British Politics Thread

Workers in poorer parts of Britain should have their pay frozen until it falls in line with the private sector, Chancellor George Osborne is expected to announce in Wednesday's Budget.

He is due to reveal plans to scrap national pay rates for workers such as teachers, nurses and civil servants.

The Treasury says public sector wages in England and Wales are, on average, 8% higher than in the private sector.

Unions have criticised the plans, which they say will drive down regional pay.

The move would mean local factors, such as the cost of living and private sector pay rates, would now be taken into account.

It means a teacher working in Sunderland would have a different pay packet to a colleague in Surrey.

Local pay rates for teaching and hospital staff could begin next year.

Career progression

Treasury officials say it would ensure the UK has "a responsive, modern labour force".

Business Secretary Vince Cable would not confirm or deny the plans but said the idea of having more flexibility in the public sector was "surely right".

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "What we're trying to do is make sure that throughout the public sector there's more genuine decision making at a local level and you have to take into account pay and conditions."

He added: "But it has got to be done very carefully because in the civil service, for example, you have to have career progression and that kind of national consideration has to be woven into the story as well."

A Treasury source told the BBC's Chris Mason the move was not about saving money but about ensuring the UK has "a responsive, modern labour force".

The source told our correspondent the move is seen as "pro-growth" because it would help make the private sector to become more competitive.

But Wales's First Minister Carwyn Jones, said the government should be trying to improve regional disparities in pay, not making them worse.

"At the end of the day, people work hard. Nurses work hard, police officers work hard, teachers work hard," he said.

"Why should they be penalised because of where they live? Surely we should be looking at a situation where we look to close the gap in income between different parts of the UK rather than make it worse, which is exactly what this will do."

'''The director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Paul Johnson, said the government faced a difficult task because public sector pay was frozen until 2014, and only then due to rise by 1%.

"If you want to introduce differential, it's much easier to do it at a time when pay's increasing more quickly so you can, for example, freeze pay in some regions and raise it more quickly in others," he said.

"If it's only going up 1% on average and you're freezing in some regions, you actually can't do very much unless you're waiting a very long time."'''

The NASUWT, the largest teachers' union, said all children, wherever they lived, were entitled to be taught by teachers whose pay rewarded them as highly skilled professionals.

General secretary Chris Keates added: "As usual the Chancellor holds up the private sector as the comparator. The inconvenient truth he chooses to ignore is that large organisations in the private sector have national pay and conditions frameworks."

The Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, which represents civil servants, told the BBC the plans would "drive down pay in the regions".

General secretary Mark Serwotka said that would be "cruel, economically incompetent and counterproductive" at a time when public sector salaries and pensions were being cut.

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: "Moving to regional pay will not just reduce the pay of millions of public servants, but hit regional economies outside London and the South East when people have less to spend.

"This budget is shaping up to be a giveaway for the super-rich and a takeaway for Britain's hardest-hit regions."

And Len Mc Cluskey, Unite's general secretary, added: "All this will do is drive workers to the better paid regions, leaving large parts of the country without the professionals essential to sustain local services."

Mr Osborne initially set out the idea in the Autumn Statement.

At the time, he announced a review of national pay rates for public servants and asked the independent pay review bodies to report back in July.

Contrasting lessons can be drawn from these twin treats. Start with those spies and gizmos. After a faintly chilly start to their relationship, when both Mr Obama and Mr Cameron were at pains to distance themselves from the blood-forged intimacies of the Bush-Blair era, ties between the two governments have strengthened. On many fronts, from foreign policy to deficit reduction, they are closer than appearance and conventional wisdom would suggest. A super-secret tour for Mr Hague was a natural bureaucratic tribute.

Such cosiness took a while to develop. In the early days of the Libyan uprising, the Americans seemed wary of being bounced into another adventure by European allies, whose ambitions seemed likely to exceed their capabilities. Even now, differences remain. Mr Cameron expresses personal frustration that no obvious plan exists for stopping the killings in Syria. Mr Obama is cooler. At a White House press conference, he stressed the need to think through every action in an “extremely complicated” spot.

In private, the prime minister makes a virtue of the cerebral rationality underpinning the relationship. He has been heard to say that the “Iraq model” of two nations in lockstep has given way to a “Libya model”. As explained by British officials, that entails a pragmatic version of liberal interventionism, based around a worldview in which the allies recognise that they cannot do everything and try to work with regional partners and with the cultural grain of countries when intervening.

...

During his two days in Washington, Mr Cameron did not meet any Republican presidential contenders. A senior figure denies that today’s Tories are closer to the Democrats, but agrees that American conservatism is now very different from the British kind. He calls it frustrating that an “interesting debate” begun by the tea-party movement on the size of the state has now taken on a zeal that surpasses British understanding. Among the candidates, Mitt Romney is “not 100 miles away from a sort of fiscally austere British Conservative”, yet is seen struggling with his party base as a result. As for Rick Santorum, his fierce, faith-based views “don’t make any sense” to most Tories.

Elite convergence, in other words, is matched by popular divergence. The explanation is democracy, or, rather, mechanisms such as Congress, talk radio and the primary system, which transmit American popular opinion to policymakers with unusual directness. Senior Americans, it is said, often sigh to British counterparts that if they could only borrow Britain’s constitution for a year they could fix the tax system and the budget.