The Leveson report is in – Protecting liberty or curtailing free speech?

And so Lord Leveson has delivered his esteemed judgement in a truly impressive 2000 page report. Typical lawyers, they always have to go overboard with the wording! For all that, it is a serious study with a lot of analysis behind it and so none of its recommendations should be dismissed lightly or quickly.

Leveson has pretty much publicly confirmed what anyone who has had any professional dealings with the media already knows. On the whole they lie. A lot! The reasons for this are many, but it boils down to deadlines, lack of standards and professionalism and outright political or commercial bias. This is on top of the mistakes that any pressured written work will have. This is not to tarnish all journalists with the same brush, but for anyone who takes pride in their work it is unacceptable to put a misleading statement into the public domain, I still remain horrified by how often the media reports opinions and complete fabrications as fact. I am a big fan of proper investigative journalism, which in many ways mirror some of the basic principles in being a good civil servant – find out what is going on and get it confirmed/checked from more than one source if possible. If this is not possible, make this clear and say it is the best judgement that can be made with the information available.

Leveson draws a crucial distinction between what is put on the internet and what has a ‘big name’ behind it. The mainstream media claim to have the high ground when it comes to news because unlike some random blogger they have the resources and people to add credibility to their articles or posts. We cannot just make free market claims that if people do not believe the veracity of the press they will go elsewhere. This might be true of blogs in the ‘wild west’ of the internet, but the mainstream press is not as diverse and the tricks used to manipulate people are subtle and well used. In short, the mainstream press have a tremendous capacity to ‘influence’ people for good or for bad and so they have a lot of power. What Leveson highlights all too starkly is that this power is too often abused with little in the way of restraint or punishment against its misuse. In short, it is a very unhealthy situation for a democracy to be in and something has to change. He make take nearly 2000 pages to say this, but I can only say that I fully agree with Leveson’s observations of the problems of the press.

Many comments and articles have been written about how the British media is controlled by a small number of wealthy individuals and it cannot be denied this is one problem, but I would argue it is certainly not the only one. One of the other big problems is the belief that the press protects liberty. While this is true in part, what this belief does is provide a good excuse for vested interests to clamour against reform. The mainstream press is not just ugly, it is clearly corrupt, self-promoting and in worse cases actually restricts liberty not safeguards it. The most obvious cases of the way liberty is restricted are those of hacking victims and those who are victims of vigilante justice promoted by the press. Less obvious is the way the press curtails critical reporting for ‘editorial reasons’ or the fact that complex issues are dumbed down and presented in a way to reduce independent/critical thought by the reader. Liberty and free speech will not be preserved by entrusting its protection to a group of journalists motivated by a variety of factors, but by making sure the population at large is well informed and able to articulate its feelings in a coherent way that politicians can listen to.

The danger of the press is not only that they have colluded in reducing informed free speech by the population, but they have cluttered the communication from the population to those at the top and so the politicians themselves cannot clearly hear the ‘will of the people’. This has been frequently referred to as “the Westminster Bubble” The press are just as guilty as the politicians for this state of affairs and they live in a state of denial about their culpability. Leveson has challenged this and the completely hypocritical response from the elements of the press saying that he will curtail their free speech reveals the state of denial or worse still their desperate desire to preserve this unsustainable relationship which is significantly undermining British democracy.

In conclusion, I believe Leveson is totally right, a self regulated body cannot work and so some statutory legislation/regulation is needed. The trick is to do it in a way that preserves the essential components of liberty and free speech that are so vital for a properly functional democracy. A self regulated press has been shown to fail (through countless other enquiries) to do this and so another approach is needed and it needs to have teeth and to be free from political control.

Not enough plebs

There can be no doubt that UK politics has entered a very divisive phase with the mainstream press and politicians daily engaging in class war. The Conservative Party is politically vulnerable on this front and so opposition politicians have shed any reluctance in detoxifying politics and are sticking it to the Government every chance they can get.

It seems to be a successful strategy with a Conservative Party unable to manoeuvre itself clear of the political broadsides. Andrew Mitchell's 'pleb' comments really should not have been much of a story. It can hardly be a surprise that current or past Government Ministers of all political shades think little of the 'lower' orders. Yet the whole Mitchell saga fuelled the political narrative of a leadership completely out of touch with the mainstream UK. With so many rich and public school educated people sitting in the Cabinet it seems incredible that Cameron along with the Conservative and Lib Dem leadership seem to totally lack the political survival skills that necessitate more women and 'working' class visibility at the top of Government, but that is what is happening.

At the other end of the scale of the Conservative Party, MPs such as Nadine Dorries, with a more 'humble' background are making a political pigs ear of things. Whether she is going to the jungle of Australia to 'spread politics' or to pocket the £40k fee for making an arse out of herself is open to debate, but it will undoubtedly fuel the belief at the 'upper ranks' of Conservative Party that those plebs within cannot be trusted either. Meanwhile they still have no real strategy of making the Conservatives look more electorable and so they can only pray for an economic miracle, throw out a bevy of clever sounding policies or just give in and make sure they get as much out of being in charge as they can before they are voted out in 2015. Civil servants can only wonder if the latter strategy is being pursued at times due to the incoherent and unpopular policies coming out of No.10, however, like the Labour and Lib Dem politicians they are keeping their heads down and letting the Conservative politicians take the flak.

Class politics has always being prevalent in British politics, but it seems to have reached new levels now. In part this is because there can be no doubt that those at the top are protecting themselves and their friends while enriching themselves at public expense. However, what has made the narrative really acidic is a belief by the UK electorate that the politicians are really making a hash of the UK economy. In recent weeks I have been meeting a lot of business men and women in the course of my duties and I have yet to meet any that thinks the Government knows what it is doing. If they do not believe things are going to get better then it is no wonder that the UK economy is not being led by a private sector recovery. In the meantime the electorate just reads the headlines and despairs.

Unfortunately the civil servants just feel the same way, backed by the fact they can see it happening first hand and with that level of de-motivation, do not expect Government to get any better. You reap what you sow and having castigated the civil service and marginalised those not in the exalted ranks, the politicians are fast running out of lower level support, vitally needed to make their policies happen.

When computer games show the political past or the potential future of political interaction

I have always enjoyed playing computer games, particularly those that force you to think tactically or have a curious twist. Lately I have been thinking about a couple of games that provoked some interesting thoughts.

Let’s start with the past and my favourite game of all time which is Rome Total War. For those not familiar with the Total War style of games, these are strategy games played on the PC where you build and maintain empires and armies and get the opportunity to fight battles with those armies in real time. They are many games of this ilk such as Civilisation, but they way the Total War dynamics is crafted by the game developer has always been interesting to me. In Rome , they really introduced the concept of not only capturing towns by diplomatic or military means, but also in having to hold on to it. This could be done by garrisoning it, building cultural buildings such as temples or circuses to keep the population happy or rather more chillingly by simply massacring everyone. For experienced players, they soon learnt that logistically it was far easier to massacre everyone as it freed up troops to use to capture the next town. While Roman times was pretty brutal, this is perhaps a rather excessive game dynamic and so the Total War team made this much less of a ‘sensible’ option for their later titles.

This brings up the interesting social question, how many gamers took the lazy way out and used the massacre option more than they ‘morally’ should? What does this tell us about people or more pertinently political leaders today? While massacring settlements is hardly a popular or common way to do things these days (occasional and vicious hot spots in the world not included) if you were a party leader and it was easier to destroy your opponents with lies than by winning the intellectual argument, would you not take it? All is fair in love and war and it can be argued that democracy is simply war conducted by more civilised means. In war, there is no such thing as cheating to win (although treatment of civilians and prisoners is meant to be above this and held to a higher standard) and thus it cannot be denied that any political group would be tempted to take shortcuts to their political objective. In the Rome Total War game, you were slightly punished for being so bloodthirsty by having lower popularity ratings, but then if you ruled a huge empire with a large army available this was hardly a deterrence. So what deters democratic leaders of today? How can a proper democratic system punish cheaters? Sadly, the answer would seem to be “not very well”.

Let’s look at a more modern and strangely fascinating game that I have got into called DayZ. This game is very simple, you find yourself on the coast of a small country infested with zombies and other human players will be around too. There is no government, there are no rules and you have to find weapons, food and medical supplies and simply survive. This is a socially fascinating game because you soon learn that forget the zombies, an awful lot of people are willing to murder you for the contents of your backpack! Some people are willing to club together, pool resources and help you fight off the zombies, but you never know which type of person you will encounter and they may even stab you in the back later on. So what would happen in the real world if there was a similar break down in social order? Would most people get together or would a huge number be willing to do anything to survive including overriding social taboos such as murder? Be aware that this game is a little unusual, once you die, you have to start all over again losing any progress you have made. While not comparable to taking a life, there is a definite sense of loss.

It is an interesting and chilling concept that this is how people may choose to act and it is hard to deny that in the right circumstances DayZ could represent a realistic social dynamic. The important factor here is that the gamers do start from a position of not having a social group or community that they belong to. Sex, race, nationality or creed are irrelevant here. It is quite telling that those game servers where people co-operate with each other the most are the ones where gaming clans (let’s call them a voluntary community) have consciously set themselves up and only members are invited. If you are not a part of that community, the odds are high that you will get shot if the zombies don’t get to you first. Does this perhaps sound rather familiar?

Of course these are computer games free from moral and social constraints and so we should not read too much into them. But in these games normal people can make vivid choices and sometimes those choices can translate to real life. When playing in online games, I have learnt to avoid Russian servers for those games where teamwork is required. I cannot explain why, but for some reason the Russian servers are absolutely terrible for teamwork. Is it cultural, social? I cannot say, only that it is a pattern repeated again and again. Take away all constraints, give people the choice of being nice or nasty and too often nasty wins.

Does this mean people are not naturally willing to be nice to each other and so extensive social conditioning is what is needed to keep humanity flowing? Or does everyone just like to let off steam once in a while?

The Olympic Legacy

And so following a very successful Olympics, which despite my usual disinterest I actually rather enjoyed, the political conversation has now shifted towards a nebulous concept – the Olympic legacy. Needless to say, politicians of all shades will be promoting this with the full knowledge that they are unlikely to be held to account for its delivery. This is all about perceptions, not substance and so words are cheap and will no doubt be plentiful on this topic. Nonetheless, the Olympics are likely to have a real impact on the political scene and so it will be worth speculating as to what this actual impact will be. As for it influencing how Scottish voters will vote in the referendum in 2013, or how the UK votes in the election presumably in 2015 there is only one appropriate response – It is the economy stupid!

The first thing of course has to be the ‘feel good’ factor. As mentioned in a previous post, all politicians of all shades try to jump onto major sporting events to try to get the electorate to feel better about them and the world in general. No doubt Cameron’s promise to maintain the existing level of sports funding for Olympic sport is doing exactly that. Milliband’s call for an all-party consensus is another example. However, it does appear that the coalition (and Labour) has very much appeared to have been left out with the media giving lots of print and air time to Boris Johnson. Politically, it very much appears that Johnson has benefitted, with negligible benefits for anyone else in politics although there is a possibility the whole class war thing may benefit some fringe political commentators. From a political perspective, this implies that the power and momentum behind the London Olympics has very much stayed within the London power base, national politics has been very much marginalised. Is this a possible indication of future political power shifts from national to local level? Or is London , as always, unique and so this cannot be seen to be representative of the nation as a whole?

One definitely positive message that came out of the Olympics was the sense of ‘civic spirit’ particularly surrounding the volunteers. Maybe Cameron can take some satisfaction that the Olympics has demonstrated better than anything else, what his concept of Big Society is all about. It will be very obvious that the Olympics was a success that involved minimal government intervention (the call up of the military and the huge amounts of cash pumped in notwithstanding!). However, Cameron will have to be very careful before he makes this claim. GB managed to pull in a record number of medals. But then everyone knows that this is in part because there has been a real push to properly fund Olympic success. While the volunteers and the athletics may have made the whole event really uplifting, it is clear that this spirit can only flourish where properly supported. Big Society as a concept has failed to prove that it is about harnessing and supporting this sort of spirit rather than being more about trying to make cuts and shift the burden onto volunteers or charities. The old adage, “you get what you put in” has very much run true of this Olympics and the Conservatives are going to struggle to get this message across. Simply put, the Conservative brand has not been detoxified and the Olympics may well make the electorate further associate cuts as causing long term damage. The whole argument around the sell-off of playing fields is a very poignant part of this narrative.

On a less positive note, the Olympics has seemed to have encouraged the media to give lots of print to a sort of ‘class war’ and focussing on the number of medals won by people from private schools. This debate is highly divisive and I fear leaving a sour after-note. The reasons for so many medals being won by privately educated people are relatively clear and easy to understand, any solutions for correcting this imbalance are not. As with anything in politics, whenever someone is peddling black and white ‘truths’ the reality is that they are expressing biases and opinions. Nothing is simple to solve even if the problem is easy to understand. It would be a pity for the Olympic legacy to descend into a destructive narrative about the ‘toffs’ winning the medals rather than the focus being on how to improve sports and sporting achievement in the UK in a way that is accessible to everyone. While the coalition may be rightly castigated for having a cabinet widely seen as elitist, this does not mean the Olympic medal holders should be seen within the context of this debate.

If people do not want to see the Eton and Oxbridge brigade dominating the top of government, rather than whinging about it and trying to arbitrarily restrict entry, focus the narrative on improving access from the bottom so than anyone of ability who works hard has a chance. This is true of education, of the Olympics and pretty much any other area of life. If you really want to damage or properly criticise the ‘millionaire’s cabinet’, nothing is more damaging than a credible discussion about their lack of competence. The USA and China ruthlessly focus on supporting competence and success rather than class in their politically polar opposite quest for Olympic glory. The legacy that the British nation has to take away from the Olympics is that it needs to do the same in its own British way. It does not need to be massively state controlled ( China ) or fully capitalist ( USA ) as the GB athletes and volunteers quite vividly demonstrated.

A bloody awful idea

Worried about politicians not being able to implement their policies properly? Need government departments to improve their performance? Well the latest idea seems to be to routinely sack those at the top of their profession and replace them with people who know even less! Today’s story in the Independent is what caught my eye:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/ministers-plot-end-to-civil-service-neutrality-7995033.html

I am fully willing to concede that numerous top civil servants have done a poor job in many respects. However, some of them are brilliant and the ones you don’t hear about are the ones making government work despite all the handicaps thrown their way. Part of the problem is that the top of the civil service has become increasingly politicised. So making them even more political seems like a rather counter-productive move. More worrying still, this gives Ministers even more power at the top of their department, but does little to ensure that they receive good service and excellent advice. In short, it is more power with decreasing accountability.

I think the myth that the civil servants block ministers from implementing policy is exactly that, a myth. I feel an important quote coming on so here goes:

Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
Napoleon Bonaparte

Simply put, government as a whole is failing to implement its policies because departments are not being run properly, policies are not being scrutinised or tweaked effectively and implementation is inadequately monitored. Bringing in another layer of political management is not going to solve the problem. More apolitical and competent technocrats is what is really needed plus reform of the system so that political ideology and corruption do not override common sense. It short, it is the politicians’ (of the last three decades) bloody fault because they are the ones who have created the structural and cultural weaknesses which has resulted in a poor civil service trying to implement bad policies, in an unfavourable environment with inadequate resources or skill sets.

The Independent article stated that Ministers were looking to the US , New Zealand and Australia as good examples. Not good choices. As anyone with the knowledge of the US can tell you, the bureaucracy is huge and every time there is an election or political crisis, government effectively shuts down. My limited knowledge of the Australian and New Zealand system indicate they have similar problems. Political decisions are too frequently made in these countries on a short term basis and with a very partisan bias. That is not how the UK wanted to do things which is why this model was never imported previously. At least the US Congress and Senate scrutinises these political appointments and they can get a very bumpy ride when things go wrong. The UK does not have this separation of powers and so such appointees are barely politically accountable. Until Parliament has more clout and independence from Downing Street , this transfer of unaccountable power would be simply frightening and likely to lead to horrendous problems.

More politicisation of the civil service is not an answer to our current problems. Neither is anything proposed by Francis Maude!

Thinking the unthinkable, going GOCO

Cast your mind back to the 80s or 90s or even early 2000 (if you are old enough to remember that far which sadly I am). Now imagine that a politician said the following thing, “Let’s privatise defence.” Granted, there was a cold war on a while back, but can you imagine the hostile reception that such an idea would have got? Handing over weapons and national security to greedy, profit hungry arms dealers, never!

Fast forward to today and defence companies are very much part of the scenery in defence. This is true for many countries and there are many logical reasons for this. Yet, the UK is willing to go one step further than anyone else and seems willing to contemplate the idea of privatising defence procurement itself. The buzzword is Government Owned, Contractor Operated. Here is what RUSI has to say about this:

http://www.rusi.org/news/ref:N501674F3225F2/

http://www.rusi.org/downloads/assets/GOCO_Briefing.pdf

What caught my eye (apart from the bloody good questions asked in the briefing paper) was the list of people contributing to this discussion. Not only is the former head of defence procurement and other ex-MOD people there, so are significant captains of defence industry. Quite remarkably, there is a not very subtle message being put out here from a group of people that shouldn’t necessarily agree on this issue, “Are you crazy?!” This is very much a shot across the bows for Bernard Gray, a political appointee who was made head of Defence Equipment and Support by David Cameron. He has always openly stated that defence procurement is a mess, it needs fixing and he sees the private sector as the means by which this can happen.

In the best traditions of Yes Minister I am going to say that he is both right… and wrong!

Let’s first give Mr Gray his due. Defence procurement is a political nightmare. Despite what the media says, this is not because the civil servants in defence procurement cannot do their jobs properly, but rather because the whole system prevents them from doing a good job. It is too easy for politics to derail even a well run defence project many of which face significant technical challenges simply due to the nature of the business. There are countless stories to demonstrate this. Mr Gray has done a good job of diagnosing the problems. His medicine, however, has not been subjected to trials of any kind by anyone else and if it goes wrong the resulting mess would be horrendous. I will not go into all the issues that can arise because the RUSI briefing paper raises these critical questions.

What I will say though is that Mr Gray has failed to answer the critical question of how do you take the politics out of defence procurement? The answer may well be that you cannot, but expecting a private company to be able to manage or even to stand up to political forces seems naïve. How would a failing company even be properly punished? The government will never be able to properly transfer the risks associated with defence or national security. Any risk transfer can only be temporary. The whole G4s security issue with the Olympics and my recent post about PFIs repeatedly emphasise this point. Like the past failures to manage NHS finances through the private sector or safely privatise the rail network, the results of such experiments are that people will die. Network Rail was dragged into court and fined, will the same happen to the GOCO when soldiers are killed due to faulty equipment? The banks are too big to fail, well so is defence.

This really is a risky experiment and Mr Gray is quite willing to say that we must run some risks if we are to gain the benefits. My question is whether the risks associated with going GOCO are worth the anticipated benefits? It may well be that some of the benefits can be delivered by a less riskier option. Sometimes being sure that you will get a ‘good enough’ solution is a much better strategy that striving for a brilliant solution that you have no certainty if it will work, especially when people’s lives are on the line. This philosophy is what often separates the public sector from the private. Some things are just too important to fail, while a proper market is all about success and failure in order to thrive. Mixing the two is always risky, a lesson the civil service has learnt, but one that politicians all too often forget or ignore.

This may sound like a boring way to approach problem, but I tend to find that good government is exactly that, boring.

Deception and taxes

Let's start with a fun quote from Machiavelli:


Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain. 
Niccolo Machiavelli 


Do you agree with this statement? So when the Treasury Minister David Gauke states that it is morally wrong to pay cash in hand is he perhaps stating the obvious and that many people are willing to deprive the Government of those precious tax revenues? Perhaps even the attitude from many people likely to be a resounding "sod off you hypocrite!"


I don't think this really is much of an issue on the Govermment's radar at all. It is not a new issue and it has been something that has been known about and managed as best as possible over decades. It is claimed that this low level tax avoidance is costing the Government £2 billion a year. Considering that the major tax avoidance wheezes are being done by corporations and rich individuals and this is costing the Government trillions. That is where the attention should be going. 


So why is this non-story suddenly newsworthy? Time for another quote from Machiavelli:


One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived. 
Niccolo Machiavelli 


This cash in hand story is only to deflect attention from the whole issue of corporation tax avoidance. Can we really blame rich people and corporations from seeking ways to reduce their tax bill? It is a simple fact that no one likes paying taxes. They do so because they have to and hopefully because they believe it is the right thing to do because they directly and indirectly benefit from it. Yet what if they feel that they do not benefit and that governments of all political colours squanders it and is too corrupt to manage it properly? How resentful must those people feel to pay those at the top who enrich themselves and their friends/political donors at public expense?

The whole issue of tax avoidance is squarely the Government's fault. It happens because it allows tax avoidance of all shades to happen through poor or slack legislation and enforcement. Furthermore, people don't trust politicians and they definitely don't trust them to spend the money wisely. Thus a political atmosphere of resentment is being created and the only way people can fight back is to withhold their taxes through covert means. Protest against the government is meaningless and worse still risks people losing their jobs, violence is an extreme method of protest and withholding your taxes overtly gets you put in jail.

I do not claim tax avoidance is directly linked to political protest, but I do claim that a subconsious culture is being created where those who can avoid tax do and don't feel guilty about it because they don't feel the Government deserves their money. It should definitely be an issue of concern to the Government and I fear obviously hypocritical comments by Treasury Ministers is not going to improve the situation. Everyone knows who the real tax avoiders are and it is not those builders/plumbers/decorators.

Bread and circuses

Many will be familiar with the old trick of the Roman emperors to dispense free bread and to hold circuses to maintain their hold on power. To a lesser extent a similar idea remains in use today through the use of big sporting events. It is well documented that politicians try to use major sporting achievements such as winning world cups to boost the ‘feel good feeling’ in voters. So it must be rather depressing for the coalition as they really do not seem to be having much luck on that front this year.

The only hero they have at this stage is Bradley Wiggins. The England football team did not do anything spectacular, Murray didn’t win Wimbledon and now the whole Olympics thing is becoming a political mess. And the Queen’s diamond jubilee did so well at getting things warmed up, what a waste! Brits are perhaps a particularly cynical lot and hard to please, but it cannot escape political notice that far from ‘distracting the masses’ the Olympics are displaying in all its ugly glory the nasty side of corporate sponsorship and the perils of outsourcing. All at a time when MP expenses scandals remain fresh, with Levenson constantly chipping away at the political foundations in the background and with the Libor scandal in full flow. No wonder the economy is not growing, the British voter does not have much to be confident about right now.

The secret to economic growth these days is not really anything to do with actually making things, investing in the future or through the use of money making the world a better place. No, it is all about confidence. People need to feel sort of good about their lot, willing to spend money in the knowledge they will get more of it and feel a desire to buy things with that money. Any basic economics course will teach its students that confidence, a very intangible thing, is the most important concept in any economy. Money has value because people believe it does. A company can make huge profits yet go to the wall if people lose confidence in it. The same is true for governments and any currency such as the Euro or US Dollar. Thus even though the Olympics being in London is thanks to Labour not the coalition or Boris, Cameron can be seen desperately talking it up with outlandish claims of how much better off Britain will be thanks to the Games. You only need to look over towards Greece and the well documented failure how hosting their Olympics failed to improve their economy, to know that Cameron must be getting pretty desperate to make those sorts of claims! Yet the reality remains that the British political leadership, along with European leaders, are failing to show leadership, improve confidence and thus inspire their voters to generate economic growth. Cameron needs the circus to distract the mob, slip into the shadow of sporting heros and get people feeling good about things again. Will it work?

I suppose Cameron could always stand up and imitate Blair for the party faithful with a rallying cry of, “confidence, confidence and confidence!” Such an intangible concept, with no firm rules on how to obtain it and yet so important and its effects easily seen. Even if the Olympics are a success, I suspect it will be very much perceived that politics played little in achieving this and all the other negative issues will overwhelm any political benefit to be gained.

Looks like bread and circuses on their own are not quite enough. But of course, the Roman emperors had the Praetorian Guard to intimidate the population, thank goodness the army won’t be doing the same for the Olympics…

The electoral reform that never was

Students of politics should do a case study into the formulation of the coalition agreement of 2010. The insights about how this unique (to the UK ) document came about and the results that we have seen from it make for fascinating study. For this post, I am going to focus on the failed referendum for electoral reform because I find it interesting and because the whole tale greatly amuses me.

Rewind back to the heady days of March 2010 with the election results in, Gordon Brown having agreed to step down and the Liberal Democrats living the dream of being the ‘king maker’. (Oh how things have changed since then, but I digress)  Top of the Lib Dem agenda was the issue of electoral reform, something they have wanted for so long. Opposite them was the Conservative Party, conservative by name, conservative by nature, entrenched by self-interest and thus not in favour of political reform. Personally I think our current First Past the Post System is a mess (mainly due to the control of the two big political parties and the way UK voters are wedded to voting in a tribal way) and so I was looking forward to the Lib Dems bringing in some much needed reform.

And then there was the huge mistake upon which the Lib Dems have had plenty of time to regret and which I, with years of experience at conducting political negotiations, instantly recognised as a mistake at the time. They sacrificed their strong position for a compromised position. The Lib Dems agreed to a referendum to a named alternative electoral system, the Alternative Vote. Why oh why were they so naïve as to have agreed to this? I can only admire the cleverness of the Conservative negotiation, they bluffed and took a gamble and it paid off. Generally speaking compromising during a negotiation can be a good thing, but you should never do so at the expense of your core objectives or ‘red line issues’ as we call it in the office.

What the Lib Dems should have done was to insist that the referendum question would be agnostic about which system to reform to, but would merely establish whether the UK population wanted electoral reform with the specific system to be decided at a later date, probably through a second referendum. They had the trump card, “agree to this or we shall go and speak to Labour about forming a coalition.” They could have said this and I am sure the Conservatives would have had no choice but to accept it. Instead, they handed the Conservatives the ability to criticise a political system that no one really wanted, it was just too easy! It stifled the debate and shut down the opportunity for proponents of the other potential systems to make their (much stronger) case. I can only imagine that these thoughts were going through Vince Cable’s mind when he described the Conservatives as “ruthless, calculating and tribal”. He knew they had blown it and he knew Lib Dem naivety several months back was the cause.

It was a much needed jolt in the arm for the Lib Dems, exposing one of their many political flaws. It also very pointedly represents the cause of their current problems, they look weak on the red line issues that matter to Lib Dem voters. The obvious lesson from this incident is not to agree to something you know that neither you nor your opposite number actually want. Unfortunately in learning this lesson, the Lib Dem blew the chance at the electoral reform that they had always dreamed of and thus along with it a genuine chance at cleaning up the current political mess that Westminster is in. Politics is a dirty and nasty game and people don’t often get second chances. For those who really wish things would be better, you will have to dream a little longer I am afraid…

Reforming the House of Lords (just the concept)

With the Liberal Democrats now having their chance to be part of government, the issue of reform of the House of Lords is now firmly on the political agenda. Truthfully, it is something that should have been reformed a long time ago, but with the main political parties having benefitted so extensively from the power of patronage (or cronyism as called anywhere else), there has been little to no political will to do so. However, the House of Lords as it stands today should not be seen as a completely pointless body. Without it, many bad laws would have been passed unchecked. It is ironic that the most undemocratic part of British democracy is actually one of the best defenders of our rights and freedoms. This strength is in part because it is unelected and many of its occupants are professionals in their fields and willing to exercise independence from the political parties, this is completely in contrast to the House of Commons.

That said, the House of Lords has a very uneasy position being a concept that is at odds with how a functioning democracy should look like and so reform does remain necessary. The trick is not to create further shortcomings or to simply replicate the shortcomings of the House of Commons. This means that having another body of elected politicians controlled by political parties has to be seen as a bad thing. Yet by the same token, there needs to be a politically legitimate body that can challenge the government of the day and stand up for the interests of the voters. How is this to be done? Well funny enough, I have some ideas on this issue that I have wanted to articulate for a while.

The first issue is that of elected peers. Election in a representative democracy is supposed to be good and democratic, yet I always think back to that great quote by Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher, “the problem with democracy is that the winner is not chosen by ability, but on who shouts the loudest.” Sounds an awful lot like the House of Commons! Even the politicians at Westminster admit they do not want a duplicate chamber. If we look at the US system, the dangers are obvious, either both houses have the same political party dominating and thus laws get rubberstamped, or they have different political parties in charge and so a huge amount of wasteful horse trading is required to get laws passed. At least in the US , they have checks and balances, in the UK such an arrangement would concede far too much power to the Prime Minister as they effectively control the House of Commons through the whips. That is bad enough, worse still if they could do this to both chambers.

And so I would argue that we need a second chamber elected in a very different way, one not based on everyone in the country voting as a one off event, but rather a system where political interests are openly acknowledged and harnessed in a constructive way. This would fall into the delegative democracy system and it is actually quite simple. Each peer would be elected on a 6-8 year term on a staggered basis. Something like one third or one quarter are elected every two years. However, these are not general elections, but rather closed ones with a variety of selection criteria.

Let’s start with regional peers. Each region in the UK ( Wales , Scotland , South West, North East etc) gets to vote one in one peer each. They represent their geographical region and only people living in those regions can vote for them. Then lets have major industry peers (rail industry, retail, finance, manufacturing etc) they get selected by their peers in those professions. So for example all manufacturing companies can be registered to have one vote each and they select a peer specifically to represent their interests. Now let’s have one peer for each government department, voted for by that department. Their job is to scrutinise their respective departments and to challenge governments about any mistakes made in running it or on the policies coming out. Each of the major religions can have one peer each. We also want peers for the voluntary sector and we want peers representing disabled people, poor people, gay people and so on. I can already imagine the question of how would their election be managed and how does one select which groups are represented, but please bear with me and gloss over this part as I want to talk about the principle of the idea rather than the detail of its implementation. Finally, the government would appoint a number of peers to answer questions. This has to happen because the government needs channels by which they can be held accountable and so a small number of appointed peers (who are also ministers in government departments) allows this to happen. They, however, are only in office for as long as the government is rather than adhering to the normal peer terms.

And so the end result is a second chamber designed deliberately to have few career politicians in it, a very diverse population (not full of white middle aged men educated at Eton or Oxbridge), as representative of the full UK population and industries as much as practically possible and those representatives are knowledgeable about their elected area. If they do a bad job, there should be rules to enable them to be impeached. Thus we have a chamber with political and professional credibility in a completely different way to the Commons. If the peer for poor people stands up and says government policy disadvantages their constituents or a doctor criticising NHS reform, the odds are that they will know what they are talking about. They are also not in the pay of political parties and they will not have a political axe to grind. Where the government has a good policy, but some flaws in its implementation, those peers would want to help them make it work. Thus the second chamber is there to help government, not just to hinder. If the government cannot mobilise the support of these professions then it must be pushing for a pretty bad law.

I am aware that this system will mean people will get represented by more than one peer, but I would argue this is a good thing. You may have not elected your MP, but they are your only representative no matter whether you hate them as personalities or their policies. With this peer system, everyone would have someone they can contact about their interests. It is much more inclusive and with the current political apathy gripping UK politics, this has to be a good thing. These peers don’t even have to take political bribes or hide support from special interests, it is their job to represent those interests. So if businesses gives peers people to help run their offices, this needs only be declared rather than glossed over as is the current case with Parliament. Above all, it is transparent.

I have not read of this sort of idea anywhere else and to my knowledge, no one elects their politicians this way. I think this is an idea well worth exploring and could well propel the UK into the forefront of democracies for trying something new and interesting. I fear however, that it is the last sort of thing that those in power want. With this system, there will be little opportunity for patronage. Worse of all, the second chamber would know more than the politicians in government, we can’t have that! It is a pity really, I fear the reality will be more politicians, more arguing, more cronyism and little in the way of political reform that would genuinely make the lives of UK people better. It would have been nice to have proved Plato wrong on the issue of democracy.

Also: Since I genuinely do not know if this idea has been voice before, I intend to apply some copyright, specifically the Creative Commons Licence below. If people wish to circulate this idea further (with attribution) they are welcome to do so. If they want to discuss it or even to flag up where it or a similar idea has been raised before, again they are welcome to do so.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Realpolitik

This story on the BBC about the Russians selling arms to Syria made me smile: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-18642032

The Russians are canny political operators and yet their position on Syria is drawing widespread condemnation. They learnt a brutal form of politics during Soviet times and although their democracy may appear messy and corrupt at times (we can't claim any moral high ground here) they have learnt painful lessons about democratic politics, can afford good PR people and they know the art of political manipulation. I would speculate that the Russian government is actually playing a double game when it comes to Syria's arms. Syria is no doubt a milestone around their neck that they would be happy to do without, yet they must protect their interests. Realpolitik is much more of a driving force than human rights concerns and they stand to lose a lot more than most countries if Assad's government falls.

Their argument that they do not want terrorists taking control of Syria is a credible one. Their point about the Western nations practising double standards by arming the rebels in Syria and Libya is a hard hitting point. Yet there is also an unspoken, yet very strong economic case for their position, this is their arms export industry. Decimated following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has spent many years rebuilding it and competing on a very competitive international stage. It is a significant revenue earner as well a means of gaining political influence abroad. So why is it important to them to continue to supply Syria despite the international political issues that this creates?

I would argue that we should look further internationally for the answer, specifically Asia, Africa and Latin America. The arms export industry for  Russia and China is very strong in those defence markets that Western democracies are reluctant to get involved with. Where there is a civil war or a corrupt regime, Russian or Chinese arms are usually to be found. Their big selling point is that they do not ask questions about how their arms are used and while their arms are not as cutting edge as Western made arms, they are rugged, cheaper and work well. This is a huge market with not only a large amount of money involved, but also the ability to influence those countries sitting on untapped mineral wealth such as oil or rare metals. China is aggressively expanding its influence and so Russian defence companies must maintain their reputation as reliable suppliers to compete.

So what is Russia to do with those outstanding Syrian defence contracts? They don't want to reduce their international standing in the world, but they don't want to lose ground in their defence export market either. The answer could be to ship the goods as required, but then to find a way of stopping them from arriving. Enter stage left some cargo ships which get stopped and turned back in British waters because their insurance is refused. How did the insurance company find out about the arms on those ships? Were they informed by an intelligence agency and if so which one, Russian or Western? And why did the Russians ship these controversial goods through the North Sea rather than through the Black Sea where they were less likely to have been stopped? I can only speculate as I have no intimate knowledge of what happened, but it would not surprise me if the Russians deliberately sabotaged the shipping. They will still try and get the goods to Syria, but quite likely by then it will be too late for the arms to make any difference. In the meantime, the Russians maintain their reputation for sticking to their contracts. Who knows, maybe they will get lucky and manage to sell the same goods twice?

How very Machiavellian! How very Russian too with a nice bit of maskirovka.

False promises, the PFI mess

The recent news that some London Health Trusts are in financial difficulty does not come as a surprise to me for two reasons: I read Private Eye and I have seen or been involved with a number of PFI (Private Finance Initiative) deals. With every single PFI I have looked at, I have never thought that any of them delivered genuine value for money for the taxpayer. But as there was no other money available and as the political instructions were very clear that they should be used, I like many other civil servants, simply had no choice but to get on with it. The sad truth is that many spending promises made by Government in the last 12 years were false promises, using money it did not really have and signing up to deals that were simply licences to the private sector and the banks to rob the UK taxpayer. Thus Labour (and no doubt the Coalition will too) put the public finances into debt in order to buy votes and thanks to the financial/banking crisis the chickens are now coming home to roost.

Maybe I should provide a brief explanation of how a typical PFI arrangement works so that people can understand how ludicrous PFI is. Bear with me as I try to simplify a very complicated area of government business.

Let us say that you are in charge of a project such as building a hospital or school or even to supply the Royal Air Force with air to air refuelling tankers. All this has been done under PFI. You need a big chunk of money to do so, for simplicity’s sake, we will use a nice round number of £1 billion. You are told, that your Department does not have the money and Treasury will not give it to you. But to maintain the current service, the operating budget is £50 million a year and this can be increased to £100 million a year (don’t ask how they manage this, it is a mystery!). As a good project manager, you need to think through-life for your project, thus you combine the cost of buying your hospital/school/tankers and the cost of running it. You need to put a time frame on it so you say 20 years. This neatly means you need £2 billion all in for a 20 year project (£1bn to buy and £50m x 20 = £1bn to support). Lo and behold, the £100 million a year operating budget over 20 years the Department is willing to give you also comes to £2 billion. Result! (Warning: most PFI do not work out this simply, I can almost guarantee that in most cases the PFI forecast is more expensive over the 20 years rather than breaking even, explanation of why is below)

So you now have a requirement, a budget and a plan and so you compete for a private company or consortia able to build what you need and keep it running for 20 years. This competition process may cost you £2 million (team of lawyers, commercial officers and experts to assess bids etc) and takes, at a minimum, two years to get to contract. Fast forward to you have selected your bidder/consortia and the discussions now turn to raising the money. Needless to say, most companies don’t have £1-2 billion in cash, so they go to the bank. The bank is willing to support the deal, but of course they are going to charge you interest on any money borrowed. Oops, this means you need another £200 million over the 20 year project because of course the £100 million a year estimate did not include commercial interest rates (remember it is £50m a year to support, another £50m a year from capital costs). This is where it gets farcical, the Government can borrow money from the Bank of England for a far lower interest rate, but you are not allowed to do so. PFI is about using private money to fund public projects. Your Department approves this increase in budget because you really badly need the hospital/school/tankers.

Off you go, things get built or made and the service is up and running. A financial crisis hits and the bank raises interest rates. That is another £100 million added to the cost. Don’t forget you have effectively borrowed £2 billion for 20 years, money costs more over time due to interest. Now your project will cost 2.3 billion over the 20 years. Of course if you had fronted up the £1 billion construction money from the beginning you wouldn’t have to pay the interest, but you did not have the money and so that is that. Your private company/consortia is able to get a better deal on the interest payments through refinancing, but the contract does not mean you get any of it. The private entity can also sell your PFI contract to someone else and again you contractually have little power over this. The contract is all about delivering output and availability, how it is delivered is not meant to be your concern as long as you get the service you asked for.

Let’s go back a bit and remember that previously it was costing the Department £50 million a year to deliver a service that was probably ok, but not brilliant. Your private entity has managed to get the costs down to £45 million a year by being ‘efficient’. One would think this is a good thing and the private entity is earning the extra profit through this ‘efficiency’. Ignore the fact that the cleaners are illegal immigrants barely paid the minimum wage, maybe the hospital/school is not as clean as it used to be and maybe a few shortcuts are being taken here and there to save money. There are two big problems. One is inflexibility. It is all about the contract. Don’t really need 100 beds or a 1000 school places any more? Tough, it is what was asked for in the contract, you still have to pay for it until the contract ends even if you don’t use it. Of course you could ask for a contract amendment, but I can promise you that the bill will sting. Why should the private entity play nice? Remember, they want the profit, what is in the public interest is your problem not theirs. The second problem is that almost without exception it is impossible to transfer sufficient risk to the private entity, not least because the cost is astronomical and/or you remain responsible no matter what. In the case of the RAF’s tankers, they may well be technically owned by the banks, not the RAF. Funny enough banks are very averse to letting their assets fly to dangerous places no matter how desperate the need. The RAF could over-rule them, but will have to pay a contractual penalty for doing so or suffer the consequences such as a plane having to divert to an airfield thus not achieving its mission. What if a patient dies in your hospital because the contractor did not clean it properly? It may be the contractor’s fault, but the NHS/Department of Health is still ultimately liable because it is with them that the patient has the ‘contractual’ relationship. You struggle to pass the cost to the contractor because the contract said it should be cleaned daily and that is what they did even if badly.


The example above is actually very conservative and I have not tried to over-egg the maths. In the real world, the figures are often considerably worse. All too often the private entity would have recovered all the cost by year 12-15, but of course the Government is still paying the flat rate as stated in the contract. Thus that private entity would, using the example above, make £50m of pure profit for the last 5 years of the contract. So much for saving the taxpayer any money...

Of course there is the irony that thanks to the financial crisis the taxpayers now own most of the banks holding the PFI contracts. So effectively the Bank of England is now loaning/giving the money to the banks who put commercial interest rates onto it and lend it to the PFI contracts who add their cut which is paid for by the Government. No wonder the whole thing is so complicated! Maybe life would be so much easier if Government departments borrowed the money directly from the Bank of England to pay a contractor to build the hospital/school/tankers (thus owning these assets), then paid for the support of these assets to other contractors on a rolling basis. They could even do clever things like break the support contract into small chunks and choose a local small firm thus ploughing money into a deprived local economy. Perhaps such a thing is rather old fashioned, but it does mean the taxpayer is not paying a huge interest bill and inviting the private sector to find ingenious and less than moral ways of making more profit (funnelling payments off-shore to avoid tax, employing illegal immigrants etc). Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying there is no role for the private sector and that they should not be invited to bring their own assets to make a public service work better, but PFI has to be the most convoluted and flawed way possible to achieve this. It has effectively saddled the Government with a huge annual mortgage bill that it is very hard to get out of. There are some PFI success stories, but the astronomical cost and mis-management completely outweighs them.

This Government has set the goal of deficit reduction its number 1 priority. How will it achieve this unless it rips up those billions of PFI deals? Aha, there is a better way – let the contracting authorities such as the London Health Authorities go bust and the PFI investors lose their shirts. Possibly a number of people will be made redundant. Sorry NHS, as the doctor might say, “it will sting a bit, but this treatment is necessary.” But who will treat those patients desperately in need of care? Step up Andrew Lansley’s new commissioning bodies and ‘any willing providers’. Probably the same people who shafted the UK taxpayer on the original PFI deals. Mind the dead bodies as you go please…

To educate or not...

First a question: what should the Secretary of State for Education not do when discussing potential Government policy? Answer: Sound like an elitist old fart reminiscing for the old days where a good education was too often a privilege reserved for the few. I do, of course, refer to Michael Gove's incredibly stupid idea to call his proposed reform of the GSCE system as bringing back O-levels.

I have some sympathy for him because my personal opinion is that GCSEs are no longer a reliable benchmark for assessing young people. The problems are very evident when students reach university and/or are being recruited by business. The common complaints are that it is increasingly difficult to differentiate between candidates (they all have As and Bs for example), too often basic skills or knowledge is lacking and there is a real disconnect between what pupils learn and what will help them later on in life such as when in work. I also find it incredibly naive that people think pupils should not be streamed according to ability with movement between the streams able to happen at nearly any point. How in the world is a talented pupil meant to get good grades in a class of 30 when the teacher has to teach at the pace dictated by the slowest? By the same token, if that slow pupil makes fantastic progress in a year, they should be moved upwards to the faster stream. Also of critical importance, those of a lower stream should not be made to feel like second class citizens.

The fact that GCSEs and education as a whole is in a woeful state is very much a shared responsibility.The teaching profession as a whole at fault for dumbing down educational standards, the exam boards have competed in a race to the bottom, the parents of pupils who do not show a positive interest in their education and the politicians for tinkering with the system and letting ideology override good sense. This decline has been in progress for decades and meanwhile the statistics themselves have just become more worrying and downright shocking.

Here is a little snippet for the GSCE results for 2011:

Results by school type, 2011

Click heading to sort - Download this data

Type of school	Grade A*	Grade A	Grade B	Grade C	Grade D	Grade E
SOURCE: JCQ
Comprehensive	5.3	18.8	40.4	66.9	83.3	91.9
Academy	8.6	25.4	47.9	72.2	86.5	93.5
Secondary Modern	2.2	10.8	29.4	57.7	78.1	89.4
FE/6th Form College	2.3	7.3	18	55.5	83.4	92.6
Maintained Selective	22.4	55.3	82.2	95	98.5	99.4
Independent	24.1	51.7	75.3	90.4	96.4	98.5

The lesson from this table is obvious and very depressing. If you want your children to do well, you must find one of the few comprehensives gaining the higher grades or send your kids to private school. When politicians talk about choice in education, what they really mean is that the system has failed and they are trying to present an illusionary solution to the ordinary parent. The answer, as it always has been, is to drive up standards at the lower middle to bottom of the education system through increased quality. Politicians should stop obsessing about academies and private schools and simply try to deliver as close as possible a guarantee that no matter how poor or rich the pupil, they will get the chance to get fair grades in core subjects. Above all, the system must be credible and must be able to honestly state that for some pupils academia is not for them, but then provide them with alternatives that they can excel at. A good plumber or electrician can earn more than a university lecturer or office manager, they do not need a degree to do so and this diversity of options needs to be acknowledged and encouraged. The most stupid goal I have ever heard out of government is for 50% of the UK to get degrees. It is inappropriate and counter-productive and any politician that champions this goal is forcing too many people towards academia where they do not belong or indeed, even want to go. It is already happening that businesses are not respecting the degree results thus devaluing it and so more of this is not the answer.

Gove's big mistake was not only to use the word 'O-levels' but also his inability to articulate a vision where the vast majority of pupils can be taught to a common and good standard (English, Maths, History and basic Science for example) and can then choose a credible path to develop their preferred skills further with there being no taboo or barrier to doing so. In short, Gove and the education establishment as a whole need to bring the bottom and middle up to a standard that is taken for granted by independent schools and then allow pupils to choose to develop through a route appropriate to them whether it be through academia or vocational. Anything else is just pointless, political deception, ideologically driven or quite simply a pile of drivel!