Postponement of English local elections for a year was announced in various media including: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-51876269

Potential consequences, especially on smaller political parties are discussed here.

By Stephen Bush  www.newstatesman.com

The 2020 local and mayoral elections will be postponed until May of next year following advice from the Electoral Commission. The political consequences are unknowable because the economic and social consequences of the coronavirus outbreak are unknowable. The one thing we can say with certainty, from a political perspective, is that “things will be very different this time next year”. British politics and culture may well be forever changed, or at least changed for the foreseeable future by the events of the year to come.

But the important logistical change is that the 2021 local elections will be a contest of near-unprecedented scale for an off-year. Thanks to the combination of the Scottish and Welsh parliamentary elections, the metro-mayoral elections, the combined authority semi-rural mayoral elections, the police and crime commissioner elections,  essentially everyone in the United Kingdom will have a ballot of some kind – which to my knowledge has never happened before.

That will be a big logistical challenge for the new leaders of Labour and the Liberal Democrats, whoever emerges from those party’s contests. On the Labour side in particular, Keir Starmer’s inner circle believes that its number one priority, should he win, is not political but organisational – both to address and respond to the Equality and Human Right Commission’s report into anti-Semitism but also to get the party “match fit” again. Starmer’s allies are concerned that Labour has lost huge amounts of institutional memory, both over the past five years and in recent months, and think that unless the party is able to become vastly more professional and well-organised, nothing else they try to do will come off.

Next year was always going to be the first real test of the post-Corbyn party’s political appeal. The level of logistical challenge means that it is now going to be a real test of competence too.

“I cannot imagine any other country, democracy or dictatorship, where the centre would so obsessively micromanage its public sector. Britain is off the graph for centralisation. Its local government now has a mere 1.6% of GDP for its spending, against 6% in Germany, 12% in France and 15% in Sweden. In the eye of Whitehall, anything beyond London is now “regional”, never local.”

He’s right – but when the alternative is government by unelected quangos we are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea – Owl

Simon Jenkins  www.theguardian.com

Populism has arrived, blue in tooth and claw. Rishi Sunak’s budget, clearly dictated from 10 Downing Street, proposes a staggering £600bn of extra public spending over the current parliament, showing an enthusiasm for public spending not seen seen since postwar reconstruction in the 1950s. Apart from cash set aside for coronavirus, it is going not into people’s pockets but largely into state infrastructure. As it rises, it will carry one signature: Boris Johnson’s.

No one can complain that a chancellor should prepare to meet a pandemic trauma. Seeking relief for those unable to work makes sense. So does short-term aid to businesses suffering a collapse in demand. But the deeper interest in any budget lies in what it reveals of a government’s mind. Sunak’s budget had one message: that the British economy is in the ownership of central government, as not seen since denationalisation in the 1980s.

Sunak made almost no mention of the private sector, except for short-term fiscal relief. His economy was a public construct of hospitals, schools, colleges, roads, railways, research institutes – all supplied by the grace of London. I calculated that his speech gave away an extra £1.7m of taxpayers’ money every second: generosity on a Neronian scale. Small wonder Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn was left stumbling over how to object. He should just have smiled and said thank you.

Absent from the speech was any idea that the public sector belonged to anyone but Sunak. As for local government, there was to be no let-up in austerity. While “our” NHS is to roll in cash, local government’s share of the welfare state, social care and social services got nothing extra. There was no mention of old people or family support or youth clubs: chief victims of the 30% cut in local council spending since 2010. Downward pressure will continue on libraries, day centres, sports fields, drug rehabilitation and facilities for young people.

Central government can borrow and spend at will. Local government is allowed no such liberality for its services. There was no whisper from Sunak of a let-up in rate capping, no new sources of local revenue, no hope of council tax revaluation. If cuts continue, they are not central government’s responsibility. Blame your hapless, wasteful local council.

In contrast, Downing Street is splurge central. Anything the NHS asks for, says Sunak, be it “millions or billions”, it can have. He pledges to pay for 50m more surgery appointments. What other government on Earth would boast such implausible specificity? No such offer is made for local care visits, on which the NHS relies for backup. This is built-in unfairness and inefficiency.

At times Sunak sounded as if Johnson wanted to be everyone’s mayor. He wants to run everything. He is to allow a redevelopment at Darlington station, a village bypass in north Wales, hotel bedrooms for 6,000 rough sleepers. He announced £8m for new football fields, grants for new maths teachers and £25,000 for an art teacher in every school. This sounds like window dressing, a sort of blame-shedding for Tory austerity.

Sunak’s Father Christmas act continued. There is to be an astronomical billion pounds for tower block cladding. “Over a hundred” road junctions are to be improved. Fifty million potholes have been identified as needing repair. Has Sunak counted them? As a cultural uplift for poor Teessiders, rumour has it that Sunak is to send 750 of his brightest and best officials to live among them. This is like a Victorian missionary expedition.

I cannot imagine any other country, democracy or dictatorship, where the centre would so obsessively micromanage its public sector. Britain is off the graph for centralisation. Its local government now has a mere 1.6% of GDP for its spending, against 6% in Germany, 12% in France and 15% in Sweden. In the eye of Whitehall, anything beyond London is now “regional”, never local.

The new elected metro-mayors were carefully assigned “regions” not cities, lest they over-identify and go native. They depend not on accountable local taxes but on Treasury handouts. As Professor Tony Travers of LSE puts it: “Devolution means mayors are allowed an opportunity to talk to the Treasury about how to spend money.” They are Whitehall agents.

Central cash for locally run services – police, schools, transportation – increasingly relies on hypothecated hand-outs, on Whitehall decisions as to how they are to be spent. Capping and ring-fencing money for police numbers, or subject teachers or new roads, is not communal choice. It is not what most countries would regard as local democracy. It is subservience to central command and control to a single leader.

This is the new egocentric populism. It has virtues. It is non-ideological. Its macroeconomics has Keynesian features, buying new public projects in advance of tough times, albeit at the risk of “crowding out” the private sector. It is not partisan, witness on Wednesday as former Thatcherite Tories bayed support for a budget they would have damned had it come from a Labour chancellor. A fleeting piquant moment came with a still, small voice speaking up for old Tory caution. It was Theresa May, speaking truth to power.

Johnson’s populism is extreme. Not even Donald Trump tries to run the US this way. It is government more in the style of Orbán’s Hungary or Erdoğan’s Turkey, relying on seeking current votes by borrowing from future taxpayers. In doing so, Johnson is suppressing what should be the fountainhead of political freedom: local democracy. Who cares whether or not this is Toryism. It is wrong.

Two days after the budget, the Office for National Statistics announces that it intends to publish a series of articles on how to understand the data around the UK’s biggest economic issue.. These will use available evidence to discount or support the main arguments around the productivity puzzle or where gaps in the data exist.

Essential reading for the Great South West, Heart of the South West and anyone else planning to double our local economy in 20 years – Owl

Productivity measurement – how to understand the data around the UK’s biggest economic issue

https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/labourproductivity/articles/productivitymeasurementhowtounderstandthedataaroundtheuksbiggesteconomicissue/2020-03-13

Introduction

In December 2019, the Royal Statistical Society announced that the UK Statistics of the Decade award had been awarded to the Office for National Statistics’s (ONS’s) labour productivity series. This series reveals that average annual growth in the decade after the 2008 economic downturn was only 0.3% a year, a period of weakness deeper and more prolonged than any seen in the UK since the 1890s. This weakness has implications for profits, wages, living standards, tax revenue and public services.

In response to the interest this has generated, the ONS is keen to contextualise its data and has commissioned a series of short “explainer” articles from expert academics, each providing a view on the measurement of productivity in the UK. These articles will explore where the data and methods are strong, where improvements are possible, and where the data support or do not support some of the main proposed explanations of the UK productivity puzzle.

Each article should provide a brief summary or assessment of a particular aspect relating to the measurement of productivity, drawing out where the available data provide evidence to discount or support the main arguments around the productivity puzzle or where data gaps exist. These articles, which will be published over the coming months, will provide an entry point for those looking to understand the main issues concerning the productivity puzzle.

We have planned a series of articles, including this one, on the following topics:

• Productivity measurement – how to understand the data around the UK’s biggest economic issue
• Measurement of productivity statistics, by Nick Oulton
• Measurement of output data used in productivity statistics, by Martin Weale
• Measurement of capital data used in productivity statistics, by Jonathan Haskel
• Measurement of labour market data used in productivity statistics, by Richard Heys and Stuart Newman
• How the production boundary influences productivity measurement, by Diane Coyle
• How management and uncertainty issues influence productivity measurement, by Paul Mizen

These articles take the enhanced set of productivity statistics now being published by the ONS to evaluate some of the different theories around the UK’s productivity puzzle, to provide clarity on the lessons emerging from these data.

The productivity puzzle

The productivity puzzle is now a firmly established part of the UK macroeconomic landscape. For five decades before the 2008 economic downturn, the average output each UK worker produced in an hour of work increased steadily by around 2% a year. In contrast, the productivity record since the economic downturn has been historically weak, enduring its slowest recovery from an economic downturn since the Second World War. While other countries have seen similar slowdowns, the UK’s productivity puzzle is deeper and more persistent than elsewhere.

The fall in productivity growth is even more perplexing because it comes at a time of apparently rampant technological innovation and the strongest labour market performance since the 1970s, with high levels of employment and low unemployment. At the Office for National Statistics (ONS), our role is to provide the best possible estimates of productivity growth to understand what is going on and perhaps assist policymakers in finding solutions. As productivity has become a bigger issue, we have invested more time and effort into detailed productivity statistics than ever before. We have established a new research centre, the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE) in collaboration with the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR) and a network of universities to improve our methods and data, alongside investigating further the detailed, firm-level data that we collect in our surveys and from administrative sources.

These are the main headings under which the causal theories of the productivity puzzle can be grouped and will be examined:

Structural arguments eg Changes in financial regulation

Labour and managerial arguments eg Weak UK management practices

Measurement arguments eg is productivity growth already captured in GDP measures

Capital arguments eg Banks’ inability to lend against intangible assets

Innovation arguments eg A slowdown in the flow of ideas or new technologies

Uncertainty arguments eg Uncertainty caused by rapid technology change causing firms to delay capital investment