Bob Piper has been a Labour Councillor for the Abbey
Ward in Sandwell, West Midlands, for 10 years. He is a lifelong supporter of Aston Villa Football Club and a follower of Yorkshire County Cricket Club.
The views expressed here are mine in a personal capacity, not those of the Labour Party, Sandwell MBC, Aston Villa or Yorkshire County Cricket Club. Get it! Mine... just mine!
Public bad, private good was the mantra of Thatcher's junta. Seamus Milne writes today in The Guardian on the way in which New Labour has slavishly followed the Thatcherite privatisation agenda, and the way Ministers have been rewarded for their work. To parliamentary expenses and second jobs, we also need to add the scandal of former Ministers feathering their own nests with consultancies, advisory posts and non-executive directorships in companies they have helped out during their time in office.
There is no end, it seems, to the fiasco of rail privatisation. For the second time in three years, the holder of the coveted east coast franchise has walked away from a contract it can no longer afford.
...For all its rise in passenger numbers, Britain's rail system remains hobbled by the folly of privatisation: overcrowded, unreliable, fragmented and exorbitantly expensive. But far from putting it out of its misery to create a reintegrated publicly owned railway at zero cost, the transport secretary, Lord Adonis, was yesterday insisting the east coast line would be up for tender again as soon as he could manage it.
...In England's health service creeping privatisation is turning into a full-frontal assault as the government strains every nerve to give health corporations a bigger slice of the action: not only in buildings and maintenance, but diagnostics, elective surgery, GPs' surgeries, district nursing, health visiting and trust commissioning – regardless of the views of staff and patients; the evidence on cost, inefficiency and lack of accountability; and the corrosive impact on the NHS ethos.
When Gordon Brown announced his new entitlement for cancer patients to be seen by a specialist within two weeks, he insisted on an entirely unnecessary extra pledge of private treatment if the NHS was unable to deliver. And when a string of private finance initiative projects – whose costs are now estimated to be double what they would be in the public sector – were on the point of collapse earlier this year, the government bailed them out rather than take them over.
Why is this going on, Milne asks, before answering his own question...
The revolving door that propels civil servants into the arms of companies for whom they previously set rules and signed off contracts was well established before New Labour came to power.
What's new for Labour is the stampede of ministers for the revolving door. Since 2006, 37 former members of the government have been given permission to take private sector jobs within two years of leaving office. As with their Tory predecessors, many of these jobs involve working for companies directly bidding for government contracts and privatised services. They include Blair himself, of course, whose £12m annual income now includes multimillion contracts with banking groups JP Morgan Chase and Zurich Financial Services, in a sector lovingly protected during his time in office.
I partially agree with Michael White here about the questioning of Michael Martin's suitability for a place in the House of Lords.
"But the Lords has its fair share of rascals of one kind or another, its mediocrities and time servers, its outright shits. And why not? It may be appointed, not elected, but it is meant to be a fairly representative sample of modern Britain – and probably does at least as well on that score as the elected Commons."
Where I differ from White is about whether we should continue with this ridiculous facade at all. When members of the House of Lords can keep their seats when found guilty of accepting cash for influencing legislation, or being found guilty and imprisoned for perjury, when they get there on the basis of ingratiating themselves to receive patronage or because their mother and father were able to reproduce... why be picky because some bloke gets there for being a not terribly good speaker of the House of Commons.
Peter Mandelson has accused his former yacht mate Gideon Osborne of being a lying little toad. OK... he didn't quite say that, but he did say there was...
"...a very unattractive pattern of behaviour that's starting to emerge with George Osborne, of innuendo in pursuit of a smear.
"Yesterday George Osborne issued a very serious allegation that the Prime Minister had intervened to deny the Opposition information they were entitled to.
This claim has been flatly denied by the Cabinet Secretary."
In the same way you should never bullshit a bullshitter, perhaps Gideon should realise you should never try to outscheme a schemer.
First, what Ed Balls said was “We have acted in the downturn, that will mean that the economy is stronger, we’ll have less unemployment, less debt.” Balls is saying that we generate less debt by shoring up the economy now, leading to lower unemployment and stronger growth figures, which in turn leads to less future debt overall. In other words, if we hadn’t acted, growth would be worse, the future public finances worse and there’d be less money to spend.* Apparently this statement of the countercyclically bleedin’ obvious is a “lie”.
Debt matters as a reflection of your ability to pay it back. If I owe a million pounds, it’s a crisis. If Bill Gates owes a million pounds, it’s an accountancy error. The same thing applies to nations. A country with a growing economy and growing tax revenues can service more debt. Debts that would force Henry VIII to nationalise the monastries are trifling to us because our GDP has grown.
Failing to understand this marks a journalist out as a numbskull, not a populist hero. It’s not even that hard to relate to day to day life. Mr F Nelson is political editor of The Watcher. He earns £50,000 and has a mortgage of £200,000 with repayments of £12500 a year. He has a debt to annual income ratio of 400%! Debt repayments take up a quarter of his income! Eeeek!
Fortunately, the next day he is made political adviser to the leader of the keepthingsthesame party at a salary of £400,000. He now has a debt to annual income ratio of 50%, and the cost of servicing that debt is a tiny 2.5% of his income.
If you can't get that... choose this... (from the incomparable Beau Bo D'Or)
Alan Johnson's announcement that id cards will not be compulsory for British citizens is to be welcomed. The Government always insisted that it would not be an offence not to carry your id card, and on that basis alone its capacity to counter terrorism was seriously ineffective. The notion that Osama Bin Laden, stopped by police shopping in West Bromwich, would be given 7 days to produce his id card at a local police station was always a bit daft.
However, I suspect the 'not compulsory' element does not run to UK passports. The biometric passports are going to become compulsory in many countries in the world in any event, so I would imagine the Government will plough ahead with that. So, I suppose the fact that you can 'choose' whether or not you have a passport means it removes at least some element of the compulsion, but I suspect some people will still be uneasy about the amount of information the biometric database will hold.
I write this having sat for hours on one of Richard Branson's high speed railway carriages, in heat way into the nineties, with the air conditioning broken down whilst a signal failure was addressed near Watford Junction. Bloody private sector... couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery!
Blogging may be light over the next couple of days because for I seem to have chosen the hottest two days of the year to go tramping around London in a suit.
THE Newcastle United board has decided to alienate its few remaining fans with a new away kit that looks like a boiled sweet made from urine.
The kit will go on sale next week, priced to meet the value for money expectations of gullible, colour-blind halfwits.
Defender Steven Taylor, who modelled the strip, said: "This is possibly the biggest tit I've felt since joining Newcastle, and I spend most of the season being dumped on my arse while the opposition hoof the ball into the roof of the net."
Which reminds me... today's daft lunchtime pub footie question was... "Can you name the only English football league team not to have any of the letters from the word 'mackrel' 'mackerel' in their name?" No cheating now....
It is the Cameron pledge to govern as New Labour, which is what has got him the friendship of the BBC. Mr Davis was cynically destroyed in his Tory leadership campaign by London liberal PR men and journalists working in concert to promote the unknown, undistinguished David Cameron. He was left out in the cold when he staged his ill-advised but rather admirable one-man campaign for liberty a year ago.
Now much as I would love to see internecine warfare break out amongst Tories only months ahead of a General Election, and a wholesale challenge to the 'liberal' Conservatism that Cameron has spent over 3 years trying to flog to the Conservative Party and the public... it just ain't going to happen. I think it demonstrates brilliantly how out of touch with reality many of these political commentators actually are.
I’ve just finished reading Gary Imlach’s splendid My Father and Other Working Class Football Heroes, and I can heartily recommend it to anyone interested in football and its place in our social history. Stewart Imlach was a footballer from the pre-Premiership, pre-Sky days of the maximum wage and when footballers were traded like commodities, with little or no say in their own destiny.
I see the Premier League, and all of the razzamatazz surrounding it as a pretty good metaphor for New Labour. Sky TV and the Premier League have almost reinvented the game, as if everything that went before was irrelevant or of little genuine consequence. The hundred years that went before conveniently forgotten or treated as some sort of historical relic. So it seems too with New Labour.
The days when the Party would oppose madcap privatisation of essential services, or have a genuine dialogue with the trade union movement, are regarded with the same sort of puzzled scorn that young football fans reserve for grainy black-and-white images of Tom Finney or Jimmy Greaves. Never mind the fact that Greaves easily outscored Shearer, or that Finney had to display his skills on a mud heap rather than a billiard table surface. And the Preston plumber would rather have quit the game than rely upon cheating like the diving Ronaldo and his fellow prima donnas.
Of course, with the old Football League, and Old Labour, nostalgia can give the old spectacles a rosy tint. I don’t yearn for the days when the only people treated with less respect than the players by a football club were the spectators themselves. The terraces, open to the elements, were a disgrace, the toilets were worse, and the ‘refreshments’ on offer were anything but refreshing. And on the pitch itself the levels of physical violence would lead to games being abandoned for two few players in the current disciplinary climate. Nor for the days when women were welcomed by the Labour Party to make the sandwiches for the socials, and black people and other minority groups were regarded with suspicion and worse. The days when trade union general secretaries would wield the votes of millions, without having to trouble to consult the poor bloody infantry.
Perhaps it is just a case of the older generation saying things were better in my day, I don’t know, but nostalgia has never been a big thing with me. I tend towards the Loudon Wainwright III lyric… “The good old days are good and gone, that’s why they’re good, because they’re gone.” But back in the day, both the game and the Party seemed to be about more than money. Way back then the right wing of the Party used to manipulate us in order to get their policies through, not because someone was offering them a windfall on a second mortgage or a new kitchen from John Lewis.
And because then, our footballers and politicians came from us, and lived amongst us. And they had passion for what they did because they loved it, not because it paid well. And both were essentially working class.
But with 'Others' polling as high as 19% in recent opinion polls, and flushed with their success in the Euro elections, I wouldn't rule out a UKIP challenge to Bercow at the General Election. With Cameron constantly being criticised by his rank-and-file for shilly-shallying over Europe, it may well be a challenge the Tories would find highly embarrassing. They might yet live to regret their pettiness over the Speaker election.
Chris Mullin's diaries, A View From the Foothills are amongst the most readable political diaries I have ever read. Now, via Hopi's superb post here, I see we are able to read his views on some of the monumental events over the last few weeks, courtesy of the London Review of Books. Here's a taster:
6 June. After days of angst the deckchairs on the Titanic have been rearranged. Alistair Darling is staying put. Peter Mandelson will henceforth be known as ‘first secretary’, which effectively means deputy prime minister. Incredibly, he has found a way of making himself indispensable again, not that his considerable talents aren’t urgently needed. Alan Johnson becomes home secretary. Bob Ainsworth replaces John Hutton at defence and Peter Hain returns as Welsh secretary. Not forgetting Alan Sugar, who has been appointed ‘enterprise tsar’ in place of the unlamented Digby Jones. Another classic piece of gimmickry which will inevitably backfire. Whatever next? Susan Boyle for culture minister?
I couldn't argue with many of the things in Simon Jenkins' article in the Guardian yesterday....This gaping hole calls for a new party. Let's call it Labour. But I do object to being lectured to on the subject by those very same Guardianistas who spent a decade grovelling at Tony Blair's feet and telling the world just exactly how 'New' New Labour was in breaking the mould of British politics.
Jenkins is right to criticise New Labour for its neo-Thatcherite tendencies, its pro-privatisation, and its sucking up to the bankers and the wealthy. But I can find no article in The Guardian from Patrick Jenkin calling for support for John McDonnell's leadership campaign which argued for just this agenda. In fact, a quick trawl through Jenkins' back catalogue reveals a man who never understood why his Uncle Tony was leaving him in the first place. It shows us a man who thinks that revitalising democracy, rather than empowering people, is actually better served by Blairite-Mayors, concentrating power in the hands of a single person. A man who thinks the only thing Brown got right about the Iraq Inquiry... was holding it in bloody secret!
So, when the likes of Jenkins, Toynbee, Bright and the others start arguing for a new Party, it is important to understand that they are not arguing for a left agenda, but from the right. What they actually want, is a New New Labour.
With a little bit of luck a good proportion of the BNP's £250,000 income stream from its new European MPs will go towards the cost of their solicitors.
Skipper speculates in his penultimate paragraph here, about the possibility that the Tory attitude to John Bercow may be as a result of a residual anti-semitism in the Conservative Party.
I recall a very senior adviser to a former Tory PM telling me he was sure Leon Brittan had his career derailed partly because of residual anti-semitism in the senior ranks of the Conservative Party. Bercow, as we know, is the son of a humble Jewish taxi-driver.
Whilst I think Bill's points are usually very well made, I think this is a non-starter and doesn't stand up to investigation. Leon Brittan was far from alone as a Jewish member of Thatcher's governments. David Young, Nigel Lawson, Malcolm Rifkind, Michael Howard and Keith Joseph all come readily to mind, and at one time the counter allegation was that Thatcher was surrounding herself with Jews. I think Jews represent less than half of one percent of the population, and with anything up to 20% of cabinet members from the Jewish faith, it hardly represents a residual anti-semitism I wouldn't have thought. And in the current Conservative Party I would imagine the support for Conservative Friends of Israel far outstrips those who would lend any support to the Friends of Palestine.
If there was only one good reason any Labour MP could think of for voting for John Bercow to be the Speaker of the House of Commons, it would be to rub the nose of the likes of the obnoxious little turd Quentin Letts deep into the dirt. I'm grateful to Paul Linford for referring me to this piece of spiteful bile from Letts in last week's HeilOnLine last week. You don't have to plough through all of the garbage to realise what a snobbish, patronising right-wing little git Letts is. Just try this...
So who is this Bercow? His father was a London car salesman-cum-taxi driver, his mother a legal secretary.
You can hear the in-built sneer in Letts' voice as he reads these words out to himself. 'This Bercow' went to a comprehensive school, for God's sake... and Essex bloody University! Not for him the finery of Haileybury and Imperial Service College or Trinity, Dublin, or Jesus Cambridge, where young Quentin didn't have to mix with the oiks who might be the sons of 'car salesman-cum-taxi drivers'.
Who said the class war was dead? Not me, that's for sure!
Update: I see that Letts, ever the graceless loser, is now floating the notion that should the Tories win a majority in the next General Election they will demand a vote to unseat Bercow and replace him with one of theirs. And well they might. But they should be careful what they wish for, because any such move will end even the facade of a neutral Speaker of the House. We will move to a situation where the Speaker will kow tow to whoever the opinion polls tell them will win the next election, so that they can offer them sweeteners to keep them in a job. Because sure as eggs is eggs, if Bercow were dismissed in this way, a future Labour Government would be under tremendous pressure to do the same, and sack the Tory choice next time around.
Oh deary, deary me. Will the next candidate for Deputy Mayor of London step this way please.
"Ian Clement, deputy mayor for government and external relations, has resigned from the Greater London authority with immediate effect. He tendered his resignation to the mayor of London this morning following the discovery of further discrepancies in the use of his corporate credit card. The mayor has accepted Mr Clement's resignation. His position will be filled in due course."
Well, everyone else appears to be speculating, so for what it's worth... I wouldn't back against George Young as Speaker.
The hacks should be well pleased with the 6th Baronet Sir George Samuel Knatchbull Young (Eton and Oxford) though. No more "Gorballs Mick" to patronise, and Young is always ready with a throwaway quip for the media. He was the Housing Minister who once joked that 'the homeless are the sort of people you step over when you come out of the opera'. According to They Work for You he is strongly against the hunting ban, moderately against equal gay rights, and in strongly favour of Trident renewal. Just the sort of man we need to get parliament to re-engage with the people.
When it comes to exchanging parliamentary tittle-tattle, you've got to give it to the man... Iain Dale is the master. No-one does it better.
But when it comes to discussing serious political issues, he's about as much use as a chocolate ironing board! Today's analysis (no, sorry, glib comments) on the US and UK response to the situation in Iran plumbs new depths though. Just have a quick flick through the comments below the piece to see that even the Dalettes are deeply embarrassed by his nonsense.
Cameron's own soundbite comments have displayed his own desperation for a headline, irrespective of how comical the content. Dale's slavish desire to suck up to his leader have only succeeded in showing why he should leave the heavy stuff alone and stick to the gossip.
This much I know... Dennis Skinner. I keep out of the House of Commons bars because it's a sloppy embrace. I wasn't allowed to dig coal and drink at the same time.
I've been in the bottom three for parliamentary expenses for the past five years. I've always paid my own mortgage.
There were 30 people in for a heart bypass when I was in the Brompton Hospital, and every single operation was a success. I rang the BBC and said: "Send a Panorama team down here to talk about the NHS." They said: "Oh yes, what's gone wrong?" I said: "Nothing! We're all living! We're all over 60!" Did they send a Panorama team? Did they hell as like!
I must have spoken in every English constituency in the past 30-odd years. People use it as a money-raising exercise. I'm like Labour's answer to Lord Ashcroft.
For those of you with an interest in modern politics, and for those who think councils spying on your dustbins represents the police state... tonight on More 4 is just for you.
First up, at 9pm we have a documentary... Strike: When Britain Went To War. Without doubt the weakest of the three films, it's attempt at 'balance' makes little attempt to explain the issues behind the strike, gives us the likes of Mathew Parris and other media whores, and our side is put by... Neil Kinnock ('nuff said).
But this is followed by Ken Loach's Which Side Are You On? which includes some of the poems and songs that came out of the strike. Finally, at just after midnight, Mike Figgis' excellent The Battle of Orgreave, a drama re-enactment of the way in which Thatcher's paramilitary police brutalised the miners and laid siege to much of Northern England.
If you want some excellent reading around the strike, I can recommend David Peace's GB84.
place in our social history. Stewart Imlach was a footballer from the pre-Premiership, pre-Sky days of the maximum wage and when footballers were traded like commodities, with little or no say in their own destiny.
Skipper speculates