"Truth" and two "trusts."

During last week I caught a clip of David Cameron addressing the United Nations  and lambasting, without actually naming them, Russia and China for failing to support UN action in Syria.  I thought at the time that these two big beast of the current world stage were unlikely to be taking much notice of what this pipsqueak from a fading great power had to say about them. In much the same way I doubt if the UK's two big beast political parties are too worried about about the detail of what is said and not said at the Liberal Democrat Conference, and the public in general will be even less concerned.    So this is a warning not to take these matters too seriously.

In general Nick Clegg seems to have come over well, recognised by the commentators I read, who are not all necessarily sympathetic, as resilient and likable under fire, though getting more of his fair share of opprobrium.  This should put paid to the pointless and destructive distraction of a leadership challenge.

It was good that the Conference flexed its muscles and defied the government and party managers by voting against the  relaxation of planning laws as a somewhat puny, but potentially environmentally destructive, means of stimulation the economy.

Hugely disappointing, however, was the continued support , in the face of all the evidence as I see it, of the Tory economic policy.  This oxymoronic concept of "expansionary contraction" never did have much credence.  It is based on the theory (for which our economics text books of  more than a decade ago said the evidence was "scanty") that  public investment "crowds out " private investment, and that if we shrink the state the private sector will expand to  fill the gap.   Well, after almost two and a half years of much urging and massive injections of available funds through quantitative easing, it hasn't happened yet. How much more evidence do we want?

Vince Cable in his speech "talked the talk" by admitting that "no amount of push from supply-side reform can possibly succeed without the pull of demand", but incredibly failed to "walk the walk" by declaring his "continued support " for the current "deficit reduction plan" - that is, Plan A.

It was also disappointing to hear Nick Clegg, in his question and answer session, "shroud waving" the case of Greece.  This country is not and never was in a situation comparable to that of Greece.  Our public debt to GDP ratio is half theirs, most of it is held internally and on a long repayment period that averages 14 years.

Clegg's rallying speech at the end also showed that, nice chap as he is, his choice of words was  hugely mistaken and contained nuances that can hardly be described as honest. He said:

Then ask them (your electorates): are you ready to trust Labour with your money again? And do you really think the Tories will make Britain fairer? Because the truth is, only the Liberal Democrats can be trusted on the economy and relied upon to deliver a fairer society too.

All Liberal Democrats are well advised to avoid the word "trust" for the foreseeable future, because however unfairly, it just reminds people of the broken promise on student fees and that we have now forfeited our reputation as the party that can be trusted. 

The nuance that Labour financial irresponsibility is the cause of our present economic difficulties is unworthy. The cause was and, alas, still is, greed made possible by the deregulated capitalism introduced and so strongly supported by our present partners in government. If it was once expedient to hint otherwis it is no longer. George Osborne was booed at the Paralympics but Gordon Brown was cheered

Trust (this is not just about Nick Clegg)

I was brought up under the influence of the Church of England and the Book of Common Prayer, so each Sunday morning  and evening, as a choirboy, I was exhorted to confess my "manifold sins and wickedness" and not to "dissemble nor cloke them."  It's a pity this has gone out of fashion, because there seems to be a good deal of dissembling and cloking going on in modern society, among all sorts and conditions of men and women, and not just in the Liberal Democrats.

Whom can we believe?

Certainly not the police.  Individuals lied in the shooting of the innocent Jean Charles de Menzses in 2005,and again in the circumstances surrounding the death of Ian  Tomlinson in 2009. In the Hillsborough disaster not only did individuals lie but it is now revealed that there was organised and systematic deceit by senior officials to try to blame  96 football fans for their own deaths and exonerate the police from any responsibility.

Politicians?  David Laws lied about his expenses but is now back in the government.   Either the police or the Tory Chief Whip, Andrew  Mitchell, are lying about week's events outside Downing Street.

The media?  The lies and deceit of the Murdoch press have just been exposed.  We shall soon find out what, if anything,  the Leveson enquiry advises we should do about it, but I suspect that newspapers will still sail as closely as they can to the wind if they feel it will make them more profit. 

The great and the good?  But it was the most senior of all civil servants who publicised, if he did not invent, the phrase "being economical with the truth" to make lying more acceptable.

So dissembling and cloking has become an expected, even accepted, part of life, and poor Nick Clegg is not alone.  And if his apology is rather ridiculous, and I think it is, it is fair to point out that we still await an apology form Tony Blair about the illegal war in Iraq, and from David Cameron for breaking his much publicised poster campaign promise of  "no top-down re-organisation of the NHS" to name two equally serious betrayals.

Our problem is that we Liberal Democrats  made  great play of being more honest than the others: the party that could be relied upon to keep rather than break its promises.  I believed it, so did most activists and, I suspect, the majority of those who voted for us.  That trust has been lost and Clegg's late in the day "apology" is unlikely to retrieve it,or even to be a step along the way.  I am not even sure the apology itself is entirely honest. He's apologised for making the pledge, not breaking it.  And the suggestion that, on looking at the books, it proved to be unaffordable, does not really hold water.  In another letter to this weeks' Liberal Democrat News, former MP  Paul Holmes  points out that he "actively participated in all the Parliamentary Party meetings which argued out all the fully-costed alternatives in details" and "made this fully-costed policy a key plank of the Manifesto."


One particular piece of dissembling which is obviously fraudulent is any suggestion that the "no rise in tuition fees" promise could not be afforded because of the need to reduce the current deficit.  Yet the existing fees system did bring in money up front:  the new one does not. Hence the government has to pay now, thus increasing current expenditure and loading the repayment onto graduates in the future.

We Liberal Democrats were obviously taken for a ride on this one (as on so much else.)  We are in a hole and we should stop digging.  In time the new system will be recognised for what it is, a graduate tax.  It does not create a debt in the normal sense,  but rather the obligation to pay additional tax,  but not  until a reasonable level of earnings is reached, and which will be discontinued after thirty years if earnings are  insufficient. 

Strange contrasts.

Whether you shrug your shoulders and just accept the "It's an unfair world", or mutter the cliché that "There's one law for the rich and another for the poor;" there are various items currently in the news which defy rational explanation to the vast majority of us: perhaps not quite the 99%, but close.

• • the Murdoch empire commits the most appalling, not to mention illegal, invasions of privacy and is found to be a "fit and proper person" to hold a broadcasting licence.
  • G4s  fail to fulfil their contract to provide security guards for the Olympics, yet still claim their £57m "management fee, " and look as though they will get it, along with, incredibly,  further government contracts.
  
  Along with these are the further  "on running" sores, such as
  
  
  • bankers and financiers, whose ineptitude and greed caused the financial crisis, remain unpunished,  with their banks unreformed, and continue to award themselves massive bonuses. (According to a letter in this morning's Guardian,  "extra cuts of £14bn are needed to hit the spending target" whilst, "City bonuses totalled £13bn in the year to April." )
  • top rate tax payers have a 5% tax cut whilst those at the bottom of the pile, the unemployed and disabled, have their benefits cut.
  
  More controversially perhaps, though I cant understand why it should be:
  
  • a Liberal Democrat MP, yes, a Liberal Democrat, (to paraphrase slightly Neil Kinnock) complains that the government is slow to implement changes which would limit the cost of personal care for the elderly to £35 000 so that their children, grand-children, favourite charities, the Battersea Dogs' Home or whatever  can inherit the rest of their wealth (much of which will come from the unearned appreciation of the value of their houses.) 
  
  With these glaring anomalies, it is no wonder that the electorate conclude that their politicians are either incapable of altering the "way things are", or don't really care.

Much Ado about GCSEs

When I want to secondary school in 1949 the boys aged 16+ , in what was rather curiously called the Upper Fifth, were still studying  for  their School Certificate.  This was a school leaving certificate and to obtain one pupils had to pass in, I think, at least five subjects, which included English and Mathematics, although I feel the pass mark was only 35% in each subject.  Many boys, possibly the majority, left  school a this stage  to go into business, or train as bankers, solicitors, accountant, architects, or other professions.Those intending to enter higher education remained in the Sixth Form to take the Higher School Certificate.

Whilst I was still in the lower school this system was replaced by the General Certificate of Education, the GCE, usually taken at 16+ (O-level) and  18+, ( A-level). I remember some employers were very sniffy abut the GCE O-level because it was possible to obtain it in only one subject, whereas in their day passes in a least five had to be achieved.  The original pass mark was 40%, but this moved up to 45% the year I took the exam, much to the distress of one of my friends, who obtained 40% in at least one of his subjects.  However, he went on to make a pretty substantial fortune, though I believe he subsequently lost it.

When I started teaching, in one of the now much derided secondary modern schools, which had six streams, the top stream studied for O-levels and and the middle streams  for  a hotchpotch of qualifications, some awarded by the highly respected Royal Society of Arts.  The lower streams just studied.  In the mid 60s the "hotchpotch" was replaced by the Certificate of Secondary Education, or CSE, some versions of  which placed much more emphasis on course work than did the GCE.  There was an overlap in that a top grade in CSE was regarded as equivalent to an O-level

By this time the selection of primary school pupils for grammar of secondary modern schools at the age of 11+ had been abolished in most areas but the division of pupils into those taking GCE and those taking CSE meant hat we were still separating our pupils into sheep and goats.  So the two examinations were sensibly merged in 1985 into the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE.)

As I've pointed out in an earlier post, the continuing need for a nationally organised and validated  examination at16+ when everyone, academic or not, is now required to remain in some form of eduction or training until 18, is highly questionable.  There is certainly no need to rip up the whole system,  denigrate the achievements of pupils over the last decades by questioning the validity of their qualification,  and introduce something entirely new  with the pretentious and inappropriate name of  EBacc when a bit of tinkering  to iron out problems in the existing system is all that is required.

What is appalling is that this country has several dozen internationally respected universities, most with a department of education staffed by professors who know what they're talking about and  researchers who base their opinions on actual evidence, not to mention a a vast army of experienced teachers and examiners. These have hardly been consulted.  Thus the schooling and qualifications of the young for the next twenty years is to be based on a political fix,  not mentioned in the election and certainly not in the coalition agreement,  but cobbled together by an opinionated secretary of state who seems more interested in stamping his name, however ignobly, on posterity, (why else give every school a King James Bible inscribed with a personal message from yourself?) than in the genuine interests of the young.

Keynes on the tele

A splendid programme on BBC2 giving  a very rounded account of Keynes, his life and policies.  A must. About the only disquieting comments are from David Laws.

Watchable for about a week on
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01mxpzv/Masters_of_Money_Keynes/

Honesty is the Best Policy

Tim Gordon, the CEO of the Liberal Democrats, sends out an Email each week, telling us, among other things, that one of the five points Liberal Democrats should make on the doorstop is that (we are) 
  "Clearing up Labour's economic mess."  This statement is highly misleading, if not downright mendacious.  I have written to Mr Gordon pointing this out, but received no response, and a letter on the topic to the party  newspaper has not been published, or not yet anyway.  So this appears to be a point of view the party hierarchy would rather not acknowledge.

That the "economic mess" is Labour's is only strictly true in the sense that they happened to be in charge when the financial crisis broke.  We need to make it abundantly clear that the "mess" was caused, not by Labour profligacy, but  by greed made possible by the  excessive financial deregulation introduced by the Thatcherite Conservatives..

 True, Labour did little to oppose financial deregulation, but our present partners in government were loudly calling for yet more  and, apart from a few warning shots from Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrats as a whole had little to say on the topic.  In fact the publication of the "Orange Book"  marked a significant shift in the direction of the then dominant "markets rule OK" economic fashion.

Thanks to clever PR  "the financial mess that Labour left behind"  had populist support for a while,, but the fact that Gordon Brown was cheered at the Paralympics, whilst George Osborne was booed, indicates that this piece of political misrepresentation is now past its sell-by date. 

It is surely time for Liberal Democrats to be honest (after all, we did promise more honesty in politics) and recognise that the economy was growing and the deficit reducing when Labour left office,as a result of the VAT cut and public investment.  We desperately need to temper our support for Osborne's failing policies and press hard for a serious Keynesian stimulus package now.

Liverpool

On most Wednesdays a friend and I go for a walk, sometimes with the local Ramblers,  sometimes on our own, and usually in the lovely countryside around here. However, yesterday we went independently and, for a change, chose to visit Liverpool for an urban walk which my companion had spotted in an AA publication..

Although I've visited Liverpool before I hadn't realised that it is built on such a massive scale.  It makes Leeds look like a village, and it's no wonder the people who come from there are so proud of it.  Our walk started at the rehabilitated waterfront, past the massive Liver Building and the imposing but now rather tatty-looking Town Hall..  There was remarkably little traffic, whether the result of good organisation or a still faltering local economy I can't say.

Our route took us through the "Beatles" area, most of which is interestingly preserved, though unfortunately half the famous Cavern Club has been pulled down.

The Roman Catholic Cathedral is an inspiring piece of modern architecture, with some interesting side-chapels, one of which contains the tomb of the former Archbishop,  Derek Worlock, who worked so closely with the Anglican bishop David Shepherd to heal sectarian divisions in the community and to promote economic as well as spiritual regeneration.

The walk from the Roman Catholic to the Anglican Cathedral took us to the pub our guide-book recommended for lunch, the Philharmonic.  This is a splendidly preserved late Victorian pub, a massive slab of a building which in its way is as interesting architecturally as the cathedrals.   As well as providing decent food it claims the only Grade 1 listed urinals in England.  Well worth a visit.

Our big disappointment was being unable to enter the Anglican Cathedral.  We were aware that a report on the Hillsborough disaster, in which  96 Liverpool football supporters were crushed to death 23 years ago, was to be published, and indeed that relatives and friends of those killed were to meet in the cathedral to discuss the report, but we did not expect the entire cathedral to be closed all day,  It was, after all, built to outdo all others and is the fifth largest in the world with a seating capacity of over 3 000. I am aware of the key role the present Bishop of Liverpool has played in chairing the enquiry, and can understand the Church's desire to be seen to share the pain of the city and the bereaved, but it does seem rather silly to close down entirely a major tourist attraction, or place of pilgrimage, if preferred, when so many alternatives are available.

Unfortunately the day was also marred by frequent showers, which culminated during the afternoon in heavy rain, so we retreated indoors to  the Museum of Slavery (on which much of Liverpool's prosperity was built.)  This is a moving record of our callous treatment of the different, and a reminder, that, in less obvious ways (international trade rules dictated by the rich, our prosperity built on  the export of arms, indifference to the effects of climate-change) we comfortable still exploit the weak..