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Archive for 2012

If we believe in a British nuclear deterrent, Trident is our only option

24/07/2012, 07:00:06 AM

by Alan West

The debate over the future of Trident is coming to the public fore. This is an emotive issue and our starting point must be to respect the strength of feeling on all sides.

It is important, however, that the debate is based in fact and evidence.

This leads me personally to conclude that maintaining the present Trident ballistic missile system is the best option if UK is to remain a nuclear weapon state. Numerous studies over the past 40 years have reaffirmed that.

I have been involved in a couple of those studies. Having looked at other options in detail it is quite clear that none of them are as cheap or practical as their supporters claim.

Recently the benefits of going for a cruise missile option carried in Astute class submarines have been articulated.

The first thing to remember about this is that no appropriate cruise missile exists. The UK would have to develop, test and bring into service a new weapon. Even allowing for the “triumph of optimism”, such a programme would be complex, fraught with risk (we have not developed such a missile before) and extremely expensive.

We would have to embark on a new warhead development programme for a nuclear package that would be capable of fitting into other weapon delivery systems. The design and production of completely new warheads would be hugely expensive.

The new missiles and weapon system would have to be regularly and rigorously tested on all measures of performance. This would involve the development of further new technologies and new associated assets. At present the US provide all the facilities for Trident test firings, so all of this would be a further cost to our exchequer.

We then come on to the operational issues.

What range should these missiles have? How many missiles should we have? How many cruise missiles should each Astute carry? Should all Astutes carry nuclear tipped missiles? How many Astute class submarines would be required? The answers to these questions have implications for cost and capability which I do not see evidence of having been thought through by proponents of this model.

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Time for a more honest debate on immigration control

23/07/2012, 04:28:38 PM

by Matt Cavanagh

Today’s report by the Home Affairs Select Committee into the UK Border Agency makes uncomfortable reading for the Government. The report identifies a series of new “backlogs” building up – unsuccessful asylum seekers, visa overstayers, and foreign-national offenders who should be deported at the end of their sentence – in total numbering almost 300,000.

There are continuing management failings at the agency, and in the way it works with other parts of government, and the Committee is right to highlight them.

But the truth is that while in the early 2000s, this was a failing organisation (not “fit for purpose”, if you prefer) by 2010 it had been dragged up to a roughly similar level of competence and morale to the rest of government.

There are worrying signs that it is slipping backwards, in particular due to spending cuts. The coalition’s line is that the staff being made redundant will be replaced by new technology, but the synchronisation is wrong: rather than waiting for the technology to prove itself before taking the dividend in reduced staff numbers, the cuts started at the same time as the technology programme was mired in delays.

Some of the biggest challenges, however, are beyond the control of the agency – and even that of the government as a whole. Take the issue of removing those who have overstayed their visas, or had their asylum claim rejected, or were here legally but then committed a serious crime which should see them deported. This is one of those problems which, in opposition, both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats colluded with the media in presenting as easy to solve.

It is becoming increasingly clear that, in government, their performance has been no better than Labour’s – if anything slightly worse. The number of foreign national offenders removed at the end of their sentence, which rose each year from 2006 to 2009, has fallen each year since.

Today’s report highlights the growing backlog of visa overstayers, which the home office apparently has no strategy for dealing with – and warns that the backlog of unsuccessful asylum cases, recently cleared, may be starting to build up again.

This is an area where the policy and politics of immigration would be greatly improved if all parties decided to join together and be honest with the media and the public about the constraints on what government can realistically achieve.

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Labour seeks divine inspiration for new funds

23/07/2012, 07:00:45 AM

Labour’s belated appointment of a commercial director finally completes the new senior management team. Given the parlous state of the party finances, this is perhaps the most important appointment of all.

Broadening Labour’s donor base to attract corporate funds is essential not just to tackle the party’s debt, but to deepen Labour’s ties with business. Last year in 2011, total donations from individuals, companies and limited liability partnerships to the party were just £1.2m – 6% of total income of £19,316,555.

It’s a tough challenge and into this breach has stepped John McCaffrey. His track record in raising funds is exemplary: several millions of pounds secured over the past few years. For a role such as fundraising, it is the only metric that counts.

But McCaffrey is in one sense a novel appointment. The official Labour press statement seems straightforward enough,

“John McCaffrey is a leading international fundraiser with years of experience which will be of enormous benefit to the Party. He has worked widely raising very substantial funds across the education, arts and museums sector in the UK and the US.”

But it doesn’t highlight a key element of McCaffrey’s CV.

In the past, Labour’s money men have been sympathetic businessmen, happy to tap their network of contacts. Lord Levy was a case study, and David Cameron’s Eton contemporary, Andrew Feldman, performs a similar role for the Tories.

In contrast, McCaffrey’s background is the church. The Catholic Church to be specific. He has personally raised gargantuan amounts for Catholic causes including $5m in 2006 towards the renovation of the Pauline chapel in the Vatican which has two of Michelangelo’s final frescos and £6.5m towards the cost of the papal visit to Britain in 2010.

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The Sunday review: The years of Lyndon Johnson: the passage of power by Robert A Caro

22/07/2012, 08:00:33 AM

by Anthony Painter

The latest volume of Robert A Caro’s genre re-defining biography of Lyndon Johnson is structured around the mortal battle of two political foes. This conflict comprises both dependence and an antipathy that will define their historical legacy. They can never rid themselves of one another. For all their qualities, their weaknesses are plain and revealed in their fraught interaction. Each would love to be free but their fates have become entwined. It consumes the final decades of both men’s lives. The men to which I refer are, of course, Lyndon Baines Johnson and Robert A Caro.

Whilst the real story lies beneath, the narrative of the book itself is centred on two main characters whose destinies swing around the pivot of John F Kennedy’s assassination. That is Johnson and Robert F Kennedy. Their mutual loathing is seemingly without bound. From the humiliation of the vice-presidency, Johnson emerges, in this volume at least, as a dominant President with a legislative agenda the like of which hadn’t been seen since the New Deal nor since. JFK’s domestic programme was log-jammed and going nowhere. Johnson, the re-emerging master that we saw in volume three, reprises his capacity for institutional transformation and turns the presidency in an active direction. He palpably fails to do the same whilst in vice-presidential office.

John Adams once referred to his position as Vice-President thus, “I am Vice President. In this I am nothing, but I may be everything.” This is the basic premise of the new Armando Iannucci created HBO drama, Veep. Moments of Johnson’s vice-presidency such as when he collapses in a heap while dancing with one of JFK’s mistresses at a socialite-laden Georgetown party might be comedic if they weren’t so painfully tragic. A dominant theme of Caro’s four volumes is the capacity for Johnson to find power in any situation – yet he fails to do this as Vice-President. He physically and emotionally crumbles as a result as he had a tendency to do from time to time.

Johnson’s plight is made all the worse on account of the social clash of cultures as the entitled Kennedys condescend and belittle the man from the Hill Country; JFK refers to him as a bumpkin-esque “Rufus Corpone”. In this, Johnson is frighteningly similar to Richard Nixon – forever burdened by a harsh upbringing, their fathers’ failures, with ferocious energy and drive filling the vacuum where status stood for the New England Harvard crowd. When Johnson and Bobby Kennedy have the opportunity deploy power against the other that is what they do without hesitation while all the time consumed by hate, contempt and fear. At the end of this volume, it is RFK who lies emotionally, physically and politically defeated, drenched in grief. We know he is to rise again – but not yet.

Caro seems clear where his allegiances lie – he’s a JFK man. While wanting to settle the odd historical score with President Kennedy’s biographer, Arthur Schlesinger, he basically appears to be bought into the Kennedy as lost great President narrative. It is the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis later this year and we are likely to hear a great deal about Kennedy’s diplomatic genius. We certainly get a flood of it in the passage of power. Actually, it was Krushchev who achieved far more in strategic terms through the crisis – the protection of Cuba and the removal of Jupiter air missiles from Turkey.

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In honour of Bradley Wiggins…

22/07/2012, 07:00:33 AM

The Style Council – My Ever Changing Moods by UniversalMusicUK

The premier music video of cycling mods for the world’s number one mod on a bike. From 1984, the peerless Style Council with their ever changing moods: bringing together competitive cycling with a biting excoriation of American militarism in Vietnam. Seriously. Watch the video.

No, we don’t know how they make the connection either, but somehow it all works thanks to the magic of Paul Weller, “Merton” Mick Talbot, Steve White and Dee C Lee.

Enjoy.

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Labour gears up for the Bristol mayoral election

20/07/2012, 02:24:19 PM

by Amanda Ramsay

Bristol’s city governance will look very different from November onwards. This week Labour launched the “City Conversation” around what should be the priorities for the first directly elected mayor for the city. Despite big Labour gains in both 2010 and 2011 local elections, at the moment the city council has a Lib Dem leader running a minority administration.

Marvin Rees is Labour’s hopeful to be Bristol mayor. He launched a series of roundtable discussions this week, kicking-off the process with an all member meeting on Wednesday of Bristol Labour Party. Transport was the topic of last night’s roundtable meeting chaired by Lord Andrew Adonis, with experts from across the city. Next week is the health and well-being forum.

Members of Labour’s shadow cabinet including Stephen Twigg, Chuka Umunna and Hilary Benn will be chairing roundtables over the coming weeks on key policy areas such as children and young people, families and communities, the Bristol economy and housing.

Developing a stronger city identity is the name of the game for Labour and Marvin is very much in listening mode with high aspirations for taking Bristol forward: “From higher education to green technology to the creative industries to finance, Bristol is home to world class activity. It is a creative hotbed and an economic powerhouse, but we punch below our weight in too many ways for too many people living here.”

One of the challenges facing campaigners though is the background to all of this. Many Bristolians had reservations, at best, about moving to a system of governance by an elected mayor in the first place. Turn-out in the mayoral referendum was very low, as indeed it was in the other nine English cities with referenda last May.

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Revealed: Unite boss’s plan to turn clock back to 1983 for Labour

20/07/2012, 07:00:45 AM

by Atul Hatwal

A few weeks ago Uncut revealed Unite’s political strategy. How the union intends to take control of local Labour constituency parties, influence parliamentary selections and extract maximum political return for their funding largesse.

The focus of the strategy was on the acquisition and retention of power within the Labour party. Now, one of the most senior officials in the union lays bare what Unite intends to do with that power.

Dave Quayle is chair of Unite’s national political committee. This is the body that is responsible for the management and delivery of the union’s political campaign, from national activity down to Unite’s constituency level plans.

Critically, it is the body that determines how Labour’s biggest donor spends its money in the party.

Comrade Quayle recently gave an interview to the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL) website. This would be the AWL that defines itself as an organisation committed to the ideas of “Marxism and revolutionary socialism”.

He clearly felt among friends as he held forth on how Unite plans to change the Labour party,

“We want a firmly class-based and left-wing general election campaign in 2015. We’ve got to say that Labour is the party of and for workers, not for neo-liberals, bankers, and the free market. That might alienate some people, but that’s tough.”

It’s an extraordinary statement for someone like Quayle to make. Unite’s plans for Labour, backed by the millions of pounds at their disposal, can be summarised: yes to class conflict; no to the free market; and forget about the votes of businessmen, Tory switchers or the centre ground. Anyone in the party disagree? Lump it.

Quayle’s vision genuinely involves turning the clock back to 1983 for Labour.

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Sunday review on Thursday: The Labour Movement in Westmorland by Dr David Clark, Lord Clark of Windermere

19/07/2012, 12:00:38 PM

by Jonathan Todd

Emily Thornberry, who cut her teeth as a Labour parliamentary candidate on the challenging terrain of Canterbury, finds that her computer seeks to autocorrect the word “unwinnable” to “unsinkable”, which she considers apt. David Clark – the long serving MP for South Shields turned Lord of Windermere – has written a history of the Labour movement in Westmorland that supports this view.

“This was only a start”, said Reginald Burnett upon his defeat as the first person to contest the parliamentary seat of Westmorland for Labour in 1924, “but they were going on until they had made Westmorland a safe Labour seat”. Sadly, notwithstanding Burnett’s confused tenses, this has not come to pass.

The hills and lakes of Westmorland are epically beautiful but hardly the Big Meeting, Durham. Still, just as the beach is beneath the paving stones, so too some of Labour’s proudest and most evocative roots have been cultivated in the most unexpected of circumstances. Everything the movement has achieved in Westmorland has been achieved in the face of indifference or hostility, which makes these achievements all the more admirable.

The year after Burnett’s defeat Frank Parrott, a headmaster at a school in Westmorland, received an unexpected visit from “two well-dressed ladies in large hats”. They indicated that they had come to collect their subscription. As he was recently appointed and an “offcomer”, this was perplexing to Parrott, who enquired to what he was supposed to subscribe. When told “the Westmorland Conservative Association” Parrott demurred to offer his subscription or his support. He was rebuked: “But you must Mr Parrott, all headmasters in Westmorland subscribe to the Conservative Association”.

This gives some sense of the entrenched conservatism that has always confronted the Labour in Westmorland. But Parrott went on to be a long-standing Labour councillor. In so doing he was following a trail blazed by Rev Herbert V Mills, who had become the first Labour member of Westmorland County Council in 1892.

Around this time Mills also established a “colony” in Westmorland whose basic purpose was to show that it was possible to rehabilitate individuals who had fallen on difficult times by introducing them to work on the land. This venture received the endorsement of John Ruskin, an early socialist, pioneer of the arts and crafts movement and resident of nearby Coniston.

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Labour needs to be honest about tough spending choices in the NHS

19/07/2012, 07:00:28 AM

by Peter Watt

It has been a particularly tough few months in the NHS. Setting aside the impact of the NHS and Social Care Act (2012), the impact of the freezing of budgets is being well and truly felt. Every week sees another story of a hospital or a patient group in crisis or expressing concern.

July seems to have been particularly difficult. Early in the month we saw the South London Healthcare NHS Trust being put into administration. The Trust consists of three hospitals – Princess Royal in Orpington, Queen Mary’s in Sidcup and the Queen Elizabeth in Woolwich and serves more than one million people.

And then this week the South West Pay, Terms and Conditions Consortium, a group of 19 hospitals in the south west, were shown to be planning to cut the pay and conditions of up to 60,000 staff in order to balance tight budgets. The headlines all warned of doctors and nurses being sacked and of pay and conditions being cut. I had a special interest as one of the hospitals in the consortium, Poole, was where I nursed and I still have friends there.

According to their project initiation document, the consortium has come together in order to:

“…assist Trusts across the South West in modernising pay, terms and conditions to ensure that they are ‘fit for purpose’ going forward.”

In other words they are hoping to challenge national pay and conditions for their staff as a way of bearing down on their staffing costs. Specifically they are exploring a number of options such as reducing anti-social hour’s payments, some degree of reward for performance for incremental progression, reducing holiday entitlement, increasing hours and reductions in pay for staff on over £21,000.

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Is Batman really a conservative?

18/07/2012, 01:55:56 PM

by Anthony Painter

Robert Colville argues zestfully that Batman is a conservative in this morning’s Telegraph. My first reaction was that it’s a strange type of conservative that so flagrantly disregards the rule of law. The whole point of the vigilante, Batman, is that the law cannot protect itself. Therefore, it needs shadowy figures who operate outside of it to save society from itself. It trashes the whole notion of rule of law – it’s difficult to think of anything less conservative than that.

It might well be that Batman seeks conservative ends – order, hierarchy, defined social relations, rule by status. But the means are distinctly non-conservative.

In the Dark Knight he establishes a private panopticon in order to defeat the terrorist, the Joker. Sure, he hands over the access to this system to Lucius Fox, his wise and principled technologist. Access is given not to prevent its use but to facilitate its use – he just doesn’t entirely trust himself. Fox ultimately destroys the system but that’s not at Batman’s instruction.

There are definite signs in the same film that Batman aspires to conservative means as well as ends – he just can’t quite trust them. He wishes to get out of the game and hand over safeguarding of the city’s welfare to Harvey Dent, Gotham’s energetic District Attorney. We are not sure whether he’s thinking straight as this has the advantage of clearing the way to him re-opening his pursuit of Rachel Dawes (who refuses to countenance a marriage to Bruce Wayne while he is still playing at Batman.) Nonetheless, he enthusiastically embraces Dent as a figure who can restore the rule of law.

It all goes terribly wrong as Dent is turned by the Joker into the gruesome Two-Face. In a Michael Corleone fashion, just when he hoped he might be out, Batman is pulled back in. Dent is the greatest hope for the law being able to take care of itself. It fails and so the vigilante is needed once again. Upon, Dent’s death, Batman conspires with Commissioner Gordon to take the blame for murders perpetrated by Two-Face (Dent) as the people of Gotham would not be able to cope with the crimes of their latest saviour, Dent. Propaganda is not beyond our conservative super-hero.

So our Batman is a conservative who doesn’t believe in the rule of law. He is a protector of liberty who wants to turn every mobile phone into a recording, imaging and tracking device. He upholds a people’s values by manufacturing reality. If he is a conservative then it would appear that he’s a conservative in the George W Bush mould.

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