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Ticking boxes and snazzy campaigns won’t be sufficient to improve ‘dementia rights’
Cited in a OECD report, it is reported that half of all people with dementia may have experienced verbal, physical or psychological abuse or neglect at some point.
We feel strongly that the discussion of ‘dementia rights’ is very serious, and far too important to be left to marketing leaflets.
Dementia rights affect many people, such as carers or care home managers, but not least people living with dementia themselves.
And yet it sometimes feels as if ‘dementia rights’ have primarily been interpreted according to the needs of the people other than those living themselves with dementia. And, disturbingly, there is no distinction between ‘consumer rights’ and other rights.
A wider of range of people should be involved in the future discussions of rights. There are burning issues to discuss, such as glaring inconsistencies in current law. What about those who have agreed to hospital admission, or at least show no signs of objecting to it, but who may still be deprived of their liberty in various ways – for example residing in a locked ward?
We know in theory that every effort should be made to prevent the need to deprive someone of their liberty. It must be used for the minimum time possible. The legislation is supposed to protect vulnerable people. But why the perpetual schism between rhetoric and reality?
The English Law Commission’s own recent report“372 Mental capacity and deprivation of liberty” noted that:
“It is concerning that people often do not feel safe, treated with dignity or that their human rights are respected whilst detained.”
Dignity is an essential intrinsic part of human rights law. It is not merely an ‘adjunct’.
In response to the war’s atrocities, the UN’s universal declaration of rights in 1948 provided that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” under its article 1.
But Catherine Dupré comments:
“Protecting and defining dignity through human rights law is not always a straightforward business, especially because it often raises, in the words of the European court of human rights, a question of civilisation.”
It is critical now that we have an inclusive, wide-ranging debate, about how to progress. For example, an independent reviewhas set up for England and Wales, led by Professor Sir Simon Wessely, to look not just at our mental health laws, but also how they interact with services, good practice and the wider care system.
We must concede that changing legislation alone will not be enough to improve the lives of people affected by dementia, but, still arguably, a wider range of people with dementia and care partners should still have a seat at the table while this legislation is being changed.
In the “competence model”, a patient with dementia might be deemed incompetent to make a particular treatment decision, the decision must be based on an advance directive or made by a substitute decision-maker on behalf of the patient.
It seems that CRPD article 12 makes it impermissible to deny persons with mental disabilities the right to make treatment decisions on the basis of impaired mental decision-making capacity and requires the replacement of all regimes of substitute decision-making by “supported decision-making”.
The crucial difference is, therefore, that the “UNCRPD states that everyone with a disability should enjoy legal capacity on an equal basis with others in all aspects of life.”
Whatever local focus groups and tick-box “engagement meetings” take place, it is essential we have a thorough discussionof ‘dementia rights’ including specialists in law and dementia care, especially when so much is at stake. This is especially important as there are so many valid voices and actors in the ‘civil society’.
As the experience of Dementia Alliance Internationalshows, “nothing about us without all of us” needs to be more than a slogan.
Even the figures suggest Labour is more trusted on issues to do with the economy
It’s taken me a few days to think about the data which John Rentoul reported on a few days ago in the Independent. Aside from the headline figure that the Labour lead is only of the order of a few % points, the poll results make interesting reading even for those people like me who are normally totally uninterested in such rough population statistics.
As a disabled citizen, I am always quite touchy about the rhetoric of being ‘tough’ in the benefits system. This is because it took me approximately two years for my own disability living allowance to be restored, and this was only after I appeared in person at a benefits tribunal here in London. And yet the lead which the Conservatives have on benefits is massive: “Be tough on people abusing the benefits system: Conservative lead 39 points”. Here, I think usefully Labour can distinguish between people who deserve disability benefits for their living and mobility, whom they should be proud to champion, and people who are clearly free-loading the system. To try to get to the bottom of this, I tried to ask a 64-year-old friend of mine from Dagenham whether this notion of ‘benefits abuse’ is a real one. She explained ‘too right’, citing even that the council estates in Barking and Dagenham appeared to be stuffed full of immigrants who had somehow leapfrogged the social housing waiting list. I cannot of course say whether she’s right, but this is her perception. She went on to say that there were blatantly people around where she lived, who were making use of schools and hospitals, “to which they were not entitled.” The truth and legal arguments surrounding this feeling are of course longstanding issues, but the margin of the Conservatives’ lead on this is not to be sniffed at.
The finding that, “Keep the economy growing: Conservative lead 14 points”, is not of course particularly surprising. This is also a fairly robust finding. I suspect most people are still unaware of the enormity of the challenge which the last Government find itself confronting, such that Gordon Brown describes having to consult a few Nobel prize winners in economics at the last minute about his plans for bank recapitalisation (in his memoirs “Beyond the Crash”). How the £860 billion contributed to our famous deficit has been played out ad nauseam on Twitter, but such a discussion does not appear to have dented in the minutest sense the mainstream media. When Conservatives are faced with the question what they would have ‘done differently’, most do not even offer any answer, though true libertarians argue that they probably would have done nothing learning from the ‘Iceland experience’. But certainly one of the greatest successes of the political landscape has been converge all issues to do with the economy on the question, “Who do you trust on the economy?” The facts do actually speak for themselves, even though somewhat unclear. We may dispute we have had a double or triple recession since May 2010, but there is absolutely no doubt that the economy under this Coalition since May 2010 has done extremely badly (when the economy was indeed recovering in May 2010). That the economy may be dethawing a bit when the latest GDP ONS are released on Friday may not be a bad thing for Labour either. If voters are ‘grateful’ for an economy in recovery, and ‘trust’ Labour sufficiently, they may ‘hand over the keys’ to the Ed Miliband.
But would you like to give the keys back to the people who “crashed the car”? We, on the left, know that Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and Gordon Brown, did not single-handledly (or indeed triple-handedly), “crash the car”. Only, at the beginning of this week, JP Morgan was handed an eye-watering fine by its regulator over securitised mortgages. Nonetheless, this IS the public perception, and there are no signs of it shifting yet, given the sheer volume and brilliance of the lies from professional Coalition MPs. When you turn to issues to do with economy, which face, “real people”, the poll results produce an altogether different narrative. Whilst the media and Westminster villages enjoy GDP figures and “the scale of the deficit”, most hardworking people in the UK don’t go to work thinking about the deficit. Car drivers may think about the cost of filling up a tank of petrol in their car, or worry about the monumental scale of their energy bills.
This is why in a sense it’s payback time which Labour intends to take full advantage of. The Conservatives are clearly hoping for ‘analysis through paralysis’, where voters will be bored to death over what is exactly causing such high bills, including ‘green taxes’. The fundamental problem is, arguably, reducing the competitive market from 14 to 6, in part, but the public appetite for blaming Labour for this appears to be surprisingly weak. The public appear to have gone somewhat into “I don’t care who caused it, but please do sort it out” mode. Therefore, the poll finding, “Keep gas and electricity prices down: Labour lead 20 points” is striking. The market is not anywhere near perfect competition. It is an ‘oligopoly’ as it has too few competitors, which means that they can arrange prices at a level suitable for themselves. This is called ‘collusive pricing’, and it’s notoriously hard to regulate. That’s why the ‘price switching’ approach is so banal. As soon as you switch from one energy provider, you can land with another energy provider who is teetering on the brink of putting up energy prices themselves. They can do that. The latest intervention by Sir John Major provides that Ed Miliband has identified the right problem but arrived at the wrong solution. The irony is that Major himself has probably himself arrived at the right problem, but many disagree with the idea that a ‘windfall tax’ will ultimately benefit the consumer because of the risk of taxes and levies being indirectly handed down to the end-user. Nonetheless, it will make for an interesting Prime Minister’s Questions at lunchtime today.
The poll finding, “Protect people’s jobs: Labour lead 16 points”, also represents another powerful opportunity. The finding that there is a ‘record number of people in employment’ has always had a hollow ring, but Channel 4’s “Dispatches” programme managed to explain lucidly how millions were being duped into jobs with poor employment rights by multinational companies seeking to maximise shareholder dividend. The use of ‘zero use contracts’ has also raised eyebrows, as well as the drastic watering down of rights for employees under the unfair dismissal legal framework of England and Wales. And yet these are fundamentally important issues to do with the economy. Political analysts who do not comprehend this idea, in perseverating over their question “Who do you trust with the economy?”, are likely to be underestimating the problem which Cameron and colleagues face on May 7th 2015.
Whatever the public’s eventual ‘verdict’ on who runs the economy or issues to do with the economy better, the Conservative-led government is clearly running out of time. In a week when they should be fist-pumping the air over the GDP figures, three years down the line, they are bogged down in a debate over ‘the cost of living crisis’. That is, because all of his ‘faults’ in leadership, Ed Miliband has managed to choose which narrative he wishes to discuss. Whatever the precise understanding of voters over complicated issues of economics, this Conservative-led government are proving themselves to be excellent at one particular thing. They appear confidently self-obsessed and ‘out-of-touch’ with ordinary voters. Recent announcements, also relating to the economy, such as the decision to build a new nuclear power plant and the privatisation of the Royal Mail, have merely been interpreted as Cameron and ‘chums’ looking after his corporate mates rather than having the interests of consumers at heart. Whereas the Independent poll did not examine the issues to do with the NHS, it is clear that Jeremy Hunt’s relentless smear campaign has not even produced the slightest dent in Labour’s substantial consistent lead. With an imminent A&E crisis over Winter, actions will speak louder than words anyway.
But for Labour things appear to be ‘on the right track’. Even the figures suggest Labour is more trusted on issues to do with the economy, even if the answer to ‘who do you trust more on the economy?’ does not appear to be at first blush in Labour’s favour. What is, though, interesting is that Labour appears, at last, to have some ‘green shoots’ in a political recovery after one of its worst defeats ever in 2010.
It's all too easy to dismiss Miliband's attack on energy prices. It fundamentally blasts Thatcherism.
Virtually all attacks on Ed Miliband regarding energy prices begin with the statement ‘Ed Miliband is right but…” That the Conservatives might be wrong on their basic economics is politically very worrying. And yet Ed Miliband has not sought to frame the article like a convoluted Oxbridge economics tutorial. Long gone are the days of Gordon Brown using logical inferences to explain why financial recapitalisation was needed to avert an even bigger global financial crisis. Nobody seemed to care. What did George Osborne wish to do exactly about Northern Rock. He didn’t say, and it didn’t seem to matter. Labour, the allegation, spent too much, and yet staggeringly George Osborne wanted to spend as much more. When asked to identify what it was about Labour’s economic policy which was so fundamentally awry, Tory voters invariably are able to articulate the answer. When further pressed on how the Conservative Party opposed this fundamentally awry policy, there’s a clear blank.
Ed Miliband and his team can explain how the market has failed, perhaps going into minutiae about how competitors end up colluding, except nobody can prove this. They therefore rig the prices, it is alleged, so that they can return massive shareholder profit, while the prices endlessly go up. The Tories will counter this with the usual reply that the profits are not that bad, and it was Miliband’s fault for introducing his ‘green taxes’. Anyone who knows their economics at basic undergraduate level will know the problem with this. It’s all to do with the definition of ‘sustainability’. Sustainability does not simply mean ‘maintained’, although you’d be forgiven for thinking so, on the basis of the mouths of PPE graduates from Oxford. It’s all about how a company can function across a time span of very many years, acting responsibly in the context of its environment.
It’s instead been framed as ‘the cost of living crisis’. The problem with the national deficit, while a useful tool in giving people something to blame Labour for supposedly, is that when somebody goes out shopping in a local supermarket he does not tend to think of the national deficit. Likewise, much as I disagree with the ‘Tony Blair Dictum’ that ‘it doesn’t matter who provides your NHS services so long as they are free at the point of need’, voters will tend not to care about NHS privatisation unless they have a true ideological objection to it. NHS privatisation as such makes little impact on the ‘cost of living’.
Energy prices are an altogether different bag. It is perhaps arguable that the State should not interfere in private markets, but surely this acts both ways? Should the banking industry, and more specifically bankers, be ‘grateful’ that they received a £860 billion bailout from the State as a massive State benefit to keep their industry alive? Or did they not want this money at all? Even you brush aside the need of the State to interfere legitimately with prices, it is commonplace for the State through the law to interfere with unlawful activities to do with competition. The prices are the end-product of an economic process of faulty competition, poorly regulated.
And there’s the rub. Ed Miliband’s ‘attack on energy prices’ is not just a policy. It is actually a political philosophy. It is more tangible than responsible capitalism or predistribution, although one may argue that it bridges both. The attack on energy prices, on behalf of the consumer whether hard-working or not, is indeed a political philosophy. Margaret Thatcher may have gone to bed with a copy of ‘The Road to Serfdom’ by FA Hayek under her pillow, and all credit to her for fundamentally believing, most sincerely, that the markets could be ‘liberalising’. With this attack on energy prices, Miliband effectively in one foul swoop demolishes the argument that markets are liberalising. In Thatcherite Britain, consumers are suffocated by the business plans of big business. Miliband’s discourse is not a full frontal attack on any business; it specifically targets abusive behaviour of corporates. And the energy prices are symbolic of much of what has proven to be faulty many times before. Andrew Rawnsley concluded his article at the weekend, advancing the theme that the current Conservative-led government is a bad tribute band to Thatcherism, by saying simply that we know what happens next. It’s not just gas; it’s everything which has been privatised, including water, telecoms, and so it goes on. Authors in the right-wing broadsheets can go on until the cows come home evangelising how privatisation is a ‘popular’ concept, but the criticism of the abuse of privatisation is far more popular.
And Ed Miliband doesn’t want to issue ‘more of the same’ as before. John Rentoul is so exasperated he is now left to write articles on how being called ‘Blairite’ is not actually a term of abuse. But these are yesterday’s battles. The battle over energy prices is a massive explosion in the world that the market knows best. Its shock waves are to be felt in how Labour conducts itself in other policy domains, putting people primacy ahead of shareholder primacy. And there’s a plenty of evidence that this is the Most Corporatist Government yet – ranging from the reaction to Leveson to how to allow ‘market entry’ in the newly privatised NHS. The public were never offered an antidote to the Thatcherite poison from Tony Blair, and, even after 13 years of Blair and Brown, many Labour members had been left mystified as to what happens next.
The beginning of that answer definitely seems to be end of Thatcherism. The answer seems to involve a new post-Thatcherite ‘settlement’ about politics, society and economics. Whilst distinctly populist in feel, it fundamentally blasts Thatcherism to the core, and is highly deceptive. Whilst easily dismissed, it intellectually is a lethal weapon.
It's all too easy to dismiss Miliband's attack on energy prices. It fundamentally blasts Thatcherism.
Virtually all attacks on Ed Miliband regarding energy prices begin with the statement ‘Ed Miliband is right but…” That the Conservatives might be wrong on their basic economics is politically very worrying. And yet Ed Miliband has not sought to frame the article like a convoluted Oxbridge economics tutorial. Long gone are the days of Gordon Brown using logical inferences to explain why financial recapitalisation was needed to avert an even bigger global financial crisis. Nobody seemed to care. What did George Osborne wish to do exactly about Northern Rock. He didn’t say, and it didn’t seem to matter. Labour, the allegation, spent too much, and yet staggeringly George Osborne wanted to spend as much more. When asked to identify what it was about Labour’s economic policy which was so fundamentally awry, Tory voters invariably are able to articulate the answer. When further pressed on how the Conservative Party opposed this fundamentally awry policy, there’s a clear blank.
Ed Miliband and his team can explain how the market has failed, perhaps going into minutiae about how competitors end up colluding, except nobody can prove this. They therefore rig the prices, it is alleged, so that they can return massive shareholder profit, while the prices endlessly go up. The Tories will counter this with the usual reply that the profits are not that bad, and it was Miliband’s fault for introducing his ‘green taxes’. Anyone who knows their economics at basic undergraduate level will know the problem with this. It’s all to do with the definition of ‘sustainability’. Sustainability does not simply mean ‘maintained’, although you’d be forgiven for thinking so, on the basis of the mouths of PPE graduates from Oxford. It’s all about how a company can function across a time span of very many years, acting responsibly in the context of its environment.
It’s instead been framed as ‘the cost of living crisis’. The problem with the national deficit, while a useful tool in giving people something to blame Labour for supposedly, is that when somebody goes out shopping in a local supermarket he does not tend to think of the national deficit. Likewise, much as I disagree with the ‘Tony Blair Dictum’ that ‘it doesn’t matter who provides your NHS services so long as they are free at the point of need’, voters will tend not to care about NHS privatisation unless they have a true ideological objection to it. NHS privatisation as such makes little impact on the ‘cost of living’.
Energy prices are an altogether different bag. It is perhaps arguable that the State should not interfere in private markets, but surely this acts both ways? Should the banking industry, and more specifically bankers, be ‘grateful’ that they received a £860 billion bailout from the State as a massive State benefit to keep their industry alive? Or did they not want this money at all? Even you brush aside the need of the State to interfere legitimately with prices, it is commonplace for the State through the law to interfere with unlawful activities to do with competition. The prices are the end-product of an economic process of faulty competition, poorly regulated.
And there’s the rub. Ed Miliband’s ‘attack on energy prices’ is not just a policy. It is actually a political philosophy. It is more tangible than responsible capitalism or predistribution, although one may argue that it bridges both. The attack on energy prices, on behalf of the consumer whether hard-working or not, is indeed a political philosophy. Margaret Thatcher may have gone to bed with a copy of ‘The Road to Serfdom’ by FA Hayek under her pillow, and all credit to her for fundamentally believing, most sincerely, that the markets could be ‘liberalising’. With this attack on energy prices, Miliband effectively in one foul swoop demolishes the argument that markets are liberalising. In Thatcherite Britain, consumers are suffocated by the business plans of big business. Miliband’s discourse is not a full frontal attack on any business; it specifically targets abusive behaviour of corporates. And the energy prices are symbolic of much of what has proven to be faulty many times before. Andrew Rawnsley concluded his article at the weekend, advancing the theme that the current Conservative-led government is a bad tribute band to Thatcherism, by saying simply that we know what happens next. It’s not just gas; it’s everything which has been privatised, including water, telecoms, and so it goes on. Authors in the right-wing broadsheets can go on until the cows come home evangelising how privatisation is a ‘popular’ concept, but the criticism of the abuse of privatisation is far more popular.
And Ed Miliband doesn’t want to issue ‘more of the same’ as before. John Rentoul is so exasperated he is now left to write articles on how being called ‘Blairite’ is not actually a term of abuse. But these are yesterday’s battles. The battle over energy prices is a massive explosion in the world that the market knows best. Its shock waves are to be felt in how Labour conducts itself in other policy domains, putting people primacy ahead of shareholder primacy. And there’s a plenty of evidence that this is the Most Corporatist Government yet – ranging from the reaction to Leveson to how to allow ‘market entry’ in the newly privatised NHS. The public were never offered an antidote to the Thatcherite poison from Tony Blair, and, even after 13 years of Blair and Brown, many Labour members had been left mystified as to what happens next.
The beginning of that answer definitely seems to be end of Thatcherism. The answer seems to involve a new post-Thatcherite ‘settlement’ about politics, society and economics. Whilst distinctly populist in feel, it fundamentally blasts Thatcherism to the core, and is highly deceptive. Whilst easily dismissed, it intellectually is a lethal weapon.
CV here
How the quiet man Ed Miliband managed to turn the volume up
For Ed Miliband, this particular conference speech was a ‘coming of age’. It’s somewhat bemusing that political journalists have described Ed Miliband as “disappointing”, or “singularly unimpressive”, but Miliband does not need to impress these people who’ve got it wrong before.
Most people will converge on the notion that David Cameron gave a horrifically dull speech, more akin to a newsreader reading out a corporate’s executive summary of an annual report. The pitch of Nick Clegg, that he could permanently be Deputy Prime Minister, was frankly risible. UKIP managed to propel Godfrey Bloom into the limelight for all the wrong reasons, in their pitch to make cleaning behind a fridge more relevant than the ‘cost of living crisis’.
Ed Miliband’s moral triumph is that he can genuinely say he is going into the election, to be held in the UK on May 7th 2015, having tried his best to piss off the key players in the print press. The BBC’s news coverage, whether it includes not reporting the National Hospital Sell-off following the Health and Social Care Act (2012), or not reporting the closure of law centres in England, or not reporting a march against NHS privatisation in Manchester involving approximately 60,000 people, has become astonishingly irrelevant.
The ‘coming of age’ of Ed Miliband politically is an intriguing one. Whilst Miliband has really struggled, initially, to convince others of the need of ‘responsible capitalism’ or indeed ‘predistribution’, he managed to produce a populist synthesis which was strikingly popular.
Phone lines are typically inundated in any radio phone-in with callers moaning about how their utility bills have shot up. The ‘free market’ has not offered choice or competition, but has become a gravy train for greedy companies.
There is not a single truly ‘free’ market. Virtually all free markets have needed some degree of regulation, to stop customers being abused.
It has become much easier to fire employees on the spot, and access-to-justice evaporated. Virtually all free markets have needed some degree of regulation, also to stop employees being abused.
Whilst then the ‘One Nation’ concept may seem a bit pie-in-the-sky, an economy and society which works for its citizens ‘for the public good’ is a worthy one. It is a bit of a stretch to make this sound like a return to 1970s socialism. It is entirely about making the State protect the interests of its citizens.
The media have long been gleeful at the personal ‘poll ratings’ of Ed Miliband being dire, but David Cameron impressed as a dodgy double-glazing salesman this week. Nick Clegg, having led his party to voting for NHS privatisation and the decimation of legal aid, has become a laughing stock with his argument that he is a ‘moderating force’.
Many people will therefore say begrudgingly that Ed Miliband had by far the best conference season. This was not because he had ‘rote learned’ a script rather than reading an autocue. This is because, whether it was synthetic or not, struck a chord with the concerns of ordinary voters not corporate directors.
The Westminster Class is clearly going to take a bit of time to readjust to the new mood music. Miliband has, whether they concede it or not, has been able to change the narrative from the deficit to the ‘cost of living crisis’.
The ‘cost of living crisis’ is a genuine one, with the cost of living outstripping real wages for the vast majority of the term of this government so far. It is shocking perhaps it is taken so long for the political class to realise that this is an issue.
This is not, of course, a rejection of the market in any Marxist sense. It is merely an acknowledgement that voters do not intellectually masturbate any more on the allegation of Labour singlehandedly bankrupting the global economy.
The bankers are the baddies, like the energy companies. They have failed to regulate themselves, and have been the beneficiaries of ineffective regulation from the State. The Unions are rapidly no longer becoming “public enemy number one”, not because there has been a sudden conversion of a mindset to valuing employees’ rights but because votes find disgusting the idea of faceless hardnosed hedgies and venture capitalists determining public policy behind the scenes.
And there’s finally the rub. Ed Miliband has managed to shove the volume up, when he was perhaps so quiet that people were wondering if he ever had anything useful to say. And he somehow has managed to make his ‘One Nation Economy’, ‘One Nation Society’ and ‘One Nation Politics’ seem relevant to many people who had previously given up on politics.
This is actually no mean feat.
Thanks to @labourmatters for correcting a factual misstatement in an earlier version of this blogpost.
In a typically understated way, Ed Miliband has unleashed an explosive election-winning policy
Ed Miliband has always been “the underdog”, even since he won the party’s protracted leadership contest at Conference in 2010. That Conference was also held in Manchester. People will necessarily be trying to work out what he has done since last year. The public are irate that their public services are being outsourced, being run incompetently, and key people seem relatively incompetent; the public disgust at A4e, ATOS and G4s, over various incidents, has been enormous. And yet when Ed Miliband talked about how it was simply insufficient that certain corporates make enormous profit without acting responsibly, nobody knew what Ed was talking about. And they still don’t know what Ed is talking about – but Ed knows he’s right, and, in a typically understated way, he just gets on with his business.
Ed Miliband is not unpopular, much to the chagrin of his opponents, and indeed Labour is relatively popular in the opinion polls currently. The media have worn themselves out with quasifeuds between David Miliband and Ed Miliband, and Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, because the media know that if they were take to the moral highground on actual feuds they would be obliged to analyse the highly dysfunction in Coalition dynamics in time-consuming detail.
Ed Miliband has in fact through his Policy Network speech put down a trap for the unwary. Whilst ‘pre-distribution’ is not a new concept, it has a lot of people who will warm to it. Unions will warm to it, because their members might feel valued more through a ‘national living wage’. People who criticise the lack of implementability of the ‘national living wage’ would be best advised to consider that the national minimum wage, under Tony Blair, has been successfully implemented.
It is also a direct attack on the primacy of the City of London. It is indeed interesting to see where this approach sits with members of the former ‘Blue Labour’ initiative. Whilst Chuka Umunna can validly fight for the rights of employers and workers in the workforce, including SMEs, not least because he is an experienced employment lawyer by training, there may be little to embrace so warmly the City, as the Brown/Blair governments had. The City have had their tax breaks, and awarded themselves cushy bonuses having been bailed out by the State which the Conservatives love to malign. The City is unpopular amongst the majority of UK voters, and any sense of wealth creation is negated by the amount of damage which they have done to this unbalanced economy. A small number of people have awarded themselves excessive pay, and these are obviously not the beneficiaries of ‘pre-distribution’. In ‘pre-distribution’, the government can decide to reward directly public sector workers (e.g. nurses, teachers) through a form of ‘working tax credits'; or else it could throw the ball into the courts of the all-powerful corporates, in encouraging them to introduce fairer pay such that people actually want to work for them.
Most significantly, ‘pre-distribution’ puts Society ahead of the market. This is an election-winning strategy, not least because there are millions of customers who feel that many private entities offer little in the way of choice or competition, offer their shareholders large dividends, and do not have the quality of their goods or services as a major goal. These market failures are seen, for example, in the banking, gas, electricity, water, and exam boards sectors, and the fact that the market is failing means that Society will be able to revolt.
Finally, and most significantly of all, pre-distribution is a direct attack on New Labour, as it places value as a much higher priority than simply price or cost. It is well validated by experienced economists, and is a popular ideology amongst the current US administration. New Labour did nothing to promote the value of the Unions, and the fact that the Unions warmly embrace this policy should give Ed Miliband promise. It will do a great many things within Labour, not least ‘give value for money in public services’, and ‘allow aspiration for individuals’, for example through better wages for their jobs and career progress. These ironically were New Labour goals as well, but the problem with New Labour is that it threw the baby out-with-the-bathwater, for the sake of winning elections.
November 2011 Newsletter by the Legal Awareness Society by BPP students
Members of the Legal Awareness Society for BPP students will receive the following newsletter shortly.
Legal Awareness Society Newsletter for BPP students November 2011
You can be pro-business, without being pro-greed
What annoys me about some people is that they equate capitalism with greed. This is wrong. Businesses work in the context of the rest of Society, or at least that is the intention. It should never be a ‘them against us’ situation, as we are ‘all in it together’ – law, business and Society, to coin a phrase.
LegalAware podcast 1: Ataxia and welfare benefit cuts
Welcome to the first ever LegalAware podcast. I am sorry for the sound quality. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, it’s recorded on a very busy Regents Park Road, which can be busier than the #m6. Secondly, I am still getting used to the #yeti microphone and Audacity. Notwithstanding these problem, Alan (@AlanROYGBIV) joins me for a explanation of the neurological condition of ataxia, which we both have, what Ataxia UK is, and how the welfare benefit cuts are a tragedy for society, including disabled citizens like us.
Things mustn't get any worse: the new Labour dream?
“I’m Labour, or I was Labour, and I sympathise, but there’s no fairness, no fairness, it’s absolutely ridiculous. Millions of immigrants have come in and it’s making everything harder”, though there was also a firm and contradictory response: “I don’t think so, that’s all a bit of hot air. A lot of foreign workers do jobs British workers don’t want”.
These were the now immortal words uttered by Gillian Duffy in Rochdale.
2010 was indeed a far cry from this.
The 2015 election makes very grim reading for us. The Fabians’ “Southern Discomfort Again” pamphlet published today provides that,
“At the 2010 Election, there was almost a wipe-out of Labour seats in Southern England, where almost half of British constituencies are located. 13 seats were lost in the South East, 8 in the South West, 11 in the East, 14 in the West Midlands and 11 seats in the East Midlands, a total of 57 seats or nearly two thirds of Labour’s overall loss of 91 seats. Indeed, the Labour party now has no MPs whatsoever in Cornwall, Somerset, Wiltshire, Dorset, West Sussex, East Sussex, Kent, Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire, Rutland, Warwickshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and Herefordshire.”
The Fabian Society published its long-awaited “Southern Discomfort Again” report today. The survey results and discussion are available here. Lord Giles Radice and Dr Patrick Diamond from Oxford were the co-authors. Lord Radice is pictured here in our meeting at 1 George Street, Westminster. SW1.
Our next election will be in 2015, 18 years away from Tony Blair’s dream of 1997. Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell were possibly at the right place at the right time, with a country absolutely sick to the back teeth of the Conservatives. Note that this is different to the current situation, where the Coalition, according to all the polling evidence, appears to be popular, as it has a credible policy for reducing the deficit, and, overall, the general public support the idea of people working together in the national interest, as evidenced by David Cameron’s populist speeches at Conference. Tony Blair tapped into a mood of optimism, and, more importantly, aspiration; and the county ran with it. The mood in 2011 is very different, and Labour has to recognize this. The buzzword now is ‘insecurity’, both in social and cultural terms. Gillian Duffy’s comments touch on one plank of this; immigration in itself, with its repercussions on employment. Actually, it touches on another plank, housing. Interestingly, Labour has become known as the party of the benefit scroungers, immigrants and the Unions. Clearly, Labour has failed to make the “globalism is good” argument, and the benefits of free movement of Labour was not even attempted by Phil Woolas MP in the last parliament.
Labour would therefore be advised to be sensitive to the feeling of insecurity by their voters. And who are their voters? For the first time, last Election, according to YouGov, the middle classes overtook the working classes in voting for Labour. It would be sensible to highlight the social implication of cuts, because there is the outside risk for Labour (and of enormous benefit to the country at large) that drastic benefit reduction might indeed ‘work’ without seeing adverse effects in unemployment. If the economy goes belly-up (we are assured by Cameron and Osborne, reflecting on Ireland inter alia, that it won’t), Labour will be home-and-dry. If not, it’s going to be ‘quids in’ for all involved in the Coalition; in particular, Nick Clegg MP. They will be able to play ‘well, it was unpleasant, but the country is much more better off now, and we can pay for more nurses and teachers now?’ card.
Labour should be ready for a long period of opposition, until proven otherwise. I feel that this will give Ed Miliband sufficient time to sort his team out. There are issues to be debated, such as the degree to which ‘creeping marketisation’, much despised by Ed Balls MP, will be avoided by Ed Miliband. As for the psychodrama, one can speculate ad nauseam on whether Ed Balls will support Ed Miliband, but the future direction taken by John Healey and Alan Johnson, for example in opposing NHS ‘privatisation’, will be necessary. There are some of course, perhaps Tony Blair included, who feel that some sort of corporate restructuring and business ethic in the NHS is needed. It may be there is a long haul ahead, which will give time for Ed Miliband to work Angela Eagle MP up from Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury to Shadow Chancellor, in time. As Alan Johnson MP readily admits, he is currently reading a primer on economics, but is possibly the best person to oppose the Comprehensive Spending Review as a politician at this particular moment in time.
We need to consider carefully why we lost an election. Whilst I am an ardent fan, I recognize that 13 years was quite long enough for people who felt that Labour had run out of steam following 2005-2007, and that Gordon Brown, whilst good at leading economics seminars (although he probably lost on the £6bn point, in fact) was not an inspirational leader. I feel that the lower middle classes feel disenfranchised, still have aspiration, but are faced with massive insecurities now, which the left need to address. Furthermore, Labour can’t duck away from the fact that, despite having successfully made in-roads into restoring its reputation, has become perceived as ‘economically incompetent’ again. Ironically, the report on waste in government, which Labour actually commissioned, was published today.
Liam Byrne and Ed Miliband will be trying to make sense of all of this.
Dr Shibley Rahman
Queen’s Scholar, BA (1st.), MA, MB, BChir, PhD, MRCP(UK), LLB(Hons.), FRSA
Director of Law and Medicine Limited
Member of the Fabian Society and Associate of the Institute of Directors
