Category: National politics

The Labour party is desperate to get hold of your e-mail address so that it can spam you mercilessly in the run up to the general election. This is the minisite it produced to exploit the Plebgate affair. As of this week it was taken down as it is clear to most people that it was a large number of policemen that were lying, not Andrew Mitchell.

As I have pointed out before the Labour party is not only being venal but is breaking the law. This line of small print at the bottom of the page is not sufficient for the Information Commissioner.

The Labour Party and its elected representatives may contact you using the information you supply. If you do not wish to be contacted, please write to the Communications Unit at The Labour Party, Labour Central, Kings Manor, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 6PA.

Guidance from the Information Commissioner says:

Organisations must not make it difficult to opt out, for example by asking customers to complete a form or confirm in writing.
It is good practice to allow the individual to respond directly to the message – in other words, to use the same simple method as required for the soft opt-in. In any event, as soon as a customer has clearly said that they don’t want the texts or emails, the organisation must stop, even if the customer hasn’t used its preferred method of communication.

This week’s report on skills from the OECD made the news here in a fairly big way. The report highlights that England has a real problem – instead of our kids being more capable than their elders as in many successful countries of the OECD our youngsters are going backwards. They say:

Older people in England are among top performers in reading while younger adults are near the bottom.

This work is based on testing 166,000 people. It shows that while Labour told us that it was fixing education it is clear that it failed. We must all hope that Michael Gove does rather better. The UK’s education system has been failing and needs to change if we are to win the global race.

A huge scalp for Justice Secretary Chris Grayling and his reforms of legal aid. Extreme left wing barrister Michael Mansfield is winding up his fancy barristers chambers at 81 Farringdon Street.

The spin from Mansfield & co. is:

The dissolution of Chambers is the direct result of government policies on Legal Aid. The public service we provide is dependent on public funding. 90% of our work is publicly funded. The government policies led by Justice Secretary Chris Grayling are cumulatively devastating the provision of legal services and threatening the rule of law.

These changes may be devastating for Mansfield’s expense account. They may require him to work from home like 100,000s of other professionals who wouldn’t dream of hiring out expensive offices in the West End. He might have to learn to use a PC and do without a secretary. The changes will not affect the rule of law or access to justice. Welcome to the 21st century Mr Mansfield.

If you read a bit further down the press release you get to the meat of the thing:

Michael Mansfield QC and others are actively pursuing the possibility of reconfiguring resources in order to create a new and alternative working model based on an electronic hub and a compact physical space. This is particularly intended to support publicly funded practitioners who are committed to continuing the struggle for social justice both inside and outside the courts.

The Telegraph goes on to say:

Mr Mansfield said he plans to form his own, low-cost chambers “within the near future”.

Fifteen barristers from Tooks are expected to join the new set, to be called Mansfield Chambers, which will keep overheads low by employing fewer clerks, sharing desks in cheaper offices and using free computer software.

So, in future this privatised extension of the public services will be run more efficiently eschewing expensive real estate. You can find more info here.

I was interested to see Allister Heath’s comments today about driverless cars. They will change the world and much, much faster than you can imagine. You may have heard of Google’s driverless car project being undertaken by some of the same people who came up with Street View.

Driverless cars will mean that it becomes much, much cheaper to buy a car or rent vans by the journey rather than owning one, according to Parallel importer in Singapore. Cars will become a service proposition. When you want to go somewhere you will put your destination into an app and get price and availability quotes back from suppliers. The price might make you think again and the app will tell you how quickly you could walk there. If you choose to be driven you accept a quote and your driverless car will arrive outside at the agreed time.

Driving yourself will soon look very silly and expensive compared to an automatic car that gets paid for by the journey. Sharing the capital cost of the car over many people will make driving much cheaper. Rather like commercial aircraft are always in the air or being serviced on the ground cars will always be in motion or in the repair shop being fixed.

The car rental business will disappear.

The taxi business will disappear.

All street signs and street furniture will disappear.

Car parking will disappear. Our roads will quickly empty apart from moving vehicles.

Hotels will become a destination only business – business travellers will just kip in the car on the way home.

Our front gardens will come back and garages will become a thing of the past. It will seem ridiculous to use any of your property to store a car.

Our road capacity will increase by 6 times.

Most public transport will be made redundant. The Tube system might survive and a couple of metro systems but pretty much everything else will get superseded by cheaper driverless car journeys. Driverless car providers will innovate so much faster than ponderous governments and rolling stock producers that it will soon become obvious that you should dig up the railways. Our railways will become long distance, driverless car only high speed routes.

Drink driving will disappear. You will pay more for a ride at 11.30pm on a Saturday night but the market will decide if you pay more or have another drink and wait for the price to come down after the rush.

Is this a fantasy? I don’t think so. My Samsung Galaxy SIII came with faultless satnav thrown in for free. I didn’t ask for it. It was just there and it works. This would have been a fantasy ten years ago.

I am prepared to bet that my five year old will never learn to drive.

However, there will be one thing unhanged. You would still need to be careful with car key and door lock. Learn about Kingstone Locksmith, if you need the best modern lock for your car.

The government should not spend £35 billion on HS2 – it should take a few billion Pounds and work out how to speed up driverless cars in the UK. The economies that get this technology implemented first will reap huge benefits.

When I saw the comments of Maria Miller regarding the arts having to make an economic case being reported I wondered who would be the first leftie to partially quote Oscar Wilde’s play Lady Windemere’s Fan. I think the prize goes to ex-Labour MP for Stroud David Drew. The left used this quote throughout the eighties and into the nineties. It was tedious then, it sounds very retro now. I guess we will have to put up with it for a while yet. Apparently Drew is the PPC for Stroud. Long may the unread Drew remain ex.

The full dialogue from Lady Windemere’s fan goes like this:

LORD DARLINGTON. What cynics you fellows are!
CECIL GRAHAM. What is a cynic? [Sitting on the back of the sofa.]
LORD DARLINGTON. A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
CECIL GRAHAM. And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.

Is Miller is a cynic? I don’t know. With the deficit still running at a rate of about £120 billion per annum, the equivalent of £4,000 a year for every taxpayer in the UK, there is still pain to come and we probably need the Millers of this world. Drew and the rest of Labour’s sentimentalists are simply not the right choice for our country.

Yesterday the GMB union paid a lot of money to put a four page advert into the Gazette reminding people about the hospital march on 27th April. The council couldn’t afford this and neither could any of Ealing’s political parties.

It would be nice if GMB could use its members’ money to tell the truth. The detail of the leaflet tries to blame NHS cuts on the Conservative party ignoring the Coalition and Labour’s own decisions before the election. They say:

… now the Tories seem hell bent on taking away our health service!

The ongoing consequences of Andrew Lansley’s emasculation of the NHS being carried forward by Jeremy Hunt and the damaging effects of seeking to cut the NHS bill by around £20 billion over a five year period is proving disastrous, in the same way that Cameron’s infamous promise to reduce costs not the NHS is proving farcial, …

At the same time when justifying the proposals for the service to save £20 billion over 5 years, Team Cameron with the use of smoke and mirrors, attempts to convince us that this will not affect frontline services.

Although you can argue about the odd million here and there the Conservatives have met their promise to protect overall health spending in real terms – many parts of government have had to put up with 20% cash cuts which are even bigger in real terms. If that is so where does the £20 billion come from? It is real enough.

In 2009 the controversial NHS chief David Nicholson kicked off the Nicholson Challenge whilst a Labour government was in power and Andy Burnham was Health Secretary. The idea of the Nicholson Challenge was that in a resource limited environment the NHS would have to do more for the same money. He proposed £20 billion of efficiency savings over five years which would be ploughed back into new services. This is how we get the current situation where health service spending is kept up but we all hear about cuts.

The NWL NHS “Shaping a healthier future” proposals are our local NHS’s response to the Nicholson Challenge. We don’t like the proposals because they treat Ealing very unfairly. The preferred option moves services further away from us. We maybe cannot change the overall financial envelope in which these changes are being made but we can certainly object to a solution that is so visibly inequitable.

Go on the march. Blame Labour for the finances. Demand that the NHS does not settle for a scheme that is unfair on Ealing.

Labour and the GMB should stop lying about Labour’s £20 billion Nicholson Challenge. The Nicholson Challenge was settled Labour policy before the election. Only this week Ed Miliband refused to promise to undo the so-called Bedroom Tax when he visited Newcastle. This change is reckoned to save £480 million. The idea that a future Labour government could find £20 billion to undo its own £20 billion Nicholson Challenge policy is a pretty big stretch.

The emetic “Made by the Many” is an emotional appeal so typical of Labour party political broadcasts. Much of the footage and commentary could be used by any of our parties trying to show that they were aligned with ordinary working people.

The banks seem to be a target. No acknowledgement that it was the last Labour government that took banking supervision off the Bank of England and supervised the implosion of the idiot Scottish banks. Our banking crisis was largely local and driven by stupid business models (lending interbank funds in the case of Northern Rock and dumbass commercial lending in the case of the Arc of Prosperity banks – RBoS and HBOS failed in the same way as the Icelandic and Irish banks). Gordon Brown and Ed Balls are the villains of that story.

Of course the 45% tax rate is mentioned notwithstanding that Labour had the 50% rate for a full 31 days out of its 13 year term of office and that the under the Coalition the richest will pay more every year of this government than in any year of the last government.

The largest omission in the piece is that “the forgotten wealth creators of Britain” were of course forgotten by Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson, Ed Balls, Ed Miliband, etc. All Miliband is offering today is a promise to bribe people with their own (childrens’) money. Don’t be fooled again.

I couldn’t believe this Reuters headline “In mining ruins left by Thatcher, new economy struggles” I saw yesterday. Reuters says:

Thatcher, the most polarising prime minister in modern British history, is nowhere more thoroughly despised than here, in northern England’s coal belt, where her crackdown against striking miners is blamed for wiping out an entire industry that had sustained a community for generations.

You might think that Reuters news agency could provide a bit of perspective but instead it just repeats clichés that are divorced from any analysis.

From the formation of the National Coal Board in 1947 until today employment in mines has dropped pretty much every year. You can see the data here.

It is instructive to compare Harold Wilson’s first term with the Margaret Thatcher period.

At the end of 1964 there were 502,000 mining jobs which went down 212,000 to 290,000 by the end of 1970. Harold Wilson served as Prime Minister from 16th October 1964 to 19th June 1970. So broadly speaking in 6 years Wilson could be said to be responsible for the loss of 212,000 jobs or 42% of the workforce.

At the end of 1978 there were 240,000 mining jobs which went down 191,000 to 49,000 by the end of 1990. Margaret Thatcher served as Prime Minister from 4th May 1979 to 28th November 1990. So broadly speaking in 12 years Thatcher could be said to be responsible for the loss of 191,000 jobs or 80% of the workforce. It is worth remembering that at the end of 1990 they were producing 75% of the coal with 20% of the workforce.

It is harsh to blame either for the uncompetitiveness of British mines or world coal prices driven by opencast mining in empty places like Australia but as Harold Wilson took out slightly more jobs in half the time you could say he was the more vicious if you want to use that language about anyone. Wilson did not have to deal with striking miners who arguably made their own industry less economic and attractive as a business proposition in the process. What did for Margaret Thatcher was that she presided over an 80% loss rather than a 42% loss.

Essentially mining employment held up in the fifties. It halved in the sixties. It kept up again in the seventies. About 80% was lost in the eighties and 80% again in the nineties and half again in the noughties. To single out Margaret Thatcher is just plainly unfair. Reuters really could have been a lot more illuminating rather than just repeating mining village myths.

One of the criticisms made this week about Margaret Thatcher’s three governments was that the Right to Buy (RTB) policy, whereby council house tenants could buy their homes at a significant discount, “decimated” social housing in this country and therefore people are homeless today. Yeah right.

The really quite unpleasant Glenda Jackson MP told us on Wednesday:

It is a pity that she did not start building more and more social housing, after she entered into the right to buy, so that there might have been fewer homeless people than there were.

Jackson is talking rubbish of course and does not have any idea of the numbers or the performance of the last Labour government which was particularly poor. If RTB was such a big problem, why didn’t Labour build?

It is estimated that RTB took 2 million properties out of local authority control. Since the war we built about 16 million houses in this country (1949 to 2011). About 6.5 million of those were social housing of which local authority 5.3 million and housing association 1.2 million. So at the most RTB took out less than one third of the social housing stock. RTB didn’t destroy any houses. They are often owned to this day by those who bought them (many aren’t). But the point is that RTB did not reduce the housing stock.

What happened in the UK was that after the war governments of both colours built social housing on a large scale to replace bomb damaged homes, provide homes for returning servicemen and upgrade poor stock. This process lasted through the 70s and then ended, certainly the council housing component. The nadir was reached in 2004, seven years into the last Labour government, which built only 130 council houses in the whole of the UK in a whole year.

The numbers show that no Labour voice can complain about RTB. The last Labour government didn’t prioritise social housing. It is quite clear that fewer social houses were completed on average each year under Blair/Brown than under Thatcher/Major.

It is true that there is a lag in building houses and it is not clear yet whether the Coalition’s policies in this area will succeed. But it is certain that Thatcher/Major outperformed Blair/Brown in the delivery of social housing. If Labour truly thought there should be more social housing then they should have prioritised it. They didn’t. They underperformed the Tories. The numbers debunk the rhetoric.

All the numbers come from the DCLG’s Table 241: Permanent dwellings completed, by tenure, United Kingdom, historical calendar year series