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George Osborne’s “duty of candour”
I’m pretty certain that George Osborne is actually quite a nice guy.
I know of people who know people who’ve had dealings with him on a chat-chat level. And apparently he’s perfectly harmless.
George Osborne’s one job was to run the UK economy. And he’s failed at that.
The LibDems had a job to deliver to deliver ‘a strong economy and fair society’. Add in the murder of English legal aid, we can confidently say the LibDems failed on their side of the bargain.
It doesn’t matter which particular metric you wish to use. The only good soundbites came from the rose garden soundbites from the Office for Budget Responsibility in 2010 informing us of the shiny uplands.
But it turns out that the incline of the uplands was steeper than we first thought. Osborne kept on telling us this was due to the Eurozone crisis. This is the same Eurozone crisis which has suddenly disappeared with one us being one of the ‘best performing economies’ in the G20.
Osborne’s pitch is that he needs just a little more time, as the famous Reet Petite song goes. He needs to ‘finish the job’ to put the UK back ‘on the path to prosperity’. This is the “long term economic plan”.
Except… the long term economic plan is not working. A record number apparently in employment with really bad income from as receipts? How did that happen?
Was it something, perhaps, to do with a record number on low security “zero hour contracts”, topped up with tax credits, who do not end up paying much income to the State?
The Conservative (Ronald Reagan) doctrine of a small state is creepy. The drastic diet of an ‘over bloated’ State has left a State which is anorexic – and which is dangerously fragile.
The Coalition’s anorexic state is consequently far from resilient. Most reasonable people agree that the anorexic State would simply be unable to cope with the Conservatives’ further planned cuts in the next term of office.
This is not the “shock doctrine” of Greece. It is a reality of something happening in the UK not seen since the 1930s.
The current Government has successfully relaunched the ‘duty of candour’. The duty of candour, about being open in the NHS when a mistake is made, already existed in the regulatory codes of the clinical professionals.
And again – it’s not actually the legal instrument as drafted which is the main problem (though there are problems here). It’s whether anyone is observing them properly: see for example ‘wilful neglect’ (section 44 Mental Capacity Act), national minimum wage, or deprivation of liberty safeguards.
Osborne does not want to come even close for apologising for the record debt, the colossal borrowing, the poor living standards, or the fact that his plan to pay off the deficit has been tragically bad.
I don’t know whether this is a pride thing, but in the real world it has a knock on effect for whether you can pay for health and care. We know the social care budget has been on its knees for years.
Many NHS Trusts are in deficit. This can’t be due to the nurses, most of whom have not experienced a pay rise for years. It may be due to the salaries of top CEOs in the NHS who have to ‘deliver’ on metrics which do not necessarily reflect high quality care (e.g. the ‘four hour wait’). Or it could be due to paying off the loan prepayments for PFI under successive governments.
I really like members of the NHS campaigning parties, but discussions about the NHS have to be linked with the discussions of the state of the economy. It’s an elephant in the room.
Likewise, for all of the slagging off of the Efford Bill, I can guarantee that the statutory instrument UKIP would like to introduce would be far more controversial.
UKIP at least do entertain a discussion on leaving Europe and European law, sort of, even if they do not have any plans for the UK economy.
The Efford Bill was seen in some quarters as ‘the trojan horse for privatisation’, and I can see how interpretation of the clauses might result in this conclusion. I think a problem the Efford Bill was ‘reverse engineering’ to comply with EU competition law – i.e. clauses which perhaps sound as if they’re providing exemptions from EU law, but nobody actually knows.
Not even the best legal minds in the country, of which I am not one, know.
But the EU is founded on free movement of people. Tick – I remember working as a junior in NHS hospitals in London, and simply the day to day operations of these Trusts would have been impossible without the hard work of staff nurses predominantly from India and the Philippines.
And it is also founded on free movement of capital.
There is a genuine feeling of ‘I wouldn’t start from here’ for NHS campaigners in NHAP and Keep our NHS Public. They certainly want to go to a NHS inspired by Nye Bevan which had never heard of section 75 or TTIP.
But it is impossible to have this debate in the absence of a discussion of Europe. It’s impossible to have a debate on the NHS in the absence of a wider debate on the economy.
Russell Brand and Nigel Farage may be grandstanding, but on the face of it they seem to be coming from different places, and with huge followings.
This all matters as it is highly unlikely a Labour-UKIP coalition could be made to work on the NHS, given we know such little about what accommodations UKIP might make on EU competition law or the economy.
We don’t know whether UKIP supports ‘efficiency savings’ however.
All of this is not a leading to a conclusion of ‘Vote Labour’. Labour has not overtly apologised for some thorny apsects of NHS policy, in the same way that Osborne has not apologised over the economy. But it does seem to have apologised for a lot – like letting the market in too far – but curiously not PFI?
I am particularly mindful that there are some ‘real’ experts in NHS policy who are far more experienced and wiser than me. I am also in strong admiration of campaigners wherever they hail from; many of whom have experience of seeing patients regularly.
I never see patients unless they’re friends of mine; and that’s purely for social reasons.
But the next Government’s policy on the NHS will be severely affected by the mistakes of the current Government, part of which ironically has a catchphrase ‘strong economy, fair society’.
Liz McInnes won. Live with it.
The “thrill of the chase” is the layman’s version of a body of marketing research looking at why humans expend a lot of energy in pursuing a goal which they find rewarding, and yet effortful.
Apart from THE major policy, of pulling up the drawbridge on the torrent of immigration we’re apparently experiencing on an industrial scale, many members of the general public are at a loss to identify a single meaningful policy of UKIP. This is particularly the case in UKIP’s submissions on NHS policy, where scattered offerings do not form a coherent picture.
If anything the policy mutterings of UKIP, which do not in any form constitute a policy, go along the lines of a fundamentally corporatist flavour, ‘making the NHS more efficient’ and ‘laying off the excessive staff’, rather than valuing the workforce, for example many nurses who’ve not benefited from a pay rise for many years.
But it could be that the sheer enjoyment of seeking pleasure ultimately from UKIP matters more than what they wish to do on the NHS.
The ‘scattergun’ nature of UKIP decision-making is of course hugely fraudulent. At one moment, UKIP can offer motherhood and apple pie, such as insisting on an exclusion from TTIP, the hated transatlantic trade agreement. It can then do a volte face at any moment, in the hope that potential voters will have selected in their minds the policies most attractive to them even if they subsequently become redacted. UKIP, also, despite wishing to present a united front, can present polar opposite views to voters who have previously voted Labour like Gillian Duffy from those presented to normally Conservative voters in the South West or East of England.
UKIP is an embarrassment politically. All the criticisms have been well rehearsed elsewhere. The criticisms against Liz McInnes, who has spent the last thirty years working in the NHS, have been utter desperation. The BBC, whose credibility is as embarrassing (and some might say offensive) as a Jeremy Clarkson numberplate in Argentina, would much rather focus on how pathetic UKIP insisted on a recount, rather than mentioning what McInnes might offer her constituents in terms of her wealth of experience on valuing staff in the NHS.
But here’s some sanity from James O’Brien.
In a sense we get the media we pay for, but I for one do not wish to pay an enhanced contribution to listen to the bigoted ranting of BBC domestic news commentators as a form of indirect taxation. The output of the Corporation in domestic news has been for some time worse than pathetic.
It has been worse than getting blood out of a stone in trying to get the BBC to cover the diabolical NHS reorganisation which has so far cost a huge amount of waste in terms of redundancy payments and legal fees for competition experts. Labour has next to no hope in getting a fair crack of the whip when it comes to their flagship policy of combining health and care, which many specialists now feel is long overdue in England. There has to be some semblance of fairness in the BBC’s coverage, such that, for example, it can be difficult to incumbents to increase their majority (a meme rapidly disseminated by the CCHQ ably assisting the BBC). Also, the swing away from the current Coalition in the Heywood & Middleton seat was actually more than thirty percent. Labour’s share of the vote did go up in Heywood and Middleton.
The majority for Liz McInnes might constitute a fewer number of people, but overall votes have been declining. The Conservatives which lost both the seats know their leader David Cameron is a dead duck. I do not particularly like Ed Miliband’s leadership style, but I am truly sickened with the way that the Coalition has incessantly lied about how the deficit was caused unilaterally by Gordon Brown. This sheath of lies has given credence to the shambolic lie of economic credibility by the Conservatives – despite a level of debt which is now exploding out of all control.
In a ‘first past the post’ system, Liz McInnes won. Live with it.
For many, the chase of UKIP will be sufficient escapism, until the moment such voters enter a hospital to be treated by an Asian nurse on the minimum wage who will show the patient excellent professionalism anyway. It is impossible to tell the outcome of the general election of 2015, but it might be worth all the political parties not publishing manifestos but statements of their unnegotiable areas.
If it turns out UKIP does not want to negotiate on its flat-tax for the NHS from UKIP manifestos popping through the letterbox, at a time when NHS funding is a national cause for concern, then we know we do not have to buy any extra toilet paper.
On ‘the thrill of the chase':
Labroo A.A. & Nielsen J.H. (2010). Half the thrill is in the chase: Twisted inferences from embodied cognitions and brand evaluation. Journal of Consumer Research. 37(1), 143-158.
You wouldn’t get a plumber to mend your fuse box. so why would you let Farage near the NHS?
I saw up close and personal how some people vote in elections. My mum asked me to work out how to package her postal vote using the declaration, ‘envelope A’ and ‘envelope B’. Whilst I did not actually see how she did the vote itself, I did ask my mum how come she did the vote in seconds.
“It’s what I always vote.”
I can well believe that. She attends, like many, the NHS – in her cataracts. She will have a procedure done on the NHS, and yet I know she has very little in how the NHS works.
She has only ever attended our local A&E in London with me very infrequently. We had to queue for hours, but we put this down to being infrequent attenders, ‘being unlucky’, ‘to be expected’ etc.
I bet you if that if you were to ask my mum about section 75, or clause 119. If you asked her about Jos and the other Lewisham campaigners, she would immediately start smiling though.
That nice man, Nigel, is possibly a man you might like to have a drink with, particularly if you liked drinking. I definitely do not wish to imply he’s a problem drinker, despite wishing to be down the pub during the day.
But in much the same way you wouldn’t like a plumber to mend your fuse box, the chances are you wouldn’t like UKIP to run the NHS.
You might be tempted ‘to give them a go’, particularly if you feel the elections do not matter.
But the factors stopping you voting from UKIP require you partly to have decided that they would be incompetent at running the NHS.
It is incredibly difficult to work out what the official UKIP policy on the NHS. It appears that they’re in favour of the usual corporate memes of ‘private sector efficiency’ – for all we can tell they would have been in favour of section 75.
They appear to be in favour of free trade, but not necessarily as a member of the European Union. I have never heard them voice an opinion on the EU-US free trade treaty investor protection mechanisms. This may or may not change the landscape of how multinational corporates can take over running of bits of the NHS, and get away with it.
Nigel Farage simply fell apart in his interview with Andrew Neil, but I don’t suspect many people in the general public watched it carefully. I know my mum for example couldn’t care less that his tax policies, i.e. how you pay for the NHS, are simply incoherent.
So I don’t particularly need to make a rational argument that Nigel Farage and UKIP running the NHS would be like getting the presenters of BBC News to do complicated brain surgery.
They might win a sizeable proportion of the vote, but, when it comes to the general election, their offerings on health, education, world affairs, benefits, home affairs, and foreign policy will mean they will never be asked to form a government.
They keep Question Time and Any Questions amused, as well as other current affairs programmes, and I dare say they’ll do sufficiently well in the European Elections to ensure they continue being invited to perform their hopeless skit.
But it would take an earthquake of some sort for my mum to wish to vote for them. That’s why I don’t think they’ll make it.
What have UKIP got to say on the NHS?
Hugh Muir may have just done an extensive synthesis of the faults of UKIP, but their party is still expected to do very well in the forthcoming European elections.
On the UKIP issues website, it is declared that:
“The NHS and state education strain under a population increase of 4 million since 2001.”
Clearly free movement of persons/workers is going to be a major issue for UKIP in discussing the NHS, but it would be sheer folly to ignore the large numbers of workers from ethnic minorities groups which work day-in and day-out for the NHS.
That sentence on NHS and state education is the only formal mention of the NHS on the “Issues” page.
However three other things are mooted.
“Open GP surgeries in the evening, for full-time workers, where there is demand.” This is of course a perfectly sensible policy if resources allow.
“Locally-elected County Health Boards to inspect hospitals – to avoid another Stafford Hospital crisis.”
This of course could be seen as dogwhistle politics too.
Despite Jeremy Hunt’s regular mentions of Mid Staffs, the current Government has failed to introduce before parliament a draft Bill on the regulation of health professionals, proposed by the English Law Commission – and time is running out.
And in the voluminous Health and Social Care Act (2012), there is no clause on patient safety – apart from the one abolishing the National Patient Safety Agency.
The discussion around patient safety essentially revolves around budgeting and safe staffing, not local health boards. Section 44 of the Mental Capacity Act 2005, legislating on wilful effect, did exist at the time of many of the possible offences at Mid Staffs.
“Make welfare a safety net for the needy, not a bed for the lazy. Benefits only available to those who have lived here for over 5 years.”
This runs the risk of ‘dog whistle politics’, as nobody reasonable would dare to call the whole community of disabled citizens ‘lazy’.
However, a useful account of UKIP’s main policies on health are provided by Keith Rowe here.
But there are still glaring gaps – such as what is UKIP’s view on the current expenditure in the private finance initiative? It appears that UKIP has waged war of sorts on multinational corporates. Cynics might say this has been a means to capture the Labour vote. Others say that this is not a general war on finance, particularly given Farage’s stockbroker background.
Many people intending to vote UKIP are not intending to vote UKIP in the general election. But the question is why are they voting for UKIP at all?
It could be that they have been whipped up into a media hysteria, which issues such as the NHS simply can’t generate.
But this explanation is quite unlikely – given, for example, the intensity of discussion around the NHS when Question Time visited Lewisham.
And, frustratingly for supporters of the NHS, UKIP do not spend much time discussing the quite damaging effects the investor protection clauses of the EU-US free trade treaty might have.
This has been left to other parties, including Labour, the Green Party, and the National Health Action Party, to discuss.
I sincerely hope this blogpost has not been too friendly – as Patrick O’Flynn, Communications for UKIP, has said in the past: “With enemies like you, who needs friends?”
Should Doctors and Nurses act as surrogate immigration officials?
Anyone can get very ill at any time.
This issue is also about recognising mutual obligations and responsibilities, and looking after all our futures.
Would you like to be a British citizen abroad in France and being refused treatment?
Nonetheless, the British media has been relentless in presenting the ‘dogwhistle’ politics of immigration, rather than having an open, honest or complete debate about the NHS privatisation enacted by this Government.
Jeremy Hunt MP says today:
Having a universal health service free at the point of use rightly makes us the envy of the world, but we must make sure the system is fair to the hardworking British taxpayers who fund it.
This current Government, it has been argued, has been extremely divisive, setting off able-bodied people against disabled citizens, employed people against unemployed, and so it goes on.
The ludicrous farce of this latest announcement, of cracking down on “health tourism”, is that similar announcements have been made before. In the meantime, Hunt has been forced to apologise for a tweet when faced with legal action, and there has been talk of an impending crisis in acute medicine.
Today’s announcement will again see Ministers facing renewed claims that GP surgeries are being turned into “border posts”.
In its three years in power the government has a poor record on announcing policies that sound good but prove to be completely unworkable
(shadow health minister Liz Kendall, previously)
The Chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners, Prof Clare Gerada, has previously warned that:
“GPs must not be a new ‘border agency’ in policing access to the NHS. While the health system must not be abused and we must bring an end to health tourism, it is important that we do not overestimate the problem and that GPs are not placed in the invidious position of being the new border agency.”
Today, the Department of Health is publishing the first comprehensive study of how widely migrants use the NHS. These independent findings show the major financial costs and disruption for staff which result from a system which will be substantially reformed in the interests of British taxpayers. Just because they are ‘independent’ findings does not necessarily mean they are very accurate, as any observer of the “output” of the OBR will tell you.
Previous estimates of the cost to the NHS have varied, but this latest attempt research reveals the cost may be significantly higher than all earlier figures.
To tackle this issue and deter abuse of the system, the #omnishambles Government is proposing the following now:-
- introducing a simpler registration process to help identify earlier those patients who should be charged.
- looking at new incentives so that hospitals report that they have treated someone from the EEA to enable the Government to recover the costs of care from their home country.
- introducing a new health surcharge in the Immigration Bill to generate income for the Government (but it is unlikely this money will go into frontline patient care, as indeed the £2.4bn “efficiency savings” have not been returned either);
- appointing Sir Keith Pearson as an independent adviser on visitor and migrant cost recovery;
- identifying a more efficient system of claiming back costs by establishing “a cost recovery unit”, headed by a Director of Cost Recovery;
Andy Burnham MP, Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary, responding to Jeremy Hunt’s announcement on overseas visitors’ and migrants’ use of the NHS, said:
We are in favour of improving the recovery of costs from people with no entitlement to NHS treatment. But it’s hard not to conclude that this announcement is more about spin than substance. The Government’s own report undermines their headline-grabbing figures, admitting they are based on old and incomplete data. Instead of grand-standing, the Government need to focus on delivering practical changes. Labour would not support changes that make doctors and nurses surrogate immigration officials.
For a video of Andy Burnham MP responding to this latest report, please go here.
Furthermore, it appears that what Hunt won’t say about migrants is that British expatriates might make much heavier use of the NHS than any other visitors (and accordingly they should pay.)
A recent report by the European Commission concluded that so-called benefits tourism was “neither widespread nor systematic”.
As for most countries, residency not nationality primarily determines eligibility for healthcare treatment.
With the Conservative Party finding themselves ‘squeezed’ by UKIP in the run-up to the European elections, this could provide an useful smokescreen for the disaster in acute care which the Conservatives have somehow single-handedly generated.
However, the “benefits tourism” narrative of the Conservatives and UKIP was dealt a heavy blow by the emergence of this information, which the BBC’s Norman Smith tweeted earlier last week:
Last week’s announcement by Jeremy Hunt on loneliness was panned in a widespread manner by many professionals.
Maybe for the Conservatives there is ‘no such thing as Society’ after all?
Overseas visitors and migrant use of the NHS: extent and costs
Many posts like this have originally appeared on the blog of the ‘Socialist Health Association’. For a biography of the author (Shibley), please go here.
Shibley’s CV is here.
The Tories have never had any ideology, so it's not surprising they've run out of steam
A lot of mileage can be made out of the ‘story’ that the Coalition has “run out of steam”, and this week two commentators, Martin Kettle and Allegra Stratton, branded the Queen’s Speech as ‘the beginning of the end’. There is a story that blank cigarette packaging and minimum alcohol pricing policies have disappeared due to corporate lobbying, and one suspects that we will never get to the truth of this. The narrative has moved onto ‘immigration’, where people are again nervous. This taps into an on-running theme of the Conservatives arguing that people are “getting something for nothing”, but the Conservatives are unable to hold a moral prerogative on this whilst multinational companies within the global race are still able to base their operations using a tax efficient (or avoiding) base. Like it or now, the Conservatives have become known for being in the pockets of the Corporates, but not in the same way that the Conservatives still argue that the Unions held ‘the country to ransom’. Except things have moved on. The modern Conservative Party is said to be more corporatilist than Margaret Thatcher had ever wanted it to be, it is alleged, and this feeds in a different problem over the State narrative. The discussion of the State is no longer about having a smaller, more cost-effective State, but a greater concern that ‘we are selling off our best China’ (as indeed the late Earl of Stockton felt about the Thatcherite policy of privatisation while that was still in its infancy). The public do not actually feel that an outsourced state is preferable to a state with shared responsibility, as the public do not feel in control of liabilities, and this is bound to have public trust in privatisation operations (for example, G4s bidding for the probation service, when operationally it underperformed during the Olympics).
It is possibly this notion of the country selling off its assets, and has been doing so under all administrations in the U.K., that is one particular chicken that is yet to come home to roost. For example, the story that the Coalition had wished to push with the pending privatisation of Royal Mail is that this industry, if loss making, would not ‘show up’ on the UK’s balance sheet. There is of course a big problem here: what if Royal Mail could actually be made to run at a profit under the right managers? Labour in its wish to become elected in 1997 lost sight of its fundamental principles. Whether it is a socialist party or not is effectively an issue which seems to be gathering no momentum, but even under the days of Nye Bevan the aspiration of Labour was to become a paper with real social democratic clout. One of the biggest successes was to engulf Britain in a sense of solidarity and shared responsibility, taking the UK away from the privatised fragmented interests of primary care prior to the introduction of the NHS. The criticism of course is that Bevan could not have predicted this ‘infinite demand’ (either in the ageing population or technological advances), but simply outsource the whole lot as has happened in the Conservative-led Health and Social Act (2012) is an expedient short-term measure which strikes at the heart of poverty of aspiration. It is a fallacy that Labour cannot be relevant to the ‘working man’ any more, as the working man now in 2013 as he did in 1946 stands to benefit from a well-run comprehensive National Health Service. Even Cameron, in introducing his great reforms of the public sector in 2010/1 argued that he thought the idea that the public sector was not ‘wealth creating’ was nonsense, which he rapidly, unfortunately forgot, in the great NHS ‘sell off’.
The Conservatives have an ideology, which is perhaps outsourcing or privatisation, but basically it comes down to making money. The fundamental error in the Conservative philosophy, if there is one, is that the sum of individual aspiration is not the same as the value of collective solidarity and sharing of resources. This strikes to the heart of having a NHS where there are winners and losers, for example where the NHS can run a £2.4 bn surplus but there are still A&E departments shutting in major cities. Or why should we tolerate a system of ‘league tables’ of schools which can all too easily become a ‘race to the bottom’? Individual freedom is as relevant to the voter of Labour as it is to the voter of the Conservative Party, but if there is one party that can uphold this it is not the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats. No-one on the Left can quite ignore why Baroness Williams chose to ignore the medical Royal Colleges, the RCN, the BMA or the legal advice/38 degrees so adamantly, although it does not take Brains of Britain to work out why certain other Peers voted as they did over the section 75 regulations as amended. But the reason that Labour is unable to lead convincingly on these issues, despite rehearsing well-exhausted mantra such as ‘we are the party of the NHS’, is that the general public received a lot of the same medicine from them as they did from the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats. Elements of the public feel there is not much to go further; the Labour Party will still be the party of the NHS for some (despite having implemented PFI and NHS Foundation Trusts), and the Conservatives will still be party of fiscal responsibility for some (despite having sent the economy into orbit due to incompetent measures culminating in avoidance of a triple-dip).
It doesn’t seem that Labour is particularly up for discussion about much. It gets easily rumbled on what should be straightforward arms of policy. For example, Martha Kearney should have been doing a fairly uncontroversial set-piece interview with Ed Miliband in the local elections, except Miliband came across as a startled, overcaffeinated rabbit in headlights, and refused doggedly to explain why his policy would not involve more borrowing (even when Ed Balls had said clearly it would.) Miliband is chained to his guilty pleasures of being perceived as the figurehead of a ‘tax and spend’ party, which is why you will never hear of him talking for a rise in corporation tax or taxing excessively millionaires (though he does wish to introduce the 50p rate, which Labour had not done for the majority of its actual period in government). It uses terms such as “predistribution” as a figleaf for not doing what many Labour voters would actually like him to do. Labour is going through the motions of receiving feedback on NHS policy, but the actual grassroots experience is that it is actually incredibly difficult for the Labour Party machine even to acknowledge actually well-meant contributions from specialists. The Labour Party, most worryingly, does not seem to understand its real problem for not standing up for the rights of workers. This should be at the heart of ‘collective responsibility’, and a way of making Unions relevant to both the public and private sector. Whilst it continues to ignore the rights of workers, in an employment court of law over unfair dismissal or otherwise, Labour will have no ‘unique selling proposition’ compared to any of the other parties.
Likewise, Labour, like the Liberal Democrats, seems to be utterly disingenious about what it chooses to support. While it seems to oppose Workfare, it seems perfectly happy to vote with the Government for minimal concessions. It opposes the Bedroom Tax, and says it wants to repeal the Health and Social Care Act (2012), but whether it does actually does so is far from certain; for example, Labour did not reverse marketisation in the NHS post-1997, and conversely accelerated it (admittedly not as fast as post-2012). No-one would be surprised if Ed Miliband goes into ‘copycat’ mode over immigration, and ends up supporting a referendum. This could be that Ed Miliband does not care about setting the agenda for what he wants to do, or simply has no control of it through a highly biased media against Labour.
Essentially part of the reason that the Conservatives have ‘run out of steam’ is that they’ve run out of sectors of the population to alienate (whether that includes legal aid lawyers or GPs), or run out of things to flog off to the private sector (such as Circle, Serco, or Virgin). All this puts Labour in a highly precarious position of having to decide whether it wishes to stop yet more drifting into the private sector, or having to face an unpalatable truth (perhaps) that it is financially impossible to buy back these industries into the public sector (and to make them operate at a profit). However, the status quo is a mess. The railway industry is a fragmented disaster, with inflated prices, stakeholders managing to cherrypick the products they wish to sell to maximise their profit, with no underlying national direction. That is exactly the same mess as we have for privatised electricity, or privatised telecoms. That is exactly same mess as we will have for Royal Mail and the NHS. The whole thing is a catastrophic fiasco, and no mainstream party has the bottle to say so. The Liberal Democrats were the future once, with Nick Clegg promising to undo the culture of ‘broken promises’ before he reneged on his tuition fees pledge. UKIP are the future now, as they wish to get enough votes to have a say; despite the fact they currently do not have any MPs, if they continue to get substantial airtime from all media outlets (in a way that the NHS Action Party can only dream of), the public in their wisdom might force the Conservatives or Labour to go into coalition with UKIP. There is clearly much more to politics than our membership of Europe, and, while the media fails to cover adequately the destruction of legal aid or the privatisation of the NHS, the quality of our debate about national issues will continue to be poor. Ed Miliband must now focus all of his resources into producing a sustainable plan to govern for a decade, the beginning of which will involve an element of ‘crisis management‘ for a stagnant economy at the beginning. The general public have incredibly short memories, and, although it has become very un-politically correct to say so, their short-termism and thirst for quick remedies has led to this mess. Ed Miliband seems to be capable of jumping onto bandwagons, such as over press regulation, but he needs to be cautious about the intricacies of policy, some of which does not require on a precise analysis of the nation’s finances at the time of 7th May 2015. With no end as yet in sight for Jon Cruddas’ in-depth policy review, and for nothing as yet effectively Labour to campaign on solidly, there is no danger of that.
Labour must indicate what its 'red line' issues are before 2015
Like it or not, there is now a sense that ‘anything goes’ in general elections. It could be that the arithmetic returns a Coalition government, where the Conservatives can only be in government with support of UKIP, or Labour can only govern with the support of the Liberal Democrats. Of course, the most preferred option for Labour members would be for a Labour government to be returned with a landslide.
The current coalition is what can only be described as a ‘miserable compromise’. As a result of the Conservatives continuing to be in denial that the explosion in the deficit had been caused by injecting money into the banks as an emergency measure in the global financial crisis, Labour still have difficult in making the case for safe management of the ‘nation’s finances’. This is of course extremely frustrating for Labour, since the facts are that Labour ran a deficit comparable to the tenure of Norman Lamont and Ken Clarke otherwise, and George Osborne, assisted by the Liberal Democrats, has managed to reverse a fragile economy into a double-dip, and now possibly a triple-dip recession, only saved by some creative accounting over the Olympics and the 4G receipts, as revealed by George Eaton.
In civil litigation, all parties are supposed to adopt a “cards on the table approach”, and given what has happened in the past, all parties should make clear, I feel, what are “red line issues” for them; in other words, what is unnegotiable. Labour might definitely wish to repeal the NHS act and to reverse Part 6 of the Act, UKIP might wish to withdraw from Europe, and the Liberal Democrats might wish to [insert a reasonable choice here]. The combined total of Conservative and UKIP polling figures suggests an alliance would significantly narrow the difference of popularity between the two parties. David Cameron has, in fact, promised the Conservatives will fight the 2015 general election as an anti-Europe party in a bid to see off the threat of UKIP. The Prime Minister delighted Conservative MPs last night when he pledged he will fight for his first overall majority from a ‘clear Eurosceptic position’. However, the chance of UKIP gaining a significant number of seats is still small. They are also dependent upon the continuation of the Eurozone crisis in order to maintain their popularity.
However, we can only really draw conclusions from by-elections, albeit they may fall under the ‘mid-term protest vote’ umbrella. According to Andrew Sparrow’s “live blog”, Nigel Farage is quoted as saying the following:
“It’s a big advance. It’s our best every byelection result. I said at Corby two weeks ago that Rotherham would move us on further. We’ve got a good, active local branch here. We fight local elections here. We are well known. The fostering row didn’t hurt our vote. But I rather agree [that] whilst people were very upset and outraged by it, not that many people changed their vote purely on that issue.”
No prime minister has improved his party’s vote share since October 1974, which is a bit of a special case anyway. The election of February 1974 had produced a hung parliament. Harold Wilson went back to the country soon afterwards to ask for a stronger mandate, repeating a tactic he had pulled off in the 1960s. The Liberal Democrats’ decision to frustrate boundary changes which Conservative high command regarded as vital to their chances of victory at the next election still is troublesome. Indeed, not all Conservatives have given up hope of getting the boundary changes through the Commons. Senior Tories have vowed to press on with changes to constituency boundaries, saddling taxpayers with a bill for £12 million, even though the Liberal Democrats have vowed to stop them going ahead. However, the Liberal Democrats have reason to wish their heels in. Tom Clark, also in the Guardian, provided a comprehensive overview of why the AV referendum was lost, with this as the no. 1 reason:
“1. If the lack of a hate figure was the gaping hole for the yes side, Nick Clegg provided an unbeatable one for the noes. The man himself recognised that voters wanted to poke him in the eye, and he dutifully kept a fairly low profile in the campaign that was by far the most visible single concession that he obtained from the Conservatives. Shrewd as it was for him to go to ground, it could not prevent the noes from warning that “President Clegg” would be kept forever in power by everybody’s second preferences. He had a horrendous hand to play last year, but he made things worse for himself by appearing to the country as a head boy thrilled at being unexpectedly tasked with helping to run the school. When the headteacher and his staff meted out their long-planned litany of horrors, it was not they but Clegg who felt the force of the pupils’ revolt. Having once dismissed Gordon Brown’s pre-election promise of an AV referendum as doomed by association with him, there is a bitter irony here. It is not association with Brown but association with Clegg that has now sunk the electoral reform he was so desperate to achieve.”
Richard Reeves, the Lib Dem leader’s senior strategist and speechwriter, has now left. Reeves, the ultimate in tong-term strategists, had personally worked out the three-step programme to see the leader through to 2015. First, the Liberal Democrats would share the spoils of a recovering economy, “after the mess that Labour had left”. Then they would move into the “differentiation” phase. Finally, they would set out their own agenda prior to a smooth disconnect at the election. The first phase is perceived to have gone well by loyal Liberal Democrats and Nick Clegg, though Labour members still think that much legislation from the Conservatives has only been enabled through Liberal Democrat votes on the NHS, education support allowance, legal aid reforms, to name but a few. Few people in Labour have sympathy with Sarah Teather, who was sacked as minister for families in September, appears to have found some reservations.
“But she also makes no bones about the fact that, for her, the cuts and caps already agreed by the coalition are unacceptable and wrong. Brent, she points out, is an area with high rents where many people are already living in appallingly crowded conditions. She is in favour of that part of government policy which encourages people off benefits into work but not when it seeks to erode sympathy and support for the poor. “Having an incentive in the benefits system to encourage people to work is a good thing,” she says. “It is a good thing because it encourages people to participate in society. But having a system which is so punitive in its regime that it effectively takes people entirely outside society, so they have no chance of participating, crosses a moral line for me.””
However, such late confessions may not be sufficient for her seat to be saved ultimately. As regards “the economy stupid”, the Bank of England now thinks it is likely the UK economy will contract in the fourth quarter of 2012, with governor Sir Mervyn King predicting a “zig-zag” road to recovery thereafter. It recently downgraded its forecast for gross domestic product (GDP) in 2013 to around 1 per cent, while the UK government’s tax and spending watchdog is not much more optimistic, at 1.2 per cent.
So, quite unbelievably, Ed Miliband and Labour might be able to win the 2015 general election in some form or other, and as per usual the policy review is still under way. However, Labour could reap much political capital by saying what it definitely will not do, given that most of the most damaging actions of this Government were not set out in front of the electorate prior to May 2010 (the £2bn NHS restructuring for example). The danger is that, if Labour actually does win a landslide in 2015, it will not use this as an opportunity to reshape a definition of the UK, away from misguided marketisation of “New Labour”, but towards a society where citizens can aspire to be fully employed in salaried work and where the genuinely vulnerable are not troubled by securities over the health and social care for example. Nick Clegg’s pathological hatred for Gordon Brown and Labour may be ‘water-under-the-bridge’ if Labour does need to work with the Liberal Democrats, but it could be that Ed Miliband states that one red line he does not wish to cross is to work with Nick Clegg.
