EDITORIAL : THE GUARDIAN, ENGLAND

        

 

Politics: Disunited Kingdom

Ed Miliband needs to recapture the support which Tony Blair once mustered across the deep blue south

There's a long time to go before the SNP's promised referendum on independence, but Alex Salmond aims to use it to exploit the momentum the party has gained from its overwhelming success in the May elections. His latest London-based target is the UK supreme court, which two weeks ago ruled that a Scottish conviction should be overturned on human rights grounds. That, the Nationalists say, fails to honour their nation's established right to conduct its own legal system.

Scotland's determination to march to its own music is the most spectacular sign of the diminishing political unity of the United Kingdom. But it's not alone. Fifty years ago, the Conservatives could be sure of nearly 50% of the vote in Scotland; in the 2010 election, they took 17%, and only one seat. But 50 years ago, too, the party held four of Manchester's nine parliamentary seats, and six of Liverpool's nine. They have not now won in Manchester since 1983, or in Liverpool since 1979. In the local elections in May, they failed to win even one seat in Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle and Sheffield. Had they not through the Thatcher years forfeited the allegiance of great cities they might not be needing coalition partners today.

Yet these elections were ominous for Labour too. A month ago, Ed Miliband rode in triumph to Gravesham, Kent, to celebrate its capture from the Conservatives. "North, south, east and west," he enthused, "Labour is making gains and coming back." Not so. Of the 27 councils Labour gained, only one apart from Gravesham was in the south. Of 61 councils where Labour failed to take even one seat, almost eight in 10 were southern. As the geographer Danny Dorling demonstrates in his book So You Think You Know About Britain?, in 2010, political polarisation, north versus south, urban versus rural, reached its highest point since 1918. Nor is it hard to see why. As Dorling also shows, British society, as measured by a wealth of indicators from life expectancy to housing provision, is built on inequality. The least favoured places, by no means all in the north, have done worst in recession; but they also gained least from Labour's years of prosperity.

There's a hard choice here for Mr Miliband. He needs to recapture the support which Tony Blair once mustered across the deep blue south. But to do so implies a top priority for what New Labour used to talk of as "southern comfort" – at great possible cost to harder pressed places across the rest of the land. For David Cameron to win back Liverpool Walton, for Ed Miliband to recapture Wimbledon – such epic feats look well beyond their present capacities. We may have rejected AV, but the chance of returning to clear cut national outcomes looks remote.

 

Charities: The state of donation

Donations will have to scale entirely new heights if the phrase big society is to avoid acquiring the ring of a cold joke

A Conservative council, with a history of cleansing the poor from its housing, is currently attempting to criminalise the good souls who distribute soup to the destitute. For the moment, Westminster's draft bylaws are a minor embarrassment for David Cameron, but the way things are going they could become an emblem for the fate of his avowed wish to create a kinder, gentler country amid hard times.

The prime minister remains genuinely convinced he is on to something with his "big society", or else he would hardly have attempted something which no political adviser would ever recommend – a third relaunch. In a speech a fortnight ago, the prime minister acknowledged that Joe Public now doubts the coalition is about anything except cuts. But undeterred by the simultaneous announcement that big society tsar Nat Wei was abdicating, Mr Cameron replayed all his soothing records about how the giving impulse makes communities come alive. He offered one or two prosaic thoughts, such as broadening the narrow basis of Whitehall's cost-benefit analysis, which may eventually win philanthropic efforts a little more recognition. For the most part, the speech was a reminder that warm words about the space between the state and the citizen plays better in opposition. Like the young Tony Blair before him, Mr Cameron made great play of the indubitable importance of civic society before coming to office. Unlike Mr Blair, however, he has not grasped that after the people propel someone to power, they are more interested in what that person says about the things they can influence than about the things they cannot.

One by one, the big ideas which it was promised would involve charities in the state's work are coming unstuck. The health service reforms are in pieces, most welfare-to-work contracts have been gobbled by businesses not charities, and now the mooted new right for outsiders to run any public services is being held back by Lib Dems who fear it amounts to a general duty to privatise. The immediate future of the little platoons who, in the Burkean buzz-phrase, comprise the big society, depends not on picking up public sector work, but on inspiring new generosity to make up for the sudden drying up of billions in statutory grants.

As we report today, the auguries are not good. The disappearance of a net 1,600 charities over the last year is one indictor of strain. Some amalgamations make things more efficient, others merely balance the books at the cost of a distinctive focus – witness the recent forced marriage of Fairbridge, a superlative youth charity once hailed by Mr Cameron himself. Such are the pay cuts and shake-outs in some platoons, that by the time happier days return there may not be enough professional troops left to rally voluntary help.

Donations have picked up from the nadir of the crash, but they have not returned to the previous peak. They will have to scale entirely new heights if the phrase big society is to avoid acquiring the ring of a cold joke. Anything is worth trying, including the derided Whitehall proposal to invite benevolence at the cash point, but the most authoritative study of the last 30 years of British giving suggests such innovations tend to shuffle donations around, as opposed to increasing their overall level. The one idea in the giving white paper which charities have really latched on to is inheritance tax breaks for generous bequests. Persuading Britain's tight-wadded wealthy to redeem themselves in death is a noble ambition, but the more established plutocratic magnanimity of America is better at achieving immortality through bricks and mortar than reliably addressing social needs.

Worse, by draining tax revenues, the scheme could hasten the shredding of the welfare safety net, and so increase the call on charities. One more of the many paradoxes involved in building a bigger society with shrinking budgets.

 

In praise of … Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee

Through lots of microstudies, they make a subtle case for one big argument: aid really can help poor people

Since the banking crisis broke, the different schools of economic thought have gained much exposure. You've heard of the Keynesians, the monetarists, the behaviouralists. Well, now meet the randomistas. The nickname given to the work done by MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo refers to their use of randomised control trials, familiar to whitecoats working in science labs but not so common among crumpled development analysts in, say, West Bengal. Yet Banerjee and Duflo put the random trial to excellent use to find out what works. Want poor families in north India to immunise their children? Offer the parents a small bag of lentils as an incentive and vaccination rates make a startling jump, from around 5% to almost 40%. Or take the question of whether poor Africans really value mosquito nets they are given free. Much debated within university faculties, it took a randomista to go out to west Kenya and find the answer (an emphatic yes). Duflo and Banerjee tell these stories in a lovely new book called Poor Economics. As they admit, randomistas cannot answer some big questions – how to tackle food prices, for instance. But through lots of microstudies, they make a subtle case for one big argument: aid really can help poor people, provided the money follows the evidence. The economists back home lining up to warn George Osborne his plan isn't working must wish there was some simple experiment to settle the manner, without making guinea pigs of us all.