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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Winterton of discontent

February 18, 2010 — admin

Another day, another Conservative MP rolls up to the Stephen Nolan show on Five Live to commit political self-immolation. This time it’s Nicholas Winterton on trains and Pete Waterman he ain’t.

Just so he knows what it’s like in second class these days, I went into the City earlier on South West Trains and had to stand next to the toilet due to the volume of people aboard. It’s pretty difficult to get your laptop out or start leafing through reports when you’ve go no seat to use, despite paying the same fare as the people who have got seats. So I hope he’ll forgive me if I don’t share his “outlook on life” when on the train, it’s just that usually I’m having to listen to kids noisily playing I-spy or someone sitting across from me using a personal music device that’s anything but personal.

I’d love to have a “business environment” in which to work, but sometimes you just have to share your world with other human beings and make the compromises that that inevitably entails. He should try it sometime. My company doesn’t pay for me to travel First Class – and neither should taxpayers pay for MPs to do the same. Give them the regular fare – if they want to top it up from their considerable wages, so be it. But I suspect that some of them could do with a bit of second-class travel.

On the way back, I did manage to find a seat, open my laptop and do a few emails before the train pulled into Woking. You see, Sir Nicholas, some of us carriage-classers are capable of doing work on the train, despite being a different type of person. There’s no reason that MPs can’t do the same at certain times of the day.

There are many issues with our trains and overcrowding and punctuality are just the surface of a deeper problem, which the Wintertons might like to look into and lobby Andrew Adonis about. The fact that the most pressing problem in Sir Nicholas Winterton’s mind is that he wants to travel first instead of second class just demonstrates how much better off Parliament will be without him.

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May still a long way off

February 17, 2010 — admin

Teresa - know what you are going to say and what might be said back before you say it!

I drove out to Dorking this morning along the A25 via Send for a business meeting. The road, which I know very well from reporting days and past lives, is in a truly awful, appalling state. But that is Guildford and Mole Valley’s issue – the reason I mention it was that I was stuck for about ten minutes in the aftermath of a nasty car crash (at which I hope no-one was seriously hurt) that seemed to mirror what I was listening to on the radio.

Teresa May, shadow employment secretary, appeared on the Stephen Nolan Show, BBC Radio Five Live (you can listen here but need to fast forward), to talk about today’s unemployment figures (notice how the BBC allows Lib Dem Steve Webb to get in a pop at cutting the deficit at the bottom - no bias my foot), which are mixed. It is good that overall unemployment is down – but with the number of Jobseekers’ claimants up and long-term unemployment up it is difficult to argue that it’s a great day. Teresa presumably went on the air to point out the mixed message – specifically that the number of “under-employed” people – where they have been forced into part-time and reduced-hours work – stands at almost three million.

Instead, she allowed herself down a classic funnel by stating that Labour has closed Job Centres at the average of one a month since 2008. There was no need for her to go there – all she needed to do was talk about the Work Programme, express sympathy and understanding and stay calm. By raising the matter of closures, she prompted the inevitable comeback “so would you re-open them?”, to which she had no answer.

The funnel happens when you’re drawn to a pinch point from which the interview cannot go forward without an answer, usually a yes or no question. “I’ll ask you again, if you say that Labour was wrong to close the Job Centres, will you commit to re-open them?” Again she evades – it sounds very poor. Now she’s struggling because once you’re in the funnel, it’s difficult to climb back out again. “Look, you are hoping to become the next government in three months’ time, I think people have a right to know whether you will right a wrong that you say Labour has committed – so yes or no, will you re-open the Job Centres?” Crash, bang.

It’s not the point she has come on air to make (if it was, it was extremely ill-judged and poorly prepared). So why does an experienced politician like Teresa May allow herself to be dragged into the funnel so easily? By the time Labour minister Jim Knights is introduced into the proceedings, he could have danced around like a chicken and sounded more credible than Teresa. To be fair, she improved towards the end but the damage was done. And I don’t blame the BBC for being hard on her – if you make such basic unforced errors, you get what you deserve.

So how to get out of the funnel? Firstly, avoid going there in the first place. Why bring up the mistakes of government on such a peripheral matter? The essence lies in Conservative policy, which in this case is very credible. Once you’re in, there are only two options – attack the basis of the question or tell the truth. In Teresa’s case, she could have done either.

Attack the basis of the question: “I understand why you as a journalist are asking me that question but whether or not we commit to re-opening the centres is not relevant. The damage has already been done and the people who those centres could have helped have not been helped, which adds to the problems that we face now. The time to save those centres was 2008, not 2010. Instead of talking about committing to re-open those centres, we have adjusted our policy to suit the needs of today’s unemployed people.” If nothing else, it looks less evasive and puts you back in control of the issue, dismissing the question as outdated.

Tell the truth: “I think it’s important to give an honest answer to you and that answer is that we are not in a position to re-open those centres given the state of the public finances. If they had been kept open in 2008 we wouldn’t now close them because that money would already be in our budgets. This government has ruined the economy and left us with huge debts and that means that as much as we’d like to, we simply can’t go and undo this and many other bad decisions that Labour has left us with. In the light of these tight resources, it’s important that we target them properly and that is what our new programme is designed to do.”

Neither answer gets you off the hook completely but it allows you to move on. There’s nothing the public hates more than politicians that blatantly won’t answer questions and evasiveness is not a good thing for voters or party members to hear. I don’t know who’s advising Teresa May on dealing with the media but they clearly have a lot of work to do.

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Remembering Dresden

February 15, 2010 — admin

Abend - Sonnenuntergang hinter der Dresdener Hofkirche by Caspar David Friedrich. Both spires have been reconstructed since 1945

Sixty-five years ago today, the citizens of Dresden – the Baroque capital of the German region of Saxony – were going through what must have been the ultimate terror. After two nights of bombing, they found themselves in the middle of a firestorm, where the air in the city was hot enough to burn skin and the thirsty flames consumed the oxygen from miles around, making it a hellish inferno.

I have always believed that war makes the unthinkable thinkable and cast no blame on the RAF, USAF, Churchill or Arthur Harris for the decision to bomb the town. The historical revisionism of some (funding by the government in this instance) – to try and prove that Dresden was known to be an insignficant target and bombed for the sake of its cultural value, is as pointless as it is regressive. We mustn’t forget that London, Coventry and other British cities suffered equally.

Among my favourite artists is the German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, whose contemplative landscapes include several interpretations of Dresden, his native town. Every time I look at them, they seem to reflect nostalgically on a landscape since destroyed; even though Friedrich could never have imagined what would happen to the landmarks he knew so well. In that context the picture seems to be a representation of how time, technology and politics change all of us – not only in the course of our lifetimes but from one era to the next.

I’m certainly not here to say that it was right or wrong to bomb Dresden – it was necessary to fight a total war in order to rid Europe of one of its most evil regimes. But it is right to remember Dresden and everything – lives, culture, art, human spirit and endeavour – that was lost 65 years ago.

And to understand that in 1945 it only took two nights to obliterate 700 years of Saxony’s history. Now it would probably take two hours.

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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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Rogues’ gallery, allegedly

February 5, 2010 — admin

…Not that I am suggesting for an instant that they are guilty, of course, as it seems finally a court of law will get to decide on the MPs’ expenses scandal. While I remain sceptical about the moral posturing conducted about MPs by some of the equally morally dubious press, I have always said that cases where there was evidence of criminal behaviour should be dealt with.

Now we know four people will face criminal charges over misuse of public money. And each of their circumstances helps us paint a picture of what was going on with the Fees Office and MPs’ claims.

So as not to be biased, I’ll start with the Conservative member of the quartet, Lord Hanningfield. It is said that between March 2006 and May 2009, he submitted claims for overnight stays in London when he was actually driven home to Chelmsford. Earlier versions of the story in the media contained information that has subsequently been removed for Contempt of Court reasons. Suffice it to say that it appears from earlier quotes that Fees Office staff were informing those that they oversaw that charging for overnight stays and then sloping off back home – or staying the night with friends instead - was a perfectly acceptable thing to do.

Well it isn’t – and those alleged to have made such claims should clearly have known better. But it also serves to illustrate the catastrophic failure of the Fees Office to do its job – it has been seeking to run things for the benefit of MPs and peers rather than for the taxpayers that are its real masters.

Elliot Morley is charged with claiming mortage expenses during a three-year period on either a false basis or when the loan had already been paid off. He claims that he didn’t realise that mortgage had been paid off and he has repaid the money. It is also worth noting that the Fees Offices clearly didn’t see fit to check his claim over this long period of time. In my view, it is totally correct that these charges should be heard by a court. This is not the same as charging for a duck house or trouser press; the allegations – and they are only allegations – amount to something else entirely.

David Chaytor is charged with submitting false invoices and coming up with an ingenious scheme whereby a flat that he actually owned was “rented” from his daughter and mother in order to claim expenses on it. Again, these are only charges, but it seems to me that if MPs put half as much energy into lawmaking as they appear to have put into finding ways of maximising their expense claims, the country might not be in such a dire situation. And once again, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that somewhere along the line, the Fees Office knew of this arrangement and were happy to accommodate it. And if they didn’t, they should have.

Jim Devine took Robin Cook’s seat after the latter died in 2005 and is charged with using false invoices. His case is interesting because he became an MP only four years before the story broke. I refuse to believe that a man of previously good character - and who has been through a rigorous selection process – suddenly decides to come up with false invoices after only three years in the House of Commons.

I think that somewhere in all of this there were people assuring MPs that it was fine to claim for bathplugs, fine to claim for overnight stays and then go home, okay to put through a “replacement” invoice for one that was lost and no problem to use a variety of tricks to keep the expense payments as high as possible.

That doesn’t excuse the MPs, all of whom are guilty of poor judgement and avarice. But it does ask questions about the officials involved in this discredited process and whose names are not plastered all over the papers at the moment.

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BBC – Broadly Bashing Cameron

January 27, 2010 — admin

In the dark - Broadcasting House seems to have its own view on economics

Apparently two separate blog entries in lightning succession trying to make hay out of the Hatfield House meetings clearly wasn’t enough for Nick Robinson, who surely won’t still be BBC Political Editor by the end of the year. The fact that no other media saw fit to run with this story in a big way shows how isolated he is, how drawn into the Labour spin trap.

We now have another blog post on Tory cuts that tries to have it all ways – saying the Conservatives will cut and if they don’t painting that as a U-turn and another slight on DC. He then helps perpetuate the myth that government spending boosts growth and will therefore aid a recovery. Government spending doesn’t boost growth - it creates its own growth, which then disappears once the subsidy is withdrawn. The UK would still be in recession without the Car Scrappage Scheme – with that scheme over, the car industry can expect a significant downturn in the months ahead.

Today, the Labour group on the LGA announced it would push for a 1% pay increase for the least well paid rather than exercise restraint. Again, the money that goes into propping up more and more public sector wages is a massive ongoing subsidy and one that cannot be withdrawn now it has been enacted without devastating unemployment. The reduction of the public sector headcount must be a target of a Conservative government because it is not healthy for our economy, society or democracy for such a large proportion of the population to be employed by the government.

But now so many are, reducing that number is a hugely painful and expensive thing to do. We mustn’t make the same mistake with the economy by using more government money to prop it up – it needs to be nurtured and kicked into a recovery of its own and the only way to do that is to reduce our debt. Yesterday Bill Gross told investors across the world to avoid the UK because of our huge debts, weak currency and fragile recovery. Like George Osborne, he sees that debt reduction – preferably quickly – is the only way to restore confidence, maintain our credit rating and keep interest rates down.

It’s all very well pumping money into the economy – even if it doesn’t actually promote sustainable growth. But if people’s mortgage rates go from 2.5% up to 6% within 12 months, it isn’t going to leave them with much money to aid the recovery; in fact, many of them will be worse off than they were while we were in recession.

So the BBC needs to stop chucking the last dice all over the place in support of Labour and start understanding that more borrowing and spending in the short-term is going to make the problem far, far worse. If they leave everything as it is, we will fingernail into a slow and drawn out recovery process during which many people will be worse off than they have been for the past two years.

Only by committing to reduce the deficit can we carry the confidence of the markets, which are the real force behind recovery. We need to cut public spending while keeping as many people as possible employed, to raise taxes for those that can afford it most and keep interest rates down while selling on as much of our debt as we can. It’s not going to be easy.

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Carthouse Lane Allotments part II

January 22, 2010 — admin

I did say that I would return to the subject of the Carthouse Lane Allotments, although the target date for this application is not until the middle of February. It won’t be heard at the planning meeting on Tuesday – the agenda for that is now published.

Horsell Residents Association met on Wednesday evening and briefly discussed the application. There were concerns about how allotments and warehouses could be built in close proximity to the Special Protection Area when homes themselves were restricted. This all stems to a useless EU directive that is designed to protect nightjars and Dartford Warblers in southern Spain but has wrecked the housing plans of local authorities throughout the Thames Valley.

Put simply, people keep pets and walk them near where they live. It is those dogs and cats that cause a potential hazard to the habitat of ground-nesting birds and the birds themselves. By comparison, a warehouse or industrial unit creates no similar threat. It’s a completely ridiculous directive but there we go.

The general consensus at HRA was that the application itself is no bad thing, even if it did highlight the silliness of the EU law.

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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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Gardeners question BBC

January 12, 2010 — admin

Many of today’s papers carry the story about the BBC having to back down over the new series of Gardener’s World, due to begin in March. I had read about the controversy surrounding the changed format of the show for 2009, especially from the established viewers. But I think the corporation should have stood its ground.

I never watched the show before 2009 because I never had a garden to speak of. Last year, I designed beds, cleared turf, dug over, planted, fed, watered, fretted and harvested like millions of other gardeners across the country. I derived that same therapeutic enjoyment and experienced one of the great glories of England – working in one’s garden on a warm spring day. I can’t imagine ever giving that up now for as long as I am able.

But to me, Gardener’s World in its current form was superb. Yes, it was a bit ridiculous that the team was able to move onto a wasteland and seemed to have unlimited resources to create walls, glass and beds that most people can only dream of. But I like Toby Buckland and his team and particularly that the show was  not aimed at people who knew the Latin names of everything growing on their property.

And I take exception to the notion that the amateur kitchen gardening that I did is not the ”proper, grown-up gardening” the GW viewer wants to watch. For thousands of years, kitchen gardeners on differing scales have kept their communities alive. By comparison, flower gardening has only been a working man’s pursuit since the war.

Not that I don’t like flower gardening – I’m sure it’s something I’ll turn to in due course. But by then, I shouldn’t need a programme each week to tell me how to do it and I’ll be happy to leave GW to those just beginning to experience the pleasures of the garden. For the serious gardener surely moves on to RHS reference books and, of course, Gardener’s Question Time.

I wish the BBC had kept the current format for a second year – people need time to get used to change as with Top Gear, the programme to which the new GW was sneering compared (and another programme that I enjoy very much). What we are likely to end up with is a compromise that will neither be accessible enough to entice the “new guard-ners”, nor pure enough for the “Latinistas“.

Another great British Broadcasting Corporation compromise.

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