Public policy

Leviathan

  • Police and press

    A (very) sober way of dealing with police leaks

    Jan 4th 2012, 17:03 by A McE

    It will not be a lot of fun being a crime reporter in the capital for the foreseeable future. A report by Dame Elizabeth Filkin into relations between hacks and the Metropolitan police paints a dim picture of alcohol-soaked encounters with “flirty” journalists (it seems safe to assume Dame Elizabeth means female journalists talking to male police officers, though that is a bit of an assumption).

    As parliamentary standards commissioner, Dame Elizabeth jarred so much with Labour ministers that she was squeezed out of the role. But this report of her recommendations in the Guardian today does suggest some pitfalls of a too stentorian approach to public probity: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/jan/04/met-police-warned-of-drinking-with-journalists.

     Of course, in the wake of the hacking scandal in Fleet Street and failure of the police fully to investigate charges of malpractice, both in hacking and the payment of officers for information, we must expect there to be a clearer, sterner approach to the media on the part of the police. Dame Elizabeth duly disdains the “carousing” which has marked relations between some crime reporters and the police. Full disclosure here –your blogger recalls being taken out for background briefing sessions by senior Met officers in a previous career incarnation, at which drinks flowed while an ambitious figure in the force explained precisely why his embattled boss should resign. A culture of behind-hand briefing in the police rivals anything politicians have to offer. That has been to the benefit of the press, but it has come at the price of a relationship which has often been too close for public comfort. 

    Still, recommendations here do err on the intrusive side. The report concludes that media contact should be, “permissible but not unconditional", so that officers must keep a record of what was discussed and prepare to be randomly audited. It does not seem likely however, that a source imparting a juicy secret will write it down afterwards for the record. A degree of real-life thinking is called for. A more fundamental objection is that the police in Britain serve the public and not the state and this report is at times inclined to overlook the distinction.

     There are other reasons why officers leak stories, beside financial reward, drink or flirtation. Sometimes they do so to highlight malpractice or sloppy work of the kind that impeded the inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s death in 1993 or the messy events around the police-shooting of the (innocent) terror-suspect Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005. We should not encourage a system in which failure is more likely to be hidden away than aired. The risk of an over-reaction to loose tongues at the Met is a culture of silence about embarrassments. The public interest would not be well served by that, even if the price of probity is an abstemious glass of lemonade.

  • NHS reform

    A dose of private funding that's good for the NHS

    Dec 27th 2011, 15:18 by A. McE

    THE fate of health-care reform since the grand retreats which began in of spring 2011 has been vague. Now Andrew Lansley, the health secretary who spent much of this year defending his sickly Health and Social Care Bill, has returned to launch another set of proposals which will put the cat among the pigeons. Existing foundation trusts, which run large hospitals, will be able to raise up to 49% of their funding from private work. This has brought forth more cries of a “two-tier health-care system”, a somewhat ritual denouncement which shies away from the fact that the real NHS is multi-tiered already, with doctors mixing private and public practice and widely varying levels of efficiency within the system. No one seriously pretends that a run-down hospital with funding problems is on the same “tier” as a top clinic in a university hospital. Or rather, some people do, but only for political, not clinical reasons.

    The aim of the new plan is to make foundation trusts more independent of government, allowing private income to replace falling central funding as the NHS struggles to meet its target of a £20 billion reduction in spending by 2014. For Andy Burnham, Labour’s health spokesman, this is merely, a “determination to turn our precious NHS into a US-style commercial system, where hospitals are more interested in profits than people.” It is, however, curiously similar in its approach to the independence of foundation hospitals, and the private-public mix in health care, to a plan first mooted by an enterprising Labour health secretary: Alan Milburn.

    Whatever their differences on detail, Mr Milburn and Mr Lansley share a common recognition that the health-care budget is not a bottomless pit. Mr Lansley wants additional income earned from private practice to be ploughed back into the NHS. It’s also worth remembering that the arguments about “co-payment”—people paying to top-up their health care—were around when Labour last thought seriously about health (which sadly, was some time ago). To maintain the NHS means finding new ways to help fund it. The argument that only a state-funded health system can work in Britain has long ignored an inconvenient truth: namely that outside periods of boom-time spending, the system is badly stretched, patchily managed and suffers from low productivity in too many areas.

    True, the NHS benefits from economies of scale and is highly valued for being free at the point of use. But it suffers from erratic financial management, especially in the larger trusts, many of which are struggling to make savings while running acceptable services. Bringing in more private practice would also expand opportunities for good managers who have private-sector experience. That is not something a modern health-care system should be ashamed or afraid of. The NHS never was a monolith and especially now, it cannot afford to indulge the illusion that it would be better if it were. David Cameron will need to throw his weight behind this reform if it is not to suffer death by a thousand cuts. He should do so. Here are a few words not often heard in 2011: Andrew Lansley is right on this one.

  • Changing the state

    How Dave's Big Society dream turned small

    Dec 13th 2011, 20:05 by A. McE. | LONDON

    LARGELY unremarked among the greater political dramas, the coalition’s Big Society aspirations have undergone a health-check and being found sorely wanting by the public accounts committee, which monitors progress of the big idea. In a report published today, the committee warned that the project is hampered by the lack of a clear implementation plan, was confused about its policy agenda and “requires substantial change in Whitehall and to the nature of government”. Apart from that, it's all going fine.

    On one level, David Cameron has bigger fish to fry. He needs growth, a settled relationship with the European Union after the summit and a coalition which functions well enough for his Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister to actually turn up and sit beside him when things get rough. But still, the prime minister chose to put his Big Society rhetoric at the heart of his election campaign and re-positioning rhetoric, so he must expect to be judged on it. One criticism does stand out as particularly justified, namely the treatment of charities and voluntary groups who were intended to help to deliver public services as an alternative to state, alongside big business. “Government must address the barriers such bodies experience in the contracting and commissioning system,” declares the report.

    That is the worst-kept secret in Whitehall. In truth many such bodies find themselves at the sharp end of contracts doled out to major providers, who can deliver economies of scale and are far better-placed to take risks in a chilly financial climate. In especially tough policy areas like the work programme to address unemployment, the insistence on payment-by-results stacks the odds towards larger providers, with the smaller and voluntary ones reduced to providing services for the hardest cases, often with uncertain outcomes and poor profit margins.

    The report recommends an impact assessment, to be applied to every government policy and Bill. This is added freight, alongside calls for impact assessments on women, which ministers are likely to resist or at least treat as an encumbrance. Finally—and more nebulously—there are calls for a “cultural shift” in Whitehall. Desirable surely: but elusive in times when the government machine is focused on implementing cuts and stimulating growth.

    Concrete matters like reductions in grant funding by local authorities have an immediate and negative impact on many Big Society projects. New measures like social impact bonds, which truly do have the potential to transform public services, are slow off the mark. The report’s conclusion that “the government has not been clear enough about what the Big Society means in practical terms” is uncontroversial. Mr Cameron set out to change the way that government worked. That is the right response to an over-mighty and inefficient state. But it needs political capital to flow from the top continuously. If the coalition does aspire  to be remembered for its role in changing the nature and practice of public service delivery in Britain, it has to be prepared to make the Big Society a lot more than just a slogan.

     

  • Party funding

    How not to pay for the party

    Nov 22nd 2011, 18:01 by A. McE.

    HOW MUCH should Leviathan fund political parties? Not to the tune of £100m, it seems, as it emerges that the three major parties are about to reject the proposals of the committee on standards in public life, which had been investigating the matter. Your blogger (who has toiled longer than is good for her in the undergrowth of party funding), would make two points.

    The first is that it was inevitable that the committee would recommend a strong element of state funding as a way of guaranteeing cashflow to parties with fewer strings attached than personal or company donations. Second, it was just as likely that the parties would demur. This is the worst kind of Westminster pro forma exercise, in which parties sign up to inquiries whose findings they know they are unlikely to approve, come the day of action.

    Sir Christopher Kelly is entitled to be annoyed that the parties have continued to defend positions which are purely self-interested. In easier economic times, he could have lightened his claim on the public wallet by offering tax exemptions for those who donate to parties, and tightening the cap on individual gifts. This is the sort of plan that would expand the number of donors and has been embraced with a reasonable degree of success in Canada. Or his state funding plan could have mirrored Germany, by allowing politically interested individuals to pursue their objectives by setting up foundations—often allied to parties, but not subject to the same tight funding rules and not so open to the charge of influence-mongering with ministers.

    None of the parties, however, is showing much interest in models from outside Britain. Recession encourages parochial feelings in this area, as in many others. One aspect of funding that the report does flag up is that 42% of voters consider that donations of over £10,000 are intended to gain influence for the donors. This is not an unreasonable assumption. At the same time, the committee proposes a far greater emphasis on “opt-in” payments from the unions to Labour, rather than the present opt-out scheme that makes donating to the party through union membership a default position. Naturally, the Labour party finds this as objectionable as the Tory Party finds a cap on big donors.

    State funding might well be a rational way out of this impasse, but it is hardly one that politicians are in a position to adopt when family budgets are constrained and voters have such a low opinion of politicians. Paying for the parties is thus a task deferred, yet again. The only certain outcome is that the next election campaign is going to be very, very cheap.

  • That Tobin tax (again)

    The archbishop gets his bank tax in a twist

    Nov 2nd 2011, 16:08 by A McE

    AMID the messy stand-off of disputatious protestors and hapless administrators in the great sit-in at St Paul's Cathedral, the Archbishop of Canterbury has issued a modest proposal. Dr Rowan Williams has revived one of the favourite theoretical devices to constrain bankers' greed and redress what he describes in the Financial Times as the need for "visible change" in banking practices. The Church of England, he adds, has a "proper interest" in such matters. On that score, the Archbishop speaks for many in Britain who think that the bankers got off lightly and have not changed their ways. Now he is asking David Cameron and George Osborne to drop their opposition to a proposed Europe-wide tax on financial transactions at the upcoming G20 summit of world leaders.

    Alas, the Tobin tax is the wrong way to go about addressing the problem. Not for the first time, a cleric who is a well-read and sympathetic character in many ways has emerged with a naive view of what should be done in practical matters. One reason France and Germany are prepared to back a tax on financial transactions is that it punishes the City of London as Europe’s major banking centre. Even taking into account a high level of public frustration in Britain about banks' behaviour, it is not clear why doing less business (which taxing transactions would make inevitable), would help the general good. The Archbishop wants it both ways. He believes that a rich society's good should be shared more widely: but he dislikes the "greed" of the bankers and wealth-creators who contribute to the public coffers. The Tobin tax has however been around as an idea since the 1970s: Gordon Brown had a brief flirtation with the idea in his brief stint as prime minister. The reason it is not adopted, even after the "robust public discussion" the Archbishop calls for, is simple. In a globalised economy, banking transactions taxed heavily in one place will move elsewhere. Unless the Archbishop is certain that he can secure global adherence to his plan, the net result of his proposal will be to drive many financial dealings from London. The only certainty is job-losses in the banking sector: a consequence which he does not dwell on and which would not affect only the wealthy, but their workforce and auxiliary businesses. 

    It is by no means wrong to want to give better scrutiny to the banks, and to regulate their risk-taking, the better to avoid the casino-like behaviour which led to the crash. It is quite another to support an idea whose time has not come for rather good reason; it would do more harm than the vaguely conceived good it proclaims.

  • Going private in China

    Hunting the private-sector Snark in Szechuan

    Nov 1st 2011, 9:03 by A. McE. | CHENGDU

    YOUR blogger has been released from the delights of following the NHS healthcare bill and British planning arguments and set off to the western Chinese city of Chengdu, to assess the state of private input into the public sector. It started out feeling like a hunt for Lewis Carroll's mythological Snark. Chengdu is a massive, modern sprawl of nearly 14m inhabitants and is a vast manufacturing base for Chinese and international companies. The majority of parts for the iPad 2, we were proudly told, hail from the Taiwanese Foxconn company, which has a major production centre here. The long drive through the city’s highways passes vast sticklebrick constructions, bearing the logos of Maersk, Ikea and the other gaudy talismanic logos of international enterprise. But how much has the enthusiasm for state capitalism resulted in the spread of private-sector efficiencies in the public sector?

    The London-based Institute of Strategic Dialogue had brought together a phalanx of local officials with some Western journalists to explore public-policy developments. We were told by a city official that the private sector did co-exist happily with the public in health care and education, but that final control of what was offered remained with the authorities at all times “and the quality and the standards are the same.” In which case, why pay to go private at all? There were “certain similarities” in health care across the two systems, was the answer. I asked what, exactly, and who pays and profits? “We don’t have the details.” A mood of embarrassment still surrounds the private sector’s role in public services.

    Research by the Milken Institute in America recently concluded that middle class families in Asian countries spend up to 50% of their income on education for their children – over and above what the state provides, living in smaller homes and driving smaller cars than their US counterparts to provide maximum education for their off-spring. Talking to students in Chengdu confirmed this. An academic revealed that among his higher earning colleagues, private schools and health care were becoming the default choice – with the amount being spent for a good private school around $20,000 per year. It was unusual, he added, for the fu er dai (second generation nouveau-riche), not to access to some form of private health care – or at least pay unofficial “top-up fees” to secure the services of senior doctors, on top of the agreed fees in a largely self-funding health-care system. (China has long been familiar with what we might call “co-payment”, though it comes perilously close to bribery in this guise). The wealthiest went to American-run clinics in town, originally set up for foreign workers, while the others offered top-up fees to secure top doctors or a second opinion.

    The aim of the fu er dai is not to go to Chinese university, but to study abroad, principally in America. The first generation to be allowed to study abroad under the opening up of the China in the 1980s yielded a class of high-flying, state-educated Chinese. As their children grow up, however, the growth of private education - with an emphasis on fluent spoken English – is creating a new tier of feeder schools, aimed at sending well-primed children to the world’s best universities, not just China’s top league. It’s another of the hairline splits separating the merely well-off from the very prosperous: a fault line with unpredictable consequences in a country where so many are still living in poverty. Still, it shows “certain similarities”, as the official might put it, with the divide between the squeezed middle-and upper-middle class, so common in the West.

  • Protest in the Square Mile

    A day with the tent tendency

    Oct 18th 2011, 16:32 by A. McE. | LONDON

    THE tent city on the western side of St Paul’s Cathedral is thickly carpeted with colourful bivouacs and placards declaring war on bankers, global capitalism and much else besides. “Capitalism is Crisis,” reads the main banner. “Capitalism is anti-empathy!” proclaims another, and “Bankers are the Mubaraks of the West”. One zipped-up tent has a sign hung out offering “free hugs”. This could be a threat or a promise, but the inhabitants are fast asleep so it’s hard to judge.

    Moved on by the police from their intended encampment on Paternoster Square, where the London Stock Exchange and Goldman Sachs are headquartered, the protesters are now huddled against the winds in the shade of Christopher Wren’s great creation. Church authorities have so far been tolerant. The Reverend Dr Giles Fraser says the group can stay as long as the demo is “good-natured”, though there are worries at the prospect of the 200-tent enclave becoming a semi-permanent fixture in an areas frequented by tourists and used for grand weddings (St Paul’s was where Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana were wed).

    It’s mammon rather than God that exercises the crowd, who are quietly spoken, apart from the occasional blast through a loudhailer. Joanna Wilde, a chatty Australian who works in the tourist industry, says she has taken some time off to attend the camp. How long will it stay? “Till we get what we want.” There’s the rub. An hour chatting to the protestors yields a rainbow of demands, aversions and quixotic theories, but the overall objective remains muddy. “It’s all the fault of the Bank of England,” says Joanna. “Because it’s not really there for the people. It’s just an international finance institution. These banks are cancers. If you cut them out, the body will survive much better. People are full of productivity and goodwill, but the banks steal the money. They are criminals.” Her neighbour, who identifies herself only as Jan, is a former teaching assistant. “I’m here on behalf of all the people whose jobs are being cut by this government,” she says. “And for more equality and empathy in the world.”

    A lot of complaints are age-old: heartless capitalism, rapacious companies and multinationals allegedly plundering the resources of developing countries. The younger members of the crowd have grandparents who said the same things back in the 1960s. Today it’s the sound of The Fall, a noisy Manchester post-punk band, rather than Bob Dylan, playing in one corner. The movement’s “Occupy London” website has issued a ten-point list of complaints. Among them: “We refuse to pay for the banks’ crisis and “We demand an end to global tax injustice—and our democracy representing corporations instead of the people”. “It’s the beginning of the end of global capitalism,” says Jamie Lee, a London university student, washing up cups in a makeshift kitchen.

    Yet the crowd is as globalised as the passengers in a major airport. Petras Banis is from Lithuania, and says he is here to show that the post-communist countries don’t accept capitalism, though he stops short of wishing for a return to socialism. “We are here to look for something else.” A coach pulls up from Herne in western Germany, disgorging a new load of supporters. Cheers ring around tent city. Round the corner, your blogger spies a former Conservative minister, clutching his briefcase nervously. He thinks his present job, which combines private equity with defence contracts, might not make him flavour of the month with the crowd. His office has advised him to use a side entrance.

    Back among the tent tendency, Ms Wilde pledges to stay “until we educate people to wake up to the truth about the banks.” How long will that take? She shrugs. The answer is blowing in the wind, which on a blustery October day on London’s Ludgate Hill can be bracing indeed.

  • A new GOD

    Can Dave's favourite mandarin break the blockage on reform?

    Oct 14th 2011, 17:05 by A. McE. | LONDON

    NEVER mind the recently departed defence secretary, Liam Fox—that defenestration was only a matter of time. What is really exercising the custodians of Leviathan in Whitehall this week is the impact of GOD’s demise: the early retirement, that is, of Sir Gus O’Donnell, head of the domestic civil service, and his replacement by a trusted Number 10 civil servant. The anointment of Jeremy Heywood signals a major shift in what the prime minister wants from his officials. See “Goodbye to GOD” in the Britain section for further details of that job-swap.

    Some commentators see this as yet more centralisation. Britain’s civil service is indeed one of the most centralised anywhere, with its rigid grades, hierarchies and knighthoods (Mr Heywood won’t be plain “Mr” for long). Occasionally, able or nimble officials side-step this and end up in a position of power beyond their paper-grade—but not often enough. David Cameron has clearly chafed under this constraint and believes it is one reason he has had early difficulties delivering policy change. One Whitehall mandarin of some decades standing sighs to your blogger that the “Sir Humphrey” interplay, in which ministers (even prime ones), were outwitted by clubbable senior civil servants, has been replaced by a knee-jerk instinct on the part of governments. All too often, they blame the civil service when their own ideas are half-baked, or have no idea how to deliver them.

    The appointment of Mr Heywood is the favoured solution. He saw the wood for trees during the Blair years and concluded that pushing for decentralisation was the answer. But Leviathan spots other tale-tale signs of worry on policy delivery. One department that takes a back seat in this re-ordering of power is the cabinet office, used as an ideas and policy laboratory by prime ministers. Under the new arrangements, it would have its own civil service boss—who will, presumably, talk to Mr Heywood regularly. Still, the danger of the cabinet office becoming cut off in practical terms is a real one. Quite how welcome this is to its ministers, Francis Maude and Oliver Letwin, we can only guess.

    I was reminded by Philip Collins’s Times column today that this crusade to sharpen up the delivery of promised reforms is greatly indebted to academic work which influenced a generation of policymakers in Britain and the US, from the mid-1990s onwards. In “Re-inventing Government”, Osborne and Gaebler argued then that “a revolutionary restructuring of the public sector is under way—an American Perestroika." It would be propelled by politicians and bureaucrats under financial pressure, who would thus be prodded to introduce more market forces into monopolistic government enterprises. The result would be new "entrepreneurial" government. Yes well. That was in 1994—and the entrepreneurial flair of government is still more conspicuous by its absence than a lightening bolt of invention. In fairness, the Cameron administration can claim to be pushing on fast with educational reform. It is also tearing up regulations on planning in Britain – though that may be far more problematic.

    On health, the government has blundered into the minefield of an unwise bill, shepherded by a secretary of state in Andrew Lansley, who never gained public trust and has now lost his cachet with health professionals. If there is one service that badly needs perestroika, this is it. But Mr Cameron may have missed his moment. One of Mr Heywood’s jobs as a seasoned official who has seen the wheel of fortune turn for prime ministers before, will be to help this one judge what he can still achieve in the rest of this term in office. He will be the first to remind him that the clock is ticking and that good leadership is also about prime ministers choosing what really matters most to them. That is what the PM must now do.

  • Public health rows

    The doctors versus Dave—Round two

    Oct 5th 2011, 13:25 by A. McE | MANCHESTER

    ROWS about the coalition's health-care reforms come around rather frequently these days. David Cameron cannot be best pleased to find that another tranche of heavy-hitting critics have launched a frontal attack during the Conservative Party conference.

    Some 400 public-health practitioners, including senior doctors, have signed up to a letter warning that the proposals in the health and social care bill will waste money, fragment the service and damage patient trust. This missive is aptly timed to raise awareness of the resistance of many clinicians to change, just before the bill arrives for its second reading in the Lords next week. Baroness Williams and David Owen (coincidentally two of the four founding members of the short-lived but influential Social Democratic Party in the 1980s), are steering opposition to the bill—and both command respect.

    The signatories to the letter, published in the Daily Telegraph, argue that "marketisation and commercialisation" will erode both patient care and medical ethics, ultimately weakening public-health provision in Britain. They do not, however, explain why. Indeed, there is ample evidence to the contrary. A recent McKinsey paper, gathering evidence from researchers at the London School of Economics, as well as from American hospitals, showed a clear link between competition in health care and rising standards. Research by Paul Corrigan (an erstwhile Labour advisor on health) for the Reform think-tank shows much the same thing. Many other countries like the Netherlands, which have good record in providing equitable health care, do have private providers in the mix, the very "marketisation" that the letter's signatories object to.

    In his response, Mr Cameron trod softly. Evidently he is wary of triggering another big fight around health care reform after his health secretary, Andrew Lansley, sparked a rebellion over messy GP-commissioning proposals earlier this year. Already, the arrangements for private providers are hedged around with fresh restrictions. But like the protesting doctors, many senior Liberal Democrats harbour doubts about allowing any advance of private providers in the sector.

    Many of those who worry that public-health provision might become more fragmented by competition have well-considered points to make. But some of the signatories seem to have more ideological than clinical points in mind. David McCoy of University College London, for instance, told the Telegraph that the service required "participatory and integrated responses to rising unemployment, youth alienation, fuel poverty and social inequality." Something in the choice of words (rather reminiscent of Private Eye's great fictitious leftwing crusader Dave Spart), suggests that strictly impartial evidence might not be the only consideration here.

    Mr Cameron has started a battle about health, which is also one about variety of provision in the public services as a whole. Now he needs to fight it out to a clear conclusion before his noisier opponents steal the reform show.

  • Working women on film

    Is the working woman allowed to get rich on screen?

    Sep 16th 2011, 9:56 by A. McE

    IN THE same week that Theresa May, a senior Conservative, ditched a Labour drive for equal representation on company boards on the grounds that it might "frighten the horses" comes the film release of "I Don’t Know How She Does It"—the writer Allison Pearson’s social comedy about combining workplace with motherhood. It stars Sarah Jessica Parker, Christina Hendricks, Pierce Brosnan and Kelsey Grammer. Yes, just like the colleagues in my day job, too. The film, based on the rise of senior women in the workplace, is also an absorbing insight into changing fashions when it comes to the portrayal of women in the financial world.

    In between Sarah Jessica running late in high heels and trying to please her steely boss (Grammer) and despairing husband (Greg Kinnear), there’s a clip of Rosalind Russell in "The Front Page", vainly striving to get out of the newspaper business so she can return to more womanly pastimes. Of course, she can’t—and neither can Ms Pearson’s heroine, Kate, who loves her rather vaguely delineated job in asset management, despite the toll it takes on her family life. (A warning to bankers: do not dwell too closely on the nature of the product Kate is selling: the producers have evidently decided that vagueness is all when it comes to financial services on screen.)

    Still, the portrayal of women aspiring to make money has long been seen as something smart and enviable by cinema-goers. "Working Girl" with Melanie Griffiths in the 1980s firmly established the successful working woman with “a head for business and a bod for sin” as desirable, both financially and sexually. In the current revival of Caryl Churchill’s play "Top Girls" in London, we’re cast back into the era of power-shouldered jackets, short skirts and liquid power lunches, in Churchill’s case, including a female pope, Viking warrior and explorer.

    Since the crash, though, films about money-making are required to carry a strong moral health warning. Consider the sequel to "Wall Street" last year, which failed to sparkle like the original because it laid on the opprobrium so thick from the start and did not even allow us to flirt with the notion that greed might be good.

    The adaptation of Ms Pearson’s book follows the apologetic rubric. Whereas the author conceived her character Kate as a likeable go-getting hedge-funder, the movie version imbues her with more altruistic motives than mere drive to make moolah. When she and her mentor Jack Abelhammer (played by Mr Brosnan) meet the bowling-alley yokels in Cleveland, Ohio and help bring off a tournament triumph, one of the locals says that this is enough to “forgive you for being a banker”. If only it were that easy, the unpopular money men (and women) may well grumble.

    But to the relief of its long-standing female fans, your blogger included, "I Don’t Know How She Does It" allows Kate her chance to shine, despite outbreaks of children’s nits, late-running nannies and a mobile phone with a nursery ring-tone on it. In some small way, this feels like progress. Those who don’t like frightening horses will observe that she did it all without quotas. But then, she had Pierce Brosnan on her side.

  • Scotland's Conservatives

    Can beheading save the Scottish Tories?

    Sep 5th 2011, 14:30 by A. McE | LONDON

    AS IF by magic...no sooner had Leviathan blogged on David Cameron's decision to step up the fight to save the union, than the man most likely to lead the Scottish Conservatives, Murdo Fraser, announced that he felt the best chance of future success for the centre-right in Scotland lay in not being formally connected to the Conservative party down south at all. We are familiar with "decapitation strategy" as a ruse in election strategy. Less common is the idea of self-imposed decapitation, such as Mr Fraser proposes. In some regards, his premise is unarguable. Scottish Conservatives have been in a dire state since the death-blow wielded by Tony Blair in 1997. (That's another reminder, should Ed Miliband require it, that Labour needs to reach beyond England for its own revival.) This parrot, as Monty Python put it, is dead—not just resting. Something needs to be done about that, and even Mr Cameron can't see a way to bring Scottish Toryism back to life.

    Where the plan may come unstuck is in offering the Scottish Nationalists more momentum, by effectively admitting that Conservatism has been beaten by the rise of the pro-independence movement north of the border. A centre-right unionist party is a good idea for Scotland, where the debate about future public spending and its sustainability is being held at bay by the SNP.  But that supposes that there are politicians able and brave enough to lead it. If they are not, then a mere change of name won’t help.

    Also, until the mid 1960s, Scottish unionism was its dominant identity. Mr Fraser may well lean too on examples like the Christian Socialists in Bavaria, who act as sister party to Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats, but have a culture and pre-occupations of their own. These things take time to grow and graft, however. In the shorter term—the kind of time-scale that pertains until a referendum is held on independence—the best that a new party could hope to be is a rump Conservative one, without the logo.

    If nothing else, the suggestion draws attention to how serious the Conservative party now acknowledges its plight to be. The only comfort it might take is that Scottish Labour and the Liberal Democrats are in a poor state too. The pro-union parties will have to start to hang together, or prepare to fall apart.

  • Scottish independence

    Mr Cameron has trouble with a modern Scottish Braveheart

    Sep 2nd 2011, 17:15 by A. McE | LONDON

    WHAT pressing matters are in David Cameron's in-tray as he returns to the autumn fray? Just a few small things, like handling the aftermath of the Libya victory, clearing up the social and criminal-justice mess left by the inner-city summer riots and juggling deficit reduction, rising NHS waiting lists and impending public-service cuts. Yet one subject which—perhaps surprisingly—made it near the top of the "to-do" list is the discussion about how to counter the Scottish National Party's advance. The "Quad" of Mr Cameron, George Osborne, Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander (chief secretary to the Treasury and a Highland Scot), have just agreed a “gear-shift” in their campaign to halt independence-strivings north of the border. Mr Alexander this week reminded his kinsfolk that the banking crisis would have been "catastrophic" for Scotland had it not been part of the United Kingdom, and thus able to rely on the bail-out of wobbling banks.

    The "Quad" is now making the case for continuing the United Kingdom, long before Alex Salmond, the Scottish National Party leader, has even got round to telling us when he proposes to hold a vote, or quite what he means by independence.  This vagueness leads some Scots to talk of a “neverendum”. Mr Salmond is however a very tactical operator. He has schmoozed the Queen to reassure Buckingham Palace that Scottish independence would not affect her status (or indeed her summer residence of Balmoral.) Although a man of the left by background, Mr Salmond has also befriended Rupert Murdoch, who publishes separate editions of his newspapers in Scotland.

    For the government in Westminster, the stakes are high. David Cameron, who has Scottish lineage, has regretfully accepted that his (admittedly brief) attempts to revive Scottish conservatism failed. The party is no more than a rump in Scottish politics. His coalition partner Nick Clegg badly needs to restore flagging interest in the Liberal Democrats as the natural alternative to Labour in Scotland. Now that Labour has hit the northern doldrums, the beneficiary is the SNP, with a majority at Holyrood—and a pulpit to establish its bona fides as the natural choice for Scotland. Although its high spending is largely possible because of generous transfers from the South, Mr Salmond is the beneficiary of a feeling among many Scots that they are doing better in an era of spending cuts than the English. As one old Glaswegian lady receiving free personal care (unlike her English relatives) expressed it to your blogger, "I'm glad ah dinna live doon there."

    All these factors, and the natural tendency of devolved nations to want more, not less, devolution, mean that Mr Cameron and co have a fight on their hands to keep the union together. There are many sound reasons to do so and Mr Salmond's account of a high-spending state, based on oil revenues and wind-power, is Panglossian. Still, he rarely misses a moment to underline the separateness of Scottish culture: not least by demanding that the BBC refer to English rioters, since the Scots were blameless in the summer upheavals. Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg see momentum moving firmly in Mr Salmond's direction and they don’t want to be too late in joining the battle against a modern Braveheart. Heavens, it might get so bad that like the Queen, they agree to forego summer holidays in southern Europe for a bracing trip to the far north—and not just the grouse moors, either.

  • Broadcasting and the riots

    When black is white

    Aug 16th 2011, 11:32 by A. McE | LONDON

    HOW far should a publicly funded broadcaster disseminate controversial—and possibly offensive—views about the causes of Britain’s riots? The BBC has received nearly 700 complaints about a claim by David Starkey, an outspoken historian, that "whites have become black" during a discussion on BBC2's Newsnight. Dr Starkey alleged that the spread of black patois was a contributory factor in gang culture and that a “violent and destructive” creed on the streets has impoverished life for many of the youthful poor in Britain. A further petition calling for the broadcaster to apologise that was submitted to Ofcom, the regulator, has raised over 3,600 signatures. The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, has also piled in, describing the comments on race as "disgusting and outrageous".

    So should a publicly funded broadcaster apologise, if a lot of people find a contributor’s views so objectionable? Some of Dr Starkey’s analysis was downright odd—like his statement that anyone hearing David Lammy, the well-educated, black Tottenham MP speak, would think he was white. Plenty of other British black people speak without resort to Afro-American patois. But he did raise an issue plenty of viewers would think worthy of discussion: the cultural and social factors forming the way that some inner-city youths conduct themselves. Nor could it reasonably be denied that the “gangsta” culture of hooded young men and contempt for the “Feds”, previously known as the police, played a major role in unleashing some of the violence and disorder, even if others from other social and ethnic backgrounds joined in.

    As usual in arguments where race is a factor, it isn’t what you say but how you say it. Dr Starkey chose to be provocative, but discussion is the poorer if strong views are swept under the carpet. As long as controversial opinions are challenged, as they were in this case, there should be place for them on the airwaves. At least on this occasion, the Beeb won’t be slammed by its critics as purveying a cringing leftish liberalism.

  • Britain's riots

    What would Milton Friedman tell the looters?

    Aug 9th 2011, 14:32 by A. McE | LONDON

    YOUR blogger set out for a quiet cocktail in fashionably edgy Hoxton on Monday night, only to find herself in the middle of wailing police sirens and shuttered shops as the riots in nearby Hackney took hold. The capital, which has been working itself into a mood of quiet pre-Olympics pride, suddenly feels uncomfortably close to a bonfire of the vanities in some quarters.

    Leviathan has begun collecting explanations for the turmoil across London and other British cities. On Newsnight, Ken Livingstone, once again a mayoral candidate, expressed the view that the riots were linked to young people’s “uncertainty about the future”. He had, the ex-mayor said, been to inner-city colleges where the pupils were worried about how to complete their courses, after proposed changes to the Education Maintenance Allowance.

    That sounds suspect. The behaviour and targeting of the looters does not suggest undue concern about lost educational opportunities or public-spending cuts. However competent or otherwise the government has been in its deficit reduction, it has set out to protect students from low-earning families—and indeed, taxed the rich more highly.

    The most intriguing explanation for misbehaviour so far was offered to Mark Stone, a Sky News reporter, who recorded looting in Clapham Junction on his phone. "Are you proud of what you're doing?" he asked one young woman who was stealing goods from a smashed-up store. "I’m just getting my taxes back," she replied. As appealing as this may be to Milton Friedman followers (in other circumstances), it is a pretty rubbish excuse for pillaging.

    Mr Livingstone spoke amusingly of “clapped out politicians” denouncing criminality—and, in truth, the bromides against the rioters do have a certain ritual quality. One could predict that David Cameron would deploy the word “sickening”—and lo, he did. Still, even the most freshly minted politician would have difficulty in creating credible linkage between the economic situation and the inner-city smash-and-grab of the past few days. Reasons and excuses are different things and it is wise and proper to respect the difference.

  • Top tax rates

    How to cut the tax rate: a 1980s guide

    Aug 4th 2011, 9:29 by A. McE | LONDON

    AS THE political argument about Britain’s top tax rates heats up (see the article in The Economist this week), your blogger’s attention has turned to previous occasions on which received thinking on taxation abruptly changed. The March 1988 budget saw the top tax rate slashed from 60% to 40%. Despite objections from Labour’s chief shadow secretary to the Treasury at the time, Gordon Brown, it remained in place until the wake of the banking crisis in 2009.

    Digging through the (thankfully) online Hansard reports of the budget day and debates that followed, several comparisons offer themselves. The arguments, as today, were about how to breathe life into a post-recession economy and whether public spending or tax cuts showed the way forward. But complaints about the alleged “inequity” of the tax cut and the failure to cut marginal tax rates for the lower paid were treated with scant sympathy by Nigel Lawson and the Tory front bench—in contrast with the dominant thinking around David Cameron today, that a centre-right government must not be seen to favour the well-off.

    This was also a period when the number of big beasts in the Commons was high. Mr (now Lord) Lawson ruled the roost as chancellor; Margaret Thatcher had not yet dwindled towards her inglorious end. Gordon Brown’s thumping condemnations of tax reforms, which established the episode's reputation as the “rich man’s budget”, were plangent and a reminder of how good Mr Brown was as a parliamentarian, before narrow-minded bitterness ate away at him.

    Certainly Mr Lawson’s clarity on tax has seldom been echoed in budgets since: “First we have to reduce tax rates which are clearly too high,” was his starting point. It is hard to imagine George Osborne echoing that. In reply, Alex Salmond, the Scottish nationalist, was suspended for shouting “this budget is an obscenity!”. Just as entertaining was the poisonous goading of Mr Lawson by his implacable foe, Sir Edward Heath. A sample exchange:

    Mr Heath: The chancellor did not mention the fact that, our interest rates having been increased, the Americans are following.

    Mr Lawson: I did mention it.

    Mr Heath: I am sorry if I did not hear the chancellor make that point. Perhaps I was making a note of his other points.

    Ah, happy days. And for all the political swordfighting, the economic-policy appraisals come across loud and clear. Strangely, no trace exists of the authorship of the memorable description of the 1988 budget as a “rich man’s champagne budget”. It is cited by Emma Nicholson, but attributed to a Labour backbencher. Who was it, I wonder, and where are they now?

  • Justice for Charlie Gilmour

    Should the law take class into account?

    Aug 3rd 2011, 10:43 by A. McE | LONDON

    WELL now here's a summer fuss dividing London social life and legal opinion. Should a posh student who gets himself involved in a riot and ends up climbing up the Cenotaph—the city's most sombre memorial to the war dead—and attacking a convoy with the heir to the throne in it, get a particularly tough sentence for a first offence: 16 months behind bars?

    Martin Narey, the former director general of the prison service, has weighed in. In the Times today, he argues that the sentence meted out to the student protester was excessive and that a non-custodial sentence would have been more appropriate. Eric Cantona, the footballer, argues Mr Narey, kicked a fan in the face and ended up doing community service, rather than time in jail. So why should vandalism, even on the rather epic scale attempted by this foolish Cambridge undergraduate, earn a prison sentence when so many other infractions of the law these days are treated to other punishments?

    In the arguments over Charlie Gilmour's sentencing, a number of facts are unignorable. The first is that, in the rough and tumble of the student-fees demonstration in December last year, Mr Gilmour's behaviour stood out in its offensiveness and extremity.  He was “out of his mind” on drugs and drink. He threw a bin at a convoy carrying the Prince of Wales and his wife, was part of a mob attacking a business in the centre of town and topped off the day's activities by swinging from the Cenotaph.

    But the underlying dissent has been as much about Mr Gilmour's background as his activities. As the privately educated and wealthy step-son of the Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour and a prominent journalist mother, Mr Gilmour is, as his mother plaintively put it "perfect to use as an example". Judge Nicholas Price, passing sentence, explicitly noted that "You, of all people, should have known better." That's an instinct many share when it comes to assessing crime and punishment. But it is always a controversial way to interpret the law and requires limits, lest it tip simply into anti-toff populism or other forms of self-righteousness.

    When Cherie Blair QC , sitting as a judge, admonished a Christian defendant in a case that he should have behaved better because he was a religious believer, she had her knuckles rapped by a more senior judge. In the Gilmour case, however, his education and standing as a Cambridge undergraduate is relevant to his argument that he did not realise the Cenotaph commemorated the war dead. (Parents may feel that this is a poor advertisement for history studies at Lancing private school, Gilmour’s alma mater. For a history undergraduate, it is a frankly daft line to take.) 

    Now his mother and rock-star father are urging politicians to support their appeal against sentence. It does appear to be on the long side, though siding with a posh student revolutionary might not be high on the list of many politicians' priorities. His family maintain that Charlie's imprisonment is "a waste of taxpayer’s money". That could be said of much incarceration of people far less well-connected that the Gilmours and without their access to publicity. The key question is a different one: whether the punishment fits the crime. As stupid and dangerous as Charlie Gilmour's behaviour was, it doesn't.

  • Inquiries and politicians

    Did Sir Gus miss the inquiry moment?

    Jul 14th 2011, 10:44 by A. McE | LONDON

    GORDON BROWN is furious. Not an uncommon state in the case of the ex-prime minister, but one we have not seen in public since he retreated from public life after the election. The big engine that is Gordon steamed back to the Commons yesterday and promptly accused a top civil servant of blocking an inquiry he had wanted to hold while as prime minister, into the phone-hacking scandal at News International. Mr Brown is serving his revenge cold, which is not a pretty sight. But is he justified in complaining that Sir Gus O'Donnell erred in blocking the inquiry?

    British political life is now choc-full of inquiries into the behaviours of its elites, from the mis-reporting of Iraq's alleged WMD possession in the run-up to the war to the newly announced, judge-led investigation into the extent of misconduct in Rupert Murdoch's newspaper empire. By definition, they tend to occur after the horse has bolted, when the mood is already sour and recriminations about who really knew what (and who sat on knowledge they should have shared), are whirling around the public domain. Mr Brown says that Sir Gus as cabinet secretary should have agreed to his demand for an inquiry into News International before the election. Possibly so, though much has emerged since which strengthens that case and Sir Gus was privy only to limited information about wrong-doing.

    And Mr Brown omitted a key motivator in his own behaviour: the Sun had dramatically switched its support to David Cameron the morning after his speech to Labour Party conference. Up to this point, there was no sign that Mr Brown himself thought the phone-hacking worthy of an inquiry. So Sir Gus might well have concluded that the sudden desire for an inquiry the then prime minister wanted, a few months before the election, was politically motivated, rather than a service to media transparency and the greater well-being. And of course, had Mr Brown felt so strongly that the issue was one of national importance, he could have made public his belief that an inquiry should be held. No cabinet secretary could have prevented him from doing that.

    Clearly, a danger lurks in the use of investigations as a political battering ram. Might Mr Brown's ailing government have been helped if the deserved censure against Mr Murdoch's papers had come earlier? Possibly, though Labour had as much to lose from its earlier proximity to the Murdochs as the Tories. Was Sir Gus right in worrying that an inquiry in the circumstances could only be construed as a last-ditch bid by Mr Brown to heap slurry on the heads of those who had deserted his party and its leader? Most definitely. Often, the civil service top brass stand accused of Sir Humphry-ish foot dragging. In this case, Sir Gus was right to watch and wait. 

  • RIP the PCC

    The Press Complaints Commission is another victim of the phone hacking scandal

    Jul 8th 2011, 12:22 by A.McE | LONDON

    ALONG with Fleet Street and the prime minister's reputation for sound judgement, a British institution is up against the wall today. The Press Complaints Commission will shortly be put out of its misery. Weighed in the balance by the hacking scandal and News International’s failure to investigate it properly, the PCC has been found sorely wanting. David Cameron today and Ed Miliband yesterday were in uncommon agreement that it must be ditched. Baroness Buscombe, its chairman, never looked remotely up to the task of holding a newspaper out of control to account. For what, the Baroness plaintively asked, could she do if lied to be senior figures in the press? This is truly pathetic. "Absent, ineffective, lacking in rigour," was Mr Cameron's judgement. Had the PCC insisted on pursuing the allegations of hacking, and made a fuss about the limited flow of information from the News of the World, the organisation might be in a better place to defend its record on self-regulation.

    In truth, the commission has not been so much toothless as blind. In many cases, self-regulation has worked well in Britain. That's a point to remember, as many who want a sweeping privacy law would like to use the current events as cover to muzzle the press. Does Britain really want supine newspapers on the model of France of Germany, where the lives of elites are immune from impolite probing and the official version often triumphs over the truth? Your blogger would say not. Also, the rough and tumble of competitive tabloids and a lively middle-market in newspapers, creates an exciting, commercially vibrant media landscape. These are not bad things. But right now, Fleet Street does need to examine itself and the cosiness of its practices—not least the assumption that the big titles could and should be trusted to regulate their own behaviour. In effect, the PCC has only got involved where issues like the impact of reporting on children, redress for those wronged by intrusion, or the prospect of court injunctions against publication were at stake. What it has not done is set out, or enforced, minimum standards of behaviour. That is one reason the grim News of the World culture could flourish, without fear by the perpetrators or bosses that they might be found out. 

    Mr Cameron says his "instincts" remain that self-regulation should continue, but with a new and more independent body. Good idea: but lay members of the PCC are already in a majority. What matters is not so much that is on a new body, but what its powers will be. Would it, for instance, be able to call journalists to give evidence, and how would it avoid ending up embroiled in legal battles about what can legitimately be published—and what cannot? One thing is for sure: the PCC will disappear. What Leviathan would like to know (and will continue to chart), is how public policy towards the press will henceforth change in Britain, as a result of the horrors of tabloid excesses and the humbling of a brash newspaper. The battles over that will shape what kind of journalism we will get to read for years to come—and perhaps just as important, what we won't. 

  • BBC pay

    General Patten goes to war on the BBC's top brass

    Jul 7th 2011, 12:01 by A. McE | LONDON

    WHILE the gruesome fate of Britain’s tabloids is played out with full furore this week, another British media institution is being re-made more quietly, but still definitively. The new BBC Trust chairman, Lord Patten, has delivered his first major speech. While stopping short of blood, sweat and tears, it offers new austerity and differing expectations to his predecessor.

    The Beeb has never sounded enthusiastic about pruning itself back, either in terms of its services or expenditure. Sometimes, it is forced to do so: but the tone has generally been defensive. The lacklustre former chairman, Sir Michael Lyons, was inclined to make quiet recommendations and then sit back to discover whether the management at TV Centre felt like carrying them out. That tendency to rest on laurels continues. The director general, Mark Thompson, interviewed in the New Statesman, says that "pay had come down significantly". He has already forgone a bonus and instigated a pay freeze for top management.

    That hardly answers the broader question of an upper-end salary structure, frequently out of step with the leaner TV commercial sector. Lord Patten is allergic to this anomaly and he is saying so rather loudly, by targeting a subject the DG does not want to focus on at this late stage in his tenure. Most intriguing, for a senior Tory grandee, Lord Patten also embraces the idea of the BBC accepting the principle of a "pay multiple" so that the public can see exactly how the salaries of those at the top of the BBC compare with those in the rest of the organisation. This is the first example Leviathan can find of a senior figure in a public institution in Britain wholeheartedly embracing the idea put forward by the Work Foundation's social democrat boss Will Hutton. Mr Hutton asserts that the public sector should limit the income of its highest earners, compared to the least well paid.

    General Patten is in full military campaign mode with the notion. "There is further to go—both in making further reductions and securing public confidence," he says. No kidding. e laggardly approach of the BBC to reforming pay for its top brass has been as toxic with its own modestly remunerated programme-makers as it is with licence-fee payers. Lord Patten also argues that the publicly funded BBC "needs to distance itself" from the commercial market. This is a trickier ask. Talent can travel, and a broadcaster which relies on arguments about its its reach, as well as quality, can’t be entirely resistant to commercial pressures if it wants to retain good people. Still, the new chairman is right to identify that a desire to keep up with the Joneses, in terms of financial deals for star presenters and key talent, has at times lead to foolish decisions to pay eye-watering sums to household names.

    Your blogger (an occasional, modestly remunerated broadcaster on the BBC) notes that Lord Patten signals that he hopes the present director general will stay, while gently opening up his requirements for a successor. He or she must be prepared to accept the “pay multiple” restriction; in other words, come cheaper than the existing version. The cost model is to be easyJet, rather than British Airways first class.

    This is unlikely to be the chairman's last broadside, and few managers today in the public sector will risk a row by defending high pay. In the labyrinthine corridors of the BBC, it feels as if a new era has already begun.

  • Strikes, protests and good times

    A blogger's week among the demonstrators

    Jul 2nd 2011, 15:12 by A. McE | LONDON

    YOUR blogger kept finding herself among the protestors this week, as the awaited summer of discontent finally dawned. On Thursday, Westminster was awash with demonstrators chanting "2-4-6-8, we won't work till 68." Today (Saturday), her path to Fortnum’s, near the Economist office, was barred by the cheery gay Pride march. A bus carrying gay tax inspectors and local government workers, one of whom was dressed as the White Rabbit from "Alice in Wonderland", was followed by a float occupied by gay schoolteachers, who did a bit of leafleting at the same time on their pension rights and wrongs. Not far behind were the sexual-health workers, cheerfully handing out free pink condoms. It was as if Ken Livingstone's rainbow coalition of fringe groups had emerged, all in one glorious week, to tell the rest of straight-laced Britain they still existed. The Socialist Worker Party—who have always had the best placards—have a new one of a grim-faced David Cameron with the words "He's got to go!” plastered above his face. Mr Cameron may be tempted to reply that he has only just got here, with a mere year and a bit under his belt. And how long did the previous generation of opponents chant "Maggie: Out!" before Lady Thatcher finally left the stage? Better not count.

    What interests your blogger, as a child of the late 1980s, is how non-committal the general public mood is. True, a demo of a quarter of a million workers is significant. So far though, anger has fallen rather short of the mood of the Thatcher years, or more recently, the divisions of the Iraq war, which brought a million people onto the streets in protest. The broader public is not aligning itself with the anti-cuts movement. Its most energetic spokesmen are organisations like UK Uncut, which campaign for maximum public spending. But the organisation’s latent anti-capitalist message and rowdy tactics makes Labour run scared of endorsing the movement—much as Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, has warned unions of walking into "a trap" if they carry out rolling stoppages throughout the summer.

    The hope of many public sector demonstrators Leviathan spoke to was that Mr Cameron will negotiate on a pension-age rise, much as he agreed to adjust intended NHS reforms, when placed under pressure by the professionals. Somehow, one doubts this. Any British government (except perhaps one headed by the Socialist Workers), would be raising the pension age now, and the prime minister can’t always give in.

    The gay Pride march, with its cheerfully assertion of homosexuals' rights to be seen and heard, is steadily achieving its goal—it came across as a cheery public event, not a list of grievances. Far fewer Londoners think it odd or moan about it than used to do so. The public sector protests, by contrast, felt like the march of interest groups, with little full-hearted support or broad empathy outside their ranks. Perhaps they should hire the tax inspector in the rabbit suit for their next day out.

  • Grammar school comeback

    Why the Tories are talking about grammar schools again

    Jun 23rd 2011, 8:36 by A. McE | LONDON

    IT HAS taken a few years but Conservative ministers are beginning to utter the long forbidden words "grammar schools" in the debate about the proper mix in education reform. Nick Gibb, the schools minister, says that existing state grammars would be able to take advantage of new rules to admit extra students without seeking the permission of local authorities. Even more controversially, he has suggested they encourage social mobility.

    His colleague, David Willetts, now universities minister, enraged the Tory ranks and lost his job as education spokesman in opposition for saying exactly the opposite. Mr Gibb was pointing out that, among the 158,000 children in the rump of grammar schools in England, poorer children perform almost as well as their peers. What he didn’t dwell on was Mr Willetts’s central point: that a combination of selection-by-house-price and middle-class parents tutoring younger children for 11+ entry effectively means that the social selection takes place rather earlier. This is something that those who want to expand grammars tend to neglect.

    More usefully, Mr Gibb called on existing grammars to form partnerships with local comprehensives to encourage the teaching of difficult academic subjects. One very positive thing happening in education today is the breakdown of the old barriers between types of schools and sectors. The government wants something in return—namely that grammars opt into becoming academies. This will create an anomalous situation in which existing selective schools "would be able to take advantage of crucial freedoms" (Mr Gibb) and continue selecting their pupils. Other academies, while enjoying freedoms in organizing themselves, are obliged to stick with the existing comprehensive approach to intake.

    Why transform grammars into academies? Because Michael Gove and his education team are well aware that their major expansion of the academy programme must be seen to show results a lot better than the remaining comprehensive schools. No one has quite explained what will happen to them. They feel like the unloved residue of previous policies—which they are. Having grammar schools within the academy fold helps ensure that the exam passes will look good when we come to assess the impact of the Gove-ite reforms. It does, however, leave another riddle for perplexed parents deciphering the system. When is an academy not an academy? When it’s a grammar school.

  • Criminal justice reform

    Clarke and Cameron need more convictions when it comes to crime

    Jun 22nd 2011, 10:46 by A. McE | LONDON

    WE HAVE just learned something new about U-turns from the Ken Clarke, the British justice secretary. Mr Clarke told parliament that such moves should be executed with "purpose and panache". He had also found himself on "probation" after the reversal of some of his key proposed reforms to the criminal justice system. Alliteration is good for sounding sure of oneself, but Mr Clarke is in a policy hole, into which he has dug himself, with no small degree of assistance from the prime minister, David Cameron, and his deputy Nick Clegg. This is one case where we really can round up the usual suspects.

    A clear approach to criminal justice is one of the most important building blocks of a government's approach to public policy. New Labour understood this, when it courted unpopularity with its own liberals and left-wing, the better to reassure the majority that it was serious about crime. But reading the variable statements of ministers on sentencing, we are no wiser about what their beliefs really are.

    So Mr Clarke has said that it is not a U-turn to reverse plans which would give judges more influence over murder sentences and allow sentence reductions for some guilty pleas to rape charges. No less an adept U-turner than the prime minister yesterday demanded that prisoners spend longer in jail, rather than serving less time behind bars. Language can only be tortured so far when it comes to policy amendments and the government is in danger of its intentions on reforms being too unreliable to take seriously.

    Indeed, Mr Clarke has introduced a new Sir Humphrey-ism into the lexicon, insisting that he had been "impressed" by proposals to shorten sentences, only to conclude that the scheme was not workable. A remarkable definition of the word “impressed”, you might agree. Beyond the mismanagement and Number 10's panic about potentially unpopular policy shifts on health and criminal justice, there is a theme here which underlies a lot of the government's current problems with policy execution. Unless senior figures themselves know whether they genuinely want to reform things, or simply manage the status quo, they will lose their bearings when the going gets tough and objections come thick and fast.

    That goes for liberals as well as criminal-justice hawks. Mr Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, says he was unconvinced about the plan for reduced sentences. So how did it get so far? Mr Clegg is, after all, a former spokesman on home affairs, so he cannot plead ignorance of the territory and has often said that too many people are in prison in Britain. Mr Clarke is a seasoned ex-cabinet minister. Mr Cameron is leader of a party which has historically had a lead on crime. Together, they have messed up their first batch of policy proposals on law and order and then retreated. Impressive? Only in a very Clarkeish sense of the word.

     

  • Reviewing NHS reform

    The hole in the heart of the NHS reforms

    Jun 13th 2011, 15:13 by A.McE | LONDON

    SO EVOLUTION, not revolution, is to be the way forward on British health care. The NHS Future Forum was convened by the Government to signal a change of direction in health-care reform. It has duly delivered just that: unsurprisingly, given that the panel of experts were largely culled from the NHS and attendant organisations in their current form. There was only modest input from private sector providers or outside experts, for instance.

    Besides the restoration of a lot more oversight and consultation (otherwise known as more tiers of NHS bureaucracy), the key finding of NHS Future Forum is that the regulator’s primary duty to promote has been "significantly diluted".

    The regulator, Monitor, should not be devoted to the task of promoting choice and competition. The new aim of Monitor is to promote collaboration and integration between providers. However Number 10 describes this alchemy, it is a significant departure from its original intentions. Ministers have said that there is nothing in the review which stops private providers continuing to provide services within the NHS. This is true: but what has very clearly been cast aside is any impetus from the centre to encourage more private providers or indeed investors. Some may regard that as reassurance. The Labour leadership has said it will vote against the white paper whatever it contains, on the grounds that if the coalition is doing it, it must be suspect.

    The retreat does however create a hole where the heart of the reforms used to be. Private-sector management and areas of practice and innovation providing competition to the NHS are one way in which standards can be pushed up, in a sector where cost tends to grow faster than outcomes (see the Obama reform debate about coverage versus cost-effectiveness). That, rather than some reckless disregard for the patient, is what has driven several other European countries to have mixed health-care systems—and in some cases, to farm out management of entire services to providers who can deliver them at a lower cost than the state can manage.

    Sir Richard Thompson, president of the Royal College of Physicians, said changes to Monitor's role would be a "step in the right direction". But what exactly is the direction of the reforms? Britain has an NHS which is costly, facing a spending squeeze and in which productivity has not kept pace with expenditure. "Integration, collaboration and quality", the watchwords of the review, sound comforting. We are not much closer, however, to finding out how they are to be delivered. A political patch-up is not the same as an advance for the NHS.

  • Health reform

    Five-a-day to save the NHS

    Jun 6th 2011, 15:11 by A.Mc | LONDON

    DAVID Cameron has returned to a very old, New Labour idea—a quintuplet of pledges to reassure voters that his intentions towards the NHS are honourable. Beset by internal and external criticisms of his proposed reforms and with Andrew Lansley, his health secretary, insisting that he will not readily water down the delayed bill to accommodate Liberal Democrat criticisms of the plan to allow more private sector providers into the mix, Number 10 has weighed in with "five guarantees" of wholesome reform.

    Some of these are mere re-statements of existing pledges not to "privatize" the NHS (in the unlikely event that the coalition should find itself parcelling it up to sell to an off-shore operator). Another commitment is that there will be no increase in waiting lists (Leviathan would be intrigued if readers can find examples of politicians pledging to make waiting lists longer).

    Two substantive policy ideas lurk in the undergrowth here. The first is the pledge to give other clinical staff a say in how care is allocated to patients: effectively the death knell for Mr Lansley’s over-zealous plan to make family doctors the gatekeepers of care—and by extension, expenditure. The second is the commitment to "integrated care"—designed to ensure patients receive continuity of treatment.

    This aim was also prioritized in the "patient pathways" instigated under the last government, to simplify ways through the labyrinth of treatment. Mr Cameron does however concede that the present funding strictures of the NHS combined with an ageing population and rising drug costs mean that changes are necessary, if the service is not to decline. So far opponents of NHS reform have not been put on the spot on this point. They should be.

    Mr Cameron cites other European democracies as heaving better health outcomes. What he is not saying—or, in fairness, not yet—is that the main reason other systems are more efficient than the NHS is that they allow for more pluralism and competiveness, which keeps costs low and providers on their toes.

    A social insurance system pits rival insurers against each other to secure a good deal for patients—and keep premiums at a rate acceptable to employers. Mixed systems of public and private providers are also becoming more common, from eastern Europe to cities like Spain's Valencia, which have farmed out healthcare to providers who can manage their systems more efficiently than state rivals.

    The prime minister's instincts are pro-reform, but he cannot indefinitely deploy mood music only to assuage critics. If the principle of private intervention to improve the NHS is worth having, then it will need to be fought for. As his predecessor Mr Blair would surely remind him, the problem with the politics of reassurance is that they take up time and energy when you could just be getting things done.

  • Resigning from the Big Society

    The Bigsoc is getting very short of Tory friends

    May 25th 2011, 15:19 by A. McE | LONDON

    IT WOULD appear that association with the Big Society is something of an albatross. As eagerly as David Cameron has ridden in to re-explain the idea, few in the inner counsels of government now think it will be something to boast about when the time for re-election draws near. Lord Wei, the former management consultant sent to the Lords to be a figurehead for the project, has just announced his resignation to work for a charity. A spokesman told the Guardian that Lord Wei had completed the task of developing the policy—and thus there was no need to replace him. This is akin to saying that Andrew Lansley has completed a task of developing health policy, and so there is no need to replace him either. Not many at Westminster would take bets on that.

    Lord Wei himself sounds like a disappointed man, speaking of the "modest" role he was able to play. The story is symptomatic of the broader problems of the Big Society as a guiding idea. More than the government has been prepared to admit, it arises from a desire to save state expenditure. But this context has proven difficult for those, like Lord Wei, who have to flesh out a nebulous policy. 

    The prime minister recently spoke warmly of charitable and voluntary bodies innovating public services in their communities. Truly, these are often more flexible and less bureaucratic than state-run ones. Alas, these are the very bodies threatened with loss of funding—frequently delivered through local authority grants—as the cuts are implemented this financial year. However great Mr Cameron's faith in local green shoots springing up to replace the tangled undergrowth of state provision, it is hardly realistic to expect this to happen on any major scale, when the most experienced voluntary and charitable sector groups are facing incisions into their budgets. 

    Even in the cabinet office, where the Big Society duo Francis Maude and Oliver Letwin have their lair, Leviathan detects a falling enthusiasm for discussing the "Bigsoc". It is interesting too that the Liberal Democrats haven’t taken up the idea with any enthusiasm. Nick Clegg is focusing on restoring more local accountability to health and education reforms instead. One of his allies describes it merely as a "device to salve guilty Tory consciences". That is putting it too harshly. Mr Cameron and his Bigsoc architect Steve Hilton genuinely believe that there is more commitment, knowledge and ability lurking in communities than the state can unleash alone—and they're right. But their flagship idea is beginning to look like New Labour's Third Way: an idea that came and went, leaving not much trace in the real world and precious few adherents. The Big Society is already on its second relaunch since Mr Cameron took power. Leviathan doubts it will get a third.

About Leviathan

In this blog, our public policy editor reports on how governments in Britain and beyond are rethinking and reforming the state's role in public services, the arts and life in general. The blog takes its name from Thomas Hobbes's book of 1651, which remains one of the most influential examinations of the relationship between government and society.

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