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.