The trouble with G.O’D.

The Guardian reports today that Sir Gus O’Donnell – head of the Civil Service – blocked an attempt by Gordon Brown to launch a judicial inquiry into the phone hacking affair because of the general election.

Given recent revelations, that looks like particularly poor judgement.

And it raises another important question: is Sir Gus O’Donnell too political to be head of the Civil Service?

On the one hand, you might agree with his analysis that it would “inappropriate to hold a judicial inquiry so close to a general election”, as the Guardian reports – any such inquiry would likely have become a campaigning issue due to (a) the fact former Editor of the News of the World, Andy Coulson , was a key part of David Cameron’s so-called ‘inner circle’ and (b) Labour had lost the support of the News of the World (and the Sun).

On the other hand, the appointment of Andy Coulson – and his retention even when the evidence of widespread phone hacking continued to drip into the public sphere – calls into question Cameron’s judgement. It is entirely appropriate for political opponents to highlight this.

More fundamentally, the proximity or otherwise of elections should not be used to insulate politicians from poor decision making, and nor should it be used to obfuscate the judicial process – remember, victims of phone hacking were subject to illegal acts for which some reporters have already been imprisoned.

This is the second time in 10 months that Sir Gus O’Donnell’s advice has been called into question – the first related to his role in the coalition negotiations last summer.

Is it now time for him to go?

Alex Baker is Secretary of the Young Fabians.

Are some wars better than others?

Is a civil war better than military intervention by other countries?

I ask because the Stop The War Coalition is tonight demonstrating against military intervention in Libya. On its website, the Stop The War coalition lists ten reasons against military intervention, which include:

• As soon as NATO starts to intervene, the Libyan people will start to lose control of their own country and future.
• Intervention can only prolong, not end the civil war.
• Intervention will lead to escalation.
• Respecting Libya’s sovereignty is the cause of peace, not is enemy.
• This is not Spain in 1936, it is more like Iraq in the 1990s. Or Kosovo and Bosnia.
• It is about oil.
• It is also about pressure on Egyptian revolution.
• NATO will only ever intervene to strangle genuine social revolution, never to support it.
• Liberal interventionism cannot be allowed to rise from the graves of Iraq and Afghanistan.

I’m not making these up, unfortunately.

Behind the assertion and the otherwise objectionable argumentation put forward by the Stop The War Coalition is a worrying underlying implication – that it is better to leave Colonel Gaddafi to use military force against his people, than risk shedding blood by intervening to oppose his brutality.

We’ve been here before.

Perhaps the Stop The War Coalition would like to believe there are moral absolutes – that killing is absolutely wrong. But the implications of taking a stance against military intervention to prevent civil war is that you might condemn people to die by other means. So much for your morals.

Or perhaps they are comfortable with military action in general, but object to the deployment of military force by a country in situations where there is no direct threat to its own people. But that is just as illogical – why oppose specific types of military action when you’re comfortable with the concept in general?

Or, more likely, perhaps the Stop The War Coalition long ago lost any coherence to its core aims.

The vexed issue of our involvement in military activity overseas did not resolve itself with the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Bad people exist, and some of those do bad things to others. On the facts of each case, there may be merit in acting to stop them on humanitarian grounds. The bad people may die as a consequence. So too might some good. But they might have anyway.

But that cannot be the intention of countries acting to intervene – they act to prevent unnecessary loss of life, not to cause it. However, doing so is not without risks.

Moral relativism might be troubling, but being a moral absolutist about military intervention appears unsustainable.

Alex Baker is Secretary of the Young Fabians.

Why David Lammy is wrong

In advance of this week’s vote on tuition fees, David Lammy has penned an article for the Guardian titled “The Oxford whitewash”, in which he basically accuses Oxford of institutional racism – it is, he argues, the university of the elitists in Government and “continues to recruit in the same image”. The tuition fee hike will only entrench that, he concludes.

There are several things wrong with David Lammy’s article, not least his questionable use of statistics – see here, here or here for example. But what most angers and worries me is that apparently serious Labour politicians continue to bemoan the symptoms of a deeper problem, rather than its root cause.

I’ll declare my interest early on – I went to Oxford. It’s not something I’m ashamed of – I worked hard at my local state-funded community college to get the grades, and even harder at the interviews to get the place.

While at the university, I helped on various access schemes including Sutton Trust summer schools and other outreach work. I tried to do my bit to encourage people with backgrounds like mine to believe that Oxford was a university for them, because I genuinely believe it is if you can get the grades and demonstrate potential to tutors.

But what struck me about the then 16 and 17 year olds I spoke to is that a worrying number of them had already made up their minds that Oxford and Cambridge were not the sort of universities people like them went to. Much of the outreach work I did was probably fruitless – not because of the best endeavours of the committed outreach staff at the university, but because those they targeted were beyond convincing of the merits of even applying.

Those experiences convinced me that while universities must do their bit to encourage applications, the real problem was that in schools like the one I went to there is a real poverty of aspiration. Kids aren’t necessarily encouraged to do their best, but to do enough to make league table statistics look a bit better (for example, I remember a lot of effort was spent trying to move kids on the C/D borderline at GCSE into the cherished A*-C grade). This isn’t a reflection on the teachers, of which there are many outstanding examples, but of the structure of the national curriculum system and the practical difficulties of making comprehensive education work.

It is easy for politicians to push the burden of outreach onto universities – it allows them to think less about policies to widen participation in primary and secondary schools, and gives them someone to blame when things don’t work out.

And it is easy for Labour politicians to play the elitist card, both about the current government and about Oxford and Cambridge.

But that won’t help change the problem Lammy identifies. The more Labour politicians bang on about elitism at Oxford and Cambridge – rather than do something useful like focus on the evident poverty of aspiration in state schools – the more likely talented young people from disadvantaged backgrounds will think that they’re not the sort of universities for people like them.

Instead Labour politicians should hold such universities up as the sort of institutions to which anybody should aspire; they should fight for a higher education system in which more universities develop world-leading specialisms; and they should advocate policies at all levels of education which are likely to result in higher volume of applications to world-leading universities (not just Oxford and Cambridge).

Labour should be the party that puts forward a positive vision for our higher education system, and the impact it can have on people’s lives. But instead the temptation to inverted snobbery is too great.

David Lammy is right to be concerned about the impacts of changes to the higher education system on those from disadvantaged backgrounds, but he is wrong to use lazy, worn arguments about elitism to make his point.

Alex Baker is Secretary of the Young Fabians.

Ed, take your time and don’t be hurried

PMQs is a pantomime but it’s one that needs to be entertaining for the right reasons.

With poll results coming in showing Labour on 40 per cent and, amongst students, 42 per cent the question has to be weather difficult PMQ episodes like today’s really matter? Some say yes, some say no. It is no good claiming piously that PMQs is a Westminster oddity that plays badly to the country – we all know it is one of the worst public excesses Westminster allows itself. Nor is it a case of simply taking it on the chin as a ‘bad week’ which won’t happen again. Irrespective of your view, a British political leader needs to show their ability to command PMQs.

Right stupidity

In this Guest Post, Young Fabian member Christine Quigley takes issue with calls for “a leader of the Labour right”.

For ten minutes, we were all playing nice. Labour had elected a new leader, and Party Conference saw a swell of support for (not-quite-Red) Ed from all sections of the party. Most of us were just relieved that the long wait was over, and that we could begin the serious work of winning back the country from the Conservatives, rather than sniping at rival supporters over Twitter. For me at least, the Manchester conference this year embodied a feeling that we were all on the same side.

A feeling that lasted right up until I read Sion Simon’s blogpost yesterday about the need for a leader of the Labour Right.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the Labour Right has a leader. His name’s Ed Miliband. He’s the same leader as everyone else in the party has.

Calls like Sion Simon’s do nothing but further foster factions within the party. Debate is good; division is not. We need only to look at Labour’s implosion into internal wrangling after the 1951 and 1979 election defeats to know how disastrous this sort of infighting can be. Just last week, some Conservatives were attempting to capitalise on disaffected David Miliband supporters by extending the warm hand of friendship (and an invitation to join the party). I have great faith in all those who supported the defeated leadership candidates to back our new leader; putting party over petty factionalism.

We have always been a party that accommodates different voices, and we are stronger for it. It’s crucial that important decisions and policy positions that we take up over the next few years are discussed and debated, to ensure that we’re getting them right. But the scattergun support picked up by the leadership candidates itself demonstrated how individuals can cross factional boundaries. Setting up a candidate to channel right-wing dissent isn’t helping anyone. (And really – Ed Balls?) We have to stop talking about right and left and start talking about what we all believe in; fairness, equality and justice.

So, whether you’re a unilateral-nuclear-disarmament, nationalise-it-all, dyed-in-the-wool red, or the palest pink ultra-Blairite, now is the time to redouble your support for Ed Miliband and the new Shadow Cabinet team. We won’t all agree on everything the party leadership does over the next four-and-a-half years, but we can agree on one thing; Britain is better under a Labour Government. That’s something we all need to fight for.

On a progressive note

In this Guest Post, Young Fabian member Alex Adranghi ponders the meaning of the word ‘progressive’.

Whether it’s the debate on higher education funding, tax credits, or party ideology, the much sought after ground is that of a ‘progressive’. With a liberal usage, the term has become synonymous for all things good. The progressive position is claimed by all parts of the political spectrum, so either all claimants share a common policy – which is clearly not the case, or it is a word with different meanings for different people.

So what does progressive mean?

Puritans will say that being a progressive is merely accepting the world as dynamic and embracing reform with changing ideas of society. This is also the widest description. Others may go further and add a particular direction to policy – the aims to make society more inclusive and fair. More tangible still is the position that being a progressive is about tackling societies problems starting with the most vulnerable and weak before moving through society. This ties in with another definition of progressive in terms of taxation. But even this has limited use as most of the spectrum would agree with these notions, yet there is a constant jostling for the progressive crown.

If we were playing a game of chess, a progressive might accept the state of play and look for the next move to maximise the value of their position. But if they wanted to force the game to take a particular course, is the progressive limiting what moves they can make now? If we are steering towards an ideology, does this impair their progressive credentials? We aren’t adapting to the needs of society, but we are coming to the table with preconceptions on what direction society needs to go.

Does this mean that true progressives are playing the short game, with no strategic designs of future? Or does this mean that being a progressive is nothing about future intentions, but merely how willing you are to make the next move? If the latter, how do you measure how progressive a policy is?

For example, if we accept climate change is having a critical effect now the sustainability of our society for this generation and the next, should we not be doing everything we can to avert it? Or do we want a balance with ensuring jobs and prosperity for people today? Where does it leave us if we are managing conflicting progressive policies on a manifesto of topics? Less progressive? How do you measure each package?

The parties argue that they are the most progressive of them all. Does the political spectrum measure from the same stick? Or is a better measure of the policies of different parties just political ideology? If “progressiveness” isn’t a metric which allows comparison of policies, then why do we use the term at all?

Activists and supporters have an opinion greater than many in the public, but does using the term progressive obfuscate our message to the electorate compared to a situation in which we used, for example, the long-since abandoned “S-word”?

Out of the shadows and genuine contenders

Gosh, it’s like the start of the season isn’t it, when after several months of no action, a few last minute arrivals on transfer deadline day, and then finally you get to see the team that hopefully is going to lead you to glory. 

I maintain what I wrote over on the Progress blog at the end of the summer, that there is much for Labour to be optimistic about. That is not to say that times won’t be tough – they will – but to believe that we can build confidently from the position we are in.

Ed’s got a strong team. Number of women is pleasing and the other side are quite rattled if this offensive blog from Toby Young is anything to go by. A few surprises last night, but it’s already quite exciting to see the job titles next to the new names. Our leader began well last week of course when he forced Nick Brown not to stand for Chief Whip. 

Alan Johnson is a great choice for Shadow Chancellor. He will provide a stark contrast to George Osborne and, despite his prominent allegiances during the leadership election, will be fiercely loyal to his boss. Most of all, there seemed a risk that Labour’s most natural media performer was going to be buried away shadowing the Leader of the House. Here, he will be up front (last football metaphor, I promise) and the public face of Labour opposition to flawed Tory – ahem, Coalition – economic policy and its potentially devastating consequences. 

It’s good to see Yvette Cooper get a prominent role, though I think I would have kept her in domestic policy. Is Andy Burnham’s move from health to education a sign Ed isn’t going to make the national care service a central plank of his policy offer? Andy’s personal experiences and drive to challenge barriers to aspiration and achievement will make him a passionate voice on education. 

One of Ed’s big decisions was over Peter Hain. Did he promote a key ally or did he signal the new generation by appointing one of the other Welsh contenders who lost out? It looks to me like the re-appointment of Shaun Woodward to shadow Northern Ireland is aimed to mitigate Ed taking the former approach. Angela Eagle is a good choice for shadow chief secretary but previous post-holder Liam Byrne is hard done by not to get bigger job than shadow cabinet office minister. 

I was pleased to see John Healey do well last night and think he will succeed in both articulating new Labour health policy and attacking Andrew Lansley’s complex reforms of the NHS. 

Some early reflections then with plenty to stew over ahead of parliament’s return next week. I, for one, am looking forward to seeing them all get stuck in.

We must stand by our NHS

In this guest post, Young Fabian member Martin Edobor argues that we might fight the proposed changes to the structure of NHS service provision in the UK, or risk undoing many of the improvements Labour achieved in its time in government.

Upon reading the Coalition Government’s NHS white paper, I was both shocked and dismayed with their plans to restructure the NHS. The proposals are likely reverse the progress that has been made under Labour, where the NHS delivered a new level of health and equality to the people of Britain.

One of the major proposed changes is to give GPs the power to commission the vast majority of health services for patients, which would result in the closure of Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) – the bodies currently tasked with commissioning healthcare from NHS providers. At this moment in time a reorganisation would be the wrong direction to take; in this period of financial uncertainty, the NHS requires stability.

Michael Dixon, Chair of the NHS Alliance, has argued that only 5% of GPs are ready to take over commissioning. While the chief executive of the NHS, Sir David Nicholson, has suggested that the quality of current GP practice-based commissioners isn’t at the level which would be required to transfer commissioning to them under the proposed timetable. At this moment in time, most GPs are simply not prepared nor ready to commission services for their communities. By pushing forward with this reform, the Coalition Government are placing the quality of GP services at risk.

Another major announcement is the increase in patient choice of providers, but this is likely to lead to privatisation by the back door. Allowing private firms greater opportunities to win NHS contracts may result in a two tier system, where those with money will be able to receive better care than those without.

Edward Davies, editor of BMJ Career Focus, claims that the white paper was ‘expected and little more than a logical continuation of 13 years work from the previous government’. He couldn’t be more wrong: the British public did not vote for a re-organisation or privatisation of the NHS. For that reason we must do all we can to oppose this white paper, in order to maintain the quality of the service the NHS provides.

Seriously, what are MPs for?

It struck me when reading the post by my colleague, Vincenzo Rampulla, on Nick Clegg’s Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill that there is something else missing from this debate that was almost entirely absent too from the commentary on the expenses crisis last year.

Really it’s the first principles of making the sort of administrative changes IPSA has led, and constitutional changes, now being sought by the Coalition government: the role of MPs in 2010, and beyond.

The work of an MP has evolved and it seems incredulous that changes to how the offices of MPs are financed and, right now, how many people an MP should represent, are being pushed through without proper discussion; in parliament or amongst the general public.

Surely we should be asking what, in the twenty-first century, MPs are for, seeking to reaffirm why the public need them, and agree somewhat on what they are expected to do, before we determine how many are needed and how we provide funds for them to carry out their duties and represent their constituents?

The evolution has seen a massive increase in casework and the huge demands of extensive scrutiny and pressure led by mass media, and latterly, new media. The British public – but particularly those people that rely upon governments more like the last than the ideological service-cutters currently residing in Downing Street – deserve to openly discuss where the focus of their representatives’ work should be before they are told they have to get in the queue behind more people.

Shortly before parliament was dissolved in April, retiring Labour MP, Mark Todd, in a criticism of parliament’s failure to address this core issue, conveyed the nature of change:

First, what are the understood functions of a Member? In Churchill’s definition, published in the 1950s, the role was threefold, and in order of priority. I have edited it to remove the explicit sexism from his text. He said that the roles of a Member were: to exercise judgment in the interests of Great Britain; to act as a representative, but not a delegate, of his or her constituents; and to serve his or her party’s interests.

The Select Committee on Modernisation’s report on the role of Back-Bench Members, published in 2007, set out the following functions. Unlike Churchill’s, they are not in priority order. They were: supporting their party in votes in Parliament; representing and furthering the interests of their constituency; representing individual constituents and taking up their problems and grievances; scrutinising and holding the Government to account and monitoring, stimulating and challenging the Executive; initiating, reviewing and amending legislation; and contributing to the development of policy, whether in the Chamber, Committees or party structures, and promoting public understanding of party policy.

He goes on to highlight one such moment in time that accelerated change:

An MP serving between 1935 and 1950 said that, ”before 1939, unless there was some controversy afoot, I rarely received more than twenty letters a week…But after the election of 1945, everything was changed…suddenly the MP ceased to be a politician and potential statesman and became an official of the welfare state. Thousands wanted houses; old people wanted pensions; ex-service men wanted jobs; everybody wanted something and ‘write to your MP’ became a cliché”.

But it wasn’t the only instance – change has been both rapid, and inconsistently distributed amongst constituencies.

IPSA has set out its stall. Instead of taking the moral and long-term approach, the new independent authority took the populist approach of clamping down on ‘expenses’ (and this did need action even if I may not have chosen the exact same route to doing so myself) without considering the very real need to provide finances for MPs to act in their constituents’ interests. The media were allowed to get away with a characterisation that most MPs were on the take rather than a sensible dialogue being cultivated about the need for (fairly paid) staff with the resources to do their jobs. I sense no movement here.

But the Coalition’s intentions to reduce the number of MPs present an opportunity to discuss why – beyond a simplistic, yet dubious, argument of savings to the public purse – British people’s representation should change, not least as the reforms are not linked to a democratisation of parliament’s upper house. I suggest to the prime minister that this country needs effective representation, not less representation. Debating and consulting on the role of MPs would help determine whether I, or Mr Cameron, is right. If the expenses crisis taught us anything, it is that Britons very firmly expect more of their MPs. It is hard to see how the Coalition’s reforms can possibly provide this.

Stories that speak volumes: Refugee Week 14th – 20th June

“Don’t sit on the sofa. When people sit on the sofa they get red spots on them and they itch too bad. I tell (accommodation provider) but they say it’s my fault because I must not have a dog in the house. I don’t have a dog. I am Muslim I don’t have dogs”

(Beyond Borders, Nottingham’s Refugee Week publication 2010)

Sometimes it’s the simple stories that speak volumes. The treatment of asylum seekers and refugees in the UK is an issue I never stop hearing shocking stories about. A quiet man from Congo Brazzaville who had won the respect of his British community through hours of volunteering and kindness, still with torture marks on his body and a judicial review open, forcibly deported with handcuffed hands and feet carried by 4 security guards onto a plane…A Kurdish man from a political family sent back because the area was considered safe with no regard for his family’s background, dead within a month of deportation.The UK’s disrespect for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in its treatment of asylum seekers has long been spoken of anecdotally.

Last week brought news of ‘special arrangements’ by the Home Office to speed up the deportation of a group of asylum seekers to Iraq. The Guardian (Tuesday 8th June) explained:

‘Government lawyers have warned high court judges that last-minute legal challenges should not be allowed to “disrupt or delay” a deportation flight to Baghdad due to leave Britain early tomorrow…The disclosure of the “special arrangements” around the charter flight to Baghdad sparked strong concern from immigration legal experts, who said that government lawyers were trying to tell high court judges how to do their jobs…
This is the first time the detailed operations of the “special arrangements” surrounding such deportation flights have become public. But the immigration minister, Damian Green, said they were standard procedure and had been used in 16 previous flights to northern Iraq.’

This is what makes me sad. All political parties are guilty. Something is not right. Asylum seekers have the right to a fair process to assess whether they are eligible for refugee status, and most of all they deserve to be treated as human beings. Why does the UK have such a bad record on this?

Gary Young wisely titled an article in the Guardian on 26 April 2010:

‘Yes, we need an honest immigration debate. But this tough talk isn’t it. Racist fear-mongering prevents discussion of the poverty, natural disasters and wars that cause people to emigrate’.

It also encourages intolerance and lack of understanding:

“They (UK Border Agency) don’t have any idea about our background or what circumstances we have been through. For example, they would ask you about when you had to report to the police in your country: “Where is the copy of the statement now?” How can anybody make them understand that in a country in which there is no photocopier in the University how can there be one in a police station? For God’s sake don’t torture those who have already been tortured.”

(Beyond Borders, Nottingham’s Refugee Week publication 2010)

May Refugee Week 2010 be an opportunity of more of us to take a minute to understand a little more about the truth, rather than the myths, surrounding asylum seekers and refugees, and to move as a country towards a better record on this issue.

www.refugeeweek.org.uk
www.refugee-action.org.uk
www.refugeecouncil.org.uk