A Strong Labour movement Raises everyone’s Living Standards

Owen Jones in The Guardian

Respect for tradition, we are told, underpins the Conservative party. But there’s one tradition for which it has unwavering contempt – strike action: a part of our culture and heritage it has ferociously and instinctively demonised as an antisocial attack on the general public. Tories are known to extol the virtues of rugged individualism, but it seems the collective suddenly matters when industrial action is declared. Then, it seems, society – which in previous Tory eras was doubted to even exist – becomes a totem to be protected from sinister forces, from a malign and externalised striking rabble.

Strikes bring inconvenience. Of course they do. They disrupt our normal life, our plans, our expectations. But the concentrated attempt to stigmatise the very notion of the strike is something that must be resisted. The strike – and the threat of striking – should be celebrated precisely because it underpins many rights and freedoms we now take for granted. Union struggles in the 19th century played a pivotal role in shortening the working day, and in the 20th century, in creating the weekend. In the postwar heyday of union power, they drove up incomes. Strikes are a profound social good.

Yet how little this argument is heard. Anti-union sentiment is profoundly embedded in our political culture. When the Tory chairman, Nadhim Zahawi, suggested on national television that the upcoming nurses’ strike would aid Vladimir Putin by worsening inflation in the west, it was yet another crude illustration of this very British phenomenon, echoing Margaret Thatcher’s denunciation of striking miners as the “enemy within” in the 1980s. This hostility has a long pedigree and, historically at least, the Tories have been known to be candid about their real intentions.

RMT picket at Slough railway station, 8 October 2022. Photograph: Maureen McLean/Rex/Shutterstock

As the 20th century dawned, the Tories defended a legal ruling making unions financially liable for profits lost to strikes, leading the Conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin to later confess: “The Conservatives can’t talk of class war. They started it.” In 1926, they introduced a raft of anti-union laws in the aftermath of the general strike, including the banning of solidarity industrial action.

But while unions were hobbled in the 1930s, a spirit of collectivism nurtured by wartime sacrifice helped their rebirth. The three-decade social democratic consensus established by Clement Attlee’s Labour government led the Trades Union Congress in 1968 to boast that it had grown from a “small debating assembly” into a body that shared “in the making of government policies, taking part in administering major social services and meeting on equal terms with the spokesmen of the nation’s employers”. This was the era in which Britain enjoyed its highest ever sustained period of economic growth, which – thanks in part to strong unions – was more equitably distributed, boosting the pay of ordinary workers.

When the oil shock of the 1970s sent prices surging, unions mobilised in an effort to match wages with the cost of living. The grand climax – the winter of discontent – was successfully spun by Thatcher to label unions as national bogeyman for a generation. Her successors took up that framing as well. When Tony Blair became prime minister in 1997, he promised that his government would “leave British law the most restrictive on trade unions in the western world”. And David Cameron assailed Ed Miliband as “taking his script from the trade unions”, and turned the screw further, with even more restrictive laws.

But today this anti-union approach jars with political reality. One poll has suggested that nearly six in 10 voters back the nurses’ strike, and another found that more people backed the rail strike than opposed it. After an unprecedented fall in living standards, the default position of millions whose pay packets are shrivelling in real terms has become “well, fair play to them, at least someone is taking a stand”.

While earlier generations of Tories may have used the language of class warfare openly, their modern cohort is savvier. They seek to isolate striking workers from the wider public, portraying them as somehow separate from society at large. Rishi Sunak denounces strikers as a threat to “hardworking families”, as if nurses, paramedics or transport workers are excluded from that category. But this attempt to separate striking workers from society at large collides with the reality people see every day. The withdrawal of strikers’ labour is so noticeable precisely because of how central they are to our way of life. Rather than a middle-finger salute at the general public, it is one part of society crying for help from another.

 

Despite all the talk of monstrous disruption, for most the real inconvenience is struggling to pay bills and feed their children, rather than the irritation of a postponed train journey. Real wages are projected to be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008.

Indeed, a fundamental reason for wages being so low and conditions so poor in the UK is because of the dilution of union power. According to one study, the “changes in bargaining power” suffered by unions explains half of the decline in the share of the economy going to wages over four decades in several rich countries, including Britain. Rather than union action inconveniencing everybody else, the decline of unions has dragged down the wages of non-unionised workers, too, according to a US study. A strong labour movement, in other words, brings up everyone’s living standards.

A strike, then, isn’t antisocial behaviour, on a collision course with the interests of the wider public. By neutering the threat of strike action with authoritarian laws, the Tories have succeeded only in weakening a mechanism with a proven record in raising the living standards of all workers. Despite the mythology, no one goes on strike on a whim. A worker forfeiting a day’s pay isn’t just a sacrifice for the sake of their own interests, it’s a gamble and a sacrifice. Indeed, one of the government’s fears is that a victory for nurses or railway workerswould embolden the pay claims of other workers – an anxiety that is well founded.

Union membership should be honoured not just as a democratic right, but as a cornerstone of collective prosperity. Even many union sympathisers have retreated from such an argument, instead blaming bosses and government for any regretful breakdown in industrial relations. But to strike isn’t a sin, or antisocial or an act of mendacity: it’s a key to a society less beset by injustice than our own.

Why Correlation is Unreliable

 

Do not blame accounting rules for the financial crisis

Hans Hoogervorst in The Financial Times

Ten years after the outbreak of the financial crisis, there are still persistent arguments about the role that accounting standards may have played in its genesis.

Some critics of International Financial Reporting Standards argue that they gave an overly rosy picture of banks’ balance sheets before the crisis and are still not prudent enough despite improvements since then. These same critics also argue that excessive reliance on fair value accounting, which reflects an asset’s current market value, has encouraged untimely recognition of unrealised profits.

They want to require banks to make upfront provisions for all expected lifetime losses on loans and, presumably, a return to good old historical cost accounting, which values assets at the price they were initially purchased.

Though superficially appealing, these changes would weaken prudent accounting, rather than strengthen it.

The British bank HBOS, which collapsed and was taken over by Lloyds Banking Group during the crisis, has been presented as an example of failing pre-crisis accounting standards. The truth is that HBOS met bank regulators’ capital requirements, and its financial statements clearly showed that its balance sheet was supported by no more than 3.3 per cent of equity. For investors who cared to look, the IFRS standards did a quite decent job of making crystal clear that many banks had wafer-thin capital levels and were accidents waiting to happen.

However, the crisis did reveal that the existing standards gave banks too much leeway to delay recognition of inevitable loan losses. In response, the International Accounting Standards Board developed an “expected loss model” that significantly lowered the thresholds for recognising loan losses. The new standard, IFRS 9, requires banks to initially set aside a moderate provision for loan losses on all loans. This prevents them from recognising too much profit up front. Then if a loan experiences a significant increase in credit risk, all the losses that can be expected over the lifetime of the loan must be recognised immediately. Normally, that will happen long before actual default.

In developing this standard, the IASB did consider whether to require banks to recognise full lifetime losses from day one. We rejected this approach for several reasons.

First, accounting standards are designed to reflect economic reality as closely as possible. Banks do not suffer losses on the very first day a loan has been made, so recording a full lifetime loss immediately is counter-intuitive. Moreover, in bad economic times, when earnings are already depressed, banks would have an incentive to cut back on new lending in order to avoid having to recognise large day one losses. Just when you need it most, the economy would probably be starved of credit.

Second, future losses are notoriously difficult to predict, so any model based on expected losses many years later would be subjective. Before the crisis, Spanish regulators required their banks to provision for bad times on the basis of lifetime expected losses. But their lenders underestimated and were still overwhelmed by the tide of bad loans. This kind of accounting also tempts banks to overstate losses in good times, creating reserves that could be released in bad times. That may seem prudent at first but could mask deteriorating performance in a later period, when investors are most in need of reliable information.

Critics also allege that IFRS has been too enamoured of fair value accounting. In fact, banks value almost all of their loan portfolios at cost, so the historical cost method remains much more pervasive.

Fears that fair value accounting lead to improper early profit recognition are also overblown. IFRS 9 prohibits companies from doing that when quoted prices in active markets are not available and the quality of earnings is highly uncertain. Moreover, fair value accounting is often quicker at identifying losses than cost accounting. That is why banks lobbied so actively against it during the crisis.

This does not mean that the accounting standards are infallible. Accounting is highly dependent on the exercise of judgement and is therefore more an art than a science. Good standards limit the room for mistakes or abuse, but can never entirely eliminate them. The capital markets are full of risks that accounting cannot possibly predict. This is certainly the case now, with markets swimming in debt and overpriced assets. For accounting standards to do their job properly, we need management to own up to the facts — and auditors, regulators and investors to be vigilant.

Mexico cuts poverty at a stroke – by changing the way it measures earnings

Change in methodology by national statistics institute provokes scepticism after it shows Mexico’s poor are richer by a third compared with last year

 

A girl stands in a slum in Mexico City. Mexico’s poor may not be feeling better off despite the latest report from the national statistics institute. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo


David Agren in The Guardian


Mexico’s impoverished masses were up to 33.6% richer in 2015 than the previous year, according to the state-run statistics service.

But the change owes less to a sudden increase in actual wealth and wellbeing for the country’s poor than to unannounced changes in the methodology for measuring household earnings.

The changes make comparing poverty rates from one year to the next impossible – something acknowledged by the National Geography and Statistics Institute (Inegi).

But the tweak will allow image-conscious politicians to claim success in their anti-poverty programs and economic stewardship, even though public discontent over stagnant wages and rising prices remains widespread.



Pope's focus on violence and poor likely to make for 'uncomfortable' Mexico visit



“Basically what the Inegi is saying is: we’ve been overestimating poverty levels,” said Jonathan Heath, an independent economist in Mexico City.

“The way that they did this” – without public consultation – “raises suspicion,” he added.

“The new poverty numbers are certainly going to fall by a significant amount and it’s not due to improvements, it’s not due to government action, it’s not due to anything. It’s due to the way Inegi has carried out this survey,” he said.


The methodological changes were revealed on Friday with the release of the 2015 edition of the Survey of Socioeconomic Conditions, which showed an overall real increase of 11.9% in household earnings. In some states, the increase was more than 30%, while the poorest Mexicans saw the biggest gain in earnings, according to Inegi.


The changes came as a complete surprise to social scientists and non-governmental groups, but were justified by Inegi as an attempt at obtaining a truer measure of poverty – a notoriously tricky undertaking as people tend to underreport their incomes.


Inegi said in a statement that it applied new criteria in the collection and review of field data, which allows it to “offer society and the State a more precise measure of household earnings”.


Measuring poverty has proved controversial in Mexico, where social programs are often criticized as vote-buying exercises and beneficiaries in some states are told erroneously that their benefits are conditional on supporting the party in power.

Mexico used to measure poverty based on income, but changed its methodology in 2008 to take a “multidimensional” measure based on six social necessities, according to Heath.

The information collected by Inegi is provided to the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (Coneval), an agency responsible for measuring poverty rates and the performance of social programs. Coneval put the poverty rate at 46.2% of the population in 2014, an increase of 0.7% points from 2012.


“[The] changes lack public technical documents to justify them,” Coneval said in a statement. It added the increase in household earnings “is not congruent with the trend that has been shown in other Inegi documents and with other economic variables”.

TTIP leak could it spell the end of controversial trade deal?

Andrew Griffin in The Independent

Hundreds of leaked pages from the controversial Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) show that the deal could be about to collapse, according to campaigners.

The huge leak – which gives the first full insight into the negotiations – shows that the relationship between Europe and the US are weaker than had been thought and that major divisions remain on some of the agreement’s most central provisions.

The talks have been held almost entirely in secret, and most information that is known in public has come out from unofficial leaks. But the new pages, leaked by Greenpeace, represent the first major look at how the highly confidential talks are progressing.

They indicate that the US is looking strongly to change regulation in Europe to lessen the protections on the environment, consumer rights and other positions that the EU affords to its citizens. Representatives for each side appear to have found that they have run into “irreconcilable” differences that could undermine the signing of the landmark and highly controversial trade deal, campaigners say.

For instance, the papers show that the US is looking to weaken the EU’s “precautionary principle” that governs how potentially harmful products are sold, Greenpeace says. The US has much weaker regulation that aims to minimise rather than avoid risks, and that same less strict regime could come to the UK and Europe under the deal.

If the EU made further changes to similar regulations, it would have to inform the US and corporations based there, according to the documents. American companies would then be able to have the same input into EU regulation as European ones do.

There are also notable missing parts of the agreement. None of the texts includes any reference to the global effort to cut CO2 emissions agreed in Paris last year, according to Greenpeace, despite a commitment from the European Commission that it would make environmental sustainability a key part of any deal.

Those who support TTIP argue that it represents an important step that will allow the US and EU to work together more closely and that it will support business in both regions. But parts of the deal and the secrecy that surrounds it have led campaigners to argue that it could include dangerous changes to the consumer protections that are guaranteed by the EU.

UK Parliament 'would not be able to stop NHS sell-off under TTIP'

Poverty, environmental and other campaigners have claimed that the new leak could be enough to undermine those already controversial talks.

"The TTIP negotiations will never survive this leak,” said John Hilary, the executive director of War on Want. “The only way that the European Commission has managed to keep the negotiations going so far is through complete secrecy as to the actual details of the deal under negotiation. Now we can see the details for ourselves, and they are truly shocking. This is surely the beginning of the end for this much hated deal."

Other campaigners criticised the fact that the only public information that has emerged about TTIP has come from leaks.

“TTIP is being cooked up behind closed doors because when ordinary people find out about the threat it poses to democracy and consumer protections, they are of course opposed to it,” said Guy Taylor, trade campaigner at Global Justice Now. “It’s no secret that the negotiations have been on increasingly shaky ground. Millions of people across Europe have signed petitions against TTIP, and hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets to call for an end to the negotiations. These leaks should be seen as another nail in the coffin of a toxic trade deal that corporate power is unsuccessfully trying to impose on ordinary people and our democracies.”

George Osborne's description of the economy is near-Orwellian

The fact that even Labour accepts the UK is 'on the mend' shows how low our expectations of economic performance are

• 
• • Ha-Joon Chang
  • The Guardian, Friday 26 July 2013 20.01 BST

George Osborne this week. 'The UK's economic performance since the start of the coalition government … has been so poor that Thursday's announcement of 0.6% growth … was greeted with a collective sigh of relief.' Photograph: Christopher Thomond

If all else fails, they say, you can always lower your standards. This is what we have become used to doing in relation to the UK economy. The UK's economic performance since the start of the coalition government in May 2010 has been so poor that Thursday's announcement of 0.6% growth in the second quarter of 2013 was greeted with a collective sigh of relief.

Having declared the UK economy to be "on the mend" on the strength of this growth figure, George Osborne is said to have regained his swagger. Even the opposition grudgingly acknowledged that the latest figures were good enough news, although it was quick to add that the benefits of the recovery have been almost exclusively concentrated at the top.

But even the opposition's interpretation may be too charitable. Including the last quarter, the UK economy has grown by just 2.1% during the 12 quarters since the current government came to power. This compares very poorly with the 2% growth that the economy had managed in just four quarters between the third quarter of 2009 and the second quarter of 2010. The coalition blames this poor performance on the eurozone crisis. But this argument is not very persuasive when output has more than recovered to pre-crisis level in many eurozone countries, including France and Germany, while UK output is still 3.3% less than what it was at the beginning of 2008.

It gets worse. During the past five years, the UK's population has grown by 3%. This means that, on a per capita basis, the country's income is 6.3%, not just 3.3%, less today than it was five years go. This performance is far worse than what Japan managed during its infamous "lost decade" of the 90s. At the end of that period, Japan had a per capita income 10% higher than at the start.

If the UK is to match this performance during what looks certain to be its own "lost decade", it will have to grow at the rate of 3.9% every year for the next five years (or 3.3% in per capita terms, assuming that the past five years' population growth rate of 0.6% per year continues). Even the most optimistic cheerleaders for the coalition government are not talking such numbers.

Thus seen, describing the UK economy as being "on the mend" is a near-Orwellian redefinition of economic recovery. The fact that most people accept that description, even if with reservations about the uneven distribution of its benefits, shows how low the standard of performance we expect of the UK economy has become.

But even applying this low standard, it is not clear whether we can expect a sustained recovery in the coming years. There are at least two factors that can derail the recovery process, especially given that it is so feeble. The first is the likely evolution of the global economy. The eurozone may be dragging itself out of a recession, but things can turn for the worse at any moment. Especially given the severity of austerity in countries such as Greece, Spain and Portugal, the policy's continuation may result in another bout of political unrest, negatively affecting the economy.

Thanks to its avoidance of the worst form of austerity policy, the US economy has recovered from the 2008 crisis more strongly than the European countries. But with another federal debt ceiling negotiation looming later in the year, it is possible that the US recovery will be set back by another round of budget cuts. The Chinese economy has visibly slowed down. And the Chinese government seems determined to keep it that way for a while. Concerned with financial stability, it has clamped down on credit expansion. Worried about seething public anger against government corruption and extravagance, it has imposed a ban on "wasteful" government spending (lavish buildings, banquets, and foreign trips). These are all good policies in the long run, but they will dampen Chinese demand in the immediate future.

The other two biggest "emerging" economies, Brazil (second largest) and India (third), have both seriously slowed down in the last couple of years. India's growth rate fell from 10.5% in 2010 to 6.3% in 2011, and then to 3.2% in 2012. The equivalent figures for Brazil were 7.5%, 2.7%, and 0.9%. Both these economies suffer from high inequality and social tensions, as shown by the recent protests in Brazil and the resurgence of Maoist guerillas called the Naxalites in the eastern part of India. Therefore there is always a possibility that political unrest may dampen these economies even further.

These global factors are, of course, beyond the UK's control, but there is another factor at least partially within its control that may derail the recovery. It is the asset bubbles that have developed in the stock market and the property market, fuelled by cheap credit (sounds familiar?).

Share prices have reached levels that simply cannot be justified by the state of the economy. In May 2013, the FTSE 100 share price index surpassed the pre-crisis peak of June 2007, although it has come down a bit since then. Given that the pre-crisis peak was supported by a buoyant (albeit unsustainable) economy, current share prices, which have no such support, can only be described as an even bigger asset bubble.

Although the rest of the country is still experiencing a stagnant housing market, property markets in London and the south-east are beginning to look inflated, given the state of the economy. And the government is stoking this property bubble with the Help to Buy scheme.

These asset bubbles have provided important sources of demand in the UK economy in the past few years. But the trouble is that they are quite shaky even for asset bubbles, for they are only sustained by historically low interest rates and the massive indirect subsidies given to banks through the so-called quantitative easing scheme.

The fragile nature of these bubbles is revealed by the nervousness with which financial market participants react to pronouncements by central bankers. They know that the current price levels are viable only with QE, so they are readying themselves to jump as soon as there is a sign that it may come to an end. When the asset bubbles deflate, there is likely to be a serious fall in demand that will derail the recovery.

In the past few years the UK should have found a way to stage a recovery without having to rely on state-sponsored asset bubbles. As it hasn't even tried, it is facing the prospect of having a "lost decade" that is even more "lost" than the original one in Japan. 

The meat scandal shows all that is rotten about our free marketeers

This is a crisis not only for environment secretary, Owen Paterson, but for the whole Conservative party

• 
• • Will Hutton
  • The Observer, Sunday 17 February 2013

A laboratory worker tests beef lasagne. Photograph: Pascal Lauener/Reuters

The collapse of a belief system paralyses and terrifies in equal measure. Certainties are exploded. A reliable compass for action suddenly becomes inoperable. Everything you once thought solid vaporises.

Owen Paterson, secretary of state for the environment, food and rural affairs, is living through such a nightmare and is utterly lost. All his once confident beliefs are being shredded. As the horsemeat saga unfolds, it becomes more obvious by the day that those Thatcherite verities – that the market is unalloyed magic, that business must always be unshackled from "wealth-destroying" regulation, that the state must be shrunk, that the EU is a needless collectivist project from which Britain must urgently declare independence – are wrong.

Indeed, to save his career and his party's sinking reputation, he has to reverse his position on every one. The only question is whether he is sufficiently adroit to make the change.

Paterson is one of the Tories who joyfully shared the scorched earth months of the summer of 2010 when war was declared on quangos and the bloated, as they saw it, "Brownian" state. The Food Standards Agency was a natural candidate for dismemberment. Of course an integrated agency inspecting, advising and enforcing food safety and hygiene should be broken up. As an effective regulator, it was disliked by "wealth-generating" supermarkets and food companies. Its 1,700 inspectors were agents of the state terrifying honest-to-God entrepreneurs with unannounced spot checks and enforced "gold-plated" food labelling. Regulation should be "light touch".

No Tory would say that now, not even Paterson, one of the less sharp knives in the political drawer. He runs the ministry that took over the FSA's inspecting function at the same time as it was reeling from massive budget cuts, which he also joyfully cheered on. He finds himself with no answer to the charge that his hollowed-out department, a gutted FSA with 800 fewer inspectors and eviscerated local government were and are incapable of ensuring public health.

Paterson, beneath the ideological bluster, is as innocent about business as Bambi. Even the most callow observer could predict that with the wholesale slaughter of horses across the continent as recession hit the racing industry – horsemeat production jumped by 52% in 2012 – some was bound to enter the pan-European network of abattoirs, just-in-time buying, industrial refrigeration units, food brokers and giant supermarkets that deliver British and European consumers their food.

Meanwhile, the budgets of some local government food sampling units have been slashed by 70%. A Tesco beef burger containing 29% horsemeat was an accident waiting to happen. Of course it was the Food Safety Authority of Ireland rather than the FSA that blew the whistle. Businesses owned by footloose "tourist" shareholders whose sole purpose is profit maximisation in transactional markets have an embedded propensity to degrade. Consumers and suppliers alike become no more than anonymised numbers to be exploited to hit the next quarter's profit target.

The large supermarkets have said little or nothing, which Number 10 deplores. There is nothing they can say. They have lobbied for the world in which we now live. An alternative world – in which consumers were genuinely served and where it is understood that suppliers need adequate profit margins in the supermarkets' interests as much as the suppliers' own – has to be created by stakeholders, including by government. There is a codependency between state, society, business and business supply chains, anathema to Paterson with his undeviating obeisance to the virtues of a "private sector" free from such "burdens".

What the Paterson worldview has never understood is that effective regulation is a source of competitive advantage. If Britain had a tough Food Standards Agency, it would become a gold standard for food quality, labelling and hygiene. British supermarkets and food companies could become known for their quality at home and abroad, rather as "over-regulated" German car companies are, rather than first suspects when something dodgy is going on. Capitalism does not organise itself to deliver best outcomes, whatever rightwing American thinktanks might claim. There has to be careful thought, law and regulation about the obligations that accompany incorporation and ownership, how supply chains are organised and how companies are managed and financed. Otherwise disaster awaits.

And there are other bitter implications for Paterson. Geography means that Britain is inevitably part of the European food supply chain. Our efforts at better regulation – and of catching wrongdoers – have to be matched by others for everyone's sake, exactly what the EU was set up to do and is now doing. The hypocrisy of passionate Eurosceptic Owen Paterson flying to the Hague urgently to meet Europol, saying afterwards: "It's increasingly clear the case reaches right across Europe. Europol is the right organisation to co-ordinate efforts to uncover all wrongdoing and bring criminals to justice" and urging all European governments to share information with it, should not be lost on anyone. Europol holds powers from which Eurosceptic Tories, led by Paterson, urgently want an opt-out, but not in the middle of a first-order food safety and hygiene crisis.

That everything Paterson believes in is so wrong is not just a crisis for him – it is a crisis for his party and for Britain's centre-right media whose prejudices makes thinking straight in the Tory party impossible. A great country cannot be governed by politicians whose instincts and policies are at such odds with reality, so betraying the people, economy and society they govern. The horsemeat crisis is not confined to our food chain. It reveals the existential crisis in contemporary Conservatism. British democracy needs a functioning, fit for purpose party of the centre-right.

Instead, it has Owen Paterson and today's Tories.

How to let your kids fail

by Elizabeth Hartley-Brewer in The Times

Don't confuse your success with your children's. Separate yourself from your children. Neither their failures nor their successes are yours. Ask yourself why either matter so much to you.

Don't set unrealistic standards. Allow your children to set their own achievable goals and move on to the next one when they are ready.

Don't punich failure and see it as shameful; this can lead to lying, cheating, defiance, self-doubt and anxiety.

Don't generalise from any setback or mistake. It is not helpful to say, "You'll never be successful in life if you carry on skimping ...."

Don't reject them if they disappoint you or adore them if they succeed. Love them for who they are, not for what they can do.

Don't demand perpetual progress so that no success ever seems good enough. This could lead to anxious perfectionism and burnout.
 

Journalist opens a Public Register of income. I wish all others follow.

A register of journalists' interests would help readers to spot astroturfing

Pieces paid for by lobby groups would become apparent if, like me, other writers opened a public registry of their interests

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • guardian.co.uk, Thursday 29 September 2011 21.00 BST  

Expenses submitted by David Heathcoat-Amory MP for horse manure.
 
Journalists are good are dishing it out, less good at taking it. We demand from others standards we would never dream of applying to ourselves. Tabloid newsrooms fuelled by cocaine excoriate celebrity drug-takers. Hacks who have made a lifetime's study of abusing expense accounts lambast MPs for fiddling theirs. Columnists demand accountability, but demonstrate none themselves. Should we be surprised that the public place us somewhere on the narrow spectrum between derivatives traders and sewer rats?

No one will be shocked to discover hypocrisy among hacks, but there's also a more substantial issue here. A good deal of reporting looks almost indistinguishable from corporate press releases. Often that's because it is corporate press releases, mindlessly recycled by overstretched staff: a process Nick Davies has christened churnalism. Or it could be because the reporters work for people who see themselves, as Max Hastings said of his employer Conrad Black, as "members of the rich men's trade union", whose mission is to defend the proprietorial class to which they belong.

But there are sometimes other influences at play, which are even less visible to the public. From time to time a payola scandal surfaces, in which journalists are shown to have received money from people whose interests they write or talk about. For example, two columnists in the US, Doug Bandow and Peter Ferrara, were exposed for taking undisclosed payments from the disgraced corporate lobbyist Jack Abramoff. On top of the payments he received from the newspapers he worked for, Bandow was given $2,000 for every column he wrote which favoured Abramoff's clients.

Armstrong Williams, a TV host, secretly signed a $240,000 contract with George W Bush's Department of Education to promote Bush's education bill and ensure that the education secretary was offered slots on his programme. In the UK, a leaked email revealed that Professor Roger Scruton, a columnist for the Financial Times and a contributor to other newspapers, was being paid £4,500 a month by Japan Tobacco International to write on "major topics of current concern" to the industry.

These revelations were accidental. For all we know, such deals could be commonplace. While journalists are not subject to the accountability they demand of others, their powerful position – helping to shape public opinion – is wide open to abuse.

The question of who pays for public advocacy has become an obsession of mine. I've seen how groups purporting to be spontaneous gatherings of grassroots activists, fighting the regulation of tobacco or demanding that governments should take no action on climate change, have in fact been created and paid for by corporations: a practice known as astroturfing. I've asked the bodies which call themselves free-market thinktanks, yet spend much of their time promoting corporate talking-points, to tell me who funds them. All but one have refused.

But if I'm to subject other people to this scrutiny, I should also be prepared to expose myself to it. So I have done something which might be foolhardy, but which I feel is necessary: I've opened a registry of my interests on my website, in which I will detail all the payments, gifts and hospitality (except from family and friends) I receive, as well as the investments I've made. I hope it will encourage other journalists to do the same. In fact I urge you, their readers, to demand it of them.

Like many British people, I feel embarrassed talking about money, and publishing the amounts I receive from the Guardian and other employers makes me feel naked. I fear I will be attacked by some people for earning so much and mocked by others for earning so little. Even so, the more I think about it, the more I wonder why it didn't occur to me to do this before.

A voluntary register is a small step towards transparency. What I would really like to see is a mandatory list of journalists' financial interests, similar to the House of Commons registry. I believe that everyone who steps into public life should be obliged to show who is paying them, and how much. Publishing this register could be one of the duties of whatever replaces the discredited Press Complaints Commission.

Journalists would still wield influence without responsibility. That's written into the job description. But at least we would then have some idea of whether it's the organ-grinder talking or his monkey.