And lead us not into an Election..

No, the picture, left, is not David Miliband estimating Labour's chances of re-election. In fact, his theme was, if anything, defying the fatalism of defeat. If he really believes that, he is not New Labour, he is Evangelical Labour.

'Brains's conference speech today was, as usual, totally bereft of any decent gags. You've got to pity the delegates; the poor buggers have been hard-arsing it in that conference hangar since Saturday morning with barely a good pun to cheer their spirits. The place looks strangely empty with banks of unused seating - there would probably be a better turnout if they put Mama Mia on instead.

Fortunately for everyone, Ministers have been instructed to limit their speeches to a mere six minutes. The downside is there no other option for them but to regale a list of bite-size soundbites.

Dave began by setting out his family's journey, as if it were the opening two minutes of "Who do you think you are?" The story of his Jewish grandfather being refused re-entry to the country in 1945 (he selfishly went to Belgium in search of his wife and child) reminded us immigration authorities have always employed plenty of officious pencil-necks.

But after the personal bit, everyone was looking for a sign, just a subtle hint of disloyalty or independence of spirit which would indicate his intention to move boldly against the PM. But no dice.

What did come was a personal commendation, " to you Gordon" thanking him for his great efforts in improving the world's aid budget. After so much recent in-fighting, Gordon found it impossible to take the compliment with any grace. Brown's tired and quietly resentful smile of 'appreciation' was like that of the amputee whose surprise present turns out to be a new pair of trainers.

Arse, Elbow?

This entry is something of a post-script to the previous one on Brown's miniscule 'gas giveaway'on Thursday. Gordy was quite clear about who would benefit (albeit marginally) when he said, "all lower income and all pensioner households will be eligible." The DEFRA press release was equally crystal when it said the new energy efficiency scheme would apply to, "those most at risk of fuel poverty, including all pensioners." No journalist checked that fact, they didn't need to, did they? It was only when a 60-year old woman contacted the Conservatives to say she had been refused free insulation, this much heralded policy began to unravel. DEFRA press office have now conceded only those over 70 may apply. Compared to the loss of data discs, failing to call an election, dropping the 10p rate, this may appear to be quite a small drama. But it shows the Government at its most disfunctional.

Whenever there is any well-planned Government press announcement, officials sit down, a couple of weeks before, with press officers. Invariably the first question discussed is, 'who benefits from this'? Naturally all Governments wish to push their new policies to the appropriate constituency. The draft release plus background briefing and detailed Q and A would be seen by more senior officials, press officers, special advisers and very often two Ministers before being given clearance. In this case there was an additonal, supposedly more rigorous stage, of going through No.10 as well. The process, like so many in the Civil Service is lengthy but eradicates risk of saying the wrong thing or at the wrong time.

And yet, here, the first principle point of the statement was wrong. There appears to be immense sloppiness at every level of Government. Ultimately it is Hilary Benn's (pictured above) fault as Secretary of State for Environment, it his Department's policy. But the mere fact that Downing Street allowed this farrago to occur at all, shows the well-oiled machine once ran by Alistair Campbell is now grinding its gears and is nearly out of juice.

I Offer you Peace, Bread, Loft Insulation

To the left is the CEO of an unnamed energy company when told he would have to justify price rises to the regulator OFGEM. The Government is just totally impotent in the face of these huge rises - even the latest wheeze of getting the companies to fund £900m for better insulation can easily be passed onto the consumer. The domestic energy market alone is worth about £30bn so Brown's big boast of "a sea-change" in energy consumption looks empty if not insulting. I would be very surprised if the full amount is even spent as the Government's "Warm Front" scheme has been offering almost exactly the same deal since 2000. This big idea also fails to address those legions of families in fuel poverty who rent and whose landlords are not inclined to pay their share.

Millions of Labour voters are desperate to see the Government flexing its muscles, showing it can match words with deeds and address some of the glaringly obvious social injustices. But Brown always tries to strike a perfect balance between all interested parties and in the end nothing is achieved.

Labour's raison d'etre, its rallying cry, used to be equality. Without it there would have been no equal pay act, race relations act or minimum wage.

Now even the word 'equality' sounds too left-wing. It has been expunged and replaced by the altogther more woolly 'fairness'. A good example (below) is an excerpt from Gordon Brown's message to party members at conference on two week's time.

"I know there are people who feel that modern Britain has been unfair to them. Some of them are right. But there is nothing that is bad about Britain that cannot be overcome by what is good about Britain, as long as we keep faith with our belief in fairness. Throughout our history, this nation has repeatedly demonstrated a proud spirit of cautious and practical optimism and we call on that spirit once again. Fair rules, fair chances, and a fair say for everyone: that is the new deal for this new world." Click on the link below for the full text (if you can bear it).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/sep/08/labour.gordonbrown

Reading the words I was reminded of Robert Donat in the 39 Steps (there's one for the teenagers) when he is compelled to address a public meeting and reels off a series of crowd-pleasing but meaningless platitudes. Brown's vision is similarly opaque. If you forced to summarise his philosophy it would be, "we believe in things in general!"

The Fruits of a Tough Immigration Policy

There have been several references in previous entries of this blog to the patently unjust and inhuman manner Britain now treats asylum seekers. It is as if the words have lost their meaning and the term is now simply a euphemism for 'foreign scrouger'. A hidden aspect and probably the most shocking is how our 'robust' enforcement regimes deal with the children of asylum seekers. About 2,000 kids are locked up in immigration detention centres each year in conditions barely discernible from actual prison. At Yarl's Wood children must pass through eight locked doors before reaching their rooms, they are searched each time, with very little freedom to mix with other families. They have lost nearly all possessions, they have no access to pediatric care and for those traumatised, there is no mental health provision. The catalogue of brutal treatment meted out to these minors is utterly indefensible. Check the link below to the article in this week's New Statesman by Sir Al Aynsley-Green, the Children's Commisioner. I met Sir Al a few times and he is very earnest, polite, serious. He always tries to find the best of any situation but his assessment of the treatment by the British Immigration Agency is scathing. The case studies read like something from Turkey in the 1970s.

http://www.newstatesman.com/law-and-reform/2008/09/children-detention-immigration

How did we reach this intolerable place? It must be a few Home Secretaries ago, Straw or Blunkett when the Labour Government was being baited by the Conservatives and the Mail for being a 'soft touch'. Well we've certainly dispelled that accusation.
This summer, I met up with an old friend who has lived in Spain for some years. It seemed very apt to be discussing the state of the nation while watching some cricket at the Oval. When I told him the stories of asylum seekers from being treated with chemo being deported he was dumbfounded. Turning back to game he said wistfully, " I thought this was England....and I thought it was a Labour Government."

It was Twenty (Five) Years Ago Today...

...since Neil Kinnock, then new Labour leader, made his rallying cry for party unity after Labour's worst post-war electoral performance. "Remember how you felt on that dreadful morning of the 10th of June," opined Neil. "Just remember how you felt then, and think to yourselves: 'June the 9th, 1983, never ever again will we experience that.'

Clarke was reciting those lines ad nauseum in every TV news studio this morning. It's not so surprising Clarkey should recall that speech so clearly, as he wrote it. Its message should be considered just as relevant today, Clarke has argued, for Labour face "utter destruction" at the next General Election and the party are sleepwalking into disaster.

The irony is our local boy (Norwich South) Charlie's outburst in the middle of Gordon's fightback week, aims to cause just the kind of disunity and instability he was warning against in the early eighties. However, there was a certain frankness and stating the bleeding obvious about his interviews and the original Newstatesman article. The piece was really putting to bed any thoughts of a Blairist faction rising up against Gord, "there is no coherent Blairite ideaology...no Blairite plot." However, amongst Clarke's few supportive voices were, predictably, Stephen Byers and Alan Milburn who probably wish there were such a plot.

Charlie's intervention follows close behind Alistair Darling 'moment of clarity' when he conceded economic times were as bad as they had been for 60 years. "People are pissed off, " he added laconically. People actually started to warm to AD for the first time since the opinion polls went south last year. I particularly enjoyed his opinion of ex-Scottish leader Wendy Alexander, "not at all likeable." (Wendy is notoriously out of touch, in 1997 campaign she saw a constituent's mobile phone and asked where you put the money in).

But at last some senior figures in the party are make a stab at being honest with the public. Straight-talking would look more attractive than Cameron and Osbourne's fatuous faux-shock at every Government report. It won't last of course, No.10 machine will soon grind Darling's honest approach down and Clarke has already been painted as, "bitter and twisted." Clarke, even giving time to local news prog, Look East, responded in a suitably curt manner, "Bitter and twisted, I may be. But I'm also right."

For the Many not the Few, Remember?

How very fitting for John Hutton, business minister and free-market disciple (left) to select the Daily Telegraph to announce a big 'No' to any thoughts of a windfall tax on gas and oil companies' huge profits. Very few Telegraph readers would be personally intimate with 'fuel poverty'. However most would still be aware of the inexorable rise in fuel and electricity costs. (Fuel poverty is defined as any family who spend in excess of 10% of their income on fuel and that's about 3m families at present.) Hutton was clear despite overwhelming evidence of hardship, families had "benefitted very considerably in the past from low prices." It is true we have had comparable prices to other European countries in recent years. But then again these countries have not had the massive resources of oil, gas and coal we have in Britain. There was barely any acknowledgement from the Labour Minister of the misery and want millions have in store this winter.

The profits enjoyed by firms such as BP (£13Bn last year and £4bn last quarter) are by any standard extra-ordinary and all of their increases have been derived from market conditions and not from harder work or shrewder investment. British Gas has a more modest enterprise than BP and only posted a £2bn profit at the same time as announcing an overnight increase in bills of 35%. If you didn't realise it, gas has doubled in price in the last two years.

Hutton argues it would be unreasonable to tax the utilities like 1997 when £4.5bn was raised because that was a manifesto committment. However the market economy grows in unpredictable ways and Government should not wait for an election before making any adjustment. Traditionally American Democrats have been well right of Labour in terms of being business friendly. But Obama is committed to impose a windfall tax on oil firms and give a tax break to middle and lower income families.

Hutton has unashamedly swallowed the CBI argument about disincentives to investment - the same arguments that have been made by Tories about minimum wage, equal pay and going back 100 years national insurance. Much of the Labour administration is just too cautious to make any bold policy gesture toward social justice. I suspect for Hutton re-distribution is not an embarrassing reminder of naive ideals, he really believes in the unrestrained business ethos. To Hutton, addressing these profits would be a 'tax and spend' socialist agenda. His constiutency is no longer the poor and elderly struggling to keep their houses warm -now he serves the profiteers.

Pontificating on Racism

His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI has stepped into the increasingly frantic race row in Italy mainly concerning the prejudicial treatment of the 150,000 Roma population. Being the Pope he only referred in an oblique way to "new and worrisome signs of racism in the world" but his words are certainly a calculated intervention responding to the sinister creep to open bigotry from Italy's establishment. Burlosconi's announcement that all Roma should be fingerprinted was effectively blessed in a High Court Ruling last month where the presiding judge said, "all the Gypsies are thieves." Now that's what I call institutionalised racism.

Here in Britain we can look at these events with a sense of superior calm, can't we? Except we can't. The Government still intends to press ahead with denying GP treatment to failed asylum seekers. In their joint DH/ Home Office consultation paper 'Proposals to Exclude Overseas Visitors to Free NHS Primary Care' they assert 'genuine' asylum seekers will continue to get GP treatment but failed asylum seekers will not. It would be easier to understand, although still discriminatory, if all failed asylum seekers were workshy economic migrants and 'genuine' ones were brave, oppressed and without hope. But many (thousands) in the failed category are from countries like Zimbabwe, Iraq and Congo where basic freedoms and individual rights are routinely denied.

It is already Government policy to disallow work or benefits to failed asylum seekers but to prevent access to healthcare would be to confirm them as entirely 'second-class.' GPs were invited to comment but the Government have refused (even under FOI) to release their responses and seem content to supress the professionals' opinions. Some responses have leaked out anyway. Naturally there were severe concerns about the spread of certain diseases which would go unchecked, TB, diptheria and measles (the proposals would also outlaw vaccinations).

Then there is that pesky General Medical Council guiding principle that GPs should "make the care of your patient your first concern." There seems no way around that one and it would be pretty hard for the Government to carry this through Parliamnet with almost unviversal objection. Alan Johnson as Sec of State for Health can clearly see the iniquity - the ghastly, humourless Liam Byrne has all the necessary sangue froid to implement this dispicable policy.