Conservatives' election war chest tops £10m

Buying votes in marginal constituencies with the help of Lord Ashcroft

The Conservatives received more than £10m towards their election war chest in just three months – far more than the other parties combined.

The flood of cash into the Tory coffers is enabling it to outspend Labour in pre-election skirmishes ahead of the campaign. It reported gifts worth £10,481,949 in last quarter of 2009, compared with £4,962,886 collected by Labour and £1,055,717 received by the Liberal Democrats. The figures released by the Electoral Commission also show that the Conservatives raised some £26m during 2009, while Labour received about £16m over the year.

The appeal of David Cameron's party to donors adds to the pressure on Labour to match Tory spending. It is certain to appeal to the unions for fresh funds to bankroll its campaign ...

Independent  25 Feb 2010    Election 2010

MPs' verdict on News of the World phone-hacking scandal: Amnesia, obfuscation and hush money

The 167-page report by a cross-party select committee is withering about the conduct of the News of the World, with one MP saying its crimes "went to the heart of the British establishment, in which police, military royals and government ministers were hacked on a near industrial scale".

MPs condemned the "collective amnesia" and "deliberate obfuscation" by NoW executives who gave evidence to them, and said it was inconceivable that only a few people at the paper knew about the practice.

The culture, media and sport select committee was also damning of the police, saying Scotland Yard should have broadened its original investigation in 2006, and not just focused on Clive Goodman, the NoW's royal reporter ...

Payoffs buried scandal at heart of the establishment

An email of 35 transcripts of phone messages sent by reporter Ross Hall to Mulcaire and marked "transcripts for Neville", implied the message was for Neville Thurlbeck, the paper's chief reporter. The report said it was unlikely that Hall did not know the source of the material "and was not acting on instruction from superiors. We cannot believe that the newspaper's newsroom was so out of control".

A contract sent to Mulcaire by a news executive, Greg Miskiw, promised him £7,000 if he delivered a story on Taylor. And the MPs' own inquiry revealed the payoffs to Goodman and Mulcaire, "and that they tapped the phones of [princes William and Harry] as well". This was not in the public domain, said the report.

Criticising the Metropolitan police, MPs said detectives had known of the "Neville" emails and the Miskiw contract while investigating Goodman, but they did not investigate further, "based on available resources" and the fact that it would be difficult to prove criminal activity – a decision endorsed by the CPS.

A Labour committee member, Paul Farrelly, said MPs were disappointed that the police seemed to be more "forthcoming" when replying to a subsequent Freedom of Information request by the Guardian, which revealed they had uncovered 91 pin numbers relating to hacking – information not offered to the committee by the Met's assistant commissioner, John Yates, when he appeared before it.

Guardian  24 Feb 2010

The MPs reject testimony by assistant commissioner John Yates that there had only been "a handful" of hacking victims of the News of the World.

Former minister Tom Watson, a member of the committee, said at the press conference at the Commons:

"Scotland Yard are sitting on a whole bank of information and data about very senior people in public life who were hacked, that the public don't know about."

He called for the information commissioner to access all the police files and see if any legal breaches had occurred.

The other body which failed in its task was the Press Complaints Commission, the committee report says.

The PCC had rushed out a report purporting to exonerate the News of the World that took the paper's claims of innocence at face value.

"We find the conclusions in the PCC's November report simplistic and surprising. It has certainly not fully, or forensically, considered all the evidence." ...

Guardian  24 Feb 2010    Corporate Media    Media_Democracy    Rupert Murdoch    Third Face of Power

News of the World phone-hacking scandal: the verdicts

Overhaul British laws to stop 'libel tourism' report says

MPs' attack provokes the wrath of Murdoch

Today is a good day for free expression

Unanimous backing for real freedom of the press

Darling 'faced forces of hell' from No 10

Alistair Darling has described how the "forces of hell were unleashed" against him by Gordon Brown's aides after he predicted that the recession would be the most severe in 60 years.

In a frank interview, the Chancellor said that Mr Brown's close allies began to brief against him after he made the ominous prediction in the summer of 2008.

His admission follows claims made in a book by the journalist, Andrew Rawnsley, that spinners close to the Prime Minister attempted to undermine Mr Darling following his comments, which proved to be accurate ...

Independent  24 Feb 2010    Social Darwinism

Brown denies ordering aides against Darling

Darling defends economy warning

Gordon Brown: Brought to book

The root of the PM's anger may be insecurity, but it inhibits him in the core tasks of delegating and deciding ...

... no prime minister can govern well by frustrating every ministerial decision until he is 100% sure that every detail is exactly as he would wish.

In the unlikely event that Mr Brown belatedly acquires a mandate of his own in the spring, it must be hoped that this will give him the confidence to lead and trust his team – confidence he has thus far sorely lacked.

Guardian  22 Feb 2010

Brown bullying row spreads to Whitehall

A long list of failings

I don't recognise this portrait of Brown

Councils afraid to say how much they pay chiefs

“ a gross invasion of privacy ”

Democracy? It's so intrusive.

The Government had ordered local authorities to disclose the earnings of all executives after concerns were raised about the size of pay increases granted to council officers.

But local authorities claimed that the pay disclosures would leave their staff vulnerable to reprisals from taxpayers. They argued that officers would be subjected to “personalised attacks and mischief making”.

They said family members might be threatened and officials’ children bullied at school. One local authority even said the proposals represented “a gross invasion of privacy” ...

Council bosses were expected to list the names and salaries, as well as pensions, perks and pay-offs, of everyone paid more than £50,000 a year. They have since persuaded ministers that they should only have to disclose the full details of staff earning in excess of £150,000 a year. They will list the number of staff and the job titles of those employees earning more than £50,000, but no further details.

Rather than tens of thousands of local authority workers having their salaries published, just 114 council staff, most of them chief executives, will have to disclose their pay ...

Telegraph  17 Feb 2010

Court orders release of Binyam torture papers

Government secret communication with judge a breach of separation of powers

A letter written by one of the government lawyers also emerged in which he protested at the strength of a judge's draft judgement in the case.

Jonathan Sumption QC wrote a letter to the Appeal Court on Monday after seeing a draft copy of the judgment of the Master of the Rolls (MR), Lord Neuberger.

The QC said the draft would be read as a court statement "that the Security Service does not in fact operate a culture that respects human rights or abjures participation in coercive interrogation techniques".

In his letter to the judges, Mr Sumption said the MR's draft observations in upholding the High Court decision "go well beyond" anything found by the court.

The QC said those observations constituted "an exceptionally damaging criticism of the good faith of the Security Service as a whole".

The version of the MR's decision published today did not contain the passages objected to by the QC, leading to accusations that it has been "watered down".

Media lawyer Mark Stephens said: "It is a breach of the long-standing constitutional principle (from the 1637 Ship Money case) that governments may not secretly communicate with the court or with judges." ...

Channel 4 News  10 Feb 2010

MI5 and Whitehall accused of torture 'cover-up'

Binyam Mohamed ruling a 'tactical retreat'

Heathrow airport expansion cover-up

THE Department for Transport ... is accused of disposing of emails to and from the airport’s operator, BAA, between September and November 2007 as the government prepared to push through its controversial plans for a third runway.

The investigation unit of the Information Commissioner’s Office ... has asked to interview civil servants at the DfT about the apparent destruction of evidence.

The emails were requested under freedom of information laws by Justine Greening, a Tory frontbencher, who has led the campaign against the £9 billion expansion.

She asked for an investigation after spotting gaps in email conversations between transport officials and BAA.

One email sent between the DfT and BAA on November 1, 2007 referred to potentially damaging information and asked: “Can we play down?”

The reply is among those emails that have apparently gone missing ...

Times  07 Feb 2010    Broken Forms of Democracy

Civil servants condemn 'dysfunctional' government

The UK government has become "utterly dysfunctional" and is failing to prepare for spending cuts, the head of the civil servants' union has said.

Jonathan Baume, of First Division Association (FDA), told the Guardian No 10 was seen as a "blockage" because of indecision from the prime minister.

Some ministers had "given up" and civil servants were starting to informally prepare for a Tory government, he said ...

Mr Baume, who has been FDA general secretary since 1997, told the newspaper the dysfunction he perceives is "partly political and partly organisational".

"No-one is clear how the Treasury, the prime minister's office and the Cabinet Office actually loop together and come up with a coherent policy initiative.

"When Gordon Brown became prime minister, no clear direction ever emerged from him," he said.

He said there was a "government by announcement", with new policies unveiled without a clear indication of how they would be funded at a time when departmental chiefs were looking at how budgets could be cut by 17% ...

BBC NEWS  23 Jan 2010

The laughing policemen: 'Inaccurate' data boosts arrest rate

Police are using controversial car-surveillance technology aimed at catching criminals and terrorists to target members of the public in order to meet government performance targets and raise revenue, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

Police whistleblowers also claim that intelligence stored on the national Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) database is "at least 30 per cent inaccurate", which has led to the wrongful arrest of innocent motorists and the seizure of their cars ...

ANPR was originally used in counter-terrorism operations in Northern Ireland. However, since the late 1990s it has been introduced on Britain's roads. A network of static and mobile cameras surrounds major cities and monitors motorways and main roads. Each camera can capture over 3,500 images of licence plates and drivers an hour. The pictures are cross-referenced with police intelligence and data from DVLA and insurance firms to generate "hits" which are then sent to police ...

This target culture has allegedly led to unethical practices during roadside stops, according to concerned police sources. Some officers, they say, trawl through drivers' personal data on police databases to find any reason to arrest. Alternatively, they "wind up" motorists who, in their frustration, become abusive and are then arrested for a public-order offence ...

Independent  17 Jan 2010    Targets and Bonuses

Whitehall rebels over ‘brutish’ Gordon Brown

GORDON BROWN’S government is “weak” and “dysfunctional” with a “strategic gap” at its heart, Britain’s top civil servants have warned, in a devastating critique of the state of Whitehall.

A report, based on the testimonies of 60 senior civil servants, has found that Downing Street and the Treasury “have few tools beyond the brute force of political edict” ...

The analysis by the respected Institute for Government ... Shaping Up: A Whitehall for the Future, was overseen by Sir Michael Bichard, a former permanent secretary ... concludes:

“The office of the British prime minister holds a concentration of formal power greater than that of almost any other country in the developed world.

“In contrast, the fragmentation and lack of co-ordination at the centre of the civil service — the Treasury, No 10 and the Cabinet Office — leads to an administrative centre that is relatively weak.

This curious situation has created a strategic gap at the heart of British government which inhibits the ability to set overall government priorities and translate them into action.”

...

Times  17 Jan 2010

Institute for Government

Where does all our money go?

Mismanagement of public programmes has cost the taxpayer more than £22bn in recent years.

It is a story of shocking extravagance and waste, carried out under the noses of the people we pay to keep an eye on how public money is spent. It is about Parliament's failure to maintain any rigorous controls on spending while hundreds of MPs and civil servants fritter away taxpayers' money behind the scenes – or use it to feather their own nests ...

Critics last night offered a range of explanations for the ongoing failures – from institutional incompetence to a high turnover of ministers, which has meant the individual responsible for making procurement decisions is rarely around to face the flak when the project busts deadlines and financial targets.

Furthermore, it is often difficult to identify who has ultimate responsibility for a project, as many do not have a named individual with overall responsibility for delivering it on time and on budget.

Some departments have also tied themselves into unequal contracts that opponents claim levy high charges because the Government is seen as a "soft touch".

Some private finance initiative (PFI) deals impose charges as high as £300 for replacing an electrical socket or almost £500 for fitting a new lock ...

The TaxPayers' Alliance (TPA) pressure group has calculated from the Government's own figures that, even allowing for those projects that come in at or under budget, the total net overrun on 240 large-scale capital projects is more than £19bn, which equates to over £750 for every household in Britain.

Almost a third of the projects went over budget, averaging 38 per cent above expected costs. Almost a quarter of the schemes came in under budget ...

Independent  10 Jan 2010

General Electric, one of the world’s biggest corporations, is using the London libel courts to gag a senior radiologist after he raised the alarm over the potentially fatal risks of one of its drugs.

The multinational is suing Henrik Thomsen, a Danish academic, after he described his experiences of one of the company’s drugs as a medical “nightmare”. He said some kidney patients at his hospital contracted a potentially deadly condition after being administered the drug Omniscan.

GE Healthcare, a British subsidiary of General Electric, has run up more than £380,000 in legal costs pursuing Thomsen.

“I believe the lawsuit is an attempt to silence me,” he said last week. “It’s dangerous for the patient if we can’t frankly exchange views.” ...

Sunday Times  20 Dec 2009

A wretched law that threatens our free speech

The justice secretary has blocked the release of minutes of a 1997 cabinet committee meeting on devolution.

Jack Straw said he believed disclosure would put the convention of collective cabinet responsibility for decisions "at serious risk of harm" ...

Information Commissioner Christopher Graham had previously ruled that the Cabinet Office should release the minutes, but the government chose to challenge that decision ...

A statement from Mr Graham said: "The commissioner is concerned that the government may routinely use the veto whenever he orders the disclosure of the minutes of cabinet proceedings, irrespective of the subject matter or age of the information.

"A full hearing was due to take place on 25 January 2010 and the commissioner regrets that the tribunal's role has been disregarded at this stage." ...

BBC NEWS  10 Deceomber 2009

Second use of ministerial FOI veto

Straw strikes again

Dr Foster is not, of course, a doctor at all, but a witty name chosen by two journalists when they set up a healthcare analysis company eight years ago, planning to exploit the mass of data churned out by the NHS (..."Dr Foster went to Gloucester, in a shower of rain")

Tim Kelsey from The Sunday Times and Roger Taylor from the Financial Times saw an unexploited commercial opportunity in the work of Professor Sir Brian Jarman of Imperial College. Professor Jarman had devised a way of measuring how well hospitals perform by using the Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) produced by the NHS.

Kelsey and Taylor's timing was good. The Department of Health under Alan Milburn needed evidence to support and monitor progress in implementing the NHS Plan and, after some initial hesitation, embraced Dr Foster warmly. The first Good Hospital Guide under the Dr Foster imprint appeared in 2001. Hospitals were under notice to collaborate with Dr Foster, however little they liked doing it.

So keen was Milburn's successor, Patricia Hewitt, on the product that she bought the company. Under a deal negotiated in 2006, £12m of public money was invested in a joint venture between Dr Foster and the NHS body, the Information Centre for Health and Social Care, to create the Dr Foster Intelligence consultancy.

The fact that this deal went through without a competitive tender raised some eyebrows, and was heavily criticised by the National Audit Office (NAO). The department had paid too much, and had failed to give others a chance to bid, the NAO ruled.

Professor Denise Lievesley, a statistician who had become chief executive of the Information Centre, protested to her bosses in the NHS, and again in 2007 when a contract to provide material to the NHS Choices online information service was awarded to Dr Foster without (in her view) proper procurement procedures.

She was eased out of her job, with a gagging clause preventing her from telling her side of the story ...

Independent  01 December 2009

'Dignity & Compassion' in the NHS

During the parliamentary session just ended, Labour MPs rebelled on 74 occasions, a rate of 30 per cent. Moreover, since 2005 a total of six whipped votes have been lost by the government, a post-war record for a party with a majority of more than 60 ...

Were the Parliamentary Labour Party involved more fully in the development of programmes from their early stages, MPs might feel less disposed to take the 'nuclear option' of rebelling when measures were presented for parliamentary approval.

A lesson that can be drawn from Cowley and Stuart's work is that new mechanisms need to be developed to make possible this kind of liaison ...

openDemocracy 19 November 2009

Gordon Brown suffers backbench rebellions

Government attempts to consult on post office closures are seen as "window dressing" by the public, according to a damning new report by an influential committee of MPs.

In a damning indictment of the government's treatment of the post office network, the committee of public accounts found the financial benefits of closures did not compensate for the social upheaval they triggered.

"Compulsory closures of post offices should in future be a last resort, not a first", Edward Leigh, chairman of the committee, said.

"The closure of the local post office can be a real blow to the community.

"The consultation process appeared to the public as little more than a piece of window dressing for a decision which to all intents and purposes had already been taken."

In the early consultation stages, as few as 18 per cent of people had been aware that a consultation was going on in their local area, and many considered the six week period too short.

Furthermore, while the report revealed that even when Post Office Ltd did consider whether the local post office was necessary to the survival of the local shop, this was not always enough to prevent the closure.

The government failed to take into consideration the social value of the post office, the committee concluded.

"The inadequate assessment by the department of the social and economic costs of its programme to close some 2,500 post offices showed a real lack of concern for the citizens affected", Mr Leigh said.

This, coupled with the lack of consultation angered many communities who feel the consultation process was a sham.

With 10,000 fewer post office outlets than in 1965, the report made it clear the government needs to set out its expectations concerning the size and spread of the network.

Inadequate monitoring of the impact of post office closures and national quality standards also undermined the approach, MPs found.

politics.co.uk  11 November 2009

MPs' ability to scrutinise appointments to government posts are a "bit of a charade and a sham", the schools select committee chairman has suggested.

Barry Sheerman criticised Schools Secretary Ed Balls for choosing Maggie Atkinson as children's commissioner, despite the committee's reservations.

He said it showed MPs' vetting powers "aren't really that strong" ...

Select committees only recently began scrutinising government appointments and this is the first time one has not supported the government's choice ...

A fellow committee member, Liberal Democrat MP Paul Holmes, said: "What is the point of pre-appointment hearings if the candidate has been selected and told they have been appointed?" ...

BBC NEWS  21 October 2009

The existence of a previously secret injunction against the media by oil traders Trafigura can now be revealed.

Within the past hour Trafigura's legal firm, Carter-Ruck, has withdrawn its opposition to the Guardian reporting proceedings in parliament that revealed its existence.

Labour MP Paul Farrelly put down a question yesterday to the justice secretary, Jack Straw. It asked about the injunction obtained by "Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton Report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura".

The Guardian was due to appear at the High Court at 2pm to challenge Carter-Ruck's behaviour, but the firm has dropped its claim that to report parliament would be in contempt of court.

Here is the full text of Farrelly's question:

"To ask the Secretary of State for Justice what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura." ...

The ban on reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds appeared to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights ... Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian editor, welcomed the move. He said:

"I'm very pleased that common sense has prevailed and that Carter-Ruck's clients are now prepared to vary this draconian injunction to allow reporting of parliament. It is time that judges stopped granting 'super-injunctions' which are so absolute and wide-ranging that nothing about them can be reported at all." ...

Guardian  13 October 2009

Secret Trafigura report said ‘likely cause’ of illness was release of toxic gas from dumped waste

Guardian claims victory on 'gag'

Carter-Ruck

If the European Council appoints Mr Blair it will be installing, without an election, an articulate, charismatic leader who will have a colossal impact on global politics.

The future of European institutions, the conduct of foreign policy and, without question, the domestic political position of Gordon Brown and David Cameron, all would be changed by Mr Blair’s ascendancy.

This, of course, is the point of his candidacy. Those promoting him doubtless believe he will do a good job, and that Europe needs an Atlanticist free-trader.

But they also believe, as Monnet would have done, that the Lisbon treaty’s creation of a presidency is an opportunity. The appointment of a major figure such as Mr Blair can help, they believe, to strengthen Europe’s political identity and pave the way for still further reform.

Mr Blair’s candidacy may be foiled. There are plenty of European statesman who do not want a British president, let alone one with Mr Blair’s attitude to the United States.

But the very fact that Mr Blair’s appointment is a possibility makes the case for a British referendum on the Lisbon treaty ...

Times  03 October 2009

Tories warn of British backlash to Blair ‘presidency’

A solicitor who devoted herself to improving the lives of hundreds of disabled and elderly care-home residents has won a historic battle which had threatened to end her career.

Yvonne Hossack, 53, was yesterday cleared of professional misconduct after local councils, angered by her successful campaigns to stop the closure of care homes, mounted a "witch- hunt" to get her removed from the solicitors' roll.

The case has given hope to thousands of other professional campaigners and charities which work against the odds to improve the lives of disabled and elderly people ...

Ms Hassock, previously shortlisted for a human rights award, built her legal practice out of helping residents challenge the power of local authorities to shut down care homes.

But Ms Hossack's high-profile campaigning brought her unwelcome attention from local authorities in Northamptonshire, Hull and Staffordshire, who regarded her activities as an embarrassing obstacle to their cost-cutting plans.

They used technical rules about working with clients in an attempt to get Ms Hossack struck off. The case was prosecuted by the Solicitors' Regulatory Authority.

But in a hearing this week, clients and families came forward to praise the work of Ms Hossack ...

In a dramatic twist to the case this week, the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, was called as a witness to help save her career.

He told the tribunal that he had sent emails congratulating her for the work she had done.

Yesterday the panel of judges dismissed all the most serious charges against her, leaving Ms Hossack to describe the terrible stress and trauma of her disciplinary ordeal.

Independent  19 September 2009

The government bowed to the inevitable today by agreeing to a strategic defence review but said it would exclude Britain's most controversial weapons system, the Trident nuclear deterrent. "There is no sacred cow besides Trident," defence officials said.

However, they indicated that plans to build two large aircraft carriers, estimated to cost £5bn, would also be excluded ...

Guardian 07 July 2009

Thousands of people are being stopped and searched by the police under counter-terrorism powers simply to provide a racial balance in official statistics, the government's official anti-terror law watchdog has revealed.

Lord Carlile said in his annual report that he has got "ample anecdotal evidence", adding that it was "totally wrong" and an invasion of civil liberties to stop and search people simply to racially balance the statistics.

The official reviewer of counter-terrorist legislation said there was little or no evidence that the use of section 44 stop-and-search powers by the police can prevent an act of terrorism ... such searches were stopping between 8,000-10,000 people a month ...

None of the many thousands of searches had ever led to a conviction for a terrorist offence ...

"I have evidence of cases where the person stopped is so obviously far from any known terrorism profile that, realistically, there is not the slightest possibility of him/her being a terrorist, and no other feature to justify the stop."

Carlile uses his annual report to endorse complaints from professional and amateur photographers that counter-terror powers are being used to threaten prosecution if pictures are taken of officers on duty ...

He mentioned an incident in which two Austrian tourists were rebuked by officers for photographing Walthamstow bus station ...

Guardian 17 June 2009

Any reform of parliament should urgently include means to restrict the use of secondary legislation – usually statutory instruments (SIs) – and provide better ways of scrutinising what are essentially ministerial edicts.

Most bills contain clauses that allow for secondary legislation to be drafted in certain vaguely specified areas at a later stage – a blank cheque, if you like. Eventually these refined measures are presented to parliament and made law with almost no debate. Research shows that in the last two decades statutory instruments have doubled, with a noticeable spike at the beginning of the Blair era. In 2005, there were an incredible 14,580 pages of legislation, of which nearly 12,000 were statutory instruments.

Much of this amounts to harmless regulation but increasingly we are seeing criminal offences created by unscrutinised measures that ride into the law on the back of primary legislation. The general point about statutory instruments is that they greatly increase the power of the executive and allow ministers to avoid unfavourable publicity and critical examination.

The Norton commission in 2000 said that scrutiny of statutory instruments was "woefully inadequate" and that "major changes were needed to existing practice". This has not happened ...

Guardian  20 May 2009

Curbing the whips

Direct democracy

Empower the committee system

Holding the executive to account

A New Politics

Here's how things stand. The follies of the big banks have caused the ­steepest plunge in output since the second world war. The economy is showing signs of stabilisation, owing largely to emergency cuts in interest rates and taxpayers' billions being used to prop up a ­financial system on the brink of collapse. Unemployment is rising, and it is rising most rapidly for the blameless, not the wretched bankers.

Even before the recession began, incomes for those at the bottom of the pile were below the level of three years ago. The longer Labour has been in power the slower incomes have grown. Inequality is higher than under Thatcher. Child poverty has increased in the past three years and the public finances are shot to pieces.

According to the prime minister, we are now living in a different world. The crisis of neo-liberalism has ushered in a new age in which there is a new and more important role for the state.

That is true, but only up to a point. The state is rather keener on controlling the people than the markets.

The evidence for this? Well, in the past month, the Treasury has announced that it is "not persuaded" that the most profound financial crisis of the past 100 years should result in reform along the lines of the Glass-­Steagall act of 1933. This is a sensible idea that would cut the banks down to size and create a legal distinction between retail and investment banks.

Meanwhile, the government is pressing ahead with the part-­privatisation of the Royal Mail and made conditions for financial support for Jaguar Land Rover so tough that they were bound to be rejected. This is not interventionism: it is neo-liberalism lite. The aim, as it has been all the way through this crisis, has been to return to Labour's comfort zone – the economy as it was before 9 August 2007.

In other respects, though, the state has bared its teeth. Labour is ploughing ahead with identity cards; it intends to keep the DNA records of innocent people on its database for up to 12 years; it sanctioned the aggressive policing of the G20 demonstrations. Britain already has more CCTV cameras per head than any other western industrialised country and the weakest laws on privacy and data protection. We have a surveillance society and prisons that are bursting at the seams ...

Those of a liberal bent are appalled at the authoritarianism that is apparently required to keep the lid on a society where the gap between material desires and weak income growth has for years been bridged only by debt. Professionals loathe the target culture. Only the functionaries of the Big Brother state remain loyal, and even now there are not enough of them. The party's over.

Guardian 10 May 2009

UK 'failing' on causes of crime

This has been a week to provoke uncomfortable contemplation about the sort of country we are we now living in.

We have learned that the Home Secretary, aided by civil servants, grossly exaggerated the security threat posed by a leak from her department, prompting the police to arrest an opposition MP.

The Government has conceded that the surveillance powers it granted to local councils have been used to spy on innocent members of the public.

And yesterday it emerged that Ian Tomlinson, who was assaulted by a police officer at the G20 protests in London earlier this month died not from a heart attack but abdominal bleeding.

The common imprint on each of these stories is that of the unaccountable and rampant executive arm of the British state ...

The Independent 18 April 2009

Tomlinson pathologist's decisions questioned

Shami Chakrabarti was target in police search

Government faces legal action over online snooping

In order to measure the effectiveness of big public institutions it is necessary to ask only two questions: To whom is the organisation accountable? To whom are its leaders accountable within the organisation?

If the answers are clear, the organisation and its leadership will almost certainly be robust.

But if the answers to those questions begin with the words, "Well it's all a bit complicated..." you know for certain that the organisation and its leaders are in trouble ...

The Independent 10 April 2009

If, historically, the record of British judges as defenders of personal liberty has been patchy, the tools at their disposal were rather limited. They could, in case of doubt, interpret parliamentary enactments on the assumption that parliament did not intend to infringe rights and freedoms; yet if the enactment was clear and unambiguous, they had no choice but to give it effect.

But the rules of the game have changed - if not in the sense or direction that Tony Blair had in mind when using that expression - for parliament has, in the Human Rights Act 1998, instructed the judges to protect the main rights and freedoms enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights, providing a much more comprehensive framework of principles than judges have been able to invoke before.

It is in this context that we must review a development that is a cause of profound unease to many.

It has recently been described, in unrhetorical but chilling terms, by the House of Lords select committee on the constitution in its recent report on Surveillance, Citizens and the State: "Successive UK governments have gradually constructed one of the most extensive and technologically advanced surveillance systems in the world ... The expansion in the use of surveillance represents one of the most significant changes in the life of the nation since the end of the second world war."

Tony McNulty, then minister for security, counter-terrorism, crime and policing, told the committee that this was "today's normality. CCTV, DNA database and a whole range of these other elements are not there as a response to exceptional threats and exceptional circumstances." A national identity card and a database with the name and address of every child lie in the future.

Perhaps the British are content to be the most spied upon people in the democratic world. But this would be surprising given their traditional resistance to official intrusion and their traditional belief that the state should mind its own business, not theirs.

The qualified right to respect for private and family life, home and correspondence, embodied in Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, is not an ideal weapon to counter the growth of a surveillance society; but failing parliamentary restraint and adequate regulatory oversight, it may be the best weapon there is.

In reversing a House of Lords decision that permitted the police to retain DNA samples given by people who had been acquitted or never charged, the European Court of Human Rights has given a nudge in the right direction.

There has been a surprising paucity of legal challenges in this area, but the number of challenges may grow in the years to come, as the public appreciate the extent of the surveillance to which they are subject.

But the judges are not, in any ordinary sense, legislators: they cannot rule on claims that litigants do not choose to bring before them.

• Lord Bingham retired as senior law lord last year

Guardian 17 February 2009

Corporate State Britain

The government was under fire last night after it emerged that the new chief whip, Nick Brown, is proposing that any Labour MP voting against the government in the past year will not be recommended to sit on all-party parliamentary select committees.

The proposal appears to counter suggestions that the select committee system should be a non-party check on the executive. It was also being seen as an attempt by the new Labour whips to deter rebellions, that are seen as occurring with impunity. The proposal was put to the new parliamentary committee of elected Labour backbenchers last week, and endorsed. The weekly meeting of Labour MPs was due to discuss the plan last night.

Brown is recommending that whenever a Labour vacancy on a select committee occurs the whips office will not recommend anyone who has voted against the government in the past year ...

Guardian 11 November 2008

In the Westminster village, people continue to be surprised at the malfunctions of government. Get used to it.

It is going to go on happening. It isn't just a run of bad luck for Gordon Brown. It is how things are. John Reid, when he was Home Secretary, blurted out the truth. He famously said that his department wasn't "fit for purpose".

He should have gone further. It is the entire Government that isn't fit for purpose.

It was about three years ago that I first started noticing, as many other people did, that the Government had become incapable of carrying out what it wished to do.

Repeated reorganisations of the National Health Service and of the education system had promised new and better ways of going forward, but each time had ended up in culs-de-sac – a useless process that in the old Soviet Union after the death of Stalin was called "the treadmill of reforms".

I joined a group of former high civil servants, ex-ministers, academics and business types who began to meet regularly to discuss what was going wrong and what would bring about an improvement. We call ourselves, I hope not too pompously, the Better Government Initiative.

The answers to the first question will be obvious to readers. Among the many causes of dysfunction one could pick out is the doubling in the volume of legislation that has led to a decline in its quality.

To give an example, a friend who had been appointed chairman of a new regulatory body found that the institution's powers had been so sloppily expressed in the relevant act of Parliament that it took his lawyers a year to decide what they were.

Another source of trouble has been the sort of unofficial presidential system that operated at the heart of government for 10 years – but with two presidents. One was the Prime Minister, the other the Chancellor. Now there is one president. But see what three respected, political correspondents have recently written about Mr Brown's methods.

First, my colleague Andrew Grice on 15 December: Ministers "claim they can't get decisions on policies or the timing of announcements because his aides are not authorised to say what "Gordon wants" – sometimes because the only person who knows what he wants is ... Gordon."

On the same day, Patrick Wintour in the Guardian: "High up in government, there is now serious concern at what looks like a malfunctioning Downing Street." One impeccably Brownite source claims there is an insufficiently clear managerial or sufficiently powerful party structure inside No 10.

With Brown trying to do too much, mistakes were being made." And finally Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer on 30 December:

"Talking to members of the Cabinet and their aides, I have been staggered by the degree of vehemence with which they despair of what one called 'the sheer dsyfunctionality' of No 10."

Worse than this blockage at the top, however, there persists throughout government a miasma of distrust – between Downing Street and government departments, between ministers and established civil servants, and between Whitehall and those responsible for delivering services on the ground.

When our group met with senior executives working in the National Health Service, the first thing they described was the atmosphere of fear in which they operated.

The root cause of persistent government dysfunction, I believe, goes deeper still. It is the notion that a new government, once elected, must immediately start campaigning for re-election, even though its term will last for a number of years.

This leads to government by gesture and to the requirement that the prime minister of the day must put his or her mark on everything. If there is press criticism, then new measures must be swiftly announced. Don't spare the horses. Rush, rush, rush.

Unfortunately nothing is harder than trying to get an improvement in the processes of government itself. For if the prime minister of the day and his or her colleagues don't want to do it, and the Westminster village remains comfortable in its old ways, how can well-meaning outsiders like the Better Government Initiative make the slightest difference?

Well, you hope that the paradox itself will become more glaring. If a growing reputation for sheer incompetence is going to result in Labour being expelled from power for a generation, in the same way that sleaze did for the Conservatives, then reform may begin to seem like a matter of self preservation.

One of the main themes of the 50 proposals that the Better Government Initiative publishes today for improving the quality of decisions and service delivery is to slow things down so that government business can be more carefully done and to use Parliament to accomplish this.

Thus the very first recommendation is that Parliament should secure both more rigorous analysis of policy proposals and retrospective reviews of costs and outcomes.

(The full list can be found on the Better Government Initiative web site – www.bettergovernmentinitiative.co.uk).

The 50 proposals cover Parliament and the executive, the conduct of Cabinet business, national security, government departments, training of ministers, the relationship between ministers and officials, and central government's relations with local government.

There is not enough room here even to summarise the group's conclusions, so I will concentrate on just the single recommendation described above.

We have put forward a method for securing the desired outcome: "In order to raise the quality of legislation and policy proposals, Parliament should pass a resolution which sets standards for thorough preparation by the executive."

This proposed enhancement of parliamentary oversight of government is back to basics. It is of the essence of British constitutional arrangements.

In the resolution that we have drafted we declare that "ministers have a duty to Parliament to ensure that their policy and legislative proposals to Parliament have been thoroughly prepared" and that, "ministers should respond to this resolution in a public document setting out how they intend to ensure that their proposals comply with this resolution" and then we list what elements of thorough preparation Parliamentary Committees would look for before anything could come to the floor of the House."

This resolution may read as unduly technical, but then you can only engage with government and Parliament on their own terms. Yet in the neat clauses of the draft lies a revolution in the way government business has recently been conducted.

Nothing less will do if it is to become fit for purpose again.

Andreas Whittam Smith 07 January 2008

“We’ve had too many organisational changes, with insufficient thought. The original thought to merge Inland Revenue and Customs was not thought through and the huge differences of culture were not given the attention they should have been given.”

As a result, voters are losing faith. “What has really damaged the public’s trust in politics is the failure to live up to promises… Ordinary people want the money spent on the NHS to have brought about the improvements it should have done.”

Public servants are also getting fed up. “Teachers, nurses and doctors can see how much micro-management is going on, that makes their job harder and seems to treat them as unintelligent creatures.” There is a similar problem in Whitehall. “Civil servants are not expected to analyse problems and produce intelligible policy,” he says.

“Ministers come up with an idea and expect civil servants just to do it. You can’t just come down on civil servants if they don’t deliver when you haven’t been very precise about what you mean by delivery.”

He says politicians lose out as a result of not trusting officials enough. “Civil servants can make a good minister very good and a not very good minister passable… The lack of co-operation damages them all.”

Sir Christopher blames Tony Blair and his sofa for much of the decline. “He was the worst prime minister since Lord North, he’s lost us a form of government that creaked and groaned but worked reasonably well.”

In his view, Mr Blair saw politics as a permanent campaign. “He was obsessed by the media – he’d have an eye-catching initiative like marching hoodies to cashpoints and that would be it. That’s the wrong way round, you have to work out what the problem is before you come up with endless solutions.”

He says taking Britain to war in Iraq was the ultimate example of government by instinct rather than process. “Most of us who are not instinctive, moralistic Christians would think what are the pros and cons and do quite a bit of analysis to work that out. Moral certainty is much quicker but one’s moral intuition is not always that reliable.”

In his view, Britain must not embrace presidential politics. “One wants a strong leader but if the Prime Minister is over-burdened, as Blair was, it will go wrong. You need a Cabinet system to make it unlikely an Iraq situation will arise, but also to spread the load.

“No one person could run Britain. Absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. People get cocky. They start doing silly things. I hope Gordon Brown understands that.

Telegraph.co.uk 25 November 2007

When I joined the Civil Service in 1976 I used to spend 95% of my time working and maybe 5% having a scheduled tea break and making the odd personal phone call.

The tea breaks went, the personal phone calls went and micro management came in, bit by bit. Chip, chip, chip.

I now spend 40% of my time working. The other 60% of my time is spent proving that I have done the work, showing how quickly I have done it, showing what my next task will be, estimating how long that next task should take me and checking that colleagues have done the same for their case load.

Every caseworker in my unit carries a "budget manager" an "operations manager" or a "systems manager" whose activities add no value to the work but who are needed in order to supply the miriad reports and statistics required by our masters.

Put these colleagues back to frontline jobs and there will be enough of us to do a competent job for our country,without backlogs and delays. Morale would improve and with it efficiency.

But what do I know, I'm only a Civil Servant of 30 years, I'm dead wood because I don't speak the sexy jargon.

Posted by Old and tired on November 23, 2007 7:47 AM

Telegraph.co.uk 23 November 2007

• The single biggest problem is the lack of accountability of power.
  
  It underlies every issue where the party and the public disapproves of government policy but cannot change it.
  
  There is little point in lobbying parliament or taking to the streets in protest at war in Iraq or Iran, or the replacement of Trident or a new round of nuclear power stations, or the marketisation of public services, if the government (for which often read the prime minister) has already made up its (his) mind, and can't be held to account.
  
  The checks and balances have all but disappeared.



• What is needed is a new framework of power that restores the authority of the House of Commons ...
  
  Parliament, through strengthened select committees, chosen by a secret vote of the whole house in accordance with party numbers and not by the whips, should have statutory power to ratify cabinet appointments, summon ministers and require disclosure of all relevant documents, to appoint external committees of inquiry where the government may be reluctant to do so, and to table its own motions for debate ...



• A reinvigorated parliament is also needed as a bulwark for the defence of civil liberties.
  
  We are now seeing the rebalancing of power towards the state, with restrictions on jury trials, cuts in legal aid, a national database of all individuals registered via ID cards, limits on the right to protest, the use of control orders for detention without charge or trial ...



• The obsessive introduction of the private-market model into every area of public services - the NHS, education, housing, pensions, probation and local-authority "strategic development partnerships" - has neither party nor public support, nor the evidence base to justify it.
  
  What is needed instead is a genuine public-service model - identifying failings in delivery of the service and vigorously remedying them, but retaining the structure and concept of a public service that uniquely expresses an equal citizenship and nationhood for all ...



• New measures are needed to restore equity and justice as a balance against the overriding drive for economic efficiency.
  
  As Sweden has shown, a more socially integrated society is also more economically dynamic. Social mobility, which all support, is highest in countries with much more equal distribution of income and wealth.



• A fixation on economic dominance within the Lisbon EU agenda has led to the downplaying of environmental goals ...

Guardian 11 May 2006

EU 'Privatised Superstate'

The Hutton hearings lit up the workings of Whitehall like a flare in the night-sky, and showed how few checks and balances existed at the top.

The tiny circle within Number Ten were obsessively pre-occupied with their immediate problems, absorbed in their 'game of chicken' with the BBC and in controlling Whitehall.

They could bully the intelligence services to provide the evidence they wanted, breaking down the thin partitions which protected their integrity, and ignoring warnings about the aftermath of a war in Iraq.

They could deploy their own in-house diplomats, reporting direct to the prime minister, sidestepping the ambassadors and the Foreign Office next door.

They could exclude the secretary of the cabinet from decisions, and override the concerns of the Ministry of Defence and the military chiefs.

They could replace parliamentary government with prime ministerial or presidential government, heedless of the dangers of abusing such power: the frenetic emails and memos from Number Ten recalled the taped conversations of President Nixon's advisers at the time of Watergate in 1973.

Anthony Sampson "Who Runs This Place?"

John Murray 2004, page 358

Britain's Black Wednesday

The Franks precedent: government cleared and intelligence damned

The Scott Report and Ministerial Responsibility

Tony Blair says no to 7/7 inquiry

WMD expert's staff said: "We've been on the dossier. There are problems."