Edukational standards under the Coalition
First we had HM Treasury, who can’t spell “independent” when referring to the Office for Budget Responsibility.
Now, rather more embarrassingly, we have the Department of Health, who can’t spell “vegetable”, in a questionnaire about healthy eating.
I hate to think what the Department for Edukation will get up to.
(Hat tip: outraged wife)
Reducing Chinese export dependency: an own goal
In October, Will Hutton said this about China’s economic model:
[It] is built on sky-high saving and phenomenal export growth
The by-line for the same article was:
As America and China square up, the chancellor is ignoring the bigger picture with his ill-advised spending review
But nevermind the CSR, the House of Commons yesterday missed the chance to set a strategic limit on our reliance on imported soy, through the Sustainable Livestock Bill.
One part of China’s “phenomenal exporting” is soy; indeed phenomenal is an understatement:
Granted, there is more than one way of curbing dependency on Chinese exports, but opposition to the bill noted it’s “red tape” – that’s pretty lame, given the need for sustainability and the durability of the planet.
Plus, missing out on a clever way to promote maximised livestock production in this country – which the bill was set to do – will probably be another own goal.
The grey resistance (1): 10 step guide to defending your voluntary sector
This is the first in an occasional series of posts about how old people like me might be part of the multi-faceted resistance that Adam at Libcon advocates, and which I suggested months ago (not that anyone took any notice.)
It’s only occasional as I’m quite old and forgetful.
Realistically, people like me are not going to be on the demo frontline very much. Indeed (and to my shame) one of the things that struck me most about Ian Tomlinson’s death was hearing him referred to by eye witnesses as an older man who seemed out of place (he was, in fact), and thinking to myself ”Blimey, he was my age!”.
I will do what I have to when push comes to shove , but I’m not going to pretend that I’m “up for it” in the way I once was. As I joke to friends, I’m all for the revolution as long as it comes with cocoa at the end and tasteful soft furnishings.
So what can old people like me get up to help the overall cause?
In a subsequent post I’ll cover the intricacies of the Local Government Act 1972 (part 3, schedule 12, para 18, subparas 4&5) as a weirdly effective though sadly forgotten tactic (though see here if you want to get a head’s start), and other stuff will no doubt occur to my addledness.
But for starters, here’s an excerpt from a seemingly obscure Cabinet Office paper published last week: ’ Exposure of the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector [VCSE] to cuts in public funding: Information for Government Departments and Local Authorities’.
“The scale of the current deficit brings clear challenges to the sector as Government seeks to make necessary spending reductions. The VCSE cannot be immune from these cuts, which will fall on all sectors, but the Government is clear that cutting funding to the VCSE sector must not be seen as the easy option. To do so will risk a disproportionate impact on the sector, threatening the services the sector provides for some of the most vulnerable in our communities, and potentially slowing progress towards the vision of a stronger civil society.
With this in mind it is vital that central and local government have robust, local information on the sector to inform any decisions relating to cuts and ensure that the sector, and the social capital it generates, is not weakened.
The first and foremost source for information should be through direct communication with the local VCSE sector and infrastructure bodies in your local area, or area of work. Local Councils for Voluntary Service (CVS) agencies hold a wealth of knowledge on the scale and scope of the local sector, its impact on citizens and communities and the current challenges it may be facing. Discussions of the risks and impacts of potential spending cuts will be vital in mitigating the impact of any such cuts on the sector and the communities and citizens it supports” (my emphasis).
First, simply ignore the garbage about the cuts being necessary. It’s garbage.
Second, be clear from the outset that that this Cabinet Office guidance is aimed not just at local authorities but at all public bodies, including Primary Care Trusts (which tend to fund the VCSE as much as local authorities do or more).
Third, while obviously circumstances will differ from place to place and proposed cut to proposed cut, try to work the central government guidance into all statutory and democratic processes that you possibly can.
Fourth, and more specifically than the point above (which I only put in to get up to 10 steps), get on to sympathetic council groups (or individual councillors) and ask them to put forward general motion to Full Council (or carefully phrased formal question) about following both the spirit and letter of the Cabinet Office guidance, especially in respect of ‘direct communication’ with VCSE representative groups, and how this will be recorded and reported back to Council. Make sure you ask your sympathetic councillors to call for ‘recorded votes’, so that individual councillor votes are recorded in the minutes for future reference.
Fifth, ask councillors either to call-in decisions/proposals for cuts to the VCSE to Overview & Scrutiny meetings or take them to such meetings as Community Calls for Action (procedure established under the last Labour government but still under-used in many areas). Again, ask them to focus specifically on whether the Cabinet office guidance has been/will be followed, exactly who will be involved in the “direct communications” and how and when they will be reported back to Council
Sixth, check out the Local Strategic Partnership structure, and write to the Chair of the LSP asking her/him how decisions/proposals for cuts to the VCSE have been discussed within the LSP function and how they may affect the Sustainable Communities Strategy. Again structures differ from place to place, but the key is to ensure, where possible that you get the Cabinet Office requirement for ‘direct communication’ with the VCSE on the table.
Seventh, get in touch with the Primary Care Trust around the same issues. Write to the Chair and ask if he will put the issue on the Board’s agenda, again being specific about how the PCT will engage with the VCSE before making any decisions on funding, and how this will be reported both to the Board and to the Council’s Health and Overview & Scrutiny process.
Eighth, make sure you report your moves regularly to the press. Obviously.
Ninth, make sure of regular attendance at the meetings where you get this stuff on the agenda. Overview & Scrutiny meetings are open to the public, but no-one ever attends. Change that. This is the opportunity to interface with the different facets of the overall resistance, with you creating new and surprising sites of resistance for the more vocal demonstrators to get their teeth into. The element of surprise is still useful.
Tenth and finally, don’t forget to work in Cameron’s weasel words, extracted him from him on 15th September by the (very good) Labour MP Julie Hilling:
We should say to every single council in the country, when it comes to looking at and trimming your budgets, don’t do the easy thing, which is to cut money to the voluntary bodies and organisations working in our communities. Look at your core costs. Look at how you can do more for less. Look at the value for money you get from working with the voluntary sector. The hon. Lady [Julie] should take that message to her local authority. That is the message that I would take to her local authority and everyone should try to work in that direction.
Letter to the Times of London
Dear Sir
Like all loyal subjects, I am delighted at the news from our royal couple-to-be, and look forward immensely to the wedding.
In the meantime, is there any word from Clarence House as to how people should most properly refer to Ms Middleton, once she is married?
Will she become Princess Kate, and when she does become Queen at some point in the future, will she become Cathryn the Kate?
Yours etc.
The meaning of Thatcher’s handbag
Margaret Thatcher’s handbag took £61,000 at auction in 2004?
Fair enough. It did create a verb where there was none:
“She cannot see an institution without hitting it with her handbag,” Julian Critchley, a backbench Tory critic, once said.
And the term “to handbag” entered the political lexicon.
The only other Conservative politician to manage that is Michael Gove.
So there’s no wonder that her handbag still has a hold on the popular imagination. But what does it actually mean?
For Laurie Penny, it’s a symbol of fradulent feminsism:
Thatcher was no more a feminist than Bradley from S Club 7 was ghetto, but she created a brand of female empowerment – all heels, warmongering and expensive handbags – striking enough to replace the erstwhile aspiration of real woman-power.
For Najlaa Zorgui, a 17 year old Thatcher admirer, it’s a symbol of her housewife-wisdoms and her “femininity”
Well, for one thing, she was definitely a woman, and she made sure people knew, particularly early on in her political career. She shared her housewife-wisdoms with the nation, and even used a handbag. Given the timing of these displays of femininity, however, it’s certainly not improbable that these gestures were more geared towards helping her shrug off the “Iron Lady” image and adopt a more human-looking form.
And for me, it’s a symbol of monetary flat-earthism:
When John McFall refers to Thatcher’s notion of household income as erroneous, the image that comes forth in my mind is of Thatcher herself, standing in front of a door – a door that may be in Downing Street or may be that of a 1950 grocery store – arm folded half defensively across her wait, and a handbag dangling from it.
It is an image that takes us backwards to a time when money was easy to understand, when you couldn’t spend more than you earned because you simply didn’t have access to the cash, when household budgeting meant stocking up judiciously on tins of beans if you could afford it one week. It is a pictorial representation of [Stuart] Hall’s articulation of the new monetarism to an older tradition, ultimately a pre-capitalist tradition in which money still represents goods and labour.
Surely Thatcher’s handbag can’t mean all these things simultaneously.
The scary thing is that it can. That’s the power of the Thatcher inconography, and the Left needs a counter-image.
Any ideas?
Wanted: Tax policy, for use by the Labour Party.
It seems that Ed Miliband, either through bad decision or bad choice of words, has incurred the wrath of many lefties today, after a spokesperson seemed to wobble on his previously enthusiastic support for the 50p top rate of tax.
The talking head told journalists, that the Party does indeed support the 50p rate, “for now, and for the forseeable future“.
For those who struggled with elementary english, this isn’t really the same as the promise from “Red Ed” during the leadership contest, to keep the 50p rate “permanently”.
The clarification, or revision for those of a slightly more cynical persuasion, came after Alan Johnson cast doubt over the nature of this supposedly permanent tax. This raises further concern amongst those of us who live in fear of plotting and scheming, from those who never agreed with Ed, who wish to destroy any hope of him delivering the change which he promised during the campaign.
As Ed said during the contest, the 50p rate isn’t just about deficit, but it is about “fairness in our society”. But obviously, there are those who think that taking that little extra from the tiny, tiny minority of very well off people who can afford to pay it, is the beginning of a slow drift towards electoral suicide. presumably because bankers and lawyers earning somewhere in the region of £150,000 a year suddenly became Labour’s core base of support without any of us noticing.
Many would agree with what Ed had to say. I would, and do agree with it. But I’m starting to wonder whether or not he does too.
It’s no secret that there are those in the Labour Party who were uncomfortable with raising the top rate on higher earners, and thus appearing to abandon New Labour’s pivotal covenants with the filthy rich. I remember Mandelson publicly flirting with the idea during the election, much to mine, and many of my comrades annoyance.
But this instinctive tendency of those more right leaning Labourites to cut taxes for those who probably don’t miss it so much, casts the light to another policy path, cutting taxes for the LESS well off.
And this shows the political insufficiency of the likes of Mandelson et al to those of us generally committed to advancing the settlement of lower earners in Britain. Where were the warnings against appearing tough on aspiration when the lowest earners were having their tax rate increased?
Sadly, such prioritization of high earners would seriously bring into question, just who Labour exists to represent. A question that needs to be at the core of everything the Party does as we pick ourselves up from electoral defeat.
If we really want to reaffirm our image as the representatives of the less well off, more vulnerable members of our society and want to talk about tax cuts, then we should be talking about cutting taxes for those at the bottom end of the income scale, not those at the top.
But in my experience, many lefties, for some reason seem totally unwilling to incorporate tax cuts into their political lexicon.
Any preference for the former will only perpetuate the illogical thinking that had us removed from power in the first place. So sort it out Ed, and do it quick.
The independence of the OBR
The new Office for Budget Responsibility is completely independent of the Treasury, honest guv, and is seeking a new economist.
Which department will that job be in?
Why, the Treasury, of course.
Mind you, the OBR might have been better off going to the Dept for Education for its HR support services. At least they can probably spell:
Please note – HM Treasury provides HR support services to the OBR, however the OBR remains independant (sic) from the Treasury.
(Hat tips to the observant Duncan Weldon and @sheilar42)
Bloody students
I see the National Union of Students are thinking of putting up a candidate in the Oldham East and Saddleworth election, if it is re-run.
Why they would want to give a boost to the LibDem campaign, when it’s the LibDems they’re angry at for lying about tuition fees, is somewhat beyond me.
There may be a logic in there somewhere.
Moreover, I’m sure there’s a rationale for putting up a candidate who’ll carry forward their argument for no increase on tuition fees, potentially in opposition to a Labour candidate who’s argued consistently and coherently for the total abolition of such fees.
But I can’t see it off-hand.
Thoughts on loan sharks
Recently I penned an article, published today on the Guardian’s Comment is free section, drawing on the consumer credit (regulation and advice) bill drawn up by Stella Creasy, MP for Walthamstow.
After writing it I had some notes left over which I want to jot down here.
During her adjournment debate held on 9 November in the House of Commons, Creasy noted that of those who use credit over their means, 26% are male, and 34% are women, and of that latter 34%, 50% are recently divorced. And with 1 in 10 people, according to Creasy, struggling to finance themselves until pay day, it is clear to see that desperation leads individuals to something which would put the willies in most people.
Creasy also informs us that 1 in 10 customers of legal loan sharks earn under £11,000 per year, and that even lenders playing by the book are able to okay loans at 272% APR (compared to 9-10% by mainstream lenders).
Tim Worstall, who popped up in the comments section of my article, made the point that all short term loans are going to be high in APR to cover the loan application process itself. Furthermore, loan sharks don’t make as much profit than, say Lloyds bank, so by his account they can’t be so bad (or, perhaps he doesn’t think that, but that legal loan sharks needn’t feel so immoral).
Now call me a Maoist protectionist Nazi Communist if you will, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing that our government subsidise credit unions with the intention of making more individuals creditworthy, so they don’t end up lining the pockets of the likes of the chief executive of Provident – who recently stated that he expects growth in his target market as a direct result of the CSR.
This is not, as Mr Worstall has accused me of being before, because I am anti-market, anti-people making money. In actual fact, what informs my decision to dislike legal loan sharks, and want to campaign against sky high interest rates, has in recent times been contained by many conservatives and New Labourites alike – the view that having credit dependent and debt ridden consumers in the system is bad for a savings culture (and a savings culture is generally considered quite good).
Regardless of a person’s first principles, markets can’t run themselves, and so it seems appropriate to operate them – as best as possible – to bring about good. Forging a mechanism to limit the amount an agency can charge as interest, while using state subsidy to make more people creditworthy, while we simultaneously battle to cut credit dependency altogether, sits perfectly well with me.
Free marketeer Damian Hinds, MP for East Hampshire, who attended Creasy’s debate, made three points in response to the bill: it is not necessarily party political to support (or even, I suppose, take issue with) the bill; it is not necessarily new; and it is not in conflict with a diverse market. If this friend of the market can agree, why can’t others do the same.
Runaway MP?
Sholto Byrnes of the New Statesman has a little story to tell of one of his leftie lunchmates:
On a beautiful day this last summer I had lunch with an old friend, a well-known Labour activist and journalist, whose words cast a chill on our conversation even as the sun beat down on the Persian repast in which we were indulging on the lower slopes of Hampstead. “People have no idea how bad it’s going to get,” he said of the austerity measures he feared were about to be imposed. So bad, he told me, that he and his family were considering emigrating. “We’re seriously thinking about moving to Canada…..
This is a man who has been a correspondent for an international television news network, a frequent columnist in the British press, and who, if he stays, stands a very good chance of becoming an MP at some point, and one sure to enjoy either swift promotion to the front benches or notoriety and respect as one of the leaders of the awkward squad. If he thought then that prospects were that gloomy, what hope for the rest of us whose CVs may not possess quite such lustre?
Sholti uses this as a basis for his assessment of how bad it’s going to get for those not planning or able to emigrate.
But he bypasses a key point.
Why on earth would someone who calls himself an activist, and who’s even thinking of being an MP, emigrate at a time like?
Isn’t right now, when those less fortunate in life than him are suffering most from the bastards in power, precisely the time he most needs to stick around?
Of course there’s the Abbottian argument that he must do ’the best for [his] family at the time.
Fair enough, but it doesn’t make you good Labour MP material*.
I’m surprised Sholto doesn’t seem to notice that. Or is it one rule for the leftie-media-luvvie Labour activists, and one for the rest of us?
* As an MP hopeful myself, I should add that this is not an abstract argument on my part.
As I touched on here, I passed up the chance of a life of luxury in capital cities around the world, because in the end I put my political principles first (I don’t deny it was a struggle, and that I sometimes wonder ‘what if’).
And as I set out here, I also chose not to abandon what was then a struggling school, in order to ‘do the best for my family’ Instead, I joined the governing body, got stuck in, and helped turn the school round, because in that lay the best interests not just of my family but the whole place I live in.
So who’d be a better MP? Me or Sholti’s lunch partner?
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