Councillor Bob Piper

In February 2009, the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, David William Donald Cameron flexed his muscles to the British people. Gordon Brown’s Government were weak, said Cameron, and he told The Guardian:

Cameron said today that bankers “needed to wake up and smell the coffee” as he urged ministers to tear up existing bank executive contracts at semi-nationalised banks to prevent them receiving any bonuses this year.

[Cameron argued] …that the government, as majority shareholder in some of the banks, could simply force the issue. Cameron said “it is infuriating to listen to all this stuff about ‘existing contracts must be kept to’.

In fact, only last week ‘Determined’ Dave in the Mail…

…vowed to block a £1million bonus for the boss of a failed bank rescued by the taxpayer yesterday. The Prime Minister’s war on excessive executive pay comes as critics said Royal Bank of Scotland boss Stephen Hester should not receive ‘a penny in bonus’.

Speaking this afternoon Cameron’s Chancellor, Gideon Oliver Osborne, told the Davos Summit:

…that RBS bonuses were not set by the Government.

Speaking to broadcasters at the Davos World Economic Forum in Switzerland, Mr Osborne said: “They were determined by the board of RBS under arrangements set up by the previous government.”

Yes, but surely, Gideon, you can just tear those contracts up? It is so infuriating having to listen to all this stuff about ‘existing contracts must be kept to’ don’t you know?

You would think David Cameron had enough on his hands. The economy, Afghanistan (Iran?) benefit reforms, mass unemployment, the possible collapse of the Euro and the Eurozone. Certainly enough problems there to cause headaches for any government, let alone a Party leader whose party can’t command a majority in the House of Commons.

All of which makes his decision to stick with Andrew Lansley’s Health and Social Care Bill all the more mystifying. It won’t save the government any money, certainly not in the short term when dealing with the deficit is the mantra. It wasn’t in the Tory (nor the Yellow Tory) manifesto, nor the behind-closed-doors ‘coalition agreement’, and almost every serious body involved in health – with the exception of those looking to profit from the break up of the NHS – say that it won’t work.

Before the General Election it didn’t appear Cameron himself thought there was any necessity to fiddle with things. He went on the stump up and down the country dispelling all rumours of breaking up the NHS, and using his own family tragedy as an example of his commitment to the service. His famous quote about “No top down re-organisation of the NHS” came from a man who either didn’t know about Lansley’s plans, or is a bare-faced liar. Neither of which leave him in a good light.

The fact is, whilst Labour did waste some money on the NHS, (Agenda for Change, PFI) there were genuine and measurable improvements in healthcare and health outcomes during the Blair/Brown years. Waiting lists tumbled, as did waiting times for treatment, there were new acute and primary care facilities, more nurses and doctors, and in cancer care and heart disease the indicators were travelling in a direction that would make the NHS amongst the very best in Europe. Public approval of the NHS stood at 34% in 1997, and had risen to 70% by the time of the general election. Cameron wasn’t making his forked-tongued promises because he thought the NHS wasn’t working.

As I say, all of which makes his continual support for Lansley’s proposals which threaten to bring chaos across the service all the more mystifying. Whilst almost everyone expressed a desire to see a modernisation of the NHS, and a reduction in unnecessary tiers of bureaucracy, most people in the service were wise enough to realise that the scalpel was a more effective tool than Lansley’s blunt axe approach.

The Tory-Lib Dem dominated Health Select Committee is the latest body to throw cold water over plans to introduce this massive reorganisation of the health service at the same time as planning to implement £20billion of ‘efficiencies’ to the budget. We are not just talking about the trade unions here. Almost every conceivable body involved in providing healthcare, from surgeons, through general practitioners, to nurses has expressed at the very least, serious reservations about what these proposals will do.

As one doctor wrote in The Guardian:

 We will all be the worse off if we allow this disastrous bill to be passed. I feel this sentiment is shared by the overwhelming majority of doctors, nurses and the public. Members of the Royal College of General Practitioners have overwhelmingly backed moves for the health and social care bill to be scrapped, with more than 98% of respondents calling on the college to seek the withdrawal of the bill alongside other royal colleges. This view is also shared by the British Medical Association.

An e-petition to drop the health bill, led by Kailash Chand, has amassed over 36,000 signatures in the space of two weeks. Please sign it here and get as many other people to do so too.

From The Guardian Letters

 David Cameron believes he is on a crusade to drive a new “moral capitalism”. He should read Will Hutton on stakeholder capitalism and look to Germany, where employee representatives engage in corporate decision-making including levels of executive pay, local banks provide long-term support to business, apprenticeships remain common, stakeholders include suppliers and distributors, and community engagement stems from a responsibility to protect the interests of all employees.

The ghastly alternative of shareholder capitalism engineered by Conservative governments in the 1980s, and cravenly supported by New Labour, has destroyed UK manufacturing and turned the country into a spivs’ paradise, with investment banks and hedge-fund managers holding everyone, including the government, to ransom. Where is the moral compass in gambling on corporate failure? Or in ensuring that one of the few profitable UK manufacturing sectors left is an arms industry mostly in partnership with the US, a war-exporting economy?

Shareholder capitalism regards share value as the only criterion for success, encouraging foreign takeover of businesses like Cadbury’s that for 176 years had applied Quaker principles. Asset-stripping has become a national sport, devastating families and communities. It is inconceivable that Cameron will reverse this ruinous crusade on behalf of the super-rich parasites who have devastated the UK economy.

The tragedy is that the stakeholder model remains under attack throughout the western world. Without a multilateral turnaround by all OECD countries, beginning with the closure of tax havens and the imposition of a financial transaction tax, and the establishment of a World Environment Organisation possessing common powers and veto alongside the World Trade Organisation, we are heading towards an economic, environmental and social meltdown.

Simon Sweeney

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University of York

 Elderly homeowners will be encouraged to downsize to smaller properties and allow councils to rent their homes to local families under Coalition plans to ease the nation’s housing crisis

 Heaven only knows why, but the Government, the opposition, the media, and industry seem almost unanimously in favour of the ridiculous vanity scheme HS2. We are led to believe that the only people who are against this spiffing idea are a totally selfish bunch of rural dwellers whose homes and lives are about to be blighted by the prospect of trains flashing through their back gardens at speeds approaching 250 mph. Nimby buggers!

Apparently spending £32billion, at a time when we are supposedly belt tightening, in order to allow the super rich in 2025 to spend an extra half an hour in bed before commuting to the smoke in unashamed luxury, is supposed to be a bloody good idea. The notion that ordinary commuters will get their extra lie-in is pretty damned fanciful. The cost of tickets will be prohibitive and preference will go to those who want to lounge around in the office-style facilities of HS2, and whose companies are paying for the ticket. The remaining commuters can just bloody well get their arses out of bed at the usual time and struggle down to London crammed like sardines on the West Coast mainline which will be left to rot as investment is switched to digging tunnels in the Chilterns. Of course, outside the ‘rush hour’ day trippers will be allowed to take a supersonic trip… at a price, of course

Meanwhile, civic leaders in Birmingham stumble over themselves to tell everyone how this will be a tremendous boost to the region. Businesses will locate to the West Midlands from the over-heated South East when commuters can speed up to Birmingham in less than an hour.

Complete cobblers, of course.

We had similar arguments advanced here in the West Midlands when a metro line was built from Birmingham to Wolverhampton. Areas like Bilston and West Bromwich which were stops on the metro line would get a massive boost as the million customers from Birmingham flocked along the metro line to shop in the the suburbs. The reality was that people from Wolverhampton, Bilston, West Bromwich… found it easier to commute into Birmingham’s flashy Bull Ring… whilst the boards went up on the windows of the shops in the suburbs.

The reality is England is a fairly small country. You can travel to almost any major business centre in the country in a couple of hours or so. An exhorbitantly expensive train line designed to cut travel time by a few minutes (before getting off the train and sitting in a traffic jam) between two cities just over 100 miles apart seems to be no more than a bit of willy-waving by politicians desperate to show the world that we are really ‘modernised’ too.

If the nation really wants to invest in its infrastructure we could build new homes for our overcrowded youth, invest in decent social care facilities for our elderly, and build new schools to replace the rotting slum schools where many of our kids still have to try to eke out an education. It would not only get people back to work and reduce the benefit bills, it would give us some real ‘modernisation’.

Letter in The Guardian  

Michael Gove has extensive form in spending our money on his bizarre ideas. As an expert in buttering up his betters, he must be unrivalled. 

In 2005, he spent more than £7,000 of our money on furnishing his London home, including charging us for such essentials as a Manchu cabinet, a pair of elephant lamps and a Loire table. A few months later he moved, and flipped his second home allowance to a house in Surrey – for which he claimed over £13,000. 

 Last year, it was revealed, the Department of Education handed £500,000 to the New Schools Network, headed up by one of Gove’s friends, to promote free schools. There was no competitive bidding process. 

Gove’s own political career was no doubt boosted by the fact that about one third of his home spending in 2005 was with a company run by the prime minister’s aristocratic mother-in-law. Now he is courting royalty, but – as always – landing the taxpayer with the costs of his questionable taste. 

Nigel Gann, Chiselborough, Somerset

Off to see Christy and Declan tomorrow night in Dublin. Should be a great night.

Tomorrow marks the 10th anniversary of the first hostages detained by the United States government at their torture camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. On January 22, 2009, the White House announced that President Barack Obama had signed an order to say the concentration camp would be shut down within the year. As of today it remains open and 171 detainees remain at Guantanamo.

One of those still detained is Shaker Aamer, a British national with four children living in London. He has been in solitary confinement in an eight foot by six foot windowless cell for over six years after leading a hunger strike against the conditions in the camp. He is now very ill and his family and Clive Stafford-Smith from the organisation Reprieve which is campaigning for his release fear that he will now die in Guantanamo.

Foreign Office Minister Alistair Burt told BBC 5 live: “We have been making significant representations to the United States over a period of time.

“The prime minister has raised it, the foreign secretary has raised it, our officials have raised it, it’s a matter for the United States to release Shaker Aamer who is a legal UK resident, and we continue to make what representations we can.

“It is a matter for the United States authorities to take the decision to release.”

Some ‘Special Relationship’ eh? I cannot conceive of a better example of the way in which the United States government treats the UK government with complete contempt, and of British impotence in response. Does anyone imagine that if Britain was detaining a US national in the same sort of concentration camp as the US have constructed in Guantanamo that Hilary Clinton would casually shrug her shoulders, say “Well, the President tried, but at the end of the day, these decisions are down to the Brits.”

We should feel a deep sense of shame that Guantanamo was ever created in the 21st Century, and an even deeper sense of anger that it still exists ten years on.

Details of the Save Shaker Aamer campaign can be found here

The race has started (or should it be crawl) for those seeking to be an elected Mayor for the City of Birmingham. Well, to be strictly correct, the battle has started to convince the good folk of Birmingham that even if they elected a megalomanic of Mussolini proportions, they would be better served than they are under the ‘leadership’ of the Conservative-controlled coalition led by the hapless Mike Whitby.

Mike Whitby (the one on the left)

It is a good argument. To be honest, it’s about the best element of their argument. Even during the years before the bubble burst, when Gordon Brown had mysteriously defied the iron rule of capitalist boom and bust and everything in the garden was rosy… Birmingham was dragging itself deeper and deeper in to a quagmire, with Whitby leading from the front displaying all the bluster and strategic genius of George Armstrong Custer at Little Bighorn.

As I say, it is probably their strongest argument, but only because the rest are rubbish. We hear that it will give Birmingham a greater voice. A greater voice where, precisely? Around the Cabinet table? Are we seriously expected to believe that the government will quiver when faced with one of the three Labour candidates to have shown an interest so far? They may well be a passionate voice for the City, but that doesn’t mean anyone will listen.  Gisela Stuart is a fine local MP, and  Sir Albert Bore has led the City for years in the past,  and then there’s… errm, the bloke that made THAT video.

Now, that’s a voice the Government will really listen to.

We’re told they will be more responsive to popular demands because they are directly elected by the people. Which is a bit like saying, if we all elected the Prime Minister, rather than MPs voting for the Prime Minister, then the Prime Minister would listen to all of us, rather than having to be pestered with the House of Commons. The natural conclusion to which is… keep the Prime Minister, and abolish Parliament.

The other part of this argument says a Mayor would be able to act swiftly, without having to bother with the views of her/his  council colleagues… which (apparently) just wastes time. Yes, all that silly nonsense asking about how their constituents may be affected. Bloody waste of time!

One local blogger in favour of the Mayoral system pointed out that whereas the police and City Council dithered at the time of the riots last Summer, the Mayor would leap decisively into action. The good folk of Tottenham and elsewhere in London might want to mutter the words “Boris” and “Johnson” into their beer at this stage. Also, that is the Tory argument for directly elected police commissioners, whilst Labour stand on their heads and argue that commissioners would be expensive and not democratically accountable.

The reality is that Cameron, like Blair and Thatcher before him, loathes local government. They have had no experience of local government. Thatcher detested councillors from Clay Cross to the GLC, and Blair was the same, bloody Liverpool riff-raff defying him!  He even lost some interest in Mayors when Ken Livingstone showed him that the Prime Minister couldn’t just choose his own. Cameron thinks that with only a dozen people to berate covering virtually the whole country, life will be so much more simple.

And if people have deluded themselves into thinking that central government is introducing powerful City Mayors because it wants to create an alternative political focus and challenge to central government… then sadly, they are simple too! The truth is, since the arrival of the universal franchise, the establishment has slowly worked its way around the inconvenience of the ballot box. So on a national level we see whole chunks of our sovereignty are taken away, and in return we are given meaningless MEPs to vote for, and we are never even asked! Now at local government level we can elect a single person to make executive decisions, and in real Orwellian 1984 ‘newspeak’ we are told it is in the name of democracy.

At least the citizens of Birmingham will be given an opportunity to vote to emasculate their locally elected councillors (even further) – so perhaps they should be grateful for the crumbs from the masters’ table.  Those of us in what the arrogance of Birmingham like to describe as ‘Greater Birmingham’ are not even being given the opportunity to say ‘bugger off!’

Finally, it is amazing how often those folk who argue for elected Mayors are the very same democrats who favoured PR and the EU and – although they are a tad shy about it these days – a single European currency.

Well, I note that the ‘Yes2Brum Mayor’ people have all the flashing lights with knobs on.  A shiny website, and no doubt tons of glossy brochures, and the backing of a local democratic allies in the media.

But then again, so did Yes 2 AV! Their problem wasn’t the medium, it was that their message was crap!