Tony Benn Dies Aged 88 – An Icon of the English Left

Very sad to hear the news that Tony Benn has died. He had been very ill for a little while and when last I saw him in the flesh, which was a couple of years ago, he looked very frail.

I once saw him make a speech at The Free Trade Hall of all places in Manchester in I think 1980, and he was very powerful, electric even and really inspiring, and I left the event feeling as though the revolution was about to begin in the next week or so.

Times change of course, and the revolution (a peaceful one, of course) looks further away than ever now, but Tony Benn was the only figure on the left from the 70’s and 80’s and before that managed to keep up with the new politics of the left, attending Left Field at the Glastonbury festival for example and he could engage easily with the younger generations.

I thought of trying to get a video clip for this blog of Tony Benn in his prime, but in end thought it more appropriate to feature a recent one, like the one above, because he really did adapt with the times, and could be just as inspirational in his later years.

He will be sadly missed by all those of a radical political persuasion, young and old. He constantly reminded us of our power to change things, and to never give up hope. A great man indeed. 

The Earth Cannot Wait

The Earth Cannot Wait : Part 3 from STRIKE! mag on Vimeo.

The Green Party's Derek Wall (@anothergreen) on direct action, seven generation thinking and Marxist ecology:

"Even an entire society and nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. The are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries and have to bequeath it in improved states to succeeding generations"

strikemag.org

thepeoplesparliament.me.uk/

Statement on Local Authority Cuts

The Green party of England and Wales fought the 2010 general election in opposition to the savage public service cuts supported by the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties. The Green party offered a different approach to reducing the country’s debts, which included making the wealthy (people and corporations) pay their fair share of tax, investing in the economy to produce sustainable growth through the Green New Deal, some cuts for example to Trident and pledging to protect public services particularly for the most vulnerable in our society.

Unfortunately, we did not win the general election and so are unable to put these policies into practice, although Caroline Lucas has almost single handedly taken the opposition to the Coalition government cuts agenda. The ideologically driven shrink the state policies of the Coalition government aim to reduce public spending and turn most of the public services over to private corporations. 

Our elected representatives in local government are on the front line in the assault on public spending, with local authorities having their funding from central government cut by around a third since 2010. Councils of all political stripes are hurting and they worry about whether they will even be able to fund their statutory duties in the future. Local government is under serious threat and everyone involved in it knows this to be true, despite the blithe statements about local authorities making efficiency savings and encouraging local business growth to pay for services, trumpeted by the Coalition central government. All the easy savings and many not so easy have been made now, and a future of even more of the same is daunting.

Haringey Green Party would continue to look for better and more effective ways of doing things in Council budgets especially on energy, transport, supplies, consultancy, and agency fees, whilst avoiding cuts in services, jobs, or wages and whilst recognising the importance of all sub-contractors’ staff (as well as Council employees) being paid a London living wage.  We would oppose any salaries in new appointments being over ten times the lowest full time wage.

Haringey Green party supports Green councillors who refuse to participate in or support an administration that implements any further cuts; and recognises that Green councillors may better represent the interests of their constituents by remaining in opposition at this time.

Haringey Green Party supports popular mobilisation against the cuts through demonstrations and where necessary direct action, in coordination with local, regional and national anti-cuts movements such as the People’s Assembly. HGP would welcome coordinated actions between Green and left councillors in different areas to resist cuts in services. 

HGP would welcome a national campaign for reform of local taxation and/or Council or GLA charges to make them more progressive and to capture more of the profits of developers to support local services, and would encourage and support any Green councillors elected here to pursue these aims as well as to campaign for local eco-taxes like levies on commercial packaging.

Haringey Green Party believes that Green Councillors, whenever faced with a need to make instant decisions about budgets in the Council chamber and whenever consultation with supporters and allies is not possible within the permitted time frame, should do whatever they judge to be in the best interests of the local population and consistent with Green Party policy.

David Harvey interview: The importance of postcapitalist imagination

From housing to wages, David Harvey says examining capitalism's contradictions can point the way towards an alternative world

You’re working on a new book at the moment, The Seventeen Contradictions of Capitalism. Why focus on its contradictions?

David Harvey: The analysis of capitalism suggests that there are significant and foundational contradictions. Periodically those contradictions get out of hand and they generate a crisis. We’ve just been through a crisis and I think it’s important to ask, what were the contradictions that led us into it? How can we analyse the crisis in terms of contradictions? One of Marx’s great sayings was that a crisis is always the result of the underlying contradictions. Therefore we have to deal with those themselves rather than their results.

One of the contradictions you focus on is that between the use and exchange value of a commodity. Why is this contradiction so fundamental to capitalism, and why do you use housing to illustrate it?

All commodities have to be understood as having a use value and exchange value. If I have a steak the use value is that I can eat it and the exchange value is how much I had to pay for it.

But housing is very interesting in this way because as a use value you can understand it as shelter, privacy, a world of affective relations with people, a big list of things you use a house for. But then there is the question of how you get the house. At one time houses were built by people themselves and there was no exchange value at all. Then from the 18th century onwards you got speculative house building – Georgian terraces which were built and sold later on. Then houses became exchange values for consumers in the form of saving. If I buy a house and I pay down the mortgage on it, I can end up owning the house. So I have an asset. I therefore become very concerned about the nature of the asset. This generates interesting politics – ‘not in my backyard’, ‘I don’t want people moving in next door who don’t look like me’. So you start to get segregation in housing markets because people want to protect the value of their savings.

Then about thirty years ago people began to use housing as a form of speculative gain. You could get a house and ‘flip’ it – you buy a house for £200,000, after a year you get £250,000 for it. You earned £50,000, so why not do it? The exchange value took over. And so you get this speculative boom. In 2000 after the collapse of global stock markets the surplus capital started to flow into housing. It’s an interesting kind of market. If I buy a house then housing prices go up, and you say ‘housing prices are going up, I should buy a house’, and then somebody else comes in. You get a housing bubble. People get pulled in and it explodes. Then all of a sudden a lot of people find they can’t have the use value of the housing anymore because the exchange value system has destroyed it.

Which raises the question, is it a good idea to allow use value in housing, which is crucial to people, be delivered by a crazy exchange value system? This is not only a problem with housing but with things like education and healthcare. In many of these we’ve released the exchange value dynamics in the theory that it’s going to provide the use value but frequently what it does is it screws up the use values and people don’t end up getting good healthcare, education or housing. This is why I think it’s very important to look at that distinction between use and exchange value.

Another contradiction you describe involves a process of switching over time between supply-side emphases on production and demand-side emphases on consumption in capitalism. Could you talk about how that manifested itself in the twentieth century and why it’s so important?

One of the big issues is keeping an adequate market demand, so that you can absorb whatever it is that capital is producing. The other is creating the conditions under which capital can produce profitably.

Those conditions of profitable production usually mean suppressing labour. To the degree that you engage in wage repression – paying lower and lower wages – the profit rate goes up. So, from the production side, you want to squeeze labour down as much as you possibly can. That gives you high profits. But then the question arises, who is going to buy the product? If labour is being squeezed, where is your market? If you squeeze labour too much you end up with a crisis because there’s not enough demand in the market to absorb the product.

It was broadly interpreted after a while that the problem in the crisis of the 1930s was lack of demand. There was therefore a shift to state-led investments in building new roads, the WPA [public works under the New Deal] and all that. They said ‘we will revitalise the economy by debt-financed demand’ and, in doing so, turned to Keynesian theory. So you came out of the 1930s with a very strong capacity for managing demand with a lot of state involvement in the economy. As a result of that you get very high growth rates, but the high growth rates are accompanied by an empowerment of the working-class with rising wages and stronger unions.

Strong unions and high wages mean the profit rate starts to come down. Capital is in crisis because it’s not repressing labour enough, and so you get the switch. In the 1970s they turned to Milton Friedman and the Chicago School. That became dominant in economic theory and people began paying attention to the supply-side – particularly wages. You get wage repression, which begins in the 1970s. Ronald Reagan attacks the air traffic controllers, Margaret Thatcher goes after the miners, Pinochet kills people on the left. You get an attack on labour – which raises the profit rate. By the time you get to the 1980s the profit rate has jumped up because wages are being repressed and capital is doing well. But then there comes the problem of where are you going to sell the stuff.

In the 1990s that is really covered by the debt economy. You started to encourage people to borrow a lot – you started to create a credit card economy and a high mortgage-financed economy in housing. That covered the fact that there wasn’t real demand out there. But eventually that blows up in 2007-8.

Capital has this question, ‘do you work on the supply side or the demand side?’ My view of an anticapitalist world is that you should unify that. We should return to use value. What use values do people need and how to we organise production in such a way that it matches these?

It would seem that we are in a supply-side crisis, and yet austerity is an attempt to find a supply-side resolution. How do we square that?

You have to differentiate between the interests of capitalism as a whole and what is specifically in the interests of the capitalist class, or a section of it. During this crisis, by-and-large, the capitalist class have done very well. Some of them got burned but for the most part they have done extremely well. According to recent studies of the OECD countries social inequality has increased quite significantly since the onset of the crisis, which means that the benefits of the crisis have been flowing to the upper classes. In other words, they don’t want to get out of the crisis because they are doing very well out of it.

The population as a whole is suffering, capitalism as a whole is not healthy but the capitalist class – particularly an oligarchy within it – has been doing extremely well. There are many situations where individual capitalists operating in their own class interests can actually do things which are very damaging to the capitalist system as a whole. I think we are in that kind of situation right now.

You have said often recently that one of the things we should be doing on the left is engaging our postcapitalist imagination, starting to ask the question of what a postcapitalist world would look like. Why is that so important? And, in your view, what would a postcapitalist world look like?

It is important because it has been drummed into our heads for a considerable period of time that there is no alternative. One of the first things we have to do is to think about the alternative in order to move towards its creation.

The left has become so complicitous with neoliberalism that you can’t really tell its political parties from right-wing ones except on national or social issues. In political economy there is not much difference. We’ve got to find an alternative political economy to how capitalism works, and there are some principles. That’s why contradictions are interesting. You look at each one of them like, for instance, the use and exchange value contradiction and say – ‘the alternative world would be one where we deliver use values’. So we concentrate on use values and try to diminish the role of exchange values.

Or on the monetary question – we need money to circulate commodities, no question about it. But the problem with money is that it can be appropriated by private persons. It becomes a form of personal power and then a fetish desire. People mobilise their lives around searching for this money even when nobody knows that it is. So we’ve got to change the monetary system - either tax away any surpluses people are beginning to get or come up with a monetary system which dissolves and cannot be stored, like air miles.

But in order to do that you’ve also got to overcome the private property-state dichotomy and come to a common property regime. And, at a certain point, you need to generate a basic income for people because if you have a form of money that is anti-saving then you need to guarantee people. You need to say, ‘you don’t need to save for a rainy day because you’ll always be getting this basic income no matter what’. You’ve got to give people security that way rather than private, personal savings.

By changing each one of these contradictory things you end up with a different kind of society, which is much more rational than the one we’ve got. What happens right now is that we produce things and then we try to persuade consumers to consume whatever we’ve produced, whether they really want it or need it. Whereas we should be finding out what people’s basic wants and desires are and then mobilising the production system to produce that. By eliminating the exchange value dynamic you can reorganise the whole system in a different kind of way. We can imagine the direction that a socialist alternative would move in as it breaks from this dominant form of capital accumulation, which runs everything today.

First published at Red Pepper

Labour Party Conference - Welcome to Brighton

The Green party welcomes Labour to Brighton with the message. We are the real opposition to the ConDems.

The Great Royal Mail Robbery – But Will They Get Away With It?

I was pleased to see that the Green Party conference unanimously passed the motion to stop the privatisation of Royal Mail and support the campaign by the union the Communication Workers Union (CWU) to fight the sell-off.

I worked for BT for twenty years, joining just a few years after it was privatised in 1984 which was the first of the public utilities to be sold off by the Thatcher Tory government, but was followed by many more, some under the subsequent Labour government, in an ideological process of robbing the poor to the benefit of the wealthy.

In the time that I worked at BT it did change a lot, going from 250,000 employees down to something like 80,000 by the time that I left, and I think even lower now. When I started working there I did think that there was a plausible argument for privatising a business where thousands of people had to wait six months or more for a telephone connection in an industry that was obviously going to expand because of technology.

Of course the government at the time could have made that investment themselves, but that was the whole point, take ownership off everyone and concentrate the profits generated, which amounted to billions of pounds a year, into the hands of those who could afford to buy the shares. Despite share issues to staff and some allocations of shares to ‘small investors’, the ownership largely fell into the hands of the big investors. And the drive to increase share price superseded everything else, including service.

Asset stripping became the policy in BT, with over a hundred buildings and land sold for development in London alone and Royal Mail is well endowed in property, but selling it off is bound to have a more acute effect on customers in the mail trade, with longer distances to collect registered mail etc.

Customer service has actually gone down in the privatisation years. Who hasn’t despaired of the call centre customer service experience? Who can be bothered to examine the bewildering array of choice of providers and their myriad ever changing tariff deals?   

One cultural thing that did linger in BT up until the time I left, was a unionised one, with around 80% membership amongst sub management grades and even a decent proportion in the lower ranks of management. This cultural attachment to the union, is even stronger in Royal Mail than it is (was) in BT, and I fully expect a huge vote in favour of industrial action, and a really solid response from the rank and file.

I was a CWU rep in my time working at BT, so I mixed with activists from the postal side of the union and I know that they are not going down without a fight on this. But all may not be lost.

Big political beasts have tried to privatise Royal Mail like Michael Heseltine and Peter Mandleson, only to be thwarted by a campaign of resistance, not only from the CWU, but from Tory MP’s and now probably Lib Dem MP’s in rural constituencies, where inevitably the service will get worse and more expensive, despite assurances to the contrary. It could well cost some of these MP’s their seats, so I do not discount a U-Turn on this policy by the government.

Support the CWU Campaign Save Our Royal Mail     

Haringey Needs St Ann's Hospital!

Haringey’s last hospital is under threat. Plans to redevelop the St Ann’s Hospital site have been rumbling on since 2006. Now, as the managers of the site, Barnet Enfield and Haringey Mental Health Trust (BEHMHT) are preparing their application to get Foundation Trust Status in 2014 the redevelopment plans have been developing rapidly. To get Foundation Trust status – which is another step towards the marketisation and privatisation of the NHS – BEHMHT needs to ‘balance its books’. They claim the site is underutilised, has poor facilities and is costing them £7.5m a year to maintain. They say the only way they can afford to provide the healthcare facilities we need is to sell off two thirds of the site to property developers. We say we already pay for universal healthcare out of our taxes, we demand healthcare facilities that meet the needs of local people now and for the foreseeable future. We don’t see the site as a liability – it is an asset that needs protecting.

From an early stage it was evident that BEHMHT’s finances were driving the agenda, not the needs of local people. They proposed moving the mental health inpatient wards from St Ann’s to Chase Farm Hospital in Enfield. Mental Health Campaigners pointed out that this would lead to the isolation of people with mental health problems as friends and carers would have to travel miles to visit their loved ones. The plans were challenged in two internal NHS reviews. Both concluded that the campaigners were right and BEHMHT were wrong. They had to change their plans and include new wards in the redevelopment plans. If BEHMHT got this wrong how can we trust the rest of their plans?

In 2011 BEHMHT set up a Community Reference Group (CRG) to ‘involve’ local people and patients in the redevelopment plans. We were encouraged to do some ‘blue sky thinking’. We said we wanted a fully functioning District General Hospital with an A&E department. They said this was unaffordable but never produced any evidence to justify the claim. The group has been meeting for nearly two years now and we have never been allowed to discuss health care needs. We’re beginning to think that the group is just a convenient way for BEHMHT to tick their ‘community involvement’ box while they continue with their plans to sell off the site and leave us with inadequate facilities. We demand an independent healthcare needs assessment. We want to know what the community needs now and in the future, we can talk about how its going to paid for later. We don’t agree that the site is a liability, we think it’s a community asset that needs to be protected. How can BEHMHT claim that the site is ‘surplus to requirements’ without the evidence of a healthcare needs assessment and a thorough exploration of alternative options that could improve the health of local people?

The local community are already articulating their needs. Mental Heath Campaigners have argued that the current facilities are stigmatising and inadequate. In addition to the inpatient wards we need comprehensive primary care, outpatient facilities and ‘recovery houses’ on site – places where the focus is on the prevention of acute episodes and the transition between services is a smooth one, not the traumatic experience it can be now. The government has said that mental health should have the same priority as physical health, we demand that this pledge is put into action on the St Ann’s site.

If BEHMHT and the new GP commissioners of NHS services, Haringey Clinical Commissioning Group (HCCG) really cared about our health in the future they would pay more attention to the welfare of our children. Haringey has one of the worst records for child development by the age of 5 in the country. This is unacceptable. We must ensure that everything possible is done to avoid tragedies like Victoria Climbie and Baby P ever happening again. Child Development Services on the St Ann’s site are currently provided by Whittington Health. They propose a new Child Development Centre on the site, one that brings together Health, Local Authority and Mental Health services, integrated to focus on the needs of the child irrespective of organisational boundaries. Local Councillors have expressed support for integrated services, but what has happened? Nothing! We demand the best possible children’s services, nothing less is acceptable.

Hospitals can be significant drivers in local regeneration. In addition to the health services they can be a place that provides jobs and training for local people and attract other services and community facilities. We want a hospital that is the pride of our community, not just a collection of disparate services shoved into the corner of the site so that BEHMHT can offload its ‘liability’.

These are just some of the proposals that we know of. What do you need? What do you think should be provided on the site? What can improve the health of local people and reduce health inequalities in the borough?

Public Meeting

Thursday 22nd August, 7pm @ Chestnut Community Centre, 280 St Ann's Road, N15

All welcome - please come and help campaign for local health services we deserve and need!
https://www.facebook.com/HaringeyNeedsStAnnsHospital?ref=stream

St Ann's Hospital is our local health service provider. We should be developing and improving it for all local people. Despite repeated calls for the health services on the site to be based on an assessment of local health needs we are hearing proposals that the same services could operate on a much smaller site with private companies taking over other areas for their own needs and profits. This is unacceptable! We demand health services that will improve our health now and for our children's future needs.

Please come to the meeting and help campaign for the excellent health services we deserve and need in Haringey!

A Referendum on UK Membership of the European Union

Well, as UKIP surge in the opinion polls and the Tory party goes into one of its perennial spasms about the European Union, and gay marriage and the fact that we don’t live in the 1950’s anymore, foreign observers must think that the British have gone completely mad. And to an extent I’d be inclined to agree with them, because there is crazy feeling about our politics at moment, but it is largely limited to only a section of the people, whilst more are worried about their economic security and many other issues before the European Union.

One of the paradoxes of the rise in support for UKIP at the expense of all of the main parties (though particularly the Tories), is that opinion polls show increasing support for staying in the EU, though all the polls do have majorities in favour of having a referendum on the issue. UKIP are the voting receptacle of protest votes in by-elections and local elections, for all sorts of reasons as written about previously. This is not a deep insight, and surely must be obvious to all involved in politics, but a section of the Tory party have decided that this is the best chance they will get to quit the EU, and they are certainly not going to waste it.

For the record you can read the Green party’s policies on the European Union here and you will note that we have a vision of a very different Europe, one which prioritises the interests of the people of Europe, over that of multi-national corporations, which is how things stand at present. That sort of change would need referendums in all nations of the EU, but that kind of choice is definitely not what we in the UK or elsewhere will be getting.

Let’s take the Prime Minister’s plan for a referendum, ‘in or out’ in 2017, after he (if he’s still Prime Minister, which looks doubtful) has renegotiated our terms of membership of the EU as our starting point. On the face of it, this looks to be a reasonable position. It is likely that there will be changes in the EU, given the problems with the Euro. And there are problems a plenty with the how the EU works. The Common Agricultural Policy is one obvious example, and unfair tariff and trading rules with developing countries, is another.

But these things are not what David Cameron wants to renegotiate. He will try and get some deal on limiting immigration from eastern Europe, though I don’t think he will be very successful. He also wants to protect the City of London financial services industry from possible EU regulation, which he might get some concessions on. Where he probably will get somewhere, is over employment regulations, like the working time directive and agency workers regulations. So, less control over the industry that precipitated our current economic crisis and fewer rights at work, as the new settlement. 

That will be the choice, ‘in’ the newly the negotiated EU without the same worker protection as the rest and a free-wheeling finance sector, or ‘out’. We probably won’t even get the option of staying in on our current terms, let alone anything better, if the Tories get away with it.

Luckily, enough Tory MP’s seem hell bent on pursuing this issue until they get their referendum, splitting the Conservative party and the Coalition with the Lib Dems in the process, which makes it much more likely that they will not get the opportunity to determine the terms of any referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU, any time soon.                  

The Kilburn Manifesto's challenge to the neoliberal victory

The crisis in the global economic system triggered by the banking collapse of 2006-08 has precipitated a new moment in the evolution of global capitalism. But its novelty is not generally understood.

Some previous crises, most famously the great crash and depression of the 1930s, produced radical social change: the welfare state and New Deal, as well as the rise of fascism. In the past five years protest groups such as Occupy have appeared, and resistance to austerity has grown. Yet there has been no rupture in the system or its governing ideology. Indeed, elites have used the crisis in Europe and north America to advance the neoliberal project, as unrelenting attacks on living standards, the NHS and the welfare state in Britain show.

The disintegration of the British postwar settlement was the central project of one of the new right's most politically divisive figures, Margaret Thatcher. Her funeral last week was designed to install her as the emblem of a unified nation, and set the seal on three decades of work by three political regimes – Thatcherism, New Labour and the coalition – to fundamentally reshape Britain. As David Cameron told the BBC: "We are all Thatcherites now." Thatcher is dead, long live Thatcherism.

What is new about this phase of capitalism? Its global interconnectedness, driven in part by new technologies, and the dominance of a new kind of finance capitalism mean that, while a crisis of this system has effects everywhere, these effects are uneven. So far the Bric countries seem relatively unscathed, while the impact of economic devastation has spread from Asia and Africa into Europe.

The breakdown of old forms of social solidarity is accompanied by the dramatic growth of inequality and a widening gap between those who run the system or are well paid as its agents, and the working poor, unemployed, under-employed or unwell.

The crisis has revealed a new, international and ethnically diverse super-rich. The Sunday Times Rich List is topped by two Russian oligarchs and an Indian billionaire. They live a life totally divorced from and almost unimaginable by ordinary people, fuelled by an apparently unstoppable appetite for profit.

Neoliberalism's victory has depended on the boldness and ambition of global capital, on its confidence that it can now govern not just the economy but the whole of social life. On the back of a revamped liberal political and economic theory, its champions have constructed a vision and a new common sense that have permeated society. Market forces have begun to model institutional life and press deeply into our private lives, as well as dominating political discourse. They have shaped a popular culture that extols celebrity and success and promotes values of private gain and possessive individualism. They have thoroughly undermined the redistributive egalitarian consensus that underpinned the welfare state, with painful consequences for socially vulnerable groups such as women, old people, the young and ethnic minorities.

Corporate exploitation of cheap labour, natural resources and land has worsened the crisis in the developing world. Environmental degradation, poverty, disease pandemics, poor education, ethnic divisions and civil wars are paraded as inevitable postcolonial failures and provoke the old powers to intervene to safeguard the conditions for capitalist accumulation.

The neoliberal victory has reasserted the powers and position of the dominant classes. But this victory was not inevitable. No social settlement is permanent, and this one was fought for, from the coup in Chile and the defeat of the miners in Britain to current attacks on workers' rights and the benefits system. There is more than one way out of the current catastrophe. There is always an alternative.

Today – Wednesday – the founding editors of Soundings, the new left journal first published in 1995, launch a manifesto that will attempt to outline ways forward. Over the next year we and our collaborators will, in a series of monthly instalments, examine different aspects of the current crisis and try to frame a more systemic set of questions than is usually asked. We do not offer policies but alternative approaches and demands that we hope will contribute to the broader debate that is the environment in which policymakers operate.

New Labour's collusion with the neoliberal project – through an agenda of privatisation, outsourcing and the marketisation of the public sector – has left the party unable to draw a clear line with the coalition. Having driven forward many of Thatcherism's gains under Tony Blair, it is constrained by timid leadership, by a lack of clear vision and new ideas.

Outside party politics new social movements, including environmental, anti-cuts and feminist groups, have not come together sufficiently with the old, defensive organisations of the working class to produce the coalition that might make them an effective political force. Yet there are indications of how such a compromise might work, for example in the short era of Ken Livingstone's GLC and the radical experiments under way in Latin America. By contrast, turmoil in the Middle East shows us what happens when democratic demands are not met, while in Europe resistance to austerity is twinned with the revival of fascism.

This is no time for simple retreat. What is required is a renewed sense of being on the side of the future, not stuck in the dugouts of the past. We must admit that the old forms of the welfare state proved insufficient. But we must stubbornly defend the principles on which it was founded – redistribution, egalitarianism, collective provision, democratic accountability and participation, the right to education and healthcare – and find new ways in which they can be institutionalised and expressed.

All of us who oppose the current direction, whether from inside or outside party politics or other organisations, must invent. We must set about disrupting the current common sense, challenging the assumptions that organise our 21st-century political discourse. We hope our manifesto will open a dialogue with a new generation shaped by different political experiences. This is a moment for challenging, not adapting to, neoliberalism's new reality, and for making a leap.

After Neoliberalism: The Kilburn Manifesto, by Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin, is launched in London today, Wednesday 24 April, and online

First published at The Guardian

Margaret Thatcher – A Class Warrior For The Rich

A huge amount is being written in the mainstream media about the former Tory Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who died on Monday morning, most of it sycophantic rubbish, but worse still, there is also a concerted attempt to rewrite history, preferring instead a story which is reminiscent of a Greek myth or Kim Jong-Il’s golfing exploits (seven holes in one out of eighteen, the first time he picked up a golf club).

I do feel that I’m entitled to have my two pence worth on her time in office, as I was seventeen when she was elected as Prime Minister in 1979, and she blighted my life as a young man in the north of England, forcing me to move south in a search for some kind of future. I was young and well enough educated and could afford to up everything and move, which wasn’t the case for everyone, despite Norman Tebbit’s exhortations to the unemployed to do just that. But all the same, I felt compelled to leave my community, just to have a chance of getting a job and making a life for myself.

The story painted in the media of the late 1970’s is of a country ‘on its knees’, in need of a strong leader to make the nation great and proud (again), ‘held ransom’ by over mighty trade union ‘barons’, with runaway inflation, rising unemployment, inefficient state owned industries draining the public purse and consequently high rates of taxation. A deeply divided once great nation crippled by the evil doctrine of socialism.

Instead, we needed a fresh approach, becoming fashionable at the time through figures such Milton Friedman and others at the Chicago Business School, where unions were tamed, public industries and services privatised, income tax cut (mostly for the wealthy), and ‘red tape’ was cut, which in turn would free up entrepreneurs to create wealth which would ‘trickle down’ to the little people in due course.

That was the rhetoric, at least, in practice we had mass unemployment in the industrial heartlands of the north of England, Scotland and Wales with the closure of most of the state owned heavy industries, (this had the added advantage of reducing the membership and the power of the unions), cuts in welfare benefits, a cut in income tax (mostly for the wealthy) but a sharp increase in indirect taxes (hitting the poorest proportionately most), which led to an equally sharp increase in inflation, and a giveaway (mostly to the wealthy) of the public utilities in privatisation and share issues. The financial services sector was deregulated, the so called ‘Big Bang’, leading to many risky and questionable practices being made legal. The employment market was made ‘flexible’.

Perhaps Thatcher’s most cunning idea was the ‘Right to Buy’ policy of encouraging tenants to buy their public housing at up 50% discount, which was extremely popular with a section of these tenants (those in the best houses, in the best areas), and effectively divided the working class between the ‘aspirational’ and the ‘losers’. People with mortgages were also less likely to go on strike too, so, so much the better. Classic divide and rule.     

Some areas of the country have still not recovered from Thatcher’s neo liberal policies, which have largely been maintained and taken further, under successive governments, most shamefully, a Labour government included. But from the viewpoint of recent history, we can see that Margaret Thatcher’s legacy is that she sowed the seeds of the present recession, from the housing crisis to the financial crisis, from the large amounts being spent on benefits rather than more productive investment, to the huge increase in wealth inequality. It all started in 1979.

The period from the end of World War 2 to 1979 saw a narrowing of the gap between the rich and the rest (fairly modest, but still), whereas post 1979 this gap has increased hugely, nationally and internationally too. And this is Thatcher’s true place in history, a warrior for the outraged establishment elite. She fought a class war on behalf of a world elite that had seen their wealth decrease in the post war years, to the advantage of the rest of us. Welfare states were demolished and income taxes for the rich reduced in the most audacious thievery from the people imaginable.

Margaret Thatcher was not a national heroine; she was a sort of Robin Hood in reverse. She was a very effective hench-woman for the ruling classes worldwide, so if she is to have some fancy funeral parade, then those whose dirty work she did, should send her off in a privatised cavalcade, rather than add insult to injury for the majority of British people by making us pay for her procession.      

The above video/song is Shipbuilding by Robert Wyatt.    

2012: How the NHS Became Privatised

2012 will go down as a cataclysmic date in the history of the English health service. It was the year when the virus of privatisation finally gained control of the cell nucleus of the NHS and began its destruction in earnest.

If you listen to the politicians you wouldn’t know it. According to David Cameron, “we will not be selling off the NHS.” If you believe Nick Clegg, “there will be no privatisation.” They have been able to get away with this deception because the transformation they unleashed is messy. It is happening everywhere, but not uniformly. It is hidden by its very scale and spread.

But take a step back and the patterns are unmistakable. The controversial Health and Social Care Act passed in March 2012 ended the English National Health Service in all but name by abolishing the 60-year duty on the government to provide comprehensive healthcare for all. In its place is not so much a new structure as a process with its own dynamic-that of a snowball tumbling down a hillside.

All across the country treatments that patients used to receive are no longer available to them. Hip and knee replacements, tonsillectomies and cataract operations are among the procedures being restricted, forcing patients to wait longer, suffer in pain, or go private. Surgeries, wards, units and community services have been closed and clinical staff shed as the NHS desperately seeks to make “savings” of £20 billion.

Private GP surgeries near you

With perfect symmetry, the private sector expects to win £20 billion of business from the NHS, according to the corporate finance adviser Catalyst. Huge slices of the health service are being awarded to the highest bidder. With remarkable speed a few gluttonous companies: Virgin Care, Serco, Care UK – have secured dominant positions in the market, gobbling up services from Cornwall to Cumbria. The defenders of the reforms talk about competition driving improvements, but already it is consolidation, not competition, that we are seeing.

There may be a GP surgery near you that is now run by Virgin. Until March 2012 Virgin Care did not exist, although it had been operating under another name since 2010. It now runs at least 358 GP practices. Behind the friendly PR façade of the bearded entrepreneur, patients see a different face, cold and sinister. Take the Kings Heath Practice in Northampton. Since Virgin took it over from the NHS, patients have had to wait up to three weeks for an appointment instead of three days, three GPs have been reduced to one, and three nurses cut to one part-time nurse. And while the company boasts about the surgery’s opening hours, often there are no clinicians present, just an open empty building. Locals complain that Virgin has “brought Third World medical standards to Kings Heath.”

Consolidation is also happening in out-of-hours GP cover. In November Care UK took over out-of-hours services for up to fifteen million people across England by simply buying Harmoni, a company that started as a GP co-operative. The only competition patients see is between their health needs and the profit margin. People in Cornwall know which wins out: an official report in July found the Serco-run out-of-hours service in the county was under-staffed and falsified data to meet targets.

The biggest privatisations are taking place in community health services. The government’s “any qualified provider” policy means whole services must be subject to competition, leading to the demise of NHS-run options. Local NHS bodies have already been instructed to outsource 39 types of service. Dubbed the “39 steps to privatisation,” this covers everything from autism care to wheelchair provision. Even publicly provided vasectomies are for the chop.

The ‘logic’ of privatisation

The logic of privatisation favours a few big winners over the co-ops, charities and social enterprises that act as window dressing for the policy. A prime example came on April Fools’ Day, 2012, when Virgin Care took over a £500 million contract to deliver community services in parts of Surrey. The joke was on Central Surrey Health, a “social enterprise” formed by former NHS staff that was praised by David Cameron and hailed as a model for the Big Society. Central Surrey Health scored the most points in the bidding process, but the contract was given to Virgin because of its financial backing.

Not even hospitals offer shelter from the destructive gale blowing through the NHS. Many Hospital Trusts are being pushed to the financial brink by the disastrous legacy of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), under which new hospital building was financed by a deal that is akin to paying by credit card, leaving Trusts with crippling debts to the banks.

This has led to some Trusts literally going bankrupt, such as the South London Healthcare Trust which serves over a million people in three hospitals. Its PFI debts, like a black hole, have sucked in surrounding hospitals and units, like Lewisham’s A&E department which is now facing closure. Patients are left high and dry. As for the Trust, it is to be carved up and offered piece by piece for privatisation, with the familiar vultures-Virgin, Serco, Care UK and Circle-picking at the remains.

In a first for the private sector, in February 2012 Circle took over an entire general hospital at Hinchingbrooke in Cambridgeshire. The hospital has since fallen 19 places in the patient satisfaction rankings and its finances have worsened, forcing Circle to ask for a bailout after just six months.

Private income at NHS Hospitals

Combine this with another controversial aspect of the Health and Social Care Act-the ability for NHS hospitals to earn half their income from private patients-and the implications are scary. A chilling investigation by ITV’s Exposure program secretly filmed doctors assuring a private patient that her money would buy priority over NHS patients within the same hospital. It revealed a tragic case where a consultant left half way through a dangerous birth to carry out a private caesarean section. The baby later died. A two-tier health system is not on the way; it is already here.

The drive for profit is insatiable, not least because many of the dominant players in the new market are owned by ruthless private equity firms. Similar funding models to that which led to the collapse of the Southern Cross care-home company are now in the NHS. For example, Hospital Corporation of America, which is entering into joint ventures with NHS hospitals, is majority owned by three private equity firms including Mitt Romney’s notorious Bain Capital.

All of this comes before the most high-profile part of the Health and Social Care Act has even been fully implemented-the replacement of PCTs with Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs). Sold to the public as “giving power to GPs,” this transfers responsibility for spending £60 billion of public money to largely unaccountable new groups, who will in turn outsource the work to privatised “commissioning support units”-allowing the private sector to decide how taxpayers’ money is spent. If that sounds complicated, it is. David Nicholson, the head of the health service, fears it could end in “misery and failure.”

The Labour party, after its record in government of opening the way for privatisation, has changed tack in opposition, repeatedly pledging to repeal the Act and scrap the market if elected. These are important commitments that it must be held to.

But the quantity of contracts currently being signed may take the NHS over a tipping point, where the “facts on the ground” cannot be reversed. That is why it is crucial to monitor, expose, slow and disrupt the destruction of the NHS now, while there may still be time to save it.
—
Alex Nunns is an NHS campaigner, writer and editor whose blog about a job offer from Care UK went viral in July 2011. This article was sponsored by the NHS Support Federation

This post was first published at Liberal Conspiracy

Haringey at the end of the welfare state

You may have seen the Guardian’s two-pager on poverty and homelessness on 19 Nov. The New Economics Foundation’s (NEF) report ; Everyday Austerity; life at the end of the welfare state looks at the impact of the ConDems’ myriad benefit cuts in Haringey – and Birmingham. It details the local effects of cuts in tax credits, housing benefits, benefits for disabled people – and the horrendous prospect of more to come, with £28 billion to be stripped out of the national welfare budget by 2017. Haringey Citizen’sAdvice Bureau has estimated that the ‘benefits cap’ of £500 per week being introduced by the ConDems in April 2013 will hit around 1100 families in the borough, with 600 of them losing over £100 a week.

There are now at least four food banks in Haringey, serving those hit by cuts and increasingly by the new sanctions regime which, since October, allows job centres to deny people benefits for up to three years if they offend against the very rigid jobseeker rules.

The NEF report reveals:-

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      Drastic effects of the limits on housing benefit/local housing allowance which were introduced in January this year, placing 6900 Haringey homes that were affordable for people claiming these benefits now out of their reach. Up to 1100 families are expected to become homeless as a result –plus over 800 single people who are ineligible for local authority rehousing and are already cramming into church-run night shelters.

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      A mounting personal debt crisis, with three and a half times as many applications for ‘crisis loans’ in 2009/10 compared to 2005/6. (The Social Fund which provided “crisis loans” will close and the responsibility for making them devolved to local councils in April 2013 – it’s not yet clear what Haringey will do about this).

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      A huge overload for the Citizen’s Advice Bureau, which now sees queues from dawn onwards of people needing debt advice, help with appeals against benefit cuts and withdrawal of benefits due to sanctions and the much-criticised ATOS medical tests. (These tests have re-classified many disabled people – often inappropriately- as ‘fit for work’ in the worst job market for decades).

All this comes as Paul Nicholson, of Taxpayers against Poverty (TAP), has begun a campaign against cuts in Council Tax Benefit (see earlier post on this blog and the Haringey Independent). From April 2013, central government money for this benefit will be reduced, and councils will have to either source more of its cost themselves, or devise their own local schemes at lower rates. Haringey’s consultation about this ended on November 19th, with TAP and many others arguing that it is both unjust and unrealistic to expect people already facing benefit cuts, to pay 20% of their council tax when previously all of it had been paid for them.  Whilst rich councils like Westminster can afford to fill the gap and maintain CTB levels, Haringey cannot. Its main solution must be to lobby central government against the change with other similarly affected councils.

Likewise London-wide is needed to secure more affordable housing and challenge Tory policies. Mayor Johnson recently announced that he would no longer fund any new social-rented housing. He said the 50,000 target for new ‘affordable’ homes over the next four years would mean rents at between 60 and 80% of the market rate – well above the levels that housing benefit will now pay.  Unless Haringey acts with other councils to demand the reinstatement and increase of genuine ‘affordable homes’ targets, and to demand the reintroduction of rent control, low waged and disabled people will basically be driven out of London.

The failure of other boroughs to provide sufficient low cost housing also impacts on Haringey. Families hit by the housing benefits cuts are moving to Haringey to escape high rents closer to the centre. Other boroughs are also renting private landlords' here for 'their' homeless - between June and September 2012, 258 homeless households were housed by other boroughs in Haringey, amongst them 27 'vulnerable' needing social work support, whilst Haringey council had to place 105 of its own homeless applicants out of the borough. With other London boroughs, by last month it was looking for homeless accommodation outside of London.     

But on affordable homes, Haringey’s own policies need a re-think.  The new “Plan for Tottenham” with its promise to increase the proportion of owner-occupied housing in Tottenham and restrict conversion of existing buildings to bedsits (“HMOs” or “houses in multiple occupation”) makes one wonder where more badly needed low-cost housing is going to come from.

We need some Green Councillors to stand up for the low-paid, disabled and unemployed people of Tottenham, to secure adequate housing for them, more jobs and a London living wage level.

Written by Anne Gray

Work Capability Assessment Survival Tips

Raymondo, member of Kilburn Unemployed Worker’s Group and Social Work Action Network London, shares with us his Work Capability Assessment Survival Tips…

The Work Capability Assessment is the test by which people claiming the out of waged work benefit Employment and Support Allowance are gauged as qualifying for Employment and Support Allowance or ‘fit for work’.

“The Work Capability Assessment (WCA) has three stages. Firstly, the Limited Capability for Work Test determines whether or not you remain on Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), secondly, the Limited Capability for Work Related Activity Test determines whether you join the ‘support group’ of claimants or the ‘work-related activity group’ and thirdly, the Work Focused Health Related Assessment provides a report that can be used in any work-focused interviews that you may be required to attend later on.” (i)

Atos Origin are the company profiting from carrying out the much criticised Work Capability Assessments.

WCA Survival Tips

(Some of these tips are repetitions or further defining of others. This is to add emphasis.)

 1)    Never answer a question without understanding what it means. (ii)

 2)    Wise up on the ESA eligibility ‘descriptors’. (iii)

 3)    From the moment you first apply for Employment & Support Allowance, consider

 4) who will be best suited to accompany you to the ‘medical’ interview and

 5) who to approach for evidence to back your case.

 The person to accompany you will be your McKenzie Friend. (iv)

 6)    Realise that shame and embarrassment in relation to your condition may be the biggest barriers to your successful form completion. In the world of claiming ESA what was previously regarded as a ‘mark of shame’ often becomes a ‘badge of honour’.

 7)    Picture yourself on a really bad day, because otherwise the inconsistency of ‘it varies’ answers will too easily be interpreted as, “This descriptor is insignificant to this claimant’s eligibility.” Beware also of the inconsistent ordering of some of the answers in the ESA50, and recognise the relevance of minimum 24 hour working week realities to what makes your condition worse.

 8)    Realise that the ESA50 form content sets the scene for how you will be assessed.

 9)    Consider the possibility of a relevant helping professional completing the ESA50 on your behalf, but be the final arbiter on this. A relevant helping professional’s authoritative input may be especially helpful if yours is an invisible disability or mental health condition, but if they take a rushed approach to your form’s completion while you may be inclined to attempt to avoid embarrassment in stating how bad your condition really is/can be, their input may well weaken your case.

 10)    Never attend the Work Capability Assessment ‘medical’ alone. This is something you must factor in when completing the ESA50.

 11)    Make optimum use of the ‘lead time’ from receiving the ESA50 application form to the deadline for form completion and return, bearing in mind that the ESA50 will be redirected to a different address than that given on the reply envelope before it reaches the Atos team who will be conducting your individual assessment.

 12)    Quote any documented evidence as much as possible in the body of the form, rather than relying on a covering letter and/or other attachments that are all too commonly ‘lost in the post’.

 13)    Keep copies of all your form content and documentation. Electronic copies of your form content can make editing form content easier for repeated testing situations.

 14)    Check out the building accessibility of the ‘Medical Examination Centre’ (MEC), realising that elevator access may not be operating at the times that the adjoining jobcentre closes. (Some MECs are open on Sundays, and when jobcentre staff go home at 4:30pm, elevator access may be denied.)

 15)    Realise that the ‘suggested route’ details/advice that Atos Healthcare admin issue of how to get from your home to the MEC may be unnecessarily complicated in order for you to be intimidated out of attending.

 16)    Don’t allow yourself to be bullied and intimidated by the inflexibility of ‘we’re only following orders’ Atos call-centre staff. In the event of your not being able to attend the MEC as a consequence of any ‘last-minute emergencies’, say, arising from the weather denying your McKenzie friend access to a car ride from home to the MEC, realise that a call to the relevant Disability Benefit Centre can trump such inflexibility. Remember, without someone to attend the medical, it will be assumed not only that you have no trouble getting to appointments alone, but also that you will be a less reliable witness than someone who can corroborate your version of what happened or did not happen at the medical.

 17)    Consider the ‘medical’ as more of an observation activity with you as the one being observed from the time you enter the waiting room, rather than an exhaustive and thorough medical examination.

 18)    Seek out, join, or form a support group for benefit claimants. This will help make your life feel more relevant between WCAs and help to counter the isolating influences of the reassessment process.

 19)    Keep abreast of changes to the law as it relates to your ESA entitlement.

NOTES AND SOURCES

(i) http://www.tameside.gov.uk/esa/wca

(ii) Dorothy Leeds (1998) Secrets of Successful Interviews. The fact that the vast majority of ESA claimants who win their tribunals do so with advocacy support indicates that those without advocacy are not sufficiently resourced with the relevant information and interpretative guidance.

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmworpen/313/31307.htm

(iii) Beyond a Yahoo! Search for “ESA descriptor points”, you might consider subscribing to the services provided by Benefits & Work Publishing. A year’s individual person subscription to Benefits & Work Publishing costs currently less than £20 per year and allows you unlimited access to their guides written by legal professionals into how the ESA descriptors might be interpreted.

http://www.benefitsandwork.co.uk/join-us

(iv) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mckenzie_friend

Greenwash Olympics in London

Human rights and environmental pressure groups have joined forces to campaign against three sponsors of the London Olympics.

The protest campaign - called Greenwash Gold 2012 - has targeted Dow Chemical Company, BP and Rio Tinto.

The group has made three animated films about the firms and members of the public will be invited to vote online for the "worst corporate sponsor".

All three companies have defended their ethical record.

The films include footage of:

A survivor of the Bhopal gas leak disaster in 1984. Dow agreed to purchase the Union Carbide Corporation - whose subsidiary Union Carbide India ran the Bhopal pesticide plant - in 1999. The purchase was completed in 2001.
A representative from the Gulf Coast where communities have been dealing with the environmental impact of BP's oil spill in April 2010
A woman from Utah who claims she is fighting against "life-threatening" air pollution levels caused by one of the mines from which Rio Tinto is providing the metal for the Olympic metals.

'Money talks'

Meredith Alexander, who quit as a commissioner of the 2012's sustainability watchdog in protest over the link between the Bhopal disaster and Dow Chemical Company's involvement in the Games, chaired the campaign launch.

"The Olympic values are all about celebrating our common humanity. But the Olympics is also big business," she said.

"There is an expensive machine behind the Games that is funded by corporate sponsors. Sadly when these sponsors are selected, money talks much more loudly than values."

Dow has always denied any liability for the chemical gas leak and maintains the £288m ($470m) settlement for those affected is fair and final.

BP refused to comment on Greenwash Gold 2012, but in June 2010, the oil firm's regional vice president Peter Mather defended the company's actions.

"Our focus as a company is 100% on the Gulf of Mexico, doing the right thing - doing the right thing on the seabed and our focus is also on the shore," he said.

A Rio Tinto spokesman, defended the company's actions saying: "We operate within the parameters of our air permits and are consistently in compliance with US Environmental Protection Agency and Utah Division of Air Quality regulations, which are based on strict standards for protecting human health."

London 2012 is yet to comment on the campaign launch.

First published by the BBC here

The campaign group for a cleaner Olympics are the Counter Olympics Network

Downhills School Govenors Sacked by Government

Six months ago I volunteered to become a local authority-appointed community governor at Downhills primary school in Tottenham, north London. Last Thursday, I tuned in to BBC radio to learn that I had been fired. Our governing body was dissolved without notice and I, a "big society" governor who is not a parent at the school, may not be allowed to set foot inside again. Many of my former colleagues have been reduced to tears: what had we done to deserve to be despatched in such a ruthless manner?


The reality is that we were victims of our own success. The secretary of state had to remove us, using his sweeping powers under the new Academies Act, because of the resistance we had put up to plans to force the school to become an academy. With our parent-led protest and threats of judicial review, we were in danger of setting a precedent for other schools opposed to a forced academy conversion.


On 8 March, shortly after the Downhills Ofsted report was published (which judged the school inadequate and put it in special measures), my fellow governors met department of education officials and were told that Michael Gove was minded to impose an academy order. Under this order a school can be forced to become an academy governed under an interim executive board (IEB).


The following Monday we wrote to Mr Gove. We said we did not rule out becoming an academy but also considered remaining a community school in local authority control a viable option. We wanted to consult the school community on both options before making a decision. In the end we conducted our own ballot, which showed that 90% of parents who responded were against academy conversion.


In our letter we presented our action plan to address the serious failings identified in the Ofsted report. We recruited an executive head from an outstanding school in Haringey to assist our deputy head, who had been praised by Ofsted. We suggested the governors ourselves should be mentored by the governors at the outstanding school.


We asked for more information about the Harris Federation– the government's preferred sponsor – and for an explanation of why they were considered right for Downhills. We requested raw data for each Harris academy showing progress in maths and English, particularly for disadvantaged children.


Instead we were dismissed without answers. The summary justice dispensed by Gove to our governing body and that of neighbouring Nightingale school indicates that he will not let anything stand in the way of his grand design. But he is making a serious mistake in treating parents and governors who question his plans with such brazen contempt.


We are not Trotskyites or political extremists – far from it. One of my colleagues is a hedge-fund trader who spends every Wednesday evening on football training classes. I am a lawyer who has spent the past five years working at a UN war-crimes tribunal. I joined Downhills governing body because I wanted to do some useful work in the local community. I knew next to nothing about education policy and had no bias against academies. My own poorly performing state secondary school became an academy years after I left, and I only wish it had changed earlier.


I have nothing against the Harris Federation, whose track record is by all accounts impressive. What I do not accept is the argument that academies are the only means of achieving a good education for our children. There are plenty of outstanding schools in local authority control. How a school is run is what's important, not whether an academy or the local authority is in charge.


What persuaded me to join the Downhills campaign were the views of the other governors, parents, staff and the local community. They had legitimate concerns and felt the school could be turned around under local authority control. Many of their arguments I disagreed with, but as the majority wanted the school to remain under a democratically elected, accountable local authority, I was persuaded they were right. At the very least I believed they were entitled to have some say on who should be in charge of the school when such dramatic changes were under consideration.


No doubt Gove's supporters will say Downhills was a failing school that needed dramatic intervention. I find that argument unconvincing. Downhills is certainly not among the worst performing schools as our key stage 1 results for 2011, which at 61% were above the national floor standard, indicate. And it cannot be right that every underperforming school needs to be converted to an academy. Where there are strong arguments for an alternative this should be properly considered. The views of parents and the local community should also be taken into account.


It seems that we will never know the answers to the questions we asked. Our dissolution and replacement with an (Interim Executive Board) IEB, highlights the academies' lack of transparency. As David Wolfe, a leading education lawyer points out, academies do not want to disclose information about how they are run and often back out of legal challenges to avoid so doing. We have league tables for primary and secondary schools and we now need them for academies too. Otherwise parents and governors can have no way of gauging whether a centrally selected "chain" academy provider is a suitable match for their school.


The big guns that have been brought in on the new IEB running Downhills will be under tremendous pressure to deliver results. No one would question their credentials – the new IEB members include "superhead" Dame Sylvia Morris, honoured for her work at a primary school in Southwark, Dan Moynihan, the CEO of the Harris Federation, as well as Robin Bosher, its primary director. But they have never been seen at the school before and we can only wonder how much they know about Tottenham, what links they have with the local community and what sort of welcome they expect from parents who have so overwhelmingly backed our campaign against forced academy conversion.

Written by Roger Sahota
First published at The Guardian here

Boris Bikes are a Corporate Bonanza

Some love him, others mistrust him but few dispute London mayor Boris Johnson's gift for making his mark. No policy of the celebrity Conservative politician has demonstrated this more conspicuously than the 6,000 bulky, blue, Barclays-sponsored bicycles for hire he has brought to the centre of the capital.

Johnson, himself a highly recognisable cyclist, has made the scheme – Barclays Cycle Hire (BCH) – a flagship policy for what he calls his cycling revolution in the capital, proclaiming it a "glorious new form of public transport".

The bikes and the more than 400 docking stations from which users collect and return them have become familiar sights in central London since their introduction in July 2010. On Thursday the scheme will be extended eastwards to within a 15-minute walk of the Olympic Park, with a further 160 docking stations across the East End hosting a further 2,300 bikes.

Yet as his campaign to retain the mayoralty at the 3 May election intensifies, critics are questioning the success of "Boris Bikes".

Transport for London (TfL), the public body responsible for running the scheme, says 137,000 people have active membership accounts, though these include people who might not have used their membership key to hire a bike for many months.

Numbers of casual users, who hire by swiping a credit card at a docking station terminal point, varied last year between 48,379 in January and 240,000 in July. About 20,000 hires altogether are made each weekday and 13,000-15,000 at weekends.

Johnson's election campaign website boasts of "nearly 10m hires" since launch. However, a customer satisfaction survey conducted for TfL by Ipsos Mori last summer found the scheme's novelty had worn off for many of its members with cyclists becoming "more critical of the BCH offer". There was growing dissatisfaction over bike maintenance and finding docking stations full when attempting to return the cycles.

Early teething problems with the system, run for TfL by Serco, had meant that casual users could not access it until December 2010 and nearly 2,800 people were incorrectly charged during its first five months, though TfL says such problems are now long solved.

The survey also found that more than half of members are men aged 35-54, that only 71% live in London and that nearly half used the bikes for commuting, primarily instead of walking or taking the tube. It also found 93% of all Boris Bikes trips lasted less than half an hour, which is a free period after casuals and members have paid an access fee.

Jenny Jones, the Green party's London mayoral candidate and a regular cyclist, said: "Cycle hire is a brilliant idea but the London scheme has been hijacked by corporate interests."

She also said it was unambitious compared with Paris's much larger Vélib scheme. She cites TfL figures to claim it has generated only 3% of the extra 1m daily cycle trips the mayor is committed to seeing by 2026, compared with 2000.

At the first mayoral election hustings both the Labour candidate Ken Livingstone and Liberal Democrat Brian Paddick attacked the cost of the scheme, which Johnson pledged in his 2008 transport manifesto would be delivered at no cost to the taxpayer through "a deal with a private company."

Yet Barclays' contribution has offset only an undisclosed fraction of TfL's outlay. When the deal was announced in May 2010 it was described by TfL as being worth "up to" £25m over five years with the sum also contributing to the "Barclays cycle superhighways" Johnson has begun introducing on some main commuter routes. The cost of installing the first phase of the scheme was £79.5m. Only £3.4m had been received from Barclays by the end of 2010.

Last July Johnson applauded Barclays' agreeing to "provide another £25m sponsorship," extending its support to 2018 and planned further expansion into west and south London next year.

But in November he said the "anticipated total operational and project cost" over the following five years for the first two phases of the scheme was £140.5m, and that over the life of the contract with Barclays there was "a potential" of £50m in sponsorship.

Johnson added: "The profiling and detail of the payment of the sponsorship is commercially sensitive." A report by the London Assembly transport committee last month criticised the process by which Barclays was selected as a sponsor as "almost totally opaque".

Johnson has enjoyed a close relationship with Barclays throughout his mayoralty, appointing the bank's now global chief executive Bob Diamond the first chair of his charitable Mayor's Fund for London in 2008. Diamond has since stepped down but Barclays Capital is a "strategic partner" of the fund.

BBC London last year reported that he had made "a personal approach" to Barclays chairman Marcus Agius about sponsoring the scheme and that other high street banks were not sounded out.

Three advertising consultants put the publicity value of the deal to Barclays, whose name and Barclays blue corporate colour adorns the bikes and docking points, at £9m-£15m a year. But Johnson and TfL have always insisted the deal is good value for money in tough economic times.

The original colour of the signage and roundels for the scheme was mint green, but was changed to Barclays blue as part of the deal. TfL has always denied that the blue paint used to mark the cycle superhighway lanes was chosen because of its similarity to the Barclays hue, saying it was settled on at least three months before Barclays came on board.

London's boroughs are now being asked to help fund the scheme's growth. Citizen journalists at MayorWatch and the Shepherd's Bush blog have disclosed that Tower Hamlets, Wandsworth and Hammersmith & Fulham are each required to provide £2m.

TfL puts annual operating costs at £15m a year, rising to £20m with phase 2. Johnson wants these to break even by 2015, but TfL is forecasting only £7m income from users by the end of this financial year. Come 3 May Londoners' votes may be swayed by whether they consider Boris Bikes to be the triumph Johnson says they are – or a taxpayer-subsidised advertising vehicle for Barclays and the Tory mayor.

Written by Dave Hill
First published at The Guardian