Democracy isn’t about easy answers- that’s why we should give prisoners the right to vote.

Prime Minister David Cameron told MPs this week that he will resist calls from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to give prisoners in UK jails the right to vote. The issue was, he said, one that should be decided by ‘parliament and not a foreign court.’

He was responding to a question from Democratic Unionist Party leader Nigel Dodds asking if he would ‘succumb to the diktat of the ECHR?’ The diktat in question was a ruling handed down by the ECHR giving the UK six months in which to outline its plans for changing the law to give prisoners the vote.

In reply the prime minister said that people who have been sent to prison ‘should lose certain rights’, including the right to vote, parliament had, he said, ‘made its decision’ not to give prisoners the vote and he was fully in agreement with that position. The opposition are also in agreement with the present position, Labour shadow cabinet member Andy Burnham said the ECHR had ‘crossed the line with this one and we need to take a stand. It is an unacceptable intrusion into domestic policy.’

Labour will support any government challenge to the ECHR ruling in the belief that, as Mr Burnham put it, there is ‘ a very important principle’ at stake and that parliament needs to sent a ‘clear message to Strasbourg’ over who calls the shots.

The solitary voice of sense, well almost, in what was a turgid and overly emotional debate came from Liberal Democrat Stephen Williams, who said that when working to rehabilitate prisoners ‘ maintaining links with society, such as the right to vote’ is an important part of the process. He then rather blotted his progressive copybook by adding that prisoners guilty of really awful crimes like rape, murder or terrorism shouldn’t be given the vote.

There are, I think, two distinct issues here, on one of which I am in full agreement with the line taken by the government.

David Cameron is quite correct in challenging the high handed actions of the ECHR, it is for parliament and nobody else to debate and if necessary amend the laws of the UK. The fact that it has seen fit to issue an ultimatum from on high only adds further fuel to the fires of suspicion raging in most of the tabloid press about all things European.

Where David Cameron is both wrong and demonstrably cynical is in using the debate on whether or not we give prisoners the vote to play shamelessly to the tabloids and his own back benchers. There is a certain type of Tory for whom sticking two fingers up to the EU evokes sub Agincourt fantasies of crying god for ‘Harry, England and St George’ as they gallop off to bash the French and the Huns.

Cameron, like all cynical politicians, knows a dog whistle issue when he sees one; and when he does see one he plays it like Charlie Parker. After all if the Turnip Taliban, as he once described his party’s traditionalist grassroots members are busy foaming at the mouth about the ECHR they aren’t sniping at him for being a modernizer who consorts with Liberal Democrats.

For the record I believe that the UK should give prisoners the vote, not because someone in Strasbourg has told us to; but because it is the right thing to do.

Like Stephen Williams I believe that if the prison system is going to seek to rehabilitate its inmates, rather than just warehouse them between crime sprees, then they need to stay connected to society. I also believe that whatever the nature of their crime a criminal is still a citizen, it is the job of parliament to protect his or her rights just as it protects mine, not to conspire towards their removal.

Dictatorship is built on the idea that there is a simple answer to every question, if you march in time salute the beloved leader everything will be fine, the state will even find you a convenient scapegoat to blame when things go wrong. Democracy, by contrast, is about asking awkward questions and accepting that at some stage we will all have to sacrifice something that it is in our material or ideological self interest to maintain for the greater good.

That is why even the most loathsome criminals deserve the right to cast their vote, cherry picking those ‘we’ think are ‘nice’ (meaning redeemable) enough to be given it isn’t a liberal compromise, it is the first step along the stony road to a place where the franchise is something handed out as a reward for obedience.

It is better that a small number of people who have committed heinous crimes to be given the vote, than for us all to be complicit in the greater crime of making the right to vote into a gift to be handed out by a remote elite to those people they think can be relied on to do as they are told.

What exactly do YOU do all day Mr Duncan Smith?

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith has refused to apologise for saying the 1518 Remploy workers facing the threat of redundancy spend much of their time making cups of coffee.

In an exchange of views with campaigners who handed in a petition against the closure of Remploy factories at his office Mr Duncan Smith reportedly said, ‘is it a kindness to stick people in some factory where they are not doing any work at all? Just making cups of coffee?’

He went on to say that his decision to close the factories was based on striking a ‘balance between how much do I want to spend keeping a number of people in Remploy factories not producing stuff verses getting people into proper jobs.’

When challenged by one of the campaigners over whether or not disabled people had the right to chose between a mainstream workplace or a segregated one that might be better suited to their needs Mr Duncan Smith retorted ‘How far do you want to go with the idea that you can choose to do exactly what you want?’ Honestly the nerve of these people, wanting to make choices about their own lives; they’ll want the vote next the ungrateful blighters!

Responding to the comments shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Liam Byrne said they were ‘appalling’ and that ‘Remploy workers work hard for a living and they deserve to be treated with respect, not contempt particularly by the man who is sacking them.’

To say the comments made by Iain Duncan Smith were similar to those you might expect from a saloon bar bigot is an insult to saloon bar bigots. They at least try to cover their cruelty with humour and cringe with embarrassment when challenged, he though, speaks with the authentic voice of witless prejudice and doesn’t feel obliged to apologise for anything.

His comments prompt one important question; just what is it that Iain Duncan Smith does as a minister that makes him such a paragon of productivity?

As a minister he has a legion of civil servants to keep the wheels of bureaucracy turning and a squad of ambitious special advisors to write his speeches and laugh at his jokes. Needless to say nobody in either of these groups ever tells him he’s wrong, the polite civil service code for ministerial idiocy is call something ‘brave’; even when as in the case of these comments, it is misinformed, unfair and downright offensive.

What about his role as an MP then, aren’t they obliged to work long into the night and to spend three weekends out of four in their constituency? Quite so, however the House of Commons is one of the more convivial places in which to work what with its excellent restaurant and subsidized bars. There is also the small matter of the generous holidays; the commons goes into recess for weeks at a time because it still operates as if members have to journey back to their constituencies on horseback rather than by train.

Then again perhaps the real work of a minister is to produce policies not tangible products. If so then Iain Duncan Smith has been a serious disappointment. His attempts to reform the welfare system on the principle of giving people a hand up instead of a hand out have, so far, been utterly counterproductive.

His comments are made all the more offensive by the fact that Iain Duncan Smith is supposed to be a different sort of Tory. After a disastrous spell as party leader he re-invented himself as a social campaigner doing much to highlight the growing inequalities in British society and persuading his party that it needed to talk to people struggling at the bottom of society as much as its traditional core supporters.

Which is what makes it so disappointing that after two years in government he has gone feral and reverted to Tory type (or stereotype), surely his serious studies of inequality must have taught him that the one thing that does most damage to individuals and communities is a lack of work. Even a short spell of unemployment can cause people to lose their sense of purpose and become prey to serious physical and mental health problems.

In what is a very tough labour market disabled people will struggle more than most to find work, not least because employers are unwilling to hire staff who may need to, quite legitimately, take a considerable amount of time off to manage their ongoing health needs. Remploy, on the other hand, was set up for no other purpose than to provide employment for disabled people and to be responsive to their needs in a way that other employers cannot be, closing it down will create more problems than it solves.

That Iain Duncan Smith cannot see this is a serious failure of political understanding; that he can’t speak to the people fighting to keep their jobs with the respect they deserve shows a lack of basic empathy. Maybe it isn’t just his position on the future of Remploy that he should reconsider.

Pomp, circumstance and business as usual

This week the Queen clattered off to Westminster in her gilded coach to open parliament and deliver a speech setting out a legislative programme that Prime Minister David Cameron said would ‘build Britain.’ The subtext, of course, was that it would re-launch the flagging fortunes of the coalition; to which the only appropriate response it good luck with that.

The bills announced include one to set up a Groceries Code Adjudicator to ensure supermarkets treat their suppliers fairly; measures to allow parents to share maternity leave; a Banking Reform Bill to force banks to separate their retail and investment arms; and proposals to set up a Green Investment Bank. All of which sounds like good progressive stuff, at least it does until you consider little matters like the government’s shameful track record when it comes to standing up to the banking lobby.

Other aspects of the Queen’s speech give greater cause for concern, the government intends to push ahead with the draft Communications Bill, otherwise known as the ‘snoopers charter’ allowing the security services to access the phone calls and emails of private citizens and the introduction of individual electoral registration. That one is a shameful infringement of civil liberties and the other risks disenfranchising thousands of voters in disadvantaged areas has simply failed to register with a government that when it finds itself in a hole tends to start drawing up plans to dig a tunnel.

David Cameron told the commons this week that the government’s legislative plans as set out in the Queen’s speech were all about ‘taking tough long term decisions to restore our country to strength.’ The reality may be a little different, it is reliably rumoured that the speech was rapidly rewritten following the drubbing the coalition parties received in the local elections and frankly it shows.

BBC political correspondent Norman Smith described it as a ‘hotchpotch’ of a speech with ‘no over-arching theme’, it certainly fails to address adequately the concerns over the economy that were the cause of so many voters rejecting Tory and Lib Dem candidates.

In perhaps one of his most assured performances at the despatch box Labour leader Ed Milliband launched a savage attack on the government saying the bills they were putting forward offered ‘no change, no hope’ to people struggling through hard times. He went on to say ‘the electorate have spoken and they are not listening’, accusing David Cameron and George Osborne of believing that ‘people are turning against them because they have not understood the government’s economic policy. The truth is people have turned against them because they have understood it only too well.’

As re-launches go this one has proves, so far, to be the dampest of damp squibs. It shows a government that manages to combine a few good intentions with a tin ear for the concerns of hard pressed voters.

By far the biggest problem faced by the coalition isn’t the bills it plans to put through parliament so much as the man at its head; David Cameron. In his salad days he styled himself as the ‘heir to Blair’ and as such stamped his own personality all over his project to detoxify the Conservative Party.

In opposition this worked well enough, hugging huskies softened the party’s image, but it failed to deliver a conclusive result at the 2010 election because after more than a decade of Blair’s antics the public were growing weary politicians trying to present themselves as being a ‘pretty straight kinda guy’ and suspected, rightly, that there was no substance under the spin.

Two years in government have shown David Cameron in his true colours, not as ‘Dave’ the modernising man of the people, but as a member of the metropolitan elite who wanted to be prime minister not because the thought he could change the world, rather he just felt he might be quite good at the job. In fact he’s been a disaster, stupidly inflexible over economic policy, misguided in his relations with other European leaders and dangerously out of touch with the concerns of ordinary voters.

Where does all this leave Ed Milliband? Since the budget there has been a decided spring in his step and his performances at PMQ’s no longer resemble those of a British tennis player in the first week at Wimbledon. However, to keep the sporting analogy going for a moment, he now needs to make sure he doesn’t emulate everyone’s favourite nearly man Andy Murray.

The awkward earnestness that until recently made him into a national joke now looks rather more appealing when opposed to the shallow posturing of David Cameron. The challenge now for Milliband and Labour is to find something original to say, promising to deliver a watered down version of austerity won’t cut it; they need to talk about how a Labour government would build a fairer society and to rebuild the party’s links with their core vote they so shamefully neglected during the Balir/Brown years.

Predictions of the imminent demise of the coalition are probably exaggerated because there will always be an incentive for the Liberal Democrats to prop it up in the hope that by doing so they will forestall their own brush with electoral annihilation. Three years is a long trek for an opposition party to keep up the pressure and keep its own message fresh, but it can be done if the message itself is a sufficiently compelling one.

One thing it for certain more and more people are starting to agree with the slogan on the poster showing an air-brushed photo (is there any other kind?) of David Cameron toted at demonstrations by members of the Socialist Workers Party; it reads: ‘He’s got to go.’

Shiny new buildings mask an NHS stretched to breaking point.

Early last week a close family member was taken suddenly and seriously ill, meaning that he had to be rushed to hospital. The hospital in question was the University Hospital of North Staffordshire (UHNS), a shiny new institution built on the site of the old City General using PFI cash.

At this point I would like to say that I have nothing but admiration for the calm professionalism under extreme pressure displayed by the staff and none of what follows is in any way a criticism of their behaviour. However anyone who experiences the NHS at the sharp end cannot do so without coming face to face with some uncomfortable truths about how it operates.

The UHNS looks more like a mid range motorway hotel than a hospital with its pastel painted corridors, coffee bar and soft lighting. Look a little closer, something you have more time to do so than you would ever want if you’re waiting for a loved one to have treatment, and you soon realise that within this modern shell operates a system that has changed little since the 1940’s.

Here, just as in the decade of bombs, rationing and blackouts life is a slow progress from one queue to another; moments of frantic activity punctuated by interminable stretches when nothing happens. That patients so often bear such a situation with such, well, patience says much about the inherent stoicism of the British character, even so it contributes to make an already difficult time that little bit more traumatic than it needs to be.

This is more to do with the huge cuts imposed on the NHS than the Spanish practices the tabloids love to accuse its staff of engaging in, as the PFI investors start to claw back their money I see little chance of things improving soon. Not while investment bankers have private healthcare anyway.

For decades politicians of both the left and the right have lavished the NHS with syrupy and hypocritical praise whilst basing their attitudes towards it on outmoded and self serving misconceptions. The left treat any suggestion that the Britain of 2012 needs a heath service very different to the one it did in 1948 as a potential existential threat; the right mask creeping privatisation with airy talk about efficiency.

I have yet to meet anyone who wants Britain to have the sort of health service where the first piece of equipment brought to a patient’s bedside is the credit card reader, but we may end up with one if the debate surrounding the NHS is stifled by sentiment and self interest.

Hospitals are the twenty first century equivalent of a medieval cathedral, a vast open space into which all human life inevitably pours. We need an honest debate about how they can be made to serve our needs in a way that keeps the NHS financially viable without making compromising on the principles that make it unique as the one institution all sections of the public respect and value.

Half of voters not being interested in politics is a problem- but not a surprise

According to a poll conducted for the Hansard Society less than half (42%) of the British public will openly admit to having any interest in politics and only 48% said they would go out and vote were a general election to be held. This shows a fall of nine points in the past year and is the lowest figure recorded since such polls began nine years ago.

Just 24% of the people questioned said the coalition was working well, although this jumped 56% amongst self declared Tory voters, Lib Dems were less enthusiastic with just 27% saying the coalition was working. No surprise really since until the shambles over the budget the lion’s share of public opprobrium was heaped upon Nick Clegg’s hapless crew.

Dr Ruth Fox of the Hansard Society told politics.co.uk that voters seemed to be ‘disgruntled, disillusioned and disengaged’ adding that if ‘only a quarter of the population are satisfied with our system of governing’ it ‘must raise questions about the long term capacity of that system to command public support and confidence.’

There is, perhaps, some small crumb of comfort to be drawn from the fact that 56% of people still thought that it was possible to make a difference politically at a local level; until you read on and discover that only 38% said they wanted to be actively involved with local politics.

When we think about a ‘broken’ political system it is easy to picture something that resembles Eastern Europe after the wall came down, or some banana republic where everyone from the bellboy on upwards has a price and isn’t ashamed to name it. The corruption within our system, all those duck houses and bath plugs bought on expenses is very much minor league stuff by comparison.

Our problem isn’t a culture where politicians are on the take; its one where they are taken for granted.

On the one hand you can see why so many people are turned off by politics, the noisy, childish and out of touch antics of many practitioners act as a sort of aversion therapy when it comes to crushing engagement. The moribund state of the three main political parties doesn’t help either , but the fault can’t solely laid at the door of the Oxbridge educated politicians who have done so much to turn their parties into ghost brands.

Like it or not we the, increasingly non-voting, public must shoulder some of the blame. Just as there are ‘census Christians’, people who pitch up at church for weddings, christenings and the odd Harvest Festival when the kids are small, but don’t much want the fuss and awkwardness of actually believing in all that guff we now have ‘census democrats’; people who think voting is important and democracy is a good thing but don’t want the hassle of actually taking part.

In their understanding of politics the council and beyond them the government exist as a sort of amorphous ‘they’ to be called on to solve any problems that might crop up and ignored the rest of the time. This is what has fuelled the rise and rise of what might be called anti-politics politicians, who include in their number the likes of Tony Blair and George Galloway.

Whatever they may tell the public (or themselves) such politicians believe first and last in the inevitability of their ascent to high office, everything and everyone else is just a rung on the ladder to the top. In place of real beliefs or convictions they have a shrewd grasp of the zeitgeist of their particular moment and a neat facility when it comes to performing for the cameras.

They are lionised for a brief period and then shunned by the public they so cynically took in; needless to say the ‘change’ and ‘hope’ they promised never arrives. Real change, dull as the prescription may be, will only come about when the political system itself does more to promote collaboration and consensus.

A little under a year ago the British public fluffed the chance to start building such a system when it allowed itself to be scared into rejecting plans to change the voting system. If we had accepted the alternative vote and begun the much needed discussion about maybe moving to proportional representation it might have allowed new, possibly ‘radical’ voices to join the political conversation whilst tempering what they say with the moderation that comes from having to actually deliver.

Instead the next election will be fought by exhausted parties saying things in which the voting public isn’t much interested. If the Hansard Society conducts a poll in 2015 the days when less than half the public took an interest in politics may seem like a golden age of engagement.

Take to the streets over government snooping plans- just don’t tweet about it first.

People should ‘protest in the streets’ over government plans to increase monitoring of mobile phone calls, emails and web usage. This isn’t a communiqué from the Workers Revolutionary Party or boat race disrupting ‘activist’ Trenton Oldfield; it’s the advice of World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee.


The proposals to increase surveillance of communications made by suspicious characters such as you and I put forward by the Home Office are set to appear in next month’s Queen’s Speech. It will still, for now, be necessary for the authorities to obtain a warrant to access the content of emails and phone calls, but they will be able to find out who an individual spoke to, how often and for how long.


This is all being done in the name of combating terrorism and organised crime, so we should all stop worrying and let the spooks get on with things. I don’t think so, there is plenty to worry about, not least, as Sir Tim points out, the failure to strike an appropriate ‘balance between respect for human beings and the powers the government is giving itself’ inherent within the proposals.

Speaking to the BBC last week Mr Berners-Lee predicted a ‘battle’ between the government on one side and the vast majority of responsible internet users on the other over access and privacy. He said, ‘we need to fall back on the principle that the government doesn’t have the right to intrude on individual people in their homes and look at what they’re doing.’


He went on to say that people should not take the freedom to use the internet for granted and should make their MPs aware of their concerns and ‘if necessary get out there in the streets waving banners.’

Prime Minister David Cameron denies that the proposals constitute a ‘snoopers charter’ and that they aim simply to help the security services ‘keep up with technology.’ Civil liberties groups, understandably, disagree with this point of view, as does former shadow Home Secretary and Tory leadership contender David Davis, who called the plans ‘an unnecessary extension of the ability of the state to snoop on ordinary citizens.’

Equally worrying are the ongoing attempts to water down the power of the public to access information the government and other bodies would like kept quiet through the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. The poster boy for this campaign is former Home Secretary Jack Straw, who, along with his good friend Tony Blair, has some awkward questions to answer about the rendition of terror suspects he would quite like the public to be prevented from asking in the first place.

New Labour have very little to be proud of, but introducing FOI is one of the few occasions when they were unquestionably on the side of the angels. Empowering the people to find out those things the government would like to keep hidden may sometimes make things awkward for minister and civil servants, but it does much to bolster a democracy that often feels like it is slowly dying of indifference.

Perhaps in this brave new world of internet surveillance the government should give serious consideration to blocking Facebook, Twitter and the like and replacing them with alternatives that are run directly by GCHQ. Actually when you come to think of it people can get up to some pretty seditious things without having to go online to do so, perhaps the government should ban groups of more than three people meeting together in public places without a MI5 officer in attendance?


The suggestions made above, rightly, sound absurd; but if you enter into the Alice in Wonderland world where the government knows every detail of our lives but keeps its own activities hidden behind a cloak of secrecy that is the sort of mind-set you are taking on. A governing class that treats everyone, including before long its own members, as objects of suspicion will eventually be driven mad by paranoia.

At a time when the government is clawing back benefits from the ill, the elderly and the poor it would be deeply misguided to sanction the huge costs involved in setting up the massive apparatus of snoopers required to put these proposals into action. Even if the money could be found to do so the plan would fail due to the impossibility of monitoring the unceasing babble of internet and mobile phone chatter.

I have always though it rather an anachronism that we still make people knights of the realm, although if, like Sir Tim Berners-Lee, they are willing to have a go at slaying the dragon of state funded paranoia I’m willing to concede that they have their uses. If necessary we should all join him in taking to the streets to protest against government plans to snoop on the way individuals use the internet; but it’s probably not a good idea to tweet about it beforehand, you never know Big Brother might already be listening.

Never mind making mud pies some eleven year olds haven’t even had a childhood.

The National Trust has released a list of things every child should have done by the age of eleven, it is, to say the very least, a little bit Swallows and Amazons. Even so this has been sufficient excuse for a marching corps of columnists to wax lyrical about the joys of climbing trees and making mud pies.

Rather fewer column inches have been devoted to a survey conducted for the Consortium for Street Children (CSC), which showed that four in five Britons are unaware that a hundred thousand children run away from home in the UK every year, many of whom end up living rough. Most people, myself included, associate ‘street children’ with Africa of South America, that sort of thing doesn’t happen here we tell ourselves; only it does.

As Sally Shire, chief executive of the CSC told the BBC ‘whether they are a runaway from Derby or a street child in Delhi the factors that drive children to the streets are similar.’ They include poverty, abuse and addiction and the victims have little or no access to support.

Andy McCullough, UK policy lead for the charity Railway Children said ‘Street children are over-represented in the mental health system, the criminal justice system and there are clear correlations’, they also often go on to experience homelessness as adults.

If the authorities were serious about helping vulnerable young people they had, he said, to ‘go to the streets, the estates, the street corners’, he added, ‘you can’t expect them to reach out to you. This, Mr McCullough said, was not happening because local and national government officials were trying to solve the problem ‘from behind their desks.’

In response an spokesman for the Department of Education said local authorities were ‘responsible for targeted support for families with complex needs’ and that the government was ‘providing funds through the Early Intervention Grant which they can use to invest directly in services to safeguard vulnerable children’ and that they were working with ‘a range of charities and organisations to help them do this.’

Even though we contrive not to ‘see’ them we all know that Britain’s ‘street children’ are there. They don’t beg at the roadside, instead they’re the mob of youths in hooded tops hanging round outside after dark. It is their fists and feet that smash up the property of others because it happens to be in the path of some nameless anger they can’t control.

The poor, and even more so their children, are the ‘poor bloody infantry’ of the type of capitalism Britain embraced in the eighties, forever at risk of being harmed by the stupidity or capriciousness of someone in a, metaphorical, chateau far away from the carnage. It is an old and painfully unjust relationship to which a new and even crueler element has been added. These days government doesn’t try to solve the problems of poverty and social breakdown from behind a desk; it tries to do it through tabloid editorials instead.

This isn’t a new thing, ‘chavs’, ‘feral children’ and ‘sink estates’ have been journalistic clichés for the better part of a decade, but since the riots the façade of objectivity has been torn down. Quite reasonable disgust at individual crimes is used as an excuse to stereotype whole communities as being home to ‘scroungers’ and ‘thugs’ in a show of unashamed prejudice it would be unthinkable to heap upon any other social group.

This is another symptom of a ‘political class’ that is out of touch with the realities of everyday life being egged on by a media that increasingly has little of value to say. The latest wheeze is for MPs tax returns to be made publicly available, this is supposed to make their finances more transparent, but will really just give the media an excuse to fillet the resulting documents for more evidence of public money being spent on building duck houses and renting ‘artistic’ videos for ministerial spouses to watch.

Frankly I don’t much care about politicians building houses for ducks; I want to hear what they’ve got to say about the growing number of children who haven’t got a roof over their heads. I’d also like to see what they say reported and challenged by a media that sets its sights higher than providing celebrity tittle-tattle.

On mainland Europe disaffection amongst people who have been made poor by the recession, particularly the young, is translating into increased support for extremist parties of the left and the right. Here in the UK a sense of entitlement fostered by a quarter century of rampant consumerism has curdled into resentment, anger and as last year’s riots showed occasional outbreaks of violent chaos.

None of this is being reported in the media in anything other than the most simplistic terms and worse still our political leaders don’t seem willing to come out from behind their desks to engage with a rapidly fragmenting society. As a result for too many young people their childhood has more in common with the dystopian horrors of The Lord of the Flies than the soft focus fantasy of tree climbing and den building prescribed by the National Trust.