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I'm a Labour member who despairs over our leadership on welfare; and I'm not the only one
So what’s new? This is yet another article about Labour and welfare. George Osborne wanted a debate about welfare, but he wants people to be united against ‘shirkers’ staying in bed while good citizens go out-to-work.
I don’t want even to go into that tired debate about working tax credits, and how the people Osborne appears to be targeting are low earners in society. I don’t wish to go into the billions of other arguments concerning this huge part of the budget, for example whether the “millionaire’s tax” would have ‘covered the costs’ of the “bedroom tax”. But increasingly I sense an overwhelming impression from Labour members like me an engulfing sense of despair. This is not about the top 15 things that Labour has promised to repeal or enact on gaining ‘power’, although virtually all of that list has to be cautioned against the state of the economy that any government will inherit in 2015. There are certainly too many variables and unpredictable externalities on the horizon, which makelife difficult. Labour is undergoing a complex review, and indeed people can contribute to the policy discussion through their website. However, there is simply a sense that the Labour Party has lost its identity, and that many people would simply like to quit and “up sticks”. Much of this is that Labour sets out to be a social democratic party, not a socialist party, so therefore has a real ideological problem with saving failing hospitals in the NHS; it paradoxically does not appear to have a problem in saving banks, increasing the deficit, creating billions of bonuses for some bankers in the cities. It engaged in ‘buy now, pay later’ behaviour which meant NHS hospitals, in the name of public infrastructure investment, being put on commercially-confidential contracts lasting decades at interest rates which most agree are competitive.
Labour’s fundamental problem is that it has fallen into the ‘bear trap’ of following not leading. 62% of people think that spending is too high, and indeed Philip Gould, Alistair Campbell and Peter Mandelson are reputed to be fond of ‘focus groups’. However, 99% of Sun voters are reputed to ‘back the Death Penalty’, and no-one is seriously proposing that Ed Miliband should ‘back the penalty’ to get elected. There is a sense that Ed Miliband will jump on any fast bandwagon going, but to give him some credit he has in fact caught a national mood over certain issues such as press regulation. However, many Labour voters feel that Ed Miliband does not share this passion over certain key issues.
Ed Miliband exhibits ‘a stuck gramophone syndrome’ when speaking about “vested interests”, which appears to be Miliband’s contorted way of reassuring the public that the Unions are not round for ‘beer and sandwiches’ every other day. But Ed Miliband simply has to emphasise, as he has tried to do to some extent, that it is the members of the Unions who, uptil now, have backed him not “the Unions” as neolithic organisations per se. Miliband has failed to make clear the essential democratic nature of the Unions, and if he has any sense of history of the Labour Party (which he does), he will wish to emphasise this. If he wishes to make the party wholeheartedly social democratic, he will not care. Surely members of Unions, such as “hard-working” (to use that tired word) nurses and teachers, will wish to have an input into nursing and teaching policy as much as private equity companies who are literally lobbying behind close doors on education and teaching policy? Labour is caught in a trap of advancing neoliberal policies of setting off hospitals against hospitals and schools versus schools, so has totally lost sight of its socialist sense of solidarity. It is currently, on welfare, allowing the debate to be ensnared and enmeshed into a discussion over ‘lazy shirkers’, and one person with 17 children setting fire to his house, but do not wish to establish basic truths about welfare for disabled citizens: that is, the living and mobility components of the current ‘disability living allowance’ do not constitute an employment benefit, but are there to help to allow disabled citizens cope with the demands in life: to use wonk speak, “to allow them to lead productive lives”.
Ed Miliband is also following not leading on the economy. The semantics of whether we should analyse the nature of the boom-bust cycle as FA Hayek would have wished us to do rather than the drawbacks of Lord Keynes’ “paradox of thrift” do not concern the vast majority of voters. However, workers who are being paid pittance, and certainly those below the statutory minimum wage, do not hear Labour screaming out from the rooftops about this achievement, which even happens to be an achievement of a Blair government. Ed Miliband has somehow managed to screw up discussions of ‘a living wage’, not in terms of allowing living standards for workers and employees, but through a convoluted discussion of ‘pre-distribution’ and the academic career of Prof Joseph Hacker (called Mr Hacker by David Cameron in ‘Prime Minister’s Questions’). Workers and employees are concerned that they can be ‘hired and fired’ below the minimum length of service (which this Government is set on reducing anyway), and that any awards for unfair dismissal will be less in future. Voters want some sort of protection through the policies of a Labour government, to curb the excesses of multi-national corporates for example, not a protracted list they can retweet at length on Twitter of the top 15 things Labour would repeal in 2015. This is basic stuff, and it is galling of a Labour opposition not even to do their fundamental job of opposing. Virtually everyone agrees that a strong opposition is essential for English parliamentary democracy.
Labour simply exudes the impression of a political party that has lost its direction, will say or do anything to get into power (while spouting platitudes such as ‘we don’t want to overpromise and under-deliver’), and is totally cautious about what offerings it possibly can supply to the general public in future. Nobody is expecting them to have a detailed manifesto, but a sense of the ‘direction of travel’, in other words people saying that disability living allowance is not an employment benefit, or that Labour would seek to curb his ‘hire-and-fire culture’ and discuss with the Unions how to go about this, would help enormously. Another critical problem is presented by the sentiment conveyed in Adnan Al-Daini’s tweet this afternoon: “If the #Labour party is going to mimic the Tory party at every step what is the point of it? Same policies different rhetoric! #hypocrisy”. Labour, at an increasing number of junctures it seems, appears to be quite unable of opposing convincingly because of its past. I am the first person to promote rehabilitation, but this is genuinely a problem now. It is claimed that Labour introduced the equivalent of the “bedroom tax” for the private sector, so themselves should not be aghast that this has been proposed on an ‘equal playing field basis’. I happen to oppose strongly the “bedroom tax”, as it appears to discriminate against sections of the population, such as disabled citizens. The NHS is another fiasco. Labour ‘as the party of the NHS’ can offer to repeal the Health and Social Care Act (2012), but this is a symbolic (and rather vacuous) promise. The problem with Foundation Trusts still in a ‘failure regime’ will exist, the issue of hospitals paying off their PFI loans on an annual basis will still exist, and it was Labour themselves who legislated for an Act of parliament managing procurement (the Public Contracts Regulations Act); through a long series of complex cases, NHS hospitals have become enmeshed in EU competition law, but Labour had, whether it likes it or not, set in motion a direction of travel where hospitals would be caught in the ‘economic activity’ and competition law axis of the EU.
What Labour obviously did not legislate for was to allow up to 49% of income of hospitals to come from private sources, nor to make the legislative landscape most amenable for private providers to enter with the lowest barriers-to-entry; it was a policy decision of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats not to give the NHS any unfair ‘protection’, meaning that the NHS would of course be expected not to provide anywhere near a universal, comprehensive service. However, as the marketisation of the NHS and privatisation has been accelerated, but one in which Labour to a much lesser degree did participate, it is hard for Labour to provide convincingly a narrative on what it wants to do next. Labour seem very eager to produce apologies at the drop-of-a-hat, such as on immigration (which came to a head with the Gillian Duffy altercation after Gordon Brown forgot to remove his clip-on microphone and Sky happened to take a recording of it). It has tried to apologise for the emergency spending on the banks during the global financial crisis, but experts are far from convinced about why the banks were not allowed to fail; it is an inherent paradox in the Labour narrative that it seems content with allowing NHS hospitals to fail, but seems reluctant to allow banks to fail (meaning shareholders and directors of banks can be rewarded, and Labour gets blamed for the exploding deficit).
Against the backdrop of a false security of poll leads perhaps, Labour’s performance is floundering because it just appears to be opposing for the sake of it; it is now a rational accusation of the Coalition to say that Labour opposes virtually everything (except for Workfare and the “benefits cap” perhaps), but does not appear to have constructive policies of its own. Despite its rhetoric on “vested interests”, it seems perfectly happy to honour the contracts it started with ATOS over the disastrous outsourcing of welfare benefits (which has seen 40% of some benefits overturned on appeal, and some claimants reported to have suffered psychological distress through the benefits application process), yet, apart from a handful of excellent MPs such as Michael Meacher, seems rather limp at criticising this particular ‘vested interest’. It is a problem when the public perception of Labour protecting multi-national vested interests overrides its ‘loyalty’ to the Unions. It is also a problem when two years into the leadership of Ed Miliband the media are unable to report the closure of law centres or the problems of the NHS privatisation process but can only report how to self-litigate and what to expect from your GP in this new NHS landscape. Ed Miliband’s fundamental problem is that he gives the impression of being a follower not a leader. Miliband appears like a TV newsreader, nicely a product of “make up”, but whose autocue is suffering a technical fault. Labour does not currently inspire confidence. If it is the case where the best Labour voters can hope for is a ‘hung parliament’, despite glaring incidents of an #omnishambles government, something is very wrong indeed.
"we would conclude that expenditure on the NHS in real terms was lower in 2011-12 than it was in 2009-10"
From the UK Statistics Authority here.
Andy Burnham MP, yesterday on ‘Opposition Day’ on the NHS, in the House of Commons:
Rt. Hon. Jeremy Hunt MP
Secretary of State for Health
Richmond House
79 Whitehall
LONDON
SW1A 2NS
4 December 2012
Dear Mr Hunt
PUBLIC EXPENDITURE ON HEALTH
The Statistics Authority has been asked to consider, in the light of the published official statistics, various statements made by the Prime Minister, by yourself, and on the Conservative Party website. For example, you said in the House of Commons on 23 October that “real-terms spending on the NHS has increased across the country and the Conservative Party website states that “we have increased the NHS budget in real terms in each of the last two years”.
We are aware that there are questions of definition here. The year on year changes in real terms have been small and the different sources, including the Department of Health Annual Report and Accounts and the public expenditure figures issued by the Treasury, are not necessarily exactly the same.
The most authoritative source of National Statistics on the subject would seem to be the Treasury publication Public Spending Statistics, and I note that these figures were used in a Department of Health Press Release in July 2012. The most recent update to those figures was published on 31 October but the July 2012 release gives a more detailed breakdown. I attach a note prepared by staff of the Statistics Authority summarising some of the relevant figures from the two Public Spending releases.
On the basis of these figures, we would conclude that expenditure on the NHS in real terms was lower in 2011-12 than it was in 2009-10. Given the small size of the changes and the uncertainties associated with them, it might also be fair to say that real terms expenditure had changed little over this period. In light of this, I should be grateful if the Department of Health could clarify the statements made.
I am copying this to the Cabinet Secretary, to the Permanent Secretary at the Department of Health and to the National Statistician.
Yours sincerely
Andrew Dilnot CBE
John Flood chairs a debate on the impact of the Cloud on law and legal education #LawTechCampLondon 2012
[This blogpost gives accounts as if the own words of the speakers involved. The author does not take responsibility for the accuracy of information contained therein.]
Track One: Law + Tech: Advances Online, in the Cloud and with the Crowd (Methven Room)
Moderator: Prof. John Flood, University of Westminster
Extra talk
Computers will cut down the head count by 15%. The legal market may require new services from distress goods to consumer goods, from only when they need lawyers when things are bad, to providing law services otherwise. We ideally want to change from a Martini glass to a beaker glass.
First step: connect with law firms.
You then have to provide new services which are not currently been offered. For example, lawyers can provide services for them to plan their lives. You can also brand ‘family legal check-ups’, i.e. seeing a lawyer even if you’re not sick. One of the services could be, for example, a credit check. A way forward would be to pay into untapped markets, and perhaps create a Google or Apple system where lawyers can continually think about new products and services, and to deliver them in a new way. Not all clients are currently online, but future clients will be online. You need an accessible website.
Tom McGinn, Director of Business Development, VirtualCourthouse
Virtual Courthouse is a startup in Washington. Low income individuals are being priced out of the law. Online dispute resolution and self-litigation are important new areas. There is no right to civil legal aid in the US. How is the Legal Services Corporation faring? Currently, the ratio of legal aid lawyers to low income individuals is 1:6,415. More people are entitled to legal aid, but also the legal aid services budget is being cut. More and more people are going thirsty, and there is less water available. In 2011, 72,900 represented themselves in the federal courts (20% of all cases filed). 1:5 in Americans therefore represent themselves in court, as they cannot afford one. Litigants put themselves at a huge disadvantage, as they do not understand the nature of the legal system; it is analogous to an emergency room, and the emergency room cannot cope. What is the solution to this? Alternative dispute resolution is far from a new idea, for example Plato ‘The Laws’ and Abraham Lincoln has provided a description thus: “discourage litigation: the nominal winner is often the loser in fees, expense and cost of time”. Technology can help us drive the most efficient way of doing something: disputes settled with live litigators but with the help of technology, and disputes settled entirely through technology. This was touched upon in Prof. Susskind’s keynote speech. ‘Cybersettle’ (online dispute resolution) has saved $11.3mn http://www.cybersettle.com/pub/ ?#LawTechCamp?
Josh Blackman, Asst. Professor, South Texas Law, Creator of FantasySCOTUS.net, Harlan Institute
Disruptive technology is changing how we do law. ‘Law’s Information Revolution’ involves disruptive technology. People can make predictions – this crowd-sources the prediction market, based on ‘The wisdom of the crowds’ by James Surowiecki. Most people involved with the judicial system interact with the lower courts. There are inherent problems therefore in crowd-sourcing, therefore. Assisted decision-making can instead help make decisions, with the help of ‘Super Crunchers’ (Ian Ayres). Individuals have capabilities which are limited. In the US, we use ‘PACER‘ which is not free, and close sourced. It’s a very good money-maker, but the information is there. Law is like data, and there are facts and trends lying there, like “The Matrix”. Another example is Harland which has used the PACER data which can track the timeline which we have developed, and events can be linked easily. For example, one could ask what cases are Google currently involved in? It would be very difficult to track this without such a platform. Take another example: imagine if you have an app where you could ask to ask, “I want to draft to draft a contract which…” or “My landlord won’t fix my problem” – regarding the latter, the app could produce various options.
Dr. Adam Wyner, University of Liverpool
“We want to lead law students astray, because we’re bad” Lots of open, unstructured legal data, so how do you find the information you need? Law students highlight information by highlighting different text, however this is time-consuming. We wish to create an open-source resource which can allow information-extraction, used by law students interested in case analysis, but it would be a nice tool to incorporate into law school classes. We are targeting the same type of annotations which law schools already use – there will be a tool to analyse conflicts. A blog explaining this is here. There is additional semantic meaning which is mapped onto the annotation, for example information about the appellant, jurisdiction or defendant. The legal case factors are also interesting, and very important for legal case-based reasoning. Research from intellectual property can find the textual basis in deducing the legal basis of intellectual property cases, in working out whether cases are sufficiently similar. A gold-standard can be found on the basis of inter-annotator agreement; they then curate the disagreements to create a Gold Standard corpus. You can also search the annotations using a tool such as ANNIC. We’re academics, and we’re making these data helpful to the public.
Richard Cohen, Executive Chairman & Group Counsel, Epoq
This topic is on online automatic automation. Epoq is the largest provider of online legal services which provided 390,000 drafting services. We have 300 different legal document/form drafting services. We use an online automation platform, and currently the ‘brand behind the brand’ allowing others to ‘dig for the gold’. We provide the platform for about 350 banks and a relatively small number of law firms (“early adopter firms”). The client’s journey begins with a phone call – there may then be an online interview, the client buy service, lawyer review, and the document is prepared. The phone call is an example of ‘quick registration’ – e.g. a client needs a will, e-mail goes to the client, the client gets sent an e-mail to request specific information. The client has access to helpful notes in the Q&A process, and these are the same questions which a real lawyer would ask. In most cases, the lawyer is in fact more interested in the answers than the actual document itself, but the document is nonetheless reviewed in detail. At the end of the process, the document can be exported into Word or as a pdf – the system will notify the client that the document is ready for execution, or it is necessary for the client to come into the office. How does this compare to traditional delivery of documents today? The current system is very inefficient: a will with power-of-attorney would normally cost £750, and take about 3 hours (private client work). 969 were wills and lasting powers-of-attorney for husband and wives – it is uncertain how many people will engage with the business as these legal services will normally be bundled with other services like life insurance. Lawyers are changing – it is cultural, like working with pens. Law firms in England and Wales are managed by partnership, just a collection of sole practitioners working in a big building, and even if there is management it is very poor on change.
Raj Abhyanker, CEO @ Trademarkia.com
This is a search engine for logos, trademarks and brands. They can find Apple’s latest product, or J-Lo’s latest perfume. We attract 1.7 million unique people/month allowing us to monetise, such that we are now the largest trademark in the firm. I created ‘Google Offers’, which is the Google alternative to Groupon. How can law firms move forward? Quality Lawyers, Legal Zoom and Rocket Lawyer are the competitors. The real market is international, the power of the internet, and a global structure. Lawyers and law firms will adapt to a new reality, and attorneys will be accessible to people in a new way (no amount of automation can replace face-to-face law). The belief is to create ‘retail spaces’, which are not law firms, but are the bookstores or coffee shops of law. You can access your law through an #ipad – this is a ‘coal hub and spoke’ opening at University Avenue, Legal Force Trademarks. The key to creating legal space – and we are measuring ROI for everything we do. If I have an online presence in London, I can be at an advantage, and producing a pool of lawyers through collaboration is much stronger. The ROIs have to be shown to the actual law firms. The distance between one solicitor and another, in one of the competitors, is quite large, and we are trying to create a hub and specific ‘brand experience’. My tips are:
1. When you dream, dream big
2. Plant trees today, harvest in 500 years (Oxford trees)
3. Best lawyers and web entrepreneurs are psychiatrists.
4.Appreciate lawyers who like law, but find the rare breed who challenge it.
Do you remember the final leadership debate?
DAVID DIMBLEBY: Right, we have to bring this part of the debate to an end there, with that question. Thank you very much, all three of you. We end with final statements from each of the three party leaders, David Cameron to start.
DAVID CAMERON: Thank you. I’m standing here for a very simple reason, that I love this country, and I think we can do even better in the years ahead. We can go on, solve our problems and do great things. But we need a government with the right values. We need a government that backs families and understands that the family is the most important thing in our society. We need a government that backs work, and people who try to do the right thing. We need a government that always understands that keeping us safe and secure is the most important thing of all. But there’s something else you need to know about me. I believe the test of a good and strong society is how we look after the most vulnerable, the most frail and the poorest. That’s true in good times, but it’s even more true in difficult times. And there will be difficult decisions, but I want to lead us through those to better times ahead. I think I’ve got a great team behind me. I think we can do great things in this country. If you vote Labour, you’ll get more of the same. If you vote Liberal, as we’ve seen tonight, it’s just uncertainty. If you vote Conservative on Thursday, you can have a new, fresh government, making a clean break, and taking our country in a new direction, and bringing the change we need.
DAVID DIMBLEBY: Thank you. For the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg.
NICK CLEGG: Everything I’ve said during these three television debates is driven by my simple belief that if we do things differently, we can build a better, fairer Britain. As you decide how to cast your vote, of course you’ll be told by these two that real change is dangerous, that it can’t be done. But don’t let anyone scare you from following your instincts. Together, next week, we can change Britain for good. Just think how many times you’ve been given lots of promises from these old parties, and when they get back into government, you find that nothing really changes at all. We can do so much better than that this time. Of course, I can’t guarantee that all the problems you face will be solved overnight, but I can guarantee you that I will work tirelessly to deliver fairness for you. Fair taxes so that you pay less, but people at the top pay their fair share. A fair start, smaller class sizes for your children, a different approach to the economy and decent open politics that you can trust once again. I believe all this can happen. This is your election. This is your country. When you go to vote next week, choose the future you really want. If you believe, like I do, that we can do things differently this time, then together we really will change Britain. Don’t let anyone tell you that it can’t happen. It can. This time, you can make the difference.
DAVID DIMBLEBY: Thank you, Mr Clegg. Now for Labour, Gordon Brown.
GORDON BROWN: These debates are the answer to people who say that politics doesn’t matter. I want to thank everybody who’s been involved in these debates over the last few weeks. They show that there are big causes we can fight for. They also show that big differences exist between the parties. I know that if things stay where they are, perhaps in eight days’ time, David Cameron, perhaps supported by Nick Clegg, would be in office. But I’ve had the duty of telling you this evening that while we have policies for the future, the Conservatives would put the recovery immediately at risk with an emergency budget. I’ve asked David and Nick questions all evening. David has not been able to confirm, but it is the case that inheritance tax cuts will go to the richest people in the country. I believe he’s planning to cut the Schools Budget, and he hasn’t denied it. I believe also that child tax credits would be cut by both parties if they came into a coalition. I believe too that policing would be at risk from a Conservative government, because they have not said they would match us on policing either. And the health service guarantees that we have that gives every cancer patient the right to see a specialist within two weeks would be scrapped by the Conservative Government if they came into power. I don’t like having to do this, but I have to tell you that things are too important to be left to risky policies under these two people. They are not ready for government, because they have not thought through their policies. We are desperate to get this country through the recession and into the recovery, and that is what I intend to continue to do. But it’s up to the people to decide, and it’s your decision.
DAVID DIMBLEBY: Mr Brown, thank you. And thank you to all three party leaders who’ve taken part in this debate, and to our audience here.