Thursday 29 July 2010

Opposites Attract



In 1812, Governor Gerry of Massachusetts (left) carved up the constituencies of the State in a shameless attempt to rig his re-election. The term 'Gerrymander' derives from the fact one seat was drawn so unwieldy, it somewhat resembled a salamander.


History lesson complete, the final row of this Parliament on the final day before recess concerned the proposed referendum on moving to the AV system for elections or a "pathetic excuse for a voting system" as Clegg used to call it.

Although Labour was the only party to include a committment for AV in its manifesto, it has no option but to oppose the bill as it has all sorts of Tory electoral fixes bolted on to it. The drive to equalise the constituencies, although worthy in principle, will have to defy existing county boundaries and make some rural one bigger than whole counties, making life effectively impossible for the sitting MP.

As Comrade Straw alluded to at DPMQs, it will mean making a hybrid constituency, half made of some of the Isle of Wight and the remainder a chunk of Hampshire. The Cabinet Office drone, Mark Harper, answered that point rather dimly, "we are not proposing to move anybody who currently lives on the IoW". Neither are they proposing to allow them to have their say as that pesky local consultation thing would inevitably delay the process.

Clegg has still not explained why it is neccessary to reduce the number of MPs from 650 to 600 although one suspects it is part of the math in stitching up the constituncies. The saving of £12m is not remotely proportionate to the loss of democratic representation. MPs are already overwhelmed by constituency inquiries and now they will volunteer to add ten percent to that workload.

The Cons also are living under a strange dichotomy, they will fight to the death to allow the Lib-Dems their little referendum to take place then at the actual vote, oppose it.

The Bill should still pass, the referendum will probably be delayed past the proposed 5 May but will be almost certainly lost. It's a classic three card trick from the Tories. The defeat of electoral reform will be a sad indictment of how politically inept the Lib-Dems are proving in Government.

Tuesday 27 July 2010

Vandals at the Gate


Thatcherism, as a brand of economic and political philosophy. was borne out of a fundamental re-appraisal of policy by senior Tories following their two electoral defeats in 1974.
The main architects were Keith Joseph and Enoch Powell who fundamentally rejected Keynes in favour of a Monetarist approach. It proved to be a highly divisive and transformative force for change in UK. But at least, you could say it was intellectually coherent.
The current Coalition Government appear to be acting with no such higher strategy other than tearing down any constructive organisation established under Labour by labelling them "wasteful" or "bureaucratic". Each day seems to bring another crass decision of incredible ineptitude. In many cases the organisations to be abolished are, by any measure, revenue-raising for HM Treasury and not remotely a burden on public finances.
The decision by that gormless, grinning buffoon Jeremy Hunt to scrap the National Film Council defies any sense whatever. Established in 2000, the Council has invested lottery money in about 900 films and has repaid its original money at about a ratio of 5:1. The Chief Executive, John Woodward, was not even consulted to present his case for defence to these Ministers.
The Sustainable Development Commission is a smaller operation with a budget of only £3m but has shown to be highly effective in identifying huge areas of savings in fuel, water and waste particularly by Government. Again scrapped, without evaluation, by the stroke of a pen. By these standards, the intended investment in sporting prowess for the London 2012 Olympics looks extremely vulnerable. Presumably the message which needs to be sent out to athletes is that Gold medals are only truely earned if by an entirely free-market approach.
Certainly this Government is acting swifter and more ruthlessly than Thatcher's first Government of 1979-83. But its manner is haphazard, capricious and at times just plain self-defeating.
History and politics can always surprise us but by their unneccesary perniciousness this Government now makes the Iron Lady, Thatcher's look quite amenable and sympathetic.

Monday 26 July 2010

War on Safety


If you believed every word of our cynical press, you would never consider Britain to be top of any world league at all. But the almost total uncelebrated fact is Britain's roads are the safest in the world, beating notoriously cautious and sensible nations like Germany, Sweden and Japan.
The remarkable achievement is owing to the successful introduction of technology, enforcement and advertising over a sustained period. Although every new measure, like the breathalyser has been fought fiercely by a small vocal army of reactionaries, successive Governments have resisted their unscientific claims and spurious appeals to a personal right to liberty.
Until now. Step forward the Coalition Government's prize fool, 'Road Safety' Minister, Mike Penning. His mindless boasting of the new Government's intention to be rid of most of the country's speed cameras will start to reverse 45 years of steady reduction in road deaths, from about 8,000 in 1967 to less than 3,000 last year.
Said Penning, "This is another example of this Government delivering on its pledge to end the war on the motorist." Or, to put it another way, this is another policy entirely based on plainly disprovable nonsense derived from Daily Mail editorials.
A third of road deaths are caused by excessive speed and speed cameras save lives by the most efficient means. There is no study which can disprove that. Leaving aside the human cost of a road death, each one costs the country's emergency services and NHS about £1m, so cutting £50m from road safety budgets will prove to be actually more expensive if the numbers of dead motorists, cyclists and pedestrians grow by just a four or five dozen.
As previous Home Secretary Alan Johnson put it, the Tories have adopted "a saloon bar view." I wonder what hope there remains for plans to lower the drink-drive level in line with the EU average. Looking pretty bleak, I fear.
Other comparably developed countries look jealously at the huge savings Britain makes through road safety where Italy has double the proportion of road deaths and the US treble. Only the most short-sighted, small minded Government would contemplate conceding effortlessly to the road hog lobby. These Ministers do not appear to be fully in control of the vehicle.

Friday 23 July 2010

Got him.


Shadow Justice Secretary, Jack Straw did pretty as a stand-in for the opposition at PMQs on Wednesday. He focussed much of his questions on the idiotic decision by school bully Osbourne to pull a vital loan for Sheffield Forgemasters, one of only two companies in the world to produce specialist equipment for nuclear power stations.

Besides being a symptomatic example of 80s style false economy from the Tories, the company is located in Clegg's constituency so was also exposing him to acute political embarrassment. The South Yorkshire press are really after him and with good reason.
But Clegg as DPM did quite well too. I mean 'well' in the sense he dodged every question and batted back the same old guff about Liam Byrne's joke note about no money being left. At the final exchange, little Nicky forgot where he was for a moment and felt emboldened to kick out at Straw's role as Foreign Sec in the Iraq invasion. "Perhaps one day he will account for his role in the most disastrous decision of all: the illegal invasion of Iraq."

Illegal, you say. Neither the current Foreign Secretary nor Defence Secretary has suggested as such, let alone Dave. No.10 press office found this quite a tough one to square with spin and suggested when the DPM speaks on such matters it is his "long-held" and "personal" view. Sir George Young, Speaker of the House continued this drivel when told the House, "It is not unprecedented for Ministers speaking at this dispatch box...to make their personal views known."
Claptrap, said the increasingly busy Speaker Bercow. It seems astonishing senior Parliamentary figures need to be reminded of the basics of House convention. At the Dispatch box, you speak as a Minister of the Government and represent Government views alone.
Now it would seem the wooliness of the Coalition on Parliament is the least of their problems. One of Forgemasters main rivals, businessman Andrew Cook, had lobbied for the loan to be withdrawn. It would seem it would have prevented Cook from "investing" in Forgemasters which sounds rather like a takeover bid. His other role as one of the Tory party's main donors introduces this bunch of amateurs to a new yet familiar charge: sleaze.

Tuesday 20 July 2010

Rules of Engagement


Every new Government has the right to challenge the accepted procedures and institute new rules to help maintain a fairly efficient Parliamentary democracy. So long as Ministers are even-handed in their decision-making and chairs of Select Committees like, Tim Yeo (left) keep their independence.

But the new Coalition Government, in their haste, seem able to rid themselves of even these tiresome burdens of accountability.
This week Yeo published a dismal pamphlet 'Green Gold' on climate change. His suggestion all motorways should be privatised and all road users compelled to pay for their use was on the radical side. But his 'report' is the kind of material his committee is supposed to assess, he appears to be lobbying himself on this one.
Any body with evidence presented to counter his free-market ideas already knows how this previously unbiased committee will now respond. (It was also staggering to see the matter-of-fact way the Mail reported Yeo's brainchild -when the most modest regulations were brought in under Labour, mostly for the sake of road safety were deemed a 'war on the motorist'.)
IDS, as Sec of State for DWP, is delighting in his ability to judge and condemn whole strata of society which displease him for their apparent fecklessness. At the same time his Centre for Social Justice keeps churning out reports on social issues including, this week, on the management of drug dependence.
Drunken Smith (teetotal) did not pass comment when the CSJ advocated abolition of the pragmatic National Treatment Agency to be replaced by a more ideological Addiction Recovery Board. A few days later the NTA had performed a Damascene-like conversion to setting time limits for allocating methadone to heroin addicts. His meddling in DH and HO business would usually prompt a call from Chief Whip to keep to the brief but IDS seems free to pour his evangelical scorn on the drug user with impunity.
This blurring of roles may not be very good for Government but if he gets his way it may prove, perversely, quite lucrative for dealers in heroin.

Wednesday 14 July 2010

In Whom We Trust


It seemed like Andrew Lansley had been shadow Health Secretary throughout Labour's three terms in office. Certainly he's had a huge amount of time to devise the rationale behind the massive health care changes he wanted to see under a Tory Government.
So it is something of a surprise to hear his plans for 'reform' now he is in office; they sound ill-considered and entirely reactionary. First, he said Jamie Oliver's programme for healthy school dinners was "lecturing" and "nannying" and was largely "a failure". Although there is nothing to support those arguments, such as they are.
"Ministry insiders" hinted heavily on Monday, the Food Standards Agency and would be abolished and in its stead would be an inert Ministerial sub-Committee chaired by Andy himself. The food giants must have wept with joy over that one. Let us not forget the FSA was established following the BSE outbreak where big business's lack of moral scruples led to the extermination of the entire national beef cattle herd. Over 1,500 people in the UK have died of CJD.
But these issues are piffling compared to Lansley's plan for transferring four-fifths of NHS budgets to 5-600 consortia of GPs, as "doctors know best how to manage treatment for patients."
This facile philosophy is applied by Tories to schools too, "where parents know best how their child should be educated." This is patently idiotic. We are not the experts and GPs can't be expected join up all the right decisions and gain the full economy of scale for the health service.
But when pressed on the point by Martha Karney on Newsnight, Lansley opted for an ad hominem argument, "Don't you trust your Doctor to make these decisions?"
It takes seven or more years to train to be a GP and yet there are still no modules for financial management nor strategic planning. Trust is not the point: it is simply about competence and managerial capacity. These plans rather treat GPs as some sort of homegenous group with consistent outlook and skills. It would have been advisable to canvass their views first but these vast changes appear ready to be implemented without consultation nor piloting.
The purpose of this dramatic structural change is to rid the NHS of "bureacracy". The term is used in place of many inefficiencies and red tape. But huge organisations rely on a level of bureacracy to function at all; they provide the levers to pull. LAnsley beleives there are 68,000 managers carrying out superfluous duties.
Lansley and Cameron sound like those Leninists who attacked the agrarian "management" of kulaks. The ensuing chaos may not be quite so tortuous as Soviet Union in 1920s but the judgement is almost as dubious and prejudicial. It is a huge gamble and Lansley has not even started to explain why it is necessary.

Friday 9 July 2010

But Are You Experienced?


It may be a bit previous to call for Michael Gove's resignation over the school building programme list fiasco.

But Gove would be as well to locate the slim vestige of humility he may still possess, if he is to learn anything from this unneccessarily embarrassing episode.

The original route of this idiotic cock-up was Gove's determination to proceed wth his purely ideologically 'free' school initiative. In order to release the necessary funds, he had to first cancel large parts of the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme this side of recess, in order to have some flagship free schools in place for September term. A lawyer might call such huge shifting of resources in a period of a few weeks as "precipitative haste."
But that had no influence over Gove's amateurish and shambolic release of information cancelling hundreds of vital school building projects. His entirely inept performance would have shamed a sixth-form debater let alone a Secretary of State.
Speaker Bercow allowed Gove to run way beyond his usual time allowance of ten minutes. His statement was delivered with the usual Aberdonian briskness but was all outlandish rhetoric where measured tones would have been more apt. But on the list of schools affected, he omitted to deploy the vital phrase, "and copies are available from the Vote Office." Because they weren't.
First Speaker slapped Gove across the chops for not answering questions, "he's not supposed to be reading out a previously written script." He underlined the seriousness of Gove's misdemenour calling it, "unprecedented."
Mikey said, yeah thanks, but took no heed and carried on banging on about "scandalous" Labour waste, yadda, yadda. Mr Speaker then metaphorically held him against the wall saying, "Let me say to the Secretary of State, the assurance of his gratitude is of no interest to me; adhering to my ruling is."
Members then naturally probed him for news of their own constituencies. Gove had plenty of detail at his fingertips and wasted considerable Parliamentary time effectively reading them out one-by one. He then conceded he would write to every local authority and each Member. His Private Office must have exploded at the prospect of drafting 750 odd letters.
The dusky Caroline Flint was able to scoff at Gove's hapless handling when she said simply, "it would have been better to have provided that information, before the debate rather than during it." The effect was Gove casually divulging dramatic and devastating news to one community after another, like he was flicking peas off a table.
When it was finally over, which Mr Speaker described as, "an unwieldy process, to put it mildly," it emerged, via Ed Balls, that the elusive list had been circulated to the media prior to the debate. Members were now beside themsleves and even Speaker called it, "rank discourtesy." The car crash continued; Gove failed to take responsibility and said he didn't know if Balls was right even though precise timings were provided.
Speaker had to throttle Gove again reminding him he had Ministerial responsibility and ignorance could be no defence, "the Secretary of State should be aware". It was getting toe-curling now and could not possibly get worse could it?
But once MPs began verifying details of the cuts, they found a huge number of inconsistencies - in Sandwell in the West Midlands, nine school building projects which appeared to have been saved were actually for the chop after all.
But despite this comedy of errors, Gove was the very picture of arrogance on Newsnight and showed not an ounce of chagrin about his school boy handling of the cancellation of £55Bn worth of school building.
Even after he was compelled to apologise in the most abject terms on Wednesday, what was still missing, as Glenda Jackson said in the House, was, "any concern at all for the future of our children."

Monday 5 July 2010

C'est La Guerre


Mark Serwotka (left), the eloquent head of Public and Commercial Services Union, is already a hardened campaigner against public sector cuts.

For all the Tories' talk of finally bringing discipline to public accounts, it ignores the several assaults Labour made on reducing welfare and the benefits to the civil service.

As soon as Ministers start using isolated examples of big payouts to mandarins you know the service as a whole is in for a battering. The reality is rather different. Most civil servants retire on a fairly pitiful small pension, the terms may be better than some areas of the private sector but the pay rates have been poor for so long, they could not really be described in any way as "generous".

Pensions and staff levels are being targetted for colossal reductions. Just at the point the economy is starting draw breath again the Coalition overnment is aiming a blow at its solar plexus. Serwotka rightfully described the forthcoming job losses as, "economically illiterate." The public sector, according to the more conservative Treasury figures is facing at least 600,000 job losses which rises to 1.3m when adding private sector. Add these numbers to the existing 2.57m unemployed and a total in excess of 4m is, to borrow a term from Osborne, "unavoidable."

It rather makes a nonsense of pulling 10,000s off disability benefits to give them a bigger incentive to find work. Each graduate position now receives 70 applications. Quite how students are expecting to pay off huge debts may be a mere detail to Ministers like Gove but a source of huge stress to countless families.

The Government is preparing for a huge rise in poverty, IDS's Work and Pensions Department are developing plans for issuing of food stamps. This is the undignified future for many, unemployment, no job prospects, reduced benefits, living off handouts.

What did we actually do to deserve this? Did millions of civil servants, low paid and benefit claimants spend extravagantly in the last few years? Or did the vast national debt pile up on bailing out TSB/Lloyds, Bradford and Bingley, RBS and Northern Rock?

The banks' share of pain is a derisory £2bn transaction tax which even the IMF has suggested should be at least four times higher. Soon they'll be back earning their super profits while the bottom sixth of society sinks to a new level of 'underclass'.

This is what you voted for.

Friday 2 July 2010

Sound the Alarm


Assistant Commissioner at the Met, John Yates (left) heard Home Sec, Theresa May's speech on Tuesday and, like the rest of us, realised huge cuts to our police forces were inevitable.
She said quite unequivocably, "cuts will fall on the police as they will on other public services, " they would be expected to, "make sacrifices" and mirror the "ruthless cutting [of] waste" in the Home Office.
The projected cuts are staggering; not just down to the bone but effectively removing limbs.
Yates, anticipates his budget on counter-terrorism to be slashed by £65-87m and I think it was his duty to reflect how this would impact on the overall policing capability of keeping the country safe from terrorism.
Step forward the old crocodile, Francis Maude, Secretary of State in the Cabinet Office, to give Yates a public dressing-down for daring to speak the bleedin' obvious. Maude savaged Yeats for, "alarming the public" and "shroud waving." Well it was hardly Yates's idea to shift counter-terrorism from the category of 'necessary' to that of 'preferable'.
The first aspect this febrile spat reveals is the Tories' wholly different attitude to the police service. While Labour was rather fawning and genuflecting, Tories expect deference from mere "public servants."
Secondly, the need to slash public spending to pay for the banks' economic crash is now considered beyond question. Anyone who doubts the sense of reducing what yesterday we thought as essential public services, can expect vilification.
Five years ago tomorrow were the 7 July bombings in London where 52 people were murdered.
At the time, I would never have thought it possible any Government, even a Tory one, could consider measures to prevent such carnage and bloody killings should be just like any other budgetary issue, like whether to build more laybys on the A12.