All progressives should get behind Corbyn

 The Labour Party conference has resounded with repeated calls for unity behind Jeremy Corbyn, now re-elected as leader with an even bigger share of the vote than last year.

 Not only should Labour's MPs heed the call, but the rest of what I'll call for want of a better name the "progressive left" should get behind him as well.

Just over a year ago, when Corbyn first was first elected leader with the overwhelming support of party members, the BBC published a list of "24 things that Jeremy Corbyn believes."  You can see the full details here, and here's a summary (my comments and reservations where necessary, in brackets):

1.  The [internal government] deficit should be reduced "not through spending cuts and not by an arbitrary deadline" but by raising taxes etc.  Half marks.  This deficit is not all that important and will reduce itself if and when the economy revives.   Giving internal deficit reduction too much priority has delayed and will continue to delay our recovery.
2. Renationalising the railways. Yes yes, and he's against HS2 as well.
3. More allotments. Very worthy: great for those who like that sort of thing.
4. Talking to all groups, even militants, to win peace in the Middle East.  Common sense: has had to be done to resolve most conflicts, eg in colonial  disengagement  and in Northern Ireland.
5. "Quantitative easing for people." Not too keen on this.  QE is a fanciful and ineffective fad.  Directed government expenditure on the infrastructure etc is a better alternative.
6. No replacement of Trident. Absolutely.  There is no rational case for it.  Replacing it is purely a misguided  attempt to retain prestige.
7. A National Education Service. Not too keen on the "national" implications of this.  However, he is keen to restore responsibility for all state-funded schools to local authorities
8. No support for air strikes in Syria. The better approach is to try to cut off arms supplies to IS.   Yes.  Our military interventions is this and other conflicts had done incredible harm and very little, if any, good.
9. Rent controls should be re-introduced.  Yes, yes. 
10. The Chagos islanders should be allowed to return.  Yes, yes. Other people's human rights should not be sacrificed to accommodate the US.
11. A liberal and rational policy on immigration to replace the present "unpleasant" debate.  Yes indeed.  Our failure to share in the proper reception and resettlement of refugees and asylum seekers is a national disgrace.
12. A diplomatic resolution to the Falklands dispute. Long overdue. Could and should have been achieved in 1982.
13. Property speculators are forcing the closure of pub in London. Probably elsewhere as well.
14. An arms embargo should be imposed on Israel.  Yes.  They're in contravention of UN resolutions.  Embargo should apply to Palestine as  well.
15. He's a committed republican. So logically should I be, but if by any chance I did something brave and were awarded a medal, I'd rather get it from a Windsor than Tony Blair, David Cameron, or any other failed politician.
16.  Remain in the EU, but with changes.  Yes.  He gave it 70 to 74%, which is a fair assessment (and would give you a first class honours degree in even our poshest of universities.
17. Backs cycling. So do I, but not for too far.
18. Energy companies should be under public ownership.  Yes.
19. Ireland should be united.  It probably will be eventually, though we shouldn't rush things.
20. A national maximum wage.  Yes: no more that 10x the minimum? 
21. Every child should have the chance to learn a musical instrument.  Yes, yes, yes.  A recipe for a lifetime of enjoyment, and far more valuable than the obscure things they're now required to learn about English grammar.
22. PFI deals should be ended and existing ones "bought out."  Yes, yes yes.  They are a disgrace and should never have been introduced.
23. There should be "a serious debate about NATO."  Yes, we need to consider its appropriateness and relevance in the present circumstances.
24. The arms trade should be restricted. Yes, yes yes, long overdue (and our reliance on it for our "prosperity." )

So, whilst not wishing to dot every i and cross every t, there's enough in the above around which we in the Liberal Democrats, plus the Greens, and most of the nationalists, could unite.  It has vision and could lead us towards a society in which we could be proud to be members.  The mechanics of a "progressive alliance" I leave for the moment to the political apparatchiks, but they need to be thinking of it now.  At the very least we should stop being rude about Corbyn.  Every time we are, or repeat the mantra that he's "unelectable," we play into the hands of the Tories.

The alternative is yet another decade or more of a society that locks itself off from the rest of the world's problems, demonises our own less fortunate citizens, dismantles the public real in favour of private  profit,  panders to the already rich, promotes absurd inequalities, secures its powers  through unacceptable surveillance and is cavalier, even contemptuous, of human rights.

9/26 - America's, and the World's, Black Monday?

Tonight at 21h00 their time (02h00 ours on the 27th) Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump face each other in 90 minutes of televised debate.  This could easily be America's and the World's most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile crisis.  And it may not have such a non-climatic ending.

I happened to be in the US during the Carter- Reagan campaign in autumn, 1980.  To my mind there seemed to be no doubtt that Carter would win hands down, but, as we know, Ronald Reaagan prevailed and served two terms.  Part of the reason for his victory was his performance in the debates.  For every reasond proposition Carter explained (albeit in somewhat ponderous detail) Reagan would turn and with a  condescending sneer, say: "There you go again." (There's an example on this clip)  In this case brash condescending bluster triumphed over reason.

A more recent example of  a debate "going wrong " (as I see it) was that between Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage on Britain's membership of the EU in the run up to the 2014 elections for the European Parliament.
In a post before the debate I confidently predicted that Clegg would win "hands down"  but the popular perception was in favour of Farage. Bash bombastic bluster triumphed over reasoned argument.

In Britain's campaign on the EU referendum earlier this year we have a similar phenomenon.  Although  the Remain side was itself more than a little careless  with the facts and threats, the bulk of the reasoned argument was on the side of remaining.  But once again brash, bombastic, and simplistic, bluster swayed more minds.

So I await with trepidation the outcome of tonight's debate.  Donald Trump has so far triumphed with an absurd series of distortions and generalisations and has got away with it through absurdly self confident panache.

It is hard to see how Mrs Clinton can counter this.  I pray that she does.

Hinkley Point C: government not listening

In the Brexit debate  the then leading leaver Michael Gove made himself look silly by claiming that Britain had "had enough of experts."  He has now been shifted to the back benches, and Mrs May's decision to put Hinkley Point C nuclear power station "on hold" while she had a further look at the evidence gave the impression maybe we now had a government that was prepared to listen and act rationally.

Alas not so.

I have just re-read my previous post on this topic and can see nothing that I would change. The project uses technology which achieves the paradox of  being  at once  unproven but already outdated. It is  too big, too expensive, and there is as yet no reliable method of disposing of the nuclear waste it will generate.  There are umpteen more modern, less expensive and more reliable alternatives.(see here and here for some examples.)

Clearly cancelling the project would  be embarrassing in terms of our diplomatic relationships with both France and China.  But that would be a small, and temporary, price to pay compared with that of lumbering future generations with the problem of paying through the nose for it, even if it ever actually works, and disposing if its radioactive refuse.

So from Mrs May's "fresh" administration we now have the return of  Secondary Moderns, and  a nuclear white elephant:  two massive errors in less than three months.  Clearly her government remains in hock to corporate lobbyists and the right wing of her party.

Sadly Labour, still  the  main opposition party, welcomes the decision to continue with Hinckley Point C because it will create jobs, as though the many alternatives wouldn't.

It is difficult not to despair of British politics.

Britain's complacent entrepreneurs.

At last a leading Tory, DR Liam Fox, Secretary of State for International Trade no less, has blown the gaffe. Britain's poor export performance is due to "business executives [who] would rather be playing golf on a Friday afternoon than negotiating export deals."

Good for him and about time too. 

For most of my lifetime Britain's poor economic performance has been blamed variously on lazy workers,  obstructive trade unions, inadequate education, absenteeism, restrictive red tape (even before we joined the EU), too many holidays, excessive pay demands, suffocating bureaucracy (this particularity in the nationalised industries),  and any thing else by which the onus can be placed on the workers and measures to protect their  interests and dignity.

My own list  has placed more emphasis on under- investment, short-termism, under-investment, poor management, under-investment, feeble  marketing, under-investment, lack of language skills, under-investment, failure to integrate the workforce into the management structure,  under-investment, lack of training and retraining (unless someone else pays for it), under-investment, and  a tendency to produce what people used to want rather than what they will want in the future.  Oh, and under-investment.

For the twenty or more years after the war "Made in Britain" was still seen as a guarantee of quality and Britain's firms tended to rely on this, rather than efficient marketing, to sell their products.Foreigners who wanted one of our products could form an orderly queue and when convenient we would supply one.  This certainly seemed to be the case with Landrover and Papua New guinea.  Until the 1960s even the German missionaries used Landrovers.  If you needed a spare part then a posh sounding firm would order you one and it might come in on the next boat but three.

 Then along came Toyota, highly competitive on price as well as quality.  I think they trained mechanics and  set up their service centres and spares departments before they sold any vehicles (as I believe did Volkswagen before they sold any cars in the US).  By he time I left PNG nearly all 4x4 vehicles were Toyotas or Suzukis, and Landrovers had become a rarity.

In marketing, our reliance on quality has now been replaced by the belief that, since much of the world speaks English, we needn't bother to learn their languages. However I understand that, whereas foreign buyers are very happy to talk to our representatives in English - they appreciate the opportunity to practise - they  tend to buy form those who speak their language.

So Dr Fox is right - those complacent entrepreneurs should get off the golf-courses and, among other things, get stuck into learning Chinese, Spanish and Bahasa Indonesian.

The return of the Secondary Moderns (aka HQNSSs)

I recently read an article which pointed out that, if there were a school with  two dinner queues, a short one which specially attractive dishes reserved  for those pupils who scored As and Bs for their work, and a much longer one with more mundane food for the rest, we should be horrified.

But by selective education we do exactly that, and the reward for the selected is not just a tastier lunch, but all the best opportunities in life.

I trained as a teacher in the late 1950s and the evidence about grammars versus comprehensives has not changed much since then.  Research consistently shows that, in a selective system the "best" do not perform significantly better, but the "middle" do significantly worse than in a comprehensive system.  The reason seems to be that the presence of the "bright" stimulates and inspires the "less bright."  Analysis of the GCSE and A-level  results in areas such as Kent, which still has grammar schools, shows that their over-all performance is below that of areas with a comprehensive system.

Even if there were advantages, it is universally understood that selection at the age of 11+ is highly unreliable (children develop at different rates, even if they are not "hothoused" by private tuition) and the stigma of non-selection (ie rejection) can niggle for the rest of one's life, as this letter from a "late developer" Dr Michael Paraskos shows.

So Teresa May's  decision to allow grammar schools to be established where none exist at present will do harm rather than good.  If is yet another government decision based on prejudice rather than evidence.  What Mrs May does not emphasise is that for every 20% liberated from consorting with the the rest of society 80% will be rejected: each grammar school will be accompanied by three secondary-moderns (though in a piece of convoluted jargon Education Secretary Justine Greening has described them as "High Quality Non-Selective Schools" - who (she'd probably prefer "whom") does she think she's kidding?)

Mrs May claims that that the aim of the policy is to promote social mobility and create a more efficient meritocracy.  Not only is it more likely to do the reverse (the established middle classes will bust a gut to make sure their kids are in in the shorter dinner queue), we also need to ask ourselves if that is the sort of society we want.  Michael Young, who coined the term "meritocracy"back in the 1950s, regarded it as a warning, not as an ideal.  The concept had been satirised even earlier by R H Tawney, who in his Halley Stewart lectures of 1929 vividly described it as follows:

“It is possible that intelligent tadpoles reconcile themselves to the inconvenience of their position by reflecting that, though most of them will live and die as tadpoles and nothing more , the more fortunate of the species will one day shed their tales, distend their moths  and stomachs, hope nimbly onto dry land , and croak addresses to their former friends  on the virtues by means of which  tadpoles of character and capacity  can rise to be frogs”

Surely the purpose of true education is not to enable  a minority in climb higher up as social ladder but to

enable everyone to develop their talents, whatever they, are to the full, and to live a fullest possible  life in a society where all are equally respected.

State of the UK - an inventory (2)

For the genesis of this inventory please see previous post, which examines the UK in respect of Beveridge's "five giants."

Now to look at some additional, random, issues.

Democracy: The House of Lords, the electoral system, the financing of political parties,  all remain insufficiently reformed; respect for politicians is severely diminished, largely as a result of expenses scandals which seem to continue in spite of embarrassments;  and lobbyist have influence which far outweighs that of the public.  Our democracy is moving closer to the American model - available for purchase

Equality: Our society is becoming more and more unequal, with the top professions  still dominated by the privately educated, CEOs paying themselves over 200 times the average pay for their employees, the established middle classes are able to entrench their position via the tax free bonus resulting from rising house prices, and a recent Rowntree Trust Foundation  report claims that 13 million people in the UK are living in poverty.  Research shows that societies with a higher degree of equality are, among other desirable outcomes,  more productive, suffer less mental illness and are happier.

Culture:  We are still among the leading countries of the world in terms of literature, art, music (especially "pop"), and theatre,  but the government is chipping away at the Arts grants and our leading cultural outlets are becoming increasingly concentrated in London.


Communications: Most of our press is disgracefully biassed, misleading and  trivial.  Serous news outlets are finding it increasingly difficult to survive since advertising revenue is being diverted  to other media.  One serious newspaper, the Independent,  has recently been forced to cease print publication and go "on line" and the Guardian may not be far behind.  The Times is owned by the Murdoch empire, and the government is doing its best to emasculate the BBC (and prepare parts of it for takeover by Murdoch?).  Healthy free media are vital for a healthy democracy  but the variety of informed print sources is becoming sadly diminished. This of course, is balanced by the wealth of information and opinion easily available on the internet for those who bother to look for it.

International: Our interventions in the Middle East have been ineffective and  in some cases disastrously counter-productive,  our response to the refugee crisis has been and continues to be disgracefully inadequate  and our international standing is gravely diminished by our decision to leave the EU.


The Economy: Our productivity is roughly a third below that of  the US, France and Germany, we have a frighteningly large balance of payments deficit and, rather than seriously tackling these issues we take the coward's way our of devaluing the currency.  Recently our Pound Sterling was exchanging for less than a Euro in some airports.  At its launch we could buy a Euro for less than 71 pence

Society:  On the brighter side, we have assimilated a lot of people from other cultures with reasonable success, crime rates are falling (except for financial crimes on the internet, and among bankers who seem able to get away with it) and we have some of the most varied and easily accessible restaurants and food outlets in the world.  Sadly , the Brexit vote  seems to have legitimised rudeness towards foreigners, especially Poles, and terrorist threats have provided excuses for objecting to Muslim women's wearing of the  hijab, niqab, and burka - in some cases even the entire Muslim religion is tarred with the potential for terrorism.

The government's policies seem designed to exacerbate rather than reverse the negative  trends.

State of the UK - an inventory (1)

Tomorrow I expect to have lunch with a man to whom I taught economics in the 1960s.  Then he was a youthful and very enthusiastic  member of the Labour Party and I, as now, a committed Liberal.  But we shared an optimism about the future.  The Labour Party was in power and Harold Wilson was prime minister.  Using what what Wilson called the "white heat of the technological revolution" and the intelligent application of the social sciences, we both expected we were on track towards "building the New Jerusalem." as  Wilson's deputy George Brown (no relation to the more recent Brown) put it in an inspiring speech in Cleckheaton (and possibly elsewhere.)

In preparation for what I expect to be a very interesting conversation I've tried to put together an inventory of where we're at on that journey.  A convenient start will be the "five giants" -  squalor, ignorance, idleness, disease, and want -  which the Beveridge Report of 1942 proposed to slay.

Squalor:  Here Beveridge had in mind slum and insanitary housing.  Most of this had been demolished by the 1960s and today the problem is not so much the quality of the housing (though I understand that a lot of people in the south are condemned to live in back-garden sheds,) but the quantity an price.  The government's policies seem largely counter-productive.  Subsidising first-time buyers will push up prices even further and so make houses even less affordable, the extension of the "right to buy" to housing associations will make affordable housing less available and ultimately place more into the hands of rapacious landlords, and there is no sign of  any renewal of permission for local councils to build affordable homes.

Ignorance: Well, we now have universal free education up to the age of 18 but the enforced introduction of academies and free schools means that sensible planning for provision has gone out of the window.  At the same time the enforcement from the  top of a tick-box culture focussed on league tables based on a narrow range of subjects allegedly useful to the economy means that real and creative education has taken a back seat.  It is hard to see today's teachers having much opportunity to enthuse anyone about anything. The re-introduction of selection at 11+ , in the face of all the evidence of the negative effects of this policy, is deplorable.

Idleness:  Beveridge regarded maintaining  full employment as a key function of the government.  In the 60s we defined this as no more than 3% unemployed, and often the figure was below even this (Hence immigration for the Indian sub-continent and Caribbean to fill the gap). Today the official level of unemployment is almost double that, and in real terms, taking account of those who have been shunted off the register  for various reasons, or forced into premature retirement, the real figure is probably double again. Many people "in work" are on short term or zero hours contracts with little security, minimum protection or entitlement to holidays, on boring routine jobs with few prospects of a  satisfying future.  Thousands have been forced into pretended and unwanted "self-employment." Most heartbreaking of all, over half a million young people aged 16 -24 are unemployed, and that doesn't include those enduring courses which they well know lead to very little.

Disease: Public health measures were implemented and the  NHS created to reduce this to a minimum.  Public heath has made great strides though the emissions and pollutants which stimulate asthma and various allergies among the young are cause for worry.  I'm glad I don't live in London. The NHS is subject to costly re-organisations and starved of funds, with its so-called junior doctors in revolt.  It is hard to argue with a letter in today's Guardian from a Professor Fay Dowker that the government's aim is to run it down in preparation for privatisation (which already seems to have happened to the larger part of the dental service.)

Want:  Whilst the elderly are being being protected from the worst effects of "austerity"  (thought the state pension remains one of the lowest in the rich world  - we come 12th out of 15 countries)  benefits for the unemployed, sick, disabled and incapacitated are being pared down and the recipients demonised.  The most unacceptable statistic of which I'm aware is that unemployment benefit for a single person aged 25+ is £73.10 a week, but if you're a member of the House of Lords you can claim £300 a day (yes, a day.)

Sadly, based on the above,  most of the current government's policies seem to be leading us away from rather than closer to the New Jerusalem

MPs should say "No" to Brexit.

Although straight after  the referendum result in favour of our leaving the EU I signed the petition calling for a second referendum since I felt the issue should be debated I argued that it would be wrong at that stage to try to overturn the decision.  The "people" had spoken and that was that. Yes, the referendum was technically only advisory, yes the margin for Leave was very narrow, and yes there was a lot of misrepresentation and some downright lies in the campaign.  But these matters should have been anticipated dealt with before the campaign, not as an afterthought becasue in the eyes of the establishment the wrong decision had been made.

At that time I felt that the preferred option was for the negotiations to take place, to see the result which I expected to be much less favourable than the Leave campaign had pretended, and  that a groundswell of public opinion would  demand another referendum.

However, it is now clear that that option is not available. Once Article 50 has been triggered there is no going back.  However inadequate the terms, however far they fall short of the promises made by the Leavers during the campaign, that's it.  Two years from the triggering  of Article 50 we are out, like it or not.

It is also now clear that our  government neither knows what it wants not has the resources to achieve it.  The choice is between the extremes of "hard Brexit" -  leaving the European Economic Area (EEA), thus trading over the tariffs and restrictions on WTO terms like the rest of the world, but having control over migration from the EU, or "soft Brexit" -  remaining in the EEA but accepting all the regulations including free movement.

So far here is no sign whatsoever that the remaining 27 are interested in a "bespoke" deal giving us the best of both worlds, as the Leavers liked to believe.  Indeed the major Brexiteers, who within 48 hours of the result withdrew most of their promises with a metaphorical shrug of the shoulders ("You didn't really believe that did you?  Just campaign rhetoric!"), Farage has walked away and Boris Johnson ducked trying for the top job.

Be it Brexit hard or soft, since trade negotiations have been an EU function for the past 40 years the UK has nowhere near the number of trained and experience negotiators to cope with  with the multiplicity of  deals which will be needed to negotiate with the 164 WTO members, and re-negotiate the 50 or more free trade deals which the EU has already negotiated on our behalf, but which wlil no longer apply to us.   Private sector staff will need to be recruited, many from the discredited giant accountancy firms which are partly if not largely responsible for the economic crash of 2007/8.

 And at a cost to the public purse of up to £5 000 per person per day (yes, per day) or secondment at   £250 000 per year

Jon Henley, the Guardian's European affairs correspondent, estimates  that the process could last up to ten years and the administrative costs to the civil service would amount to £5bn.  More seriously, in my view, the whole process will distract government, civil service, parties and media from focusing on solving Britain's real problems: housing, youth unemployment, low productivity, sustainable energy, climate change, a frighteningly-high balance of payments deficit,growing inequality, to name but a few.

Consequently it is a nonsense to plunge the UK into this massive and damaging distraction on the basis of an unnecessary referendum called by an inept prime minister to solve an internal problem within his own party and which  demonstrated all the flaws to which referendums, alien to our constitution, are prone (see earlier post).

 MPs, the  majority of whom are in favour of Remain (as are overwhelming majority of the Lords) should be true to their function, which is to use their experience, wisdom and judgement to make wise decisions on our behalf, refuse to authorise the triggering of Article 50, and tell the government to go to the EU Commission, apologise for the distraction and disruption we have caused, and promise to be good in the future.

And no nonsense about another referendum.  That could be prone to the same distortions as the one we've already had.  Of course, some Brexiteers will make a fuss, some of the Leave voters will feel let-down, the red tops will howl blue murder and some people's faith in our politicians will receive a further dent.

But it will all  blow over far more quickly that persuing the Brexit route, and give us time and opportunity to attempt to solve some of those issues which caused so many to feel left behind and that the system doesn't work for them