Why aren’t the TPA complaining about the Royal drain on taxpayers?
contribution by Tim Fenton
We the people still enjoy a good Royal wedding – or at least the broadcast and print media reckon so, because from the announcement yesterday that Prince William of Wales is to marry the future Princess Catherine of Berkshire next year, it’s been wall to wall coverage throughout.
The Government have led the way in lapping up the news: Young Dave was outside 10 Downing Street sharpish to pitch a few soundbites, telling how the Cabinet had been banging the table in approval.
But hang on a minute: Royal weddings cost serious money.
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Cameron’s approval rating falling off a cliff
An Ipsos-Mori poll released yesterday, for the month of November, brought a torrent of bad news for the Coalition over their plans.
It showed high levels of concern about the effects of the spending cuts, particularly to university tuition fees, local public services and policing.
People are worried about cuts to public sector jobs, and have little confidence that there will be enough new jobs in the private sector to make up for losses in the public sector.
Satisfaction with the government, Cameron and Clegg continues to fall. People still think that no party having an overall majority is a bad thing for the country, and there is widespread belief that the Conservatives are making most of the decisions in the Coalition rather than the two parties making decisions jointly.
[It's worth noting that a majority of the public (56%) believe that there is a need to cut spending on public services to pay off the national debt]
But look how fast Cameron’s net satisfaction rating is falling.
That steep fall is comparable to how Gordon Brown fared, and the comparison will increasingly be made unless Cameron can find a way to turn that around quickly.
Ipsos-Mori gave the government a net satisfaction rate of -20, double that of YouGov polling. Only 35% were satisfied with the government while 55% are dissatisfied.
The poll also said Nick Clegg’s ratings are the lowest Ipsos-Mori have recorded for him, with net satisfaction at -11.
Ed Miliband remains the most popular party leader with a net satisfaction score of +9. However, a third of the public (33%) are still unable to give an opinion.
Coalition wants powers to weaken Parliament
The Coalition government has made much of its commitment to strengthen Parliament.
So one would think it would want as little as possible to do any massive extension of “Henry VIII” clauses – introducing powers to enables primary legislation to be amended or repealed by ministers, with or without further Parliamentary discussion. (Keen historians may know that this relates to Henry VIII’s Statute of Proclamations of 1539).
Think again.
The Public Bodies Bill – which abolishes as many quangos as possible – gives ministers astonishingly leeway to amend all legislation.
The House of Lords Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee could not be clearer in its latest report that this goes much too far, and would be an important weakening of Parliament.
This Committee was established by the House as a result of “considerable disquiet over the problem of wide and sometimes ill-defined order-making powers which give Ministers unlimited discretion”.[1] The powers in this Bill as it is currently drafted fall into that category. The Committee is instructed by the House in its terms of reference “to report whether the provisions of any bill inappropriately delegate legislative power”.
The Committee considers that the powers contained in clauses 1 to 5 and 11 as they are currently drafted are not appropriate delegations of legislative power. They would grant to Ministers unacceptable discretion to rewrite the statute book, with inadequate parliamentary scrutiny of, and control over, the process
…
The Bill confers powers on Ministers to make very significant changes. All orders under the Bill may amend or repeal any Act of Parliament and are thus Henry VIII powers. Orders under the Bill may even amend or repeal Acts of Parliament which have not yet been passed by Parliament (clause 27(2)).
The exercise of those powers is in each case made subject to the affirmative procedure. But that procedure cannot in any circumstances be regarded as a substitute for a bill, for two reasons in particular. First, as is normal with secondary legislation, the orders are considered only once and are unamendable, however much material the order contains. Second, in practice, it is very rare for either House to vote down subordinate legislation, whatever its concerns about them.
Indeed, no such instrument has been voted down by the Commons since 1969 – over forty years – as Stephen Gummer reported on LabourList.
How IDS misled parliament on housing cuts
I’ve said for a while that Iain Duncan Smith and his team at the DWP are weak on the detail of their policies and have a preference for “policy based evidence”, ignoring any data which doesn’t support their view of how the world should work.
Here’s a great example. Inside Housing found that a key fact which IDS and his Tory and Lib Dem allies quoted to justify their housing benefit policies was inaccurate, based not on the Office of National Statistics (as they claimed), but on a property website owned by Associated Newspapers.
The real stats demolish the claims of government ministers about the likely effect of housing benefit cuts.
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Should Libdems propose a ‘two-tier manifesto’ at elections?
All this chat about how the Libdems have broken their manifesto promises leaves me a little cold. Or rather, in the modern parlance, “a bit meh”.
I think my failure to become outraged or agitated stems from a sense that the Liberal Democrats have fallen into a semantic trap. ‘Manifesto commitments’ are things that you promise to enact when you have Power to do so in Government.
But the situation that the Lib Dems find themselves in does not seem to fulfill the sufficient and neccessary conditions to merit such a description.
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If Cameron wants to protect children from sexualisation, what about Page 3?
contribution by Emily Davis
The Sun’s page 3 feature has now been going for 40 years, and some say is central to its success. However, the Conservative now say they want to halt the ‘sexualisation of children‘.
Would Cameron consider taking action or making a comment regarding the Sun’s ‘page 3′ soft porn then? It is of course widely consumed in public spaces where children are often exposed to it.
Or would he not want to confront the paper in this way?
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Four questions Labour will have to ask over voting reform
Former Cabinet minister Ben Bradshaw is to lead a Labour campaign for a Yes vote in the Alternative Vote, it is reported in today’s Guardian.
Fittingly for Labour’s contribution to a pluralist campaign, the Labour Yes campaign will engage a very wide range of Labour voices, with Compass and Progress from the left and right of the party joining forces too.
Ed Miliband has committed to supporting a Yes vote and I expect that most prominent Labour figures will also do so. But others in the party are uncertain or agnostic.
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Is Labour on a tuition fees fiasco bump?
After two days of showing a slight 2pt lead over the Conservatives, yesterday Labour jumped ahead with a 5pt lead over the Conservatives according to YouGov (42%, 37%, 10%)
This is significant because:
A five point Labour lead is the largest any pollster has shown since the general election (and the largest Labour lead since the election-that-never-was). This is also the lowest Conservative share of the vote since the election.
There is a good chance the debate over tuition fees, where the public overwhelmingly opposes Coalition policy, has had an impact. It has dominated political discussion over the past week.
It also looks like Government approval is holding at around -10pts.
For a Coalition dedicated to bringing together a plurality of the electorate, it seems only Conservative support is rock-solid right now.
If Labour was pursuing such a blatantly partisan agenda that mostly appealed only to their own constituency, they would be accused of a ‘core vote strategy’.
NHS stealth privatises thousands of jobs
The Department of Health sent out this innocuous sounding press release today: Thousands of frontline NHS staff take control of £900 million of services.
It’s a nice day to bury bad news (hat-tip Richard Blogger).
The press release states quite excitedly:
Thousands of frontline NHS staff are taking control of the services they deliver in a drive to transform patient care and improve health outcomes, Secretary of State for Health Andrew Lansley announced today.
Thirty-two projects will form the third wave of NHS organisations that want to set up social enterprises, through the NHS ‘Right to Request’ scheme that gives public sector workers the opportunity to become their own bosses.
Sounds exciting! Public sector workers getting more control over budgets and having decision making localises! Who would be against that??
But scroll further down and you get this gem:
These proposals will transfer an estimated £900m of services and almost 25,000 NHS staff into the social enterprise sector.
The proposals in this third and final wave span nine of the 10 Strategic Health Authorities and include services like primary care access for the vulnerable and homeless, sexual health services, and support for bereaved children and families.
In other words these jobs have essentially been privatised.
It’s worth emphasising the difference however. A social enterprise reinvests profits in the business or the community rather than deriving profits for shareholders. That’s not entirely a bad model.
But there a lot of unanswered questions here: will these organisations be subject to national standards? Will they be subject to FOI requests? What impact will this have on service delivery?
The Nursing Times reports that similar attempts to localise maternity services, rather than be run by the national commissioning board, faced criticism.
Doctors’ groups have joined midwives in opposing a government U-turn that would see control of maternity services handed to GPs, warning such a move would lead to a fragmented service and a potential postcode lottery.
The potential for the same here is also obvious.
Guantanamo payouts: right decision, wrong reasons
If anything, a million pounds is not compensation enough for seven years’ detention without trial in Morocco and Cuba, including subjection to starvation, sleep deprivation, regular beatings and having your penis mutilated with a scalpel. For that reason, Binyam Mohamed deserves the money.
Sure, the pay-off means that legitimate questions over whether he received paramilitary training in Afghanistan in 2001, and what he was doing when he tried to fly to the UK on a false passport before he was lifted in Karachi the following year, will now never be answered. It may be that Mr Mohamed is not a morally meritorious person.
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