Well, the Labour ones have all come out . . . As soon as Blair got in, if you came out as lesbian or gay you immediately got a job. It was wonderful . . . you just knew the Tory party was riddled with it like everywhere else is.

Now “riddled” does jump out from the page as an odd word to use, with its connotation of disease. But the key point is that Livingstone didn’t put it in a page – he said it in an interview.

I suspect what is happening here – though it is impossible to know absolutely in the absence of a verbatim transcript/audio recording – is that Livingstone is trying, as a rhetorical device, to ”speak with the voice” of the type of hypocritical Tory that he has only just referred to in the interview, who “denounc[es] homosexuality while they are indulging in it”.<

This type of rhetorical device is very common amongst politicians, who most often use it to try and display empathy with the voting public, (though Livingstone here is using it as a means of scorn).

Indeed I pointed out recently how David Cameron used it to show how touch he is with real people, but suggested – given that he used it with a wholly inaccurate term – that he was probably telling a lie.

Now clearly Livingstone’s team is not going to get into this kind of linguistic defence, and sticks with a straight “look at my record” statement.

So as I’ve got a book on my shelves that not many others are sad enough to have, I’ll just help out by quoting from another Livingstone interview – this from 1984 – which provides documentary evidence of the ridiculousness of the “homophobe” barbs now being chucked his way:

The removal of empire, plus great achievements in the liberalisation of censorship, divorce and gay rights, meant that the issues that dominated the 1950s tended largely to be resolved in the 1960s. (Boddy M & Fudge C, Local Socialism, 1984, Basingstoke: Macmillan, p.262-3).

For Livingstone, the matter of gay rights was clearly sorted a very long time ago.

Yeah, that’ll work out well!

Below is just one example of one of the forms a nurse will have to fill in every hour for every patient in her/his care, instead of doing the caring. Note the 152 boxes per patient per day.

And here’s one (see final page) from a pilot study at Whipps Cross Hospital. Progress.

It’s only got 144 boxes per patient per day.

Mr Balls said the summit had not addressed the crucial role of the ECB to head off the eurozone sovereign debt crisis. He also believes that European leaders – not just David Cameron – must move away from collective austerity and focus on growth.

This position is close to what I suggested yesterday:

I said at my own blog:

The main message should be that Cameron is now an irrelevance. Miliband should get on with setting out clearly how the removal of the fiscal stimulus option, under the proposed Treaty, would be an unmitigated economic disaster both for the Eurozone and for the UK as a key trader.

It would be nice to think the interview will go as far as arguing a full Keynesian alternative, developed in cooperation with other European parties of the Left.

This alternative might include not just an unambigious commitment to making the ECB as lender of last resort, and a commitment to a major ‘grands travaux’ fiscal stimulus, but also to the development of coherent long-term measures to address the major trade imbalances within the Eurozone.

Nice, but unlikely at this stage.

Even so, it’s a step in the right direction from the Labour leadership.

The idea that more than half of those responsible for riots should blame a failure of moral conscience might seem contradictory – but it accords with hundreds of interviews in which rioters expressed regret, concern or disappointment at what they saw going on around them. More interestingly, they revealed how the rioting crowd would – at times – exercise some degree of moral restraint.

Whatever the bleakness of the picture portrayed by the research, this is something to hang on to.

So, more contentiously, is the finding that those who do belong to gangs made agreements to suspend hostilities while the riots continued.

For what the research appears to reveal (and I haven’t seen the full report yet) is that those involved are not the feral, mindlessly consumerist thugs the government and the Right are so keen to portray.

Instead, they are often people with the capacity to think things through and make quite sophisticated, negotiated judgments about who the (current) enemy is. While I’m not currently at liberty to provide my own quotations or even paraphrase conversations, what I can say is that even I – liberal old woolly head that I am – was impressed by the way in which people – when given the chance I was able to give them – were able not just to articulate their feelings, motivations and judgements, but also to set them in the wider economic and political context.

The challenge for the Left is, of course, to work with the people who rioted, or who may riot in the future, towards a more coherent class analysis of why they find themselves in the situation in which they find themselves.

I’m not naive enough to think that this will happen any time soon, and I know if I were to start wandering the streets where the riots took place trying to sell my class-based wares, I’d soon enough be laughed out of town, or worse.

The scale and depth of the social and economic dislocation experienced by a very large number of people in this country is likely to require massive state intervention if it to be resolved. After all, as I have previously set out, many of the problems faced by people in their 21st Century ghettos are a direct result of massive and malign state intervention in the mid-20th Century.

Only a similar scale of targeted investment in education, jobs and housing – alongside a ‘peace and reconciliation’ process which recognises the riots for the semi-declaration of war that they actually were – stands a chance.

They know that the battle lines have now been drawn; if we lose this battle, then we’re likely to lose the war.

The overall impression I took from yesterday is that we may be getting our tactics very wrong for the war of attrition to come, and that we need to pay attention now to the basics of strike organisaton.

I accept that those who marched yesterday generally had a good time, and may have come away from the post-march rallies buzzing with solidarity. But city centre demonstrations, where we all go to the pub afterwards, will not win us the battle.

Instead, we need to get seriously local, we need to get seriously organised, and we need to get grim.

1) In the war of attrition to come, attending demonstrations will be a luxury most strikers simply can’t afford, given the travel costs and the inevitable cajolings to city centre pubs. To keep on arranging them in light of decreasing numbers will not only look bad with the media, it also discriminates directly against the poorer strikers left to hold the picket line.

At the level of senior union organiser too, demonstrations will become a luxury we can’t afford. The hours and costs that go into organising, publicising and controlling city-centre demos and rallies need to be diverted towards grassroots organisation.

2) The strikes will take place at many thousands of different workplaces across the country. It is important that picket lines are seen (it doesn’t matter so much about heard) whenever people pass them. If you’re an undecided member of the public, a real life picket line – perhaps with someone you know on it – is much more effective means of attracting your support than watching a large group of jolly people waving banners on the telly.

3) The message we now need to get across is that this is for real. We need to contrast the buffoonish, petulant, childish behaviour and image of ‘senior’ Tories – now starting to get established in many people’s minds – with the grim, silent determination of ordinary people on cold, winter picket lines.

It’s about buy-in. A passerby who, on the third morning of seeing cold strikers, spontaneously chucks a quid into the strike fund bucket, or even toots her/his horn, has invested in the labour movement; she/he feels part of it, and there’s no turning back.

4) In public sector workplaces there are many middle and even senior managers who have risen from the shopfloor, and still share the values of their ex-colleagues. While they may no longer feel able to join the picket themselves, a correctly organised strike fund, for example, can help them to engage, as well as making striking more possible in the longer term.

5) Large scale demonstrations create an environment for confrontation between police and workers/supporters. The police may well be the agent of a repressive state, but we need to make clear that our enemy is the government, not the police.

All of this may start to sound like I’m denigrating the efforts and commitment of those who turned out to march yesterday. I’m not, and I have no big problem with a one-off like yesterday, but our tactics now need to change.

What the coming war of strike attrition offers is an opportunity to take some of the ‘expertise’ refers to places where the working class actually congregate. The mountain will not come to Moses.

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For my part, on Wednesday 14th Dec I’m doing a workshop at the Bank of Ideas on how my old-style trade unionism can and should meet new-style rebellion through engagement in dull-sounding things like Trades Union Councils (where wider community and unions are supposed to come together, but mostly don’t).

The excellent Jim Pickard of the FT points out that Australian and Canadian pension funds put 8-15% of their funds respectively into infrastructure investments, while in the UK it’s only 1%.

But I have increasing doubts whether this is anything more than a delaying tactic while the government tries to figure out how to keep capital investment ‘off balance sheet’ at all costs. If I were on the Labour frontbenches tomorrow, I’d be looking to ask the following questions.

1) How does the proposed investment, in the next parliament, of around around £25bn of the total £30bn annnounced, help us deal with the economic flatlining/recession right now?

2) How much of this year’s announcement is actually a repeat of the National Infrastructure Plan published on 25th October 2010, in which the government states:

We plan for UK infrastructure investment to be some £200 billion over the next five years. We will help make that happen through smarter use of public funding, improving private sector investment models, encouraging new sources of private capital and addressing the regulatory failures that stand in the way of greater private sector investment in our country’s infrastructure (p.3-4).

3) Exactly how will pension funds get a return on their investment?

In 2010 the National Infrastructure Plan noted that the Regulatory Asset Based (RAB) model for investment, currently used by regulated utilities companies to generate investment, for example, might be extended to other areas of capital investment. The plan stated the need to pass on costs to the consumer through this model. Has the govt clarified this?

4) The 2010 National Infrastructure Plan also said:

[T]he Government will conduct an internal review, supported by external experts, to consider extending the use of the regulatory asset base model. The review will report in spring 2011 (para 3.20)

Why was this review never carried out/published?

5) The Treasury Select Committee recommended in July 2011 (para 121):

The Treasury should consult on the possibility of using other financing models, including the Regulatory Asset Base (RAB) and Local Asset Backed Vehicles (LABV), as a way of financing capital projects in competition or in preference to PFI.

Why is the government announcing with such confidence that pension funds will be used to deliver capital projects BEFORE any such consultation takes place? Is this is why the main infrastructure invesment is put back into the next parliament?

6) According to the FT, four pension funds institutions have signed a ‘memorandum of understanding’ about the proposed investment. What commitment to invest does a memorandum of understanding involve?

7) Many of the pension funds being asked to invest are associated with public sector workers (e.g. two signatures to the memorandum of understanding are the Greater Manchester Pension Fund and the London Pensions Fund).

Why are these pensions deemed to be a matter of public spending when public sector workers defend their pension rights, but become ‘private’ when the government seeks to use them?

32 years on, a 10 minute bill sponsored by Alan Beith MP goes to its second reading on Friday 25th November.

The Road Safety Act 2011, which you can help support, would:

a) require the fitting of equipment to heavy goods vehicles to eliminate driver blindspots and aid driver awareness of cyclists, pedestrians and other road users in the immediate vicinity of the vehicle;

(b) make other regulations to ensure drivers are trained in using safety equipment as fitted to their vehicles, to improve the safety of cyclists, pedestrians and other road users.

Alan’s initiative follows the death of one of his constituents, on a London road in 2009, in which the circumstances were similar to my father’s.

It also comes shortly after two deaths at the same point on Bow Interchange in London.

Of course there may be arguments against the bill, arguing that this is yet another expense for haulage firms in difficult times. (Interestingly, when the matter was the subject of an Early Day Motion earlier this year, 114 MPs signed the motion.)

Against this argument, there is the obvious. 2,500 cyclists are killed or badly injured every year. It’s always seemed odd to me that there is relatively massive investment in rail safety, for example, when a much smaller number are killed or injured on this transport (not that I begrudge this), while cycle deaths and injuries just seem to remain regarded as the collateral damage of our transport system.

This Bill won’t stop cyclists being killed, but it is an important step in the right direction.

If readers do get a chance – perhaps linking to this – I’d be grateful for a quick email to your MP, especially to those in London who will be more likely to be around on Friday, asking them to support the bill. Jeremy Corbyn supported the bill at the first reading, and Emily Thornberry seconded the EDM earlier this year, so perhaps they might be asked to tweet this post to other MP they know are around.

It appears that the government’s Regional Growth Fund has awarded more than a million pounds in funding (that’s the minimum grant level) to Listen Media Company Ltd, which is…

a) dormant, in accounts made up to June 201o (see Companies House website);

b) changed its company name just before the submission of its bid (previously called Tribute Campaigns Ltd)

c) supposedly going to create jobs in Liverpool, but which no one there has ever heard of, and whose registered address is in Cambridge back street.

d) 100% owned and directed by Stephen Callen (until this month when joined by another director), who took over the company just before the bid was submitted (deadline 01 July 2011), and who since 2009 has sat on the board of Talent TV with George Kynoch, the deputy chairman of the Scottish Conservatives and a former minister alongside Lord Heseltine in the 1990s.

Heseltine chairs the Regional Growth Fund Independent Advisory Panel the and advises the government on which organisations should be funded.

At round 1, another media company received funding and admits that it was asked to do so personally by Heseltine.

A new body could decide whether people are fit to work, according to drafts of the Government’s Independent Review into Sickness Absence. Employers would be able to ask the assessment panel, rather than GPs, to make independent decisions.
…
It is likely to say that family doctors can be too quick to sign people off on sick leave because there is no incentive for them to help people stay inwork.

“No incentive,” eh?

Perhaps the now well-developed and successful Quality & Outcomes Framework doesn’t count, even though it is specifically designed to “reward practices for the provision of ‘quality care’”.

It also includes financial rewards for care which promotes people getting into work (e.g. see p.97), as well as explicitly recognising the general link between employment and good health (e.g. p.125).

This new review has been co-chairedby Dame Carol Black, a NHS director for health and work. I’m sure this briefing from the Commercial Occupational Health Providers Association (COHPA) is entirely coincidental:

COHPA has been active politically in trying to represent the interests of commercial OH providers to Dame Carol Black, Government and key bodies in the industry.

We have met with Dame Carol and Ministers from DWP /senior HSE (etc) to put our views across about the future of OH. We hold seats on Dame Carol’s select committee for OH and the Council for Work and Health.

And we’re sure it’s entirely coincidental that COHPA was founded by ATOS Healthcare, which owns ATOS origin, which already has a £500m contract to conduct incapacity assessments, but which doesn’t necessarily do them very well.

In any event, we’re sure, should it comes to pass, that a key element of primary care provision will be safe in ATOS’s hands.

10. Kensington and Chelsea. K&C make it in at number 10 with the news that they’ve misused millions of pounds on consultancy contracts.

They then got a firm of consultants in to tell them how badly they’ve misused the money, then held the meeting about it in secret because it’s not “in the public interest” for people to know how they’ve misused all the money.

This scores good points for large amounts of money wasted, but loses out because wasting money on consultants is not very imaginative stupidity.

9. Mendip District Council. The West Country Tories have been put forward for the list by David Edwards, who feels they should be in there on account of their “general, smug Tory incompetence”. He’s not sure why they’re so smug, and how they manage to be quite so incompetent when they’ve outsourced most of their services anyway.

Normally, generic smug incompetence wouldn’t get you into this list, but we’ve made an exception here because the Mendip Tories did try to get a wizard elected to Council, presumably in the belief that a Tory Council is a bit like Hogwarts, but with less good bin collections.

8. Trafford Borough Council. They’re generally just run-of-the-mill shocking, but news that one of their Tories has been charged with seven counts of benefit fraud.

Now normally this kind of alleged criminality, however hypocritical, wouldn’t get you anywhere near the list, but there’s been special pleading from Matt Finnegan, who points out that Trafford should score higher for making this guy a Party Whip, charged with keeping up standards within his group.

7. Those Shropshire Tories are in at number 7, with an impressively brazen attempt to clamp down on free speech, combined with a high level of condescension to their residents. They score highly for celebrity factor also, having banned Sally Bercow from going into one of the day centres they are planning to close, despite her having been personally invited in there by a user of the centre. They met in the car park instead.

6. Plymouth Tories are in at a very respectable number 6, with their attempt to derecognise trade unions. Good points were awarded for a total lack of understanding about what trade unions do, and slavish adherence to the rightwing line.

5. Southampton Tories, intent on privatising the whole of the Council just months after forcing Council staff to take a massive pay cut.

4. Essex Tories

This all concerns Lord Hanningfield, ex-Council leader and now ex-prisoner, who has declared himself “destitute”, while knowing full well that his erstwhile colleagues are developing plans to make thousands of residents properly destitute by “localising” control of welfare benefits, then slashing both amounts paid and tightening eligibility criteria.

Impressive viciousness combined with the ideological drive to become a Tory flagship for uncaring Conservatism and economic illiteracy.

3. Storming in at number 3 are the famously Thatcherite Tory crew in Wandsworth. They’ve come up with a scheme to throw you out of your home if you can’t get a job if, just for example, there aren’t any jobs.

2. What Wandsworth Tories have done, Barnet’s Tories have done better, and this gets them close to the coveted top spot.

Barnet have come up with a massively creative plan (item 7), under which people under 25 get chucked out of their home if they don’t get a job, BUT ALSO if they do get a decent one, with the limit for eligibility for a council home to be set at a little less household median income for the area (currently at £32,580 per year).

1. Straight in at number 1 is West Lancashire Borough Council – who have managed to completely ignore the fact that around about 20% of their landmass is likely to disappear underwater by 2015.

This will happen under Environment Agency plans to turn off two pumping stations and allow once-reclaimed but now rich horticultural land to return to unfarmable marsh. This would cost thousands of jobs in the horticulture industry, and disrupt thousands of lives. Even the dozy local Tory MP, who claimed at a meeting in early November that it was the first she’d heard of it (the consultation began on 29th September), has briefly woken up.

But not those West Lancs Tories.

Despite having had an official representative on the Environment Agency steering group, they apparently haven’t noticed that a large part of their borough is due to be permanently flooded, and failed to put the matter on this week’s Cabinet agenda

Losing a fifth of your borough’s landmass without even noticing is, I think you’d agree, incompetent even by Tory standards.

Habe you heard any oher tales we may have missed out?

Ministers are finalising a radical plan to boost investment in UK infrastructure and stimulate the economy, with proposals to pool the vast assets held in British pension funds and use them to back an ambitious programme of road and house building.

Pension and insurance funds are to be encouraged to invest up to £50bn in improving infrastructure, including private and social housing, power stations, super-fast broadband and motorway toll roads.

The plan was pushed by Cable at BIS earlier in the year, but knocked back by the Treasury.

Now, with the Treasury desperate, it looks as though Cable may get his way.

Clearly, the plan will take ages to bring to fruition. Pension Funds are required under fiduciary duty to maximise the value of their investments for their pensioners, and the due diligence that will need to be undertaken by them, their advisers and their fund managers will not be quick.

Even so, it’s a huge step in the right direction towards a more sensible economic policy, and if it is delivered will be a victory for Cable the Keynesian over Osborne the Fool.

Of course you could argue that it doesn’t need to be this complicated. Government could simply just get on with the spending, and allow Pension Funds to make their own minds over time as to whether it’s worth investing in the government debt that support this new economic growth.

After all, Pension Funds (together with Insurance Funds) already own around £300bn of the £1,069bn government debt out there (DMO, June 2011), so an extra £50bn invested in programmes designed to relfate the economy would seem like a pretty good bet, and much easier to arrange.

However, the Cable-proposed way allows them to keep government debt of balance sheet, and as with Labour’s PFI programme, this is an important political consideration.

So this is good news, and Labour should react to it as good news. In the week that Ed Balls goes out on the road selling his Five point plan (sensible enough, but small beer in comparison to the Cable plan), the worst thing Labour can do is start whinging about how the Tories are u-turning, and how hyocritical the Coalition is noe being about off-balance sheet debt. That would be easy, but wrong, politics.

Instead, Balls and team should welcome Cable’s initiative.

They should welcome Cable back to the Keynesian fold, while pressing more advenurous (and more direct) long term action of the same ilk, as well as for short term action (e.g. Balls’ Plan B) while the Cable plan gets underway.

Some will say the banks are partly to blame for the sluggishness of the economic recovery, having pumped up the leverage in the boom years and now – in this era of so-called de-risking and deleveraging – starving businesses with good growth prospects of the credit they so badly need. That said, the banks are more-or-less hitting the so-called Merlin targets, agreed with the Treasury, for lending to businesses, including small businesses.

Peston clearly hasn’t looked at the data properly.

As I set out in detail here, the banks are only meeting their Merlin targets because they have conspired with the government and the Bank of England to set targets and measures which include all their rollover lending.

This allows RBS, Lloyds et al. to look like they’re lending more when in fact their proper productive lending is declining.

In reality, the banks are doing nothing at all to contribute to economic recovery because both their new and their net lending trends are negative.

There is no need for Peston to take my word for it.

This is the Chief Economist of City research firm BCVA in September:

The ‘gross lending’ figures reported in the Project Merlin data are inflated compared with the official Bank of England series, because they include rollovers of existing facilities. In fact, net lending to the non-bank corporate sector has been firmly stuck in negative territory this year. From a business perspective, this is not especially surprising – retail banking, and in particular lending to SMEs, just doesn’t generate the high margins and profits that investment banking can.

The government and banks should be ashamed of misleading Peston, and the rest of us, about what they are really up to. And he should not be fooled by them.

The government said on Monday it planned to invest £1bn in 100 companies to create new jobs.

But some bids go as far as arm-twisting the government to hand over money in return for keeping jobs in the UK.

One of the first successful funding applications to emerge FOI requests undertaken by Liberal Conspiracy concerns Bridon International Ltd, successful in its application for £2.2 million.

Key sections of the application (some extracts at the end) indicate that Bridon regarded the grant as a ‘sweetener’ for them to remain operational in the UK, rather than as an additional investment in the UK economy.

Bridon have identified and investigated two viable locations for this facility, Neptune Energy Park at Newcastle and Gelsenkirchen in Germany. The final decision regarding the location of the proposed facility has not yet been taken and will be significantly influenced by the availability of grant support from the Uk Government. If the project were to proceed in the UK, it would entail capital expenditure of £17.3 million in addition to the annual lease cost of £1.1 million, and would creat 39 jobs. It would also safeguard the 150 existing jobs at the Willington Quay site.
…
If the project proceeds in Gelsenkirchen, we will adjust our European operations accordingly, as Gelsenkirchen becomes Bridon’s main manufacturing centre…..Under this alternative the Willington Quay site will cease to be viable…. If the project proceeds in Gelsenkirchen not only would there be no private sector investment in the Uk and no job creation but the 150 existing jobs at the Willington Quay site would also be lost.

This effectively changes the fund from its stated purpose of job creation (in fact only 39 new jobs are projected to be created) to one which is focused almost exclusively on job retention.

Bridon isn’t alone in taking this approach either.

Another bid by the company Holroyd (owned by the Chinese company CQME) outlined a plan to establish a “brand new high–technology and research facility” for Holroyd and its sister businesses.

It is projected to bring in 130 to 150 new jobs, “including a substantial number of PhD and Degree leve positions,” says the application, to the Rochdale area.

The bid stated:

Without [Regional Growth Fund] support, the project will not go ahead in the UK as it leaves us with a shortfall of £2.82 million having taken account of a £17.625 million contribution from CQME and a £3.055 million comtribution from Holroyd Precision.
…
Without RGF support, it is a certainty that CQME will either move to Holland or Germany as an alternative or take the slower route in transferring the technology into China, with resultant slow loss of employment in the UK.

There is no suggestion that any of the companies have acted improperly.

Other problems with the RGF
And then there questions about the bidding process itself.

44 of the 50 round 1 applicants refused to release their applications to the RGF.

Other bids to the RGF, such as one by the Historic Buildings Trust (Prince’s Regeneration Trust spin off), are unclear about other public sources of funding (Euro money, English Heritage) rather than the private investment we were promised.

Yesterday, The Times also revealed that grants had been made to local councils in politically marginal areas and to companies who are significant backers of the Conservative Party.

—
Note: Both the Times report and a piece on the Financial Times website used the above information.

—
Bridon Holdings Bid to Govt

The City of London Corporation, which is the Highways Authority for the Square Mile, is set to call a special meeting of its Planning and Transportation Committee for Friday to hear legal advice and decide whether and, if so, how to take legal action to clear the highways around St Paul’s of campers.

The Planning and Transportation Committee would meet in private session to consider the legal advice (my emphasis).

The wording is clever, and may lead members of the public unfamiliar with local government legislation into thinking there’s no point in turning up to such a meeting.

In fact, the meeting is bound by law to open in public, and declarations of personal and prejudicial interests on the part of committee members must be made, in public, in respect of the WHOLE agenda. In this case, such declarations may prove of interest to the public, where they concern financial or other relations with St Paul’s.

Only after these declarations of interest have been made can a motion then be put to the meeting with the following wording:

That under Section 100(A) of the Local Government Act 1972, the public be excluded from the meeting for the following items on the grounds that they involve the likely disclosure of exempt information as defined in Part I of the Schedule 12A of the Local Government Act.

In this case, the exemption will be sought on the grounds that members will be considering ‘information in respect of which a claim to legal professional privilege could be maintained in legal proceedings’ (Schedule 12A, para 5).

Although any such move is unlikely to succeed, members of the committee are entitled to speak and vote against the motion to hear the legal advice in private, but one or two of them (e.g. The Revd Dr Martin Dudley) might at least be inclined to raise questions on why the motion has been put.

So members of the public who want to witness the start of this meeting, and the likely act of their own exclusion from that meeting, have a legal right to do so.

Here is the agenda for the meeting. The venue is the Livery Hall, and the meeting commences at 10.30am on Friday.

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h/t to @davidallengreen for spotting this meeting was taking place

She has spotted not just that the ‘status quo’ option (a) and the ‘nutter’ option (b) are unacceptable.

She has also spotted that the midway option (c) is still a Conservative ‘free trade’ option, under which the neoliberal norms embedded in the current Lisbon Treaty and the devalued but still dangerous Growth & Stability Pact would remain, while at the same time allowing for an assault on the things that Europe has done well, such as the freedom of movement within borders and (some) worker rights.

The bill, complete with the Lucas amendment now reads:

This House calls upon the Government to introduce a Bill in the next session of Parliament to provide for the holding of a national referendum on whether the UK should: (a) remain a member of the EU on the current terms; (b) leave the EU; (c) renegotiate the terms of its membership in order to create a new relationship based on trade and co-operation; (d) [Lucas amendment] seek to build support for radical reform of the EU, increasing its transparency and accountability, refocusing its objectives on co-operation and environmental sustainability rather than competition and free trade, and enabling member states to exercise greater control over their own economies.

By adding her own amendment, focused on her Green agenda, she emphasises that she is a seriously different politician, reflecting a seriously new political agenda, and she should be congratulated on her initiative.

More importantly, however, Labour should now follow her lead, perhaps by stressing that, while the Lucas amendment is worthily intentioned, it is not appropriately worded.

This is for the simple reason that the Bill, were it to be approved, would form the basis of the Referendum that the government is then tasked with calling.

Yet no government in their right mind could accept a wording which is more manifesto expression than referendum question, as is the current Lucas amendment. This then creates the opportunity for Labour to provide its own amendment, with a simpler form of words and with a proper sense of Labour’s objectives in it.

I would advocate something along the following lines:

renegotiate the terms of its [the UK's] membership in order to create a new relationship based on peaceful co-operation, democratic accountability, citizen rights, economic and environmental sustainability.

This wording is perhaps more red than green, though still wide enough for coalition building. What, after all, is there to object to in it? It also avoids some of the wooliness of Lucas’s desire to ‘build support’. Success in ‘building support’ is necessarily dependent on the will of other states, and does not therefore fit well as an instruction from this parliament on what the UK government should do in the interests of its own citizens.

More than anything, though, it is a third option that you might actually expect to see on a referendum ballot paper, alongside the straight ’yes’ and the ‘no’, and could become the hallmark of Labour’s distinctive vision of what Europe should be about even after it is voted down.

Labour’s key message can become, now that Europe is much more ‘real’ for most people, that Britain will better off under a Labour government seriously engaged with reforming the EU than under a bunch of lunatic Tories whose key concern is the EU’s latest ‘ban’ on irregularly shaped fruit.

The Cabinet Office is running a statutory consultation until 18th November on the future policy direction of the Big Lottery Fund (BLF).

Proposed new policy direction B is…

The need to ensure that the Fund achieves the distribution of funds to a reasonably wide spread of projects, primarily those delivered by the voluntary and community sector and social enterprises, including small organisations, those organisations operating at a purely local level, newly constituted organisations, organisations operating as social enterprises and organisations with a base in the United Kingdom and working overseas (my emphasis).

The small but significant change here is that, under this new direction, not all money will go to the VCS (in its broadest terms).

This is quite different from what was promised in the Conservative manifesto in 2010:

We will restore the national Lottery to its original purpose and, by cutting down on administration costs, make sure more money goes to good causes. the big Lottery fund will focus purely on supporting social action through the voluntary and community sector, instead of ministers’ pet projects as at present. Sports, heritage and the arts will each see their original allocations of 20 per cent of good cause money restored (p.39, my emphasis).

It is also quite different from what we were told, nearly exactly a year ago, by a Tory Minister:

The National Lottery has a fine record of supporting VCS projects, and we are absolutely clear that this work should continue. We will be directing the Big Lottery Fund to make sure that its future funding is focused very clearly on the VCS (my emphasis);

Fortunately, those good people down at the National Association for Voluntary and Community Action (NAVCA) have spotted the subtle change of language, and their Chief Executive has come out fighting:

A year ago the Government reduced the share of good cause money going to the Big Lottery Fund from 50% to 40% and increased the shares going to support heritage, sport and art. At that time Ministers promised that 100% of Big Lottery Fund spend would be in the voluntary sector. Now they are just saying that primarily the money will go to our sector.

Public spending cuts especially in local government grants mean that there is more pressure than ever on lottery funding. I am worried that this is a quiet signal that more Big Lottery Fund spending will go to the statutory sector. And I would feel that the whole voluntary sector has been let down if the government reneges upon the reassurances it gave us just 12 months ago.

NAVCA estimates that if this new policy direction is followed through as they fear, up to £300 million a year could be lost to local charities and community groups.

Last week’s childcare support announcement started to fall apart under scrutiny, and today TCF and False Economy exposed how Cameron’s very personal ”Community right-to-buy” promise didn’t make it as far as reality. Here again the Tory devil is hidden in the civil service detail.

It really is starting to look like cuts by subterfuge may be a deliberate government strategy.

As now families will be able to recover childcare costs at 70 per cent – up to £175 for one child or £300 for two or more children per week. The money will be paid through Universal Credit from 2013 and will mean that around 80,000 more families with children will be able to work the hours they choose.

Let’s set aside quickly two more obvious matters already widely commented upon: first, this support doesn’t start for another 18 months; second, it does nothing for those working/wanting to work 16 hours or more per week, who suffered big cuts in April 2011.

What commenters don’t appear to have noticed is that for the most women who work or want to work for less than 16 hours per week, all of that childcare is already free, and has been for some time now.

Yes, that’s right. The government is offering to pay up to 70% of childcare costs on hours of childcare which, for most parents, are 100% free anyway.

This 100% free care comes under the longstanding Nursery Education Grant programme, under which all children 3 years and over get 15 hours per week free provision.

The programme is also already being extended, plans, to provide the same free care for children 2 years and over.

So in fact the only group who will benefit properly under the new scheme are parents of 0-2 year old children.

While there will be some benefit around the margins, it’s difficult to see this move by the government as anything other than a short-term panic measure, whether or not backed by some cunning plan to ‘unspend’ some of the £300 million once everything settles down.

No wonder Labour called it nothing more than a ‘smoke and mirrors’ announcement.

—
A longer version is at Though Cowards Flinch

The failure to release any funds was acknowledged by Philippa Lloyd, Director of Economic Development at BIS in a reply to a Freedom of Informatio request seeking copies of all bids approved for funding under the scheme to date.

In the letter, Ms Lloyd admitted:

The successful bids are currently undergoing due diligence (apart from one which has completed the due diligence and has been provided with a final offer letter) before a final offer of funds can be made.

The failure to spend any of the £1.4bn Growth Fund budget will be a source of embarassment to the Coalition as it discusses whether or not to invest £5bn in infrastructure works as a way to promote growth.

When the fund was first announced on 29 June 2010, Nick Clegg, Vince Cable and Communites Secretary Eric Pickles were all keen to be associated with the announcement, with Clegg saying: “this fund can make a real difference to companies during difficult times.

At the time, Eric Pickles stressed the urgency of getting the Fund under way, stating that he did not want to “strangle business with red tape” and that “Urgent action is needed to rebuild and rebalance local economies so that new businesses and economic opportunities spread across the country.”

Presumably, Lansley is banking on us all having short memories, and hoping that we’ve forgotten the main reason these costs may be unaffordable.

I haven’t.

As I reported here, this is the main reason the PFI costs are unaffordable:

compounded over the five years for which [NHS] Monitor has published projections, the efficiency target for hospitals is 37 per cent [from May 2011].

Lansley’s new “findings” are nothing more than a precursor to the announcement of foreclosure on these parts of the NHS Estate.

This is what the Health Service Journal said in April:

The numbers are more than just a description of the financial pressures faced by the NHS, however. They are also the figures the regulator will use from May 1 to assess the robustness of applications from NHS hospitals to become independent foundation trusts and for any takeovers planned.

The firesale has now been announced.

The article focuses solely on the upfront costs of childcare as an obstacle to employment.

As such, it appears to be based on a single press release from insurance firm Aviva, and the author/editor don’t even seem to have bothered to read the report the press release is advertising.

In that report, the Chief Executive of the Daycare Trust is quoted:

Parents in the UK contribute more towards childcare costs than any other country in Europe, and costs have risen every year for the last ten years.

At Daycare Trust we are particularly concerned about the recent cuts to the childcare element of working tax credits. Too many parents are already making the tough decision to give up their jobs because the extortionate costs of childcare do not make it worth their while. We fear that these tax credits cuts will mean that many more parents could also be priced out of the job market.

That is, while costs may be an issue (though this a simplistic argument), an expert in the field suggests that the government’s cutting of tax credits (from April 2011) is the bigger problem*.

As a social enterprise childcare provider, I have plenty of evidence that Daycare Trust is correct in its assessment.

The main problem for many/most families is NOT the cost of childcare, but the changes in April 2011 to Working Tax Credit (both overall ‘withdrawal rate’ and reduction in proportion of childcare costs covered by childcare element of WTC from 80% to 70%). See here for a quick summary of changes and the TUC site etc. for examples of impacts.

As a social enterprise childcare provider I’m seeing a big change in families’ plans, as they come to terms with these cuts (many people have just received their tax credit settlement and have made decisions in the last month or so).

This has led to significant loss of business for us. The tax credit changes are much more important to people’s decisions than our inflation-related fee increases, which we publicised some time ago.

The Coalition counterproductive austerity measures, not childcare providers, are to blame for the lack of choice many women now face. It’s a pity the Guardian has not said that.

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*(To be scrupulously fair, the press release focuses on data from the last year, before the main impact of the WTC changes, but it still seems odd for the Guardian to have left the new developments out, especially when the report highlights them.)

Sean Woodward’s secret strategy memo tells the Shadow Cabinet:

[T]he very terrain on which we will fight is changing……..Analysis of Tory party policy, carried out over the summer, convincingly demonstrates the Conservatives are shifting to a distinctly rightwing strategy, in both their chosen focus on issues and their solutions.

Subsequently, I developed the analysis further, arguing that Cameron’s own political make-up is dominated less by an adherence to Thatcherite thinking than by more traditional upper-class attitudes to government, in which “high” and “low” politics are separated, leading to a leadership style in which trifling matters like welfare, health and education are handed over to the Thatcherite nutters in the party, except on occasions where those nutters’ excesses mean he has to intervene for a while.

Of course, there will be the inevitable kickback from the unreconstructed Blairites. Paul ‘The Thinker’ Richards is straight in there, giving the Spectator the fodder they want with this tweet:

I spent the 80s yelling ‘rightwing’ at Tories RT @anthonypainter: @chuzzlit @alexsmith1982 he’s refighting the 1992 general election.

Clearly Richards is unable to grasp the nuance that attacking Cameron for his class-based traditional Conservatism might be different from attacking Thatcher for her very non-traditional approach to Conservative government.

In fact, Martin Bright’s (Spectator columnist) own hostile reaction to the Woodward paper is closer to the mark:

Great scoop from The Observer on Labour strategy. Shame about the strategy. Should be attacking Coalition competence not Tory rightwingery.

Bright is right that Coalition competence should be Labour’s main target, but fails to see that Cameron’s own lack of “low politics” competence is actually a direct result of this “[high] Tory rightwingery”.

Bright fails to see that a main attack point during the recent riots, for example, should have been that Cameron failed to return from holiday to oversee the riot response until such a time as he felt he need to play the great statesman. That achieved, he buggered off on holiday again.

The attack should have been around the fact that Cameron’s competence in government extends only as far as the maintenance of his own image as high Tory statesman, and stops short of a capacity actually to govern the country properly.

Similarly, Woodward appears to miss the point, when he accepts that Cameron is (in the Observer’s words) ”regarded as a skilful manipulator of his image”.

The point is that what is that Cameron’s image-making strength is also his biggest potential weakness, if Labour can expose the distance between Cameron as statesman and Cameron as the head of a supposedly modern government.

Nevertheless, it does look like Labour’s leaders may finally be headed in the right direction, and a year late in developing this attack line is better than not at all.

It’s a pity, though, that Sean Woodward doesn’t read Though Cowards Flinch regularly. We’d be a lot further forward if he did.

As such, the article offers an important lesson for the Centre Left/Left on how to do things better the next time it gets the chance.

For our purposes, this is the crucial section in the article:

Most of them [those involved in the riots] are shaping up that way by the time they are in primary school or even in nursery. They then grow up in circumstances where their role models are drug dealers, pimps, people with knives and guns, people who will exploit them and abuse them but with whom they feel a belonging. Hence the gang culture that is so destructive…..

By the end of my time as prime minister, I concluded that the solution was specific and quite different from conventional policy. We had to be prepared to intervene literally family by family and at an early stage, even before any criminality had occurred. And we had to reform the laws around criminal justice, including on antisocial behaviour, organised crime and the treatment of persistent offenders. We had to treat the gangs in a completely different way to have any hope of success. The agenda that came out of this was conceived in my last years of office, but it had to be attempted against a constant backdrop of opposition, left and right, on civil liberty grounds and on the basis we were “stigmatising” young people. After I’d left, the agenda lost momentum. But the papers and the work are all there.

Let us leave aside the petty jibe that, had Blair remained in office, he would have sorted out gangs and gangs culture by now, so it must be Gordon Brown’s fault.

But I think there is more to Blair’s article than a simply attempt to cast himself in the best light possible.  I think Blair’s revisionist narrative tells us a lot about the New Labour approach to social policy in general.  

Underlying Blair’s revisionist narrative is New Labour’s core managerialist assumption that if a problem has not been resolved, it is because the policy designed to resolve it was wrong, and a new policy is needed.  In most cases under New Labour, this new policy tended to be a shift towards the authoritarian right. 

What New Labour’s consistently failed to grasp was that policy as implemented is hardly ever the same as policy devised, and that the main reason top-down policies fail to deliver on their objectives is that policy implementation is mediated by frontline workers. 

New Labour’s obsession with targets in particular stopped it from realising that the best way to develop effective policy is not to insist a bit harder that frontline workers should be strategic and focused (through the creation of an Implementation Unit reporting directly to Blair), but to trust frontline workers to do their jobs, and resource them appropriately.

None of this, of course, provides an answer to how government should deal with anti-social behaviour and gang culture.  

The issues are deep, the problems intractable, and there is no silver bullet, though I have suggested here that a part of the solution MUST be to recognise that the problems we face today were caused by deliberate government action is the 1960s and 1970s, and that only be taking responsibility for these mistakes will any future Labour government be in a position to give a whole generation of disaffected young people a fresh stake in mainstream society.  Such a ‘truth and reconciliation’ process will need to be in addition to the creation of a material environment  through decent quality jobs and a public environment which nurture mutual respect. 

But before all of that, Milibandian Labour needs to recognise, and reflect upon, some very straightforward truths about what New Labour got wrong, and which Blair continues to get wrong (and it is not even in the Tory hierarchy’s interests even to understand the concepts covered here).  

Effective policymaking and implementation are not just about ideas on what might work and then announcing the grand plan;  they are about handing over the power to make it happen.  That should be a central plank of what makes Labour different from the Tories.

The letter concerns the media controversy over the way in which the ONS reported on the Q2 GDP Statistical Bulletin, referring to several ‘special factors’ as reasons why the growth figures was only 0.2%.

The Bulletin by the ONS went as far as to suggest that, without these special factors, growth ”may” have been 0.7%, although an important caveat is added:

These estimates must be regarded as broad brush and illustrative. There can be no certainty as to the impact of the special events and there may be other factors at play.

The letter from the Chair of the Statistics Authority in response is carefully worded but, amidst the niceties, this section stands out:

There may be benefit in further developing the commentary so that it is fully understood by all commentators that a discussion of special factors will routinely be published regardless of whether the effects of those factors is to increase or decrease GDP. It may also be that any quantified estimate of the net effect of the special factors should only be published as part of a full analysis, if at all.

It is hard to read this as anything other than a slap on the wrist from the regulator, who is clearly concerned that ONS is being drawn into a defence of the Coalition, through the use of “quantified estimates” which are totally unbacked by any justifying rationale, but appear to have been plucked out of the air as a way of helping the Coalition explain away the poor growth.

The Director General of ONS has replied to the regulator with an equally carefully worded letter, in which he slips in what is effectively an admision of guilt, under the guise of an update about methodoligical review:

We will in the autumn be reviewing with the GSS Methodology Advisory Committee the approach we are taking on the estimation of the effects of special factors. I will ensure that review takes account of the points you have raised.

It’s good to see the National Statistics regulator on his toes, but I for one will be taking an interest in whether and how this methodological review is carried through.

If the Coalition starts to think that it can get away not just with undue influence over the media, but also – however discreetly – over quintessential aspects of the country’s civil service machinery, trouble surely lies ahead.

Frankly, whether or not he does go is unlikely to be very heavily influenced either by Labour or what is reported in the media.

Even so, every little helps, and it’s important for Labour to get its broad narrative right as the revelations continue to spill out.

The temptation will be for Labour to go for the Cameron jugular, setting out in ever increasing detail how Cameron and his inner circle (including Osborne) knew perfectly well what they were doing when them employed Coulson, how they’ve deliberately spread misinformation about who they met where and when, and how they’re desperate to see an end to the affairs so that Murdoch can continue on his no-longer-quite-so-merry-way towards total domination of the UK media.

Labour’s sniffer dogs and rottweilers are chomping at the bit for a meaty piece of the action.

I’m not so sure that this is the right approach.

I’ve been out and about a lot over the weekend around Bickerstaffe and Skelmersdale, and people are well aware of the growing scandal. But the people I’ve spoken to are not very aware of the detail, and have no great desire to be. They just think it’s all bloody typical of the political/metropolitan classes.

Trying to pin Cameron on detail is therefore largely irrelevant to most people.

People do know that the main phone hacking predated Cameron in office, and solely on that score he remains innocent in the eyes of the public at the moment.

The picture Labour does need to paint of Cameron is that of incompetent, upper class dupe, not least because it is true.

Cameron recruited Coulson to his inner circle – the only working class person to join it – because he didn’t know any better. Cameron met Murdoch dozens of times, even when he should have known better, because he didn’t know any better.

There is now a good respository of evidence to show that Cameron is unfit to govern Britain because his upper-class background means he simply doesn’t understand how things work. The latest one was his image of GPs at 1950s ‘Private Function’ dinner parties, but there is plenty more where that came from – thinking that his own constituency still has Council houses is just one more in the list.

The image Labour needs to create about Cameron and Coulson’s relationship is something like we see in a 1960s St Trinians’ movie, where the Cockney wide boy invades the upper class world with ’hilarious’ results.

Labour needs to attack Cameron not because he is the main villain of the piece – he isn’t. They should attack him because he’s an incompetent upper class fool, unfit for the realities and complexities of modern government.

People with money can get friendly with their local GP at a dinner party, maybe see them out of hours if there’s an emergency. In this world of restricted choice and freedom it’s the poorest who lose out.

First, there’s the idea that people seek out a GP when they have an “emergency”. What world is Cameron living in?

The idea of the 19th century personal physician, always at the beck and call of the elite, springs to mind.

More seriously, Cameron here comes close to accusing GPs of outright corruption, and he certainly suggests that many of them are not following the duty of a doctor set out by the General Medical Council to:

Never discriminate unfairly against patients or colleagues.

Cameron’s view that a standard GP is part of a ‘dinner paty’ clique is more a reflection of his upper-class background than it is of any kind of reality.

The reality is that the dinner party circuit as envisaged by Cameron is a phenomenon really quite specific to the ‘networking’ ruling class that Cameron inhabits; in most towns and cities up and down the country, it simply doesn’t exist.

If there is one statement from the last year that sums up Cameron’s lack of experience of the real world, a lack of experience which makes him fundamentally unfit to govern Britain, then this is surely it.

I’ll leave the last word to a very angry GP on the Pulse Today comments board (grammar and spelling slightly tidied):

Mr Cameron is obviously delusional considering his sense of reality – time to stop sniffing the solvents, Mr PM. His public school boy background obviously afforded him such great insight into social dynamics! He thinks he knows more about the average GP’s social calendar than we do.

What a twat! Since when do most GPs attend dinner parties with their patients in attendance? Utter bollocks. He’s just slinging mud at GP’s to deflect the shit storm facing him in the wake of his relationship with corrupt press officers and ahead of the BMA’s action on pensions.

Indeed.