Phew! After one of the closest ever finishes to a top flight English football season it was with considerable relief that I watched Manchester United deservedly claim yet another Premier League title at the weekend. But the end is also nigh in this year's other tight contest - the fight to secure the United States Democratic Party Presidential nomination.
As things stand it looks at though poetic visionary Barack Obama will edge out fiesty pragmatist Hillary Clinton (who just happens to have a daughter called Chelsea - spooky eh?) and move on to tackle Republican Party nominee John McCain ahead of the November poll to decide who will enter the White House next January. The campaign has already stirred many Americans from a state of political apathy - one reason perhaps being that this could be dubbed the western world's first truly 'diversity Election'.
When it comes to the highest office in the land, voters usually have a number of middle aged white men to choose from. This time around we have a white woman, a black guy and an old bloke in his early seventies. The line up could have been scripted by a quango like our own Equality and Human Rights Commission - though sadly Britain doesn't seem quite so ready to break the political mode in this way.
Sure, we did have a woman prime minister from 1979 to 1990. But this increasingly looks like the exception rather than the start of a new dawn. It's hard to think of a contemporary female politician anywhere close moving into the Downing Street hot seat - and harder to still image a black or asian politician of either gender doing so. And the sad political demise of former Lib Dem leader Sir Menzies ('Ming') Campbell - replaced by a telegenic well spoken youngish white man who looks like a clone of the guy leading the Tories back to credibility - casts doubt on us having a PM close to pension age any time soon.
It may of course be misleading to compare Ming with McCain. The former US Air Force fighter pilot and Vietnam war hero looks robust for his age. Sir Menzies, despite having been an Olympic class athlete in his youth, has the whiff of superannuation about him. Yet you can't help thinking that Ming fell foul of a deeper seated ageism prevalent in British society.
This is exemplified by the government's timid decision to include a default retirement age of 65 in anti-age discrimination legislation introduced in 2006. Although employers can't retire staff younger than this against their will, and are required to consider requests from those wishing to work beyond 65, there is little meaningful protection against older workers being involuntarily put out to grass. This is wrong and ought to be outlawed, despite the loud protestations of employers' bodies. Removing the default might not be enough to guarantee us an older Prime Minister but would show that Britain is serious about moving to the top of the diversity league table.
'Oh to be in England now that spring is here'. For once the May Bank Holiday lived up to this sentiment, leastways for those like me lucky enough to enjoy some fresh(ish) Home Counties air. But the lure of our green and pleasant land is clearly more than a one weekend wonder – as the half million or so immigrants who cross our borders each year will be the first to tell you – which is why politicians of all persuasions are increasingly engaged in the ‘great immigration debate.’
Last month an esteemed group of peers on the House of Lords Economic Committee – in a seeming endorsement of Conservative Party policy – called for a clear annual limit on net immigrant numbers. The Government – while perhaps unwisely adopting the BNP slogan "British Jobs for British Workers" – disagrees but knows that an open door policy won’t go down very well with patrons of The Dog and Duck. Instead Home Office Minister Liam Byrne has this week rolled out further details of the points based system for managing work related migration from countries outside the European Union.
Coming just days after an IPPR think tank report reckoned the big influx of Poles is drying up and may start to reverse, Mr Byrne’s timing might seem less than perfect. But I think his approach is the right one. There are winners and losers from large scale immigration and while I’m sceptical of the merit of a firm cap on immigrant numbers it seems sensible to only allow entry of people from outside the EU who have specific skills or general abilities not readily available, or that might reasonably be home grown.
Sadly, however, what makes sense for the common good is not always appreciated by employers. I write hot foot from a seminar organised by the independent Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) which is currently analysing the UK labour market to identify labour shortages in skilled occupations that can be sensibly filled by migrants. The MAC’s task is largely technical but it is consulting stakeholders and – along with ministers - is being actively lobbied by employers’ groups asking to be given an easy ride, with the Ethnic Catering Alliance (ECA) amongst the most vociferous.
The ECA argues that 30% of ethic restaurants could go to the wall if the UK removes the welcome mat from Bangladeshi and Chinese chefs and waiters. This strikes me as the worst kind of special pleading. I’m as partial to my Balti and Sweet and Sour as the next man and appreciate that a Pole or Czech version might not be quite the thing. But 1 in 3 Bangladeshi and Chinese men currently living in the UK is not active in the job market, and of those Bangladeshis that are active at least 1 in 10 is unemployed, double the national unemployment rate. Surely an opportunity there for the Curry and Rice trade to train up some home grown talent – assuming that cost cutting is not the primary motive for hiring staff from overseas? And doing so might even give a more positive ethnic spin to talk of ‘British Jobs for British Workers."
As we all know only two things in life are inevitable: death and taxes. Gordon Brown, embroiled in a row over the recent abolition of the 10p starting rate of income tax, is starting to realise that tax policy mistakes can also spell political mortality. It’s a sad irony that a Prime Minister who has done more than any politician in a generation to combat poverty and inequality has been hammered as the result of a tax change - made in 2007 in his last Budget after a decade as Chancellor of the Exchequer – that allows his opponents to portray him as the Sheriff of Nottingham rather than Robin Hood.
Brown clearly miscalculated that low earners losing on the swing of removing the 10p tax band would enjoy a gain on the roundabout of a corresponding 2p cut in the standard income tax rate and improvements in tax credits. He was wrong – about 5.3 million low income tax payers wrong. Having bowed to an understandable rebellion of Labour backbench MPs the Prime Minister has handed over the task of making amends to Alistair Darling – officially Chancellor of the Exchequer but increasingly deserving of the additional title of ‘picker up of the pieces’.
The detail of Mr Darling’s so-called ‘compensation package’ remain sketchy. But employers’ organisations are up in arms that the package might include a hike in the National Minimum Wage, especially for younger workers aged 18-21. I have sympathy with this view – raising the minimum wage to help the Government out of a political fix would set a dangerous precedent. However, I’m opposed to the associated suggestion that in order to prevent such manipulation the minimum wage should in future be up-rated according to some pre-determined formula. Much better to stick with the present system whereby the independent Low Pay Commission recommends by how much the minimum rate should rise in the light of economic circumstances.
Britain should learn from the experience of France’s minimum pay policy. They have an automatic rate setting formula. But governing politicians often override this anyway to gain popularity and there is no strong independent expert body to assess the merit of an over the odds hike. As a result the French minimum wage has contributed to high youth unemployment across the Channel. We must avoid this. Our system works well. UK employers’ bodies and as well as government ministers may want to tinker but both should keep their hands off.
The middle Wednesday of the month and as usual I’m pouring over the latest snapshot of the state of the labour market as provided by the Office for National Statistics. The April figures coincide with an opportunity to chew the cud with the Department of Work and Pensions so, dispensing with my anorak, it’s off to Whitehall for a private sandwich lunch with Stephen Timms MP, Minister of State for Employment and Welfare Reform.
I’ve been having such informal meetings with employment ministers – Conservative as well as Labour - at fairly regular intervals for more than 20 years now. Thankfully I’m not quite old enough to have been involved in public policy discussion in the era when beer accompanied the sandwiches. But my experience does provides a valuable sense of perspective against which to judge the many forecasts of economic doom made in the wake of the ongoing credit crunch. The portents, it is true, are worrying. Although the available official job stats still look healthy, these reflect what was happening at the turn of the year. By contrast the forward focused CIPD/KPMG quarterly Labour Market Outlook (LMO) survey paints a more sombre picture. Yet even so the jobs slowdown likely to hit later this year and next is small potatoes on the recent historical scale. Remember the recessions of the early 1980s and 1990s when tens of thousands of jobs were lost every week and unemployment topped 3 million?
Fingers crossed we won’t see anything remotely similar in the coming months. At present employers are adjusting to tougher conditions by curbing hiring, cutting hours of work and where necessary not renewing temporary contracts. Mass redundancies are currently off the agenda though the LMO survey has indicated that more job cuts are in the pipeline. My fear is that a sudden loss of confidence in economic prospects could still trigger a sudden avalanche like whoosh of lay-offs. I’m hoping this won’t happen – but watch this space.