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Data-driven policy has its problems, but single issues are alive and well
Michael Green is not just the ‘alter ego’ of Grant Shapps, whose personal image continues on its ‘slow burn’ after a mass of ridiculous stories concerning his business activities. Michael Green is the name of a top Carlton Communications figure, known to be a personal friend of David Cameron, like Andrew Cooper, the founder and strategic director of the Populus voting initiative.
There are many problems with polling as a way to make policy. Not least, it can produce results which are at odds with domestic and European law, such as repeal of the Human Rights Act, encouraging a swop for fundamental employment right in share ownership, or ‘bash a burglar’. The further problem is that the results themselves can be intrinsically unreliable on public policy grounds; such as the vast majority of survey respondents in the Sun who believe that the death penalty should be re-introduced. Furthermore, it is generally acknowledged that in politics the whole is more than the sum of its constituent parts; therefore the ‘gestalt’ of the policy must overall make sense. However, data-driven policy is attractive from an ‘efficiency’ aspect of the operations management of politics; money can be spent in producing data, which can be number-crunched, to act as the input for a speech-writer. The impact of the delivery of the speech written by Clare Foges and colleagues can then be ascertained through further polling, in a ‘feedforward’ mechanism of feedback control.
The idea of ‘strivers’, as Isabel Oakeshott points out, sounds like the product of a computer cluster analysis of polling data (though she did not phrase it in such statistical words.) The concept of strivers does not make sense if you consider that members of the Conservative Party also wish to cut non-employment benefits, the economy has been imploding under the direction of George Osborne since May 2010, parts of the government wishes to take away basic legal rights (such as human rights or employment) which would protect and enhance the wellbeing of a ‘striver’. Oh – that’s another aspect of data-driven policy which doesn’t make sense; how can you pursue an agenda of happiness and wellbeing, when you wish to impose austerity and swingeing cuts that is doing much short-term damage to the economy and much long-term damage to society?
It has been interesting to watch how the mainstream and blogosphere have responded to ‘single issue’ politics. It is perhaps true that general polling data do not give a helpful picture of the value of disability issues to non-disability voters, but Sonia Poulton’s articles have had a genuine captive audience. On welfare, Kaliya Franklin was even shortlisted for this year’s coveted Orwell Prize, and her friend and fellow campaigner for disability issues, Sue Marsh, has had a remarkable impact in breaking the ‘glass ceiling’ of this topic which previously had barely been addressed. Likewise, Dr Eoin Clarke, in the blogosphere, has been addressing with considerable bravery previously taboo issues of potential conflicts of interest and the implementation of the NHS Act, which would be felt by most reasonable people to be issues of public interest. Mainstream media may of course be frightened to tackle the complex issues of the Health and Social Care Act, or simply do not understand them, but it is noteworthy that the Daily Mail has recently, and successfully, embarked on a campaign against A&E closures.
That Hunt has decided to frame the argument as ‘modernisation’ of the NHS, which Andy Burnham MP, had started is indeed interesting. David Cameron hardly mentioned the NHS in his speech, which perhaps does reflect the polling data. Recent estimates have provided that the Labour Party is indeed around 30% ahead on the NHS, ‘can be trusted with the NHS’ and so forth. On the other hand, there has always been ambivalence about Labour’s record in public spending, despite the fact that this double-dip recession was directly caused by the policy of the Conservatives, and that George Osborne MP in opposition had promised to meet the spending commitments of Labour, a fact which has conveniently forgotten with his Liberal Democrat accomplices.
Danny Finkelstein has previously warned that the Conservatives should not put all their eggs in the austerity basket. The austerity plan has of course been utterly discredited, with the economy going into reverse under the Conservative-led government, and the Financial Times recently warned that due to the ongoing problems austerity would have to continue until 2018 at least. The austerity agenda could be another ‘single issue’ which might cause pain for Ed Balls and Ed Miliband, if members of the public sector continue to ‘feel the pain’ in the relative absence of a Labour government wishing to tax heavily the top 1% of earners.
Voters are likely to produce a decision on a combination of factors, and certainly predicting this less than three years ahead of a general election is not easy. Whilst ‘Bigotgate’ probably did not lose Gordon Brown the 2010 election, though it might have been representative of a confusion on Labour’s part in understanding the aspiration of voters in an immigration context, certain issues can seem to prove fatal. It is perhaps significant that the poll tax debacle was necessary and sufficient in toppling Thatcher, but it is also significant perhaps that the Conservatives went on to win the 1992 general election. That was the last election they actually won, as many members of Labour will remind you.
A coalition with the LibDems would stink, but Clegg's motives are nakedly clear
I know it’s all about not shutting any doors, and keeping all options open. However, much as I like Neal Lawson personally and the whole of Compass, especially Gavin Hayes, I think the best way to save the “progressive left” is to vote Labour at the general election of 2015.
Why do I bring this up now? Nick Clegg said he could imagine working with Labour after 2015, and Ed Miliband has said politely, “it would be difficult”. This is the equivalent of a boy saying, “Do you fancy us going to Claridges’ tomorrow evening?”, and the girl saying, “Not really, you stink”.
It would be impossible for us to work with Nick Clegg or the Liberal Democrats. While Clegg can use empty words such as “duty” and “national interest”, actually his proposition is deeply offensive. It’s deeply offensive to those innocent people who objected to his party enacting the privatisation of the NHS. It’s deeply offensive to those disabled citizens who hate the new disability benefit legislation. It’s deeply offensive to those with housing or other social welfare problems who are seeing a swathe of free law centres and citizens advice bureaux shut down.
The Liberal Democrats are now in self-destruct mode, en route to commit a full political apoptosis on May 8th 2015. They will be utterly obliterated from English politics. Do you think that Nick Clegg is lending an olive branch to Labour members? No, Nick Clegg hates Labour and the Unions. He is sending out a message that a vote for the Liberal Democrats is a vote for Labour.
Ed Miliband must reject this at all costs. We do not need a sympathy vote from Nick Clegg or his party. His MPs enacted three of the most destructive laws, without involvement of the people concerned, in my lifetime. He is hoping that Social Liberal Democrats won’t bother voting at all, and his Orange Liberal Democrats will provide “one last heave” to get David Cameron winning his first ever general election.
Nick Clegg’s message is politically odious. He never explained why the deficit had increased due to spend on the hospitals or schools, nor why a desperate measure was needed to save the banks. I would say, “If he wins Sheffield, I’m a baboon”, but unfortunately he has a very safe seat which would be impossible for Labour to win.
David Cameron's brand of "pragmatic politics" is not likely to be a vote winner
For some time, I have been worried about the perception of David Cameron by Prof. Vernon Bogdanor, at Brasenose College, Oxford, as a “classic Tory pragmatist”, that he is an “instinctive Conservative”. Bogdanor feels, apparently, that the closest comparison is with Harold Macmillan or Stanley Baldwin. In a way which I can understand, it is symptomatic of a Government which ‘is in office but not in power’, as Norman Lamont so famously said of a previous Conservative administration. Attempts deconstructing Cameron’s biographical roots appear to have overall drawn a blank, although Jason Cowley’s attempt in the New Statesman does not unearth evidence for a strong ideological passion. Cameron simply looks like a person who has been at the right place at the wrong time, or the wrong place at the right time, but never unfortunately the right place at the right time; although due to misfortune rather than design he seems to have attracted also the wrong people at the wrong time, such as Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks who through alleged activities at News International face severe allegations from the Crown Prosecution Service.
The word ‘pragmatist’ means in political circles means, to a large degree, that he is a consensus politician; it is a matter of personal preference whether you embue into that a sense of compassion. I sense that Cameron would like to be seen to make tough decisions, such as exposing the NHS to the full opportunities and challenges of operating in a regulated market, or by taking certain legal services, such as welfare benefits legal advice, out of scope simply because we cannot as a country afford it. Further, it has been observed that Cameron, in his general style of decision-making, has shown raw pragmatism in trying to minimise the negative aspects of policy, particularly in areas of immigration, Euroskepticism, and multiculturalism. However, the ultimate denouement of this nature of politics has fundamentally been exactly the same problem faced by a business wishing to take into account views of its stakeholders – what Ed Miliband calls ‘responsible capitalism’, but what the recent of the business and legal fraternity have known for ages as ‘corporate social responsibility’. That denouement is that it is actually impossible to reconcile all of the views all of the time, and, as in many multinational corporates, some views will simply be irreconcilable.
As a style of leadership, it means that David Cameron is not a leader, but a manager – given the nature of the Coalition politics, some will necessarily view him, in fact, as a ‘caretaker manager’. It’s what the late great Prof. Peter Drucker would call ‘doing things right’ typical of managers, rather than ‘doing the right things’, typical of leaders. David Cameron cannot unfortunately rely on natural charisma necessarily, though few of us have met him. The media have been effective in painting a view, and the public have been keen to accept the depiction, of Cameron as a Bullingdon Flashman-type figure, completely at odds with Cameron wishing to present himself as a one-nation Tory, certainly very far away from Benjamin Disraeli’s character or performance. The ‘come on Dear’ putdowns to Angela Eagle may have been a flashman-in-the-pan, but it is fact that he can call Nadine Dorries ‘frustrated’ to roars of public which attracts concern from the spin-doctors of the Conservatives. As a leader, possibly Cameron is a ‘transformational’ leader, but he has in fact, with the help of George Osborne, transformed the country from a deficit to an even bigger deficit; whatever deficit he has paid off, the benefit paid out coupled with decreased income till receipts and horrendous growth, meant that plan A has objectively failed, and the Government had to swallow their pride yesterday. The investment policy is better late than never for Keynesians, but there is a definite sense of lost time, such that most economists believe that the UK will not emerge from recession until 2018-2020.
This all puts Ed Miliband and Ed Balls in a tricky position. People will be quick to criticise any agreement with austerity at the time of the General Election, but Ed Balls has a powerful morale high-ground in being able to claim that the double-dip recession was exactly as he had predicted. Sunder Katwala in 2010 warned a meeting of ‘Next Left’ of the Fabian Society in Manchester that, even if the programme of austerity worked, the social damage to the UK would take many years to recover from. Since then, austerity has been totally discredited in Europe. All of this of course assumes that David Cameron is solely pragmatic, but lacks an ideological mantra.
I do not believe David Cameron lacks an ideological mantra, he may be pragmatic, but his policies are entirely impractical. His ‘pragmatic’ policies have seen the deficit get worse, the raison d’etre of the coalition, even if there had been an initial element of ‘crisis’ which had brought the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats together. His economic policy was an ideological rejection of investment in the UK; it is a fact that stopping the ‘Building Schools for the Future’ starved investment in the country, leading the Q3/4 2010 construction industry growth figures to deteriorate, precipitating the overall decline of the weak recovery in the UK. This fact is a clear prediction of Keynes’ General Theory of 1948, a school of thought from meaning leading economists, wilfully rejected by Cameron.
I also believe that David Cameron’s doctrine is not simply to ‘make the state smaller’. He has a specific ambition to outsource or subcontract the state, and we have seen this policy run into clear difficulties as the general public reject the notion of unaccountable people in the private sector taking no responsibility for catastrophes in policing to security. The behaviour of private sector organisations in generating money through illegal or unlawful means has also shocked the general public, illustrated by the A4e, News International and Barclays scenarios. Whilst it is a complicated argument, this argument, best seen as mostly ideological but partly pragmatic, is not one which the public appear to support. The largest democratic movement in England, the Unions, are furthermore keen to represent the statutory duties of employers, or overzealous corporate directors, although their scope for shareholder activism is somewhat muted by the English courts at present.
David Cameron is best seen as a manager, but in meantime it is very unfortunate that George Osborne has murdered the economy in the UK, either through a mens rea of intention to kill the recovery through rejection of Keynesian economics, or through extremely recklessness (or incompetence) rather in running the economy. With Cameron through a highly ideological, but perhaps pragmatic, management procedure in outsourcing the State, the public is already noticing a clear lack of leadership in any time. It is this rejection of what the Conservatives stand for, illustrated by mismanagement of the last budget despite seeing a tax concession for the highest income citizens of the UK, will mean that this is possibly not the wrong time to demonstrate this particular style of “pragmatic politics”. A weakness of this “pragmatic stance” is that Cameron quite often has not been able to please many of the people much of the time, and this indeed has been a problem in general of the Coalition needing to appease the views of different factions, especially in the field of social welfare and justice. Another weakness of this stance has been Cameron’s apparent eagerness to show the politics of ‘divide and rule’, living a nation very unease with itself; pitting employed versus unemployed, the City against non-City, the rich against poor, the non-disabled versus the disabled, and so it goes on. This all smacks of the style of government of David Cameron, characterised by the approach of ‘whose time then is it to be unpopular?; One term governments are most unusual, but, as I suspect Cameron will find out on 8 December 2015, entirely possible.
Thanks to Ram Lakha for a comment on a previous version of this blogpost.
plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
This apparently is an epigram by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr in the January 1849 issue of his journal Les Guêpes (“The Wasps”). Literally “The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing.”
In the same way, James MacIntyre, John Rentoul, Mehdi Hasan and Sunder Katwala will always be there, Labour will always be there. Or maybe not – Luke Bozier has recently departed.
Not much has fundamentally happened in fact. The Unions are still ‘angry’ with Labour, but actually no union is ‘pulling out’. Ed Balls still feels that the cuts are ‘too fast and too deep’, and this explains why he’s not surprised that the deficit will be paid off in 2017 at the earliest. The Tories pretend to be against the Human Rights Act, but they know full well that even if they scrap the Act the jurisdiction of Strasbourg will still exist – unless we leave Europe. Talking of which, are we leaving Europe? No, don’t be silly.
The parties are still appalled at bankers’ bonuses, except nobody really wants to do much about it. The law regarding renumeration and corporate governance has not changed. However, we do know now that the clause obliging Hester to get a huge bonus does not as such exist, despite what the Coalition has been spinning for the last couple of years at least.
It’s still the case that Labour ‘overspent’, but hold on Labour still spent money to recapitalise the banks to stop the banks imploding. And George Osborne wouldn’t have stopped the fall of Lehmans or Northern Rock, either. It might have been possible that the Conservatives might have wished to maintain spending in NHS and state schools, indeed that is why they matched Labour’s comprehensive spending review of 2007.
I am of course being disingenuous. The Liberal Democrats are on 8% in the polls, although Nick Clegg remains ever popular when polling data are actually analysed. Ed Miliband still fails to impress apparently, and the Labour/crossbench Lordships are still able to create trouble for the Welfare Reform Bill despite the fact the LibDem peers voting with the Government. The NHS Bill is still a disaster, with the majority of the public and the Royal Colleges opposing it.
So the Government will get its legislation through, the deficit will get worse so long as unemployment increases and welfare benefits spending increases, the Unions continue to fund Labour, the Tories deny that emergency recapitalisation of the banks was necessary and deny that public spending was a good idea, and the Liberal Democrats become increasingly unpopular. The regulation of the media is a bit faulty at least, but will Leveson encourage state legislation? Probably no.
So are we just playing for time now? Yes.
Why David Cameron should share his iPad app with Ed Miliband
At 07.12 a.m. on Thursday, the BBC Radio 4 Today programme ran an item about the effects of adoption of technology. Sir Victor Blank believes that we communicate less in modern day society. He asked the BBC’s technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones to investigate whether innovations such as email and social media have hindered, rather than helped, communication.
The Telegraph newspaper reported recently on an intriguing adoption of innovative technology. Programmers inside the Cabinet Office are designing a new app that will bring together all the latest information from across Whitehall. The idea for the app came from a trip by advisers to the US. The software will allow the Prime Minister to see the latest NHS waiting-list figures, crime statistics, unemployment numbers and a wide variety of other data at a glance. It will also include “real time” news information from Google and Twitter, according to the Times. Mr Cameron is known to be an iPad devotee, using it to read newspapers as well as to tune into radio programmes, According to an article in the Huffington Post, the app is due to be unveiled in March. Officials say it may also be made available to the public, meaning it is unlikely the app will contain security sensitive government information.
I strongly believe in the thesis that technology assists innovative research, and that, specifically, the iPad is a godsend for people who engage in academic research like me.
Innovation is central to organisational growth and competitiveness (Tidd et al., 2001). Effective innovation can transform highly-functioning politicians into world leaders and ordinary organisations into stimulating environments for employees. Poor innovation within political parties could lead to poor morale both within H.M. Government and its official opposition, and ultimately stagnation and decline of the entire political process.
Organisations often face an “innovation paradox“; they must innovate in order to compete against one another, but in order to achieve the innovation, they may need to collaborate with organisations they compete against. In David Cameron’s case, this means collaborating with the app designers, sharing some of his ‘secrets’ about how he wishes ‘to do’ government. If Cameron succeeds here, he will have achieved a nirvana of the political process that he is said to be passionate about; including opening up a huge amount of stored information to the general public.
Traditionally organisations have been secretive of their innovations to protect any emerging intellectual property, but in this case also valuable information about how effectively the U.K. is being run. Over the years, such a secretive culture has been reinforced in the minds of other stakeholders, including M.P.s and voters, that the political environment is cut-throat and that innovation is how parties might gain competitive advantage over one other. Thus, the concept of open knowledge exchange with other independent organisations, even within a distributed innovation network, might be difficult for those people working in politics to accept.
This might result in members of the Conservative Party being apprehensive about exchanging knowledge with individuals outside their organisation, both within the Coalition and outside of it, in case of divulging information that was not intended to be exchanged. The presence of trust between individuals from the collaborating organisations is a key determinant in the success of collaboration. However, a key advantage for the network was a dramatic lowering of cognitive distance and increased collaboration and sense of community within the consortium. The physical separation between the political parties, especially in Portcullis House, is also not that huge.
In summary, I feel that Ed Miliband should embrace David Cameron’s new app, and they should both embrace a collaborative, innovative spirit. Whilst it may not make for a massive competitive advantage for Cameron compared to Miliband, it might make the sharing of ideas and information a more interesting and challing one intellectually.
Reference
Tidd, J, J Blessant and K Pavitt (2001). Managing Innovation: Integrating Technological, Market and Organisational Change. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
Law centres and legal aid funding
This is not a headline you will normally see.
Firstly, I should like to acknowledge Krish, who tweets at @TheTCHawk, for providing the inspiration for this blogpost. He has recently written on his experience with the Citizens Advice Bureau for which he works.
Instead, I have been working in a famous law centre in London for the last few months. This has been an incredibly rewarding for me, as I am looking forward to studying law further in my LPC in January 2012. I have already spent four years in legal training, but one of the many things that I have learnt of some importance is that lawyers do not get emotional.
Once I was aghast when a law student tweeted at a friend of mine, “Is there a difference between a law centre and a CAB?” However, it was a perfectly reasonable question. As members of law centres, we must confront this issue of what we’re (=law centres) doing that’s different from CABs. Marketing professionals must have an understanding of the awareness of any particular brand, for example the CAB or the law centre, before proceeding to develop a marketing strategy. I feel that law centres will need to develop a professional marketing strategy to raise their awareness amongst the community and investors. In my belief, whilst the CABx brand is very strong indeed, perhaps for historical reasons, the ‘Law Centre brand’ is virtually non-existent in comparison. I would be interested to know whether this is borne out by any hard data.
I have been thinking about how my law centre, especially my area of welfare benefits advice for disabled citizens like me, can benefit from alternative sources of funding, like the Big Lottery Fund, but this fundamentally depends on what pitch I should make. Is it that we are any more central to the communiy than the CAB? Or is it that we have more specialist qualified legal advisors than the CAB who can act as advocates? Are any generalisations possible or warranted? Furthermore, legal aid funding affects private practice stakeholders, as well as legal centres and CABs, and market forces affect all three. For all stakeholders to benefit the public the most, which is their ultimate aim after all, they need to have a clear idea of their values and which services they’re providing, so that all stakeholders can achieve optimal market and strategic positioning in a crowded, funding-challenged, market, perhaps.
Whatever – I personally think all legal practitioners should be given support, acknowledging that funds are limited. but funding bodies will have to prioritise unfortunately. In fact, a focus on funding may have the beneficial effect of providing better precision to all stakeholders in their strategy and core competences of their legal services, whatever sector they are in. However, fundamentally, I most agree with the observation that, at this late stage, arguing over a sense of entitlement is totally unhelpful. It is desperately important that we fight until the end for our common purpose in protecting legal aid. I would find it very hard to support law centres if they wished to campaign at the expense of CABx or other stakeholders, but they should think about how they differ from other stakeholders when applying for London Borough grants for community investment or structural upkeep, I feel.
Immediately this throws you into the territory that, as a lawyer to-be one day hopefully, I am getting emotional. Worse than that, I am getting political. Of course, central to the whole debate, is access-to-law and the rule of law. The Law Society and Bar Council provide that the legal aid cuts offend this fundamental right, and indeed many blogposts and the Guardianistas have thus far pressed home this vital point. However, an issue that my colleagues in the Law Centre I work at feel enormous frustration at the fact we are simply unable to get our message across.
We have, as citizens of society, to acknowledge that no political party will be in power forever, and it is not impossible that this Bill will become repealed in time or amended drastically. I feel that all employees in all legal institutions should not feel frightened in giving a voice to the opinions of citizens wishing to protect legal aid, and should be allowed to express such opinions in this organisational change. As part of my MBA, I studied in enormous detail critical success factors for relatively-rapid organisational change like this in the public sector, and by far the most important issues are trust and openness in the followers (including legal professionals) in ensuring the change goes smoothly. This is in addition to the demanding structural changes which are necessitated in this reform.
An issue is that the Legal Aid and Sentencing Bill, as proposed, could have a selectively detrimental effect on certain groups of society, including the disabled. Many of us have been prone to defend our own patch, and there is somewhat an element of ‘divide-and-rule’ in the debate which has ensued. Yet again, whilst I find repugnant that welfare benefits legal advice is being cut at the expense of some other fields of law, I feel that we all should be pulling in the same direction of protecting all areas of law (but especially for the socially disadvantaged.) In other words, lawyers and bloggers appear to the outside world to be not “in it together“, talking at cross-purposes, and becoming constituted by tribalistic vocal subgroups which are easy to ‘defeat’ as a whole. Secondly, I believe, that there is an element of where looking forward to the holiday has become more exciting than the holiday itself. I had a feeling of this in our opposition to the Health and Social Care Bill, where Labour loved opposing, but were completely incompetent in articulating arguments about competition, quality, value and cost in the NHS. Indeed, further, like perhaps #OccupyLSX, the opposition for the left has become more exciting than the substantive points of the opposition itself; I do not deny the inspiring success of @SoundOffJustice, and others. In fact, I met them at the DODS meeting in September, and was overawed personally about how much passion they had put into their campaign.
Thirdly, some elements of the ‘progressive left’, for example the Liberal Democrats, perhaps could have been more articulate about the effects of the legal aid policy on children, families, and wellbeing, which are now central planks of Liberal Democrat policy. Fourthly, whatever the reasons for it, the Legal Services Commission has been criticised, and there is a huge amount which could be done to improve the legal aid funding mess which has developed for a number of decades, including the last Labour governments? Whilst I do not feel the need to be perjorative in quoting the “most expensive service in Europe” statistic, which is actually untrue, we do need to address how best to develop legal aid funding. Fifthly, and this is an economic and quasi-political argument, I am a Keynesian and I do not agree with the ‘maxing out the credit card analogy’, but likewise, albeit as an utilitarian, I do believe we have to prioritise given the deficit which has come around in a large part through recapitalising the banks in #gfc1 (a policy which I am still uncertain about).
Finally, we need to get people interested in this subject in the media. I don’t mean the Guardianistas necessarily, otherwise we’re preaching to the converted. Whilst Sepp Blatter and racism, superinjunctions, anonymised injunctions and Andy Marr, and the BBC’s Children in Need are very important issues, we could do with much more focused coverage and debate of the Legal Aid and Sentencing Bill. I think this is essential, as I bet my life that this will obtain Royal Assent without any difficulty in due course.
Is the law political?
The law is supposed to solve the problems within, and arising, from society, and is not meant to create them. Sometimes the judiciary are able to implement, and correct mistakes in the, interpretation of the law written by the legislature. Within such a framework, it is possible for the day-to-day process of the law to be non-political, even if the creators of the law are, at any particular stage of time in England’s history.
It is hard to ignore that the use of language can impinge on areas of activity of corporate life; take for example the reference by Ed Miliband, the Labour Leader, to private equity firms as ‘predators’. Private equity practice seats exist in virtually all the major corporate law firms in the City. The fact that the Lord Chancellor is currently from the Conservative Party as such should not matter, as he is a professional barrister, and indeed studied law at Cambridge. Lord Justice Laws, at a recent meeting of ALBA, did however query what gave judges any particular advantage in able to adjudicate on matters of social justice. The fact that society has recently been faced with issues of social justice including the law, such as the eviction at Dale Farm or the revision of the Disability Living Allowance system, is unfortunately inescapable. The Law Society and the Bar Council are not supposed to be political, but notare against the legal aid cuts in their current form. That is not to say that they are in complete denial over the funding problem in legal aid; indeed the Law Society have proposed an alternative method of funding, which would save a substantial amount of money.
‘Sound off for justice’ and ‘Justice for all’ maintain that their campaigns are not political. However, senior people I talk to in law centres in London come to a conclusion that it is not possible to divorce politics from legal aid funding. Poverty unfortunately is political, as the Shadow Attorney-General, Emily Thornberry MP, suggested yesterday on BBC’s ‘Any Questions’. It happens that access-to-justice could disproportionately affect people on the basis of their income, in that cases of access-to-justice could become much harder to obtain for poorer people for certain problems. With many law centres set to shut down altogether, the legal services for immigration, housing and asylum, and welfare benefits, look set to be affected. The question is whether the poor will suffer disproportionately. Rich people will possibly be able to afford superinjunctions as before, as the evidence that the top 1% of the population have been affected substantially by the recession is lacking. This top 1% includes some (at least) well-paid lawyers in London.
In recent months, it has been argued that much policy is not entirely based on macroeconomics, but has a strong ideological basis. In the 1980s, the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher promoted “deregulation”, and this mantra appears to have been resurrected with some success by David Cameron, the Prime Minister. “Deregulation” presumably means ‘getting rid of the law’, but one is not absolutely clear whether Cameron means it in a libertarian way; one is told not. It does however pose a problem potentially for workers in manufacturing industry, potentially, who see their employment rights whittled away. Absolute deregulation would, of course, mean that the energy oligopolies could make a massive profit, maintaining an extremely high shareholder dividend, while elderly and poorer people do not burn as much gas over the winter saving money; and the law would not regulate against abuse of dominant position. In an extreme form, there would be no taxes, so a windfall tax, even for utilitarian good and justice, would be out of the question.
It could therefore be a political convenience that the law is not seen as political. Most astute pundits think that the Legal Aid and Sentencing Bill will become enacted after it passes uneventfully through the House of Lords. This because the Liberal Democrats will vote for it, as indeed past precedent provides (in the form of the Health and Social Care Bill). It does not matter that this Bill might affect the quality-of-life of children and families affecting Liberal Democrat voters or activists. Past precedent is all important.
This time, LibDems, expect the worst because of your political magpie Clegg!
For ages, the Liberal Democrats have argued that it is a matter of expectation management. They say that they have always confounded the pundits who have consistently exaggerated the extent and timing of their demise. Nick Clegg has demonstrated remarkable alacrity in underlining that this is bound to be a tough time for the LibDems, as they “repair the mess” left behind the last government. Since 2010, the Coalition government, only made possible through the voting support of LibDems MP, have scrapped EMA, SureStart, Building Schools for the Future, seen the introduction of a Health and Social Care Bill which people say is either disastrous or catastrophic, and caused falling consumer confidence and a worsening recovery.
Nick Clegg offered so much – a clean break from “broken promises”. Within months of his government, he broke his ‘categorical promise’ on tuition fees – nearly 80% of higher education establishments will be pricing their courses at the top rate. People voted for Clegg believing that the LibDems would make a difference, but the reason why the LibDems would be wise to get rid of him is the same reason that Tiger Woods and Wayne Rooney were dropped in their lucrative advertising contracts. This is where the expectation management comes in – this time, we can expect the worst for the LibDems, including the full works, including being demolished at local councillor level and the AV referendum – and, according to the polls, overwhelmingly, we will get it.
This makes a big difference for Labour. The LibDems (Chris Huhne, Nick Clegg and Simon Hughes) are considering legal action, apparently, over what they feel to be fraudulent misrepresentations (i.e. lies) in the anti-AV campaigning, and the country is now in a real economic mess. Labour would be wise to distance itself from the LibDems at this point; the ‘progressive left’ olive branch has been resoundingly dismissed by the right-wing LibDems, and without this branch, I, for one, should be happy for the LibDems to sink without trace. David Cameron is probably regretting having introduced fixed terms, as seeing this Coalition limp on, despite the fact that both parties can work together but dislike each other immensely, will not be in the country’s national interest until 2015. Ed Miliband should, of course, be ready for an election at any time, but it is a fairly firm fact that David Cameron – despite the enormous unpopularity of the cuts, but paradoxically boosted by LabourUncut – has grown from strength-to-strength. It will once again be a two-horse race, but will thankfully no longer have at its centre, the Political Magpie that is Nick Clegg.
