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Commons sketch: PMQs

22/06/2011, 01:54:28 PM

by Dan Hodges

David Cameron is for turning. We know this because he spent the whole of PMQs telling us he is.

Would the prime minister, Kerry McCarthy asked, consider changing his evening viewing plans to watch a BBC documentary on child poverty? Oh yes, he most certainly would.

He would? Blimey. Poor Samantha. “Sorry love, I know we’re supposed to be going for dinner and a show, but I promised some Labour back bencher from Bristol East I’d stay in and watch a programme on impoverished children. All part of my new pragmatic leadership style I’m afraid”.

Ed Miliband sensed an opportunity. The country was at war. The defence chiefs were raising concerns about the mission in Libya. Quite serious issues like not having any planes, ships or guns. Would the prime minister look again to see whether our brave boys and girls had the tools to finish the job?

Look again? Was Ed Miliband kidding? This was pragmatic Dave he was talking to. “We’ve had a review of the national security and defence review”, said the PM proudly.

Reviewed the review? Labour’s leader looked astounded.

Perhaps he was toying with the image of a former Tory Prime Minister standing at that same dispatch box; “We will review them on the beaches. We will review them in the fields and on the landing grounds. We will never stop reviewing”. It would come as news to the military and defence community that all these reviews were flying around, Ed Miliband said. Why hadn’t the results been shared with the experts?

Share the reviews? With experts? David Cameron looked perplexed. He had set up the national security council. It sat weekly, something that came as a relief to those of us worried the defence of the realm took a break for Wimbledon. Its’ role, he said, “was all the time to ask have we got the right resources, do we have the right strategy”. He could have added that the answer to those questions was invariably no, but there wasn’t time. There were more u-turns to me made.

Would the prime minister look at the closure of the post office in Wick asked John Thurso? Stupid question. Of course he would.

Then Ed Miliband sprung his trap. OK, if the PM was so open to persuasion, what about his decision to let rapist run amok on our streets? Actually, it was a little bit more nuanced than that, something about retaining a DNA database of totally innocent people, on the off-chance they turned into crazed rapists at a later date.

David Cameron looked nervous. How pragmatic could he afford to be? More importantly, how pragmatic would George Osborne, sitting menacingly beside him, allow him to be? Stopping rapists costs money. Stopping innocent people who might one day become rapists would cost even more.

He glanced to his left, as if looking for help from someone who understood the intricacies of your average DNA database. Then he realised the man in the know, justice secretary Ken Clarke, wasn’t in his usual place, but jammed right at the end of the government front bench, away from prying eyes. That made his mind up for him. “There’s always room to see if the system can be improved”, answered the prime minister.

The ground for a new u-turn had been laid. By this time next week anyone accused of so much as shoplifting will have their DNA retained for posterity.

It’s called the politics of pragmatism. And it’s working. For now. But every u-turn leaves another tiny, imperceptible chink in the prime minister’s authority.

David Cameron cannot run away from his own decisions for ever.

Dan Hodges is contributing editor of Labour Uncut.

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Cameron’s sleight of hand distracts from sentencing reform shambles

22/06/2011, 12:00:19 PM

by Matt Cavanagh

Cameron fools the tabloids into thinking he’s delivered his promises on ‘jailing knife thugs’ and ‘bashing burglars’ to distract from the shambles on sentencing reform.

Two weeks ago on Uncut I criticised Cameron’s cynical opportunism over knife crime: exploiting the moral panic in summer 2008 by promising to send everyone caught carrying a knife to jail, a promise he clearly had no serious commitment to delivering. As the latest figures show, never mind everyone caught carrying a knife going to jail, in fact a smaller proportion are going to jail now than under Labour.

In a now familiar pattern, Cameron had managed to escape direct personal damage for this broken promise, shifting the blame on to his coalition partners and cabinet fall-guys – this time Ken Clarke, who has come under sustained and vicious attack from the Sun. But it must have worried Cameron, and when he needed a tough-sounding announcement to distract from the shambles of the U-turn over 50% jail discounts for guilty pleas, it was knife crime he reached for.

He still had no intention of actually delivering his pre-election promise, even if he fooled some, including the Spectator, into thinking he had. What he proposed was different: a new offence of ‘aggravated knife possession’, carrying a mandatory minimum 6 month sentence – but applying to a much narrower category of cases, around 10-15% as many as are caught carrying a knife.

‘Aggravated knife possession’ means using a knife to threaten someone. This is, of course, already a crime – and not one which needs much clarifying. Not only is it already a crime, the sentencing guidelines – dating from that summer of 2008 – already recommend a minimum prison sentence of 6 months. So what Cameron actually announced, was a way to wriggle out of his original promise by narrowing it down to a small minority of cases, an unnecessary new offence to distract from this, and – the only genuine change – a new mandatory minimum in place of a recommended minimum sentence.

Luckily for Cameron, the Evening Standard among others ignored all this boring detail, and fell nicely into his trap with the hoped-for front page splash: “ALL KNIFE THUGS TO GET 6 MONTHS as David Cameron Cracks Down on Crime”.

So far so good. But Cameron had clearly been worried enough about how the day would go, to feel he needed more than one diversion. The second, splashed across today’s Mail and Express front pages, was his plan to “put beyond doubt that home owners and small shop keepers who use reasonable force to defend themselves or their properties will not be prosecuted”. This predictably sent the Mail and Express into raptures (the Express wins the prize with its “NOW YOU CAN BASH A BURGLAR”) but again, a longer memory – or a few minutes searching the web – would again have revealed Cameron’s history on this issue, and raised questions about how new this announcement really is.

In early 2010, Cameron successfully courted the front pages with another promise, to change the law on self-defence, to allow anything short of a “grossly disproportionate” reaction to a burglar or robber to escape without charge. That would have been a genuine change – albeit an unwise one. Yesterday’s proposal, which retains the quite different test of ‘reasonable force’ for people protecting their lives or their families or their property, appears simply to restate the existing legal position.

When Labour did this kind of thing – announce a new offence, or new legislation, seemingly to distract from how effectively or severely existing laws were being enforced – both the Tories and the Lib Dems complained. In 2008, for example, the then Tory shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling derided it as “using legislation as a public relations exercise”, while Nick Clegg sniffed that “weighing down the statute book with new laws is no substitute for good government”.

But leaving aside the politicians’ hypocrisy and the journalists’ gullibility over these diversionary tactics, what about the U-turn itself – should Labour gloat with the tabloids, or join the Guardian and Independent in mourning it as a setback for liberal reform? As usual, this is a false choice. Today’s impassioned Guardian editorial is right to call Ken Clarke’s original sentencing proposals “the revolution that never was”, but wrong in its analysis.

It is right to criticise Cameron for “backing the Clarke plans in private, then emerging to trash them in public”, but wrong to pretend that Clarke “stood ready to unlock 20 years of failed thinking”. I support sentencing reform, but these were the wrong reforms: carelessly thought out, badly framed, confusingly argued, and ineptly and weakly handled. Rather than lamenting their demise, we should charge Clarke along with the rest of his colleagues with clumsily wasting a once in a generation opportunity, and reinforcing the general assumption among the political class that reforming sentencing is impossible. It isn’t – but it is difficult, and that means careful thought, and careful handling. A smarter approach would have kept Labour onside and spiked the worst of the tabloid attacks. Instead we got an incoherent mix of Clarke’s view that “prison is an expensive way to make bad people worse” (which you can call liberal if you like, though I tend to see it as old-fashioned Tory pragmatism), Osborne’s cuts, and Cameron trying to be all things to all people.

Until yesterday, when Cameron came down against reform, and for the status quo. When he intoned at the press conference that “we will always pay the costs necessary to protect the public and to punish criminals, and we will not reduce the prison population by cutting prison sentences,” you wondered where he was in October, when his Justice Secretary and Chancellor announced that his government would do precisely that. You also wondered if you had slipped back in time to the Labour era. Blair Gibbs of Policy Exchange noted approvingly that “the objective now seems to be to ‘stabilise’ the prison population at around 85,000, not reduce it” – back to the Labour position. Mandatory minimum sentences – favoured by Labour, dismissed by Clarke as “ill-thought out, overly prescriptive, and over-used” – are back.

Cameron’s “three principles” were lifted straight from a New Labour script: “the first duty of government is to protect the public… Serious and dangerous offenders must go to jail and stay there for a long time … breaking the cycle of reoffending needs to be at the heart of the criminal justice system” (yes, even the third: Labour had a target for cutting re-offending, not for increasing the prison population).

We heard the same tired bromides we’ve had from successive Prime Ministers, Home Secretaries and Justice Secretaries about prisons being full of foreigners, and people with mental health issues and drug problems. We heard that the ‘drug free wings’ which were being piloted in a handful of prisons in 2009 have been renamed ‘drug recovery wings’ and are being piloted in a (different) handful of prisons. We were reminded about the Peterborough pilot for getting innovative social investment into schemes for tackling re-offending – a pilot started by Jack Straw.

It is not all bad news. There are sensible proposals which take forward the New Labour approach, including taxing the earnings of prisoners working on licence in the community, and channelling the money to victim support services. And Clarke still plans to go further than Straw or any other Labour minister in tackling the rising legal aid bill. This is both necessary and overdue, and those who oppose the detail of the planned cuts should suggest alternative savings, ideally within the legal aid budget itself. But overall this is a confused, confusing, and hobbled set of proposals.

The Ministry of Justice rather pathetically continues to describe it as ‘radical’, and Cameron gamely asserted yesterday that it would still somehow ‘transform’ the system. But the truth is, having talked up the problems – society was broken, crime rising, the justice system a failure and Labour’s policies hopeless – the Government has abandoned most of the radical solutions, with no replacement in sight. Even the solution urged on Cameron last night by his favourite think tank, Policy Exchange, expanding private prisons, they admit is “a continuation of a process that began under Jack Straw”.

Cameron wants to slip back into the Labour narrative and policies he spent years trying to discredit, and hope that everyone will forget this ever happened. But it’s not so easy. The budget cuts which drove the previous proposals remain in place, and the U-turn has done real damage. For all the ambitious talk, what we are left with for the remainder of this parliament is a cautious nervy incrementalism, implemented by a confused and demoralised department, living under the shadow of future budgetary crises. It reminds me of the Ministry of Defence in recent years – hardly the most reassuring parallel.

Matt Cavanagh was a special adviser on crime and justice under the last Labour government. He writes in a personal capacity.

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David’s story

21/06/2011, 08:19:15 AM

by Dan Hodges

History is written by the victors. Just ask David Miliband.

He’s been plotting. Briefing. Generally making an embittered nuisance of himself.

We know this thanks to Ed, the racily entitled stab ‘n tell biography by James Macintrye and Mehdi Hasan, trailed last week in the Mail on Sunday. Not that all of these allegations are actually contained within the book itself, but its serialisation unleashed the biggest frenzy of speculation, allegation and recrimination since…well… the last lot.

Supporters of David Miliband had been bracing themselves for fall-out from the book’s publication for several weeks. Although they cooperated with the authors, and received assurances that it would be a balanced look at the leadership election, they were under no illusions: “Ed won and David didn’t”, said one insider, “That sets its own narrative”.

The narrative has basically three elements. An enraged elder brother, his political ambitions thwarted by his younger sibling, has been actively plotting his revenge and preparing a bold Blairite counter-coup.

Exhibit A in the case for the prosecution has been the speech-that-never-was, the address, leaked to the Guardian on the eve of the book’s publication, that David would have delivered had he himself been crowned leader.

“The idea that speech was leaked by David is bollocks”, says an insider. “Do you think he’s stupid? If he really wanted to damage Ed would he do it in a way that tied himself so directly to the act”? Other sources point out that, contrary to popular belief, the speech had quite a wide circulation. The Labour party was furnished with a final draft. A copy was left on a teleprompter after a leadership announcement rehearsal, although some former Miliband staffers say it was an early version. External advisors, such as Jonathan Rutherford and Maurice Glasman, worked simultaneously on both David and Ed Miliband’s victory speeches. And Ed Miliband’s team approached David Miliband after the result to ask if they could have a copy to assist in producing their own address. David Miliband is said to have considered this, though his team reacted angrily to the idea, with selected passages eventually being passed across instead.

The fact is that, whatever the intent, the leaking of the speech damaged David Miliband more than his brother. “It didn’t do David any good to have that floating around”, said a friend, “It just hyped the story and made it look like he was agitating”. The result was the release of a statement by David urging people to “move on” from the leadership election, and calls from senior DM supporters such as Jim Murphy to rally around Ed.

That said, there’s no doubt that David Miliband has himself found moving on a difficult thing to do. “He’s been in a dark place”, said one friend. To be fair, even members of his own campaign team reject some of the more fanciful charges laid at the door of his brother, such as the claim that David wasn’t aware of Ed’s final decision to stand until it appeared in the media. “That’s rubbish”, said one source, “There were extensive discussions, involving both of them and the wives. David knew Ed was running, and when he was going to announce”.

But what David Miliband did apparently find hard to take was the nature of that campaign once the contest was underway. “David thought they had an understanding”, said one former aide, “They weren’t going to brief against each other. They were going to steer clear of personalities. He stuck to that agreement. Ed’s team didn’t”.

This is confirmed by a journalist who attended an editorial dinner with David Miliband during the campaign. “We’d been getting some pretty heavy briefing from Ed’s people against David. When we asked him about it his face fell. He obviously didn’t know it was going on”. “That really hurt him”, said a shadow cabinet colleague, “He couldn’t believe Ed would allow that sort of thing to happen”.

Members of his team urged him to hit back. But he refused, not just out of a sense of propriety, but also through a fear of what would happen to both campaigns if they become engaged in a destructive briefing war. “David thought it would be a catastrophe”, said a source, “If the whole contest had descended into a bitter and public family feud it would have been the end for both of them. They’d have taken each other off the cliff”.

Although the briefing hurt David Miliband personally, those around him acknowledge the political impact was relatively minimal: “We’re talking Ed Miliband and Polly Billington”, said an insider, “Not Gordon and Damian McBride”. Perceived as much more significant was Ed Miliband’s astute repositioning as the anti-New Labour and change candidate, keen to move on from an election manifesto that actually he’d written himself.

“David was too slow to appreciate the danger”, a former advisor acknowledges, “You have to remember, he and Ed had been part of the New Labour project all their political lives. An attack like that, from the left, he just didn’t see it coming”.

Key supporters urged him to move away from his safety first messaging. Jon Cruddas never told David Miliband to punch his brother. But he did warn him that he had to stop running such a conservative, mechanistic campaign, and begin to make some bold, eye-catching statements. “David, I don’t think you’re winning this”, he told him in one meeting, “You’ve got to open up. Stop nuancing and start painting in primary colours”.

David responded with a speech at the Keir Hardie lecture that was regarded as his best of the campaign. But by that point Ed had the definition and the momentum. David’s team, nervous that the contest was slipping away, urged him to reach out to Ed Balls and try to secure his second preferences.

Again, he hesitated, “The problem was Balls’ Bloomberg speech”, said an insider, “David thought it was much too weak on deficit reduction. It made it very hard for him to offer Balls the position of shadow chancellor”. By the time David Miliband began to tentatively court Balls it was too late. Key members of Balls’ team had already begun to mobilise behind his brother, along with Gordon Brown, who personally telephoned selective wavering MPs. Their intervention proved decisive.

It did not help that David had allowed himself to be characterised as the last living Blairite. As the contest developed Miliband’s team became desperate to put distance between themselves and the other living Blairites. They sought, and received, assurances from Blair himself that he wouldn’t intervene directly in the contest. But they failed to elicit a similar guarantee from Peter Mandelson, whose claim that Ed Miliband would lead the Labour party “into a cul-de-sac”, proved to be a crucial turning point. “It was a disaster”, said one David supporter, “Those MPs who were sitting on the fence all started shifting towards Ed. David was furious with Peter. In fact, he still is”.

So is all this history as ancient as some would claim? Since “bloody Sunday”, which saw the revelations in the book, the leaking of David’s victory speech and broader concerns about Ed Miliband’s leadership collide, both brothers have been making efforts to stress that the tensions of the past will remain there.

Some insiders are, to put it mildly, sceptical. “Perhaps we’re all just going to get along now”, said one David Miliband supporter, tongue pressed firmly to his cheek. Others claim that both brothers peered into the abyss, and recoiled at the sight. “David and Ed witnessed what happened to Tony and Gordon at close quarters”, said a shadow cabinet colleague. “They saw how, in the end, it destroyed them both. They know the party can’t afford a repeat of that”.

David Miliband has not relinquished his leadership ambitions. But those closest to him are adamant, in a pointed way, that he doesn’t intend to trample over his brother to fulfil them. “Look”, said a friend, “what’s David supposed to do? If he stays on the outside he’s plotting and scheming. If he comes back in he’s a distraction and a back seat driver. He can’t win”.

He’s certainly not at a loss for advice. “It’s time for him to return to the shadow cabinet”, says one former aide. “I’ve been arguing that for a while. It’s the only way to begin to draw a line”. “He’d be crazy”, says another shadow cabinet insider. “Every statement would be set against what Ed had said. He needs to stay precisely where he is”.

So will he? “Look, the defeat hurt him personally”, says a friend, “And Ed hurt him personally. But he’s not under any illusions. A lot of the problems and criticisms Ed’s facing are problems and criticisms that would have been directed at David even if he’d won. Yes, he’s still angry. But there’s also a little bit of him that thinks, ‘there but for the grace of God’”.

History is indeed written by the victors. And for the moment David Miliband can do little except hope their verdict isn’t undly harsh. But that doesn’t mean he has given up all thoughts of eventually penning a chapter or two of his own.

Dan Hodges is contributing editor of Labour Uncut.

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“Not a lot” – Cameron’s grasp of detail

20/06/2011, 09:15:42 AM

by Michael Dugher

At last week’s prime minister’s questions, David Cameron was asked a very specific question by Ed Miliband. Namely, “when the prime minister signed off his welfare bill, did he know that it would make 7,000 cancer patients worse off by as much as £94 a week”?

Cameron denied that this was the policy, replying that this was “simply not the case”, when of course it jolly well was the case. As Ed Miliband continued to batter away at the prime minister, it was blindingly obvious that Cameron did not have the faintest idea what was in the bill that was before the House that very day. Not for the first time, it exposed the fact that David Cameron doesn’t do detail.

One of Cameron’s more desperate comments last Wednesday, was to say to Ed Miliband that he should “check his facts before he comes to the House”. But by the afternoon, Downing Street and the DWP were confirming that the government were pressing ahead with plans to remove out of work benefits from people with cancer if they don’t find work within a year. No 10 said it would not be making any changes to the bill that might provide exemptions for cancer patients.

Cameron is usually an assured Commons performer. He is rarely short of self-confidence (expensive public school education instils this in people). But Cameron, like so many Conservatives, also believes that he was “born to rule”. As such, his performances in Parliament can be breezy, he is light on his feet and has an easy manner in the chamber. He has also improved with experience.

But his over-confidence is his greatest weakness. You get the impression that he never bothers to do his homework. Labour members complain that the prime minister rarely answers their questions. I am convinced that one of the reasons for this is that he simply doesn’t know the answer.

This is not the first time that Cameron has failed to have a grasp of detail. Only a few months ago, he got his facts wrong on the number of black students studying at Oxford university. He also famously accused two private schools of being established by an “extremist Islamist foundation”, which later turned out to be completely unfounded. Another clanger was his confident assertion that Iran has already “got a nuclear weapon”. And last year he appeared to belittle the efforts of British veterans by saying that the UK was the “junior partner” in the allied fight against Germany in 1940, neglecting the fact that the US didn’t enter the war until 1942.

There are further examples. Cameron was caught out in an interview with the Gay Times before the election. It became apparent that he was unaware that his Tory MEPs had abstained on a vote about a motion to condemn a new homophobic law in Lithuania.He also appeared unable to say if Tory peers would get a free vote on a Lords move to allow civil partnerships in places of worship. At one point during the interview he asked, “can we stop for a second”? How he must have wished he had been able to say that to Ed Miliband during the PMQs last week.

Labour shadow minister Ian Austin, who was a parliamentary private secretary to Gordon Brown when he was PM, and was often involved in preparations for PMQs, said to me last week: “can you imagine Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, John Major or Margaret Thatcher not knowing about a key measure in their own reforms”?

Prime ministers spend hours in the cabinet room at No 10 preparing for PMQs. In truth, when you think of all the important things that prime ministers could be spending their time doing, they probably spend too long being briefed for one 30 minute parliamentary set-piece. But the public are right to expect that the person in charge of their government has at least a vague idea about what is going on in the government. Similarly, prime ministers ought to think through their reforms very carefully before they introduce them.

But the truth is Cameron does not think things through. His government is not only callous, it is careless. This is one of the reasons for the abundance of u-turns of late. Cameron may well be being urged to work rather harder at mastering some of the detail of his own government’s policies, not least after his mauling by Ed Miliband last week. Certainly Labour should use prime minister’s questions to find out what David Cameron knows what is going on in his government. To quote Paul Daniels’ famous catchphrase, I suspect the answer might be “not a lot”.

Michael Dugher is Labour MP for Barnsley East, a shadow minister and parliamentary private secretary to Ed Miliband.

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Sunday Review: New British Fascism: rise of the British National Party by Matthew J Goodwin

19/06/2011, 02:00:33 PM

by Anthony Painter

The BNP has overreached itself. In an attempt to make the political big time, it stretched its resources and organisational capability beyond the point of elasticity. Triumph for the forces of hope over the forces of hate? Yes. But, as Matthew J Goodwin argues in the New British Fascism, the extreme right is a more permanent phenomenon than we wish to admit. This has deeper consequences for our politics than we seem to want to face up to.

Where this book succeeds is in tying together narrative history, survey and statistical evidence, and interviews gleaned from BNP activists themselves. It gives us both a sense of context and continuity. The rise of the BNP was down to a different way of communicating hate – focused more on culture and nation than race per se – and it was also dependent on community based organisation. However, the BNP tapped a reservoir of support that was particular and politically instrumental.

Whether the BNP is still with us at the next election or not, it will have a successor. Its exodus is latching onto other groups and parties – the English Democrats and the English Defence League seem obvious places for disillusioned BNP activists to head. Indeed, ex-BNP London Assembly, Richard Barmbrook, was invited to join the English Democrats. It remains to be seen whether they can survive their transformation into the successors to the BNP as their existing membership base revolts.

Two substantive factors have changed over the last decade or so. Racially driven extremism has been rejected. They are still racist but the BNP and others have evolved their argument into a more sophisticated critique of cultural threat, political betrayal, and economic desolation. This is what has enabled the BNP, falsely, to claim that they are the “Labour party that your father voted for”.

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Tories reap the credit for Labour’s automotive success

17/06/2011, 03:30:09 PM

by Ian Lucas

Two pieces of excellent news for the UK automotive industry last week.

First, Nissan announced a £192 million investment to bring the Quashquai to the UK – building on the excellent relationship the British government has built up with the company over the years.

Second, BMW/Mini announced a £500 million investment, bringing its new mini to the UK – and David Cameron was keen to do the photo-op of the mini in Downing Street. Much better, David, is to visit the stunning Cowley plant. Here I was privileged to drive number 1.5 million of the mini production line away from the factory.

What is significant is that these two inward investors have kept faith with the UK automotive industry, and that that investment will now contribute to bringing down our budget deficit.

I believe a big part of the reason for that new investment was Labour’s support when the post 2008 whirlwind hit the industry.

Labour’s 2009 car scrappage scheme was one of the most successful interventions in industry in recent history. Initially using £300 million of public money, it fuelled demand when the car industry was flat on its back. Companies like Nissan and BMW/Mini pressed hard for the introduction of the scheme and the Labour government responded.

It was a massive success – devised quickly and administered smoothly, it preserved jobs in British manufacturing as well as in the important car retail sector. One of my first jobs on becoming automotive minister in June 2009 was to badger Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson to extend the scheme – pretty frightening when facing the worst world financial crisis since the 1930s.

It was quite a day when, at the 2009 Labour party conference, Peter announced the extension of the scheme.

And this support, along with Labour’s automotive council and the excellent UK collaboration between employers and unions, is the reason why we are so well-placed to compete today.

Part of the reason we have a budget deficit today is because of Labour’s investment in policies like the car scrappage scheme when we were in power.

The Tories and Liberal Democrats did not oppose the car scrappage scheme in opposition. The present government is better placed to reduce the deficit on the back of that investment made in 2009. It is only a shame that it was David Cameron at the wheel of the mini, reaping the political benefit, outside No. 10 last week.

Ian Lucas is Labour MP for Wrexham and a shadow business minster.

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Better Ed than Zed

17/06/2011, 12:00:56 PM

by Dan Hodges

Dateline: 13.9.2015

Report No.: 675/43/E

Subject: UN Subcommittee 4A, “Causes, Effects, Lessons of Zombie Outbreak, Westminster, London, United Kingdom, 1 April, 2012”

Status: Secretary General Clinton’s Eyes Only

This report follows conversations with British Labour party survivors of the Zombie infestation that struck the Westminster area of London on the above date. In all instances the names have been redacted to provide anonymity:

Witness A: “…in retrospect, they’d been in amongst us for months. People like Iain Duncan Smith, Frank Field and Mike Harris were the first to be infected. But by the time anyone noticed it was too late. Obviously, Norman Baker had been warning everybody since January. But no one took him seriously…”

Witness B: “…who knows if we’ll ever find the specific cause. All we do know is that after the cuts we were totally unprepared. No army. No police. No health infrastructure. When David Cameron appeared on telly and said Andrew Lansley guaranteed a cure within in 24 hours, that’s when the panic really set it in. I’ll never forget the sight of Osborne being dragged off the treasury steps by that Zombie mob shouting “there is no plan B”. Just terrible…”

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The next Tory U-turn: immigration

17/06/2011, 08:09:09 AM

by Atul Hatwal

There it is again.

That faint squeal of tyres and slight waft of burning rubber – the hallmarks of a minister struggling to keep their policy on the road.

And now we wait for the noise to get louder, the smell more pungent, until the minister gives-in to the sliding chaos of another U-turn.

The latest threat to political pedestrians maybe a little while before it careens across the news pages, but it’s only a matter of time.

The Tory migration cap might get re-branded, re-engineered into a broad range of metrics and turned into an elasticated party hat, but the target of net migration in “the tens of thousands”, will ultimately go the same way as the NHS reforms, forest privatisation and weekly bin collections.

So far, Theresa May has been one of the quiet successes in the government, escaping relatively lightly in the gaffe stakes. She’s remained safe largely by moving slowly and not trying to reform every single piece of departmental policy within 10 minutes of arriving.

But with the migration cap, May has one of those too-good-to-be-true policies. A Jimmy Choo initiative that looked so alluring in the manifesto shop window that the Tories had to have it. But now, in government, somehow the shoe doesn’t fit, no matter what May does.

This week saw the first signs of the U-turn to come.

On Tuesday, the home secretary announced that the net numbers of foreign students in the UK would be reduced by 52,000 per year. On the face of it a major cut and a big step towards achieving the government’s target.

Except that in March, the reduction was going to be 100,000 per year.

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Supporting carers is not just right, it’s rational

16/06/2011, 07:28:46 AM

by Peter Watt

This week is “carers week“, when the fantastic contribution and role played by the millions of carers in the UK is celebrated. It is all very big, or even good, society. The numbers of those with a caring role is on the increase. But there is one particular group of carers whose numbers are increasing fast, and that is older carers who care for very old relatives. The reasons for the increase are clear. According to the ONS, the fastest population increase has been in the number of those aged 85 and over, the “oldest old”. In 1984, there were around 660,000 people in the UK aged 85 and over. Since then the numbers have more than doubled reaching 1.4 million in 2009. By 2034 the number of people aged 85 and over is projected to be 2.5 times larger than in 2009, reaching 3.5 million and accounting for 5 per cent of the total population. This is, of course, a fantastic success story with people living longer and living healthier for longer. But it also means that there are many older people who are themselves caring for very old and frail relatives.

The statistics are not even half the story. Behind them are hundreds of thousands of human stories of love and care that are a source of pride and inspiration. But they should also be a source of shame that as a society we are still allowing people to struggle so appallingly. Take Mrs M who is 80 and cares for her husband, Mr M, who is 87.

They have been married for forty years and until Mr M was diagnosed with dementia 6 years ago they had plans to travel in their retirement. He was once a pre-eminent science lecturer and it has been difficult for Mrs M to adjust to the changes in Mr M’s behaviour. On top of all of this, Mrs M has arthritis and has been suffering from exhaustion due to her caring role. She loves her husband but is struggling to support him – she will not give in willingly though.

She is not alone in this. It has been reported that 75% of carers have suffered with health issues as a result of their caring role. Unfortunately, reductions in the budgets in Mrs M’s London borough mean that her husband has had his needs reassessed by the local authority. Because it is not seen as a “critical” need to go to a day centre, Mr M will no longer have his one day a week outing. This break gave Mrs M three hours of time to take care of paper work, do the shop, and possibly attend GP appointments for her arthritis.

The problem is that Mrs M’s own health is deteriorating because of her arthritis and the decreasing amount of support she gets from her local council. Losing just three hours a week in respite means that pretty soon Mrs M won’t be able to take care of her own needs. This could, and in fact often does, lead to a crisis where two people end up very ill and without support.

If Mrs M couldn’t care for her husband, then the state would have to step in. And that costs. In fact, the replacement value of a carer is £18 an hour. With an estimated 6,440,713 carers in the UK, people like Mrs M, pound for pound, save the UK economy £119 billion per year by caring for a partner or family member. Even if Mrs M only cared for her husband five hours a day, instead of her usual 12 (including being woken up each night), she would have saved the economy £32,850.00 a year. That is for five hours a day. The fact is, most carers report that they care for someone for over 50 hours a week, saving the economy, on average, £52,560.00 a year per carer.

According to carers week:

76% of carers are worse off financially since taking on their caring responsibilities;
75% of carers have suffered with health issues as a result of caring;
49% of carers have a disability, condition or illness themselves;
48% have been a carer for more than 10 years;
78% are female.

So carers are a massive and undervalued resource. They save us all money and provide the ultimate welfare state to their loved ones. Successive governments’ track record in supporting this group is pretty poor – none of us has much to be proud of. But as we look at making savings in the public purse, we should take care that we don’t make the situation even more difficult. The long term cost to the taxpayer would be much more than the savings. The human cost would be incalculable.

Remember that in the future Mr and Mrs M could be you.

Peter Watt is the chief executive of counsel and care, a national charity supporting older people, their family and carers. He is also former general secretary of the Labour party.

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