8 Benchmarks and what the Tories should be saying

I've been looking at Osbourne's 8 "Benchmarks for Britain" in this speech.

Well, first I had to actually find them, there was a lot of waffle in the speech and I'm still not sure I've got the right bits. I was always taught that when public speaking to use lists, rather than some ambiguous bollocks with an occasional point.

Anyway, as I understand them, here are the "Benchmarks", they're all taken as quotes from Georgie's speech with most of the waffle removed.

1: Cut the deficit more quickly to safeguard Britain's credit rating.
2: Higher exports, higher business investment and higher saving as a share of GDP.
3: Lower youth unemployment.
4: Improve Britain's global rankings for tax competitiveness and business regulation
5: We will raise the private sector's share of the economy in all regions of the country.
6: Higher public sector productivity and better value for money.
7: Create a safer banking system that serves the needs of the economy.
8: We will see lower emissions and a rising global market share for low carbon technologies.

Lets go through them one by one and see what use they are.

1. "Cut the deficit more quickly" - what does he mean that 'more' quickly. Quicker than Labour, Quicker than it's been cut over the past few years? Whilst I applaud the intent to protect Britain's Credit Rating (which I've talked about here) and I'm sure that cutting the Deficit is the way to go, a little more detail would be nice.

2. Higher exports - good. Higher Business investment - good, but from whom? Higher Saving - Well, perhaps people might be saving if interest rates weren't unprecedentedly low? Again, these are all lovely ideas, but are somewhat lacking in substance. Also, all of these are pretty much at record lows at the moment, and any improvement will be "Higher". Again, where is the detail? Why not "Increase exports as a percentage of GDP by 15% over 5 years"? Still, on the bright side, if the Tories cut Government spending (currently 44% of GDP) by 10%, all of these will increase without any work done. Easy, but somewhat pointless.

3. Well, it's at a record high at the moment, can't see this one being too tricky. Just got to give one 18 year old girl a job and you've "lowered" youth unemployment.

4. This one I actually quite like. Sure, there's no detail and under Labour we've slide from 4th to about 85th on both these counts. Logically the only way is up but the intent is decent.

5. Raising the private sectors share of the economy in all regions is another good one. Areas such as Gordon Brown's constituency where 75% of households are partially or totally dependant on the state are a sign of a failed administration. Roughly two thirds of the whole of the North East are in the same boat. It's about time those situations are changed. A smaller public sector can only help the country as a whole.

6. Higher public sector productivity is a lovely idea. It's also fairly easy to achieve. Even Labour increased public sector productivity by 2% over the last decade or so. Of course, you have to compare that to the 30% increase in productivity the Private sector managed. An increase is easy! Some detail would be great, like: "Increase productivity by a minimum of 75% of private sector productivity improvement"!

7. Safer Banking System - well, it's meaningless bollocks that sounds good, I suppose.

8. Ah, the good old Low Emissions and Low Carbon Economy and Exports game. The Tories had better seriously hope we're not heading for another Dalton Minimum. If we do, they're going to look fucking stupid, hitching their election bandwagon to Climate Change. Their problem is that whilst their mates in Notting Hill all passionately believe in the religion of AGW, the rest of the country, particularly in areas where they need a serious swing, are far less certain. I'd bet nearly any sum of money that a policy of "We need to wait and see before committing Billions to fight a problem" will drive many more votes than spunking money on an increasingly ropey looking theory (for Christ's Sake, even the bloody Guardian is slagging off Climate "Scientists" these days!)

Overall rating - meh.

These points are the right ones, but the lack of detail makes the whole thing rather pointless. I'm guessing the Tories don't want to be nailed to a promise they can't keep, but it never hurt New Labour to miss pretty much every target they set themselves.

Over the last few weeks the Tories seem intent on throwing away this election. I don't quite understand why. All they need to be doing is building on some simple solid policies (none of this crappy Policy a Day bollocks, I mean Prison Ships, who cares?).

Why don't the Tories say something like these:

"We will encourage the economy to grow by reducing taxation and regulation on Businesses"

"We will be careful with your money, cutting government spending and improving Public Sector Productivity, and driving economic growth through our private sector policies"

"We will slow Labour's immigration, to focus public spending on our current population"

"We will fight for the rights of the Victim, not the criminal"

"We will put Teaching back in the hands of Teachers and Headteachers, not bureaucrats with clipboards"

These would probably do far more to drive confidence that they're actually trying to win this bloody election. It would provide a simple message for Ministers, MPs, PPCs and all the rest to say whenever they're interviewed. If you're worried about people going off-message, then your message is either way too complicated, or wrong.

Come on Tories, drop all the bollocks and start trying to win this election!

Pointless Graph of the Day: Mk II

Today's graph is looking at Alcohol related deaths in England. Similar to yesterday, I'm looking at how these rates vary compared to voting patterns in the 2009 Euro Elections (where we showed that Labour voters are more likely to let their teenagers smoke).

As with yesterday, Red is Labour vote share, Blue represents the Tory vote share. Simple, right?

As with yesterday, we've got another pretty obvious conclusion.

It looks like Labour voters are more likely to be drinking themselves to death. Conservative voters are less likely to feel the need to drink so excessively.

Caveat: Yes, I know the stats behind those conclusions are shaky as hell. Hence the title - "Pointless Graph". However, just because it's somewhat simplistic, doesn't mean that there's a grain of truth in it. Yes, there's mostly likely another factor that makes people both drink themselves to death AND vote Labour. It's probably Thatcher, or something.

Pointless Graph of the Day

Whilst the rest of the blogosphere is spellbound by the fact that tweetminster may not have done their sums correctly, I've been doing serious poltical research.

There's a new report out, looking (amongst other things) the rates of smoking amongst teenagers (11-15 year olds). As usual I decided to get into the details. Luckily these statistics are provide by a Government Office Region, which is exactly how the European Elections are counted.

I've produced a graph with two lines. The Red line shows how the Labour share of the vote changes by region. The Blue line shows the same for the Tory share of the vote. Note how generally the Tory vote was higher than Labour in all regions except the North-East.

The R-squared for each line isn't great (0.25 for Labour, 0.5 for Conservative) but enough to suggest that there's a certain correlation between these two factors. As Labour's share of the vote increases, so does the percentage of teenagers smoking. The opposite is true for the Tories, as their share of vote increases, the percentage of teenagers smoking falls.

Can we conclude that people who vote Labour are more likely to allow their children to smoke? Or is it the case that people who smoke (so, their children are as well) are more likely to vote Labour? Or, seeing as the Tory line is a better fit, is it that right-wing voters more likely to stop their kids from smoking?

Pointless, but fun.

Do men really earn more than women?

Everyone's favorite minister has today announced another Government sponsored report looking at Inequality (details here).

Shockingly, the report finds that women earn less than men. Luckily the Government is now forced to provide as much data as possible to back up their claims, so I was able to delve into that data and see if I could replicate some of their graphs.

As I'm not a complete idiot, I understand the necessity of only comparing like to like. So for this piece of analysis I'm only going to look at Full Time workers. There might be a gender disbalance for the ratio of part to full time workers, so I'm not going to bother correcting for that and rather than ignoring it, I'm excluding part-timers. Also (mainly because I'm lazy), I'm going to investigate Median earnings, as this is usually considered the best measure (it excludes the extremely high and the extremely low earners automatically).

Right. Headline figures:
Median Weekly Earnings for Men: £494
Median Weekly Earnings for Women: £386

Gender Pay Gap: Men earn 28% more than Women.


That's pretty clear , lets have a look at how that varies by age:

As we can see, even at 16-19 Women are earning less than Men. The gap widens all the way up to the 50s then slightly falls. At every age group the Median woman is earning less money every week than the Median man.

Then I had a look at how Hourly Wages compare:


Here the picture is subtly different. Whilst there's still a big pay gap between the ages of 35 - 59, at younger and older ages it's almost entirely vanished. In fact, the Median 25-29 year old woman has a higher hourly wage than the median man! It appears the massive pay gap we saw earlier has mostly vanished.

Of course, the obvious reason for that is that the hours worked by Men and Women are different (although both are working full time). So I worked out the inferred hours worked per week by our median man and woman (Are they a couple?).

Wow! At every single age group, men are working for longer hours than women. This increases as both get older. The median man (across all age groups) is working 4.5 hours a week longer than the median woman. A 65-69 year old median man is working over 5 hours a week longer than his female counterpart.

This is actually quite fun news, because it gives us something we can control for. We can increase the weekly earnings for women by assuming that they're all suddenly going to become 'hardworking' and work the same hours as the median men are doing. This gives us the following graph:

Our "Hardworking" woman are now much more in alignment with the male earnings. There is still a big gap, starting from around 30. Coincidentally, this is almost the average age a woman has her first baby.

What are the headline figures now?
Median Weekly Earnings for Men: £494 (the same as before)
Median Weekly Earnings for Women: £431 (higher due to more hours worked)
Gender Pay Gap: Men earn 14.5% more than Women.

The Gender Pay Gap has halved. Just by correcting for a single metric (hours worked) I've singlehandedly done more to enhance women's pay than the last 12 years of New Labour.

This still leaves us with about a 14.5% difference though. Can we explain why this would be? I'm certain that in the vast majority of industries Gender makes no difference to pay. I earn the same as my female colleagues at the same level and it's very hard for a company to do otherwise. Clearly there is another factor at play.

I actually mentioned what I believe it is above. Babies. The average woman has about two children, starting on average at 29.

I've built a very crude model. It assumes a man and a woman both start work on the same day and earn the same. Both get 5% pay rises each year until they retire. The man takes no Leave of Absences, so works flat out from 20 to 60, then retires (hopefully to a nice civil service pension). The woman does exactly the same, with one exception. She doesn't get a pay-rise for three years as she's taking maternity leave (knocking a minimum of six months out of each year) and takes time to get back up to speed in her old job.

Over his lifetime the man earns £1.3m. The woman earns: £1.1m.

The difference is 14%, almost exactly that actually found in the survey above (If you assume two years of no pay rises, then the difference is 10%).

Clearly most, if not all, of the current Gender Pay divide is actually down to women choosing to delay their careers and take materinity leave! If the government was serious about reducing the divide, then they should mandate equal paternity leave (as they do in some Scandinavian countries).

The one thing these figures show is that once you correct for women choosing to have babies and choosing to work shorter hourse, men and women earn almost exactly the same. Why then do we need further measures to ensure 'equality'?

Artificial Recovery?

Lots of people today have blogged that the 'growth' we're now seeing in the economy is in fact only caused by the £378Bn or so of additional spending that has been forced into the economy (QE and Deficit spending). No doubt they're right but I'm looking at the factor that is artificially keeping large parts of the economy afloat.

The graph above shows both RPI (a measure of inflation which includes things like mortgages and oil) and the Bank of England Base Interest Rate. As you can see, over the past few years they've tracked each other pretty closely.

Actually, Interest rates have tracked Inflation rates as the BoE Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) tries to keep Inflation within various bounds, but basically it's pretty clear that they're connected.

As you can see, inflation fell massively recently. As a result, so did interest rates.

However, inflation is now back up again (RPI was at 2.6% in December, the February figure is an estimate assuming that growth rate continues). When RPI was last around 2.6% (back in late 2005) the BoE Base Rate was around 4.5%. Now, it's 0.5%.

Of course, the MPC wants to keep interest rates low, as this ensures that the banks are able to build healthy profits.

Sorry, you thought it was to ensure that people weren't suddenly priced out of their homes? That might be true if the retail banks were passing on the unprecedentedly low interest rates to their consumers, but the typical mortgage is somewhat higher. Nationwide, one of the "nice" mortgage providers out there is quoting 5.74% fixed for only two years for a piddling £200,000 mortgage with an 83% LTV. That's over 11 times the current BoE base-rate.

By holding the 'cost' for banks to borrow money artificially low, the banks can make some seriously healthy product margins. As borrowing is generally cheap, consumer and corporate spending should increase and the economy should head back to growth.

It actually appears to have nearly worked as well. Technically the economy is back in growth by 0.4% (annualised). The problem is that inflation is running at 2.6%, meaning despite this, we're actually in the hole by over 2%.

Inflation is likely to continue to rise. Not least because in January we'll have the 2.1% increase due to VAT rising. Oil prices are hardly stable and with the US (and in fact every country aside from us) getting back on their feet, we'll no doubt see another rise.

Sooner or later the BoE is going to have to raise the Interest Rate. Will that cripple the economy? Probably. It'll certainly fuck the housing market over.

It looks good for Labour. They get to leave office with the country in 'growth' thanks to their artificial boosts and then watch the economy fall into another hole just as the Tories get in.

Has Labour been worth it?

The figures are out for December's public Debt. Once again we have a record!

Labour borrowed a mere £15.7 Billion in December. Just to give you a sense of scale around that, it's still over £500,000,000 a day and just under £6,000 a second.

Sure, once again I'm spouting figures that don't mean anything to anyone. Well, the average British male lasts 7.6 minutes during sex. So, assuming you have "average" sex (though I'm sure it's very satisfying for you) this country gets a further £2.7 Million pounds in debt. That's enough to buy your partner 8 large and perfect diamonds (like this one). That might even be more impressive than 7.6 minutes in the sack with you.

But anyway, on a serious note, this means that Public Debt has now risen to an all time high (shockingly) to £870 Billion. I thought I'd have a quick look at how public debt has risen over the last 13 years. Afterall, it's possible that those Evil Tories saddled this poor, sweet, innocent Labour Government with so much debt that they're still struggling to get the whole situation under control. Well, the graph below show how debt has varied since 1997 and makes quite interesting reading.

As we can see, initially Debt actually fell. This trend continued right up until 2001, when the then Chancellor, a Mr Brown (anyone know what happened to him?) decided that instead of following the Tory spending plans from the previous government, he would slightly increase spending on important things, like Laptops for Labour Voters (OK, OK, that bribe might have come a little bit later).


As soon as he abandoned sensible economic policies, the Debt began to rise, slowly at first, then picking up pace in recent years (the Bank Bailout). In 2010 we're expecting to have £1,015,000,000,000 of debt. That's only £658,000,000,000 more than when Labour came into power.


A few weeks ago I looked at what we could buy with the additional £500,000,000,000 of debt that Labour was building up over the next few years. 3,125 Boeing Jumbo Jets, 5 Apollo Programmes from scratch. That sort of thing.

But already over the last few years they've been in power, they've squandered more than that! Whilst my party piece is sizing massive numbers like these in simple easy to understand metrics I'm running out of things that I can think of that are expensive enough to give any sense of scale to the size of Labour's Debt!

OK, just for old times sake: A few years back the Queen Mary 2 was launched, one of the largest and most luxurious cruise liners ever built. She's capable of carrying over 3,000 passengers at a time. With Labour's current, not future debt, we could buy over 1,400 of these magnificent vessels. That's not a typo, that's really one thousand, four hundred QM2s. Those ships could carry simultaneously nearly 43 million passengers. Assuming we can train enough crew for all those ships, we'd be able to have the whole 60 million UK population heading out on a simultaneous cruise!

I'm not saying that buying enough hyper-luxury cruise ships (minimum of £9k for a round-the-world trip) would be a good use of all that money. I merely ask if we've had value for money fr this sheer spending. Is the NHS so much better? Are our schools producing better trained students? Do we have world-beating public transport?

I don't believe we have any of those. I know we have over 8 million "economically inactive" people (another record figure for Labour). I know that compared to other countries our education system is getting worse. I know that Labour have wasted billions on pointless and failed IT projects.

Over the last 13 years Labour has borrowed a amount. Because of their mis-management we've got nothing to show for this other than a population addicted to benefits and an ever-mounting interest bill.

My take on the DaveyC Poster

Come on Labour!

Constantly referring to "Airbrushing" (policies, photographs, yadda yadda yadda).

The Tories might be evil. They might want to enslave the poor. But at least they're not fucking stupid.