.

Learn Internet

For any­one who’d like to sign another peti­tion against the Inter­cept Mod­erni­sa­tion Plan, the Open Rights Group cam­paign is here.

The Curious Case of the Disappearing Child Benefit

Posted on by
5

This morn­ing, the Prime Min­is­ter used his BBC inter­view to let us know why, exactly, his pro­posed changes to the Child Ben­e­fit sys­tem take into account the income of a sin­gle fam­ily mem­ber rather than the house­hold overall.

As loudly bemoaned in the media over the past few days, the Con­ser­v­a­tives plan to scrap Child Ben­e­fit for higher rate tax pay­ers, those earn­ing over £44,000 a year. Because this is tied in to the tax sit­u­a­tion for a sin­gle indi­vid­ual, it leads to wild incon­sis­ten­cies in the fam­ily incomes that are affected. Under the scheme, a two-parent house­hold where one par­ent earns £44,000 and the other does not work would lose their Child Ben­e­fit. How­ever if both par­ents were to work and earn £43,000 each, for a total of £86,000, they would still receive the payments.

As some­one who earns far less than £44,000 and who could still get by with­out Child Ben­e­fit if nec­es­sary, I have no prob­lems with scrap­ping or reduc­ing Child Ben­e­fit for those sub­stan­tially more wealthy than myself. But couldn’t we at least make it fair?

David Cameron’s excuse for this unfair­ness is that to base it on house­hold income rather than indi­vid­ual income would involve a whole new means-testing process, with all the added bureau­cracy and money-wasting that involves.

Has Mr Cameron for­got­ten about Labour’s Child Tax Credit scheme, a bizarrely par­al­lel yet unre­lated pro­gramme under which work­ing par­ents can claim more money. Child Tax Cred­its are means-tested based on house­hold income in just the same way that the Prime Min­is­ter is claim­ing to be too much work. Would it not in fact reduce bureau­cracy and wasted effort if both were to be com­bined into a sin­gle Child Ben­e­fit sys­tem that was means-tested on house­hold income?

But no, appar­ently the deci­sion is set in stone.

How do the Con­ser­v­a­tives plan on try­ing to fix this unfair­ness? Appar­ently, it emerged this after­noon, with a mar­ried cou­ples’ tax break. How­ever, as the rumour heard by the BBC has it, this would only affect cou­ples earn­ing less than the £44,000 thresh­old — the house­hold with one par­ent earn­ing over £44,000 and one stay-at-home par­ent would not stand to ben­e­fit. It’s also reported as being intro­duced “before the 2015 elec­tion”, poten­tially leav­ing a four-year gap between then and now in which the unfair­ness of the Child Ben­e­fit change is not being adressed.

Fur­ther­more, while the pro­posed mar­ried cou­ples’ tax break thank­fully includes civil part­ner­ships, it pre­sum­ably does not include long-term part­ners who choose not to marry. I imag­ine that encour­ag­ing tra­di­tional val­ues such as mar­riage is a vote-winner amongst cer­tain groups of Tory vot­ers, but should the gov­ern­ment not stay well clear of these very pri­vate deci­sions? Should a poor cou­ple who do not want to marry be pres­sured into it, how­ever gen­tly, by their finan­cial situation?