Tim Worstall

Ruth Kelly and HIPs

Hasn’t she learnt about holes yet?

The government’s home information packs should be operating across the
country for all house sales by the end of the year, a defiant Ruth
Kelly said yesterday.

Speaking at the end of a bruising week in which
the communities secretary was forced to withdraw the Hips packs eight
days before they were to be begin, she insisted she would not back down.

The
government was left humiliated when Ms Kelly had to tell MPs that Hips
would not start on June 1 because of a legal challenge and a shortage
of assessors to survey energy performance of homes.

You know, when at the bottom of one, stop digging?

In

8 responses

  1. dearieme Avatar
    dearieme

    Old Dillowbert seems to think highly of La Kelly, but she seems a real twerp to me.

    Reply
  2. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    “You know, when at the bottom of one, stop digging?”
    C’mon. Ruth Kelly is personally not to blame. She inherited HIPs when she took over her present cabinet job as minister responsible for local government after John Prescott had been obliged to retreat to the Cabinet Office following extensive publicity for indiscretions with his diary secretary:
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4945170.stm
    The minister who really devised HIPs is Yvette Cooper, who has impressive academic credentials in economics, from Balliol, Oxford, and the LSE as well, as an impeccable NuLab provenance from both sides of the Atlantic including a stint in Bill Clinton’s campaign office during the run-up to the 1992 Presidential election:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yvette_Cooper
    Besides all that, in 1998 Yvette Cooper married Ed Balls, who was a leader writer and columnist for the FT in the early 1990s prior to becoming an adviser to El Gordo when he was shadow Chancellor. From there, he progressed to the post of Chief Economic Adviser in HM Treasury when El Gordo become Chancellor in 1997. Shortly before the 2005 election, Ed Balls resigned his civil service post and was adopted as the Labour candidate for Normanton, in West Yorkshire, a constituency neighbouring his wife’s constituency at Castleford and Pontefract. Since May 2006, he has been Economic Secretary to the Treasury:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Balls
    It was Ed Balls who penned that immortal phrase: “post-endogenous growth theory”:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_growth_theory
    Btw for those who seek enlightenment, the currently rated academic text on endogenous growth theory is Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt: Endogenous Growth Theory (MIT Press, 1997).

    Reply
  3. dearieme Avatar
    dearieme

    Ah Bob, should I trust a Wikipedia entry so badly written that it seems to tell me where her father was born when it probably means that she was born there?

    Reply
  4. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    Never mind the Wiki entries. The main point, surely, is that Ruth Kelly is definitely not to blame for the HIPs proposal and that the minister who is responsible has absolutely impeccable academic credentials in economics as well as being married to Gordon Brown’s right hand man on economic issues in government. That is the terrible irony about the background to this hiatus.
    If anything, Ruth Kelly ought to be patted on the back for her effort to so truncate the original proposal that it has almost vaporised.

    Reply
  5. dearieme Avatar
    dearieme

    You may well be right, Bob, but I incline to ask a bit more about someone who read PPE. After all, the “E” component might only have been studied for one term. Probably all that economics is worth, but not everyone would agree.

    Reply
  6. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    You are absolutely right about Oxford PPE degrees having a very adaptable structure: for some graduates it could have meant either very little economics content or very little apart from economics or a whole variety of combinations of P, P and E in between.
    However, by reports both Ruth Kelly and Yvette Cooper also have (probably part-time) masters degrees from the LSE as well as PPE degrees from Oxford.
    In the course of her career as a professional economist before being elected to Parliament, Ruth Kelly worked in the Bank England, which is where she likely took her (part-time) masters at the LSE.
    OTOH Yvette Cooper’s Guardian profile describes her as “ferociously bright”:
    http://politics.guardian.co.uk/women/story/0,,2051878,00.html
    Another fascinating angle on this is to note Blair’s thing about picking women with strong academic credentials to serve as ministers shortly after their first election to Parliament. Patricia Hewitt is another example.

    Reply
  7. dearieme Avatar
    dearieme

    This is perhaps not the best spot on which to attempt a sneer at the LSE. Be that as it may, some jobs require good judgement – and if these lassies are deficient in that, all the sucking up that the Nardguai is capable of won’t repair the ommission.

    Reply
  8. Philip Thomas Avatar
    Philip Thomas

    Yvette Cooper is actually my local MP and, being involved in local politics, I’ve met her a number of times. She’s not widely liked in my neck of the woods because she was helicoptered in to be one of Blair’s Babes displacing the previous MP and doesn’t involve herself in constituency issues.
    I’m not sure what her economic credentials have to do with the viability of the HIP. We know that they are at least in part a consequence of EU regulations and it isn’t hard to see that domestic political investment in the scheme has reached a point that they’ll be pushed through irrespective of the economic outcomes.
    She’s a bright lady but the uncertain future of my local infirmary, as a consequence of quangos created when she was a health minister, and the HIPs debacle, begun when she was a housing minister, all smack of political rather than economic decisions. The evidence for that is that she later came out fighting for the infirmary after having set up the means to see it killed.
    If voting for Labour wasn’t genetically programmed into the local population, she’d have been out on her ear a good while ago.

    Reply

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