Given the ongoing battle between Ken Clarke, with the help of Crispin Blunt, and the Downing Street media operation over reducing prison sentences, Guido was particularly amused to see the make-up of this Policy Exchange event at Tory conference:

So along with a chairman, there are three speakers in a row who want to cut the prison population and no one who thinks this a bad idea. Don’t tell Andy…

But is everyone at Policy Exchange signed up to the chosen viewpoint? Why isn’t their Head of Crime and Justice, Blair Gibbs, on the panel? At the other events, the PX speaker is the person responsible for that policy area, not Neil O’Brien. Could it be that Gibbs might not be in agreement with the rest of the carefully selected guests. What does the Head of Crime and Justice have to say on the matter?

Well when he was at Reform he certainly made his views known:

“An ideology hostile to prison has taken root, progressively warping successive Government’s response to rising crime, and in its complacency, directly contributing to it… on all levels – deterrence, incapacitation and rehabilitation … prison cuts crime. The reason this argument is rarely heard, and certainly not from the prison reform lobby, is because the “experts” regard a rising prison population as a sign of society’s failure and so can rarely find a good thing to say about it.

The result of this anti-prison mentality and increased use of non-custodial sentences has been thirty years of rising crime and failed responses.

…we run great risks if we think, despite all the evidence, that we can have a low prison population, while we still have a high crime rate, and not expect public safety to be jeopardised… Much evidence suggests that when it is allowed to, prison works, and with expansion and more investment in Britain it can be made to work better. What doesn’t work, is a criminal justice system that attempts to replace prison with other forms of community punishment, solely on the back of ideological motives or misplaced sentimentalism.”

You can hear the wonks wincing already. How fortunate for the Prison Reform Trust who are sponsoring, sorry “partnering”, the event, that Dave’s favourite think-tank is willing to gag its experts.

Guido was pleased to see the venerable Adam Smith Institute as the top trending Twitter topic earlier this morning.  Had the Twitterati finally fallen in love with one of Thatcher’s favourite think tanks? Perhaps they had recognised the debt owed to a body that helped push through housing reform, led the attacks on Quangos and pioneered privatisation of public services.  Instead the ASI had dared to criticise the licence fee.

Their report has provoked outrage amongst media luvvies for pointing out that the license fee is a regressive tax that criminalises the poor, restricts competition and props up a bloated broadcaster – “a subsidised entertainment firm with some non-commercial obligations”. The wonks provide a consistent, measured attack on an outdated method of funding. The only problem is that it doesn’t go far enough. While the BBC costs the licence fee payer 40p a day, Guido will continue to provide his public service broadcasting for free.

It is fair to say that London Labour’s activists and wonkish elite are by and large behind Ed Miliband, unless they are ideological Blairites (like the Progress crowd) or careerist greasy pole climbers like most MPs, in which case they are behind David Miliband. The headbanging Tory hating activists go for Balls and lefties back Abbott with Burnham picking up a Northern token vote.

Supporters of Ed Miliband are adamant, despite polls showing David has more than twice as much support among Labour supporters, that he will win on second preferences.  Will Straw at LeftFootForward has even built a predictive model that forecasts Ed scraping through. Yet punters persist in making David Miliband the runaway favourite. Are the punters or the wonks right?

Guido accepts that Ed will probably win the union’s endorsements, though the Fabian’s Sunda Katawala argues that doesn’t necessarily mean he will win the votes of union members. Punters agree with Will and give Ed a 60% chance of winning the union votes.

Guido and punters make David the 80% favourite to win the MP/MEPs vote.  Will forecasts it will be closer than that but accepts that David will win this part of the electoral college.

It is over the membership vote that Will’s model and punters differ dramatically. Based on a non-representative, self-selecting poll of LabourList’s readers (DM 34.9% EM 30.8%), he predicts that the second preferences from the more left-wing candidates will switch to Ed and he will thus beat his older brother. The argument being that since Ed is positioned to the left of David, second preferences won’t tack right to the most centrist candidate. This is delusional.

Not all the voters will see the candidates in such finely calibrated positions on the centre-to-left spectrum, much of the electorate will vote on character and personality. Apart from Diane Abbott the policy positions of the candidates are in reality very closely bunched and Ed Balls’ new found tactical leftism is transparently risible.  Experience shows that second preferences tend to break in correlation with first preferences. The correlation isn’t perfect, but nor is it so weak as to be insignificant. Yet Labour sympathisers in the media and even more objective pundits like Toby Young believe Ed will come through.

So if it will be decided by the membership vote, is the LabourList poll accurate? It is unlikely that a self-selecting web poll will be. YouGov actually put Balls ahead of Ed Miliband but behind David with Labour voters (and another private poll by Survation put Diane Abbot within 5% of Ed among union members).  With the polling confusion Guido puts little reliance on the sampling and absent of clear polling evidence Guido opts to “follow the money”. David Miliband has raised more money than all the rest and he has the weight of  punter’s money backing him. It will be close, but Guido suspects Ed will lose to his big brother.

Touching to see that now Gordon has exited the stage his old slush fund / think-tank / charity is no more. Former Smith Institute boss Wilf Stevenson has at last got his peerage as a reward for being Brown’s long time toady. The charity which even provided a well paid berth for Balls when he first stood for election is now superfluous and has been wound up.

The name lives on as a limited company available as a think-tank-for-hire by big business; organising seminars for pharmaceutical lobbyists, government contractors, supermarket chains and other vested interests aiming to get their hands into taxpayers’ pockets. The glory days of hosting Al Gore meeting Chancellor Gordon a distant memory…

The list includes a few more LibDem names, forinstance Giles Wilkes is tipped to move from the Centre Forum think tank to Vince Cable’s office.

Guido has had a few complaints that people on the list are not strictly speaking Special Advisers. Guido is using the term loosely, basically the people on this list are political appointments of various kinds doing the bag carrying for Ministers, some are not your usual wonky, spinning, greasy pole-climbing SpAds – clearly Sir Peter Ricketts heading up the National Security Council for Hague is not a teenage bag carrier.  Nic Boles for example is an MP but glides in out of the Cabinet Office helping the Implentation Unit in some unspecified and presumably unpaid way.  One way or another they’re on Guido’s list…

Guido’s latest list of government SpAds, wonks, “chief of staff” and assorted bag carriers is here. Compiled so Guido knows who to go to when shit happens…

You’ll no doubt see this republished in the papers and by scummy lobbyists public affairs firms as original research later this week.

Rumours of a battle over job titles between Rohan Silva (backed by Osborne and Hilton) and James O’Shaughnessy are denied by all. Ex-CCHQ / Policy Exchange über-wonk O’Shaughnessy reckons he was promised and is in line for the Downing Street policy chief role. Informed sources say he will have a long-term policy role and Rohan a more political / tactical role.

The list is a work in progress, but one Downing Street staffer told Guido it is the only one he’d seen…

The Fabian’s Tim Horton and IPPR’s Howard Reed have jointly authored a paper for Left Foot Forward designed to undermine the case for raising tax thresholds for low income earners.  Clearly they are trying to undermine Clegg’s claim to support a fairer tax system, which by all accounts is playing very well on the doorsteps.

Horton and Reed make a number of charges that need rebutting:

• Three million of the poorest households gain nothing from the change

That is only because they simply just don’t pay tax. No tax cut will ever help that group, only an increase in welfare transfer payments can benefit them. That however would further increase dependency and disincentivise them from coming off welfare support.

• Households in the second richest decile gain, on average, four times the amount of those in the poorest decile.

Once again, this is because the lowest decile don’t pay much if any tax – we are really talking about part-time workers and those on welfare. Nevertheless everybody, including the lowest decile, will be better off whatever their income.

• Only around £1 billion of the £17 billion cost actually goes toward the stated aim of lifting low-income households out of tax, the policy would increase socially damaging inequalities between the bottom and middle.

Here we get to the real reason they object, it cuts taxes for the middle classes. According to their numbers, those on low incomes will only benefit by £5 a week and those on middle incomes will benefit by £20 a week. Low income households also qualify for welfare transfers from middle income earners, from free school meals to welfare credits.  Is it really unfair against a background of progressively higher marginal tax rates on middle income earners?  Middle earners pay disproportionately more tax after all.

Horton and Reed don’t really dispute that the lowest earners will be better off, they just don’t like the distribution of benefits from the policy. They do conclude with a bit of hyperbole: “It could actually harm the welfare of low-income households by increasing inequality and relative poverty.” Nobody is harmed by a “relative increase in inequality”. That is a left-wing myth. If your neighbour wins the lottery you are relatively poorer in comparison but not objectively, similarly those on lower incomes are not made poorer by those on middle incomes paying a little less tax. Nice try, but the moral case for taking those on the minimum wage out of tax is still stronger than the case for taxing them to pay them welfare.

On Wednesday David Cameron gave a speech to a TED audience described by host Matthew Freud as “movers and shakers”. That is Mathew Freud the lobbyist and son-in-law of Rupert Murdoch. Dave made a new pledge to publish not just details of spending over £25,000 but details of all government contracts worth over £25,000 for goods and services in full, including all performance indicators, break clauses and penalty measures. This will enable voters and taxpayers to “Google their government”, searching out wasteful spending and poorly negotiated contracts, opening up government procurement system to small businesses.

That is a non-trivial change in policy and will have far reaching ramifications, not least of which will be increased competition and downward pressure on public spending. Ending “commercial confidentiality” and publishing all government contracts  was a proposal floated last September in an article (“A See-Through Government“) in the journal of the Reform think-tank and at their New Government Agenda conference last November.  Guido was wearing his wonk hat…

Speccie editor Fraser Nelson is giving the Keith Joseph Memorial Lecture to a Centre for Policy Studies audience tonight.  The CPS was of course founded by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher.  His speech is titled “Winning Is Not Enough“.

Fraser is willing to tell it straight:

“The political fallacies of the 1970s are leaping out from their graves: the notion that you squeeze more out of the rich by increasing their marginal tax rate. The idea that one improves the health service by pouring money into it. The ideological demons that Keith Joseph had thought slain have come back again. And, just like last time, some of these demons are wearing a blue rosette.”

The critique he offers of the Tory willingness to accept Brown’s parameters of debate is not just the Tory right calling for the old Thatcherite tunes. He is squarely taking on what can be described as the Fink approach to politics:

… the Conservative Party is, to an extent, still in therapy; shell-shocked not just by three election defeats, but by the trauma of its own internal warfare. The temptation is to get rid of anything that anyone might criticise, and become politically neutral: provoking neither hatred nor enthusiasm. Here, the Conservatives are in danger of forgetting Keith Joseph’s most enduring lesson: the difference between the Middle Ground and the Common Ground.

Guido is off to hear the speech…

The civil service is getting into planning for the post-Labour period. Who better to get in to give a preview of the likely thinking of the next government than one of Steve Hilton’s favourite wonks, the ‘Red Tory’ Philip Blond?  This email has just been sent out by the Cabinet Office Strategy Unit to senior civil servants:

Title: ‘The decline of civil society and what it means for society’
Date: Wednesday, 25th November 2009
Time: 5:30- 6:30pm (refreshments available from 5pm)
Venue: Admiralty House, Whitehall
Chair: Gareth Davies, Director of the Strategy Unit
Respondent: David Rossington, Director of Strategy & Performance, DCLG

Dear Colleague

I am pleased to invite you to the above Strategy Unit – evening seminar at Admiralty House.

Phillip Blond’s talk on “The decline of civil society and what it means for society” will focus on the New Civic Settlement: outlining a new politics of civic association. The talk will outline how civic society has been eroded, and what we can do to rebuild it and how a reconstituted associative culture can help solve public policy problems which neither the state nor the market have the ability to solve.

We are also pleased to confirm that David Rossington, Director of Strategy & Performance, from the department of Communities and Local Government will join us to briefly to respond to Mr Blond’s presentation.

Philip Blond is known as the “Red Tory” and is centrist on economics and conservative on social matters. The civil service is obviously starting with the less scary centre-right wonks. Just wait until the bureaucrats hear from the other centre-right think tanks about what the ‘post-bureaucratic age means for them…