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Why the National Health Action Party doesn't need its own 'Country Club Bore'
There is apparently a consensus around Westminster circles that Nigel Farage is ‘the Country Club bore’, a slightly red-faced jovial, charismatic man who doesn’t particularly mind speaking shit.
While such people appear pleasant, often their messages are not entirely trivial. The same criticism has been made of ‘Bungling Bojo’ i.e. Boris Johnson, that behind the buffoonery there is quite an incisive mind who politically astute. The Left, which has been accused previously of lacking a sense of humour by notorious funnyman Jeremy Clarkson, appears not to have its own ‘nice buffoon’. Maybe it’s because buffoons are supposed to have posh accents and smile a lot – though Tony Blair did have a posh accent, and smile a lot.
UKIP policies simply don’t add up. I have previously thought that UKIP could equally appeal to the left, in that Labour also has a proud history of wishing to leave Europe. The recent accusation that ‘UKIP means “racists for posh people” has been violently criticised by UKIP who cite that the last thing that they are are racist (either even having members from ethnic minorities themselves, or having members who are married to people from abroad.) They don’t have a single MP, and yet they are given a huge amount of air time. People often joke on Twitter that tonight it is ‘Nigel Farage Nigel Farage Nigel Farage Nigel Farage Nigel Farage #BBCQT”.
Emulating the secret of Nigel Farage is, though, difficult if you’re a “single issue party”. Nigel Farage is very different to Caroline Lucas, or Natalie Bennett. One suspects you would never get Nigel Farage voting against the section 75 NHS regulations, even though one also suspects that Farage wouldn’t know what these regulations are even if his life depended on them. However, Nigel Farage has been an effective ‘Trojan horse’ for getting his immigration issues a lot of air time. The National Health Action Party would probably love to have the media dominance which has been secured by UKIP, but the last thing the National Health Action Party needs at this time their own equivalent of a ‘Country Club Bore’.
However, the National Health Action Party, I feel, should think carefully about what sort of impression they wish to create. There is a huge amount of goodwill and affection to the NHS from traditional voters of all parties, and Dr Clive Peedell and Dr Richard Taylor could not do much worse than to present themselves as a modern day Alec Douglas-Home. The patrician view of the NHS consultant, who spends most of his time on the golf course (which is of course completely untrue), would go down like a lead balloon with the electorate.
Also, it has a very serious dialogue to have with the electorate, on the future of the NHS, who “owns it”, who it “works for”, and who is deciding policy for it. The enactment of the Health and Social Care Act (2012) was one of the most disastrous steps to increase the democratic deficit ever to take place in England, when it became clear that this current Government is much more interested in having behind-closed-doors conversations with private healthcare providers than members of the medical Royal Colleges or the BMA, for example. Sure, the the National Health Action Party needs to represent faithfully the views of all healthcare professionals including nurses, as well as Doctors, but it also needs to represent ordinary members of the general public. Dressing up in theatre scrubs or donning a medical stethoscope, akin to a low-budget RAG project, may not be the best way to project a serious image, but the election in Eastleigh was a real eye-opener in how the media could completely ignore NHS issues.
Whilst it is tempting to spend a lot of time and energy in wondering why the BBC have steadfastly refused to cover the NHS reforms, to be frank the discussion of the NHS’ journey of late has been scant and pathetic for a very long time. Members of the public are generally aware of the private finance initiative, but seem generally unaware of the major advances in this initiative during Major’s short stay in government. Likewise, people are generally unaware of the impact of NHS Foundation Trusts, what ‘efficiency savings’ are, or what the failure regimes of NHS hospitals means. The social media can do so much, and it is incredibly disheartening to hear Liberal Democrats whining in the House of Lords about how much ‘misinformation’ has emerged from the social media.
The basic issue is that the social media is the only mechanism many people have for discussing the NHS at all, and neutering this device is in nobody’s interest apart from powerful corporates. While the National Health Action Party may not have its equivalent of the “Country Club bore”, I am sure that they are putting maximum effort into thinking which seats they wish to target, what their core message is, what they feel the basic understanding of voters on issues to do with the NHS might be, how they’re going to get their message across, and what they feel their ideal outcome is. I think they should drag themselves away from the philosophy of the ‘focus group’ made popular by New Labour, but lead on what they think is right. This could include populist issues, of massive public policy concern, such as patient safety, which no traditional party has had a moral licence to pursue.
Ed Balls 'trending' doesn't mean Keynesian policies are suddenly popular
from one of the Ed Balls spoof Twitter accounts today.
There are reasons, of course, why people or things tend to trend on Twitter. In my experience, never having read an official study on this, this tends to be when people die, or are reported to die. Or else, something a bit defamatory-worthy has occurred, and people are ‘intrigued’. Or else, something very minor has happened on BBC Question Time, BBC Any Questions, BBC Any Answers, Britain’s Got Talent, or the X Factor. It is nonetheless interesting watching the phenomenon of people jumping on bandwagons, and a sense of collective excitement, such as when Barack Obama was re-elected. Or else, there is a sense of genuine shock at sudden news, such as death of Baroness Thatcher.
There can be a temptation for all of us to read too much into things we observe in the social media. Hundreds of photoshopped images about George Osborne or Iain Duncan-Smith do not cause a change in direction of travel over the economy or universal credit. Why then do people devote so much time to doing them, as well as posting pictures of cute kittens? Why do people also put in so much time and emotional into having passionate debates on Twitter with well-known journalists? There is an element of narcissism which pervades all our society, where we often do things not for the benefit for anyone apart from ourselves. However, this culture is also pervasive in the politicians who seek us democratically. Many people as they become older become jaded about what politics actually achieves, and, whilst they find the topics themselves actually quite interesting, find the actual political process quite rank and stifling.
Today was “Ed Balls Day”. Ed Balls, it is reputed, accidentally tweeted his own name, leading to thousands of people re-tweeting it. It has become a viral meme, and the subject of an affectionate joke. What does this do for Ed Balls’ popularity? Not much, of course, in that most people have either heard of him as someone who helped to wreck the economy under Gordon Brown, or a brilliant Keynesian economist who trained at Oxford and Harvard, or somewhere in between. Have people used seeing the Ed Balls tweet to seek to discover what the Labour economic policy is or isn’t? No. Granted, there are going to be people who have re-tweeted Ed Balls’ name not because they love him, but because they loathe him.
All of this feeds into the apparent paranoia of politicians who feel that politics has become irrelevant. Seeking out the reasons for the millions of people not bothering to vote has become almost obsessional. Already, the post mortems have begun about why the section 75 NHS regulations vote was lost in the House of Lords. Various theories abound ranging from the relative success of the sales patter of Baroness Williams and Lord Clement-Jones, the fact that elderly Labour peers could not find suitable accommodation in London that night, or an insufficient number of Crossbench peers were unconvinced to vote against the Regulations. And so it could go on, but the issue remains why do people not bother voting. I have also noticed a trend where people find not only politicians boring, but the generally tribalist partisan nature of debate. The legislative process, like the judicial one, is adversarial, and is therefore based on competition not collaboration. The end result is that people end up being hostile to each other, exaggerating their differences, but not drawing attention to the similarities. This, of course, leads to a very distorted manner of taking policy further. For example, the Labour Party have amplified policy differences in procurement to the point of arguing that the privatisation rollercoaster has accelerated, but it is of course Labour which introduced NHS Foundation Trusts (which some believe are the ultimate ‘units’ for a privatised secondary care system) and the previous procurement regulations in the form of the Public Contracts Regulations 2006. Supposedly, the Conservatives are ‘building on’ the legacy of New Labour in “free schools”, and much to the embarrassment of Labour, Baroness Thatcher is reputed to have said that her greatest legacy was Tony Blair or New Labour. The Conservatives have attacked the attack on the Bedroom Tax (or “Spare Room Subsidy”) by arguing that Labour introduced something similar for the private sector, and now this idea is being extended to social housing, despite being a socially divisive policy and incapable of generating much revenue.
So the idea of Ed Balls ‘trending’ is of course neither here nor there, and utterly irrelevant to the political discourse today. It doesn’t make Ed Balls any more popular, and doesn’t get round the popular anti-Keynesian attack of ‘How can the solution to borrowing be yet more borrowing?” That meme, while not viral, has been very successful in conveying a popular idea held by some that a Keynesian solution to an economy recovery is to pour fuel on the fire, or to have the ‘hair of the dog’ while suffering from a hangover due to the night before. However, it is incredibly hard to think of a punchy meme in reply to that line of attack which has been successful in the USA today. Another popular meme is, “Why would you hand the keys of the car back to the people who crashed it in the first place?” A reasonable answer to this would be to identify who actually crashed the car – was it the bankers/banks or the State, and were the problems due to the crash per se or due to ‘lack of regulation’ in the lead up to the crash? Nonetheless, both memes focus the mind on the more negative aspects of Labour’s tenure in government, and the public seem to be generally unpersuadable on the economy. The Labour Party, likewise, feel that they are still the party of the NHS, despite the well documented problems in Mid Staffs, though there is a genuine debate about the extent of morbidity and mortality even after two voluminous reports.
Many in all parties feel of course let down by the media, and it might appear that all parties feel equally let down. For example, most recently, some people feel that the coverage of the NHS reforms has been poor, and the media are hopeless at explaining how we have come to have just escaped a ‘triple dip’ recession when the economy was in fact recovering in May 2010. Whether you buy into the idea that ‘the economy is healing’, or this Government would like ‘to make work pay’, it is crystal clear that, whatever the nature of debate (whether it is Afghanistan or welfare), people have a markedly varying understanding of the issues – but have an equal say in the democratic process. Ed Miliband always spoke of ‘building a movement’ in the Labour Party, and by this it means that he would like to capture a sense of national pride and trust in the politics of Britain. He feels that ‘One Nation’ is the best way to do this, and the results from his detailed policy discussions are yet to emerge into the sunlight. When I used to ask my late father to cheer up, he used to say, “What do you expect me to do, Shibley? Dance?” This is in a sense the main problem faced by Labour today, one of expectation management. The discussions of the ‘legacy’ of Baroness Thatcher were at times as finely focused on the purported successes of turning Britain around ‘from a basketcase’ to the social and economic distress (illustrated by the damage done to local communities), pursuant to the closure of coalmines in Easington. People are now muttering again, “I am to be honest very disillusioned with Labour, but this current Government are terrible”. Part of this disconnect with Labour is that people simply don’t trust them to do what they say on certain key issues, such as repealing the Bedroom Tax, or repealing the Health and Social Care Act (2012). And to be blunt, Labour’s “got previous” on this. As a result of the general election in 1997, Labour did not abolish the market in the NHS as they had promised. And yet, Labour does have a reasonably loyal ‘fan base’, and people who genuinely like Ed Miliband as a person. Miliband has always been mindful of being the guy who ‘promised too much but delivered too little’, but it will exasperate even his loyal followers if he turns out to be the guy who in fact ‘promised too little and delivered also very little.’ Ed Miliband can always play the ‘we don’t know how the economy will be in two years’ time’, and get his shadow cabinet to argue that making impossible promises would be reckless, but in the meantime Ed Miliband needs a steady trickle of bits of evidence suggesting that he is heading in the right ‘direction of travel’. For example, the idea of incentivising businesses to implement ‘the living wage’, in a socially inclusive policy which is not overtly ‘tax and spend’, is a useful one, and one which Miliband can legitimately campaign on.
It is hard for Labour members to tell why members of the public dislike them so much, but this is of course the challenge for Labour in the next two years. In the meantime, the challenge is to work out how many people who vote for Labour in the local council elections are doing so, not only because they are protesting against this government, but also find the offering of Labour feasible. These local elections are a timely reminder of how barmy UKIP actually might be, in promising more austere cuts than currently being offered, or what actually differentiates the Liberal Democrats from Labour in a meaningful way. The social media, it can be argued, is a great way for people to write on and discuss the issues that concern them. Without the social media, a meaningful discussion (away from the BBC) about the section 75 NHS regulations would have been impossible. However, as Baroness Williams provided in her speech last week, Twitter can easily be discredited through referring to the wealth of misinformation ‘out there’. From my own personal experience, I feel I can tell what the reaction will be from Labour members towards Baroness Williams, on issues pertaining to the NHS, before she has opened her mouth. Whilst the Ed Balls meme might be equally divorced from real debate, and, whilst it has become a popular past-time to criticise ‘armchair activists’, the role of technology in political movements cannot be ignored. Used responsibly, it can override some of the cynicism we all share, as long as a small minority of bloggers do not persuade themselves they are speaking on behalf of all of us. And possibly the “Ed Balls meme” reminds us of one very important thing relevant to all of us: we should be less obsessed about our image (but not in an irresponsible way), and should from time-to-time take ourselves less seriously.
Bankers or top-income CEOs are not "the centre ground" either
In a rather indecent way, people are well known to be sympathetic to the Blairite cause have taken to the TV studios effectively to undermine Ed Miliband, including Dan Hodges, John Reid, Alan Johnson, and David Blunkett. They claim not to be anything other than positive about Labour, but their appearances have been cringeworthy and unconvincing for many true Labour supporters. They persistently bang the ‘Elections are only won from the centre ground’ drum, but that does not reflect the reality of the majority of Labour voters. If anything, they despair at the fact that Thatcher’s legacy seems to have engulfed the achievements of Labour, say in founding the principles of the welfare state or building the NHS. They, at worst, lack confidence that Labour can do much to protect workers from austerity, and feel that Labour will be unable to stop the tide of rampant privatisation in the NHS. I still remain convinced that, whilst it is possible that elections can be won from the ‘centre ground’, a Labour support could vanish if its core voters do not feel included in their journey. I also believe that, with George Osborne having taken Europe to court over the financial transactions tax this week, we are not ‘all in together’, and that overpaid investment bankers or top-income CEOs do not constitute the ‘centre ground’ either.
Lord Stewart Wood this week, on Thursday, looked at ‘One Nation Labour’ at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, the day after the funeral of Margaret Thatcher, from a historical, philosophical and policy perspective. According to Wood, Thatcher spotted “the exhaustion of an old settlement”. Wood calls this new construct a ‘social democratic ambition’, not dependent on spending, more familiar to social democratic parties in Europe. It also forces to think about building new institutions, including ones that bridge the markets and states, in a more organised economy and society.
Wood argues that this is a moment when such a challenge will be richly rewarded, and can be articulated in “One Labour”. He argued that five core ideas characterise this.
Firstly, it is a commitment to building a different type of economy, “a supply-side revolution on the left”. The neoliberal problem has not worked, according to Wood. Many steps, reducing taxes on the well-off and deregulation of services, have not worked. The “trickle down” effect has not worked, with inadequate regulation of too powerful financial services. The skills gap in our population has not been addressed. Secondly, to compete in the world, we need to compete on high skills, high productivity and high wages, in a sense “there is no alternative”. But to raise our game on the productivity front, according to Wood, there needs to be a fundamentally different approach to wealth creators, a “trickle down approach” has to be explicitly challenged to avoid a ‘race to the bottom’, “the only real wealth creators are the ones with those with most wealth” and “everyone who is wealthy is a wealth creator”. Wood therefore emphasises his central doctrine, “it is pro-wealth to criticise that wealth is produced by the few, and not the many”; this means that we need to have banks competing with each other, so that they can provide capital for innovation, and supporting industries. Secondly, Wood wishes to address growing inequality, and this does not question being pro-business. Growing inequality has demonstrated that ‘trickle down’ is not working in the post-1979 settlement, that “the freeing up of the top will lead to the benefit of the many”, which has not happened patently. The share of GDP going to wages has fallen by 10% in the last 40 years, and a Government’s rôle has been to support incomes at the bottom (asset-bubble and overleveraging at the middle are also key failures) has contributed to these problems. A ‘One Nation’ approach looks to a more equal distribution of economic power, revisiting the wisdom of the ‘tax and spend’ philosophy of previous governments, through for example incentivisation of the implementation of the living age, or a ‘mansion tax’.
A third branch is to encourage ‘responsibility’, not in terms of expectations of those who rely on state support, but applies to all members of all society including those who have the most. Responsibility, according to Wood, should be at the heart of the welfare state, and that “the contributory principle is more resilient and robust”. A fourth element is “protecting areas of our public life”, including public spaces and arts can contribute, and encouraging community stability, meaning a toleration of diversity in what people value. Finally, Wood wishes to challenge the ethic of the post-1979 settlement. He feels that this is the most challenging. There would be a new consensus on a different set of ethics, embracing the importance of individual freedom, but rejecting the idea “that individualism pursued by each magically generates the interests of all”. This too fundamentally rejects that a metric of value is the market price of something. Wood remarks that a fundamental problem is ‘restoring faith in politics’, and the belief that politics, even from the left, can transform the lives of people is important.
In this week’s Labour Party Political Broadcast (PPB), “Made by the Many”, many of the themes were further explored in terms of the “forgotten wealth creators”. “We teach, we build, we sell, we look after our mums and dads, we know we’re not the most powerful, we don’t run the banks, but we keep the country running… while tax cuts go to the millionaires, do they think the country can succeed without us?” say a myriad of voices introducing this PPB who claim they lie at the centre of the economic recovery. Miliband’s voice then comes in to say that he would be introducing a ‘Mansion tax’, a jobs guarantee, stopping those big companies which ‘rip people off’ and abolishing a tax cut for millionaires. Whilst this may seem a somewhat simplified version of the message above, and it may sound more populist, this is a message which does strike at ‘the centre ground’. As the Office for National Statistics prepares to tell us the latest GDP estimates, indicating to us whether the UK has avoided a “triple dip” (and bear in mind the economy was growing in May 2010), isn’t time the loudmouth disenchanted Blairites belt up?
My personal response to Tony Blair's "advice"
This is a response to “Labour must search for answers and not merely aspire to be a repository for people’s anger”, by Tony Blair, published in the New Statesman on 11 April 2013.
Fundamentally, Blair is right in that Labour cannot merely be a conduit for ‘the protest vote’, but the issues raised by heir to Thatcher are much more than that to me. Blair argues that, “the paradox of the financial crisis is that, despite being widely held to have been caused by under-regulated markets, it has not brought a decisive shift to the left.” I am not so sure about that. Whilst I have always felt the taxonomy of ‘left’ versus ‘right’ largely unhelpful in British politics, I think most people in the country today share views about bankers and the financial services ‘holding the country to ransom’ (like the Union Barons used to be accused of), the failures of privatisation, the failures in financial regulation (PPIs), for example, which might have been seen as ‘on the left’. Tony Blair had a good chance of coming to power in 1997, and ‘the pig with a Labour rosette might have won at the 1997 General Election’ is not an insubstantial one. To ignore that there has been no shift in public opinion is to deny that the political and social landscape has changed to some degree. Whilst ‘South Shields man’ is still living with the remants of the ‘socially divisive’ Thatcherite government, what Michael Meacher MP politely called yesterday “a scorched earth approach”, voters are indeed challenging flagship Thatcherite policies even now.
Some Labour councillors and MPs did indeed embrace the ‘right to buy’ policy, but likewise many MPs of diverse political aetiology warn about the currentcrisis in social housing. Blair is right to argue, “But what might happen is that the left believes such a shift has occurred and behaves accordingly”, in the sense that Ed Miliband does not wish to disenfranchise those voters who did happen to embrace New Labour pursuant to a long stretch of the Conservative sentence, but we have a very strong danger now of disenfranchise the core voters of Labour. They are rightly concerned about workers’ and employees’ rights, a minimum wage (a Blair achievement), and a living wage (possibly a 2015 manifesto pledge by Ed Miliband.) Nobody wants to re-fight the battle of ‘left’ and ‘right’ of those terms, but merely ‘building on’ the purported achievements of Margaret Thatcher has to be handled with care.
Blair further remarks: “The Conservative Party is back clothing itself in the mantle of fiscal responsibility, buttressed by moves against “benefit scroungers”, immigrants squeezing out British workers and – of course – Labour profligacy.” Of course, Blair does not address the growth of the welfare dependency culture under Margaret Thatcher, but this is essential. Blair has also airbrushed the core of the actual welfare debate, about ensuring that disabled citizens have a ‘fair deal’ about their benefits, but to his credit addresses the issue of pensions in his fourth question. However, Blair falls into the trap also of not joining up thinking in various arms of policy, in other words how immigrants have in fact contributed to the economy of the UK, or contributed essential skills to public services such as the National Health Service. This is indeed a disproportionate approach to immigration that was permeating through the language of Labour ministers in immigration towards the end of their period of government. Blair fundamentally wishes to fight this war – indeed battle – on his terms and Thatcher’s terms. This is not on – this debate is fundamentally about the divisive and destructive nature of policy, of pitting the unemployed against the employed, the disabled against the non-disabled, the immigrant versus the non-immigrant, and so on. Part of the reason that Thatcher’s entire hagiography cannot be a bed of roses is that there exists physical evidence today of this ‘divide-and-rule’ approach to leadership.
Blair, rather provocatively at this stage, refers to the ‘getting the house in order’, which is accepting the highly toxic meme of ‘A Conservative government always has to come in to repair the mess of a Labour government spending public money it doesn’t have.’ However, the economy is in a worse state than bequeathed by Labour in 2010, and therein lies the problem that the house that the Tories ‘is getting in order’ is in fact getting worse. Acknowledgement of this simple economic fact by Blair at this juncture would be helpful. Blair’s most potent comment in the whole passage is: “The ease with which it can settle back into its old territory of defending the status quo, allying itself, even anchoring itself, to the interests that will passionately and often justly oppose what the government is doing, is so apparently rewarding, that the exercise of political will lies not in going there, but in resisting the temptation to go there.” Like all good undergraduates, even at Oxford, this depends on what exactly Blair means by the “status quo” – the “status quo” is in Thatcherism, and the “greatest achievement” of Conservatism, “New Labour”, so a return to listening to the views of Union members, ahead of say the handful of wealth creators in the City, is in fact a radical shift back to where we were. In other words, a U-turn after a U-turn gets you back to the same spot.
Blair then has a rather sudden, but important, shift in gear. He writes, “The guiding principle should be that we are the seekers after answers, not the repository for people’s anger.” This is to some extent true from the law, as we know from the views from LJ Laws who has described the challenges of making dispassionate legal decisions even if the issues are of enormous significance in social justice. Blair, consistent with an approach from a senior lawyer remarks, “In the first case, we have to be dispassionate even when the issues arouse great passion.” But then he follows, “In the second case, we are simple fellow-travellers in sympathy; we are not leaders. And in these times, above all, people want leadership.” Bingo. This is what. Whatever Ed Miliband’s ultimate ideology, which appears to be an inclusive form of social democracy encouraging corporate as well as personal citizenship, people ultimately want a very clear roadmap of where he is heading. The infamous articulation of policy under Cruddas will help here, but, as Ed Miliband finds his feet, Miliband will be judged on how he responds to challenges, like Thatcher had to respond to the Falklands’ dispute or the Miners’ Strike.
Blair fundamentally is right to set out the challenges. In as much as the financial crisis has not created the need for change per se, to say that it has not created a need for a financial response is ludicrous. The ultimate failure in Keynesian policy from Blair and Brown is that the UK did not invest adequately in a period of growth, put tritely by the Conservatives as “not mending the roof while the sun was shining”. Mending the roof, to accept this awful image, is best done when the sun is shining. Therefore, Labour producing a policy now is to some extent not the best time to do it. Blair had a great opportunity to formulate a culture in the UK which reflected Labour’s roots in protecting the rights and welfare of workers, but it decided not to do so. Tarred with the ‘unions holding the country to ransom’ tag, it decided to Brown-nose the City quite literally, leading to an exacerbation of the inequality commenced under Thatcher. Blair skirts round the issue of globalisation and technology in a rather trite manner, one assumes for brevity, but the wider debate necessarily includes the effects of globalisation and technology on actual communities in the UK, and the effect of multi-national corporates on life in the UK. Even Thatcher might have balked at the power of the corporates in 2013 in the same way she was critical of the power of the Unions throughout all of her time in government.
Whilst “Labour should be very robust in knocking down the notion that it “created” the crisis”, there is no doubt that Labour has a ‘debate to be had’ about how the Conservatives did not oppose the legislation of the City at the time by New Labour (and even advanced further under-regulation), why George Osborne wished to meet the comprehensive spending review demands of the last Labour government, and how the Conservatives would not have reacted any differently in injecting £1 TN into bank recapitalisation at the time of the crisis. The idea of spending money at the time of a recession has been compared to supporters of FA Hayek as ‘hair of the dog after a big binge’, but unfortunately is directly relevant to Blair’s first question: “What is driving the rise in housing benefit spending, and if it is the absence of housing, how do we build more?” Kickstarting the economy and solving the housing crisis would indeed be a populist measure, but the arguments against such a policy remain thoroughly unconvincing. The second question, “How do we improve the skillset of those who are unemployed when the shortage of skills is the clearest barrier to employment?”, is helpful to some extent, but Blair again shows that he is stuck in a mysterious time-warp; two of the biggest challenges in employment, aside from the onslaught in unfair dismissal, are the excessive salaries of CEOs (necessitating a debate about redistribution, given Labour’s phobia of the ‘tax and spend’ criticism), and how to help the underemployed. The third question is, course, hugely potent: “How do we take the health and education reforms of the last Labour government to a new level, given the huge improvement in results they brought about?” Fair enough, but the immediate problem now is how to slow down this latest advance in the privatisation of the NHS through the Health and Social Care Act (2012), and for Labour to tackle real issues about whether it really wishes to pit hospital versus hospital, school versus school, CCG against CCG, etc. (and to allow certain entities, such as NHS Foundation Trusts, “fail” in what is supposed to be a “comprehensive service”). The other questions which Blair raises are excellent, and indeed I am extremely happy to see that Blair calls for a prioritisation of certain planks of policy, such as how to produce an industrial strategy or a ‘strategy for growth’, and how to deal with a crisis in social justice? There is no doubt that the funding of access-to-justice on the high street, for example in immigration, housing or welfare benefits, has hit a crisis, but Blair is right if he is arguing that operational tactics are not good enough. Sadiq Khan obviously cannot ‘underachieve and overpromise’ about reversing legal aid cuts, but Labour in due course will have to set out an architecture of what it wishes to do about this issue.
Ed Miliband knows that this is a marathon, not a sprint. He has the problem of shooting at a goal, which some days looks like an open goal, other days where the size of the goal appears to have changed, and, on other days, where he looks as if he runs a real risk of scoring an ‘own goal’. It is of course very good to have advice from somebody so senior as Tony Blair, who will be a Lord in the upper chamber in due course, and Miliband does not know yet if he will ‘squeak through’ in the hung parliament, win with a massive landslide, or lose. Labour will clearly not wish to say anything dangerous at the risk of losing, through perhaps offending Basildon Man, and, whilst it is very likely that South Shields Man will remain loyal, nothing can be taken for granted for Ed Miliband unfortunately. Like Baroness Thatcher’s death, Tony Blair’s advice at this stage was likely to rouse huge emotions, and, whilst the dangers of ignoring the advice might not be as costly as Thatcher’s funeral, it would be unwise to ignore his views which, many will argue, has some support within Labour. However, it is clearly the case that some of the faultlines in the Thatcher society and economy have not been healed by the New Labour approach, and Ed Miliband, many hope, will ultimately forge his own successful destiny.
The 'bandwagon effect' and language of welfare reform
“Bandwagon” is one of the most common techniques in both wartime and peacetime, and plays an important part in modern advertising. Bandwagon is also one of the seven main propaganda techniques identified by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis in 1938. Bandwagon is an appeal to the voter, who is perhaps feeling mixed feelings of “aspiration” and “insecurity” to follow the crowd, to join in because others are doing so as well. Bandwagon propaganda is, essentially, trying to convince the subject that one side is the winning side, because more people have joined it. The subject is meant to believe that since so many people have joined, that “victory is inevitable and defeat impossible”: in a sense, “success” becomes a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. Since the average person always wants to be on the winning side, he or she is compelled to join in.
When confronted with bandwagon propaganda, we should weigh the pros and cons of joining in independently from the amount of people who have already joined, and, as with most types of propaganda, we should seek more information. Thankfully, there are prominent disability campaigners, such as Sue Marsh and Kaliya Franklin, who have a very good, accurate command of the actual DWP data (as reported). In layman’s term the bandwagon effect refers to people doing certain things because other people are doing them, regardless of their own beliefs, which they may ignore or override. The perceived “popularity” of an object or person may have an effect on how it is viewed on a whole. Hence, it is entirely fitting that George Osborne should wish to give a speech on welfare reform to a group of employees in Sittingbourne, who “all share his concerns” about the small proportion of people in the population who are freeloading. This effect is noticed and followed very much by youth, where for instance if people see many of their friends buying a particular phone, they could become more interested in buying that product.
The history of this concept is interesting. A bandwagon is a wagon which carries the band in a parade, circus or other entertainment. The phrase “jump on the bandwagon” first appeared in American politics in 1848 when Dan Rice, a famous and popular circus clown of the time, used his bandwagon and its music to gain attention for his political campaign appearances. As his campaign became more successful, other politicians strove for a seat on the bandwagon, hoping to be associated with his success. Later, during the time of William Jennings Bryan’s 1900 presidential campaign, bandwagons had become standard in campaigns, and “jump on the bandwagon” was used as a derogatory term, implying that people were associating themselves with the success without considering what they associated themselves with. Often political commentators will say something which captures this derogatory nature like, “Ed Miliband has jumped so fast onto this moving bandwagon, that he’s likely to fall off it.”
The government is increasingly using value-laden and pejorative language when discussing benefits and welfare, something poverty charities warn is likely to increase the stigmatisation of poor people. The findings show that the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, has spoken of a mass culture of welfare dependency in every speech on benefits he has made in the past 12 months. The analysis came after complaints that the government is using exceptional cases such as that of Mick Philpott, the unemployed man jailed this week for the manslaughter of six children, to justify its programme of changes to the benefits system. The problem of using single cases to make a general point was highlighted by Diane Abbott who, this week, warned about drawing general conclusions about Austrian villages from the Josef Fritz case and Owen Jones who, also this week, warned about making unreliable inferences about inheritance tax from the Stephen Seddon case. Indeed, an examination of Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) speeches and press notices connected to benefits in the year to April 1 shows a significantly increased use of terms such as “dependency”, “entrenched” and “addiction”, when compared with the end of the Labour government. Fraud, which currently accounts for less than 1% of the overall benefits bill, was mentioned 85 times in the press releases, while it was not used at all in the final year of Labour. In the 25 speeches by DWP ministers on welfare over the year, “dependency” was mentioned 38 times, while “addiction” occurred 41 times and “entrenched” on 15 occasions. A comparison of 25 speeches on the subject by Labour ministers saw the words used, respectively, seven times, not at all, and once.
Whatever the ultimate success of the Coalition’s war of words against “scroungers” and “skivers”, casualties of the ‘bandwagon’ will continue to attract attention. This use of language is, unfortunately, of huge concern. In previous years, there has been documented reliably a rise in hate crimes against disabled people, police figures for England, Wales and Northern Ireland show. For example, more than 2,000 such offences were recorded in 2011, up a third on 2010. Police said this was partly due to an increased willingness to report crimes. Strikingly, this statistic was in the context that, overall, hate crimes linked to race, religion, sexual orientation and disability fell by 3,600 to 44,500.
The LibDems' USP is, apparently, "a fair society and a strong economy". Their party name is a misnomer, but the USP is clearly fraudulent.
If you tell a big one, tell a big one!
One lie leads to another!
Choose your adage, and run with it. At two separate points, I thought of these sayings this weekend. The first time was when Nick Clegg was interviewed by Sophie Raworth about various issues, including the economy. Clegg wasted no time in criticising the previous Labour administration in the running of the economy. The second time was when I finally read the article in the Independent about David Laws writing the next Liberal Democrat manifesto of 2015.
David Laws and Nick Clegg believe that the the unique selling proposition (USP) of the Liberal Democrats is “a fair society and a strong economy”.
Let us take first the economy because of the famous saying, “It’s the economy stupid”. It is a fact that if you look at the actual figures Labour spending prior to the economy was in fact comparable to Ken Clarke and Norman Lamont. George Osborne went on record to say that he would match at least the spending plans of Labour, and possibly exceed them, in the last government. There was a £1tn bailout in the UK economy which all experts concede was due to the emergency measure of recapitalising the bank.
The argument for doing this massive bailout was to stop the banking system imploding. The argument runs something like follows: all banks are heavily in debt (leveraged), and therefore when one bank can’t repay its debts, the bank to which it owes its debts can’t then repay its debts, and so you then have a domino effect. Northern Rock and the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a failure of the international securitised mortgages, saw the beginning of this dangerous situation. George Osborne puts a lot of store on credit ratings, ignoring the fact that Lehman Brothers had the top rating the second before it went bust.
Also, the Liberal Democrats’ economic policy has shared ownership with the Conservatives’ economic policy. They state clearly that their raison d’être of being in a Coalition is to reduce the deficit, even though the deficit has been going up due to falling tax receipts and increased levels of welfare payments. This policy, which has been criticised now by Ed Balls and the Labour Party, the head of Goldman Sachs, Prof. Stiglitz and Blanchflower, Lord Skidelsky and the trade unions, amongst others, has spectacularly failed, and the Liberal Democrats should be reminded at all opportunities about the mess they created following May 2010. They had inherited economy which was in a fragile recovery, squandered it, and for them to claim they aspire for a ‘strong economy’ is a disgusting laughable claim.
For the Liberal Democrats to have an ounce of credibility in the “damage that Labour did to the economy” argument, they must answer that one. True libertarians, it is argued, might have followed an argument akin to “creative destruction”, and allowed the banks to fail as per Iceland, a country which George Osborne praised before the Iceland economy went bust. It is argued by true libertarians that the best way to ‘cure’ the system overall is to allow the failing banks to fail, otherwise you unnecessarily give the wrong people money, and you’re in effect rewarding failure.
The Liberal Democrats are entirely silent on this matter.
The second part of the USP is no less fraudulent. The enactment of the Legal Aid and Sentencing of Offenders Act has seen law centres going out of business on the high street. Such law firms are essential for basic access-to-justice across a range of social welfare issues, not least disability and other welfare benefits, unfair dismissals and other employment disputes, immigration and housing matters, for example. In another Act, which only obtained Royal Assent because of the Liberal Democrats, the massive increase in the rôle of the private sector in running outsourced services for the NHS has become law, already leading to the marketisation and fragmentation of services offered by the NHS. This is a massive attack on the notion that the NHS is comprehensive, and even has threatened some services being “free-at-the-point-of-use”.
Disabled citizens do not feel that the LibDems have created a “fair society”. The Welfare Reform Act was steamroller-ed through Parliament and the House of Lords by the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. The appeals over people deemed ‘fit-to-work’ continue, as do the stories of inappropriate decisions, successful appeals, and, tragically, suicides.
The LibDems’ USP is, apparently, “a fair society and a strong economy”. Their party name is a misnomer, but the USP is clearly fraudulent. It is sick, disgusting, and needs to be scrutinised carefully in the next election campaign.
The Obama victory is a rejection of the philosophy of David Cameron
The Conservatives ARE LYING. They are claiming that Obama’s situation is fundamentally different, as the Conservatives inherited a mess from Labour. They LIE, LIE and LIE even more, and simply do not care. Unfortunately, the public are not stupid. In 2008, the then Shadow chancellor George Osborne has committed the Tories to matching Labour’s public spending totals for the next three years. Osborne said the 2% increases in the financial years 2008/9 to 2010/11 would also allow “sustainably lower taxes” as the economy is expected to grow faster than public spending. The shadow chancellor said triumphantly in a newspaper article: “I can confirm for the first time that a Conservative government will adopt these spending totals.” He then continued: “Total government spending will rise by 2% a year real terms, from £615 billion next year to £674 billion in the year 2010/11. Like Labour, we will review the final year’s total in a spending review in 2009. Just in case you were in any doubt, “The result of adopting these spending totals is that under a Conservative government there will be real increases in spending on public services, year after year. And why did Labour have to spend so much money to increase the deficit? To stop the banks from imploding, as an emergency measure. The Tories would have done the same had it happened on their watch. Fact.
In contrast to Iain Duncan-Smith and Dr Liam Fox who were actively helping the Romney campaign, it is no secret Labour were helping the Obama campaign. “It matters because America is the last superpower where who wins a leadership election really matters – it affects the whole world,” said Simon Redfern, chair of the Walthamstow Labour Party. Simon just returned from ten days of campaigning for Mr Obama in Cleveland, Ohio, as part of a 30-strong British delegation. He explained: “I was given the opportunity and I just jumped at it. In the Labour Party we’re trying to emulate many of the things the Democrats have been doing with community activism, so it was a real education. Simon added, “Getting people involved and battling cynicism has really been [Walthamstow Labour MP] Stella Creasy’s mission. Things like the pop-up respite centre during the riots last year are an example of that type of community, grass-roots involvement.” That, I think, is precisely it – instead of asking for votes by scaremongering over impending bankruptcy like Greece, losing our gold studded triple A rating, talking about spending sprees with the public finances, Obama uniquely offered hope not hate. It is therefore little wonder then that American President was left rather underwhelmed after a private discussion with Mr Cameron in 2008 and his impressions of the Conservative leader were reported in a confidential cable sent by US officials back to Washington. David Cameron was regarded by Barack Obama as a “lightweight” politician following their first meeting, the leaked documents have disclosed apparently. The embarrassing memo is among more than 1,000 documents from the American embassy in London that have been leaked and been publicly released, consequently. According to the Daily Telegraph, American officials had already warned Downing Street over the contents of the diplomatic cable. It is thought that they have stressed that Mr Obama’s opinion of Mr Cameron has changed as the two men have got to know one another better.
At least Obama was able to say last night that “Our economy is recovering”. Indeed in 2010, George Osborne inherited an economy that was growing at 0.7 per cent. Later that year he ignored the advice of many economists and set out plans to close the deficit within four years rather than eight. He also failed to set out a coherent growth plan, predicated on investment and jobs in the green economy that his party once championed. The result of Osborne’s slasher-nomics has been, as entirely predictable, that borrowing that is rising rather than falling. In this year’s budget, the Chancellor was forced to admit that public sector net borrowing (PSNB) would be 8.3 per cent in 2011-12 rather than 7.9 per cent as he’d predicted a year before. Since then, the situation has deteriorated. The most recent ONS release showed that the PSNB is up nearly 22 per cent in the first five months of the financial year compared to the same period last year. Borrowing is going up even as the departmental spending cuts continue apace.
It is thought that Cameron will seek to “seek change” in 2015 even as the incumbent candidate, but a François Hollande proved, it is possible for one-term oppositions to exist. Obama said last night, “It doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you’re willing to try.” Meanwhile, here in the UK, ATOS has conducted about 738,000 work capability assessments on benefit claimants in the past financial year. However the assessments have been widely criticised and it has emerged that 40% of people appeal against the decisions – with 38% of those successful. The cost to the taxpayer of the tribunal system alone is £50m, around half of the amount spent on reassessment. In sharp contrast to Miliband’s “One Nation”, charities say jobcentre staff have been shocked “when someone who is clearly unwell turns up having been told that they are fit for work”. In May 2012, GPs called for the assessments to be scrapped. Tom Greatrex, whose investigation into Atos led to the National Audit Office this month calling for an overhaul of the government’s medical testing contract with the company, said the firm “would not fix its reputation by sponsoring the Paralympics”.
“Tonight you voted for action, not politics as usual. You elected us to focus on your jobs, not ours. And in the coming weeks and months, I am looking forward to reaching out and working with leaders of both parties to meet the challenges we can only solve together.” We in Labour support him, as we always have done.
Meanwhile, this Twitter exchange from last night sums it up nicely.
Nick Clegg has got a difficult political game of chess to play, but he can go for checkmate if he wishes
Nick Clegg has a very difficult political game of chess to play, but he can go for checkmate if he wishes.
He is indeed much more popular in the country than members of Labour would like to admit. A recent YouGov survey found that just 20 per cent of people say Ed Miliband is performing well as Labour leader, while 21 per cent think the same of Nick Clegg as leader of the Liberal Democrats, despite his party’s unpopularity.
Tim Montgomerie has produced an article in the popular grassroots blog ‘Conservative Home’, warning David Cameron that it has been a mistake to put the NHS at the centre of the political debate. Montgomerie has indeed used the term ‘potentially fatal’ in describing the potential impact of the Bill on the future electoral chances of the Conservative Party in 2015.
The poll ratings of the Liberal Democrats have been consistently poor recently. In June 2011, an ICM poll reported that the Liberal Democrats have plummeted in the public’s opinion suffering a 14-year low with a score of 12 per cent.
Nick Clegg has been important in enabling important amendments to the proposed Bill. For example, in May 2011, he opposed to the surprise of many the competition regulator. He also publicly criticised David Cameron for declaring his love for the NHS while taking advice from people talking up the potential for private profits.
Nick Clegg has been remarkably loyal to the Coalition, having pledged an ‘united coalition’ in that famous rose garden scene on 12 May 2010, vowing to provide ‘strong and stable leadership’. Clegg has repeatedly emphasised the function of the Coalition as acting ‘in the national interest’.
However, many interested parties have now united instead against the NHS Health and Social Care Bill, including the Royal College of GPs, Faculty of Public Health, British Medical Association, Royal College of Nursing and Royal College of Midwives, which all oppose the bill outright.
Interestingly, Tim Farron MP, seen as a critical figure within the Liberal Democrats, has voiced his concerns, stating clearly this was not a Bill that the Liberal Democrats would have introduced if they had been in power on their own. He added: “What we’ve done is to prevent the worst excesses, to stop the emphasis on competition and put the emphasis on quality. I guess my largest complaint is that it has taken 12 months and it has taken people’s eye off the ball when it comes to delivering health care at the chalk face.”
This political game of chess for Nick Clegg is therefore an extremely complicated one. If his party supports the Bill, he could be supporting legislation modernising the management of the NHS ‘in the national interest’. However, many MPs and activists from various parties have warned that this Bill is no longer fit for any purpose.
If Liberal Democrat MPs are successfully whipped to recommend the Bill for enactment, the popularity of David Cameron is very unlikely to be affected. Ed Miliband will have been handed a gift for the 2015 general election, and the Liberal Democrats might achieve their lowest poll rating ever. Despite the national interest, does Nick Clegg wish this to be his lasting legacy for the Liberal Democrats?
If, on the other hand he decides to urge his party to oppose the Bill, he will have strengthened the importance of the Liberal Democrats in the Coalition, and may indeed have done England a big favour. That might be a more fitting legacy.
If I could subpoena Cameron and Clegg to do a leaders' debate now, I would
If I could subpoena Cameron and Clegg to do a leaders’ debate now, I most definitely would. As a student of a MBA course going at a very fast rate, it is easy to get a feel for a flavour of the management and leadership styles of David Cameron, and to understand why he personally, and his Tory-led government, are doing catastrophically badly. I exclude Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats, whose ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ opportunity to transform the nature of politics on the left-wing has been utterly wasted. Nobody sane would expect Nick Clegg to face the music in a Leaders’ debate in 2015, for example.
The issue with the Tory-led government is that they have a sole core competency, that is to reduce the deficit. However, the mechanism by which they are doing it is causing considerable damage to the recovery which had started in the first few months of their current (and probably) last term of government. By having no coherent policy for generating growth, they potentially could worsen the deficit by decreasing tax receipts and increasing benefit spending. It’s like having a credit card when you’re unemployed, but you are sanctioned from having any source of income.
David Cameron also fails as a leader in a number of textbook ways. As a potential transformational leader, he does not have the support of key followers essential for a change management to succeed, say in the public sector. Essential in this change management is not doing the change too fast, and having some symbols of success. Instead, David Cameron faces increasing waiting times and a plethora of equally disastrous metrics in NHS management, and the ultimate accolade in manufacturing output, the GDP, is deterioriating all the time. His preferred management style for running the public sector is ‘lean management’, which runs two grave dangers. Firstly, it can be extremely difficult to do a root cause analysis of problems when things go wrong, and secondly there is little functional slack. Take for example the recent riots. In an overstretched, underfunded, police service, it is difficult for the police and justice system to mount a satisfactory response. Amazingly, they have, but despite a dangerous level of cuts.
David Cameron has equally proven himself as a poor crisis leader. Over the riots, where he was accused of spending too long in Tuscany, and over the hacking crisis, where the evidence provided by Goodman, Coulson and Murdoch continues to cause problems, Cameron has been seen naked in responding way too late after the events; and again he suffers from a lack of trust by his followers, the UK general public.
Furthermore, in textbook terms, David Cameron fails as a charismatic leader. This was first identified really by Mary Liddell who wondered some time ago whether the general public could grow to embrace David Cameron. Indeed, Liddell was right. They couldn’t. The result was a hung parliament, with a completely ineffective Nick Clegg, driven by a personal dislike of Gordon Brown and ‘liberal principles’, led his party at Westminster to vote against EMA and the rise in tuition fees. No wonder his political party was slaughtered in the local elections.
So, I do come back to my basic thought: if I could subpoena Cameron and Clegg to do a leaders’ debate now, I would. Tragically, the country is stuck with them until 2015.
Please vote for http://www.shibleyrahman.com in the Total Politics Blog Awards 2011.
David Cameron is wrong on the NHS corporate restructuring for these reasons
In an interview where David Cameron tried to tell John Humhrys he was wrong, Humphrys identified that Cameron was showing no leadership on the bankers.
The interview can be heard here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9363000/9363655.stm
David Cameron is wrong about the NHS restructuring for the following:
It is wrong simply to focus on outcomes at the treatment end; much more could and should be done at the diagnosis end (health policy analysts find outcomes useful, but what they’re actually measuring are objective benefits). Much of the fundamental issue for the next decade will be the early diagnosis of the disease especially cancer, and there needs to be some focus on the efficacy of screening methods at the other end too (e.g.for colon cancer, breast cancer, COPD).
It is no good just talking about length of survival times, because there has to be a proper analysis of the quality-of-life and well being of patients with chronic morbidity including dementia.
The Doctors were not asking for the changes – the BMA is opposed to it, and to my knowledge the Royal College of Physicians shows little interest in it in a very positive direction. The King’s Fund certainly think it is a calamity.
2-3 years is a very short time to produce ‘the biggest reorganisation’ in the first time; it will involve £1.4 bn in the first year. John Humphrys was right to correct the figures that Cameron produced on the basis of actual evidence from the Kings Fund.
Satisfaction is at an all time high now with the NHS – this cannot be divorced from the record spending by Labour in the last parliament.
David Cameron denied the NHS IS getting better. This must means that he thinks that all aspects of it are getting worse. THIS IS A LIE.
John Humphrys asked that the NHS was in fact changing to a Federal Health Service. Cameron saying that there are already regional variations is frankly irrelevant. Humphrys is correct saying that an analogy between GPs and free schools is an extremely poor analogy; I am shocked that David Cameron is idiotic enough even to suggest it.
There’s no point Cameron trade-union bashing, as there are many ordinary nurses, doctors and other health-professionals who are non-Labour members who are highly critical of his insane policy.
If Andrew Lansley is so well respected, why does the whole of RCN disagree with him? The man is not well respected amongst the health professionals.
Dr Shibley Rahman Queen’s Scholar; BA (1st Class), MA, Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery, Doctor of Philosophy, Diploma of the Membership of the Royal College of Physicians (MRCP(UK)); FRSA, LLB(Hons).
Member of the Fabian Society.
