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A public opinion poll published by The Children’s Society today, as part of its ongoing Good Childhood Inquiry, reveals a consensus among adults that increasing commercialisation is damaging children’s well-being.

60% of respondents believed that young people’s self-esteem is damaged by the media’s negative coverage of their age group. The poll, conducted by GfK NOP, also highlighted adults’ concern about various areas of children’s lifestyles, with 61% saying that the Government should ban the advertising of unhealthy food and seven in ten (69%) agreeing that violent video games make children more aggressive.

Eighty nine per cent of adults felt that children nowadays are more materialistic than in past generations. Evidence submitted to the inquiry from children suggests that they do feel under pressure to keep up with the latest trends.

An overwhelming majority (90%) of adults thought that advertising to children at Christmas puts pressure on parents to spend more than they can afford. This could put parents and families at risk of debt in the early months of the new year and beyond.

The Children’s Society commissioned the GfK NOP poll to complement the launch of a summary of the evidence submitted to the inquiry on its fourth theme - children’s lifestyles. Professionals and members of the public submitted evidence on a variety of issues, ranging from places to play to children’s diets but a major theme emerging from their comments was concern about the commercialisation of childhood.

Dr. Rowan Williams, The Archbishop of Canterbury, patron of the inquiry said: “Children should be encouraged to value themselves for who they are as people rather than what they own. The selling of lifestyles to children creates a culture of material competitiveness and promotes acquisitive individualism at the expense of the principles of community and cooperation.”

Professor Philip Graham, Emeritus Professor of Child Psychiatry at The Institute of Child Health, London and an inquiry panel member, believes that commercial pressures may have worrying psychological effects on children:

“One factor that may be leading to rising mental health problems is the increasing degree to which children and young people are preoccupied with possessions; the latest in fashionable clothes and electronic equipment,” said Professor Graham who is leading the inquiry’s lifestyle theme.

“Evidence both from the United States and from the UK suggests that those most influenced by commercial pressures also show higher rates of mental health problems.”1

Bob Reitemeier, chief executive of The Children’s Society said: “A crucial question raised by the inquiry is whether childhood should be a space where developing minds are free from concentrated sales techniques. As adults we have to take responsibility for the current level of marketing to children. To accuse children of being materialistic in such a culture is a cop out. Unless we question our own behaviour as a society we risk creating a generation who are left unfulfilled through chasing unattainable lifestyles.”

Over the next 12 months the inquiry will hold meetings on the remaining themes of health and values before publishing its final report in early 2009. The public can contribute to The Good Childhood Inquiry by logging on to www.hundredsandthousands.org.uk and sharing their childhood memories.

Last year the left pressure group, Compass, produced a report on the Commercialisation of Childhood which can be read here. The report detailed the intensity and effects of advertising to children and revealed an army of marketing experts and branding gurus spending billions every year to directly target children to sell products and groom them for a lifetime of consumerism.

Leaders from across the centre-left, civil society and from all corners of the UK, have today urged every progressive voter, activist and organisation to get behind the campaign to re-elect Ken Livingstone, in a statement - reproduced below - co-ordinated by the leading left-of-centre pressure group, Compass.  The statements 100 signatories include 18 academics, five people from the arts, MPs Diane Abbott and Dawn Butler, Claude Moraes MEP, Baroness Helena Kennedy, Tony Benn and TMP editor, Chuka Umunna.

“On 1st May London will elect a Mayor. It will either be Ken Livingstone or Boris Johnson. Livingstone has been the front runner for re-election but alarm bells may be sounding.

One straw in the wind was the unprompted comment from a progressive colleague last week that she thought Johnson was going to win. This wasn’t a statement of desirability but feasibility.

Are the centre-left and the progressive voices and organisations of the capital sleep walking into the nightmare of a Johnson victory? Well maybe. But this isn’t just about the politics of London but a battle between the forces of progress versus reaction in the nation as a whole.

Let us be clear. Ken Livingstone is not perfect. Show us a politician who is. But he is not just a serious and skilled politician compared to almost any rival (but especially the horror and embarrassment of the Johnson alternative), Livingstone is a standard bearer for real progressive politics.

That is why this election matters to the nation, not just the capital. Livingstone represents a hope that something better is possible; that a different type of society – is not just some pipe dream of the left – but can be created. This is the reason he is under such severe attack. The Conservatives see a Johnson victory as a springboard to beat Labour at the next general election. They are piling in with every resource to make it happen – not least the negative campaigning skills of the Australian Lynton Crosby.

The lead attack dog is of course the Daily Mail group’s Evening Standard. The Standard is the most influential paper in the country because every decision maker and influencer in London reads it. It is being used day in and day out as a battering ram, not just against Ken Livingstone, but against the ideals of more democratic, egalitarian and sustainable politics. This is not the freedom and independence of the press but the disfigurement of the fourth estate into a blatant propaganda machine for the rich and powerful who fear the re-election of Ken Livingstone. It is indeed the few using their wealth and influence over the many.

And perhaps most alarming of all we see writers and commentators who claim to be ‘on the left’ taking the fight to Livingstone in a way that will only result in a victory for Johnson and all that means for the poor and dispossessed of the Capital and the future politics of our country.

So a battle is being waged in the country and it is time to stand and fight to ensure that Livingstone wins so that the ideals of democracy, equality and sustainability endure and are given new hope.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ahead of the second reading of Labour MP Andrew Miller’s Private Members Bill in the House of Commons today, the TUC has produced a briefing on agency working. TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said: ‘Employers cannot claim that agency workers are all fairly paid and then say that it will be prohibitively expensive to pay them fairly. But even their more plausible arguments such as better rights will stop agency work providing a bridge into permanent jobs for the unemployed do not stack up.’ The briefing is below and the CBI briefing on the same topic can be read here.

How many agency workers are there?

The correct answer is that no one knows for sure. The Government’s Labour Force Survey (LFS) says there are around 260,000, but agency trade body the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) claims to place 1.25 million workers on any one day.

The LFS figures are certainly an underestimate as this is a telephone household survey. It makes no effort to trace workers living at their place of work - not uncommon in agency placed workers in the agriculture, hospitality and care sectors - and seriously underestimates non-English speakers, long hours workers, multiple occupation households, which are all characteristic of migrant and other groups high in agency working.

The big difference means that either the REC figures are right and there are up to one million invisible agency workers, who do not show up in official statistics, or the REC figures are an overestimate. The LFS sample is usually used for the statistical profiling of agency workers but is likely to be skewed towards well paid, relatively stable workers. Put simply, it is more likely that a supply teacher will be included in the LFS than a Lithuanian fruit picker.

What issues are at stake?

Unions are supporting two routes for better agency worker rights, and in particular giving agency workers the rights to equal treatment with permanent staff doing the same job.

The draft EU Temporary Agency Worker Directive (TAWD) has failed to make progress since 2002 due to a failure to reach agreement in the Council of Ministers. The UK has led a blocking minority, but there are signs that support for the UK is diminishing and that once the Lisbon Treaty has been ratified, ministers will no longer be able to block progress.

A second private members’ bill on agency workers (moved by Andrew Miller MP) is to be debated in the House of Commons today.  An earlier Bill introduced by Paul Farrelly MP was talked out with Government support.

The Directive is part of a family of three measures to improve protection for what the EU calls atypical workers. Yet the directives to protect part-time workers and temporary workers were passed in 1997 and 1999. Only agency workers remain unprotected.

There is a separate issue about whether there is effective enforcement of existing rights for agency workers, given the many media exposures of exploitation of migrant and other vulnerable workers placed through agencies. The Gangmaster’s Licensing Scheme - opposed by the Government until the Morecambe cockle pickers’ tragedy - only covers some sectors. Unions support better enforcement and licensing, but action on enforcement is not sufficient. Both agency and existing permanent staff deserve protection, by stopping the replacement of secure jobs with insecure agency staff on worse terms and conditions.

Are unions opposed to agency working in principle?

No. As TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber has said: ‘There is nothing wrong with agency working. Matching employers with short-term needs with employees with short-term availability or who genuinely prefer working this way, as some do, is not just a perfectly respectable business, but good for the wider economy.’ Read the rest of this entry »

Hot on the heels of his routing of Senator Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries in Virginia, Washington DC and Maryland last week, Senator Barack Obama has won the primary and caucus in Wisconsin and Hawaii respectively, giving him 10 straight wins in a row in the race to win the U.S Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. He took 58% of the vote in Wisconsin and 76% of the vote in Hawaii, where he spent time growing up.

Obama’s victories in Wisconsin and Hawaii are less significant than the demographic there that voted for him. Clinton has been carried along by the support of Latino, blue collar, and women voters, but Obama made inroads into the latter two groups this time round. Also, Clinton’s last minute attacks on Obama for allegedly plagiarising the speeches of his supporter, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, appear to have backfired.

Many are now talking of the uphill climb Clinton now faces as the all important Ohio and Texas primaries loom large on Tuesday 4 March. The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza writes:
“All of [the data from Wisconsin] suggests one thing: Obama is building the coalition that Clinton appeared to have built in earlier votes. And without winning back a significant portion of that coalition, it becomes VERY difficult for her to come from behind and claim the nomination.”

However, speaking immediately after the Wisconsin results in Houston, Texas, Obama was keen to play down the momentum which is building behind him:
“Understand this, Houston: As wonderful as this gathering is, as exciting as these enormous crowds and this enormous energy may be, what we’re trying to do here is not easy, and it will not happen overnight.
“It is going to take more than big rallies. It’s going to require more than rousing speeches. It will also require more than policy papers and positions and Web sites. It is going to require something more, because the problem that we face in America today is not the lack of good ideas. It’s that Washington has become a place where good ideas go to die.”

The latest polls in Ohio and Texas give Clinton 9 and 5 point leads respectively over Obama.

In a Guardian/ICM poll published today record numbers of people say the gap between the rich and the poor today is too great.  75% of those questioned said the gap between high and low income earners is too wide in Britain - the highest ever level found by ICM - whilst only 15% think the income gap is about right.

The poll also suggests that Middle England is open to a more progressive political message with less middle class voters than lower income voters believing they are paying too much tax.  73% of those at the bottom of the socio-economic scale think they pay too much tax, against 62% of those at the top.  Middle class voters are also more likely to think taxes make society fairer.

The poll has the Conservatives on 37%, Labour on 34% and the Liberal Democrats on 21% support.

Keith Vaz MP, Chair of the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee and Chair of the Labour Party’s Ethnic Minority Taskforce, introduced his much anticipated 10 minute rule bill – the Race Relations (Election Candidates) Bill – in the House of Commons last week.

The Bill is meant to exclude from the operation of the Race Relations Act 1976 and the Race Relations (Northern Ireland) Order 1997 certain matters relating to the selection of candidates by political parties. The Bill would allow political parties to adopt positive discrimination measures such as all ethnic minority shortlists - from which parliamentary candidates would be picked - along the same lines as the legislation introduced to allow for all women shortlists.

The Bill is supported by Britain’s most senior, elected, ethnic minority politician, Skills Minister David Lammy MP, who called for the adoption of such measures last June. Labour Party Deputy Leader and Leader of the Commons, Harriet Harman MP (left) was present at the First Reading of the Bill last Wednesday. Harman, has said that four times the current number of ethnic minority MPs need to be elected if the Commons is to reflect the national population. In a speech to London’s South Bank University recently, she said:
“The last General Election saw a net increase of only two minority ethnic MPs taking the total to just fifteen. But we still have further to go. If the chamber is to reflect the make-up of society, that figure needs to increase four-fold.”

Harman announced at the Labour Party Conference last September that she had asked Simon Woolley (right), the director of the pressure group Operation Black Vote to carry out an investigation into the viability of all ethnic minority shortlists. OBV recently won an award at the highly acclaimed Channel 4/Hansard Society Political Awards for its Welsh Assembly Member Shadowing Scheme. Reports over the weekend indicate that Woolley has now presented his final report to Harman. The Observer reported that Woolley concludes that all-black shortlists would be needed for two decades, after which talented candidates could be expected to make it on their own, and he identifies 100 constituencies with large ethnic minority communities as prime targets for such shortlists. Read the rest of this entry »

Fresh from victory in Washington, Maine, Louisiana, Nebraska and the British Virgin Islands, Senator Barack Obama is hoping to win the U.S. Democratic primaries in Virginia, Maryland and Washington DC today. In the latest poll of polls he leads Senator Hillary Clinton by 17.7 points in Virginia, 22.3 points in Maryland, and is expected to take Washington DC.

Presently Obama has 1144 delegates to the Democratic Party’s national convention in August which will decide who becomes the party’s nominee in the presidential election on 4 November. Clinton has 1138 delegates but, crucially, has more super delegates than Obama – 213 to his 140. Super delegates are made up of current or former elected officeholders and party officials – the party establishment - and are free to support any candidate for the nomination, whereas other delegates are subject to some kind of mandate, primarily based on how their state voted in its primary or caucus. Democratic super delegates are thought to favour Clinton.

Meanwhile in the latest national poll by Associated Press/Ipsos into how the two remaining Democtaic contenders would fare against the likely Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, Obama leads McCain by 6 points, whilst Clinton only leads McCain by 1 point. This will be of assistance to Obama in winning over the party establishment who commentators now predict will determine the winner if the race continues through to the summer.

Ahead of the “Super Tuesday” Democratic Party primaries in the US this evening, watch this music video “Yes We Can” which is inspired by Senator Barack Obama’s presidential bid. It has been produced by Black Eyed Peas frontman, will.i.am, and film maker Jesse Dylan (son of John).

Commenting on ABC News on the video, will.i.am said of Obama’s speech (after the New Hampshire primary) which inspired the video:
“It made me reflect on the freedoms I have, going to school where I went to school, and the people that came before Obama like Martin Luther King, presidents like Abraham Lincoln that paved the way for me to be sitting here on ABC News and making a song from Obama’s speech”.

The video features Scarlett Johansson, John Legend, Herbie Hancock, Kate Walsh, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Adam Rodriquez, Kelly Hu, Adam Rodriquez, Amber Valetta and Nick Cannon.

Meanwhile, Obama was working New Jersey voters yesterday with Hollywood actor, Robert de Niro. De Niro said Obama was the “one person has given me hope, has made me believe that we can make a change.”

New research for the TUC published today reveals that the public purse loses £13 billion a year through tax avoidance by the wealthy and £12 billion a year through tax avoidance by corporations. Altogether this adds up to £25 billion - or around £1,000 a year for everyone at work in the UK.

The research, conducted by accountant and tax specialist Richard Murphy, is published in “The Missing Billions”, the first in a new series of TUC pamphlets designed to stimulate debate called Touchstones. The research includes the analysis of 344 sets of accounts from Britain’s 50 largest companies and analysis of HMRC and other official statistics.

Analysis of the top 50 companies’ accounts shows that their effective corporation tax rate is 22.5 per cent - not the 30 per cent agreed by Parliament. The companies almost always pay 5 per cent less tax on average than they declare in their accounts and in the seven years up to 2006 their effective tax rate fell by 0.5 per cent each year.

The report shows how super-rich individuals avoid paying their fair share of tax. £3.2 billion tax is lost by turning earned income into investment income (which is taxed more favourably) or by shifting the income to others (such as spouses) in lower or nil tax bands. Another £3.8 billion is lost moving transactions out of the UK, £0.5 billion by turning income into a capital gain and £4.8 billion from various kinds of tax planning.

Half the amount lost to tax avoidance could raise the level at which higher rate tax starts being paid by £10,000 a year, which would also offer significant help to those on middle incomes; or increase the state pension by 20 per cent; or reduce income tax by 3p in the pound; or build an extra 50 hospitals a year.

The Touchstone pamphlet calls for:

- a minimum rate of tax to be paid by all those earning more than £100,000 a year to limit their use of tax avoidance and tax planning, without affecting the tax rates of middle Britain;
- a stop to HMRC staff cuts so that there are sufficient resources to effectively collect tax;
- the non-dom tax loophole to be abolished;
- capital gains on assets held for less than a year to be charged to income tax;
- a change to the tax treatment of charities to give them more income and close a tax loophole; and,
- the introduction of a new ‘general anti-avoidance principle’ to make it easier to tax the super-rich and large companies.

TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said: ‘There is mounting concern at the growing gap between the super-rich and the rest of society, but so far there have been few practical proposals to do anything about it. This TUC pamphlet is therefore doubly helpful. First it carefully works out just how much the super-rich and big companies rip the rest of us off by not paying their fair share of taxes. Secondly it sets out a practical set of policies that close loopholes, end abuse and starts the process of making the super-rich make a proper contribution - all without raising a single tax rate.

‘Our strong view is that the proceeds should be used to properly fund public services, where six million are facing cuts in their real pay, and relieve poverty - particularly child poverty. But you do not have to agree with our spending priorities to back our call for fair tax, and we recognise the argument at this difficult economic time for boosting the income of low and middle Britain through tax cuts.

‘This is not the politics of envy but the economics of fairness. It is all about getting rich and powerful people to understand they must play by the rules, not look for ways round them.”

Senator Barack Obama won the South Carolina primary on Saturday taking 55% of the vote to Senator Hillary Clinton’s 27%. Notably, he picked up a greater proportion of white Democrats’ votes than expected.

The Democratic nomination juggernaut swings into Florida today for the controversial primary there which, like Michigan’s, has been outlawed by the Democratic Party. Floridian Democratic delegates will not be able to take their seats at the party’s national convention as the state party is being penalised for holding its primary before 5 February.

Obama has not campaigned in Florida but Clinton has, and it is widely believed she may challenge the national party’s ruling as commentators predict the race could come down to the delegate count at the Democratic Party’s national convention in August. A candidate needs 2,025 delegates to win the nomination and it is estimated that Obama currently has 63 delegates, whilst Clinton has 48.

Yesterday Obama received a massive boost with the endorsement of Senator Edward Kennedy, the younger brother of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who were both assassinated in the 1960s. Flanked by ”JFK’s” daughter Caroline and his son Congressman Patrick Kennedy, “Ted” Kennedy declared “I feel change in the air”.  He went on,
“With Barack Obama, we will turn the page on the old politics of misrepresentation and distortion.
“With Barack Obama we will close the book on the old politics of race against race, gender against gender, ethnic group against ethnic group, and straight against gay.”

Comparing Obama to his older brother JFK, Kennedy said,
“There was another time, when another young candidate was running for president and challenging America to cross a new frontier. He faced public criticism from the preceding Democratic president.
“That president, Harry Truman, urged patience. And John Kennedy replied: ‘The world is changing. The old ways will not do. It is time for a new generation of leadership.’ So it is with Barack Obama.
“[Barack Obama] will be a president who refuses to be trapped in the patterns of the past.
“He is a leader who sees the world clearly without being cynical. He is a fighter who cares passionately about the causes he believes in, without demonising those who hold a different view.”

Over 20 states vote in primaries and caucuses next Tuesday in a race that appears to be wide open.  You can watch Edward Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama below.