There is no story here, just my various puns:
Coverage has been largely restricted to the specialist press, so I think it’s worth bringing to wider attention a secretive little government scheme to strip up to £300 million a year from an already battered voluntary and community sector.
The Cabinet Office is running a statutory consultation until 18th November on the future policy direction of the Big Lottery Fund (BLF). Proposed new policy direction B is:
The need to ensure that the Fund achieves the distribution of funds to a reasonably wide spread of projects, primarily those delivered by the voluntary and community sector and social enterprises, including small organisations, those organisations operating at a purely local level, newly constituted organisations, organisations operating as social enterprises and organisations with a base in the United Kingdom and working overseas (my emphasis).
The small but significant change here is that, under this new direction, not all money will go to the VCS (in its broadest terms).
This is quite different from what was promised in the Conservative manifesto in 2010:
We will restore the national Lottery to its original purpose and, by cutting down on administration costs, make sure more money goes to good causes. the big Lottery fund will focus purely on supporting social action through the voluntary and community sector, instead of ministers’ pet projects as at present. Sports, heritage and the arts will each see their original allocations of 20 per cent of good cause money restored (p.39, my emphasis).
It is also quite different from what we were told, nearly exactly a year ago, by a Tory Minister:
The National Lottery has a fine record of supporting VCS projects, and we are absolutely clear that this work should continue. We will be directing the Big Lottery Fund to make sure that its future funding is focused very clearly on the VCS (my emphasis);
Fortunately, those good people down at the National Association for Voluntary and Community Action (NAVCA) have spotted the subtle change of language, and their Chief Executive has come out fighting:
A year ago the Government reduced the share of good cause money going to the Big Lottery Fund from 50% to 40% and increased the shares going to support heritage, sport and art. At that time Ministers promised that 100% of Big Lottery Fund spend would be in the voluntary sector. Now they are just saying that primarily the money will go to our sector.
Public spending cuts especially in local government grants mean that there is more pressure than ever on lottery funding. I am worried that this is a quiet signal that more Big Lottery Fund spending will go to the statutory sector. And I would feel that the whole voluntary sector has been let down if the government reneges upon the reassurances it gave us just 12 months ago.
NAVCA estimates that if this new policy direction is followed through as they fear, up to £300 million a year could be lost to local charities and community groups.
Last week’s childcare support announcement started to fall apart under scrutiny, and today TCF and False Economy exposed how Cameron’s very personal ”Community right-to-buy” promise didn’t make it as far as reality. Here again the Tory devil is hidden in the civil service detail.
It really is starting to look like cuts by subterfuge may be a deliberate government strategy.
In November 2009, Cameron promised, in writing:
[T]he next Conservative Government will introduce a “community right-to-buy”….. This means that local people and organisations will be given first refusal to take over community amenities for the benefit of the community.
He was lying.
Yesterday, The Minister for Civil Society, Nick Hurd, wrote to the ’third sector’, and told them:
[T]he Localism Bill provides radical new rights and powers for citizens and communities, not least the Right to Buy….
He was lying too.
The Localism Bill, now making its way from the Lords back to the Commons and on to Royal Assent, makes no mention of the a ‘community right to buy’; indeed the word ‘buy’ appears nowhere in the bill.
What Ch. 4, paras. 75-96 of the Localism Bill actually do is set out arrangements whereby communities can bid for ‘assets of community value’, but at no point is a right to buy – Cameron’s ‘first refusal’ – accorded.
This is perfectly clear in the consultation document on the bill’s provisions put out by government in February:
The provisions also introduce a window of opportunity for community groups, once a listed asset comes up for sale, in order to give them valuable time to organise and fundraise, so putting them in a better position to compete with other potential buyers (para 1.17).
Certainly there is scope for owners to sell to community groups ahead of other interested bidders at a lower price if they wish to (see para. 11.6), but there is absolutely no compulsion.
Furthermore, this provision is aimed explicitly (para 11.8) at local authorities and other public bodies, and they already have that discretionary power under the Local Government Act 1972 (General Disposal Consent 2003), which allows them to dispose of assets at less than market value where there is clear community benefit.
On Monday, the Tory Baroness Hanham successfully put amendments to the bill (p.74 of Hansard record) which further restrict communities’ right even to bid for assets, because this right might interfere with rich people’s inheritance tax avoidance plans.
Yet even before that, the whole idea that communities would have any greater ‘right to buy’ than they ever had before was a simple Tory lie.
It’s a lie that shows no sign of ending any time soon.
I’ve not had a lot of time to blog just recently, what with being a) busy b) a lazy arsehole. So below a press release about what I and some other Liverpudlians are up to. Tony’s on Radio Merseyside on Wednesday at 0750hrs, if you’re into that kind of thing.
Press release: Researching the Riots up and running in Liverpool
A diverse group of researchers, comprising a stand-up comedian, an arts company director, an ex-councillor and two University of Liverpool academics, are spending October out and about on the streets of Liverpool. They are all part of an innovative research programme, being led jointly by the London School of Economics and the Guardian, which looks to discover the truth behind the headlines about August’s riots in Liverpool.
Selected because of their strong knowledge and links to the Liverpool community, their work is part of a wider national effort, with research teams also looking to carry out interviews with those involved in the riots in London, Birmingham, Nottingham and Gloucester.
Tony Schoemacher, one of the Liverpool researchers, and a stand-up comedian and writer, explained why he’s involved in the research:
I got involved because I think it’s really important that we understand what went on In August and why. To do that we need to listen to those who were actually involved in the riots, and get their side of the story. This research means they’ll be able to do that with complete anonymity. Great care has been taken to ensure that everything we’re told will be treated in absolute confidence, and that no names or other identifying details will be revealed. The research study is completely independent of the government and the police.
The other researchers are two Liverpool University academics, Helen Porter and Katinka Weber, Paul Cotterill, who was until recently the leader of the Labour group of councillors in West Lancashire, and Nick Owen, director of arts education social enterprise the Aspire Trust.
Katinka said:
We’re all excited to be working together on this project. We all come from very different backgrounds but we’ve already gelled really well as a small team. We’re looking forward to getting at the truth behind the headlines, and to the first report on the study, which will be produced by early December. As Tony says, all the interviews will be conducted under conditions of strictest confidence. Anyone who was involved and wants to be interviewed should call the research hotline 0203 353 2763 or go to the Facebook page http://on.fb.me/readingtheriots to see how to get in touch. The contributions of those involved are vital to understanding the unrest that spread across many English cities in August.
Nick, of the Aspire Trust, said:
I am delighted to be part of the research. Aspire is currently developing an arts based citizenship project in Merseyside schools called ‘What’s Our Future?’ Designed as a pupil voice project which explores young peoples ideas on citizenship, civil rights and society, we are hoping that What’s Our Future will provide some additional insights into the Reading the Riots research.
Ends
It should go without saying that this book is relevant to the UK’s current political landscape. For my lifetime, the Liberal Democrats were at best a quiet protest party for the bleeding hearts in the South West of England, and at worst a grouping speaking to themselves, able to make promises nobody will ever ask them to substantiate upon (tuition fees being one case in point). Now the liberals are encountering their first direct input of the country since Churchill’s wartime coalition, dealing with the challenges that follow.
(Read on)
Apparently in panic about falling polls amongst women voters, the government has ‘found’ £300 million for childcare support. According to the Department for Work and Pensions press release:
Currently, childcare support is only available if you work 16 hours or more, but the Government is removing the minimum hours rule so that all families receiving Universal Credit will be eligible for financial help. This means that families on low incomes will receive more support to keep them in work.
As now families will be able to recover childcare costs at 70 per cent – up to £175 for one child or £300 for two or more children per week. The money will be paid through Universal Credit from 2013 and will mean that around 80,000 more families with children will be able to work the hours they choose.
Let’s set aside quickly two more obvious matters already widely commented upon - first, that this support doesn’t start for another 18 months, and second, that this move does nothing for those working/wanting to work 16 hours or more per week, who suffered big cuts in April 2011 when 500,000 people, mostly women, lost an average £436 a year, and up to £1,300 a year”.
What other commenters don’t appear to have noticed is that for the most women who work or want to work for less than 16 hours per week, all of that childcare is already free, and has been for some time now.
Yes, that’s right. The government is offering to pay up to 70% of childcare costs on hours of childcare which, for most parents, are 100% free anyway.
This 100% free care comes under the longstanding Nursery Education Grant programme, under which all children 3 years and over get 15 hours per week free provision. The programme is also already being extended, plans, to provide the same free care for children 2 years and over.
So in fact the only group who will benefit properly under the new scheme are parents of 0-2 year old children. This would be fine, except that we already know that the number of parents seeking care for this younger age group is proportionately much smaller than for the 2-4 year age group. (For example, the most recent Lancashire Childcare Sufficiency Assessment (p.40) found only 4,344 childcare places for 0-2 year olds, compared with 24, 206 places for 2-4 year olds.)
The 100% free care does currently cover only 38 weeks of the year (effectively a 50 week year because pretty well all childcare ceases for two weeks over Christmas). It might be argued therefore that the new 70% support announced could help with holiday care costs, but surely if this had been the intention the government could simply have topped up funding specifically around holiday provision.
Similarly, there might be an argument that this move is in some way targeted at parents of school-age children so that they can work outside of school hours (for example, in a 8am to 11am job which means they need to use a breakfast club), but there would be much more effective ways of doing this (not least given the lack of breakfast clubs in most schools).
All in all, while there will be some benefit around the margins, it’s difficult to see this move by the government as anything other than a short-term panic measure, whether or not backed by some cunning plan to ‘unspend’ some of the £300 million once everything settles down.
DWP officials MUST surely understand that the government is largely announcing 70% support for a group already being 100% supported, although there may be some confusion caused by the fact that DWP implements the former, while the Department for Education is responsible for the Nursery Education Grant system.
Whatever the case, it does look a little like Labour’s initial reaction – that this is nothing more than a ‘smoke and mirrors’ announcement – has some justification, and there must be some suspicion about whether this £300 million will be effectively spent or later sucked into existing budgets.
And certainly, the Spectator’s view that the announcement “owes more to politics than policy” rings true, when the detail of the actual policy is examined in the context of existing arrangements.
For obvious reasons the empire of Steve Jobs has received much praise over the past 24 hours, and he himself has been treated as a kind of revolutionary – proving the old suspicion that capitalism is itself a progressive force which in turn denotes the vagueness of the word progressive.
One thing that struck me, on that very subject, was Julian Baggini’s piece on how Steve Jobs had changed capitalism itself (which I read here, but I believe has been padded out for G2 this morning).
This is a grave misunderstanding of capitalism. It is constantly in flux, image-wise; after all, the surprise for some that this mega-boss was not a bully kid with a suit and tie, but a “turtleneck-wearing vegetarian Buddhist“, reminds me of what Slavoj Zizek said about revolutionary politics today, namely that it is commodifiable, able to be contained inside the functioning of capital itself, and that even Hollywood today is “anti-capitalist”.
I won’t lie, the rags to riches thing grates as well.
His philosophy of not giving the consumer what they want, because they know not what they want, does disturb the usual functioning of market research led consumerism, but all in all the same tools are there – he made money and became a sign of American economic dominance, and used cheap labour in China.
As Time put it: “Chinese workers have for months complained about environmental and labor abuses that they say Apple has yet to fully address”.
I don’t mean to be unkind to someone we are mourning the loss of, but to suggest he has in any way changed capitalism, marks a total, and telling, misinterpretation of capital to sell bullshit like it was running dry.
Before the Liberal Democrats were kingmakers in the UK political landscape, they were no saints. They were, however, haunted by their aversion to Toryism. The only reason the social market policies of David Steel were not set about in manifesto was because internal critics felt the language looked a bit Thatcher-lite. The reason David Laws’ Singapore-style plans for the NHS were not taken up as policy was because it would give Labour a free ride to say LibDems were the party willing to sell hospitals in local elections – where the activists tended to be more to the left.
The Liberals have never been angels, but they have always been weak.
Though it’s possible that without them, Blair’s reforms for the public sector would never have happened. While the Tories were always geared towards favouring the market, the Liberals made their policies look like they were the ones in tune to the turning consensus that state regulation of market productivity was self-defeating.
But though there was universal fear of Blair among the political elite, now that the consensus is that his politics are finished, it has left a gaping hole in the soul of the Labour Party.
The Liberals have, as part of their inheritance, Liberalism. Whether they heed to that inheritance or not doesn’t matter, it still stirs their core audience. The Conservatives have conservatism as their inheritance, and they rarely heed to that, but that is almost beyond the point.
Labour have socialism, but are terribly embarrassed to admit so.
No amount of ideas will take away from the fact that Labour deny their own inheritance. And with this, the party jeopardises having any sort of ideal of which to aim. Like the Liberals and the Conservatives alike, Labour needs to be more than just a party of means, it needs to return to being a party of ends. Otherwise it will find itself in the same position as the Liberals did in the 70s, 80s and 90s, cautious not to announce what it really stands for on the grounds that it will look too assertive.
And as Owen Jones recently put it: “We need to talk about Socialism”.
The Liberals wanted to form a coalition government. Remember that. I’m talking of course about the Liberals in the 1981 SDP-Liberal Alliance under the leadership of David Steel. It was that year he told delegates “go back to your constituencies and prepare for government.” Then the Fawklands war happened, and the rest is history.
During Steel’s tenure, he was criticised by social democrats for legitimising Thatcher’s economic policies – ambiguous, as it was, whether he put too much emphasis on the market, and not enough on the social, in his “social market” policies.
As far as Steel was concerned, he was just being liberal. The Conservatives and Labour were the non-progressive forces leeching off vested interests, whether that was monopolistic big business, or militant trade unionism.
His version of social market economics posited that more people, families and communities should be the beneficiaries of a thriving market, as opposed to a select few up the top, and that surplus should be better distributed as part of an adherence to the basic precepts of welfare.
Today, all parties think like this. In fact, some go further still. When Mandelson told us he was comfortable with the super-rich, he was basically telling us that surpluses should stay locked in at the top, and that monopoly capital did not affect the chances of the rest of us.
In a sense, Steel dreamed up an economic policy which imagined free markets, when better regulated by the state to be less monopolistic, would benefit everybody. But this is not a free market. When free markets work properly, monopolies are a reality – there is no getting away from this. Just ask any supporter whether Microsoft contradicts capitalism.
I’m sure Steel had good intentions, but the type of good capitalism he wanted – which is accepted today across the mainstream political spectrum – cannot have it both ways. Either the market is allowed to control itself, in which case capital will be concentrated, or you try and control it in the pursuit of some kind of dream-world stakeholder society.
Save for the Randians (for whom the moral pursuit is self-interest), if your politics are based upon an ethics of the good society, then the prospect of the free market working as freely as possible will not appeal. It is for this reason that Steel and his modern day adherents are deluded and wrong – the market that is most free is not the one that creates the highest amount of inclusion in it.
Obama, during his inauguration speech, made history by acknowledging non-believers as part of the many people who he was happy to represent – sending chills down the spines of many evangelicals, while excitement of the recognition overcame US humanists.
Now that cohort has more reason to celebrate – that is the rise in American atheism, now putting the American right – as one Guardian article puts it – on the defensive.
The article goes on:
The exact number of faithless is unclear. One study by the Pew Research Centre puts them at about 12% of the population, but another by the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture at Trinity College in Hartford puts that figure at around 20%.
No doubt some in the New Atheist camp will take their share of the reason why Godlessness is on the rise. The books of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens had sales in the millions, and their campaign to “raise the consciousness” of atheism seems to have been a success.
The problem with it is clear to see – it pretends that faith will be sidelined through the development of science. Not only will this not chime with those who are both scientists and of faith, it is also a false argument. Like Robert L. Park before them, they try to treat God as a scientific question – and in the words of Park himself, hold the illusion that “Science is the only way of knowing – everything else is just superstition”.
The appropriate stance to take is that humans and science have limits in knowledge. That is to say, God would only be a scientific question if he were imminent, as opposed to transcendent – since there is no immanent God we can never acquire the tools with which to test the God hypothesis.
The theistic and atheistic positions, thus, are both based on a kind of leap since the limits of our knowledge, and of the scope of science, cannot disprove something that exists outside the sphere in which it operates.
I admit to having an atheistic worldview only on the basis that in the absence of certainty, it is beyond the realm of reasonable humans to posit the existence of a being, which they have had no contact – and by its own logic, could never have contact with.
By no means is it a bad thing that Dawkins has raised consciousness about atheism, for if I was an American citizen I, too, would want recognition and to not be prejudiced – but atheism has some lousy representatives in the academic and pop scientific world, and it would be an idea to change the leadership.
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