Freemania

Labour’s lost voters

Published on 2010-08-27 02:09:00

As this has come up lately during the Labour leadership campaign, I thought I’d look at the socioeconomic status (or ‘class’ as I believe some people quaintly call it) of voters abandoning the party.I’ve used MORI’s ‘how Britain voted’ data going back to 2001, the last time Labour won convincingly. To focus on political shifts rather than changes in the population, I’ve assumed a consistent electorate for all three elections of 2010 size and social structure: 44.4 million people,

Clegg vs the IFS: reductio ad absurdum

Published on 2010-08-25 13:58:00

Via Sunder Katwala, I see that Nick Clegg has reprised one of his greatest moronisms.Back in June, the Institute for Fiscal Studies reported that George Osborne’s Budget would hit the poorest hardest. Clegg responded by saying that the IFS analysis didn’t take into account the effects of unspecified future policies that the government might introduce. This met with general ridicule.Undaunted, Clegg has reacted in the same way to the latest IFS report:It doesn’t cover what we’re going to

An Office for Distributional Responsibility?

Published on 2010-08-25 06:26:00

The Budget in June included a chart showing that its measures would hit the rich hardest and the poorest the least. Within a day, the Institute for Fiscal Studies had demolished this as a farrago of dishonesty (I paraphrase) and that the truth was exactly the opposite.Now they’ve done a more thorough analysis that confirms and deepens this picture, and the government is getting a deserved kicking all over the media. Its spokespeople are still pathetically clinging to the bar chart George Osbor