Aside from the post that introduced the blog itself, today's posts generally have a political theme.
I may as well start with commenting on yesterday's Prime Minister's Questions.
David Cameron immediately answered the first question with the standard reply. This was quite surprising since I don't remember the last time the Prime Minister immediately answered Number One with the standard reply; for the first time in a while, it seems, a British Prime Minister has stood up and not said “Thank you Mr. Speaker. I'm sure the whole house would like to join me in paying tribute to...” or something similar. Whether this was because the names of the casualties in Afghanistan since 23rd June hadn't been released or whether the Government has dropped the tradition, I'm not sure, but was still rather surprising.
Not that Afghanistan was out of the discussion altogether. One or two MPs raised the issue of the wounded and another gave Cameron the chance to praise the homecoming parades.
Caroline Lucas asked her first PMQ – on an exit strategy from Afghanistan and the idea of starting talks sooner rather than later. It wasn't as interesting as her actual maiden speech, made a few weeks ago during the Queen's Speech debate (and incidentally rather a good one), but then she was basically asking a variation of question that has often been heard before rather than giving a full speech. The answer was as might be expected – “There is no purely military solution in Afghanistan, says Cameron, but it is important to continue with the surge while pursuing a political track.”
Harriet Harman gave an interesting argument. It's interesting because I don't quite understand why she'd think it was a good one. She basically claimed that fewer public sector jobs would mean that the Treasury would lose money, through being paid less in tax and also through paying more in unemployment benefit. This is true. However, unless I have a poor understand of the nature of the public sector, a public sector worker's pay is eventually going to come from the Treasury. Given that unemployment benefit is not particularly high – I'm a single male aged under 25 and I get just under £50 a week – and that only a small proportion of earnings are payable as income tax – and that only after you earn a certain amount per annum, it seems fair to suggest that the Government would save more money by cutting public sector jobs than they'd lose. That isn't to say that Governments should use such an argument to cut jobs willy-nilly. If they cut too many there wouldn't be enough workers to get the jobs done, and that would be rather costly to the country in more than just purely monetary terms. Also, letting people run around spending cash in shops nets the government some more money in VAT, and though the initial spending of money by a public sector worker would only allow the Government to claim back a little of what they paid that person in the first place, the owner of the shop that person spent the money in would in turn spend the money they were paid, and the government would be able to claim VAT on THAT, and so on. Having said that, though, having fewer workers in the public sector will save some money, so long as the level doesn't get too low, and the Government could, though I'm not saying it will, invest those savings into helping the private sector to expand and thus create more jobs there. Private sector jobs benefit the Treasury as they bring them money in through taxes and don't cost them money through salaries. There are reasons to oppose public sector job cuts but in this case costs to the Treasury doesn't seem to be one of them.
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