Donna Edmunds: An invitation from the Bow Group and a reply to Iain Dale

Donna Edmunds is the Head of Media for the Bow Group and Director of Research at Progressive Vision. Follow  @bowgroup and @ProgVis on Twitter

A couple of weeks ago Iain Dale decided to take a pot shot at the Bow Group on these pages. His motive was unclear, but his comments suggest that he hasn’t spoken to a Conservative Party member outside of SW1 for quite some time. In one particularly revealing segment, he notes that our chairman, Ben Harris-Quinney, is also the director of Conservative Grassroots, a campaign which he “would have thought, [would] have very different aims”. If he means to infer that the CCHQ policy unit has fallen completely out of step with the grassroots, I guess he would be right. I suspect that’s not what he meant to infer though.

The Bow Group has always tried to embrace the full range of Tory thought from the left to the right of the party. But in order for all these strands to be woven into one coherent party, every Tory should be able to point to key underlying themes. On our website, we suggest support for a market economy, and for social responsibility. I might have added a respect for social conservatism as being indicative of an understanding of, and respect for, Britain’s history and values.

Certainly, my experience of ‘ordinary’ party members up and down the country, working class and landed gentry alike is that this sketch of conservatism is their instinctive understanding of what the party is all about. It’s also what we in the Bow Group are in the business of promoting.
Today we are having our Summer Reception at the Spanish Embassy at 7pm. I would like to extend an open invitation to the readers of Conservative Home: if you would like to know what the Bow Group is all about and what we plan to achieve in the next twelve months, come along and find out for yourself. Tickets are £15 on the door.

Donna Edmunds: How an obscure Swedish tobacco product could hold the key to reversing Cameron’s EU problems

­­­­­Donna Edmunds is the Head of Media for the Bow Group and Director of Research at Progressive Vision. Follow  @bowgroup and @ProgVis on Twitter

When Cameron and his team contemplate their policy shift in response to UKIP’s popularity, they ought to consider not just the message, but how it is delivered. The media loves to portray Farage with pint and cigarette in hand – indeed, the pint has become something of a motif in recent weeks, whilst a recent BBC report featured a lingering shot of a slowly burning cigarette. Presumably the left-wing media assumes that this will in some way degrade Farage in the eyes of the public. ‘Look at this lout, he drinks and smokes! How could anyone expect him to run a country?!’ In fact, it is his ‘man of the people’ persona that really drove people to UKIP in the polling booths at the local elections, not any one policy on immigration or Europe.

So how to counter? Whilst Obama is occasionally snapped cigarette in hand, taking a fag break round the back of the White House to contemplate the trickier problems of state (and somehow makes it look cool), it is unlikely that Cameron could pull off the same look. He has spent too long trying to appeal to the organic tofu-eating, husky-hugging Notting Hill set to sport smoker chic successfully.

Donna Edmunds: Osborne was right to link Philpott and welfare

Donna Edmunds is the Head of Media for the Bow Group, but she writes here in a personal capacity

The man that the Daily Mail branded the ‘Vile product of Welfare UK’ is behind bars today, serving the first full day of his life sentence for causing the death of six of his children. There can be no doubt in anyone’s mind that Mick Philpott was indeed vile and thoroughly deserves his sentence, but the claim that the welfare system played a role is proving controversial.

Blogging recently, Daniel Hannan MEP warned against using extreme cases such as these in the wider debate around topics such as welfare: “The last thing we should do is to turn such cases, from either end of the scale, into political weapons. The people involved are suffering quite enough, and extreme examples make for bad policy.”

Donna Edmunds: Ultimately, a Budget that doesn't fix the economy isn't a good Budget

Donna Edmunds is Head of Media for the Bow Group. Before the budget, she laid out her recommendations for a return to supply side economics in a Bow Group Briefing.

Osborne has made it easy to damn with faint praise; budget 2013 was his best yet. After last year’s omnishambles budget, Osborne was clearly keen to avoid Pasty Tax II: The Return of Scrooge. Rather, he attempted to demonstrate that he was listening, and yes, that we’re all in it together, with another freeze in petrol duty and a penny off beer tax.

These are welcome measures, particularly for Robert Halfon MP who can view the petrol duty freeze as a personal victory, but the budget as a whole will do little to quell unease on the Tory backbenchers over the next year, especially if the growth forecast of a meagre 0.6% turns out to be optimistic. Looking at the OBR’s growth predictions over the next few years – 1.8 per cent in 2014, 2.3 per cent in 2015, 2.7 per cent in 2016 and 2.8 per cent in 2017 – Macawberish optimism seems to be the name of the game. The figures are based on an assumption that rising wages will increase disposable incomes from 2015 onwards, but it’s unclear why either the OBR or the Chancellor believes that wages will rise in real terms. The OBR also expects employment figures to rise, but the private sector job market has only expanded because real term wages are dropping so it’s unlikely that both wages and the job sector will increase without a change in a third factor. Yet that nebulous third factor was not delivered in this budget.

So where does the Chancellor believe that growth will come from? The cut in Corporation Tax to 20 percent demonstrates some understanding on his part of the concept that tax cuts stimulate the economy, but he then delays the tax cut to 2015. Why the prevarication? If Osborne accepts that these measures are needed, why does he think that delaying them will help with the recovery?

Donna Edmunds: The mysterious silence of Ed Miliband on the BBC's big media stake

Donna Edmunds is Director of Research at Progressive Vision.

We’re now over six months into the Leveson enquiry, and the British media still have not tired of the navel gazing exercise that is their full live coverage of events.  As the giants of the media and political worlds are paraded for our delectation, the content of their contributions has often fallen short even of tipping into titillation.

So it was in many ways remarkable that Ed Milliband yesterday made statements that were truly noteworthy. He said:

“I should say we have no worries about someone owning 20% of the news market. I think there is then a question of between 20-30% where you should set a limit.” Murdoch owned News International accounts for 34% of the British Newspaper Market, which came down from 37% upon closure of the News of the World. Milliband asserted that this was “too high”.

I couldn’t agree more.

Donna Edmunds: In Praise of Capitalism

Donna Edmunds is Director of Research at Progressive Vision. 

Much has been written over the last week on the government response to last week’s riots, some of it on this blog. But whilst there has been some welcome rhetoric from the Prime Minister on returning the country to a state in which hard work is fairly rewarded (although not in so many words, admittedly), there has been much more from both the PM and his ministers that has been kneejerk, illiberal and unfounded.

What is rapidly becoming clear is that this Conservative-led administration is determined to continue with the sorts of policies that have been employed by politicians in this country for decades. But it is the failure of those policies that we are seeing in tragic episodes such as the rioting, the shootings in Norway, and the financial turmoil that Europe currently finds itself in. This government has not recognised that it could be the first for many decades to stand for an alternative approach. James Delingpole has written:

“This is an opportunity for astute politicians to reject decades of ingrained, state-enforced political correctness and actual give the people what they want. What people want is very simple: a government which secures its citizens lives, livelihoods and property rights but otherwise leaves them well alone. Furthermore, a government which does not see it as part of its function to take money from the productive sector of the economy and squander it on the feckless and workshy.”

Donna Edmunds: A truly progressive Government would lower tobacco duty

Donna Edmunds is Director of Research at Progressive Vision.

You there, reading this on your BlackBerry whilst having a quick cigarette – put that out! Don’t you know that today is No Smoking Day? I’m told that one million people will try to give up smoking today, helped to do so by their friendly government adviser. Of course the health benefits speak for themselves, and the money that can be saved is astronomical. If you smoke a 20 pack a day, you can save around £6.63 a day – or £2,419.95 a year.

But why are prices so high in the first place? Does the high tax burden really encourage people to quit, or does it just push trade underground? Is there are dark side to this worthy tax?

Last month, Progressive Vision brought together almost 100 stakeholders including those from the tobacco industry, retailers, HMRC and Trading Standards to discuss the trade in illicit tobacco at a one day summit. We discussed best practice in collecting intelligence on criminals dealing in illicit tobacco; we considered how to best share that information to present a united front in the fight against tobacco; and we explored the use of nudge theory to encourage people to buy legitimate products.

Ultimately, from whatever angle we came at the problem, the answer was the same. The consensus was that high taxes drive the illicit trade as people will always buy an identical product for less money if they can. How high is the tax? Well, on a typical pack of 20, the tax burden is anywhere between 77% and 90%. In the UK a typical pack of 20 cigarettes costs £6.63, so somewhere between £5.10 and £5.97 is going to the treasury for every pack.

Donna Edmunds: By axing some of its World Service transmissions, the BBC will be failing many in their greatest moment of need

Donna Edmunds is a Fellow at Progressive Vision.

Last time you went abroad, did you notice that people the world over seem to treat us Brits with a certain measure of respect not necessarily afforded to all other nationalities? To be a Brit abroad is to receive an open-armed, open-doored welcome in to the businesses, and sometimes the homes of strangers abroad. Ever wondered why that might be?

Of course there was a time, not so long ago, when Britain was top dog. We ranged across the world leaving our mark wherever we went. People admired our stoicism and ability to drink tea in almost any circumstance. But a great deal of this respect was also gained through our BBC broadcasts into the homes of millions; in a multitude of languages, the words “This is London” held great resonance.  

My mother’s family was just one of countless many who would covertly listen to Voice of America and the BBC World Service for a reliable account of what was happening within their own country. She recalls that, whilst a coup or other national disaster was taking place, the state media would show ballet for hours on end – even as recently as 1986 when the Chernobyl disaster struck. “In fact”, she says “it got to the stage where, if you turned on the TV and ballet was on, you’d know that something was up.” At which point the TV would be turned off and the family would retreat to the back room to huddle around the Bakelite radio, turned down so that it was barely audible, and tune into the World Service.   

Those radio broadcasts were carried to her and the family on short wave radio transmissions originating from transmitters located on British soil. Next month, the BBC plans to decommission those transmitters.
The Berlin Wall has fallen and the Soviet Bloc has broken up, but the World Service continues to be a reliable and trusted media source for millions of people worldwide. Its audience figures are 50% higher than those of its leading competitors, and until 2009 were rising – from 120 million in 1993 to a record high of 188 million. But in 2010 those figures dropped by 20 million, due, in part, to the rolling back of the short wave service.