The Joy of Six 1271

"Council estates are not Labour. Tower Estate, which had Labour councillors continually for almost five decades, now has three Lib Dem councillors all elected on around 50 per cent of the vote. Lincoln’s Liberal Democrats have proven we can win anywhere." Darryl Smalley says it’s time for us to march into the council estates.

Andy Cowper on the Darzi review of the NHS: "It’s interesting how much the Darzi review emphasises Lansley’s NHS reforms. It’s also politically smart, because they were a total failure. Choice, competition, and clinical commissioning achieved nothing in the English NHS over the past 12 years. The Darzi review’s main, unstated purpose is about the allocation of political blame. It does that quite effectively."

"The first government minister who kept a cat with him when on government business was Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII. It was said he travelled with a number of cats, took them to Mass and that they sat in at meetings with him. The statue of Cardinal Wolsey in Ipswich shows a cat peeping around his robes." Nicola Cornick sets out the long history of political cats.

"Despite the grave fate that awaits Mary, for the most part Yield to the Night is a quiet film that relies on the emotional dexterity of its star for a narrative engine. At every juncture, Dors was not just convincing, but compelling. It was a mammoth, and yet searingly intimate, performance." Chloe Walker celebrates Diana Dors' wonderful performance in the anti-death-penalty film Yield to the Night (1956).

Matt McManus wants the left to read the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre.

Shroppie Mon will tell you all about a Shrewsbury dragon.

Shirley Williams: a Liberal lion and trailblazer?

Shirley Williams was the subject of a fringe meeting organised by the Liberal Democrat History Group at the party's spring conference this year. You can watch the proceedings in the video above

What comes over is that it was Williams's personal qualities as much as her political beliefs that attracted people to her, and that a certain diffidence held her back in her political career. I think being a woman in politics in her era is enough to explain the latter point.

I was a little surprised by the fringe meeting's title - 'Shirley Williams: Liberal Lion and Trailblazer' - because throughout her time in her first party, Williams was seen as a mainstream Labour figure. She received considerable trade union support in internal elections, for instance.

It was her intellectual opposition to Trotskyism that led her to leave Labour: she wasn't prepared to mouth  clichés about 'a broad church' or tolerate the compromises necessary to thrive under Michael Foot's leadership. That made her a lion, but not in itself a Liberal, still less a trailblazing one.

A puzzle late in her career is why she staked so much of her political capital on getting the Lib Dems to support Andrew Lansley's changes to the National Health Service. They were not in the Coalition agreement, went against everything David Cameron had said about health before the 2010 election and few people even in the Conservative Party had any idea what Lansley was trying to achieve.

When I started editing Lord Bonkers' diaries the old boy said of Shirley Williams: "Surely she must be the most popular politician ever to be defeated at three consecutive general elections?"

But I would never be that brutal, because I remember just how difficult it was to get elected as a Liberal or SDP parliamentary candidate in the Alliance years.

Grant Shapps to be sacked in cabinet reshuffle?

In the Independent, Jane Merrick and Mark Leftly forecast that David Cameron will carry out a "ruthless' cabinet reshuffle this week:

Senior ministers who are thought to be nervous about their position include Andrew Lansley, the Leader of the Commons; the Chief Whip, Sir George Young; the Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson; Ken Clarke, the Minister without Portfolio; and the Tory chairman, Grant Shapps. 

Despite their bitter row, Theresa May, the Home Secretary, and the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, are unlikely to be moved or demoted, because such a switch-around would risk escalating tensions between their supporters and trigger a fresh round of bloodletting.

If have seen no speculation anywhere about a reshuffle of Liberal Democrat ministers.

Sebastian Kindersley chosen as Lib Dem candidate in possible South Cambridgeshire by-election

With speculation that Andrew Lansley will be made Britain's next European commissioner and thus cause a by-election in his South Cambridgeshire constituency growing, the local Liberal Democrats have chosen their candidate.

According to Aidan Van de Weyer on Twitter, than candidate is Sebastian Kindersley.

Later. Read more about the selection on The View from Creeting St Peter.

"The DfE are talking b*******," a senior Lib Dem source said

It's all kicking off in the Coalition.

BBC News reports:

The Liberal Democrats have accused the Department for Education of "going rogue" by briefing against Nick Clegg. 

The deputy prime minister has announced primary schools in England will get an extra £150m for new kitchens and dining rooms, to cope with the roll-out of free meals for infant pupils next year. 

This would be part-funded by an £80m education underspend, Mr Clegg said. 

But, after an education official told newspapers this was not the case, a Lib Dem spokesman accused them of "lying".

The Daily Mail adds some colour:

A DfE source said: 'There is no spare money in either the basic needs or maintenance budget to pay for Clegg's kitchens.' 

It was suggested the money would be taken from funds used to provide extra school places. 

But furious Lib Dems hit back, insisting the policy had been agreed by David Cameron and George Osborne, and Mr Gove's ministry should fall into line. 

"The DfE are talking b*******," a senior Lib Dem source said.

"Gove and the DfE had their eye on the underspend for free schools... which I think explains the slight bitterness from the DfE in some of the briefing. 

"What we are seeing from DfE is them going rogue. They are completely out of step. 

"It is time for them to stop whining and get behind a policy that they are going to have to deliver. The DfE are lying if they say there is no money."

The Mail also says that Downing Street made it clear that it was Tory Mr Gove's department that were out of line.

'The position is absolutely the one the DPM's office have set out,' the Prime Minister's official spokesman said.

David Cameron has no great interest in policy, which is why he gave Andrew Lansley his head and allowed him to implement heath reforms that were heartfelt but that no one else understood. Once Lansley threatened to become a political liability he was moved on.

I have some sympathy with Gove's views on education and the teaching unions are always angry with the government, so they tend to be discounted. But if Gove becomes unpopular with the wider electorate he may find himself leaving his current post.

Education: When did Kenneth Baker become a Liberal hero?

When an unpopular dictator leaves for an international conference he risks being deposed in his absence. Michael Gove has not called the tanks on to the streets, but he has launched a missile at David Cameron in the shape of his proposed reforms to education.

With their flavour of rigour and 'going back' they have delighted Conservative backbenchers and infuriated Liberal Democrats, which I suspect is precisely the reaction they were intended to evoke. It is hard to see Michael Gove being popular with the wider electorate, but he is able and ambitious. David Cameron needs to watch out.

But I cannot share the general Lib Dem horror at Gove's ideas. I don't like the idea of a single national examination board, but the system left by Labour had to be reformed. If you combine Blairite targets with the profit motive, you are bound to get falling standards.

Abolishing the national curriculum in secondary schools may not mean very much with that single examination board in place, but it is the sore of mood music educationalists should be pleased to hear. And surely no one would mourn the death of AS levels?

The general Lib Dem complaint against Gove's call for a return to GCSEs is that it would result in a 'two-tier system', but it is worth reading his retort when Labour's Kevin Brennan made the same point in the House today:

He invited us to consider that what the Government are reported to be putting forward would lead to a two-tier system. The sad truth is that we already have a two-tier system in education in this country. Some of our most impressive schools have already left the GCSE behind and opted for the IGCSE or other more rigorous examinations.

It is also the case, sadly, that 40% of children do not achieve five good GCSEs, including English and maths, in our system. He said that, under the proposals that are being reported, 25% of children would be left behind. The sad truth is that at least 40% of children have been left behind under the current system. There is no excuse not to act.

There is another reason that I find it too hard to be outraged at the prospect of changes to our current education system, and that is I remember when it was brought in.

It is chiefly the brainchild of Kenneth Baker, a Conservative whose was so slimily loyal to Margaret Thatcher that Spitting Image quite fairly depicted him as a slug.

Back in the 1980s Labour and Liberals did not support Baker, they opposed him. Labour educationalists produced a book called Take Care, Mr. Baker!: The Advice on Education Reform Which the Government Collected But Concealed. For the Liberal Democrats Paddy Ashdown and Alan Leaman wrote Choice Without Privilege: The Alternative Education Reform Bill.

I don't recall much praise for Kenneth Baker then. Indeed, I have a sneaking suspicion that we opposed him because we feared his ideas would produce a 'two-tier system'.

I have seen little reasoned argument against Michael Gove from Liberal Democrats today. Most seem locked in a mind-set where the world can be divided into sensible people who agree with us and ludicrous people who want to turn the clock back.

Just as with health (and let us pause for a moment to observe how much more deft Gove has been at bringing in his reforms than Andrew Lansley), we Liberal Democrats give the impression that we have arrived in power after 90 years in the wilderness with no higher ambition that maintaining the status quo. We need to do better than that.

So where are we with the Health and Social Care Bill?

Last month Dr Phil Hammond wrote in his Private Eye column:

When MD asked health secretary Andrew Lansley to reduce his unintelligible 358 page health bill to 140 characters or less, he wrote: "Putting patients and their doctors and nurses in charge, accountable for the results they achieve."

Put like that, it sounds rather attractive to a Liberal, so how has the government got itself into such a mess over this bill?

The first reason is that is has stirred up an issue that is inherently difficult for the Tories. Fairly or not, voters tend to see Labour as the party of the NHS, so the conventional wisdom holds that the best the Tories can do with health is to defuse it as an issue. And that David Cameron did very effectively as leader of the opposition. The Tories needed to be very sure of their ground if they were going to stir things up again on health.

The second reason is that, though Lansley has held the health brief for his party for years and has obviously put a lot of thought into his proposals, he has failed to communicate what he hope to achieve through them even to his closest colleagues. The tweet he suggests in the quotation above is a single shining exception.

And the third reason is that the government has tried to bring in these changes all at once. This is the mistake Caroline Spelman made with her plans to sell off or make over state-owned woodland to private sector, community and charitable groups. If she had started with one or two pilot schemes involving respected bodies like the National Trust of local wildlife trusts, these plans might well have proved popular. Certainly, the opposition to Spelman ignored the fact that most woodland has always been privately owned and never showed that this was worse run or less available to the public than that in the public sector. But proposed all at once, these moves provided opposition and pressure groups with too lumbering a target.

This is the point Simon Carr made about Michael Gove and free schools in a rather sugary profile in the Independent:

The introduction of free schools has been properly Burkean. They've started slowly with 30-odd in the first year or so, and seem to be popular enough for another 70 to be up and running by the end of this year. Good or bad, they aren't destroying public education, as their enemies claim – not yet and not unless all schools become free schools.

If you read the whole thing, do bear in mind that Burke was a Whig and not a Tory as Carr imagines.

So where does the bill go from here and what should the Liberal Democrats do about it?

David Cameron has shown himself ruthless in dropping people who threaten him and his touch-feely Conservative brand. It may well be that Lansley is on the way out and his bill with him. If it is not withdrawn then Lib Dems must continue to try to amend it. In particular, the the duty of the Secretary of State for Health to provide services needs to be retained.

But the trouble is that we have spent months campaigning for the status quo when we like to think of ourselves as a radical party. And there has been a great deal of enthusiasm expressed for central planning when in other areas of policy, notably the economy, we have rather weaned ourselves off our faith in it.

We need a policy on health that goes beyond this. One obvious direction to explore is local democracy in the NHS. Experimentation is fine when it allows clinicians to develop new services, but people need to have some means for doing something about it when they see that they are not getting those services in their own area.

As Paul Burstow wrote on Lib Dem Voice last year:

In 2002, conference debated Chris Huhne’s report into Public Services Quality, Innovation, Choice, which amongst other things recommended making the NHS more responsive to patients needs and choice by ensuring that decisions are made locally in response to local needs and preferences.

And, interestingly, he went on to claim:

Largely unnoticed the Health and Social Care Bill delivers on these recommendations by radically altering the relationship between the NHS and local government by ensuring that in the future Councils will be responsible for taking a lead in shaping local health services through Health and Wellbeing Boards.

Lansley and his bill may well fall, but the need for Liberal reform of health services will remain.

Andrew Lansley bankrolled by private healthcare provider

Or so the Sunday Telegraph reports tomorrow.

It appears all to be above board, but doesn't Lansley realise how bad it looks? And I say that as someone who is not as anti the health reforms as many Liberal Democrats.

Health: Opposing Andrew Lansley is not enough

Like David Boyle I am left a little underwhelmed by the Liberal Democrats' success in bringing about changes to the Health and Social Care Bill:

So in one bound, the coalition has leapt triumphantly into embracing a wholly different series of NHS reforms. Instead of GPs driving forward the commissioning process, there will be appointees representing hospital doctors, nurses and others.

The brave new compromise looks a great deal more like the old PCTs, which are still twitching away prior to being dead and buried.

It is not so much that I was an enthusiast for Andrew Lansley's plans. It's more that I believe a party that has been out of powers for 90 years ought to arrive in government some ambition beyond maintaining the status quo.

David has one intriguing idea for what a Liberal Democrat health policy should look like. My own is that it should receive an infusion of localism and democracy along the lines advocated by the 2002 Liberal Democrat document Quality, Innovation, Choice - otherwise knows as the Huhne Report.

This was one of the best things the party has ever produced, but it seems to have disappeared altogether. There used to be a copy on Chris Huhne's website, but that has gone now. I discussed it briefly in a post from 2005.

It is interesting that two local health issues I have written about frequently both have their roots in a lack of local scrutiny. They are the St Lukes Hospital debacle in Market Harborough and the row over Ayelestone Meadows in Leicester. In the latter case NHS Leicester decided to put £2 million into a scheme that would probably have decreased exercise levels in the city.

That is why we need more democracy and local accountability in the health service. It is the natural Liberal solution and it is the one we should be campaigning for.

Liberal Democrats to propose changes to Coaltion's health reforms

Tomorrow's Guardian reports that proposed changes to the Coalition's health reforms are being drawn up by the Liberal Democrats following the vote at the party's Spring Conference in Sheffield. The newspaper says that they are

likely to focus on areas such as ensuring that GP commissioning boards have a duty to prevent cherry-picking by the private sector, and that the boards contain locally-elected councillors or are scrutinised by councils.

They would also look at the structure, aims and membership of the proposed economic regulator, Monitor.

I am pleased that the reforms concentrate on the need for more local democracy in the NHS. Simply calling on the government to "Save the NHS" by defending professional interests, as Labour does, will not do.

Because worthwhile reforms are always likely meet with opposition from that quarter. Both Lloyd George's Health Insurance Act and the National Health Service were opposed by the British Medical Association.

An interesting question is how wedded the Conservative Party is to these reforms. They are very much Andrew Lansley's reforms, forged during his long years holding this portfolio in opposition.

Lansley undoubtedly believes in them, but it is quite possible that other Tory cabinet ministers will conclude that they are not worth the row they are going to cause. Liberal Democrat hostility may give the Tories the excuse they need to drop or water down his ideas.