Cameron's 'full employment' pledge isn't very convincing

Earlier today in Ipswich, Prime Minister David Cameron pledged to turn Britain into a nation of “full employment”, aiming to overtake Germany for the top percentage of people in work. From the BBC:

The PM is aiming for Britain to have the highest percentage of people in work of any developed nation.

Labour said the Conservatives' promises would sound like "empty words" to the unemployed or those on low pay.

Mr Cameron's goal of "full employment" would involve the UK, currently 72%, overtaking Germany's 74% in terms of the percentage of people in work, said BBC assistant political editor Norman Smith.

There is no timescale, but it is an "aspiration which he wants to achieve", he added.

It’s a nice ‘aspiration’ sure, but Labour’s not the only group to think these are ‘empty words’ coming from the PM.

Why?

His pledge to bring full employment to Britons includes measures to increase the number of start-up loans provided by the government, as well as plans to invest in infrastructure, which he hopes will attract business and support new apprenticeships. But no word about changes to the minimum wage. Not a word about the personal allowance or National Insurance tax.

Research that my colleague Ben recently highlighted shows what a negative effect the minimum wage can have on unemployment – it's estimated that “minimum wage increases reduced the national employment-to-population ratio by 0.7 percentage point(s)” in the United States during the late 2000’s.

What’s more, a job is significantly less valuable to the newly employed if she is still unable to provide for herself and her family. At the same time the PM scraps the minimum wage, he should raise the tax-free personal allowance to the Living Wage, taking the poor out of tax completely. National Insurance tax should also be scrapped for low-earners, as it works as just another form of income tax.

A backtrack on minimum wage increases combined with pegging the personal allowance and NI to a Living Wage would be a serious indication of Cameron’s commitment to ‘full employment.’ But while he continues to spout plans for increased government spending and building, I remain unconvinced.

David Cameron vs feminism

Today there was a minor kerfuffle about the Prime Minister’s refusal to wear a t-shirt that says “This is what a feminist looks like” after Elle, a women’s magazine, asked him to do so for a marketing campaign. Elle had a go at Cameron, saying that “It should be simple. Do you believe that men and women are equal? Do you believe men and women should have the same rights? The same opportunities? Yes? Then you are a feminist.”

Well, that sounds pretty reasonable! I don’t see how anyone could object to that. But the plot thickens later on. All these unobjectionable, bland claims apparently relate to quite specific public policy issues, like unequal pay and political representation for women. According to Elle, we need feminism because "for every £1 a man earns in the UK, a woman earns 80p. Women make up only 35% of senior managers in the UK and an estimated 30,000 women a year lose their jobs as a result of pregnancy-related discrimination. In politics, fewer than one in four MPs is a woman, and there are only five women in the cabinet out of 22 ministers".

In other words, we need feminism so we can do something about very specific issues (presumably in specific ways, since the Fawcett Society is involved which has specific policies to address all these things).

This sounds to me like a ‘motte and bailey’ argument. Scott Alexander explains in more detail in part two of this excellent essay here (if you have the time, read that, not this). The name come from medieval times, when a ‘motte’ was a defensible castle surrounded by a profitable village called the ‘bailey’. Everyone would work out in the bailey until they got attacked and had to retreat to the safety of the motte.

A motte and bailey argument starts off by defining itself in very defensible way. “Feminism means thinking that men and women should be treated equally.” That’s the safe, defensible motte.

It then extends that reasonable-seeming claim to all sorts of controversial claims – unequal political representation demands all-women shortlists; unequal pay demands more invasive laws to equalise pay between men and women. That’s the bailey where the actual (political or cultural) advancements can be made.

Let’s say you attack the bailey by saying that you're not a feminist because you think the policies advocated by feminists are bad, or the problems they identify are not even problems at all. Maybe you find, as Ben recently has, that “if you control for background (i.e. skills and talent) and exit (i.e. women staying in the workforce) women earn more than men and get more aggressively promoted than men”, which implies that the claims made by feminists about unequal pay needing new laws are simply incorrect.

Feminism may also be wrong about many other things, such as claims about men and women’s brains being biologically the same or the pervasiveness of a ‘rape culture’. These are substantive elements of what feminists define as feminism, and they may be right or wrong. It’s legitimate (albeit quite possibly mistaken) to think these claims are wrong, and hence to decline to wear a 'This is what a feminist looks like' t-shirt.

But do that and many feminists will retreat into the defensible motte, as Elle have today. David Cameron doesn’t think men and women should be equal! David Cameron doesn’t think men and women should have the same rights! Feminism is very simple!

This is dishonest and manipulative. And an open society requires honesty in political discourse. David Cameron is often accused of pandering to fashion. He deserves credit for refusing to do so this time.

UK politicians' ignorance towards immigration gives Juncker credit he probably doesn't deserve

It’s a tough day when you have to agree with Jean-Claude Juncker. After all, I tend not to see eye-to-eye with those who think the European Commission needs “to be an even more political body.” But today, Juncker came out strong against Cameron’s proposed cap on EU migration to the UK; which is good, important even:

From The Telegraph:

Mr Juncker said: "I am not prepared to change [freedom of movement]. If we are destroying the freedom of movement other freedoms will fall. I am not willing to compromise."

He said that any attempts to address the issue of the amount of benefits being claimed by foreigners would have to be in line with current EU treaties.

“Member states are free to take the initiatives they want as long as these initiatives are line with the treaties," Mr Juncker said.

Here's the problem - I don't think I do agree with Juncker; in fact, I have a sneaking suspicion he and I hold the opinion that free movement in the EU should remain uncapped for fundamentally different reasons. I, for one, don’t think migration is complimented by mandates to ensure a universal ‘minimum social wage’ throughout the EU.

Rather, I see free movement as an integral and necessary component of UK economic prosperity, not to mention a huge benefit for communities that both migrants and natives come in inhabit.

Yet on this particular topic, Mr Juncker and I have the same end goal. And his commitment to protecting free movement—rejecting Cameron’s migration negotiations—has taken us another step towards a full-blown referendum in 2017. Such a referendum, described in the most positive light, would be an opportunity for Britons to discuss and debate the implications EU regulations have on the UK (the specifics of trade agreements and vacuum cleaner bans are two topics that immediately spring to mind…). But there is a deep worry on the part of pro-immigration advocates such as myself that many will use the referendum to lock migrants out of the UK as best they can.

The majority of Juncker’s policies fall short of promoting freedom and prosperity—but on migration, at least his end goals are right. And until UK politicians (all of them really, Conservatives and Labour across the board) stop trying to halt the overwhelming benefits migrants bring to the UK, I find myself in unfamiliar waters, with Mr Juncker as my ally.

A reminder to Bill of Rights drafters: all we need is one right

"It's not just the European Union that needs sorting out," UK Prime Minister David Cameron told his Party Conference this week, "it's the European Court of Human Rights." This is not the first time he has said that: he said it to the judges' faces a couple of years back, at the ECHR's gleaming headquarters in leafy Strasbourg. They were not overly impressed. But his audience this week thinks he is spot on, and most people in the UK probably agree. The ECHR is not an EU body but emerged out of the postwar European Convention on Human Rights. In other words, no Parliament agreed to it, no British citizen voted for it, no Prime Minister signed a treaty authorizing its power. Like Topsy, it 'just growed.'

We are all in favour of human rights, of course, but countries disagree on exactly what those rights should be and how they should be enforced. The UK, in particular, has a very different legal tradition from other European countries – one that has served them a long time, and which they are justly proud of. But being empowered to overturn the decision of the courts in the UK and other countries, the ECHR is effectively imposing one legal regime – a judge-led regime – on everyone.

But why do we want the law of different countries to be identical? We can learn a lot from different countries running their affairs in different ways, then looking to see which way is preferable. Imposing a single legal view on a large number of countries prevents that learning from taking place.

And why should an unelected body deign to override the decisions of different countries' courts and legislators anyway? Originally, the plan was that the ECHR would simply influence governments to 'do the right thing'. But now, though it has no democratic legitimacy, it can override the decisions of UK courts and elected UK representatives. So in effect, law is being made by ECHR judges, and countries like the UK are bound by its decisions. That, as Lord Judge pointed out, gives us "a very serious problem with sovereignty".

That is a particularly serious problem when a country thinks that its entire security is at risk. More than once, the ECHR stopped the deportations of suspects to face serious charges, including terrorism and genocide charges, to face trial overseas. Indeed, the ECHR has stopped deportations of foreign nationals already found guilty of serious offences abroad. Often, the grounds for such decisions have been the UK family ties of the accused, or their 'right' to the UK's generous healthcare system. But what really got ministers' goat was the Court's blocking, for a long time, of the deportation of the radical Abu Qatada, wanted on terrorism charges in Jordan.

So now, the UK is to have its own new Bill of Rights, passed by Parliament. Actually, our old one, dating from 1689, has served us pretty well. I only hope that in drafting the new Bill, ministers do not fall for the nonsense perpetrated in the postwar settlement – things like the 'right' to free education. Because every right is someone else's responsibility to provide. You can be sure that every lobby group will be out there, campaigning for 'rights' to this or that or the other, all at taxpayers' expense of course, to be included in the Bill.

But in fact, all we need is one right - the right to be left alone without other people, and especially governments, pushing us around.

If Mr Cameron calls, I will gladly give him a draft.

Abandon hope all ye who enter this immigration debate

Immigration is good for us. With every major party now promising to ‘get tough’ on immigration, it’s easy to forget that immigrants bring new skills to the country, allow for more specialization, tend to be more entrepreneurial than average, pay more in to the welfare state than they take out, and make things cheaper by doing the jobs that Britons won't.

No political figure of any stature will say any of these things. Instead, people like David Cameron and Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg focus on the two potential problems with immigration: that, other things being equal, immigrants may push down average wages, and that an unrestricted welfare state incentivises immigration by people who want to draw benefits instead of working.

These are both valid points, but insignificant ones. Ben Powell points out that the wage-depression claim ignores the fact that immigrants demand goods and services (raising wages for those things) as well as supplying them. It also assumes that immigrants always directly compete with indigenous workers for jobs. If immigrants are doing jobs that indigenous workers will not (or cannot) do, like highly unskilled service industry work, then they are not outcompeting indigenous workers.

There is quite a bit of evidence to suggest that this is the case in Britain. Fraser Nelson has shown the high effective marginal tax rates that people on welfare face if they want to enter the workforce. If these Britons are unwilling to take low-paid jobs, then there is no harm to them caused by immigrants taking these jobs. On the contrary, the fact that these jobs are being done by someone adds to the number of goods and services that everyone in Britain can take advantage of. (There is one other point: if people’s lives are getting better overall, who cares where in the world they happened to be born? Not me. But even I do not expect any politician to go so far as to say that all men are created equal.)

The second point against immigrants is usually the one focused on by politicians. The problem here is that a valid theoretical point is assumed to be a significant problem in actual fact. Here, the numbers simply do not bear the theory out.

As it happens, we don’t actually have an unrestricted welfare state – most major forms of welfare and state services are limited to UK residents. And, if anything, the evidence suggests that immigrants are less likely than Britons to draw out of work benefits – according to Jonathan Portes, “migrants represent about 13% of all workers, but only 7% percent of out-of-work claimants”. What a surprise: the people leaving behind their friends, family and communities are the ones who most want to make better lives for themselves. Again and again, empirical studies have shown that immigrants pay more in than they take out.

In any case, if we have a benefits system that is open to exploitation, why only worry about it being exploited by non-Britons? Conversely, if benefits are necessary to maintain a basic standard of welfare, why doesn't the welfare of non-Britons matter? There is a good case for reforming benefits so that they complement work instead of substituting it, but that has nothing to do with immigration.

Like most ‘major policy announcements’, the specific proposals outlined by the Prime Minister today will probably be forgotten soon enough. Even if they do end up becoming law, they will not affect many people. But what David Cameron and Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg have achieved is to throw out any chance of a policy line that, however unpopular, has the rare political virtue of being right.