Sunday 25 December 2011

Do we really want Britain to be the sort of country where the police fire on rioters?

The week leading up to Christmas is a good time to ‘bury’ bad news, parliament is in recess and the public are too busy with last minute shopping to take notice. That is, probably, why the Inspectorate of Constabulary chose last week to release its review of how the police coped with the August riots.

The review calls for new guidelines for how the police deal with a breakdown in public order, suggestion that water cannon and plastic bullets could be used where there is a risk of ‘violent attacks on the public’ or on members of the fire and ambulance services. A survey of 2000 people carried out in September suggests there is widespread public support for the use of such tactics.

This is all well and good even though, as Sir Hugh Orde of the Association of Chief Police Officers and a man with considerable experience of coping with public disorder gained during his time in Northern Ireland pointed out, water cannon and plastic bullets are ineffective against widely dispersed mobs of the sort that took to the streets in London and Manchester. The review though went on from there to enter far more dangerous territory.

It claimed that following legal advice received by the inspectorate firearms could ‘potentially’ be used where ‘the immediacy of the risk and the gravity of the consequences’ made doing so necessary. The example most commonly cited was that of protecting homes or business from being destroyed by rioters as happened in London.

Chief Inspector of Constabulary Sir Dennis O’Connor said that in the wake of the riots it was necessary to raise what he called ‘awkward issues’ and that the police needed ‘some new rules of engagement’ so that they could ‘protect the public in confidence.’ As is the way of things raising awkward issues, such a lazy euphemism don’t you think, provoked an instant and mostly negative response.

Speaking for human rights group Liberty Sophie Farthing said the tactics recommended by the review were a ‘very serious step’ and there was a risk they would ‘sweep up the innocent with the guilty.’ Jenny Jones, a Green Party member of the Metropolitan Police Authority said that ‘endorsing the use of live ammunition is the approval of the tactics of war on London’s streets and implementing such recommendations would be madness.’

Perhaps the most eloquent rebuttal of the proposals was made on the BBC news by Professor Gus John of the Moss Side Defence Committee, he called the suggestion that the police might open fire on rioters as ‘very worrying’ and went on to say ‘the state is not in a military confrontation with its citizens, so what one should be looking at is how the police and the community engage in such a manner that you do not have these things happening.’ The real action needed was, he said, for the authorities to work to help those people who ‘have no hope, who have a future of futility, but want to engage meaningfully with the community.’

Professor John’s objections are backed by solid evidence, in a study conducted by the London School of Economics 85% of the 270 people questioned cited anger at the behaviour of the police as a contributing factor to the riots. In its interim report the Riots, Communities and Victims Panel found ‘no single cause’ for the riots but did identify ‘an overriding sense of despair that people could destroy their own communities.’

Quite how giving the police powers to fire on rioters can be expected to calm tensions in parts of our major cities where people feel alienated from society and that they have nothing to lose is a question ducked by the inspectorate. The answer is that it will do nothing to calm tensions; in fact it would in all probability inflame them.

At the time of the riots the reaction of public and politicians alike, helped by the hysteria of much of the media, was a sharp jerk of the knee. That was unfortunate but, perhaps, understandable, frightened people often exhibit extreme reactions; but the time for such silliness has long passed.

In Britain the relationship between the police and the public is different from that in the United States of much of mainland Europe, we have policing by consent, meaning the police are there to protect the public not keep them in line. Such a relationship is built on trust not the use of strong arm tactics, where it has broken down it is the result of the police and other authorities retreating from communities where they are needed most due to a toxic mix of misplaced idealism and cynical cost cutting.

The real danger is that David Cameron, a man who like all Tory prime ministers lives in constant fear of being deposed by a party that has always been ruthless when it comes to ditching leaders who aren’t up to the mark. After more than five years of frantic modernisation all he has managed to deliver is an awkward coalition in which must of the Tory grassroots believes too many concessions have been made to the Liberal Democrats, his back benchers are busily sawing away at the thread holding the sword over his head. This has prompted a recent and extreme lurch to the right.

The opportunity to portray himself as a fearless champion of law and order by endorsing these mad suggestions could prove all too tempting. Tragically wheeling out the water cannon is no solution to the problems associated with endemic social and economic hardship that lie behind the riots.

It is right that people who put the lives and property of others at risk should be dealt with forcefully, but punishment without rehabilitation is pointless. We will only solve the social problems we face when the money we spend on rubber bullets and water cannon is spent on rebuilding shattered communities and empowering their inhabitants to take control of their lives instead.

Sunday 18 December 2011

Shops, snow and sticky backed plastic.

Philip Larkin famously described Christmas as a ‘slathering Niagara of nonsense’, as it rumbles towards us yet again the politicians have skipped town, for twenty five days if you please, and so the news has been rather thin of late. Thin, but not without its points of interest:

SHOP UNTIL THE PENNY DROPS.

This week Mary Portas, the absurdly self titled ‘Queen of Shops’ published her long awaited report on the state of the British high street. As expected it made for gloomy reading and also proved again why such exercises are almost always flawed.

Her recommendations for reviving the high street are sound, lower business rates, less punitive parking fees; more small businesses and fewer soulless chain stores, they are also, sadly, all too predictable. Frankly you could have gone into any saloon bar in the country bought a few of the regulars a drink and gathered the same opinions for a fraction of the cost of retaining Ms Portas.

The whole thing seems painfully like the sort of silliness New Labour used to delight in, identifying a problem it couldn’t (or wouldn’t) solve, get a ‘celebrity to write a report about it and then kick the whole thing into the long grass. It has to be said the Portas, someone who cuts a rather alarming figure rather like one of Dr Who’s more chilling adversaries, has played her part in this pantomime perfectly, trotting around Camden Market with David Cameron and generally filling her lungs with the oxygen of publicity. She even managed to sound sincere about wanting to rescue the nation’s high streets; you’d never think the company she runs also does publicity for mall monster Westfield.

As for the poor old high street I don’t see its revival happening any time soon. Online retailing is hoovering up more customers by the day and George Osborne’s cuts are holding councils back from giving small businesses the breaks they so desperately need. Another celebrity physician has swept into the ward to make her diagnosis, but the poor old patient is no closer to being cured.

DAVE DOES DO GOD.

Unlike his toothsome predecessor but one Prime Minister David Cameron does do god and at an event in Oxford this week to mark the four hundredth anniversary of the King James Bible he made a speech telling us so.

He went further by enjoining everyone else to do god too as an antidote to the UK’s ‘moral decline.’ I am not a believer but I am willing to admit that Christianity, and other faiths, have many good points; what they don’t have though is a monopoly on goodness and to suggest they do is foolish.

This, as Richard Dawkins writes in the New Statesman this week, is something that David Cameron and his colleagues know all too well, however they also seem to subscribe to the patronising view that faith is somehow ‘good’ for the proles, mostly because it keeps them in their place.

That people are able to worship freely is one of the benchmarks against which we test our democracy, but religion and politics should be kept separate. The alternative to this is the sort of hypocrisy where candidates for office trundle about the landscape thumping pulpits and making saying things they don’t mean to credulous audiences that will be visited upon American voters when the primaries get into full swing next month.

SNOW JOKE

It’s snowed again, hardly a surprising occurrence in December but it always seems to catch we Brits out. This time round though there have, to date anyway, been no repeats of the media hand wringing about mounting chaos, this time last year the Daily Mail was all but predicting national extinction at the hands of a few snowflakes.

Whatever could be different this time round, have councils bought in more grit, are heating bills lower, has our national infrastructure gone through a renaissance that has somehow slipped under my personal radar? Nope, don’t think so. Do you think then the reticence of our, mostly, right wing press on this issue has something to do with any ‘snow chaos’ being this time the result of Boy George’s failed economic policies rather than ‘Labour profligacy’; or am I just being cynical?

LOWERING THE BLUE PETER

Blue Peter, required viewing when I was a boy, is on its last legs, the BBC haven’t cancelled the show but by shifting it into digital limbo with a repeat later in the week means it could soon go the way of Crackerjack and the Clangers.

Despite not usually being a fan of nostalgia this makes me feel quite sad. Even when I watched the programme back in the late seventies it seemed like a theme park version of a safe fifties Britain where everyone had good manners and knew their place; there was always honey for tea and nothing bad ever happened. That, I suppose, was the programme’s charm and I’m sure later attempts to make it more ‘relevant’ have mostly spoiled things; it will still be a shame to see it go though.

Quite where fans of nostalgic nonsense will go for their weekly fix now I don’t know. Perhaps they will have to take to watching Midsomer Murders or reading Michael Gove’s ever sillier ‘visions’ for how our schools should be run.

Sunday 4 December 2011

Britain needs a strong parliament not an ‘unelected king’ as Prime Minister.

The Queen could be replaced as head of state by the Speaker of the House of Commons were Britain to become a republic. Before too many red faced retired colonels living in the home counties have apoplexy this is the opinion of veteran left wing firebrand Tony Benn not, alas, a prediction of what will happen come the revolution.

Giving evidence to the commons political and constitutional reform committee as they examine whether or not the UK needs a written constitution, this week he said ‘The problem with a directly elected head of state is you get a conflict between two sources of authority,’ meaning in this hypothetical case between a president and a prime minister. The solution to this, he suggested, would be to maintain the symbolism of an unelected head of state minus the monarchical powers.

Mr Benn went on to add that ‘If you’re looking for a titular head of state I think the Speaker of the House of Commons would be perfect- he’s respected, he understands the constitution.’ I’m not sure those comments could be applied to the present incumbent the pocket sized bundle of self promotion that is John Bercow; but several of his predecessors, Betty Boothroyd for example, certainly had sufficient dignity to carry the role off.

Tony Benn originally made the proposal that the Queen be replaced as head of state by the Speaker of the Commons back in 1991 along with attacking the way successive governments have retained the powers traditionally held by the monarch and used them to impose their will on parliament. He told the committee that ‘we live in a modern parliamentary democracy, but the crown powers have been retained’ making the prime minister ‘in effect the unelected king.’

This, he went on to say, had created a political system that was ‘defective’ and he urged MPs to ensure that whatever conclusion they reach on having a written constitution the resulting document ‘protects the rights of ordinary people.’

To many people on the left Tony Benn is a sort of living history exhibit, an exemplar of values that they feel themselves to have moved on from as they have become more sophisticated; or cynical, about how they do business. Despite this patronising dismissal he, like most members of the awkward squad, has an annoying habit of being right.

However much republicans (and I include myself in that camp) might wish for Britain to grow up and stop playing mawkish nursery games with the toys of empire the monarchy is here to stay. Their presence is too bound up with our romantic ideas of national identity and the Royals themselves are too adept at playing the survival game for their public support to dip low enough to make abolition a realistic possibility.

Where Tony Benn is right though is to express concerns about the way successive residents of 10 Downing Street have used the royal prerogative to ride roughshod over the democratic process. These powers bundled together by archaic habit more properly belong to the people through the parliament they elect, without a commitment to enshrine that principle at its heart any future written constitution will only ever be so much dead prose scratched onto parchment.

Tony Benn is right the current political system is ‘defective’, parliament needs to wrestle back power from the executive, it also needs to shed the sheen of slick professionalism and become more reflective of the Britain outside the charmed circle of Oxbridge and the public schools. Even more importantly there needs to be a rejuvenation of grassroots politics in this country, the power to choose who stands for election to a seat in parliament as well as who wins the contest has to be put back into the hands of party activists and local communities.

Whether or not the monarchy with its faintly childish pomp and circumstance; its gilded coaches and dressing up box uniforms trundles on is hardly important in the larger scheme of things, the real revolution lies in handing power back to parliament and through it to the people. I’m sure that is something Tony Benn would agree with because as he has often said, democracy is the most revolutionary idea of them all.

Britain needs a strong parliament not an ‘unelected king’ as Prime Minister.

The Queen could be replaced as head of state by the Speaker of the House of Commons were Britain to become a republic. Before too many red faced retired colonels living in the home counties have apoplexy this is the opinion of veteran left wing firebrand Tony Benn not, alas, a prediction of what will happen come the revolution.

Giving evidence to the commons political and constitutional reform committee as they examine whether or not the UK needs a written constitution, this week he said ‘The problem with a directly elected head of state is you get a conflict between two sources of authority,’ meaning in this hypothetical case between a president and a prime minister. The solution to this, he suggested, would be to maintain the symbolism of an unelected head of state minus the monarchical powers.

Mr Benn went on to add that ‘If you’re looking for a titular head of state I think the Speaker of the House of Commons would be perfect- he’s respected, he understands the constitution.’ I’m not sure those comments could be applied to the present incumbent the pocket sized bundle of self promotion that is John Bercow; but several of his predecessors, Betty Boothroyd for example, certainly had sufficient dignity to carry the role off.

Tony Benn originally made the proposal that the Queen be replaced as head of state by the Speaker of the Commons back in 1991 along with attacking the way successive governments have retained the powers traditionally held by the monarch and used them to impose their will on parliament. He told the committee that ‘we live in a modern parliamentary democracy, but the crown powers have been retained’ making the prime minister ‘in effect the unelected king.’

This, he went on to say, had created a political system that was ‘defective’ and he urged MPs to ensure that whatever conclusion they reach on having a written constitution the resulting document ‘protects the rights of ordinary people.’

To many people on the left Tony Benn is a sort of living history exhibit, an exemplar of values that they feel themselves to have moved on from as they have become more sophisticated; or cynical, about how they do business. Despite this patronising dismissal he, like most members of the awkward squad, has an annoying habit of being right.

However much republicans (and I include myself in that camp) might wish for Britain to grow up and stop playing mawkish nursery games with the toys of empire the monarchy is here to stay. Their presence is too bound up with our romantic ideas of national identity and the Royals themselves are too adept at playing the survival game for their public support to dip low enough to make abolition a realistic possibility.

Where Tony Benn is right though is to express concerns about the way successive residents of 10 Downing Street have used the royal prerogative to ride roughshod over the democratic process. These powers bundled together by archaic habit more properly belong to the people through the parliament they elect, without a commitment to enshrine that principle at its heart any future written constitution will only ever be so much dead prose scratched onto parchment.

Tony Benn is right the current political system is ‘defective’, parliament needs to wrestle back power from the executive, it also needs to shed the sheen of slick professionalism and become more reflective of the Britain outside the charmed circle of Oxbridge and the public schools. Even more importantly there needs to be a rejuvenation of grassroots politics in this country, the power to choose who stands for election to a seat in parliament as well as who wins the contest has to be put back into the hands of party activists and local communities.

Whether or not the monarchy with its faintly childish pomp and circumstance; its gilded coaches and dressing up box uniforms trundles on is hardly important in the larger scheme of things, the real revolution lies in handing power back to parliament and through it to the people. I’m sure that is something Tony Benn would agree with because as he has often said, democracy is the most revolutionary idea of them all.

Britain needs a strong parliament not an ‘unelected king’ as Prime Minister.

The Queen could be replaced as head of state by the Speaker of the House of Commons were Britain to become a republic. Before too many red faced retired colonels living in the home counties have apoplexy this is the opinion of veteran left wing firebrand Tony Benn not, alas, a prediction of what will happen come the revolution.

Giving evidence to the commons political and constitutional reform committee as they examine whether or not the UK needs a written constitution, this week he said ‘The problem with a directly elected head of state is you get a conflict between two sources of authority,’ meaning in this hypothetical case between a president and a prime minister. The solution to this, he suggested, would be to maintain the symbolism of an unelected head of state minus the monarchical powers.

Mr Benn went on to add that ‘If you’re looking for a titular head of state I think the Speaker of the House of Commons would be perfect- he’s respected, he understands the constitution.’ I’m not sure those comments could be applied to the present incumbent the pocket sized bundle of self promotion that is John Bercow; but several of his predecessors, Betty Boothroyd for example, certainly had sufficient dignity to carry the role off.

Tony Benn originally made the proposal that the Queen be replaced as head of state by the Speaker of the Commons back in 1991 along with attacking the way successive governments have retained the powers traditionally held by the monarch and used them to impose their will on parliament. He told the committee that ‘we live in a modern parliamentary democracy, but the crown powers have been retained’ making the prime minister ‘in effect the unelected king.’

This, he went on to say, had created a political system that was ‘defective’ and he urged MPs to ensure that whatever conclusion they reach on having a written constitution the resulting document ‘protects the rights of ordinary people.’

To many people on the left Tony Benn is a sort of living history exhibit, an exemplar of values that they feel themselves to have moved on from as they have become more sophisticated; or cynical, about how they do business. Despite this patronising dismissal he, like most members of the awkward squad, has an annoying habit of being right.

However much republicans (and I include myself in that camp) might wish for Britain to grow up and stop playing mawkish nursery games with the toys of empire the monarchy is here to stay. Their presence is too bound up with our romantic ideas of national identity and the Royals themselves are too adept at playing the survival game for their public support to dip low enough to make abolition a realistic possibility.

Where Tony Benn is right though is to express concerns about the way successive residents of 10 Downing Street have used the royal prerogative to ride roughshod over the democratic process. These powers bundled together by archaic habit more properly belong to the people through the parliament they elect, without a commitment to enshrine that principle at its heart any future written constitution will only ever be so much dead prose scratched onto parchment.

Tony Benn is right the current political system is ‘defective’, parliament needs to wrestle back power from the executive, it also needs to shed the sheen of slick professionalism and become more reflective of the Britain outside the charmed circle of Oxbridge and the public schools. Even more importantly there needs to be a rejuvenation of grassroots politics in this country, the power to choose who stands for election to a seat in parliament as well as who wins the contest has to be put back into the hands of party activists and local communities.

Whether or not the monarchy with its faintly childish pomp and circumstance; its gilded coaches and dressing up box uniforms trundles on is hardly important in the larger scheme of things, the real revolution lies in handing power back to parliament and through it to the people. I’m sure that is something Tony Benn would agree with because as he has often said, democracy is the most revolutionary idea of them all.

Boorish and out of touch he may be, but does Jeremy Clarkson say what other Tories only think?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a TV ‘personality’ with a DVD to sell must be in want of some free publicity. That, I suppose, explains why Jeremy Clarkson so often fails to engage his brain before opening his mouth.

This week in an interview given on the BBC’s insipid The One Show he was at it again, shoving both loafer clad feet into his mouth at once as he told viewers that what he’d like to do to striking public sector workers was ‘take them all outside and execute them in front of their families.’

Just to clarify things he went on to say ‘I mean how dare they go on strike when they’ve got these gilt edged pensions that are going to be guaranteed while the rest of us have to work for a living.’

Needless to say the condemnation of what he said was both rapid and noisy, Labour leader Ed Milliband got the ball rolling by calling Clarkson’s comments ‘absolutely disgraceful and disgusting’, they showed, he said, that Clarkson ‘obviously doesn’t understand the lives of the people who were out on strike.’ Quite so, although Red Ed’s condemnation would have a lot more heft to it if he and his shadow cabinet hadn’t spent the past few months tying themselves into a Gordian Knot of evasiveness claiming to support the principle of public sector workers having the right to go on strike whilst simultaneously trying to persuade them out of putting it into practice.

A rather more effective comment was made by Dave Prentis of Unison who said public sector workers ‘wipe noses, bottoms; they help children to learn and empty bins- they deserve out thanks not the unbelievable level of abuse he threw at them.’ Mr Clarkson, by contrast, earns his daily bread by driving cars very fast and generally acting like a spoilt twelve year old in the company of his two sniggering accomplices; you don’t need the services of a super computer to work out who makes the greater contribution to society.

There were also calls for David Cameron to disassociate himself from Clarkson’s comments, the prime minister duly obliged saying they were ‘a silly thing to say and I’m sure he didn’t mean that.’ As censure goes it’s hardly the sort of thing to have its recipient quivering in his shoes, but it did move things neatly into the next phase, the one where everybody pretends to be really sorry even though they aren’t.

The BBC went first saying the One Show was a ‘live topical programme which often reflects on the day’s talking points’ and went on to say ‘usually we get it right, but on this occasion the item wasn’t perfectly judged. The BBC and Jeremy would like to apologise for any offence caused.’ Actually the One Show is about as topical as Tizwas and the failure of judgement involved seemed to consist of departing from the programmes usual formula of boring its audience into submission, but at least their apology was a genuine show of contrition.

There was nothing like that to be heard from Jeremy Clarkson himself, what he said was ‘if the BBC and I have caused any offence, I’m quite happy to apologise for it alongside them.’, then added ‘I didn’t for a moment intend these remarks to be taken seriously, as I believe is clear if they’re seen in context.’

Ah yes, Context, the get out clause of choice for people who say foolish things. The context here is that Clarkson is sorry that what he said got him a storm of criticism on Twitter instead of a belly laugh from the boys in the saloon bar, not for the potential insult he might have heaped on people who do demanding and often dull jobs for modest wages and have the temerity to consider dignity in old age something worth fighting for.

Since the advent of David Cameron in 2005 the progressive wing of the Conservative Party has patiently taught its representatives in parliament to say nice things whilst thinking nasty ones. The public sector strikes though have allowed the real and unchanged character of the party to bubble to the surface. They see striking public sector workers as dangerous ‘militants’ hell bent on overthrowing the capitalist system of some such nonsense and apply a similar attitude to anyone outside the charmed circle of ‘wealth creators.’

In his autumn budget statement this week Chancellor George Osborne hammered public sector workers and families on low incomes whilst continuing to fight shy of regulating the banks or the city. The real surge of public anger should focus on what he is doing not what a past his best TV presenter said.

As for Jeremy Clarkson he seems to cut a rather sad figure, like the class clown who refuses to grow up; an analogue controversialist gasping desperately for the oxygen of free publicity in an overcrowded digital world.

As a good pinko liberal I wouldn’t seek to deny him his right to free speech, I would though like to take the opportunity to point out that since Jeremy Clarkson achieved his dubious fame and not inconsiderable fortune working for the BBC he is himself a public servant. I doubt he would be much missed if he went out on strike indefinitely.

Sunday 27 November 2011

How many jobs will robbing workers of their rights create Vince? None.

Business Secretary Vince Cable, one of the sadder Liberal Democrat barnacles clinging to the hull of the coalition, has launched a ‘call for evidence’ on reforming employment law.

Up for grabs are ideas such as allowing businesses to cut the consultation period for making redundancies from ninety days to just thirty, making it harder for workers to take their employers to an industrial tribunal and the introduction of ‘protected conversations’ between managers and staff. This last means that employers would be allowed to discuss sensitive issues such as retirement or performance with staff without, as Dan Watkins of Contract Law told politics.co.uk this week, ‘fear of their every word being used against them in a tribunal.’

Perish the thought; actually the thought I seem to have had most about ‘protected conversations’ is that like ‘protective custody’ any exercise of power needing to be disguised by a mealy mouthed euphemism is unlikely to be a good thing. As Brendan Barber of the TUC put it ‘protected conversations’ could provide the ‘perfect cover for rogue bosses to bully at whim without fear of being found out.’

Am I the only person out there who thinks this call for evidence seems more like a fishing trip to see what the government can get away with?

If so some of the things they’d like to get away with are very nasty indeed, take for example the proposal put forward by Adrian Beecroft, a big time donor to the Tories, that ‘unproductive’ employees should lose their right to claim unfair dismissal. The Lib Dems managed to kick that idea into the long grass a while ago; I doubt it will stay there though.

The purpose of this assault on hard won rights for working people is dressed up under the dubious term ‘reform’ is, according to Adam Marshall of the British Chambers of Commerce to create a situation where ‘firms won’t have to waste time and money and can focus on running their business and delivering growth.’ Yes, naughty workers always wanting their pesky rights and gobbling up money their bosses could be paying themselves.

Hang on a moment though, will turning the clock back on employment law really kick start the economy? Chukka Umunna, shadow Business Secretary doesn’t think so and told the press this week that ‘watering down people’s rights at work is not a substitute for a credible plan for growth.’ He may have the misfortune to labour under the tag of being the ‘British Obama’ and being named as a potential future leader of a party that has lost its way big time, but on this issue Mr Umunna has a valid point.

There are a great many things the government could do to help businesses, simplifying the tax system in return for companies investing a slice of the money saved in long term job creation; speeding up the planning system for companies that move to areas where jobs are scarce for example. You might notice something about these ideas; they all involve an element of working in partnership; both sides giving a little to meet in a mutually advantageous middle.

That approach is something successful businesses and healthy societies understand implicitly. If the relationship between employers and employees is one of ‘us’ and ‘them’ with both camps armed to the teeth and spoiling for a fight sooner or later everybody loses out.

Anyway should we be dismantling rights for people in work, and for those looking for work thanks to the harshest welfare reforms for decades, in the name of promoting growth; might growth itself be something of a chimera? Natural resources and human capability are finite; the real challenge of the century ahead is to find a way of sharing what we have fairly rather than endlessly chasing after more.

Yet again the government has proved to be drawing its policies from a 1980’s playbook. Demonize the unions, shout at the poor that they just aren’t trying hard enough and attack anything connected to ‘rights’, the public will lap it up; maybe not. Times have changed, if small businesses are going to drive the recovery, and they surely are, then promoting partnership working will matter more than making it easier for bosses to fire staff on a whim.

That the government led by David Cameron can’t see that explains why they can’t some up with a Plan B for the economy and why what we need to get Britain back in business isn’t fewer rights for workers; what we need is a new government.

Sunday 20 November 2011

Were August’s riots just a taste of what is to come?

This week the first academic analysis of the riots in London, Birmingham and several other cities at the end of the summer was published; I doubt David Cameron will care all that much for what it has to say.

In ‘Mad Mobs and Englishmen’ Steve Reicher and Clifford Scott of, respectively, the universities of St Andrews and Liverpool predict that a refusal on the part of politician to pay attention to the real causes of the riots could make such social disorder more likely. They reject the knee jerk reaction that ‘straightforward criminality’ was solely to blame for the riots, claiming the real trigger was a sense of grievance and lack of opportunity felt by a growing number of young people.

Speaking to politics.co.uk Professor Reicher said the riots began because ‘police failed to engage with local communities’ and that when politicians responded by calling for ‘water cannon and curfews’ to be deployed next time they risked ‘making a bad situation still worse.’ He went on to say that politicians could learn ‘much about our society if we stop, listen and learn from what people did on those four nights in August.’

His concerns were shared by Mark Seddon, director of the People’s Pledge campaign, who said in an interview given to politics.co.uk that more unrest on the streets was possible if nothing was done to address the ‘democratic deficit’, adding that there was a real risk that ‘the state response will become more violent as the riots become more violent.’

Elsewhere director general of the CBI John Cridland warned this week that the UK economy was in a ‘bad place’ and that efforts by businesses to turn things around were being hampered by the speed with which the government was implementing its austerity policies. As understatements go that deserves some kind of prize, this week number of people out of work rose to 2.62 million, 1.02million of whom are aged 16 to 24; far from curing our economic woes austerity seems to be making things worse and could cause government borrowing to reach £100 billion above target by 2015.

In a speech to the Social Market Foundation reported by the BBC this week Labour leader Ed Milliband said that given the harm being done to the economy and to society by their policies it would be ‘the height of irresponsibility for the government to carry on regardless.’ He went on to urge them to ‘change course for the sake of our young people, change course for the sake of the country.’

Even the dear old Church of England got in on the act with eighteen bishops signing a letter printed in today’s Observer calling for the government to reconsider its plans for welfare reform because they risk tipping thousands of families into poverty. It is the sort of comment the church should have been making when the Occupy protest camp first appeared on its doorstep; but better late than never.

The unfortunate truth though is that none of this, not the reasoned analysis of academics, or the politely heartfelt concerns of senior clerics, or the appeal from the leader of the opposition to put the good of the country ahead of party politics will penetrate the shell of indifference surrounding the government. David Cameron and George Osborne have painted themselves into a corner over the economy and fixing ‘broken Britain’ and lack the strength of character to find a way out.

Instead we are treated to comments such as the following from Tory Party Chair Michael Fallon who told the BBC that ‘rather than speculation whether businesses are good and bad Ed Milliband should set out a credible plan to clear up the mess Labour left behind.’ Yes that’ll solve the problem, another spat at the despatch box between George Osborne and Ed Balls over who is to blame for the deficit; it won’t be at all like playing pass the parcel with a time bomb will it?

In his conference speech David Cameron twittered on at length about ‘leadership’; I doubt he knows what the word means, he certainly hasn’t shown any. If he were serious about solving the problems afflicting our society and economy he would be working to bring the three main political parties, business leaders, the unions and anyone else with a stake in Britain’s future together to address the problems we face and to find a solution that is to the benefit of everyone.

That is what real coalition government is about, not using scare tactic to prop up a first past the post electoral system that disenfranchises millions of voters and using the introduction of IER to rob millions more of their vote altogether; not roaring like a lion at the people tagged as the ‘underclass’ by the tabloid press then mewling like a kitten frightened by a thunderstorm whenever he deals with the city or the banks. He lacks the courage and understanding of the fears of ordinary Britons to do so and so in its place we will get instead is a vicious cycle of riots and retribution that in the end will harm everyone.

Sunday 13 November 2011

In the future everybody will be allowed to strike for fifteen minutes.

There are times when you open your morning paper and feel obliged to check the date on the off chance that you have somehow passed through a wormhole and emerged on April 1st without noticing.

I had one such moment yesterday when I read that Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude had suggested that public sector workers angry over pension reform plans imposed by the government hold a ‘token’ fifteen minute strike on November 30th. This was, he said in an interview given to the Financial Times, something the government would be ‘willing to accommodate’ and that he ‘couldn’t imagine’ any public sector employer docking worker’s who took part a day’s pay as a result.

Gawd bless you Mr Maude sir; you’re a gent and no mistake. I’ll just give my forelock a good hard tug before writing the rest of this article in honour of your boundless generosity. Then again maybe I won’t.

This offer delivered from somewhere in the leftfield had attached to it the threat that if public sector workers followed the instructions of their union and took part in a full day’s industrial action then the government would see this as making further tightening of trades union laws inevitable. As one BBC commentator put it, if the government was offering the public sector unions a carrot then it was attached to ‘a pretty hefty stick.’

Speaking to the BBC TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said that if Francis Maude had ‘genuinely wanted this idea to be taken seriously I would have expected him to have raised it directly with the unions rather than play it as a PR gambit in an interview.’ He went on to say that real progress in the dispute over public sector pensions would only be achieved via the government making ‘acceptable offers’ as part of the negotiation process.

A spokesperson for UNISON, the union representing many of the workers due to take part in the strike, questioned whether the government was in a position to guarantee that nine thousand public sector employers wouldn’t dock the pay of staff who took part. He described the offer as a ‘load of PR gimmicks to make people think unions are being unreasonable’ and went on to say that UNISON members had ‘voted a certain way and how that strike goes ahead is not a matter for Francis Maude to decide.’

I don’t know which surprises me more that the offer was made in the first place or that the response to it has been so restrained. The line taken by UNISON, the TUC and most of the media is that this is just another piece of out of touch eccentricity from a government composed of people so wealthy they really do think the world smells of fresh paint and that it is entirely normal to be met by an honour guard of footmen and chambermaids whenever you pop down to your little place in the country.

I don’t think it is anything of the sort; I think it is a concerted, cynical and potentially disastrous attack on democracy. The only question relates to how many of the people complicit in it know and agree with what is being done and how many are too stupid to understand what is happening.

Last week a commons select committee attacked the proposed introduction of individual voter registration saying that it could damage democracy and lead to the legitimacy of future election results being called into question. Turning the right of working people to withdraw their labour into something granted from above and only to be exercised within confines so strict as to make doing so irrelevant is no less dangerous.

This week the Greek people saw their, admittedly unpopular and ineffectual but none the less democratically elected, government replaced by one led by a grey technocrat in order to appease the market, a god more cruelly capricious than any their ancestors once thought inhabited Mount Olympus; in a short while Italy will follow the same sad course. Across Europe democracy is under threat in a way it hasn’t been since the end of the war because the clever manipulators of capital see it as a barrier to their turning the debt crisis into an opportunity to make money.

Here in the UK we are told that the government’s heroic deficit reduction plans will keep the wolf of financial chaos from our door and that our political system is somehow immune to the troubles that have afflicted the rest of Europe over the decades. That, to me, sounds dangerously complacent; far from saving the economy the policies driven ahead so recklessly by George Osborne risk turning a recession into a depression, if people are being stealthily discouraged from even registering to vote and tricked out of the right to withdraw their labour then our democracy will slowly atrophy.

Democracy isn’t a perfect system; but it is demonstrably the best one on offer, not least because it allows the people to make things awkward for those who set themselves up as their rulers. If things turn out how Francis Maude and his kind think they should in the future everyone will be ‘allowed’ to strike for fifteen minutes, but whether that is the same as being free is open to question.

Sunday 6 November 2011

Voting is NOT a lifestyle choice.

Ever heard of IER? I’ll give you a clue it’s not a ‘must have’ computer gadget, the next iphone app or a distant relative of self appointed conscience of the Tory party Iain Duncan Smith.

IER stands for individual Electoral Registration and it is perhaps the most dangerous idea this misguided government has come up with so far. Up to now it has been the responsibility of the ‘head’ of every household in the country to ensure that every eligible adult living in his or her property has registered to vote, the penalty for not doing so being a fine of up to £1000.

Under IER all that will be swept away and it will be up to individuals to register to vote, or not. The vote, something women threw themselves under horses to win and men (and not a few women too) of all nations died in two world wars to protect will stop being a civic duty and become just another ‘lifestyle choice.’

This has attracted expressions of concern from the Electoral Commission, academics, pollsters and, belatedly, the Labour Party, all, it seems, to no avail, the government has set its course and the presence of a huge rock in the way is seen as not being a good enough reason for changing direction.

The latest group to draw a map of the rock in this particular instance is the commons Political and Constitutional Reform committee, who said last week the that introduction of IER could ‘damage democracy.’ I admire their restraint; personally I think it risks destroying it completely.

Why so? It’s very simple, if they are not compelled to do so, register to vote that is whether or not a person actually cast his or her vote is and should remain a matter of choice thousands of people will simply not do so. As the Labour MP and chair of the committee Graham Allen told the BBC ‘Getting people to take responsibility for their own votes is the right thing to do, but it has to be done in the right way.’ In this instance the right way is by making it a requirement to register and educating people in the importance of using their vote.

A spokesman for the Cabinet Office said the government was acting to ‘modernise’ electoral registration and that they were ‘putting safeguards in place to stop people dropping off the register as well as looking at what we can do to increase registration levels.’ This all sounds very proactive but is, in fact, little more than bland nonsense since there are no plans in place to hold a national canvass of registered voters in 2014 so when IER is introduced a year later the information against which the number of voters registered will have to be checked and any targets for increasing it set will not be accurate.

There is no doubt that there is something uncomfortably paternalistic about the ‘head’ of a household registering the voters in his property and I can see the potential for fraud, but IER will not solve the problem in fact it will create even more problems. Not least because whenever I hear a bureaucrat talking about ‘modernisation’ it seems to be an excuse for someone to cry ‘havoc’ and let slip the dogs of incompetence.

What should concern us even more is the fact that, as pointed out in a recent article published in the New Statesman, that under IER the number of people registered to vote could fall from the current level of 90% to 65% or maybe even 60%, meaning that ten million or more voters could vanish from the electoral register and the democratic radar at a stroke. As Jonathan Tongue, professor of politics at the University of Liverpool pointed out in the same article this will be a ‘disaster in terms of shrinking the electoral register and reducing the number of people voting in general elections,’ he goes on to add that ‘If you diminish the number of people registered to vote, you delegitimise the outcome of elections.’

The voters who ‘vanish’ as a result of the introduction of IER will, inevitably, come from the poorest communities, the young, members of ethnic minorities and people living in rented accommodation. They are in effect being told that the political system isn’t interested in their views or their votes so would they please go away.

This should concern everyone outside the richest sections of society. The rich don’t much care about democracy because they can buy whatever they need from an education for their children to health care for themselves when they grow old or fall sick. People on low to middle incomes, the gap between the two groups is shrinking by the day, need it desperately. Without the ability to make their collective voice heard at the ballot box they, we, are sunk because their cries for help will always be drowned out by the bellowing of the corporate giants.

After an ecstasy of dithering the Labour Party has woken up to the importance of this issue, Harriet Harman denounced the introduction of IER from the conference platform and party leader Ed Milliband is said to be ‘steamed up’ about the proposals and is planning an Obama style registration drive in universities and colleges across the country.

Labour are, of course, in something of a difficult position over IER since they came up with the idea of introducing it whilst in government. I also fear that for all the good intentions behind it Red Ed’s attempts to galvanise sceptical students might be unfortunately comic in its delivery; more a timid whisper of ‘do you think we should? than a triumphant shout of ‘yes we can.’

What is deadly serious though is the threat this ill thought out plan poses to our democracy. I don’t take the line that it is part of a right wing conspiracy since this government lacks the organisational skills to mount one, it is, instead, the product of an out of touch political class that masks is inability to connect with the public with endless fiddling about with processes.

IER will damage the legitimacy of our democratic process, whether your views belong to the left or the right if you believe in the right of the people to choose how and by whom they are governed call for it to be abandoned before it is too late.

Sunday 30 October 2011

Far from being ‘all in it together’ pay for Britain’s top directors shows they aren’t even on the same planet.

Pay for directors of the UK’s top companies has risen by 49% according to a report complied by Incomes Data Services (IDS). The average pay package for a director of a FTSE 100 company now stands at £2.7 million, this takes into account salary, benefits and bonuses and the rise is higher than that given to the chief executives of the same companies. They, the poor dears, have had to struggle along on just 43% more pay than they received last year; how have they coped eh?

Pay for most employees has risen by 2.6% over the same period and many workers have seen their pay cut or remain static. Consumer price inflation is currently running at 5.2%; for most families balancing their budget has become a circus act performed on a high wire without a safety net.

David Cameron, who has been in Australia all week attending the Commonwealth heads of government jolly in Perth, said the findings of the report were ‘concerning’ and called for greater transparency when it comes to setting pay levels for senior managers. Labour leader Ed Milliband said the levels of pay awarded to directors were evidence of the ‘something for nothing culture’ that had infected business.

Trades union leaders took a more robust line, Len McCluskey of UNITE said the government should ‘consider strongly giving shareholders greater powers to question and curb these excessive packages.’ TUC leader Brendan Barber accused directors of using ‘tough business conditions to impose real wage cuts, which have hit people’s living standards and the wider economy, but have shown no such restraint with their own pay.’

If you were in need of evidence that we have passed through the looking glass into Wonderland the IDS report provides chapter and verse. On a weekly basis we are lectured by ‘business leaders’ of one stripe or another about the need for pay restraint and the importance of imposing brutal austerity measures on public spending as they vote themselves massive pay rises and cry for huge bonuses on top.

The reason for this, we are told with finger wagging imperiousness is that they are ‘wealth creators’, sorry; run that one by me again. The economy has stalled, unemployment is soaring and productivity figures are at an all time low; just what are this shower doing to create wealth? At best they seem to be shifting what little wealth there is into their own pockets.

About all of this the best David Cameron can find to say is that he is ‘concerned’, granted I don’t expect our PM and his Downton cabinet to string a ‘Capitalism is Crisis’ banner on the gates of Downing Street before leading a march on the stock exchange; but a somewhat more robust response does seem in order. Out in the real world people have moved beyond being ‘concerned’ to being alternately terrified and furious.

When Ed Milliband spoke about ‘predator’ and ‘producer’ forms of capitalism in his party conference speech he was accused, shamefully by some members of his own shadow cabinet, of not fully understanding economic realities. Now it looks like he might just have had a point, if not quite enough in the way of nerve when it comes to matching words to policies.

Even the union leaders, although they have proved the continued relevance of their movement, haven’t quite got the message yet. It isn’t enough just to point out that the casino capitalism of the past thirty years has failed, doing little to create wealth and even less to distribute it fairly, we need to have a genuine and for all parties often troubling debate about the sort of country we want the UK to be.

Do we want growth at all costs? Are we happy to see social mobility continue to decline for the sake of paying a little less tax? In short do we really want to all be in it together or just out for ourselves?

I don’t pretend to know the answers to any of the questions listed above or the dozens of others that could take their place; but, like most people outside the charmed world of the Westminster bubble I can’t see how we can deal effectively with the problems Britain faces if we don’t start asking them soon.

Sunday 23 October 2011

It is time for the 99% to occupy the political mainstream.

The protestors from the Occupy London movement who set up camp outside St Paul’s this week have done something truly historic, and I don’t mean forcing the cathedral to close its doors to the public for the first time since the war. They have given our complacent political elite a much needed shock.

The closure of the cathedral, which initially welcomed the protestors, rightly asserting their right to protest peacefully over the possible loss of tourist income, was instituted on, it is claimed due to health and safety concerns. The Right Reverend Graham Knowles, the Dean of St Paul’s, said the potential dangers arising from cooking stoves and small fires lit by the protestors were a hazard to cathedral staff, visitors and the protestors themselves.

The protestors, who are part of a worldwide movement calling for a ‘structural change towards authentic global equality’ and for the world’s resources to ‘go towards caring for caring for people and the planet, not the military, corporate profits or the rich’ claim to speak for the 99% of people for whom globalisation has brought only debt and despair over the past quarter century. They have promised to ‘accommodate the cathedral’s concerns in any way we can’; even so an organisation founded by a man who threw the money changers out of the temple has still got cold feet about supporting their cause, I’m not a believer but I still think that is rather sad.

The real impact of the protest lies not in what is participants have said and done, but in what they haven’t done. Unlike the protests over tuition fees late last year there has been no public disorder, no windows have been smashed at Tory Party HQ and no national monuments have been defiled by the offspring of rock royalty. To a man and a woman the protestors have been, for all their eccentricity, impeccably well behaved.

As one protestor calling herself ‘Lucy’ told the BBC yesterday the protest is ‘not just about a few people who have got tents in St Paul’s, it’s not a stunt, it’s not a spectacle.’ That would explain why it has given the media and the political establishment such an almighty shock.

The media had settled within twenty four hours of the first tent going up outside St Paul’s on the line that this was another outing for the ‘rent-a-mob’ protest movement, several commentators even raised the ghost of Swampy the poster boy of the Newbury by-pass protests of the nineties, even though he hung up his dreadlocks years ago. Yet is wasn’t the protestors or the public who were out of touch at all, it was the press with its default setting of moral panic who failed to grasp what was going on.

As for the politicians, all three parties have spent the week in a panic about Europe and whether or not Britain should stay in the European Union, a significant number of people would like to see a referendum held on the subject but the politicians don’t and so all three party leaders are trying to strong arm their MPs into voting against one. Not everyone who wants to see a referendum is an angry little Englander, some of us would like to see the UK leading a drive to modernise the EU so that it is strong enough to meet the challenges of a world where the US could be out of the economic game for a decade or so, but we’re being denied the chance to have a reasoned debate because a remote political class is treating the issue like something that mustn’t be spoken of in front of the children.

The presence of that sort of attitude at the heart of Westminster is why the Occupy London protests have so wrong footed the political establishment. They can cope with protests that provide a couple of hours of chaos on the streets and then melt away, not least because it allows them to adopt absurd moral postures of the sort struck by David Cameron following the riots in August.

What they can’t cope with is the existence of an ordered and articulate protest movement that refuses to conform to their favoured stereotypes. Occupy London is just such a movement and at a time when inflation is soaring, unemployment is going up and more and more people are feeling left behind in the rush for growth it resonates strongly with the public mood too.

It isn’t a panacea for all our political ills, sooner or later the tents will have to be packed away and the protest movement will have to adopt more conventional tactics, like building a strong grassroots membership, organising community activism and maybe even making an impact at the ballot box. That is has, so far, maintained its integrity and good humour whilst avoiding a damaging confrontation with the police suggests that this earnest band of eccentrics could be the start of a movement to bring politics back home to the people.

Sunday 16 October 2011

Austerity isn’t working.

The party conference season is over and the political circus has packed up the bunting along with its hangovers and trooped back to Westminster as the leaves begin to turn. If there is a nip in the air this year it has as much to do with the state of the economy as the arrival of autumn.

Unemployment figures released on Wednesday show that the number of people out of work has risen by 114,000 to 2.57 million, reaching its highest level since the mid nineties. Part time workers have been hit hard as have the young with youth unemployment rising to 991,000, meaning that 21.3% of 16 to 24 year olds are without a job.

Alan Clarke, an economist for Scotia Capital, told politics.co.uk the spike in unemployment ‘shouldn’t come as a surprise because the economy is growing at half the pace it needs to unemployment stable.’ Things are likely to only get worse with huge cuts in the public sector workforce and a failure on the part of the private sector to make up the jobs lost with fresh recruitment.

Labour leader Ed Milliband has called for an emergency budget to deal with the effects of the looming economic crisis saying the government needed to show a ‘greater sense of urgency’ and that its deficit reduction plans risk sending ‘our economy into a tailspin.’

In a speech made at a college in Southend this week he called for a plan for jobs to be implemented that would feature, amongst other elements, a one off tax on banker’s bonuses the proceeds from which would be used to create 100,000 jobs for young people; investment in large infrastructure projects that would create jobs and demand for services and tax breaks for small firms that take on extra staff.

The was, Mr Milliband said, ‘an economic emergency’ and that through its economic policies the government had shown itself to be out of touch ‘with what is happening in Britain’s factories, its high streets and its homes.’

The response from Tory MP Matthew Hancock, a former advisor to Chancellor George Osborne, was both predictable and cynical. He told the BBC that Labour had ‘abandoned the Darling plan and now freely admit they would just keep spending on the taxpayers credit card’, he added to this a jibe that just as ‘you wouldn’t bring Fred Goodwin back to run the banks, so why would you bring Ed Balls back to sort out the economy.’

I am, it is fair to say, not the most enthusiastic of cheerleaders for Red Ed, not least because most of the time he is barely pink at best; but his assessment of the damage being done to the economy and society by an arrogant and out of touch government is spot on. Quite how wide the gulf between the antics of our leaders and the experience of most Britons has become is amply demonstrated by the behaviour of Liam Fox and Oliver Letwin.

I don’t much want to join in the schoolyard game of nudging and winking that has been played by the press all week over the relationship between erstwhile Defence Secretary Liam Fox and Adam Weritty, a close friend who pretended to be one of his ministerial advisors in a political equivalent of saying ‘I’m with the band’ as a way of blagging stuff for free. What angers me and I suspect most people is the though of the not so fantastic Mr Fox and his VBF trotting the globe at the public expense while at the same time service people returning from Afghanistan were being handed redundancy notices along with their campaign medals.

As for the antics of ‘Posh Ollie’ Letwin, who it was revealed this week likes to read his ministerial correspondence in the park and then drop it in the bin because carrying all those confidential papers back to the office is the most awful fag, it is all too clear what has been going on. This is the latest incident in the gaffe prone career of a man who thinks his, alleged, intellect frees him from having to apply common sense to what he says or does. There are occasions when eccentricity can be a sign of brilliance; here though it is just a symptom of pathological self indulgence.

Far worse that this is the divorce from reality that has been occasioned by the vanity of the Prime Minister and the cynical ambition on his Chancellor, which could, in time, prove to be every bit as damaging as the decade long feud between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

David Cameron spends his time strutting the world stage pretending to be a world statesman whilst ignoring the growing problems in the UK, apart that is, from when he feels the urge to do his patronising ‘somewhere over the rainbow’ routine in the name of the ‘big society.’ George Osborne is sticking to his damaging deficit reduction plans not out of an intellectual commitment to their economic accuracy, which by the way seems to be disproved at least twice every week, as a cynical belief that if rather than when the coalition collapses and the Tory grassroots decide it is time for Citizen Dave to spend more time with his ego he will be ideally placed to sweep to power as the heir to the Iron Lady.

This is a government charged with leading our country through the worst economic crisis the world has faced since the thirties and at its heart is a toxic mix of arrogance, entitlement and jockeying for position. Across Europe young people are rioting in the streets because they have had their future stolen, but the political elite are carrying on as if nothing has changed. An austerity package implemented by these people is a recipe for disaster.

Years ago I used to drink in a bar that had by its exit a sign reminding leaving customers ‘You are now entering grim reality’; maybe it is time someone put a similar sign up in David Cameron’s office. He could get his new friend Tracy Emin to make one out of her old knickers if he likes anything so long as the message gets through that life for most people is getting harder by the day. Time to face the facts Dave, austerity isn’t working and you are leading a complacent government into an dangerous era.

Sunday 9 October 2011

All hail Churchillian Dave

Over the years David Cameron has had more personal than Barbie and Action Man put together. In short order we have met ‘Compassionate Dave’ the man who wanted to detoxify the Tory brand by hugging huskies; ‘Concerned Dave’ the man who was going to nurse the economy back to health like a vet tending to a much loved family pet; and, since the riots we’ve had ‘Self Righteous Dave’ thundering like an old testament patriarch about the behaviour of the feral underclass.

This week in his address the to Conservative Party conference in Manchester he unveiled his latest incarnation, ‘Churchillian Dave’ (policies not included), the man who will lift the country out of the doldrums with the sheer force of his personality. Along the way he will stiffen our sinews by urging us to ‘show some fight’ and to avoid being ‘paralyzed by gloom and fear’ in the face of looming economic disaster.

Speaking about the fragile world economy he said ‘As we meet here in Manchester the threat to the world economy and to Britain is as serious today as it was in 2008’, and that ‘the Eurozone is in crisis, the French and German economies have slowed to a standstill; even mighty America is being questioned about her debts.’

Crikey! Gloomy times indeed, the Autumn of 2011, it seems, is like all those other autumns when plucky little HMS Britain has had to make headway through a sea of troubles, thank god we’ve got a square jawed hero in the shape of Captain Cameron lashed to the mast.

Even tough, as he noted, ‘nobody wants false optimism’ out latter day Nelson can see sunlight and calm water ahead because thanks to the economic plan followed by his government ‘slowly but surely we’re laying the foundations for a better future, but this is the crucial point it will only work if we stick with it.’ All that is needed for things to come right is for people to adopt a ‘can do attitude’ and show a little ‘British spirit’.

An hour or so of such sentiments repeated endlessly were rounded off with an exhortation for the country to ‘show the world some fight. Lets pull together, work together and together we will lead Britain to better days.’ For an encore maybe we can teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.

Anyone listening to the Prime Minister’s speech last Wednesday in the hope of divining the future direction of the government he leads would have been sorely disappointed because it was alarmingly light on policy announcements. There will be another 90,000 places for young people on the National Citizen Service programme, all very worthy, but most of those young people would probably rather get a job or training place instead.

There is also going to be a consultation into whether or not to legalise gay marriage, something that David Cameron and his advisors think is very daring and metropolitan. In the real world most people could answer question posed by an expensive consultation in ten seconds flat by giving the idea a resounding affirmative. These days only the boys and girls in the Westminster bubble feel the need to congratulate themselves for being grown up enough to accept there is more than one kind of stable relationship.

Although it pains me to say it this was the best conference speech of the season. Where Nick Clegg was too compromised to be taken seriously and Ed Milliband sucked the air out of the room with his lack of charisma David Cameron gave a faultless performance. The trouble is that’s all it was, a performance; so much smoke and mirrors signifying nothing.

The real story was happening elsewhere, in the blithe reduction by Home Secretary Theresa May of the debate over the creation of a UK Bill of Rights into a tabloid squabble over whether or not an illegal immigrant was allowed to stay in the country because he owned a cat. Justice Secretary Ken Clarke was right to call her comments ‘childish’, he forgot though to mention that they were also decidedly dangerous.

It was also to be found in the complacent assertion by Chancellor George Osborne that the government is going to plough on with its deficit reduction plans even though they are harming the economy. By the end of the week twelve UK banks had had their credit rating downgraded by Moody’s and Mervyn King, looking for all the world like an economist who had just been goosed by the ‘invisible hand’ had been forced to announce a £75billion QE package.

The message to be taken from David Cameron’s conference speech isn’t the one he might have hoped to put over about battling through against the odds. It is one about a government that has fallen into the deadly trap of thinking that only by showing that the ‘aren’t for turning’ can they be considered strong. Even though in reality leadership is about performing a series of complicated handbrake turns to avoid colliding with an immovable object that exists to prove there is no such thing as an irresistible force.

Sunday 2 October 2011

Official: Ed Milliband isn’t Tony Blair; so who is he then?

Ed Milliband is back in town, the town in question being Liverpool home to last week’s Labour Party conference, and he’s out to wage war on the ‘predatory asset stripping’ and the ‘fast buck culture’ that has caused a ‘quiet crisis’ in the UK. If politics were an old time western then Red Ed would be the hero in a white Stetson riding to the rescue of the nations ‘grafters.’

In his set piece speech to the party conference on Tuesday afternoon he hit out at the government’s austerity plans which are, he says, to blame for the ‘quiet crisis’ and at the political and economic settlement of the past thirty years for too often rewarding ‘not the right people with the right values, but the wrong people with the wrong values.’

People such as former care company Southern Cross and the former masters of the financial universe exemplified by the likes of ex RBS chief Sir Fred, ‘the shred’ Goodwin, to whom Gordon Brown gave first a knighthood and then rather a lot of taxpayers hard earned cash when the banking system nearly went into meltdown in 2008. These all round bad hats would be shunned in favour of companies such as Rolls Royce that actually make things rather than simply shifting money around.

He admitted that during its time in government Labour had ‘lost trust on the economy’ and pledged that under his leadership a future Labour government would ‘only spend what it can afford.’ You might think that all governments intend to do this but then tend to get blown off course and into debt by what Harold Macmillan called ‘events dear boy’, however in a world where the right wing media blames everything from the global financial crisis to it raining on the proprietor’s birthday on Labour profligacy it is a point worth making.

Ed Milliband is also in favour of a ‘new bargain’ between the government and the British public, one based on a ‘something for something’ culture where responsibility and hard work are rewarded. This would apply to those people at both ends of the economic spectrum, so no more free handouts for people on benefits and a bit more tax for the rich to pay. Not a bad idea in itself and one that resonates with the public, but it does sound a little bit ‘motherhood and apple pie.’

This wasn’t a bad speech, even though by now we know the bar set for Mr Ed isn’t all that high to start with. His delivery was as pedestrian as ever and, as his attempt to tell a joke about his recent operation to correct a deviated septum demonstrates, a second career on the stand up circuit does not beckon.

There were though several things to commend in what he said, he struck the right note between nailing the failings of New Labour and being aware of those of the more traditional wing of the party. He was also right to highlight then need for Labour to champion the building of a new type of society, one that avoids a retreat into cosy utopianism and that rejects on principle the cynical calculations of the Blair years.

The problem is that after a year in opposition Labour under Ed Milliband are still unable to articulate what that new bargain would look like when translated into reality. This is partly a result of their leader’s difficulties communicating with the lobby correspondents at Westminster let alone the wider British Public; say what you like about Saint Tony the one thing he did better than anyone else was work a room.

This inability to get over a message that should resonate powerfully with the public as the spending cuts begin to bite shows itself in the fact that when ComRes polled a thousand voters for the Independent only 24% saw Ed Milliband as a credible prime minister in waiting. That figure probably dropped even further amongst voters who heard him denying on Radio Four’s Today programme that he was ‘weird’, something floating voters in another poll conducted for Tory grandee Lord Ashcroft claimed to see him as.

This accusation in itself was rather childish, for the record all senior politicians are a little bit odd, they have to be to cope with the years of ridicule and rejection they have to go through as they climb the greasy pole. Far more damaging was the claim made by the same poll that even voters who were ‘warmly disposed’ to Labour see Ed Milliband as being ‘a blank canvas onto which they projected what were essentially hopes, or at least the benefit of the doubt.’

The real problem though is that even had Ed Milliband delivered a latter day Gettysburg Address in Liverpool this week it would have made little difference because as a means of political discourse set piece speeches made by leaders to their party conference are a busted flush. They are too carefully choreographed to make a lasting impact, it would have been more effective to have heard Ed Milliband make a shorter and more passionate speech about the three thousand BAE workers thrown on the dole this week than for him to have run through his over rehearsed paces so the massed ranks of the press could hold up score cards like this was the Olympic ice skating championships.

At the end of this year’s conference Ed Milliband is no more or less secure in his position as leader than when it started, mostly because there are no credible challengers waiting in the wings. Ed Balls would dearly love to make a grab for the crown, but made too many enemies when he was Gordon Brown’s strong arm man to have any serious backing. Yvette Cooper may make a more realistic challenge at some time in the future, but not until after the next election in all probability.

Things could be worse for the Labour Party; they have the germ of a message about change and fairness that could resonate powerfully with the electorate if only it were articulated properly. The trouble is it is hard to see how they are going to get any better with a leader who, at best, can only inspire voters to give him the ‘benefit of the doubt.’

Sunday 25 September 2011

Nick Clegg rolls out the clichés on his party’s long road to nowhere.

Anyone in the vicinity of the Liberal Democrat conference last week would have been able to put their ear to the ground and hear the rumble of a statement of the blindingly obvious approaching. Here it comes; leader Nick Clegg found the decision to raise university tuition fees ‘heart wrenching.’ Golly; who’d have thought it eh?

In his keynote speech to the party conference last Wednesday afternoon he went on to assure delegates just how ‘tough’ being in government had been over the past year. It had, he said, ‘brought tough decisions’ like that pesky problem of campaigning against a rise in tuition fees only to backtrack later for example, and he had seen the anger this generated amongst the electorate saying, ‘I felt it, I have learnt from it and I know how much damage it has done us as a party.;

Referring to the party’s tumultuous year in government Mr Clegg said ‘I suspect none of us predicted how tough it would be,’ he went on to say the Lib Dems had ‘lost support, we’ve lost councillors and we lost a referendum. I know how painful it has been to face anger and frustration on the doorstep.’

So not much of a year then eh Nick; but never mind because the party faithful can be assured their leader is committed to doing what it ‘right’ rather than what is simply ‘easy’; taking the long hard road that for all its trials leads if not to the sunlit uplands then at least to a better and happier place where clichés can roam free. In a neat little rhetorical question he asked ‘some of you may have wondered will it all be worth it in the end? It will be.’

As proof Nick Clegg pointed to the party’s success in winning concessions on Tory plans to reform the NHS and over human rights. There is, of course, some truth in this, Andrew Lansley did ‘pause’ in his plans to reform the NHS in deference to the junior partner in the coalition raising concerns; before carrying on pretty much as before.

The Liberal Democrats do deserve some praise for sticking to their non-negotiable commitment to protecting the Human Rights Act, which they, rightly, love and the more foam flecked wing of the Conservative Party hate with a passion. As Nick Clegg put it ‘Let me say something about the Human Rights Act; it is here to stay;’ quite so, but it may be transformed into a UK Bill of Rights and what position will his party take then? I fear more soul searching may follow.

As conference speeches go there was nothing remarkable about Nick Clegg’s performance, he didn’t use notes and spoke ‘in the round’, meaning at any one time he had his back to half the audience. Quite brave of him when you come to think about it since he is not well loved by his fellow Liberals just now.

It was all though just a little on the bland side; a bit meh, as the teenagers might put it. In fact you could say the same thing for the whole conference. There was none of the simmering resentment you can expect when Labour convene in Liverpool next week, nobody dropped a serious clanger; as I said, a bit meh really.

We did, I suppose learn a little more about Nick Clegg, he seems to be rather like a sort of needy university lecturer. Trying his hardest to be down with the kids, an authority figure but not a stuffed shirt; you can just imagine him calling his students ‘guys’ and them mocking him mercilessly once his back was turned.

There were, of course the usual attempts to be controversial that were, again as usual, utterly contrived. Vince Cable had a pop at the bankers; Energy Secretary Chris Huhne laid into greedy energy companies. Needless to say the delegates lapped it up, mostly because it must have seemed comfortingly like old times, the not too long ago golden days when they could shake their fists in righteous indignation safe in the knowledge they would never have to solve any of the country’s problems.

It was all rather sad really, there were no big policy announcements; they’ll all have been hoarded for the speeches David Cameron and George Osborne make to the Tory conference the week after next. Instead it seemed more like a dismal trade fair than a brave attempt by an embattled party to forge a distinct identity for itself.

If you were the hypothetical activist Nick Clegg imagined asking him or herself if it had all been worth it; the public animosity, the wholesale selling off of long held principles, the near certainty that the 2015 election will bring a return to political oblivion; the answer on the strength of this sad fandango of a conference would have to be that it hasn’t.

Sunday 18 September 2011

The Liberal Democrats have to fight for more than just the 50 pence tax rate if they are to survive.

The time was when the Liberal Democrat conference was the political equivalent of the band of the Salvation Army playing before the FA Cup final, an amusing anachronism designed to entertain people as they took their seats for the real contest. This year though it really means something; what it means is that this is the year when the Liberal Democrats have to decide what the want to fight for and how much of a price they are willing to pay to win.

What leader Nick Clegg wants to fight for, despite the best efforts of the Chancellor and his friends in the city to persuade the voting public that it doesn’t work, is retention of the fifty pence tax rate for higher earners. A tax cut for the ‘very, very, rich’, he said in an interview given to the Independent on the eve of the party conference in Birmingham this week wouldn’t happen ‘until there is significant progress on giving tax breaks to those on lower and middle incomes.’

The progress in question means in practice replacing the fifty pence tax rate with something like the ‘mansion tax’ that got the Lib Dems into so much trouble at their last conference but one. It’s a nice idea and one that plays well with the public, at least it does if the technicalities are worked out more convincingly this time round; but it will surely founder on the rocks of a Treasury that quivers with terror whenever the financial big beasts roar that they’re going to take their businesses elsewhere if they don’t get their way.

Nick Clegg also commented with disarming understatement on the fortunes of his party over the past year, saying things had been ‘really tough’ and that ‘some people who used to support us don’t now.’ You can say that again, in the May local elections the Liberal Democrats lost 747 seats in councils across the country and implication in the party’s handbrake turn over university tuition fees and the disastrous campaign in support of AV mean that these days NOBODY agrees with Nick.

He went on to say that the Liberal Democrats had come into government under ‘obviously controversial circumstances because we were governing with our sworn enemies the Conservative Party and, even more controversially having to make very, very difficult and in some cases unpopular decisions.’ It would be naive on the party supporters to have expected a seat at the top table not to have come with a number of compromises attached, but the Lib Dems seem to have been peculiarly adept over the past year or so at shooting themselves in both feet.

Given the turn taken by their fortunes it is something of an achievement that the Liberal Democrats are having a conference at all, and heartening that delegates will get to debate motions on issues such as reforming the House of Lords, the phone hacking scandal and welfare policy. In the lexicon of modern politics letting party members debate an issue doesn’t mean the same thing as letting the result influence party policy, but it certainly sounds a lot more lively than the decaffeinated trade fair the Labour Party are planning to hold in a couple of weeks time.

The economy is stumbling, unemployment is rising and the public sector is about to be hacked to ribbons; most worryingly of all the government in which they are a junior partner has no Plan B and is led by a man who seems to think this is a virtue not a sign of impending disaster. What, delegates should be asking themselves, is Nick Clegg going to do about that? As Deputy Prime Minister he should surely have some input into whether or not we find an alternative course or simply sail blithely on towards the rocks.

The Liberal Democrats also need to consider the deeper problems affecting British society, problems that will not go away if and when the economy picks up. This week a UNESCO report listed children in the UK being amongst the least happy in the developed world, supplied with expensive gadgets by their harassed parents but starved of the ‘family time’ that is key to maintaining their wellbeing.

For the Tories things have always been simple, their ideology can be written on the back of a postage stamp because it amounts to helping rich people keep hold of more of their money and encouraging ambitious ones to make as much money as they can and damn the consequences for wider society. Things can never be that simple for the Lib Dems, as their name suggests they are a party that exists to fight for values that aren’t linked to protecting capital and realising short term profits.

To date they haven’t done any too well at using the opportunity presented by being part of a coalition to fight for those values, letting themselves instead become a punch bag for a public that is angry about a deficit reduction agenda that is far more ideologically driven than anything bellowed from the platform at the TUC conference last week.

Speaking to the BBC on the eve of the conference Simon Hughes, the deputy leader of the party, said along with the by now ritual denial that the has any ambitions to be party leader one day (he does and you can see it shining from him like the halo of a saint in a medieval icon) that the difference between the Liberal Democrats and their Tory partners was ‘we concentrate on people at the bottom of the economic scale and spend less time looking after people who have done very well, thank you.’

Once upon a time the Liberal Democrats were an eccentric sideshow to the political circus, understandably when the opportunity came to step up into the major league they took it. Where once we indulged the sometimes silly things they said because they had little influence we now judge them on their actions because they do.

If the Liberal Democrats are to survive as a distinct political party and use their position to make real changes to the way our society operates then the most important thing Nick Clegg is going to have to do once the conference season is over and the business of government starts again is learn to say ‘no’ more often and more forcefully to the Tories than he has up to now.

Sunday 11 September 2011

Not repeating the mistakes of the past decade is the best way to remember the victims of 9/11.

Each generation has its collection of ‘where were you?’ moments. For mine they run like this: ‘where were you when the Berlin Wall came down; where were you when Princess Diana died and, most of all; where were you on 9/11.

The attack on the World trade Centre and the Pentagon on 11th September 2001 was, even for those of us living far away on the other side of the world, the moment when everything changed. When the world we thought was safe and permanent turned out to be fragile and threatened.

My own small memories of that awful day consist of walking into a room in the place where I worked at the time and being momentarily surprised by the horrified looks on the faces of my colleagues. Then I heard coming from a radio set on a shelf somewhere behind the door a shocked announcer interrupting the programme to say that what had at first seemed to be a terrible accident had turned into a terrifying attack.

Before 9/11 it seemed that people in the west lived for the most part in a bubble of wealth and good fortune. Bad things happened, just as they always had; but they happened to other people living in places that were far away. Afterwards we seemed to inhabit a world that has grown more paranoid and fearful with each passing year.

In offices and shops on both sides of the Atlantic people solemnly rehearse bomb drills, even though as the footage of the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks shows the best laid plans tend to crumble when exposed to chaos. A single rumour on a possible attack can ground flights for days and turn airport security into an Orwellian farce.

At the time of the attacks there was a lot of talk about this being an event that would snap the west out of its post Cold War complacency; in fact quite the reverse happened. Our delusions about the world we inhabit became more firmly entrenched.

Britain and the United States entered into two wars that could not be won. One in Afghanistan motivated by the understandable desire to catch the man responsible for ordering the outrages committed on 9/11; almost a decade later when justice finally caught up with Osama Bin Laden he was hiding in a small town in Pakistan and had probably been there since before the attacks. The other, in Iraq, was launched on the basis of information about weapons of mass destruction that later proved to have been ‘sexed up’. Blood, treasure and national credibility were expended for no appreciable return.

At home we allowed an already reckless capitalist system to become even more so in the process widening inequalities that encouraged extremism at home and abroad. Remember the perpetrators of the London bombings in July 2005 were all born and raised in Britain but had become alienated from a culture that seemed to them to be shallow and greedy.

It is right to remember and mourn the lives lost in New York on 9/11 along with those lost in Madrid, Bali and London in the years since then; it is also right to honour the bravery of the fire fighters who ran into the burning wreck of the Twin Towers because they saw their own lives as a price worth paying to save those of people they had never met and in doing so demonstrated the true meaning of heroism. Commemoration though must, to have any real meaning, be matched by a demonstrable learning of hard lessons.

Ten years of intervention in the Middle East have achieved nothing, where change has come thanks to the ‘Arab Spring’ it has been achieved largely without the help of the west, which tended to turn a blind eye to the activities of despots so long as the oil kept flowing. We need to look at the sorry state of our own society before attempting to bring about regime change in other countries.

The involvement of the UK government in extreme rendition and using information extracted through the use of torture, more details of which are emerging thanks to the uprising in Libya demonstrates that Britain needs the ‘ethical foreign policy’ Tony Blair talked grandly about establishing during his salad days. No diplomatic or economic advantage should be allowed to trump defending basic human rights.

At home we need to build a society where freedom and strong communities are just as important as free trade and fluid markets; we need to be citizens working in a shared cause as much as consumers gratifying our individual desires. Most of all we need to recognise that the best defence against extremism either in its political or religious form is the banishing of inequality at home and abroad.

If we don’t do these things, many of which will be difficult in the short term, we might come to see the frightening decade we have just passed through as marking only the beginning of our troubles.

Sunday 4 September 2011

Ask Ed- just don’t expect much in the way of an answer.


In the latest wheeze to emerge from its ‘Refounding Labour’ consultation document members of the public are to be invited to take part in a series of policy workshops taking place at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool later this month followed by a Q and A session with leader Ed Milliband. This will be paired, bizarrely, with a talent contest for sixteen to twenty four year olds with skills in music, acting, filmmaking or with an idea for a new business or invention where the prize is a paid work placement.

The open day, claimed by party insiders to be the first of its kind staged by a British political party, will cover three topics, youth opportunity, the cost of living and economic growth and building stronger communities. All worthy stuff no doubt, but hardly the sort of thing that will have people queuing around the block for tickets.

As for the talent show aspect of proceedings, that, said a party spokesperson, was designed to ‘celebrate the potential of young people;’ again this is all very worthy and a definite change from the vilification of the young as obese, benefits scroungers with an inflated sense of entitlement that has been a staple of the media coverage of the riots and their aftermath.

Earlier this week the wing of the Labour Party that still longs for Tony Blair to make a comeback was said to be ‘dismayed’ by Ed Milliband’s plan to attack David Cameron as an old style Tory grandee with little idea about how ordinary Britons live. This, they seemed to think, was evidence that Ed really was a red and any day now would be donning a donkey jacket and calling for Trident to be scrapped.

On one level you can see why the party might have been concerned by their leader’s analysis of the man he wants to replace as Prime Minister. Elections aren’t won by stating the obvious; but on the whole it seems the boys and girls in the New Labour bubble have nothing to worry about. Ed isn’t red; he’s barely even pink.

If you need evidence of this then look no further than the plan described above. Let’s just count the ways in which it can be shown to be damaging nonsense.

For a start even though he might not like to admit it Ed Milliband is the leader of a political party, an organisation that depends for its survival on having a strong grassroots membership who feel they have a stake in what their party stands for. A key part of that is being involved in making the policies they will have to go out and sell to the public on the doorstep. Inviting people with no link to the Labour Party and who might not even vote for it at the next election to take part in the process makes a mockery of the commitment shown by ordinary members without whom there wouldn’t be a party for Ed Millibad to lead.

It is also far from clear what real impact these chit-chats will actually have on policy. Participation will be so tightly controlled by the party’s full time organisers, a paranoid bunch at the best of times, that anyone with anything remotely controversial to say will be ruthlessly weeded out. All that will be produced will be a pile of spoilt flip charts and a neatly ticked box marked ‘engagement’, allowing the party to scamper on down the road to disaster in the way it had been planning to all along.

There is also something deeply patronising about the fact that it is deemed necessary to include a spurious talent show element in proceedings. It is almost as if the hierarchy of what used to be the people’s party now think the people will only pay attention to things if they are a bit like the X Factor.

Worst of all this whole sorry performance will bring us no clearer to understanding what the Labour Party stands for. Have lessons been learnt from their defeat in May 2010 and the slow crumbling of its core support that has taken place over the preceding two decades?

The one thing it does tell us is what a Labour government led by if not Ed then by one of the members of the shadow cabinet waiting patiently for him to slip off the narrow ledge over a bottomless pit that is leadership of a political party in its first term out of office would be like. It would be the same sorry New Labour story, all focus groups and spin; endless initiatives and targets hiding a deep dislike of the party membership and a patronising approach towards the wider voting public that we came to know so well and like so little from 1997 onwards.

If the best Ed Milliband and his shadow cabinet can come up with after almost a year spent gazing into their collective navels is to turn the party conference, a body that should be about giving grassroots members a voice in the making of its policies, into a tawdry talent show; then perhaps it is time the membership responded in kind by not voting them through to the next round.





Sunday 28 August 2011

Bursting the ‘too cool for school’ bubble.


Its exam results week and so every news report has been full of footage of excited teens jumping for joy as they get their GCSE results. All bright eyes and boundless enthusiasm, like an episode of Glee with a less infectious soundtrack and wonkier teeth.

Yet again the number of students gaining A to C grades (70% this time) has risen for the twenty third year in a row, the number of A to A* grades has risen too up from 22.6% last year to 23.2% this time round. For a while things sounded more than a little like a Soviet factory year end report, all roads lead onwards to success, but, of course, there is a fly in the ointment; several flies in fact.

For a start the joy of the nation’s teens must have been dampened by the annual chorus of harrumphing from middle aged hacks that exams are getting easier and schools putting children under ever more pressure to jump through the testing hoop meaning that any wider understanding of the subjects being taught is steadily being eroded.

There is also the small matter that even if you believe take the results at face value the news isn’t all good, in fact for boys, of whom only 19.6% gained A to A* grades compared to 26.5% of girls its slipping past the ‘mediocrity welcomes careful drivers’ sign and heading towards downright bad. A government spokesman told the BBC that the gap between boys’ and girls’ results was a ‘concern’, but that improvements to teaching in primary schools would help to improve the situation.

That sounds like an overly complacent response in the light of some other results that were released this week over which nobody felt much like jumping up and down for joy. This week the number of teenagers not in education employment or training, NEETS as the tabloids like to call them, rose from 16.3% of eighteen to twenty four year olds to 18.4%.

NEET, like CHAV is an ugly piece of shorthand that, like all such terms, implicitly condones prejudice by removing the humanity from the people to whom it is applied, it is though impossible not to recognise there is a serious problem. Unemployment can, as a spokesperson for the Prince’s Trust told the BBC this week ‘have a brutal impact on young people with thousands suffering from mental health problems, feelings of self loathing and panic attacks.’

It is also hard not to draw a parallel between high youth unemployment and boys’ poor performance at school. The kids of either gender who get a fistful of GCSE’s might not get a job straight away and when they do it might not be what they wanted to do, but the kids who come away from school with nothing will invariably end up in trouble of one sort or another.

The government has made promises about tackling youth unemployment, introducing a Work Programme and funding more adult apprenticeships, but as ever its policies are inconsistent; any good work done by the initiatives mentioned previously is likely to be undone by the scrapping of the EMA and savage cuts to careers advice for young people.

The problem of underachieving boys is one that requires a genuinely joined up response of the sort we are uniquely bad at developing in this country. Instead everyone with a stake in the issue seems intent on fighting their own little battle with the result that the wider war never moves beyond a messy stalemate.

Schools need to recognise that to succeed in education boys need structure, discipline and competition; three things that have been absent from modern child centred theories of education. We also need to develop a system of vocational education that gives non-academic, but still intelligent students, a means of gaining the skills and self esteem they need to thrive.

We also have a massive problem when it comes to using popular culture to show boys the value of education. The sorry parade of bling draped footballers and rap stars held up as role models just don’t do the job, in fact the implied celebration of all that is boorish, stupid and obsessed with instant gratification attacks the notion of diligent hard work that underpins success in education and the wider world. When this is allied with the ‘cult of cool’ that sees anything requiring effort or quiet reflection as being either boring or suspect the resulting combination is truly toxic.

Education is the route away from a difficult beginning to a better and more satisfying future; something the countries in the Far East against whom we are competing understand implicitly, as do many of those on mainland Europe. In Britain we have made the mistake of thinking that education and equality for all matter less than being a ‘safe haven’ for investor’s money; that whole sections of society can be abandoned without hope or opportunity.

A few weeks ago we saw the net result of such thinking played out as violent chaos on the streets of London and other major cities. If we’ve learnt anything from what happened then it should be that education and opportunity are the best defence against the mob.