That NHS Listening Exercise in Full

From the LRB blog,

"...there’s more to the listening exercise than a website. Paul Burstow, the care services minister, announced last month that 119 listening events had been planned. 119? Impressive. It would be nice to see a list. Apparently if you ask for the list you are told to contact NHS Future Forum. But it turns out that NHS Future Forum does not take incoming calls. Not, it would seem, that kind of listening exercise."

No need to even pretend to listen now, I'd say. It was always about keeping the junior partners in the coalition happy anyway. Those pesky Lib-Dems have been put back in their box via the AV vote and local elections, so Lansley is probably going to get a clear run at his intention of dancing on Nye Bevan's grave.

& hey- sometimes it really is true that you need to go ahead with a war because the railway timetables say so, as it were. At least that's what the NHS chief executive thinks.

Addendum: of course the really clever thing would be for Cameron to sack Lansley - and appoint Clegg to carry out Lansley's NHS plans which are now hurtling down the track towards reality.

Waiting For the Great Leap Backwards?

I had been wondering exactly what the Coalition now expects to happen. They've pushed through the budget, they've handed down the pain to the operational bits of the public sector in eye wateringly-tight financial settlements and they've (just about) got through the first really tricky Commons vote, the one on tuition fees.

Were they, I mused, now hoping a spirit of grim, 'post Dunkirk-like determination in adversity' to take over the country and we all pull together through these straightened times till the sunny uplands of a private sector led recovery are reached? That we collectively roll up our sleeves and build the Big Society out of whatever happens to be at hand?

Andrew Rawnsley says not: they want to unleash revolutionary cultural change on the country, and especially its public sector. He makes a rather far fetched analogue with Mao,

"I have heard one important figure in the government talk of unleashing a "cultural revolution" in the public services and another hailing devolution of power away from the centre using Mao's old slogan: "Let a thousand flowers bloom."

.... I have actually heard more than one member of the cabinet explicitly refer to the government as "Maoist".

Just about anywhere you look in Whitehall, there is a secretary of state unleashing upheaval. Ken Clarke challenges two decades of orthodoxy about the criminal justice system. Michael Gove battles the educational establishment to create his "free schools". Iain Duncan Smith has ambitions to be the man who definitively reformed welfare. Chris Huhne is dramatically recasting energy pricing. Nick Clegg wants to rewrite large parts of the constitution. Over at health, Andrew Lansley proposes the greatest upheaval in the NHS since its foundation. They are urged on from within Number 10 by the prime minister's principal strategist, Steve Hilton, who is probably the most Maoist person in the government. He has been heard to tell colleagues: "Everything must have changed by 2015. Everything."

Rawnsley manages to weave into his case the blurted out remarks of one Nick Boles MP , who claimed that chaos in local government is not only coming but is to be welcomed, as it is an alternative to intrinsically impossible planning. (In other news: Tim Worstell manages to work this up into a moment of Hayekian purity, somehow implying an obscure linkage between butterflies flapping their wings in the Amazon and the socialist calculation debate. Or something like that.)

Rawnsley's wrong. He's looking in the wrong bit of Marxist history for his analogies. I think I'm coming round to the view that what this lot are doing is much more akin to Stalin's scorched earth policy in WW2. They're not engaged in a 'regressive modernisation' as Stuart Hall so famously called Thatcherism. They're simply trying to lay waste to territory they don't expect to occupy for very long, to make it unusable by their opponents.

I suspect, deep down, they know their moment is passing, that the political and economic conditions which allowed neoliberal economics to become the default consensus of governments throughout the Anglo-American world have come to an end. The Great Moderation is over, it went down the pan in the Credit Crunch. The systemic default modes of managerial and political thought based on neoliberalism continue for want of a positive alternative, but the old certainty is gone. This may be their last chance to shrink the state for a long, long time. They're going to take it, come hell or high water.

On Watching Some Windows Getting Broken as a Family Group

Interesting times last night - not just at Millbank, but here at Chez McMenamin. Now, time was when Mrs. McM and I would have happily sat watching a few broken windows at Tory HQ on TV, chugged away at the Merlot and gleefully quoted Jim to each other ('If there's a lesson in life we should all learn is that students must never break windows unless they're members of the Bullingdon Club.').

We are both behind the students, both recall that sometimes - but only sometimes - riots do work and, lets be frank, we are both perfectly aware that there seemed to be almost as many camera operatives in Millbank as there were occupiers so the world was getting a rather skewed view of the demonstration. The violence was all a bit small scale to be truthful - not a Poll Tax Riot in miniature at all. We both have memories of being caught up in .....well, lets call them 'spots of disorder' in our youth and early adulthood: she still dines out on the Greenham fence she pulled down and we both have various memories of seeing bottles, bricks and fireworks being tossed around on various demos - and of running away, frightened, from police charges. So our reaction to the events was perhaps entirely predictable.

But what was different last night was the presence on the sofa of a young master McMenamin who is fourteen tomorrow. Now he is a well behaved boy with a lifetime's training in doing the decent thing and a default assumption that violence only really happens in video games, despite living in a not entirely salubrious part of South London. He knew the students were marching - and indeed rioting - for him. He was wide eyed with excitement as the glass window broke, cheering on the students as if they were his football team, just high on the apparent disorder.

His mother and I shifted in our seats uncomfortably, and started murmuring things like,

'...that lad with the wedge haircut has made a mistake not to have a scarf over his face, he'll be nicked before the end of the evening and probably chucked off his course as well...';
'...have we ever explained what kettling is?' ;
'..of course its important to have a spare battery for the mobile if you do get into a sticky situation, just so you can ring someone.."and
'...actually, it's really frightening when things kick off like that and you don't know how to get away from it..."

He calmed down and asked us what we really thought of the TV news pictures. I looked at his Mum and she looked at me. I cleared my throat to launch into some lengthy dull diatribe from half remembered EP Thompson on the long English tradition of 'negotiation by riot' when Mrs.McM quietly spoke up,

" I wouldn't want to smash windows, and I wouldn't want any of my family to do it...but I'm glad it has happened".

We went to our beds a family united on that thought.

Social Housing: the End?

The graphic is from this week's edition of the housing trade mag, not some alarmist leftist publication. It refers to the end of public subsidy for the capital costs of building social housing. If the Tories really mean what they say, we're in uncharted waters.

Housing finance is notoriously difficult and dull, so let's strip it back to its essentials: to cover the costs of building houses you can either pay a lot upfront to cover the initial costs or borrow that money and pay the loan off by hiring it out on a periodic basis. The smaller amount of money you sink into the scheme upfront the higher the periodic charge. This is not rocket science.

Since the late 1980s, we've not had 100% capital subsidy for social housing - indeed, housing associations have bid for funding partly on the basis of how little capital monies they need to deliver any given project. Naturally, the first result of this system was to send rents - the 'periodic charge' - through the roof in the early 1990s.& high rents do tend to produce very high Housing Benefit bills.

So a decade or so ago the government introduced a system of 'target rents' which apply to both council and housing association rented stock. Basically, this system sets the rent of any given socially rented property, new or existing, in accordance with a formula based on the size and value of the property and relative local manual wage rates. So this reined in the tendency to produce low capital subsidy/high rent schemes.

The Tories have decided to rip this system up: they want rents to be capped at 80% of the local market rate for all incoming tenants, even those going into existing social housing, which has enjoyed past capital subsidy. This is laughably called 'affordable'. Public capital subsidy is being reduced to more or less nothing. The promised 150,000 new 'affordable' social tenancies are supposedly going to be financed primarily from either these higher rental streams or via loans mobilised by big housing associations on existing stock where previous capital subsidy means the debt is now largely paid off.

Wake up at the back there - I know this is boring and detailed and rather more than you perhaps want to know. So let me put this in context: this means that rents for a two bedded socially rented property in Islington would rise from £91pw to £232pw: a three bed social rented house in Cambridge would go up from £93pw to £128pw. I can only assume that the application of the word 'affordable' to such rents is some kind of sick joke.

& what's more this means that the Housing Benefit bill is going to go up, not down. The housing associations' trade body is saying that, in Hackney, you'd have to earn £54,000 to escape HB eligibility and be in a position to keep the bulk of your additional salary and be better off in work.

For all the dull, grey complexity of housing finance it really is that simple: higher rents= deeper benefit traps for wider numbers of people. No amount of huffing and puffing about a Universal Credit is going to change that.

Nor is this simply a problem for the minority of the population who live in social housing. House prices are now such that it is increasingly difficult for people to get their foot on the ladder. A new report from the Home Builders Federation puts this pretty graphically:

"...the average first time buyer (FTB) would have to save every single penny of their earnings for more than two years to have a chance of getting a foot on the housing ladder. In London it would take three years.

Even over five years, young people have to save almost half of their take home pay every month to save a deposit for a house, with some areas even higher."

So rents matter: even if you're in the 70% of people who are currently home owners your children are probably not going to be any time soon if they live in London and the SE.

Addendum: the definitive explanation of the impact of the Housing Benefit changes, found in possibly the most unlikely place on earth for sensible comment, CIF.

The Centre Stirs...

David Marquand:

I'm worried, not because the Government is departing from New Labour's legacy, but because it's sticking to it. Here, I believe, both Government and Opposition are engaged in a phony war. Despite all the furious charges and counter-charges that echo through the Westminster air, they are both on the same side. They both want to return to business as usual as quickly as they can. They disagree furiously about the route, but they agree about the destination. They want to get back to the sunlit uplands of ever-rising material prosperity, fuelling and fuelled by ever-rising consumption, both public and private. Both are dominated by short-term policy wonkery. Neither seems to have grasped the need for a new politico-economic paradigm, post-Keynesian, post-socialist, post-Thatcherite, post-national and above all post-affluence. I don't carry such a paradigm in my knapsack, I hasten to add. But I feel in my bones that this is what used to be called the left should now be working on.

Now, ignoring for a moment the rather impressive number of usages of the prefix 'post' in that, er, post, isn't this interesting? We have the primary academic representative of the line that runs from Crosland to New Labour (via the SDP) saying the game is now up, and the current froth of politics represents little more than a churning of outdated verities.

I think he's right. I just don't think that prefixing the word 'post' before every previous paradigm is particularly helpful. Challenging the inherited meaning of 'affluence', for instance, seems to me to be pretty vital - re-defining it as meaning something different: an 'affluence' of equality, resource sustainability and greenery springs to mind as the objective. &, of course, I'm not willing to concede we're in a world that is, by definition, post socialist.

Famously - and I can recall getting a lot of stick for this 25 years ago - Marquand, despite being then in the SDP, wrote regularly for Marxism Today. Quite who was trying to exercise hegemony over whom might still provoke a pub argument or two with friends to my Left. But if the would-be generals of the -so far - imaginary armies that are supposed to resist the coming cuts are to put flesh on their 'strategic' posturings, they must find a language which calls people who conceive of themselves as 'centrist' to the banner, as well as the thin ranks of the more committed Left. So it is always worth maintaining that dialogue with people like Marquand in my view.

Red Meat for the Tunbridge Wells Conservative Club Lounge Bar

Cameron has floated plans to take away basic security of tenure from new entrants to socially rented housing. This is a big step - and an important one.

It's important but not, of course, practical in any way - he's just fired the starting gun for a hail of factually based correction from Shelter, the Churches, the Chartered Institute of Housing and every Tenants' Organisation in the land and we all know what happens when 'factually based correction' hits the fan.

If implemented, this idea would create homelessness, hugely increase routine housing management costs in social housing, increase rather than decrease the benefit traps Ian Duncan Smith is supposedly unpicking, lead to all sorts of undesirable 'hard cases' making unwelcome new housing law and - here's the rub - almost certainly increase the number of people in the private rented sector, which, not being subject to rent control, is more expensive than social housing. In short, it would cost the state more money. So it ain't going to happen.

My best guess is we'll see a familiar cycle of small pilots followed by a range of minor tinkerings with tenure law and a dribbling away of the original political motivation that reduces to some small funding programme designed to produce a few hundred, at best, specially designed new tenancies that automatically convert to shared ownership when and if the family income reaches a certain point.

No, the importance of this announcement is that it the first sign of the end of the 'glad confident morning' for this government and the harbinger of the shit-storm they are going to face once the autumn budget is announced.

This idea is really not like the 'Free School' initiative where Tory plans can be arguably claimed to be seeking to mobilise the positive aspirations of the Daily Mail reading classes. I don't actually think that's true, but the fact that Gove has undoubtedly played his hand very badly so far doesn't mean it remains anything but a positive hand in principle. The Education policy tries to reach out to so called 'aspirational' Britain.

This housing policy doesn't: it seeks to mobilise the prejudices and ignorance of the Tory heartland.It's red meat for the Tunbridge Wells Conservative Club Lounge Bar. It offers a 'tin-ear' to every other strand of opinion and, indeed, to the pesky constraints of reality. It is therefore important in a symbolic way: it ain't going to happen, but it is a way station along the path to what a contributor to one discussion over at Blood and Treasure described as 'Thatcherism without the Falklands'.

Shiny Dave looks a little less shiny this morning. That moderate veneer is starting to peel.

Osborne, Disciple of '60s Childcare Guru

Young Gideon Osborne was on the Today programme this morning, doing a fair imitation of a politico with the wind in his sails. Others will deconstruct his appalling budget better than I, but I was struck by his sheer chutzpah on one matter: having announced yesterday that all non protected public service departments are facing a 25% cut when the figures are sorted out in the autumn, he backtracked a little and seemed to say that if larger 'savings' can be found in the benefits budget then cuts to services need not be quite so severe.

Now where have I heard this sort of thing before? Oh yes: Dr Spock, the childcare guru of choice for your average concerned parent in the 1960s and 1970s, so quite possibly someone Gideon's own mater and pater encouraged their nanny to read.

You may recall the good Doctor's advice on how to encourage a toddler to eat properly - give them a closed option in the form of a choice: "Are you going to eat your greens up before or after you eat the meat?"& it worked, as a whole generation of people who are now grandparents will testify.

Well, mainly it worked. There is also the case of my friend Andy. A couple of weeks into this new Spock inspired regime 3 yr old Andrew was eating his greens - but then he turned round and asked, "Dad - are you going to buy me an ice cream before you take me to the park or after you take me to the park?" .

Which does seem to me to be precisely the place for opposition to this lot to start from.

Free School: A Three Card Trick to Promote Privatisation

Clarification from the Dept of Education:

Free Schools will have the same legal requirements as academies. Free Schools are normally brand-new schools set up by charities, universities, business, community or faith groups, teachers and groups of parents where there is parental demand. Academies are usually a change to an existing maintained school.

Legally the structure is the same, and they are expected to meet the same requirements as other academies. Free Schools will also benefit from the same freedoms and flexibilities as academies....

OK, so I get that: they're the same thing except 'free schools' are new and Academies are the option available to existing state schools. but, ah-ha, wait, there's more:

Can an existing independent school become a Free School?

Yes. Independent schools can apply to become a Free School and become state-funded independent schools. These schools will need to meet the entry criteria – including an agreement that their admissions policy is in line with the Admissions Code, demonstrate they have a good record of success as an education provider and financial viability. Independent schools applying to become Free Schools will not be able to retain any existing academic selection admission arrangements.

OK, I get that as well: it's a way of channeling tax payers money into the private sector. But you might object that few independent schools would take this option as they wouldn't be allowed to charge top-up fees. Well, not necessarily. The cornerstone of the policy is quite simple:

How will applicants be expected to demonstrate that they are suitable education providers?
... Proposers will not have to be groups who already provide education services; they can be new providers but we will expect them to be able to demonstrate a capability to deliver their plans. This might mean partnering new providers with a third-party group with education experience or having plans in place to subcontract parts of the running and management of the school to other suitable organisations. ( my emphasis)

Hey-ho: here's the rub. Basically parents don't get to set up schools, they get to choose 'third party groups with educational experience' to do so on their behalf. But not councils - who might otherwise be thought to be precisely the most obvious 'third party groups' with such experience. No, the point is to debar them and promote other providers. Which can only mean either the private sector - sometimes thinly disguised as 'charitable trusts' a la Eton, Harrow and so on - or ultimately Church backed front organisations.

Michael Gove: Encouraging Educational Leylandii

Michael Gove is a very, very clever politician - probably the most dangerous person in government at the moment from my point of view, despite the odd spot of entertaining hypocrisy in his past. (yes, there's a reason for the dodgy photo - follow the link).

I think he is dangerous because he is the one who seems to have properly thought through how to dismantle the support for - as oppose to simple cut - a basic state funded service. I suspect him of being one of those right wingers who have read their Gramsci and really understood the concept of 'hegemony'. If his educational policies are successful he will have moved education out of the 'health' box - where there remains strong public support for an universalist service - into the 'housing' box -where private satisfaction of our needs is seen as normal and 'social' housing is seen as residual, welfare provision.

His plans focus on two main points: 'enabling' parents to set up so called free schools, and 'liberating' high performing state schools to become Academies. Note the language of freedom implicit in the presentation: both polices are suppose to give consumers (parents) and staff (well, managers) powers now held by town halls. This was once the language of the left. The danger for the left is that in opposing them they sound as if they're defending bureaucrats and stuffy procedures against the wishes of ordinary people. What's more, New Labour - not a group I consider co-terminus with 'the left' - has the not inconsiderable problem that Academies were their idea in the first place.

Let's get one thing clear however: there is nothing to stop Toby Young and co going off to start a school for their children as it is. But what they're actually asking for is the right to take large chunks of public money and set up a school which they can run as they like, more or less - or rather appoint any private sector provider they might like. &, here's the rub, they'd be taking this public money from the national government, not the town hall, riding rough shod over the local educational ecology. Contrast this with the local partnership approach of Britain's first parent promoted school. It's a different world view.

Similarly, the so-called freedoms of Academies should be carefully picked apart by the left. The freedom to ignore large parts of the National Curriculum? Bring it on - but do it for all schools, and let's have some backstops to prevent nutty creationists taking over the show. Given these caveats there is nothing to oppose here. Nor is there any in principle reason to get too hot under the collar about devolving currently centralised budgets to schools - and even introducing some flexibility into nationally negotiated pay scales is a pill which, after careful union negotiation, the left might be able to swallow. The key issue is admissions. Who controls who gets to go to which school? Again, this is about the local educational ecology.

All schools have what economists call 'externalities': by virtue of their very existence they don't just affect the children who attend the particular school they also affect the choices open to children who don't.

So let's try the Gove trick: let's try and put the case against his reforms in the language of our opponents. To take a favourite Daily Mail theme, schools are like leylandi: they don't just affect your own garden when you plant them. They can bring your neighbours' pleasure and appreciated privacy, sure - but they can also block out the sun. It really ain't a private matter when you put them in the soil - it's a community matter. It's a matter of local social ecology.

Education is a community garden and Toby Young or prospective Academy Heads shouldn't be able to plant just what they like without some say for the rest of us.

Rabbits and Headlights and Old Fashioned Leftie Phraseology.

I see Mandelson's short-lived championing of a rehashed dirigisme seems unlikely to survive the immediate cuts - the new Govt is looking at ways of wriggling out of a promised £750m worth of subsidies to the car and nuclear industries. And, in truth, I personally wouldn't have chosen either of these industries to back if I was the one on whose shoulders the ghost of Harold Wilson's 'white hot heat of the technological revolution' had belatedly descended. I'd have gone with the Green or bio-tech industries of the future.

But I don't think that is the Coalition's plan. I think they're just doing a 'rabbit in the headlights' act in the face of the endless drumbeat of pressure from the markets. Someone needs to remind them of the wise - and not at all leftwing - words of Edward Hugh:

"Something strange seems to have happened to the discourse over the last three years, since a problem which originated in the financial sector has now metamorphised into a fiscal crisis for almost all modern democratic states. Indeed, such is the sense of panic being generated out there on this issue that I am already starting to see articles from investor circles asking whether or not democracy is compatible with fiscal rectitude. This is rather putting the cart before the horse, I feel.....we should not fail to notice the fact that another significant part of rising state indebtedness comes from having recently bailed out a significant chunk of the private sector. ...In fact, a rather weird circle has been created. The private sector (possibly as a result of the absence of adequate public vigilance) got itself into a huge mess of its own making. Governments all over the globe (understandably and correctly) rushed in to put the fire out, and in the process transferred the problem over to their own balance sheets. But what is most interesting to note about what happened next is how, given that the crisis itself means there are few positive investment outlets in the first world, the money generated by the bailouts is increasingly being used to encircle those very governments who initially made them. Basically a massive moral hazard conundrum has been created, as markets leverage a discourse which pressures governments for fiscal rectitude (which is contractionary - given the depth of the crisis - as far as aggregate demand is concerned), in the process creating the need for yet more bailouts, and so on (the possibility of ultimate Greek default being perhaps the clearest example here)."

What he's saying here, translated into archaic leftwing language, is that there is a need for a greater 'relative autonomy of the state'. & Coalition strategy is basically about decreasing that relative autonomy.

Spare Us the Restoration Comedy, There’s A ‘Live Rail’ Approaching..

At school, I have a hazy memory of the Restoration being presented as being all about the reopening of theatres, unleashing pent up demand for maypoles and the sweeping to Jordan-like fame of buxom orange girls. Wikipedia tells me different:

"In 1661,Oliver Cromwell's body was exhumed from Westminster Abbey, and was subjected to the ritual of a posthumous execution,..... Symbolically, this took place on 30 January; the same date that Charles I had been executed. His body was hanged in chains at Tyburn. Finally, his disinterred body was thrown into a pit, while his severed head was displayed on a pole outside Westminster Hall until 1685."

What brings this to mind? Duh, the amazing discovery that Labour did some things the Tories Don't Like in their last few days in office. Digging up a corpse and giving it a kicking to establish one's own legitimacy has a long pedigree. Hopi needn't over worry about oiling the wheels of a rapid rebuttal unit, this is a very old trick. It will only convince the already converted.

In other news, Gideon and his sidekick Laws have announced a significant move towards taxation without representation in the form of an Office for Budgetary Responsibility. And the Times are leading on the plan to move forwards towards the sunny uplands of political and democratic renewal by ...er, creating 160+ new unelected peers. My, isn't last year's crisis of political legitimacy over MPs expenses paying dividends now for those who need to insulate their next moves from any kind of democratic accountability? My gut feeling is that these moves will prove ephemeral: I agree with Potlatch when he says a fiscal crisis, as we now face, represents a political choice inviting political answers.

Meanwhile, amongst the grownups, Merkel has acknowledged that the Eurozone bailout isn't a permanent fix. George Magnus (that calm, hyper-intelligent guy from UBS with a Keynes-like 'tache that Mason often interviews on Newsnight) agrees. He seems to be saying he does not think the European Union's Greek rescue will be enough to resolve the situation or stop it from spiralling into a structural crisis for all large debtor nations in the industrialised world - unless somehow the EU becomes a fully political union. Indeed, at points, his carefully technical language gets even scarier: he seems to suggest that more or less the entire Western World is moving into a 'debt trap': no plausible growth rates are going to be sufficiently high to offset the rising cost of borrowing for Govts.

I'm no economist but I think this means he's saying we're going to have to pay more tax for less services and it's still not going to be enough to stabilise the situation. If things get really bad, there seem to be two ways out of this currently being kicked about in technical economic discussion:

1. As George Magnus suggests, the Eurozone might have to move to complete political union – the much discussed 'United States of Europe'. I regard this as utterly unfeasible, but things change quickly under this sort of pressure.

2. For the weaker members of the Eurozone to leave and re-establish their own currencies. But no one has the faintest idea of how to do this and if it happened it would be a crushing blow, not only to the political 'project' of the EU but also to trade within the EU, which represents a high proportion of all world trade.

Either eventuality would certainly mean that quite a bit of British held Greek/Portuguese/Spanish and, especially, Irish debt would be 'restructured': the preferred financial euphemism for 'you can whistle for it matey, I'm not paying'.

Europe is famously the 'live rail' of Tory party politics- just think how much more electricity that rail is carrying now they're in coalition with a pro-European Party....

The Inevitable Blue Creep

We're told there is to be a Lib-Dem in every Government department. On the perhaps outdated Wikipedia entry I count 24 government departments - let's be generous and say this new Ant and Dec led govt is going to slash that back to 21. Every minister has a Parliamentary Private Secretary(PPS): a gloried bag carrier who nonetheless counts as part of the payroll vote.

So that's 42 Lib-Dems locked into voting for all government measures, leaving a rather sparsely populated Lib Dem backbench numbering only 15 MPs. Not a huge talent pool from which to replace the inevitable failures in government/ personal crack ups/disaffected individuals/discredited sleaze merchants who will inevitably emerge.

So, in time, it is likely that the government will take on an increasingly straightforwardly 'Tory' character. There's going to be a 'blue creep'. But that's going to take a little while: we've all got to live through this ghastly 'glad, confident morning' first.