Forging ahead

June 17, 2010 — simonashall

The government today announced some more projects that would have to be put on hold in light of the economic circumstances we find ourselves in. Among them was the £80m loan to Sheffield Forgemasters, which sits very close to NC’s constituency.

Labour beatniks, keen to grab back Sheffield City Council from the Lib Dems and keep them out of the Sheffield Central constituency where the majority is now just 165 for Paul Blomfield, have already been condemning this move. But to say that it will cost jobs is just nonsense – no jobs currently exist; the postponement of the loan will mean that they won’t be created as planned. This money would be better spent avoiding cuts to the hundreds of other projects where cancelled government funding will mean private contractors losing revenue and having to lay off staff.

But as they are involved in the “leaching” industry of outsourcing away from union-backed in-house public sector workers, Derek Simpson doesn’t give so much of a monkey’s about them. Apart from anything else, £80m is simply far too much public money to spend on 150 jobs, whether in Sheffield, South Wales or Surrey.

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Thoughts on Southport

June 7, 2010 — simonashall

Catching flies - Miliband won't be the threat Tories fear

Labour held its leadership hustings today in Southport and according to the BBC, which seems to be intent on pretending that Labour is still in power, this internal Labour Party process was an event that merited live TV coverage. In fact, the reason that the hustings were held at all seemed to me to be all about David Miliband in particular getting some welcome exposure.

Yesterday, the BBC news lead with the bare-faced revelation that Miliband was accusing the PM of “hypocrisy” on spending cuts and “broken promises”. The sheer brass neck needed to occasion such a piece of naked and mendacious opportunism is difficult to quantify with words alone – suffice it to say that the corporation seems to have decided that Miliband is the next Labour leader and they are determined to make him PM in 2015. Personally, I can’t see the British people going for it but there we go.

Today however and in front of the GMB, comrade Miliband was talking about “our people” and building Labour up “workplace by workplace“. And he’s supposed to be the Blairite – can we assume that the likes of Ed Balls, brother Ed and Diane Abbott would wish to be seen as even more substantially left? No doubt the coalition has pulled the Conservative Party to the left and the Liberal Democrats to the right to end up somewhere in the genuine centre rather than the centre-right with which many Conservatives would be more comfortable.

Is the only place for Labour to go back to the left? From 1994 onwards, Labour had a go at being capitalists but forgot that supporting and spending the proceeds of economic growth also entails a measure of responsibility and after 15 years of profligacy the money has run out. They can’t go to the right, they no longer look credible in the centre ground and so with Miliband heading back to the comrades for support, they can only move to that left ground vacated by NC. Fine by me.

Until today, I think most Conservatives were hoping that Ed Balls might get the leadership in an attempt to saddle Labour with a leader even more unelectable than Gordon Brown. However John McConnell seems to be intent on taking on that mantle after some very ill-judged comments about Lady Thatcher. I admire her in many ways; but not in others as I’ve said before. But the idea of assassinating political leaders is either puerile posturing or dangerous nonsense from a man who wants to become Prime Minister (presumably). Leaving aside the poor taste, if the best answer Labour has got to Britain’s problems is time travel back to the 80s and taking out the then PM – who for a greater part was simply sorting out the last mess Labour left – then their ideas barrel clearly has sprung a leak.

If Labour is sensible it will elect David Miliband as leader – but I’m not sure Conservatives should be too worried by that prospect.

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Tip of the iceberg

May 26, 2010 — simonashall

One suspects that if Nick Clegg had decided after May 6 to take up Campbell and Mandelson’s grubby little offer and a Lib/Lab coalition was in power, the BBC would have reported David Laws – rather than Alistair Darling – delivering £6.2bn cuts. As it happens, no such favours are granted to the Conservatives by a corporation whose very skin has been saved by the votes that denied the PM a majority.

The savings identified by the Treasury include some really good things, such as the austerity measures put in place to stop ministers using cars all the time, the abolition of pointless quangos and renegotiating government contracts. The rest of the news emerging from the details is less welcome but regrettably necessary, not least because it goes further than the public sector. The £690m cut from the DfT means contracts put on hold, which has a knock-on effect in the private sector – the A23 scheme and the third phase of the Birmingham Box Managed Motorways project are both, for example, placed on hold and this means uncertainty for the consultants and contractors employed to deliver them.

So too Communities and Local Government, which loses £830m and will have less to spend on meeting its core objectives but also on schemes and projects that are delivered and help fuel a large – and growing – portion of the private sector. Companies like Atkins, Capita, Serco, Halcrow and Balfour Beatty are major employers and cutbacks in local government spending – further underlined by the £1.165bn in savings being expected of local authorities – will mean tougher times ahead for these businesses. The best, of course, will survive – but those who don’t can expect to shed jobs in addition to those that will be shed by the public sector.

And with an emergency budget in June and a Comprehensive Spending Review in October, the bad news is that £6.2bn is only the tip of the iceberg. The total deficit is £157bn and quite how this will be eradicated is anyone’s guess - even ten times what the government announced on Monday is only a third of what is needed. There is a great deal of pain to come and taking the decisions won’t be easy. Although there is a chink of good news in terms of a rise in GDP, the OECD is putting yet more pressure on George Osborne to raise interest rates and avoid cutting too quickly.

It all goes to demonstrate two things: firstly, that there has been – and will continue to be for a while – no real recovery, merely a plot by a Labour-staffed treasury to pump vast amounts of taxpayers’ existing and new money into the economy to delay the onset of recession and the necessity to make fiscal and spending adjustments until after the election. This may turn out to be more damaging than the recession itself.

Secondly, if you vote in a Labour government, sooner or later it runs out of money from which the only recovery is a Conservative government (or in this case coalition) to administer social and economic shock treatment. The only way Labour gets into power is when it promises to spend money - that is the central ethos of democratic socialism. In good times, it will always look more attractive than the more cautious Conservative within-means alternative. But there’s a catch; and we are about to find out exactly what that entails.

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Gene-ius!

April 3, 2010 — simonashall

This is the defining image of the 2010 election

One of the most interesting things about the totally inexplicable Labour poster is the way that the character of DCI Gene Hunt obviously means completely different things to different sectors of political opinion. I’ll say now that I don’t watch either Ashes to Ashes or Life on Mars (although that is based in the 1970s) but my understanding is that he represents everything good – and bad – about how policing used to be before the reforms of the 1990s.

I know him best from the Marks and Spencer ad where he ogles a female model in a harmless enough way – although this was enough to get some people worked up. That is clearly the side that Labour is aiming for – the corrupt, brutal and amoral character that Hunt is in Life on Mars. But what Labour has spectacularly failed to grasp is that the people who see him in that way are people who think like the London-centric, politically-correct Islington sushi set; and the vast majority of people have, as the Grauniad said – the Grauniad , for goodness’ sake – “taken to our hearts” the character of Gene Hunt. People in Britain like a loveable rogue.

Ironically, in the 1980s series Ashes to Ashes, Hunt is a different character – more professional, loyal and with a host of good qualities he lacked previously. Which begs the question of whether Jacob Quagliozzi, the poster’s designer – who was four or five years old when the 1980s ended - actually watches Ashes to Ashes either?

Whatever the reason, Labour has catastrophically misjudged the majority’s viewpoint. People might have reservations about some things that went on in the 1980s but I can remember a time when police were out on the streets rather than filling in forms. I also see that rates were dramatically less by percentage of income, petrol cost a quarter of what it does now and houses exchanged hands for something like the cost of building them rather than a four or five times premium. Everyone had a NHS dentist, doctors gave out appointments in the week they were requested and councils didn’t hand out fines for selling goldfish, or engage in social engineering.

You can see what Mr Quagliozzi had in mind – there are some things about the 1980s that weren’t so great. I just about remember the Miners’ Strike and while British de-industrialisation was necessary in the face of foreign competition, I will never support that the way some of our northern communities were treated. Thirty years on, dozens and dozens of towns across the north will never vote Tory because of the appaling way they were treated and there is some justice in that.

Those towns will “get” this poster (although it’s probably not appearing there). But they won’t vote Conservative anyway. For the majority of people, Gene Hunt is something entirely different and Labour have shown in splendid technicolor how they have become unable to engage with people who don’t think as they do. Up until this point, the Conservative posters have been rubbish. The airbrushed one of DC was limp and corporate and the Saatchis were brought on board to rescue a sorry situation. Luckily, Labour has gifted them the defining image and slogan of this election – Fire up the Quattro. It’s time for change.

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Council pay-offs need stopping

March 17, 2010 — admin

Three cheers for the Audit Commission, which has finally roused itself to look into the phenomenon of local government chief executives getting ridiculous pay-offs, only to find six-figure jobs at other local authorities within a matter of months.

They’ve concluded that it’s not on, which is difficult to argue with. What’s easier is the reaction of John Denham (on the BBC).

Local Government Secretary John Denham backed the report’s recommendations and has urged the Local Government Association to see they are adopted.

He said: “Taxpayers’ money should not be used to resolve personal differences. It is time we find a way to change the rules so taxpayers’ money can be clawed back where the system has been exploited.”

Er, aren’t the pay and rations of council staff dictated by a series of Local Government Acts, employment legislation (signed into law by Labour) and regulations/statutory instruments that this government has had 13 years to adjust and amend? Is John Denham surprised by these pay-offs? If he is, he should read Private Eye a bit more carefully because they have been covering this stuff for years.

It’s not just the size of the pay-offs or the fact that subsequent LA employment doesn’t seem to have any bearing on them. It’s the fact local government leadership is so incestuous, with the same pool of individuals going from council to council building up their pensions and taking these parting payments. We need more people to move out of the private sector into the public sector and bring a new perspective on how local government is run – and we need a legislative framework that breaks up the current musical chairs and supports inter-sector transition.

Incidentally, the chief executive of the Audit Commission is leaving at the end of the month. Does anyone know whether he’s been given a few meagre coins to see him on his way?

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Westminster playground gets ugly

February 22, 2010 — admin

Gordon practising his left hook

It was almost inevitable that following the allegations of bullying contained in Andrew Rawnsley’s book appeared to be backed up by the National Bullying Helpline, the Labour machine would turn on Christine Pratt and her organisation and try to claim that it was motivated by political malice. The allegations contained within Rawnsley’s account were so potentially damaging that only the robustest of defences was ever going to be considered.

From PM’s point of view, you have to manage the crisis by not making the story about the PM and his treatment of staff – which, frankly, is an open secret far from the Westminster Village. Instead, the government spinners are trying to make the story about a dodgy charity launching a personal campaign against the PM at a time when they believe people have more capacity for sympathy than they have in the past. To a point, they have succeeded.

But let’s cut through that. The fact that three patrons of the NBH – including Conservative MP Anne Widdecombe - have resigned because Ms Pratt chose to reveal that her charity had fielded calls from Number 10 staff demonstrates that by all accepted standards of ethics, she shouldn’t have made public information about her clients. I’ve listened to her on the radio and she seems very passionate about her cause – but she can’t sustain a charity that is nominally about confidentiality while sounding off to the press if she thinks it is in the public interest.

So yes, Ms Pratt has a case to answer. But then, she’s not Prime Minister. And nothing that she has done (I believe she was so incensed by minister after minister lining up to defend someone she knew ran an office where there was a problem that she let herself be drawn into an error of judgement) detracts from the central allegations.

Let’s look at the evidence. No-one has denied that No 10 staff phoned the charity, even if they were wrong to say so. Sir Gus O’Donnell’s statement roundly leaves open the possibility that he approached the PM and warned him about his behaviour. And both PM and Harriet Harman’s use of the euphemisms “demanding on others” and “he gets frustrated” along with the PM’s “I get angry with myself” all pointedly don’t rule out the account of Rawnsley.

But while Ms Pratt is being shoved through the ringer, the PM is being given a relatively easy ride. The distraction technique has worked – apart from Nick Robinson, whose unwillingness to side with Labour is quite telling. It would be safe to assume that he knows things he’s not inclined to reveal.

All that matters, of course, is what the voters think. The appearance of a Number 10 employee to testify to having been on the receiving end would probably seal the PM’s fate. That won’t happen unless someone is planning to leave the Civil Service at the election anyway because the price of talking would be ostracism from the higher grades. Even though Labour would smear them, the weight of evidence would be too great and the PM finished – it would be poetic justice indeed.

As it happens, things are finely balanced. DC is right to back off and strongly rebut any Labour smears about opposition connivance. But it is worth saying that while Christine Pratt made an error speaking out, that doesn’t discredit the testament that she made. And a lack of self-control and respect for others is not a trait that lends itself well to the modern office of Prime Minister.

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Brown’s Got Talent

February 14, 2010 — admin

It’s not much a secret that Piers Morgan is a big supporter of Labour and his whole transition from hack to celebrity has centred around his political connections and the New Labour project that has failed Britain so woefully during the past 13 years.

What he served up on ITV tonight was something more akin to what you’d expect from the BBC - a sycophantic and unduly flattering portrayal of the weakest PM this country has had since Anthony Eden. As far as I’m aware, no other PM in modern times has had the luxury of a similar “interview”, which was little more than a party conference piece, stage-managed as it was with his silly smile and prompted audience laughter. Surely nothing the PM says is really that funny?

ITV’s dull reaction to Conservative protests has been to offer DC a spot on Piers’s show as well. No thanks. With any luck, the public will see through this carefully choreographed piece of propaganda and remember that Gordon Brown is the architect of Britain’s worst recession in 70 years, the man whose own staff and colleagues believe is incapable of leadership and should be removed and who is now using his last days in government to make it harder for an incoming government to deal with problems.

That is the reality. What Piers Morgan served up was a masterclass in re-presentation and an insipid manipulation of public opinion. No big surprise there.

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Fiddling the system

February 3, 2010 — admin

Tony Blair talked about it after his win in 1997 but soon kicked it into the long grass when civil servants pointed out the advantage that it could potentially give him during the next 10 years. I am of course talking about the first-past-the-post voting system, which has served the country well for 150 years by delivering strong governments in a two-party system.

Yes, it tends to flatter the winning party – enabling them to get legislation through that would otherwise be compromised by protracted negotiations with coalition partners. We haven’t had a hung parliament in this country since 1974 and you have to go back to 1929 for the one before that. In that time, the country has undergone radical economic and social change and the fact that we’ve had governments able to push through their legislation – both popular and unpopular – has been one of the factors that still allows us to be competitive nearly a century after the onset of post-Imperial decline.

Now Gordon Brown wants to change all that.  Isn’t it interesting that having thought about it in 1997 as Chancellor only now is he coming to realise that perhaps it might be a good idea after all? Or, more likely, isn’t he just after a chance to gerrymander the electoral system? He knows that if he wins the election in May, he’s very unlikely to deliver a fifth term for Labour in 2015 because governments just don’t stay popular for that long. So, he reasons, let’s change the system to make it tougher for the Tories, if they don’t win in 2010, to get in at a later point.

And it’s interesting that a graphic in the Guardian today shows how the House of Commons would have looked if the AV system had been in place already. We can see that while it appears to bolster the interests of the largest and smallest parties at the expense of the one in between, that isn’t really what happens. What happens is that Conservative voters are far more likely to vote Lib Dem as their second choice, Lib Dem voters far more likely to put Labour as theirs and Labour voters also likely to vote Lib Dem as a second preference. So with Conservative shorn of the majority of second choices, they have to win on the first preference votes alone, whereas the other two parties are more likely to win on second choices.

It, in effect, seals an unofficial electoral pact between the Lib Dems and Labour – even though a good many people who vote Lib Dem do so because they don’t want to vote Labour or Conservative and have little idea what they are voting for – except they “think that Vince Cable is ever such a nice chap”.

There is an issue with the first-past-the-post system in how it works in a three-party, not two-party system. The largest party is inflated, the smallest party negated. But the Lib Dems have always called for proportional voting out of self-interest and not because they believe it enhances democracy. I don’t remember it being quite so far up their list of priorities 100 years ago when they were forming governments on the back of the FPTP system.

Thankfully, not everyone is taken in by the PM’s Saulian conversion to the cause of electoral reform. I’m heartened to see that the BBC reports (I’ll quote becuase it’s a long way down):

“Campaigners for democratic reform give a mixed reaction on Mr Brown’s proposals, with some, such as Power 2010 saying it did not go far enough: “Without troubling the public for their views, ministers hand-picked the voting system they favour in a cynical exercise aimed at wrong-footing the Tories ahead of a likely election defeat.

“The future of our democracy is far too important to be decided by empty gestures such as this.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

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Cadbury cremed by bad law

February 2, 2010 — admin

I’ve always been partial to Cadbury’s Creme Eggs and for the past two weeks, I’ve been buying boxes and bringing them into the office, exhorting my colleagues to “eat them while they are still British”. Alas, no more. At 1pm today, the iconic British company became the plaything of an American conglomerate whose trademark cheese products are, astonishingly, even less related to actual cheese than Creme Eggs are to eggs.

PM has been busy lately, launching a attempted decapitation strategy on DC yesterday in a speech filled with more chutzpah than a New York second-hand car dealership. Now he’s been to meet the Kraft CEO, who’s not averse to audacity herself on the evidence of this takeover, he is sagely warning that he’ll be looking for more detailed assurances in the coming months. I don’t think that’s going to worry Irene Rosenfeld much – she’s only 4% short of the shares she needs to take Cadburyoff the stock exchange altogether.

And what PM is less keen to let you know is that it was Labour, through the Companies Act 2006 that effectively removed the right of government to protect our long-established businesses from takeover. The act implemented the EU’s Takeover and Transparency Obligations Directives, which harmonise takeover law throughout the EU and prevent company boards from doing anything to frustrate takeover bids. But surprisingly, it’s not the EU’s fault.

Despite the obvious agenda of EU member states to fix takeover legislation to favour their own subsidised corporate environment (ever wondered why so many German, French and Spanish firms can afford to buy British companies and infrastructure?) the directive did leave EU governments free to restrict takeoever law in their states. Labour didn’t take that opportunity and so the government is now in a very weak position to do anything about Kraft or dictate terms to it once Cadbury is bought.

There’s nothing intrisically bad about large British companies getting taken over. It puts money into shareholders’ pockets and since many shareholders are pension schemes, it helps to boost flagging pension values. Certainly Kraft has chosen to pay well over the odds for Cadbury. But it is important that we have British companies continuing to develop and emerge on the global market as players.

And with little or no protection from foreign predators, that is less, not more, likely to happen.

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Security threat

January 22, 2010 — admin

The Home Secretary has revealed that the level of terror threat to the public has been officially increased to “severe” by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre. This comes a few days after flights to and from Yemen were suspended. Does anyone else see a pattern emerging here?

I have said before that I anticipate more and more security alerts as we run up to an election as Gordon Brown appeals to us to believe that he is the only person able to look after us.

But let’s look at how likely this really is. Today, the threat level gets raised to “severe”, meaning an attack is “highly likely”. Yet Alan Johnson accompanies this move by stressing “there was no intelligence to suggest a terrorist attack was imminent“. Eh? Of course we wouldn’t expect him to release details of operations being picked up by GCHQ or MI6 but it’s still an odd thing to say given that the reason that the threat level is raised in the first place.

In addition, the threat level has been set at “severe” or higher since August 2006. In that time, we have had one very amateurish attack on Glasgow Airport where the perpitrators were the only victims (and they were only 50% successful in that given that they had both intended to die and only one did). Another very unsophisticated attack in London was foiled - both were also probably connected to Gordon Brown becoming PM that week and so might not have happened but for that event.

Nothing else has materialised that even comes close to the level of violence seen on the mainland at the height of The Troubles. During that time, there was no terror threat indicator made public via the BBC and Prime Ministers made speeches not outlining in the gravest terms actions that were being taken against a perceived threat but of defiance in the face of enemy action and sympathy with those killed.

In my view, the decision to make public the UK terror threat level is little but a publicity device that keeps terror in the news and in people’s minds when actually the security services would be much better left to their own devices to fight the issue out of the limelight. What possible use can it serve to tell people that they are in danger when you absolutely can’t tell them why? During the Second World War, the very opposite approach was used by the government and people were told that they should simply keep calm and carry on.

And why were they not given more information? Because the government believed, rightly, that the result would be a scared and frightened population. Which can be the only reason therefore that this government has chosen the approach it has - and we ought to ask ourselves why.

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