Oh my!

It’s been some considerable time since I was last moved to sound this particular organ, but it appears that Labour MP Tom Harris wants to pay for me to have a car and driver to take me to and from work.

Writing in defence of ministerial cars (after Ed Vaizey suggested they be scrapped) he says:

…if you’ve just had a 12- or a 14- hour day and you’re leaving the Commons after the last vote, it’s wonderful to be able to slide into the seat of a car and relax while you’re taken home, knowing you’ll be lucky to get six hours sleep before your ministerial diary kicks in the next morning.

Well, Mr Harris, I’ll be spending at least thirteen hours at the hospital tomorrow. I’ll then sidle outside, probably feeling physically and emotionally drained, pay £7.70 for the privelege of parking at my workplace, and drive myself home. And it isn’t as if I’m the only one!

But, apparently,

…a car and driver makes life easier and … doesn’t cost that much in the grand scheme of things…

It costs £6,000,000 to run 86 ministerial cars, so I make that just shy of £69,000 per car. On my salary, Mr Harris, that is quite a lot of money. But since its peanuts to you, I’d be more than happy to let you pay!

See you tomorrow!

Several MPs, ministers, and political commentators appear to want Gordon Brown to resign as leader of the Labour Party. God knows why: These lefties seem to think that sacking Brown would be good for Labour when, in reality, it would be anything but.

Labour cannot win the next election. Barring the hugely unexpected, Labour is now by far the most damaged political party, and the Conservatives are well into an inexorable resurgence. The political wind in the country, stirred up by Big Bad Blair, is now circling Downing Street and will huff, puff, and blow down Labour’s house with surety.

Labour’s popularity is in its boots as it is, and whilst Mr Brown is hardly boosting it, it is most certainly the party which is damaged now, not the leadership, and it cannot win the next election until it has undergone a Cameronesque detoxification. And,as Carol Voderman will tell you, you can’t detoxify when under the pressure of Government.

As if that weren’t enough, governments undoubtedly live and die through economic cycles. Few governments could hope to survive the present economic downturn, and both Labour and Brown – who have previously sung so enthusiastically about how they control the economy – have dug their own graves. Taking credit for the upward economic stroke has now left their popularity careering head-first down the slippery slope of economic downturn.

Of course, Brown’s fervent support for the merger of HBOS and Lloyds TSB this week is a further mistake: He’s backing a process which he doesn’t entirely control, and any regulatory hurdles the process stumbles at will be painted as Brown losing his influence. There’s a reason why back-room deals and discussions should stay in the back room.

But still, he shouldn’t resign. Labour failing under Brown is infinitely better for the Party than Labour failing under two leaders. Labour can’t win the next general election, but with a new leader, a lick of paint, and some enthusiastic party unity, they can purge themselves back into power reasonably quickly – and that’s where minds should be focussed.

To elect another leader now and yet still lose the next election will damage the Party far more: Failure under one leader can be painted as the failure of a bad apple, fail under two consecutive leaders and the country thinks whole orchard is rotten. Allegiance is switched to pears.

Of course, such is the nature of politics, few Labour MPs genuinely care about the long-term future of the party. The career politicians in marginal seats would desperately like to keep their jobs at the next election, and see Brown as damaging the Party. They want to chuck him out to give themselves a flicker of hope of avoiding their P45 for another Parliamentary term. Frankly, they’d stand a better chance if they crossed the floor.

This Labour government is undoubtedly moribund. There are no heroes in the wings waiting to swoop in a resuscitate their chances. The only sensible thing to hope for now is a dignified death, in the hope that the rebirth can be swift.

Brown simply must not go.

Patientline Bedside System

I note with interest that Patientline, provider of controversial bedside phone-cum-television-cum-internet consoles in NHS hospitals, went into administration on Friday.

My posts on Patientline – dating back as far as 2005 – received numerous comments complaining about the overpriced nature of the system, as well as the poor customer service users received, yet I’ve always been one of the first to defend the system against criticisim of high prices: That particular problem has come as a result of poor contractual negotiations on the part of NHS Trusts countrywide.

The contracts negotiated vary from the flexible terms in which the systems are cutsomised and integrated into the hospitals IT system, to crazily imposing terms whereby the units’ screens can’t even be switched off during daylight hours. The NHS Trusts who allowed the units to be installed must have been aware that this private company was primarily interested in profits, yet allowed the installation to go ahead regardless: In some cases, through apparently give-away contracts.

The company spent hundreds of millions of pounds providing expensive equipment to patient bedsides across the country – replacing simple TVs which used to exist on wards. They then attempted to charge up to £3.50 per day for individuals to watch their souped up TVs, and charged up to 49p per minute for people to phone the units.

This represented unacceptably poor value to hospital patients – after all, who wants to pay £24.50 per week for Freeview? – and has ultimately resulted in poor value for the NHS: Essentially, patients are getting much the same service provided by the TV in the corner of the room and the portable payphone for many times the cost.

It’s easy to see the apparent advantage to NHS Trusts – able to boast about an apparent improvement in service whilst neglecting to mention the increased cost to patients – yet it’s hard to see how, at those prices, investors didn’t see Patientline’s business plan as critically flawed before it even got off the ground.

Private companies are, by definition, interested primarily in profits – not in the best interests of patients. This is the fundamental problem with PFI projects in the NHS, and that the government fails to see that time and again shows either great naivety or great incompetence. I suspect I know which.

The ghost of Patientline is rising, pheonix-like, in the form of Hospedia, who are attempting to become the monopoly provider of such services – and oversee the spread of these terminals yet further. By investing a further £12m in improved services and cutting prices, Hospedia hopes to make a go of this business. I’m not convinced it’s possible… I guess only time will tell.

» Image Credit: Patientline publicity image

Mr Brown insists that he’s been planning today’s postponement of October’s fuel duty increase for some time. Perhaps he’s a fan of this very blog, and has been planning it since May:

Every indication appears to suggest that Brown is going to give in to the current demonstrations on fuel pricing and – at the very least – further delay October’s increase in fuel duty. This will be unfortunate but necessary damage limitation, and will spin well for, ahem, ‘hard-working families’.

Indeed, as predicted, he even spun that it was a measure ‘to help families’. If only he’d listened to my earlier advice and announced it at the time of the local elections:

In his single exclusive interview, Mr Brown should have been armed with an arresting announcement – something along the lines of freezing fuel duty increases to help the poor … Pretty much anything would have moved the news cycle forward, and taken the focus away from Mr Brown and the disastrous election.

Instead, he’s decided to keep the announcement back to today, thereby achieving nothing but a pasting by those who say its another sign of the economy going down the plughole, and a good ol’ bashing by those who say it’s electioneering.

Good one, team Brown – Yet another remarkable own goal.

Cast your mind back, if you will, to 1999.

Almost a decade ago, the shiny new(ish) Labour Government decided it was important to celebrate the Millennium, and that an appropriate way to do this would be to build a nice big white tent in Greenwich.

And oh, it was a lovely white tent. So strong, it’s still there to this day. So monumental, it has its own tube station. So loved by the nation, it’s in the Eastenders title sequence.

Yet they had a problem: What to put inside the tent. Ideas were flowing, for everything from a Festival of Britain for the modern age, to a theme park. So many choices, so many options, so many decisions.

So, in the end, they went with an elephant: A big white elephant, to be precise.

Tony Blair thought the elephant and it’s dome would be “a beacon to the world”. I was more cynical: I’d not been a fan of elephants for some years, since an unfortunate collision between an elephant’s trunk and a particularly sensitive part of my anatomy.

For once, it seemed the public agreed with me, leaving the elephant unvisited and the government red-faced.

This left Tony’s team scrambling to regain any sense that they were “in touch” with the people. So, in a masterpiece of spin, they simply denied that the dome contained a white elephant. They told us it contained all sorts of fun treats, that the public would really, really like to see.

When that didn’t seem to be working, they brought in a frog to feature alongside the elephant, a strategy that brought in about six-and-a-half million visitors, yet still continued to deny the primarily elephantine contents of the dome.

“It’s great!”, they told us. “Come visit the dome and see the special treats within! It’s fun for all the family! It’s not a white elephant, it’s a rip-roaring smorgasbord of good natured wholesome British fun!”

Even once the dome closed, they still protested that the contents had been “really good”, and certainly in no-way elephant related.

That is, it seems, until last week.

In an extraordinary interview with LBC, Tessa Jowell not only admitted the existence of the white elephant, but – unbelievably – insisted that white elephants were to be banned from the Olympics, since the white elephant in the dome had been such an embarrassment for all.

Is it really fair to blame this failure of Government competence on the white elephant itself? What happened to ministerial responsibility? I’m quite sure the elephant did its best to entertain people, but was placed in a rather impossible position by this Labour Government.

And, more pertinently, why are all white elephants being tarred with the same brush and being banned from the Olympics?

I very much doubt this would happen with Indian or African elephants – no, that would be racist – but it’s perfectly fine to discriminate against the hard-working, white, middle-class elephant families of these British Isles, whilst allowing any foreign elephants to just wander into the Olympics as they see fit.

It’s absolutely sickening that the respectable white elephants of this country should be treated this way by an incompetent government. When the government starts prioritising the Olympic dreams of other country’s elephants above our own, surely the whole country is going to hell in a handcart.

It’s disgusting.

» Image Credit: Original image by Aaron Logan, modified and published under licence

In Tony Blair’s day, New Labour were the masters of spin – at their most effective when they did it so convincingly that we didn’t even realise the facts were being spun, or else we were led to believe that we could see through the spinning, when in fact that presentation was the intention all along.

Now, it seems, that’s all gone. Yet, oddly, it hasn’t been replaced by the honesty and straightforwardness we were promised – an honesty many would say was incompatible with politics – but rather by terrible attempts at spinning.

Take the Henley by-election: Instead of pointing out that this is a Conservative seat and virtually ignoring electoral defeat, the omnipresent ‘Party Sources’ are mumbling about victory being secured if Labour keep their deposit. They’re saying that anything over 5% is some kind of win. Oh, brother.

And all the while, Harriet Harman is squeezing out plans to support ‘positive discrimination’ – another bizarre New Labour oxymoron. Discrimination is discrimination is discrimination – whether or not it’s positive or negative depends on your standpoint. Is selecting a member of an ethnic minority to balance out a sea of white faces still ‘positive discrimination’ if you’re a serial killer, or does this only apply when we’re handing out things perceived as rewards?

The same propsals also, apparently, ‘ban ageism’ – the government pretended to do back in October 2006, as covered on this very site. I note that Ms Harman is bounding about stating that doctors should only refuse treatment to elderly patients on clinical grounds – not on the basis of age. Three points: Firstly, doctors are already required to do their best for patients, regardless of age. Secondly, is age not part of the clinical picture any more? Thirdly, does this mean that twelve year olds should be openly prescribed the contraceptive pill? We wouldn’t want to be discriminating purely on the basis of age.

Ageism goes two ways. Why is it that this government consistently pretends that ageism only represents discrimination against the old, just as they pretend that racial discrimination only represents discrimination against ethnic minorities?

And let’s not forget that much of the economic policy underlying the NHS is based on QALYs – Quality Adjusted Life Years. That is to say that if an operation costs £30,000 but will lengthen someone’s life by 30 years then the cost per year gained is £1,000. Such measures in and of themselves discriminate against older people – an 80 year-old’s life far less likely to be extended by 30 years than a 20 year-old’s.  The same treatment is less likely to be cost effective in the 80 year-old purely because of their age. Is this to be overlooked in future? How is NHS rationing to take place now?

I sincerely hope that this is a crappy proposal put forward to distract us all from Labour’s impending Henley hammering. It’s not the best of ideas, because it shows Labour in a bad light, but perhaps not quite such a bad light as being deeply unpopular.

On the other hand, if this is a serious attempt at law-making, then we’re all clearly doomed.

» Image Credit: Original image created by Graham Richardson, modified under licence

Every indication appears to suggest that Brown is going to give in to the current demonstrations on fuel pricing and – at the very least – further delay October’s increase in fuel duty. This will be unfortunate but necessary damage limitation, and will spin well for, ahem, ‘hard-working families’.

If Gordon had made this announcement as part of his disastrous round of mea culpa interviews a couple of weeks ago – as I said he should – it would’ve worked to move on the news cycle exactly when he needed some movement, it would have been a pre-emptive strike against this kind of protest, and it would have played well to the public at large.

Instead, Mr Brown has decided to hand the press to his critics. The fact that the police decided to intervene earlier today only served to make the protesters more angry, and increase public sympathy towards them.

This is yet another relatively simple political situation for Brown’s team to handle, yet they appear to have failed to manage it effectively.

Many political pundits are already saying it’s impossible for Gordon to win the next election. If he doesn’t get a grip soon, I’ll start believing them.

» Image Credit: Original photograph by Rama, modified under licence

Today, new fertility laws are to begin their passage through the House of Commons, with a number of important debates about the current draft text coming up.

Some MPs are unhappy about the lack of a specific mention of fathers in the part of the text regarding suitability for IVF. The current draft has only a provision to ensure that their is an appropriate and stable family environment in which a child can be brought up – the presence of a father-figure is not specified, which is intended to be a correction to a current anomaly.

Currently, fertility legislation states that a father-figure must be identified. However, more recent Equal Rights legislation has superceded this requirement, allowing lesbian couples to have children using bank sperm. It is therefore proposed that the text of the fertility bill should be changed to reflect the reality – failure to correct it would mean that the current state of affairs would be reversed, with lesbian couples unable to have children once again.

Iain Duncan Smith is one of the prime Parliamentary opponents of this amendment. Earlier this week, he told The Observer:

Without fathers, boys join gangs and teenage girls become pregnant

This is obviously something that Mr Duncan Smith believes strongly, as it seems unlikely that he would want to use small-minded, bare-faced mis-truths to offend large swathes of the population who have grown up without fathers unless he had a very good reason to do so.

He surely wouldn’t express such an ignorant view of the causes of teenage pregnancy and urban crime unless his belief was so strong as to think that the end was justified by any means.

And I’m quite sure that he wouldn’t want to leave himself open to accusations of ignorance unless this was a matter which he felt was of critical importance.

Curiously, though, he didn’t believe in the role of fathers strongly enough to support the Employment Bill in 2002 – a Bill which gave fathers far greater entitlement to Paternity Leave.

Nor was his conviction such to compel him to bother to vote on the issue of children conceived through IVF knowing their natural fathers, back in 2004.

And nor did he believe it strongly enough not to vote in favour of the War in Iraq – a war which has left hundreds of British children without fathers, and tens of thousands of Iraqi families fatherless.

If I didn’t know better, I’d suggest this was thinly veiled homophobia from an MP who doesn’t want lesbian couples to be allowed IVF.

Of course, Mr Duncan Smith is far above that, and the fact that he’s voted against Equal Rights legislation time and again lends no weight to the argument: He’s just thinking of the kids.

Of course.

» Image Credit: Original photograph by Steve Punter, modified under licence

Gordon Brown’s disastrous round of interviews on Sunday morning merely added fuel to a fire which had already reached an unprecedented temperature at the heart of government. Each and every interview was a complete and utter shambles. Gordon should not have done them. They were a mistake, and they highlight the underlying problem of Brown’s occupation of Number 10 – bad advice.

Either Gordon or his team have failed to realise that Mr Brown is a completely different creature to his predecessor. They need to understand that to succeed as Prime Minister, Mr Brown urgently needs to stop attempting to use Blairite media tactics to tackle Brownite problems.

Gordon is, without doubt, a poor communicator – the public speaking antithesis of Tony. He does not come across with clear, crisp soundbites. He does not portray empathy. He emanates boredom, surliness, and arrogance. A round of mea culpa interviews in the face of electoral defeat was not the right call.

Agreeing to appear on every political programme going made him look desperate. He should have agreed to a single, exclusive interview, probably with Andrew Marr (his is the show which gets both the most viewers and the most dissemination through other media outlets, and that which has the host most sympathetic to Mr Brown).

He should have done the interview on his turf – get Marr to come to Downing Street, and conduct the interview surrounded by the trappings of power, helping to reaffirm Mr Brown’s position as the Prime Minister: He may have had an electoral battering, but he’s still in charge, still working hard for the people, and – ultimately – still in Downing Street. The pilgrimage to the BBC studios made him look unnecessarily weak, and levelled him with his opponents.

No programme in its right mind would have denied this relatively straight-forward rider when trying to negotiate potentially the most politically significant TV interview of the year. Everyone wanted him, and the programmes could – if necessary – have been played off each other. The neutral surroundings would also have helped to get other broadcasters to play the exclusive interview, as it wouldn’t be so clearly exclusive. Or, alternatively, the interview could have been pooled as a further rider.

Yet the surroundings would have only improved a bad situation – Mr Brown’s alienating nature is a bigger problem. He needs to be coached in how to talk to the electorate. I’m sure this is something his team is working to tackle, but drastic solutions are urgently needed.

Firstly, he needs to be banned from using the phrase ‘global economy’. He’s forever talking about it, and it is utterly meaningless to the vast majority of people. I hear nobody in the real world complaining about the state of the world economy – I see teachers striking over pay, people complaining about the rising cost of food, and increasing concern about petrol prices. To communicate effectively with the country at large, Mr Brown needs to frame discussion in these terms – something David Cameron does excellently, and to great effect.

Secondly, he needs to stop talking about himself. That’s a Blairite tactic, which worked brilliantly for Tony as he had the personality to carry it off. Brown doesn’t possess the necessary connection with voters to manage this – he needs to be the professional, distant leader. He needs to let go of the details, lead with big ideas, and communicate these in a commanding way. He’s a leader who needs not sell the ideas to the people, but rather allow the people to see the benefits of the results. Fewer attempts at personality, more attempts at policy. More of the Stalin, less of the Bean.

And that brings us to the other great failure of this interview: The distinct lack of policy. In his single exclusive interview, Mr Brown should have been armed with an arresting announcement – something along the lines of freezing fuel duty increases to help the poor, or even a major reshuffle of the cabinet since ‘the voters have told us things aren’t working’. Pretty much anything would have moved the news cycle forward, and taken the focus away from Mr Brown and the disastrous election.

This approach would have left him open to accusations of being reactionary, which is why I’d favour the former approach rather than the latter. A reactionary reshuffle would probably play well for the Conservatives in terms of painting the Government as ‘panicked’, but a freezing – or cutting – of fuel duty would be such a populist measure that it would be difficult for the Conservatives to land a meaningful punch. With oil prices rising, revenue from fuel duty is rising unexpectedly quickly anyway, so it wouldn’t leave much of a Budgetry hole.

All of these factors represent basic tactical errors, whether on the part of Mr Brown himself or his surrounding advisory team. Either way, this whole electoral defeat – and many of his other ‘crises’ alike – could have been handled much more effectively.

The fact is that Mr Brown could make for an excellent Prime Minister. He’s vastly more intelligent that his predecessor, appears to desperately hunger after ‘doing the right thing’, and he’s deeply principled. All he needs to do is to learn to keep his hands off the details, make snappier decisions (accepting when he gets them wrong), and learn how to better his personal presentation.

In short, he needs better advice.

» Image Credit: Original photograph from the World Economic Forum, modified under licence.

Labour have been hammered across the country in local elections and have lost the Mayoralty of London. Coverage of this result has reached saturation point, and I’m not sure that there’s much I can add.

Last year, with respect to Mr Brown, I predicted

If he continues to crash his way through crisis after crisis, announcing ridiculous policy after ridiculous policy, then the next government of this country will be Conservative.

He’s doing the media rounds tomorrow. In the face of multiple political crises, a failing economy, and an historic election defeat – really, what can he say that will change anything? I expect he has a half-baked plan to announce something impressive to move along the news agenda.

Like much that Mr Brown does, I fully expect it will fail.