Following on from Guido’s post, I have had confirmation from a couple of other news organsations that they too are on standby for an announcement this weekend.
Of course, we have heard this before. And being on “standby” does not mean that a decision HAS been made or WILL be made. But something is definitely going on.
Maybe they could not see eye to eye on the budget afterall…..
Tags: Early election, general electionHere’s a 5 minute film put together by BBC’s The One Show looking at the past, present and, most importantly, the possible future of the Liberal Democrats. Timely questions.
You can see the whole programme on iplayer.
Tags: Liberal Democrats, The One ShowThere are but ten hours to go in the Power 2010 vote on changing British democracy.
You can vote, very easily. Takes barely a minute. If you’re going to do it, do it now.
In lieu of a grand “which ones should liberals vote for” post, here are some that I’d personally recommend voting for:
Post your disagreements below.
Back in April 2009 I wrote a piece “Councillors join the gravy train” pointing out the ludicrous rise in councillors remuneration in recent years.
Now, despite a demand from the Government for councils to allow public scrutiny of senior local authority officials pay and benefits, Councils have resisted the order. The reason - it would lead to a public outcry- that “it could lead to personalised attacks” … officials “families could be at risk of abuse” etc etc. I don’t know about you but that has eyebrows raised in my house - just how big a scandal is this if Councils think the public reaction to seeing who is being paid exactly what, will be that extreme ? My oh my what are they hiding? Just how big IS this latest scandal.
It was obvious. Following the MP expenses scandal, public service officials income and benefits needed greater transparency. As part of a “cleaning up of politics” process, the Government, rightly, sought to make public the pay and benefits, allowances and pay-offs of local authority officials earning over £50,000. Its much harder to pay over-inflated salaries and above inflation pay rises when the voters can see what you are doing and who is getting what.
So how come the Government has apparantly backed off from this demand? Following, the frankly ludicrous bleating of councils as to why they should not let the voters see the figures, they have somehow won ! The government has accepted that only those local government officials earning over £150,000 will be identified (thats still over 100 of them). Allowing thousands of senior local authority officials to continue hiding behind anonymity.
And not only are many local authority officials on astonishingly high incomes - they have been getting huge pay rises a over the last couple of years as the rest of Britain suffers.
It’s a disgrace. And something that we, as taxpayers, should not put up with. If officials can’t justify the salaries and benefits they are on - they shouldn’t be getting it.
Tags: local councilsHere are a selection of posts from about the blogosphere on the Tories new Mutualist plans:
Positive:
“Co-op’s are neither socialist or capitalist necessarily. Most hedge funds are co-ops, owned by the partners with the profits shared by the workers. Many law firms are co-ops, luxury apartment blocks are run by self-selecting co-ops, huge agri-businesses are run by co-ops of rich farmers, mutual funds are a form of co-op, the list is endless. Lefties might want co-operatives to be non-profit, organic wool knitters but the most successful ones are not. They do this because they are smart and don’t want a third party to profit at their expense. Co-ops have nothing to do with top-down state socialism as designed by Fabians.”
Co-operative Ownership - the Liberal Way:
“I have written before that co-ops and similar ventures are part of the rich tapestry of a market economy. After all, before the days of statutory regulation, the Stock Exchange was a mutual – you can’t get closer to the market economy than that. Co-ops and mutuals certainly have their limitations – access to capital and corporate governance being the two main ones. People complain about profit-making banks being owned by shareholders but mutuals can be captured by management and pay poor interest rates to savers and co-ops can be captured by a senior management clique without any possibility of facilitating change. There is a big literature on all this and I hope that Osborne’s team has read it. Neverthelessm, mutuals and co-ops definitely have their place. Three cheers for George Osborne’s attempts to create co-ops in the public sector then? Not yet.”
“The Conservative Party recently re-asserted its commitment to allow co-operatives and other non-profit bodies to run public services on a contractual basis. It is an idea very similar to the adopted Swedish model of paying for schools, although there are a number of clarifications that need to be made. Whilst the ‘Free School’ model allocates funds according to the number of pupils being educated (i.e. according to outcome), the worker-co-operative proposals have hinged on the use of contracts. This means that while the penalty for a failing school will be the loss of pupils and a corresponding loss of revenues, ultimately resulting in the closure of a pupil-less school, the penalty for a failed contract is still unclear. The ‘Free School’ model means competition is automatic as pupils and parents are instantly able to choose and change the school they would like to attend, but a truly competitive environment based on contracts will be much harder to achieve with co-operatives, as each contract could essentially be a short-term monopoly on government-funded services for its duration.”
Negative:
“If a John Lewis style primary school were a floperoo, would all the teacher-shareholders be sacked, or only the head? A resolution procedure for failing co-ops that didn’t harm pupils - or patients of community nursing teams - would plainly be essential. And what about the power structure within each co-op. Would all co-op members have identical shares and equal votes on strategy and management? Some headteachers, for example, would find such democracy profoundly uncomfortable. Or would there be a boss or senior management team, who would have both management control and the potential to pocket the bulk of any financial gains? The background to all of this - of course - is that revenues for public services will be under pressure for many years, as a result of the shocking state of the public finances. For the looming general election, there are few more important debates than how public services can deliver more out of less.”
“The public finances are dire. The co-op business plan will have to assume the state will be paying less and less for their services over time. Yet somehow they’ll have to work out how to make a surplus to make the venture attractive. This could make sense with a high degree of flexibility over staff pay and terms and conditions. But in the case of nurses and teachers, contract terms would be transferred from the public sector, which gives the workers protection. So the flexibility will come in paying more, or paying any new staff less. Over time this will make a big difference and could be the basis for a decent business model. But big barriers remain, not least the generous public sector pension terms. Will the potential surpluses really be enough to convince public sector workers to become entrepreneurs?”
WTF???!!!:
“After they are ostensibly mutualised, social enterprises will be subjected to competitive tendering, internal markets and divisive incentive structures. The economies of scale and low cost finance available to large public sector organisations will also be lost. As an added bonus to the right, a serious wedge will be driven into national pay bargaining and public sector trade unionism further weakened.
In other words, forget all Cameron’s talk about ‘Conservative means to progressive ends’. The big idea here is to open up Jobcentres, schools and NHS trust to marketisation. Those guys remain as high on Hayek as they ever were.”
As if…
It’s what we’ve always suspected…
Still, it’s nice to have a poll we come top in for a change (!)
The lexicon of government neologisms is a heavy and depressing tome. Indeed, politicians and bureaucrats have a remarkable capacity to speak differently from everybody else.
Remember Tony Blair’s ‘sentences’ without verbs? Or the verbisation (sic.) of nouns (the latter not unique to government, as anybody who has ever partied will attest)? When did encouraging and rewarding become “incentivisation”?
The latest fad seems to be in conflating words, creating one word where two would do. A couple of years ago the new anti-smoking legislation led to the creation of “Smokefree” zones.
Today I learn that TfL is to urge London’s motorcyclists to get ‘BikeSafe‘ while being invited to a ‘Smartmoves‘ conference.
The Local Government Association sought to discourage around 200 examples of local government jargon last year, but they seem to be fighting a losing battle against the forces of ‘newspeak‘.
Over the weekend I watch the first episode of the BBC’s series on the Great Offices of State, which focussed on The Home Office. At one point they had footage of Roy Jenkins visiting the wreckage of the Birmingham pub bombings. As he walked past the angry crowds, a voice (or it may have been two voices) shouted out “Bring back hanging!” “Your’re too liberal!”
At the time I just chuckled a bit. “You’re too liberal” isn’t a common critique in the UK, where (unlike the United States) liberalism is not conflated with socialism, and people tend to be practical rather than philosophical.
Indeed, for my mind, Roy Jenkins wasn’t liberal enough, in that it was his and our tragedy that he reached the zenith of his political career at around the time that the Liberal Paty was in its nadir.
Yet this morning I was suddenly struck by something that I had overlooked at the time. The woman who was accusing Jenkins of being too liberal was doing so in the context of the Birmingham bombings. Those same Birmingham bombings that led to the wrongful conviction of six people.
Too liberal? Thank heavens Roy Jenkins was liberal. Thank heavens he was Home Secretary after the abolishion of capital punishment, and so was not faced with the onerous duty of overseeing the execution of six men. Thank heavens that we didn’t determine, 17 years too late, that we - too - had killed the innocent.
In fact it wasn’t Jenkins who abolished capital punishment, but James Callaghan. Still, it seems like a very long time since we have been confronted with the prospect of a Home Secreaty who could in any way, shape or form be call liberal.
Tags: capital punishment, Home Office, Roy JenkinsThis is quite possibly one of the best things I’ve heard come out of the EU in some time and yet has been woefully under-reported:
The European parliament rejected an agreement on sharing banking data with the US yesterday, delivering a potential setback to long-running US efforts to track down terrorist financing.
Citing concerns about European citizens’ privacy, the parliament voted to scrap a deal that would have given the US continued access to data compiled by Swift, a co-operative that handles interbank money transfers.
The move means that for the first time since the September 2001 attacks, the US will not have access to large parts of the Swift database, which includes information from more than 8,000 financial institutions globally.
Crucially in this vote it was the Liberals (ALDE) who helped sway the vote in favour of our right to privacy. We should be very proud of the role LibDem MEPs played in ensuring this result. The end result was 378 MEPs voting to block the data sharing and 196 voting in favour of it’s continuation with 31 abstentions.
One has to wonder at the sheer nerve of the US:
The US had lobbied hard to keep the data flowing, with Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, and Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, both contacting Jerzy Buzek, the parliament’s president, in an attempt to sway the vote.
The US Treasury had previously obtained the data through repeated subpoenas sited on US soil, but a decision by Swift to move key computer servers to Europe from last month means Washington must now persuade the EU to hand over the data voluntarily.
EU governments agreed, on an interim basis, to continue co-operation last November. Though some had reservations, most were swayed by US arguments that the Swift data led to valuable intelligence that could prevent terrorism in Europe.
No matter how the US try to spin this, it is a victory for the little people against the state. The US demands were grotesquely disproportionate to the threat posed by terrorism. Dutch Liberal rapporteur Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert explained:
“If the US administration proposed something equivalent to the Congress – transferring in bulk all banking data on American citizens to a foreign power - we know what they would say”. In other words, the agreement provides for no reciprocity for the EU.
At last, a tobacco manufacturer sticks its head over the parapet and says to government enough is enough. Imperial Tobacco has issued a statement stating that its subsidiary will challenge the government plans to ban vending machines.
And why not? There are - as stated on this site before - many ways that the children can be prevented from purchasing cigarettes, mostly obviously by ensuring that “tokens” must be issued over the counter to use the machines. Anyone under age will not be sold a token and so be unable to use the machines. (There are other systems, equally effective I should add) Simple! This would eradicate the problem of underage purchases in one fell swoop, whilst not limiting the rights of business to sell, and consumers to buy, this perfectly legal product. Everyone happy.
Ok, it may be a bit strong to say “the tobacco fight back starts here”. I am sure that tobacco companies have done much behind the scenes to stand their ground in recent years. But ordinary folks like me dont always get to see they are doing. So well done Imperial Tobacco.
The press release from Imperial Tobacco reads….
“Imperial Tobacco Group PLC announces today that its subsidiary cigarette vending machine company Sinclair Collis is seeking a judicial review of the relevant sections of the Health Act 2009 which seek to ban sales of tobacco from vending machines from October 2011.
Gareth Davis, Chief Executive, said: “Legal action is always a last resort but the Government’s decision to ban cigarette vending machines is so disproportionate and unnecessary that it must be challenged.
“We do not want children to smoke and supported the Government’s proposal to stop underage access through the introduction of electronic ID cards, token mechanisms and remote control technology.
“These are effective solutions which have been implemented in a number of other countries and it is a matter of great regret that the UK Government ultimately chose to disregard all of these options in favour of a ban that will result in significant job losses in the vending industry.”
Tags: Imperial Tobacco, smoking, smoking ban, vending machines
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