Though Cowards Flinch

I’m surprised more has not been made of the report just out from Legal and General on current mortgage types, which contains some pretty frightening figures.

The headline figure is that 90% of households with a mortgage are on a variable rate, compared with 60% in 2006. 

This is much higher than has previously been assumed because researchers have not looked at the many households changing from fixed rate to variable rate in recent years in order to benefit from low interest rates.  Many people have been on 2% interest rates rather than 4.5% 5 year fixed rates.

The maths from there are reasonably simple, although approximate.  If interests rates now rise, as they are predicted to do, people tied into variable rates will be forced on to 4.5%  rate.  This will cost an extra £200 per month on an average mortgage of £150,000.   If the rate soars to 8%, which is nearer the worst case scenario, we’re talking additional costs of £500 per month or £6,000 per year.

With around 8 million live mortgages in the UK, that’s going to mean an enormous hit on general consumer demand, quite aside from the personal distress caused by the inevitable repossession.  5 million households having to spend £1,000 a year on mortgage payments rather than in the wider economy is going to hit consumer demand by £5bn a year, and that’s a conservative estimate. 

Menawhile, Osborne’s happily slashing demand through massive cuts to the public sector.  I’d ask someone send him the L&G report, but I don’t suppose it’ll make any difference. 

The two Eds, on the other hand, should be carrying a copy for their next ‘squeezed middle’ pitches.

Something about the Conservative tradition has been lost as time has passed, namely in that Edmund Burke was not simply against the French Revolution per se. Instead Burke was positively for the Monarchical tradition that preceded him, pleading at revolutionaries to explain why they were going to put into jeopardy a system of governance that had the benefit of tradition, for a new experimental system, benefits of which were not entirely known.

The knee-jerk opinion that Burke was simply a thorn in the side of revolutionary change has normally been the preserve of liberals, but the Conservative phobia of experimentation with evidently useful, treasured and existing elements of society has clearly been overturned by Andrew Lansley, the UK health minister, and his new health bill. So much so in fact that Liberal peer Shirley Williams declared her opposition to what she called the “untried and disruptive reorganisation” of the NHS, back in February.

Yesterday, during the Liberal Democrat Spring conference in Sheffield, party members (still able to change policy) voted for an “extensive and radical re-write of the government’s NHS bill”.

Williams, along with former MP Evan Harris, “tabled calling for proper accountability and safeguards against privatisation” which has thankfully paid off, and not without support from party leader Nick Clegg who accepted the “rebel” amendments.

What this will do in the short term is create deep ruptures within the coalition. The Liberal Democrats, and Nick Clegg – who has vowed not to let the “profit motive drive a coach and horses through the NHS” – have sent a message to the health minister saying that they do not support the inclusion of “any willing provider” in the NHS. But as Paul said recently on this blog, proposing amendments to the health bill may not stop the coach and horses so soon. The backdoor attack on the NHS:

has been in the form of the abolition (in 2013) of Primary Care Trusts, and the establishment of three waves of GP commissioning consortia, already covering 35 million people in England.

This has created the space in which most GP consortia, who have nothing like the capacity to commission their own secondary care services, will buy in what the commissioning PCTs used to provide.

This time it won’t be the PCTs who provide it, but private sector health management firms like Capita, Dr Foster and the US giants like McKinsey, who are already working with 25 consortia.

Sure, some ex-PCT staff will get jobs in these management firms, as their technical understanding of secondary care contract development and monitoring will be needed, but little will remain of the PCT’s public-health oriented, public service ethos.

Though many of us are unsure what will happen if the coalition collapses, we hope Lib Dem rebels pull something out the bag to shake things up for good. Many people I know were hoping for the floor to fall in over tuition fees, but to no avail. Hopefully enough courage from the Tories’ orange bedfellows will be plucked to tear apart this horrible political mess once and for all.

Perhaps even the British Medical Association will pass a vote of no confidence to really bollocks things up for Lousy Lansley. But amid all celebrations that the majority of Lib Dems have dealt an important split in the coalition, we must still remember that the pressure by the Tories to pursue round-the-back privatisation to the NHS extends further than this new bill.

(H/T Alex for information on the BMA)

Naadir Jeewa has written another blog post opposing a No-Fly Zone in Libya, this time partly in reply to my comment yesterday. I want to take up another three points from his argument:

1) The financial implications of an NFZ matter because it’s not the only option available to Western forces

This is true, though obviously support for a NFZ does not limit ones interest in other ideas. I was very interested in reading about how the US handled themselves with regards to Chad. But training up rebels was still an issue for the author. The US/UK/EU or whoever do not have a great deal of time to be limiting their input on training alone. One thing they obviously can do is source soviet weaponary (I read that the US could source it from Ukraine with corruption, from Poland without) and that will bypass a lot of the time training up rebels with arms the US have, but this doesn’t solve the problem of air attacks.

Even the author of the piece expressed concern that the rebellion cannot be compared to the Chad army, and they had only one pilot; how many does the rebellion have if, say, the US gave them a helicopter?

2) Do those who propose a NFZ have an endgame?

As I said regarding your point on the tribes, the onus is upon the rebellion to gather as many supporters as possible, from across the tribal landscape. Additionally, of course, it should be making some statements as to what kind of government it wants in lieu of Gaddafi’s. One reason why Sarkozy has received criticism for pledging support for the National Transition Council is because there has been no diplomatic input, and at the moment the rebels’ demands are uncertain, other than to get rid of the Colonel and promote support for a NFZ (mirrored today by leaders of the Arab League, opposed by Syria who are providing air support for Gaddafi, safe in the knowledge that their country will not rebel).

I’m not sure whether you are calling for intervening nations to have ideas, other than being against humanitarian tragedy, but it seems that much of the criticism levelled at the West intervening is predicated on the fact that in previous wars they’ve had too much of a vested interest. At this stage, the term humanitarian intervention becomes perverted, since if, say, mitigating against oil prices is the real name of the game, then the term is used as smoke and mirrors (see for example Tony Blair and Iraq).

The more the Transition Council demand, and expect intervening nations to do, the less opportunity the US will have in setting up their interests in Libya, which so far is mere conjecture (see for example Richard Seymour).

3) Surely, the NFZ is a declaration of war*

This may be a pedantic point, but if entering a country in any way equates to a declaration of war, then so be it. But since there are conditions under which a NFZ could passify Gaddafi without the aid of an all out war effort, then I’m convinced that the only grounds for war would be on the head of the Libyan leader, therefore in itself I don’t think a NFZ is a declaration of war. And certainly no more than Gaddafi’s successful efforts to engage his people in a civil war.

*Correction: The question put to me inside Naadir’s piece was: “if I make an NFZ sound too much like a war, that’s because it is an explicit declaration of war.” A NFZ is an act of war, this is accepted. But my other points stand, that the NFZ is a warning, or a gearing up militarily, to counter Gaddafi’s moves towards humanitarian crisis. Therefore I still believe that the grounds for action to be taken against Gaddafi’s air presence will be on his head. Disproportionality is unjust and this is his capital over the rebels, intervention should seek only to ratify this problem.

I’m enjoying the stick Niall Ferguson’s getting for not knowing history and/or for his view that history is all balls.

So here’s my little archived contribution to Ferguson-bashing:

Ferguson, Los Angeles Times, October 2005:

[E]conomic volatility has declined markedly since the 1970s……Recessions are happening less often, and when they do, they are not too steep and not too protracted’ .

Ferguson, Vanity Fair, January 2009:

Two and a half years ago [July 2006]  I decided to write this book, because I was sure that this financial crisis was going to happen, and the reason I was sure was because people kept coming up to me—whether it was investment bankers or hedge fund managers—telling me that volatility was dead that there would never be another recession. I just thought, ‘These people have completely disconnected from reality, and financial history is going to come back and bite them in the ass’.

History just bit you on the ass, Niall mate.

I want to address three points made by Naadir Jeewa in his thoughtful piece on Liberal Conspiracy today:

1) “Proponents of an NFZ must answer the basic question: what exactly we’re trying to achieve?”

Gaddafi has almost exlcusive use of the air, and though it’s disputed by Russia there have been reasonable claims that air operations have resulted in many of the +1000 death toll. To cite finances (“would anyone be satisfied with maintaining a decade-long, open-ended engagement at a cost of at least £9.5m, and maybe up to £185m per week.”) as a reason why the West shouldn’t back a NFZ seems to miss the point.

Further, if Gaddafi defeats rebels, which is likely without an intervention of sorts, this will send a rather optimistic message out to other despots in the region. Of course, a NFZ runs the risk of failing, as does any operation one engages in, but such a defeatist attitude when the rebels have disproportionate use of strategic manoeuvring is inappropriate.

One reason given to oppose all western-backed intervention is that if a NFZ helps secure victory, Arab patriots will forever pour scorn on the National Transition Council for using imperialism as a way of settling differences. Perversely, if a western-backed NFZ fails then at least that will apease those patriots, but the death toll would almost certainly have risen quite considerably by then.

2) “…there’s the internal legitimacy problem. Historian Dirk Vandewalle warns that the Libyan National Council is representative only of Cyrenaica tribal leaders.”

This may well be true, but then did you see from the reuters article the amount of support Gaddafi receives from large tribes?

Though even if you’re assessment holds true, this simply requires pressure from inside the council to reach out to those tribes which are broadly and unambigiously against Gaddafi. The Warfalla tribe for example, the largest in Libya, announced early on they were turning against Gaddafi, not to mention the Magarha and Zuwayyah tribes. Further, despite having military personnel among their numbers, the Tarhuna and Zentan tribes in the west of the country declared early support for protests.

3) “An NFZ will not be an invisible, skies-only operation. Sec. Gates has stated that the presence of large stocks of Surface-to-Air-Missiles dictates the need to bomb Libya’s air defences, in contrast to Iraq, where most of the air defences had already been destroyed as a consequence of the Gulf War.”

This is akin to the argument that it looks too much like war. There are rules attached to the NFZ and if Gaddafi breaks those rules then we know what will happen (though we don’t want another Downing of Scott O’ Grady). Gaddafi’s army will only be made culpable if they break the resolution (should the block by Russia or China be overturned) and thus the onus is upon them.

The extent to which I would hope the NFZ is not skies-only, is in equipping the rebel forces with amunition, basic accessories should they be needed, and at a push strategic assistance. No ground troops! The rebels have been clear and foreign intervention should recognise who is in charge here.

Naadir has produced a thoughtful rebuttal of the NFZ which, unlike many attempts by others, does not appeal to absurd logic, or mere epithets. Though in spite of his efforts, I disagree with his conclusions and look forward to his response.

One thing leftist supporters of liberal intervention in 2003 did, as part of their campaign to convince the left they were right, was try and forget that it was a US neo-con Christian with a history in oil deals taking forces into Iraq. For them, it didn’t matter who was going to take out Saddam Hussein, just as long as somebody did; their left wing credentials, they supposed, were still intact.

Unfortunately for them they were wrong. The US and the UK ought to have stuck their thumbs out, sided with the oppressed under Saddam and joined forces with the willing nations in the League of Arab States to contain Iraq.

Saddam was arrogant, but not invincible.

(As an aside, a no-fly zone on Iraq must be viewed differently to the current situation in Libya as it has transpired that Saddam felt the invasion in 2003 was not important enough to utilise the 267 planes and helicopters he had at his disposal – ironically saving them for a rainy day.)

At best, the mission into Iraq was an error by Bush and Blair, though cynically I suspect it was possibly a very strategic effort to make oil companies the beneficiaries (perhaps it wasn’t meant to be as bloody as it was, and this is why Saddam felt it unnecessary to use his air capabilities?). Unfortunately, however, any appeal to humanitarian intervention from now on will ring the sound of blood – and this is dangerous.

Intervention is not de facto smoke and mirrors.

However the question does remain: why in the UK are we so concerned about Libya?

In 2004 the UK forgave Gaddafi; he was an ally in the fight against Al Qaeda, and moreover he was halting development of weapons of mass destruction. Blair liked that. He also liked it when a “1 billion contract was announced for two concessions to explore an area of 54,000 square kilometers on the inland Ghadames field and in the Sirte offshore basin over a seven year period.”

Blair did so like pleasing oil companies like Total, Conoco Phillips, CNPC, Russia’s Gazprom, who after sanctions had been lifted by the US, couldn’t wait to dig their claws in Libya.

According to Sergei Shashkov, an independent columnist for New Eastern Outlook:

A pivotal moment came in January 2009 when Gadhafi announced that Libya might nationalize foreign oil companies if the price of oil on the world market increased to $100 per barrel. He added that prices at that level would let Libya control its oil industry without foreign involvement and stressed that “nationalization is our legal right.”

Reductions in foreign share prices started to fall, Gaddafi was reaping the benefits; he had stitched the companies up like a kipper.

Further:

For the West, the prospect of a substantial increase in oil prices and limited access to rich oil deposits while Gadhafi remained in power with contracts in hand for advanced Russian weapons systems was simply too much.

Does this attitude remain today with prices around $120 a barrel?

*

The reason why the UN could be seen dithering about Rwanda has been put bluntly by Shashkov:

There is no oil in Rwanda; therefore the unhurried UN negotiations with the United States to buy 50 APCs for the peacekeepers came to naught (they could not agree on a price)

[...]

In contrast to the Tribunal on Rwanda, the ICC is now acting with incredible speed. The ICC Prosecutor announced on March 3, 2011 that it was initiating an investigation into reports of crimes committed in Libya after February 15 and that it intended in the near future to draw up a list of suspects and issue warrants for their arrest. It is curious that the jurisdiction of the ICC (the agency was established on July 17, 1998) extends to the most serious international crimes committed only after July 1, 2002 and is limited to crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes as defined in the treaty establishing the Court, or the Rome Statute.

What can we learn from this? When oil is involved the ears of our leaders perk up!

Has NATO been stirred to distraction over Gaddafi blowing up oil pipes? Probably.

Should this stop the Left supporting intervention in Libya today? Of course not!

I have heard all the arguments; from the far left (any intervention could end up looking like war; this is hypocrsiy since the West enjoys diplomatic relations with, say, the Saudi King; Gaddafi is looking rather weak anyway) to more considered argument (foreign power will taint the revolution; if early foreign intervention fails then knee-jerk campaigns may take place too soon; it’s too tranparently opportunistic) and I’m not convinced by any that intervention should be written off out of hand.

I agree with recent statements made by Shadow Defence Secretary Jim Murphy when he echoes the “unpopular concept is that you have a responsibility beyond your own borders.” And implementing a no-fly zone (NFZ) would be relatively easy to operate. According to RUSI, NATO “might only need to cover Tripoli, its transport corridors, and a handful of urban areas threatened by Qadhafi loyalists” in order that air space is cleared, giving the rebellion the upper hand they are in lieu of right now.

The UK, as everywhere else, should recognise the National Transition Council (as France has done, and as representatives meeting with Hilary Clinton today will try and achieve) and foreign presence in Libya should be at the beck and call of the rebels, in order to prove this isn’t racist paternalism in action, but an acknowledgement that power and war capabilities are disproportionately geared towards Gaddafi’s army lackey’s (while they remain loyal to him).

I despair at UK complicity in picking and choosing what interventions are worth engaging in, to prevent systematic violation of fundamental human rights, based upon what appears like mitigating massive fluctuations in oil prices. But Gaddafi is vengeful, over 1000 people have been killed on his demand, and without immediate action 1000 more could suffer the same fate. Doing nothing is no longer an option. The NFZ is a good start.

Hats off to backbench Liberal Democrat, John Hemming, for lifting the lid on the secret hearing this week granting disgraced former RBS CEO Fred Goodwin a superinjunction preventing him being identified as a banker.

The MP for Birmingham Yardley used parliamentary privilege to reveal the court order, warning against the increasing use of super-injunctions by the rich and famous.

The Daily Mail has written that by using specialist £700-an-hour lawyers, individuals can claim that their “right to privacy would breached by damaging allegations”.

A football player worried that his manager won’t put him on the first team because of all the girls and boys he’s been sleeping with on the side is one thing, but banning the use of the word banker seems to be trivial, particularly if the person is, or at least was, a banker.

To call onself a banker in the current climate is obviously asking for trouble, tarred as they are for collapsing the economy and awarding themselves huge bonuses (though any reasonable person knows there are exceptions to this rule, hence @bankersuncut).

But the problem with “Fred the Shred” was not that he was a banker per se, it’s that he was a shit banker.

The Times describes in brief the fall of Goodwin’s banking credability thus:

Running one of the largest banks in the world CV highlights Acquisition spree, buying stakes in 26 banks in seven years. Sacked thousands of employees as part of cost-stripping exercise [18,000 to be precise]. An ill-fated £50 billion takeover of ABN Amro in 2007, despite warnings that RBS was over-indebted

After being at the head of the bank while it made £24bn in losses, Goodwin still wanted to draw £700,000 from the pension pot.

It takes a lot to make even a banker look bad in today’s banker-bashing environment, but Fred has done it. A banker is the very least we should be calling him – though I mean no harm to those engaged in cod fishing off Newfoundland.

Neil Forster has a post up at Liberal Conspiracy suggesting that the government has a huge battle on its hands to push through its plans for the termination of the NHS:

[M]ore and more doctors are speaking out against their plans at the same time. The Government faces the steepest of uphill battles because it mistakenly thinks this is about ‘the message’. It’s not. It’s about motives and in particular the trust of the messengers.

If only it were so. 

Sadly, the facts indicate that the battle for the NHS has already been lost, and that it doesn’t matter whether doctors are trusted more than politicians, or that their representatives think the Tory changes are bad news.

To understand this, it’s important to understand the government’s main attack point on the NHS.  

There hasn’t been a direct attack on state hospitals, or a direct attack on GPs.  The attack has been much more effective than that.  The attack has been in the form of the abolition (in 2013) of Primary Care Trusts, and the establishment of three waves of GP commissioning consortia, already covering 35 million people in England. 

This has created the space in which most GP consortia, who have nothing like the capacity to commission their own secondary care services, will buy in what the commissioning PCTs used to provide. 

This time it won’t be the PCTs who provide it, but private sector health management firms like Capita, Dr Foster and the US giants like McKinsey, who are already working with 25 consortia. 

Sure, some ex-PCT staff will get jobs in these management firms, as their technical understanding of secondary care contract development and monitoring will be needed, but little will remain of the PCT’s public-health oriented, public service ethos.

These private commissioning firms are there to make their profit from the management service they provide. 

They will do this firstly by focusing entirely on the core business of purchasing secondary care, to the exclusion of all other considerations around preventative and public health.  The regular PCT contracts for voluntary sector interventions will be a thing of the past, though some GP consortia may retain some kind of grant-giving programme.

Second, they will purchase as much private healthcare as they can, and the percentage of the care bought from the private sector will increase dramatically within a year or two.  As state hospitals lose their business, they will close or – more likely in the shorter term – be bought up lock, stock and barrel by the private hospital operators.

Some scandals may emerge in time over ‘backhanders’ paid by the private hospitals to the private commissioners, and in some circumstances it will turn out that the people doing the commissioning are simply commissioning themselves in another name – the whole inefficiency of which the provider-purchaser split was supposed to stop – but it will all be a bit esoteric and complicated for people to understand, and there won’t be much of a fuss.

In fairly short order, we may get these new commissioners creating two tiers of provision from within GP surgeries, with one level of care for those not paying, and those who just happen to have signed the relevant insurance policy forms, which just happen to be in the GP surgery.  

Insurance-based healthcare, and the exclusions that this brings, will come not through a government announcement,  but by the surgery backdoor.

Will the doctors stop all this?

No, because they’ve already given in.   I can take you to three GP surgeries in my area where GPs have chosen to stop being a partner in a multi-partner surgery and become an employee of a single partner.  This single partner is the one who’s dealing with the consortium, while the others opt for the quieter, clinical life they trained for in the first place.  Who can blame them. 

The consortia will end up being led by two or three ‘movers and shakers’ in each area, whose job will be simply to negotiate a decent deal for their colleagues and let the private commissioners get on with the rest.   There will be no revolt in primary care, and in secondary care no-one will actually notice till it’s too late.

That’s my doomsday scenario for the NHS. 

The NHS is already lost, not least because Labour has not understood or cared about what’s happening, and because any protest movement in the Left has simply ignored or not understood what’s going on under its nose, preferring to focus on the bits it does profess to understand e.g. local council cuts.   While Rome burns etc…..

If I get round to a part 2, I’ll cover some things the Left and Labour still can do, but this will be with a mind to strategy, not pointless posturing (so I don’t suppose anyone will take any notice).

In a letter to Ludwig Kugelmann on December 13, 1870, on the subject of the combination of civil war with revolutionary wars, Karl Marx opined that socialists should embrace giving “the proletariat practice in arms.”

141 years later, capitalist governments such as the US have been given permission by the UN to arm rebels in Libya.

Today, also, Tory backbencher Mark Pritchard said the “international community should allow rebels access to arms”.

And what have the UK’s Marxist representatives said? Simon Assaf for the Socialist Worker has said:

It may seem callous to oppose intervention in the face of such harrowing repression. But any Western intervention will come at a heavy price.

Since arming the revolution would count as “Western intervention” I guess that’s out of the question.

The world has turned upside down.

(H/T @libyansunite cf here and here)

The government’s SEN green paper is as can be expected: full of waffle offering choice in services instead of pursuing child inclusion, offering up horror stories of a sector in lieu of joined-up thinking without dealing with the issues at hand, and offering the olive branch of personalised budgets.

Since when did Big Society become a veil for vague policy? Or has it always been this way?

One of the contentious subjects regarding statements for children with learning difficulties is that it stigmatises them early on in their development. And yet in this latest green paper less emphasis is being put upon integrating children into mainstream education and challenging the negative perception of SEN.

In fact one of the bargaining chips for increasing the independence of children’s assessments from councils, conveniently at a time when public sector jobs are being struck off without a private sector able to fill the gap, is allowing parents and communities to set up special free schools.

It’s unclear at this time how Michael Gove has planned to deal with the matter of social exclusion when allowing the permission of parent-led schools.

Joined-up thinking has been held by the government as a way of condensing the assessment process of a child, reducing the amount of time it takes to address a pupil’s learning difficulties. The benefits of the single assessment is that it will reduce repetition and cut down bureaucracy, however extra cautionary measures need to be in place to ensure no child falls through the net.

What is disconcerting about the green paper is that it has been informed by “Ofsted’s evaluation of SEN support, published last September, which said that thousands of children are wrongly labelled as having SEN.” The scare stories about children being put on statements because they have food allergies are so few as to be regarded purely as a matter for general teaching competency. The criteria for labelling a child as having special educational needs are quite clear, and every measure should be taken to ensure assessments are rigorous and followed to the letter.

What changes to the assessment process should not do is allow for the opinion that special educational needs are attached to too many children or used as a perverse incentive for schools to receive more money.

The argument that the label is applied to too many children has been had many times before.

The Warnock report (Baroness Warnock) for the department of education and science (DES)had been reflected in the Education Act of 1981. The most prominent feature of the report to feature in the Act was the recommendation to abolish the ten statutory categories of handicap which had encompassed special educational needs since the 1944 Education Act.

Those categories were blind, partially sighted, deaf, partially hearing, educationally subnormal, epileptic, maladjusted, physically handicapped, speech defect, and delicate, and only applied to 2% of school aged children.

The Act went on to criticise the lack in identifying solutions to children with special educational needs, and though not addressing the exact number of children who qualified, a DES circular 8/81 accepted that up to 20% of children of school attending age can be regarded as having special educational needs (p.9, Croll and Moses, Special needs in the primary school: one in five?)

What had developed with further enquiries and scientific research was that children who needed a special education made up a larger amount of the population than originally thought, when only appealing to physical disabilities and not emotional.

The argument that was to emerge, and linger in the minds of many educationalists, was whether children with special educational needs could be educated in the same setting as other children.

The Daily Mail was one of the papers who viewed Mary Warnock with suspicion, referring to her as having a “monstrous ego” that has helped destroy our moral and social heritage, for her work on special needs, embryo research and support for euthanasia.

But, as Mike Baker in 2005, retorted:

The Daily Mail derided her as a “monstrous ego” who had established the principle that all children, however disabled, “should be taught in mainstream schools”.

Yet she has never said all children should be taught in mainstream schools. Her Committee of Inquiry, and the subsequent legislation, said that provision should be in the mainstream “wherever possible”.

Warnock negated the view of some (even many schools and school leaders) that children with special educational needs were unable to be educated. Further, it predicted the rise in children who could be identified as having special educational needs (in the immediate aftermath of the report the percentage went from 2% to 20%), which, as with many stigmas in society, was not something that didn’t exist before, but the way in which experts have defined it, and the measures with which they judge special needs, has changed.

Isolating everyone who could be identified as having special educational needs would dilute schools and build barriers between people, that wouldn’t be beneficial for anyone in the long term.

Not helping matters much was Warnock’s decision to make a u-turn on her report in the 70s, saying instead that more, not fewer, special schools should be set up.

Today the argument has been raised once more. The reality is that children’s learning can be helped through educational integration, not social exclusion, though the green paper looks less concerned with trying to amend that problem. The other issue has to do with how assessments are conducted. Erroneous assessment is not the same as having too many children labelled with SEN, but inevitably the SEN sceptics in the right wing press will try to angle news of this towards the latter.

The green paper is really an exercise in BS clap, but it also fails to address major problems such as exclusion. The policy recommendations are unextraordinary and conclusions wide of the mark.