GreenAid: The Video

Employing some humour to make a point has often been the most effective way of make a message stick. And so, as covered in the last blog piece, last weekend found the Liberal Democrats' federal conference in York being offered the services of a group of enthusiastic volunteer medics from the Green Party. Styling themselves on the 1970s M*A*S*H* satire, the Greens offered a range of support to the Lib Dems, whom they assumed would by now be riddled with guilt and disoriented from nearly four years of Coalition with the Tories.

Green Eurocandidates for Yorkshire and the Humber region were on hand to offer sympathy and remedies including an organic detox centre to get clean from the Coalition. However, after engaging with a number of Lib Dems, the Greens' lead candidate, Cllr Andrew Cooper, concluded that it was a hopeless case - those who remain in the Lib Dems apparently are either in deep denial about what they have done (and even what is happening to their collapsing party) or simply have no conscience in terms of the impact of their doings on society.

York is often portrayed as a "chocolate box" city, the epitome of what England should look like (or even does look like in American TV shows). But scratch the surface and the story is very different. Over a century ago, Seebohm Rowntree's groundbreaking report exposed the widespread poverty in what, even then, was regarded as a successful town. A century later and many statistics show that very little has changed - tens of thousands of people in the city, as elsewhere, remain mired in poverty. That the Lib Dems felt it was acceptable to turn up and proclaim the supposed success of the Coalition demonstrates their detachment from the reality of Britain today. But, as the video shows, the crowds of trade unionists, Greens, socialists, physiotherapists, actors, Labrador dogs and others who rallied outside the Barbican did their best to put them right.

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Support Your Local Sheriff?

15th November sees an innovation in British law enforcement of a dubious nature. Thanks to some odd and expensive scheduling courtesy of the Liberal Democrat arm of the Coalition Government, electors across England and Wales will have the opportunity to vote for the newly created role of Police and Crime Commissioner.

This role  is charged with ensuring effective policing in its area and replaces the committees of Police Authorities. These consisted usually of 9 local councillors nominated by the councils in the Authority area, plus 8 members who were a mix of magistrates and independent appointees. These were a valuable means of oversight and governance but one where no one person was powerful enough to interfere overly with the operational activities of the police, which remained the provenance of the professional Chief Constable. Equally, having a range of views and interests represented meant that any cosy one-to-one relationship between a Chief Constable and a Police Commissioner was not possible.

The thinking behind Police Commissioners is supposedly to combine democratic control with a more directive approach to policing, just as elected mayors were once touted as the miraculous cure-all for local authorities - with decidedly mixed results (viz, Hartlepool and Doncaster). Given the choice in May this year of having more elected mayors, voters in all but two of the eleven areas voting decided against. Sadly, no such vote was ever taken on Police Commissioners and as the idea featured in the manifestos of both Coalition parties, this dreadful example of gesture politics has gone ahead.

So what do we have now that nominations have closed? Given the complete absence of any public funding for the election campaign - such as the free mailshot distribution in other elections - the only people capable of mounting a credible campaign across the large geographical areas involved will either be machine politicians or rich people with their own agenda. So we are left with a rag bag of local politicians eyeing up the significant pay packet attached to the post, along with a collection of ex-police officers possibly looking to get their own back on their former bosses and a smattering of former military people, which seems mildly worrying. Few inspire any confidence of offering any fresh start to policing. And how could they?

Effective local policing needs local input from a range of sources - community policing at its best encompasses a wide range of views and needs and while it varies in different parts of the country, there are a number of examples of good policing working well with local people and attendant reduction in crime.

None of that has involved some local would-be caped crusader offering instant salvation. Rather it has involved a lot of long-term, painstaking work by officers and communities getting to understand each other and working together in ways that defy the hot headed ranting of the likes of the Daily Mail about soft cops and ineffective courts. The result has been a steady decline in crime to its lowest level in over 30 years, but the fear of crime, thanks to the media, has grown so that the public perception is that it is worse than ever.

And this is the worry about these new posts and the election that goes with them: the candidates are just feeling their way into new campaigns for a new type of post. Most voters are unaware and quite disinterested - turnout is likely to be appallingly low (which begs the question why the Lib Dems were so keen to have them now rather than alongside other local polls in May next year). But longer term, forced to justify their tenure in office - or seeking to challenge an incumbent who will be blamed for all manner of ills - there is every likelihood of Police Commissioner votes turning into populist referenda driven by revenge-seeking stories in the press. Incumbent Commissioners will be more and more tempted to make headline-grabbing gestures, pressurizing the police into politicised agendas that can easily lead into extremely difficult territory in terms of social cohesion.

It is perhaps only because of their current organisational stasis that so few far right candidates are standing in these elections - the BNP is collapsing because of in-fighting, but the far right will not go away. There is every chance that future PC elections will become a gift-horse for their scapegoating agendas, and a Trojan Horse for those who think that this sort of vote somehow enhances democratic control of policing.

Time to stop aping America. We're not Gotham City just yet...

The Terrible Burden of Equality

Since the 1970s, the concept of equality of treatment in the workplace has become more and more part of the accepted culture in Britain - which does not mean for a moment that it has been achieved, but relatively few would argue that it is not both ethically and indeed in terms of business efficiency the best way to work. Discrimination has been outlawed in terms of disability, gender, sexual orientation, age, race, transgender and belief/non-belief. There are exceptions where these are valid - for example, a church can require priests to be Christians; care homes can recruit male or female staff as necessary to ensure the privacy of their clients; and theatre directors can employ actors according to role requirements, and so on. In 2010, these were drawn together into the single Equality Act, which added the need to not discriminate on grounds of social background and required employers to protect their staff against discrimination by third parties, such as clients and customers.

These laws, as Home Secretary Roy Jenkins spoke of the first of them, provide a basic floor of rights - they are not rigid, nor stupidly dogmatic as the likes of the Daily Mail would have you think - political correctness gone mad! They have not achieved all their objectives - women, for example, still earn significantly less than men overall - but, working in Human Resources as I do, equality laws have made a huge difference in general attitudes over the last twenty years or so, and from the perspective of working to improve processes and culture within organisations, they have provided a major impetus in challenging attitudes and, in turn, changing behaviour.

So it is utterly depressing, though unsurprising, now to discover that the Coalition Government is reviewing these workplace equality laws in the name of cutting the awful burden of red tape, which even now is apparently holding back billionaire investors from pouring cash into job creation in the UK. In particular, they are looking to abolish:

1. the rule that employers are liable for repeated discriminatory harassment of their staff by people from outside their organisation where inadequate steps have been taken to prevent it; 
2. the ‘questionnaire procedure’ that enables people who think they have been unlawfully discriminated against to seek information and explanations from the person they believe has discriminated against them; 
3. the power given to Employment Tribunals to recommend that an employer take certain steps to avoid others being affected by discrimination. 

In defence of the planned abolition, the Government argues that, for example in the case of harassment, good employers would still take action to stop harassment of their staff because, if they didn't, morale would get poor and performance suffer and staff leave.

A few points on that argument:
- good employers would take action; but if all employers were good, we wouldn't have needed the law to begin with and it wouldn't create a "burden" on anyone as they would already be doing what it required. There are plenty of bad employers.
- in the absence of the law, it will be harder for good employers to take action against harassers, as they will not have the backing of the law to do this.
- morale may get poor and staff leave - yes, they may do, and the harassers will have won and discrimination will have won.

So, in other words, if a member of the public comes in and makes offensive remarks to a disabled member of staff, their employer will be able to tell the staff member, "too bad, not my problem." And their only recourse will be to resign. One-nil to discrimination.

And on the other points:
- the questionnaire procedure is rarely used; but when it is, it is actually very helpful to an employer facing an employment tribunal complaint in terms of understanding the complaint and assessing whether or not the employer is, in fact, at fault and should seek to settle the claim. It IS a bit of paper, but it can save lots of other bits of paper and hours and days of litigation. Abolishing this would be a really counter-productive own goal, though our headline grabbing Government will doubtless portray it as a nail in the coffin of litigants.

- and the suggestion that, having found that someone has been discriminated against, employment tribunals will no longer be able to make recommendations for changing practice to the employer to prevent similar problems in future. How is this a burden of red tape as opposed to very useful advice to help the employer avoid similar problems and costs in the future and end discrimination against employees who have not yet gone to a tribunal?

Unless of course, deep down, you don't actually believe in equality. Unless, in fact, discrimination actually is your cup of tea and, chipping away, bit by bit, line by line, you'd rather refashion the Equality Act 2010 into the Charter for Bigots 2015.

From Baloo's Cartoon Blog

The Regime is carrying out a supposed consultation exercise on these proposals. Anyone can comment on them via this link. 

Link to consultation papers (closing date for responses 7 August 2012) http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/equalities/