Don't confuse me with the facts

The Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith (IDS, or, as Jeremy Hardy entertainingly calls him, Irritable Duncan Syndrome), has this wonderful insight in the Telegraph today:

[Duncan Smith] said that Labour’s failure to help British unemployed people compete for and win jobs had fuelled immigration in recent years.
The last 13 years saw the number of people in employment increase by 2.5 million, he said. Yet today there are around 5 million people on out-of-work benefits.
“So who took all the new jobs? Over half of them went to foreign nationals. This isn’t about immigration. It is a simple question of supply and demand,” he said.
“We had a supply of labour – the unemployed. We had a demand for labour – all the new jobs. But we couldn’t match them up, so we had to import people who could do the work.”

Never mind that all the way back in 2004 the Centre for Economic Policy Research found that "Research for the US and other European countries finds, with very few exceptions, modest or zero effects of immigration on employment and wages of residents."

It is, of course, easier to scapegoat immigrants than to deal with the structural economic problems leading to such high unemployment. But then, did we expect anything less from the Tories?

"I mean, I like kebabs. But now that we've got the recipe, is there really any need for them to stay?"

Appalling racism from the new German interior minister. I mean, it would be awful if anyone said this, but this is the guy in charge of immigration:

In his first press conference as minister, [Hans-Peter] Friedrich said on Friday that Muslims should be allowed live in modern Germany, but he added: "To say that Islam belongs in Germany is not a fact supported by history."

To their credit, a long list of fellow-ministers and other political figures have slapped him down. If I were his boss I'd ask him to resign. But between this and her recent speech on the so-called failure of multiculturalism, it seems like Angela Merkel has decided to gamble on a more populist stance on immigration. It's all very worrying.

Incidentally, for those who aren't getting the reference in the subject line:

Teaser

The Coalition today gave a teensy-tiny hint of what's the come in the future on student visas and the Post-study Work Visa - or, as we here at Some Things I've Read Industries call it, the sole route to my future happiness.

[Universities minister David Willetts] said the "range of options from complete closure to the status quo was still under consideration for the future of the 'post-study work route'", under which 38,000 students stay on each year. He did, however, report concern that some universities would be disadvantaged in the international market if they were to lose that route.
The immigration minister [Damian Green] indicated last month that he and Willetts were considering placing time restrictions on post-work study rather than abolishing the scheme.

It's really good news that they're being hesitant about this. Time restrictions are not ideal - I'd imagine they're thinking of something along the lines of what used to be called the Working Holiday Visa, where you got it for a fixed period of time and couldn't renew it. But compared to the usual Coalition approach of "bugger the consultation - just ram it through!", this is a good sign. Hopefully it stays nice and ambiguous right through the summer, so I can have my lousy visa already by the time they make up their minds.

Death or taxes

An editorial in The New York Times today makes what to me is the most salient point about the current fiscal problems states and the federal government find themselves caught in:

The federal deficit is too large for comfort, and most states are struggling to balance their books. Some of that is because of excessive spending, and much is because the recession has driven down tax revenues. But a substantial part was caused by deliberate decisions by state and federal lawmakers to drain government of resources by handing out huge tax cuts, mostly to the rich. As governments begin to stagger from the self-induced hemorrhaging, Republican politicians like [Speaker of the House John] Boehner and [Wisconsin governor Scott] Walker cry poverty and use it as an excuse to break unions and kill programs they never liked in flush years.

This is classic, Marxian class warfare - war waged by the rich on the poor, with no one crying foul until the poor start to fight back. But the tide of public opinion may be turning:

A New York Times/CBS News poll published on Tuesday showed that Americans oppose ending bargaining rights for public unions by a majority of nearly two to one. And the poll sharply refutes the post-Reagan Republican mantra that the public invariably abhors all tax increases. Nearly twice as many people said they would prefer a tax increase to cutting benefits of public employees or to cutting spending on roads.

I find it bizarre that not one American political commentator I have heard on the radio, seen on TV or read online or in the papers has suggested raising taxes as a means of cutting the deficit. I mean, shouldn't this be the obvious solution? We have some of the lowest effective tax rates in the developed world - surely we have at least a little bit of wiggle room?

Against performance reviews

Good op-ed in the New York Times today on the argument that ending collective bargaining will ensure fairer pay, because better employees would be able to be paid more. Samuel Culbert of UCLA says that's nonsense, because the "merit" that merit-based pay is based on comes from assessment by performance review:

In my years studying such reviews, I’ve learned that they are subjective evaluations that measure how “comfortable” a boss is with an employee, not how much an employee contributes to overall results. They are an intimidating tool that makes employees too scared to speak their minds, lest their criticism come back to haunt them in their annual evaluations. They almost guarantee that the owners — whether they be taxpayers or shareholders — will get less bang for their buck.

My Quaker skepticism of competition makes me suspicious of merit pay as a concept for very similar reasons to this - who exactly decides what constitutes merit? And on what authority? Surely "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is a much fairer way of doing things - and easier to get right, too!

Fox News, eh?

The Globe and Mail reports that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has scrapped plans to abolish Canada's version of the "Fairness Doctrine" (abolished in the United States by His Holiness St. Ronald Reagan in 1987).

[T]he CRTC's call for public input on the proposal resulted in a tidal wave of angry responses from Canadians who said they feared such a move would open the door to Fox TV-style news and reduce their ability to determine what is true and what is false.

In the face of the outcry, the regulations committee, which is composed of both MPs and senators, met last Thursday and decided it would no longer pursue the matter with the CRTC.

 I think the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine and the ability of wealthy, unaccountable corporations to flood the airwaves with misinformation has done a great deal of harm to American public discourse. I also think that, due to our influence, it's harmed public discourse around the world: have you ever noticed how conferences of climate-change skeptics in Europe are often headlined by American "experts" who made their reputation on Fox News et al.? Ditto ex-gay organizations and other radical rightwing groups. So good for Canada for standing up for integrity and moderation in the news. It's too important to get it wrong.

From Our Own Correspondent: Kate Adie in Libya

Kate Adie, former BBC reporter and new presenter of From Our Own Correspondent on Radio 4 (which, incidentally, is some of the best radio you'll hear), has a great essay in today's Guardian about her experiences reporting on Libya for many years. She focuses on how the regime functions on the inside, emphasizing the total dependence on Qaddafi and the chaos of the country's administration:

At the Interior Ministry I asked the man in the biggest office (with a broken fax machine and no working telephone) if he were the minister.
"Maybe," he replied, adding that he had been last year, then someone else had been appointed while he was still in post, but had subsequently . . . er . . . left town . . . "So, maybe I'm the minister," he added helpfully.

And Qaddafi himself doesn't come across as especially reliable or stable either:

Gaddafi called himself Colonel occasionally and refused to acknowledge the phrase President, preferring the term Leader. He was costumed theatrically – admiral, desert Bedouin, Italian lounge-lizard. He occasionally used the trappings of conventional power – long motorcades – or the occasional white horse. However, he was just as likely to turn up driving a battered small Peugeot with the bumpers missing. I know, because he nearly ran me over one morning trying to park the wreck very inexpertly outside my hotel.

 But don't let the humor fool you. She talks about people so scared of him that they physically shook in his presence; about people disappearing and human limbs showing up in dumpsters. "Farce mingled with fear," she writes, "That is how the country ran. At the very heart of the mysterious administration was a clutch of men loyal to – but still very scared of – the Colonel himself."

It's not reassuring. The regime's short-sightedness has left no natural power structure to take over after Qaddafi goes. Adie even talks about how this was clear to people within the regime - there was no succession plan, and no one knew what would happen when he finally died. Now the problem is even more acute, and it is not at all clear how it should be overcome.