When is a bully not a bully?

The prime minister's recent dismissal of the findings of an investigation into accusations that Priti Patel had been guilty of breaking the ministerial code by her mistreatment of her civil servants has revealed yet again the pernicious culture of cronyism that lies not only at the heart of British governments in general, but of this government in particular. 

The investigation was supposed to be independent, but we have learnt that Johnson attempted to persuade Sir Alex Allan to water down his conclusions. Having failed in that, he simply rejected the report and publicly stated that Ms Patel was not guilty of bullying and, in any event, she had apologised. It is typical of Johnson that he either did not see, or did not care about, the contradictions inherent in these assertions, i.e. that if she had done nothing wrong, why did she apologise? It is unsurprising that Sir Alex chose to resign.

Ms Patel's apologists have pointed out that she is doing a very important job - as though we needed to be told that - but that utterly fails as a defence for bad behaviour. They have also pointed out that the report states that Ms Patel did not receive the service she might expect from her civil servants - one Tory stated that there were faults "on both sides". A journalist actually asked how a woman little over 5' tall could possibly be a bully when dealing with mostly male civil servants. Such rationalisations are either disingenuous, or astonishingly ignorant of the dynamics of the boss/staff relationship. 

The first point is that in the Home Office, Ms Patel is the boss and the civil servants are her underlings; her height and gender are irrelevant to the fact that she is the one with the status and authority. The job of civil servants is to implement the law and government policy. This is true of all civil servants from those at the top in Whitehall to the junior levels that I worked in for 28 years as an executive officer in DHSS/DSS/DWP local offices. Civil servants have little discretion about what they do; to put it bluntly, they have to perform their job as instructed.

As for the suggestion that there were faults on both sides: the boss and her staff do not represent "two sides", which implies a conflict between two equal parties. One is in a position of power and authority over the other. If, as is claimed, civil servants were failing to provide the service Ms Patel required, there are well-established procedures to address the problem.

I was a trade union rep in the civil service for 24 years and while I wasn't involved in representing any mandarins, the procedures my members were subject to were the same as those covering top civil servants. There have been some hints there was an element of sabotage by senior civil servants possibly with an element of racism as to why they weren't (allegedly) doing their job properly. If this were true, then the appropriate response would be to have disciplinary action instigated against the alleged offenders. If the failings were the result of staff not being able to do the job required, then inefficiency proceedings should have been initiated. Those would be the appropriate ways to manage problems with staff performance. The entirely wrong response involves shouting, abuse and swearing. 

Johnson's dismissal of Sir Alex's conclusions, after unsuccessfully trying to influence his investigation, is entirely typical of a man whose own behaviour in both his political and his private life indicates that personal integrity is an utterly alien concept to him. His uncritical acceptance of Dominic Cummings' feeble excuses for breaking the first lockdown constitutes another example of his determination to stand by his mates, no matter what the consequences, which in Cummings's case included damage to the public's compliance with COVID-19 restrictions. The police reported that when questioned about breaking lockdown, many people justified their actions by mentioning Cummings.

Ms Patel's failure to ensure that appropriate disciplinary or inefficiency procedures were used to deal with the problems she claims to have had with staff demonstrates that she has few managerial skills, if any. Bullying is an abuse of a position of authority or power over another, leaving the victim powerless to defend him- or herself, especially as the minister is not a civil servant and is therefore not covered by the internal complaints procedures that do exist in the civil service. This also highlights the utter nonsense of the 'faults on both sides' argument: in vertical hierarchies, there are people with power and their underlings - hardly a battle of equals.

The 'two sides' argument also completely ignores the potential damage that bullying can do to the mental health and well-being of the victim. It is wholly unacceptable to say that bullying is a 'rite of passage' or a fact of life in the world of work, and that you should be a man and just take it on the chin. Recent research on the impact of bullying on both the mental and physical health of victims has demonstrated potentially serious consequences, both in the short-term and the long-term. 

The only protection for victims of ministerial bullying has been the ministerial code, and Johnson's dismissal of the findings will have sent the message to staff that they have no effective defence against overbearing ministers. This whole episode demonstrates that the prime minister is not the right person to adjudicate upon ministerial code enquiries, especially not the brazenly cronyist Johnson; this all leaves the code now fatally undermined.

Ms Patel has form; this is the second time she has been found guilty of breaching the code. Will it be three strikes and she's out? I wouldn't bank on it.

• When is a bully not a bully? When the prime minister is your pal.

The UK's first spoilt brat PM

It may seem a strange thing to say but wealth, privilege and an elite education can have a very infantilising effect - on males particularly. A perfect example of this phenomenon is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. As a child, he declared that his ambition was become president of the world. He was educated at Eton College and Oxford; at the former he is said to have expected to receive perks and privileges without having to do anything to earn them. Clearly his sense of entitlement developed at an early age. 

It is perhaps not very surprising that at university he became president of the Oxford Union, and even less so that he joined the Bullingdon Club, described by Wikipedia as "a private all-male dining club for Oxford University students. It is known for its wealthy members, grand banquets, boisterous rituals, and occasionally bad behaviour, including vandalism of restaurants and students' rooms." They always got away with trashing restaurants because their rich daddies reached for their cheque books; less privileged young men would undoubtedly have ended up in court.

By the time he left Oxford, he was clearly of the view that what was most important to him was obtaining what he wanted, irrespective of the cost or consequences, a pattern of behaviour that persists today.

Like Trump, he is a serial liar, but there's a difference: Trump cannot tell the difference between the truth and his own thought processes, while Johnson regards the truth as acceptable collateral damage in order to achieve whatever end he has set his sights upon. He was sacked from The Times in 1988 for making up a quote in an article, and he lost his job in 2004 as shadow arts minister of the Tory Party for allegedly lying about an extra-marital affair.

As Kirsty Major wrote in The Independent in 2016:

"As Mayor of London he promised to totally eradicate rough sleeping by 2012; it doubled under his leadership. His 2008 manifesto promised there would be manned ticket offices at every station; he closed all of London's ticket offices. He aimed to reduce transport fares; they increased by 4.2 per cent."

It's obvious that he was prepared to say absolutely anything to be elected, and having won, he made little effort to keep his promises. On the contrary, he was more interested in his pet vanity projects, cutting what he saw as unnecessary public sector costs, and helping his rich friends in business. He automatically upheld all appeals to him against refusals by local authorities to grant planning permission for developments. He was so irritated by a London Assembly member demanding an explanation how fire safety could be improved while fire brigade staffing levels were being cut and fire stations closed that he dismissively blurted out: "Get stuffed!" While this was before the Grenfell disaster, it was nonetheless a wholly unacceptable response, and it typifies his impatience with any questioning of his decisions, which is surely what the Assembly is for. This aversion to accountability has been a defining characteristic of his political career. 

His notorious Garden Bridge project cost £53 million, including £43 million of public money, despite never even being started. To date, I have't heard a word of apology for such a waste of public money. As a trade union rep, I represented one of my members who had been wrongly accused of deliberately misspending public money, a matter of little more than £100; if I'd lost the case, he would have been sacked. Johnson's squandering of millions of pounds hasn't earned him so much as a slap on the wrist.

He bought two water cannons, even though it is illegal to use them in the UK; presumably he either didn't know they couldn't be used because of his habitual inattention to detail, or in his breezy and ill-informed self-confidence he believed he could obtain permission to use them. Either way, his successor was unable to sell them and they were scrapped at a loss of more than £300,000. Who pays? The taxpayer, obviously.

As PM, during the worst pandemic to hit the UK for a century, he considered it important to spend nearly a million pounds repainting an aeroplane in patriotic livery so show Britain is ... well, I'm not actually sure what!
 
These projects derive from Johnson's self image as the man whose destiny post-EU is to recreate an image of UK greatness in the eyes of the world - not unlike Trump's mantra 'Make America Great Again'. That he fails time and again doesn't seem to dent this self-belief.

A fine example is when he managed to get himself infected with COVID19 by deliberately shaking hands with everyone, including patients suffering from the virus, that he'd met during a tour of a hospital, a foolish activity that he boasted about on television. My view is that he felt it showed him as a fearless leader and a man of decisive action during a crisis, but the reality is that, as well as making himself ill, he probably spread the disease further, both in the hospital and elsewhere. It is not impossible that his stupidity caused deaths. He was acting with the same sense of personal invincibility as reckless teenage youths performing stupid and dangerous stunts. 

The breezy and jokey persona that he has applied to his progression down the path to prime minister, the post he feels he was born to hold, has proved wholly unsuited to dealing with a dangerous pandemic. Faced with this disaster, he decided to exploit it to show that, unshackled from the EU, Britain could now be 'world-beating', leading the world in pandemic reduction.

Instead of simply purchasing effective ventilators, he set British industrialists the task of devising a superior, British, 'world-beating' version. Some of them were disgusted when he joked that it could be called 'Operation Last Gasp'. There's a time and place for humour, but a cheap gag about people dying when you're ostensibly in charge of overseeing a pandemic is extremely difficult to excuse.

He wasted around £11 million on a 'world-beating' track & trace system which didn't work and was abandoned - more public money squandered on yet another failed, 'world-beating', vanity project. The pattern just keeps on repeating itself.

Referring to the possible introduction of local lockdowns, he used the analogy of an amusement arcade game, Whack-A-Mole. Such a frivolous comparison is scarcely appropriate to describe a method of tackling a virus that has so far killed close to 50,000 of his fellow British citizens, but is quite typical of his inability to treat a very serious situation with the gravity it deserves.

Extraordinarily, he has recently been boasting about his government's overall approach to CV19, even though the UK's rate of excess deaths is the highest, especially in England, which is particularly significant because it is the only UK nation without an elected assembly of its own and is therefore subject to direct rule by Johnson's government.

Johnson has the sense of entitlement of a rich, spoilt brat who expects to receive what he desires without any need to earn it. His personal life has been a series of self-indulgent affairs that has left an unknown number of children - six at least - in its wake. He is a philanderer with a sociopathically under-developed sense of self-restraint. Like most such males, he would probably assert that he loves women, but in reality such behaviour is closer to exploitation than affection - he wants it, he takes it, and then flees.

It is signally unfortunate that, at a time of a national crisis that is killing tens of thousands of Britons, seriously damaging the economy and destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs, we are led by an immature, vain liar with an overweening sense of entitlement and the mindset of a spoilt, lazy, public schoolboy who has been granted far too much of his own way.

► P.S. Since writing this post earlier today, I have learned that Johnson has launched an - in the words of the official government website - "independent panel to look at judicial review. A panel of experts will examine if there is a need to reform the judicial review process after an independent review was launched by government today (31 July)".

This government has had a number of setbacks because of judicial reviews, most humiliatingly when it was ruled that Johnson had broken the law last year by advising the head of state to suspend Parliament, which he did to close down parliamentary scrutiny of his embarrassing performance during the Brexit crisis. This high-handed action was quite typical of his sense that he is entitled to get whatever he wants.

However, because the Supreme Court blocked this shabby tactic, he has predictably responded by trying to have the rules changed. I say 'predictably' because simply accepting the judgment and moving on could be interpreted as an admission that he was wrong, something his self-importance could never tolerate. I am certain that he intends to ensure that future legal challenges to any similar overbearing actions by his government will become much more difficult to win, if not downright impossible. I'd like to be wrong, but with Johnson's record, it seems unlikely I shall be.

► This is a follow-up to a previous post: 

The USA's first toddler president.

Boris de Pfeffel Johnson – master of misdirection

The democracy demo in Liverpool on 2 September 2019

The Trump effect has finally poisoned British politics. We too now have a leader who:

• Has no real convictions and changes his mind to suit what is to his advantage at any given moment.
• Has a record of incompetence, such as when as Foreign Secretary his words ensured Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe's prison sentence in Iran was increased.
• Squanders public money on pet schemes that get nowhere.
• Is openly jingoistic, misogynistic and racist.
• Is a womaniser. Womanisers claim to love women, but womanising is exploitation, i.e. abuse.

Johnson beat Hunt by 92,153 votes to 46,656. As the total number of registered UK voters in December 2018 was 45,775,800 (source: ONS), this means Johnson will become PM with the support of 0.2% of the electorate. To put it another way, 99.8% of the electorate did not vote for him, and 99.65% had no vote at all.

Here is a telling comparison:

When I was a union rep in the civil service, I represented a member who was facing dismissal having been accused of deliberately misspending public money; the amount involved was a couple of hundred pounds. I managed to save his job only at the final level of appeal when it was eventually accepted that it was a genuine error. The first two decision makers had rejected that argument and had recommended dismissal.

Johnson, on the other hand, squandered £53 million of public money for a bridge that was never even begun. He also misspent more than £300,000 on illegal water cannons which were never used and were eventually scrapped at a huge loss. Despite all of that, he was rewarded with the keys to Number 10. I cannot understand why he has not faced prosecution for massive misuse of public funds. If not prosecuted, then at least barred from holding public office. My member would have lost his job for misspending a tiny percentage of the fortune that Johnson “spaffed against a wall”, to use his own unsavoury phrase.

As prime minister, he is misusing the power to prorogue Parliament, normally just a suspension during which the government prepares its programme for the next Parliamentary session, to prevent MPs holding him to account for his actions over leaving the EU. This is contrary to the Bill of Rights 1689, the foundation stone of our modern constitutional system, which clearly asserts the sovereignty of Parliament over monarch and government. However you voted on leaving the EU, you should be worried by this cavalier approach to our constitution. Furthermore, he has threatened any Tory MPs who vote to block a no-deal exit from the EU with, in effect, the sack.

These two actions demonstrate Johnson's despotic tendencies. He is not a natural democrat, and is prepared to resort to extreme measures to achieve his own aims. Those who voted Leave so that we can “take back control” could not have foreseen that the control would be handed, not to our elected Parliament as we were told, but to just one man, unelected and extremely unscupulous. Proof of the latter is his dismissal of genuine concerns in Ireland that a no-deal exit from the EU could jeopardise the peace process there.

His 'election' was little more than a coup d'état and his reckless misspending of public money has been shrugged off. He has a privileged immunity that ensures his incompetence and arrogant profligacy avoids any kind of scrutiny or investigation. His succession has denied the people any say in who leads the country, which is especially galling because he denounced Brown for succeeding Blair as PM without calling an election.

Stage magicians use a technique called misdirection in which the performers draw the attention of the audience to one thing to distract it from another. Johnson's buffoonery has amused and even endeared him to many people who have failed to see that behind the hesitant waffle, outrageous statements and clownish antics there is a thoroughly cold-hearted, egotistical and unprincipled right-winger who stands only for his own and his cronies' advancement in terms of both status and wealth. Many of us thought we had reached a political nadir with Theresa May, but in a reverse of the New Labour anthem, things can only get worse.

This article follows on from the post immediately before it by Geoff Parry, who kindly asked me to post this on his blog.

How to insult 145 million people - all at once

I once read that diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they actually look forward to the journey. On that basis, it is clear that our Foreign Secretary is about as diplomatic as a heavy metal band in a Trappist monastery. His comparison of Russia holding the football World Cup with Hitler's 1936 Berlin Olympic Games is crass, undiplomatic and deeply offensive.

In the UK, we have a judicial system based on the principle that an accused person is innocent until proven guilty. I am not an uncritical supporter of our Establishment, but this is one idea that I tend to support. Our government has repeatedly stated that Russia is probably responsible for the poison attacks in Salisbury, but they haven't produced a shred of evidence. Not only that, they haven't even claimed that they do have evidence but must withhold it on the grounds of national security. While I wouldn't necessarily be convinced by such an assertion, the fact that they have made no claim to holding any evidence whatsoever makes me very suspicious. I therefore conclude that it is highly probable that they have none.

I am not a Putin apologist, and I am not saying that his government is innocent of the attack; I am simply stating that our government's assertions would not stand up in a British court of law.

Boris Johnson' comparison with Hitler is deeply offensive as well as being quite inaccurate. This doesn't surprise me: the last senior Tory politician who had any true historical understanding was Winston Churchill. Hitler intended the Olympic Games to demonstrate the innate superiority of the Aryan Master Race, a doctrine ultimately derived from a distorted view of the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. We all know what Hitler did to the various peoples whom he regarded as inferior. Putin is no Hitler, he has no comparable philosophy of racial superiority and he has initiated no holocausts. He quite deliberately appeals to the patriotism of the Russian people, but then so do national leaders everywhere, to varying degrees. Every country that hosts world sporting events likes to show itself in the best possible light: the UK certainly tried with the 2012 Olympics, and I see nothing remiss in Russia trying to do the same with the World Cup.

The Hitler comparison demonstrates how Johnson has little or no understanding of Russian history and the sensibilities that to this day derive from that history. The USSR suffered at least 25 million deaths as a direct result of the Second World War; this terrible statistic still resonates with Russians today. To put it in perspective, 25 million would have represented more than half the UK population at the time. Total UK deaths from the war were 265,000, which means the USSR lost 94 people for every one the UK lost. At that time, the population of the USSR was at most four times the UK population. *

As those 25 million Soviet lives were lost resisting and, ultimately, defeating Hitler, it not hard to see that the Russian anger generated by Johnson's crass comments is not the synthetic indignation of diplomats. No, a country that suffered greatly - still just about within living memory - has been compared to the Nazi monster who caused all that grief.

I have watched RT, the Russian TV channel, and Johnson's comments have, unsurprisingly, been extensively reported. I have little doubt that they will have caused some Putin detractors to rally behind him in the face of such a slur against their country. If Johnson has any understanding of what the term 'diplomacy' means, he should realise he has just scored a massive own goal, but instead he has stated that he stands behind what he said.

Johnson should be sacked, but he won't be because Theresa May is a lame duck prime minister whose survival depends on keeping all the potential leadership challengers in her Cabinet. A PM who was forced to give the magic money tree to the DUP will not jeopardise her government by doing anything to alienate Johnson - not even a reprimand.

The Russians have just re-elected Putin as president. Whatever you think their leader, the Russian people do not deserve the vile insult that Johnson hurled at them.

* Source of casualty statistics: The Guinness Book of Answers,

The USA's first toddler president

Donald Trump is a businessman. According to some analysts, he hasn't been anywhere near as successful in business as he should have been, given the fortune he inherited, but even so, he is undeniably very rich and is accustomed to getting what he wants. As the boss for most of his working life, since the early 70s in fact, he is used to sycophancy, complete obedience, and an unhealthy dose of flattery. People who get in his way are either sacked if they are among his staff, or vigorously counterattacked with maximum force if they are not. In short he is a man who is completely programmed to get his own way. Even his so-called reality TV show, The Apprentice, involved telling people, "You're fired!"

It is symptomatic of the vanity of the man that he decided to spend some of his fortune buying his way to the presidency of the USA, which he narrowly did - narrowly because he gained less of the popular vote than his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Despite that, the American electoral college system awarded him the victory. Smug British Facebook postings declaring that this could "only happen in America" show ignorance about our own system. The UK has had had two general elections since the war when the winning party had a smaller share of the popular vote (1951 and the first 1974 election) because of the our 'first past the post' system.

His presidential style is that of the spoilt brat. He is incredibly sensitive to criticism, and seems genuinely upset by it because he isn't used to it. So accustomed is he to getting his own way, even when he was wrong, that he gives the impression of believing his own infallibility. News is what he decrees it to be, and evidence isn't necessary. He has never needed it in his business decisions and cannot adjust to having to consider different opinions as president. 

His method of responding to opposition is juvenile in the extreme: tweets that end with an insult. Meryl Streep is a mediocre actress, despite 161 awards so far; he described judges who had frustrated his anti-Muslim order as "so-called judges"; some tweets end up with toddler speak, such as "bad man". When Vanity Fair published a review headlined, "Trump Grill Could Be The Worst Restaurant In America", Trump commented on the magazine's "really poor numbers - way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!" even though Vanity Fair's sales have actually increased 24% under the editorship of Graydon Carter. Like a toddler, he hurls ineffectual and juvenile insults when he's been frustrated, irrespective of the facts.

He loves to repeat the phrase 'fake news', but is guilty of making it up himself, such as when he told his followers to look what happened in Sweden the night before. Nothing had happened in Sweden on that night, no deaths associated with violence or terrorist incidents. On the other hand, 32 Americans had been killed in the USA by their fellow countrymen with many others injured in 128 violent incidents involving guns on the day in question. 

Trump claimed that he had achieved a record number of votes in the electoral college, until journalists pointed out to him that Obama, Bush Sr, Bush Jr and Bill Clinton had all recorded more votes in the electoral college than he had. His assertions that 1.5 million turned out for his inauguration are not supported by photographic evidence which compared his inauguration to Obama's; it is clear that far fewer people were there. 1.8 million is the estimate for Obama's inauguration, while one estimate for Trump's bash is 250,000. The Washington Metro had carried only 193,000 passengers by 11.00am on the Friday, significantly fewer than Obama's two inaugurations and slightly fewer than Bush’s inauguration in 2005.

More recently, he has demanded that that charges be laid against Obama for tapping his phones at Trump Tower, insisting that the FBI and Congress should investigate his assertions with the same energy they are employing to investigating the Trump team's dodgy dealings with Russia during the election campaign. He didn't produce a shred of evidence to support his claims, whereas there is some evidence that there have been untoward dealings with Russia. Misspelling "tap" as "tapp", he concluded his Twitter rant with the customary childish insult, describing his predecessor as a "Bad (or sick) guy".

He is quickly becoming frustrated that his customary methods of bluster, unsubstantiated assertions, firing at will, and maximum force against anyone who opposes him that were his style as a mega-rich boss are not working as he would wish as president. He gives every indication of not understanding how the USA's system of checks and balances work by his repeated attempts to trample roughshod over them. His reintroduction of his amended Muslim banning order is evidence of this. 

We have a president whose rationality appears to be no more developed than that of a 5-year old, who seems quite unable to distinguish reality from fiction, and who believes that his own hunches, prejudices and random assertions amount to truth. To be honest, I am not quite sure whether he really is incapable of perceiving the truth, or, alternatively, whether he doesn't think it matters and will cynically make any assertion, or propagate any story, that suits him. My own opinion, for what it's worth, inclines to the former.

He has been in office for little more than 60 days and already those American checks and balances carefully devised by the founding fathers are being strained to the limit. We have nearly four more years of this to come from a man who is commander-in-chief of the armed forces and whose finger is on the nuclear button. This means that, while we have laughed at him and we probably will do again, we must not underestimate how frighteningly dangerous this vain, irrational and very immature president potentially is. 

Austerity: economic necessity or right wing revolution?

We British have a healthy scepticism when it comes to our politicians. We also tend to accept the general view that most of us are sensible people inclined to the middle way of politics, perhaps leaning slightly to Right or Left, and dismissive of what we are told are the extremes. This mindset, part of the post-war consensus, worked reasonably well in the years after the Second World War when even the Tories would not seriously have considered changing the fundamental nature of state provision, such as the NHS.

The consensus was brought to a juddering halt in 1979 with the election of Margaret Thatcher. With the slogan "Rolling back the frontiers of the state", she proclaimed a belief in free markets and a small state, rejecting planning and regulation of business and people's lives. Instead, government should confine itself to the essentials: defence and the currency. Everything else should be left to individuals to make their own decisions and take responsibility for their own lives.

The post-war consensus - under sustained attack since 1979

Margaret Thatcher spelt it out in 1987: "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first." In other words, if you've got a problem, sort it out yourself because the state is not there to help. This was a direct, deliberate slap in the face for advocates of the post-war consensus, and I think it's fair to say that opponents of the new regime were extremely slow to challenge the new dogma. In some respects, nearly 38 years on, many of our politicians still haven't caught up.

Privatisation was the first large-scale manifestation of the new order. Flogging state-owned industries was made acceptable by bribing the public with under-priced shares that could be cashed in for an immediate profit. This softened the public for the next stage: the selling off of public services. So confident were they that privatisation had become acceptable that in time they decided they no longer needed to offer the public shares at all. The rhetoric of 'a share-owning society' was no more than a means to an end.

A lot of the opposition to Thatcher consisted of little more than demonising her; while hurling insults might make you feel better - getting it off your chest, as it were - it didn't achieve much, and made the opposition look boorish and extreme. The political psyche of many of Britons today is still determined by the long-gone post-war approach: while the majority continue to reject what they are told are the political extremes, they have subliminally absorbed the vilification of the Left, by both Governments and their allies in most of the capitalist press. As an example: Jeremy Corbyn's politics would not have been seen as far Left in the 1970s, and indeed Harold Wilson gave Tony Benn, whose politics were akin to Corbyn's, a cabinet post. Now the Labour leader is depicted as an outdated and hopelessly adrift Soviet-style apparatchik, and this black propaganda is succeeding.

Government expenditure is a matter of choices, not of financial necessity. For example, last year Parliament voted to replace our Trident nuclear weapons system, which will cost at least £205 billion*. In contrast, NHS providers overspent by £2.45 billion in 2015/16. In the last 16 years, we have been fighting almost continuous wars and conflicts of various kinds, while house building has ground almost to a halt, young people can't afford homes, and homelessness is hitting record levels. We could have chosen differently: most countries in the world, including many that are comparable to the UK in political and economic terms, do not have nuclear weapons of any sort, and have not engaged in constant war, a nation's most costly activity in both human and financial terms. All we have to show for the vast fortunes squandered and human lives lost is the serious destabilisation of an already volatile region of our planet.

How does austerity fit into this? We are told that cuts in public services are necessary to balance the books (a cosy euphemism if ever there was one), at both local and national levels. Local authorities (LAs) have had millions cut from their grants from Government, and many are struggling to maintain services that they are obliged to provide by law. LA functions that aren't essential to child welfare and social care, such as parks, arts centres and libraries, are especially vulnerable. Protests have been limited in their vision. To take libraries as an example, while many local 'Save Our Library' groups have been set up, and have achieved the occasional success, few of them challenged the cuts to LA funding: for the most part, they addressed the consequences, not the cause.

Cutting funding to LAs has been sold to us as an economic necessity, but in reality it is a continuation down to local, even street, level of Thatcher's rolling back of the state. If you want a library or a park, do it yourself. Recent Government statements that families should take primary responsibility for care of their elderly relatives are an extension of the same dogma into social care, and tough luck if you haven't got a family.

Since 1979, taxes have been devolved downwards from the rich to everyone else. When Thatcher was elected, VAT was 8%, but she immediately increased it to 15%, and it is now 20%. VAT is a poll tax, in that we're all charged the same, irrespective of ability to pay. At the same time she progressively cut income tax: the basic rate of tax fell to 25%, while the higher rate was slashed from 83% to 40%. This has had the effect of passing the tax burden down to the lower levels of the income ladder. It hasn't ended: in November 2016, Theresa May promised to give the UK the lowest rate of corporation tax of all the world's top 20 economies. If business pays even less tax, guess who picks up the bill?

Such moves have been justified by the myth of the 'trickle down effect', whereby the hard work of 'wealth creators' would lead to benefits for society as a whole. In reality, we have increasing numbers of workers on the minimum wage and zero hours contracts, or subjected to minimal wage rises, wage freezes or even cuts.

If the Government's rhetoric of balancing the economy had ever been sincere, then they have completely failed, because borrowing is at least £60 billion greater than planned. But they haven't failed: rolling back the state, cutting or privatising public services, reducing what they call 'dependency' are all part of the destruction of the welfare state that was designed to provide its citizens with social security 'from the cradle to the grave'.

The present Government's policies, like those of the Coalition before it, are intensely ideological, but so many of our fellow citizens, with that British scepticism of political extremes, cannot see it that way. They cannot accept that one of our mainstream parties has been waging war against the supportive society that many of us grew up in and which is being wilfully dissolved before our eyes.

Attacks upon organised labour, severely diminished in its influence though it is, are part of the plan to create a compliant workforce, grateful for whatever scraps of employment can be thrown their way, with no more bolshy unions to obstruct the progress of the enrichment of our 'betters' - as they doubtless see themselves.

It's not too late to do something - it is never too late - but the longer before we as a people reject the neo-Thatcherites, both in Government and those who lurk within opposition parties, the more disruptive the dislocation and the greater and more costly the essential task of reconstruction will be.

* This is the Government definition of a billion as a thousand million, rather than the traditional British definition (a million million).

You never shut up - why should we?

A letter in our local paper stated that "those calling for referendum mark two are talking nonsense" [mark three, surely?]. The writer asserted that, after we leave the EU, we will still be able to trade with the EU and with the Commonwealth. I appreciate the his upbeat wishful thinking, and the interesting suggestion that Commonwealth members have spent 41 years waiting for us to leave the EU so they can trade with us again. In reality, they have in the intervening decades forged other trading links and I cannot see how we'd be able to stroll in and pick up where we left off.

The EU vote was an enormous gamble that certain politicians chose to take with our future: David Cameron held the referendum, which he fully expected to win, not to give us a say, but to try to silence his Euro-sceptic backbenchers once and for all, a foolish tactic that disastrously backfired. Boris Johnson supported the leave side to further his own ambition to be prime minister, but you don't have to take my word for that: senior Tories such as Anna Soubry and Alan Duncan will tell you exactly the same thing.

Because Cameron anticipated a victory, no plans were made about what to do if the 'leave' side won; so confident was he that government departments were specifically instructed not to make any contingency plans, which to me seems the height of irresponsibility. Having engineered this vote, Messrs Cameron, Farage and Johnson all stepped away from leadership roles. To put it another way, having started the fire, they all simply ran away leaving others to deal with the consequences.

Those who are happy with the result keep on telling those who voted to stay in to get over it. Just like they did? We have had 41 years of constant whingeing and complaining by them about the EEC/EC/EU since the first referendum in 1975. They did not 'get over it' then, so why should anyone else now?

The first referendum did not close down the debate; I strongly doubt that the second one will either.

Trident Nuclear Weapons

Letter to my Member of Parliament

I am writing to ask you to vote against renewal or replacement of our nuclear weapons. These are my reasons:

1. The possession of nuclear weapons did not save us from being involved in conflicts in Cyprus, Suez, Malaya, Kenya, the Falklands, the Gulf War, Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. It did not save us from years of terrorism by the IRA or by Islamic extremists on 7.7.05, Al Qaeda or ISIL.
2. In Europe, only the UK, France and Russia have nuclear weapons. This leaves more than 40 European countries that do not consider they need such weapons to ensure their security. If they don't need them, we can do without them as well.
3. The cost is unaffordable: at least £205,000,000,000 at a time when all our public services are being attacked, including health, social care, social services, benefits, education and public transport. Local authorities are cutting services, not to the bone, but into the bone. Our border forces are lamentably inadequate: 3 boats as against Italy's 600, even though their coast line is shorter.
4. Once a nuclear war begins, both sides lose, no matter who was the aggressor. A system of deterrence that would ensure our own nation's destruction if it were ever employed is in reality a form of national suicide.
5. Submarine-based technology is already obsolescent. Its strategic value derives from the fact that, even today, submarines are not as easy to track as land-based installations and vehicles. Unmanned underwater drones will remove that advantage forever, and such drones are currently under development. There would be no way of compensating for the loss of that tactical advantage. In the event of a conflict that ends up going nuclear, our subs, previously almost untraceable, would be easily located and destroyed before we deploy them.
6. The only reason why the UK retains Trident is because our leaders want our country to be seen as a major player on the international scene, thus justifying our permanent seat on the UN Security Council. This is a spectacularly bad reason, and it is definitely not a priority for most ordinary citizens in this country. It is simply using weapons of mass destruction as a global status symbol.
7. Mass murder by nuclear weapons would not be war: it would be genocide. Leaders who used them, or agreed to their use, would be war criminals.

Even if one has previously accepted the argument that we need nuclear weapons in the past, the rationale behind retaining or replacing them is ceasing to exist. I am reminded of how during the First World War, the generals maintained cavalry units and looked for opportunities to deploy them, ignoring the fact that military technology had rendered them obsolete. The repeated full frontal assaults by infantry units against entrenched machine guns was a refusal to adapt methods to changed circumstances; the generals eventually learnt to modify their tactics only after horrendous and pointless losses of lives caused by this bloody-minded obstinacy. The consequence was carnage on an industrial scale.

To renew our Trident weapons system is to employ the same blinkered thinking. There is no moral or financial logic to nuclear weapons. There is increasingly no tactical value in them either.

I therefore urge you to vote against renewal or replacement of our nuclear weapons systems.

Thank you.

MPs snub autism debate

£66,000 annual salary for each of the
639 absentees - money well spent

On 17 July, just 11 Members of Parliament turned up for a parliamentary debate on the provision of education for children with autism. The debate was opened by the MP for Burnley, Gordon Birtwistle, who raised the issue of the difficulties faced by parents when trying to get a diagnosis for their child, and the problems this can cause for that child's education.

"Children with statements of special educational needs are eight times more likely to be excluded than their peers, and children with no statement are 11 times more likely to be excluded," he said.

11 MPs out of a total of 650 represent a 1.69% turnout, a disgraceful showing for a debate of such importance to many parents. They do not seem to have a problem showing up for the pantomime of Prime Minister’s Question Time just to howl and bray at their opponents. As the quorum for the House of Commons is 40, which represents an eye watering 6.15% of MPs, the debate on autism could have no effect anyway, other than worthy rhetoric.

If MPs imposed upon themselves the turn outs they are proposing for trade union ballots, perhaps some of them might discover what a hard day’s work really means.

Public sector bad ~ private sector good

Tax staff in Bootle opposing the cuts

That was one of the slogans used in the 1980s by those opposed to the first great swathes of privatisation that were cutting across state-owned industries during the Thatcher era. It could be argued that the state had no business running industries such as British Leyland: that's not a view I'd automatically endorse, especially in relation to manufacturing, because rescuing industry in trouble and thereby saving jobs, preserving skills and improving our balance of payments by reducing our need for foreign imports makes a lot of sense to me.

That's all yesterday's debate. The principle of privatisation has a quarter of a century or more later become an article of faith, rather than a different view of how to run the economy. All opinion polls showed that the privatisation of the post office was opposed by a clear majority. The Coalition went ahead all the same, even though the Post Office was making a healthy profit, unlike the old British Leyland; being a drain on the public purse was not a factor here. However, we tax payers were still conned because the government took over the expensive responsibilities of the pension fund, thereby making the Post Office sell-off very attractive indeed to potential investors. Furthermore, the share prices were either deliberately or incompetently set too low; the surge in price straight after privatisation was a nice bribe for the investors, but another financial loss for us tax payers. This took us right back to the bad old days of "Tell Sid", when the British Gas share prices were pitched so low at privatisation that within 24 hours you had an unearned bonanza at the nation's expense. The prospect of quick winnings was to entice ordinary people to invest and, by involving them, break down a lot of the opposition to privatisation.

In tandem with these latter day privatisations are drastic cuts to public sector jobs. The propaganda against the public sector has been so successful - uncaring bureaucrats with jobs for life and gold plated pensions - that people don't react very much when they hear that the jobs of civil servants and local authority workers are being cut. In terms of council jobs, people simply complain that they're not getting the same level of service that they had before the cuts and rarely link cause and effect. For example, my own council has laid off library workers and closed many libraries, not because they weren't being used, but because of the Coalition's cuts to council funding - and yet many of our local residents complained because the Christmas tree the council put up on our main shopping street was smaller than in previous years. After all, the thinking goes, they've only got rid of a load of useless pen pushers who wouldn't know a hard day's work if it hit them over the head.

I'll conclude with a couple of examples of civil service cutbacks that are damaging and self-defeating; similar stories can be heard across the public sector, including in the NHS, education and social services.

1. In 2013, the Environment Agency (EA) issued 7,000 flood warnings, the highest in its history, and in recent weeks there have been as many as 188 flood warnings at one time, 14 of them involving danger to life. We seem to be moving into a period of more extreme and unpredictable weather, probably associated with global warning and we may well need more staff to deal with it, but the Coalition's response will be to get rid of 1,550 EA staff in 2014. (Numbers from Private Eye)
2. Tax avoidance and evasion cost the tax payer 16 times the amount lost through benefit fraud. The Coalition is cutting HMRC (tax) staff and closing down offices all over the country. If we're not dealing effectively with tax fiddling now - and we aren't - what chance do we have with fewer staff? The conclusion I draw is that tax fiddling is respectable, whereas benefit claimants are routinely reviled by politicians and in the media. If tax fiddling got the same relentless flood of shock-horror stories in the press, TV documentaries and ministerial denunciations, there is no way the Coalition could turn a blind eye to it, as it does now. We get an occasional token swipe at Amazon or Vodaphone, and that's our lot. (Tax/benefit comparison from Channel 4 News website)

When your job cuts damage the economy and people's lives, homes and livelihoods, you are in the realm of irrational dogma. Yes, you can argue that the state shouldn't own car manufacturers, but you cannot argue that cutting staff who warn about floods or who could be chasing tax fiddlers makes any kind of sense all.

House of Lords reform – a con trick

As most people will know, the Coalition Government has proposed the House of Lords Reform Bill 2012. Ministers are trying to bludgeon this bill through with comments such as:

• We’ve been arguing about this for 100 years – let’s just do it.
• This is just a Westminster issue; ordinary voters are more concerned about jobs, education, health and their declining living standards.
• The Opposition supported House of Lords reform in their manifesto, so opposing this bill is just political posturing. Let’s just get it done and dusted.

All these arguments are over-simplistic. The reason why it has taken 100 years is that there is no agreement on what should replace the Lords. Some politicians want a wholly appointed chamber (which was Tony Blair's preference), some want a mixture (with no agreement on the ratio of appointed to elected), and a few want it fully elected. Just saying, “let’s get it done”, ignores this fact. A rush to get reform through should not mean that we should be prepared to accept something that is scarcely better than the present system. “Get it through quickly before they can think about it!” is the motive here.

The suggestion that most people are not much interested because of other concerns is patronising. Obviously on a day-to-day basis, people are worried about practical matters, but that doesn’t mean that the way our country is governed is of no interest to them. If that view were generally correct, hardly anyone would vote; in fact, most voters take part in general elections. The White Queen in “Alice Through The Looking Glass” asserted “nobody can do two things at once, you know”, but in the real world, where politicians and the White Queen do not live, it is possible to hold views about more than one thing at a time.

So why do they keep saying that? Because they want us to believe this is simply a bit of constitutional tidying up that is long overdue and we needn’t worry our pretty little heads about it. Are they right? I think not.

So what is wrong with their proposals?

1. The size of constituencies: these will be enormous, region-wide in size, thus eliminating any meaningful link between a candidate and the people s/he is supposed to represent. 
2. Lists: you will vote for a party, not an individual. You will have no say who the successful candidate is; s/he will come from the lists decided by parliamentary whips in consultation with party leaders. Individuals will be able to stand as independents, in which case you can vote for them, but with the enormous constituencies, your chances of knowing much about them are very slim. 
3. One fifteen year election term: they say this is to ensure continuity in the chamber, although there is no logical reason why continuity cannot be maintained by an elected Lord getting re-elected, except then s/he would then have to satisfy the voters who put him or her there in the first place. And therein lies the rub: they will not be accountable to their electorate, because they will never be seeking re-election, which means they can do what they like. An election without accountability does not constitute democracy. It is, at best, elective oligarchy. 
4. Public disengagement: a system that gives you a vote once every 15 years for a remote candidate who can then ignore your wishes is not likely to engage the electorate in the political system. We have enough trouble with public disenchantment with politics as it is; this will do nothing to change that, except perhaps for the worse. 

Okay, it’s not perfect, but it’s an improvement on what we’ve got now, isn’t it? No, not much. We will be in the position that the whips, in consultation with their party leaders, will decide who goes on the lists. You can be certain that a lot of retiring MPs will be jockeying for position, and the promise of a place on the list will probably be conditional on behaving. It will be another bribe to keep otherwise unruly backbenchers in line, not good for democracy in the Commons - rather like now, come to think of it. This means that most elected Lords will be party nominees, just like they are under the present system of honours. They will not be accountable to the voters, because they’ll never have to face re-election – just like the present system. Their link with the electorate will be extremely remote – little better than the present system.

So what is different? They will be there for 15 years, instead of for life – that is the biggest difference, and it’s not that great really. It will still be a nice little job creation scheme for ex-MPs, one that, as now, we have no control over; instead the parties in the Commons will control the intake. No matter how you vote, nearly all of the elected Lords will come from party lists: unless you vote for an independent, you will have no say who the successful candidate is.  You will of course have no say whatsoever in the one fifth of the chamber who will be appointed, not elected, nor the 12 bishops, nor the eight ministerial members appointed by the government so that they can put people who aren’t MPs into the Cabinet, as they do now with life peerages - where's the democracy there?

Why are they doing this? Basically, it’s control freakery, which I believe is proved by the argument that a fully elected Lords would challenge the supremacy of the Commons. This is rubbish. The Parliament Acts will still be in place and the powers of the new chamber will be the same as the old Lords; they can only delay Bills, and the Commons would still be supreme on financial matters. Changing how we put people there will not affect these limitations on the Lords’ powers in the slightest. Many other countries manage with two elected chambers; so would we, although it might take a period of adjustment. But raising the false spectre of a constitutional clash is designed to stifle demands for a more genuinely democratic upper chamber.

It’s no more than a big con trick, designed to maintain the present system while coating it with a veneer of fake democracy. The problem is that if this is passed, we will be stuck with it for at least another 100 years as party leaders use the charade of democracy to maintain their political patronage into the foreseeable future. The recent defeat in the Commons means that it cannot now be rushed through; this should give more time for reflection and scrutiny as to the real implications of this Bill. Let's hope that time isn't wasted.