What did Labour gain with #dropthebill?

Time will tell on this one, but I'm concerned that Labour may not realise how much they may have shot themselves in the foot over the NHS reforms, or...even worse...how they let political opportunism trump ensuring that the country avoids the dangers that they predicted.

The background is simple, Labour started the ball rolling on privatisation and, in a purely financial way, competition in the NHS. It's been taken further and moulded in to a slightly different shape, but the core is still there. Unfortunately there are also ambiguities, unclear definitions and concerning aspects to the reforms.

Labour chose to outright oppose the bill, opting to try and inflict the ultimate humiliation of forcing a government to drop a flagship piece of law after almost a year's worth of time and effort going in to it. The gains for Labour on this would have been considerable if they'd have achieved it, but as it happens they've managed to only achieve modest gains and failed in their goal of finishing the bill.

Of course that assumes that they ever thought that they would get the bill dropped anyway. And this is why I wonder about the direction that they've taken. If Labour knew that they wouldn't get this bill dropped, and that they would be playing on stirring up hatred of the Tories for "destroying" the NHS, do they also realise this is fraught with public opinion related danger?

This option that they have taken has short term gains, this is undeniable, and unfortunately some people will be misinformed enough (and partisan enough) to believe a lot of what Labour have said long after it has been disproved. In the long term though it relies on the NHS actually falling apart. If, by the next election, waiting times haven't sky rocketed, and patients up and down the country aren't complaining about not being able to see their GP because of all the bus loads of private patients taking all the timeslots, then people will in general see through what Labour have tried to do here.

In the long term, this scenario surely only leads to distrust of Labour, and a cautious sheepishness over believing them compared to those "evil" coalition government members who said that it wouldn't be like that?

But what about the other course they could have taken, constructive engagement? By working with the Lib Dems as they woke up to the dangers of this bill early on, time spent in the house of commons simply trading soundbites for the media, petulantly opposing each other's view points, all three parties could have come to the table and come up with a bill that is not far from what we have now, but with all the ambiguous and potentially bad parts completely removed or cleared up.

As a party they would be able to say, as now Lib Dems will be trying to, that they took a bad bill, put aside political differences, and worked in the interest of the people to make the reforms in the interest of patients, not profits. In the short term it may not have reaped any benefits, but showcasing that they are ready to govern, and that they are growing up out of this idiotic "oppose everything" stage that they're going through, would almost certainly gain them support in the long run.

Instead the coalition had little choice, given the campaign against them, but to spend their effort justifying what was there and getting it to the finish line. Time that they might have otherwise spent engaging was instead spent putting up defences, useless to the enhancement of the bill itself, ensuring that all three parties have ended up neglecting all of us in pursuit of scoring some bloody noses.

If the NHS stays standing, and doesn't seriously decline in standards (which unfortunately may be expected due to reduction of funding that any of the three parties would have opted for), will people still believe the soundbites, or the reality?

11 facts about the NHS going forward

1. The NHS is still free at the point of use (as much as it ever was)

With regard to what will be charged for under the NHS, nothing has changed. The same provision for allowing charges to be made existed in previous NHS law, and while responsibilities for deciding what services are required or not have changed hands, the same level of ability for someone to determine that a service isn't needed was in place in previous law.

This could lead to certain areas having services dropped, but to counter this the law states that there is a need for equality in patient care across the country, and it would be interesting to see a healthcare providing body argue how it is meeting it's duty to reduce patient inequality by giving their constituent patient less services than someone next door.

2. Secretary of State for Health: Once secretly delegated, then removed, now transparent responsibility

One major claim that is still repeated, despite the amendments being made and touted over a week ago, is that the Secretary of State for Health (Andrew Lansley) would no longer be the person whose house we turn up outside with pitchforks when sufficiently unhappy with the NHS.

Well cry no more, pitchfork wielders, as once again the Minister is ultimately responsible for provision of the health service for England. Sensibly he now shares the administrative responsibility in a transparent manner with a Board, but the buck stops with with Mr Lansley and his successors.

3. Privatisation: Started by Labour, continued by Tories, regulated by Lib Dems

Remember this, Labour started privatisation. Allowing companies to receive money to carry out certain services in the NHS, regardless of performance or efficiency, it was ushered in gladly by an overly-popular Labour party. When this new NHS bill started it simply took it one step further and made it easier, encouraging those in charge, perhaps even legally mandating them.

Thankfully, despite the bluster about the Lib Dems "allowing" privatisation to happen, they have instead helped to secure that where privatisation does happen within the NHS, that it is measured on the core principles set out (see fact 4) and that any process for gifting public money to businesses does not lead us down the anti-competitive route that is based on profits for the business ahead of results for the patients (see fact 5).

It's a case of the ball being set rolling by Labour, kicked harder by the Tories, and then brought back under control thanks to the Lib Dems.

4. More scrutiny, more accountability

an NHS constitution was introduced at the end of Labour's time in office, a set of principles that perhaps could change that various bodies in the NHS were required to pay mind to when making their decisions. But not the Health Secretary.

This, along with quite a few other improvements as to the transparency as to the management of the NHS, has now been rectified. Whereas the National Health Service act of 2006 was light on details about what the Health Secretary's duty actually entailed, and the first draft Conservative bill did even worse...the bill now likely to be made in to law makes the path of accountability clear, and sets in law the factors that such accountability will be measured on.

The Secretary of State for Health will retain over all responsibility for provision of the NHS to England, but will essentially delegate a lot of his responsibilities to a new Commissioning Board who will administer the money for the health service, and the bodies that will be deciding which services should be contracted in or paid for at your local level.

And when making their decisions they must ensure that the NHS is:

Continuously improving safety, effectiveness and quality of the NHS
Providing equal care to different patients, wherever they are in England
Securing autonomy for those providing care (where it doesn't detriment the above)
Improving research, training and education

5. Quality of care first, profits second

Privatisation may be given a certain kind of "thumbs up", but it is a very new approach that doesn't simply hand money to big business and say "See how much profit you can make". The reality is that the law lists very clearly that results are based on the quality of the service being provided. How do patients feel they were cared for, how efficient was their care, and how *good* was their care? These are the questions that every level of the new NHS structure have to answer, and if the answer is not "at least as good as the last patient" then they have legally stepped in to the realm of bodies and individuals failing in their duty.

It's a brave new world, and one that only came about fully after amendments made halfway through the bill's life, after the "pause" to consult properly with healthcare professionals. This is privatisation, in theory, working for the public sector, not the public sector throwing out money for private companies.

Even Monitor, described by some as a body to promote competition as if that is a way of forcing contracts on to private companies, has more to consider in it's day to day life about the way it's purposes affect the equality and quality of patient care than keeping things cheap.

6. Commissioning Groups (CCGs) are Primary Care Trusts (PCTs)

This isn't a major change that is going to redefine the logistics of our NHS. The way money has been funneled, and the way decisions have been made, will not change. What will change is the geography of how these organisations cover the UK, and a likelihood of there being more CCGs than there were PCTs.

With this there is no more responsibility delegated to these groups than was for the PCTs, and there are more checks and balances to ensure that required legals standards are being achieved.

7. No patient left behind

Along with the new groups is a legal requirement, as you would expect, for everyone to be able to healthcare with the NHS. Whether registered with a provider that makes up the CCG in their area or not, that CCG has a duty to provide healthcare for them. Tied with the enhanced accountability in this bill, there is no legal opportunity for that person to recieve any different treatment because of how remote they may be, or poor, or any other factor.


8. Healthcare could be denied to individuals or groups

The law does set out the option for people to be omitted from the population that CCGs have a responsibility to provide care to. In theory this should just be those who are just over the national borders, however it opens the door to...for example...let recently settled immigrants be excluded from the NHS, or perhaps those waiting deportation, or who knows.

The "safety" is that those people would need to be excluded via secondary legislation, a particularly easy way of pushing rules and regulations through parliament since MPs tend not to turn up. For now, unfortunately, we will have to keep an eagle eye on the Statutory Instruments that may arise on this subject, and thankfully a need for both MPs and Lords to vote in favour of such changes we have every opportunity to attempt to lobby politicians to not let any abuses of civil rights happen.

All said, this is still far from ideal and a much more well thought out set of justifiable exemptions should have been included in this bill without secondary legislative power to amend them.

9. Larger "postcode lottery" effect

The reality is that as few as two primary care providers (traditionally GPs, though Labour opened this up to include other organisations) can create a CCG. The prospect for having very "elite" areas fence themselves off and reap both the benefits of an enhanced private funding stream as well as a good baseline for performance through local residents that are less pre-disposed to illness or injury, is a very real one. Even though people could sign up for services with a GP or provider outside of their area of residence, the CCGs are not, as far as I'm aware, obliged to take them on.

On the flip-side there will be CCGs that have to exist in a geographic location that will content with higher levels of poverty, more difficult logistical considerations, and the prospects for these CCGs to benefit from any performance relate bonus, or to even keep their head above water, financially, is a real risk. It's also a risk that could mean these more vulnerable people are provided with fewer services, however this would seem in contention with the greater scrutiny and standards that this bill sets out.

It will be all too easy for the well off to fence themselves off, and not "share" their facilities...the hope would be here that the Commissioning Board would see their duty to maintain an equality of outcomes, nationally, for patient care and use their powers to amend and/or merge CCGs to ensure that patient care is not compromised.

10. Definition of who provides each service is poorly defined

It is my opinion that the spirit of the law is that the Secretary of State needs to ensure national level services are in place for dealing with issues of national importance, especially the potential of outbreak of disease or outcome of catastrophic events. CCGs would be responsible for ongoing care and emergencies, while Local Authorities would work alongside CCGs to provide regional based healthcare, more focused on education, but also including keeping the local area healthy through health services.

It all overlaps a little bit too much, while CCGs have set areas, they don't need to cater for people such as tourists, workers on the road (perhaps visiting a client in another part of the country), or visiting family members. In theory I can see that this would need to result in local authorities and CCGs working in partnership to provide services, with transient populations relying on the local authority's provision, but the reality is far from being as clear as it should be for a top-down re-organisation such as this.

11. The NHS will not now collapse/disappear/explode/be destroyed because of this bill

The way in which the NHS functions, the people that are involved, the NHS will seem almost to be the same after this bill becomes law as it was before the last election. Some may even see improvement if providers in their area are set up to exploit these changes. That doesn't mean that the service the NHS provides won't decline, and that problems won't happen.

This, however, will not be due to the bill..instead it will be down to the lack of funding that any of the three parties are willing to give the NHS to continue improvements. With tighter budgets all round the NHS is going to struggle until the next election and beyond to provide the same level of service, or better, for less money and resources.

This bill hasn't changed this reality, and abandoning the bill completely wouldn't change it either.

If this leads to a level of inequality in the NHS, the reason some critics are claiming that this is the end of the NATIONAL health service and instead the start of the break up in to many regional health services (as if this wasn't somewhat the case already, where different PCTs have provided different services to their neighbours for some time), then it will be a failure of adherence to the law, since the underlying principle of equality of care for all patients means that allowing areas of the country to fall in to poor quality, inefficient or unsafe healthcare would be a breach of at least one, if not more, group of people's legal duty to the people of this country.

NHS Bill, a revisit: Part 1

In September I looked at the NHS reform bill and decided that, on balance it wasn't a bad situation, as long as some concerns were dealt with...specifically on issues of regionality of commissioning bodies, how competition balances with patient care, and giving watchdog bodies more "teeth".

Since then the government has done it's best to portray this bill in it's worst light, not really answering criticisms, deflecting (quite accurately) on Labour's own history of privatising the NHS, and taking quite bizarre actions that make ordinary people question the government's motives, the main case in point being the refusal to publish a document of the risks involved in the reforms being proposed.

Combine this complete lack of political ability with professional bodies themselves, GP's and doctor's representative groups, calling for the bill to be completely scrapped and my view...previously ambivalent, has turned distinctly negative to the bill.

But does that mean the bill itself is actually as bad as Labour are claiming? Will it actually destroy the NHS, leaving nothing like it in it's wake? Will it mean higher waiting times for the poor as the rich get preference? Will it mean universal healthcare only for those with enough funds or insurance?

Let's see... Warning, this is long.

For a start the bill now explicitly says, for the first time since these reforms started, that the minister in charge of healthcare in this country retains responsibility for the provision of services. This keeps the largely symbolic link of democratic representation in place, the idea that we can demand the government do more on the health service because it is that member of the cabinet who needs to ensure provisions are adequate.

Furthermore there is an explicit legal requirement for the NHS to remain free at the point of delivery, with exceptions. These exceptions are detailed elsewhere (namely dentistry, etc), and is kept open ended for pragmatic reasons. This is exactly the same as it was in the last law, the NHS 2006 act.

So, the government is still responsible to provide a national health service, the buck stops with the Minister for Health. Furthermore, the idea of the NHS suddenly getting more expensive to use as a patient is no more a threat than it was in the past. No-one has made it so that suddenly private companies, or the NHS bodies themselves, can start charging you for your cancer treatment.

So far, so 2006.

Added to the above we have newly defined responsibilities, an added layer of transparency as yet unseen in setting out what the Secretary of State for health should be ensuring.

The most interesting is a new legal responsibility for the Minister, not only to provide for the NHS to run, but also to ensure it improves. OK, it is "woolly" meaningless language, but the intent is clear...the Minister for Health needs to show that he is making decisions that are for the betterment of the NHS. Specifically he needs to make the NHS safer, more effective and of better quality, and the outcomes of those three areas must be measurable.

Does this mean that if the NHS performs inadequately on such issues that legal action could be taken against the Minister and their department? Absolutely! Of course the threshold for proving that proper care hasn't been taken to try to achieve improvements would be very high, but the principle is there.

Then we also have:

• Adding the Secretary of State for health to the list of people that need to respect the NHS constitution.


• It will be enshrined that, aside from situations where autonomy detriments the achievement of improved safety, quality or success of the NHS, people providing healthcare must be allowed to do it their way.


• Research must be provided for, so we must assume the Minister has to make sure it's funded.


• The buck now legally stops with the Secretary of State for health when it comes to training and educating NHS staff. If people aren't doing their job properly because they haven't had the right guidance, it's the health department that needs to explain why.


• Finally, the Minister must also make sure no organisation is at a disadvantage when applying to provide supplies to the NHS. Particularly specific this one, and seems to surrounding the issue of VAT for supplying the NHS.

Along with the Minister for Health, there will also be a Commissioning Board set up. They will also share many of the responsibilities above, perhaps sensible when considering the amount of time that a Minister will realistically be spending on a multitude of governmental and parliamentary duties. The board don't share total responsibility on issues such as health emergencies, and local health promotion.

And then there is also, of course, the creation of the "Clinical Commissioning Groups" that will be responsible for "arranging for the provision of services". More on that later...

Local councils also retain a level of responsibility for promoting and funding health beneficial services, as well as providing facilities for healthcare.

So, to recap, centralised responsibility by an elected member of parliament to provide the NHS, free of charge, with specific duties properly and transparently defined for the first time, along with a board to help achieve those aims. Hospitals and clinics are maintained or funded by local authorities.

The gist of this is that a national infrastructure is maintained through our representative governing bodies, while strategic direction is provided at both a national and local level, with key responsibilities detailed further than they ever have been about the duties of the Minister ultimately in charge of it all.

I'll look in to the newer parts of the reforms, commissioning groups, competition, in a further post later...but right now the claim that this bill destroys the NHS, removing the "national" from our health service, just doesn't stack up.

Image Replacement Technique

Just a bit here for me to be able to keep this somewhere I shouldn't lose it! Many people seem to be sticking with the old "Phark" method of replacing text with an image, but this forces the text off screen and invisible if the images are turned off for whatever reason. It may end up being the best solution when fast internet is ubiquitous, but even now it feels a bit presumptuous that people (especially on mobile devices) would all have images downloading.

Anatoly's method is as below...


h1 {
width: 247px;
height: 27px;
line-height: 1em;
white-space: nowrap;
font-size: 100%;
overflow: hidden;
}

h1:after {
display: block;
content: url("logo.png");
width: 247px;
height: 27px;
margin-top: -1em;
}

/*IE hacking */
* html h1 {
background-image: expression(this.runtimeStyle.backgroundImage = "none", this.innerHTML += '');
position: relative;
z-index: 1;
}

/*Now the simple and effective IE styling.*/

* html h1 span {
display: block;
width: 247px;
height: 27px;
background: url(logo.png) no-repeat;
position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0;
z-index: 2;
}


I would go one step further, however, and say that you could turn either the height or the width to something more variable as long as the image you were using (logo.png in this case) had "dead space" on it to cover the text up if it grew (due to people having higher text sizes set on their browser, for example), and get rid of that white-space:nowrap to enable the text to still be displayed. A min-height or width would have to be used, and IE can see this action using the following expression:


height: expression(this.offsetHeight > this.parentNode.offsetHeight ? '100%' : this.parentNode.offsetHeight +"px");


Colonial shame is the reason the Falklands should be British

In the Guardian it is being reported that Roger Waters, founding Pink Floyd member, while garnering support for his current tour in the South Americas, has stated that the Falklands should belong to the Argentinians. It is reported as follows in the Guardian...

"I am as ashamed as I possibly could be of our colonial past," Waters is reported to have said to TVN journalist Amaro Gómez-Pablos. When asked if the islands are British or Argentinian, Waters reportedly replied: "I think they should be Argentinian."

This is obviously after other celebrity endorsements for the Argentinian heightening of military tension in the region, the most prominent being Sean Penn, clumsily sticking his foot in to something far more complex than he perhaps realised when first opening his mouth.

The trouble I have with these statements is that they are completely at odds with their own reasoning for making the statements, complete oxymorons. If we want to atone for our colonialist ways of the past, we need to stand by the wishes of the population of the Falklands and their wishes, people that have lived on the island for generations.

It is no less than a colonialist mentality to state that Argentina should be given sovereignty over the islands simply because of their position. There is no significant evidence of "Argentinean" people living on the island pre-discovery by the British in the 17th century, any claim to the islands is purely based on the whims and wishes of a particular government and the benefit that such sovereignty can have for their strategic aims.

This is colonialism 101.

Celebrities and others that would see Argentina regain some sovereignty over the land, especially ones that have been so vocal against military excursions in the Middle East due to the underlying controversy of how the country's oil reserves get exploited, are being amazing hypocrites by making the stand they are.

There aren't many up to date opinion polls on the subject, maybe because the last one Argentina tried to use to gain ammunition for gain in sovereignty of the islands almost 20 years ago resulted in only 4% of the population being open to discussions about it. The people, unless there has been a seismic shift in public opinion in the last two decades, want to remain as they are...who are we, or the Argentines, or Sean Penn and other vocal celebrities, to tell these people what country they associate with, potentially against their will?

And why would they want to change? They have an island of their own, not ruled over by the government of Argentina, and not really ruled over by the UK. They have their own governance, their own laws, their own way of life.

Those asking for the people to risk giving that up, and to be amalgamated with a population of people that are culturally and physically miles apart, ought to be ashamed; not for Britian's role in colonising various lands in history, but for their own desires to demand Argentina be allowed to colonise the island now, in the modern world.

Political spin in full flow

It seems as though the political world we have to endure right now is one of those with vested interests, and no intention of listening to the public, twisting our complaints and trying to make out that it is us, wishing to keep the poor and the destitute from becoming more poor, more destitute, that are the "bad people". In some cases the arguments are being turned from big business taking the piss to big businesses having to endure severe hardship in the face of our laws and regulations.

Here are some of the best examples from this month...

Chris Grayling on Workfare during Channel 4 News 21/02/2012

Chris Grayling, while being expertly skewered by John Snow on various claims he was making in defence and promotion of the work scheme that sees "long" term unemployed people coerced in to basic jobs with little to no value in developing skills, came up with this doozy of a spin in order to sidestep one of the main criticisms of the scheme, that people lose their benefits.

Despite the main companies partaking in this scheme have been those like Tesco, Argos, the owners of Topshop and Topman, Poundland and others that have now sensibly removed themselves from the scheme like Sainsburys and Matalan, Grayling had the clumsy audacity to try and compare them to a "local small bakery business".

You see the taking away of benefits is purely there to protect these poor companies from being screwed over by benefit claimants agreeing to provide labour for free, and then deciding maybe they can do something better with their time for free instead. What is the small bakery business to do when the person just doesn't turn up for work? Well..I imagine the same that they'd have to do if the person failed to keep on going to the scheme within the first week, during which they won't lose their benefits.

And of course, let's not forget, the number of small businesses using this scheme is a pittance compared to those like Tesco who are earning MILLIONS OF POUNDS EVERY DAY and who's only complaint is that instead of paying no-one to do the work that they'd normally pay minimum wage for, they might need to ask someone else to cover those hours....for minimum wage.

Iain Duncan Smith on Workfare "Job Snobs" in the Daily Mail (and other papers) 21/02/2012

I doubt I'm the only person who thinks supermarket shelf-stackers add more value to our society than many of those 'job snobs' who are busy pontificating about the Government's employment policies. They should learn to value work and not sneer at it.

Hah! "Job Snob", it rhymes and everything. You see it is not a problem that people are doing work that, if they were given the job, would be earning at least TWICE the amount that they take on Job Seekers Allowance, no...the problem is us "Job Snobs" who somehow think that people doing labour for another person have a right to be fairly paid for that!

We are not sneering at the jobs that people are taking. It might not be everyone's dream, but for a lot of people minimum wage work at the biggest companies in the UK, like Tesco, means the difference between living in daily worry over choices between food or heating, or only having to worry about budgeting properly. What we want, us "Job Snobs", is for people doing this clearly available work to be PAID A WAGE FOR IT.

We sneer not at people getting work experience in Tesco, though for the life of me I can't think what employer is going to value the skill of taking stock from the back of the store to the front, other than Tesco or it's competitors, we sneer at the politicians that think it's fair to say "Here you go Tesco, feel free to save around £150-200 a week on employing someone, you obviously have the capacity to take on a worker...but we'd rather keep them stuck on benefits than actually in employment! We'll pay!"

Yes, it is us "job snobs" that are the devious bastards...

Liam Fox complaining about workers rights to anyone that'll hear his corrupt self 22/02/2012

"It is too difficult to hire and fire, and too expensive to take on new employees. It is intellectually unsustainable to believe that workplace rights should remain untouchable while output and employment are clearly cyclical.

Too difficult to hire and fire? There are too many people to fill each of the jobs around various parts of the country, and recent law changes mean that no matter how good you are at your job, no matter how well you perform, you are not safe from simply being told to pack your desk up and leave before you've been employed at your company for two years

Let's not have any of this bullshit that companies have it hard right now, and that workers have too many rights.

Also "intellectually unsustainable" is an intellectually unsustainable term.

Stephen Hester in an interview with Laura Kuenssberg on anti-banker mood 23/02/2012

He says he has 'great sympathy' for people who worry about pay gap, but UK won t prosper if we 'stigmatise success'

Who is stigmatising success? The complaints against those like Hester are not complaining about successful people getting paid. We are complaining because unsuccessful people are getting paid extra for being unsuccessful, even if they are slightly better at keeping it from being a complete disaster than the last guy.

We all want people to prosper...at least those of us that aren't spending all of our time demonising the poor...what that means, however, is society reaping the benefits of that success. The problem is that bankers get huge bonuses for very little, it might as well just be called their salary. Advisers get huge sums of money paid in to companies so that they can avoid tax, the highest paid in the land do more and more to avoid paying through these hard times despite still having enough for a great number of families to live off of their spare cash.

Meanwhile the poor are being told they don't deserve their benefits, there are calls for further deregulation of the workplace, a removal of workers rights, the ever present murmurs of removing the national minimum wage.

If anything is being stigmatised it is pricks that think it's ok to skim huge amounts of money off the top, avoid acting ethically on their earnings, and then have the audacity to point the finger at the poor and say that it is those people that need to lose more of their money, their services, their hope, their will.

2014 election? Maybe, maybe not.

Over on the LSE blog an article has been posted, positing that a 2014 election is all but inevitable. It's my opinion that while Professor Patrick Dunleavy may possibly end up being correct, it may have been easier to reach the same conclusion by drawing years from a hat. It certainly would have had the same amount of logical reasoning.

I fisk it below...

The term of this Parliament has passed an invisible but magically potent half-way mark. We now have two years to go to the start of the UK’s next general election campaign in May or June 2014. I am now 90 per cent sure that Britain will go the polls again fully a year ahead of the ‘official’ date for Conservative and Liberal Democrat co-operation to wrap up (supposedly May 2015).

It doesn't bode well when, even by his own standards, his statement of this parliament passing a "half-way" mark is not true. A May 2014 election would mean the halfway mark would be just short of May 2012. Following the expected lifespan the true half way mark in law would be November 2012. Maybe this article has been published too early.

Forecasting the future in political life is a mugs game at the best of times. The opportunities for falling flat on your face are legion, and the chances of actually being prophetic are tiny.

I can't remember where it was right now (damn) but a nice little flow chart detailed that people take the stance of "predict doom" because in game theory is has the best overall outcome for the person doing the predicting. On a personal level if they're wrong then the "good thing" will happen, they won't feel bad. If it does happen, well.."I told you so". More so than this it's that predicting that things will go as planned doesn't get you remembered.

So most social scientists consequently eschew anything that smacks of ‘futurology’. Yet the timing of the next general election is an important matter. Billions of pounds may hang on it for the City of London’s financial markets. And in the second half of a Parliament it behoves all MPs, government departments, party activists and citizens to calibrate their behaviours with an accurate view of when the next election will happen. So a half-time assessment could be useful, however risky.

The fixed term parliament bill was created for a multitude of reasons. First of all it is a democratic move, since the form stance is to have a single person decide when an election happens. This law changes that to say that a super-majority of the representatives of the people must also want that election. It has devolved power to our representatives, and thus more power to the people. Further from this, there is also an element, as Professor Dunleavy will go in to, of "coalition securing".

However the purpose of helping the coalition stay together isn't out of some kind of love for hung parliaments and proving it works...it exists for the very reason that Professor Dunleavy details right here; Fixed term parliaments are to provide the City of London with a very strong promise that this country is not going to destabalise politically.

The fact that he looks at the potential for panic by the financial sector in this country as a reason to look at the possibility for a scenario, a scenario that would exist in direct opposition of decisions made to quell such fear, is quite frankly bizarre.

Liberal Democrats are convinced that this particular stable door [of uncertain election dates] is firmly locked, and that there is now no way that the Tories can ‘cut and run’ – whether through David Cameron ‘betraying’ his commitments to Clegg in order to seize a poll advantage, or because of a putsch or demarche by the Tory right forcing the Prime Minister’s hand. They believe that Clegg has accomplished a fundamental constitutional change, achieving a cast iron guarantee of remaining Deputy PM until the spring of 2015. And, ironically, if the current government was single party majority government, the five year rule really would indeed be binding.

I don't know if any of this is actually quoted from any Lib Dem, in fact I'm sure it isn't. I'd like to meet a single person that would describe a fixed parliament law, that both allows 50%+1 of the parliament to "no confidence" a government, forcing a new government to form, and allows two thirds of Parliament to straight out force an early election, as a "cast iron guarantee" of Clegg and the Liberal Democrats being in government until 2015.

So, we've not even got into the substance of this exercise in "futurology" an hyperbole has already set in...

Yet the incontestable evidence of all coalition theory is that every coalition (without exceptions) tends to unzip from the end. If two actors A and B are in coalition and co-operating, but they know that the coalition is going to end at time T, then it makes sense for one actor (say A) to defect from co-operation in the time period just before the designated end, that is, at time T minus 1.

Can't deny this, there is always a point where differentiation needs to occur. Unless the Tories and Lib Dems forge an election pact to try and attain a second term as a joint governing force, something that might sound tempting to both Clegg and Cameron who can use the other as excuses for their discussion making to the Left and Right of their respective parties while avoiding the many head to head battles the two parties face, but in reality is unlikely to sit well with supporters of either party or the public at large.

The interesting question will not be whether the parties "split apart", as there is evidence every month that more and more is being done to seed evidence of differences between both parties without threatening the union, the interesting question will be if it is done in a respectful manner or in a petulant manner.

And so the logic of unzipping goes on. The only circumstances where co-operation in any coalition will continue is when the end is uncertain or unforeseeable.

Only then will both actors still hope to reap the gains to be had from co-operation, and fear to incur avoidable losses if they defect too early, getting punished for it by the other (betrayed) actor playing tit-for-tat. Explaining this to senior Liberal Democrats I see flutters of unease cross their faces, and sometimes get a reaction that perhaps the election might be two or three months early, but still it will surely be in 2015.

Or where election pacts are made between the two parties, as unlikely as that may be, but it's interesting that not all avenues are being explored here, lest they get in the way of the point that the Professor wishes to make, regardless of how he gets there. There is also still no talk, despite it starting this whole "thought experiment" off, of external factors in the co-operation of coalitions.

Traditionally coalitions exist in times of political shift in the people of a country, or as happened in 2010 an almost uncertainty as to whether changing from Tories to Labour or vice versa will really make any difference to the way the country is run.

While we exist in the latter scenario, it is only because of the idea of forging market stability that a coalition even exists. The Tories would have been perfectly within their rights to govern as a minority government with a confidence and supply agreement from others. It wouldn't have worked in this economic and political climate without Labour themselves providing that endorsement.

I think it is naive to not include the factor of stability, and the perception by the public, let alone the markets, of a move to weaken that stability in to how long a coalition may co-operate.

Writing on this blog recently, Mark Pack – an unbelievably smart and well-informed analyst of the Westminster and Liberal Democrat scene – did none the less concede that:

‘The ‘fixed’ part of the new rules is pretty fixed, but not completely set fast in legislative Araldite… there are caveats for cases where there is either wide cross-party agreement or no one can form a government.

Why is this being written as if he is uncovering some big secret here? The law was pretty clear from the get go, it's a fairly small and easy to follow piece of legislation. At the time there was controversy precisely because it was TOO easy for the caveats to take place and undermine the fixed term nature of the bill too easily. Again, if any politically minded person believes any fixed term parliament bill is a 100% guaranteed "this election date will not change" bill then I fail to understand why they are in politics.

[Mark Pack continues] Forget the idea that Cameron might face a politically bountiful time and try to cut and run for an early election – if the timing is good for the Conservatives, it would be bad for Labour, meaning Labour could and would block it’.

… An early election also happens if the House of Commons passes a vote of no confidence in the government (by a simple majority) and then fails within fourteen days to pass a motion of confidence in a new government’.

Yet the Act is not the waterproof requirement that the Liberal Democrats believe it is. In fact, the scenario for a radically early general election in 2014 is the simple one in bold in the quotation above – the possibility that Pack dismisses as infeasible, where the Conservatives want to call an early general election to reap a polling advantage while they can. Labour will block that for sure he says.

There are good reasons why Mark Pack is right, and it comes down to simple polling and the extension of Professor Dunleavy's theory on political parties cutting and running when it is most opportune for them to do so, the same behavior that has compelled prime ministers for decades to choose or not choose their election dates.

But will it? Imagine that in January/February 2014 David Cameron takes a look at the polls, and talks to George Osborne about the economic prospects and the budget. With press speculation already beginning to build, he privately resolves to step down as Prime Minister in May that year. Accordingly the budget is loaded up with immediate tax cuts and other goodies for voters. The unveiling of the Chancellor’s budget in March 2014 of course gives the game away.

But what can Nick Clegg do now but grin and bear it? If he picks a fight, then Cameron can announce that he is stepping down because of irreconcilable differences. If Clegg stays quiet, the tax cuts happen, the pre-election boom builds, the press speculation escalates into overdrive, and in April Cameron announces that to end damaging uncertainty, the ‘National Interest’ requires him to resign. We must now give UK voters the chance, he will say, to elect a Conservative government with a secure majority, that alone can bring prosperity back to Britain.

Oh of course, "imagine" this, "if" that! A highly specific scenario without any real specifics. Give me a break.

If the Tories go for an early election they have to put it to parliament. This isn't the same as the old way of simply doing it and putting an X on a calendar. The 'easiest' way would be to have a no confidence vote in the government. The Tories would have to say they have no confidence in themselves, resigning as government. I'll go in to this later...

Alternatively they could try and force Labour and the Lib Dems to make that confidence vote, perhaps by offering the tax cuts Professor Dunleavy describes, and therefore services cuts that inevitably goes along with this, since we are going to be nowhere near out of out the woods with our borrowing situation. The Tories would have to start running things like the NHS and welfare truly in to the ground to keep the international markets from panicking.

The danger with this approach is that they would do it, and in the 14 days that the country is then "in turmoil" (note: May not include turmoil) Labour and the Lib Dems could come together and work with other interested parties for the remaining year to "steady the boat."

So in reality "no confidence" ways of destroying the 2015 election date don't work favourably for the Tories, they either have to be seen as sabotaging their own plans for political gain, or they have to allow the opposition the opportunity to take their coalition partners and create a "Well we can't leave this country in a mess like the Tories are leaving it" rhetoric.

Indeed, the only realistic option is working with Labour to gain a 2/3rds vote on calling an early election...

If the Conservatives are calling for an early general election in May 2014 then can Labour (ever) stand out against that? At all times Miliband must look as if he really wants a general election, and is raring to go at any moment.

Well, since you're not really going to look at any of the reasons why they probably would stand out against that, Professor, why don't we do the work for you?

First, where Labour stand on this, and conversely whether the Tories would risk an election coming early, depends on the polls. If Labour are leading in the polls, assuming there is no way for Scotland to be independent in time for the early election, then the Tories can kiss any hopes of a majority goodbye. They might be tempted to try the minority government route, but that isn't dictated right now by their desires as much as the general economy. In effect they would be shunning convenient and willing partners for a slight chance of abandoning them, while ultimately being very likely to need them again for another 5 years.

Not the greatest hand to play.

If the Tories are significantly leading in the polls, and unfortunately for them it does have to be significant still, then they could call the election...but why would Labour say yes? The public will be generally happy with the Tories in rule, albeit in coalition, happy enough to vote them in as a majority...what is Milliband gaining by showing that he's raring to go in to an election?

It's not like Ed saying "No, why don't we adhere to the principles of the law that you set out, to provide stability in this country, we're perfectly happy to fight you on the doorsteps when the law says, not when you say" is going to exactly push him severely down the ratings. Brown lost out because he was seen as playing with power, and also going against public wishes to give or take his mandate away...Ed, in opposition, by definition cannot suffer that same fate. Not unless the polls are vehemently against this government and he turns it down, but again... why would the Tories offer the opportunity to be severely punished by the electorate?

Outside of the polls there is also this issue, mentioned before, of the markets. It's not so much relevant as to whether the markets would be destabilised by an early election or not, as to the narrative that the Tories have built up about economic stability, and then the opportunity for not only Labour, but also the Lib Dems, to make strong arguments of hypocrisy and possibly even lying to the electorate.

"How can you threaten the stability of our economy by trying to gain politically, the public voted in 2010, and their voices said we ALL had to solve this mess?"

"I put it to you that the Tories and Lib Dems conspired to create an impression of market instability to suit their political ends, to cut the amount of money disabled people get, to raise tuition fees, to carve up the NHS for private gain, when it suited them...now they're proving this was all a lie by calling this election!"

I can't think of a single positive argument that can come out of the situation of the Tories successfully bring an early election about within the current political climate.

Labour certainly has no reason at all to look as if it wants to lend a politically toxic Nick Clegg any kind of hand.

It's hard to call Nick Clegg politically toxic without also highlighting everything that is toxic about British politics in turn. If Labour are to try and claim that they wouldn't do any deal with Clegg because of certain issues then they'd find it hard to justify their stance. NHS reforms too crazy? Sure, but then the plans are now just watered down versions of an even worse Tory marketisation of the NHS that Labour started in the first place. Students in higher debt? Shame that Labour have agreed to the principle of it then, except to do it in a way that makes it easier for rich graduates to pay less overall than poorer ones.

Toxic is only toxic if no-one else wants to go near it, and Labour aren't just going near to it, they're pulling their wellies on and jumping right in, where it comes to Lib Dem policy stances.

This all ignores another possible scenario which is that Nick Clegg steps down as leader amongst this "chaos" and allows a new bond to be forged between Labour and the Lib Dems with a hope of moving the coalition to a more left leaning alignment from 2015.

And while sitting in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street once again may seem immediately attractive, Miliband has very, very few incentives to agree to run a risky and lame duck minority government for ten months, with or without Liberal Democrat ministers.

Except to show supporters of things like the NHS that this is the best way to stop cuts to publicly loved services is to let Labour have control again, perhaps? To prove that Labour are actually ready to take the steering wheel and aren't just opposing for the sake of being in opposition?

And who says it has to be a minority government? Labour would only have to find 8 members outside of the Lib Dems to form a working coalition, or a coalition with confidence and supply for one year. With 15 socialist, liberal or generally anti-tory members to choose from it's less in the realm of fantasy than the Professor's prediction would lead you to believe.

So if the Conservatives want an election, and Labour wants an election, an election is absolutely certain to happen.

Yet if I try and push a positive end of a magnet against another positive end it's really hard to make them meet in the middle!

To bring it about it is only necessary for Cameron to resign as PM, forcing Labour to go through the motions of trying to form a maximum one-year administration with Liberal Democrat backing. For form’s sake, because the law requires it, and because it will give him endless TV coverage, Miliband will agree to negotiate for several days on some form of agreement (perhaps not with Clegg though). But then his team will say that it’s clearly impossible. The Liberal Democrats are untrustworthy and right wing, and there is no realistic agenda to get anything done. The ‘National Interest’ is calling Miliband too to go for a Labour government with a clear majority.

It is indeed that 'easy', No agreement for 14 days, an election must occur. But for this to happen this easily, you have to foster an environment where both the Tories are confident that Labour will either follow their lead, or will try and rule for a year and fail...at the same time Labour have to be blind to the possibility of being set up for failure, and have to have the same feeling on winning the election that the Tories do, despite there being only a singular issue dominating people's political minds...that of the economy and how it affects them...and plenty of public opinion data to state who is winning on that front.

So maybe not so easy? Take those magnets above, in theory it is easy to push them together, but in reality it's never that simple.

And with that, fixed term Parliaments are toast and a general election is called at the normal 4 year time, that could mean (indeed is almost certain to mean) maximum disaster for the Liberal Democrats.

Fixed parliaments aren't toast, they are still there, the date just changes. THIS fixed term parliament would be toast, sure.

But again, in the Professor's "I don't really do in-depth" way of analysis, what ways could this mean disaster for the Lib Dems? Let's try and define disaster for the Lib Dems. A big result would be remaining in a coalition, or being the "king makers" in a confidence and supply agreement. An average result would likely be going back to the position they were in pre 2010, a minority opposition party, with a better seat per vote share than they currently have. Disaster? Wipe out, reduction to only a handful of MPs that puts them on a level with other barely-there parties.

So how would that happen? Simply put, the public support for the Lib Dems would bottom out...completely bottom out. Yet despite having already lost a lot of Left-leaning supporters with their entry to the coalition, this has probably had a very small effect on their electoral chances. The reality of FPTP Britain is that Lib Dems end up fighting the Tories much more than they do Labour, and where the Lib Dems are fighting the Tories they are still drawing the "anyone but a Tory" vote.

In the end, this Lib Dem disaster is also a disaster for the Tories. Lib Dems are spoilers, and while they would gain seats from their own marginal fights, there would be a bunch of seats that they only keep secure because of third party interference. of roughly 37 seats (if boundary changes go ahead as planned) only 6 are going to be head to heads with the Lib Dems. The rest are Labour, hot on their heels, with a better poll rating than in 2010 (if things remain similar on the polling front) with no Lib Dems stealing votes away from the second place party that at least a third, if not a half, of Lib Dem voters have jumped ship towards.

Perhaps this is another reason why all of this fantasising over Tories fantasising about a Lib Dem demolition at the ballots is just a bit too unreal.

Just as happened with the AV campaign in spring 2011, Liberal Democrat ministers in 2014 will be stunned by the virulence of the Conservative electioneering

Will they now? Having experience it at the last election, and the AV campaign, will they really be stunned that the Tories can be a bunch of pricks with a pot of money come the time to try to get the public on their side? Really?

by the opportunistic way in which they are pilloried by Tory ministers and the Conservative newspapers for every government failing; by the shamelessness with which all Tory bridges to future co-operation are apparently burned; by the extent to which rampant Euroscepticism and populist causes are exploited in Conservative campaigning; and, on election night, by the radical way in which the cohort of Liberal Democrat MPs in the Commons is eviscerated.

Nothing happens to counter this situation by the Lib Dems in Professor Dunleavy's world. There is no concerted effort by the Lib Dems to work with the more liberal media to win back votes that they have recently lost to Labour on the back of evidence of "tempering" the Tory machine? There is no traditional Lib Dem fight of appealing to "anyone but the Tories", again in the realm of evidencing the way they have declawed the nasty party to some degree? Nope, the Lib Dems in this imaginary scenario just sit and take it, and seemingly so do Labour, possibly by joining the Tories in bashing the Lib Dems and handing the conservatives an excuse for everything that hasn't gone smoothly.

What could still stop this ending?

Reality, mainly.

By early 2014, only an economic situation so poor and a Conservative poll rating so low that David Cameron cannot risk any election.

Remember that a poll rating "so low" is still as high as 35% if Labour are higher than them and Lib Dems aren't polling significantly less than 10%....

Instead he would be locked inDowning Streetto the bitter end, hoping against hope that some good news will turn up. With the PM probably facing a divided Tory party (like John Major in his final year before him), a 2015 election would be a train wreck alternative for the Liberal Democrats also.

Brilliant, so even if things stay politically much where they are now, with labour gaining (very) slowly in the polls, it's still a terrible situation for the Lib Dems? Even though every public opinion poll out there on domestic economic issues is aligned perfectly with the Lib Dem stance, they won't be able to profit from that whatsoever? No analysis at all of the potential for the Lib Dems to generate a new Labour/Lib Dem coalition from the ashes of what ends up being a marginally popular, but resented government? No investigation in to the idea that the Lib Dems could act both as saviours to the Tories and to the idea of coalition politics by gaining a stronger hand in negotiations a second time around?

This vision of doom from the Professor, if I were a more cynical man, I would suggest is less about accurate predictions and more about very personal political tastes.

I say all this not because I believe I know better. I don't. Who knows what political craziness could happen to force allegiances apart, or to forge new ones? But if you're going to try an analyse the future, to be "90%" certain, maybe you'd do as well to actually entertain more than a single track of thinking, and stop excluding the most pertinent catalysts for our current political environment from the equation.

Tesco, Workfare, and poor social (media) skills.

If you have been following the news...not the main news of course, no-one cares enough about the unemployed and those on benefits to give top billing to such controversy....you'll know the government has a scheme that says people are now being perfectly legally offered jobs to work for free. "Workfare" as it's being dubbed. If this doesn't sit well with you, perhaps you worry that your job might be at risk because "employing" someone for free may be better for business than employing you, help show support against the practice by signing this e-petition.

Well, actually it's not exactly working for free, they keep their job seekers allowance (even though they're technically in a job) and might get additional expenses from the company. This equates to companies, many of which can be found on This List, paying NOTHING for labour, and individuals only being paid ~£1.50-2.50 an hour for their efforts....efforts that would normally get them at least £5 an hour. If they don't adhere to the compulsion on them to work? They'll lose their benefits.

But then it's only filthy benefit scroungers getting hit, forced to either find work in jobs that don't exist or turn to other ways of financing themselves, right? Oh, wait... how about the disabled too?

The thing is that Workfare doesn't even seem to work. Read this report that the Department for Work and Pensions put together, and you'll see that workfare certainly isn't an answer to anything on it's own, that is potentially reduces the chances of people that are forced to work from getting real employment, and that (funnily enough) it's least effective in a high unemployment market. Why? Because there are no jobs for people to take after they've done their "placement"!

Somehow this report that says "it's not really effective" has led to this government ploughing ahead with it, no doubt with wind in their sails courtesy of it being a policy idea from the particularly vile parts of the previous Labour administration.

Tesco are currently absorbing most of the ire about this, previous targets like TK Maxx and Sainsburys have done the right thing and agreed to stop this practice, Tesco on the other hand have repeatedly tried to spin their stance, and obfuscate what is going on...clearly hoping it'll all just go away. You can tell, however, when a company is acting shifty when they spin their scheme in to "We give guaranteed interviews to everyone on the scheme". Of course there are few hard figures I can find, it doesn't help that Tesco, on their facebook page, keep deleting comments from anyone that tries to highlight any facts on the issue, but an unverified number popping up is that a whole 5% of people get permanent jobs after being in the scheme.

What has been quoted by someone, on Twitter, is:

@cutchswife
Tesco have taken on 1400 unpaid claimants in the last 4 months that equates to 168,000 hours unpaid work (30 hours a wk) Tesco profits 3.5bn

This is AT LEAST £840k saved by Tesco in the 4 months of the program instead of paying fair wages. They make a profit of £3.5bn and we're supposed to accept that the only way for people to get work in this country is by the tax payer funding people to work for these organisations for free? There is clearly work that Tesco can employ people for, why isn't there a huge outcry that they could be employing up to 1400 on a real, full time, job?

Hardly cause to celebrate the company and the scheme with their "guaranteed interviews" now, is it?

Hiding behind a "community policy" that seems to revolve around them dictating what the "community" is interested in (currently sky diving for charity and £5000 worth of chocolate being given away for free), their online moderators seem to be in a minute by minute battle with online activists trying to promote to fans of Tesco just what their favourite supermarket is involved in. Hundred upon hundreds of comments are posted about their Workfare involvement, and yet they refuse to publish any area of discussion on the front of their facebook presence, where everyone can see it, despite the clear desire by the "community" to discuss it.

Like Paperchase and others before them, Tesco are falling in to the well trodden social media trap of believing that they can honestly contain the outcry for them to do something about their practices. These companies fail, time and time again, to realise that the more you contain something the more loud it becomes. We don't have mass censorship here, there are plenty of avenues for this discussion to take place. Twitter is favourite right now, but it can't be long before it moves in front of Tesco stores. If they think that hiding the facts from people on the front of their Facebook page is important, how are they going to deal with people, feeling they're being silenced, being much more effective in making Tesco customers know what they are supporting with each purchase.

But the reality is that if Tesco and others are taking part in this scheme, it is because the Government is allowing it. No, they're not just allowing it, they're pushing it. Changing the policy originally from being purely for the benefit of communities...an attempt to keep it in the realm of volunteering and vital local work...they now have expanded the language to include pretty much any business. We can shout at Tesco all we want, it is a fun thing to do for activists, they're low hanging fruit...but if we want to change this we need to tell our Government, our MPs, that this is not how we want our country to treat our poor, disadvantaged and disabled. Sign the petition

I shall leave you with an example of this terrible strategy below, one of many conversations that "David" (are there more than one David's, or are Tesco also making their community hosts work outside of EU working time directive agreements also?) has had with people instead of just doing the right thing and being open and compliant to customer desires in the social web...

Tesco:
Morning. A quick remiinnder that we keep our posts on-topic on this page so we can cater for users who want to diiscuss a range of subjects. If you have a subject you want to comment on other than our chocolate giveaway you may be able to find a relevant post to comment on by clicking 'Everyone (Most Recent)' above. Best wishes, David - Community Host

Me:
David...how about you guys make an official post about your stance on Workfare, here on the front page, where you're not trying to hide the issue, and we can all be on topic there in an open and fair way, and stop wasting your time?

Tesco (paraphrasing, as they've already deleted their own post, along with however many others):
Hi Lee. Tesco's statement on Workfare can be freely discussed on one of the Workfare related posts to be found by clicking 'Everyone (Most Recent)' above.

Me:
I know it can be found by clicking away from the visible front page...I'm wondering why you are afraid of discussing it openly by letting those who just drift by your facebook page to see what you are involved in, right here where they can see it without having to go searching?

Tesco (paraphrasing, as they've already deleted their own post, again):
Hi Lee. Tesco's statement on Workfare can be freely discussed on one of the Workfare related posts to be found by clicking 'Everyone (Most Recent)' above.

Me (quoting from Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy): ‎
"But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months."
"Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything."
"But the plans were on display ..."
"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
"That's the display department."
"With a flashlight."
"Ah, well the lights had probably gone."
"So had the stairs."
"But look, you found the notice didn't you?"
"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."

Tesco (now deleted):
Hi Lee. Tesco's statement on Workfare can be freely discussed on one of the Workfare related posts to be found by clicking 'Everyone (Most Recent)' above. We keep posts on a particular topic so that a wide variety of users have a wide variety of subjects they can talk about. Best wishes, David - Community Host

Me:
Which is why I'm saying make a new "particular topic" so that people can keep "on topic" with that "particular" topic, and we can have a truly "wide variety" of subjects to talk about here. It seems to me many more people want to talk about your workfare policy than a free chocolate scheme.

Tesco:
Hi Lee. Tesco's statement on Workfare can be freely discussed on one of the Workfare related posts to be found by clicking 'Everyone (Most Recent)' above. We keep posts on a particular topic so that a wide variety of users and Arthur Dent (above) have a wide variety of subjects they can talk about (perhaps with Arthur's towel, a dressing gown and a nice hot cup of tea). Best wishes, David - Community Host

Edit: I have now been blocked by Facebook, despite remaining fair and non-abusive, and asking multiple times in the area they requested I post in, about their scheme...they never replied, and now have decided silencing me is better than engaging with me.

Benefits, unfair?

Let's be factual for a second. A couple that are out of work, without kids,in social housing, get £5.5k to do with as they like (when I say this, it means to pay for their food, drink, heating, electric, water, clothing, insurance, petrol, maintenance costs for various things...and all the more optional things like mobile phones, sky, internet, etc). This is just over £100 a week.

A couple who both earn £18k (which takes us to around the same level as this benefits cap in take home pay) will have £560 a week before mortgage/rent and council tax. After paying those two things (I'm going to arbitrarily choose a rent of £600 a month, and council tax of £1000 per year...I think these are low, but here goes). This means the couple on around the "benefit cap" of earnings are £370, or £270 a week better off than the same couple on benefits.

How low do the two people have to go on their earnings to be worse off? Technically if both are earning £7k and are working lots of part-time hours, they are a couple of pounds worse off than those on benefits.

Add 2 kids in to the scenario, and the "free loaders" get £411 a week. Our 2 person couple who work get £226. The earning couple are still £190 better off in this situation.

This isn't to say that there aren't people out there on higher benefits than those who earn, and obviously there are plenty out there *under* the average family earnings amount. But you have to compare fairly. It is ridiculous to look at amounts of income based purely on the amount they're entitled to, since most of the entitlement that people have is for their rent, which they never see. If there is a problem with people on low to average incomes affording those rents then the problem is NOT benefits payments, but the price of rent, and the disparity between earnings and the areas those people earning have to live.

If there are people on benefits that find they'll be worse off by going in to work the problem is NOT the benefits payments, but the fact that our government(and past governments) seem to think that a fairly low level of weekly income, poverty level I would say, is not viable for supplementary income support. To be clear, two people earning £7k (minimum wage, part time but over 16 hours a week) will earn barely enough to pay their rent, council tax, bills and basic provisions, if they have enough at all, and get little to no benefits or support. The reality is that the government allows people to earn this amount of money, but not to necessarily be able to afford to live, at least not without making compromises on food or heating...deadly in the winter.

Yet the public, it seems, would rather deal with the non-issue of the benefits claimant. Much fairer, you see, to bring everyone down to a standard level of poverty, than to try and ensure no-one has to endure that.

All of this fuss for around 0.2% of the households in the UK (1% if you talk about benefits over £20k) while the opposite 1% in the country, the highest earners (who incidentally make up at least 0.6% of UK households if we assume that all highest earners are paired up in to families) are fretting about being close to being taxed an extra 10% on their income, of which they already accrued around £100k after tax before having to pay more.

Food for thought, moving the 50% tax rate from £150k to £100k would see around 0.3% of uk households (at least, see proviso above) paying an extra £480-960 a week (on average) into the governmental pot, and another 0.3% an extra ~£100-200 a week (on average). Basically, this tax change would (assuming no tax dodging, HAH!) bring in over £100m a week. Cutting 67,000 house holds benefits? I'd be surprised if it saves more than £16m a week.

The difference? That £100m a week comes from a set of people that, even after the change, still have AT LEAST around £700-750 a week each as individuals, therefore not taking in to account their partner's earnings...even after the basics of living are removed. Two of these very wealthy people together would still have at least £1500. Taking the money from those 67,000 households above the "cap" limit reduces their income to £500 a week, though they still need to spend a significant amount of that on their rent, council tax and other basics of living.

Yet somehow this increasing of taxation is less popular than giving those freeloading scroungers a kicking. Of course this makes sense, since the scroungers aren't working, and therefore are all scum, contributing NOTHING to society, and that don't deserve any money whatsoever, while the super rich work their hands to the bone every day...

What a wonderful society we live in that jealous spite will drive something like 60+% us to agree to deprive people of something like £100 a week (assuming an average drop of £6k in benefits for that 0.2% of uk households) while only 45% of people think taxes on the wealthy, that could pay for proper income support for extremely low earners for example, should be increased.

I guess my TL;DR is this... wealthy families, especially ones with landlords in their family unit, must be laughing to the bank while poor people try to belittle and reduce the amount that other poor people have to live on.

Racism vs Authoritarianism

If there's one thing that is sure in the world it is that the days of "shipping people out of the country" for the colour of their skin alone are long gone. While the odd convicted criminal may be deported along side some perfectly innocent foreigners fleeing persecution, the mass general public is not going to seriously consider that it is sensible when the "Racist Tram Woman (RTW)" says that her various self-appointed enemies should not be in this country.

The rantings and ravings of this person, perhaps in more than one occasion caught on video, are disgusting views...and they aren't to be applauded. The trouble is that they are just someone's views, able to be ignored or challenged as one wishes. Such mature beings are we that we're meant to be able to disagree without causing any harm to each other, save perhaps a little bit of tweaked nerves and a heightened sense of anger. It is depressing then that the woman has been arrested, for something that shouldn't be cause for arrest, as Sunny Hundal says over at the Guardian.

People get wholly unrational when it comes to racism, which is natural given it is such an emotional subject. But the views of this woman are nothing more than extreme and voiced in a anti-social manner. They are, in an objective sense, no worse than when you have to listen to the misogynistic braggings of a guy behind you while waiting to get served at your lunch break, having to hear the preaching of your city centre evangelist, or being with that person at a party that just won't shut up about the state of politics in this country (Yeah, sorry, I'll try to keep it to myself in the future!)

They're opinions, we can ignore them, we can challenge them, we can (ultimately) walk away. Yet unfortunately there is a law that exists that can lead to up to TWO YEARS imprisonment for simply getting on some people's nerves with racist connotations.

Worse still is the growing number of people that are in agreement with each other that perhaps this woman should lose custody of her child. To me this is mindboggling. There is no evidence at all that she is a bad parent, only that she is a woman that we don't really like the look of. I could give up half a dozen names each week to child if the threshold for "being a good parent" was whether or not I personally had a good feeling about them or not, thankfully a persons ability to raise their child is not about such childish and trivial measures.

Yet there are people that would have it this way. She has said a naughty thing, therefore her son is CERTAIN, they will lead you to believe, to become as bad a racist as her, if not worse. Forgetting all of the other influences that a child has, the community around them, teachers, friends, the culture they aspire to be a part of, it is not even certain that a child will take their parents views as their own. Yet these people will assume that this small possibility is a great threat, that needs to be snuffed out.

But why? Even if they're right what is another racist person on the streets, assuming that he has not got violent tendencies (which would tend to be present regardless of world view...but then beating up other same coloured people in a drunken fight because of their class would acceptable to these same masses, no doubt, at least more acceptable than the exact same action committed because of skin colour as the primary factor in target...), what actual harm is that placing us under so much that we need to intervene by breaking up the family unit?

Are we so untrusting of our public education system, of the rest of society at large, that this kid will not have any other scope over the next decade and a half to come to understand the ridiculousness of racist sentiment? It seems funny to me that the same people that fear for how this child has no hope unless the mother is taken out of the equation, and therefore lack faith in both the child and society to be a stronger influence on their own beliefs, also applaud the general public view of the racist outbursts as one of "proof" that people are sane and won't stand for this kind of belief in modern Britain.

Where do these people get off stating that one person telling another that they should "fuck off back to where they came from" is any more morally corrupt than their own statement of "You don't deserve to have your kid so I want him taken from you JUST because I don't agree with this opinion of yours"? Seemingly if the racist woman had shut up and another person on the train had started shouting at her that she shouldn't have her kid, that the state should take him from her, this would be applauded. It would be just as much a "criminal action" (though a slightly different crime), yet I am not sure we would have twitter campaigns to track down that individual and get them arrested.

Such is the danger of the law we have in this country against combative speech. If you offend a lot of people the law will come down on you, if you offend one person then the law...just as applicable...will pass you by.

You'll have to forgive me if I worry more about those that advocate greater state involvement in family life, for tenuous concerns based on opinions alone, than a woman madly ranting on public transport. There are those all too ready to make connections to Nazi Germany, and that we shouldn't "let these views go unchallenged", and perhaps that is where the whole "save the kid from this filth" mentality comes from too. I just find it depressingly ironic that it was just that kind of mentality, stamping out things like homosexuality and religion like Judaism, that we fought against the Nazi's for. The Nazi's thought they were absolutely morally correct too, and used that as justification for their state intervention in the affairs of people's choices and views.

I sincerely hope that the talk of her getting a jail sentence is just optimistic from the "baying for blood" brigade, that she gets a slap on the wrists, a mental health assessment and an obligation to attend anger management classes. In the end we shouldn't cheer people getting put away for offending people, it's all too easy to offend others and we never know when we might be just out of step on public opinion ourselves.

Strikes and November 30th

I don't have a good and generous feeling towards strike action, I have generally agreed with politicians like Cable that have suggested the action of striking needs reform. I'm staunchly pro-worker rights, I think it's disgusting that there have been moves to remove the ability for people to claim unfair dismissal until after 2 years of employment, I don't understand why anonymous applications for jobs haven't become law, and on the issue of pay I agree wholeheartedly with the idea of the minimum wage in an organisation being no worse than a set fraction of the top paid position (for example, a CEO wishing to pay themselves £100k a year would have to ensure the lowest paid workers got no less than £15k).

But strike action just feels to me to be an archaic and blunt weapon used by workers to get/keep their rights, almost exclusively used in an inappropriate manner these days, that fills a void that better legislation towards resolution of conflict could achieve so much better.

Those that strike on Wednesday will be doing so off the back of an endorsement carried by a small percentage of their population. I know..I know...I've heard the arguments about a Tory government being elected on the same percentage, and of the "overwhelming" support by those that turned out. I also think those arguments are disingenuous.

It may well be the case that the vast majority of workers that had the right to vote in the strike ballot, but didn't, do indeed support going on strike. It may also be that they don't. The lower the turn out, the lower the chance of the verdict being 'correct'. Combine this with the fact that those that wish to turn out to these kinds of events are those that are predisposed to striking at the drop of a hat, or feel for the first time that they need to go out and support strike action, as well as the varying shades in between...the "sample" of voters is unweighted and completely biased.

The taking of a strike ballot is akin to YouGov going out with a loaded question such as "The Tories want to give you lots of free money, while Labour are trying to take away your hard earned cash...who will you vote for in the next election", and asking only those in the heart of Witney.

We don't take abstentions during General Elections to mean support for any one party, indeed abstention is a mark of "don't care", or of actually voting against the process in general. Yet the union leaders will put a completely different spin on abstention during strike ballots, I saw one article or blog in passing (didn't keep the link, sorry) that suggested that not voting wasn't a vote for the status quo. How they worked that out I will never know.

And so people will strike, assuming that no deal is reached between the government and unions...in reality there is little reason for either to give much way outside of trying to build a narrative of "being reasonable" with their respective friendly media outlets. The Unions want to show the Government up as not being in control, of the people being more powerful than the government is (quite rightly so in that respect alone). Meanwhile the Government wants to show the opposite, and that the unions themselves are unreasonable and selfish. With a single strike on the cards both parties can play this card effortlessly, and nothing will change. The die will have been cast before the day's strike action starts, with only a violent clash or two likely to sway public opinion (and then only towards to the government, in net effect).

Strike action is neither effective, nor reasonable...it hits this middle ground of posturing for the sake of it. If the proposed strike action was to go on for days...weeks...as it has done in the past with the firefighter strikes (which I have always, and will always, be morally against) and postal strikes...maybe it would be a different story. The government wouldn't be able to just "write off" a day's worth of economic productivity as they would do with a special bank holiday, and the unions wouldn't be able to meander in to the action without a much stronger and publicly acknowledged stance.

But then, as said above, I don't like strike action. I believe it needs to be a final option for workers, you can't take away their ability to simply protest...but if there are avenues of actual prosecution/fine by tribunal for unfair employment practice the chances of anything getting to that stage would be greatly reduced. Right now we'd be seeing the government having to seriously justify the option they have taken, to have gone through much greater consultation with all of the workers that are affected rather than just putting some sums together and deciding "here's where we save the cash".

In the end I find the prospect of Wednesday's strikes a little "meh", I strongly believe that the workers have a case, Labour already mucked with their pensions and there are significant amounts of public sector workers, especially those who have given service to this country for decades, that are going to be significantly out of pocket. That said, the government has been fair in negotiation to ring-fence those very workers that are set to lose out the most. To me it seems like the two sides could negotiate for much longer before having to break out in to an all out fight, but the environment of how we deal with these disputes in this country aren't conducive to taking this more mature and less disruptive/futile path.

Why the Tories will live to regret their anti-AV campaigning

UKIP polled 3% of the national vote in 2010, and yet their stock has risen to nearer 6% in latest opinion polls; a rise fueled in no small part because of the Tory party becoming a little more moderate in coalition and certainly because of their cooperative stance on the EU.

My calculations are far too rough and laden with assumptions to publish fully, but taking the notional results based on the 2010 elections under the proposed new boundaries for Scotland and England (assuming equal changes for each party in Wales, as their review isn't out yet to my knowledge), and attributing a rise to the UKIP vote of 3% universally at the expense of the Tories in it's entirety will mean the difference in 2015 between another Tory/Lib Dem coalition, and a Labour/Lib Dem coalition (or minority governments of either of the leading parties aforementioned).

In simple terms, the rise in UKIP support does nothing but split the vote of the "right" of the political spectrum, i.e. the Tories. Given also that we know that the Tories are suffering in marginals where the Lib Dem vote is holding it's own (most likely due to tactical voting by Labour supporters that still understand ends justify the means in a FPTP system). The effect of this is that such a rise of the UKIP party's vote shifts about 20 seats to Labour as it loses it's marginal Labour/Tory fights even more easily than the current rise in Labour support would suggest.

The future is less than certain and all kinds of changes could happen in what is a very volatile political landscape over the next 3 years, so none of this is a given. UKIP support could fall back as the Tories find a way to placate the far right, or it could rise higher as disenfranchisement grows. Lib Dem's stock could be anywhere in 2015 and the battle between Labour and the Tories is far from over with the cuts and growth outcomes uncertain.

One thing is very probable though: When taking in to account UKIP's numbers, if those people were to put the Tories as their second preference under an AV election, the Tories would have a narrow but absolute majority of their own, even if Labour was as popular at the next election as they are currently in the polls.

I think that the Conservative party will come to rue standing against the idea of an AV system in the end, and perhaps AV supporters like myself will end up having the last laugh after all.

Greece: More reasons against direct democracy

So the Greek Government want to give their people a referendum? How very "democratic". How very wrong.

There's a time and a place for all kinds of different aspects of democracy, and referenda, a form of direct democracy, only really stand relevant in one place; a referendum is needed when the law of the country is changing as to how the people are governed, or interact with being governed. Outside of that, it is used as a tool by governments crying "democracy" to get their own way.

Take Iceland. They were loaned money by the UK and Denmark to get them out of a similar spot to which Greece find themselves in, to be able to fulfil their legal obligation to provide a safety net for savers in their national banks. Then they held a referendum to ask the people if they wanted to pay it back. This is both democracy and not democracy. Asking people what they want, but on a subject where the people (unfortunately for them) have no right to a say without bringing in a wider audience...namely the public of the countries that loaned them the money to get them out of their mess.

This is what is happening now with Greece. Papandreou, realising that he is on a knife edge, if he hasn't completely killed all chances of his party's re-election in 2013 already, has turned to a referendum to hold a politically cowardly position. To the EU he can say that he wants to get this situation resolved as quickly as possible, to the people he can say this is their opportunity to put a stop to the austerity plans that will be increased.

What he doesn't care about is the ongoing effect of this political cowardice, and those that are championing this route of "democracy" are out of touch with how much democracy has gone on to this point.

The people of Greece don't need a referendum to make it clear that they don't like the route their government is taking, they've made that clear already. But then who would like it? Higher taxes, cutting services, this isn't a time to be asking turkeys to vote for Christmas.

But let's say that the pro-referendum people are right, that it's correct to follow through with this most obvious of direct democracy. We have no date, we have no question, we have no clue about where this is going. In the mean time Italy is going to the brink, and the question has to be asked as to how many other countries are still under threat of being pulled under.

It could be weeks, if not months until the referendum is actually put to the people. Will it be about accepting the bailout or not, as Papandreou has suggested, or will it actually have meaning? I say this because simply phrasing the question as a "accept this or not?" question doesn't solve the problem of stabilising markets. So you don't want the deal, but you do want to stay in the EU? Or don't you? Or is it just the Euro you want out of? Or do you want the money but not the austerity? Do you want to have your government find another route out of this without leaving the Euro?

Edit: I've just read that there are assurances this referendum isn't about the Euro. Perfect. A pointless referendum that serves only to weaken the system as a whole. The only problem with Papandreou shooting himself in the feet over this is that he's using piercing rounds, and lying on his back with his feet facing towards Italy.

A referendum, blunt instrument as it is, will not provide the answers that can accurately portray the will of it's people. Condensing the options down to two extremes may be best, but will also risk ignoring the preferred wishes of a more moderate majority.

Then once the referendum is done, what next? Hopefully it would be an issue of simple constitutional due-process. But the reality is that a referendum like this is a political football, and it is also non-binding until the parliament and president of Greece sign it in to law. Will the opposition play ball? Will the president? One PASOK MP has resigned, others have said they will if this referendum goes ahead. If this is true then the government would no longer have a majority to push the referendum result through, regardless of how together the cabinet may be on the subject.

It should be as simple as not going against the wishes of the public and may well go that way, but if the referendum is put in as vague and potentially extreme way as it seems it must, then there is plenty for those in power to argue about it's very legitimacy.

Even if there was an option on the question paper that led to immediate action, the politicians could still try to use it as a further bargaining chip while the Euro burns.

And this is the reason why Germany and France haven't already jettisoned Greece. A lot of stability for the Euro relies on people being happy to use it. If Greece is able to be got rid of, or leave when the going gets tough, there are serious questions over the value of the Euro to financial markets. It would seem that the high powers of the Eurozone would want the Greece problem to go away quickly, but they're powerless to make this happen without undermining their own power base.

If Papandreou wanted to do the best for Greece then he would be a real leader and make decisions, ideally based on some kind of knowledge of what his people want through the perfectly adequate representative structures that exist in his country. He could soldier on, or he could go down a different route...and he could do either of those today.

A referendum just draws this out, doesn't necessarily provide a definitive answer at the end, and damages all involved while indecision and bickering takes priority. This is why direct democracy simply isn't the answer to all of our political ills, and may in this case actually be fuel on the fire.

EU undemocratic?

Is the EU undemocratic? I don't think so...here's why...

Election of representatives
European Council - Prime Minister or equivalent of each EU member state is automatically a member, thus indirectly elected by the public
EU Parliament - MEPs elected by public vote
Council of the EU - Relevant ministers automatically appointed from each EU member state, thus democratic accountability varies
House of Commons- MPs elected by public vote
House of Lords - Lords selected by leaders of parties, or by pre-conferred "right" to sit in the House

Formation of "cabinet*"
European Council - The European Council is it's own cabinet, so is indirectly elected by the public
EU Commission - Council of Europe and President have discretion over who is in the commission, but must be approved by the EU parliament
UK - Prime minister has sole discretion over who can be in the cabinet

Election of political "heads of state**"
EU President (colloquial term) - Elected by representative body of heads of EU member states
Commission President - Elected by representative body of heads of EU member states, and further ratified by the EU Parliament via a vote (second election of sorts).
Prime Minister - Elected by unrepresentative body of members of a single party

Removal of political "heads of state"
EU President - able to be removed from office by super-majority (not just over 50% of the votes, currently over 75%) vote of heads of EU member states at any time
Commission President - Can be removed through a vote of no confidence by the EU Parliament
Prime Minister - Only removed through fixed term changes of party in power, or prime minister's choice to stand down

Powers of political "heads of state"
EU President - Cannot make policy, can only help bring consensus on discussions
Commission President - Controls most of the policy agenda for the EU, policy must be voted on by Council of Europe and EU Parliament
Prime Minister - Controls most of the policy agenda for the UK, policy must be voted on by House of Commons and House of Lords (though House of Commons can force the House of Lords to be ignored).


So in the UK we elect one chamber out of two, this helps to decide who is the person that chooses our policy direction (though that person is elected by a tiny subset of a completely unrepresentative sample of the UK population). This person, along with other party leaders modify who sits in the second chamber, the House of Lords. The Prime Minister then decides who he or she wants to help him form policy, and that group of people entirely unelected by the people put forward new laws. These laws are voted on by those MPs we voted for directly, and then by Lords whom we have had no say in their "make-up".

We can't get rid of our Prime Minister, our MPs can get rid of our Prime Minister with a super-majority (which means those who are in the party of the prime minister would also have to vote them out), and so effectively the only way to change our policy direction is for the Prime Minister to volunteer to stand down, or to elect a new government at the next election.

By contrast the EU system is more complex, but more democratic. The European Council is made up by political heads of state, and as such the nations interest on the European Council always reflects the current wishes of that nation's public as of the last general election. The EU Parliament is directly elected just as our House of Commons is.

Comparison: The European Council is a psuedo cabinet for the whole EU, but unlike the UK where the head appoints his cabinet in a top down fashion, the EU functions on the indirectly elected heads of each country deciding who their President will be. A more democratic situation. The EU parliament is very similar to the UK, MEPs elected by the people, and a second chamber that are appointed. The difference is that the Council of the EU is still supposed to be representative of the will of each member state (since the minister involved at any one time should be following that country's policy direction). The House of Lords is representative to no-one, though supposedly should be representative of the power balance in the Commons. This too is very slightly more democratic in the EU, though could be counted as more democratic simply through MEPs being elected in a way that ensures a much closer accuracy to people's political beliefs through proportional representation.

The European Council decides who should be the EU Commission President and the European Council President (The former more like a "Prime Minister" the second more like a "President" though without the wider powers), they do this with a democratic vote in a system designed to try and forge a unanimous decision. The Commission President then needs to be ratified by EU parliament.

As said above, the presidential role in the European Council is a bottom-up appointment. As for the Commission President, unlike our Prime Minister who is only determined by members of their party, the Commission President has to be approved by both the "Cabinet" of the EU, AND your elected representatives in Europe.

In short, the systems in the EU are fundamentally more democratic than our own in the UK, and where there are potential weaknesses in the EU on the front of democracy it is only because individual member states (like the UK) have poor democratic structures when considering integration in to Europe, and because Europe does not tell those member states what they most democratically achieve to be included in it's processes.

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*It's worth thinking about the Council of Europe as a small version of our House of Commons, with each head of state being an MP. They automatically have a say in policy direction in some areas for the EU, and if anyone else such as the High representative of the Union for foreign affairs and security policy is elected in to this sphere of "cabinet member" by super majority, though they have no voting rights. A Cabinet in UK terms is the body of people that decide policy direction for the country.

**I'm fully aware the Prime Minister isn't technically our head of state, but for all intents and purposes (s)he is to be regarded as one.