Restoring dignity for asylum seekers

December 15, 2008 at 9:39 pm | Posted in Asylum, British Politics, Conservative Party, New Labour | 5 Comments

Back in March, when the government was still intent on tossing a gay teenager back to Iran with instructions to ‘be discreet’, the human rights group EveryOne stated that the United Kingdom was a ‘danger for all refugees’. Citing the mistreatment of Mehdi Kazemi and so many others, the group warned that the way we treat refugees is so systemically callous as to border on persecution. Upon reading the story of yet another brave, frightened family who’ve fallen victim to a system short on logic and decency, it’s very difficult to draw any other conclusion.

The process of dealing with asylum claims desperately needs reform, and since there are no indications the government shares this concern, we’re forced to look elsewhere. This week, the Centre for Social Justice published its report into the flaws and failings of the current system, together with practical ideas of how it could be improved. It was produced with the input of various experts in the field and and contains a foreword by, of all people, Iain Duncan Smith.

For Duncan Smith, this marks something of a Damascene conversion. During his early parliamentary career he was known as an arch Eurosceptic and a strong critic of asylum and immigration; he had flirted with ‘voluntary repatriation’ and used Powellite language when speaking of the ‘dangers’ immigrants posed to his constituency. That he has gone from that to endorsing proposals which are more progressive than a Labour government is quite an achievement.

The report wastes no time stabbing at the heart of the system, which operates under the assumption that if you make the place more difficult to enter and make their circumstances more unpleasant when they arrive, it’ll deter people from coming here in the first place. Whilst that logic might be true of your average teenage boy’s bedroom, it doesn’t work with immigration. Why? Well, according the Home Office’s own research, asylum seekers didn’t come for the NHS or the free council housing, but because of colonial links, family ties and a sadly mistaken belief that we’re a nation with a deep sense of justice. Oh, and because quite a few of them were fleeing for their lives. What’s more, levels of asylum applications have pretty much risen and fallen in line with global trends, so the extent to which this approach has worked seems negligable.

The report also found that asylum seekers are subject to a ‘culture of disbelief’, which treats them more as potential ‘scroungers’ than victims. On top of this, interpretation is of a poor quality, decisions are based on the whims of those assessing each claim, the evidence of expert witnesses is often dismissed without justification, assessments are often made using out-of-date information and by people under pressure to meet politically-motivated targets.

But by far the worst part of the system is what happens when an asylum claim is rejected. Access to public services is severely restricted and refugees are barred from working, which drives some underground and leaves others at the mercy of charity; for example, the Red Cross estimates that 26,000 people are relying on their food parcels just to eat. I wish there was a more diplomatic way of putting it; our government tries to choke asylum seekers into leaving the country.

So how does the Centre for Social Justice propose to change things? Well, the first – and most important – reform is to take politics out of the decision-making process by having applications heard by well-trained and independent magistrates, rather than ill-equipped administrators striving to meet government targets. The next is to split the UK Border Agency into three parts so that more emphasis is placed on care, increasing access to legal aid and giving enough time for applicants to make their case. Crucially, failed asylum seekers would continue to receive housing & financial aid until their appeals have been decided, and those whose claims have been rejected but cannot be deported will be allowed to seek work. Whilst there might well be aspects of the report we can quibble with, each stage in the process outlined by the CSJ reads as more humane and effective than the desperate mess we have now.

The fact that a man whose bid for the Conservative Party leadership was endorsed by the far-right Monday Club can see the inhumanities of our asylum system and endorse an alternative which is superior to that offered by Labour should really give one pause for thought. It’s just a shame that in a public sphere which still sweats with anti-immigrant sentiment, it’s difficult to see either party adopting it. Nevertheless, those of us who care more about good policy than good politics should embrace this report as a much-needed blueprint for restoring dignity for asylum seekers and beginning to repair the good name of this country.

Gimme Shelter

December 14, 2008 at 11:31 pm | Posted in Asylum, British Politics, New Labour | 8 Comments

I know there are few moral absolutes in politics. Every day our public sphere throbs with debate about the challenges we face, and on issues as complex as tax and spending, crime and welfare, women and men of good conscience should be able to argue in good faith, and their disagreements shouldn’t mean that one is more virtuous than the other.

I know, too, that in an age of austerity, the prevailing instinct is self-preservation. When we’re losing our jobs and our homes and are paying for the shopping with small change, it’s sometimes impossible to look outside of our own private battles towards the wars which rage outside our windows.

But surely we can agree that no matter how wretched the recession, no matter how frightening our finances, no matter how much more prudent we all need to be with our money, we can still, as a country, afford a home for someone with nowhere else to go.

Surely we can agree that in Great Britain, in the 21st century, under the party of Labour, a woman who has tried to rescue her children from tyranny can be found some quiet corner of this green and pleasant land to live the rest of her life in peace. We can still manage that, can’t we?

Apparently not.

The woman in the centre of this picture is Priviledge Thulambo. Several years ago, her husband was murdered for failing to goose-step to the tyrannical drumbeat of Robert Mugabe. When she tried to flee Zimbabwe with her two daughters (both pictured), she was arrested, raped and tortured. She eventually escaped to neighbouring Malawi, where her late husband held dual citizenship, and then came to Britain to claim asylum. Priviledge and her daughters have lived here for eight years, and have become part of the community in the Sheffield suburb in which they live.

But now the Home Office wants to send them back. Because they entered into the country on Malawian passports (which was the only way they could’ve gotten here in the first place), they have been idiotically assessed as Malawians, which makes their asylum claim invalid. As a result, they will spend Christmas in a detention centre before being deported to Malawi, where they face the prospect of a second deportation back to Zimbabwe and an all-but-certain execution.

For all the faults of this government, it is not intrinsically malicious or mean-spirited; indeed, the Home Office has promised to protect Zimbabwean asylum seekers for however long that crazed despot continues to squeeze the life out of it. Instead, Ms Thulambo and her daughters have become victims of bureaucracy – that abyss of form-filling, box-ticking and de-personalised processing which leaves asylum seekers in years of limbo: barred from employment, unable to plan a future for themselves, and left at the mercy of Churches and charities like ASSIST, which does incredible, heart-rending work.

These brave women’s plight isn’t the first injustice our asylum system has created and it won’t be the last. Some, like Mehdi Kazemi, will be saved through the publicising of their plight, whilst others will pass unnoticed, tossed back to whichever humanitarian catastrophe they fled. Whilst I’m open to ideas about how this mess could be reformed, one thing should be undeniable: when the system makes decisions like this, it desperately, urgently needs to be changed.

One quote you read often in civil liberties circles is “give me liberty or give me death“. For Ms Thulambo and her daughters, their future really is that depressingly stark, and it’s to this country’s shame that we’ve allowed it to happen.

Coal is the new Christmas

December 13, 2008 at 2:40 pm | Posted in Idiot Hall of Fame | Leave a comment

I wish I could say this was some kind of joke, but alas, it seems the ‘clean coal’ industry really is this desperate…

Treehugger has even more, if you can stand it.

How the low wage economy caused the credit crunch

December 13, 2008 at 2:30 pm | Posted in U.S. Politics | 3 Comments

As a coda to the last post, it seems appropriate to post this speech by Damon Silvers, Associate General Counsel for the AFL-CIO. The speech is a compelling (and frequently ignored) alternate history of the credit crunch, which places the plight of the American worker at its core. Among his many observations, Silvers blames the dismantling of union rights, wage stagnation and the outsourcing of jobs as having contributed to a credit crisis which, when the speech was made in April ’08, had not yet reached its most destructive extremes:

But the real roots of the crisis do not lie on Wall Street. The cause of the crisis can be found in the long-term weakening of the real American economy in an era of globalization—in closed factories, outsourced high tech jobs and low wage jobs with no benefits, and in the unsustainable effort to maintain middle class living standards through borrowing. It is to be found in the reality of lives like that of Kimberly Somsel of Westland Michigan, a member of the AFL-CIO’s community affiliate Working America, an unemployed single mother of two battling breast cancer and facing foreclosure due to a ballooning “2 and 28” loan payment. She is selling the family car and her furniture just to get by. Five houses on her block are threatened with foreclosure.

Powerful voices in our country say that public resources should be there for Bear Stearns, but not for Kimberly Somsel, to keep the champagne flowing on Wall Street, but not to build a future for Michigan. But there is another way — a return to a high wage economy driven by productive investment in the United States. This way requires not that we retreat from the global economy, but that we insist that the globalized economy have real rules that work for working people. At the center of these rules must be labor market regulation, and in particular, regulation that empowers workers to speak for themselves by acting together. But rules are no enough. The United States must pursue a real national economic strategy in a globalized world economy.

For thirty years, America’s economic elites and their political allies have pursued a combination of economic and social policies designed to produce a low wage economy. These policies—our labor laws and our broader system of labor market regulation, our tax policies and our approach to globalization, have yielded decades of stagnant wages and rising economic inequality.

But at the same time, policymakers of both parties have sought, with some success, to maintain high levels of consumer spending. The pursuit of the contradiction of a low wage, high spending economy has systematically destroyed the various ways we individually and collectively save and invest. Instead of an income driven economy, we have become an economy driven by asset bubbles fueled by cheap debt. The ultimate unsustainability of this strategy has brought us to our current economic crisis.

The whole speech can be read here. Whilst it’s pretty long, it’s also very thoughtful & well-researched interpretation of the events and policies which have brought us all low.

Ransom and retribution

December 13, 2008 at 1:52 pm | Posted in U.S. Politics | Leave a comment

To widepread despair, efforts to pass a bailout of the US carmaking industry collapsed in the Senate yesterday. Whilst the negotiations were long and complex, it’s generally accepted that the main sticking point was the refusal of autoworkers unions to allow their members’ pay to be cut.

Here we can see a fairly transparent attempt to hold organised labour to ransom; either they allow their wages to be eroded in an age of mounting bills and where credit is a scarce commodity, or the Republicans will allow the auto industry – and all those companies which rely on its existence – to collapse. Since the consequence would be a deepening of the recession and would plunge Detroit into what can only be called a new great depression, it’s no surprise that the White House is stepping in to provide some temporary relief.

There are certainly non-malicious reasons for the GOP to take this stance; it goes against conservative, free-market principles to save failing businesses, and it’s therefore ideologically consistent to insist that any bailout is met with efficiency savings on the part of manufacturers. Problem is, whirring in the background of this sound (if irritating) rhetoric are the mechanisations of political malice. MSNBC’s Countdown obtained a strategy memo written for Republican Senators, stating the reasons they should maintain opposition to the bailout.

This is the democrats first opportunity to payoff organized labor after the election. This is a precursor to card check and other items. Republicans should stand firm and take their first shot against organized labor, instead of taking their first blow from it.

To which your first response would be a profanity, but it’s heartening that the autoworkers unions held their nerve in this Mexican standoff, as similar resolve will be required in the months ahead. For unions, arguably the most longed-for piece of legislation is the Employee Free Choice Act, which would give workers the ability to organise without fearing for their jobs and has the potential to drive up wages, expand pension & healthcare provision, and improve standards in the workplace. For pro-worker Democrats, this legislation is sacrosanct; for Republicans, it is an anathema. This is why both sides have begun to lobby, publicise and organise support ahead of its possible inclusion in President Obama’s fiscal stimulus package.

For both sides, the stakes could not be higher, nor the margin for victory any narrower. Given that the Democrats’ Senate majority is not filibuster-proof, they will need one or two (depending on the results of the Minnesota recount) votes to pass the measure, which puts the decisions of Republican moderates like Arlen Specter in the position of being dealmakers. Whilst the EFCA’s passage still seems very possible, it will require some Republicans to defy the wishes of a party leadership which seems bent on post-election retribution.

Criminal records

December 13, 2008 at 11:14 am | Posted in U.S. Politics | Leave a comment

It might be somewhat guache to point this out, but it seems that after spending eight years ignoring, excusing or actively cheerleading for some of the worst abuses of power by an executive in recent memory, the Republicans’ Über-partisan apparatchiks have suddenly become awfully concerned with defending ethics, integrity and good government. Anyone know why that might be?

Yes, the right is positively frothing with outrage, schadenfreude and journalistic expose about the rank idiocy of small time crook Democratic Governor Rod Blagojevich, whose f-bomb-laced wiretaps (in which he suggests the President elect can go fuck himself for refusing to enter into bribery) seem likely to land him a generous spell in prison. What a relief it must be for members of a party beset by a ‘culture of corruption’ to finally point at the party opposite and shout ‘well, at least we’re not the only ones!’

But before the Republicans start enjoying the scrutiny-free obscurity of their years in the wilderness, this week Congress published a report into criminality so serious it makes Blagojevich – and even Jack Abramoff and Ted Stevens – seem like petty thieves:

A bipartisan Senate report released Thursday concludes that decisions made by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were a “direct cause” of widespread detainee abuses, and that other Bush administration officials were to blame for creating a legal and moral climate that contributed to inhumane treatment.

The report, endorsed by Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee, is the most forceful denunciation to date of the role that Rumsfeld and other top officials played in the prisoner abuse scandals of the last five years.

[…]

“The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own,” the report says.

Instead, the document says, a series of high-level decisions in the Bush administration “conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody.”

The report also notes that Donald Rumsfeld’s order in December ’02 to allow ‘aggressive interrogation techniques’ at Guantanamo Bay was directly responsible for the absuse of detainees, and that President Bush’s order denying captured prisoners the rights afforded to them by the Geneva Convention “impacted the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody.”

For a long time after Abu Ghraib was revealed, the spin from this “support our troops!” party was to blame the troops. They spun detainee abuses as the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ which were in no way related to or sanctioned by the Bush administration. As shown in quite toe-curling detail (PDF), we now know that the opposite was true.

It certainly appears that Blagojevich did a series of Very Bad Things, and he should be impeached and imprisoned for any crimes he’s committed. But if the GOP and its keyboard-thumping online warriors believe that crowing over the arrest of one jackass Democrat will disguise the slime of criminality they’ve been soaked in, then they’re madly, badly deluded.

‘Raising expectations’

December 10, 2008 at 11:27 pm | Posted in British Politics, Working Class Britain | 1 Comment

I know I said I wouldn’t be around much for the next few days, but I do have some time left before my eyelids stop functioning, and thought it’d be better to make some barely-lucid comment on the welfare white paper before sleep banishes everything I’d considered writing about. So here it is (prepare to be bored):

1) The white paper isn’t quite as drastic as some of the newspaper reporting has made out, which suggests an effort on the government’s part to brief the press using tabloid-pleasing slogans and sanctions which are at the more extreme end of the government’s plans. As Chris Dillow notes, this may have been done to distract conservatives from the fact that these reforms should actually entail giving some of these ‘scroungers’ more money.

2) The government’s argument about why they should press ahead with these reforms even in a recession is a fairly good one:

Some people have argued that now is not the time to press ahead with welfare reform. We believe the opposite is true. The current economic climate means we must step up both the support we offer to people on benefits and the expectations of them to get themselves prepared for work. To do otherwise would be to repeat the mistakes of the past, writing people off and encouraging the long-term benefit dependency that still scars too many of our communities.

In a job market that is becoming more competitive, everyone needs to build their capabilities and update their skills. When the downturn ends, as it will, and the jobs market strengthens, we want people to be ready to take up the opportunities that will arise. That means putting in place the reforms now to get the system into shape for the future.

All of which is sensible enough, as is the extra £1.3 billion they’re pumping into Job Centre Plus & its private/third sector affiliates. But its success in getting recession victims back into work shouldn’t be what it’s ultimately judged on; the ultimate metric for measuring its success is whether it can find work for those who were long-term unemployed before the recession. Labour will no doubt claim any future fall in unemployment as proof of these reforms’ success, and we should treat such claims with scepticism.

3) Despite being a good 200 pages long, there are a few important judgements which have either been outlined only partially, or deferred entirely. For one, the white paper signals an intent to eventually simplify the welfare system into a single working-age benefit, but so far doesn’t include definite plans on how or when that might happen. Reform of housing benefit has also been delayed until next year, and both of these will have considerable impact on welfare claimants.

4) Another deferred judgement is on the controversial (and rather ugly) area of ‘Work for your Benefit’, whereby after a year on the ‘Flexible New Deal’, you’re expected to complete a period of work or work experience in order to qualify for your benefit. At the moment, the plans are only to pilot this programme in 2010, and the government still seems open for ideas about how you could ‘incentivise’ it. The obvious answer, you’d hope, is ‘pay them the minimum wage’. You can either have workers or welfare claimants, not some army of people who’ll do a week’s worth of menial labour out of fear of losing their benefit.

5) The government doesn’t seem clear yet about how it will ensure private companies don’t simply ‘park’ and ignore those who’re more difficult to employ, whilst making easy money off the ‘low-hanging fruit’ (i.e. people who are ready & able to work). These reforms will be doomed from the start if the companies government uses don’t have a sufficient incentive to help those who will need the most guidance, training & education.

6) For all the talk of greater flexibility, there aren’t many practical indications of how the reforms will allow for greater staff/claimant agency. As it is now, the process of ‘signing on’ every fortnight is so heavily mechanised that some of us would be able to do it ourselves, like a self-service supermarket checkout.

7) Unless I’ve missed something, there’s hardly any mention of how they’re going to get prisoners into this system and prevent them from re-offending, which seems a quite extraordinary oversight.

Bored yet? Sorry, I’m done. I’ll try to get interesting again by the weekend.

Selected reading (Tuesday)

December 9, 2008 at 11:04 pm | Posted in Misc. | Leave a comment

The rest of the week will probably be light on those posts which require any deep thought, but I should have enough time to produce one of these each day.

First, your round-up of “Gosh, Rod Blagojevich is (allegedy) more of an idiot than anyone could’ve imagined”:

During the call, ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated, “unless I get something real good for [Senate Candidate 1], shit, I’ll just send myself, you know what I’m saying….And if I don’t get what I want and I’m not satisfied with it, then I’ll just take the Senate seat myself.”  Later, ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated that the Senate seat “is a fucking valuable thing, you just don’t give it away for nothing.”

[…]

Later in the conversation, ROD BLAGOJEVICH said he knows that the President-elect wants Senate Candidate 1 for the open seat but “they’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation. Fuck them.”

  • Yeah, fuck Obama and all that pansy-ass, ‘obeying the law’ shit. I like Ta-Nehisi Coates‘ response:

In the words of Avon Barksdale, Governor, they seen your ghetto-ass coming from a mile away. I wonder if this is why Valerie Jarrett pulled out. I swear the last year has been one big blaxploitation flick. Without the guns. And without the white girls…

  • So did the President-elect do anything wrong? For that, I’ll hand you over to Marc Ambinder:

Having read through the charging document twice, there’s no evidence whatsoever that anyone associated with the Obama presidential transition did anything improper. Obama himself is barely mentioned.

  • According to TPM, Blagojevich apparently had one corrupt hack willing to buy Obama’s seat.
  • So who fills Obama’s Senate seat now? Well, Sen. Dick Durbin has the novel idea of allowing the Illinois voters to pick their next Senator. Understandably, Wonkette are having none of it:

Oh Dick Durbin, have you forgotten everything about your state’s politics? Do you think that just because Blaggy’s in jail, the corrupt General Assembly members have stopped bribing him for their preferred replacements? Obviously the voters of Illinois deserve nothing, anyway, since their recent electoral judgment has produced two (2) consecutive criminal governors and one douchebag Senator who started running for president after four minutes on the job.

Elsewhere, stateside:

  • In a debate that has the tendency to get a bit heated, Ezra Klein does a very fine good job weighing the different judgements of the appointments Barack Obama’s made so far.
  • Not content with being stalked by Bill O’Reilly, The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg has acquired the scorn of former Speaker Newt Gingrich, who apparently thinks the dude’s a ‘total jerk’. Yes, that’s the same Newt Gingrich who tried to impeach Bill Clinton for having an affair, who at the very same time he was having an affair of his own. But Hertzberg’s the jerk, obviously.

Back in dear old Blighty:

  • Behold the new capitalism! Robert Peston and Marcus Shukla discuss what global capitalism 2.0 (or should that be 3.0?) will look like once the fallout from the financial crisis known. Meanwhile, in a piece for The Atlantic monthly, Henry Blodget warns that capitalism will revert to type before too long, and we’re all partly to blame.
  • The ‘nef triple crunch blog’ has some noteworthy news about efforts towards a ‘Green New Deal‘
  • At the Centre For Cities, Dermot Flinch writes about proposals to radically reform Regional Development Agencies.
  • Continuing the reformist bent, The F Word carries an interesting post about reforming parental leave entitlements.
  • George Monbiot is a bit hit-and-miss for me, and even when he’s right it’s easy to be put off by his hectoring tone. Nonetheless, this column on the urgency of the climate protests seems just about right.
  • We thought Ken was bad enough, but it’s quite likely that Boris Johnson is even worse at picking his advisers

And finally…

  • The Times lists its top 100 records of the year, and… it’s actually not that bad. They certainly couldn’t have made a safer pick for the #1 spot than Fleet Foxes, but there weren’t too many records which were better. Case in point:

Surely not?

December 9, 2008 at 3:34 pm | Posted in U.S. Politics | Leave a comment

This is bonkers. Sure, Illinois is well-known for its shady & even outright corrupt politics, but surely they can’t be this corrupt?

Federal authorities in Chicago arrested Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich on Tuesday and accused him of attempting to benefit financially from his position to appoint Barack Obama’s Senate replacement.

U.S. Attorney’s office spokesman Randall Samborn said both Blagojevich and his chief of staff, John Harris, were taken into custody.

[…]

A federal official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Associated Press that the allegations include that the governor took money from at least one individual in connection with naming a successor for the U.S. Senate seat that was vacated by Obama. The official declined to be named publicly because the investigation was still under way.

From the Chicago Tribune:

Federal authorities got approval from a judge before the November general election to secretly record the governor, sources told the Tribune, and among their concerns was whether the selection process might be tainted. That possibility has become a focus in an intensifying investigation that has included recordings of the governor and the cooperation of one of his closest friends.

So they suspected before the election that he’d try to sell Obama’s seat if he won, and now they believe he’s proved them right.

Nothing surprises me when it comes to corruption cases any more, but this, if it turns out to be true, is some astonishing chutzpah.

It’s like the War of the Roses never ended

December 9, 2008 at 11:31 am | Posted in Misc. | 2 Comments

Run for the hills, people! The Lancastrians are coming!

the-mancs-are-coming

Seriously, is it really the most accurate description of this business story to call it a ‘cross border raid’?

Is Yorkshire now as dangerous as the Afghan border?

Who’s winning the war on welfare?

December 8, 2008 at 11:59 pm | Posted in British Politics, Conservative Party, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, New Labour, Working Class Britain | 4 Comments
Tags: , , ,

There has never been a better – or a worse – time to reform the welfare system. Aided by a recession which has made public spending the top political issue, and the deep anger caused by the tragedies of Baby P and Shannon Matthews, the public have become far more receptive to the idea of a tougher, sanction-based system than they were in the halcyon days of summer. Short of a Labour rebellion on the scale of the 10p tax fiasco, our increasing antipathy towards the terminally jobless will probably see Purnell’s pet project sail through the Commons. And yet, as some are painfully aware, in days when the jobless figures keep rising, it’s hard to find jobs for the short-term unemployed, let alone those who have never worked in their lives.

The problem with trying to write about welfare reform is so much of the rhetoric tends to merge economic issues (the amount of money the state spends on the poorest in society) with social problems (the crime, poor education, family breakdown and general dysfunction which can be found in impoverished communities).The two are heavily linked, of course, but the mistake politicians often make is assuming that by producing policies to tackle the former, the latter will somehow fix itself.

The chief perpetrators of this mistake are the Labour government. As the Joseph Rowntree Foundation points out, the primary weapon in Labour’s war on poverty has been expanding and incentivising employment, and whilst this worked fine during our Days of Plenty, it was unlikely to stand the test of time; we were always going to endure a recession at some point, and some of those lifted out of poverty by employment will inevitably fall back into poverty when they lose their job.

At the same time, whilst Labour had succeeded in extending prosperity to some, it’s been unable to tackle the underlying social problems which prevented the poor from finding work even during the boom years. We still have crime and violence, drug addiction, teen pregnancy and kids being raised by parents with barely a GCSE to their name, and there’s nothing in Purnell’s proposals which suggests that will change.

The Conservatives’ proposals are slightly more complicated to assess. Predictably enough, in the Mail on Sunday, David Cameron daubs a bleak, Lowryesque picture of working class Britain and indulges in the kind of crude moralising of someone who’s just read about poverty in the Daily Telegraph. But when you look beyond the  ‘Purnell on steroids’ part of the Tories’ plans, there’s an attention to social problems which sets them apart from Labour.

Yes, Cameron insists, we need to badger, cajole and ‘condition’ the poor into taking whatever work our newly-minted job centres will give them, but we also need tax breaks for married couples and greater freedom for schools. Furthermore, The Observer reports that they’d create a ‘new breed of welfare-to-work’ advisers, who, in addition to finding people jobs, would also assess their home lives and the conditions their children live in:

They could examine children’s school performance or problem behaviour, check whether the parents encouraged homework and school attendance, and intervene if necessary to stop children risking future unemployment.

I don’t want anyone to mistake me for a fan of these ideas. Even if marriage tax incentives really are designed to help the poor and aren’t just the Middle England-pleasing giveaway I assume them to be, it’s still a waste of money which could be put to good use elsewhere. And as for the proposed ‘home visits’ from welfare-to-work advisors, what that essentially amounts to is a quasi-criminalisation of unemployment and one of the most astonishing examples of right-wing authoritarianism I’ve seen in a long time.

Nonetheless, there is at least an acceptance on the Tories’ part that adequately reforming the welfare system will also require a commitment to tackling some of the causes and consequences of lifelong unemployment, that those problems have formed over generations and will take just as long to resolve. Their diagnosis of the problem is reasonably good, but their idea of the cure is emphatically not.

The war on welfare is still in its infancy, and I don’t think we can make any definitive conclusions from these opening skirmishes. However, now that the shortcomings of Labour’s attempts at tackling poverty are slowly being revealed, it’s time to look again at the causes of long-term unemployment and look to strategies which go beyond simply outsourcing job seekers to private contractors, crossing our fingers and hoping for the best. In their own, maddening, meddling way, the Tories have at least grasped that fact. Now it’s time for Labour to start catching up.

Image by Flickr user Neil101 (no relation!) (Creative Commons)

Selected reading

December 8, 2008 at 11:58 pm | Posted in Misc. | Leave a comment
  • Over at ToUChstone, Philip Pearson blogs from the UN Climate Conference in Poznan on the challenge of tackling climate change whilst also ensuring workers’ rights.
  • Via the same blog, this Democratiya piece assesses the relationship between Barack Obama and trade unions, and ponders the prospects of a better deal for workers.
  • There’s quite a bit of loathing for Malcolm Gladwell’s new book. Matthew Yglesias takes a moment to come to his defence.
  • Ever heard of Gen. Eric Shinseki? He’s Barack Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Veterans Affairs, and whilst that won’t mean much to anyone other than veterans, serving armed forces personnel and people who take an interest in the US military, what might be of interest was that he also worked for George W. Bush, but had the nerve to tell the truth about Iraq troop deployments. As James Fallows explains, he was then humiliated, removed from his job, and… completely vindicated.
  • At Demos Greenhouse, there’s a wonderfully practical piece on teenage binge drinking by Julia Margo, who makes some easily-ignored but very important observations.
  • Matthew Taylor points out that when proposing reforms to the education system, you should avoid the word ‘progressive’ at all costs.
  • How biased is the BBC towards Oxbridge applicants? Not very, according to this, but then they didn’t ask the right question. If you really want to determine whether an Oxbridge elite holds sway over the corporation, what you should’ve asked was how many management level employees attended either Oxford or Cambridge. That would give you a much clearer impression.
  • Finally, I haven’t posted any music in a while. And I saw The Hold Steady last night. So this was inevitable:

Rewards for lies

December 8, 2008 at 11:53 am | Posted in Idiot Hall of Fame | Leave a comment

I’m sure it’s a secret only shared among members of the gilded media elite, but I would love for someone to explain why the BBC is so infatuated with Kelvin MacKenzie.

For a start, they’d do well to remember that he was editor of a newspaper for which Beeb-hating is its raison d’etre; you’d surely think the instinct of self-preservation would dissuade them from giving a mic to a guy who hates their very existence.

But this isn’t really about that; the BBC is free to fawn over anti-license fee acolytes if it so chooses, I just wish their airtime was after the watershed. And on a channel nobody watches. Nor is this even about the spite his newspaper spat in the faces of working people during the 1980’s – if the corporation excluded people on that basis, they’d have to impose a media blackout on half the Conservative Party.

No, this is really about The Lie. The Lie to end all lies. A Lie of such magnitude that it makes ‘I did not have sex with that woman’, ‘the sword of truth‘ and ‘I’d like to report a missing child‘ seem like minor fibs. A Lie he authored, defended and still defends to this day, and which continues to haunt and hurt its victims. You know The Lie I’m talking about, right?

In almost any other walk of life (aside from professional politics, of course) making such a disgraceful error, and then standing by that error over a decade later, would make you persona non grata in your own profession. If you were a doctor, you’d be struck off. If you were a builder, you’d struggle to find work. But if you’re a mendacious media rent-a-mouth, the market will embrace you with open arms.

And so on the BBC’s Breakfast news, MacKenzie was brought on to advocate for James Purnell’s welfare reforms. Quite what qualifies him as an expert on welfare provision – or an expert on anything other than the art of tabloid slime – is beyond me, but there he was, on that plush, license fee funded sofa, explaining that (I’m paraphrasing here) poor people can go fcuk themselves. It was like a ghostly, ghastly echo from the eighties.

And he’ll be back in few weeks time, no doubt, armed with tabloid-pleasing quotes and hackneyed ‘analysis’, and the BBC will once again ignore the hurt his appearances continues to cause to The Lie’s victims, simply because he makes good TV. And we wonder why everyone wants a career in the media.

Update: Sorry for betraying my usual temperate self, but some people just incite enraged ranting.

Obsessive lawmaking

December 7, 2008 at 2:46 pm | Posted in British Politics | Leave a comment

Whilst civil libertarians do have a habit of overstating their case, it’s still generally true that if the consequence of being a nation of laws is that individual freedom is restricted, then it’s common sense to ensure we only enact laws which (a) are needed to secure security, stability, equality and justice, and (b) actually work. You’ll have to decide for yourselves how many of the 3,600 new offences Labour has created manage to fall under that criteria, but in this Commons debate, the Liberal Democrats‘ Chris Huhne points out some of the more ridiculous:

  • Causing a nuclear explosion.
  • Wilfully pretending to be a barrister.
  • Disturbing a pack of eggs when instructed not to by an authorised officer.
  • Obstructing workers carrying out repairs to the docklands light railway.
  • Offering for sale a game bird killed on a Sunday or Christmas day.
  • Attaching an ear tag to an animal where it has previously been used to identify another animal.
  • Landing at a harbour without permission a catch that includes unsorted fish.

Whilst I wouldn’t want to be seen as ‘soft’ on people who want to cause nuclear explosions, I’m pretty sure we already had laws which covered that particular crime.

Just a thought…

December 7, 2008 at 2:04 pm | Posted in U.S. Politics | Leave a comment

…but since the President-elect has selected Samantha Power to work on his transition team, does anyone else think now might be a really good time for America in the World to consider taking her name off their list of the varieties of anti-Americanism?

Or should the Secret Service insist on a strip-search each time she tries to go near the next President?

« Previous Page — Next Page »

Blog at WordPress.com.
Entries and comments feeds.