Ed Vaizey - "Let the Bookworms Gnaw His Entrails..."

For him that stealeth a Book from this Library, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with Palsy, and all his Members blasted. Let him languish in Pain crying aloud for Mercy and let there be no sur-cease to his Agony till he sink in Dissolution. Let Bookworms gnaw his Entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his final Punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him for ever and aye. 
— Curse Against Book Stealers 
Monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona

The curse is pronounced against one who would steal a book. But what more torments might assail one who steals not just a book, but a whole library, or ONE HUNDRED LIBRARIES?

100 libraries have been closed down since the Con Dem "Culture Minister", Ed Vaizey, took office in 2010. As the Government has wielded its axe on public services across the country, our libraries have not been spared. At best, they might hope to survive in a twilight zone of "Information Points", where it is assumed that everyone now has access to the internet and is happy to download stuff to ipads or Kindles. Books? So last six millennia!

Yet this cultural Armageddon comes at a terrible cost and potential threat to our society. Ever since humans first gathered in the cities of Sumeria back around 2,600 BC, libraries have been a hallmark of civilised life, of access to knowledge and of the fostering of learning and citizenship. It was the loss of the great classical era libraries such as that in Alexandria that marked the decline of learning and reason that led to the superstition and persecution of free thinking during the Dark Ages of Europe. And it was the recovery of knowledge in libraries such as those of Islamic Spain and Renaissance Italy that set us on the path to the Enlightenment and the birth of the modern age. And Karl Marx of course constructed his mighty opus Capital on the tables of the British Library.

Cultural tragedy or real estate opportunity? The great
Library of Alexandria burns, c 30BC

But when times are troubled and resources scarce, the ruling class views knowledge as dispensable at best and dangerous at worst. If people know, they will question; and if they question, they might act. And so Mr Vaizey and his ilk, while decrying poor education standards and the collapse of community in their patronising "Broken Britain" strap line, are content to close libraries down in the name of efficiency savings. Google, it seems, is the way forward, copyright of the elite, monitored by their minions.

And so, as we head back to a world of superstition, half-truths and net-powered rumour, let me be the first to dust down the ancient book of curses and gladly heap them upon the brows of the morons who ascribe to themselves the custodianship of our culture.

May the worms bury deep...

VOICES FOR THE LIBRARY SITE: CLICK HERE

Slave Britain

Arbeit Mach Frei, the Nazis proclaimed above their concentration camps. Well, in 21st century Britain we now have a government offering cheap or even completely free labour to employers using the most vulnerable people imagineable - prisoners, the unemployed, the physically disabled and the mentally ill. And the dying.

No, it is not a sick joke. Cameron and Clegg's Britain has today seen three blows to what little civilised restraint remained among Coalition policymakers.

1. The "Justice" Secretary hosted a seminar for employers on his plans to create 10,000 new jobs in British prisons where employers of all shapes and sizes can boost companies' profitability by in-sourcing their work to jails. Prisoners are exempted from the national minimum wage and have no employment rights. So, anything from call centres to finishing kitchen units will be carried out by prisoners earning less than £1 per hour.

2. Tescos in East Anglia had the audacity to advertise PERMANENT "jobs" paying out of work people - nothing! The jobs were advertised in partnership with the appropriately named "Monster" website. As part of a government workfare scheme, they will continue to get their unemployment benefit - Jobseekers' Allowance - plus unquantified "expenses" in return for working all night. If they turn down the work, their benefits will be cut. Tescos made profits of £1,900,000,000 in the six months to October 2011.

3. And now, sneaking in behind the controversial Welfare Bill, the Government has briefed a range of charities that disabled people will be forced to work for free for charities, public bodies and high street retailers on open-ended work experience placements or face losing their disability benefits. This will include people who are terminally ill with cancer, but assessed as having more than six months left. 

These provisions have been voted through the Commons with the support of nearly all Lib Dem MPs and all voting Conservatives. When disability campaigners objected to the work experience plans on the basis they penalise and exploit vulnerable people, the cold-hearted response was Ministers felt sanctions are an incentive for people to comply with their responsibility.

The terrible, inhumane thinking behind these "schemes" is bad enough. But the fact that the Government feels it has demonised  the weakest people of all in our country to such an extent that it can pursue them so vindictively and so openly and unashamedly is beyond appalling - it is positively chilling. If this is what they are like after 18 months, what about another three years of people with mindsets like theirs running our society?

Booze, baccy and the Minister for Public Health

In a week when, with the passage of the Welfare Act through its second reading in the Commons stripping it of the fairly minimal amendments proposed by the Lords, it seemed that the Conservative-Lib Dem Coalition couldn't get any more offensive or vicious towards the weak and sick, the ill-titled Public Health Minister, Anne Milton MP, has decided to pile on the agony.

In a bizarre tirade against people living in the north of England, this woman, in whose hands supposedly we are meant to believe the NHS is safe, has blamed the higher than average early death toll in the north to be down to the locals supposed over-indulgence in ciggies, beer and sex. Clearly things that Ms Milton eschews for herself, her view is that if only these promiscuous, fag-and-booze swilling miscreants would mend their bad ways, then the 37,000 premature deaths in the north-east and the 5 year lower life expectancy in the area compared to the prosperous south would vanish.

In her mind, poverty, poor life chances and a disproportionately high reduction in health services to the poorer areas in our country have nothing to do with people's well-being. Dangerously, she also ignores the fact that poorer London Boroughs show similar health outcomes to the north-east. To her, it is all to do with some sort of retarded regional culture. In saying this, she goes against the findings of years of non-political, evidence-based research which shows precisely that poverty equates to bad health. This may in some cases include some bad personal choices - but if you've few chances and even less hope, and zero to negative self-esteem, perhaps the odd extra pint, (shock) one-night stand or even a nice hot pie might let you forget the misery for a few hours.

The answers don't lie in castigating and condemning people who have no way out. They do lie in supporting them and their communities to find some purpose and control over lives and economies which at the moment are in the hands of people like Ms Milton. Yet with her bigoted views of people she has not met, Ms Milton seems unlikely to do the things which, in her well-paid role, she has, along with her Conservative and Lib Dem colleagues, the power to do.

As well as tackling inequality and unemployment, the answer also lies in investing in proactive health services and in ending the scandalous power of the food manufacturing lobby, which the Coalition has permitted regular access to government ministers in order to continue to promote the sale of high-fat, high-salt and high sugar foods. And, of course, in order to make high profits from poor people.

Some people just don't know when to stop...

The Coalition might also take a look at some of the initiatives by the Scottish Government and other governments abroad to tackle the scandalous sale of low price alcohol, including the deliberate pitch to underage children of so-called alcopop drinks (which with their garish colours and labels masquerade as the next "adult" step up from kiddies fizzy drinks). There seems little chance of this, however, as the Government has stacked the alcohol advisory body with representatives of the alcohol companies.

All these remedies lie in the hands of Ms Milton and her Con Dem colleagues, including the Deputy Prime Minister, who, demonstrating the Coalition's concern for self-restraint, claims to have slept with "no more" than thirty women. But we will ourselves expire if we hold our breaths waiting for them to adopt any of the real solutions when they can of course spend their time understanding even less and condemning even more.

For more on health and poverty try the Socialist Health Association link here

Disablism, Con Dems and Lib Dems: No More Excuses

From The Morning Star newspaper

As I write, the Con Dem Government is comprehensively voting down in the House of Commons various amendments passed a couple of weeks ago in the House of Lords which would have partially mollified some of the harshest aspects of the new Welfare Act. These amendments included extending from one to two years the period of time people previously on Incapacity Benefit would keep the new Employment Support Allowance before it becomes means-tested (at which point, if the disabled person's partner earns more than £7,500 p.a., they get nothing). This amendment has been removed today even although the Government acknowledges that at  least 94% of those on the new ESA Work group will not find employment within twelve months.

The Lords' amendments also included exemptions from loss of benefit for cancer sufferers and widening eligibility criteria for young people. However, the Coaliton MPs have swept these aside and, a few minutes ago, they voted to cut disability living allowance (to be renamed personal independence payments) to disabled children.

Concerned that the Lords might reimpose their amendments when the Bill goes back there for its next reading, the Government has invoked the Parliament Act and declared the legislation to be a financial measure. Now, to be sure, the Act will involve spending money; but on this basis, virtually all legislation would be classified as financial. The Parliament Act was introduced a century ago to ensure that the Lords could not block indefinitely a Budget passed by the Commons - so it is stretching the spirit of the law far beyond breaking point to try this sort of ruse. But, there again, as the Government has already written to many disabled people informing them of the changes to their benefits from April, when the necessary legislation has not yet been passed by Parliament, perhaps they are in a bit of a hurry.

Never has the assault on the literally most vulnerable people in our society been so full on, so evident and so utterly vicious. The whole Act is petty and narrow-minded in its conception and unyielding and bigoted in its execution. This Government, led by a Prime Minister who has had to apologise for making so-called jokes about disabled people, is the most unashamedly wicked in modern history. Not even Thatcher pushed through such mean-spirited legislation.

"Proof the Tories know nothing about real life!" I noticed someone blog today.

Well, yes, many people do think we have a Tory Government. It has certainly out-Toried every previous one by a long shot. But never, ever let us forget that this is not a majority Conservative Government. It is a Conservative-Lib Dem Coalition. And today, these measures have been passed only with the vital support of Lib Dem MPs. Oh yes, a handful of them rebelled, and plenty of them doubtless wrung their hands and muttered about the deficit. But they still put their hands up to support this pernicious assault on some of the poorest and sickest people in Britain. They are not passive bystanders helplessly witnessing some unfolding tragedy; rather, they are active participants in a crime against society.

Yes, they whine and shake their heads apologetically alongside people like Nadine Dorries MP who declare people not to be disabled if they are able to text or twitter; alongside people like Philip Davies MP, who thinks people with mental health problems should be exempted from being paid the national minimum wage, and alongside Tories who echo and support the words of Cllr Luke MacKenzie of Basildon who thinks "unwashed" disabled people should move to North Korea.

I am married to a disabled person who got her letter informing her of her ATOS assessment for future eligibility last week. She had been expecting it for some months but needless to say, the prospect of an employee of a French IT company deciding whether or not she is disabled enough after a forty minute interview (if it lasts that long) is not an appealing prospect. And in the climate of hostility engendered by the Government, with its peddling of myths about scroungers and the workshy, she has, like many others (including police statistics) tracked a rising degree of overt hostility from complete strangers in recent months. This is fuelled by the lies repeated over and over again by Con Dem MPs, who often muddle things like Incapacity Benefit and Disability Living Allowance - I choked with bemusement and anger listening to Nick Clegg talking about the need to get people off DLA and back to work last year: DLA is not an out-of-work benefits, but rather paid in recognition of the higher costs faced by disabled people in participating in society. Frequently, DLA is the vital aid that ensures many disabled people CONTINUE to work. Without it, tens of thousands now in work will end up on the dole.

To be fair, the Lib Dem federal conference voted substantially against most of what the Government is doing. Many Lib Dems are far more than slightly uncomfortable about the changes. But Lib Dem members can't have it both ways - their MPs and Peers have, with a handful of honourable exceptions, consistently voted for this legislation. Their leader and parliamentarians have ignored their demands and concerns. So if ordinary members really disagree with this most disgraceful piece of legislation, targeting vulnerable people and using dubious parliamentary methods to rush it through it time, the only true course left to them is to leave their party. If they genuinely hold to any shred of socially progressive belief in the welfare state or a vaguely humane society, they will walk away from a party which is now simply one of the twin engines of a vehicle driving forward on full-throttle the most extreme rightwing project in British history. There can be no more excuses.

If they don't leave, if they stay in collusion with the rank disablists who run our government, then as the saying goes, by their friends shall you know them.

UPDATE: New survey by Scope shows massive increase in abuse of disabled people following Government and media stigmatising of benefits claimants. More here.

A Joke No More...

Housing - the Benefit of Mutuals

Hidden as a footnote in the BBC business news today is the report from the mutual Building Societies Association that in 2011, approved lending in this not-for-profit sector rose by a substantial 15% overall, with a massive 49% increase in mortgage lending. At the same time, the corporate banking sector saw a small decline in overall lending in spite of the increasingly desperate efforts of the Con Dem Government to get the "Masters of the Universe" as the financial PLC sector used to refer to themselves to lend cash to get the economy out of the doldrums.

Mutuals have long been advocated by many in the socialist and green movements as a key part of the solution to a free market economy based on speculation and accumulation. Formed out of mutual aid friendly societies as long as the late 18th century, British building societies have always worked on the basis of sufficiency - never lending more than came in and limiting what members could take at any one time; and, critically, not seeking profits for any purpose other than reinvesting in the business. There are no shareholders, no owners and no money taken out.

The result was that by the late 1980s, the sector was large and healthy, and at that stage still relatively diverse in spite of a trend of mergers. But the Thatcherite era saw an infusion of new possibilities for financial mutuals first of all to diversify their services and then to "go public" - become publicly listed companies making profits for shareholders. In other words, to become banks. Key to this was the 1986 Building Societies Act, as Thatcherite a piece of legislation as you could possibly find, which paved the way for the cash-grab of the bankers.

I briefly worked for the Bradford-based National & Provincial Building Society in its last days as a mutual. As its Board tilted towards de-mutualisation, scores of high paid executives were imported from the banking sector in a veritable frenzy of backslapping bonus-sharing as they strove to find ways to become a bank. In just three years, the number of Directors increased from six to over 60. Many staff in what had been a major local employer and a means of fostering modest home ownership and savings became uncomfortable about the sponsorship of a culture of greed and pie-in-the-sky notions that, in future, N&P as it became, might sell anything at all - "even hamburgers!" one over-excited director declared.

The vanishing mutual: N&P's Bradford city centre branch, long since empty..

As it was, a couple of years after I left, the first big housing recession kicked in and their plans came to nothing. Instead of sailing their way into corporate supremacy, the financial wizards had to settle for being swallowed up first by Abby National PLC before in turn vanishing into the giant Santander PLC. The headquarters, a large building in Bradford city centre that appeared to have been architecturally inspired by lego windows, was symbolically dynamited as hordes of locals looked on, uncertain how to react other than run up the hill when the dust clouds billowed out much further than anticipated.

The intervening decade and a half up to 2008 saw the bankers egotistical bubble inflate and stretch horrendously. Old shibboleths that limited lending went by the wayside. Anything could be borrowed and repaid. Buy-to-let mortgages, where people could borrow to purchase property to rent out, were introduced after decades of being illegal - causing massive inflation in the first-time buyers sector and pricing many younger people out of the housing market for good. Mortgage limits, once pegged at 80% of house value, rose to 120% and beyond as the poison of overlending reached everywhere.

The banks have failed and failed comprehensively. Nearly four years on from the crash of 2008, most remain in hoc to the Government, which in turn is punishing ordinary people through higher taxes and reduced services, grinding the whole economy to a halt. The housing market is flatter than flat, with unscrupulous private landlords the sole beneficiaries. In spite of repeated demands from the government, small businesses especially complain that it is nigh impossible to get loans for vital investment in their businesses. Stagnation results, with unemployment and low wages driving the consequent cycle ever down.

In all, with offers of a few hundred pounds in shares to members, ten building societies took the crooked path from mutuals to plcs. Read the list now, and they have virtually all vanished or, in the case of Bradford & Bingley and the pisspoor Northern Rock, were nationalised after collapsing only for their profitable sections to be sold off to the private sector once more.

The Green New Deal, proposed just before the last election by a range of green economists and politicians, including GPEW leader Caroline Lucas, argued for the hastily nationalised banks to be broken up and re-mutualised rather than sold off. In this way, the link with the need to make profits would be broken and they could focus again on building communities and local businesses and co-operatives.

But the Government is not listening. The profitable bits of RBS are being sold off to Santander, all of which will go firmly back into the private banking sector, in spite of all the signs that it has not learnt its lessons from the avaricious mess it has got itself and all the rest of us into. 

But of course, the building societies don't make donations to the Conservative Party - perhaps the one investment that does still count these days.  

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO STOP BANKING WITH BANKS, LINK TO THE NEW MUTUALS CAMPAIGN TO VOTE WITH YOUR CASH - MOVEYOURMONEY.ORG.UK

The Spirit of Free Enterprise

The Guardian newspaper is reporting that the Business Secretary, the foot-in-mouth ballroom dancer Vince Cable, is likely to exempt small businesses from most employment law protection for staff. It isn't clear yet, but the exemptions seem set to reduce further the rights of millions of ordinary people, potentially allowing their employers to bully them, treat them unfairly and dismiss them with some ease. Although the Con Dem Government already accepts that Britain has one of the most "flexible" work forces in the world, apparently some folk are not tugging forelocks far or flexibly enough not to traumatise our nascent entrepreneurs. So what little practical protection exists for swathes of low paid, temporary, part-time, often female staff, will be taken away.

All to help unleash the spirit of free, but evidently not fair, enterprise.

The Tory Taliban Are Coming...

As the rioters pass from the streets to the courts and jails (and the Premier Inn in one bizarre case), the Government's crackdown continues apace with the absence of a written Constitution and the elasticity of British "justice" increasingly apparent. Excessively heavy sentences have been passed out, not only to those involved in violence, but two men have been jailed for 4 years for posting supposed encouragement to riot on a joke Facebook page, while a young mother who slept through the riots was sent away for 5 months. Her crime? Receipt of stolen goods, when a friend gave her a pair of knickers stolen from a shop.

But it is not just in the courts we see the authoritarian kickback - egged on by Housing Minister Grant Shapps, one council has begun proceedings to evict a woman her jailed son was involved: she and her daughter, who had nothing to do with the trouble, now face homelessness. Quite aside from the rank injustice of it, how on earth can anyone think for a moment that anything will be achieved by putting people convicted of rioting in the streets out on the streets?

But of course it is vengeance rather than justice that the Coalition appear hellbent on - including Nick Clegg's wheeze to have work gangs of convicts in orange jackets visibly undertaking community service. Creating a a magnet for the same crowds of thugs who used to go on News of the World "nonce-hunts", what impact will it have on those dressed like that, paraded and humiliated in public? Will it make them suddenly want to embrace society? Or will it simply alienate them further? What happens when the first Orange Riot occurs between one of these chain-less groups and the local vigilantes?

As with 9/11, the State is using this opportunity to bring forward ever new powers of control over all of us. Social network bans are to be introduced for those deemed to be a threat to public order (a heading the police increasingly place the most innocuously peaceful environmental protests under) - watch out for surprise "Friend" invites from people with the names Nick, George or Dave: they might be going to report you for more than spam. But at least the Con Dems have been praised by the Chinese Government.

Swept up in part of this, slightly un-noticed last weekend, two young men who were organising a summer "water fight" were arrested and their gathering banned under the Serious Crimes Act. Although these have happened before without being licensed, they have never led to any significant trouble or damage and have provided an ideal way for young people to have some fun and maybe even let off some steam on hot days. They are very popular in Iran - the authorities there have tended to tolerate them; not so here.

Mr Cameron is starting to show his true colours. He spent years trying to claim that the Tory Party was no longer the nasty party of the 1980s, that it wanted to embrace a new social agreement, to seek to mend what he and Mr Duncan-Smith patronisingly refer to as "Broken Britain". They have estimated that about 5% of the population - part of the underclass so skillfully created by Thatcher and Major in return for people buying into the prosperity myth of the last 20 years - are completely detached from society. Marginalised, poor, with no prospects and no stake in society. So what is to be done for this dangerous untermensch? Well, Cameron is going to appoint some sort of Moral Mentor, to come round and tell off the worst families in the country. These people will supposedly give assistance while goading them into turning off all that loud music, cutting the grass and getting one of the thousands of vacant jobs going for the asking in Tory Britain.

That is, of course, as long as the Moral Mentor can reach the door having queued behind the officials that Ian Duncan-Smith plans send round to knock on the doors of convicted people each day, in order, it would seem, pretty much just to annoy them. I do hope this most odiously sanctimonious of Ministers includes himself in the line of people harassing these people - the "Quiet man" clearly hasn't ever had to work in such an environment and his ideas betray the total, crass ignorance of this self-appointed social guru.

However, some of the most worrying moments for the longer term have not been heard from Government members lips - but in the media. One BBC News journalist took the cameras round Tottenham as people were clearing up. He talked about how greed among bankers and politicians had infused society, and then bracketed the rioters with them - so far, so good, until he declared that this showed the appalling levels of greed among the richest and poorest in society ("middle Britain" was conveniently exempted). People, he declared, wanted this immoral lack of respect sorted out.

As well as clearly confusing reportage with editorial, this presented a rather chilling piece of disinformation.. As has been pointed out, the cost of the riots, unjustifiable and awful as they undoubtedly were for the innocent victims of the trouble, is tiny by comparison to the tens of billions effectively stolen by the richest in society. With the wealth of the richest 1% continuing to grow very substantially throughout the recession, who is committing the real violence?

What a bunch of bankers...

By virtue of their favoured position, our elite don't need to break shop windows to get anything; but by their thieving our common wealth in the shape of our planet and the labour of our people, it is quite frankly staggering to draw any comparison between the rich and the poor. There is a huge difference between the chronic grasping of the rich and the desperate attempts of some among the poorest in society to steal things which either provide them with the very basics of life or, on another level, allow them to momentarily possess some item which our consumer society says represents success and makes them someone worthwhile.

But of course, the BBC will never provide such a challenging analysis as suggesting the new morality needs to be one that changes the value base of our economic and social systems. Rather, the morality that is being harped on about here is of the "doff-your-cap-and-know-your-place" variety. Duncan Smith has threateningly promised that the response to the riots will be "the making" of David Cameron and already the objective is clearly to contain the disaffected rather to tackle the root causes of disaffection. Repression will be the true watchword - as was plainly evidenced one morning on Radio 4 as a vicar intoned his horror about the riots before saying mournfully that punishment was important, and for now all he could think about was the phrase "I am my brother's keeper..." 

ATOS Employee on Disabled People: "Parasitic Wankers"

ATOS Origin is the French-based company whose UK arm, ATOS Healthcare is employed by the Coalition Government at a cost of hundreds of millions of taxpayers' money to supposedly carry out a fair and balanced review of people who are on disability benefits. As previously blogged here and a thousand other places, there have been many, many dreadful examples of vulnerable people being mistreated during cursory assessments that have effected more miracles than Lourdes, so much so that a recent report by MPs criticised ATOS's claims to be treating people properly.

This weekend has come news that a dozen ATOS doctors are facing possible disciplinary action from the General Medical Council for their off-hand dealings with disabled and sick people undergoing assessment. And one medical professional has raised concerns that, by working for a process that deliberately aims to achieve a 20% reduction in costs, Government-driven, non-medical concerns are taking precedence over the welfare of the patient, a breach of medical ethics.

Many disability campaigners have argued strenuously that a system that sets a deliberate financial target and then masquerades as a reassessment of individual conditions can never be fair or truthful. Much evidence bears this out - including terminally-ill people being told to get back to work and blind people being assessed as seeing because they have a guide dog. With ATOS seeking to achieve Government targets rather than doing right by disabled people, it has declared the overwhelming majority of those who have been assessed as fit for work, only to see around 70% reclassified as unfit when they have appealed to panels of genuinely independent medical practitioners. In spite of this massive failure rate, the Con Dems have continued to shell out hundreds of millions of pounds to the profit-seeking ATOS Origin (to be fair, Labour originally engaged ATOS and developed a very unfair test of disability, but this was aimed solely at new claimants - bad enough - while the Con Dems have massively increased both the cost and scope of the contract with ATOS to review several million current claimants as well).

There is some hope that parts of this sorry process may be revised or dropped in the coming months. While their Commons colleagues cravenly go along with their Tory Masters, Lib Dem Peers in the House of Lords have signalled they may vote with Labour to change the process if a motion on Employment Support Allowance is passed by ordinary party members at the Lib Dem Conference in a few weeks time.

In the meantime, disabled people will continue to be served by the likes of the ironically named Anthony Treasure, an ATOS worker who decided to use his Facebook page to make clear his view of the vulnerable people he is meant to be fairly and impartially processing in his job as an ATOS Centre Administrator: "Parasitic Wankers" he declares.

Given his employers' pisspoor record attacking the vulnerable and ripping off the taxpayer, we may be entitled to ask if he means his clients or his bosses; but we think Anthony has already made his feelings quite clear.

To complain to ATOS, please contact them by:

• Email customer-relations@atoshealthcare.com 
• Write to Atos Healthcare, Block 1, Wing G, Government Buildings, Otley Road, Leeds, LS16 5PU.

Update - see ATOS response to my complaint - Comment 3 below; please write to your MP!

Fear and Loathing of Oliver Letwin

Old Etonian, Oliver Letwin, MP, the Cabinet Minister in charge of the Coalition Government's reforms of the beleaguered public sector yesterday went along to the head office of KPMG, a consultancy  firm that has ripped tens of millions of pounds out of state coffers providing "advice" on efficiency over the last two decades. With his hosts eyeing more cash as the quintessential Public Schoolboy of British politics gassed his way through a speech on how they have more work to do charging for yet more advice, Letwin declared that the public sector needs "some real discipline and some fear" among its staff to get them to work harder.

Britain's hardest worker busy instilling some fear

Oliver, a man who seems never to have held a real job in his entire life (although he does have at least one lucrative consultancy "arrangement" doubtlessly entirely in his spare time), went on to warn that without this, innovation and change in schools and hospitals just won't happen. Of course, he starts from an entirely impartial point of view, having stated in 2003 that he would rather "go out on the streets and beg" than ever have his children go to a state school.

This callous statement, made at a time when the public sector is already reeling from service cuts and job losses following the slashing of budgets to pay for the massive bailout of supposedly efficient private sector banks, misses a few obvious points.

First, given the massive amount of public services already tendered out to private providers or totally denationalised, like the railways and bus services, where are the supposed efficiencies and improvements the private sector ethos supposedly brings? Public subsidies to the rail industry, for example, have more than doubled since privatisation, leaving the much-derided state company British Rail as a paragon of good service and value for money by comparison. And with social care effectively privatised, we have in the last few weeks seen the Southern Cross care company go bust, although its clearly useless directors have walked away with millions of pounds each in their greedy, grasping pockets having capitalised its property for rent-back a few years ago - the source of their financial crisis.

Likewise, KPMG and its ilk have enjoyed literally thousands of contracts for providing consultancy advice and even running contracted out services over the last two and a half decades (since Ollie was working in Mrs Thatcher's Policy Unit) - how come they have evidently made so little progress in spite of all the invoices? Any ideas? Because Oliver Letwin's certainly don't hold up at all.

BUT Oliver does know all about public money himself - he made jolly good use of the £2,145 he claimed from our taxes to fix a leaking water pipe under his private tennis court. Of course, the poor chap had to pay it all back...when he was found out. He did keep the cash for cleaning out the septic tank - how appropriate.

Athens and Austerity: A Hymn to the Goddess of Democracy

It must have been one of the most inspiring sights of the year. Spread across the walls of the Acropolis, high above the Athenian plain which birthed the very ideal of democracy, Hellenic Communists demonstrated against the austerity package being forced through the Greek Parliament by pseudo-socialist PASOK at the behest of the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

With Greeks facing a further round of massive cuts in public spending - some €28 billions (£25 billions) in a country of just over 11,000,000 people - a general strike has begun and the streets of the capital have been filled for weeks with people from all walks of life protesting. The cuts come on top of a range of measures increasing taxes, cutting pensions and hiking the retirement age by 4 years, introduced last year in return for loans from the EU. With their nation staring bankruptcy in the face, demonstrations have turned to riots, with police deploying tear gas and a range of violent tactics to suppress the anger of the hundreds of thousands crowding in the city.

And on the Acropolis, the Communists unfurled their protest.

It was a dramatic scene, one played out with a message in English as well as Greek to speak to all the people of the European Continent as smaller states like Ireland and Portugal face the consequences of Austerity Diktats imposed by the Central Bank and the financiers. And who suffers from these measures, the consequences even now a wave rippling out of the whirlpool generated by the credit crisis and banking collapse of 2008? Not the bankers or bosses, whose wealth is now at greater than pre-crisis levels. Not at all. The hit is to be taken by the public services, the hospitals, schools, transport and social services that support the least well-off but often hardest working in society.

The Hellenic crisis is significantly enhanced by the neoliberal monetarist "shock doctrine" of orthodox economists who have run the IMF for decades and also prowl the corridors of the ECB. Their nostrums are about balancing books rather than investing in sustainable growth/equitable distribution of wealth, and consequently shrink economies further and further by sucking demand out of them. That these are also the underpinning of the single European currency, the Euro, adds substantially to the pressures on Greece. Indeed, it does not take a lot of examining to see that the real objective is far more about rescuing the Euro as a viable currency than about reforming or restoring the Greek economy.

Pallas Athena, Goddess of justice and workers

If Greece still had its own currency, we would not be here. There might still be problems with a large deficit, but these could be resolved by the Greek Government, free to take its own path and decide on, for example, expanding demand by printing money and generating wealth which in turn could increase the tax take and reduce the deficit. It could also devalue its currency in relation to other countries, improving its balance of trade and again improving Government revenues. In the Euro, with its fate tied to the desires of the Central Bank and larger economies like France and Germany, Greece has no such option.

By contrast, Iceland, which continues to enjoy financial sovereignty and control over its own currency, recently voted in a national referendum to default on billions of pounds of debts. Has it gone bust? No. Iceland remains at work, its economy readjusting itself, albeit with some short-term disruption, but still functioning and with economic growth now returned.

The same situation applies to Britain, which kept out of the Euro thanks to the punitive "five tests" created in 1997 by then-Chancellor Gordon Brown to deflect the starry-eyed desires of Premier Blair to join the super-currency. This far-sighted act has left Britain with control over its own currency and money supply. While, of course, we need to exercise prudence and cannot exist in isolation of the world economy, we retain the ability to increase the amount of money in the economy via the inelegantly named process of quantitative easing. Consequently, in spite of the hysterical nonsense prattled by the Con Dem Government, there is utterly no prospect of the UK going bust. Cameron and Clegg's often-voiced fears that the UK could end up like Greece are not merely inaccurate - they are downright lies. It is purely for reasons of ideology, not necessity, that they have worked so hard to impose the same neoliberal economic prescription of cuts and deflation on the UK economy as the IMF wants for Greece.

And so this week Britain too faces strikes, with somewhere approaching three quarters of a million public sector workers likely to strike for one day in protest at Government plans to cut their pensions. Again the Government have trotted out a load of exaggerations about the pension schemes being unviable. Rubbish has spewed from Ministers' greasy lips about "gold-plated pensions" for public employees, when the average pension is in fact no more than around £6,000 p.a. But, like PASOK in Athens, the Con Dems parrot the line of austerity and cuts for the less well-off while the super-rich continue to flourish to ever greater heights of prosperity.

The Communist demonstration on the Acropolis was not merely an imposing and inspiring sight. It was also symbolic in its location on the steps of the Parthenon temple, the House of the Hellenic Goddess Athena, deity of civilisation, workers and justice, and patron of the city where the concept of democracy was first fashioned into practice. On the same site where Socrates challenged the greed of the wealthiest and where Plato warned of eternal war between rich and poor, the battle is being fought for Europe's future - for a social Europe that values its people or for one based on the interests of secretive multinationals and a banking system that feeds on itself.

We must pray that the Goddess is listening. And then join the protests on Thursday.

Twisted Cable

The surreal freak show that is the Con Dem Coalition continues apace.

Talking to the GMB trade union, Lib Dem Business Secretary Vince Cable, warned the unions that any significant increase in strikes in opposition to Government public spending cuts could be met with legislation to restrict further the right to strike. Condescendingly, he suggested that the current level of disputes are ok and so he won't legislate - unless people start to use their right to strike. It is a twisted, deceitful logic that is being employed - you can have a right, as long as you don't use it. All the more insincerely patronising are his "this will hurt me more than it will hurt you" protestations, like some old headmaster admonishing the naughty boys. Who does this incompetent sell-out of a man think he is?

The right to collective strike action has been a mainstay of workplace rights ever since the Liberal Party Government reversed the Taff Vale Judgement back in 1901. The judgement used common law to hold trade unions liable for any costs incurred or profits lost by employers as a result of a strike - effectively crushing any legitimate right to strike. Following massive campaigning by unions and by Labour and Liberal politicians, the Liberal Government elected by a landslide in 1906 reversed the decision through the Trades Disputes Act, which removed trade union liability. This concept, of a right to strike without liability, has underpinned even the Thatcherite legislation of the 1980s. Its latest manifestation is in the Trade Union & Labour Relations Act passed by the Conservatives in 1992.

British employment law is at its heart still governed by common law nostrums on the law of contract and, within that, the enacted laws of Master and Servant which were introduced in the 18th century and which require "obedience and loyalty" of employees towards their contracted employer. Later statute laws on employment conditions have modified but not replaced this inherently inegalitarian concept, which is also at the centre of the capitalist economic system. Given that employers, particularly now in the form of large, financially powerful and impersonal corporations, hold the whip hand in this relationship, being effectively in control of the livelihoods and career prospects of their staff, the right to collective action by employees via their trade unions is utterly essential to provide any sort of counterbalance.

As the Liberal Prime Minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, argued when he told the Commons back in 1906, the protection for unions was essential because:

The great object ...was, and still is, to place the two rival powers of capital and labour on an equality so that the fight between them, so far as fight is necessary, should be at least a fair one.

Yet here we have a leading light among Campbell-Bannerman's successors a century on set to turn the clock back - not because unions might break the law, but because they might use their legal rights. Of course council and other public workers might strike against plans to cut services and make jobs redundant - these are perfectly legal as long as a strike ballot is held. And why on earth wouldn't they? What other weapon do they have to protest or try to save their jobs?

New Lib Dem employment rights policy announced

The unions are central to the defence of needlessly beleaguered public services - and popular in doing so. Polls repeatedly show that the public have much greater faith in the trade unions now than for decades and infinitely higher trust in them than in our political leaders and the corrupt business class whose interests our government so keenly serves. Strikes will come as the cuts bite, as services are withdrawn and people suffer - and if Cable's response is to try to remove the right to strike in order to suppress opposition, he and his ilk will be inviting strife probably unknown in this country for nearly two centuries.

Dangerfield wrote of the passage of the Trades Disputes Act as a seminal moment in The Strange Death of Liberal England, his analysis of the collapse of the once dominant British Liberal Party. A century on, by in effect seeking to repeal the principles it established, Cable looks firmly resolved to kill his party all over again.

And no one will miss it.


And now for something TRULY awful: Lib Dem sycophancy at it's very worst.

Crippling the Disabled - Where Compassion Comes With an Invoice

The last twenty four hours have seen Britain's social care system plunged into genuine crisis on several fronts.

Most graphic has been the secretly filmed abuse of residents with learning difficulties at a hospital facility in Bristol. An undercover journalist spent five weeks posing as a member of staff to record images of residents being doused with water for not obeying instructions, beaten, stamped on and verbally abused by the people responsible for their care and well being.

Next came the news that Southern Cross, the country's biggest care provider and landlord to over 31,000 elderly people with care needs, is in deep financial trouble. It has staved off bankruptcy by securing temporary rent reductions from its own landlords, but only until October.

And finally, but by no means least, a group of senior clinicians wrote to the Guardian condemning the Con Dem Coalition Government's heartless pursuit of hundreds of thousands of people with mental health problems on Incapacity Benefit and Disability Living Allowance. Since their election a year ago, the Government has massively revamped the already widely criticised tests for disability brought into operation for new claimants only in 2008. In addition, it announced that all claimants are to be reviewed, eventually every six months, in what amounts to a blatant attempt to hound some pretty vulnerable people off benefits into an uncertain future where jobs are relatively thin on the ground and where many employers are clearly deeply prejudiced against disabled people to begin with. The result, the clinicians warn in their letter, has been to increase the stress and mental health problems of the people targetted, with growing evidence of both attempted and actual suicides by deeply distressed people facing the loss of the pretty tenuous safety net that has been in place until now.

But what if they can't work?

ATOS Origin, a large French-based IT and facilities group, has been engaged to carry out the review, which will cover some 1.5 million people. Buttressed by pronouncements by Conservative Ministers that at least 20% of people on disability benefits should be in work (a rather arbitrary figure with no research to support the assertion), ATOS to date fail or cut payments to over 90% of people who go through what should be a comprehensive assessment lasting an hour or longer. Many claimants emerge with tales of 10 minute gallop-throughs, with surreal lines of questioning including imagining how people with walking difficulties might cope better in a wheelchair; or how a blind person with a guide dog has consequently no disability. Terminally ill people have been ordered back to work - though perhaps the most bizarre incident was where a woman dismissed by her employer as permanently unfit for work after an assessment by an ATOS occupational health therapist was sent for a IB review with ATOS, who decided there was nothing wrong with her.

On appeal up to 2/3s of people have their benefits reinstated, but only after some months and after a deeply worrying time for them. And many are then called back almost immediately for a new assessment - harassment in all but name. With the drip-drip of Government propaganda increasingly portraying disabled people as a burden on society, the last year has seen a rise in aggression and violence towards disabled people according to a survey by Scope, and terms of abuse such as "spastic" and "mentalist" are creeping more and more into the acceptable lexicography of the mass media. So-called comedians such as Frankie Boyle are feted and awarded TV shows in spite of "jokes" about disabled babies.

Disability has long been an awkward issue for society. I have worked with organisations providing disability support for the last 21 years and can only put this down to ignorance at one end of the spectrum and real, genuine evil at the other. The media is frothing spectacularly at the abuse filmed in Bristol, but this is the same media that routinely denounced those with mental health and other less physically evident disabilities as scroungers, malingerers and frauds. The Con Dems play up to this with stunts like the list of excuses put forward by people found to be defrauding disability benefits earlier this week - implying that fraud is widespread when in truth every audit carry out confirms the level as around 1% of total spend, costing the exchequer some £2 billion p.a. - not insignificant and not to be ignored, certainly, but where is the same pursuit of tax avoidance which robs the nation of at least £20 billions p.a. in lost revenue?

Misleading headlines stigmatise claimants

Of course, the elephant in the room with all three of the crises brought to the public's fleeting attention is that the profit motive features in all of them: the Bristol hospital is run by a private contractor, Castleback Care. Southern Cross, meantime, is a large business, complete with its Investor Centre (click here). which has happily ratched up five figure profits in the not-distant past (and its former Chief Executive was personally £13 millions richer when he left them after heading up a tendfold their expansion in Southern Cross' operations). Meantime, ATOS Origin stand to make over £300 million from their efforts to stamp down on disabled people, with unconfirmed rumours that additional bonuses (or perhaps bounties would be a more appropriate word) payable for each person knocked off the incapacity benefit or DLA registers.

Prime Minister David Cameron claimed that the disability of his late son, Ivan, had opened his eyes to the prejudices and barriers facing people with disabilities. Poor little Ivan is sadly gone now, but his father's awareness appears to have passed away with him - referring to disability benefits as a "something for nothing" culture and slashing hundreds of millions from local authorities social care budgets, leading to the closure of day centres and the isolation of thousands of disabled people, unable to leave their homes or access any sort of beneficial social interaction. And yet, perhaps unsurprisingly, he seems content with arrangements that pour good money after bad into the pockets of companies that seek to make a profit out of welfare, creaming off cash from compassion.

Society, it has been said, even by Mr Cameron, is judged by how it treats the vulnerable. By that standard, Britain is failing badly and its Prime Minister is encouraging its failure, forging a society where compassion comes with an invoice. Good care and support is not cheap; it comes at a price, one which society should be more willing to meet, rather than take the narrow view that sees vulnerable people as a burden on everyone else. If for no other reason, the blinding truth is that effective welfare and social care is important to us all because, whether we like it or not, in the end, we are all at least potentially vulnerable
.

Sacking with CONfidence (Part 3)

On the morning after the beginning of the latest series of The Apprentice, it was somehow ironically appropriate that Lib Dem Business Minister Ed Davey announced that the Government have now moved on from their plans to reduce individual employment protection (see Sacking with CONfidence Parts 1 & 2) to signal an assault on collective redundancy rights.

Currently, employers can make staff redundant as long as they put up a pretty simple business reason for doing so (which can be about as straightforward as just wanting to make some basic changes to the way they do things); where 20 or more people are affected by the same proposal, there are some timescales which are applied - if 20 people are affected, there must be at least 30 days consultation on a scale rising to 90 days consultation for more than 100 people. (Lower than 20, there must be "adequate" consultation, which ACAS have indicated should normally be around two weeks). The need to consult does not remove the employers' ability to proceed - it simply means that where a significant number of people may lose their livelihoods, there is an obligation to consult on alternatives to redundancy and on the process being undertaken (such as the criteria to be used for selecting precisely which staff will lose their jobs).

You're Fired! A bit more flexibility needed for Lord Sugah!

The Government today has decided that this is no good - in the free market profiteers lexicon that informs their thinking, consultation on people's livelihoods reduces industrial flexibility and so it is up for a full review, along with long established protection where jobs are transferred from one company to another (the TUPE - Transfer of Undertakings, Protection of Employment regulations). TUPE is intended to fit with the European-wide Acquired Rights Directive, which provides protection to employees throughout the European Union. Under this, if their employer's business is merged with another, their employment rights and terms and conditions must be at least as good as before. Britain may struggle to amend TUPE and still meet the legal requirements of the ARD, but it looks like our plucky ConDem masters are up for it.

How any of this will help the Government claimed objective of making it easier to employ staff, who knows? At present, you have to work two years to qualify for a maximum statutory redundancy payment of precisely £800 or 2 weeks pay, whichever is the lower - what a massive cost! The bankers must quake in fear when they think about having to shelve out so much to their cleaners. see what you'd get by clicking HERE, because who knows, one day it could be you.

It will be interesting to see how the new shout-out-loud Lib Dems face up to this: they have never been particularly sound on employees rights (really weird, given that by an overwhelming margin, most workers are employees) and they have been itching for decades to get rid of the Working Time Directive (in spite of being all in favour of it back in the early 1990s when they were so in favour of the Social Chapter of the Maastricht Treaty). And of course, faux rebel Vince Cable, Business Secretary, will be ultimately responsible for the review of the legislation. Now doesn't that just so fill you with confidence?

God bless Blighty, land of the low paid and the maximum profit shareholders...

Porridge for Profit - Privatizing Prisons

The announcement yesterday that a Birmingham prison is to be moved into the private sector is yet another huge and disgraceful step towards the total dismantling of the public sector by the Con Dem Government. Ethically, it is a terrible social decision to allow companies to profit from the incarceration of prisoners and raises many deeply troubling questions about the future of the prison system and rehabilitation of offenders.

It is not the first case of privately run prisons in the UK - 11 have been contracted out since the 1990s, and about 12% of prisoners are already held in the private sector, not that you would know from the condemnation by Labour MPs in response to yesterday's news. But this is first case of an existing public sector prison being privatized, and Group 4 Security, who have won the contract, operate as a profit-seeking company. They do not have social objectives in what they do - an outgrowth of private security guard operators, they are known for low wages and operational mismanagement. They do make nice profits for their shareholders, and in this context, what genuine interests might they have in running a prison?

Far from wanting to rehabilitate offenders, a private prison operator will inevitably see much merit in repeat offenders - guaranteeing a continued supply of business. Likewise, facilities for prisoners during their stay in jail would be kept to a bare minimum to drive costs down and again increase returns - the track record of existing private jails pretty much confirms this. And of course, doubtless arguing that this might save the public purse costs, the operator would logically look to maximise the financial returns to be had from cheap/free prison labour.

Unlikely? Well, take a look at the USA, where so many of this government's ideologically-motivated initiatives have their origin.

The USA has privatised scores of its prisons, precisely as, under the barbarically inhumane "three-strikes-and-you-are-out" rule implemented by many states, the prison population has trebled in recent years, with even minor shoplifters (like Gary Ewing) now imprisoned for life. Deploying the cost argument, these prisoners have been conscripted into all sorts of labour - the bulk of US armed services uniforms and ordinance is now manufactured, free of charge, by (disproportionately black) prisoners. The private company Unicor "employs" 20,000 prisoners in 70 US jails to carry out work which even includes making components for Patriot missiles.  Wages can be as low as 23 cents (or 15 pence in UK terms) per hour. Prisoners are also used for a huge range of contracted-out services, including corporate payrolls and call centre work, sometimes placing customers data privacy at some risk, but keeping plenty of income flowing into owners' pockets. The twisted "three strikes" policy ensures a continuing supply of such handy, exceedingly low-cost labour.

If this was happening anywhere else, such as Iran or Zimbabwe, it would be condemned as slave labour. But instead, the US example is being used as a model for Britain. With foaming rightwing papers like the Daily Mail and the Sun backing the move precisely as a means of saving the taxpayer money and vindictively dehumanising prisoners, the Lib Dem Minister, Sarah Teather, blandly states that it doesn't matter who runs prisons, as long as prisoners are rehabilitated effectively.

Prison: no such thing as a free bowl of porridge...

This more than anything betrays her lack of understanding of what is going on in the minds of the corporations bidding for contracts like this, and others in services like health and elder care. This is a company that exploits the staff who apply to work for it voluntarily, minimising wages and maximising working hours - is it suddenly going to be infected with some sort of social concern virus when it takes on prison work? Or is it going to drool at the prospect of virtually free labour and an endless supply of new business?

How we treat prisoners is a mark of how civilised we are, or not. Not only should many of those in prison not be there to begin with, but anyone in a prison is still a human being. They deserve dignity, even if in some cases they are there for removing dignity from others, because the prison system should not be about vengeance or humiliation, but about correction and support to find a better life when they come out again. There are many examples of former prisoners going on to make good and contribute very effectively to society, not least in helping younger people avoid getting into the sort of trouble they have experienced themselves.

But if we give prisons and their inmates over to the likes of Group 4, the emphasis on rehabilitation will no longer be at the heart of the system; rather it would be viewed by corporate executives as being like turkeys voting for Christmas - leaving us with the real prospect that, in future, prison may well work, but only for the purpose of filling the pockets of Group 4 shareholders.