Left Foot Forward shows its bias

When Will Straw first set up Left Foot Forward in 2009 he asked me to be a part of the inaugural team of contributors with a particular focus on drugs policy and electoral reform. Having learned all about how LFF was to be an evidence based blog with a left-leaning agenda I was happy to be a part of it although over the last few years I drifted away from contributing.

I was however somewhat irked in 2010 when LFF published a number of pieces relating to research done by Tim Horton of the Fabians and Howard Reed of Landman economics which did its best to try and comprehensively destroy the argument for the Lib Dem £10K tax rate funded by a mansion tax. Their arguments were that it did nothing to help the very poorest (because they pay no tax), only around £1 billion out of £17 billion goes to the lowest earners, households in the second richest decile did better than the poorest and that overall it would increase socially damaging inequalites.

Despite lots of people arguing in the comments (which I cannot currently locate) that they were missing the point, that the change was essentially progressive and had lots of good aspects to it, especially the mansion tax aspect the LFF editorship seemed to have no truck with this. I was particularly irritated because I suspected that had Labour announced a similar policy they would have given it a much fairer wind. Of course I had no proof of this so I let it lie.

Then today, Ed Miliband announces a plan to reintroduce the 10p tax rate for low earners paid for by, yes you've guessed it, a mansion tax. This is very similar to lifting low earners out of tax. There are of course some differences and I would argue that a higher starting rate is even more progressive (as this analysis suggests) but they are close policy stablemates. And the mansion tax seems pretty much identical to how the Lib Dems wanted to fund their policy. So you would have expected LFF to come out dead against it straight away, exactly like they did when they published their "Think again Nick!" analysis on the £10K rate and mansion tax.

Not a bit of it. The first piece they have published on this subject is this post which highlights the 5 reasons why progressives should support the mansion tax. They also praise Ed Miliband for his "differentiation" on 10p with Gordon Brown.

I tweeted about this pointing out their hypocrisy. To be fair they did tweet back saying they would be publishing a piece later highlighting some of the problems with the 10p rate. But that doesn't change the fact that their initial reaction was to be broadly supportive of policies that three years ago when proposed by a party that is not Labour they were arguing against using analysis resources to explain why. There was no balanced argument back then, just attack, even naming the pamphlet in a way that seemed like a campaign targeting the leader of the party proposing it.

I have no problem if Left Foot Forward wants to be biased towards the Labour party. But if that's what they are going to do they need to be open about it rather than claim to be "evidence based" when they are actually actively looking for evidence to support Labour and to attack Labour's opponents.