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Archive for 2012

We must keep the Post public

18/07/2012, 11:56:15 AM

by Amanda Ramsay

Yesterday the Business, Innovation and Skills select committee published Post Office Network Transformation: a progress report, scrutinising controversial plans to change post office services. It makes stark reading for users of postal services and postal workers alike.

From this summer, many consumers across the UK will see a new model of post office in their area known as a Post Office Local, moving services to within existing retail premises, such as shops and garages. The so called “Local model” will not offer the full product range of traditional sub-post offices, leaving hundreds of postmasters and their communities facing the loss of core post office services.

Billy Hayes, Communication Workers Union (CWU) general secretary, is calling for a moratorium on any formal rollout of the Locals model and says: “If this programme marches ahead, post offices close and then services fail, it will either be costly to re-open a post office or will leave communities without these services.”

The Locals model would have simply been rolled out, had it not been for the work of the MPs on the Business, Innovation and Skills select committee and the CWU, who asked the committee to carry out this review.

This Tory-led government wasted no time in getting to work on privatising postal services. Something even Margaret Thatcher hesitated to do. The Postal Services Act (2011) allows the government to privatise the Royal Mail. The Post Office is already operating as an independent company as of this year, with little noticeable political discussion or dissent. There needs to be a high profile public campaign to protect this valued institution.

Right-wing calls for these changes to post office services date back to 2010 when the government made a policy announcement: “Securing the Post Office Network in the Digital Age”. One of the arguments advanced at the time was that the rise of e-mail correspondence had reduced the need for post office services. But, the huge rise of internet shopping says otherwise, as parcel traffic is at a high.

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It’s time for a “victims law” where the state recognises its obligation to homicide victims

18/07/2012, 07:00:41 AM

Last week David Hines won the “top of the policies” vote at Pragmatic Radicalism’s justice/constitutional reform event, chaired by Sadiq Khan MP, shadow justice secretary. The winning proposal was for a “victims’ law”

Almost twenty years ago, my wife Kathy and I fought a painful 3 year court battle to adopt our infant grandson.

The boy had been left parentless when his mother was killed and his father was sent to prison… for committing the murder.

Three years seems like an eternity for people trying to rescue a victimized child from the social services system. The ordeal seemed even more unnecessarily lengthy (and outrageously expensive) since we were the boy’s blood relatives; his murdered mother was our own daughter.

The victims of murder live a lifetime of pain and anguish. At the corner pub, people whisper about them from the next table over. Neighbours drop off flowers and then look away. Lifelong friends, never sure what to say or afraid to seem happy in front of people in perpetual mourning, fade away.

We were extremely hurt by how the system us down – not only through the painstaking adoption process but also during the trial and criminal conviction process.

My anger grew when I saw my daughter’s murderer benefiting from the social service system (appointed counsel, fed, clothed, housed, and treated humanely). That’s where the tax payer’s money is going. The granting of legal aid to a murderer and the refusal of aid to the victims’ family was an injustice and insult.

The system’s betrayal was particularly pointed for me, because, as an elected magistrate, I had been a proud part of the mechanism of justice. I was supposed to be the knowledgeable one. I was working in the system.

It made me feel that everything in this awful situation was geared for the criminal not the victims.

That’s why I founded the National Victim’s Association and why I went to the Pragmatic Radicalism “top of the policies” event to propose a new policy for Labour: a “victims law”

This would create a legal and statutory obligation to care for the victims of homicide that raise children resulting from a murder or manslaughter.

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Promoting gesture candidates should be none of Labour’s business

17/07/2012, 02:19:52 PM

by Kevin Meagher

It seems gesture politics is alive and well, although the latest outbreak has popped up in an unexpected place.

We learn today that the Labour party wants more candidates for elected office to come from a business background. It wants to extend the future candidates programme and get sitting MPs to mentor potential applicants from business. They won’t even need to be party members, just sympathetic to Labour’s ‘values’.

Of course the days when Labour candidates overwhelmingly came from trade unions, local government, universities or public sector management are disappearing. The last decade has shown that people who support Labour now work everywhere.

We should embrace that plurality. It is a success for Labour’s ambition to be a true ‘one nation’ party. And ‘business’ covers everything from executives of blue chip companies through to one-man band start-ups.

All oppositions have to reach out to build goodwill and support and it is right to do so. And Labour’s business reception in the City tonight is a good and useful thing to do.

But the announcement about candidates feels like a piece of crude brand positioning – an attempt to counter the charge that Labour is somehow anti-business. If that’s the real motive then there are better ways of going about responding to it.

If we need a concrete message for tonight’s business reception, how about promising that missives from HM Revenue and Customs will be written in plain English? That would be greeted with hosannas from every small business in the land. Or perhaps reverse the closure of HMRC front counter offices? Or how about a dedicated account manager for each small business?

Meet, talk and discuss with business by all means, but offering special access into the party’s selection processes is as abasing as it is pointless. Abasing because it sends the signal ‘we don’t – cannot – understand business without you’ and pointless because the take-up will be so low.

Do we really think there will be a rush from the executive corridors of Britain to spend evenings in residents’ association meetings or to take pay cuts to serve as MPs?

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Why aren’t home office civil servants in the dock along with G4S?

17/07/2012, 07:00:04 AM

by Atul Hatwal

At midday today Nick Buckles, chief executive of G4S will begin some of the most uncomfortable minutes of his life.

His questioning by MPs on the home affairs select committee will lead the news bulletins. The management double talk, where simple failure becomes “complex human resource supply chain capacity challenges” or some similar corporate confection, will be boringly familiar.

Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch, Bob Diamond, and now, Nick Buckles; a nation’s heads will shake in bewilderment across the country, as the news plays out.

But, for all the justified anger and rolled eyeballs at yet another example of egregious corporate malfeasance, something will be missing from proceedings.

Buckles’ pain and squirming will satiate some of the desire for public retribution yet this disaster, as with all government procurement catastrophes, was not the sole responsibility of the private sector.

This contract was allowed to careen horrendously off the rails by civil servants.

In a past life I spent years working projects like this when they used to be called public private partnerships. For all the anger that is directed at the private sector, in one sense, the old title of these projects was right.

They are partnerships.

For every bad contractor spectacularly failing to deliver, there will inevitably have been shoddy, amateurish management by the civil servants running the contract. Never one without the other.

The numbers of checks, committee approvals and monitoring reports that need to be completed in any public contract mean that it should be impossible for something like the G4S scandal to suddenly erupt across our TV screens.

Should be.

At each turn, G4S will undoubtedly have failed to meet the required standard but a brigade of home office civil servants will have been sufficiently incompetent not to notice or do anything about it if they did.

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Progress are here to stay, get over it

16/07/2012, 01:32:14 PM

by Curtis McLellan

It’s been a strange few weeks to be a Progress member, a Unite member and a Labour party member. It is almost like me and my kind are persona non grata. Well, I am not ashamed. My kind are part of a long proud lineage of revisionist thought in the Labour party. My kind and our thought laid the philosophical foundations for an unprecedented 13 years of Labour government.

My kind bided our time whilst the other side had their 1983 manifesto, we fought against Trotskyist entryism, siding with the unions to remove that threat. We had internal victories and internal defeats, but there was one thing for certain: we were in perpetual opposition. And then, in 1996, many of my predecessors formed a think-tank to generate ideas for the fledgling New Labour project. A year later, well, the rest is history.

For all of you still pretending that it is simply an “organisational” spat, who still believe in the platitudes that we are a broad church, be under no illusion. This is an ideological attack on Progress and the philosophy of New Labour, cloak and dagger.

In all honesty, anyone on the centre should have seen it coming. We were in the ascendancy for too long, and now we are in decline. That is the cyclical nature of internal Labour party politics, and it is now time for revenge. They’ve got their party back. For those of you who disliked Luke Akehurst’s Niemoller analogy, look away now: prepare for a period of Stalin-like rewriting of history. Unite call the last Labour government “a bitter disappointment”.

Why? Was there too much employment? Too high a quality of life (certainly better than before and now)? Did the minimum wage grind their gears? Perhaps the low number of strikes annoyed them. Or maybe there were too many hospitals and schools built, or the top tax rate was too low. I don’t know, but it certainly wasn’t what some union leaders had wanted. But it’s not just the past, and how bad New Labour was that draws union leaders’ ire. It’s the influence of New Labour now.

I should hope that Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, two members of New Labour government, feel quite insulted that they are not thought to be able to think for themselves. The times that they adopt centrist policy, it is claimed by Unite, is only at the times that those nasty Blairites lean on them:

“‘it was Progress who argued that Labour’s front bench needed to support cuts and wage restraint. Congress regrets that Ed Miliband caved into this pressure. Congress notes with concern the support by Ed Balls and Ed Miliband for public sector pay restraint, thus giving credibility to Tory arguments about the deficit”.

For the record, Progress did not argue that.

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The Cameron project has stalled

16/07/2012, 07:00:05 AM

by David Talbot

The Cameron project is now in major crisis. When a smooth talking, young Conservative leader burst on to the British political since in late 2005 he talked a new language for the new Conservatives. The project had a clear-cut logic and sensibility.

After three election defeats the Conservatives could no longer content itself in its own obsessions, talking to nobody but itself and lecturing us on tax, immigration, law and order and Europe when most sane members of the British public had long since given up listening.

The approach drew unapologetically from New Labour. Cameron, for his many faults, was one of the few Conservatives who clearly understood that the Tory brand had become the central problem and that it had to be detoxified. Then, and only then, could the whole edifice be modernised, renewed and the long, slow reconnection with the voters begun. This is what led to Cameron’s most memorable moments in opposition.

The original appeal of Cameron’s leadership was that he would break with his party’s past. He was emphatically not a traditional conservative. So a party that was neither socially liberal, green nor redistributionist was forced to lump Cameron “hugging a hoody”, having photographs with huskies and engaging in wild talk about “sharing the proceeds of growth”.

It was all part of his bitter struggle to rid the “nasty party” image that he, and the public, so disliked. The trouble is, unlike New Labour, the game failed miserably for Cameron at the last general election. His party only managed to defeat Gordon Brown’s policy-less, self-obsessed, exhausted and divided administration by a mere 48 seats.

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Westminster’s Tony Montana needs to learn how to chillax

13/07/2012, 12:17:37 PM

by Kevin Meagher

Those prime ministers whom the gods wish to destroy they first ridicule.

The current incumbent, who once promised to “let sunshine win the day” has a face like thunder these days.

That’s because David Cameron’s once-luxuriant Teflon coating has now rubbed off leaving him mired in a series of presentational sticky patches. He’s getting to know what ridicule is all about.

From his cosy relationship with the Murdoch empire through to leaving his daughter at the pub, the gaffes mount; while his performances at prime minister’s questions are becoming an erratic series of desperate lunges and hacking motions. The rapier has become a bludgeon.

His latest scrape, berating Tory backbencher Jesse Norman who led Tuesday’s House of Lords rebellion against the government, is now Westminster folklore.

What gives the story added comedy value is the tale of four government whips banishing Norman from the parliamentary precinct. Was it for his own good? Did they think Dave would pop a cap in him during a corridor “walk by” if he hung around?

Red-faced, finger-jabbing, insult-waving petulance is not behaviour that adds to the prime ministerial lustre.

As he put it himself when goading his predecessor-but-one, “he was the future once”. It is a telling remark. Slowly, but assuredly, David Cameron is turning into yesterday’s man.

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Leveson heads for press regulation proposals that will mean war with the papers

13/07/2012, 07:00:49 AM

by Atul Hatwal

Did you know Leveson was sitting yesterday? Thought not. But away from the high political drama of Jeremy Hunt or low criminality of hacking, this was one of the most interesting sessions.

Inquiries are defined by the character of their principals. The decidedly establishment mores of Lord Hutton became clearer throughout the progress of his investigation into death of David Kelly just as the more challenging approach of Lord Macpherson was increasingly evident in his conduct of the inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s murder.

In this latest phase of the Leveson inquiry, which has moved on to deal with the future of press regulation, Brian Leveson’s character is emerging. And most pertinently, his thoughts on what he will propose seem to have crystallised.

The key witness yesterday was Sir Charles Anthony St.John Gray.

Gray is notable for three reasons: his background, suggested approach to regulation and Leveson’s interventions.

First, as Leveson acknowledged, Sir Charles Gray is one of his long standing friends. Both served at the bar and as judges in the House of Lords, until, in the words of Leveson, Gray, “decided that he’d had enough”. The professional experiences and social environment that shaped Gray’s outlook have equally moulded Leveson.

Second, Gray runs an organisation called Early Resolution (ER). It is a body that adjudicates on press disputes without having to go through the time and cost of a full court case. ER is voluntary but Gray was up before Leveson proposing a mandatory incarnation of his organisation as the new press regulator.

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Whip’s Notebook: Oh what a night

12/07/2012, 11:00:41 AM

by Jon Ashworth

Supporters of a democratic House of Lords can take cheer that on Tuesday night the Commons voted by 462 to 124 give the House of Lords reform bill a second reading. But what a night. What a rebellion.

92 Tory MPs rebelled against their leader’s position. That’s a bigger rebellion than the recent EU referendum vote and almost the biggest Tory rebellion post-war.

From the start of the debate on Monday, Labour MPs have witnessed a slow motion car crash unfold for the Tory whips and No 10 which culminated, apparently, in an angry exhausted red faced Prime Minister angrily jabbing the chest of a leading rebel late at night in the corridors of the Commons. No wonder influential Lib Dem blogs are comparing David Cameron to John Major.

Should last night’s rebellion have come as much of a surprise to the prime minister and his Liberal Democrat colleagues?

Probably not.

For weeks Tory MPs have sidled up to me in the tea room and elsewhere asking for guidance on what Labour’s tactics would be. Fortunately our position was and had been always clear: to vote against the programme motion but support democratising the Lords and so vote in favour of the bill at second reading.

It’s been less straightforward on the government side with question marks over whether the government would win a vote on curtailing the timetable for debate, the so called programme motion.

On Monday, rumour had it the Tory whips were so worried about losing the programme motion that they were encouraging dissident MPs to vote in favour or abstain but rebel on second reading. But the Tory whips’ strategy was soon to be shot to pieces.

Early on Tuesday afternoon, Nick Clegg was still defending the programme motion but minutes later the Leader of the House Sir George Young opening the debate was forced to withdraw the very same programme motion.

Sir George tried to blame the Labour opposition for government’s failure to build support for the programme motion, an incredible claim later torpedoed by leading Tory rebel Jesse Norman who helpfully pointed out to Sir George that the government had been forced to withdraw it due to opposition on the Tory benches.

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Why is the government delaying on social care?

12/07/2012, 07:00:39 AM

by Peter Watt

It may have been a dream once, but free social care for adults who need it is not going to happen. The majority of adults in this group are aged over 65, about 1 million of them. The state does not currently pay for all of their care and so many have to pay some or all of their costs. The reality is that whoever is in government in the future, this situation is only going to get more difficult.

Right now, if you think that you need social care then the local authority has to carry out an assessment of your needs and then and assessment of your finances. Firstly they see if you are sufficiently impaired so that you need help and then they decide if you or they have to pay.

Increasingly though, the thresholds being used by councils to decide if you are sufficiently impaired are being raised; it means that the numbers of people that they have to provide help to can be reduced along with their costs. But it doesn’t mean that the needs are less!

So many people who need help with washing, cooking, dressing, and so on have to pay someone to do it. And similarly many people who need to go into residential care have to pay. Essentially if you have savings of less than £14,250 then care at home is free; between that point and £23,250 the costs are shared and after that you’re on your own.

If you need residential care and own your house then, unless your partner is continuing to live there, then you will probably have to sell your house to pay for your care. Quite frankly the situation is a nightmare for hundreds of thousands of families. You don’t think about it until it is too late; you don’t know what it is you may have to pay for and you don’t know for how long you will have to pay!

The result is that 800,000 older people are going without the care that they need or are relying on friends and family, whilst a further 500,000 are paying for their own care.

But the answer is not to pretend that somehow it can all be solved just by throwing money at the problem. Or that it is all the fault of the government and cuts. Labour had 13 years to solve it and didn’t; we don’t have the money and quite simply we’re not going to have it.

The need to reduce our structural deficit means that there are hard choices to be made by this government and the next. The fact is that many older people do in fact have the resources that mean that they can contribute to their care.

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