Posts Tagged ‘Peter Watt’

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The latest party funding figures tell us we can’t go on like this

23/08/2012, 07:00:00 AM

by Peter Watt

I’m on holiday at the moment and have both limited internet access and limited interest in all things political.  Normal levels of political obsession will no doubt return once the holiday is over.  One thing has caught my attention though this week and I felt the need to write about it.  It’s an old favourite of mine, something I feel passionately about – party funding and the trade unions.

The Electoral Commission has published its latest quarterly report on the donations to political parties.  The first thing to note is that overall levels of donations to all political parties were down almost £1 million when compared to the first three months of the year.  The Tories were down £250,000 receiving £3.8 million whilst Labour was down £450,000 receiving just under £3 million.

So it’s clear that Labour, already receiving less than the Tories, appears to be feeling the squeeze even more. The detail of the figures goes on to show that that even more of party’s income is now derived from a single source: the trade unions.  Of all of the donations received by Labour in this reporting period more than £2 million, or about 70%, came from the Trade Unions.  And of this £2 million, Unite gave over £840,000 almost double that of the next biggest, USDAW, at £429,000.

Our opponents have once again tried to make mischief and claim that this means that 70% of our income comes from the trade unions.  This is simply not true.  As I have blogged on Labour Uncut several times before, the Labour party does not in fact receive the majority of its income from the trade unions.

In an average, non-general election year income comes roughly from the following sources:

  • £8  million in affiliation fees from trade unions;
  • £7 million from the tax payer in short money;
  • £5 million from individual membership subscriptions.

This gives a “definite” income of about £20 million per year.  In addition the Labour Party gets:

  • £2 – 5 million in donations from individuals, companies and trade unions;
  • £5 million or so from other things like commercial income, legacies and dinners.

So while the attacks of our opponents are an exaggeration, we should not pretend that they do not have a point.  Labour’s financial position remains precarious and we need to face up to it.

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As party conference season approaches, have these political menageries ever been less relevant?

16/08/2012, 07:00:39 AM

by Peter Watt

So the Olympics are over and the Premier League is about to start (apologies to Scots readers, I know that the SPL has already started).  We have the fantastic Paralympics to look forward to and possibly even a little bit of late summer sun.

But, for the political world the next few weeks are the calm before the conference season madness begins.  Already political obsessives will be beginning to think about their conference itineraries.

The odd invite or two for receptions will have arrived in advance of the tsunami that will hit from early September.  Labour colleagues will be secretly smiling at the excitement of the priorities ballot; they will be wondering about this year’s conference slogan and keeping their fingers crossed about the leader’s speech.  For what it’s worth I predict that the words “fair” and “future” will feature large.

For activists, attending conference is a mix between a holiday and a religious vocation.  Party democracy is revered, the rule book studied, senior politicians are scrutinised and friends socialised with.

Anyone who is anyone makes sure that if they possibly can be there then they are.  People who would never normally willingly forego their middle class comforts are suddenly prepared to sleep on floors and worse if it means that they can attend.  If you can’t be there then you find yourself guiltily justifying yourself by saying “no, but I will definitely be there next year”.

It costs a fortune in travel, accommodation, food and of course booze.  But for a whole week of your life you feel at the centre of the world as the stories that emerge from the conference dominate the news and it’s worth every penny.  And you hungrily devour the news morning, noon and night while you’re there to make sure that the hugely important events that you are witnessing are covered fairly.

Which of course they never are; as while the conference that you are attending is always united friendly and optimistic, those rats from the press insist on reporting splits and rancour.

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All parties are responsible for the disgrace of Winterbourne View

09/08/2012, 07:00:48 AM

by Peter Watt

Sometimes you read something so depressing and so disheartening that it ruins your day.  I have just had that experience as I read the report from South Gloucestershire Safeguarding Adults Board into the appalling events that took place at Winterbourne View hospital.

You will remember the case; Winterbourne View was a hospital based in Bristol for adults with learning disabilities and autism.  A BBC Panorama undercover journalist secured a job there following a whistle-blower contacting them with concerns about the abuse of patients.  The resulting programme shocked all who saw it and has resulted in eleven former workers pleading guilty to almost 40 charges of abuse and Winterbourne View, owned by Castlebeck Ltd, being closed.

I should declare an interest here.  Two of my children have special needs and may very well need some form of supervised accommodation as adults.  I also have a brother in his early thirties who is in a smallish supervised accommodation unit.  Worrying about what happens when they are older and you aren’t there to protect them is something that all parents worry about.  To be honest, as a parent of children with special needs, the fear is debilitating.

Reading the report into events at Winterbourne View is like reading an account of some of my very worst nightmares.

Remember that we are talking about some of our most vulnerable fellow human beings here who are least able to defend themselves.   The quality of their lives really is in the hands of those entrusted with their care; if bad things happen when noone else is looking then nobody may ever know.

And at Winterbourne View there was certainly abuse (I personally would call it torture) with patients being humiliated, physically restrained, covered in cold water and left outside, hurt and over-prescribed sedatives.

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Labour needs to stop moralising about tax

02/08/2012, 07:00:40 AM

by Peter Watt

Is paying tax a moral duty?  It is the sort of question that has those on the left and right frothing at the mouth.

The question has recently come to the fore once again with row after row over tax avoidance by some of the rich and famous.  On the face of it the case is obvious.

At a time when budgets are being squeezed and services cut there are people who are really suffering.  Jobs are going and much valued support services to some of our most vulnerable are being cut so that we can reduce the amount we are borrowing as a country.

We all need to do our bit by paying our taxes and if you choose to deliberately avoid paying yours then what does that make you?  Selfish?  Unfair?  That’s certainly the common view; and with George Osborne and Ed balls united in a desire to clamp down on such “aggressive” schemes it seems that there is a degree of consensus; paying tax is our moral duty.

But, on the other hand I have an ISA that means that I don’t have to pay tax on any interest I accrue.  I take advantage of duty free (tax free) shopping when I travel abroad.  I took advice on planning my pension and made sure that my arrangements were tax efficient.  And I am hardly alone, millions of people do it.  If you have to undertake a self-assessment then you don’t start the process trying to maximise what you have to pay you look to minimise it.

It may not be in the same league as the Jersey based K2 scheme made famous by Jimmy Carr, but it is still tax avoidance.

And companies rightly look to make tax-efficient investment decisions.  Their duty is to maximise returns for shareholders and part of that is to legally minimise the tax that they have to pay.  Paying less tax means that they can maximise reinvestment in innovation and jobs; which will in turn generate more tax.

Bigger profits mean better returns for shareholders, many of whom are millions of people with savings and pensions schemes.

When the Labour party bought a London property a few years ago, it used a company to buy it.  The party did that so that when they sold the property it would be more tax efficient and indeed, when it was sold it saved tens of thousands of pounds as a result.  Quite right too!

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Open primaries not narrow shortlists are what the Labour party needs to re-connect with voters

26/07/2012, 07:00:21 AM

by Peter Watt

There has been a lot of discussion in the Labour party recently about the narrow pool from which the current parliamentary Labour party (PLP) is drawn.  Basically the concern is that there are too many white middle class graduates who don’t represent the community as a whole.

So this month we have seen Chuka Umunna launch a Future Candidates Programme aimed at encouraging more business figures to stand for the Labour Party.  As the shadow business secretary said:

“Our party – all parties in fact – must reflect what Britain looks like and the jobs which people do.  Not only do we want more people setting up businesses, leading businesses and working in businesses, we want more people from the world of business in our ranks – from our councillors to our MPs.”

And then this week Dennis MacShane has expressed concern about the paucity of working class MPs.  He has suggested “all working class shortlists” for some parliamentary selections.  The idea being that we could use quotas to increase the numbers of non-middle class candidates and ultimately MPs.

Dennis proposes that 10% of parliamentary selections should be reserved for people on the minimum wage so that the pool from which our politicians are drawn stops being so narrow.  As Dennis said:

“The country desperately needs new political ideas, but the intellectual reservoir from which we draw our political leaders has become a paddling pool, when what we actually need is a raging torrent to get the country going again,”

The Labour party already has a long and honourable tradition of using quotas to increase the representation of women MP’s and indeed councillors.  At regular intervals there is also discussion of using quotas to increase the representation of other underrepresented groups and in particular minority ethnic candidates.

But I think that all of these initiatives increasingly start from the wrong diagnosis of the problem.  The diagnosis is that the Labour party, or any of its rivals, are basically sound.

That as presently constructed, political parties are the best way to achieve social justice and progress and that once people realise this then they will want to be a part of it.

Yes, there are some institutional biases that influence selections; but overcome these by some form of positive action and all is well.

I no longer think that this is right.

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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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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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Playing party politics over Libor could wreck one of Britain’s leading industries

05/07/2012, 07:00:31 AM

by Peter Watt

You’ve got to say that the banks are shockingly bad at their own PR.  The fact that reckless lending played a significant part in the cataclysmic global downturn didn’t exactly endear them to people.

Obscenely high bonuses that seem at odds with the overall performance of the company don’t help.

And then to top it off they’ve been fiddling rates of interest so that they made bigger profits and created a false sense of their own economic strength!  Understandably therefore many people right now wouldn’t spit on a banker if they were on fire.

But in the furore we seem to be forgetting that this is also an industry that employs 1.1 million people in the UK.  That contributes 9% of the gross value added in the economy as a whole, generates 7% of all tax receipts (£35.7 billion) and produces a trade surplus.

So the current crisis in our financial sector is a potential crisis for our already fragile economy.  We simply cannot afford for this mess to continue, there is too much at stake.  It is right therefore that all parties are keen to restore the credibility of the UK’s financial sector.

If people around the world fear that our financial sector is prone to fraud then they will take their money elsewhere.  It’s not like moving a factory or an industrial complex; they can simply move their capital with a phone call or click of a mouse.

And if credibility is to be restored or maintained then decisions need to be taken about what the right balance of regulation is and who polices it.  And there are the Vickers proposals to implement splitting retail and investment banking.  Big issues that need to be sensitively but robustly handled if this vital industry is not to be further harmed.

Instead we have a slanging match between the parties.

The hundreds of thousands of bank workers earning modest wages must be crying into their ledgers.

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“Growth not austerity” is the new “stop the cuts” and will be just as successful

28/06/2012, 07:00:16 AM

by Peter Watt

This week saw yet another u-turn by the chancellor.  This time over the imminent rise in fuel duty now delayed until Christmas at least.  It was all great fun as George Osborne further dented his reputation and future leadership prospects.  Rightly Ed Balls had a ball pointing out the increasingly lengthy list of u-turns since the budget.  But there was another piece of economic news this week that was much more significant.

Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, was appearing at the Treasury Select Committee on Tuesday and his conclusions were pretty grim:

“When this crisis began in 2007, most people did not believe we would still be here. I don’t think we’re yet half way through this. I’ve always said that and I’m still saying it. My estimate of how long it will take to recover is expanding all the time.  We have to regard this as a long-term project to get back to where we were, but we’re nowhere near starting that yet. We’re in a deep crisis with enormous challenges.”

So however bad we think it is at the moment, we ain’t seen nothing yet.  There are years of tough times to come whoever is in government.  Years of cuts and years of tough decisions.  We already know that the majority of the proposed cuts to public spending, the level of which we have accepted, are still to come.

But it feels at the moment that many in Labour have comforted themselves with the notion that (1) George Osborne is useless and (2) all we need are some pro-growth policies.

Then as growth returns and tax receipts rise we can avoid tough decisions.  But setting aside that delivering growth is easier to say than to deliver; even if the economy began growing Labour would not be able to avoid those tough decisions should we form the government post 2015.

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What is the role of government when there is no money to spend?

21/06/2012, 07:00:12 AM

by Peter Watt

I very much enjoyed reading this blog from Lib Dem blogger Mark Thompson the other day.  Mark (slightly tongue in cheek) posed the question for politicians “why is leaving things alone never an option?”  It reminded me that one the criticisms levelled at the last Queens Speech was the relative paucity of proposed legislation.  As if one test of sound government was how much they added to the statute book!

But actually I think that it was a perfectly fair and indeed increasingly important question that Mark raises.  Politicians really do seem to feel the need to reach for the statute book or to make regulations to try and solve an increasing array of problems.  Some work, some don’t and some seem to make things worse.  It doesn’t really matter as long as “something” is done.  Just think Dangerous Dogs Act, the cones hotline, rewrites to school curricula, and endless reorganisations of services.

Whatever the latest moral crisis is then you can guarantee that a politician will announce the solution.  And if you really can’t think of anything to do then call a summit of experts at Number 10 and at least you will be seen to be taking action.

But the state does actually do lots of things and spends lots of money doing them.  And there is a large degree of political consensus over some aspects of what the state does like maintaining our defence and managing our criminal justice system.

But there is more debate as to the role and extent in other areas; from the choices about how we organise (say) health care and how we support the most vulnerable to the role of the government in managing the economy.

On the left we tend to be warmer to the notion of a more interventionist and active state, in particular when it comes to supporting the most vulnerable.  But Conservative governments have hardly been immune from interventionist tendencies.

Interestingly, Mark’s article provoked some comments from some along the lines of “but if the government did nothing how would you solve..?” The basic assumption of these responses being that unless the government intervenes, then the social ill will not be solved.  But surely this is wrong, or at least not always right?

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