Besides lobbyists, (or perhpas in cahoots with them) are the phony consultations beloved of this Govt, often by OLR (whose chief exec is very pally with New Lab), where participants are fed skewed info, given only one side of the argument, asked leading questions etc., thus give artificial ‘proof’ to support an already-decided-upon course of action…

Notice how Cameron flounces around the only measure that guarantees real change, Proportional Representation?

We all know why.

PR kills off any prospect of a rightwing Thatcher-esque government ever gaining power in Britain. It strangles the influence of the rightwing press. The Tories would be forced leftward, back to where politically the majority of the British voting public currently sit.

Cameron’s proposals benefit no one except the Conservative Party.

Same old power mad Tories.

‘To be fair, the government itself has been very quiet. It was due to respond before Easter’

Yet the thrust of this article is against the opposition.

Maybe this is why one senior lobbyist – Bell Pottinger Public Affairs chair Peter Bingle – last week warned the lobbying industry to keep its head down and not talk about the Select Committee’s proposal to regulate. PR Week quotes Bingle saying: “At a time when the Government has its own problems, the public affairs industry would do well to keep its counsel to itself.”
http://www.prweek.com/uk/news/905736/Questions-raised-kitemark-plan/

How about we have referendums on all major issues? That way the government would do what people wanted. The response to this is lukewarm at best

Those who, for example, want a referendum on the death penalty may not be so keen on a referendum for a higher rate of tax and vice versa.

Should majority opinion always get its way and if not, how do we determine which issues the majority should determine?

BenM: you’re not wrong, Cameron only chooses “safe” reforms, i.e. shit we’ve all thought, heard and dismissed before as a way of making politics like a fashion trend.

So far, the call for people involvement has seen other Tory celebrities want to stand against current Tory MP’s, “safe”.

Cameron is just taking the piss. This one from yesterday’s Guardian made me laugh, until it hits home that this is our next PM, and the joke isn’t funny anymore.

“But the tragic truth today is that no matter how much we strengthen parliament or hold government to account, there will still be forces at work in our country that are completely unaccountable to the people of Britain – people and organisations that have huge power and control over our daily lives and yet which no citizen can actually get at.”

The lobbyists? The banks? The corporations? Er, no:

“Almost half the regulations affecting our businesses come from the EU. And since the advent of the Human Rights Act, judges are increasingly making our laws.”

I don’t think I had fully realised until I read yesterday’s Guardian stuff just how bad it is going to be under Cameron. Another mediocre showman who is completely and utterly the possession of big business and big money.

Off topic, but what the hell:

“Almost half the regulations affecting our businesses come from the EU,” says Cameron!

For crying out loud.

“Almost half” now is it?” What is it with obsessive Europhobes and exaggerations about how much regulation is agreed at EU level? None of them can agree what the figure is: some say 70pc, some 75pc, some say 80pc. Cameron now says its “almost half”.

The only definitive figure I’ve ever seen is the House of Commons library one which, collated, made it around 9pc (and in broad areas where the EU already has competency – trade, consumer affairs, agriculture, fisheries).

Anti-EU obsessives constantly lie, exaggerate and misrepresent. It’s a wonder so-called euroscepticism has any credibility left in this country.

I didn’t think they were strong words yesterday. They were old words, needed years ago, and catchphrases that were painfully constructed. Nothing strong or brave came out of Cameron’s speech nor his “interaction” with social media. Underneath it all Cameron was stating a status quo with some minor reforms being considered. No electoral reform, nor constitutional reform that actually makes a significant change and hasn’t already been bandied about within the houses at some point or another over the last 4-5 years.

Cameron’s Guardian piece yesterday was headlined “We need a massive, radical redistribution of power”. Several thousand words later the sum total of what is offered is a massive, radical redistribution of power from Gordon Brown to David Cameron, with no further meaningful change to the same old same old agenda of funnelling taxpayer’s money and public assets as fast as possible to City and corporate interests.

Richard Murphy at Tax Research UK dissects Cameron’s weasel words on education brilliantly at
http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2009/05/26/i-dont-believe-david-cameron/comment-page-1/#comment-552268 The agenda for health and education, as with New Labour, is & will be privatisation at all costs.

Could Cameron’s entire reform strategy be designed to resurrect the image of his opponent as a tyrant holding onto power? Remember the Stalin jibe thrown at Brown? Cameron, by contrast, will give “power back to the powerless”. Put in this context yesterday’s speech looks very cynical.

I’m disturbed by Cameron’s promise to devolve power away from Parliament, particularly when you see who he wants to give it to instead. I don’t think that the issue here is that parliament are too powerful (it is what they’re there for, after all) it’s that they (sometimes) make the wrong decisions and, as the article points out, are influenced by people who are not visible or accountable to the public, which wouldn’t be aided by giving power and public money to any unelected person who wants to see their (potentially unhinged) ideas made into policy. There’s something deeply undemocratic about taking power away from elected officials and handing it instead to anyone who wants it. To run with the examples of schools, the sorts of people who are likely to set up their own schools are almost certainly not going to be normal parents with concerns about the quality of their childrens’ education, but those with the time to do so (which in this instance would probably be those with enough money not to have to work) or, more worryingly, those with views radically different enough from the norm to motivate them into setting up special schools to promote them. Quite apart from the issue of wether it’s right to indoctrinate children into extreme modes of thinking because their parents want it done, (and Cameron’s been awfully vague on the amount of quality control that would go on – there’s been nothing on wether these new schools would have to follow a standardised curriculum, for example) this would obviously be massively more expensive than improving the quality of state schools which, short of a huge increase in the education budget, would harm the (vast, vast majority) of children whose parents don’t set up their own schools, as money was diverted away from existing schools and into oneswhich cater to much smaller numbers of people.

I don’t think that giving more power to local government and putting in place measures which make it easier for people to be heard is a bad idea, quite the opposite, but what Cameron’s said on the subject so far implies that his reforms have very little to do with making the voices of the majority heard or deal with corruption and unfair influence within Westminster, and everything to do with giving more power (and public money) to small groups of people who, almost by definition, have interests incompatible with those of the rest of the community and trying to appear ‘progressive’.

But it wasn;t just Cameron’s two-page spread in yesterday’s Guardian that took the piss. Today the Independent has the three of them penning their “grand visions for the future”. Clegg was the only one saying something (only slightly) different, but Brown and Cameron are literally an exercise in hollow triteness.

Whenever a professional politician speaks you should always try this test: reverse each of their sentences and see how bleeding obvious what they are saying is. Because eventually they will do the opposite of what they said in the first place.

Brown for instance. Here’s a snippet from his piece for the Indy:

“I will tolerate behaviour that is against everything I believe in. A thorough investigation of all expenses claims will not be conducted. Local people cannot have more influence on local budgets and local decisions, from policing to schooling. Everyone must know that they are not being heard. Our proposals will put more power where it belongs – away from people’s hands. There is no option I will consider if it redistributes power”.

“None of them can agree what the figure is: some say 70pc, some 75pc, some say 80pc. Cameron now says its “almost half”.”

I believe the 80% figure came from a German official.

“To run with the examples of schools, the sorts of people who are likely to set up their own schools are almost certainly not going to be normal parents with concerns about the quality of their childrens’ education,”

Tell that to the Swedes. In any case I thought one of the arguments against this idea is that middle class parents concerned with their childrens’ education would take their children out of the local comp and effectively segregate them in these new schools.

Corporations only exist because they are given an artificial legal personality by the government. Almost by definition, they are respected and listened to more than other interests because they are pretty much arms of the state anyway. As they exist, they behave rather like government departments, angling for funding or other support in terms of exemptions and licenses. I am sure there is a consistent way to reform how they behave around government short of abolishing them.

Cameron’s suggestions seem to go at least some of the way towards a fairer kind of democracy but in practice he is unlikely to make any change that would reduce his powers if elected. That is the nature of the power hungry and DC has an appetite second to none as far as I can see.

Significantly he made no mention at all of the greatest obstacle to People Power and that is our archaeic monarchial system. Power and influence beyond the dreams of mere politicians and only some of it gifted to the Prime Minister of the day through the Royal Perogative. If we are ever to become a true democracy then we need to start at the very top; the unelected, unaccountable, undemocratic, royal family, by which I mean the royal institution not the individuals.

Richard,

Approx. 8% of Swedish schools are publicly funded independents, which, compared with the 92% that are not, is a pretty small minority and certainly not something that the ‘average’ parent could be said to have endorsed. More worryingly, the two biggest criticisms of those which do exist are that they are often run by religious or social fundamentalists who believe that their views are not represented in mainstream schools, rather than parents who set them up due to educational concerns, and that the diversion of students has caused some public schools to collapse, which, if it were to happen over here would potentially result in (as I said, the majority of) children whose parents don’t have the time or inclination to set up schools being forced into privatly established ones.

“Corporations only exist because they are given an artificial legal personality by the government.”

In a free market system they’d be formed by contract instead, although they’d probably have to negotiate limited liability with their customers.

“More worryingly, the two biggest criticisms of those which do exist are that they are often run by religious or social fundamentalists who believe that their views are not represented in mainstream schools”

So? That’s the price we pay for living in a tolerant, liberal, pluralistic society. I’d rather live in a country that included a minority of nutty schools than one on which the state controls all of them.

Give more power to the amateurs who run much of local govt? No, thanks – unless we see a believable strategy for bringing competence into all of local govt. And into all central govt depts, not just a few that I could mention.

The point of having a free market in schools isn’t so that the weirdos that set them up have the power, but the parents have the power to choose which school to send their kids to. That will tend to crowd out the weirdos from the market (except the good ones, like say Steiner-style teaching which is weird but works very well!). There is nothing wrong with eccentricity and experimentation in education. Even ones with a religious ethos. After all, we all end up believing in some mumbo-jumbo or other. At least we should have a choice of which!