The government has done another U turn. First it supports the Field / Dorries abortion amendment. Now it does not.
There was a highly effective lobby on the issue targetted at MPs. The result is that victory at this stage can be claimed.
It was the same on the sell off of the Forestry Commission.
Now do not for a moment get me wrong: this is vital stuff. But just suppose for a moment the government is setting these issues up as decoys?
After all, they might think winning on destroying the NHS is worth a decoy loss on abortion. And preventing banking reform is worth losing on a few trees.
Are they that clever? Well I would be surprised, but let's not distracted is all I am saying. The big stuff is still going on. Democracy is being eroded. The NHS is being destroyed. Services are being undermined. The economy is in dire trouble and people' lives are being wrecked.
Winning skirmishes is good. The battle to preserve anything close to effective government on behalf of the people of this country is far from over.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
There are links to this blog's glossary in the above post that explain technical terms used in it. Follow them for more explanations.
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Buy me a coffee!
Have wondered the same thing. With HSC Bill, banking reform, even HS2, could the govt. be putting forward so many enormous projects that none of them receive fully effective scrutiny, and opposition where necessary?
The Tories show no suggestion of being clever at all but those advising them may well be. Their backers could be too…
BB
Richard, I tend to agree with you that these issues are being deliberately set to distract us from the real targets. Just look at the latest polls where the Tories are only one point behind Labour. At the moment Cameron can bask in the glory of being on the ‘winning side’ in the Libyan civil war and I expect he will make great play of this at the Tory conference. Meanwhile in the real world, which of course the right wing press rarely analyse, the cuts are starting to bite, women’s employment is falling, youth unemployment is rising and the banks continue to lobby that reform is unnecessary.
I think you’re absolutely right. I’m convinced that the government has from day one been shamelessly and deliberately employing a strategy of:
1) proposing the most outrageous policies imaginable overshooting even their own mark
2) awaiting the public’s enraged reaction and allowing it to stew for a while
3) retracting slightly from the original target making it seem like a victory for the public
This is haggling on a grandiose scale — I can’t help thinking of it as the Big Haggle. This is, in my opinion, exactly what happened with the NHS reforms.
At the end of the day:
Energy prices are rising by an average of around 18%
Wages are, at the lower end of the scale, falling.
The amount paid to those on benefits (and I include state pensioners) is, if not falling, being eroded by inflation (itself reported as lower than it is by various exclusions)
The amount paid as a “winter fuel bonus” is being lowered.
The health service is struggling, and will do so much more in years to come due to rising elderly and chronically ill (the chronically ill being poorly served now by cuts and economising)
Hospitals will soon be closed:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/jan/14/hospital-closure-inevitable-private-provider
and reliance on “care in the community” has already been shown to be an empty vessel, bereft of care or humanity.
The GP combines due to replace local health authorities are onto a loser from the start, and “private providers” will move in to run them…..anyone with knowledge of these private providers is already looking at the bupa website in preparation…..they are a disaster, only being good at covering their backsides when the fan is impacted by solid excrement.
And this is only the start.
I’m actually more optimistic on the NHS position. 38degrees have managed to get specialists to look at the NHS bill and their full report is available – but they’ve identified the crucial key points about the SoS’s accountability and the possibility of subjecting the NHS to EU competition law, and people are lobbying the LibDems hard.
This is great work – but will the Bill be changed?
I don’t see how the Coalition can put up ‘decoy’ issues when the economy in the UK is behaving so differently from the myths of the Powell-Joesph-Thatcher outlook. Those who have looked at the way the Thatcherites revised the Great Depression – which they called Victorian Values, namely a 1930s with the unemployment airbrushed out – knew this would be a messy process, but their austerity will not be expansionary and the moment of realisation must come soon.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/31/nhs-bill-amendments-mainly-name-changes
And a “private provider” well-known in London congestion charge circles has already started offering services.
A government of firestarters or incompetents? It’s hard to tell which… http://politicaltherapy.blog.com/2011/08/30/firestarter/
Comment: The secret immigration policy they tried to hide
Linda Kaucher
http://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2011/09/01/comment-the-secret-immigration-policy-they-tr
‘Thus the UK government is even now encouraging the use of a cheap labour supply that not only displaces workers here but also damages the national economy in a variety of ways. Wages are repatriated overseas, the earn/spend cycle needed for recovery is broken, workers become unemployed and the welfare bill increases, the employment future for young people is further curtailed, and skills and skills transfer are lost for the future.’
This is a bi-lateral deal with India in lieu of the completion of DOHA. Instead of a transnational relocating to India, they relocate the workforce. What does this say about Tory spin about limiting immigration?
So is the problem really EU law,or could the UK legally ignore such demands? To quote from the article:
“A very important trade deal in this regard is the EU/India Free Trade Agreement (FTA) that has been under negotiation for four years. It has been discovered that Mode 4 concessions are the one thing that the Indian government is demanding. In addition, leaked documentation shows that the liberalised UK will be taking the bulk of the EU’s Mode 4 commitment.”
Brian, regarding EU law, it seems to me that the problem you have highlighted could be the underlying reality to Phase 3 of the Grand Strategy I referred to in the Tyranny of Democracy thread – withdrawal from the EU prior to the next General Election. This could be Cameron’s masterstrok, since, with the gerrymandered boundaries and cut-down membership of the Commons, it would probably give the Tories a permanent majority, since many Labour voters, and all the UKIP, BNP and EDL voters would vote for a Tory party promising to withdraw from Europe.
Richard has consistently flaggedup the fact that the Con-Dems (or at least the Tory part) are hell-bent on turning Britain into a tax haven; well, if they succeed, a large part of the reason for staying in the EU will vanish – what need of ‘trade’ with the EU, if we can rake in dosh by the shipload? – and indeed, the argument for leaving will be overwhelming, since we won’t need to be bothered by trifles such as EU regulation on tax discosure, nor, indeed, in the valuable EU social legislation, deriving from the Social Pillar of EU thinking.
I was taken to task for saying that only the Labour Party offered us a chance, of putting the brakes on this strategy, and that we should place our faith in, and work for, a genuinely popular, Socialist, organisation. Well, frankly, we haven’t got time – it took Labour 45 years to achieve a real majority; I would gauge that we don’t even have 45 months, more like 45 weeks, to try to turn out this disastrous Government, by peeling off the Lib-Dems, and getting them to withdraw support, before the new Commons boundaries and system come in.
I am fully acquainted with Labour’s faults, about which I need no tutoring: my mother and her sisters were all active in the Party before the War, and my mother was a personal friend of Herbert Morrison, while I myself joined Labour in 1988, and been elected a Labour Councillor to the L.B. Barnet in 1994, splitting a Tory Ward, so putting Labour in power for 8 years. However, I resigned in 2001, in disgust at the rightward lurch of the Blairite Party, and the way New Labour had hollowed out the ethical heart of Labour, leaving only a power-hungry shell, and only rejoined in early 2010, as the true nature of Cameron’s Tory Party became apparent, once his “touchy-feely-love-a-hoodie” mask was dropped, and the real dimensions of the threat they offered to our democracy became plain. Brown I trusted – certainly more than Blair, and especially since Brown had shown some willingness to move on the electoral reform issue, that Blair had kicked into the long grass (we wouldn’t be in the mess we are now in, if the Jenkins Report had been implemented!). Besides, Gordon Brown really had earned his keep in the credit crunch crisis, and he was certainly better than Cameron.
But to return to the issue of leaving the EU – if we consider each of the most significant changes of each Labour Government since 1945, we find a) 1945 = the NHS, he nationalisation of the Bank of England and Legal Aid b) 1964 = the Open University and the Equal Pay Act c) 1974 = the Health and Safety at Work Act, the Race Relations and Sex Discrimination Acts d) 1997 = National Minimum Wage, the Working Time Directive, the Human Rights Act and the Equalities Act. Well, everything from the 1945 government is already under attack, while, apart from the Open University, and perhaps the H&SW Act, everything else is underpipnned by EU legislation, depending on EU membership. The whole lot could (and I bellieve woulld) be scrapped if we withdrew from the EU – which is something Margaret Thatcher really wanted to do, as do well over half the members of the Tory Party still do. I have to say that I increasingly come to believe that this is Cameron’s game plan, something he will find far easier to do if a Tea Party Republican wins in 2012.
Creaking gates they may be, but a lot rests on Ed Milliband and Labour, and on Obama and the Democrats, for Tax Haven UK, adrift from the EU, and relying on illicit cash-flows would be a wonderful place for the new Barons, but a grim, expensive, illiberal, largely workless place for the serfs, whose only way of achieving freedom would be through armed struggle, which would be ever more difficult to accomplish in an increasingly authoritarian state. We would have become the neo-ilberal mirror image of Lukashenko’s post-Soviet Byelorussia.
I actually think the Tories have been incredibly “lucky”. I am pretty sure if they had been elected (I know they dont have a majority) and there had not been the financial crisis they would have still embarked on a massive round of cuts and reforms to benefits etc.
For them its about restructuring society into their neo liberal fantasy not about cutting the deficit. If it was they would get the tax income in from the very rich !!. Having a financial crisis must have been a gift from heaven – they can do what they wanted anyway and say that they “have to because of Labour mishandling the economy”. And people believe it !!!
The very rich have a tendency to avoid paying tax.
Many of the very rich are very friendly with politicians, and biting the hand that feeds you is not a trait that politicians are prone to, unless it is a hand that has no money.
As for many blaming labour…I recall a survey of a year or so ago….in which some 60+ percent blamed the bankers…..although it should be said that when the survey took stock of the political leaning of those surveyed, 75% of conservative supporters blamed labour !
High unemployment is a price we have to pay for low wages….now where/when did I hear that ?
Oh…the forestry sell-off is continuing….just very slowly….15% at a time…..
“Meanwhile in the real world…”
I was down the beach yesterday collecting clams. While I was doing so a young man started chatting up my wife. He said he could not believe how nice Jersey was. He came from Nottingham and he said that you couldn’t walk down the street there without “watching your back”, and that he was amazed that people left their stuff on the beach in Jersey while they went for a swim, because it would immediatey get stolen in Nottingham.
I suspect that is a glimpse of the real world and there hasn’t been a political party that has given it a moment’s thought in 40 years. There are whole swathes of Britain where people live in fear or are forced to become hard and cynical just to physically and psychologically survive.
And it is relevant because it breeds throughout society a belief that you have to look after yourself, because the state has failed in its basic purpose of providing a safe environment. So faith is lost in government, in politicians and in tax and large numbers of people are forced to be less of themselves and to use less of their potential simply to survive. How’s that for something the Courageous State could work on?
You’ll have to wait to read it
I’d say more the results of thinking you could get away with putting some very nasty children in charge of a zoo, than a deliberate ploy.
It’s a shame we can’t get the kind of emotional engagement we saw on the Dorries’ amendment applied to NHS reform more generally.
It seems that certain sections of the gliberal intelligentsia are more covered about controlling their own fertility than they are about the rights of everyone else to have serious illness properly treated.