More BS Than "Big Society"

Originally posted at:  http://barryphelps.posterous.com/more-bs-than-big-society

The ConDem Coalition's "Big Society" And How It Will Affect The Borough

There is a scene in the film "Angela's Ashes" where Frank McCourt's impoverished mother, played by Emily Watson, went to a local welfare board to plead for some money to feed her family.  It was a humiliating experience.  If the ConDem Coalition Government has its way, this will be the future for many impoverished families throughout the country, as the "Big Society" manifests itself as a postcode lottery for social welfare provision by local charities and voluntary organisations staffed by local busybodies and individuals with missions to moralise the poor.  Readers of this blog might be sceptical that this is where the "Big Society" will take us, but some of those experts who have studied what exactly this notion of the "Big Society", so often referred to by the Coalition, actually means have come precisely to the conclusion that it involves the dismantling of the welfare state and collective provision of government services.  You can read what one of these experts has to say here:

http://www.neweconomics.org/blog/2010/07/19/camerons-big-society-will-leave-the-poor-and-powerless-behind

Although the government hasn't given a detailed programme of what the "Big Society" will mean, from what we know it seems that it will involve the replacement of collective and state provision of services with greater reliance on voluntary, charitable, and private sector provision in such areas of welfare, social services for the poor and elderly, housing, education, healthcare, and even policing.  Some of us who have studied British political history might have the feeling of deja vu all over again, as these ideas, although packaged as new by the Coalition, are as old as the nineteenth century.  The debate concerning state versus voluntary and private provision of services was very lively at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly at the time when Lloyd George was Chancellor of the Exchequer and was laying the foundations of the welfare state.  In fact Lloyd George was playing something of a catch up with the rival economic power of Germany, which had pioneered the welfare state and state social insurance in the late nineteenth century.  The debate we are going to have about the ConDem "Big Society" is going to be a rehash of the old arguments we can study in our history books, whereby the case for state collective provision for welfare and other services will have to be made all over again, only this time it will be about dismantling state collective provision rather than establishing it.  Back at the beginning of the twentieth century there were studies by many early sociologists and philanthropists such as Rowntree's studies of York, which showed considerable poverty was in no way eradicated or diminished by charitable and voluntary sector provision.  This was the main argument of those proposing state provision of welfare and other services, in that charities and the voluntary sector just would not be able to provide what is needed or provide a consistent universal standard of help and service nationally.  Also there was the stigma of those who were poor and needed help having to apply for something discretionary, rather than as a statutory right.

Anybody studying Rowntree's periodic studies of poverty in York will note the gradual improvement in the condition of the poor as each instalment of the welfare state was being constructed throughout the first half of the twentieth century.  Charitable and voluntary provision for the poor, as well as other social services and healthcare, were supplementary to the state becoming the main provider for social security, social services, and free health care through the National Health Service.  This is something which Britain could be proud of.  Most Conservatives accepted this arrangement, such as Harold Macmillan and Edward Heath.  Even Margaret Thatcher never went as far as the ConDems in their plans to dismantle the welfare state and even the National Health Service and to take us back to the nineteenth century where such services will be local, and the voluntary and charitable sectors will be involved in service provision.

But how would all this manifest itself on a local scale in the borough?  The blog will try to provide a preview of how the dismantling of the state's provision of welfare and social services, and many other services provided by the local authority,  will affect local residents.  The devolution of many government and local government statutory services to voluntary and private bodies, will be a recipe for chaos and a postcode lottery for service provision for not just the most vulnerable and poor in our community, but also for all residents who rely on statutory and regulated services from the Town Hall.  It will be a charter for busy bodies and for crones and cronies of the Town Hall to establish themselves with quasi authority, and funded by your Council Tax to govern and intrude in all our lives in many areas of service provision currently provided by the Town Hall.  In a prosperous borough such as Kensington and Chelsea, there might be no shortage of articulate individuals with the time and the money to engage in many local initiatives to bring decision making on many issues away from the Town Hall to Residents Associations, or local societies or local planning campaigns.  This will ensure their voices will be heard more than the inarticulate and those too busy with work to get involved in local decision making or providing local services.  Do we really want to move to a society where a committee of prosperous residents acquire for themselves powerful decision making roles over many aspects of our lives, from local policing, to parking regulations, to planning decision making, as well as local charities being the port of call for when we are poor?  Do we really want a post code lottery for finding a General Practitioner who will be willing to provide an expensive but effective medication for a chronic illness?  Some parts of the borough may be very desirable places to live in, but others may deteriorate with poor standards of service provision, dragging down house prices, and with there never being enough money to maintain the infrastructure of the area.  Also, there will be the risk of increased poverty and crime, as collective provision of social services and welfare is withdrawn in favour of more local initiatives with limited budgets which cannot cope with the extent of local need.  In short we will be going back to how things were in the nineteenth century.  Except that the world has changed much since then, and the problems which gave rise to the intervention of the state in the twentieth century will be even more urgent after we get a taste of what the ConDem Coalition has in store for us.

Coming Soon: More BS Than "Big Society"

Originally posted at:  http://barryphelps.posterous.com/coming-soon-more-bs-than-big-society

The ConDem Coalition's "Big Society" And How It Will Affect The Borough

There has been much talk among the chattering classes concerning the Coalition's big idea concerning the "Big Society".  But the government hasn't given a detailed programme of what the "Big Society" will mean, but from what we know it seems that it will involve the replacement of collective and state provision of services with greater reliance on voluntary, charitable, and private sector provision in such areas of welfare, social services for the poor and elderly, housing, education, healthcare, and even policing.  Some of us who have studied British political history might have the feeling of deja vu all over again, as these ideas, although packaged as new by the Coalition, are as old as the nineteenth century.  The debate concerning state versus voluntary and private provision of services was very lively at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly at the time when Lloyd George was Chancellor of the Exchequer and was laying the foundations of the welfare state.  But how would all this manifest itself on a local scale in the borough?  The blog will attempt to provide a preview of how the dismantling of the state's provision of welfare and social services, and many other services provided by the local authority, and their devolution to voluntary and private bodies, will be a recipe for chaos and a postcode lottery for service provision for not just the most vulnerable and poor in our community, but also for all residents who rely on statutory and regulated services from the Town Hall.  It will be a charter for busy bodies and for crones and cronies of the Town Hall to establish themselves with quasi authority, and funded by your Council Tax to govern and intrude in all our lives in many areas of service provision currently provided by the Town Hall.

Liberal Democrat Throws A Hissy Fit At The Blog

Originally posted at: http://barryphelps.posterous.com/liberal-democrat-throws-a-hissy-fit-at-the-bl

One of our writers at the blog received an email from a senior local Liberal Democrat who was closely involved in Linda Wade's campaign.  The blog is not going to name this individual at this stage, and it will not reproduce the email on this site.  However, we feel it is important to share with our readers the tone and sentiments of this email inorder to refute some of the arguments that will be used by Liberal Democrats to justify what they will be doing both at the Town Hall and in national government to support their Conservative colleagues.  The email could only be described as a hissy fit from this individual who clearly took exception to this blog's criticism of Linda Wade as not representing change but instead as being an appendage of the Conservative Party at the Town Hall, who will join with her Conservative colleagues in voting for the forthcoming policies of the Coalition government as they affect the borough.  Our writer was then subjected to a patronising and sarcastic lesson in politics, the likes of which he never received even from his supervisor when he was writing his PhD.  But our writer is used to Liberal Democrat pretensions to knowing everything about the art of politics.  At the blog we believe that irritation with the Liberal Democrat tactics and opportunistic campaign techniques is shared by anybody who has had experience in fighting with them or against them in politics.

There are two parts to this email, one is the hissy fit and the other part is where some attempts at argument were made presumably after this individual had calmed down.  The blog will deal with some of the criticisms made in this email.  One of the criticisms was that the blog is too serious.  We make no apology for that.  The blog is serious because its primary purpose was to expose the sexualisation of young underage boys by the now ex-Councillor Barry Phelps.  This blog would not be light hearted about such a serious issue.  Councillor Phelps might have thought his emails sexualising young boys frivolous and witty, and one of his recipients, a member of the Committee of the National Liberal Club and an ex-Parliamentary candidate, might also have thought these emails witty, but we do not.  We have discussed other issues on this blog, but we do not work to be light entertainment, but where it is appropriate, any satire or humour flows naturally from the topic under discussion and would not have to be worked at inorder to try to titillate our readers, who we believe are intelligent and sophisticated and would see through anything which was not just genuine journalism.

The Liberal Democrats are being wooed and screwed

In terms of a more serious argument put forward in this email, it was alleged by the Liberal Democrat that this blog has no understanding of the coalitions which have existed in local government between different parties for many years.  Of course, we know about these coalitions.  For example, when our writer was active in the Social Democratic Party in the 1980s, the SDP-Liberal Alliance as it was then known formed a coalition in one London borough with the Conservatives to keep out a left wing Labour Party from taking power.  However, in this case there was no SDP-Liberal Alliance coalition with the Conservatives in national government.  The SDP-Liberal Alliance was able to argue, convincingly, that it was supporting the Conservative group on the Council to avoid a radical left wing Labour administration, but there was no question of the SDP-Liberal Alliance providing more than just limited support for strictly local policies to help run the Council.  There was no question of an ideological meeting of minds and camaraderie on the scale witnessed by the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives in the Coalition government.  But of course there are many Councils which have been run by coalitions of different parties having to work together to form an administration.  What is different now is that the context for these local government coalitions has changed along with the national political landscape.  In areas where the Liberal Democrats are in control or in  coalition, they will not be free to ignore or challenge or alleviate the policies of their government as they affect the local authority where they are in power.  Party loyalty will now extend to loyalty to their government, and increasingly, loyalty to their coalition partners, the Conservatives.  It's just practical politics, and does not involve any political insight.  This blog could be accused of stating the obvious, but instead our Liberal Democrat has challenged this and states that this is nonsense.  While the Liberal Democrat might wish to preserve the fiction that the Liberal Democrats locally are free agents from the party nationally, we should consider that maybe we would argue the same if we were members of a party which has slumped in the opinion polls for its actions in joining in government with the Conservatives.  However much the Liberal Democrats might wish to run away from this new reality, for the rest of us the days of voting Liberal Democrat inorder to get the Tories out are over.

The changed political reality is that the Liberal Democrats are in Coalition with the Conservatives, they are the government and this government is bringing in spending cuts affecting many areas of local government services, including housing benefit and other important local services for vulnerable people. The Liberal Democrats will have to support what their government is doing in implementing these policies locally.  It is not like before when the Liberal Democrats were not in government and were more free and independent in their position to oppose cuts in services.  They have a bargain with the Conservatives to implement these very unpopular cuts inorder to get their referendum on the  Alternative Vote.  Both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party know that when their party is in government, they pay the price for the political failures of their party in local elections.  The local situation is not hermetically sealed from what is happening to their party nationally.

The Liberal Democrat who wrote to our writer also accused the blog of supporting the Labour Party in the Earls Court by election.  Some clarification is needed here.  It is true that we recommended our readers to consider voting for the Labour candidate for a number of reasons.  One of these reasons was the appalling lack of choice between the Conservative and the Liberal Democrat candidates and the prospect of no real change in how things are done at the Town Hall if either of them were elected.  The blog was saddened by the lack of choice for the voters of Earls Court from among the main parties.  The blog then did its best to inquire about whether there was a Labour candidate and to find out something about what his position was on some of the issues the blog has campaigned about.  The blog believes that the Labour Party candidate raised some important issues about cuts in housing benefits for poor residents which the Conservative and the Liberal Democrats were quite understandably unwilling to highlight in their campaigns, not least because both parties agree on these cuts.  The blog was open minded about which party to endorse at the beginning of the by election campaign, although it appeared unlikely that the Conservatives would be responsive to the issues that the blog was campaigning about.  Indeed there is no natural antipathy of the writers of this blog towards the Liberal Democrats as most of us here actually voted for the Liberal Democrats in the general election.  However, we all share a sense of betrayal by the Liberal Democrats by their conduct since the general election in joining a Coalition with the Conservatives and endorsing such a severe programme of cuts affecting the most vulnerable, the elderly, the sick and the disabled, in our society.  This disllusionment with the Liberal Democrats is shared by many other voters, as we observe the Mephisto like zeal for power at the expense of their manifesto promises, their historic values, and the suffering the vulnerable and poor in our society will have to endure as the cuts take effect.

Nonetheless the blog gave the local Liberal Democrats a chance to see who their local candidate might be and if their campaign would be for real change locally.  With their choice of Linda Wade, and her response to the litmus test of whether she would call for the resignation of her friend Jennifer Ware from the Standards Committee, this blog became convinced that the Liberal Democrat rhetoric about change at the Town Hall would not be substantiated by action.  The Liberal Democrats appeared to be rather opportunistic in its condemnation of expenses at the Town Hall, but when it came to condemning Jennifer Ware for her conflict of interest, there was a reluctance to condemn her.  This gives rise to the understandable suspicion that Linda Wade will not condemn Jennifer Ware because she is her friend and a fellow Liberal Democrat.  We should remember that Jennfer Ware was on the Standards Committee which decided on the complaint made by Mr Donald Cameron against the then Councillor Phelps.  She did not declare publicly her friendship with Phelps.  This panel gave Phelps the lightest possible penalty of just making an apology to the Mayor for bringing the Council into disrepute.  It is the most disgraceful example of failing the community in Earls Court and the borough, that a so called independent member of the panel should be on friendly terms with the accused to the detriment of providing a fair and unbiased hearing of Mr Cameron's complaint.  Ordinary people do not have many means of holding their elected representatives to account, especially between elections, and when those elected representatives engage in misconduct towards an ordinary resident the Standards Committee is the main means by which to hold them accountable.  Yet it seems that Linda Wade is happy for her friend Jennifer Ware to continue sitting on the Standards Committee despite this deplorable conduct and the fact that this violates all priniciples of fairness and transparency in the handling of complaints from members of the public against elected local councillors.

Finally, as it is the belief of this blog that the Liberal Democrats will not be able to maintain a charade of being an alternative to the Conservatives for much longer, whether in local government or nationally, they would do well to consider how they are being wooed and screwed by David Cameron, the Conservative leader.  The love in at the moment is drawing the Liberal Democrats into a greater dependency on the Conservatives, until eventually the Liberal Democrats will be absorbed by the Conservatives, after having split with their more radical and social democratic wing of the party.  It seems like there will be another chapter to include in George Dangerfield's The Strange Death of Liberal England.

Coming Soon: Earls Court By Election Results Analysis

Originally posted at:  http://barryphelps.posterous.com/coming-soon-earls-court-by-election-results-a

This blog will be providing an analysis of the results in the Earls Court by election when they are available.  Of interest, will be of course, if the Conservatives hold the seat, and by how many votes, whether their vote has slumped, and whether the Liberal Democrat challenge was just a lot of hot air and needless felling of trees to provide their deluge of leaflets.  It will also be interesting to see if Labour come in second or third place, and whether the Labour vote has increased, suggesting Lib Dem defections to Labour, or decreased, suggesting that there might have been some tactical voting by Labour supporters, or maybe that Labour voters just stayed at home.  In a council by election, turn out would be expected to be low.  But in the special circumstances of the by election in Earls Court, with the resignation of the pervert Phelps and the strong campaign mounted by the Lib Dems, it would not be surprising if the turn out will be slightly higher than expected.  This by election is also a miniature test of popularity for the Lib Dems, whose support has slumped nationally since joining the Conservatives in the government.  A disappointing result for the Lib Dems would add to the increasing bad news for Lib Dems across the country who are doing poorly in by elections.  It would also increase tensions within the party.  One of the writers on our team at this blog has had considerable past experience of involvement in the Social Democratic Party, which broke away from the Labour Party in 1981 and subsequently merged with the Liberals to form the Lib Dems.  Although no longer politically active, this writer can provide some insight into the tensions within the Lib Dems arising from that social democratic element which still retains Labour party values and will find Coalition with the Conservatives increasingly intolerable.  So in a wider context, a poor result for the Lib Dems will feed into these increasing tensions within the party.

Election Day Blues

Originally posted at: http://barryphelps.posterous.com/election-day-blues

The polls open today, Thursday, 16 September, for the by elections in the Earls Court and Cremorne wards.  As this blog has played an important role in exposing the disgusting emails sent by the pervert ex-Councillor Phelps which led to his subsequent resignation, it is important to reflect at this time on what is sadly a missed opportunity for change.  This blog has focussed on the Earls Court by election, as Phelps was one of the ward councillors and his impact and public profile locally, has been enormous.  The issue of Phelps and the sleaze that he represented was therefore a relevant issue particularly in this ward, and it was hoped that any by election campaign would open up opportunities for real change at the Town Hall.  However, having provided coverage of the by election for readers of this blog, it will come as no surprise that we have been underwhelmed and very disappointed at the offerings of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.  The Labour Party has been invisible in this campaign and is disappointing for a different reason, that their campaign highlighting important issues that will affect many vulnerable and poor people in Earls Court were not discussed or publicised enough.

This blog has felt very disappointed with the Liberal Democrats, who began with much promise of change, but then selected Linda Wade as their candidate, who was part of the problem and was compromised by her friendship with Jennifer Ware.  So it was no surprise that when asked if she would call for Jennifer Ware's resignation from the Standards Committee, she fudged the issue and could not give a straight answer.  This was a litmus test of Linda Wade's commitment to bringing about change at the Town Hall, and she failed it, and it provided no encouragement to think that her rhetoric of change would be matched by action.  But moving in the same narrow pool of the Earls Court Society as Malcolm Spalding, and being a friend and a political colleague of Jennifer Ware, Linda Wade has too many ties to the ancien regime to make her truly independent to challenge the way things are done at the Town Hall.  The Lib Dems might have wanted, tactically, to capitalise on any anti-Phelps feeling there might be in the ward, and may also find it useful to attack financial sleaze at the Town Hall, but this blog doubts this is more than just campaign rhetoric.  The Lib Dems at the Town Hall are not known for campaigning on these issues.  Jennifer Ware, herself a Lib Dem, enjoyed a friendship with Phelps and has publicly defended him despite those disgusting emails.  It is difficult to see how Jennifer Ware, especially in the light of her disgraceful failure to declare publicly an interest at the Standards hearing earlier this year, has been anything other than a very useful tool for the Cockell leadership through her role on the Standards Committee.  Yet Linda Wade is happy, it seems, not to call for Ware's resignation.

Therefore, whoever wins in the Earls Court by election, whether it is Malcolm Spalding or Linda Wade, this blog is sadly confident that there will be no change in how matters are done at the Town Hall.  Those who have put their confidence in Linda Wade will be disappointed.  But there is one other observation that can be made from this by election.  That is the ridiculous situation of having two parties that are in a Coalition in government, pretending to be fighting each other at local level when in fact both parties are committed to supporting their government's policies, including those policies which will have a direct impact in the borough.  It was just a contest between two personalities, with different brands and packaging.  Anyone walking past Earls Court Tube station on Wednesday evening would have seen the surreal sight of former Lib Dem MP Susan Kramer and a cohort of Lib Dems handing out leaflets alongside Spalding's supporters.  You have the impression of the good old days, where Lib Dems fought the Tories, but the reality now is different and this blog believes that the Lib Dems have not yet really accepted that they are now colleagues with the Conservatives and are now in government with them.  It is important for the Labour voters in Earls Court to realise this changed reality too, as the days of tactical voting for the Lib Dems to get the Tories out are now gone.