John Redwood's comments are being taken totally out of context

Tory MP John Redwood wrote a blogpost earlier this week where he drew a parallel between how a middle class family who finds their income cut by 10% can make adjustments and used the analogy to describe how the UK state could also make adjustments.

Here is main part of what he wrote:

Tomorrow’s budget will probably be proposing cuts of less than 10% over the lifetime of this Parliament. Sensibly managed, this need not entail cutting anything that really matters.

The UK state has been living a middle class lifestyle. If you are living on a low income then of course cutting spending is difficult or impossible. If you are living a middle class lifestyle and your income goes down by 10% you have plenty of options. You can holiday nearer at home and cut out the foreign trip. You can eat in more than in the local restaurants. You can trade down for a cheaper car. You can draw some money out of the savings account to tide you over until your income goes up again. You can buy more of the value items at the supermarket, and put more vegetarian dishes into the home menus. You can discover home entertainment to keep the leisure bills down. You can turn down the thermostat a little and put on a jumper.

The UK state finds itself in that position today. It has plenty of assets. Some can be sold to help out. It has been dining out on consultants and temporary labour. It needs to do more in house. It has been appointing all too many to exotic job titles which we could manage without, and sending many of them on expensive overseas fact finding trips and seminars. It has indulged in a mind blowing array of politically correct regulations which often fail to tackle the underlying problem they wanted to address. It has been a master at buying the “nice to have” or the “why do we need this?” instead of concentrating on doing the basics well.

Seems like a reasonable post to me. Perhaps I might quibble with making a direct comparison between the UK state level and a household level as it is a bit simplistic but it allows him to make his broader point in an accessible way which I am sure was his aim.

However the Daily Mail has picked up on this and in a story entitled: "Cold and hungry? Wear a jumper and eat vegetables: Tory MP sparks outrage with advice on how to survive 'Bloodbath Budget'" it proceeds to take Redwood's comment totally out of context and treat them as if he is giving direct advice to people as to how they should handle the budget cuts which he is not.

Sunny Hundal on Liberal Conspiracy has taken only the section highlighted above in red and hence shorn it of all its context and then posted this entitled: "Redwood asks poor to ‘put on a jumper!’" even though Redwood explicitly states that if you are on a low income then cutting is "difficult or impossible". And just to repeat it is an analogy, not direct advice.

I tire of saying this but no wonder politicians are terrified of saying or doing anything outside of bland pre-prepared and vetted statements. All Redwood is trying to do here is point out a way that the public spending cuts could be viewed.

The reaction from The Mail, Lib Con and doubtless others is just deliberately taking his comments and twisting them in order to make it look like he is saying something that he is not.

UPDATE: The Mail article I linked to has now changed so that the Redwood stuff is not in the main article but instead in a side box where they show that Redwood denies what they originally claimed and they give him the right of reply.

John Redwood's high handed arrogance

Following yesterday's poll which suggested the Conservatives might only have a 6% lead over Labour, there is a lot of talk about hung parliaments.

John Redwood has blogged about this today. He starts his post with some very sensible comments about this showing that the Conservatives cannot take victory for granted and emphasising the size of the task that faces them.

However towards the end of his piece he demonstrates the sort of arrogance that I sometimes see from members of the parties (Conservatives and Labour) that benefit hugely from our rotten First Past the Post system. He had already mentioned that UKIP and the Greens were on 3% each in the poll. He then says:

What these polls also show is that UKIP and the Greens are unlikely to win any seats. Their prospective voters can back their chosen cause, or they can vote for either Labour or the Conservatives to help choose the government. If they do the former they will have to accept whatever others decide to do.

Now I like reading John Redwood's blog. He is a very thoughtful and thought provoking commentator. I don't always agree with what he says of course but he is very capable of making compelling arguments and is very well informed on numerous issues including the economy. These comments I have quoted from him however are arrogant and beneath him. There is no attempt to address the underlying unfairness that the fact that a party may get 3% of the vote and 0% of the seats, just an attempt to get these supporters to vote for one of the two main parties. That approach is completely disenfranchising and the worst sort of "vote for the least worst option of the two main parties rather than who you actually agree with" tactics.

In the European elections a few months ago, UKIP got 16.5% of the votes and came second both in terms of vote share and number of seats. This is the sort of thing that happens when there is a system that allows a fairer share of seats allocated for the votes. One of the main reason that many of the voters who vote for UKIP in the European elections do not at national elections is because they know they cannot win! The First Past the Post system has such a high barrier to entry that even a party which has demonstrated very strong breadth and depth of support at national level, coming second in a national election cannot get a single seat in a Westminster election. And John Redwood thinks that all this tells us is that people should vote for either Labour or the Conservatives. Not that our electoral system is utterly broken.

If people want to vote for UKIP or the Greens at the next election they should damn well vote for them and ignore the overtures of people like Mr Redwood.