Mutualism and free schools

Let's be generous and welcome a couple of initiatives from the other parties.

In this morning's Guardian Tessa Jowell had an article trailing the Progress lecture she gave this evening:

on the supply side, we need to do more than hold up the model of the relentlessly managed plc. We should look instead at other successful ways of delivering goods and services. There are important lessons to be learned from studying how the Co-op and John Lewis work, companies owned, respectively, by their customers and their staff.

Public services exist to serve, and are paid for by, the public, so it is the public that has the right to influence how those services are delivered, to build shared responsibility for them, and improve them by harnessing the efforts of both professionals and those they serve.

Indeed, can we really expect citizens to take on greater responsibility for their own health, learning, and environmental impact, if public services fail to give them the right to shape the ways in which they deliver them? We can. By bringing users, employees, and others together as mutual members of the provider organisation we can successfully get to grips with the supply side of public service.

All good stuff, and let's not spoil it by asking why her government has done so little to further this agenda after 12 years in office. Note too that this is a Labour minister solemnly pointing out that "the relentlessly managed plc" is not the only possible model of organisation. Whatever happened to socialism.

On the Tory side, I take similar encouragement from the Guardian report that:

Hundreds of parent groups have come forward to set up schools under Conservative plans to overhaul the education system which could see new community-run primaries and secondaries given the go-ahead within months of a change of government, figures seen by the Guardian reveal.

If this policy is to have any point then the Tories are going to have to give up their plans to decide centrally how children should be taught and even what they should wear. But I am pleased it appears to proving popular.

Those who oppose it should beware of taking the John Prescott line:

"If you set up a school and it becomes a good school, the great danger is that everyone wants to go there."

Labour staff face DNA tests over ballot box tampering

You have to laugh.

From the Sunday Times:

In a move that has been labelled “bonkers” by insiders, Ray Collins, Labour’s general secretary, wants to collect samples from all workers at the party’s Victoria Street headquarters who could have been involved in spoiling ballot papers in the bitter contest for the constituency of Erith and Thamesmead.

Among the candidates running for selection was Georgia Gould, 22, the daughter of Lord Gould, one of the architects of New Labour. The selection process was marred by claims that she was being “parachuted” into the safe seat by the Labour party machine and being given unfair help by powerful figures including Alastair Campbell and Tessa Jowell.

A hustings in April had to be called off after seals were broken on a ballot box containing postal votes at party headquarters.

House Points: The Olympics, school choirs and Samuel Danks Waddy

Today's House Points arguable finds me a little demob happy. This is my last column of the parliamentary season.

Incidentally, when I was at primary school in Hemel Hempstead we sang for no one more eminent than Potten End Women's Institute. We got a good tea, though.

Bercow's big tent

Bad news from Olympic questions on Monday: Tessa Jowell is talking about “investment” again. And we all know what that means under Labour.

This time the government is making good the shortfall in private sector contributions to the media centre and athletes’ village. It all comes out of the contingency fund, apparently, so it doesn’t really count.

Still, if anyone can make a mess of selling property in London – assuming it will be possible to sell houses again by the time the Games have taken place – it is national government.

A clue to the mind-set of those putting on the Olympics came in a Spectator diary written a few weeks ago by Roger Mosey, the man in charge of the BBC’s preparations. He blithely wrote: “£9bn is a lot of money, but the government is offering £220bn of gilts to cover our debt in this financial year alone.”

So spending £220bn on bailing out the banks means we need worry less about the cost of the Olympics? If they gave medals for bending logic....

******

John Bercow passed one early test. As part of the campaign against water companies’ higher charges on community groups for surface water drainage, some brave soul decided to bring 100 cub scouts to Westminster. But the Commons authorities said no because cubs are too young to vote. Bercow lifted this ban and allowed them to meet in Westminster Hall.

On Monday we learned of a new challenge. For the past four years school choirs from Hemel Hempstead have entertained MPs, and staff over lunch in the run-up to Christmas. In future, says the local MP, this will be banned as it inconveniences people.

Youth groups in Hemel are having a bad run. Last Christmas a shopping centre banned Brownies from carol singing because they are a “fire hazard”. Yet I know of no evidence they are any more flammable than the rest of us.

Mr Speaker should overturn this ban too.

******

This has been a depressing political season, but Liberal history always cheers me up. In recent days I have become interested in a gentleman who was MP for Barnstaple 1874-9, for Sheffield 1879-80 and for Edinburgh 1882-5.

The reason he makes me so cheerful?

It’s his name: Samuel Danks Waddy.

Bob Russell snubs Essex girls

Yesterday I reported that a Labour MP (David Taylor) had made a joke about Essex girls in the Commons. As Russell once wrote a a ludicrous trenchant letter to Liberal Democrat News after I made some mild jokes about Essex MPs, I naturally assumed that he would defend the honour of his fellow countywomen.

So I checked his website.

Nothing.

I looked at Google News.

The BBC quotes Lord Hanningfield (leader of Essex County Council) as calling Taylor's comments "pathetic" and "juvenile".

The Braintree & Witham Times quotes Tory MP Simon Burns:

“I am bitterly disappointed that in a sensible exchange with the Olympics Minister, Tessa Jowell MP, about how Essex could benefit from the Olympics a Labour MP (David Taylor, NW Leicestershire) should interject with such a silly and hackneyed stereotyping of people in Essex. It is very immature and unnecessary.

The Daily Mail quotes both Hanningfield and Burns and adds in John Kotz (chairman of the Essex Labour Party) and Mike Penning (a Tory MP from Hertfordshire).

But from Bob Russell, nothing.

He wants to buck his ideas up. Otherwise we'll be hearing jokes like this all the time...

An Essex girl was involved in a nasty car crash and was trapped bleeding in the wreckage. The paramedics soon arrives on the scene.

“It’s OK” said the ambulance man, “I’m a paramedic and I’m going to ask you some questions.”

“OK,” said the girl.

"What’s your name.”

“Sharon.”

“OK, Sharon is this your car?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you bleeding from?”

“Bleeding Romford.”

Essex girls look to Bob Russell to defend their honour

Back in 2004 I wrote a House Points column (scroll down to 9 April) that made fun of Essex MPs. "Why do Essex MPs support VAT? Because they can spell it." That kind of thing.

Although I had taken pains to exclude him, and made no mention of Essex girls, that column brought a ludicrous trenchant letter from Bob Russell, the Lib Dem MP for Colchester. Published in Liberal Democrat News for 23 April, it said:

Had Jonathan Calder made reference to people because of their colour, religion, sexual orientation or disability in what he presumably thought were “jokes” in his House Points column in issue 799 there would have been outrage from Liberal Democrats.

The fact that he used the word “Essex” instead of any of the descriptive words which would have been deemed to be offensive does not make his jokes “acceptable”.

Some of us have grown tired of the insulting “Essex jokes”, generally aimed at women, which have no place in civilised society and certainly not in the national newspaper of a political party which professes to deplore discrimination and derogatory comments.

I trust there will be no more offensive and insulting references about Essex and those of us who hail from the county.

So what is Bob Russell going to do about David Taylor? Yesterday the Labour MP for North-West Leicestershire, asked Tessa Jowell to:

deny the scurrilous rumours that, to encourage the people of Essex to be more involved, it is intended that the sports of putting the medallion and throwing the white high heels should be included?

Come on, Bob. The women of Essex are relying upon you. Liberal England will be keeping a close eye on your response.

If Tessa Jowell doesn't like a free press she should stay in China

From the Guardian:

The Olympics minister, Tessa Jowell, today criticised the British media for running too many negative stories about China that failed to recognise the progress the country had made.

"You can get big headlines back home for slating the repressive regime - and there are some aspects that that are profoundly repressive - but there is a great risk of going too far," she warned in an interview with the Guardian.

The paper's website has a video of her saying it.

Meanwhile in Tibet:

a picture is emerging from various sources of Tibet as a country in lockdown. The Free Tibet campaign has provided a briefing detailing huge military build-ups in many areas of Tibet, with checkpoints on almost every corner and early evening curfews imposed. Undercover Channel 4 footage has shown snipers positioned on rooftops in Lhasa.

Respected China analyst Willy Lam today suggests the Chinese regime's pre-Olympics security build-up has been planned to enable a major crackdown on dissent after the games are over.

An Olympic-standard hoofing for Tessa Jowell

It comes from Marina Hyde and can be found on the back page of this morning's Guardian sports section:

"I'm on the record repeatedly being very hard on China on its human rights record," she claimed. "Every time I have been to China I have raised human rights with the relevant ministers."

The minister is also on the record - on film, in fact - looking rather awkward as the tracksuited guards muscled in on Gordon Brown's photo opportunity. So she can hardly claim not to have had a clear view of any incident from her position in the dug-out. Yet despite this, you could not persuade her to utter a word against them in the aftermath.

Her appearance on the next morning's Today programme contrived to make her position even more ludicrously inconsistent. "Would it have been better if the torch had passed smiling crowds and cheering children?" she wondered aloud. "Yes, it would."

But of course it wouldn't. Even for an expert in double-think - Jowell recently joined a campaign to keep open a post office in her constituency, despite having voted in the Commons to shut it - this is a logical breakdown too far.

“Think of the poor whiting, Bill”

Today's House Points from Liberal Democrat News. As it turned out, Maclean's bill was not debated today but will reappear next month. The Guardian explains the machinations behind this.

I knew I should have written more about fish.

Dodgy questions

Last Thursday’s environment questions provided a chance to catch up with the career of Ben Bradshaw. And the bad news for Bradshaw watchers is that he is still the Minister for Fish.

You imagine him cornering the prime minister in the lobby and talking about his ambitions for the Treasury or the Foreign Office. And Tony Blair says: “Er, it’s Bill isn’t it? We need you at Fish, Bill. I can’t change things at the moment. Not when the haddock negotiations are at such a delicate stage.”

Which is why Bradshaw finds himself still answering questions on long-lining off Lowestoft and the by-catch regulations for skate and dogfish.

Will he do any better under Gordon Brown. With the Firth of Forth filling up with raw sewage, I doubt it. “Think of the poor whiting, Bill.”

******

The next day saw Norman Baker and Simon Hughes thwart David Maclean’s attempt to exempt MPs from the Freedom of Information Act by talking until it ran out of time and went to the back to the queue.

Except there was no queue. Remarkably, the authorities decided that no other private member’s bill was ready to go before the House. The result is that if you get your Lib Dem News on Friday morning Norman and Simon may be doing it all over again even as you read this.

Some might say that Simon will still be speaking if you are reading this on Monday afternoon, but you won’t find cheap cracks like that in this column.

Maclean, of course, is a former Tory minister, but it was notable how many prominent Labour MPs supported him, including Tessa Jowell and both Tony Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s bag-carriers.

This is typical of Labour. In their long years in opposition they became intellectually converted to what you might call the Charter 88 agenda - devolution, proportional representation, freedom of information - but they soon got cold feet in power.

Devolution went through, but Labour promised not to use its extra taxation powers in Scotland. PR was forgotten as soon as they saw the size of their majority.

Now they are having doubts about freedom of information. A backbench bill does not get this far without government approval.

Your cut out and keep guide to spiralling Olympic costs

Courtesy of the BBC:

• 2003: Consultants Arup put total cost of building and staging the Games at £1.796bn
• 2003: Tessa Jowell launches bid in May telling MPs it will cost £2.375bn - including a 50% contingency
• 2005: Bid succeeds in July with "prudent" estimate of preparing for games of £2.4bn
• 2006: Tessa Jowell says Olympic Park costs up to £3.3bn
• 2007: Olympic Park budget now at £5.3bn - including regeneration and infrastructure
• 2007: Total budget, including contingency, security and tax, reaches £9.35bn

The occasional horse’s head in the marital bed

This week's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News.

The observation about commandeering a De Havilland was orginally made of the first Lady Bonkers. And the story about John Prescott and the Edens can be found somewhere on my (very occasional) anthology blog Serendib.

Fun and Games

I don’t care if Tessa Jowell resigns or not. What I want, as I have said here many times, is for her whole department – Culture, Media and Sport – to go.

You wonder why? Monday’s question time gave a clue. The first question came from our own Paul Rowen and was about Rugby League. That didn’t stop Richard Caborn congratulating Alastair Cook on his century in India and Shelley Rudman on her silver medal in the Winter Olympics.

With her job under threat, Tessa Jowell had to act decisively. Faced with a question on the switchover to digital television, she countered by congratulating Rachel Weisz. Nick Park and Steve Box; and Martin McDonagh for their success at the Oscars.

It’s good to praise people when they have done well. But somewhere behind all these congratulations is the belief that all achievements by British people are really government achievements. And that is downright sinister.

Which brings us to Jowell’s home life. What can it have been like? How David Mills explain all those mortgage agreements to sign at breakfast? Or the occasional horse’s head in the marital bed?

Now they have separated, and those who suspect there is something convenient about this are accused of the most appalling cynicism. Yet we remember the widely reported story that Robin Cook took a phone call from Alastair Campbell at Heathrow, telling him that the headlines meant he had to choose between his wife and his mistress. He did so, telling his wife their marriage was over in the VIP departure lounge.

Yet what this story really shows is a decline in the quality of political wives. If Harold Macmillan had treated Lady Dorothy like that. She would have commandeered a De Havilland and gone after him.

*****

Talking of political wives reminds me of an interesting historical sidelight. An exhausted Anthony Eden resigned as prime minister on 9 January 1957. A few days later he and his wife set sail on a cruise from Tilbury to New Zealand aboard RMS Rangitata.

They were looked after by their cabin steward, who also fought on-deck boxing matches to entertain passengers. When he won, the former prime minister or his wife would sometimes present him with his prize of beer or wine.

His name? John Prescott.

Chasing nymphs around a pool

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News. You may detect echoes of this posting about Bolsover Castle and of half a dozen columns where I have moaned about the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.

Olympic dreams

After our recent alarums and excursions, there is something reassuring about questions on culture, media and sport. You know they are going to be a waste of time.

Two Labour backbenchers stood out even amongst Monday’s festival of dross: Natascha Engel and Derek Wyatt. The former has flown beneath the radar of this column up to now. The latter has been one of our heroes because he used to play rugby for England.

Engel asked the question provincial MPs always ask. How will my constituency benefit from the 2012 London Olympics? More precisely, she wanted an Olympic-size swimming pool built in her North-East Derbyshire seat “or perhaps in Bolsover”.

Don’t laugh. There is nothing funny about Bolsover. Life there is not all slagheaps and Dennis Skinner. Before the mines opened at the end of the nineteenth century that part of the East Midlands was an aristocratic playground. And Bolsover Castle, a seventeenth century pleasure-dome, is particularly worth a visit. You could certainly imagine one of the Cavendish family chasing nymphs around a pool.

But nowhere outside London will see much benefit from the Olympics. Security considerations meant all the bidders emphasised how compact their venues were. So Scotland will host no more than a few football matches at Hampden Park and lose anything up to £40m of Lottery sports funding for the privilege.

And Derek Wyatt? He recalled the happy days before fall of Communism when East Germany and the Soviet Union dominated the medals table. “One reason for that was that they tested their young children at school at the ages of seven and 11.” Couldn’t we add heart tests and hand-eye co-ordination tests to children’s new health MOTs and identify future champions?

I have always thought Liberals should worry more about public health policies that we generally do. If they are to be used to pack children off to some New Labour version of East Germany without the steroids, we should be very worried indeed.

Meanwhile, behind the gloss of the Olympics and the funding for elite athletes, things look less healthy. Tessa Jowell boasted that “we have school sport for two hours a week in 64 per cent of our schools”. The more you look at that statistic, the less impressive it becomes.

Roy Hattersley talks nonsense

Will there be a sillier column published in the Guardian this year than the one Roy Hattersley contributed today?

Here is his take on whether to ban smoking in private members' clubs:

But the notion that liberty demands that members of gentlemen's clubs be allowed to expose the waiters who serve them to the risk of lung and throat cancer is a sophistication of Mill's theories that can justly be described as original. The claim that the exceptions to the smoking rule have something to do with freedom is absurd.

Since passive smoking is a cause of cancer, allowing continued contamination in privileged circumstances is about as defensible as arguing that little boys should be sent up chimneys, so acquiring scrotal carcinomas - but only in big houses.

As everyone except Hattersley knows, the debate over whether to give some premises exemption from does not concern gentlemen's clubs but working men's clubs. John Reid, uniquely in this cabinet, recalls that the Labour Party was formed to defend the liberties and advance the interests of the working class. This puts him in conflict with the likes of Tessa Jowell for whom socialism has always been something done to the working class.

Hattersley way of resolving this dilemma is to pretend that it does not exist and to witter on about gentlemen's clubs in a way that would have sounded dated 50 years ago.

As the mention of Mill reminds us, Hattersley has pretentions to being a philosopher. But he does not convince in this article. Take the sentence that comes before the passage I quoted above:

It has often been argued - quite wrongly, in my view - that a truly free society would not prohibit self-styled guardians of the countryside killing small furry animals in the process of what they call sport.

I am not sure what "a truly free society" means, but it can hardly be denied that a ban on hunting is an infringement on liberty. You may well think that infringement a price worth paying to further animal welfare, but an infringement upon liberty it remains.

To some extent we are all in favour of curbing individual liberty for the common good - even a wacky libertarian like me. That is inevitable. It only becomes dangerous when we seek to fool ourselves about what we are doing - when we start saying that "true liberty" or "real liberty" consists in doing what the government tells us. Or that liberty consists in doing things of which Lord Hattersley approves.

The President of the MCC’s buttocks

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News.

Sporting chance

I lived without a television for most of the 1990s. It is possible, and you really do write more and read more good books. I even kept up with the programmes I was missing by reading Nancy Banks-Smith's reviews in the Guardian.

There was only one snag: the TV Licensing Authority. On Monday at culture, media and sport questions John Pugh described it as "harassing a pensioner couple in my constituency - threatening them with court action, fines and enforcements visits in December, January, February, March, June and August, with each letter becoming even more threatening".

This attitude will be familiar to anyone who has tried doing without a TV. It's the dark side of the BBC. You get the impression Auntie believes the government has made it compulsory for everyone to own a set.

When I got one again in 2000 the programmes and advertisements had changed. There were lots of people from ethnic minorities on screen, the view of family life offered was uniformly negative and advertising logos had invaded the world of sport.

People think the cricket authorities are stuffy, but really they are the most shamelessly commercial administrators of all. There are now logos on the players' clothing and painted on the field of play. For the right price you could probably get your company's slogan tattooed on the President of the MCC's buttocks.

So it was no great surprise when exclusive rights to screen England test matches were sold to Sky TV. You can see why the authorities took the money, but it's unlikely to be in the long-term interests of the game if fewer youngsters get to watch it.

Should government intervene to save cricket from the consequences of its own folly? Tessa Jowell offered no more than a review of all sporting rights in a few years' time. Crispin Blunt and Derek Wyatt suggested ways of ensuring no sport is allowed to deal with just one broadcaster, which must be the way forward.

The rest of Monday's question time was dominated by the new licensing hours. The government's hope is that they will lead to more civilised drinking - certainly, we Liberals used to believe they would - but not many people are holding their breath.

New Labour's divorce from liberal England

Martin Kettle writes movingly in today's Guardian about the memorial service for Anthony Sampson:

This was unmistakably a gathering of English men and women of a particular kind. They seemed to me to be the stubbornly principled, occasionally self-righteous bearers of the English imagination of which Peter Ackroyd writes so movingly - people haunted by the landscape and above all by the language, people permanently aware of the past, but people adaptive and comfortable in diversity, practical and pragmatic carriers of a mixed culture. Call them the recusant establishment of literate and liberal England.

I find this a good description of the kinds of liberalism and Englishness that I find particularly congenial. I had these ideas somewhere in mind when I chose the title of this blog, which probably explains why it has been consistently been more interested in rural Shropshire than, say, the reform of social services.

Kettle continues:

On the steps of the church afterwards, I looked for the politicians and saw only a few of any stripe. Shirley Williams and David Owen were there; Margaret Jay and Helena Kennedy too. But none of the thinking ministers you might expect to want to mark the passing of the anatomist of Britain. No Peter Hain, no Tessa Jowell, no David Blunkett - and no Gordon Brown or Tony Blair.

In fact, he notes, "there was not a single Labour minister or MP there".

Kettle sees this absence as evidence of a recent divorce between the New Labour project and liberal England, contrasting it with the efforts senior ministers made to pay tribute to Paul Dacre on the tenth anniversary of his becoming editor of the Daily Mail. David Blunkett, for instance, turned up to propose a toast to a man who "reflects the best of journalism". For there was a time, says Kettle, when Blair felt comfortable with liberalism, and cites his 1995 Fabian lecture on the 50th anniversary of the Attlee government as an example.

I wonder. I sensed the fundamentally illiberal nature of New Labour early. In the winter of 1996-7, a few months before Blair became prime minister, I attended a lecture given by Gordon Brown in the heart of the City of London. His theme was the rediscovery of a sense of shared national purpose through work.

This sounded at once cheerless - stemming from what Andrew Roth has called Brown's "mixture of Presbyterian doom and self-satisfied righteousness" - and sinister. Can a free nation have one purpose? Surely free citizens have many different purposes and a good society enables them to pursue these in some degree of harmony?

It happens that I spent some time this weekend researching the eugenics movement in Britain for an article I am writing. I knew that this movement had enjoyed a wide following, particularly in the Edwardian era, but what struck me most was how familiar the views of its advocates sounded.

Like New Labour, they believed that we are faced by a vast underclass that is frequently criminal and is such a drag on the national economy that it threatens our future survival in an increasingly competitive world

In 1905 the answer was to sterilise the unfit and to encourage the right sort of people to have more children. In 2005 it is to have childcare professionals train parents and to make the socialisation of children the business of the state. What these two approaches share is a fundamental fear and contempt of the poor.

So while Kettle is right to say that New Labour is fundamentally divorced from Liberal England, I suspect that this divorce was inherent from its inception and is not a recent development.