Why it became Michael Gove’s awful month
The surprising thing about Michael Gove’s short tenure as Education Secretary is how quickly an appointment which began with such hype and bluster has descended into one of hubris and error.
The controversies Gove has been embroiled in since May have been entirely unforced errors; it is not beyond a Secretary of State to publish an accurate list of which schools will/will not see their building projects completed, nor is it beyond his ability to give a realistic estimate of how many would take advantage of his invitation to become academies.
The truth, as we now know , is that most schools in England & Wales didn’t await the Academies Bill with the same breathlessness Gove had when he rushed it through Parliament.
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Government admits housing benefit cuts will increase homelessness
The government has admitted that its planned cuts to housing benefit entitlement may make it harder for claimants to find housing and could force families to move further from where they work.
Last month’s Budget introduced a cap on the level of Local Housing Allowance (LHA) paid to claimants, and cut the level of LHA to the 30th percentile of rents in each area, rather than the median – reducing the number of properties that claimants will be able to afford.
Last week the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) published its equality impact assessment into the changes, which admitted that the cuts would hit some families hard.
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The Big Society exists, just not where the Tories want
I doubt David Cameron was watching Channel 4 last night, away as he is in America. But his aides ought to save the 4OD link for him.
I’m talking about Undercover Boss, which followed Kevan Collins – Chief Executive of Tower Hamlets Council – as he became “Colin” and met people doing frontline services in his borough.
It was remarkable.
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How close is Michael Gove to the New Schools Network?
What a curious beast is the New Schools Network, the "independent charity" that championed the plans for "free schools" now being rushed through Parliament by Education Secretary Michael Gove. Click on the group’s online form to "Sign up for more information" and a message appears:
We may pass relevant details to the Department for Education so they can provide assistance. If this is a problem please email us on…
How many other "independent charities" pass your details to government unless you email to object?
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The story the media isn’t telling: falling business confidence in the budget
Last week a major survey showed that confidence in the economy is falling sharply.
What was extraordinary about the latest Markit/ CIPS UK (PMI) survey was that the fall in confidence related to the upcoming Conservative budget.
And so while the national media is breathlessly repeating the Tory line that our deficit is unmanageable, what they’re paying little attention to is how Tory cuts are weakening our recovery.
The survey also showed that business confidence for future activity suffered its greatest monthly drop in its 14-year history.
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Will Iain Duncan Smith lose his fight with Osborne?
contribution by Richard Exell
Yesterday’s Observer reports that the Treasury has told the Department for Work and Pensions to “do its sums” because Iain Duncan Smith’s plans for welfare reform would either cost too much or disadvantage too many people.
Last month, I pointed out that the DWP’s options for major reform necessarily involve a choice between cutting the benefits of current claimants (including many who will suffer real hardship as a result) and spending more money – £3.6 billion to implement the ‘Dynamic Benefits’ proposals the Secretary of State developed when he was in Opposition.
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‘Everybody’s doing it’ isn’t an argument, Zac
Tory MP Zac Goldsmith appeared to think he did jolly well in his interview on Channel 4 News tonight, so vigorously rebutting questions about his election expenses by railing against Jon Snow.
Fans of the Goldsmith gene pool will have particularly enjoyed his brave decision to break with British political custom and practice by issuing threats against the media.
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How long before IDS realises his dreams are dead?
So it begins.
Gary Gibbon – Channel 4 news, yesterday.
Elsewhere in the Whitehall jungle I hear that IDS is having a rough time of it at DWP. The Treasury isn’t buying any of his expensive proposals, carefully worked out in opposition. He’s baulking at even bigger, straight, old-fashioned cuts to benefits than those already announced. The perpetual conflict between tighter means-testing and disincentives to work is at the heart of all this.
Some Whitehall old hands say IDS is the senior civil servants’ top tip as “minister most likely to walk”…
Of course, this was all foretold.
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Legal Aid cuts are designed to hit most vulnerable in society
contribution by Sundip Meghani
In yet another shocking example of how the least well-off in our society are now the Government’s lowest priority, new Tory legal aid minister Jonathan Djanogly has scrapped the legal aid training/contract grant scheme.
The scheme, which was introduced by Labour in 2002 and costs the average UK taxpayer around eight pence per annum, helped to create more than 750 new legal aid solicitors over the last 8 years.
Legal aid lawyers are really the only professionally qualified people who can actually help those in desperate need for legal advice; from immigration matters and family breakdown, to citizen’s advice bureau and welfare centres, from criminal law and actions against the police, to debt and social housing problems.
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The coalition’s plan now is to dismantle the NHS
The Coalition, now in its most confident phase, is starting the process of changing the fabric of Britain to reflect its shared beliefs.
This morning a close friend, chair of a Northern Primary Care Trust, contacted me for help with an article he was writing on the Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley’s, plans to shift “power” to GPs.
My friend, a former GP with 30 years experience, was flummoxed by the decision to ask primary care clinicians to become the key actors in the NHS’s economic and disease management alongside their current role as patient need managers.
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Why is our new government so accident-prone?
I am quite surprised by just how badly the new government has been doing on basic administrative competence.
Let us acknowledge that David Cameron is rather good at the tonality and public perfomance aspects of “being Prime Minister”, without perhaps placing quite quite the premium on etiquette which so impresses Martin Kettle.
On policy, the record on ever the highest-profile issues has been astonishingly poor.
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Is this why Sir Alan Budd distanced himself from the Tories?
Sir Alan Budd’s sudden resignation from Osborne’s Bureau for Rebuttal is the perfect moment to remind ourselves of his astonishing – but essentially correct – analysis of Tory economic policy in the 1980s (from Adam Curtis’s 1992 documentary Pandora’s Box).
(video clip after the fold)
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Conclusions of the upcoming torture inquiry may have already been agreed
Today the government is expected to make an announcement about a judge-led commission or inquiry into whether the UK was complicit in the use of torture.
Patrick Wintour on the Guardian blog says the test for the Coalition will come in the details. He asks:
Nick Clegg, Edward Davey and Hague have demanded an inquiry so much in Opposition, they would look ridiculous if they rejected one today. But much will depend on the details. Is the inquiry to be held in public, what evidence will be published, what witnesses will be called, will the civil court cases being taken against the government be stopped, how will compensation, if any, be distributed to victims of torture? And, finally, how will the American security services be involved and how will torture be defined?
But the answers to several of these questions were already set out last week in a well informed Telegraph column by political editor Ben Brogan.
It bore all the hallmarks of several authoritative insider briefings.
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A new government, a new age of spin
“What I can tell you is any cabinet minister, if I win the election, who comes to me and says: ‘Here are my plans’ and they involve frontline reductions, they’ll be sent straight back to their department to go away and think again. After 13 years of Labour, there is a lot of wasteful spending, a lot of money that doesn’t reach the frontline.”
David Cameron on the Andrew Marr show, Sunday May 2nd 2010.
Well, they will be sent back to their departments to “think again” alright, to draw up illustrative plans for 40% cuts, as the Coalition is now briefing the press in an excited flurry of axeman machismo.
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Prison works? No thanks, Jack
As Justice Secretary, it often felt like Jack Straw was motivated more by a desire to protect the public from liberals than from criminals.
In his inglorious time in government, Straw’s Labour Party oversaw a record rise in the prison population, dangerous levels of overcrowding and a disastrous early release scheme which completely battered public confidence in the courts.
He ignored British and European law on prisoners’ voting rights, fed us policies packed with pure populist junk and blithely suggested that those who complained simply didn’t care enough about the victims of crime.
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Conservative contradictions on crime and punishment
The Tories have long had what one might call a ‘progressive’ (ugh, hate that word) streak on crime and punishment.
In the late 1980s, prison populations under the Tories began to fall as Douglas Hurd and others tried to establish consensus around non-custodial ideas, which would see people avoid prison.
But to leave the matter there is to ignore staggering contradictions on the part of the Tories.
Firstly, there’s no proposal to get rid of what has essentially become a people-herding industry of private companies, to whom a lot of services have been outsourced.
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Does Jeremy Hunt illustrate why class still matters?
Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, recently revealed his vast ignorance of British footballing history whilst managing to insult thousands:
[A]s a Minister I was incredibly encouraged by the example set by the England fans, I mean not a single arrest for a football related offensive and the terrible problems that we had in Heysel and Hillsborough in the 1980s seem now to be behind us and I think, you know, there is small grounds for encouragement there even though obviously we are very disappointed about the result.
Anybody with even a basic knowledge of English football will know that what happened at Hillsborough had absolutely nothing to do with hooliganism.
That Hunt was shadow secretary for the same office during last year’s 20th anniversary Hillsborough memorial services is an even greater indictment of his callous ignorance.
But could there be something more going on?
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This budget could lead to 1.6 million job losses
I am intrigued by the debate on public sector employees. I took part in a phone in on BBC Radio Scotland yesterday morning and you’d think these people are the devil incarnate based on some comments.
I decided to have a quick look (no more) at what they do. I used UK government statistics created by public employees to find the answers, and then wondered whether I’ll be able to do so in the future when all the cuts have taken place?
So, first things first, at end 2009 how many public sector employees are there?
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New government housing policy: make people homeless
In yesterday’s Budget, the Tory/Lib Dem government set out their key housing policies over the next four years:
1. Increase homelessness.
2. Reduce the number of homes available for rent by people who are unemployed or in low paid work.
3. Ensure that people on low incomes are evicted from more affluent areas and herded into ghettos.
4. Increase overcrowding, and therefore increase ill health and reduce educational attainment.
5. Increase personal debt amongst people in housing need.
6. Take £15 per week away from people who have managed to find low cost housing.
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It’s not progressive to cut income tax while raising VAT
VAT is a tax which hits the poorest hardest. As the Fabian Society’s Tim Horton has noted:
The richest 10% pay one in every 25 pounds of their income in VAT; the poorest 10% pay one in every seven pounds as VAT (Source: Office of National Statistics, References here).
Yet raising the income tax threshold does nothing for the poorest households.
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You can read articles through the front page, via Twitter or rss feeds.
» Hague’s farcical attempt to establish ‘supremacy’ over EU law
» Shadow cabinet: why strategy triumphed over necessity
» The Tories and the curse of proletarian fecundity
» Four reasons why we should be defending the middle-classes too
» Why Labour desperately needs Yvette Cooper or Ed Balls as shadow chancellor
» Our priority should be free childcare, not child benefit
» My average life as an average whore
» Osborne could be planning to disrupt Labour’s plans again
» Three reasons why the child benefits fiasco is a Tory master-stroke
» How Ed Miliband could respond to child benefits fiasco
» No escaping it – the polling looks bad for Ken Livingstone
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