Boris, Ken, or someone else?

Non-Londoners can skip this post, I won’t be offended.

The time has come for those of us who live in The Great Wen to decide who we want to be Mayor of this great metropolis for the next four years. Although there are seven candidates, unfortunately I think our choice probably boils down to, do we dislike Ken more than Boris or vice versa?

Here, in alphabetical order are the seven candidates and the parties they represent:

Candidates

Name	Party
Siobhan BENITA	Independant
Carlos CORTIGLIA	British National Party
Boris JOHNSON	The Conservative Party Candidate
Jenny JONES	Green Party
Ken LIVINGSTONE	The Labour Party Candidate
Brian PADDICK	London Liberal Democrats
Lawrence James WEBB	Fresh Choice for London (UKIP)

Clicking on the candidate’s name will take you to their website, except for the B.N.P. candidate, who does not seem to have a dedicated website, so clicking on his name takes you to his Wikipedia entry.

Lets take a quick look at the minor candidates first.

Both the BNP and UKIP seem to think that the Mayor of London has more powers than he actually has. The BNP wants their Mayor to build a better NHS and pledges that they will not allow an amnesty for illegal immigrants. I might be wrong, but building (or currently destroying) the NHS is probably down to the Secretary of State for Health and granting an amnesty for illegal immigrants (not that there has ever been one suggested by either of the main parties) would probably come under the Home Secretaries remit. The UKIP Mayoral candidate, judging by his policies appears to think that the Mayor can unilaterally withdraw London from the EU. Both of them also seem to think that the Mayor can ban non-UK citizens from working in London.
If they don’t know what they Mayor can and can’t do then I think we can move on.

Siobhan Benita, the Independent candidate, is more interesting. I can agree with a lot of her ideas, especially on education, housing and infrastructure. Interestingly she is the only candidate to advocate building a third runway at Heathrow. If she was standing as the Labour or Liberal Democrat candidate (her ideas would fit reasonably well with both parties) I might consider giving her my vote, but as an Independent, she will find it difficult to garner the support she needs.

Jenny Jones, the Green Party candidate, is the only candidate with a well thought out and practical plan to turn London into a cycling city, along the lines of Amsterdam or Copenhagen, and for that alone you should consider voting for her. While cycling in London isn’t a dangerous as it is often perceived to be, it is not safe either, as she says:

It may well be fine if you are confident, experienced and physically fit, but we want roads where everyone feels safe whether you are 7 years old or 70.

Some of the other policies I am a bit more ambivalent about, though she is good on transport and recycling, slightly less so on what to do with non-recyclable waste.

Brian Paddick, probably doesn’t see himself as a minor candidate, but he is. He is not going to win, but the second preference votes of people who vote for him might, in fact probably will, decide who does.
He builds is candidacy on the following facts. For the first time the Mayor will be directly responsible for the Metropolitan Police, and he was a police officer for over 30 years. I will admit that during his time as Borough Commander he came up with some interesting and moderately radical (too radical for the Daily Mail) ideas on policing. The “big idea” on policing seems to be this:

If elected Mayor and London’s “Police and Crime Commissioner” I would make it my top priority to bring the police and public together, so that criminals don’t stand a chance.

Reading his manifesto it seems to me that he isn’t actually running for Mayor the position he wants is Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis. I want to elect a Mayor not a police chief. He is also a Liberal Democrat and I haven’t forgiven them yet.

Boris or Ken?

Here we have our choice then Boris or Ken, Punch or Judy, Scylla or Charybdis?
The best thing I can say about Boris Johnson is that he wasn’t (quite) as big a disaster for London as I feared he might be. He comes across as a cuddly buffoon, but is actually a very calculating politician.
There are two Londons, the divide is not between Inner London and the Outer London suburbs as some suppose, and Boris Johnson tries to pretend, the divide is between the City of London and Greater London.
The London that he has been Mayor for is not Greater London, he has been Mayor for the City of London.
Billy Bragg links to a story in the Sunday Telegraph and points out:

Two headlines from the Sunday Telegraph today – ‘Boris Johnson: We need more tax cuts’ and ‘Rich get richer’. Could the two be in some way connected?

The one thing that people will probably remember him for, the TFL Cycle Hire scheme a.k.a “Boris Bikes” wasn’t even his idea. Jenny Jones (the Green candidate) came up with it and Ken Livingstone adopted it during his last period as Mayor. It just happened to be introduced during his term in office, but he gives himself the credit for it. Similarly with introducing Oyster Cards on the rail system in London. The donkey work was done before his election in 2008, all he had to do was dot the i’s and cross the t’s.
What have his achievements been, well, he got rid of ‘bendy buses’ to keep the cab drivers happy and replaced them with white elephants, sorry Modern Routemasters, that is if they ever get enough built.
His reaction to last summer’s riots was late, ineffective and patronising, to put it mildly.
I won’t be voting for Mr Johnson.

That leaves Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London from 2000 to 2008, Leader of the GLC before its abolition by Margaret Thatcher back in the 1980′s and known to most Londoners as ‘Ken’.

In years gone by I would have said “Vote for Ken, he is the only candidate who actually understands London.” This time I am not so sure. I could be that I think he has been around too long – he is 67 this year – I think that Labour would have been better with Oona King as their candidate, but they plumped for the devil they knew instead. A few other things are also bothering me. There is a vague whiff of Anti-Semitism around some of his statements. There is also a feeling that he has been opaque about his financial affairs. Having said all that, his policies, cutting public transport fares and the reintroduction (in London) of the Educational Maintenance Allowance, and support for childcare, seem to me to be the best package on offer and look affordable.
Along with every other candidate he pledges to reduce crime and make housing more affordable. I can’t recall ever having heard a politician pledge to allow crime to increase, so I think we will ignore that one. Making housing more affordable is more easily said than done and while I am sure they are all sincere in their wish to get housing cost down, again I think that should be taken with a pinch of salt.

My vote, without any great enthusiasm will be cast for Ken Livingston. As the Mayoral election is a sort of Alternative Vote, I was toying with the idea of giving my first preference to either Siobhan Benita or Jenny Jones, with my second preference to Ken Livingstone, but I think I might as well just vote for him and leave the second preference blank. There is no point in putting a minor candidate as your second choice, because they will all be out by the time the second choice votes are counted. If you want to support a minor candidate put them as your first choice and the vote for Livingstone as your second preference.

As for the London Assembly my advice is this vote Labour for the Constituency Member (elected on First Past the Post) and vote Green for the London wide additional member – we need some greens on the assembly to make sure that the other parties keep to their pledges on the environment.

So to summarise this is how I recommend that you vote

• Mayor – Ken Livingston – reluctantly
• Constituency Member – Labour
• London Wide – Green

A letter to my MP #NHSBILL

Below is the text of a letter (well email actually) that I have sent to my MP. He is Tom Brake (Lib Dem) Carshalton & Wallington.

Mr. Brake,
I am writing to you as a constituent who believes that the purpose of the NHS bill is not to improve the National Health Service but to facilitate its systematic destruction.

Given that all the Royal Medical Colleges, and everyone who has thought about the NHS bill consider that it will be disastrous for the National Health Service and ultimately for the majority of the people in this country.
This is the introduction to a piece in the British Medical Journal:

“Entitlement to free health services in England will be curtailed by the Health and Social Care Bill currently before parliament. The bill sets out a new statutory framework that would abolish the duty of primary care trusts (PCTs) to secure health services for everyone living in a defined geographical area. New clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) will arrange provision of fewer government funded health services and determine the scope of these services independently of the secretary of state for health. They may delegate this decision to commercial companies. The bill also provides for health services to be arranged by local authorities, with provision for new charging powers for services currently provided free through the NHS (clauses 1, 12, 13, 17, and 49), and it will give the secretary of state an extraordinary power to exclude people from the health service. Taken together the measures would facilitate the transition from tax financed healthcare to the mixed financing model of the United States. We provide an analysis of the key legal reforms that will govern policy development and implementation if the bill is enacted.”

The full article can be found here I strongly recommend you read this.
As you can see the authors consider that the Bill will allow charging for NHS services currently provided free at he point of delivery and allow the exclusion of groups of people from receiving treatment under the NHS completely.

I would urge you read it consider the opinions set out in it and vote against the bill.
Regards
John Manderson

If you care about what this bill proposes, which in my opinion is the dismantling of the National Health Service and its replacement with something along the lines of the American health care model, I would urge you to write to your MP expressing your opposition.
If you aren’t sure who your MP is or how to contact them this link http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ will help you find them.
As Ben Goldacre (@bengoldacre) tweeted

NHS is a historical aberration, built at a time when ppl better than us gave a shit. When it goes, it won’t be rebuilt

Write to your MP especially if he or she is a Liberal Democrat. They are all seriously worried that they will be out of a job come the next election when the Labour supporters (like me) that have elected them since 1997 decide to vote Labour again – even if it does mean I end up with Tory MP.

Fred Goodwin – Justice at Last?

Fred Goodwin (aka Fred the Shred) is no longer Sir Fred Goodwin, but has become one of us again, albeit one of us with a £350,000 per year pension. The Queen has stripped him of his knighthood.

The Guardian reports:

Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, has been stripped of his knighthood by the Queen on the advice of the forfeiture committee.
It was awarded by the previous Labour government in 2004 for services to banking .
The London Gazette announced that he had brought the honours system into disrepute.
Goodwin has no right of appeal, and in accordance with custom was given no right to make representations to the forfeiture committee, a group of four permanent secretaries. The authority to rescind an honour rests with the Queen alone.
David Cameron said: “I welcome the forfeiture committee’s decision on Fred Goodwin’s knighthood. The FSA [Financial Services Authority] report into what went wrong at RBS made clear where the failures lay and who was responsible. The proper process has been followed and I think we’ve ended up with the right decision.”

The full article can be read here.

I am not against him losing his knighthood, but I feel that it is just a token gesture. I agree with the sentiments expressed by a Unite spokesperson:

David Fleming, Unite’s national officer, said: “It is a token gesture to strip Fred Goodwin of his knighthood, but one which will be well received by the thousands of workers who lost their jobs during his rule.

What I am more bothered about is that Fred Goodwin is now the scapegoat for the banking industry. All the sins of the industry are now heaped onto his shoulders, and he has been loose in the desert. The banking system can the carry on as before, its sins suitably atoned for.

As I was driving home, listening to the news on the radio, another thought occurred to me as the pundits weighed in with their thoughts. Mr Fred Goodwin has not even been charged with a criminal offence, let alone convicted of anything.

This man was found guilty of perjury and perverting the course of justice and sentenced to four years in prison (of which he served two). He is still allowed to call himself Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare, and (if he has the brass neck, which he probably has) can attach the words “The Right Honourable” to the front of the title.

So I am looking forward to hearing Eddie Mair open the PM programme with the announcement that “Jeffrey Archer has been relieved of his Lordship and is now to be known only as Mr Jeff Archer.”

Can we have our ball back? … please

This strikes me as perhaps just a touch cheeky and optimistic.

President Barack Obama has said the US government has requested that Tehran return the surveillance drone captured by Iran’s military earlier this month.

BBC News – US asks Iran to return captured drone.

Now I can appreciate why the United States would like their spy plane back, what with all the top-secret anti-radar coatings and engines and the like. Not to mention whatever data it had picked up about Iranian nuclear installations and other interesting factoids. But do you think there is much chance? I suppose the Iranians could be a bit like the janitor when I was at primary school, and hold onto it for a day or two just to make a point then give it back.

No probably not.

Cameron’s Tories are the wrong kind of right.

Tim Mongomerie editor of the Conservative Home* blog had a piece in yesterday’s Guardian in which he argues that David Cameron is not pursuing the right kind of right-wing policies.

I believe that Britain wants a party with rightwing policies but it wants a rightwing party that demonstrates a deep concern for the ordinary voter. In other words, we are talking about a party that occupies the common ground rather than some milk-and-water centre ground. A party of the common ground takes a tough approach to immigration, crime and welfare, but also wants to protect the NHS and look after the poor. Cameron should have aimed to turn the Conservatives into a rightwing party with a heart; instead he turned it into a leftwing party with cuts.

So a bit more like the UKIP or the BNP and a bit less like the LibDems then Tim?

*Excessive reading of this blog may cause an uncontrollable increase in blood pressure and a reduction in IQ

Shami Chakrabarti defends the Human Rights Act

Today’s Guardian featured a discussion between Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti and a Tory MP (Dominic Raab) on the subject if the Human Rights Act. Chakrabarti won.

For those of you not aware of the background to this, the Tories would like to repeal the Human Rights Act and replace it with their ‘British Bill of Rights’. The ‘British Bill of Rights’ will include nothing that The Daily Mail might disagree with. It is possible that The Daily Mail may in fact be asked to produce the first draft. The Liberal Democrats, possibly for the first time are digging their heels in and saying NO! as is Ken Clarke (I think).

Anyway back to Shami Chakrabarti taking an ignorant Tory apart.

Dominic Raab: The tabloids blame everything on the Human Rights Act (HRA) and, in my view, the NGOs think it’s perfect. I think there’s a middle ground. The HRA didn’t do a great deal to protect some of our freedoms – against ID cards, the DNA database, against some of the surveillance where children were followed home from school to check their catchment area.

Shami Chakrabarti: That was our case, and we brought it under article 8 of the HRA, so I disagree with you.

That was just the start of it.

The bottom line of all of this is that for me as a middle class, middle aged, British born, white male, with all the privilege and entitlement that brings, a change from the Human Rights Act to what ever legislation the Tories might introduce probably wouldn’t make any difference. As long as we remain a democracy my human rights will probably be protected. The mark of what we are as a society is how we protect the human rights of people less lovable than me.

Rioting & Looting in London

I did try to put together some sort of post about the past few days events. But I found that after expressing my feelings of loss and dismay about Reeves Furniture Shop (a kind of iconic building in Croydon), and a fair bit of London Road being burnt down, all I was coming up with were worse platitudes than Boris Johnson. So I decided not to bother.

I did however come across this post by a blogger who goes by the name of Motown. He lives in Camberwell and gives his eye-witness account of the (comparatively) minor rioting/looting that took place in Camberwell on Monday evening.

Billy Bragg on Murdoch Phone Hacking and the rest

Billy Bragg makes some very pertinent musical points about the Murdoch Empire:

The background (if you don’t know the story already) to his chorus line “Scousers never buy the Sun” is the virtual city-wide boycott of the Sun that has held for over twenty years. Following the disaster at the Hillsborough Stadium in which 96 Liverpool fans were killed, the Sun published various disgusting and untrue allegations about the conduct of the Liverpool fans at the game. This article gives the background

Rupert Murdoch, Phone Hacking and Press Regulation

Will Cookson has an interesting post on media regulation, where he argues against our current media ownership rules. He says;.

We need to look at the ownership rules of the media for our country. They are not like other goods and services. They can strike at the root of our democracy. If someone like Rupert Murdoch can summon senior politicians at short notice to the other side of the world because of his power then that is bad for democracy.

The media should only be allowed to be owned by UK citizens resident in this country. Political parties are no longer allowed to receive gifts from overseas residents and the same should apply to the media ownership.

Not that much for me to disagree with there, though drafting legislation in such a way that it cannot be challenged (especially under EU competition law) will be difficult. Plus all our main political parties and the City do not think that nationality of ownership is anything that we should worry about. Convincing them otherwise without voting for a UKIP or a Socialist Workers Party government at the next election will be difficult.

Where I tend to disagree with Will  is on his proposals for regulation, which I think have implications around freedom of the press, and freedom of speech in general. He says;

We must have an external independent ombudsman for the media whatever the media throw at the politicians (and be prepared for some very nasty stories about politicians with innuendo and smears in the early autumn).

Newspapers have always been the tools and playthings of the rich and powerful. Owners in the past like Lord Beaverbrook and the Rothermeres  (owners of the Daily Mail) have always used their publications to persuade, bribe (by granting or withholding support) and if necessary bully governments into doing their bidding. Whether Rupert Murdoch has a larger and more insidious influence is a moot point

I am sure that journalists on the past bought information and were on far too friendly terms with various police officers. They didn’t hack mobile phones (they didn’t exist), but probably had ways of tapping landlines if they thought that the story would be worth the risk. But the sins of the past do not excuse the sins of the present day.

Even phone hacking gets a bit tricky. I don’t want my mobile hacked. I don’t want Milly Dowler’s parents’ phones hacked. Neither do I want the phones and emails of relatives of service personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan hacked. But, say a newspaper has very tenuous evidence that a senior politician is accepting bribes to influence the placing of government contracts , would I worry if the newspaper hacked his or her phone as part of their investigation?

The hard question is what to do about it. It is without doubt that what happened at the News of the World was beyond the competency of the Press Complaints Commission as it is presently set up. The PCC does valuable arbitration and conciliation work and it needs to carry on doing it, but without increased powers it should drop the pretence that it is a regulator.

A truly effective regulator has to have the powers to stop a story being published in the first place. Our ridiculous libel laws (“super-injunctions”) are often used by celebrities to just that end. The publishing of a story , or putting a celebrity adulterer’s name to a twitter #hashtag. puts the information into the public domain. Taking it back is impossible. The regulator can do nothing other than deal with the complaints.

The idea of a state appointed “independent” press regulator worries me. Would a state appointed regulator have allowed the Daily Telegraph break the story of the MP’s expenses scandal? MP’s, and probably not just the guilty parties, would have complained to the regulator and asked for the suspension of the story. The Telegraph bought the information. The information, was probably stolen. I think that an independent regulator would have prevented the Telegraph publishing the story.

How far will the press regulators powers go? Will every story in every newspaper need submitting to him or her before publication? If not, what will be criteria that triggers the need for submission? If a newspaper (or other outlet like say a blog) publishes an unsuitable story what powers will the regulator have to correct them? Will the regulators powers only apply to newspapers, or will they extend to include all publications? If the regulators powers cover all publications, will I have to send my blog posts, will they come back with the spelling and grammar corrected and will the regulator reading my blog posts show up in my statistics? Do we want to regulate unsuitable stories or just unsuitable methods of journalism?
We must have these, and probably more questions satisfactorily before we head down this path.

I think that keeping press regulation voluntary, with the PCC having increased powers to demand retractions and insist on the positioning of the retractions within the newspaper, and possibly even suspending a publication in the worst cases might work. If, as is currently the case with the Express group newspapers, they refuse to be bound by the PCC rulings then OFCOM will take over their regulation. OFCOM has the powers to insist that the owners of a non compliant company sell their stakes in it (at a loss if necessary).

Oh, and applying the law, not just to “rogue” reporters, but extending culpability to those who employ them.The possibility of the Rupert and James Murdoch, Andy Coulson and Rebekah Wade, spending some time behind bars would really get the attention of the owners and editors of newspapers. I understand that the instances of phone hacking have dropped to round about zero since Glenn Mulcaire and Clive Goodman were jailed.
I am also sure that it is against the law for police officers to pass confidential information to third parties, with or without money changing hands. If the law needs clarifying then clarify it, but again applying the law will be more effective.

Debt Crises and Paying Your Taxes.

The budgetary problems of Greece are again making the headlines. The country is in a mess, and because of it the Euro-zone is also potentially in a mess. If the Euro goes tits up, the banking crisis of 2008 will look like a bun-fight at the church fête. The question I want to explore is how did we get here?

There are two basic reasons why Greece got itself in to its current situation:

• The previous government cooked the books
• Paying your taxes is seen as a voluntary activity – especially by the rich

Philip Inman in exploring the possible outcomes of the crisis, states this as part of the most optimistic (and least likely) scenario:

Greece’s rich landowners, shipping magnates, doctors and dentists all agree to pay their taxes. As City credit analyst Jan Randolph of IHS says: “The Achilles heel of the Greek economy is tax evasion. If the rich paid their taxes there wouldn’t be a problem.”

Grecian doctors and dentists apparently use accountancy systems that British “cash-in-hand” builders might be advised to study. The mega-rich just avoid paying taxes at all.

Jason Rosehouse touches on this in the context of American politics

The power brokers in the Republican party are primarily Wall Street barons and other members of the super rich. On domestic policy they care almost exclusively about redistributing wealth upwards and in creating an entirely unregulated environment for corporations. The flip side is that anything that might benefit poor or middle class people they oppose. That is why they will fight tooth and nail to oppose the tiniest tax increase on millionaires, but will then turn around and accuse schoolteachers (!!) of being greedy. It is why they openly despise the public schools, and propose ludicrous, unworkable tax schemes that overwhelmingly benefit the super rich. It’s why they are so horrified by the idea that the health care system might be reformed to make it possible for millions of uninsured to obtain insurance. (It’s certainly not that they had a better idea for reforming the system. And notice that when they controlled both Congress and the Presidency from 2000-2006, they never even mentioned the health care crisis. As far as they are concerned, forty million people without health insurance simply isn’t a problem.)

This increasingly the situation throughout the western world. The rich basically want it all. They want the state to educate and train their workforce. Suitably trained they want our labour at the lowest possible price. They expect the state to protect their property, to make sure that the transport system and services work, and in the last resort to bail them out. But they are more and more reluctant to pay for any of it.

They demand lower corporation tax. They demand that the 50% income tax rate be removed. Multi-nationals declare their profits where ever it suits them, regardless of where those profits have been earned. Thus they deprive developing nations of large amounts of needed and legitimate revenue.

The middle classes in the west used to think that at least we had a share in all this corporate greed through our pension schemes, but even that is going. We are now too expensive to keep in our old age, and paying into a employee pension scheme damages corporate profitability. Besides the middle classes are no longer needed by the Masters of the Universe©. Someone on the other side of the globe can do (with a few exceptions) your job just as easily and for half, or less, the wage that you need to live on in the west.

When Bill Clinton left office in 2001 the American Federal Budget was in surplus, now it is in massive deficit, essentially because tax cuts for billionaires, one and a half unnecessary wars and allowing the banks to run amok. Many of the Republican candidates for the 2012 presidential elections are making noises about cutting taxes for the rich, and cutting corporation tax, “balancing” the budget by cutting environmental protection and programs such as Medicaid and Medicare. One of them Michelle Bachmann is proposing increasing the tax burden on the working classes to help offset this.

In this country the Tories haven’t gone that far yet. They would like to abolish the 50% income tax rate for high earners. They would like to cut corporation tax. But it is difficult to do so when you are trying to claim that the country is bankrupt. If you are lopping £20 billion of the NHS budget and closing Sure Start Centres, a give away to the rich just might be the trigger for either riots or the LibDems to develop a bit of backbone, neither of which is desirable from a Tory point of view.

Getting back to my original point; Government is a necessity in any community over about one hundred and fifty, and governments need to raise revenue. Graduated taxation of income is the fairest way to do it.
If the rich are not prepared to pay their share, which they did (up to a point) in the past, then all the west is heading in the same direction as Greece.