Britain tries to limit pro-choice policy

Nobody would wish an abortion upon their closest enemy. Not only for the psychological trauma and misery inflicted upon the mother and father, but also for the death of a foetus that could grow up to live a full adult life. But we also know what damage an unwanted pregnancy can wreak, and, again, not just on the parents but on the baby too. A lapse of judgement, a faulty contraceptive, a rape - and a whole life time of repercussions, some good, perhaps, but many not.

Indeed the decision to have, or not to have, an abortion seems to me to be of such magnitude that the process by which an answer is found must be critical to making the right one. And that process is, obviously, almost overwhelmingly challenging, upsetting and difficult. Who to get advice from? Who to make the decision? How long to decide it? Etc. Tory politician Nadine Dorries wants abortion providers, such as the universally lauded Marie Stopes, to be barred from giving advice in favour of 'independent' counsellors - including religious groups and for the decision making period to be lengthened. Her argument that MS et al have a vested interest in persuading women to have abortions is so implausible as to be almost offensive but perhaps her point is a good one. Isn't more time and greater independence desirable?

But is there any such thing as 'independent' advice? If we believe this decision is important then surely the first consequence we can affirm is that women must make this decision for themselves and not have legislators do it for them? Who could believe an MP has a better chance of making the right decision than the mother concerned? It would follow, surely, that women must be allowed to choose their advisers too and even the period of time that decision should take. For some it will be obvious, for others days if not weeks of agonising may be necessary. We can accept this and still allow a degree of protection - limiting advisers to those with a minimum level of qualification and setting some upper limit on decision making period. Although Dorries claims otherwise, this appears to be part of a gradual chipping away at the right to choose at every stage of having, and not having, an abortion, which the Conservative government have, until now, appeared willing to promote.

A final thought: even those who believe no abortion is acceptable do not need to affirm that it ought to be illegal. The Christian must love, forgive, help, aid and care but not condemn, ostracise or punish; loving your neighbour means allowing them to make decisions for themselves too.

Evicting rioters must stop

The news that councils in England, with the backing of the Prime Minister, will start removing benefits and council homes from the families of those arrested for rioting - even before they are convicted of their offence - is loathsome, immoral and unjust. Off the top of my head, here are just some of the problems with this: it punishes families for the crimes of their children, it exceeds the punishments given in court for the crime committed, it uses the provision of shelter and welfare as a tool of punishment, it risks extending poverty and homelessness, it is likely to increase antagonism with the police and councils, it will break up communities, and, ultimately, it will increase the liklihood of crime in the future.

These changes are probably best seen as just one further step an a series of antagonistic and thoughtless acts of community vandalism by councils run with both eyes on wealthy, right-wing voters and a complete willingness to sacrifice the needs of council tenants to pursue those votes. Wandsworth, Westminster, Greenwich, Hammersmith and Fulham - the list of councils proposing to start evicting the families of rioters reads like a roster of far-right Tory-run model councils who have spend much of last few decades doing their best to make those in vulnerable positions feel ever less secure.

Riots are a sign of the times

What do the riots in Tottenham, Enfield and Brixton tell us about contemporary Britain? It seems to me there are two options: either there is a violent streak in all young men which simmers beneath the surface waiting for an excuse to be unleashed with little threat of criminal charges and rejoices at the chance to nick some electrical hardware; or else the social and economic context are important and riots are an indicator of wider changes in society.

The first is surely impossible to credit - albeit the rioters do seem to consist of young men unconnected to any protest or legitimate concern and are hell bent on causing mayhem, destruction and looting, but these traits are not endemic, genetic traits shared by all young men. To say so is to ignore the relative rarity of such violence and their correlation to poverty, unrest and inequality, whether in Toxteth, Tolpuddle, Brixton or Tottenham.

If the second is the case then I suggest three important factors to look at first: 1. the break down in community policing in London in the last few years after the enlightened policy making of the first Labour government; 2. rising inequality and the failure of living standards to advance significantly for the poorest members of society; 3. the effect of the cuts on poverty, misery and community. To treat these riots as a self contained example of the evil of certain segments of the population or to link them with recent protests by students or public sector workers is as disingenuous as it is contrary to the evidence and to common sense. Why is it now, in poor areas of the most unequal city in the country, that these events are taking place? Vandalism is the most perfect act of self defeat, of blind rage expressing itself in short term, selfish idiocy, of pointless hurt and pain, of dispossession by people with little or nothing holding them to normal society. The police, with all credibility and public trust shattered, have no ability to hold a fragile peace amongst fractured communities. There will be more where this came from over the next few years.

Is £100,000 a year enough for a top civil servant?

There's a popular trope in politics, driven particularly by the Tory media/News International, which says that top civil servants are paid too much - conning tax payers, not giving value for money and earning vastly more than those at the bottom of the profession. Tory ministers recently boasted of the amount they had 'saved' from public spending partly by sacking top staff or cutting their wages.

This is problematic for several reasons. First, ministers rarely consider whether the staff they sack will need to be replaced, creating either holes and problems in the delivery of services or leading to a re-hiring or expensive consultants. Secondly, 'savings' for the taxpayers usually means cuts they will have to endure in another form - as the government reduces fuel duty, imposes punitive rises in VAT and proposes canceling the top rate of income tax so they scrap essential services these could have paid for.

Thirdly, a point least often raised, is that the discourse of 'high pay' for top civil servants redirects attention from vast private sector salaries, the need for high quality individuals to run public services and the differential between pay in the public and private sectors. All of which is very helpful to a Conservative government filled with millionaires and desperate to slash and burn with as little censure or observations as possible, but we should be sceptical of any argument which turns cutting public expenditure into a virtue and casts public servants as grasping fat cats. Public sector pay is chronically low, we should never have to worry about paying 'too much' to those who provide services to the public, particularly to those who have managed to rise to the top. Good management is essential, particularly in a time of cuts, and it costs a lot of money to attract the kind of managers who will ensure that services survive the Tory government. Why shouldn't a top teacher earn a salary which, although much more than most other civil servants, is still less than any equivalent private sector salary? Which, after all, do we believe is most important?

Arrogance, cynicism and ignorance: the foundation of the 'Big Society'

Listening to Phillip Blond on this week's Beyond Belief reinforced to me the cynical, empty and arrogant assumptions behind the Conservative Party's 'Big Society'. This is nothing new of course, it has been well attested to by political commentators, Labour Party politicians and the archbishop of Canterbury. Even David Cameron appears to have lost faith on this empty, ill-considered slogan left over from a failed piece of electioneering, relaunching it time and time again with no new policy ideas, little funding and no sign of public confidence.

How staggering it is that the hubris of politicians leads them to believe that in dismantling the welfare state, the single most important force in helping voluntary organisations offer care in communities, it is politicians who must be central to its every reduction. Only a Conservative politician with staggeringly little experience outside public school and TV public relations could fail to understand how many small societies there are, and have always been, providing services in damaged communities, and how much they rely on the state funded bodies which he is attacking. How patronising it is for a lofty think tank wonk in Westminster to tell religious organisations he's letting them take over libraries, after school clubs and so on. What hypocrisy from a bunch of elite men at the centre of the political machine. I just keep remembering this delightful quote from Francis Maude, who admits to doing no volunteering and then has the arrogance to claim its unfair he's been asked (why on earth should he have to do anything?) - at the same time as he tells local communities to volunteer to fill in the short fall he is creating. Phillip Blond also seems to have memorised important and meaningful phrases very well, listening to him speak is full of soothingly old fashioned left-wingism, until he tries to talk about the welfare state or about religious organisations. The welfare state keeps people poor! Religious groups'll fill in all the gaps! They just need the cuts to help them get it off the ground! Volunteer groups always do it better than the state! Cuts are good for you!

Few tropes are as short sighted or ignorant as that of 'Broken Britain': a nasty, damning sneer on how things look from houses in the Home Counties which rely on the Telegraph and nostalgic hearsay for their information about the world. The problem is almost as glossed and oversimplified as the solution: to fix broken Britain you first take away resources first from the poor and vulnerable, then from state sector institutions that provide services for the poorest people, then from voluntary organisations that vulnerable people rely on. That this outlook, a blinkered pessimism that judges without evidence and condemns without empathy, is so widespread and so instantly accepted shows how little information percolates through the right-wing media firewall to the kind of people who fill the political classes. Why bother hunting after examples of communities in impoverished areas supporting their own or attempting to form a nuanced conclusion based on actual observation and curiosity when an entire world view can be granted in two words? The seductive power that instant condemnation grants that suits both the Tory party and the boor by the bar: "I'll tell you why's this country's going to hell in a hand cart mate, it's the immigrants, the nanny state, health and safety, red tape, blah, blah, blah."

Blue Labour

There's been a lot of talk recently of Blue Labour, Maurice Glasman's 'traditionalist' proposal for future Labour Party policy. It is an interesting idea, one now widely discredited in light of Glasman's recent remarks about immigration. This is a shame, not just for the sake of pluralism and discussion but because it did offer a coherant alternative to technocratic New Labour capitalism, Conservative libertarianism and 'old' Labour social democracy. It also seemed to resolve a problem many of us on the left who have always believe in the importance and value of a large and active state have felt concerned about for the last fifteen years: how to provide meaningful and progressive public services when the political class is now drawn from such a limited pool, when the major political parties vary so little in leadership or ideas, and when the dominant ethos and discourse is so childish, empty and right wing.

The answer is not distantly related to Cameron's 'big society' - the use of mutuals, trade unions, faith groups, community groups, cooperatives, etc - traditional aspects of left wing policy making stretching back decades and predate the Labour Party. To use of a horrible cliche: 'grass roots' politics, where it is associations of people outside politics but supported by government, carrying out political activities. Labour's obsession with Westminster politics, with statist changes, with business, the EU and the major levers of state could be replaced by focus on domestice policy, providing or helping people to provide services in local areas. The key to this idea is not social conservatism, although Glasman did stir in a healthy dose of it largely as a vote winner, but embracing and supporting communities which include social conservatives, socialists who are also concerned about immigration say.

It would not of course take the politicians out of politics, unlike Cameron's proposals it would require funding, an active state run by left wing politicians who understood the importance of taxation for the provision of a healthy public leaf in Britain. But perhaps it would allow the flourishing of real communities, locally specific engagement, the mixing of human beings with their neighbours and a diversity in public life.

The big society

As the Conservative government cuts away at public services it hopes to recreate some of them, at no or little cost to itself, by relying on volunteer replacements with little support or funding to help. It's called the Big Society.

There are many problems with this idea. In my village the local library is to shut. A few jobs will be lost, a local resource ended, the many elderly people in the area will be that much more limited in their access to company, books, information, newspapers and the internet, a social space gone. The alternative is to set up a new 'community run' equivalent, relying on volunteer staff, presumably open for vastly reduced hours and without specialist workers. Where the funding for this will come from is anyone's guess.

This blog is not intended to critique government policy. What I want to focus on is the patronising idea that the Big Society is something new or that it depends on government support. Most of us don't have to look far to find examples of extraordinarily generous acts on behalf of volunteers - or, as often as not, we even use services that we don't even realise are being carried out by volunteers. There are a host of television programmes on at the moment recording the nineteenth-century history of social entreprenurship and philanthropy, see the one about Robert Owen or Dr Bernardo. In the former the presenters are amazed to discover that the Big Society wasn't a twenty-first century creation. It isn't a nineteenth-century one either.

Every medieval monastery was obliged to give hospitality to those who asked for it. Tithing in medieval villages was intended both for the poor and for the church. I'm sure there are ancient examples too, but it's a period of history I'm less familiar with. Government can help a little - it can provide funding and expertise, and it can seek out the projects that need these resources - but it isn't the creator, only a sustainer. And now, of course, it has stopped doing even that.