A man has been jailed for six weeks for posting messages on Facebook about the Leeds teacher Ann Maguire, tragically murdered by a pupil.
The man, one Jake Newsome, wrote that he was "glad" Ms Maguire had been stabbed and "felt sorry" for the perpetrator, who should have "p****d on her too".
In my view people like Newsome are loathsome creeps. But should being a loathsome creep be a crime? If Newsome had made his unpleasant remarks to a friend in private, would this have been an offence? No. Neither would it have been if he had made them at, say, a debate about educational reform. If it isn't a crime to say these things, however unpleasant, why should it be a crime to write them on Facebook (or anywhere else)? Facebook is just a public conversation writ large. If Newsome had written them to a newspaper and the newspaper had been daft enough to publish them, would that have been a crime? No. Should it have been? I don't think so.
It's not clear from the news reports under which legislation Newsome was charged. An interesting criminal law blog suggests (here) that it could have been either the Malicious Communications Act 1988 or the Communications Act 2003, but that in both cases the outcome would have been the same (it's worth reading the analysis and critique of the law on this site, which is one of the only places I've been able to find where the writers seem at all bothered about the way the CPS is applying these laws).
But the relevant provisions of both these Acts were set up essentially to make life difficult for stalkers and emissaries of abusive letters. The 2003 Act was legislated (and the 1988 Act amended in 2001) by the last Labour government to recognise that the advent of the internet required that the wording of the existing hate mail legislation be reworded. Did Labour intend that people like Mr Newsome should clog up the courts and be criminalised for saying things that lots of us find offensive? Probably not, but in a way it doesn't matter because that's what's actually happening. And I find it very disquieting, because what's offensive is a matter of opinion. Who is to say that my opinion matters more than yours, or the other way round?
These laws fail one of the most basic tests of legislation, which is that we know what it means. I have no idea what sort of conduct will and won't attract the attention of the CPS, and I don't think anyone else does either. I don't think anyone knows what is the definition of offensive. Being prosecuted (or not being prosecuted) depends essentially on the CPS's whim. If you read the blog on the link above you'll see that there's some discussion about whether the CPS obeyed its own guidelines on whether to prosecute. The writers conclude that it probably didn't, but in a way that's not the most important thing. Of much more significance is the idea that the CPS can prosecute you, if it feels like it, for a crime no-one can properly define. What would Orwell have thought of this? Not much, one feels.
What Newsome wrote was horrible. But not as horrible as prosecuting him for it. One is a transgression of manners and taste. The other is a transgression of freedom of speech.
Friday 6 June 2014
Thursday 5 June 2014
Borrowing from the future
"What happened to the world my generation built?", asks the dramatic headline in today's Graun. The article, by one Harry Leslie Smith aged 91, recounts in harrowing detail the privations of poor people before the advent of the welfare state. Mr Smith fears that we are returning to the era of his childhood.
Nowhere in his article however does he consider the economic and demographic pressures the welfare state now faces. When it was set up the life expectancy of an average working man was 48. It is now well into the 80s. People are living longer for all sorts of reasons, one of which is the staggering improvement in healthcare. Only this morning I looked at an MRI scan of my dodgy knee with an NHS consultant. These miracles are expensive. And the longer people live the more medical care they need.
My answer to Mr Smith's question sounds harsh, but it might just be true.
"It became unaffordable, and the debts we incurred to run it in our lifetimes will be still be being paid off by our great-great grandchildren".
Nowhere in his article however does he consider the economic and demographic pressures the welfare state now faces. When it was set up the life expectancy of an average working man was 48. It is now well into the 80s. People are living longer for all sorts of reasons, one of which is the staggering improvement in healthcare. Only this morning I looked at an MRI scan of my dodgy knee with an NHS consultant. These miracles are expensive. And the longer people live the more medical care they need.
My answer to Mr Smith's question sounds harsh, but it might just be true.
"It became unaffordable, and the debts we incurred to run it in our lifetimes will be still be being paid off by our great-great grandchildren".
Wednesday 21 May 2014
Race relations at the car wash
The other day I had an illuminating experience of racial and cultural relations in Britain. This is what happened.
I went to fill up the car at a garage on the A34 in Burnage. The people that run it seem quite nice. Outside as I pulled up a gang of swarthy looking lads were washing cars in the rain. It was a foul day, chucking it down, and when I went in to pay I said to the cashier, by way of making conversation (it's what we do up north), "I bet you're glad you're in here and not washing cars with that lot".
"To be honest", he said, "I wouldn't want to be out with that lot even if the sun was shining".
"Oh yes?" I said.
"Yeah. They're Romanians", he said.
Here it comes, I thought.
"We've lost so many customers through that lot. They just don't know how to behave. A woman comes in. Fine, we all have a look don't we? But this lot. They're calling out. Making remarks. Taking pictures. They're a total disaster."
I made a vague middle-class noise which could have meant anything. Assent. Dissent. Embarrassment.
"I mean. This is the UK. They've got to learn how to behave. Show some respect towards women".
I paid and left.
In case you're wondering, the cashier was a young Muslim.
I went to fill up the car at a garage on the A34 in Burnage. The people that run it seem quite nice. Outside as I pulled up a gang of swarthy looking lads were washing cars in the rain. It was a foul day, chucking it down, and when I went in to pay I said to the cashier, by way of making conversation (it's what we do up north), "I bet you're glad you're in here and not washing cars with that lot".
"To be honest", he said, "I wouldn't want to be out with that lot even if the sun was shining".
"Oh yes?" I said.
"Yeah. They're Romanians", he said.
Here it comes, I thought.
"We've lost so many customers through that lot. They just don't know how to behave. A woman comes in. Fine, we all have a look don't we? But this lot. They're calling out. Making remarks. Taking pictures. They're a total disaster."
I made a vague middle-class noise which could have meant anything. Assent. Dissent. Embarrassment.
"I mean. This is the UK. They've got to learn how to behave. Show some respect towards women".
I paid and left.
In case you're wondering, the cashier was a young Muslim.
National sovereignty and the EU - a boon to extremists
It's rare that I find something I agree with in the Guardian, and when I do it generally it isn't something written by someone the paper employs. But one must not let the best be the enemy of the good. The following leapt out of a report on 20th May by Ian Traynor on the forthcoming European elections:
"A senior Spanish politician points out how difficult it was to campaign for office and be taken seriously when budget, spending and fiscal policies were being decided elsewhere by a troika of anonymous men in suits from the European commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF. "'The voters are not stupid. They know you cannot deliver on what you're telling them. They don't believe you. You lose legitimacy', he said."
Hallelujah.
If you give up your right to decide economic policy to people you didn't elect who live and work in another country and whose sense of engagement with your own is modest at best, the consequences are not just that you tend to end up with an economic policy that doesn't suit you, but that because your domestic politicians are powerless to do anything on the economic front domestic politics are marginalised and emasculated. This is what happens when you concede sovereignty.
In the UK we had the great good fortune that Gordon Brown (credit where due to the miserable old bubble-blower) applied a healthy dose of Scottish Presbyterian scepticism to Tony Blair's hello-clouds-hello-sky approach to the prospect of Eurozone membership. Pity the poor Italians, Irish, Spanish, Portuguese and Greeks. Not only have their countries been comprehensively stuffed by a decade of the wrong interest rate and the wrong exchange rate, there is nothing (and this is the killer) their own politicians can do (or can promise their electorates to do) to make anything better. Is there a better recipe for loss of faith in politics? A more fertile seed-bed for extremism anywhere?
Of course we have our own version of this problem, which is that long, long ago we conceded control over European immigration to the EU, with the consequence that when Labour allowed the populations of new EU members the unrestricted right to work here in 2004, immigration soared. The young people of older but financially crippled EU countries have since followed.
Is there anything a British political party can do?
No. Because any British politician who promised reform of border controls or immigration policy would also have to promise to leave the EU. And this points up the sheer madness of ceding control over any policy (not just immigration) to an outside body. You can't get it back without leaving.
The need to make EU exit noises has helped UKIP and hindered the Tories, making them look like a party of Euro haters (which undoubtedly some of them are). But is that any surprise? For me the astonishing thing lies in the proposition that at one point in time you sign up to something which must then remain fixed for all eternity.
Are people serious about this? We signed up to open borders when the EU had half a dozen or so members, all prosperous, none of whose citizens had much incentive to move, whereas the EU now has nearly thirty members, countries with a wide disparity of living standard amongst many of which adoption of the Euro has wreaked havoc. The world is very different to the one we envisaged at the time of signature.
If David Cameron is wrong to threaten withdrawal from the EU in the absence of fundamental reform (and wrong in principle rather than just on this specific issue), how long would we have to wait before the changing world or changing domestic political opinion would make it OK? Twenty years? Fifty years? A century? And in the meantime what should domestic politicians say to their electorates? Sorry, but on the issues which poll after poll show you feel most strongly about, we can do absolutely nothing?
I am no visceral hater of the EU, but the present arrangements are not working. In fact they are a boon to the extremists.
"A senior Spanish politician points out how difficult it was to campaign for office and be taken seriously when budget, spending and fiscal policies were being decided elsewhere by a troika of anonymous men in suits from the European commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF. "'The voters are not stupid. They know you cannot deliver on what you're telling them. They don't believe you. You lose legitimacy', he said."
Hallelujah.
If you give up your right to decide economic policy to people you didn't elect who live and work in another country and whose sense of engagement with your own is modest at best, the consequences are not just that you tend to end up with an economic policy that doesn't suit you, but that because your domestic politicians are powerless to do anything on the economic front domestic politics are marginalised and emasculated. This is what happens when you concede sovereignty.
In the UK we had the great good fortune that Gordon Brown (credit where due to the miserable old bubble-blower) applied a healthy dose of Scottish Presbyterian scepticism to Tony Blair's hello-clouds-hello-sky approach to the prospect of Eurozone membership. Pity the poor Italians, Irish, Spanish, Portuguese and Greeks. Not only have their countries been comprehensively stuffed by a decade of the wrong interest rate and the wrong exchange rate, there is nothing (and this is the killer) their own politicians can do (or can promise their electorates to do) to make anything better. Is there a better recipe for loss of faith in politics? A more fertile seed-bed for extremism anywhere?
Of course we have our own version of this problem, which is that long, long ago we conceded control over European immigration to the EU, with the consequence that when Labour allowed the populations of new EU members the unrestricted right to work here in 2004, immigration soared. The young people of older but financially crippled EU countries have since followed.
Is there anything a British political party can do?
No. Because any British politician who promised reform of border controls or immigration policy would also have to promise to leave the EU. And this points up the sheer madness of ceding control over any policy (not just immigration) to an outside body. You can't get it back without leaving.
The need to make EU exit noises has helped UKIP and hindered the Tories, making them look like a party of Euro haters (which undoubtedly some of them are). But is that any surprise? For me the astonishing thing lies in the proposition that at one point in time you sign up to something which must then remain fixed for all eternity.
Are people serious about this? We signed up to open borders when the EU had half a dozen or so members, all prosperous, none of whose citizens had much incentive to move, whereas the EU now has nearly thirty members, countries with a wide disparity of living standard amongst many of which adoption of the Euro has wreaked havoc. The world is very different to the one we envisaged at the time of signature.
If David Cameron is wrong to threaten withdrawal from the EU in the absence of fundamental reform (and wrong in principle rather than just on this specific issue), how long would we have to wait before the changing world or changing domestic political opinion would make it OK? Twenty years? Fifty years? A century? And in the meantime what should domestic politicians say to their electorates? Sorry, but on the issues which poll after poll show you feel most strongly about, we can do absolutely nothing?
I am no visceral hater of the EU, but the present arrangements are not working. In fact they are a boon to the extremists.
Tuesday 20 May 2014
Fargo and the problem of evil
I had high hopes of Channel 4's reworking of the Coen brothers' magisterial Fargo. Hopes and fears too, because I loved the original so much I was afraid they might wreck the remake. And in a way they have.
Sure, it's well acted, the snowy exteriors look great, Molly, the new Marge Gunderson, is just as wonderful a character as Frances McDormand's original. And yet.
Here's the thing. The makers of the new Fargo have fallen into the trap so carefully avoided by the Coens. It turn on the character of Lorne Malvo, played with concentrated malevolence by Billy Bob Thornton (we may well find that the writers have chosen this name in fact because it is so nearly an anagram of malevolent). What so distinguished the bad guys in the original was that they seemed like real people. As a former criminal lawyer I can testify that very few criminals are bad in an interesting way. I never met a single one like Lorne Malvo (just in case we hadn't worked out how bad Malvo is, the writers gave him a charming little speech about bestiality in the last episode).
The ones I met were stupid, panicky and damaged rather than clever and imperturbable. And this was true in the Coen's version too. I remember the Steve Buscemi character for his bad teeth and whining voice; the guy with the bad blond dye job was altogether nastier, but he was also thoroughly dim. Together they did bad things, but the Coens realised that essentially these were individuals with low-wattage IQs, and in my experience that's true to life.
Curiously this was something the Coens got wrong in No Country For Old Men, and I mused then about why it was that novelists and film directors felt obliged to present bad people as edgier versions of themselves - people perhaps who liked wearing black polo neck sweaters, had interesting hair cuts and once had a tattered copy of The Glass Bead Game in their greatcoat pocket. Next time you watch Thornton as Malvo see if like me you can picture him as an ageing hipster, tramping the streets of Hoxton in search of an internet start-up. In films it's generally not enough to present criminals pitiable losers - directors have to make us feel, as with No Country For Old Men, that in some way the perpetrators are evil personified, Lucifer on his day off, the devil incarnate. They're wrong and it makes for bad art. Bad people are boring and - pace Hannah Arendt - banal.
PS A small bet that the new Fargo won't replicate the old one's famously downbeat ending. In the original we see the blond man feeding Steve Buscemi's leg into the woodchipper as Marge approaches through the snow, revolver in hand. Surely, we think, vulnerable Marge, gun or no, can't possibly succeed in arresting this awful man. But next shot there is Marge driving back to town in her squad car with woodchip man in cuffs in the back. Slowly the audience exhales and unknots its stomach. It is the end. I think the new Fargo will funk this. Molly will arrest Lorne. But it'll be a conventional cliff-hanger without the Coens' downbeat surprise.
Sure, it's well acted, the snowy exteriors look great, Molly, the new Marge Gunderson, is just as wonderful a character as Frances McDormand's original. And yet.
Here's the thing. The makers of the new Fargo have fallen into the trap so carefully avoided by the Coens. It turn on the character of Lorne Malvo, played with concentrated malevolence by Billy Bob Thornton (we may well find that the writers have chosen this name in fact because it is so nearly an anagram of malevolent). What so distinguished the bad guys in the original was that they seemed like real people. As a former criminal lawyer I can testify that very few criminals are bad in an interesting way. I never met a single one like Lorne Malvo (just in case we hadn't worked out how bad Malvo is, the writers gave him a charming little speech about bestiality in the last episode).
The ones I met were stupid, panicky and damaged rather than clever and imperturbable. And this was true in the Coen's version too. I remember the Steve Buscemi character for his bad teeth and whining voice; the guy with the bad blond dye job was altogether nastier, but he was also thoroughly dim. Together they did bad things, but the Coens realised that essentially these were individuals with low-wattage IQs, and in my experience that's true to life.
Curiously this was something the Coens got wrong in No Country For Old Men, and I mused then about why it was that novelists and film directors felt obliged to present bad people as edgier versions of themselves - people perhaps who liked wearing black polo neck sweaters, had interesting hair cuts and once had a tattered copy of The Glass Bead Game in their greatcoat pocket. Next time you watch Thornton as Malvo see if like me you can picture him as an ageing hipster, tramping the streets of Hoxton in search of an internet start-up. In films it's generally not enough to present criminals pitiable losers - directors have to make us feel, as with No Country For Old Men, that in some way the perpetrators are evil personified, Lucifer on his day off, the devil incarnate. They're wrong and it makes for bad art. Bad people are boring and - pace Hannah Arendt - banal.
PS A small bet that the new Fargo won't replicate the old one's famously downbeat ending. In the original we see the blond man feeding Steve Buscemi's leg into the woodchipper as Marge approaches through the snow, revolver in hand. Surely, we think, vulnerable Marge, gun or no, can't possibly succeed in arresting this awful man. But next shot there is Marge driving back to town in her squad car with woodchip man in cuffs in the back. Slowly the audience exhales and unknots its stomach. It is the end. I think the new Fargo will funk this. Molly will arrest Lorne. But it'll be a conventional cliff-hanger without the Coens' downbeat surprise.
Monday 19 May 2014
Richard Scudamore lives - for now
On an evening in which Manchester United appointed Louis van Gaal as manager and Ryan Giggs, taking up the reins of deputy manager, retired as a player, Radio 5's 7 p.m. sports programme led with . . . . yes, the news that the Premier League had decided not to take any action against Richard "Sexist" Scudamore. The panel of middle-aged sports journalists plus token woman mused over the issue self-righteously for the first twenty minutes of the programme.
Not once did any of the panellists suggest that, loathsome though they might personally find Scudamore's leaked private sexist emails, they worried about a society where one step out of line could result in a media campaign for you to lose your job. The BBC is far from being the worst offender in this case, but their news headline went along the following lines - Peter Scudamore will keep his job despite (and this was the word which stuck in my craw) being revealed as a chauvinist pig. "Despite" implies that Scudamore had done something wrong. After all, you wouldn't say he kept his job "despite" having eaten porridge for breakfast. But I don't need the BBC to tell me whether Scudamore has erred - I can make up my own mind - and it worries me that the Corporation employs people who don't understand this basic point. Either that or they don't understand what words mean.
But I guess that's kind of person who works for Radio 5, and if I don't like it I shouldn't be listening to it.
Of course the most sickening aspect of the holier than thou broadcasters was that football has always been a deeply sexist sport. One doesn't have to read the tabloids to get an idea of the Caligulan scenes which take place when a gang of footballers meets a gaggle of impressionable wannabe Wags. Out of many, two vignettes spring to mind. One anecdote was in Ronald Reng's book about Barnsley's German goalkeeper, and concerned, well, let's just say it concerned group fellatio. The other concerned the former Chelsea player Gavin Peacock, a Christian, who sometimes travelled to away games in the luggage compartment of the team bus. This was because the then manager showed porn movies to the players en route and Peacock didn't want to watch them. Football is a profoundly sexist game, female referee's assistants notwithstanding, a sexism which extends from players to fans to management and, yes, to journalists; that's to say the same journalists now agitating for the hapless Scudamore to lose his job. It is still very a largely working class pursuit, even in the prawn sandwich seats at Old Trafford, and the working class are, by and large, less careful to hide their sexism under a cloak of "respect" for the opposite sex than Proust-reading liberal humanities graduates like me.
Under the circumstances it's not surprising the Premier League clubs voted unanimously to back their Chief Exec. No doubt they would have done so even if Bruce Buck, the Chelsea chairman and one of the panel who examined the issue, had not been a shooting partner of Scudamore.
What, I wonder, would the Premier League have done if Scudmore's remarks had been racist? I expect they would have sacked him, and I think they would have been right. Racism is much more serious an issue than sexism. That's because a society can't function properly where people can be discriminated against just because of the colour of their skin. But sexism doesn't quite have the same heft. That's because while most men may be sexist to one degree or other, we all have mothers, wives, sisters, partners and daughters. We all mingle with each other in a way in which, even now, most black and white people don't. If a crude summary of male/female relations might be Can't live with them, Can't live without them, it doesn't seem unreasonable that men (and women) should be able to give vent to their feelings about the differences between the sexes from time to time. It doesn't mean that anyone is going to do anything horrible about or to the opposite sex. I thought Scudamore's remarks were bad; but nothing like as bad as it would be to sack him because he made them.
PS As Allison Pearson pointed out in the Torygraph a couple of days later, it's interesting to compare the UK media interest in Scudamore with their lack of interest in Meriam Ibrahim, a Sudanese Muslim sentenced to death for adultery; and not because she actually committed adultery, but because she married a Christian. Ms Ibrahim is pregnant by the way. Where are the double page spreads and radio phone-ins about her? The Sudanese court exercised a degree of clemency by the way - it is going to allow her to have her baby before she is stoned to death.
In a society which, for all its faults, is almost certainly getting less sexist by the day, the fuss over Scudamore and the silence about Ibrahim reveals our media to be contemptible to a degree which overruns the boundaries of the word.
Not once did any of the panellists suggest that, loathsome though they might personally find Scudamore's leaked private sexist emails, they worried about a society where one step out of line could result in a media campaign for you to lose your job. The BBC is far from being the worst offender in this case, but their news headline went along the following lines - Peter Scudamore will keep his job despite (and this was the word which stuck in my craw) being revealed as a chauvinist pig. "Despite" implies that Scudamore had done something wrong. After all, you wouldn't say he kept his job "despite" having eaten porridge for breakfast. But I don't need the BBC to tell me whether Scudamore has erred - I can make up my own mind - and it worries me that the Corporation employs people who don't understand this basic point. Either that or they don't understand what words mean.
But I guess that's kind of person who works for Radio 5, and if I don't like it I shouldn't be listening to it.
Of course the most sickening aspect of the holier than thou broadcasters was that football has always been a deeply sexist sport. One doesn't have to read the tabloids to get an idea of the Caligulan scenes which take place when a gang of footballers meets a gaggle of impressionable wannabe Wags. Out of many, two vignettes spring to mind. One anecdote was in Ronald Reng's book about Barnsley's German goalkeeper, and concerned, well, let's just say it concerned group fellatio. The other concerned the former Chelsea player Gavin Peacock, a Christian, who sometimes travelled to away games in the luggage compartment of the team bus. This was because the then manager showed porn movies to the players en route and Peacock didn't want to watch them. Football is a profoundly sexist game, female referee's assistants notwithstanding, a sexism which extends from players to fans to management and, yes, to journalists; that's to say the same journalists now agitating for the hapless Scudamore to lose his job. It is still very a largely working class pursuit, even in the prawn sandwich seats at Old Trafford, and the working class are, by and large, less careful to hide their sexism under a cloak of "respect" for the opposite sex than Proust-reading liberal humanities graduates like me.
Under the circumstances it's not surprising the Premier League clubs voted unanimously to back their Chief Exec. No doubt they would have done so even if Bruce Buck, the Chelsea chairman and one of the panel who examined the issue, had not been a shooting partner of Scudamore.
What, I wonder, would the Premier League have done if Scudmore's remarks had been racist? I expect they would have sacked him, and I think they would have been right. Racism is much more serious an issue than sexism. That's because a society can't function properly where people can be discriminated against just because of the colour of their skin. But sexism doesn't quite have the same heft. That's because while most men may be sexist to one degree or other, we all have mothers, wives, sisters, partners and daughters. We all mingle with each other in a way in which, even now, most black and white people don't. If a crude summary of male/female relations might be Can't live with them, Can't live without them, it doesn't seem unreasonable that men (and women) should be able to give vent to their feelings about the differences between the sexes from time to time. It doesn't mean that anyone is going to do anything horrible about or to the opposite sex. I thought Scudamore's remarks were bad; but nothing like as bad as it would be to sack him because he made them.
PS As Allison Pearson pointed out in the Torygraph a couple of days later, it's interesting to compare the UK media interest in Scudamore with their lack of interest in Meriam Ibrahim, a Sudanese Muslim sentenced to death for adultery; and not because she actually committed adultery, but because she married a Christian. Ms Ibrahim is pregnant by the way. Where are the double page spreads and radio phone-ins about her? The Sudanese court exercised a degree of clemency by the way - it is going to allow her to have her baby before she is stoned to death.
In a society which, for all its faults, is almost certainly getting less sexist by the day, the fuss over Scudamore and the silence about Ibrahim reveals our media to be contemptible to a degree which overruns the boundaries of the word.
Ed Miliband's target
Ed Miliband has proposed a long-term link between the median earnings and the minimum wage. In case you think this might amount to a promise, Miliband says it's a target he hopes his government will reach by 2020 or thereabouts. But does it make any sense?
The median wage isn't the same as the average wage. It's the wage in the middle, which is to say if you arranged the salaries of all Britain's 33 million workers in quantity order, the one about 16.5 million from the end (or the beginning, come to that). It seems a funny benchmark, since it doesn't reflect what most people earn.
There are several problems with Miliband's proposal. The first is that higher wages tend to mean fewer people having jobs. You can express it like this - the minimum wage (or the living wage if you like) means more money for the people with jobs, but fewer people having jobs at all. (Incidentally, before anyone points out that employment levels actually aren't that bad considering we've had the minimum wage for quite a long time, let me point out that levels might have been even better if we hadn't had one at all).
Moreover Miliband is ignoring the elephant in the room, which is that bottom end wages are low because Labour allowed in the best part of a million East Europeans after 2004, increasing the pool of available labour and easing pressure on employers to compete for staff by raising wages (thereby increasing inequality and, it might be added, increasing demand for housing not only by sheer weight of numbers but also by keeping interest rates low and encouraging people to borrow more).
Effectively Miliband is trying to fix a problem his party was instrumental in causing by attacking its symptoms rather than its cause. The cause is too many people chasing too few jobs.
And of course as long as our immigration policy remains outsourced to the EU, continental Europe with its stagnating and dysfunctional economic system can continue to export its surplus labour to Britain, where it provides jolly good service in the hotels, turnip fields and coffee shops, ensuring that wages remain low at the bottom end and British people (many of them with brown faces) languish on the dole.
Of course this doesn't mean that Miliband's target won't hit a target of its own - the ignorance and gullibility of some of his natural supporters.
The median wage isn't the same as the average wage. It's the wage in the middle, which is to say if you arranged the salaries of all Britain's 33 million workers in quantity order, the one about 16.5 million from the end (or the beginning, come to that). It seems a funny benchmark, since it doesn't reflect what most people earn.
There are several problems with Miliband's proposal. The first is that higher wages tend to mean fewer people having jobs. You can express it like this - the minimum wage (or the living wage if you like) means more money for the people with jobs, but fewer people having jobs at all. (Incidentally, before anyone points out that employment levels actually aren't that bad considering we've had the minimum wage for quite a long time, let me point out that levels might have been even better if we hadn't had one at all).
Moreover Miliband is ignoring the elephant in the room, which is that bottom end wages are low because Labour allowed in the best part of a million East Europeans after 2004, increasing the pool of available labour and easing pressure on employers to compete for staff by raising wages (thereby increasing inequality and, it might be added, increasing demand for housing not only by sheer weight of numbers but also by keeping interest rates low and encouraging people to borrow more).
Effectively Miliband is trying to fix a problem his party was instrumental in causing by attacking its symptoms rather than its cause. The cause is too many people chasing too few jobs.
And of course as long as our immigration policy remains outsourced to the EU, continental Europe with its stagnating and dysfunctional economic system can continue to export its surplus labour to Britain, where it provides jolly good service in the hotels, turnip fields and coffee shops, ensuring that wages remain low at the bottom end and British people (many of them with brown faces) languish on the dole.
Of course this doesn't mean that Miliband's target won't hit a target of its own - the ignorance and gullibility of some of his natural supporters.
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