Recent Articles

They haven’t run a piss-up in a brewery

We’re going straight over to Hammersmith and Fulham where Stephen Greenhalgh, the leader of the council and head of the Conservative Council Innovation Unit has a few thoughts on the Shadow Cabinet he’d like to share with everyone…

‘My mates are all in the shadow Cabinet, waiting to get those [ministerial] boxes, being terribly excited. I went to university with them, they haven’t run a piss-up in a brewery,’

No comment from us… well. okay, there is this video that sums things up nicely…

The Truth about Immigration: Asylum (Part 2)

Between 1991 and 2007, citizens of 41 different countries and areas (i.e. EU Accession States/ Former USSR) have generated enough asylum applications to be listed in official statistics in their own right. These countries/areas account for 682,000 of the 739,000 asylum applications made during that period, the remainder being recorded as ‘other’ and broken down only by region. Top of that list, in terms of the numbers seeking asylum, is Somalia; at the bottom is the African state of Togo with 780 applications.

Of those 739,000 applicants, slightly fewer than 10% (73,750) were granted asylum on a permanent basis on the strength of their initial application with a further 17% (124,720) granted either exceptional of discretionary leave to remain. 529,000 applications were turned down at the first time of asking.
continue reading… »

Why I don’t believe in faith schools

What’s to stop a bunch of North London Trot parents scraping two million quid together and sponsoring a secondary school with, as the jargon has it, a distinctive ethos? I have asked this question, semi-seriously, of people with a better understanding of New Labour educational policy than I can personally claim. As far as they can tell, such a project would technically be within the rules.

After all, Evangelical car salesmen with a few bob to spare have set up educational establishments that inculcate creationism. So why not Karl Marx Comp, where students get to study permanent revolution alongside evolution?

Of course, cynics will take one look at the political composition of the average inner city National Union of Teachers branch and argue that we are as near as dammit there already. And what of the omnipresent risk of a serious split in the sixth form, with a Reesite faction convening  clandestine meetings behind the bikesheds to discuss major analytical differences over the potential for a united front orientation towards year seven?

I make these points, of course, after David Cameron attempts to embarrass the government over alleged state support for two schools run by the Islamic Shakhsiyah Foundation backfired humiliatingly, largely on account of half-arsed research. The claim of Hizb ut Tahrir involvement is, at best, not proven.

continue reading… »

ResPublica? You’re having a laugh

I have no idea why various policy people get so excited by Philip Blond. Everything he says sends my inner bullshit detector into sirens blaring overload. Even the title of his new thinktank make’s me think of Johnson from Peepshow. ResPublico/ResPublicus, anyone?

Anyway, whenever someone perfectly sensible tries to get their head arounds this stuff, they end up writing a thousand words on the complex inner contradictions and fuzzyness on specifics inherent in the “Red Tory” project, which is a polite Thinktank way of saying it’s a load of old toss.

I have a simpler version. It’s toss, with the sole interesting feature being that it is fashionable toss. Why it is fashionable is a far more interesting a question than what Philip Blond is actually saying.*

I mean read this stuff:

“A new power of association could be delivered to all citizens so that if they are indeed in an area that receives public services in a form that can be identified both by sector and by type and if area specific budgetary transparency is delivered such that each place knows what is being spent on it, then if those services are less than they should be in terms of quality, design or applicability, then there should be a new civil power of pre-emptory budgetary challenge that is given to any associative group that claims to represent those in its area”

Why is it such waffle? Because if it wasn’t, if it was clear and you knew anything about housing, you’d probably say something like, “ah, like a Tenant management organisation you mean? But hold on, arent’ they part of the state that’s destroying society a paragraph ago…” and then you’d go, “ah, this is all toss”.

Which it is. So don’t bother yourselves with it.

(BTW, If the transcript of the launch is to be believed, the one thing that can be said about red Toryism is that it is resolutely, indefatigably opposed to commas. This is not good.)

As someone once said to me – Many things that are provocative are not worth arguing with. Red Toryism is one such.

Which Taxpayers’ Alliance should you join?

Our friends at the Other Taxpayers’ Alliance are one year old day.

They have produced a handy guide so that you can see which Taxpayers’ Alliance you should join, here.

Borders goes into administration

The bookshop chain Borders has gone into administration, after making over £10 million losses for the second year in a row.

I think this is sad news, and would be interested in comments. Personally, I usually buy online if there is a specific book that I want, but I much prefer browsing and looking to see which new books are about in a bookshop rather than from Amazon or wherever.

Does this just make me old fashioned, and does anyone have suggestions about the best places or sites to discover new books?

The Truth about Immigration: Asylum (part 1)

This is part one of a two-part article on asylum, which I’ve had to split to keep to a manageable length.

No single issue has done more to poison the immigration well in recent years than that of asylum seekers, or ‘bogus asylum seekers’ as the Daily Mail and the rest of the gutter press would have everyone believe. It is, I think, well known that the Daily Mail wishes fervently that it lived in a fantasy world of easy certainties (the 1950’s) and nowhere does this seem more evident than its coverage of asylum seekers, the vast majority of whom are labelled ‘bogus’ on the strength of nothing more than a bunch of lazy ethnic stereotypes that belong firmly in the 1950’s and, quite frankly, should have been left where they were.

Beyond the headlines there is, however, a much more complicated story to be told.

continue reading… »

The vision thing

Guest post by Matt Sellwood

“The very least you can do in this life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance, but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyed nor the destroyers.” – Barbara Kingsolver

British politics is in a mess. That much is obvious to anyone who has spent any time speaking to people about politics over the last year. The issue of expenses was simply an explosive symptom of a much deeper-rooted cause, rather than the cause itself.

The cause, simply, is that very few people are inspired by politics any longer – and even fewer believe that electoral politics has any transformatory potential to offer. This is not limited to the left or the right – politics as a whole is being damned by millions of people. The most common reaction that canvassers of all parties in my constituency receive is “not interested, mate”, followed closely by “what’s the point?”.

And who can blame them? British politics has, it seems entirely lost the understanding that politics is about vision. Its about improving people’s everyday lives, yes – but its also about being able to look to the horizon, and beyond, for a promise of something better. It’s about being able to identify with a party because that party embodies what you believe in – your ideals. continue reading… »

Chilcot inquiry: shoot first, ask questions later

The most sensible time to ponder reasons for going to war is surely prior to the commencement of hostilities, and not six years after the fighting finishes. Whatever the outcome of Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry into the whys are wherefores of the occupation of Iraq, the entire exercise can only ever be about as useful as an investigation into world war two might have proved, if staged circa 1951.

Yet in a way, these proceedings could almost have been modelled on the pattern of the events which they will consider in detail. There is now a large body of direct testimony that the Bush White House had already taken the decision to topple Saddam as early as 2001. All the subsequent excuses were simply bolted on, after the fact. Why not the exoneration, too?

In logic alone, it must be unfair to Sir John Chilcot, and his handpicked team of three other Sirs and a Baroness, to write off the committee’s deliberations as a snow job before the deliberations have even taken placed. In the best traditions of Tricky Dickie, Sir John has promised that there will be no whitewash. He must be given every chance to live up to his word.

continue reading… »

Reporting back from the Citizens’ Assembly

You’ve got to love London Citizens’ strategy. Stick a politician on stage in front of several thousand people, present him (and it usually was a “him”) with some wonderfully populist solutions to a bunch of devastating facts and ask, “So are you with us?”

The policies presented to the squirming politicians and business leaders at a choc-a-bloc Barbican last night were made all the more difficult to avoid because they were decided democratically. Over a thousand of London Citizens’ members were involved in developing the policies, which you can read here.

Despite some inevitable wrangling, representatives from all political parties committed to working with London Citizens on these proposals. Greg Hands said the Conservatives would introduce a cap on store card interest rates (although notably, he didn’t say what that cap would actually be) and a representative from the British Bankers Association, who was brought on stage straight after a heart-wrenching personal testimony about debt, was asked if he’d commit to help responsible lending. (He did). Stephen Timms said he’d hold a meeting with London Citizens and the OFT to discuss capping interest rates, and Andrew Altman, CEO of the Olympic Legacy Programme said he’d meeting with London Citizens quarterly to discuss their plans. (Damn I’d love to see officials’ faces when these bigwigs tell them they have to add these dates to their diaries.)

Although London Citizens does get a bit happy clappy at times, it would be pretty arrogant of the left not to think it hasn’t got a lot to learn from this movement. Besides the “stick ‘em on stage and see” tactic, I took away three other lessons:

Be prepared to risk anarchy for democracy. This organisation isn’t afraid to hand highly eccentric people the microphone, to put street dancers on stage or to ask the audience if they endorse their chair. Somehow, it works.

Don’t be afraid to work across groups. London Citizens has got representatives from mosques, unions, churches, race-based organisations and schools. Sure they don’t agree on everything, but they agree on the important stuff.

Don’t be afraid to put morality, art and emotion into politics. It doesn’t water it down – it makes it come alive.