This Gove Grand Conspiracy

Michael Gove is not universally popular.  Mention his name to a teacher and it’s likely they’ll react with the face of a cat biting a lemon.  This reaction makes Gove ‘box office’ with our news media. To read politics our dumbed-down news consumers need pantomime villains. In the eyes of Fleet Street Gove’s Evil Wizard is storming centre stage and kicking Lansley’s Wicked Stepmother into the wings.  Oh yes he is.

Every pantomime villain needs a cunning plan.   The Twitter-wisdom, which the Guardian and TES follow rather than lead, is that Gove has leaned on the Exam Boards to lower grades so that more schools fall under floor-targets.  They’ll then be forcibly turned into Academies.  This will lead to a future of Blofeld-led corporations syphoning the education budget away from the careful stewardship of LEAs and into private coffers to then fund the redevelopment of the sports fields they’ve just sold to themselves into branches of Waitrose.    The evidence is out there.  Join-the-dots.  The grades have lowered, the sports fields are being sold at an unprecedented rate.  The man must be stopped.  Right?

Oh come on.  Get a grip.   Gove is no puppet-master.  Yes, he’s single minded and does seem to ‘work around’ as much as ‘work with’ stakeholders.  But he can’t even rely on his people to count to 31 much less engineer ‘The Grand Conspiracy’. You can only join-the-dots-up in that way if you first sex-them-up. Sexing-up Gove stories has been an Olympian endeavour over the last fortnight.  Take the playing-fields storm.  Selling at an ‘Unprecedented rate’?     Even if the sports field figure is 31 they’re selling 15 a year compared with their predecessors yearly average of around 20.  Whilst every sale may or may not be a tragedy, to describe it as happening at an ‘unprecedented rate’ is an outright lie.  It’s happening at the slowest rate for 30 years.

I suspect the truth behind these exam results will be equally mundane, boring  and ignored to keep the pantomime rhetoric in play.  This idea that downgrading is a ploy to make borderline floor-target Schools look worse is a nonsense.  Don’t forget  Academies enter exactly the same exams.   Any downgrading puts the same pressure on them. They’re just as exposed in the same league tables.  If anything they’re under more pressure to raise attainment quickly and under more scrutiny.  Other things being equal, to introduce downgrading will make the Academy program look like it is failing to deliver.  That would be in direct contradiction to the desired ends of our supposed ‘Grand Conspiracy’.

Almost certainly the exam boards will have recognised that grade inflation was an issue people were gunning for and then taken the call to sort it themselves.  It seems the AQA in particular has gone a wee bit further than the others down this track.  Now I share the demand that the same effort and score in an exam of the same difficulty should be rewarded with the same grade and not be variable depending on exam date. That’s why I’m miffed that my own GCSE results are considerably lower than they would be had I taken them this January.  I took mine over 20 years ago.   Those kids on the wrong side of the C/D borderline this year would have been on the wrong side of it in 2010 and every year before.

That said, reading the anecdotes from teachers there’s a genuine  issue in the way students  had their expectations managed.  And the students themselves are blameless in that.  Had the change not  come ‘in year’ and  been properly signalled to teachers then that bit at least could and should have been avoided.   Conspiracy? No.  Cock-up?  A little bit.  British policy development  was ever thus.

I’m no blind Gove fan-boy.  I think some of his views on curriculum are plain wrong.  It’s as if he asked his Mum what she did at school and has decided that’s what kids should still do now.  The idea of ensuring rigour in GCSEs is sound, but the idea that there can only be rigour in traditional subjects doesn’t logically follow.   Raise the bar on subjects like ICT and add rigour to them!  As an employer I can assure Mr Gove that a kid with a credible ICT GCSE or, if such thing existed, even a rigorous media studies qualification would be more use to me than a kid with Latin.

A side effect of this focus on the 1.5% fall in English (and 0.4% fall overall) is it distracts us from the great August tradition of  praising success.  Ironically, given this wider context recognising success where we see it is more deserved than ever this time.   There are  schools out  there who had a great year and moved forward without a grade inflation nudge.  You wont have heard their head teachers on the radio complaining. There’s one school just down the road from me that against the odds increased its headline 5 A*-C GCSEs rate by 10%.   They can be very proud. It’s customary to say that such improvements are down to quality of teaching and a sterling effort from the pupils themselves.  This year, for the first time in a long time even the cynics will believe it.  And that is no bad thing.

The Best & Worse of America

 

Watching the local TV here in Boston, I caught part of a trashy TV show that serves as the perfect vignette for the best and worst of America.

The show was ‘Minute to Win It’.  The premise isn’t that important, but in a nutshell two strangers are paired up to complete 10 one minute challenges to win a million dollars.  Think ‘Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Take-away’ meets ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.  To emotionally connect with the contestants they throw in ‘X-Factor’ style interviews with their families explaining how the Million Dollar prize would transform their lives.

A particularly enthusiastic soul on the episode I watched explained in a matter-of-fact fashion how she used to work as an insurance agent, ‘a good job with an excellent healthcare plan’, but when the recession came along was made redundant.  They could make the mortgage payments on one salary but her younger son was on specialist treatment for Asthma, they didn’t want to stop it, without the health-plan the medical bills rolled in. They lost their house.

Just wow.  It hammered home to me that our society’s consensus that we treat our population free at the point of the delivery on the basis of need is golden.  I have no issue whatever with innovative plans put forward to meet that consensus more efficiently, nor any particular truck with whether the actual health delivery is by private, public or third sector (and so have no philosophical objection to anything Lansley proposes, only concerns about the detail) – but if ever there was a proposal that threatened that core ideal – and could result in stories like the above – well, you could find me at the front row of the protests, entirely up for subjection to a good ‘ol kettling.

But if that story was the downside of America – the upside was there to be seen in the same lady.  Behind the whooping and high-fiving, which continued even after she lost –  and all the other hoopla nonsense that makes our European toes curl – there was still that relentless optimism.  She had a belief to her core that with hard work, personal sacrifice, and just one little break it would all be OK.  Now, faith alone aint going to solve her problems.  But I have little doubt that the ‘can-do’ attitude that seeped from her every pore massively increases her chances of making herself that ‘one little break’.

That optimism seems hard-wired in the US DNA.  Yes, the recession has dulled it, but even now at the pit of the downturn the level of self-belief in ordinary hard-up Americans and that innate sense that they themselves have a stake in digging themselves out of it is something I find inspiring. On a macro level, those tens of millions of souls applying that attitude will be the real driver that picks the country up by its bootstraps and gets it back on-track.  If we could only somehow bottle that optimism and transfer it over here to the UK – we’d be a better nation for it.  Without it, we must count the blessings we have – and I’ll start that count with the NHS.

Those Tiresome Attempts to Justify the Tottenham Riots

The riots in Tottenham are hooliganism pure and simple.

For the British commentariat that is far too simple an analysis to be allowed to stand. Cue, thousands of column inches attempting to frame last night as an inevitable expression of the ‘class-war’ stoked by this Government. Please spare me that bullshit.

I’m sure that the Chinese whisper ‘on the street’ will be “cops kill family man, Mark Duggan, in cold blood”.  That will have been enough for bored youths, who are no doubt suffering crappy prospects with a combination of the recession and poor education to go out and have ‘a good old fashioned riot and loot’. To some small extent they will also be emboldened by pictures of ‘Arab Spring’ that bombard our news, and to an even lesser extent be more against the Met than ever after the hackgate coverage.

Pseuds will over-analyse all the above ‘reasons’ and offer them as ‘excuses’. There will be more than a hint they are on the rioters side. In this over-analysis they will ignore the role played by the local gang leaders in stirring this up and the opportunistic criminality they engage in whilst it is kicking off.

We don’t know the circumstances of Duggan’s death – and it may well be that the police could have handled the operation far better. Someone has lost their life, he is a father, and no matter what he was up to that is a cause of sadness. Nevertheless, the fact the chap was carrying a gun and if reports are to be believed shot at a police officer, suggests the police were right to be moving in on him. Whatever, it will be far more constructive to wait for the outcome of the IPCC investigation before rushing out and burning down the local branch of Aldi.

The real damage the pseuds cause in their post-event rationalisation and politicisation of events is to foster a sense of justification amongst the riotors. There is no justification, there should only be shame.

What was this ‘Wilful Blindness’ Stuff?

Midway through their mammoth testimony, long before the custard pie, James Murdoch was asked if he had ever heard of ‘Wilful Blindness’?  He gave an out-of-place smirk and shrugged.  His father chipped-in that whilst he’d heard of it “we’ve never been guilty of it”.   Hold that thought.

Later, during Rebekah Brooks testimony, she was asked how payments to private detectives were authorised.  The gist of her reply was that News International set an overall budget for a newspaper,   the editor would then allocate budgets downward to ‘managing editors’, they would fund individual reporters and so long as everyone stayed within their authorised threshold they were accountable for their own spend.  Underlings were trusted.  If you were within your limits it seems no questions would be asked.  None of the witnesses had any idea as to the actual transactional mechanisms -cash, invoices or whatever – that allowed their reporters to pay private detectives (or actual detectives come to that).

Now, I’m no lawyer.  I’m not clear on the line that has to be crossed in corporate governance or financial control arrangements before executives fall legally foul of neglecting their duties.  However, I’m pretty sure the MPs were trying to establish if the delegated payment authorities were so piss poor as to appear manufactured to ensure there wasn’t visibility of how junior staff were spending the company’s money.  Our inquisitive MPs danced around this.  The questions, though never framed in such direct terms, were steering them to infer they had therefore allowed ‘plausible deniability’ to become institutionalised at the News of the World.  No wonder they  introduced James Murdoch to the phrase ‘wilful blindness’.  In the US folk go to jail for that sort of thing.   If the committee smelt blood on this point they chose not to go for the kill.  For now.

Regardless, the testimony painted a picture of executives who simply didn’t grasp whole chunks of the detail you might expect. I’m happy that they wouldn’t have been in the micro-detail at the time, but troubled that given the magnitude of what has happened they still didn’t seem to have really drilled in on it since. The more mundane narrative to explain this  is that the Murdochs and Brooks had a lax grip on the internal controls in their company, they delegated to the wrong people (you can delegate responsibility, you can’t delegate accountability) and they failed to assure a culture of ethics, audit and active management on a high profile part of their stable.   If it isn’t conspiracy (and to be honest, on balance I don’t think it is) then there is still a measure of old fashioned incompetence.  Either way,  it is no wonder Rupert feels humbled.

“1.6 Million Children in the UK Live in Severe Poverty”. Erm. Really?

Today there has been an alarming headline that 1.6 million children in the UK live in ‘severe poverty’.   Examples of the reportage can be seen at the BBC and Guardian.  Every now and again a news stat sets off a little alarm bell in my head.  This was one of those times – according to the Office of National Statistics there are somewhere around 12.1 million children in the UK (2000 census, I suspect little variation since then).   So according to today’s reports approximately 13% of children in the UK must live in ‘severe poverty’.   That little alarm in my mind was making a coughing noise which only thinly disguised the words ‘bull-shit’.   I usually go off on one when pointing out the rotten state the UK was left in after 13 years of Labour but even with blue-tinted specs on I would never claim that they left us with 13% of all kids living in ‘severe poverty’.    This figure needed some sniffing.

The original report is from Save the Children.  It can be downloaded here.  It’s pretty hard to find how they technically defined ‘severe poverty’ for their ‘research’. After a bit of digging it turns out they define it as those living in households with incomes of less than 50% of the UK median income (disregarding housing costs).   A median single income in the UK is circa. £20k. I have no idea how they then use their methodology to ‘disregard’ housing costs – but the top and bottom is that a couple with two kids who, after housing costs are paid, have an income of £12.5k a year are classed as in ‘severe poverty’.

When you look at the methodology the metric they use is not about poverty – it’s a about income distribution.  Without wishing to belittle the quest for more equitable income distribution- I can’t help but think that such loose use of language cheapens the words ‘severe poverty’ and so insults those millions in the world (including in the UK) who, very literally, do not know where their next meal is coming from.    We could have a very important national debate about income disparity and this data could be used to support the case of those who believe the gap is too wide – however to hijack the language ‘severe poverty’ is a distraction from all that is valid in that debate.

Now don’t get me wrong: that couple with those two kids on that income are going to have a horrible time.  The report does do a good job of highlighting the very real issues they face.   I am also under no illusion that genuine severe poverty exists in this country – the kind were parents go and beg on the street to feed their children – I see some of this here in Birmingham.   Some stories that happen right now in my City would make you weep – but to say ‘severe poverty’ is anything other than at the very margins of our society is a fantasy.  To suggest, as the words they have chosen do, that 13% of all children live in squalid, desperate circumstances is ludicrous.  By overstating it, all Save the Children have done is muddle two debates and distract some focus from tackling those very real cases that do blight our society.

CSR: Coalition learn a trick from New Labour

New Labour used to do this thing.  If they wanted to do something they knew would be unpopular with the Unions they would ‘leak’ that something far worse was in the planning.  Once it was time to officially announce the policy they would then ‘retreat’ from the position that had been leaked to what they always wanted to do in the first place.  So if they wanted tuition fees of £3000 they would first leak that they would be £6000, let people rage about it for a couple of months, and then announce the £3000 figure.  Folk would think that this didn’t sound so bad and it would feel like a compromise.  The passion would then be taken out of any opposition.  They could  then implement exactly what they had always planned.  They did it again and again throughout their reign.  It was quite a trick.

I can’t help but wonder if the Coalition has learned well from this technique.  For months we’ve had this 40% figure of expected cuts out in the wild.  Today we learned the figure is actually 19%.    It really doesn’t sound that bad now does it?

The more tribal Labour supporters have had 20^th October circled on their calendars for months.  It was supposed to be the day that the ‘True face of the evil Tories’ would be demonstrated by these ‘savage 40% cuts’.  Winter fuel for pensioners would go.  Schools and the NHS would be slashed.  October 20^th was going to be Armageddon.   If you believed the hype they have been spouting then today was supposed to be about the Tories rolling back the state all the way to Feudal times.  Instead, we find out that the intent is merely to roll back the state all the way to the public spending we last saw way back in…………….   2008.   Yes, for all the bluff and fluster public spending is going back to the same level it was at after 11 years of Labour rule.   School spend is protected.  NHS spending will increase.

The appropriate response today from all the doom-mongers should be relief and a slight feeling of churlishness.  Not a bit of it.  Instead a quick search of the blogosphere shows they are wallowing in a curious mix of disappointment and denial.  My personal hopes that a spell of Coalition government would edge us away from our tradition of tribal politics sadly seem as unlikely now as at any point since May.

Our failure to pull everyone into a new ‘grown-up politics’ means that for our politicians the ‘X-Factor’ still matters.   This is a problem for Osborne.  He has little love from the press or public and his delivery today was cursed by a frog–in-the-throat that we haven’t seen since IDS was in his pomp.  In comparison Alan Johnson stood up and was a Mr Charisma Snake-Oil salesman.   If you were to score Osborne and Johnson you would give a 10-nil win to Osborne on substance, but you would have to give Johnson a 10-nil win on style.  In 2010, for right or wrong, style impacts the voters more.  We should be pleased that AJ did not stand for the Labour leadership as he has an almost Blair like capacity to get the public to trust and like him.  I even, strangely, like him myself – I couldn’t help but chuckle at his shot at Clegg about his change of mind ‘between the close of polls and opening of ministerial car doors’.  And on a chuckling note, I also laughed out loud at some random lefty’s ironic twitter shout that “We need these cuts so that people like the contestants in the Apprentice don’t leave the country”.

All said, the medicine has been dished and it doesn’t seem as bitter as we have been steeling ourselves for.  Time will tell if we have held back too much and perhaps should have cut deeper.   The challenge now having announced the cuts is to get out there and deliver them and get this country back on its feet quickly.

Conference Day 2: The Child Benefit Anomaly

Every single cut is going to hurt someone.   And nobody likes the ones that hurt them.  I have a daughter and another child on the way.    At conference today we got the news that the Child Benefit of 80ish quid we get each month is going to be stopped.  We’re far from rich but as a top tax-band family we are certainly very comfortable – I couldn’t look anyone in the eye and say that we either need or deserve that money.  It’s one we’ll just take on the chin in good spirit.

I suspect I’ll be in the minority in my acceptance though.  The Government is living its promise to do the right thing rather than the popular thing – and I suspect that this will be wildly unpopular.

One genuine issue that people have been quick to highlight is that there is one group who this will impact more than others:   This is single income families who earn just over the threshold.  They lose the benefit whilst families with a double income of salaries just less than the upper threshold retain the benefit.   In the very worst case example a couple who both earn 43k and so have a family income of £86k will keep the benefit, the single income family earning a fraction more the £44k will lose the benefit.   This anomaly is manifestly not equitable.

That said, people who are getting on some very high horses about this need to take a step back and reflect – this same anomaly has existed for years (including the entire 13 years of Labour rule) in that marginal rates already led to the same unfairness via income tax.  In the exact same examples above the couple with the single income has already been walloped at 40% for every extra pound they bring in, while the double income couple have only been banged for 25%.   I make the point to give context rather than as a justification.  Two wrongs don’t make a right – and obviously this new anomaly adds insult to injury for those people.

The anomaly aside (and by very definition any anomaly is an exception to the norm) George Osborne has still done the right thing.  He was between a rock and a hard place – to correct the anomaly and move to a solution that took total house-hold income/means-testing into the equation would have added an administration nightmare  – more forms, more IT systems, more opportunities for fraud all of which would eat away at the savings to be made – and the savings after all are the whole point of the move.   The solution adopted is pragmatic rather than perfect.  It can be very easily be implemented with existing tax data.  Those people with double incomes  just below the threshold should think of themselves as accidental winners rather than single income families just above it thinking of themselves as targeted losers.  The principle that high income earners do not require welfare support from the state is sound.

NHS Direct: A Public Service Cut or Public Service Improvement?

It was with a little sadness that I noted the announcement of the closure of NHS Direct.  It was a service I used myself twice. Once they saved me a trip to the doctor and left me reassured. Once they advised that I see a doctor, at least leaving me guilt-free when I then booked an appointment that I would not be wasting the doctor’s finite time (a guilt that would never enter the heads of the huge swathe of our population who book appointments every time they have the smallest sniffle).  There was some genuinely innovative use of technology in both call-centres and the use of the internet by NHS Direct at the time it was launched and it was something we could be very proud of in the UK.  Sadly, over its lifespan the organisation didn’t quite keep up with the pace of technological development although its budget certainly kept up Government largesse.  Nevertheless, the concept was something I would remain keen to advance and champion.  A couple of months ago I was even, very briefly, in the running to be a Non-Exec Director of the organisation. It was a service I would wish well and a service I genuinely regretted first hearing was going.

Predictably (and as we shall see hypocritically) Labour have gone into full mock-rage at this cut.  The principal cheer-leaders are Two-Jags who has started a petition to ‘Save NHS Direct’ and leadership pretender Andy Burnham who claims it proof absolute that the Coalition (he really means the Tories) are hell-bent on dismantling the entire NHS.  Out there (here?) in the Blogosphere the parroting of this outrage by the red faithful fills many identikit rants.  For a flavour of the hyperbole in them take a look at this typical example from ‘Jay’s Political Blog’.  The common objections in all the Labour attacks boil down to two substantive accusations:

• A)      The ‘111’ service that will replace NHS Direct will not be manned by medical professionals.  This will ‘inevitably’ lead to a poorer service.  The sound-bite attack is “Would you wish to be diagnosed by someone with no medical training?”.
• B)      The Tories said ‘NHS Funding was ring-fenced’, this is a cut to the NHS, thus the Tories are evil liars.

Both charges need unpicking.  The attack by Labour on the 111 Service, particularly by Burnham, is so bizarre as to be perverse.  The 111 service was a project that was originally initiated by Burnham himself when he was Health Secretary. Labour, whilst in Government, were rightly troubled by the cost of NHS Direct.  In fact – they’d been caught a bit on the fly – in September 2008 they thought the average cost per call was £15.35 (source: Hansard).  The Lib Dems smelt characteristic dodgy Labour accounting and demanded more detail and asked the question again. A month later an embarrassed Labour Government revised its figures and accepted that it was actually costing the taxpayer £25.53 per call (Source: Hansard).  The troubling thing here is that at this point a call to NHS direct was actually costing more than seeing a GP.

Trying to figure out scope for lowering this cost you see that in order to minimise risk of mis-diagnosis calls were handled with a protocol-led workflow.  The nurse you were connected to at the call centre had a narrow script on a computer screen in front of them – he or she clicked options depending on your answers and this delivered the next part of the script.  This would culminate in a recommendation e.g. forget about it, or take a few aspirin and see your GP if it isn’t better in 48 hours, or make an appointment with your GP now, or go to A&E immediately or whatever.  They had only a little leeway to deviate from the script and make use of their professional knowledge.

One of the genuine achievements of Labour’s time in power was that Nurses now receive something comparable to a professional wage.  It doesn’t take the sharpest commercial mind to spot that if you are doing a role controlled by computer script and that in practice this role requires the same skill to deliver that it would to sell insurance or deliver any other call center script, then it does seem rather an extravagance to have professional equivalent people’s talent wasted performing the role – particularly if they may be better deployed on front-line wards.

Labour realised this and set up a trial for the 111 scheme.   The pilot has been a success.  It was in Labour’s manifesto (page 35) that they themselves would go with 111 if elected.  The Coalition are doing the right thing in picking up and running with it.  Rather than celebrating their success Labour are now disowning their own brain-child.  That, I guess, is everything that is wrong with politics.

The vision of NHS Direct was that via the telephone or internet you could have access to a 24 hour service that would triage your condition and stop you from making a needless doctors visit if unnecessary but quickly get you to the right medical help if necessary.

The 111 service does exactly that and more:  it also allows you to  book your appointment on the same call rather than having to make a separate call to your local practice afterwards (and then consume the time of another medical receptionist in addition to your own). It is also free (NHS Direct was charged as a national rate call). In short it does more for less.  In these tough times that is something to applaud.

I suppose the Government has invited these attacks by using the language of ‘cuts’ in the way it has positioned these changes.  Cuts to me (as the end user) suggests a service will no longer be available.  Having investigated what it means it seems the service I expected from NHS Direct will still be available and better – it will just be delivered by different people, under a new badge, at less cost to the tax payer.  I concede that it is genuinely a ‘cut’ from the perspective of current NHS Direct employees and I do wish them well.  But for the end-user?  At worst it’s no different, at best an improvement.

As to the charge that the Tories are therefore evil liars: the promise was that the NHS Budget was ring-fenced and will actually increase year on year through the life of the Parliament.  So far the Government  is on track to deliver that.  And if it can supplement this by doing ‘more for less’ in other areas of NHS delivery then again – it should be applauded.

The Brutal Budget?

Well, I’ve just watched George Osborne come of age.  The ‘light-weight’, ‘inexperienced’, ‘young’ Chancellor gave an assured performance that will do wonders for his poor reputation.  It should also dispel some of the prejudice that still exists about the modern Conservative Party.

The spin that had been dripping out from Whitehall over the last few weeks could be summarised in one sentence: “This is going to Hurt”.  The facts about the economic situation were not in question –

• For every three pounds we currently receive in tax receipts we are spending four on public services (i.e we have a significant structural deficit).
• The National Debt is already £22,400 per head.

The nation could not go on spending like drunken sailors on shore-leave.  You cannot tackle the debt until you tackle the structural deficit.  You can only tackle the structural deficit in one of two ways – raise taxes or cut public spending.  The trouble for George Osborne is that neither is a popular thing for a Government to do.  But in some ways the choice was made for him, as he put it, “We are over-spending – We are not under-taxed”.  So with an impossible juggling trick demanded what is my gut reaction to what he has done today?

Well he had some pleasant surprises that may confuse those who cannot see the Tories as anything other than the ‘nasty party’:

• The increase in the tax-fee allowance was inspired and will benefit those on the lowest pay.  I fully acknowledge that this was a Lib Dem policy but it is a credit to our Coalition that we really have cherry picked the best thinking from both Parties.  880,000 of the poorest working people taken out of tax.  Wonderful.
• The raise in Capital Gains Tax will mean that the wealthiest in our society cannot be accused of not shouldering their share of the burden.  Those who thought the Tories were all about protecting the rich ahead of helping the economy have been proved wrong.
• His surrender of forecasting powers to the Office for Budget Responsibility is absolutely the right thing to do for the country – but removes a key ability for him to ‘play politics’.  The best thing Brown ever did as Chancellor was give up the power to play politics with interest rates – Osborne takes this to the logical next step.
• The acknowledgement that the banks brought about the financial crisis and the new measures to tax riskier aspects of their behaviour will be in tune with popular feeling and was the right thing to do.
• Restoring the link between state pensions and earnings.
• As a small-business owner I was delighted with the measures he put in place to give us a fighting chance of getting through the recession.
• No cuts in capital expenditure.  A grown up lesson learned from the last time the Conservatives were in power in the early 1990s.

The headline will of course be about the rise in VAT.  For all the above the pain had to come and this is where the punch landed.  A tax on consumption does encourage individual prudence, but it also risks lowering consumer spending to the point that both retail and manufacturing are hurt.  The leap of faith (no doubt supported by economic modelling) must be that the proportional pain caused by the 2.5% rise is counterbalanced by the good to the economy from the reduction in structural deficit.  We need to monitor this closely and make sure the economic modelling is correct – if it backfires we shouldn’t shy away from course-correcting quickly.

Obviously, much of the pain is also going to be felt by the Civil Service when the departmental cuts have to be worked through and Councils as they struggle to work within the constraints brought about by a council tax freeze.  The challenge for both Civil Service and Councils will be to deliver those reductions with the same equity and tone that the Chancellor managed today – and crucially without hitting the public perception of service delivery.  Ultimately, for right or wrong, it will be that upon which the Coalition is judged.

Does Birmingham Need to Call in Independent Election Observers?

An account of day touring Birmingham’s polling booths – uncovering widespread irregularities – including rescuing a hapless Lib Dem – finding campaign literature inside polling booths – voters locked out of stations – people being ‘helped’ to vote – Do we need independent election monitors?

Back in 2004 the integrity of Birmingham’s democracy was famously questioned by a Judge who found electoral conduct which would, in his exact words, “disgrace a banana republic.”* Fast forward to the 2010 General Election and I found myself as the Agent for the Conservative Parliamentary candidate for Ladywood.  This is the same area that worried the judge six years earlier.  So, have things improved?  Well, – yes and no… they’ve started to solve the problem with postal votes, but things are getting worse at the polling stations.

So, let’s start with the polling stations.   I went to a sample of a dozen or so.  I was left wide-eyed with disbelief.  At every station which had ‘tellers’ (party activists) present there was a total disregard for the rules.  There is not supposed to be any campaign material within 100 meters of the entrance to a polling station.  This allows people to enter without fear or pressure.  In all the polling stations I saw there were activists aggressively handing out leaflets at the gates.  There was also campaign material (banners etc.) tied to the railings of the gates as people entered.  At the first polling station I went to there was a van with a full Labour logo on parked directly opposite the station entrance with a loud-speaker system on its roof.  It was literally broadcasting campaign messages into the polling station.  Any voter who wanted to get to the station could not enter without having literature hoist on them and verbal encouragement for particular candidates.  The leaflets were ‘helpful’ guides on how to vote – semi-official looking instructions to place an x in a particular box (with worked examples showing the candidates name and party logo).  Shockingly in two polling stations I found these leaflets had been left on the writing surface of the polling booths.  I’ll say that again – there was party campaign literature actually on display in the polling booths themselves.

I did speak with the Station Presiding Officers and they had all spoken with the activists at the entrances but had been ignored.  The police had been notified and attended but the activists had simply gone away when the police arrived and returned when they went.  In an earlier pre-election briefing the council had told me that the Police would have a dedicated single-point-of-contact to deal with any issues.  I decided ring them since the activists had such contempt for the Presiding Officer and I.   Not being a 999 matter I rang the police station directly.  I was on hold for over fifteen minutes without answer before I hung up.  I then tried the elections office at the council to report it – again I spent ten minutes on hold before I gave up waiting.  The activist army outside the polling station stayed put harassing arriving voters.

At the next station we found another gaggle of Labour activists handing out their material at the gates – cars were again parked opposite the entrance all with large Labour placards covering their windscreens on prominent display.  We went inside and found a Lib Dem activist actually handing out leaflets within the premises!  When challenged she broke down in tears.   According to her she had tried to position herself at the gates but had suffered such verbal abuse from the Labour activists that ‘she only felt safe inside the station’.  We offered her a lift to a ‘safe’ polling station.  ‘Rescuing’ an activist from another party was certainly the most surreal moment of the day.

Whilst driving the Lib Dem to ‘safety’ we finally found a Police Officer.  The PC had pulled over campaigners for an independent local council candidate who the Lib Dem referred to as ‘The Somalian’.  They were in a car with a tannoy set-up and had been broadcasting ‘Please-Vote’ messages at volume whilst driving around the area.  The crazy thing here is that having finally found the police they were tackling the only activists who I had seen campaigning legally!  To be fair to the constable the driver didn’t have insurance – but the irony still shouldn’t be lost.   After a quick chat with the officer she contacted her control room to find out who the police single-point-of-contact for the election was. Nobody in the control room knew.  She agreed she would pop round to the polling station herself, but didn’t seem to have had any briefing whatever about what is or is not acceptable (or legal) by activists so I’m unsure what good she would be able to do.

Now, in case you think “so long as activists are outside the gates then anything goes” you need to know that there are defined rules about what people are allowed to do in the vicinity of a polling station.  A ‘teller’ is allowed to stand near to the entrance and ask voters their polling card number only.  This allows the more organised parties who have canvassed to check if the people that said they would support them have actually voted.  Towards the end of the day a Party with a decent teller operation can then chase up all its supporters who haven’t yet voted and if necessary offer them lifts to the polling booths.  The Electoral Commission has brought all the rules about tellers together in Appendix E of this document here.   It is several thousand words, so to pull out just the salient bits:

“3.3 Tellers should not display or distribute election material (e.g. billboards, posters, placards or pamphlets) on walls or around the polling place.  […]

[…]

3.5 Tellers must not attempt to induce, influence or persuade an elector how or whether to vote. Tellers cannot promote particular candidates or political parties. Their conduct must not give rise to allegations of undue influence, e.g. discussing voting intentions, party affiliations, a candidate’s history or party campaigns, or undertaking any other activity particularly associated with one particular party or candidate.”

Every time I showed activists these rules on May 6^th they looked at me like I was from another planet.

My afternoon tour brought more of the same across the constituency.  The day’s most serious incident was when I left a polling station in north Ladywood.  I’d had a chat with the activists at the gate and politely made them aware of the rules – prompting the charade of a temporary withdrawal until I was out of sight.  As I got back into my car a young women tapped on my window.  “Are you something to do with the election?”  She explained she had seen me having a word with the others, and assumed I was someone ‘official’.  She wanted me to know that the polling agents in the station had insisted that when her mother, who spoke only little English, went into the polling station they escorted her to the booth and filled the mothers ballot paper for her. I’ll not name the party accused as this is anecdotal.  She was livid; “It’s just not right.  Some of them are my family, man – but they stole my mother’s vote and it aint right.”   When I retold that tale to people who lived in the area they were unsurprised and told me the practice was widespread.   If true, one has to wonder the level of training given to Station Presiding Officers to allow this –  I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised  – on the evidence of everything I had seen with my own eyes that day it is clear that very few of the people running our polling stations have even basic knowledge of what is and isn’t allowed.

The  answer to all the polling station issues  is to stop trying to police our elections on the cheap.  If our democracy matters – and I hope it does – then we should properly train the station presiding officers to run tighter ships within the station and have the Police available at the polling stations to quickly clamp down on any unacceptable behaviour outside.  I hope that the specific problems I saw were down to over-enthusiasm and ignorance by party activists rather than centrally co-ordinated misintent.  Regardless of whether it is cock-up or conspiracy being unable to guarantee our electorate can reach the ballot box without interference or pressure begins to chip away at the notion that our elections are ‘free and fair’.  The disregard for the rules must stop and only the Police have the clout to enforce them.  Even if putting a copper at every single polling station is unrealistic, we could still go a long way by prioritising the stations that have a history of issues – yes that means Ladywood would get far more Police attention – but if that is where the problem is, then this is where the solution is needed.

Let’s get onto postal votes.  This was where it went so wrong in 2004.  The good news here is that giant strides in the right direction have been made.  I was present at the electoral office when I saw a chap come in and try to register himself as a proxy for 16 postal votes – I’m pleased to report that he was politely but firmly told he could be proxy for no more than two unless they were immediate family.

At the postal count in Birmingham (which gets underway a week before polling day) there’s spawned a whole temporary industry checking every single ballot paper received to ensure that the envelope numbers and ballot paper numbers match –  all envelopes are passed through a scanner to check individual signatures and dates-of-birth against those held in the database.  Any which the computer software says may be suspect are removed for human adjudication.  I watched the adjudication and agreed with the call the official made every time.   This is a step forward – the old fraud where cheats would get themselves a copy of the ‘marked electoral register’ from the council to see who never votes and then send in false postal ballot papers from these apathetic voters is stopped by this system.  What the system will not stop is people from bullying or intimidating their family members or friends by demanding to inspect their postal ballot before they send it to ensure that “they have filled it in correctly”.   That is the downside of the postal voting – it needs to be balanced with the large number of people who work away from home in the week and for whom the availability of a postal vote stops them being disenfranchised.  The system isn’t perfect, but it now requires much greater effort and more willing co-conspirators if you wanted to pull off a major fraud.   I await the council to publish official figures but I would estimate from what I saw that about 10% of the postal votes received were rejected for various reasons.  It is sad to see how many people who went to the trouble of filling in the ballot paper then forget to sign the envelope and so waste their vote.

Back to the polling booths – One thing I did not observe myself, but is suggested to be widespread in the constituency is ‘personation’.  This is where someone simply claims to be someone else and votes on their behalf.  There is very, very little we can do about this as under current rules there is no power for the polling officials to demand any form of identification.   Obviously, an individual would be foolish to try and vote at the same station twice – but with scores of polling stations in each constituency, anyone who has seen the marked electoral register will know the names of people who usually do not vote.  It would not require great wit to do a tour of polling booths and vote scores of times.   An organised team could quickly wrack up hundreds of votes this way.  I make no claim that this happened in Ladywood in this election – I simply say that the lack of any system to prevent it allows rumours that it occurs to persist.

There is the well known saying that “opportunity creates the thief”.  So much of our electoral procedures are based on a very quaint British notion of trust.  British MPs showed in last year’s expenses debacle that even the supposedly honourable can be quick to take advantage of trust based systems.  Should we assume that there are no elements of the population who would take the opportunity to cheat if they could in the elections?  Of course not.  It is naive to assume it doesn’t go on.  Individual ballot boxes from certain stations in Ladywood apparently had turnout 20-30% higher than would have been expected.  This may be because a party had been incredibly successful in mustering the vote and a credit to them – or it may be that after the vote had closed an insider simply ticked off the remaining names on the register, filled in a whole load of ballot papers and stuffed the box.  We hope the former but we have too much trust and too few checks and balances to be certain.  Fraud could happen.

If all that wasn’t enough we also had one polling station at St Pauls Square which was so understaffed that around 100 people were denied the chance to vote at all despite having arrived in what should have been ample time, before the station closed at 10pm.  This was particularly irritating for our Party as it is one of the stations where we do well.  At least this incident has already attracted national media attention which prompted this report by the electoral commission here.

When you put everything together you do begin to imagine how an outside observer would view the proceedings.  As it happens there were some Observers present from Commonwealth countries across the UK.  The Kenyans were shocked that they see our ballot security as a lower standard than their own.  Well, they were looking at the orderly parts of the country – one wonders how much stronger their words would have been had they been in Ladywood.  Perhaps that is what is needed to raise our game?  It would be embarrassing to be lectured by Afghans or Iraqi’s on running a free and fair ballot – but if they observed what I observed they couldn’t objectively report faith in the result.

One thing I would stress is that for all the irregularities and potential for irregularities that I saw Shabana Mahmood’s majority is such that there is no doubt whatever in my mind that she was the rightful winner.  I’m confident she knew nothing of, and had no direct part in any dodgy activities by her activists.  Likewise her Lib Dem opponent.  I would also make no claim that there is any particular party worse than another in polling fraud or conduct.  Indeed I note that just up the road from me in Walsall three Tories have been charged with regards this election.

I would also not want to cast blame on Birmingham Council’s elections office.  They were courteous, professional and helpful throughout – they are constrained in scope by their minimal statutory powers and their available budget.

I have to say though that because of what I saw on May 6^th if the result had been anywhere near close I would not feel confident it could be trusted. That can’t be right.  This is the United Kingdom in 2010.  If we value our democracy we have to tighten up procedures and we have to better police our polling booths and the security of the ballot boxes from end-to-end of the process – I understand that there would be a cost involved – but when you think of those who have died for our democracy then protecting their legacy has to be worth it.

* You can read the background to the ‘banana republic quote from this report in the Times Newspaper here.