Plenty of people had plenty of fun at the expense of Andrew Gilligan last week. Now the laughter has died down, let’s assess what has been learned.

Looking through the threads of the two Cif articles in question – by Ken Livingstone’s former chief of staff Simon Fletcher and by esteemed fellow Conspirator Adam Bienkov – we see striking examples of Gilligan making false allegations against his critics, being shown to be in the wrong, then failing to admit it or apologise. They don’t inspire much confidence.

1) At 4.50 on Friday afternoon, a commenter called AView posted three times on Adam’s thread in quick succession. Posting at 5.53 Gilligan asserted that AView was a pseudonym of Livingstone’s economics adviser John Ross. An hour later Ross, posting as RMRoss, made an appearance to point out that this was wrong (as did AView in the small hours of the following morning).
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New research by Warwick University’s Professor Steve Strand has found that British children of Caribbean heritage are discriminated against when entered for SATS tests at Key Stage 3 (Year 9 and aged 14).

Government data shows that children from a number of ethnic minority groups, including Pakistani, Bangladeshi and black African Britons, were doing far worse in these tests than white Britons. But while social factors such as economic background, attitudes to and attendance at school and mothers’ educational attainment appeared to explain this in relation to the other groups, it did not seem to with regard to the Caribbeans.
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We were assuredly told by someone who writes for the Evening Standard that the prospect of Ken Livingstone running again in 2012 is hilarious, the best thing that could possibly happen to Mayor Johnson four years from now.

So why can’t “London’s Quality Newspaper” stop fighting the 2008 election? Haven’t they noticed that their boy won? Or are they, perhaps, secretly worried that Livingstone might yet present a threat to him?

I ask this only because they’ve seen fit to make the redundancy payments of Livingstone’s former advisers their front page story. Er, scoop. Needless to say Veronica’s Cat – who only ever deals in facts, you understand – manages to describe these people as “fanatically loyal” and “current or former senior members of Trotskyite group Socialist Action”, just in case there was any doubt in our minds that the severance sums are undeserved.
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Naturally, “London’s Quality Paper” highlighted the bits that could be used to vindicate its dismal conduct during the election campaign and ignored any that didn’t. Predictably, the chief offenders seized on the report as an opportunity to attack Ken Livingstone again rather the face the fact that even this profoundly partial “audit” acknowledged that in many respects the LDA has done good work.

Never let reality get in the way of a good persecution, especially when you’ve invested so much of your collapsing credibility in it.

For the record, I’ve long been perfectly persuaded that the relationship between mayoral advisers and the LDA needs to be clarified. Indeed, it was the Standard that persuaded me. I’m also quite satisfied that Lee Jasper displayed poor judgment over some LDA grants and in one case hid from the consequences. He wouldn’t be my choice for equalities adviser either (though even his enemies applaud his work with the police.) But these were never grounds for a hard-right newspaper to smear the individual and an entire Labour administration, which is what the Standard and its political assassins did.
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My dear little news story arising from Tim Parker’s Politics Show interview yesterday mentions that Mayor Johnson’s Forensic Audit Panel will be publishing its final report shortly in advance of Mayor’s Question Time on Wednesday morning.

It also mentions that Ken Livingstone was formally invited to meet the panel to help them with their work. There had already been an informal approach, rebuffed by Livingstone in clear terms. But last Tuesday Patience Wheatcroft wrote him this note:

Dear Mr Livingstone,

You will be aware that the current Mayor asked me to chair a Forensic Audit Panel looking into the operations of the GLA and the LDA. During the course of our work we have interviewed many members of the Assembly, LDA board and executives and GLA executives. It would be helpful if we were also able to talk with you. I know that an informal invitation to you has been extended and rejected but I would now like to issue a formal invitation to you to meet with the panel.

Livingstone has sent this reply:
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He’s holding his first press conference today morning. I doubt I’ll get the chance to ask more than a couple of these, so here’s my full list for his and your consideration.
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Just joking!

I’m out of town at the moment, visiting my mum, hence the recent paucity of posts. My time in the tiny internet shop I presently share with three Warcraft junkies and their loud crunchy sweets is mercifully short.

But I’ve had a quick read of this Evening Standard piece pointing out the misalignment between Mayor Johnson’s Tube booze ban and those of the Manifesto Club, which his culture director Munira Mirza was a found member of.

Imagine if she had been Ken Livingstone’s adviser.

Far from being a mere news story this information would have been seized on by a member of the Standard’s Get-Ken squad – especially the “lefties” among them – and inflated into a massive, oversold expose of a “key associate” having “links” with a “front organisation” for a “secretive libertarian cult” with roots in the far-Left Revolutionary Communist Party which supported Serb extremists during the Balkan wars and whose, erm, “shadowy leaders” have a 40 year history of assuming false identities and engaging in subversive political activities in an attempt to undermine the British state.

In fact, it would all be true, but not really terribly important – which is, ironically, what the Manifesto Club clique is so terrifically anxious to be.

During the weeks of the election campaign that’s eaten my life, I’ve striven to be fair to Boris Johnson. There was, though, never much chance I’d vote for him. That said, I’ve also been testing my loyalty to Ken Livingstone. I believe his various critics, including those with roots on the left, have over-spun or overstated their cases against him, but that isn’t to say they lack all force. There’s also the question of how much difference a change of mayor would really make.

On the day campaigning officially began, I argued that the job description and moderate content of Johnson’s stated polices meant that many of the differences were less of Big Ideas than emphasis. This wasn’t what Team Ken wanted to hear, as it made clear in a letter the Guardian published the following day: its job from the off has been to sharpen the contrast in substance – of both policy and pedigree – between the two men; Johnson’s, in keeping with David Cameron’s approach, has been to position himself just enough to the blue side of the incumbent to mobilise Tory support without confirming suspicions that he’s daft and extreme.

But though the choice between the two was not as stark as their media images suggested, there was no doubt they were there. The thing was to clarify and quantify them. I’ve done my best and now feel I can vote for Livingstone with conviction.

Here are 10 reasons why.

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As the man who first exposed the financial inexactitude behind Boris Johnson’s “new Routemaster” proposals I’ve got to say I’m amazed that six week later he’s still getting his abacus in a twist about the cost of the scheme.

Actually, other people are in a muddle about it too, but Boris’s latest comments are making matters even worse for him. The story so far:

Episode One: Boris tells Vanessa Feltz it would cost £8 million to put conductors on the existing bendy bus routes. The following day, Ken Livingstone claims it would cost £80 million, though his website swiftly reduces that to £70 million. They can’t both be right.
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What does that term “progressive” mean? It’s a bit of a composite, one that strives to encompass social liberalism and economic leftism, environmentalism, multiculturalism, feminism and so on – an umbrella term, perhaps, for things that most conservatives dislike. It stands too for resistance to unaccountable and over-concentrated wealth and power, demanding that these things should be shared out and devolved for the benefit of the largest possible numbers of people.

If we accept that as a reasonable rough definition, who is the most progressive candidate for London mayor? The answer is not straightforward. Livingstone, of course, claims the progressive high ground and is calling for Green, Lib Dem and far Left sympathisers to join him there. He does so with some justice. In his GLC past he took the lead in campaigning against racism and for gay rights in the teeth of seething opposition. With public transport he championed and imposed cheap fares “on the rates”, driving his enemies madder still by becoming popular for doing it. Today, the green lobby lauds him as a trail blazer in tackling climate change and seeking to restrain car use.
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Last week the Observer and Evening Standard columnist used his space in the latter to explain how Brian Paddick can win. The trick is to bring about “a mass defection of voters from Ken to the Lib-Dems in the first round.” Were this to occur, he writes, Paddick would reach the second round of voting, eliminating Livingstone, and then secure the mayoralty on second preferences.

Could it happen?
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Friday’s decision by Ken Livingstone to suspend his equalities adviser Lee Jasper and invite the police to investigate the many claims made against him by the Evening Standard was a calculated gamble at the end of another awkward week for the London mayor. His and Jasper’s wish must be that the move will persuade the capital’s voters that there is nothing to hide and result in Jasper’s exoneration. Livingstone will also be hoping that some of the heat will now go out of the story and that the media will talk instead about the issues he would prefer to debate.

It may help, but Ken shouldn’t hold his breath. For one thing, summoning Plod is unlikely to prevent the Standard augmenting or reheating its attacks. For another, he has a new problem – signs that his rival candidates are gaining momentum. This is not a scientific judgement on my part: as Mike Smithson points out there have been few opinion polls on the mayoral race and the last one – which suggested Livingstone’s position had actually strengthened followed Martin Bright’s Dispatches programme – used a very small sample. It is, though, based on some close observation both of the candidates and of the press.
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No surprises in the Evening Boris yesterday – just the usual three pages devoted to demonstrating that Ken Livingstone is a turd. Boris Gilligan reported that Brenda Stern, the former LDA manager, is threatening to sue over what Livingstone said about her on the Today programme on Thursday. Boris Dovkants wrote an unflattering spread about Rosemary Emodi, the Livingstone aide (and Lee Jasper’s deputy) who got caught in a lie about how a flight to Nigeria was paid for.

Meanwhile at New Statesman and at Comment Is Free Martin Bright has been insisting that his Dispatches programme has been vindicated by Livingstone’s own words since its broadcast. And at The Times, Camilla Cavendish – I wonder which inner city comp she went to – likened Livingstone to “the dictator of a small third world country.” The London Mayor himself has decamped to Davos where he’s found time to blog a broadside in his own defence. It’s been a bruising week for him. But how badly damaged is he? And where do the week’s hostilities leave the state of the mayoral race?
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Before I become blissfully chained to my sumptuous new cooker for at least the next ten days, a quick update on ContactPoint (the “children’s index”) and related “database state” issues. I’ve written here (and here and here) about this forthcoming information sharing e-system and why I – and others – fear it may have the opposite effect to that the government desires

In theory, ContactPoint will enable public sector professionals to better anticipate when children are at risk of harm and to respond in a more coordinated way when intervention is required. In practice, say its critics, such professionals will spend an awful lot of time at computer terminals following false trails of misleading information while the fear of breach of privacy – of up to around 300 people they’ve never met “knowing their business” online – will deter the very children and families most in need of help from seeking or accepting it

In my last piece on this subject for Liberal Conspiracy I reported that ministers might be adjusting their sales pitch for ContactPoint, replacing vaguely shroud-waving references to the Victoria Climbie tragedy with less emotive talk of general practitioner efficiency. However, during her damage limitation exercise over the latest disappearing data embarrassment – those British learner drivers’ details that got lost across the pond – Ruth Kelly directly invoked Climbie when appearing on Newsnight (thank you, ARCH blog) and I heard her on Five Live asserting that the public would rightly be appalled if information wasn’t shared in relation to child protection.

Well, her last point is indisputable taken in isolation: of course relevant child welfare professionals working on the same case need to know what each other are doing. But, whatever the top brass of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services claim, a national database of dubious reliability and questionable security, compulsorily compiled and run by local authorities without parental consent being required seems precisely the wrong way of going about it.

How can we best mobilise opinion against ContactPoint? It seems to me that simply howling “Big Brother” isn’t enough. We need to show that e-government in all its form risks creating greater dangers to individuals and to society than it prevents. ContactPoint is a good example of this, and I urge readers to join the Facebook group I’ve formed to oppose it. Lobby your MP too, and lend your support to Annette Brookes MP, the Liberal Democrats’ spokesperson on children’s issues.

But let’s look at the wider picture as well. Guardian technology correspondent Michael Cross has recently argued for a far more open and political debate about e-government, taking in everything from ID cards to NHS records. He rightly observes that the public has been given no clear idea about the growth of e-government, how best to make it work and what its true implications might be. One of my New Year resolutions will be to encourage that debate in 2008. Maybe it will be one of yours too.

The 10 Downing Street petition against the planned database on children – which I wrote about here on Monday – now has over 1,000 names. It’s open until 20th December. Sign now and while you’re in fighting mood urge your MP to sign the Early Day Motion of Annette Brooke MP, Lib Dem spokesperson on children, asking the government to “reconsider its decision to proceed” with the scheme. You could raise the matter with your local schoolteachers too.

I’ve had an indication that the government may be adjusting its defence of ContactPoint. A correspondent tells me of a colleague who wrote to Ed Balls mentioning the invoking by ministers of the Victoria Climbie case as the primary reason for the database being set up. Beverley Hughes has been especially quick to do this as a way of countering critics. I’m told Balls’s reply included the following;

“In your letter, you assert the Government is introducing ContactPoint chiefly to prevent another terrible case like that of Victoria Climbie. This is not the case. The chief purpose of ContactPoint is to improve the efficiency of children’s services by freeing up practitioner time.”

My correspondent remarks that offering bureaucratic convenience as justification for reducing family privacy is unacceptable. Agreed. The same source also remarks:

“The government comments fail to mention that if you want to know a child’s GP school, etc YOU CAN ASK THE CHILD OR PARENT. They keep talking as if there were no other route than IT. It’s worth reminding people that the old fashioned low-tech solution of being polite and asking is still a viable option. Some LAs [local authorities] report [during pilot schemes] that users don’t know who they are in contact with. We should not ask families to give up privacy to compensate for incompetent professional practice.”

Agreed again. ContactPoint is a dud. And I haven’t even mentioned E-Caf yet.
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ContactPoint is a government database-in-waiting. It is bad news for all eleven million children in England and their families, especially those in need of public service professionals’ help or protection. Formerly known as the Information Sharing Index and (colloquially) “the Children’s Index”, it is officially described as, “The quick way for a practitioner to find out who else is working with the same child or young person making it easier to deliver more coordinated support.” Others see it differently. Far from being a “basic online directory” helping teachers, social workers, doctors, youth offending teams and others keep in touch more efficiently, they believe that the very existence of ContactPoint risks making it not more but less likely that children in danger of neglect or abuse will get the support they need.

Why? A group comprising experts in child protection, children’s rights and IT security produced a report for the Information Commissioner. The core of their case against ContactPoint and other databases for the logging of information about kids is that such screening and sharing of social indicators – family circumstances, health records, school performance etc – is an unreliable predictor of children being “at risk” of harm or engaging in antisocial behaviour. What’s more, it might generate self-fulfilling prophecies by putting poorer children and their families under unwarranted scrutiny. Also, it is likely to work against creating the bonds of trust that are so vital if effective help is to be accepted by and given to those who genuinely need it. They also doubt that ContactPoint would be secure – an argument likely to carry greater force in view of recent cases of discs disappearing from HMRC and the DWP.

Last week I wrote here that campaigns against erosions of civil liberties are more likely to gain widespread support if connections are made between every day “common good” issues and the principle of protecting the citizen from state intrusion. It’s not enough to be affronted by government “nannying” or to mutter darkly about Big Brother. We need to show that the database state and other curbs on privacy and freedom do more harm – possibly serious harm – than good. ContactPoint is a clear example of this. At best the system will result in professionals whose job it is to keep vulnerable children and families safe spending more and more time chasing false leads on computer screens. At worst, it will damage those most in need.

My slightly longer piece on this subject appeared on Cif last week and I wrote about it in detail about a year ago (the latter is now slightly out of date, but the key arguments still hold). The good news is that a review into ContactPoint’s security has been ordered, enabling the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives to ask more fundamental questions about the scheme. I think it’s a dud. If you agree, sign this Downing Street petition and spread the word.

I’ve long had certain misgivings about boarding the civil liberties freedom train. It’s not that I object to its destination, more that the tone and emphasis of many of the arguments made for opposing the great gamut of dubious developments under Labour, from Asbos to ID cards to the proposed (or not) extension of pre-charge detention beyond 28 days, seem to be missing something.

Henry Porter’s campaigning pieces in The Observer have been a good example. The extended thread applause they unfailingly receive seems to me to be won too easily. Henry’s doggedness is admirable but his unfortunate joining in with the government’s crass campaign of last year to tick off veiled women for not being British properly exemplified how he sometimes comes at his subject in the manner of an affronted Tory, in this case seemingly unimpressed by the inconvenient assertion by some Muslim women at the time that to be veiled is be liberated rather than downtrodden. Similarly, it’s one thing to be appalled that Big Brother is everywhere but it will take more than quoting Voltaire to persuade a lot of people living on crime-riddled council estates that they’d be freer without CCTV than they, rightly or wrongly, feel with it.

Robert’s piece here earlier today argued that resistance to ID cards should major on the moral case against the state hoarding information about us rather than the practical one that it’s not safe or reliable, as demonstrated by those disappearing CDs. “The political relationship between citizen and state does not change when the state buys a better computer system,” he wrote. I agree. But might it not also be true that unless we are able to show that the various monitoring and “database state” schemes are unlikely to solve the problems the government claims they will, we risk coming over like high-minded, even scare-mongering idealists and leave ourselves susceptible to the predictable charge of not respecting the fears of real people about crime, terrorism and so on?

The only part of this vast territory I’ve ventured into has been the so-called Children’s Index, now repackaged as Contact Point. This is the database intended to hold personal details – some of them very personal – about all 11 million children in England. The government claims that this aspect of its Every Child Matters strategy will help protect children “at risk” of harm, but some very good judges have serious doubts. Their arguments are about practicalities insofar as they claim that the scheme is unsound both technologically and administratively. But they are also about efficacy – moral efficacy –in that they seek to show that Contact Point will make it harder rather than easier to detect and protect the vulnerable.

This is a genuinely liberal-left pro-civil liberties position demonstrating that the welfare of the weak – and hence the health of society at large – is more likely to be enhanced if there is less computer-based sharing of personal information by state agencies rather than more. It connects the defence of individual privacy to the pursuit of the common good by way of everyday issues people care about. The more connections of this kind we can make in relation to all civil liberty erosions, the more support we will secure for our opposition to them.

Education policies have raised some good questions lately, and not only about pedagogy (whatever that means). They’ve brought into focus tricky issues – well, I find them tricky – about freedom and equality, choice and social cohesion, “localism” and centralised control.

Consider these recent developments. The Guardian has reported that ministers are conducting an “urgent review” into the academies programme launched under Tony Blair. This will have given some satisfaction to critics who have long claimed that these expensive secondaries, which are state-funded but operate largely independently of local authorities, are failing to fulfil their principal remit of improving attainment among poor children in urban areas.

Stoke-On-Trent Labour Councillor Peter Kent-Baguley is among these critics. He is not alone in seeing academies as, in his words, “creating structural inequality” in education. Their opponents believe that such success as these schools claim – and some can claim very little – can be largely attributed to their enthusiasm for excluding troublesome pupils, who then have to be taken in by neighbouring LEA schools.

Falling pupil numbers mean that Stoke is to reorganise its secondary provision, with some existing schools likely to be closed. Kent-Baguley accepts the need for change, but is enraged by what he sees as central government’s interference in the form of education consultants SERCO being “catapulted” in to manage it. He regards SERCO as the instrument by which the government will impose academies on his city, whether it wants them or not. He fears social division in education imposed from above.

Now let’s look at what David Cameron has been saying. The Tories, of course, have pledged to accelerate the academy programme. But last week their leader made a speech (cheekily, in Manchester) promising to enable parent or community groups to set up their own schools – as “Conservative co-operatives” – using the money their LEA would otherwise be spending on their children at existing ones. Until more details are published it’s hard to judge this policy, but it certainly looks like a further potential challenge to the power of local government. In this case, though, the challenge, though enabled from the centre, could come from below.

Might there be merit in Cameron’s idea? There are obvious reasons for concern. Chris Keates of the NASAWT said such co-op schools would be “a recipe for social segregation.” Would they simply give hardline religious groups, ethnic separatists, the pushy posh and others the freedom to effectively insulate their kids against others “not like us” at those other kids’ and tax-payers’ expense?

But there’s another way of looking at it. Cameron characterised his idea as “giving ownership” of education to parents, a formula to please his core voters. Yet might such a reform turn out to be truly “localist”, reinvigorating active citizenship on the ground and having the potential to support those children, which existing schools and policies are finding hard to help by placing them in environments more suited to their educational needs? And, if so, should the Left consider adopting – or at least adapting – the principle, even if not the precise Tory policy when it emerges?

I find it hard to say. On the one hand I sympathise with Peter Kent-Baguely and I’m receptive to the idea of power being devolved further than even many local councillors might like. On the other, I’m aware that the freedoms this would bestow could end up being enjoyed by the few at the expense of the rest and narrow children’s horizons in the process. Is there a way of having the best of both worlds? And if so, can someone tell me what it is?

I hate to tempt fate but, fingers crossed, touching wood and stroking a rabbit’s foot, this blog could turn out to be a rarity: a place where liberals and lefties gather to debate that I don’t feel an immediate urge to leave.

I doubt I’m alone in feeling that way. No need here to recap the British left’s long and turgid history of ideological introversion and sectarian scrapping. No need either, I hope, to lament the space periodically wasted on this-or-that recanting hack proclaiming their overdue escape from some state of supposed liberal denial.

I can’t be arsed with that stuff. Never have been. That’s because beyond the narrow battlegrounds and hillsides of media straw men there lies a larger landscape inhabited by people with broad minds and real lives who nowadays hold in common the sorts of values that have improved life in Britain for so many who live here over the past fifty-odd years, and of which they and the nation should be proud.

It’s a far more fulfilling place to be: a pluralist Britain where it is taken as read that there is a collective responsibility to see that the sick are cared for, children educated, the poor not left to starve and prosperity worked for and spread around. It is a place, too, where citizens respect each other’s right to do and believe what they like so long as others aren’t hurt by it. That principle has more recently extended to people’s intimate lives, weakening harmful taboos around sexuality and relationships.

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