Our forces deserve much more than pieties and platitudes from their Parliament
published in www.politics.co.uk and on Yahoo Weds 11 January 2012
“Mr Speaker, I am sure that the whole House would wish to join me in paying tribute to Private John Everyman of the Midshire Regiment who was killed in an explosion in Afghanistan. He was a very brave and dedicated soldier, deeply respected by all his colleagues, and we owe him a deep debt of gratitude…”
We have been hearing tributes like these at prime minister’s questions since the Iraq war, and sadly, we can expect more of them this year. Of course, the most important aspect of these tributes is their impact on the comrades and friends and families of the victim. No one would deny them in their loss any comfort and pride which they might take from hearing the name put on record in the House of Commons.
But all the rest of us are entitled to our feelings at such moments, and I wonder if I am alone in mine.
It makes me angry to hear politicians — whoever they are — reading out prepared phrases about soldiers they pretend to have known. I cannot stop thinking that these tributes have other agendas, which serve the interests of the politicians rather than their listeners. They are helping to create a cult around our armed forces which is dangerous for them and for our country.
When a national institution acquires cult status it commands uncritical admiration. Speakers at public meetings or broadcast panels are cheered automatically for praising it, commercial interests, especially the media, exploit it and, above all, politicians try to enhance their image by associating with it. The danger of this status is that it makes people overlook its shortcomings — and those of its managers and leaders and policymakers.
The Victorians made a cult of their army. Poems and popular songs and illustrations established the image of a Thin Red Line showing steadfastness and gallantry against impossible odds. That image helped the Victorians to forget that their army was repeatedly led by incompetents, and that its veterans regularly died in pain and poverty. In more recent times the police service enjoyed cult status and its critics were marginalized and ignored: this delayed the exposure and correction of inefficiency, corruption and racism.
It is no coincidence that our politicians should be making a cult of our armed forces when the public has lost so much confidence in the wars they have asked them to fight: the Iraq war, unnecessary and unlawful, the Afghan war unending and unprofitable. Fine words and gestures towards our armed forces help to deflect questions about why they were sent into these wars, and why they were so badly prepared and equipped for them. The cult has been assisted by the media: popular newspapers compete to be the paper that supports our boys (while their owners seek to pay as little as possible of the taxes that support our boys).
As it becomes more and more apparent that our armed forces have been misdirected and mismanaged, Britain’s politicians have offered them more and more gestures of support and admiration. Armed Forces Day has been added to the calendar, schools have been exhorted to form cadet forces, the town of Wootton Bassett has been renamed. The supreme gesture is the Military Covenant, which wraps a religious term around a collection of pieties.
The Military Covenant means everything and nothing.
All governments have basic obligations to the armed forces and their families, and since our armed forces are voluntary they also have a highly practical motive for offering them decent conditions. If a government falls short of that standard, no words in a Military Covenant will correct it. It is foolish to put the words of the present Covenant into law because they are not contractual matters but words of general principle. Making them legally enforceable will simply put more money into lawyers’ pockets, and give the courts another pretext for doing the job that parliament should do.
If it means something for the families of dead service people to hear their names read in parliament, I would suggest that the Speaker should do this — and so should the Speaker of the House of Lords, which currently does nothing. Each House could then be adjourned for a minute of silence.
Members might use that minute to reflect on what service people really need, not pieties and platitudes, but confidence in those responsible for them. They need to know that the defence budget and the defence estate will be properly managed, that weapons and equipment will be delivered on time and on budget rather than late and with massive cost over-runs, and that they and their families will not have to pay the cost of incompetence higher up the line. Above all, they need the assurance that they will be sent to wars which are lawful and necessary, which serve our national interest, with clear and achievable objectives for which they have been properly prepared and equipped.
Service people need politicians to do their job, not to act as another set of pallbearers.
YP Four new alcohol policies
Published in the Yorkshire Post on Wednesday 11 January 2012
FOR the last 30 years, governments of all parties have tried to persuade the British people to drink less, culminating with MPs asserting that drinkers should give themselves two alcohol-free days a week.
They failed. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, alcohol consumption by over-15s in the United Kingdom has risen by nine per cent since 1980.
In almost every other major country it has fallen, often dramatically.
Alcohol abuse is far and away Britain’s biggest drug problem. Recently, the Health and Social Care Information Centre put the annual cost of alcohol-related harm to the NHS in England at £2.7bn.
For the nation, this cost was supplemented by the impacts of alcohol-related anti-social behaviour and crime, family stress and break-up, by lost output and taxation from alcohol-related illness, accidents and premature death, and by lost education for the one-in-five children who drink regularly – and who are getting younger.
In Leeds alone, a recent estimate put the economic and social costs of alcohol-related problems at over £400m (more than double Leeds’ council spending on children’s services this year). On average, the city’s hospitals admit a new alcohol victim every hour.
Alcohol represents a major policy failure. Governments have been fitfully tough on drinkers but very laidback towards those who make and sell drink. They have largely let the industry regulate itself. Governments have watched passively as alcohol has been sold more and more freely, in forms more and more attractive to younger and teenage drinkers – and, above all, more and more cheaply.
Self-regulation can be summed up in the vapid exhortation – “use this product responsibly” in alcohol advertising or packaging. It suits the industry – and it is daft, because virtually every drinker believes that he or she drinks responsibly.
The Scots, with their devolved government, are meeting their alcohol crisis with a bold policy: minimum pricing.
Scotland is the first country to attempt this where alcohol sales are not restricted to government outlets. The experiment has caused intense controversy and its results will be watched by the world.
One accidental beneficiary could be Scotland’s bars and pubs, who would lose less trade to cut-price deals at supermarkets. That would mean more jobs, and perhaps more people drinking in some controlled environment rather than drinking unchecked at home.
As this newspaper reported recently, David Cameron is pushing his Cabinet to follow the Scottish example. He can expect even fiercer resistance from vested interests and long bureaucratic delay. While these are played out, he might consider some more immediate measures.
One is to bring alcohol within the scope of Drug Rehabilitation Requirement Orders. This would give the courts the same power to make offenders confront alcohol problems as they have for other drug-related offences. It would acknowledge that alcohol makes a bigger contribution to offending, particularly domestic violence, than any other drug.
Another would be a 100 per cent tax on the value of all alcohol advertising and promotion, the proceeds to be spent on alcohol education and rehabilitation.
It was recently estimated that the alcohol industry spends over 300 times more on marketing than its contribution to the Drinkaware Trust. The change would correct this imbalance and guarantee that all funding for alcohol promotion was matched automatically by funding for health promotion.
Even if it adopts the last proposal, the Government should nerve itself to set a date to end all alcoholic sponsorship of sport. This will be fiercely resisted.
Alcohol firms will offer copious evidence, much of it plausible, to suggest that sports sponsorship does nothing to promote drinking – as tobacco firms once did with smoking. It should be ignored.
If sports sponsorship does not promote drinking and make people feel better about drinking, then alcohol firms are wasting shareholder funds on it.
Sports will predict dire consequences both for international performance and for the grass roots. They too should be ignored. The association of sport with alcohol is, quite simply, bad for society and incompatible with any sensible public policy on alcohol. Sports dependent on alcohol have lost their souls.
It may be tough for football to give up its Carling and its Budweiser, for rugby union to put down its Guinness and rugby league its Heineken. The Grand National would no doubt like to keep its sponsorship by John Smith of Tadcaster. But all sports should learn to live without alcohol – as they have to in France, which banned alcohol sponsorship some years ago. It does not seem to have harmed their rugby union team.
Finally, instead of the feeble “use responsibly” slogan, the Government should insist on realistic warnings on alcohol labels. These should be tough and clear, but not too melodramatic, so that problem drinkers do not get any perverse sense of importance.
How about “this product will make you happy for a while but then turn you into a sad case. Larger doses will make you vomit and fall over.
Persistent doses will make you fat and stupid and wreck your sex life. Any doses can seriously damage your wallet”?
New Year Advice to Ed Miliband: Own The Future
published in www.politics.co.uk and on Yahoo 3 Jan 2012
Dear Ed,
You are probably sick of advice on how to lead the Labour Party. But it goes with the job and remember that most of it comes to you free from people who really want you to win the next election. In that spirit, here are my suggestions for 2012.
One, never complain about unfair media coverage. Even when that’s true it makes you look like a loser. Concentrate all your energy on making news that is worth covering, and if the mainstream media continue to ignore it, bypass them – that gets easier all the time.
Two, it may sound a small thing but make sure that your mail gets answered promptly and competently. Make all your Shadow Ministers do the same. That is not happening now. How can you hope to reach voters in general if you do not even communicate with the ones who actually want to hear from you? Of course letter-writers are a minority among voters, but one that is politically engaged and one which influences the attitudes of others. Ignoring them is bad manners and bad politics.
Three, have a setpiece battle with an unpopular enemy. Tony Blair was brilliant at this, although sadly, he chose all his targets from within the Labour movement. Why not do what Blair never had the nerve to do, and confront some of the party’s natural enemies (remember the lift you got when you turned on Rupert “Stinker” Murdoch )?
Four, don’t get indignant with David Cameron at Prime Minister’s Questions. It builds his authority and weakens yours. Stay cool and contemptuous. Use each session to establish him as a lightweight who simply is not on top of big issues. Visualize him not as Prime Minister but as a variety entertainer who’s gone on too long, or as a dodgy timeshare salesman with an offer no one believes. Present him in these terms (many of his own MPs secretly agree).
Five, while avoiding indignation, don’t be afraid to show passion. Tell the British people what drove you into politics and why you need and deserve power. You must have wanted your job passionately – you fought your own brother to get it. Why? Fifteen months later, nobody knows.
Six, own the future. This is vacant political territory. David Cameron’s government has no economic purpose except cutting the budget deficit. This is an abstract objective, because the budget deficit is simply a gigantic number which means nothing to voters. The government is actually failing to cut it, but even if it were successful it has not given voters any positive reason for doing so – only the imagined terrors of turning into Greece or Italy. David Cameron has offered no vision of post-deficit Britain. Worse still, his performance at the EU summit made it clear that his only enduring priority is the financial sector. He has no plan to end our economic dependency on financial services: on the contrary, he wants Britain to remain a giant car park for other people’s money.
This is your opportunity. Seize the future. Don’t just tell the middle classes to feel sorry for themselves, but give them some reason to hope that the country will be a better place after their pain. Clem Attlee achieved this, in far harder times than now. Warn the middle classes bluntly that you cannot promise them any short-term gains in their living standards. They know that already, and David Cameron has exploited this much better than you and Ed Balls.
So lift voters’ sights away from the deficit and talk about the big issues which determine the country’s future and have an impact on voters’ personal lives. How can we make a living in the world and create fulfilling jobs for our people? How can we provide income and care for an ageing population? How can we meet our long-term energy needs and resist climate change? (I am surprised that you have not said more about these issues already: you used to be in charge of them and could speak with real authority). How can we create a healthy population (instead of tinkering endlessly with the NHS)? How can we give people, at home and abroad, a realistic hope of lifting themselves out of poverty?
There are many more big problems you could mention but that is enough for voters to cope with at one go. Having set them out, warn people that they cannot be solved without large-scale investments and adjustments to the way they live. Promise that you will make the richest people make the biggest adjustments and meet the biggest costs, but warn that there are not enough of the richest people to bear the full load. Steal David Cameron’s phrase: we really are all in this together.
Having set out the problems, and given that general warning, show that you personally have ideas for overcoming them. Put your name on a series of big-picture plans for the country’s future: Ed Miliband’s plan for health… for old age… for energy…
Above all, give us Ed Miliband’s plan for the economy. It must be something far more comprehensive than Ed Balls’s five-point plan for jobs, which is not a long-term plan at all but a random package of short-term measures. Ed Miliband’s plan needs to take in the future of the European economy, and indeed the world’s. It must offer workable means to tame financial markets and control capital flows. It needs to tackle the huge apparatus of tax avoidance and secrecy which have turned taxation into a voluntary act for giant businesses and the super-rich. It needs identify new and sustainable sources of jobs and growth.
To steal yet another phrase from David Cameron, you need to be the Man with A Plan for the country’s future. Achieve this and almost all your other problems will disappear. Except one. No matter how successful you are, some people in your party will always think it could do better with another leader.
So my final piece of advice for 2012 is to use the stairs rather than the lift.
Yours sincerely, Richard
Richard Heller is a former adviser to Denis Healey and Gerald Kaufman. His unsolicited advice was ignored by eight previous Labour leaders, as were his novels, of which the latest is The Network
Three Dickensian obituaries (YP 23 Dec 2011)
Published in the Published in the Yorkshire Post 23 Dec 2011
Sir Wilkins Micawber OM was a Nobel prizewinning economist, whose optimistic theories strongly influenced the formation of the euro. Troubled until middle age by profound economic insecurity, he emigrated to Australia with his family and prospered as a farmer and magistrate.
But Micawber hankered for English life, and having provided for his large family, he returned to London and his passion for economics. Entirely self-taught, he never held any formal academic appointment but was much in demand as a writer and lecturer. Micawber’s style contributed strongly to his success. No dry-as-dust conventional economist, he combined pleonastic prolixity, rhetorical redundancy and otiose orotundity with sudden insights.
Micawber’s early work focused on the benefits of balanced budgets, both for households and governments. An analysis of metal price movements earned him respect among experts in the copper field. However, his global reputation was secured by his pioneering theory of Favourable Eventuality Expectations. Micawber showed that the strength of belief in a benign economic outcome was a strong influence on its probability. Later he suggested that economic optimism made some favourable outcome a near-certainty, even one not originally envisaged by the forecaster. Micawber’s theories were especially popular in the financial sector during its boom years. Behind the scenes, he helped to plan the euro, for which he predicted a golden future. He received the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2007. The same year he was knighted and made OM.
His reputation suffered from the world financial crash and the travails of the eurozone, and he was widely blamed for fundamental flaws in the euro’s design. But he stood by his theories and his advice was still sought by eurozone leaders. Only days before his death, he assured President Sarkozy: “quelquechose va se présenter. Indubitablement.”
Estella Havisham overcame her own disappointment with matrimony, and the even more powerful example of her guardian’s, to build an international business as a wedding planner. She was a perfectionist, who supervised personally every detail of her clients’ arrangements. She achieved special success with her recipe for an imperishable wedding cake and her designs for non-flammable wedding dresses. Her business model was simple: to demand full payment before the wedding, knowing that it would be much harder to collect after the bride had been jilted or discovered that the groom was a serious mistake.
Ebenezer Scrooge was a successful banker who survived early derision to earn recognition as a champion of sound finance and a pioneer of environmentally sustainable living.
Scrooge began his career in the warehouse business. Through exceptional economy (and by forsaking the prospect of marriage) he accumulated enough capital to establish, in partnership with Jacob Marley, a private bank in the City (although Scrooge preferred the old term “counting house” even after it turned into a global business with thousands of branches). Marley died, but Scrooge continued to build the business, enduring much mockery and even hatred for his austere methods and personal lifestyle.
Seven years after Marley’s death, Scrooge endured a mental aberration, in which he imagined himself visited by ghosts (including Marley’s). Convinced of their reality, he turned against his existing life and values. He embarked on a frenzy of philanthropic activities and employed a young writer, Charles Dickens, to publicize them. He also turned over management of his bank to his clerk, Robert Cratchit, and his nephew, Fred Goodwill.
However, he was soon alarmed by their profligate policies, and at this point he also received a doctor’s opinion that the ghosts were a delusion induced by mouldy gruel. Scrooge instantly resumed his former life. He abandoned philanthropy and dismissed Dickens, and reassumed control of his bank. Cratchit (still an employee) was dismissed but Fred Goodwill was able to build a glittering career elsewhere in banking.
Scrooge endured renewed mockery and hatred, particularly from the disappointed Dickens. As a banker he was derided for his belief in cash in hand and good security for loans, and for keeping his bank’s head office in its original shabby premises, rather than in an iconic new building. He was attacked for denouncing minimum wage and health and safety legislation as organized theft.
But Scrooge’s business values were vindicated when his bank survived the great financial crash of 2008, with large reserves of cash. He had the satisfaction of taking over the bank run by his nephew (now Sir Fred Goodwill) and re-employing him as his clerk.
Scrooge also enjoyed a complete re-appraisal of his personal life. No longer derided for avarice, he was honoured for his environmentally-friendly lifestyle, especially his commitment to energy-saving. He even published a book of gruel recipes, which displaced Delia Smith and Jamie Oliver on the bestseller lists. It was enlivened by a confectionery chapter with several types of humbug. Scrooge was asked by successive governments to advise on welfare reform, and although disappointed by their refusal to restore the workhouse he secured adoption of many other measures against the workshy. In a rare jest, he wrote his own epitaph “Better Scrooge than scrounge.”
Why Ed Miliband needs a Eurozone policy of his own
published in www.politics.co.uk 13 Dec 2011
With the help of a sulking Nick Clegg, Ed Miliband had a fine time in the House of Commons yesterday attacking David Cameron’s performance at the EU summit. He was fluent and confident and effectively repeated a simple message – Cameron failed and the country will suffer. It seems churlish to ask for more, but something vital was missing. Voters were given no reason to believe that an Ed Miliband Labour government would have done any better.
Ed Miliband and other Labour speakers have lined up to denounce Cameron for not securing allies at the summit. What allies would Labour have sought and for what purpose? What would Labour have offered to those potential allies – and what would Labour have treated as non-negotiable? All this is a mystery to voters, and so long as it remains so, Labour is too easily caricatured as a party which will sign up to any EU agreement, regardless of merit or national interest, to avoid isolation.
A few days ago Ed Miliband was attacked for responding to the Cameron veto on Twitter. Sadly, he had every reason to use Twitter because Labour’s policy on the eurozone crisis could easily fit into 140 characters. Does Labour that the euro can or should be saved? Does Labour think the present EU plan will save it? Has Labour any better alternative to the basic recipe in that plan – perpetual austerity for weak eurozone economies and the extinction of democratic control for all eurozone economies? And if the markets continue to turn against the euro, does Labour have any ideas for an orderly restoration of national currencies?
These are not academic issues. If the eurozone simply unravels, this will have immediate and terrifying consequences for the basic functioning of the world economy – and ours. No business and no family in Britain would escape their impact. So how would Ed Miliband and his team prevent them?
I have looked very hard for answers. I have not found them in Ed Miliband’s output. I have not found them from Ed Balls, the Shadow Chancellor, although he sends me messages regularly about his five-point plan for the British economy. There are good and bad things in that plan (for example, what is the point of cutting VAT on Ferraris?) but its prime common feature is its pervasive parochialism. It treats the British economy in isolation. It is a throwback to the era when British Chancellors tried to manage the British economy with modest domestic packages: I can almost hear Jim Callaghan saying “a touch on the tiller”.
A few weeks ago the Shadow Foreign Secretary, Douglas Alexander, delivered what was billed as a groundbreaking speech on Labour’s attitude to the EU. Most of it was familiar stuff… Britain must stay in to keep access to the single market and to amplify British influence in the world. The major new developments were a hardening of Labour’s position against joining the euro and a clumsily-worded suggestion that “we should engage now with the fact that Germany is seeking treaty change and seize this opportunity to safeguard the rights of non-euro members” – a general position very little different from David Cameron’s. He had nothing important to say about the future of the European economy and Britain’s relationship with it.
To be fair to Ed Miliband and his team, they are not alone in evading big decisions on European issues. All too often, Labour leaders have viewed them through the lens of domestic or internal party politics. The Attlee government missed a crucial chance to join the European Coal and Steel Community, forerunner of the Common Market, because Herbert Morrison was afraid of offending the Durham miners. Hugh Gaitskell lined up against the Common Market in 1962 partly from genuine belief in the Commonwealth but also because his stance united the Labour party. Harold Wilson, his successor, saw the issue almost entirely in terms of party management. It is fair to say that only two Labour leaders since the war have stuck to a personal position on European integration: Michael Foot against, John Smith for, and neither became Prime Minister.
Within the Labour party, European issues have never been as interesting as nuclear weapons, or public ownership, or foxhunting, or the party’s own rules and procedures. After the departure of the SDP, they were rarely if ever debated at Party Conference. The party’s hostility towards the EU softened in the 1980s only because Mrs Thatcher became so furious with it, not because of any real shift in the party. In the 1990s, Labour’s overwhelming objective was to exploit the convulsions over Europe in the Tory party and to present an image of unity and moderation. In consequence, internal debate on Europe was damped down even further. The party arrived in office in 1997 with almost no commitments on European issues and with very few MPs (in its landslide majority) with any kind of clear position on Europe.
The biggest European decision facing that government, on joining the euro, was resolved not by any guiding principle but by Tony Blair’s relationships with Gordon Brown and Rupert Murdoch. Much of its policy was invented by a rogue spin doctor in a pub. The five conditions for joining the euro were created after the government decided not to join. Both in boom and bust, that turned out to be a lucky choice and the party has done nothing about the euro since then except to congratulate itself on staying out of it.
Today, facing a coalition government on the edge of meltdown over Europe, it must be even more tempting for Ed Miliband and his team to follow Labour’s example in the 1990s – to attack the beleaguered Tory Premier and say as little as possible about their own policy.
That strategy carries a big political risk for Ed Miliband. It gives him a position by default. If he is against David Cameron’s decision, it means that he is for the EU agreement. If, as is only too likely, the agreement fails to resolve the eurozone crisis and there is a new EU crisis summit, many voters will think that David Cameron was right and Ed Miliband was wrong.
Ed Miliband now needs to get his name on a new plan for the European economy – something distinctively different from what is on offer now from both Angela Merkel and David Cameron. The plan should be based on getting jobs and growth back into all European economies, including ours – and on democratic control. If that entails the end of the euro as we know it, he should say so without tears.
By doing so, he would give voters a major reason to believe in his Premiership apart from not being David Cameron.
A former adviser to Denis Healey and Gerald Kaufman, Richard Heller in 1998 published Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, to warn Labour against the euro. His new novel The Network http://www.amazon.co.uk/NETWORK-Richard-Heller/dp/0955674018/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1310120716&sr=8-1
ignores the eurozone crisis, as Jane Austen ignored the Napoleonic wars.
Autumn Statement: economically irrelevant but sticking to a political script
published in www.politics.co.uk 29 November 2011
Some years ago I was flying in an airliner when suddenly one of its engines began to sputter and cough. Anxious passengers understandably began to carry on rather than keep calm. The captain’s voice cut in to assure us: “there is no cause for unnecessary alarm.”
I was reminded of this less-than-comforting message today as George Osborne presented his Autumn Statement. With all his economic forecasts falling faster than autumn leaves, and no reason to imagine that either the domestic or the international economy will improve, he had to convince the House of Commons and the British people that he was still in control of the plane.
Captain Osborne began by asking all of his passengers to look out of the window. Would they like to be in the European airliners they could see on either side of them, belching black smoke and not far from a complete power failure? That is what would happen if he tried to open the throttle. He then announced that the cabin staff would be visiting all parts of the aircraft offering a selection of boiled sweets, refreshment towels and extra pillows.
The Chancellor made the best of a very bad job. He focused the opening of his Statement on the only good feature of the British economy – low interest rates – and presented this as a triumph of government policy rather than a forced response to depression. He put over the idea that any alternative policy would reduce this country to the state of Greece or Italy. The stream of mini-measures (reminiscent of the Gordon Brown methods he used to attack) distracted attention from the awful news about the performance of the economy and its immediate prospects: dismal growth, rising unemployment, higher borrowing and abandoned hopes for cutting the deficit. It also helped to obscure the large number of losers from the Statement, especially low-paid workers hit by the stealth raid on tax credits, the public sector workers facing a long-running fall in living standards, and all workers under 52 who will have to wait an extra year for the state pension.
Within his mini-measures George Osborne was shrewd enough to mention individual transport and infrastructure projects and other small wheezes, to create favourable stories in local media and help out nervous Coalition backbenchers.
In short, the Autumn Statement was a political confection and not an economic programme. Almost nothing in it will make any significant impact on the performance of the British economy, which will be shaped by factors beyond George Osborne’s control. He himself acknowledged one of them – the eurozone crisis – and admitted that failure to find a solution would wipe out even the minimal growth in his current forecasts.
Osborne has now locked the government into its current political strategy. It must continue to warn the British people that any new economic policy (even Ed Balls’s very modest five-point plan) would extort terrible punishment from the markets and send interest rates soaring. The alternative is to admit that it got the economy totally wrong.
Osborne’s is a high-risk strategy, because when voters face an endless prospect of economic insecurity and lower living standards they may lose the fear that anything could be worse. The government’s biggest weakness is that it has pinned its entire economic reputation on cutting the deficit. That is a negative objective and it is also an abstraction. George Osborne has not only failed to cut the deficit, but he has also failed to give voters a reason for believing that they and the country would be in a better state if he actually succeeded. The Autumn Statement will do nothing to meet either problem. It offers more of the same: austerity without ambition, pain without purpose, hurt without hope.
Ends
Richard Heller is a former civil servant who helped to prepare many Budgets and economic statements. Some of their forecasts were as fanciful as his latest novel The Network http://www.amazon.co.uk/NETWORK-Richard-Heller/dp/0955674018
Politicians and their money 3: Blair has sold himself to a foreign power
published in www.politics.co.uk 13 November 2011
It could become a pub quiz question: who was the first British Prime Minister to sell himself to a foreign power?
But it might be too easy to guess the answer – Tony Blair, who recently signed a multimillion pound contract to advise President Nazarbayev ofKazakhstan. He has reportedly opened an office in the capital, Astana. Other than the President, no one knows what advice Mr Blair is giving. His client does not need any advice on winning elections: grateful Kazakhs gave him over 95 per cent of their votes in their last Presidential elections in April this year. His party already held all the seats in Parliament. Some media reports suggest that Tony Blair is advising on financial institutions. Hmm… would you buy a used financial institution from Tony Blair? According to other reports, he is helping the President prepare a bid for next year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Again, Tony Blair seems a strange source of advice, until one remembers that the Prize was once given to Henry Kissenger.
As with other British ex-politicians, Tony Blair’s paid activities inKazakhstanare virtually beyond any public scrutiny or control. They are not mentioned on the website of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA), the fangless watchdog over ex-ministers who sell their services in the marketplace. Since Tony Blair is not a peer, he did not have to supply the minimal and haphazard information required for the Register of Lords Interests. He did not have to notify the Foreign Office of his Kazakh appointment, and it is not mentioned on the website of our local embassy.
Curiously, Tony Blair may face greater scrutiny in theUnited Statesthan in our own country. If he helps the Kazakhs there in any way, he is potentially liable to register as their agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938. This wide-ranging law was originally designed to combat Nazi and Soviet agents: it is piquant to think that it might catch Tony Blair and positively delicious to imagine him receiving a late-night visit from the FBI.
Whatever Tony Blair is doing inKazakhstan, he should stop it and hand back the money. It does no good to our country and our political system – and it is in very bad taste.
Whether he likes it or not, Tony Blair is taking sides in the internal politics ofKazakhstan, which are murky and dangerous for an amateur outsider. He has become a trophy for the ruling President and a figure of contempt for the opposition. As North Africa has proved, even very long-running rulers can eventually fall, and if that happened inKazakhstan(a country of great strategic importance) Tony Blair will have harmed our country’s relationship with the replacement government. But while President Nazarbayev is in power, it must strengthen his ego and his authority in any discussions with our country to have a former Premier in his pocket. Whether he likes it or not, Tony Blair will diminish the authority, and in all probability the access, of our ambassador in Astana, Mr David Moran.
If Tony Blair gives the President any advice on how to deal with this country he will be approaching the frontiers of treason. Selling himself to a foreign ruler for any purpose at all seems hard to reconcile with his lifelong oath of loyalty to the Queen and her successors as a Privy Councillor. Its language is orotund and opaque but its tenor and general purpose are clear. It ends: “You will to your uttermost bear Faith and Allegiance unto the Queen’s Majesty; and will assist and defend all Jurisdictions, Pre-eminences, and Authorities, granted to Her Majesty, and annexed to the Crown by Acts of Parliament, or otherwise, against all Foreign Princes, Persons, Prelates, States, or Potentates. And generally in all things you will do as a faithful and true Servant ought to do to Her Majesty. So help you God.” Tony Blair does not care much about history unless he can invent it, but if he did take this oath seriously it would warn him against trying to serve two sovereigns and putting himself in the pay of any foreign state or potentate.
If the oath means nothing to him, Tony Blair should reflect on the impact on the image of our country when a holder of its highest office hawks himself about to foreign governments. What message does it send to disenchanted British voters who already believe that their politicians are only interested in money?
In recent articles I have called for the strengthening of ACOBA and of the Lords Register of Interests to give the British people more information about ex-politicians’ money and more influence over how they can earn it. After Tony Blair’s Astana adventure, I think we need to go one step further. No ex-minister should be allowed to work for any foreign ruler or government or state agency without the prior approval of the Queen-in-Council, including the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary of the day. There should be a presumption against any approval, although an ex-minister should be allowed to do voluntary service in a poor country, or to serve as an independent peace envoy or for other humanitarian purposes. That would not bar any ex-minister from joining an international body or a non-governmental organization.
Without such reforms, our country will see an uncontrolled marketplace for ex-ministers. On second thoughts, maybe that’s no bad thing. Given the recent record of British government, with many more failures and disasters than success stories, it is surprising that such a market exists. Plenty of voters might be happy to sell ex-ministers to any foreign country to make a bid for them. Or even current ones. IfKazakhstanwants to take anyone from this government, I’ve got a little list and they’d none of them be missed.
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Politicians and their money: 2 The House of Lords
Recently I described my long expedition in search of ex-politicians’ money, especially Lord Mandelson’s, and its fruitless start in the barren fields of ACOBA (the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments).
Having learnt nothing from ACOBA, I turned to the Register of Lords Interests. Mandelson’s entry did not reveal anything about his earnings or the clients who provided them. Nor was it required to. Unlike MPs, peers do not have to give any indication of the scale of their outside earnings or reveal any specific clients to whom they give politically relevant advice. Mandelson’s entry lists him simply as Chairman of Global Counsel LLP (described as a “strategic advice consultancy”) and Senior Adviser to Lazard Ltd (described as an “international financial advisory firm”). It adds the directorship of a company which handles his public speaking and writing commitments, but again gives no indication of how much he earns from these or from whom. Mandelson also declares a trip toChina and the unpaid Presidency of Hartlepool Football Club.
I emphasize that this declaration is in no way inadequate or improper. It is simply one of many demonstrations that the Lords rules about registration of interests, and their general Code of Conduct, are of no value to the inquiring public. They are pernickety about inessentials and relaxed about vital issues. Peers are therefore required to list gifts of £500, and honorific appointments, but they do not have to list the people or companies who might be paying them hundreds of thousands of pounds for advice, and giving them a lifestyle which would otherwise be unobtainable.
Like ACOBA, the House of Lords is happy for politicians to go into business (and vice versa). Its Code and its rules on registration and declarations of interest refer approvingly to the experience and expertise which peers can contribute from business and other activities outside Parliament. Indeed these come close to suggesting that the House is lucky to get them. It is worth remembering that all peers get a Writ of Summons. In beautiful ancient language it reminds them that their first duty is to be counsellors to the sovereign on weighty affairs of state and imminent perils. They are asked to attend the House “waiving all excuses”. Arguably, all peers who receive the Writ should give the House and its business priority over their outside lives, and peers with valuable strategic or other advice to give should offer it to their sovereign and their Parliament rather than selling it to outsiders.
The Lords rules are especially muddled about peers being paid for political advice. Rule 8 of the Code of Conduct puts an absolute and lifetime bar against peers taking any money to exercise parliamentary influence or for providing parliamentary advice or services. Rule 14 says that they cannot act as paid advocates in any Lords proceedings (which would include committee work or questions as well as legislation.) They are allowed to carry out “the types of services … falling under the broad heading of public affairs advice and services”. That would suggest that peers can get paid for lobbying on any issue, unless and until it comes to the House of Lords in any form. (So if you want to stop a peer from lobbying on an issue, try to persuade a rival peer to table a Lords Question about it.)
If peers do give public affairs advice, paragraphs 57-59 of the guidance to the Code tell them to declare all their individual clients. But there is no definition of “public affairs”, and if any peers decide to call themselves a “strategy adviser” instead of a public affairs consultant they do not have to reveal any clients.
The House of Lords does not define “strategic advice”. It might care to ask itself why hard-headed people and businesses in the toughest of times would pay a bundle of money to any of its members – not for fluffy “strategic” advice but for advice of direct commercial value. That might mean professional advice from peers with a recognized qualification. But for peers whose background is exclusively in politics and government, it is more likely to mean the know-how they have gained from office, especially knowledge which would assist clients in any dealings with governments, international bodies or regulators. Any such know-how was paid for by taxpayers and if peers are going to exploit this for their own gain, they should, in all decency, tell taxpayers where they are selling it.
Then there is paragraph 9 of the Code. Quoting the general principle of Integrity in public life, this warns peers against placing themselves “under any financial obligation to outside individuals or organizations that might influence them in the performance of their … duties.” If any peers become dependent on the income they receive from advising any client, they are at risk of a breach of paragraph 9. But it is up to peers to decide how they interpret this. The Lords Code does not guide peers on how much they can earn from any single source or when they should regard themselves as dependent on it.
My expedition through ACOBA and the House of Lords was a total failure. At a personal level, it satisfied none of my fevered but legitimate curiosity about the sources of Peter Mandelson’s money. But what do these bodies say about our political system? Taken together, their rules ensure that virtually anyone can pay for the services of ministers, or top civil servants or advisers, after they leave office, with the minimum of scrutiny or control. Ex-ministers and their paymasters can ignore without penalty any conditions which have been attached to their relationship. Any ex-minister who leaves the House of Commons can give advice through a company without telling anyone who pays for it and how much he or she gets for it. Ministers used to stay on in the House of Commons after defeat or retirement from government. Now they have powerful incentives to desert their constituents to make money.
If we continue with the present rules we will slide into the American system, where politicians and public servants move effortlessly between government and corporate life. If we want this, we might as well scrap ACOBA and let peers do what they please. If we do not want the American system, we need clear rules which get enforced, which allow us to know all those who have paid for an ex-minister or a peer or a top civil servant, what services they are buying and how much they are paying for them.
ends
Politicians and their money: 1 ACOBA
Published in www.politics.co.uk on 4 November 2011 with italic passages deleted
I am incurably inquisitive about Peter Mandelson’s money. I knbow I shouldn’t be but I am. The condition has lasted since 1997 and just when I think I have overcome it, some new story makes it revive. The latest is his reported offer for an £8 million house. I decided to search through public records to find out how he could afford it. The result was a long expedition, but with very few discoveries. It is easier to find the source of theNilethan to find the source of ex-politicians’ money.
The first stage of my expedition took me to the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments. It likes to style itself ACOBA, which sounds like a fashionable healthy nut or berry. It was created in 1975, and ex-ministers and senior civil servants are expected to notify it before they take up any paid appointment. More recently, special advisers were added to its remit.
ACOBA’s website leaves an unfortunate impression – of a watchdog which is rather less fierce than the Andrex puppy. Its guidance begins with a remarkable statement: “it is in the public interest that former ministers with experience in government should be able to move into business.” That statement is not self-evident and it has never been debated in Parliament or endorsed by voters. Many might disagree. It is at least arguable that British politicians should see ministerial rank as the summit of a career not as a stepping stone to wealth in another life. That is how they used to behave, and it had its advantages. It kept ministers’ minds on their job of running the country, it helped to maintain barriers between government and corporate interests, and, above all, it boosted public trust in politicians. Whatever their other failings, no one believed that they were in politics to make money.
To give just one example of how ex-ministers used to behave, when Labour’s great postwar Premier, Clem Attlee, died in 1967 his estate was valued at only £7,295.
Anyway, back to ACOBA. Mandelson declared three appointments to them: speaking engagements and writing newspaper articles, senior adviser to Lazards, the bankers, and chairman of Global Counsel LLP, described as a “global advisory partnership serving non-British companies or organizations and working with British companies or organizations outside theUK.” (This is only a little more descriptive than the company formed during the South Sea Bubble “for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage but no one to know what it is.” ) ACOBA set some time limits on his right to use “privileged information” and to be “personally involved” in lobbying UKgovernment ministers or Crown servants.
These are typical ACOBA conditions. They appear regularly on other entries for ex-ministers. It is not clear what “privileged” information means. If it means information subject to the Official Secrets Act, then ACOBA’s condition is supererogatory: it is simply re-stating the law which ex-ministers have to obey like anyone else. The meaning “personally involved” is equally obscure. Mandelson and other ex-ministers cannot lobby people themselves, but can they advise others on whom to lobby and how to do it?
I tried to look up Tony Blair, to see if he notifies ACOBA in advance of his burgeoning business appointments and what it thinks of them, but he does not appear on the website. Nor does Sir John Major, another ex-Premier who has gone into business, although far more discreetly and tastefully than Blair. The website lists several dozen lesser fry, and sometimes ACOBA gets testy with them for failing to seek advice before taking up a job. But on the evidence of its website ACOBA has never told any ex-minister not to take up a job, and I find it hard to imagine this happening. Maybe if an ex-minister said “I intend to work for a Russian gangster and advise him on whom to assassinate” it might raise an eyebrow, although only to ask him to wait 12 months.
Moreover, ACOBA, as the name suggests, is only an advisory body. Its advice can be over-ridden by the government of the day – and there are no sanctions against any ex-ministers (or former civil servants or special advisers) who ignore it.
ACOBA serves little useful purpose either as a watchdog or as a source of public information. As to the latter, it should ascertain – and publish – far more information about the intended business of former ministers, civil servants and special advisers, the nature of the services they are expected to contribute, and the scale of reward they expect. It should also publish annually their actual earnings from any business or employment which it has approved. As to its watchdog powers, these will be effective only if it is turned into a regulator rather than an advisory body. A powerful preliminary step would be a change in the law to ensure that ministers, civil servants and special advisers are lifelong servants of the Crown, and require its permission for any subsequent occupation other than Crown service.
The present membership of ACOBA is drawn exclusively from “the great and the good”, including one member from each of the major parties. How about inviting two volunteers from the general public?
The Bank of England should give the next load of QE money to the National Lottery
published in politics.co.uk 26 October 2011
As the Doors once remarked in another context, strange days have found us and our economy. The government and the Bank of England are trying to do completely different things with it. The government seeks to take money out of the economy by public spending cuts and tax increases to reduce the budget deficit. The Bank of England is trying to pump money into the economy by quantitative easing.
Strange name, strange idea. The Bank operates quantitative easing (QE) by buying government stock from banks and other financial institutions. That sounds awfully like a company buying its own shares (for which its directors may face disqualification and imprisonment), but central bankers are judged differently. The Bank pays for the stock by flicking a switch or two and creating new money which is automatically credited to the banks and other institutions. That sounds awfully like printing money, and the conventional wisdom is that this leads to Zimbabwe-style inflation and banknotes with fourteen zeroes on them. But apparently that does not apply to QE. We are assured that our Bank of England knows what it is doing. It has already created £275 billion of extra money through QE. The latest batch of £75 billion (which represents more than 10 per cent of current annual public spending) was created just a few days ago and credited instantly to financial institutions. The Bank is already contemplating another big dose of QE within a few months if the economy continues to falter.
Meanwhile the government persists with public spending cuts. One effect is that police budgets are being trimmed up and down the country. If the Bank and the government both know what they are doing, that implies that bankers are better at using the nation’s money than police officers. That might be true, but I would not like to be the minister who tries to sell that idea to voters.
In fact, many respectable economists reject the idea of simply hurling new money at the financial sector. They believe that far too little QE-created money reaches its intended targets, hard-pressed national businesses, and that far too much of it gets diverted into commodity speculation and generates inflation and poverty. There is fierce academic argument over the effects of QE and the only conclusion so far is that no one knows what it actually achieves. If it does work at all, the only guaranteed impact is on savers and pension funds, by depressing the yields on their assets. QE is particularly harsh to savers who were kind enough to lend their money to their government in difficult times.
The Bank itself has no idea what has happened to all the new money it has created. It does not “mark” QE-money and trace what banks and financial institutions do with it. The banks are quite free to sit on it and build up their capital reserves, and to be fair, they have been ordered to do precisely that. The banks are also free to use it to buy and sell more fantasy financial products, or speculate in commodity markets, or lend it to the Russian Mafia, or squirrel it away in tax havens, or use it to pay bonuses. All of these things can happen and there is nothing the Bank can do about it, or the government, or Parliament, or voters.
Given the uncertainty over the benefits of QE, it is not surprising that many people have suggested better methods for the Bank to create and spend the next instalment. Some point to theUnited States, where the Federal Reserve has bought up mortgage-backed securities and corporate bonds in an attempt to target new money on housing and American business. One especially attractive idea is to link new QE money to private sector research and development. Businesses would issue new long-term bonds specifically to finance R&D and sell them to the Bank. If the companies then failed to maintain their R&D spending they would be compelled to buy them back.
A more radical proposal is to give the next dollop of QE money directly to the British people, and trust them to spend it and put our economy back to work. I would like to suggest doing this by giving it straight to the National Lottery. Imagine a potential payout of £75 billion. Even spread over several months, it would offer monster jackpots and the chance to become a Lottery billionaire. Of course the Lottery winners would spend some of their money overseas, on holidays and property, but I believe that they would spend money within the British economy more quickly and more reliably than the present beneficiaries of QE. Moreover, the monster jackpots would have the secondary effect of generating massive additional sales of Lottery tickets. Virtually all of that new money would be spent in theUK economy, on sport, culture, heritage and good causes, and the Treasury would collect extra money from its cut of Lottery receipts.
The Bank of England was nationalized over sixty years ago. It officially belongs to us all. If it is allowed to create new money whenever it likes, it should give us all a chance to win it.
