Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

Just as Turkey abandoned the first Conference on Cyprus, in Geneva, it torpedoed the second one, the Greek Foreign Ministry has said.

The Greek Foreign Ministry said that Turkey drove the Crans-Montana conference to an impasse. A very characteristic feature of its stance was the revelations Turkey made during the dinner on July 6, when the UN Secretary-General expressed his intention of setting down in writing the points of convergence that had been achieved, it said.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres goal, the ministry said, was to shape a framework for agreement so that the conclusive negotiations could continue, with Greeces consent, in New York. But this was not possible, because when the critical moment was reached at the Conference, Turkey resolutely refused to allow a number of promises it had made to the Secretary-General to be set down in writing, the ministry said.

It noted that the Turkish side categorically refused to accept the abolition of the inexistent rights of intervention it invokes. An abolition that, a short while earlier, at a bilateral meeting with the UN Secretary-General, Turkey had indicated it would accept at the dinner that was to follow. And this was because Turkey was aware that all of the participants apart from Turkey itself and the Turkish Cypriots demanded their abolition, it added.

The Greek ministry also recalled that three days earlier, the Turkish foreign minister had bluntly revealed Turkeys position, according to which Ankara needed these rights so that it can intervene throughout Cyprus whenever it deems it necessary.

The Turkish side also revealed during the dinner of July 6 that it wants to continue the violations in the name of the Treaty of Guarantee, to ensure and perpetuate its military presence in Cyprus, it said. This, it said was contrary to the promises the Turkish side had made to Guterres on Thursday afternoon.

Promises that, in hindsight, are revealed to have been an effort to create the false impression that it was ostensibly willing to negotiate. But lies never get one very far, and the truth always finds a way to come out, the ministry added.

It noted that as soon as Turkey was faced with Guterres proposal for a binding written record of the potential compromises, it was forced to reveal and admit its real positions and intentions. It became evident that, throughout the duration of the multilateral negotiations, it said, Turkey had had no intention of compromising, and that, through its stance, sought to deceive the UNSG.

Immediately after these revelatory developments, the UN Secretary-General was forced to declare, in short order, that the Conference had ended, it said.

The Greek ministry said that the Conference ended, with the revelation/confirmation of Turkeys true intentions, which run counter to international law and the resolutions of the UN.

It reiterated that Greece will continue to work relentlessly, with all means at its disposal, for a just and viable solution to the Cyprus problem, in close cooperation with the Republic of Cyprus, the UN and the European Union.

The statement is the latest in a line of statements, tweets and public announcements from officials of both sides on who was to blame for the collapse of the talks.

The Turkish foreign ministry said on Saturday that responsible for the collapse of the Conference on Cyprus in Switzerland, were the Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias and the Greek Cypriot side.

Excerpt from:

Turkey torpedoed Crans-Montana conference, Greece says - Cyprus Mail

Reforming the welfare system has been a key aim of British government since 2010.Richard Machinwrites that the concept makes no economic sense, it does not produce the outcomes the government is seeking, all while the UK is actually spending less on welfare than countries with comparable economies.

Back in 2010, the coalition governmentstatedthat welfare reform is essential to make the benefit system more affordable and to reduce poverty, worklessness, and fraud. The2017 manifestos of the main partiesoffered a genuine choice of whether to pursue or abandon this policy. For working-age benefit claimants, Labour and the Liberal Democrats proposed a series of sweeping reforms including the abolition of the bedroom tax and the sanctions regime. A lack of detail in the Conservative manifesto could be read as an intention to continue with the roll-out of the many changes that we have seen over the last seven years, although planned changes to benefits for pensioners have been abandoned under the confidence and supply agreement with the DUP.

In the aftermath of the election where does this leave us? For working-age claimants presumably we will see the minority government pursuing the welfare reform programme. Political opposition to austerity both in Westminster and with voters has gained some traction as a consequence of the election result, and there are strong arguments that welfare reform has failed to meet its intended aims and negatively impacted on claimants.

Welfare reform does not make economic sense

Research by Sheffield Hallam Universityfound thatthe post-2010 welfare reform policies will take 27 billion a year out of the economy, or 690 a year for every adult of working-age. The Institute for Fiscal Studiesestimatethat the cash freeze to most benefits, and cuts to child tax credit and universal credit, to be pursued in this parliament, will affect 3 million working households. The Cambridge University economist Ha Joon-Changarguesthat the mainstream political narrative that welfare spending is a drain and should be reduced is illogical. He asserts that a lot of welfare spending is investment and believes that appropriate funding in areas such as unemployment benefits can improve productivity and workforce capability.

When thinking about what an appropriate welfare state looks like in this parliament we would also do well to consider the findings of Professor John Hillsslatest book, which emphasises that we all rely on welfare at some point in our lives. A sensible debate about the affordability of welfare benefits should be framed with reference to accurate statistics about the recipients of welfare spending. The Institute for Fiscal Studiesreportthat 46.43% of total social security spending goes on benefits for older people, with only 12.82% on benefits for people on low incomes (for example housing benefit) and just 1.11% on benefits for unemployed people. The governments aim of producing a fairer and more affordable system is hamstrung by ignoring fiscal facts on one hand while perpetuating inaccuracies about the profile of benefit claimants on the other.

Professionals working in the advice sector have long advocated the principles of the multiplier effect. This argues that there are economic advantages to high levels of benefit take-up as claimants spend money on goods and services in the local community. Ambrose and Stone (2003) found that a multiplier effect of 1.7 exists, meaning each pound raised in benefit entitlements for claimants should be multiplied by 1.7 to give a much greater overall financial benefit to the economy.

My own experience of working in advice services demonstrated that where household incomes are protected through adequate levels of social security there are direct savings to the public purse: rent/council tax arrears are avoided, contact with overstretched public services is reduced and improved health outcomes reduce burdens on the NHS.

Welfare reform is regressive

There is clear evidence that welfare reform has a disproportionately negative impact on some groups in society and some areas of the UK. TheSheffield Hallam researchfound that those particularly hit by welfare reform are working-age tenants in the social rented sector, families with dependent children (particularly lone-parent families and families with large numbers of children) and areas with a high percentage of minority ethnic households. Geographically, the impact of welfare reform is stark with the greatest financial losses being imposed on the most deprived local authorities. As a general rule, older industrial areas and some London Boroughs are hardest hit, with southern local authorities the least affected.

The mainstream media often fails to report the true impact of welfare reform that this research highlights. A more accurate account of the human costs can be found inFor whose benefit? The everyday realities of welfare reformin which Ruth Patrick documents her research on the impact of sustained benefit reductions. Dominant themes include the stigma felt by benefit claimants, the negative impacts of a punitive sanctions regime, and living with persistent poverty.

Welfare reform does not produce the behaviour changes sought by the government

Although welfare reform is a values-laden policy underpinned by a strong, but flawed, ideology (only those who fail to do the right thing are affected) there is little evidence that the retrenchment of the welfare state has been accompanied by the change in claimant behaviour that politicians desire. The bedroom tax was supposed to provide an economic incentive to move to smaller accommodation. Theevaluationindicates that more than 7 in 10 claimants affected had never considered moving, with an estimate that no more than 8% of those affected having downsized within the social sector.

The Benefit Capplaces a limit on the total amount of certain working age benefits available to claimants. One of the governments main intentions was for this to improve work incentives. There is no common consensus on the extent to which this aim has been achieved: the Institute for Fiscal Studieshave suggestedthat the majority of those affected will not respond by moving into work, however, government ministers rarely waste an opportunity to tell us that low levels of unemployment are partly due to the benefit changes introduced.

The research of David Webster into sanctionsarguesthat Sanctions are not an evidence-based system designed to promote the employment, wellbeing and development of the labour force and that this regressive system results in lower productivity, pointless job applications, and poverty-related problems.

In the last days of the previous administration we saw the introduction of the2-child limitfor child tax credit and universal credit. Child Poverty Action Groupemphasisethe contradiction in a policy which supposedly provides parity between those in work and those out of work, when 70% of those claiming tax credits are already working.

Comparable countries spend more on their welfare systems than the UK

Given the huge variations in social security systems across countries, a true comparative exercise is somewhat problematic. However, we can again rely on the analysis ofHa-Joon Changwho debunks the myth that the UK has a large welfare state. Taking public social spending as a percentage of GDP, the UK is only slightly higher (21.5% of GDP) than the OECD average (21%):

Moving forward a key challenge for all political parties is to start a serious conversation about benefits for older people and how to create a sustainable system with an ageing population. At the other end of the age spectrum, much has been said about the increased engagement of younger people in the political process; ironically many commentators argue that it is this age group that will be hardest hit by a continuing programme of welfare reform.

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Note: This article gives the views of theauthor, and not the position of EUROPP European Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics.

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About the author

Richard MachinStaffordshire University Richard Machinis Lecturer in Social Welfare Law, Policy and Advice Practice at Staffordshire University.

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Four reasons why welfare reform is a delusion - EUROPP - European Politics and Policy (blog)

NEW YORK, USA: On July 7, the group Faith Communities Concerned about the Humanitarian Consequences of Nuclear Weapons issued a joint statement in support of the historic adoption of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons at UN Headquarters on the same day.

The treaty, a long-awaited step on the road to a world free from nuclear weapons, lays out detailed provisions calling for a comprehensive ban on the development, production, possession, stockpiling, testing, use or threat of use of nuclear arms.

Supported so far by more than 40 groups and individuals of Christian, Quaker, Buddhist, Muslim and Jewish affiliation, the statement reads, As people of faith we accept as our special responsibility the work of raising awareness of the risks and consequences of nuclear weapons for current and future generations, awakening public conscience to build a global popular constituency in support of the Treaty in order to achieve and sustain a world free from nuclear weapons.

The full text of the statement and list of endorsers can be found at: http://www.sgi.org/resources/ngo-resources/peace-disarmament/ptnw-joint-statement-july-2017.html

Kimiaki Kawai, SGI Director of Peace and Human Rights, comments, Like-minded groups and individuals of many faiths have come together to condemn nuclear weapons as incompatible with our shared human values. The continued existence of nuclear weapons hampers peoples ability to envisage a hopeful future and thus threatens human dignity.

This interfaith statement builds on previous statements issued by the same group during initial negotiations related to the ban treaty and efforts ongoing since 2014 to highlight the catastrophic humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons.

Another statement has been put out by the SGI in the name of Hirotsugu Terasaki, Director General of Peace and Global Issues. It states, The existence of nuclear weapons is the greatest threat to the right to life of both the individual and humankind as a whole. For this reason, their total elimination is a desire shared by all people. See: http://www.sgi.org/resources/ngo-resources/peace-disarmament/ptnw-statement-july-2017.html

During the recent negotiations on the text of the treaty, SGI representatives put forward proposals for including reference to international human rights law, in particular, the right to life, strengthening the reference to disarmament education and highlighting the role of women in promoting peace and security.

The Soka Gakkai International (SGI) is a community-based Buddhist association with 12 million members promoting peace, culture and education around the world.

2017 marks the 60th anniversary of the Declaration for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons made by second Soka Gakkai president Josei Toda on September 8, 1957, and the start of the organizations efforts to raise awareness and call for a world free from nuclear weapons.

Photo caption: Interfaith vigil outside the UN in New York outside the ban treaty talks, July 5, 2017. Faith communities gathered every morning during the talks at 8:00 am at the Isaiah Wall, Ralph Bunch Park, First Avenue and 43rd Street.(Image by Clare Conboy for ICAN)

The organizations and/or individuals who submit materials for distribution by Religion News Service are solely responsible for the facts in and accuracy of their materials. Religion News Service will correct any errors brought to its attention.

Continued here:

Faith groups welcome adoption of Nuclear Ban Treaty - Religion News Service

The United States government opposed the historic UN vote for a new treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons, but that was a knee-jerk response, grounded in last century's reflexes. Today, the path forward to total abolition of these weapons is open even as, ironically, the danger of nuclear war is greater than it has been since the worst days of the Cold War. The United States and Russia hold more than 90% of the world's nuclear weapons, with about 7,000 each. The other nuclear-armed states have smaller arsenals by comparison. None of the nuclear-armed states were among the 120 nations who voted to declare these weapons illegal. But if the United States is serious about seeking the security of a world free of nuclear weapons, then it should have been the first to vote "yes" on the ban.

For decades the US has instead based its security policy on the theory of nuclear deterrence an untested belief that nuclear weapons are so terrible that they keep one nuclear-armed country from attacking any other, for fear of mutual destruction.

Is there any reason to believe such tragically flawed logic from the 19th century will work out better in the 21st? More likely, nuclear weapons, those "peace-producing and peace-retaining terrors," are simply another horror that given time will grow mundane and familiar until eventually they are used, this time perhaps in a war that destroys humankind.

And yet we continue to base our security on these "peace-retaining terrors."

A core assumption of this deterrence theory is that the nuclear-armed states will be led by calm, collected, and well-informed people, who will infallibly respond to crises in a rational fashion.

It is not enough, however, to get this particularly unqualified finger off the button. We need to get rid of the button itself.

Just consider whether anyone could be calm, collected, and reasonable after, say, a nuclear explosion destroys Moscow. It might not be clear for days whether such a disaster was caused by a terrorist, a foreign power, or a domestic accident. As this was being investigated, would the world likely be dealing with a calm, matter-of-fact Russian nation? How quickly might things spin out of control?

The treaty is in some ways a cry of frustration from the rest of the world. The United States, Russia, and other nuclear-armed nations promised more than 37 years ago to work toward total disarmament. That was the bargain of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: We pledged to get rid of our nuclear weapons, in return for others pledging not to seek them.

Yes, the United States can try to ignore this. But as with treaties banning land mines and cluster munitions, declaring nuclear weapons illegal creates a new international norm. It is also a pointed reminder that the US is long overdue to honor a legally-binding promise made 37 years ago to get rid of all of its nuclear weapons.

The new treaty is a call to action, and we should all answer it.

The next step will be to negotiate a convention among the nine nuclear-armed states to abolish these weapons, which as of today are illegal, and have always been immoral. It will not be easy. Such an abolition agreement will have to include a firm timetable for dismantling weapons, involve rigorous verification and enforcement provisions, and satisfy the legitimate security needs of concerned states from Israel to Pakistan.

There is no guarantee we will succeed in this effort. But there is no real alternative to trying, other than wishful thinking that our good luck can last forever. Until we eliminate nuclear weapons, we are living on borrowed time.

Original post:

Nations take a step away from the threat of nuclear annihilation - CNN

Who would want be a member of Generation Z? Having your every youthful screw-up tracked and recorded on social media, facing the robot job apocalypse and without a lollys chance in hell of ever owning a home in London even if medical advancements allow them to work until theyre 200. To top things off, theyre saddled with years of student debt after their three years learning about Whiteness and Privilege at university. As the Guardianputs it:

Studentsfrom the poorest 40% of families entering university in England for the first time this September will emerge with an average debt of around 57,000, according to a new analysis by a leading economic thinktank.

The Institute of Fiscal Studies said the abolition of the last maintenance grants in 2015 had disproportionately affected the poorest, while students from the richest 30% of households would run up lower average borrowings of 43,000.

Well, its not so clear cut, as Martin Lewis explains:

The real problem is the cost of housing, which puts a huge strain on peoples income throughout their 20s and 30s and without which student debt would be manageable.

Labour want to scrap tuition fees although, along with quite a few popular policies these days, this would largely benefit the middle class. The Manchester university academic Rob Ford has written about this, and why the policy would not be egalitarian.

Opponents of fees typically argue that universities are a means to provide youngsters of all backgrounds with an excellent education. Universities are the providers of higher education which is every citizens right, and which society as a whole benefits from and has a duty to fund.

But just as grammar schools were never engines of meritocracy, so British universities are not and have never been institutions engines of educational equality.

University intakes have risen hugely over time, but there is one constant: inequality in access and uptake. Higher shares of the wealthy, the middle class, those whose parents went to university and so on achieve the grades needed to go, and higher shares of these groups actually go.

The universities themselves have a steep status hierarchy, and the more privileged the institution is, the more privileged its intake of students tends to be. Again, there is plenty of evidence and research to support these points. And again they are logicalwealthier and more middle class families provide all sorts of resources that encourage children into university, while one of the main points of private schools is to buy access to elite universities via lavish spending per pupil.

Universities are therefore not, in reality, egalitarian or democratising institutions on the whole. While they are theoretically open to all (as grammars were), they recruit disproportionately from the advantaged, because the advantaged get the better grades and are more likely to apply. Therefore nowas everthey provide the privileged with a powerful resource to reinforce their advantages, at state expense. Again, the evidence on these points doesnt seem to have much effect on proponents of fee abolition.

(It should also be pointed out that school leavers from more privileged backgrounds have, on average, higher IQs, and that the longer we have social mobility the larger this gap will become but thats another issue.)

In fact there is the argument that universities are regressive because they are a very costly signal, a case made by the American economist Bryan Caplan; its one of many reasons that we should reconsider the expansion of university places.

Its partly because universities are so elitist that they have, paradoxically, become more radically left-wing and more intolerant of heretical views. In the US, for example, the more expensive a college, and the richer the students parents, the more likely they are to block a speaker.

Witness the author Charles Murrays recent ordeal at the hands of students from the unbelievably privileged Middleberry College, spoilt bastards who in any sort of just world would have been shipped off to Aden for two years of unforgiving military service, or maybe sent to work in Roman salt mines.

Political correctness is fashionable, a positional good, and it is understandable that high-status people should therefore compete to become more politically correct than rivals. This is one possible explanation for the US campus safe spaces movement, which is a well-trodden path among commentators, and unfortunately comes with the same problem that Political Correctness did in the late 80s and 90s; the people who endlessly complain about it become almost as tiresome as the people doing it. Moaning about SJWs is the 21st century equivalent to those old Mail headlines about PC Gone Mad.

But its hard to watch things like the Evergreen controversy without concluding that competitive university politics is creating a form of religious madness,like the dancing plagues that struck Europe in the late medieval period. These usually took place during times of great social stress, and also involved disproportionate numbers of unmarried women.

Likewise with the safe space movement, which tends to be female (just as its mirror image, the Alt-Right, is male) and is possibly aggravated by the gender imbalance in higher education, especially the humanities; one other result of which is that, unhappily, there arent enough marriageable men. (Many males are also dropping out of the mating game and devoting themselves to World of Warcraft or following Milo or whatever weird activities young people get up to these days.)

University is leaving large numbers of people saddled with debts, less happy, less open-minded, less likely to find a mate or to have children. Perhaps worst of all it has created an army of angry, middle-class graduates with no real purpose, and who are turning against the very system that sustains them. Jeremy Corbyn is currently 45 per cent in the polls, and won 49 per cent of people with university education in the election, a 17 point lead over the Tories and thats for all ages. Among older people, for whom university-attendance was limited, the political-cultural gap between graduates and non-graduates is small, which suggests that its is not just a function of being highly-educated that moves people to the left, but rather that in the past two or three decades merely attending university is associated with becoming more left-wing.

This might not be a problem, except many leave to find that those elite jobs they assumed were theirs do not exist. According to Theodore Dalrymple at any rate, the expansion of university places in Guatemala actually led to that countrys civil war.I doubt well get that far, but Tom Butler-Bowdonsaccount on Joseph Schumpeter in his recent bookrings true:

Surprisingly, it is the workers who articulate a hatred for capitalism, as Marx hoped, but the middle-class intellectuals who come to consider it morally noxious. This is partly an effect of the universalization of education, which produces far too many educated people for the amount of challenging mental work to be done. Failing to see their potential realized, they turn against the system.

The real worry is that, for all that the word is wildly overused, it comes down to a sense ofprivilege, a feeling that can become extremely dangerous when coupled with disappointment.

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Young people check their privilege and feel deeply disappointed - Spectator.co.uk (blog)

In the wake of the general election, theres been a lot of talk about young peoples renewed commitment to the political process. At the same time, there is evidence of young peoples pessimism about their future and what the chair of the Social Mobility Commission has called a stark intergenerational divide.

If the youth vote has indeed increased, this has the potential to bring their concerns into the centre of political debate. If young people are increasingly seeing the point of engaging with politics, that must be good for our democracy but only if that engagement offers some prospect of addressing the profound unfairness and inequality they experience.

Some of the talk is of the youth vote having been bought with purely economic benefits, such as Labours proposed abolition of higher education tuition fees. Its as if tax cuts arent also designed to appeal to particular demographics the fact is, all spending decisions have winners and losers. The question is, what are the underlying values that lead to a particular set of priorities?

A vote for free universal education goes well beyond self-interest. It is a vote in favour of education as an unconditional human right in a civilised society and a vote against the idea of education as a commodity that has to be rationed and can only be valued for economic benefits. If we have no problem with the idea of universal free healthcare funded through general progressive taxation, why hesitate about the same principle being applied to education?

But if our support for young people and their education is expressed merely in economic terms, we are missing an important dimension of the political case for universal free provision. Those of us who argue for the return to Education Maintenance Allowances and free tuition for all also need to explain why education matters to society as well as to individuals. We need to build young peoples experience of using their knowledge and skills for the benefit of others as well as themselves.

I think this means making the case for a richer, more challenging and more demanding education, and also for a new social contract between society and its young people. If we want government to fund 16-19 education at the same rate as pre-16 or HE, we need to offer something for something by broadening our uniquely narrow offer. Equally, if we are offering young people more, perhaps they should be encouraged to give something back and start putting their education to use as soon as possible, through some kind of civic service?

We live in troubled times, but if recent tragic events have demonstrated anything it is the enormous power of the social bonds between people and their ability to connect and support others. That potential is always there, even if it isnt always tapped. Educators need to help with the work of building a stronger society where people learn to care for each other and to participate in democratic and collective action to improve the world they live in.

None of this just happens. It needs to be worked at, and educational settings are well placed to develop the understanding, skills and habits of democracy and solidarity in a culture of equality.

I suspect we would be pushing at an open door. When the opportunities are available and well organised, young people are very willing to give their time. When programmes such as the National Citizens Service go beyond outward-bound activity, they show the transformative potential of civic service.

I think its time we designed a truly universal citizens service which could engage all young people in community and research projects as well as education for citizenship. Every hour of such activity contributes to building a stronger society and establishing lifetime habits of solidarity. This could reach across the generations. A mutual commitment to some form of national civic service could be everyones contribution to a social contract which promises us all free education.

Todays young people are far from being a selfish or self-absorbed generation. Those who work with them are constantly impressed and delighted by their capacity for hard work, care for others and collective action.

Their increased political participation is just the start of realising what they can achieve. We need to expect more from ourselves and from the young people we work with if we are to really mobilise their potential and give them a bigger stake in the future.

Eddie Playfair is principal of Newham Sixth Form College, East London. He tweets @eddieplayfair

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The next generation will reward our belief in them - TES News

The City of Sydney council has decided not to impose library fines after a trial found the system less effective in ensuring the return of borrowed items. Photograph: Alamy stock photo

The City of Sydney council has abolished all library fines after an eight-month trial revealed they do not work as an incentive for people to return books.

Three times as many overdue items were returned to the councils libraries during the no-fine trial period, compared with the 12 months before the trial.

The lord mayor, Clover Moore, said fines often had a detrimental effect and frightened borrowers into never returning overdue items. This new approach encourages positive community responsibility and sharing, rather than penalising people, she said.

More than 60,000 items were returned between July last year and February, some of them decades old.

Many of the overdue items came from the self-help section, including books on decluttering and cleaning up. But two copies of Mark Chopper Reads 2001 book, Chopper 10 and a Half: The Popcorn Gangster, were still missing despite being 14 years overdue.

Under the new scheme, those with an overdue book will have their membership suspended and will be barred from borrowing until the item is returned.

Sophie Hicks Lloyd, a Sydney library member who used the new system to return books she had borrowed for her children, told Guardian Australia: I just got an email from them saying we had overdue books and that we could return them now with no fine, and that prompted me to act.

She said the abolition of fines would encourage her to use the library more frequently. Raising that level of trust between us and the library, or the local government, instills a sense of community. We go to the library about once every two months and I think this means we will go more often.

Im pretty sure most library members feel a sense of loyalty to their library and, deep down, we all want to return the books. A little friendly reminder from them is all it takes.

The City of Sydney runs nine libraries in inner Sydney, and has more than 415,000 items available for borrowing.

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City of Sydney scraps library fines after trial shows reminders work better - The Guardian

The most important thing about the debate over Labours tuition fee pledge is that most of the arguments, on both sides, dont add up.

I want to first address the arguments against the pledgethat dont work.

The first, and most frequently deployed, is about people who dont go to university subsidisingthose who do. The difficulty here is that they are already under the current system. After 30 years, the debt is written off by the Treasury, a bill paid out of, you guessed it, general taxation.

(Though because our tax system is already fairly progressive, this bill is again, predominantly paid by higher-earning graduates as well.)

This is more acute if people do work that is socially important but low-paying. A social worker, even one who makes the highest pay grade, is not going to pay off their tuition fees. A teacher who stays in the classroom is not going to pay off their tuition fees. The bulk of people who work as artists or designers are not going to pay off their tuition fees.

So you cant really defend tuition fees using that argument. That Labours plan to pay for abolition of which, more below is levied on the highest earners makes the argument even more redundant.

The second argument is that a tuition fee cut is regressive that is, it hands a great deal of money to above average-earners at the expense of lower earners. It is true that the policy was the single most expensive item in Labours manifesto, at 11.2bn a year. But as Ive written before, what people miss about tuition fees is that they are a form of taxation: they are levied on graduates, not students, through PAYE or through your tax return. They dont behave like any other type of fee or loan you might take out and should be seen as a tax.

That matters a great deal because taxation has to be seen in the round, not simply in isolation. The question over whether any tax cut is regressive is only partially about who the cut benefits.

Taken in isolation, decisions on tax made since 2010 have been highly progressive, increasing the share of public spending borne by the richest. But taken in concert with what is done with that revenue, changes to tax-and-spend have been highly regressive. The gains to the lowest earners from increases in the threshold the amount you have to earn before levying taxation have been more than wiped out by cuts in working-age benefits and the knock-on effects of cuts in services.

Labours tuition fee cut is paid for by increasing taxes on capital gains that is profit made selling an investment and people earning more than 80,000. So it is basically, for the most part, a tax cut for people earning 21,000 to 45,000 paid for by people earning more than 80,000. The overall package distributes from the highest earners to people earning above average so it is downward redistribution, albeit not to the very poorest.

You can argue of course that this is not a particularly good use of 11.2bn. But the difficulty here is that for this argument to work, you have to believe that Labour would have been able to go into the 2017 election without promising to abolish fees and instead planning to spend the 11bn on, say, wraparound childcare or housebuilding, and would still have received the boost in 18-24 turnout that helped the party gain Warwick and Leamington, Canterbury, Cardiff North and Bristol North West, among other seats. This doesnt seem particularly likely.

That doesnt change the fact that while Labour is getting a lot of bang for its buck electorally speaking, it is not getting a lot of value policy-wise for its 11.2bn. Why not? Because the cost per graduate is actually quite small.

The cost for Plan 1 graduates that is, graduates who went to university on the 3,000 fee starts at 2 a month for people earning 17,776 or more a year, which gradually increases as you earn more. Earners at 80,000, when Labour's planned tax hike would kick in, pay469 a month.

For Plan 2 graduates, the cost of repayment starts at 4 a month when you start earning more than 21,500 a year, and again, increases as you earn more. Earners at 80,000 pay443.

These are not life-altering sums. If you are seeking to meaningfully alter the take-home pay of a graduate tax, reducing income tax by a penny or value added tax, or for that matter duty on petrol has a far more significant effect. Just ask people earning above 80,000, who would lose significantly more than they'd gain under Labour's plans.

(This is probably why tuition fees mostly exercise the parents of people paying them and students who have yet to pay them, rather than tax-paying graduates. Its striking that Labours turnout boost came among 18-24s and they flipped parents from Tory to Labour. Actually, if you are a taxpaying graduate, Labour policies on housing and the taxable threshold do have a meaningful effect on your quality of life. Tuition fees, not so much.)

This is even more stark when you remember the cost of tuition fee abolition to the Exchequer, which comes in at a heady 11.2bn a year. There are lots of things you can do that actually would improve the pay packets of graduates not least build a lot more housing with 11.2bn, but not much that any individual graduate can do with 2 a month.

But regardless, it comes back to the earlier question: could Labour have got the results it did while pledging the tax rises that paid for that 11.2bn a year tuition fee cut but spending them elsewhere? I dont buy it myself. Abolishing tuition fees is to Labour as redistribution to the affluent elderly is to the Conservatives counterproductive as far as their policy aims go, but essential to their election-winning coalition.

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Abolishing tuition fees is a wasteful electoral bung but it works - New Statesman

(Adds reaction from industry group)

By Bart Meijer

AMSTERDAM, July 5 (Reuters) - Many trust offices based in the Netherlands and beyond ignore international laws and regulations, facilitating money laundering, corruption and tax avoidance, a Dutch parliamentary inquiry said on Wednesday, presenting its findings.

Chairman Henk Nijboer said he hoped the findings would spur parliament into action to reform the industry, given they showed "serious" problems.

Trust offices help manage financial assets on behalf of their owners, and the Netherlands is home to many due to its favorable treatment of dividends and royalties, wide network of tax treaties, and long-standing tradition of pre-negotiating tax deals with companies.

Holland Quaestor, an industry group that represents trust offices, said on Wednesday improvements in the sector were "certainly" needed. "We are on the right track, but there is still a lot of work to be done", president Jan van der Kolk told Reuters.

Dutch Finance minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem introduced stricter rules for trust offices in 2015, but critics say oversight is still too lax.

The inquiry's findings come after the largest Dutch trust office, Intertrust, listed on the stock market in 2015 and as rival TMF is considering an initial public offering.

"At Intertrust, we adhere not only to the letter but also the spirit of laws and treaties, including those which govern our clients dealings," Intertrust said in its submission to the inquiry.

The inquiry panel, which did not name any individuals or companies accused of breaking laws, compiled information from representatives of trust offices, tax advisers, regulators and other experts from eight days of hearings under oath last month.

Among those interviewed was Jan Favie, manager of the Dutch companies that pop groups The Rolling Stones and U2 use to oversee their intellectual property rights.

He argued it was a widespread misunderstanding that the musicians use Dutch trust offices to lower their taxes, but said, rather, they were attracted to the Netherlands because of the country's managerial "expertise, good infrastructure and stable legal environment."

The parliamentary panel concluded that oversight of trust offices was limited, due to insufficient staffing at the country's central bank (DNB) and national tax office.

An area of particular concern was that trust offices often fail to identify the people behind capital flows, as they are required to do by law. That enables tax-dodging and other criminal behaviour, the committee said.

In a statement included as part of Wednesday's report, the DNB called for the abolition of all trust office processes that help mask the identity of clients. (Reporting by Bart Meijer; Editing by Toby Sterling and Mark Potter)

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UPDATE 1-Dutch inquiry calls for overhaul of trust office industry - Reuters

PCB, KCB write to Centre for more than Rs 200 cr arrears

The cantonment boards in Pune have written to the Central Government, asking it to dispense with their pending service charges amounting to more than a hundred crores for each board. The Boards have been raising their voices against the abolition of vehicle entry tax (VET) and local body tax (LBT), after the recent introduction of the Goods and Services Tax across the country.

But now, they have also sought their rightful compensation for service charges as well. An official with the Pune Cantonment Board (PCB) said, The board is not ready to face such a huge amount of loss. More than Rs 200 crore is still pending. Now, we have written to the Centre about this. We are waiting for the money to reach us. There is a clear distinction between the municipal corporations and the cantonment boards in the country. The funds allotted to us are far lesser than our municipal counterparts, yet we are expected to work with equal amount of efficiency.

The chief executive officer of Khadki Cantonment Board (KCB) also acknowledged the cash crunch, saying, The matter is now pending at a much higher level in the central government. This is not a local matter anymore. Cantonment boards across the nation have been collectively writing for adequate compensation. More than Rs 90 crore is pending and we will have to wait for further instructions.

PCB and KCB will now be staring at an approximate loss of Rs 100 crore annually after the abolition of taxes, which the officials claim will affect the revenue drastically.

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Cantt boards demand pending service charges - Pune Mirror