Though Cowards Flinch

When Cameron vetoed the ‘Merkozy treaty’ in early December, it meant that the deal could not be signed off as a variation to the Lisbon Treaty, and that any deal would need to be an intergovernmental treaty of the 26 participating countries.  As such, any deal is separate from the workings of the European Union.

This threw into doubt whether the 26 countries signing up to the Merkozy “non-EU” treaty could legitimately use the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) to police the deal and punish states which failed to abide by the proposed fiscal rules.  At the time, Cameron threatened legal action to stop the other 26 governments trying to use the ECJ in this way.

Unsurprisingly, now that he’s gained cheap political brownie points from using the veto, Cameron’s not bothered about pursuing this threat.  Diplomats are calling it a “heat of the moment” thing, and it’s being dropped as quietly as possible. 

This does, however, raise an intriguing possibility.

If the 26 member states now do go ahead uninterrupted and sign offtheir economically absurd pact, and include within it provision for ECJ ruling authority, it sets an important precedent for any set of European countries to come together, bash out a deal, and then call on the ECJ to do its thing.

Logically and legally, what could stop Francois Hollande, coming together with other like-minded European countries to sign a pact running entirely counter to the Merkozy pact, and asking the ECJ to be the binding arbiter on that too? 

After all, Hollande has already set out a clear manifesto promise around the need for a new ‘pact’.

Je proposerai à nos partenaires un pacte de responsabilité,de gouvernance et de croissance [growth] pour sortir de la crise et de la spirale d’austérité qui l’aggrave. Je renégocierai le traité européen issu de l’accord du 9 décembre 2011 en privilégiant la croissance et l’emploi, et en réorientant le rôle de la Banque centrale européenne dans cette direction. Je proposerai de créer des euro-obligations [Euro-bonds]. Je défendrai une association pleine et entière des parlements nationaux et européen à ces décisions. Cinquante ans après le traité de l’Élysée, je proposerai à notre partenaire l’élaboration d’ un nouveau traité franco-allemand.

Why would this new pact have any less legal weight than the one now being rushed through before Sarkozy is sent packing?

The  like-minded countries Hollande needs for such a scheme might include Spain, whose (rightwing) government is now calling for a ‘new realism’ about how to manage the economic crisis in light of its descent into economic chaos, and Greece,  fuming at Germany’s proposal to make its government subservient to an EU budget commissioner. 

It might, in 2015, also include Britain (or England/Wales/NI & Scotland) if Labour were minded to push for an entirely new approach to the European economy, something Ed Miliband at least hinted at in Davos this week (though clearly ideas on what to do are not yet formed).  If Labour has its wits about it, it should see jumping on the Hollande bandwagon, in a common drive to reorientate the EU towards the welfare of its people, as a very attractive proposition.

The alternative ‘Holliband’ pact might include shared commitments to investment in jobs, with targets for the reduction in unemployment levels, as a mirror to the stupid fiscal targets advocated by Merkozy, and call on the sanction of the ECJ for countries that failed to meet the employment and other needs of its citizens.

Clearly, two diametrically opposed  intergovernmental pacts, formed outside the EU but calling on the same EU institution for their operative legitimacy, would create a legal and institutional crisis at the heart of the EU that Cameron could never possibly have dreamed of when he stook his foot in his mouth in December, but that might well be better than simply allowing the current rightwingers in France and Germany to carry through their plans for the outlawing of  socialist econmics in Europe.

And what better payback for Cameron’s arrogant but wholly ignorant politicking with the EU than for him, in time, to see it used as the opening for a few Left front for a new Left ascent in Europe.

One of the more interesting documents from yesterday’s 30 year rule Cabinet paper release is a ‘Brief for a Debate on Recent Outbreaks of Civil Disorder’, prior to a Commons debate on the 1981 riots( pp. 55-60 of this file).

Section 2 of the briefing is titled ‘Extremists and the Disorders’, and starts by giving details of the recent activities – down to the content of local leaflets – of a number of groups: Militant Tendency, Labour Committee for the Defence of Brixton (noted as unrecognised by the Labour party), WRP, RCG, RCP, The Race Collective, SWP, and Labour Party Young Socialists.

The briefing then go to a subheader to this main title: The Labour party and law-breaking.  Most of the focus is on Ken Livingstone, and it is clear that his activities were being followed very closely, with detailed records of his local speeches kept. 

But perhaps the greatest surprise is what the paper has to say about the Labour leader, Michael Foot:

As Labour Leader, Mr Foot has condemned the recent violence. So, too, has Mr Hattersley.  Neither Labour leader has, however, been able to resist the temptation to refer to the high levels of unemployment as a possible cause of the violence.  Mr Foot’s record in the past has been equivocal.  He gave firm backing to those who defied the Industrial Relations Act, and made, under the last Labour government, some notorious attacks on the judiciary.  These include a reference to ”judges who stretch the law… to suit reactionary attitudes (ITV, People and politics,, 9th May 1974)) and the remark that “if the freedom of the people of this country has been left to good sense and fairmindendess of the judges, we would have few freedoms in this country at all” (Daily Mail, 16th May, 1977).

All of this begs questions. 

Did the Thatcher government really consider the mainstream Labour party, including its leaders in the Commons, to be potential violent insurrectionists, enough for the briefing paper to include them under the main ‘Extremists’ header?

Was the establishment actually scared of widespread insurrection, or was this just attention to the details of small groups just a reflection of civil servants operating to its normal code?

Is this kind of briefing still going on?  Is the state still this scared?

Lord Hanningfield, the Tory peer released from jail in September after serving time for expenses fraud, has been on the radio as a first step in his rehabilitation:

I am pretty much destitute. I have never had that much money…I am now going to have real, real problems for the rest of my life surviving.

Some may feel the term “destitute” a little strong given that, as soon as he is eligible to return to the Lords in May 2012, he will be able to claim a tax-free £300 for every Lords’ sitting day, alongside other legitimate expenses. But I suppose he may feel destitution is relative.

Fair enough.  He has “paid his debt” to society and should be able to get on with his life.  If truth be told, I’ve always had the feeling that he was just the unlucky one that got found out treating his accommodation entitlement as a regular per diem whether or not he stayed over in London.  Like him, I suspect there were plenty more at it who didn’t end up serving time.

What interests me especially, though, is whether Lord Hanningfield’s newly acquired poverty will lead him to reassess the very detailed plans he had been making, as leader of Essex County Council right up to his arrest in 2009, to drive thousands of genuinely poor people in Essex towards utter destitution.

That plan was, if you remember, for the County Council to use the local freedoms provided under the Sustainable Communities Act 2007, and to take full control of the welfare benefits system; the Council would then tighten eligibility criteria and reduce benefit rates in order to redraw, for Essex economic conditions, the balance between a ‘decent standard of living’ and ‘an incentive to find work’.

In other words, Lord Hanningfield’s plan was to starve the poor in the name of ideology.

Now, that plan did not go away with Lord Hanningfield’s resignation from the Council and subsequent fall from grace.   While Labour’s Sustainable Communities Act has faded into the background, pretty well the same provisions have been set out in the General Power of Competence section of Localism Bill. Essex County Council were quick off the mark in support of this aspect of the bill, and made the connection explicit:

We are keen that the Secretary of State must consult and try to reach agreement with local authorities on the scope of any restrictions. This would ensure that central government moves to alter local powers would be subject to similar criteria as local action to change central government behaviour under the Sustainable Communities Act 2007 (Memorandum submitted by Essex County Council, February 2011)

The Localism Bill will have Royal Assent by the end of 2011, and from the tone of this memorandum, it looks as though Lord Hanninfield’s erstwhile Tory colleagues in Essex are keen to drive through what started under his leadership.

Lord Hanningfield says now:

I just want to get on and use the experience I have had over the past two to three years for the benefit of others.

It will be interesting to see if this new desire to benefit others will include a reappraisal of his plans to make thousands of his fellow Essex citizen destitute, and public opposition to their introduction.

If he does that, I’ll certainly support his rehabilitation in the Lords.

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.

So apparently:

One in four people charged over the riots in England had committed more than 10 past offences, figures show. Three-quarters had a previous caution or conviction, Ministry of Justice (MoJ) figures show, and those with a criminal record averaged 15 offences.

And so Ken Clarke thinks:

It confirms my fear that criminals were on the rampage.

No, it doesn’t Ken.  What it confirms is that you and your advisers are a bit thick.

The main reason that the percentage of people charged in association with the riots who have criminal records is higher than the national average (around 27% for 18-45 year old males) is that they were a lot easier to catch than those that didn’t have criminal records.

We know that most of those charged were identified after the riots, not during. We also know what the mains to identify people are from CCTV and fingerprints.  They only people who have fingerprints recorded by the police are those previously charged, and most people identified by the police from CCTV will be identified because they’ve already had some kind of bother with the police.

So it’s a mathematical certainty that the percentage of those charged will be higher than the percentage of criminal records amonst the population.   But it tells us nothing about the make-up of the riots.

(Based on an earlier quickie post. There are a couple of FOI requests going out to police forces to provide data on the percentages of those charged who were identified by CCTV/fingerprints.)

Cameron speaking today:

That’s why I have asked our social policy review to look into whether we should cut the benefits of those parents whose children constantly play truant.

Oh for Christ’s sake.  He’s a fucking moron.

Benefit deduction for regular truancy already happens, regularly.

Taken at random from Google:

Hammersmith & Fulham Council guidance:

Repeated truancy can result in fines and possibly even time in prison for parents. Prosecution can result in a fine of up to £2,500, a jail sentence of up to three months or a community sentence.

Newcastle Council guidance:

The magistrates court can apply to have not only fines but also costs and compensation orders to be deducted from benefit.

Deduction of benefit for truancy has been happening for years. I’ve argued against it personally, long and hard, in magistrates’ courts (I was a magistrate till 2007).

Either Cameron’s telling us the fines process will be taken out of the judicial process to god-knows-where, or he/his policy team simply don’t have a fucking clue.

Ken Clarke uses the following information to justify the tough new punishments he’s planning for the “criminal classes”:

It’s not yet been widely recognised, but the hardcore of the rioters were, in fact, known criminals. Close to three-quarters of those aged 18 or over charged with riot offences already had a prior conviction

Ooh, three quarters. That sounds a lot. He must be right then.

Except, that it’s not necessarily a lot at all, when compared to the percentage of the general population, and the percentage of all people in the riot-affected areas, that have a criminal record.

Figures for criminal record rates are not routinely maintained, but this statistical bulletin from 2001 is instructive.

Table A gives the educated estimate that 27% of males between 18 and 45 years have some kind of criminal record (we focus on males here because they make up the majority of riot convictions)

While this looks nowhere near the 70-75% used by Clarke, the following must also be considered:

a) This 27% covers only ‘standard list’ offences, which include “all indictable and certain of the more serious summary offences”, but exclude  cautions, reprimands, final warnings, or informal methods of dealing with offenders”. It is not immediately clear if Clarke’s figures, presumably drawn direct from the police (who would have access to this information) include or exclude the latter set, but clearly he would have reason to include as many run-ins with the police in order to maximise his claim.

b) The riots took place and mostly involved people living in deprived areas, where criminal record rates are almost certainly higher anyway.  As noted, this sort of data is not routinely available, though it is possible the newly announced Guardian/LSE study may provide some data, but it would not be a surprise to many people, I suspect, if the deprived area criminal record rate turned out to be 2-3 times as high as in the country overall.

c) Most importantly, and missed in the earlier edition of this post, many of those charged and now counted as part of the 75% used by Clarke, will have been traced from fingerprints (hat-tip to Bob Piper on this – he has spoken to his local police who confirm that this was a key route to charging).  Obviously, only people with previous convictions will have previous fingerprints, and this will skew the percentage massively in favour of Clarke’s thesis).

So it may well be that, in the end, that the proportion of those convicted of riot offences is still somewhat higher than the proportion of people living in the riot-affected areas (and my recent rational choice account suggests why this might be). 

Or it might not be.

It is, therefore, the height of irresponsibility on the part of Ken Clarke to be selling criminal justice policy before what he now claims has been substantiated.

Mind you, Clarke’s approach to policy-making has always been a bit feral.

Tony Blair’s Comment is Free article on the reason for the riots brought the inevitable howls of derision. Of the 1986 comments posted to date, the vast majority are either too vicious for the moderator to allow through, or focus on whether Tony Blair’s character and/or war criminal record really make him an authority on moral issues.  Relatively few people actually seem to have bothered to digest what he actually says.  This is a shame, because the article reveals a lot not just about Tony Blair’s deep revisionism concerning his record in office but, more importantly, gives an important insight into one of the very worst aspects of the New Labour paradox - its overbearing managerialism set alongside its refusal to engage with the murky but very real world of policy implementation.  As such, the article offers an important lesson for the Centre Left/Left on how to do things better the next time it gets the chance.

For our purposes, this is the crucial section in the article:

Most of them [those involved in the riots] are shaping up that way by the time they are in primary school or even in nursery. They then grow up in circumstances where their role models are drug dealers, pimps, people with knives and guns, people who will exploit them and abuse them but with whom they feel a belonging. Hence the gang culture that is so destructive…..

By the end of my time as prime minister, I concluded that the solution was specific and quite different from conventional policy. We had to be prepared to intervene literally family by family and at an early stage, even before any criminality had occurred. And we had to reform the laws around criminal justice, including on antisocial behaviour, organised crime and the treatment of persistent offenders. We had to treat the gangs in a completely different way to have any hope of success. The agenda that came out of this was conceived in my last years of office, but it had to be attempted against a constant backdrop of opposition, left and right, on civil liberty grounds and on the basis we were “stigmatising” young people. After I’d left, the agenda lost momentum. But the papers and the work are all there.

Let us leave aside the petty jibe that, had Blair remained in office, he would have sorted out gangs and gangs culture by now, so it must be Gordon Brown’s fault.  Let us also leave aside for now the evidence, ignored by Blair, that a large section of those who involved themselves in the rioting and looting actions are not actually in gangs, at least under any generally accepted definition of what a gang is (see Shiv Malik on this).  Let us instead focus on the Blair view that what is needed to sort out the problems, as he conceives them, is a radical new policy, specific to those who engage in anti-social behaviour, which he devised in his last years as PM and the like of which we had never seen before.

At one level, we can see this assertion as a simple lie by Blair.  We need only look at the Social Exclusion Policy Action Team No.8 report on anti-social behaviour, which was published in 2000, for very clear evidence that New Labour policy on anti-social behaviour and gang management was developed very early in the Blair period, and includes all the elements that Blair now says were lacking, and which he wanted to introduce.  All the factors that lead people towards anti-social behaviour/gangs, which Blair claims to have just discovered, are clearly set out (see para .1.32 for the ‘Risk Factors’ table), and all the measures that Blair now claims would be a total innovation in policy are present and correct (summarised at para. 6.12) throughout the report - early intervention, a family-focused approach, the use of ASBOs, evicting perpetrators, it’s all there.

But I think there is more to Blair’s article than a simply attempt to cast himself in the best light possible.  I think Blair’s revisionist narrative tells us a lot about the New Labour approach to social policy in general.  Underlying Blair’s revisionist narrative is New Labour’s core managerialist assumption that if a problem has not been resolved, it is because the policy designed to resolve it was wrong, and a new policy is needed.  In most cases under New Labour, this new policy tended to be a shift towards the authoritarian right. 

What New Labour’s consistently failed to grasp was that policy as implemented is hardly ever the same as policy devised, and that the main reason top-down policies fail to deliver on their objectives is that policy implementation is mediated by frontline workers,through their engagement with (often reluctant) service users, though in many cases gaming of targets and results allowed objectives to be met on paper, though not in reality.  New Labour’s obsession with targets in particular stopped it from realising that the best way to develop effective policy is not to insist a bit harder that frontline workers should be strategic and focused (through the creation of an Implementation Unit reporting directly to Blair), but to trust frontline workers to do their jobs, and resource them appropriately. 

I have covered in some detail the effects of New Labour’s failure to understand the dynamics of policy implementation when it comes to Welfare Reform, showing how policy designed to include people from society was bound to exclude people instead.  I have also covered how New Labour’s policy centralised Children’s Centre policymaking was great in theory, but ended up alienating those who needed the service most in practice.  The failure of New Labour to deal effectively with anti-social behaviour, through the further stigmatization and alienation of a section of people, is just another example.

None of this, of course, provides an answer to how government should deal with anti-social behaviour and gang culture.  The issues are deep, the problems intractable, and there is no silver bullet, though I have suggested here that a part of the solution MUST be to recognise that the problems we face today were caused by deliberate government action is the 1960s and 1970s, and that only be taking responsibility for these mistakes will any future Labour government be in a position to give a whole generation of disaffected young people a fresh stake in mainstream society.  Such a ‘truth and reconciliation’ process will need to be in addition to the creation of a material environment  through decent quality jobs and a public environment which nurture mutual respect. 

But before all of that, Milibandian Labour needs to recognise, and reflect upon, some very straightforward truths about what New Labour got wrong, and which Blair continues to get wrong (and it is not even in the Tory hierarchy’s interests even to understand the concepts covered here).  Effective policymaking and implementation are not just about ideas on what might work and then announcing the grand plan;  they are about handing over the power to make it happen.  That should be a central plank of what makes Labour different from the Tories.

As I sat in the holiday sun this week, far from the British State’s thuggish post-riot clampdown, I re-read EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. 

The dynamics of an increasingly embittered population living on the margins of late eighteenth century ‘respectable’ society, creating its own legitimacy of action through the looting of consumer goods, seemed very relevant:

The distinction between the legal code and the unwritten popular code is a commonplace at any time. But rarely have the two codes been more sharply distinguished from each other than in the second half of the eighteenth century…..

In urban and rural communities alike, a consumer consciousness preceded other forms of political  or industrial antagonism…..

Such ‘riots’ were popularly regarded as acts of justice’…..Actions on such a scale indicate an extraordinarily deep-rooted pattern of behaviour and belief……

The final years of the eighteenth century [had seen] a last desperate effort by the people to reimpose the old moral economy as against the economy of the freenmarket….Thereafter the total breakdown of customary controls contributed much to popular bitterness against a Parliament of protectionist landlords and laissez faire commercial magnates.

And Thompson concludes:

In considering only this one form of ‘mob’ action we have come upon unsuspected complexities, for behind every such form of popular direction action some legitimizing notion of right is to be found.

Maybe there’s some more coherence in the young woman “getting her taxes back” than is being given credit.

Sue Marsh at Liveral Conspiracy has called for tighter regulation/legislation on the editorial lines of newspapers:

I’ve never understood why we allow our print media to support a particular political viewpoint. Why is it that just before an election, our media line up in their separate camps and decide to tell us who to vote for? If there is a point of law I’m unaware of, perhaps someone will enlighten me, but just how is it in the public interest to seek to influence the outcome of general elections? Why do we need them to tell us what to do?

Sue has come in for some predictable flak over this from the rightwing commentators, though a lot of it is based on an assumption that she talks about media bias “just before an election” as an example, rather than – as she later clarifies – the substantive aspect of her call for change. I’ll happily acknowledge that I read it as an example too on first reading.

Even Sue’s narrower call for regulation around what papers can and can’t say, though, misses the point (well my point).

Legislative, or any other, restriction on the editorial line of a newspaper is neither desirable nor practicable, and I think it would be a strategic mistake for the Left to campaign for something that has any hint of press censorship, however well-meaning it is as a means to redress the undoubted power imbalances currently at play in the media.

A better strategic direction for the Left is to start to create alternative business models for media ownership, and thereby editorial line in the ideological space that Newscorp’s crisis (with others to follow?) is now creating. When else, after all, might we have a better opportunity than now, when the interests, the main organs of political and civil society, the general public, ‘decent’ journalists and even some celebrities are so explicitly aligned.

The medium term objective should therefore be nothing less than the establishment of one or more worker-run press organs, set up on a thoroughly professional basis, but in direct challenge to both the current editorial line AND business model of the current rightwing-dominated media set-up.  As a principle, any such newspaper should subscribe to the main ethical stance of the current NUJ around the conduct of journalists, while avoiding the constraining, and fundamentally illogical, commitment formally espoused by much of the journalism community to ‘fair and impartial’ coverage of events.

Of course, the idea of the NUJ joining forces with the new philanthropists Hugh Grant, Steve Coogan, George Michael and a strategically disinvesting  then reinvesting Church of England for a News International takeover bid does have its attractions (and I’m available, should Hugh and Steve want me to put together the business plan and then become editor-in-chief).

More realistically though, we need to acknowledge that the Left is mosty skint, and that it’s not easy to set up a national newspaper from scratch, without fairly massive financial backing, and only be a happy congruence of events of the type envisaged above might make this happen.

More realistically in the short term the NUJ, with the explicit backing and support of our newly energised Labour party leadership, should be putting its energies into the development of local and regional worker-led titles, particularly in areas where such press has either died off completely because of the way the title main owners, principally Trinity Mirror and Johnston Press, have squeezed what are fundamentally profitable ventures till their journalists and other staff squeak, in the pursuit of quick dividends.

The NUJ can’t do this alone, of course, with the resources at its disposal. It will need the help of other unions, whose regional officers should be chomping at the bit to support regional titles sympathetic to their current members concerns and to the idea of union recruitment, and that will need the policy support of Labour to set up.

In addition, bodies like the Media Trust, in alliance with higher education, have already done a lot of good groundwork to establish the latent market for decent quality regional and local journalism, and they should be encouraged and supported to take the next vital steps, which might include raising start-up loan finance from like-minded Trusts and Foundations, as well as ‘alternative equity’ from a range of investors as interested in long-term socially valid products as the are in short-term dividend income.

None of this is impossible. A lot of the stuff about how to develop alternative financing has been around for a while now, and social enterprise/co-operative structures are very well-established.

To date a mixture of journalistic introversion (and a slightly snobby reluctance to get hands dirty with the financial elements), has given a wider sense – despite the evidence to the contrary – that it just can’t happen in the face of rightwing press hegemony.

But it can, especially in this period, when the public would be right behind such ventures, and it should.

ps.  Assiduous TCF readers will note that much of this is cut and pasted from an earlier article which hardly anyone read, because they’re all lazy bastards who don’t deserve a free bleeding press anyway.