Coalition cuts » 21stCenturyFix.org.uk

Which came first – the Autumn Statement today or the #N30 Strike tomorrow?

#N30 strike, a con, Coalition capitalism, Coalition cuts, establishment, George Osborne, pensions, public sector No Responses »

Nov 292011

This tweet says it all:

This #Tory #LibDem coalition was so blinded by it’s excitement at the prospect of dismantling the state they’ve wrecked the economy. #Resign

But a thought does come to me. Which came first – the Autumn Statement today or the #N30 Strike tomorrow? Did the unions plan with incredible foresight the date of their strike or does the establishment have something quite awful up its sleeve?

And, by positioning all this dreadful economic news right before a massively supported outpouring of public emotion in favour of public sector workers and their labour, will the aforesaid establishment now try and stoke these emotions to their ultimate benefit? For as another tweet quite wisely pointed out this evening:

It is perfectly fair that public sector wages don’t keep up with inflation whilst bankers pay themselves bonuses from taxpayers’ money.

With that backdrop of communal logic, I don’t which scares me more. That the establishment have lost control and they don’t realise it – or the establishment are in control and we don’t realise it.

In fact, Osborne and Cameron are doing just what they set out to do

Coalition, Coalition capitalism, Coalition cuts, David Cameron, George Osborne, in a hole, Tony Blair, unemployment 2 Responses »

Nov 162011

Éoin tweets thus:

UK unemployment is growing 500% quicker than the Eurozone so don’t let Osborne blame Greece http://t.co/IiJJWp2X

The post he refers to, one of his own, is well worth a read in full.

It does, of course, beg the question: what on earth are Osborne and Cameron up to? In my mind, I think the only sensible reply is to say: “Exactly what they set out to do!”

Increase unemployment – in order to tip the balance of negotiating power in the direction of employers; destroy that part of our monopolistic “free market” which, even now, was giving the bigger companies grief – in order that the only businesspeople left on the killing-field are the big-money sponsors of the Tory Party; shake out all those feelgood policies New Labour had engineered to tie the disparate social elements of this country together – in order to better control the chaos that is left; and – finally – deactivate all chances of making socialism work for the oh so conservative British.

For that, if anything, was Tony Blair’s unalloyed triumph. Make even the Conservatives believe that helping the less well-off and more disadvantaged was an inevitable political evil which had to be tolerated in the name of fair play.

Not, incidentally, what Osborne and Cameron care to believe in at all.

And that, precisely, is why they have set out to unravel all Blair’s careful and clever tapestry of union.

How about we unfairly dismiss a few of these Coalition slackers?

a con, big business, business, Coalition, Coalition capitalism, Coalition cuts, David Cameron, George Osborne, small business No Responses »

Oct 262011

I read this over at Craig’s place today and felt a real shudder go down my spine. His first paragraph starts thus but is not the bit that made me shudder:

I am not blogging about the EU summit. It is pointless. It will of course produce a communique to reassure the markets. It makes no difference.

The last paragraph finishes thus (the bold is mine):

That is why I am not blogging about today’s EU meeting or a specific statement of the US Federal Bank Chairman. They are all pissing into the wind that is shortly to be a tornado. I expect before I die I will see a genuine social revolution. I expect that, as always happens, middle class liberals like me will start by being elated by it, and end up being shot by those who seize on the change, to take their turn to use the power of the state to corner resources for themselves.

And now I hope you join me as you tremble. And if you do not tremble, then you are still exactly as were the Jews when in the 1930s they thought it could not get any worse.

For it was then the turn of the Guardian to bring me this piece of news:

In a report seen by the Daily Telegraph and commissioned by Downing Street, the venture capitalist Adrian Beecroft suggests British workers should be banned from claiming unfair dismissal so companies can sack them and find more capable replacements, saying this would boost economic growth. The document has generated a furious response from trade unions.

As it might very well do so.

But even those supposedly on our side only speak of the morality of the issue as an afterthought. Far more important for them is the health of our collapsing economy:

But Norman Lamb, chief adviser and parliamentary private secretary to the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, said taking away protection from unfair dismissal would damage the economy because it would increase workers’ fears that they could be arbitrarily sacked.

Lamb, a former employment lawyer, said: “I think it would be madness to throw away all employment protection in the way that’s proposed, and it could be very damaging to consumer confidence.

“What we are talking about here is every single employee in the land being in a position where their employer could arbitrarily terminate their employment – and the impact that could have on consumer confidence, fear of losing your job, would potentially be very damaging.”

Only to lamely remember that:

“I just think it’s also not right to throw away that sort of scheme of protection.”

Almost a year ago I said the following:

It’s not that this Coalition government doesn’t have principles. It does.

It just so happens that its principles are limited to two: sock it to the poor and train them to understand their only salvation is that of wage slave to the wealthy. Problem is that innovation doesn’t work like that. Ideas need space, confidence and trust to flourish. Cameron’s understanding of the future needs of a society which adds value by generating and implementing ideas is so tawdry and basic that all he will achieve is a mass emigration of the clever to places where they will be better understood.

And as I continued by saying:

This government is not only going to show us how bad it is at the welfare state, it’s also going to show us how very bad it is at anticipating the needs of business – all business, that is. Innovation does not come out of slotting bright and intelligent individuals into the round holes that already well-formed organisations are prepared to allow. For true innovation to surface, everything must start from the ground up. There must be that cycle of birth, growth and maturity which joining an existing organisation could never provide.

So it is that in amongst all the unrest of a capitalism going dangerously sour, we have the seeds of total collapse. And our government’s response? Invest in the future? Look to release the imagination of the very best of our nations? Consult and debate ways of ensuring we can all be in this together?

Nope. Our government’s response is to make it easier to dismiss the workers who already fear for their jobs – and have already cut back on their spending.

I tell you what. I jolly well do feel that it’s time to unfairly dismiss some of those government ministers responsible for this chaos.

Before closing up shop tonight, then, let us just run that idea past ourselves one more time. Exhibit A – The Coalition Thesis: a stumbling capitalism is due to inefficient workers who are too confident of keeping their jobs. Exhibit B – The Coalition Solution: a flourishing capitalism will come out of making us feel all awfully insecure so we stop all our spending out of fear.

And, in exchange, the proponents of all this tawdry politicking get a) to hang onto their jobs; b) assure their future employment; c) line the pockets of their pals in big business; and d) prance around on very public stages spouting the kind of disgraceful rubbish which makes me think Craig might – after all – one day turn out to be right.

This Coalition government isn’t only mad – it’s bad; isn’t only rank – it’s inefficient; isn’t only anti-good industrial relations – it’s anti-good business.

And if you don’t believe me yet, you better start soon. Because if you don’t believe me soon – believe me, it’ll won’t be long before it’s far too late.

Coalition government assures weekly bin collections for sacked Navy personnel?

a con, Armed Forces, Coalition cuts, Eric Pickles, maximum speed limit, Ministry of Defence, rubbish collection No Responses »

Sep 302011

Sometimes, governments do people like myself – the flat-information-hierarchy chaps who see everything as connected to everything – damn big flat-information-hierarchy favours. Today, the big story is that the Coalition government will – with a £250 million rapid response fund suddenly eked out of absolutely nowhere – assure one thousand sacked Navy personnel weekly bin collections when they return to Civvy Street.

Or something along those lines, anyhow. (Sometimes, with all this information they throw at us, the exact point of their mixed messages is lost on yours truly.)

Once these hapless Navy personnel have found their bearings, they’ll also be able to travel the motorways of Britain at 80 mph – or, at least, they will if this government’s ministers have anything to do with the matter. So that’s all right then, isn’t it? The euro falls apart; economic growth in Britain becomes non-existent; and public sector cuts cut deep into services, salaries, disposable income and confidence – but, for those of us who can afford to drive a car at aggressively inflated speeds, we will be able to do so even faster.

Don’t you just love a government which knows how to prioritise policy?

Just one final point. Nice to know, also, how careful ministers are with their language – and I’m sure the nigh on 50,000 Armed Forces and civilian MoD workers, who will all be shortly losing their jobs, will be grateful for the following tact and generosity. From the weekly bin collections article linked to above (the bold is mine):

Unveiling the plan ahead of the Conservative Party conference, Mr Pickles said: “Weekly rubbish collections are the most visible of all front-line services and I believe every household in England has a basic right to have their rubbish collected every week.

“Our fund will help councils deliver weekly collections and in the process make it easier for families to go green and improve the local environment.”

Tell them that in Afghanistan. Or, alternatively, in an ever-lengthening dole queue back in Blighty.

The wasteland that is David Cameron’s first year

a con, Coalition capitalism, Coalition cuts, David Cameron, NHS, The Waste Land No Responses »

Sep 102011

Stephen Dorrell has, according to Ben Bradshaw, just asserted the following:

Stephen Dorrell admits on Any Questions NHS Bill an unnecessary distraction and Govt has wasted a year but too late to undo the damage

I haven’t heard the broadcast itself, so can’t vouch for its veracity – but if it is true, it’s hardly a revelation. In the face of the fearsome spin we have become so casually accustomed to, I suppose it does contain a remarkable honesty of sorts.

But nothing we didn’t know already.

And so, before us, we have “The Waste Land” of David Cameron’s first year. Tell it to those people who’ve lost their jobs. Tell it to those people who’ve lost their homes. Tell it to those people who’ve lost their savings. Tell it to those people who’ve lost their confidence in the future.

Tell it to the young – now a singular generation which can no longer depend on the age-old certainty that Western capitalism is able to deliver the goods. The first generation in many when the next generation will not be materially better off.

For this is not a crisis of socialism. This is not a crisis of the Communist extremes. This is – first and foremost – a crisis of capitalism: its ability to enthuse confidence, belief and business swagger in its capacity to forever reinvent itself and thus escape – Houdini-like – the chains, constrictions and condemnations of the left.

As the Berlin Wall collapsed and history’s old dialectic apparently disintegrated, capitalism lost an external enemy which had kept it focussed on the job to hand.

Left, like a toddler in garishly-coloured clothing, to its own pretty devices, capitalism has been unable to understand in time the old old mantra that total freedoms bring massive responsibilities. And so it’s messed up – terribly big-time, in fact.

The Coalition government can bemoan its wasted year and the damage it’s caused to its chances of re-election. In the meantime, I would far prefer to believe that at least some members of the two political parties which constitute its make-up bemoan rather more justly the damage to human lives – caused by a capitalism which no longer complies with its promises.

We could live with the alienation, live with the incessant impositions of inexactly applied total quality management, live with the eternal unceasing changes at the top of short-term empire-building … all of this we were able to survive under because, in exchange, we got our cheap food, cheap clothes, cheap gadgets and cheap holidays. But with severe increases in the price of almost everything now in the offing, where is the upside to the legacy of end-of-20th century capitalism?

I don’t see it.

Do you?

No. I didn’t think so.

So it’s something else we need to pursue; something else we need to construct. An empowerment of working practices which releases our ability to add value in ways that circumvent the inefficiencies of Communist-like command and control. As Communism collapsed in on itself so dramatically – like a puff-pastry of a political philosophy – it seems to me that the economic crises of recent times, as well as the crises that surely still await us, are neither cause nor effect of something else we are ignorant about: rather, they are simply symptomatic of the above-mentioned command and control behaviours – behaviours which we still have to become properly aware of, in order that we might excise our body economic and political of their final malignity.

Act One of this story played itself out during the Cold War. Act Two brought about the ultimate destruction of any Communist legitimacy in Europe and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Act Three of these Communist-like behaviours – located as they are in centralised capitalist agencies which cross frontiers and continents at will – is still waving its foolish discourse over our socio-economic landscapes. And until we learn a better way of removing these command and control tics from such sad and sorry landscapes, the wasteland we have just gone through will simply be the first of many more.

How "heirs to Blair" takes on a completely different meaning

a con, Coalition, Coalition capitalism, Coalition cuts, Mediterraneanisation, NHS, NHS cuts, Rupert Murdoch, The Godfather, Tony Blair No Responses »

Sep 052011

Whilst this week it looks like the Coalition government will steamroller massive self-enriching changes through Parliament which will turn the NHS into a free-for-all for the private industry mates (more here) of David Cameron and Andrew Lansley, one could choose to reach the conclusion that all this is the logical conclusion of the outside-the-box thinking which bedevilled – or, perhaps some would argue, constructively accompanied, depending on your point of view – the New Labour years of Tony Blair.

It does seem that after getting us all used to the need to create partnerships between public and private, and engineer in the public domain a perception that profit is a necessary driver for the provision of the state’s services, what’s happening in this second leg of the Coalition government’s dismantling of the UK and its institutions is nothing more nor less than a coherent continuation of everything Mr Blair initiated. At the time, I guess, many of us trusted him – trusted him not to use against us what could so easily have become a double-edged sword; and in ways which could have harmed us far more easily than helped us or made proper progress in what we now see, in retrospect, as a socialism by stealth – that socialism, I mean, which dared not speak its name for fear of instant media retribution.

So it is that we have been sold the idea that Mr Blair spent his time cosying up to Mr Murdoch’s media empire because he felt obliged to do everything he (that is to say, Blair) could do to ensure Labour got into and retained the power it had been without for such a long time.

And that, on his part, in the light of such a perception, was a more than honourable act of self-negation which until today I was prepared to sustain.

Until today, that is. Here, then, from last night’s Telegraph:

Tony Blair is godfather to one of Rupert Murdoch’s young children, it has emerged in an interview with the media tycoon’s wife Wendi.

And:

The former prime minister was reportedly present in March last year when Murdoch’s two daughters by his third wife were baptised on the banks of the Jordan.

The information was not made public and its disclosure in an interview with Mrs Murdoch in Vogue will prove highly embarrassing for Mr Blair.

Whilst Blair is not so forthcoming, Murdoch’s media company confirms the following:

Last night, Mr Blair’s spokesman refused to comment, but a News Corp source confirmed that Mr Blair was godfather to Grace, as was Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s eldest son.

Thus the Mediterraneanisation of Britain (if you’ll excuse the racist terminology) continues apace. If before yesterday’s news we felt that politics was more important than the personal, Mr Blair has demonstrated most clearly that the personal is now more important than politics.

And this is how “heirs to Blair” takes on a profoundly different and far more worrying meaning.

Representative democracy is no longer a relationship between voters and those temporarily in charge. Rather, far more obviously, it is becoming clear that even in supposedly technocratic body politics such as the British, the vote of confidence deposited in our politicians is used and abused for utterly private benefit.

Blair’s godfathership of Murdoch’s daughter is no different in principle from David Cameron and Andrew Lansley’s dismantling of the NHS in direct and purposeful benefit of business cronies. Both see the voters’ devolvement of power through our precious and sacred ballot box to supposedly public servants as a blank cheque to make any changes necessary in the way the state and private business interact.

And whilst I despise what the Coalition are doing, and cannot hope for a change in their behaviours, I had expected far more of Mr Blair – had even arrived at the firm conclusion that whatever he had done and did was out of a true love for and understanding of the long-term needs of the Party.

Not any more. Not after this.

Heirs to Blair? It’s practically Francis Ford Coppola land …

Thinking creatively is one thing but applying policy with palette knives is quite another

a con, Coalition, Coalition cuts, Coalition U-turns, Communism, David Cameron, Labour, Scotland, SNP, Year Zero No Responses »

Sep 042011

This Coalition government will probably be arguing that thinking outside the box is one of its grandest virtues. Thinking outside the box – or blue-sky thinking – is one of those catch-all terms that serves to hide a multitude of sins. It’s essential strategic purpose is to allow those who propose inordinately radical change in the name of personal enrichment to argue that others who oppose the aforementioned modifications are inevitably conceptual Luddites - not worthy of a place in this brave new century of progress. Examples of such Coalition ideas include the Big Society, free schools and the proposal to substitute teachers with soldiers, the cack-handed attempt to rape and pillage our publicly-owned forests, the destruction of the NHS, the removal of practically any limitations on building on protected land – and only the Lord knows what else is out there on the horizon awaiting us.

I’m all in favour of thinking creatively, of course – but moving from thinking creatively to applying policy with inexpertly applied palette knives is just a short step away from stabbing us all in the back.

And it is here I am reminded of the recent poll in Scotland, which declaims from up on high the following:

On a poll of 1002 Scottish adults in the last few days of August, the voting intentions for the constituency members show a substantial lead for the SNP over Labour. Of those certain to vote, the difference is 49% to 28% in the SNP’s favour. The Tories are on 12% and the Liberals on 7%.

The figures for the total expressing a favoured party are not substantially different with the SNP on 47% and Labour on 30%. The Tories remain of 12% and the Liberals lose one to show 6%.

The graph of the constituency trend since 2005 shows a general upward trend for the SNP with a small dip in late 2009 – 2010 and then a surge towards the election, and even more of a surge since, to end at 49%.

This, coupled with the anecdotal evidence coming my way on how the Scots are beginning to feel, leads me to conclude that the emotional dynamics in favour of Scottish independence are evermore similar to how I felt shortly before Croatia achieved its independence from Milosevic’s Communist ex-Yugoslavia.

Neither is the reference to Communism altogether unwarranted in this case. Cameron’s obvious desire to turn upside down the deeply felt socialist-type instincts of community and state support for the individual (in moments, that is, when that individual finds him- or herself most in need) clearly marks him out as the kind of uncultured revolutionary able and willing to start over and over again from scratch, in order to destroy all that came before – and simply because it came before.

His is not to pick and choose whether something worked or not and is therefore worth preserving. Year Zero is what’s under discussion here. And I would not find it difficult to argue that the British Coalition government has a four-year plan to rape and pillage not just the forests – but an entire and historically noble mindset which most of us once seemed to share, and which – to their great credit – the Scots still seem able to effectively defend.

So thinking creatively always. But using creative thinking to justify personal enrichment is just about as corrupt and corrupting as one can get.

And from broad brush strokes to cack-handed palette knives to traitorous knives twisted in our backs.

That, I am afraid, is to be the trajectory of our Tory Coalition government.

Get out while you can, dear Scotland. Get out while you can.

Add your face to the NHS Vigil at the TUC’s www.goingtowork.org.uk

Coalition, Coalition cuts, in a hole, NHS, NHS cuts, NHS Vigil, on a high, TUC, www.goingtowork.org.uk 5 Responses »

Sep 032011

Here’s a splendid way of creating an online petition in favour of protecting the NHS: a mosaic of people’s pictures at the TUC’s website www.goingtowork.org.uk. As the site’s wider manifesto says:

Work is important

It’s how we organise our society, and how we distribute any gains we make. We spend a third of our waking hours at work, and it has a profound influence on our identities, our aspirations, our families, our environment and our society.

Going to Work is a project of the TUC, the umbrella organisation for Britain’s trade unions. We aim to unite people who want to see greater fairness and more common sense in the way we work for our economy, and the ways our economy works for us.

We stand for:

The opportunity for everyone to access work, safely and for fair reward.
Good jobs that give people fulfilment and a chance to develop.
More green jobs and a more sustainable economy.
Quality public services, available to everyone that needs them.
A vibrant and democratic civil society, respecting human rights.

We won’t stand for:

People being exploited at work, union members or not.
Unfair employment practices and bad political decisions that encourage them.
Greed, tax dodging and speculation that damage the productive economy.
Inequality that traps people in poverty, debt and drudgery.
Business models based on a race to the bottom on standards.

And as internationalists, we hold to these principles for people in other countries, as much as we do for those at home.

Work with us

If you share our vision of a better society, and a better way to work, then join us. It’s easy, all you need is an email address and a willingness to get involved.

From time to time, we’ll set tasks online, asking everyone to come together to make a stronger voice for change. If we can target where things are wrong, and mobilise effectively to fix them, we could move mountains.

We’ll work with unions, campaign groups, charities, politicians, media, anyone we think can help us get change. We’d like to work with you too.

If you too make the connect between savage cuts at home and unhealthy wealth wherever, and do not agree the NHS should face the ideological brunt of these circumstances, why not spread the word on this one?

More information on how to do this can be found here. And if you want to add your face to the NHS Vigil itself, please click here.

And remember: for so long the NHS has served to keep the wolf of illness from all our doors. Now the wolf at the door is the government which controls and overlords it, we need to do everything we can to protect it from further damage.

This battle is not ideological. This battle is not managerial. This battle is – pure and simple – one of people in government who know people in business who want to make more money out of us than they already do. As with the war in Iraq, if we believe the lies and obfuscation, we ourselves will remain inert and unable to think clearly.

Whilst the enemy – yes, our very own government – plays the wilfully destructive tune.

"What we found is a clear and positive statistical association between expenditure cuts and the level of unrest"

a con, Adam Curtis, Coalition, Coalition capitalism, Coalition cuts, David Cameron, Nick Clegg, riots, risk 2 Responses »

Aug 172011

So sayeth the measured authors of this report, a short overview of which I’ve just read on the Kindle version of the Guardian. Let me quote from the Guardian overview – in particular, the following paragraph, which is the one that really catches my eye:

To construct our measure of unrest, we looked at five indicators: riots, anti-government demonstrations, general strikes, political assassinations, and attempted revolutions. In a typical year and country, there are about 1.5 incidents of this type. The more you cut, the more incidents you get. By the time austerity measures hit 3% or more, the number of incidents has doubled. Interestingly, for the UK, the pattern is even stronger: for every percentage point of cut-backs, instability surges by more than it does on average in the rest of the countries. Importantly, these effects are in addition to the well-known relationship between lower growth (associated with more unemployment) and higher instability.

And so, in the full knowledge that these things will happen, it clearly involves the kind of cold-hearted button-pressing you can easily imagine those in charge applying to us robots - as well as those sorry processes where risk is calculated in order to determine where spending cuts are best made (the bold is mine):

[...] The annualized loss expectancy is a calculation of the single loss expectancy multiplied by the annual rate of occurrence, or how much an organization could estimate to lose from an asset based on the risks, threats, and vulnerabilities. It then becomes possible from a financial perspective to justify expenditures to implement countermeasures to protect the asset.

Or not, as the case may be. In other rather simpler and more straightforward words, if the cuts are going to mean more than 1,700 Londoners will be arrested for violent disorder, as well as allow for the introduction of draconian sentencing policies without the traditional resort to parliamentary approval, that then is a fair assessment of assumable consequence someone somewhere down the line must have decided at least fifteen months ago to make.

The question that comes to mind is: will they be able to get away with it?

Schools, the NHS, Legal Aid, social care: "Marvellous examples of an embedded British socialism is what this government is looking to wipe out"

a con, Captain Ska, Coalition, Coalition capitalism, Coalition cuts No Responses »

Jun 292011

Further to my previous post about the multi-pronged attack by the Coalition Tories on the Welfare State as we have come to know and love it, another video from Captain Ska seems absolutely apposite. I’d say watch and enjoy – but enjoy really isn’t the right word.

Cry perhaps?

Rhetoric versus evidence – so where’s the justice in that?

a con, Coalition, Coalition capitalism, Coalition cuts, Law Society, Legal Aid, www.soundoffforjustice.org No Responses »

Jun 282011

I was invited to a briefing at the Law Society yesterday morning on the back of a post I wrote last week about the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill currently being frogmarched through Parliament. As the briefing did, so I too am going to focus on the Legal Aid side of things – a subject I find myself new to; though in the light of everything I learnt yesterday, I have to say I am woefully sorry that I have arrived at this party at such a late hour.

I suppose and guess many of you out there are also unclear of the implications of cuts in Legal Aid – or, indeed, what position Legal Aid has occupied in British society since its constitution.

And I also suppose when we think of Legal Aid, we think of poor people without resources who cannot afford to defend themselves – for there are plenty of these sorts of people about; and there will be more so as the economic climate worsens. But Legal Aid, as it currently stands, serves a much wider remit than the simple defence of the marginalised in need. The vast majority of cases in the Crown Court require the support of Legal Aid services. Even in the Magistrates Court, up to fifty percent of all cases require such support. Without Legal Aid, without face-to-face consultations, without a decent and workable definition of domestic violence, hundreds of thousands of working people will be disenfranchised from their rights – just as the economy takes a turn for the worse.

And out of those hundreds of thousands, we might find ourselves one day suddenly without the right to financial support when we are at our most vulnerable. Maybe a case of medical negligence. Maybe a wife-beater – where the wife has complained to the police but not proceeded with a court case against her husband. Maybe a young person in digs in need of legal advice against a landlord from hell – unhappy to use mandatory phoneline assessment gateways where once a supportive face could have winkled out the bundle of other potential problems associated with the trigger which drove them to ask for help.

In a society which after the war was constituted to care for all its citizens, the principles of Legal Aid formed one of the pillars of our much treasured Welfare State – a state which in a number of other areas such as education, health and social care now finds itself under what appears to be totally irrational and incoherent attack from our government.

Sadly, I’ve come to the conclusion that the attacks are anything but incoherent – and, like Harry Potter’s invisibility magic, this awful awful Coalition is using the cloak of apparent incompetence to push ahead an entirely politically-driven agenda.

Where prevention was once seen to be better than cure, where intervention was once seen to be more cost-effective than litigation, the short-sighted proposals from a government bent on short-term slash and run seem clearly to have only one destination: that of undermining and unpicking the fabric of a supportive society where those in need could once have reasonably expected to find the support they needed.

Before I continue, let’s see an excerpt from a contextualising foreword by Linda Lee, President of the Law Society, to the briefing document I was given (intro here and full version in .pdf here) – and which was produced by the Sound Off For Justice initiative as a response by the legal profession to the government’s proposals. In what I can only reasonably describe as barely-contained fury, the Law Society’s official position is couched thus:

The Prime Minister and the Government want to reduce crime and the deficit. If they force the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill through parliament in its current form, they risk the opposite. The Bill focuses on only short-term budget-gain and not the long-term consequences.

The Justice Bill is littered with mistakes, inaccuracies and lacks detailed impact assessments. The figures and calculations the government have used for the Justice Bill are based on assumptions rather than evidence. This Bill leaves our civil justice system at the edge of an abyss beyond which we do not know where we are destined.

All the signs suggest that the Bill is to be forced through parliament in haste. The government is not listening.

I firmly believe that as it stands the Bill will only achieve the following:

Cuts in civil legal will increase criminality and damage social cohesion;

Cuts in civil legal aid will penalise the victims of crime and not the

perpetrators;

Clause 12 will undermine a cornerstone of our justice system;

The Jackson reforms will increase costs to businesses, to government departments and the taxpayer as well as raid the damages of victims of serious injury by up to 25%.

We oppose plans in clause 52 to cap the compensation people receive when they have been wrongfully prosecuted by the state.

What’s even more unpalatable, however, is the following series of realities. To the Law Society’s counter-proposals which run as follows …

The Government wants to cut the legal aid budget by £350 million. We recognise the argument for budget savings. We offer plans that could cut the legal aid budget by £360 million. We have a fully costed proposal, which will reduce the legal aid budget.

Our alternative plan will protect the victims and the most vulnerable. We know how to drive efficiencies through the legal aid system and we have called for a cap on all fees from the legal aid budget. To date we have been ignored or misunderstood by the Government.

… the government has then apparently produced a “feeble document” in reply – a document which contains little new data, and aims to rebut the Society’s arguments through a surfeit of rhetorical posturing.

For those of us already aware of government behaviours in other areas of society – from trades union legislation to NHS reorganisation, from education and tuition fee policies to social care cuts – none of this actually comes as a surprise. And yet I wonder if the government, in its outright rejection of fully-costed proposals by people who surely know the system inside out (proposals which would both cost less than the government’s own planned programme of cuts without, at the same time, hurting the most vulnerable in society), has not only bitten off more than it can chew but also runs the risk of choking on its own verbal incoherence.

Just to be clear here. Experts in a field, in this case the law, have proposed cuts which go far beyond what the government hopes to achieve – and have, at the same time, apparently squared the circle of client provision by guaranteeing that the most vulnerable will not be seriously affected. And yet the government, with the bluster of rhetorical device, apparently rejects this counter-package out of hand. The thread seems pretty common. The thesis hardly new. This is an ideologically-driven government bent on reshaping and re-engineering British society for the benefit of a chosen few and to the detriment of a needy many. They don’t actually intend to avoid the needy losing out on their rights – for legal rights, in this brave new world, will belong only to the most important amongst us. Those who make and shake and wish to own even more of the aforementioned real estate will – under these government proposals – get to do so.

And in the meantime, the strategy of this Coalition government becomes absolutely clear: the total and utter dismantling of British society as we know it.

The complete destruction of all of the pillars that once constituted our Welfare State.

So did you vote for that when you voted for them last year? Did you know that when your daughter suffered awful medical consequences at the hands of an incompetent surgeon you’d be making it more difficult to achieve the justice you deserved? Did you know that when you didn’t take your husband to court for those bruises you wouldn’t be able to get the kind of support you needed when the abuse became far more unpleasant and life-threatening?

Did you in fact understand that just as other elements of the Welfare State served to keep the wolf from the door for millions of people in our society – and thus achieve a cohesion which made Britain a place of imperfect tolerance but tolerance nevertheless – so the Legal Aid system as it currently stands has made the British legal landscape a better and more proactive place than anything which might have existed in its absence?

And when you voted for this band of rhetorical millionaires, did you actually appreciate they would take massive gambles with your future wellbeing based on hollow rebuttal and not evidence – that is to say, based on political hunches and not data?

So where’s the justice in that?

Please tell me, you (deathly) hallowed politicians who currently run this farce of a country: wherever in the world was the rhetoric of fiction so much more important than the reality of fact?

If not in 21st century Coalition Britain …
____________________

Update to this post: the BBC are now reporting this story thus.

Sound Off For Justice

a con, Coalition capitalism, Coalition cuts, human rights, Law Society, www.soundoffforjustice.org No Responses »

Jun 232011

I’ve just received an email on behalf of the website soundoffforjustice.org. If you click on the link, you will be asked to sign a petition. I strongly recommend you do so.

This is the salient content of the email I received:

Today it was announced that the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill will be read on the 29th of June.

The Law Society are outraged.

Sound off for Justice say:

Over 725,000 people per year will be denied access to justice. The bill is in tatters and is going to cost the tax payer more than it will save.

Back bench conservative MPS have complained that ministers are not giving them any access and they do not understand the policy.

Clause 12 of the bill will remove access to a solicitor for anyone who is taken into police custody.

The cuts in civil legal aid budget means that the government is going to fund cases for financial fraud over that of family cases and victims of domestic violence.

It is outrageous that the coalition government are trying to fast-track this bill through parliament. It has rarely happened and is normally reserved for terrorism law.

What really catches my eye is the bit about Clause 12 (more information here) and the wholly coherent behaviour of a government which – in the words of Sound Off For Justice - “is going to fund cases for financial fraud over that of family cases and victims of domestic violence”.

All in it together? Yet again … not. And as the email points out, even bodies as august as the Law Society have this to say on the matter:

The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill is the single biggest attack on access to justice since the legal aid system was introduced. Legal aid for private family law cases, clinical negligence, and employment has been taken entirely out of scope.

According to the government’s own impact assessment, these cuts risk increasing crime, weakening social cohesion and access to civil rights, and costing tax payers even more.

The bill will:

lead to higher government spending, rather than help cut the deficit

increase criminality, adding to pressure on prison places, and

abolish civil legal aid for victims of medical negligence and in most civil law cases.

It’s not that this government is bad. Rather, it’s a clear case of conditional relationships gone mad. They are not governing on behalf of a country. Instead, they are governing on behalf of themselves. In a country which has always despised class warfare, they will succeed in driving us off the edge of the cliffs of all reasonable behaviours – where a century of socialist opposition has absolutely failed to.

False economies, economical with the truth and now outright economic and social mismanagement. This government doesn’t understand what justice means – except perhaps in its rough manifestation.

Yet it may be choosing to foolishly forget there is such a thing as natural justice …
____________________

Further reading: more background to this appalling set of circumstances can be found here.

Dawkins believes in God after all (or more on the man in the mirror)

a con, Coalition cuts, education, God, religion, Richard Dawkins, secular society, tuition fees No Responses »

Jun 052011

Richard Dawkins doesn’t believe in God as we know Him but, rather, in that face he sees in the mirror every morning. Read this story from the Guardian today, if you don’t care to give me the benefit of the doubt:

University lecturers and students reacted with dismay on Sunday after a group of leading British academics took a step towards the establishment of an elite US-style university system in the UK by launching a new private college offering £18,000-a-year courses.

AC Grayling, a professor of philosophy at the universities of London and Oxford, will welcome next year the first students to the New College of the Humanities to study for degrees in English, philosophy, history, economics and law taught by academics from Harvard, Princeton, Oxford and Cambridge.

There is a starry lineup of professorial talent: Richard Dawkins will teach evolutionary biology and science literacy; Niall Ferguson will lecture on economics and economic history; and Steven Pinker will teach philosophy and psychology.

I do so fear the lack of humility of those who refuse to admit the possibility of an overlording supernatural being. Not because I believe they are logically wrong. After all, in many circumstances, people who believe in the absence of an afterlife will do everything in their power to avoid prejudicing the present. I can’t remember who it was who said something along the lines of “If you must travel by plane, travel with an airline from a mainly secular country” – but they were right.

Unfortunately, that very lack of humility may also lead such individuals to the rankest of acts – as, in fact, this case demonstrates. When you don’t believe in God, the temptation to set yourself up as your very own version of the Lord Almighty on earth, and then overcharge the wealthy for the honour, must be overwhelming. Anyone who believes they are in absolute possession of the truth is prone to making such a mistake: in this, Mr Dawkins is no different from any other fundamentalist out there. As the Guardian article reports, those responsible for the initiative would like to assure the rest of us that their teaching is worth so much more than the vast majority of us can ever aspire to:

“It is the economic reality,” [Grayling] said. “The £9,000 cap is completely unsustainable. The true cost is way more and that ceiling is going to have to be burst. Other universities might also think ‘either we sink or go independent’. Almost all of [the professors signed up] have served our time with decades in public sector higher education and we have seen it get more and more difficult. It is quite a struggle now to see into the future with how we can cope with these cuts. Either you stand on the sidelines deploring what is happening or you jump in and do something about it.”

So, whilst we’re on the subject of quoting from those far better than ourselves, who was it, then, who claimed that man was made in the image of God? For now it’s clear that if this was ever true, Mr Dawkins and friends have managed to fundamentally reverse the process: this is clearly, and quite irreversibly, a case of God being made in the image of man.

And a rather unpleasant, incoherent and self-satisfied one at that.

Over and over again, we’re asking "Why, why, why …"

a con, Big Society, Coalition, Coalition capitalism, Coalition cuts, disabled, eugenics, False Economy, ghettos, Nazi slogans, political DNA, why No Responses »

May 302011

Sound at all familiar, historically speaking? So could we argue that this Coalition government very nearly borders on behaving like eugenicists par excellence of the 21st century?

Yet another article which essentially asks “why” all over again. And it’s a good and substantive article:

Emergency Life Support skills are a set of actions that save lives, including cardiopulmonary resuscitation and dealing with choking and bleeding. There’s a school in Bolton West called Smithills School, who already teach their pupils these skills through the British Heart Foundation Heartstart course, and their teacher Adrian Hamilton told Julie about the benefits that the course has given to their pupils: empowering them with the confidence to administer life-saving techniques, and reinforcing a message of citizenship. Mr. Hamilton told Julie that he thought ELS skills should be an expected part of what happens in schools.

The Tory-led Coalition government’s response was as follows:

The clause got rejected; and Nick Gibb, Minister for Schools, retorted:

“I take issue with the hon. Lady when she says that this is more important than learning about the six wives of Henry VIII. If Anne Boleyn had known more about Henry VIII, it might have saved her life.”

Grace concludes her article by saying:

Having been defeated at the committee stage, Julie is continuing the campaign by working with the schools in her constituency. If you agree that Emergency Life Support skills are worth teaching, why not join the campaign by writing to your own MP and encouraging them to do the same?

In the face of such sterile point-scoring from the government – which, in any case, and however you see it, deliberately obfuscates the nub of the issue – it’s hardly surprising people ask why these things should be happening.

It’s my firm belief that the explanation is actually very simple: the Tories are looking to re-engineer long-held British tenets of societal behaviour – fair play, community support, charitable action and so forth – so that there will come a day when we no longer look out for anyone except ourselves as individuals – and possibly close family. They’re not looking to achieve the broadest possible improvement in a wider civilisation but, rather (quite the opposite), allow the strongest to rise unchallenged – and, indeed, unchallengeable – to the top.

And thus we’re asking the question “Why, why, why …”, as, for example, the disabled are demonised (more here) – and the message couldn’t then be clearer: the weak are a drain on society for which the strong have no responsibility to support.

This is apparently the true meaning of the Big Society: a society made to measure for those with illusions of – and the means to – grandeurs of a most excluding kind.

It’s amazing how tightly knit into our wider beliefs political DNA can sometimes be. Eugenics has a long and dishonourable history. Its instincts, impulses and tawdry prejudices may, over the ages, manifest themselves in many different ways. Right now, in Coalition Britain, as a massive project of social engineering is underway, the flippancy of government point-scoring simply underlines the gross unacceptability of its promoters – and leads me to believe that where economies can be shaped to most negatively impact on the already poor, the two-tier standards of 20th century eugenics cannot be very far behind.

But we must also accept our share of the blame. We also chose to re-engineer a nation – our slogan “New Labour, New Britain” acted as a defining frame for everything that came after – and, whilst we did so, and sometimes with the agreement of a wider voting public, there were many unhappy measures which the powers of representative government allowed us to impose on rather than work through alongside with the people. In this sense, Cameron and his supporters are a mirror image of New Labour. Where New Labour aimed to reduce relative poverty, and so create a society of opportunity and aspiration for the vast majority out of stealthy and supportive socialism, so the Coalition government are looking to disentangle the people from the state and create a society of opportunity and aspiration for the few. Top-down grassroots politics on the one hand (and therein our finally unavoidable contradictions) versus top-down elitist politics on the other.

And meanwhile, from the archives of the Washington Post, I wonder if this is the society which awaits us.
____________________

Further reading: you can find detail on the motion which sparked today’s post off here. Meanwhile, two articles on people-centred economics which have just come my way can be found here and here. Well worth your time.

The Bag Society more like (II)

Big Society, Coalition capitalism, Coalition cuts, David Cameron, Hazel Blears, Labour, money, unclassifiable No Responses »

May 172011

This tweet from Labour List:

Hazel Blears: “This government campaigns in catchphrases and governs in chaos” http://bit.ly/jsJ5CU

served to draw my attention to an article on the same website by the same person, which ties up in awful knots the rhetoric and reality of Coalition government:

Vision Housing is a social enterprise that provides rented accommodation over a long period of time, giving offenders a steady transition back into society. It’s run by ex-offenders, who have first-hand knowledge of the problems that other ex-offenders face and have designed a programme that provides higher levels of support with the aim of reducing re-offending rates.

The results have been phenomenal. The re-offending rate for those who are housed and supported by Vision Housing is around 15%, compared to 75% for London as a whole. They have housed over 400 vulnerable people across London.

It costs approximately £40,000 a year to the taxpayer to keep an offender in prison for a year. It costs Vision Housing about £5,500 to put an ex-offender into accommodation. The strength of this social enterprise is not only in the value that it brings to society by helping to reduce crime rates, but also by generating a financial saving for government.

Vision Housing’s reduction in re-offending rates for their users is estimated to have saved the government £10million – understandably David Cameron was pleased to support the organisation, telling Annys that “you’re exactly the sort of organisation that I think we should be looking at to work out how we try and expand.”

Confusingly, two days later the Government Crisis Loans scheme – the scheme that Vision Housing relies on to provide funding for the day-to-day existence of the scheme – informed Annys that she would no longer receive funding from them. Subsequent applications through different routes for funding have been rejected, putting Vision Housing at the risk of collapse.

As I’ve mentioned on these pages before, the Big Society – in practice – would appear to be more a Bag Society. A way of brushing away from our mindscapes and depositing in an out-of-way place the consciences in society which might otherwise manage to trouble us.

But back to the tweet at the top of this post. Labour List attributes to Blears a criticism of Coalition register and of that tendency, born of years of Blairism, to specious superficiality – a criticism which in itself is both a catchphrase and soundbite of the cleverest kind.

Clever, yes. But inexact, perhaps also.

Even chaos has a structure to it. And structure, by itself, is not enough to guarantee contentment. Some of what Labour did in the last decade shows how overarching structure can get terribly out of control.

In reality (and this thought is hardly an original one), the Coalition are governing here in Britain with the shock and awe we saw applied to Iraq – a shock and awe which led a posteriori to the further enrichment of the already rich, powerful and wealthy. So what if inflation does go up to 4.5 percent? Firstly, it doesn’t affect the well-off. And secondly, it helps to keep the poverty-stricken well in their places – as well as providing an ideal excuse to conduct further savage cuts to the support mechanisms that made us less unequal.

So Darwin has a lot to answer for. More than anything or anyone else, he verbalises and enshrines in the mathematics of evolution what, as a result, has become over the last two centuries a natural order no modern man or woman has a right to question. Applied to economic theory and practice, natural selection condemns the physically weak and relatively ugly to a lifetime of odious comparison.

In Coalition capitalism, beauty is not in the eye of the beholder but, rather, in the eye of he or she who can pay.

Just a footnote to this piece: I am shortly to be made redundant and am looking to set up a business. I would like my business to be sustainable in some way – to support me in both my work and my life. I would like to make good money without become obsessed by the subject of money. I am, however, beginning to wonder how easy this may be to achieve.

And I ask myself the following: does the necessary pursuit of money inevitably lead to the loss of sense and sensibility in other matters?

On Northampton against the cuts, marching together and being "… a true reflection of society …"

Coalition capitalism, Coalition cuts, Northampton, on a high, Philosophy Football No Responses »

Apr 022011

Northampton marches against the cuts in this heartwarming video which shows us, as Stuart pointed out on Next Left recently, that ordinary and very real emotions underpin the movement against this government’s economic policies – emotions which generally don’t find their place in modern mainstream political reporting.

As one of the interviewees points out, this is definitely “… a true reflection of society …”.

The video is funded by www.philosophyfootball.com – my dear dissenting capitalist friends who make and sell wonderful objects of reasonable and sensitive protest.

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