“With an election mere weeks away, even Lord Ashcroft must realise that he has served his party as much as he can. Mr Cameron should thank him for this service, and ask him to return to the private life that he so clearly craves.”

What was really interesting was the apparent operation that swung into action as soon as the Lord Ashcroft story broke (and this could have been completely spontaneous but I have my doubts….) On Monday, Iain Dale posted this blog trying to muddy the waters and say everyone’s at it. What was really remarkable was how often the same words appear across the web from Monday onwards.* Follow this Google search to see:

Ashcroft rebuttal Google search

But the argument of the Dale blog misses the point. Does it make it OK because there are Labour non-doms also? As it happens, no, I don’t think it does. Long-term resident but non-dom tax status should at the very least prevent you from serving in Parliament. Donations are a slightly different matter and there is more debate to be had there. If someone was earning a significant amount in the UK on which they were paying tax but were also non-dom taxpayers then should they be barred from making party donations? That’s a very tricky call to make and I’m not sure there’s a blanket rule that can be applied- it’s a case by case issue and rather depends on how much UK tax you are paying.

I’m not going to add my thoughts on the developing story of Lord Ashcroft, David Cameron, and William Hague. Others such as Sunder at Next Left and Left Foot Forward are on the case as is the Guardian and The Times. It seems very clear that he broke the spirit though perhaps not the letter of undertakings he made upon becoming a peer. His influence on British politics over the last decade or so makes a mockery of British democracy. But how to respond? Well, as the image above suggests, the right strategy is don’t get mad, get even. There are three ways  you can act to even things up a bit:

1. Join John Slinger’s Facebook group on Lord Ashcroft.

2. Sign John’s e-petition on the peer.

3. Make a donation to the Labour party so that they can start to level the playing field in marginal constituencies.

I’ve done all three this morning.

* I’m not in any way suggesting that Iain is in any way linked to this.

The presentation is below. It was a prompt more than anything else so not all of it will make sense but you’ll get the gist of my argument…in the UK the internet (and social media) has changed the way that people who do politics do politics but in the US it has comprehensively changed the way that politics operates.

H/T @dominiccampbell for telling me how to get this presentation onto this blog! Thank you.

Over the last few weeks it has emerged that:

- The District Auditor failed to sign off accounts because they were “strewn with errors.”

- Council debt for this financial year leapt from the official figure presented to the January Cabinet of £11.6 million to £34 million later in the month.

- Invoices from suppliers of goods were overpaid with some companies benefiting from being double-counted on an electronic payments system.

So the reason 2,000  people have been fired, hitting the regional economy when it least needs it, is Tory incompetence. It’s not that they’ve decided to rein in spending to be cost effective. It’s that they’ve lost control of spending.

What’s worse, 75% of a pot of a £155 million pot of money given by the Government to get people back to work has been left unspent. All of this is while hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent on consultants and agency staff. This inept Council are adding 1000s of people to the dole queues and hitting Birmingham’s economy at precisely the wrong time.

And yet David Cameron blithely tolerates this….

Political economic history from the IMF bail-out in 1976 to the credit crunch was about the slow retreat of the state from intervention in market forces. New Labour was about providing security and new opportunities to individuals in the market place without actually contending market forces themselves. It was a vast improvement on Thatcherism but accepted as a natural force the existing state-market divide (and in some respects, the line was withdrawn further.)

Now, let me be clear about what I’m not arguing. I am absolutely not arguing for the state picking winners, widespread nationalisation, subsidising failure, or attempting to re-erect the protective controls around our economy that existed post-war. However, while I think the ’strategic state’ concept elucidated by Lord Mandelson is a start, I still feel we have not yet properly broken out of the state of mind that de-legitimises certain state interventions. This is what is holding us back in properly confronting financial markets. I found John Varley’s cock-sure appearance before the Treasury Select Committee the other day grating. Nothing has changed if his demeanor is anything to go by. His argument that big banks diversify risk better is, frankly, laughable given the Government has had to takeover in major part two big banks and one medium sized one.* Enough.

We need to reintroduce a notion of public interest into our regulatory actions and interventions. Such actions could include, for example, undertakings in the context of a hostile takeover that certain community and workforce interests will be safeguarded. The agreement could be with trade unions or local communities themselves and enforced by the state.

There is a lot of thinking to be done. I do not think we should accept anything as given. But nor do I think we should be naive either.

Ali Moussavi, who is working alongside me at Demos Open Left, and I have laid out some thoughts on these issues in a piece for LabourList.

*As an aside, the issue is not necessarily the use of deposits to gamble as Varley states (though that *is* an issue.) The issue is what happens when gambles go wrong. That’s when deposits become under threat and the economy and the taxpayer is under threat.

I’ve got lots of great ideas but I want as many case studies etc as possible. I’m looking for examples that really show the power of the internet: it’s ability to connect people in new ways, to develop and disseminate messages, to quickly provoke change, and to empower the voiceless. I’d also like thoughts on the limitations of the internet. Is this really something different or is it just a lot of hype?

I thought it would be interesting to do it this to show how ideas can develop through the web and social media. Either leave a comment, send me an email, or send me a Twitter direct message.

I’ll post the presentation following the talk.

Goodhart has a point though ‘mass immigration’ feels like pretty combustible rhetoric. I’m speaking as someone whose natural inclination is liberal and sees diversity- within the parameters of common shared values, laws, culture and language- as a positive social and economic force. Just to be clear, here is the pattern (source ONS) of immigration since 1999:

So the evidence does show that we have had historically high levels of net immigration. It appears to now be declining- partly due to recession, e.g. 50,000 people went to Poland in 2009 and it’s not a great leap of imagination to say that they were Polish, and partly due to shifts in policy, not least the introduction of the points based immigration system. However, the levels of net immigration upturned significantly from 1997 which suggests that was as a result of policy- significantly so.

Now, there are both costs and benefits of immigration on the levels we seen in recent years. On the benefit side, there is little doubt that we would not as a country have been able to expand the NHS in the way that we did without hiring healthcare workers from abroad. The workers were young and less likely to use the service and beneficiaries were considerably older on average. However, on the cost side, wages and terms and conditions would have been impacted negatively for some. This was most keenly felt at the lower end of the wage scale. So the distribution of costs and benefits would not have been even with the costs falling on workers in some of the most precarious situations.

During the European election campaign, I blogged on a long conversation I had with a BNP voter in Birmingham Erdington constituency. It became quite clear to me that he wasn’t racist- in fact, he acknowledged that his black and Asian colleagues were experiencing exactly the same insecurities that he was facing. However, nonetheless, it was difficult not to have a degree of sensitivity to his position. This a point that David Blunkett acknowledged during the Goodhart programme. While he didn’t regret the policy changes, he did regret that there was not more of a response to compensate certain communities for major change.

And this for me is the key point. The rhetoric of globalisation and policy responses to the rhetoric meant that many communities- often the most vulnerable and not just white working class communities- felt that they were in midst of convulsive change. For that roofer in Bimingham that change was real- his economic circumstances had worsened. For others, it was more imagined. Nonetheless, and we constantly see this with lost Labour voters, there are people who were not comfortable with many changes they were either experiencing or felt they were experiencing.

So the distribution of costs and benefits were uneven and many felt a sense of powerlessness. It should be stated this doesn’t just apply to immigration; it also applies to change- mainly economic- in many dimensions, e.g. when an industry closes or downsizes.

Further down the line, we may as a community see enormous benefits from the immigration that occurred during the noughties- much as America has seen from its experience of immigration. There are also risks that we can not perhaps forsee. The clear lesson though for change of any kind is that it must happen with consent and be managed effectively. The state weakened in the face of global market forces and this came to be seen almost as virtue at times in New Labour thinking. Yet again, we are seeing global market forces assert themselves with no apparent benefit for local communities. The Kraft takeover of Cadbury is a prime example (see my analysis on LabourList last week.) We and the local community and workforce are powerless to stop it.

Ironically, the major lessons from this are for those who instinctively favour liberal responses to the global economy. Without an awareness of the social parameters of change, a degree of state counter-balance to market forces, and the encouragement of democratic discussion and legitimacy for change, liberal attitudes come under threat. The architects of the immediate post-war paradigm of embedded liberalism knew this. Market liberals forgot that. The consequences were predictable.

Evan Davies gets stucks in. The only issue is that he didn’t seem to be aware that when Chris Grayling said that there is no way to compare violent crime over time he is actually lying and he knows he is. There is the British Crime Survey.* And he repeats the lie repeatedly. To see this being done, take a look at the blog of the Today programme’s Mark Easton. Since 1995, people’s experience of violent crime has fallen by 50%.

Here is the full recording.

* Apologies, I was writing while listening. Mark Easton made exactly this point at end of the interview. Chris Grayling’s response is laughable- you can’t trust a professional survey but you can get the truth just by ‘talking to people in the street.’ Wally. Also, the reality is that it doesn’t matter particularly if certain things are excluded- as long as the data is comparable and in the British Crime Survey it is.

No longer. As of the weekend they no longer have an economic policy either. Realising that the spectacular idea to slash public spending in the early stages of economic growth was both economically illiterate and politically disastrous, David Cameron performed a sharp U-turn at the weekend.

Apparently, we have a debt funding crisis (which we don’t), our credit rating is about about to be slashed (which it isn’t) and we are facing a Greek-scale disaster (which we are not) but despite this nothing ‘particularly extensive’ has to be done. It’s a nonsense. It’s scare-mongering. It’s incoherent. It’s a mess.

Never missing a trick, Tory central office are straight on the front foot. All you have to do in the face of political adversity is argue that black is white and, hey presto, coal becomes ivory.

So bearing this mind, Tory press man Henry Macrory has announced that the campaign is to launch a Labour ‘chaos on cuts’ attack.

At least they have a sense of humour. This is the beginning of the Tories’ campaign a day strategy. Tomorrow, Cameron attacks Gordon Brown’s air-brushed billboards and on Wednesday Lord Ashcroft is kicking off a campaign to outlaw non-domiciled donors.

Public Finance magazine asked me to give my thoughts on the latest set of BSA data published yesterday which seems- on first glance- to suggest a far more socially and economically liberal nation. I agree with the first conclusion but the latter conclusion is far from contested. So I contested it.

I would also strongly recommend Sunder Katwala on this issue. His analysis is on Next Left.

1. Financial and banking reform. I had a bit of fun at the Shadow Chancellor’s description of his proposals for financial regulatory reform as being ‘Obama style’ on Friday. Today I’m going to give him some credit- if these possibilities have become something we used to call ‘policy’ then he is headed in the right direction. If he were to make it contingent on international agreement then he may get nowhere. So some of the thinking is right. As I argued on Friday, I just doubt that he will get there.

2. Growth strategy. He states clearly in the article:

“Exports and business investment provide the key to a sustainable recovery.”

He goes on to tantalise us with a new world where the UK is invading Chinese markets:

“The Chinese are likely to develop from a nation of manufacturers to a nation of consumers, just as we did in our Industrial Revolution. We can sell them our branded goods, our aircraft engines, our films and television, our pharmaceuticals, our financial and legal services, our higher education, and we can even attract their tourism.”

Sounds great. But how do we get there? And that is where George Osborne’s economic argument completely collapses. There is no plan. Oh sorry, there is the normal drum banging on removal of red tape. Is that really why we haven’t grown an advanced manufacturing base as we might have done- red tape? The argument is just silly- especially when you take into account the fact the World Bank places the UK fifth in its ranking of ease of doing business.

And that’s the problem with George Osborne’s argument (and let’s leave the argument that the recession was caused by government borrowing when the UK had one of the lowest national debt levels amongst the advanced economies as not being serious.) He has some good hopes and dreams but not any clue about how to achieve them. The market either delivers or it doesn’t.

No, the more serious thinking is being done by the Government- Lord Mandelson in particular. The approach is strategic and aimed to coalesce business, finance, government, and education behind strategic economic opportunities. Yes, of course business investment, export growth, banking and financial reform are important objectives. The real question though is which policies have a better chance of achieving those objectives and re-balancing the UK economy in the process.

That’s where the Government has an argument and George Osborne has vague hopes and dreams.