Frank Furedi, who I have always considered to be the sensible wing of the Revolutionary Communist Party, has attacked the decision by universities to allow students seeking placement to appoint proxies (usually parents):

Frank Furedi, social commentator and professor of sociology at the University of Kent, says that controlling parents are “destroying the distinction between school and higher education”.

“All universities now have to take the parent factor into account. On university open days you can see more parents attending than children,” says Professor Furedi.

He says there have been cases of parents who arrive expecting to attend their children’s university interviews.

Professor Furedi says that he tells parents that they have to leave, but there are other academics who “accept that this will be a family discussion”.

“There is a powerful sense of infantilism, where parents can’t let go.”

Frankly, when it comes to “destroying the distinction between school and higher education,” I think the boat left decades ago. Ever since the Thatcher government’s educational reforms which abolished Polytechnics and curtailed government funded apprenticeships due to a combination of parents wanting Little Johnny to go to university and the CBI not having a clue about what it really wants, we have been headed down this road. If you treat university as a system of prestige, you are inevitably going to end up with parental interference.

What I’m more interested in is what happens next. If we can now appoint agents, how long will it be before people start paying people to act as agents? We find this for everything else in life, from buying property through to getting jobs. And won’t it be easier for the universities to deal with agencies which have tens of thousands of people on their books, rather than sole traders? How long will it be before we start seeing this?

Of course, what that means is that we will see yet another barrier between talented people from poor backgrounds and decent university places. Mummy and daddy might be able to afford your university agent if you live in a leafy Kensington suburb, but they are less likely to have the readies necessary if you live on a crummy housing estate.

We should be more worried about this than direct parental interference. The solution is a more level playing field in which university applications take place after people already know their A-level (and/or equivalents).

Is it a coincidence that a few days after Tim Leunig apparently goes to Australia, a mayor in that country gets in trouble for saying this?

Guardian Readers burn Tim Leunig in effigy.

Press, politico and blog reaction to the Policy Exchange’s Cities Unlimited report has been quite extraordinary. The Guardian today was particularly wretched, producing a big special article extolling the North (if you really think it’s so great, why did you leave Manchester then?) and quoting David Cameron extensively (audio here):

“This report is rubbish from start to finish,” he said, repeating the charge four times in two minutes. “I think the author himself said it might be a bit barmy. It is barmy.” Referring to the report’s co-author Tim Leunig, he added: “I gather he’s off to Australia. The sooner he gets on the ship the better.”

Being part of a multi-media network these days, the paper has been prominently advertising Chris Grayling’s rebuttal of the report on Comment is Free (”I’m not allowed to say what I really think of it on a family website”) while failing to mention that Tim Leunig himself has an article giving his side of the story. To compound things, the paper has issued a handy extract of the report providing all the “damning quotes” while failing to mention its actual proposals or even provide a link to the report.

On the blogosphere, Leunig is variously described as a “twat” and a “fucking idiot.” Recess Monkey has been far more restrained, merely posting a mugshot of who presumably all right thinking socialists should direct their Daily Hate towards. Finally, noticing that no-one in the media appear to have noticed that Leunig was the central party’s golden boy 12 months ago (he being of the Community Land Auction idea), the Lib Dem press office have issued a standard press release so all local parties can join in with the fun (I’m surprised that Tom Papworth is moaning about this though; doesn’t he have some Focus leaflets to deliver?). But just to show what a classy act we really are, the party has declined to issue a national press release. I’m sure those of us working in public policy are now really reassured that the party will stand by us when the chips are down.

What is most remarkable is that in the last 24 hours since it has been available, none of these people appear to have bothered to read the actual report. Jonathan Calder has, and it is hard to fault his analysis:

David Cameron has called Cities Unlimited “insane”. My own reaction on reading it is quite different. While I like the idea of selling empty property cheaply to its neighbours and local control of development funds, it seems to me to be based on two quasi-Marxist assumptions. They are:

• contempt for piecemeal reform;
• the belief that it is the state’s role to forecast how society and the economy will develop and then expedite that development.

The fact is, Leunig and James Swaffield do bear some responsibility for the mess they have found themselves in. Fundamentally, they appear to not be able to make their minds up. On the one hand, most of the prescriptions of their report are excellent. But their analysis of the situation is at the height of economistic hubris. No-one can deny that northern towns such as Manchester and Newcastle have declined since the height of the industrial revolution and have struggled to recover since, but how does that inform us about the future? No-one can deny that the south east has been beneficiary of the post-industrial era, but how does that lead one to conclude that it will remain the case over the next 20-50 years? Can you really measure success and failure in such simplistic economic terms (I for one would move back to Manchester in a heartbeat if I thought I could have a similar career to the one I have here in London; I can’t stand the Capital)? Fundamentally, how can you claim to believe in devolution and reject ideas of a command economy while proposing to plan UK-wide demographics down to the last neighbourhood?

It isn’t really the north that should be upset by this report, it is the good burghers of Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire whose countryside Leunig and Swaffield are proposing to tarmac over. Yet this is based on the assumption that in a post-industrial information age, location will remain as important as it was 100 years ago. My ill-informed analysis is different: the south east has boomed while the north has wilted because that is where the UK’s knowledge economy has been focussed. Invest in a knowledge economy up north and there is no reason why we can’t see benefits across the country. From reading the report, I would expect Leunig and Swaffield to agree with that, at least up to an extent, so why preface their work with the counsel of despair which has caused them so much heat over the past 24 hours?

Back to the media reaction though, I have to wonder if this whole row has been engineered by the Policy Exchange deliberately. The Smith Institute has just had an uncomfortable year with the Charity Commission breathing down its neck. The Policy Exchange must know that its intimate, revolving door relationship with the Conservatives is likely to come under scrutiny sooner or later. So, why not engineer a row with the Tories? And use a Lib Dem as the patsy to boot?

Earlier this year, there was a suggestion that Nick Clegg’s Policy Exchange speech had been leaked to David Cameron thus allowing the Conservative leader to undermine his rival by making a strikingly similar speech 24 hours earlier. Charity Commission investigation or not, if you are a Lib Dem you would be well advised to only sup with the Policy Exchange with a very long spoon.

The Guardian is getting itself into a lather attacking the “Tories’ favourite thinktank” for suggesting that Northern towns are failures. What they don’t report is that the pamphlet in question is co-written by the Lib Dems’ own Tim Leunig.

The summary of the pamphlet does indeed sound quite provocative. The idea that people should simply follow the money and that national governments shouldn’t examine why northern towns have failed to get themselves out of a decades-long economic slump and should instead encourage people to follow the money down south seems entirely unworkable. Where are all these northern incomers to London, Cambridge and Oxford supposed to live for one thing? Isn’t the south under enough pressure as it is at the moment? And somehow I suspect that paying people from the north to move south while southerners themselves are priced out of their neighbourhoods is likely to go down like a bucket of cold sick. But I will suspend my judgement until I read what they are actually proposing rather than the Guardian spin.

UPDATE: I’ve just read the exec summary of this report and the Guardian spin is balls. I’m not necessarily saying I agree with all of it, but much of it is very welcome. Will blog more later.

I didn’t watch all of Question Time this week but one thing that Eric Pickles said flew out at me (in what was otherwise an incoherent mess once Dimblebum had punctured his well rehearsed soundbite): before tax, the UK has the lowest priced diesel in Europe.

It sounds like a startling, killer fact, but it actually demonstrates what a pointless debate we are having in the UK at the moment about taxing fuel. We have understood since Adam Smith that price is determined by demand and supply. Tax petrol 2p and it doesn’t automatically go up 2p because competition will hold it down. Of course, because demand for petrol is inelastic, petrol stations have a bit of leeway and so can afford to pass the increase onto consumers. But sadly they retain the same advantage if you lower tax as well: if we cut the tax on petrol by 2p, you can guarantee that most of that saving will simply be eaten up as profit by oil companies which they can safely blame on global market forces. They won’t even be lying.

All this is sub-GCSE stuff, so how come I haven’t heard a single politician point this fact out?

Unaccustomed as I am to defending Boris Johnson, I’m not convinced that publishing crime maps would necessarily result in a breach of data protection. Didn’t we solve this problem with census data decades ago?

A more intriguing objection is the complaint by RICS that “publicising high crime areas in such detail could literally wipe thousands off house prices overnight, further disadvantaging those who are already struggling to make ends meet.” I think this is possibly true, although it is a particular problem for the UK where we don’t have proper land/property taxation. In countries which use property taxes more extensively and reassess them more regularly (or indeed, at all), such data is a double edged sword. Yes, it would lead to the value of their properties dropping but that in turn would lead to them paying less tax. If you don’t get the service, you get your money back: sounds like a fair deal to me. In the UK though it would be unambiguously bad news for many, whilst enriching those fortunate enough to live in safe areas still further.

Credit where it’s due, at least Alastair Darling’s statement today has the virtue of being a simple change, rather than the convoluted nonsense he was talking about a couple of weeks ago.

I find the psychology of Labour ministers throughout this debacle fascinating. At each and every turn their response has been to sell off their critics rather than sort out the problem at root. At first, they simply couldn’t understand why a change that benefited the majority of people was proving so unpopular. In interview after interview they blathered on about most people being better off and “hard working families” as if the inherent unfairness of it all didn’t matter. When that didn’t work, both three weeks ago and now, their response has been to buy off not just the people least effected by the change but a large number of other voters as well.

Three weeks ago, it was a massive bribe aimed at the over-60s while offering almost nothing to young workers. Today it is an even bigger bribe aimed at most of the workforce (at least this time it isn’t something that people paying the higher rate of tax will be benefiting from), the only catch being that the worse off you are, the more you will remain out of pocket. It remains a cynical exercise in squeezing the least “attractive” element of the working poor - single, young, un-unionised (for “attractive” read “deserving” in NuLabSpeak) in order to bribe the fattened masses; the bribe has just ended up being a little bigger, that’s all. That should tell you all you need to know about Labour’s commitment to social justice.

What will be fascinating is how they manage to dig themselves out of the hole they’ve effectively dug for next year’s budget. They’re options appear to be limited. Do they not increase personal allowance by inflation next year? That will effectively mean that their plan is to claw back all of this tax over the next few years. Do they cut spending by £3bn? Another stealth tax? Or do they bite the bullet and whack it on higher wage earners?

Of course all these numbers are a bit fictional; Darling could still be saved by the Laffer Curve and a spot of wage inflation. With the precarious state of the economy though, I wouldn’t bet on it.

Since I’ve been blogging light in recent weeks, I’ve not commented on the ongoing mess that Labour have got themselves into over the scrapping of the 10p rate of income tax. There isn’t much I can add that hasn’t been said a thousand times before. It is of course ludicrous that the Labour backbenchers have suddenly woken from their slumber on this issue, a year after we warned them what the implications of this reform would be. That the BBC have given the rebels such an easy ride for their johnny-come-lately rebellion is just par for the course.

But they do appear to have been bought off remarkably easily. The main measures for helping those hurt by scrapping the 10p rate seem like a total crock.

Let’s start with the retrospective raising of the winter fuel allowance. This is going to apply to all pensioners between 60 and 64, including my partner’s mother who is already roughly £50 a week month* better off due to her enjoying the full impact of cutting the basic rate from 22p to 20p. This is just throwing money around at random in the hope that some of it will stick.

And then there is the pledge to raise the national minimum wage for younger workers. First of all, this will only help those earning the absolute minimum wage for 18-21s. Someone working full time on the London “living wage” (£7.20 an hour) will still be whacked by the tax rise and yet only earns £13,000 a year. Secondly, it should be pointed out that any such an increase will mean that at least some of the cost of raising the winter fuel allowance is going to be paid out of increased tax revenue generated from young earners. The very lowest earners are going to be subsidising a benefits rise that will help many of the wealthiest (and yes, I do accept that the winter fuel allowance helps poor people as well, but still).

I’m all for raising the NMW for young people so it is comparable to the NMW for older workers, but this rise is happening for all the wrong reasons: getting the government out of a fix rather than doing what is right in the first place.

Surely it is unacceptable to have people on minimum wage paying income tax anyway? It is just a deadweight cost to the economy. The government should be working to narrow the gap between personal allowance and the NMW, not widen it. What possible economic reason is there to make employment even more expensive and wages even more inflationary?

But my greatest fear is that if the Labour rebels really are so easily bought off, they will capitulate over 42 days quite easily as well. They really are a useless shower. Give them a totemic act of class warfare like fox hunting to get self-righteous about and they will push the government to the limit. But helping poor people? Defending civil liberties and the rule of law? What is the bloody point of them?

* Oops! Good job I corrected that before anyone else spotted it.

A blogger who shall remain nameless wrote on my Facebook wall on the day that my partner and I bought our new apartment: “Congratulations on joining the grasping classes! Pah.”

Ouch. Over the last few months, the significance of this comment has started to sink in. On Friday for instance I was at a friend’s birthday dinner party. As my friends dribbled in, I was asked four separate times how selling the apartment was going. Each time this resulted in me reflexively talking about the housing market, negative equity, tax, estate agents, the whole kaboodle. And each time I realised that it was stuff I was genuinely concerned about. On the fourth occasion it suddenly hit me like a bolt from the blue: I am now officially that bore at dinner parties I used to avoid who wanted to talk about house prices. My friends are now officially those boring people who actually initiate conversations about house prices.

And the worst thing is, we don’t even live in the fucking apartment! There’s nothing wrong with it, only that it is a one bedroom affair and there are two of us. We own it because my partner put a deposit down on a new flat that hadn’t yet been built during our first month of going out together, way back in 2005 when the housing market was still buoyant and it didn’t seem like much of a risk. Then one month before exchanging contracts in the summer of 2006, the fucking thing burned down (coincidentally, Lord Levy - whose own offices burned down a few months before in mysterious circumstances - was helping police with their inquiries in Colindale Police Station next door to the apartment building). We didn’t actually get to buy the thing - and we stood to lose a big deposit if we didn’t - until January this year. As you will no doubt be aware, since then the housing market has been, well, not great.

So I now pay more attention to news reports about house prices and the Bank of England than I ever have done before. A quarter of a percentage point can now raise or lower my spirits of a morning. I get palpitations each time I look at my bank account online and see a big red six figure sum glaring at me.

The simple fact is, we aren’t really doing that badly. The advantage of buying property at 2005 prices is that even with house prices wobbling at the moment we are unlikely to actually lose money (although making money is looking like it would take a minor miracle at the moment). And let’s face it, we have privileged enough backgrounds to be able to put up with the inconvenience and the anxiety for a few months. I’m acutely aware that there are people for whom the state of the housing market has a tangible effect on their quality of life. Far from becoming inured to the way our whole economy is underpinned by property prices, becoming a property owner has just made me realised what a crock it really is. At least I’m getting to see its full awfulness before in a few years time I become at one with my class and start working the system to my full advantage.

(the saddest thing is I just went back through this article and changed the word “flat” into “apartment” - I’ve become the most pathetic wanker ever)

Well, I seem to be all right. As a public transport-using, non-smoker on a decent wage who is a moderate drinker, I suspect I’ll be the beneficiary of the 2p income tax cut overall (although the devil is always in the detail). But it doesn’t look as if too many people will be particularly happy with this year’s budget.

More here.