Budget 2014 Takes Doublespeak to New Depths

Casual readers of the budget might wonder whether it had been written by chancellor George Osborne or George Orwell. A garden city built in a quarry and growth built on a reinflated housing bubble are hardly reassuring evidence of the economy based on "more economic security and economic resilience" that Osborne claims to be his objective.

Most shockingly, the freezing of the carbon tax and the reduction in the rate of air passenger duty for long-haul flights makes it plain that the chancellor has no understanding of what resilience means, and how our failure to tackle climate change threatens it.

Resilience has followed hard on the heels of that much-abused concept 'sustainability' in helping to define the key characteristics of a sustainable society. Unlike the financial system, which cracked when it came under pressure, a resilient system would be able to bounce back even in the face of unexpected challenges; unlike the railway line at Dawlish, resilient infrastructure is based on built-in redundancy that means there is always an alternative when a system comes under pressure from an unpredictable event. It is exactly this sort of resilience that has been designed out of our economy and society by years of lean management and just-in-time production systems. From computer systems to food supply chains, the globalised market-place has left us less resilient than we have ever been.

So what would a budget for resilience and security actually look like? Let's start with finance. A resilient model for banking would insist on the breaking up of the consolidated megabanks so that banks were no longer 'too big to fail', and no one bank would be large enough to bring down the whole system. Mr Osborne could pop across to the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) and have a word with his colleague Vince Cable who operates RBS on behalf of its owners, us, the citizens of the UK. He might subtly suggest that he break it up into a system of local community banks, which could be required to actually act like banks, building supportive relationships with the local businesses that a resilient economy requires, rather than acting like casinos.

While on the issue of finance, we should also tell George that his desperate attempt to reinflate the housing bubble through extending the life of Help to Buy is storing up exactly the sort of catastrophic financial collapse that put us in this economic mess. It also does nothing for those who are most in need of reasonably priced housing, since it will only support mortgages they cannot afford and encourage house prices to rise even further beyond their reach.

The most fundamental cause of social insecurity in modern Britain is the failure of the housing market to provide affordable, comfortable homes to those who need them. Here the chancellor could act swiftly to bring in rent controls which would simultaneously reduce the massive amount of public money being wasted on housing benefit. He could also raise the borrowing limits on local authorities to enable them to build houses for those on their lengthy and growing waiting lists.

The greatest source of insecurity we all face is the unpredictable consequences of climate change, and it is here that Osborne's words ring most hollow. Here we see clearly the government's back-tracking on this most vital issue, building on the earlier folly of reducing green levies on energy companies, now further decreasing incentives to business to reduce their carbon emissions by freezing the carbon price floor. He has learned nothing about resilience from the winter's devastating storms and floods, but the urgent need for a consistent policy on climate change is now more evident than ever.

Real energy security comes from demand reduction as a result of improved energy installation in homes, combined with local generation from renewable energy sources. This government's mixed messages on renewable tariffs and taxes has undermined several proposed investments in wind generation, destroying jobs in my own home region of the South West. A higher rate of feed-in tariff limited to small-scale and community-owned electricity generation projects would be the best policy in the budget to ensure real energy security.

With a budget that achieves the exact opposite of the objectives the chancellor has set himself we are all wondering what will come out of the Ministry of Truth next. A Localism Act that centralises planning perhaps; or a Big Society that cuts benefits for the poor and vulnerable?

Written by  Molly Scott Cato Professor of Green Economics at Roehampton University and Green candidate in the European Elections

First published at The Huffington Post

Follow Molly Scott Cato on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MollyScottCato

Boris’ rich investors won’t build the affordable housing London needs

Boris Johnson is heading down to Cannes this week to flog regeneration projects to investors and developers at MIPIM, the world’s largest property fair. He told the BBC he was going to “lobby key investors and developers to help double house-building, including more affordable homes”.

And yet affordable housing is the last thing on their minds, and the Mayor is all too happy to wave through regeneration schemes with or without it.

Take Mount Pleasant, for example. He took this decision out of the hands of the two local councils at the request of the recently-privatised Royal Mail Group, who own the site. They want to get planning permission so they can sell it on to a developer with a big mark-up.

In their plans, only 12 per cent of the homes would be affordable. The councils think it could be at least 50 per cent. But Boris took it off their hands before they could say no and is likely to wave it through.
The Mayor has been travelling the world to sell London. His argument is quite simple: building lots of homes is the only way to solve our housing crisis, and this is the best way to achieve that.

But what sort of homes? More expensive flats for rich investors, which could be left empty, or rented to insecure and overcharged tenants?

What’s more, the Mayor wants to stop prices rising by building more homes, and he can only build more homes if prices are rising. Spot the flaw?

I obtained copies of a brochure he took to China last autumn. One introductory page gives the game away:

“London has wealth preservation benefits, outstanding long term capital growth and an increasingly strong rental market.”

The message, in plain English, is that you can make lots of money from rising house prices and rents, and we won’t tax your profits away.

City Hall recently produced new research on London’s housing needs. To fix our housing problems over the next ten years it suggested we needed to build 62,000 homes a year, of which 41,000 should be affordable homes. So two thirds should be affordable homes.

But the Mayor keeps signing off developments like Mount Pleasant that are a long way from providing this. At Earl’s Court, only 11 per cent will be affordable, and those will only replace homes that are being demolished to make way for the expensive flats. At the Heygate estate, 25 per cent will be affordable, but these will only replace half of the 1,023 existing council homes being demolished.

The Mayor even signs off developments without any affordable housing at all, like One the Elephant, which I asked him about last October.

These are developments for the benefit of rich investors, leaving only crumbs for ordinary Londoners.

The simple truth the Mayor needs to learn is this: going to MIPIM isn’t the answer.

We need to bring in a land value tax to reduce demand from investors so that people on average incomes get a fair chance of buying their own home. For all those people stuck in the private rented sector for years to come, we need longer tenancies and rent controls modelled on success stories on the continent.

And if we are going to build 41,000 affordable homes a year, we need much more investment from public, not private, purses.

By Darren Johnson, Green Party member of the London Assembly

It's Official: Badger Culls Were Inhumane, Ineffective and Unnecessary

Last autumn, more than 1,800 badgers lost their lives in Somerset and Gloucestershire in the name of bovine tuberculosis control. From the very beginning, Humane Society International/UK and our Team Badger colleagues warned that badgers would suffer and that the cull would be ineffective. Now the government-commissioned report by independent experts, who have studied the evidence, has shown our grave concerns to be justified.

Inhumane 

The independent report, leaked to the BBC at the end of February, shows that a significant proportion of free-shot badgers took more than five minutes to die.

 Additional analysis of compliance monitoring reports from Natural England (the statutory body responsible for issuing the licenses for badger culling) shows that, while the number of shootings they observed during the pilots was very low, nevertheless a third of those badgers were shot in the wrong part of the body such as the head or neck, some wounded animals needing to be shot a second time, in some cases after being pursued for five to ten minutes. These reports suggest that hundreds of badgers will have suffered considerably during the pilot culls.

Failure

The damning conclusions of the independent report are extremely important. The pilot culls were ostensibly set up to test whether the shooting of free-roaming badgers at night with shotguns and rifles would prove to be a humane, effective and safe way of reducing badger populations.

From the start Defra ministers have ignored animal welfare concerns, public opposition and overwhelming scientific evidence that culling badgers wouldn't help to prevent the spread of TB among cattle. While the cull was underway, Defra revised the badger population estimates downwards and extended the culling period well beyond the initial six weeks stipulated in the licenses.

The culls proved highly controversial and divisive, with members of the public turning out in force at rallies and at night in the cull zones to walk the footpaths, check the setts and provide assistance for any wounded badgers. More than 300,000 people signed Brian May's Stop the Badger Cull e-petition. Costs spiralled, with the total bill for each badger killed estimated to be in excess of £4,000.

Ineffective

Despite being given more time to kill more badgers, in the end the shooters failed to even get close to their kill target of 70%. In Gloucestershire they barely reached 40%, after shooting for more than 11 weeks.
Far from helping, most scientists agree that killing a smaller proportion of badgers over a longer period of time is likely to make things worse. This is because the remaining disturbed badgers roam more widely and the prevalence of TB in the badger population increases.

Unnecessary

Let's not forget that culling badgers is also entirely unnecessary.
In Wales, annual testing of cattle, among other measures, was reintroduced in 2008. Since then, the number of 'reactor' cattle slaughtered each year has reduced by almost a half, without a single badger being killed. In England, similar measures are slowly being introduced, and while we are a few years behind Wales, we are already seeing rates of TB in cattle reducing.

In the 1960s, TB in cattle was brought under control using strict cattle testing regimes, movement restrictions and biosecurity measures. Over the intervening years these measures were slowly relaxed and abandoned altogether during cattle restocking after the BSE and Foot & Mouth Disease outbreaks of the 1990s and 2001 respectively. Reintroducing these stricter standards may be unpopular among some farmers who resist reform, but it is surely an appropriate way to bring cattle TB back under control while we await the introduction of effective cattle vaccines.

The obsession among some farmers and veterinarians with badger culling must end. Badger culling is inhumane, ineffective and unnecessary. The government, the British Veterinary Association, and farmers unions must recognise that the answer to the problem of bovine TB is within the industry's own hands. They must now abandon all notions of badger culling and focus on introducing and ensuring compliance with stricter cattle measures, and promoting vaccination of both badgers and cattle.

Only then will we have an effective policy we can all support.
Take action to help protect badgers -- Send a message to the Prime Minister: Kill the Cull, not the Badgers

 

Follow Mark Jones on Twitter: www.twitter.com/hsiglobal      

Executive Director for animal protection organisation Humane Society International/UK

First published at The Huffington Post

Boris, the super rich and pay inequality

Jenny Jones AM is leader of the Green Party on the London Assembly and Green Party Mayoral candidate for 2012

Nobody could be surprised by Boris Jonson's latest column defending bankers and the rest of London's super-rich elite.

He’s an expert in baiting the left on subjects like bankers’ pay, then switching his ground to promote the living wage. But he isn’t just a newspaper troll. He is also the Mayor of London, and he is using this position of considerable power and influence to help the elite reshape London, with real world consequences.

Did you know, for example, that the only time the Mayor has travelled to Brussels in person was to lobby for the hedge funds?

His advocacy of the wider financial services sector is incredibly one sided, without any consideration of their role in the wider London economy.

He has talked about their tax contributions, but not their tax avoidance and subsidies. He calls them the engine of our economy, but doesn’t seem too concerned that (so the New Economics Foundation tell me) only 6p of every pound deposited with RBS/Natwest goes into British businesses. He has lobbied against the bankers’ bonus cap, the Financial Transaction Tax and a number of other modest reforms of the banking industry.

His advisors, his research, the evidence he draws on are all aligned with the needs of the elite he defends.

Where does the Mayor imagine the 1 per cent make all of their money, and hold all of their wealth? What about the mis-selling scandals, the continued exploitation of workers in shakily built factories, the naked profiteering of the big six energy companies? He doesn’t want to look at the damage done by an unequal society to London’s economy and Londoner’s living standards.

The 1 per cent lobby against a mandatory living wage, saying it would mean job losses, while their pay rose 14 per cent in a year. Yes, some of that extra pay will go towards their sizeable tax returns. But one result of 700,000 Londoners earning less than a living wage is a £700 million annual subsidy from taxpayers to employers. Why not cut out the taxman and share the profits more fairly in the first place?

The Mayor champions a voluntary living wage, but in the same breath defends the right of employers to pay their employees poverty wages.

The 1 per cent are driving up property prices in the capital, exacerbating a housing crisis that has no end in sight. London is already the most unequal city in the developed world, with the wealthiest tenth of the population amassing 273 times the wealth owned by the bottom tenth. Most wealth at the top lies in pension funds, investments and property.

This is bolstered by taxpayer subsidies like Help to Buy and housing benefit, policies the Mayor supports that avoid the root causes of our housing crisis and instead help ordinary people scrape by to the benefit of the 1 per cent.

The Mayor is their champion, supporting the construction of incredibly expensive tower blocks that are often build on the site of demolished council housing.

What’s really infuriating is that the Mayor actually has a good news story on pay, but he doesn’t give it any attention.

I’ve tracked the difference in pay between the highest and lowest paid staff in the different bodies the Mayor oversees – City Hall (the GLA), Transport for London, the Metropolitan Police Service and the London Fire Brigade. Since he became Mayor, pay has actually become slightly more equal across all bodies except TfL. This is both because top pay has slightly dropped and bottom pay has risen.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say everything has been rosy in these organisations over the past five years. But I doubt the Mayor would say it has been a disaster. He just doesn’t want to look at whether he can replicate this move towards equality across London at large.

Why can’t he get on and make London more equal, a place where getting a job really does pay enough to build a life on, rather than a city where more and more of us feel like we are just sweated by a global elite?

First published at Left Foot Forward

The Lib Dems - Yellow by Name, Yellow by Nature

Confirmation that the Lib Dems are the political equivalent of something you'd rather not get on your shoes came with their opposition to Labour's parliamentary motion against the Bedroom Tax earlier this week. Apart from Tim Farron and Andrew George, Lib Dem MPs swung behind the Tories and have thus condemned the hundreds of thousands impacted by this callous, cruel, and contemptuous Tory tax throughout the country to at least two more years of misery and despair up to the next general election in 2015.

The 31 Lib Dems who voted with the government were joined by a further 21 who avoided the issue by failing to vote. Making this latest betrayal even more staggering is that it came in defiance of their own party, which condemned the Bedroom Tax at their party conference in Glasgow in September.

What motivates a person to go into politics fuelled not by principle but rank opportunism? What is that gets such a person out of bed in the morning? Hopefully sometime in the future psychologists will explore the mindset of your average Lib Dem MP in an attempt to understand the minds of those who embrace betrayal as a virtue rather than, as with normal people, rejecting it as a vice.

Since joining with the Tories in a coalition government of the bad and mad, the Lib Dems have done politics a huge disservice, responsible for deepening people's cynicism and disdain for the political process. Russell Brand's recent interview with Jeremy Paxman, during which he articulated this disdain as the reason why he's never voted, spoke to the huge gulf that exists between a growing constituency of people and those meant to represent them.

Step forward the Liberal Democrats.

At least with the Tories you know you are dealing with a party of unreconstructed class warriors. At least they make little effort to conceal their feral hatred of the poor and working people. In contradistinction, however, the Lib Dems fought the last general election on a manifesto that was broadly progressive.

Recall for a moment the excitement surrounding Nick Clegg as the coming man of British politics, a breath of fresh air who in the televised debates against David Cameron and Gordon Brown emerged as a young leader with fresh ideas, 'integrity', 'honesty', and a strong sense of social justice. Indeed Clegg succeeded in inspiring thousands of people, especially young people, to campaign and vote for him. Remember his pledge on tuition fees?

Not long after the last election a Newsnight poll of Lib Dem voters recorded that 40% felt betrayed by Clegg. This translates to some 2.7 million voters. You would think it would have made uncomfortable reading for any party, yet three years on it is clear that the collective mindset of the Lib Dems is one of 'nobody likes us and we don't care'.

But this is not a game. The Bedroom Tax exemplifies the worst excesses of a government intent of using an economic recession caused by the greed of the rich as a pretext for effecting the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich by slashing public spending regardless of the human or social cost. The lives of the poor and economically vulnerable matter not a whit in this process. On the contrary they have been demonised, dehumanised, and slandered under the rubric of austerity, which translates to a mass experiment in human despair.

According to the National Housing Federation just over half of all social housing tenants had been pushed into rent arrears just weeks after the Bedroom Tax was rolled out in April. In September an investigation by UN special rapporteur on housing, Raquel Rolnick, ended with her calling for the tax to axed on the basis that it "could be a violation of the human right to housing".

For her efforts she was dismissed and derided by the Tories as a crank.

The lack of affordable social housing in Britain has long been a badge of shame, reflective of the apathy of the entire political class when it comes to the needs of the poor. Here, as with too many issues, we see evidence of hardly a sliver of difference when it comes to the Tories, Lib Dems, and Labour. With thousands of families forced to rely on bed and breakfast accommodation, wherein they are crammed into one room, and with a private housing sector enjoying the fruits of exorbitant rents due to demand outstripping supply, the idea that those who happen to have an extra bedroom within the social housing sector should have their housing benefit cut or move into smaller accommodation is barbaric.

The size of the housing benefit bill is not the fault of tenants, it is the fault of greedy landlords charging extortionate rents. Rent control within the private rental sector in conjunction with a national housebuilding programme designed to meet the demand for social housing needs to be implemented as a matter of urgency. It is the only rational solution to the crisis. Sadly, the words rational and Tory do not belong in the same sentence. Putting it even more succinctly, men and women whose collective moral compass is stuck in the mid 19th century are about as rational as a box of frogs.

The Lib Dems were given the opportunity to go some way to salvaging some political credibility this week by voting for a Labour motion against one of the most vile policies ever visited on the poor and economically disadvantaged in many a year. They chose not to and hopefully now political oblivion awaits.

As the man said: "Treason doth never prosper".

 

Written by John Wight follow him on Twitter: www.twitter.com/johnwight1      

First published at The Huffington Post

I warned Boris that his policies would lead to more cycling deaths

Jenny Jones AM is leader of the Green Party on the London Assembly and Green Party Mayoral candidate for 2012

Four out of five cycling deaths in the last nine days are linked to either the Mayor's red buses or to his blue paint.

After almost six years of inaction on cycle safety, the rise in the number of killed and seriously injured have to be placed at the Mayor’s door. That is why this morning he started blaming the victims, rather than talking about real solutions.

It is the lowest form of politics to direct attention to the mistakes that people may or may not have made as they cycled to work, or rode home to their families, in order to draw attention away from yourself.

The whole point of being Mayor is that you take responsibility for creating safer roads, where individual mistakes by a cyclist, driver, motorcyclist or pedestrian do not get punished with death.

Boris Johnson has previous form on blaming the victims, and repeatedly refused to apologise for the wildly incorrect statistic he used to claim that the majority of deaths and injuries where down to cyclist infractions of the rules. Transport for London refused to back up his claim and the Mayor reluctantly agreed it wasn’t true, but it was a resentful, grudging conversation.

The Mayor even returned to his favourite theme that London’s roads were getting safer for cyclists and he wanted me to apologise for saying they were not. The reality is that they are safer than they were twelve years ago, but they have become more dangerous since he was elected.

My office have been trying to get TfL to make the post 2008 calculation on the ratio of cyclist death and serious injuries since July. We wanted them to do it so that we could avoid another spat between me and Boris over who had better statistics.

Instead TfL have told us that ‘they do not regularly publish’ such figures and directed us instead to the raw data. The calculation seems easy enough so here it is:

In 2008, on average a cyclists could make 401,910 trips before being killed or seriously injured.
In 2011, the average cyclist could make 364,361 trips before being killed or seriously injured.
The 2012 figures will show that this trend has accelerated; I have no idea what 2013 will finally bring, but I suspect it won’t be good news.

I have repeatedly warned Boris Johnson that his policies would lead to more death and injury. Whether it was slashing over £35m off the road safety budget, abandoning the road hierarchy which had previously made cyclist and pedestrian safety the top priority,  or stopping safety improvements at junctions because they might create a traffic jam.

The Mayor made mistakes and stayed firmly in denial about the consequences. He still is. For all the talk of a £900m cycle safety budget, he still believes in those comments about keeping ‘your wits about you’ and ‘there is no amount of traffic engineering that we invest in that is going to save people’s lives’.

The solutions are obvious and uncomplicated. Make 20mph the default speed limit across London. Give space for cycling by taking it away from cars and lorries. Ban HGVs during commuter hours. Get rid of the major gyratories and start from scratch with the redesign of places like Bow Roundabout and Old Street. Fast track all the safety measures on the top 100 most dangerous junctions.

While the Mayor is doing all of that, he could start to enforce the rules on our lawless roads, so we no longer have 62 hit and runs a week in London, or a situation where the majority of drivers with over 12 points on their licence are legally allowed to drive.

First published at Left Foot Forward

Russell Brand Interview - We need a Revolution

There is some enjoyable sparring between Paxman, clearly channelling the sentiments of thousands of PSE teachers parrotting the vacuous suggestion that those who criticize the failings of our 'representative democracy' should stop and instead involve themselves in it, and Brand, who channels the sarcastic teenagers who know all the reasons why the teacher is wrong and are happy enough with that. But this isn't a serious political debate or any sign that revolution is on the agenda.

Brand talks generically about the way in which differences within the 'political class' are more ephemeral than they seem, and how this has made people dissillusioned with the political system. Strip out the occasional nods towards leftist terminology (like saying 'political class' instead of 'Westminster Politicians') and this is mainly the stuff of a million pub conversations about how 'they are all the bloody same'. Nigel Farage could probably agree with 80% of it.

To be scrupulously fair, he does talk about the failure of the banking system, about unequal distribution of wealth and income, and about cuts and austerity. That's a good thing, and something we don't hear discussed in these terms often on mainstream TV.

But as another famous beardie once wrote, the important thing is not to interpret the world but to change it. Here Brand was utterly helpless in the face of the Paxman steamroller. Paxman says that the only way to change the political system is to participate in it; Brand knows that this is wrong but is unable to articulate why. That would require too much engagement with detail and with structure and process. Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky can do this, but they don't get prime time with Jeremy Paxman, and not many people would watch if they did. Brand does get prime time, precisely because he can't spell out a detailed critique of how 'representative democracy' screws us all.

It's a bit unfair to blame Russell Brand for not having a detailed political program or strategy, a point that he makes rather well himself during the interview. But it is important to recognize that talking about a revolution without actually expressing any idea about what that might mean is, in some sense at least, one of the safety valves of the political system. We have seen this in other anti-politics movements led by comedians and celebrities, notably the Beppe Grillo movement in Italy, that captured the rage of an important section of the population and then led into a blind alley with a program that again, Nigel Farage would have quite liked.

Lots of people have shared the interview video, excited that someone famous was at least using the R word. That's got to be a good thing, and it would be an even better thing if our party and the movement of which it is part would be able to engage with this sentiment, which goes far beyond the usual waters in which the anti-capitalist left usually fishes. But that in turn requires a political strategy for change that goes beyond 'vote for us, we are different to the rest of them'. And a vision of a revolution that is neither a fairy tale of opting out of capitalism to create a parallel world alongside it nor a nineteenth century insurrectionist fantasy.

Written by Jeremy Green

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.                  

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 Council Tax Benefit Reductions to Cause Increase in Poverty

A local activist writes an open letter to Haringey council opposing their proposed reductions to Council Tax Benefit:

I am a resident of Tottenham, living at 93 Campbell Road, N17 0BF; I pay the full rate of Council Tax (CT) for this property. I am responding to the Haringey Council's consultation about the abolition of the national council tax benefit (CTB), and about Haringey’s proposals to replace it with their local scheme.

I write to oppose your proposals on the grounds that the 25,560 households, who now pay no council tax will have to pay 20%, or around £300pa, from April 2013.

It is irrational on three grounds;

•benefits are paid by the Department of Work and Pensions to our poorest fellow citizens to provide the necessities of life; they are already inadequate in work and out of work and the benefit claimants' health and well being will put at risk, as will their children's education, by taxing those benefit incomes. 

 •there are so many cuts to benefits being made by the Department of Work and Pensions to the already inadequate benefit incomes that the risks of ill-health mentioned in (1) are multiplied.

•the stress of enforcement in families who cannot pay places expensive demands on the mental and physical health services and the schools

 •no account has been taken of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation minimum income standards which underline the inadequacy of the benefits before they are taxed.

•the increasing number of calls on the three food banks in the Borough are further evidence that benefit claimants will not be able to pay the council tax

Haringey is also abolishing the CTB for an unspecified number of people whose level of savings is currently over £10,000 by cutting the level of entitlement from £16,000. The council has not provided enough information to enable anyone to make a decision about whether this policy is rational or not; this is not a valid consultation.

The council says it is consulting all residents; how is the council ensuring that commitment is being kept?

In 1989 the Thatcher government added an amount to unemployment benefit to help them pay the poll tax; there is no sign of that in Haringey today.

Haringey has not carried out an assessment of the cumulative impact of the measures taken by the DWP to cut the benefits of 25,560 Haringey residents they now propose to tax; the measures impacting on the income of benefit claimants are;

1. The rate of increase of already inadequate benefits has been reduced by the move of uprating from RPI to CPI in April 2011, while prices of food and fuel escalate,

2. Housing benefit caps,

3. Bedroom tax,

4. £500 cap on all benefits.

5. Nationally sanctions now stop or reduce benefit payments for between 2 weeks and six months. 508,000 benefit sanctions were handed out in 2011, a rise from the 139,000 imposed in 2009. Many sanctions have been applied in the borough of Haringey.

6. The social fund has been abolished.

The local authorities will charge inevitable defaulters around £70 for a liability order from the magistrate’s courts, on top of the CT arrears, they and the advice sector, already overwhelmed will be swamped. The bailiffs charge defaulters up to £400 more.

Written by Rev Paul Nicolson, a local non party political aligned Haringey activist.

Green Party at 8% in National Opinion Poll

The national monthly (September) political tracker voting intention opinion poll by Ipsos Mori, put the Green party on an astonishing 8%. Regular readers of this blog will remember that I recently highlighted the strong showing of late of the ‘Others’ in voting intention polls. UKIP have generally been getting the largest share of the ‘others’ vote, regularly out polling the Lib Dems, with the Greens doubling our share, but still usually only half that of the UKIP share.

In the Ipsos Mori poll for September though, this situation was reversed with UKIP polling 4% against the Greens 8%. Unfortunately, the Green party is back to 3% in the October poll with UKIP on 10%, but you would expect some volatility in the polling figures for small parties, where the sample surveyed is usually around only a thousand respondents, and so smaller party support is harder to detect and predict than that for the main parties.

Another polling company,Survation, who very accurately predicted the Green party vote share in this year’s London Assembly election, have an interesting piece on another, methodological reason why some polling organisations understate the strength of small party support in their polls. Basically, companies like Yougov, prompt respondents when asking which party they intend to vote for, (Con, Lab, Lib Dem or Other), so people need to first select Other, then select the particular party from a secondary prompt, (UKIP, Green, BNP etc).

Also, Yougov list the party options in the order Con, Lab, Lib Dem, Other, whereas Ipsos Mori change this order randomly, except in the case of Other, which is always last. According to the Survation piece, this explains why the Conservatives always poll higher in Yougov polls, and therefore logic would indicate that these polls will understate the Other vote, for the converse reason. Survation themselves, do randomly prompt on the main parties, and now UKIP too, and UKIP polls higher on their surveys than any of the other polling companies.

One thing that seems to be fairly certain is that this trend of UKIP and the Greens polling well is set to continue, with the next UK wide elections being the 2014 European Parliament elections in which both UKIP and the Greens do best at. Expect some gains for both parties in the Euro elections and probably the local authority council elections that will be held on the same day. Unless something dramatic happens, the Lib Dems will be down to their ‘core’ vote of 8 or 9%, and so will not affect the outcome of elections as much as they have done in recent years.

More importantly, if this trend continues all the way to the next general election which is expected in 2015, and if between UKIP and the Greens they can take approaching 15% of the national vote, with UKIP taking their votes mainly off the Conservatives and the Greens taking them mainly off Labour, this could have a significant impact on which of the two main parties wins the election.

What’s more, Labour and Conservatives will know this is the case, as they study these opinion polls very closely, which makes them more likely to steal policies off UKIP and the Greens in an effort to minimise the votes lost to their smaller rivals. This is potentially a strong position for us Greens, where we can perhaps influence Labour policy leftwards, and for UKIP to drag the Tories rightwards (I know, it’s hard to imagine the Tories being even more right wing, but there you go).

The days of the Lib Dems maintaining ‘equidistance’ between Labour and Conservative, and so peeling votes off their right and left wings respectively, looks to be well and truly over. A new dynamic will shape the next general election, and the Green party will be right in the thick of it.

Opinion Polls – Under the Radar

When polling organisations conduct political party voting intention opinion polls, usually commissioned by a newspaper, the story is always of how the three main (perhaps that should be two now) parties are faring, and which leader has the best approval ratings.

The polls have been pretty consistent over recent months, showing Labour with a double digit lead over the Conservatives, and the poor old Lib Dems flat lining at around 10%, sometimes as low as 8%. But if you look more closely, the ‘others’ are doing surprisingly well. The ‘story’ will only mention this in passing, but if you look at the full results, as political anoraks like me do, there is something happening, which is much more of a ‘story’ than that put out by the commissioning media outfits.

What you see is an impressive (around 10%) showing for UKIP, sometimes beating the Lib Dems into fourth place, and an improvement in the Green party share, which is around 3 or 4%. An example is this recent Opinium poll commission by The Observer newspaper. 

Now, that may not sound all that notable, but from my observations over the years, the Green party normally polls about 1 to 2% in national polls, except when there is an election (proportional) coming up like the European Parliament elections, when I’ve seen us poll as high as 6 or 7%.

This is a trend which I reported on this blog here back in May, and recent opinion polls do seem to confirm this view. But why is this happening?

I think the reasons are varied to some extent. Labour, Tory and Lib Dems all offer very similar policies these days, for one thing. The MP’s expenses scandal still resonates amongst the public too, and it is the main parties MP’s that were involved in this fraudulent raid on the public purse.  But I think the main reason is a desire amongst the voters to ‘protest’ vote, “sod the lot of you” type of thing.

What has changed on the party political landscape in recent years is that the Lib Dems are no longer the beneficiaries of this desire to stick it up the political establishment. They are of course in government now, though you would hardly know it with the Tories dominating the coalition government’s policies.

Another opinion poll from Opinum sheds some light on this particular theory. Take a look at this graphic (right hand side). Of those who voted Lib Dem in the 2010 general election, only a third are intending to vote Lib Dem again, with Labour gaining the most (39%) of those who have changed their allegiance but 8% have switched to UKIP and 10% to the Green party. I find the idea that voters can switch from the most pro-European of the British political parties (Lib Dems) to UKIP whose whole raison d’etre is being anti-Europe, somewhat bemusing, but there you go.

The 10% planning to vote Green is what has doubled our opinion poll score, which is a significant advance for us Greens, if not signalling some kind of major breakthrough. But it also means that we have much work to do, if we are to translate this into seats at Westminster and elsewhere. These voters are on the left politically, and so are our natural supporters.

Put simply, we have to get more of those 39% of former Lib Dem voters that are intending to vote Labour next time, to vote Green. Which is why we need to go on the attack, and expose Labour for what it is, a ‘Tory light’ party, sometimes not even so light.

Labour Party – Are You Tories in Disguise?

We might have expected it, with Ed Balls, the Labour shadow chancellor, stating in a pre-conference announcement he will stick to the Tory public sector pay freeze beyond the next general election, should Labour win. But this year’s Labour party conference has gone even further though, with the leader of the party stealing the ‘One Nation’ mantle from the Conservative party.

Ed Miliband isn’t the first Labour leader to snaffle this particular slogan of the pre Margaret Thatcher Conservative party. Tony Blair described New Labour as a ‘One Nation’ party in his (successful) bid to win over voters from the ‘middle ground’ in British politics. Of course, the ‘middle ground’ had shifted so far to the right in elite political discourse at that time, that it was probably not an exaggeration for him to claim it as a left wing position, as being akin to the Edward Heath led Conservative party of the 1970’s is indeed to the left all three main parties these days.

David Cameron depicted himself as a ‘One Nation’ Tory when he was attempting to detoxify the Conservative party brand, and so appeal to ‘middle ground’ voters, who are generally the most fickle anyway, and it worked, in a fashion for him too. I don’t think Cameron can play that card anymore though, with pressure from within the right of his party so strong now. So, in terms of positioning in the consciousness of the public, Labour and Miliband may well be onto something. Political ‘cross dressing’ doesn’t really surprise anyone these days, and it may be purely a presentational tactic.

But on top of the other portents that have been revealed at the Labour party conference this week, about the direction of Labour and the likely approach they would take to governing the country if they win the general election in 2015 (if the ConDem government lasts that long), this may well be more significant. Because make no mistake about it, the Labour party has staked its flag firmly on the already overcrowded centre right political compost heap, in Manchester this past few days.

The huffing and puffing of the unions has been ignored yet again, and it makes you think what on earth do the unions get out of funding a party that pursues policies that are so bad for their members? Hope of some crumbs here and there, I dare say, but is that really enough for the millions of pounds they put into Labour? Union members should ‘vote with their feet’ and support parties that represent their interests, and I think the Green party comes into this category, whatever union  leaders say about reclaiming the Labour party for working people. This is just a fantasy.

Liam Byrne, Labour’s shadow welfare secretary, is on record as saying that welfare benefits are likely to be slashed further under a future Labour administration, in line with Ed Balls taking a ‘zero-based’ review of public spending. Byrne claims that more benefits will be means tested, rather than universally available, such as free bus passes for the elderly, which is bad enough in itself, but does anyone really believe that Labour will restore Disability Living Allowance and Employment Support Allowance to those who have cruelly had it withdrawn from them under the ConDem government?

The leader of Scottish Labour, Johann Lamont went even further, claiming that we need to end the "something for nothing" culture, as applied to benefits in Scotland, and blaming the Scottish National Party led government north of the border for issuing ‘election bribes’ to voters. 

With no visible sign of irony, Andy Burnham the shadow health secretary, called for the reversal of the ‘rapid privatisation’ of the NHS, when the last Labour government opened the door to NHS privatisation with exorbitant Private Finance Initiative deals to build new hospitals whilst hiving off the most profitable parts of health service provision to private companies.  

And Ed Balls has ruled out taking the part nationalised RBS and Lloyds banks into full public ownership and using them as investment motors to get the economy moving again. He also refuses to confirm that a future Labour government would raise the top rate of income tax to 50%, let alone the 75% that the socialist government in France is introducing, or to raise corporation tax from the scandalously low rate it is, by even one penny in the pound.

The generous side of me thinks Ed Miliband would like to inch Labour slightly to the left, but it is clear that powerful voices within the party will not stand for it, and they get listened to carefully, unlike the unions.

So there you have it. The right wing press falls over each other in its praise of Ed Miliband’ speech and performance, and well they might. Nothing to fear here, on the contrary, business as usual for the establishment, as the rest of us continue to get shafted.

So much for the self-styled, ‘People’s Party’.   

Tory tax on the poor – coming to a council near you

Once upon a time, there were 20 people living in King Tory‘s Mansion, 10 of whom were assessed as ‘unable’ to pay for their Council Tax for various reasons ranging from old age, disabilities, mental illness or lowly paid. The total amount of Council Tax for all 20 people was £2,000, or £100 per a person. The 10 that could pay, did directly and the 10 that could not had their Council Tax paid for by King Tory, totalling £1,000.

One day King Tory says to the 10 who can’t pay: “We are only going to pay £900 towards your Council Tax”, or a 10% cut. The 10 would need to find £10 each to top up the amount needed for Council Tax.

King Tory has a condition: he will give £900 but the pensioners will be protected 100% from paying any Council Tax. As 5 of the 10 are pensioners, £500 of the £900 is spent on them. This means the remaining 5 only have £400 between them, and now need to find £20 each. So the cut for them is 20% even though the pot is only 10% smaller.

The central government is imposing an ideology many of us would remember as the ‘Poll Tax’ where everyone must pay something. What they have done is fired a shot, and handed the gun to Local Councils to take the rap. We must not be fooled by this, even though some Councils appear to be taking the blame for the shot fired.

Who gets shot next is up to us, it’s called ‘Localism’, through the ‘consultations’.

Central Government have asked Local Councils to undertake, we decide who pays and who does not, whether everyone outside the protected pensioners pay 20% or whether we also protect low income families with Children, thus increasing the percentage for the rest.

We are being forced to choose one vulnerable group over another, groups that probably will already be facing cuts in Working Tax Credits, Housing Benefit, Disability Allowance and anything else from the ‘Overall Benefit Cap (OBC) etc.

This also creates a ‘postcode lottery’ as People with Disabilities could win the X-Factor style choice in one borough but in a neighbouring borough People with Disabilities have not won the popularity contest to be chosen. Therefore, many Local Councils are proposing a blanket ‘they all pay the same percentage regardless of circumstances’ roll out.

In Haringey where I live the shortfall is £5.7m this year and it is not 10 people affected, it is 36,000 in our borough alone. Some families are looking at a loss of a variety of benefits, including Council Tax to equate a weekly shortfall of up to £246.33.

Haringey is one of the cheapest places in London to live, so if families are unable to live here then social cleansing from more affluent areas is most definitely going to be taking place, if not already.

There are options, the Local Authority could use money from another budget to pay for this shortfall, but in Haringey that budget is already being cut by £86m just like many boroughs in England. Even if the Local Council decided to sell an ‘Old Peoples Home’ this year, what are they selling next year or the year after?

Whilst communities up and down the country figure out how this can all be paid for, ‘King Tory’ and his friends are enjoying their Income Tax Cut and some are not even paying any taxes.

Written by Seema Chandwani and first published at Liberal Conspiracy

House of Lords Reform – Overdue but Hardly a Priority

MP’s will vote on Tuesday (10 July) on the House of Lords Reform Bill, which rather modestly seeks to have 80% of peers elected by 2025, with the remaining 20% appointed by a statutory appointments commission, and reducing the total number of representatives in the upper chamber from 826 to 450. Elections would take place on the same day as the general election on an open-list system from eight different regions. The open list system is designed to give voters a choice between voting for a party and individuals.

Up to 100 Tory MP’s have said that they will vote with Labour to defeat the ‘programme motion’ which would put a limit on debate in the House of Commons to a maximum of 14 days, therefore throwing  into doubt  whether the bill will pass through the Commons at all. Opposition can also be expected in the House of Lords itself, where there are considerable numbers of Tory peers unhappy with the proposals.

The last Labour government began Lords reform, in a piecemeal, incremental way, first abolishing most of the hereditary peers, and then finally moving to a fully appointed chamber after a few more years. Clearly, in a democratic system, the hereditary principle had to go, and appointing peers is not much better, and so further reform is necessary. In my opinion all members of the upper house should be elected, and by a fairer, proportional system which reflects the diverse support for each of the political parties, including us Greens.

Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader is desperate for some kind of enduring ‘legacy’ for his deputy premiership and as some kind of justification for his party’s participation in the coalition government with the Tories. It is hard to see what progressive gains they have achieved thus far, so it is easy to understand Clegg’s determination to push this through and claim credit for the policy. Indeed, he has gone so far as to suggest that if the Bill does not pass, he will withdraw his MP’s support for the parliamentary boundary changes that the Tories want to improve their prospects at the next general election.

A recent Yougov poll for The Sun newspaper indicates that 76% of the British public support a fully or mostly elected House of Lords, but goes onto to say that only 18% regard Lords reform as an urgent matter. This seems about right to me, it is impossible to defend an unelected House, but it is pretty low on my list of political priorities at the moment. So many other issues, the state of the economy, jobs, welfare reform, privatisation of the NHS, climate change, public service cuts and education policy all dwarf constitutional reform at the moment in terms of importance.

If the price of losing Lords reform is the blocking of the parliamentary boundary changes in the Tories favour, then bring it on. And if this puts further pressure on the ConDem coalition government, perhaps even bringing about its early demise, as some have suggested, so much the better.          

How the Tories went from oak-tree logo to enemies of conservation

With unintentional hilarity, John Prescott once declared: "The green belt is a Labour achievement - and we mean to build on it." The fear among some rural campaigners is that the Conservatives really do.

Attempting to reduce more than 1,000 pages of English planning guidelines to just 50, the government has attracted the ire of the National Trust (which has over three and a half million members), the CPRE, Greenpeace and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, all of which warn that the reforms threaten the future of the countryside. The banally named Draft National Planning Policy Framework includes a reference to the need for "decision-takers at every level" to "assume that the default answer to the development proposal is 'yes'." It is this sentence, with its hint of a development free-for-all, which has so troubled campaigners.

It was not supposed to be this way. When the Tories adopted a green oak tree as their logo in 2006, it was regarded as symbolic of a renewed commitment to the environment. It was a nod to a strain of thought, dating back to Edmund Burke, which believes that mankind has a duty to preserve natural resources for future generations. The party's rural supporters, after 13 years in which they felt neglected by Labour, assumed that they would, at last, have a government that spoke for them. Yet from the attempted privatisation of the forests to high-speed rail and, now, the biggest changes to planning laws in 60 years, the Tories have taken the opposite side of the argument to its rural base. It has been left to Labour, loathed for banning fox hunting with dogs in 2004, to speak up for the shires.

Thatcher's dream

There are already uncomfortable echoes of the forests fiasco, when a campaign led by Rachel Johnson forced David Cameron to perform the biggest U-turn of his premiership and abandon the planned sell-off of 637,000 acres of publicly owned woodland. Mindful of this, the government, which had dismissed the protesters as "semi-hysterical" (Vince Cable), has agreed to listen to positive suggestions.

Is this a prelude to another U-turn? Unlikely. The Tories, fearful that Margaret Thatcher's dream of a "property-owning democracy" is in reverse, are determined to build more houses. Cameron and George Osborne believe that home ownership is vital to promote what Shirley Letwin once called the "vigorous virtues" of Thatcherism: "Being upright, self-sufficient, energetic, adventurous, independent-minded".

The reforms are also seen as central to the government's growth strategy. Whether you favour Keynesian stimulus or Hayekian austerity, the grim truth is that the UK faces reduced levels of economic growth. The reality that the economy has expanded by just 0.2 per cent over the past nine months means that the reforms have become more, not less urgent. In the words of the planning minister, Greg Clark, the government believes that it "can't be ambivalent about growth". Because of this single-mindedness, the Conservatives could yet become the enemies of conservation.

Written by George Eaton
First published at the New Statesman

UK Voters Attracted to Small Parties

The Independent on Sunday reports on a ComRes opinion poll which indicates potential support for small parties in Britain is on the rise. Although the report highlights the possible rise in support for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and a rise in Euroscepticism amongst the British public, with the resultant difficulties this could cause David Cameron and the Conservative party, it also looks just as favourable to other small parties.

One third of people who voted Conservative at the last general election now say they have now switched or are ready to switch to voting UKIP. With the current problems in the Eurozone, it is no great surprise that Euroscepticism is gaining ground and so too UKIP with its xenophobic stance on all things European. Indeed, I think UKIP would have won at least one seat on the London Assembly had they not for some reason changed their name on the ballot paper to ‘First Choice for London’.

But the report goes on to say:

‘The ComRes/IoS poll reveals deep dissatisfaction with the mainstream parties, with 37 per cent of their supporters seriously considering switching to smaller parties. Among all voters polled, 13 per cent are pondering backing Ukip, with the same proportion poised to vote Green. Four per cent are considering supporting the BNP, and 3 per cent could vote for George Galloway's Respect party. Only 38 per cent are not considering changing their allegiance.’

‘Among Labour voters, the disaffected are most likely to be looking to the Green Party (19 per cent), Ukip (11 per cent) or the Lib Dems (10 per cent). Of Lib Dem supporters, 28 per cent are considering switching to the Greens, 27 per cent to the Conservatives, 21 per cent to Labour and 14 per cent to Ukip.’

All of which means that for the Green party there is a quite large pool of potential voters, who are clearly not all that impressed with the big parties, and could well switch to us if we can show that we are a credible alternative. The British electoral landscape has never been so open as this poll indicates. Although Labour did well in the recent London Assembly elections, this poll shows that their support is far from rock solid and voters on the left are thinking about choosing the Green party to represent their views.

The Green party needs to win more seats at all levels of government to cement this position, but also, just as UKIP puts pressure on the Conservatives to be more right wing, the Green party can do the same job on the Labour party, although obviously pulling them to the left in our case.

This drop in support for the main established parties is echoed all across Europe with pro austerity parties paying the price for the failed laissez faire economic policies that have brought us to this sorry pass. People seem more open to listen to an alternative now, than at any time in the last thirty years, which presents the Green party with a unique opportunity to advance.