Though Cowards Flinch

2011, dear reader, was a really shite year. The right won, and life is worse for billions of people around the world.

In 2012, the organised labour movement will, I predict, make a partial comeback, in Britain and elsewhere, and the foundations for a fuller challenge will be laid, not least through productive engagement with newer social movements.  Though Cowards Flinch will help.  A bit. 

End of message. Now go to the pub, if it’s not closed down.

Yesterday I didn’t go on a march. 

Instead, in semi-journalist mode, I went round pickets in my area, having a bit of chat with those who were left, offering a tenner for the strike fund.  In some cases, no-one was left, and the stray placards stood forlornly by the official picket notices.  Those left behind reported that most had gone off to the marches and rallies, some to Wigan, some to Liverpool.  There were no strike fund buckets.

Those I spoke to on the semi-deserted pickets talked of their grim determination to see it through.  Not just the long hours yesterday, but the whole thing.  They know that the battle lines have now been drawn; if we lose this battle, then we’re likely to lose the war.

The overall impression I took from yesterday is that we may be getting our tactics very wrong for the war of attrition to come, and that we need to pay attention now to the basics of strike organisaton.

I accept that those who marched yesterday generally had a good time, and may have come away from the post-march rallies buzzing with solidarity.  But city centre demonstrations, where we all go to the pub afterwards, will not win us the battle.  Instead, we need to get seriously local, we need to get seriously organised, and we need to get grim.

I say this for several reasons:

1)  In the war of attrition to come, attending demonstrations will be a luxury most strikers simply can’t afford, given the travel costs and the inevitable cajolings to city centre pubs.  To keep on arranging them in light of decreasing numbers will not only look bad with the media, it also discriminates directly against the poorer strikers left to hold the picket line.

2) The strikes will take place at many thousands of different workplaces across the country.  It is important that picket lines are seen (it doesn’t matter so much about heard) whenever people pass them.  If you’re an undecided member of the public, a real life picket line – perhaps with someone you know on it – is much more effective means of attracting your support than watching a large group of jolly people waving banners on the telly.  If you’re a private sector worker going off to an industrial estate, seeing that the maintenance lads with the council base right next to your works are out in force in the freezing cold dispels the myth of gold-plated pensions quicker than any False Economy blogpost can.

2) At the level of senior union organiser too, demonstrations will become a luxury we can’t afford.  The hours and costs that go into orgnanising, publicising and controlling city-centre demos and rallies need to be diverted towards grassroots organisation.

3) The message we now need to get across is that this is for real.  We need to contrast the buffoonish, petulant, childish behaviour and image of ‘senior’ Tories – now starting to get established in many people’s minds – with the grim, silent determination of ordinary people on cold, winter picket lines.  It’s about buy-in.  A passerby who, on the third morning of seeing cold strikers, spontaneously chucks a quid into the strike fund bucket, or even toots her/his horn, has invested in the labour movement; she/he feels part of it, and there’s no turning back.  This initial buy-in is the roots of solidarity, or what we now call community organisation.

4) Likewise, keeping it day/night-long local builds solidarity both amongst the committed and the less committed.  I’m not a great one for scab-calling – I understand that workers have a whole set of countervailing pressures on them - but walking/driving past the steely silence of the co-workers who are out to defend your rights can have a motivating effect.  In public sector workplaces there are many middle and even senior managers who have risen from the shopfloor, and still share the values of their ex-colleagues.  While they may no longer feel able to join the picket themselves, a correctly organised strike fund, for example, can help them to engage, as well as making striking more possible in the longer term.

5) Large scale demonstrations create an environment for confrontation between police and workers/supporters.   The police may well be the agent of a repressive state, but we need to make clear that our enemy is the government, not the police.  It is better, through widespread local action to disperse police resources, so that they are in less of a position to express their own perverted forms of solidarity. 

All of this may start to sound like I’m denigrating the efforts and commitment of those who turned out to march yesterday.  I’m not, and I have no big problem with a one-off like yesterday, but our tactics now need to change.

The key question is where does this leave the nascent solidarity between the mainstream trade union movement and the newer, potentially powerful student/occupy movements.  

There is no doubt that the new movement has brought colour, life and energy, and this is something for us all to value and foster.  As Mil rightly says this morning:

Playing games was once the preserve of professional politicians.  Now the expertise has been massively acquired by whole swathes of amateur aficionados.

But, just as I said last December with reference to the Heinz strike, I do think the new movement needs to face the uncomfortable truth that its message has not yet reached out to the working class, despite laudable efforts to make some of those connection.   What the coming war of strike attrition offers is an opportunity to take some of the ‘expertise’ refers to places where the working class actually congregate.  The mountain will not come to Moses.

For my part, I’ll be doing my own little walk into the lion’s den on Wednesday 14th December when I do a workshop at the Bank of Ideas a  (partly) on how my old-style trade unionism can and should meet new-style rebellion through engagement in dull-sounding things like Trades Union Councils (where wider community and unions are supposed to come together, but mostly don’t).

ps.  If you’re interested in what this post has to say, please also do have a look at a post from 2008  by my blog comrade Dave Semple Student strategies and the carnivalesque, which was good then, but now looks very far-sighted. 

To modify an old saying, my journalism skills knows some bounds!

I just put down the phone to one Richard Balfe, David Cameron’s envoy to the Trade Unions. During my minute long conversation with him I asked him if he’d heard about Plymouth’s Conservative-run City Council’s decision to “de-recognise” the biggest public sector union Unison.

He hadn’t. In fact he has just come back from Brussels and has not had a chance to catch up. I informed him about the details, which have come from the Political Scrapbook website. He replied that he was not going to comment, before politely putting down his receiver.

I quickly emailed him thanking him for taking the call, signing off by saying if he did feel like commenting not to hesitate in contacting me. He soon emailed back explaining, again, about having just returned to the UK, and not being up to speed on this matter.

When Mr Balfe does manage to get himself up to speed on matters I look forward to seeing what he has to say, particularly as this could prove very interesting for him, the link he has to his party the Conservatives (after leaving, or rather being thrown out of, the Labour Party in 2002) and the Trade Union movement who he will want to remain largely on good terms with – especially now that militancy is back on the cards.

Instead of offering Mr Balfe my own words of wisdom, I should like to remind him of his own, from ConservativeHome earlier this year: “let us not demonise the Unions, but realise they are doing what their members pay them for – that is getting the best deal possible for their members.”

If Mr Balfe really thinks this holds true, then the decision by Plymouth Council to tell Unison reps to vacate their offices, after refusing to sign up to what they say are discriminatory changes to terms and conditions, is contrary to his own heartfelt sentiments.

On meeting with David Cameron in his role as envoy, after he has settled back home and glanced over the papers (which, admittedly, will include a great many articles about riots and looters), I hope he puts forward serious reservations about these events.

Again, in his own words: “I don’t think I could have joined the [Conservative] party under Thatcher.” Possibly because its loathing for unions is much like Plymouth’s now. Let’s hope an arrangement is settled soon, and Unison offices are re-opened again pronto.

1.  The 1,500, not the 200

You could be forgiven for thinking that only 200 people this week got told they didn’t have a job.  In fact it’s only 3 days since 1,500 workers in Derby started to come to terms with being thrown on the industrial scrap-heap. 

This article is about why that happened, and what Labour in opposition can learn from this latest tragedy of capitalist errors.

2.  Paxman must go

On Tuesday’s Newsnight (from 34mins 30 secs) Jeremy Paxman showed that he is no longer competent to work as a television interviewer, and should be put out to grass.

Questioning Philip Hammond over the awarding of the Thameslink contract to Siemens rather than Bombardier, with the consequent job losses in Derby, Paxman’s hubris simply failed to register the information Hammond was trying to relay about European procurement law.

Thus an important opportunity to examine in public how Whitehall got this procurement exercise so badly wrong was lost.  We’ll try here to do what Paxman couldn’t manage.

3.  The detail Paxman missed

In fact Hammond was quite right when he tried, unsuccessfully, to explain to Paxman the position the government finds itself in, and how other governments in Europe deal differently with procurement:

The terms of the procurement were set by the previous government in 2008…[Paxman interrupts]….It is possible to add in socio-economic factors, but you have to add them in at the time – you specify the requirements of the procurement. Labour didn’t do that.

This method by which other governments add their ‘socio-economic factors’ into the tendering process needs to be spelt out.

The key conceptual leap the UK government needs to make is that, in order to secure local/regional socio-economic benefit, this benefit needs to be set out in the tender as an integral part of what is being purchased, rather than as a requirement about how the contract will be implemented. More simply, buying socio-economic benefit is legal under the European directive, but bolting it on to another purchase is likely to be illegal.

Configuring the tender document in this way would not have barred Siemens from tendering from the contract, but would have imposed on it the need to work out how it might achieve the required output not just of working trains but also 1,500 safeguarded jobs in Derby. Bombardier, on the other hand, would have had legitimate ‘home advantage’.

This may all seem a little odd to people coming to it for the first time, but it is hardly rocket science. Even I understand it. Indeed, I wrote about it two years ago. 

The great tragedy for the 1,500 workers in Derby is that I, and lots of other people in Britain, understand perfectly well how to put together tenders which satisfy the requirements of the EU Procurement Directive but in a way allows government organisations to secure specific local and regional benefits.

I was doing precisely this kind of thing 12 years ago when I worked on the development of  local labour schemes for the construction industry in Liverpool, and the key book on the matter, Richard MacFarlane’s  Using Local Labour in Construction was published in 1999.  Richard is still working in this area with anyone who will listen, and this short summary of how to include training and local recruitment provisions within contracts makes it clear that none of this stuff is difficult, as long as the essential conceptual leap about what is being bought is made (see also the toolkits he has developed).

4.  So what went wrong?

So what went wrong here?

Why, if all this stuff is perfectly well-known in the UK, is Vince Cable only now writing to the Prime Minister saying we need to look into how the UK does its procurement? Why, when Duncan Smith was spouting the other day about British jobs for British workers, didn’t he suggest that refreshed tender processes might be one way to achieve this?

And, more particularly, why was Cameron’s visit to Derby, in which he promised to support local jobs, not backed up by attention to detail about how this might be achieved while there may still have been time to try to negotiate some kind of deal (both Bombardier and Siemens, after all, have German bosses).

These are questions the people of Derby will, I hope, keep on putting – all the way to the ballot box.

Let us be clear, though, that the last Labour administration also has to take its share of the blame.

The tender documentation was signed off in 2008 under Labour, and Hammond is right, for the reasons I have set out, that socio-economic considerations needed to be built in at that point.

But the problem goes deeper than that.

People in Derby are losing their jobs not so much because of failed Labour ministerial oversight – although it is right that there is this line of political accountability – but because of a the neoliberal assumptions which are now hardwired into much of Whitehall, and in turn into the public procurement ‘profession’, about what governments should and should not do.

To see what’s happened we need look no further than the National Procurement Strategy for Local Government , published in 2003 as the New Labour flame ebbed, but developed earlier in the 2000′s by officials who still thought Labour might do things differently. In that strategy document a whole chapter is devoted to the concept of local socio-economic benefit through public procurement. It’s actually very good and clear thinking.

Unfortunately, none of it was ever implemented. In the battle between the two extreme procurement positions – tendering to get the lowest price, and tendering to get the best overall outcome – there was only ever going to be one winner. For civil servants fed a diet of very basic Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT) under 19 years of Tory rule, this new rich menu was too much to stomach.

Similarly, local government procurement officers who had already become very adept at bulk buying in concert with other authorities, often at the expense of local supplier contracts, still tend to see newfangled notions of spending a bit more upfront to get something much better as a slight on their professional standards.

Thus, when I raised with my own local authority procurement manager the potential for building local labour provisions into the (long stalled) Skelmersdale Town Centre Development Agreement, but was told in no uncertain terms that the EC didn’t allow that kind of thing (I’m still working on that one).  

And even though I managed to slip a local supply chain/public procurement action research project into the LSP action plan under cover of organisational inertia, the relevant Councol-dominated sub-group failed to take any notice of it until the sub-group was handily found to be superfluous the LSP’s needs.

Put simply, the civil servants and council officers who matter just prefer not to know this stuff.  There are partial exceptions, such as the reasonably holistic (though certainly not perfect) contracting approach built into the Building Schools for the Future programme, but of course Gove and Co were quick to stick an ignorant boot into this approach, with accusations of waste taken straight from the CCT-inspired Manual for Narrow Minded Penny Pinching. (In passing I’d note that it seems a bit rich for the Tories to now be blaming Labour for applying the principles to the Thameslink tender that they said should have been applied to the BSF tender, but this post is not principally about Tory hypocrisy and policy incoherence).

The NHS is no different when it comes to built-in procurement prejudice. Next time you go into a hospital canteen, check out where the packaged sandwiches are made. The last time I checked in Liverpool, they’d come all the way down the M62 from Hull. Maybe Hull hospitals have ones from Liverpool.

One reason for this nonsense is that, until 2010, the NHS had two different procurement bodies in it – the Procurement and Supplies Agency (PASA), which favoured (at least in part of the organisation) looking at outcome-based procurement but as far as I can see never got to do it, and NHS Logistics, which favoured low-cost bul-buying.

The two organisations’ functions are now mostly merged within NHS Supply Chain, with the main operation outsourced to DHL (EXcel Europe Ltd) and the bulk-buying has won out.  What, after all, would DHL know about outcome-based purchasing

Sadly, none of what I write here will save workers’ jobs in Derby, however widely it is picked up.  While there may be some flexibility around the fact that Siemens are still only at ‘preferred bidder’ stage, Hammond is ag correct to say that trying to pull the Siemens contract now would potentially do more harm than good:

If we decided, as some people have urged us, to simply ignore the terms of the procurement that Labour set out, and to award the contract to an underbidder, first of all we would face legal action from the successful bidder. Secondly, under the terms of the EU Remedies Directive, we would very likely be prevented by legal intervention from signing a contract anyway (about 35.00 mins into the programme).

What an ethically sound government would do, of course, would be to invest the kind of sums that might have gone on such fines back into the Unite General Secretary that would be a button I’d be trying to push with government. But this government is not motivated by ethics, and much less by the lives of working people, so I don’t think Derby will see anything other than some damp squib ’retraining’; initiative aimed at the Faludian emasculation of another tranche of the industrial working class, probably expressed as “Burger King is hiring. Oh, and your benefits are at risk….”

6.  What Labour can learn

Nevertheless, I think Labour should use this debacle to look hard at itself, reflecting on what it got wrong in government and why, and how it can serve working people better in this policy area when it returns to government. Simply getting John Denham to bleat on about the Tories not having done enough to scrutinise the tendering process as it came to its conclusion is not a sufficient response.

So if I were no longer the Unite General Secretary, but morphed into Ed Miliband, I’d be ordering the establishment of a task group to review not just what Labour gor wrong with the Thameslink contract specifically, but how the mistakes with this contract reflect wider failings of policy implementation during rthe New Labour years.

The following broad question might guide that review process:

1) Why did much of the (laudable) thinking by the early New Labour (1997-2001) about more holistic approaches to the use of government spending power come to such little fruition, and what does this tell us about how a fresh Labour government can more effectively implement (radical) policy.

2) More specifically, how can a future Labour government ensure that the correct expertise around government procurement (e.g. Richard MacFarlane and your truly) is brought into Whitehall, and that this expertise is allowed a fair hearing in the face institutional opposition?

3) What does the Thameslink experience tell us about some of the deeper neoliberal assumptions embedded both in Whitehall and the party’s core policy makers about the appropriate role of government as influencer of the broad economic geography of Britain? (Clue: this isn’t a matter of how ‘big’ government should or shouldn’t be, but about how neoliberal ‘small government’ orthodoxies have led to institutional prejudice about the whole idea of government as legitimate policy actor.)

4) When and how will Labour get serious about its understanding of the economic geography of Britain, in particular the infrastructural deficiency causes of regional and intra-regional disparity, and what  might to do to make it better? (Clue: building a High Speed Railway will NOT sort it out, though it may be a useful adjunct in time.)

Are you listening, Ed? After all, I’m sure you’ll agree that developing real policy (and mechanisms for its implementation) in the service of working people is more important than triangulating electoral reasons to ignore their concerns.

‘Chav’. The word has disputed etymology, and yet everyone knows what it is – or rather, knows that they would prefer not be, themselves, identified as one. ‘Chav’ is that rare beast, denoting a section in society which almost nobody would want to touch with a bargepole, but yet, or so according to Owen Jones, has a well-defined target, at least as far as the mainstream media is concerned, as the newly consumerised working classes – and even in some cases the lower class made good.

Though, rather than being a category worthy of collected denunciation, ‘chav-bashing’ is a concerted campaign against the working class itself. The fact that many working class people would choose not to identify with the term is important in the way it has been used by many middle class people and self-appointed ‘neo-snobs’, such as Jemima Lewis, in the media.

The way in which the word ‘chav’ has been used can be seen within the framework Marxism has used to observe capitalism: as an agenda setting the workers against each other – Thatcher’s preferred means of governance. And yet, ironically, Marx himself would have been none too supportive of the so-called ‘chavs’. The assumption is that a ‘chav’ takes from society without actually giving back to it, and Marx had a word for this himself: the lumpenproletarian. This class, of whom Marx called ‘social scum’ in the Communist Manifesto, were unproductive and likely to be used as fodder for reactionaries.

But Jones has written, not a myth-busting book setting the world right about what is or is not a ‘chav’, but rather a reminder that in recent times, and quite under our noses, the working class have been institutionally demonised wholesale as the very worst, contemptible, subjects society can offer; rowdy, immoral and burdensome.

‘Chav’ is not a catch-all term, but its definition is loose enough so as to allow all to condemn the ‘chav’, thus playing into the hands of Thatcherite politics, key to which is dividing (the working class) and conquering.

As well as saying that this class-hatred (‘neo-snobs’ unto ‘chavs’) stems from the destruction caused by Thatcherite politics, and the age devoted only to a social mobility that sees being working class as a departure, not an ennobled end in itself, Jones is appealing against a rowdy headline-grabbing media, set on a course of snobbery and braggartry, who perceives somebody like Michael Carroll – dubbed the lotto lout – as the sum total of today’s working class.

Indeed, this is what was meant by local Dewsbury Moor community leader Julie Bushby, interviewed by Jones in his book, when she says “Ninety per cent of people here work. We’ve all taken money out of [our] own pockets for this [the search for Shannon Matthews]” (p.17). What she is saying here is Dewsbury Moor is not how the mainstream press paints it; namely as a scum setting with people who care only for themselves and not the communities in which they live.

It’s easy to see how the notion of ‘chav’ fits in neatly with Thatcher’s politics. In the same way that ‘chav-bashing’ is not unique to ‘neo-snobs’ in the mainstream press (the founder of website chavscum.co.uk for example identifies as working class) Thatcher’s policies were not avowedly anti-working class. In fact as Jones points out, for Thatcher class is a “Communist concept”, getting in the way of a society where one is out for oneself. There was one section of the working class Thatcher was happy to side by: the ‘Basildon Man‘. In the 1980s Basildon, a new town, generally speaking working class with a history of sitting Conservative MPs, was seen to epitomise the aspirational working class. In deed, Thatcher wanted to appeal to the “Basildon man” mentality, but in action she was setting about destructive measures which would hit working class families hardest.

In the economy, Thatcher’s 1979 Conservative government quickly “abolished exchange controls, allowing financial companies to make huge profits from currency speculation … at the expense of other parts of the economy, like manufacturing” (p.52). This was a sign that the rich were going to be given allowances, whereas at the lower end of the scale, a “de-industrialization of the economy” would sweep up jobs and opportunities – which many towns to this day have not recovered from.

Thatcher’s plans for society – a concept she was sceptical of – were worse still. Despite her words she did not want to get rid of social class, just stop us from perceiving we belonged to one. On her watch council estates were something to be feared, not somewhere to be proud of, and her callous derision of single Mother families ensured communities were divided (p.67). In an interview Jones conducted with Geoffrey Howe – the longest serving minister in Thatcher’s cabinet, and whose resignation was said to have hastened Thatcher’s own downfall – he was left surprised at how much the living standards of the poorest had become, left only uttering “…at the end of the period they’ve got better off, I think” (p.63).

As Jones rightly puts it: “Thatcher’s assumption of power in 1979 marked the beginning of an all-out assault on the pillars of working class Britain” (p.10). But surely not even she could have foreseen how far this assault would embed itself into future British politics. Jones points out that many New Labour policies were steeped in the kind of middle class triumphalism usually associated with the Tories. Stories about the lazy unemployed became a commonplace, and the era defined a new Labour politician, like James Purnell, who spent more time appeasing Tory attitudes and less time addressing the deep rooted problems that Britain inherited from Thatcherite destruction.

Today, now Labour are in opposition, things are not much better for the traditional party of the working class. While the nation apprehensively awaits Osborne’s deep cuts to the economy, effects of which will hurt the poorest harder, Blairites such as Peter Watt – Labour’s former General Secretary – are calling on the party to accept the Tories’ cuts agenda wholesale. The party historically linked to unions and working people, has become the party of the mainstream. The fire in the belly of the Labour party has been extinguished, leaving the door open for fringe parties to sweep up what has been left –  a gift for far right parties such as the British National Party (BNP).

Jones reflects upon a staggering 1958 gallup poll showing how 71% of britons were opposed to interracial marriage, however it is today, not the fifties, that the BNP is the most successful far right party in the UK to date (pp.222-23). Now that the New Labour party panders to a ruling metropolitan elite community for its votes and support, the BNP have stepped in to raise people’s legitimate concerns (housing, immigration, schools) framing the debate in racial terms. By and large, working class communities reject the appeals of the far right (they got a trumping in the last local elections), but the English Defence League are still making ground, tapping into local  concerns, and Labour is still doing little to counter this. Maurice Glasman, an academic at London Metropolitan University, has raised the debate of how Labour can win back the working classes, with his idea of a ‘blue Labour‘ – which is a start – but clearly there is much thinking left to be had inside the party, in order to reverse years of Tory pandering and working class abandonment.

But Jones doesn’t leave us hanging on what kind of action should be taken today, in order that the working class feel represented by politicians in parliament. He concludes by touching on just a few things likely to re-integrate the least well-off back into society again. Things like a national programme of social housing, reliant as it would be on “an army of skilled labour”. Today even the Tories are discussing ‘Britain making things again’, and so, opines Jones, “there is ample space to make the case for a new industrial strategy” (p.261). Furthermore, giving workers “genuine control and power in the workplace” is not unique to the Left any longer – the benefits of better workforce engagement has been researched across the board from The Work Foundation to centre right think-tank Respublica.  

Certainly the case for working class empowerment has gained traction again, the battle now is to harangue politicians to ensure they keep their word and start to deliver the changes necessary to reverse the tide of recent class prejudice, started by the Tories and carried on through to the present day via the appeasement of New Labour.

As Jones has cleverly noted in his book, ‘chav’ is the perfect embodiment of how far the class war, waged by the political establishment, and perpetuated by many in the mainstream media, has come. No longer is class prejudice simply fought along the lines of ‘them (the poor) and us (the wealthy)’, but a situation has arisen where their demonisation of the working class has created a ‘them and us’ within those very communities. That this happened alongside the political elites’ efforts to weaken working class institutions (such as trade unions) has frustrated working class strength and pride – laying the ground for the expansion of anti-working class politics. Hopefully this book, which is extremely readable and exceptionally researched, will be the wake-up call needed to combat today’s ‘neo-snob’ class warriors, whose sole aim is the destruction of all that the working class hold dear.

David Cameron is playing an interesting game at the moment. After promising to “cut the deficit, not the NHS” he went and did both anyway. In fact he went further still: NHS reforms include abolishing Primary Care Trusts and handing 60% of the NHS budget to new GP-led consortia.

Under Cameron’s watch, health secretary Andrew Lansley has done nothing else but implement the very measures the Tories have always wanted to do to the NHS, but never before being so stupid as to.

In return for Lansley’s loyalty to the cause, Cameron has given the minister a cold shoulder.

Nicholas Watt put it this way:

In public the prime minister expresses support for the hapless minister. In private few are left in doubt that the minister has been placed on the naughty step or, in the case of Andrew Lansley, on the you-have-had-the-political-stuffing-knocked-out-of-you step.

The BMA stopped short recently of delivering Lansley a vote of no confidence, concentrating on his poor reforms only, but that’s not the message put out today by nurses who will debate a motion of “no confidence” – informed in part by Lansley’s refusal to address the Royal College of Nursing conference in Liverpool, instead limiting himself to a 45-minute Q&A with 50 select nurses.

If that wasn’t bad enough for the minister, his spats with Lord Owen – who has called on Cameron to “replace existing health ministers” – and Norman Lamb have caused a public embarrassment.

The influential Lamb, who has threatened to resign unless the government acts favourably upon a series of demands on the NHS reforms, joins a number of rebel Lib Dem figures who have proposed changes to Lansley’s plans.

Cameron has responded by saying he regrets “charging ahead” on reform without support – a change of heart which will not bode well for the health minister, who will be first in the firing line if Cameron wants to save face.

Clearly Lansley should be sacked on merit of his terrible reforms, which threaten the very heart and soul of the NHS, and aims only to swamp the service with pro-privatisation measures.

But we should remember the minister is merely the architect of the plans. The Tories under Cameron are only delivering the destructive ethos they know and love.

In a thinly veiled attempt to rock the boat a bit, Rawnsley asked on Sunday:

Andrew Lansley is clearly in trouble … Does Mr Cameron need to find himself a new health secretary?

This is the final part of my four part examination of the social mobility agenda.  The other parts are here, here, and here, and focus on the Right’s interpretation of social mobility. In this final part, I turn to the alternative.

Two quick stories from my rich, varied and socially mobile life:

The Ebbw Valley Railway

Back in 2000/2001, as a cleaner-turned-staff nurse-turned-aid worker-turned-economic development researcher, I worked on the initial economic impact assessment of the proposed Ebbw Valley railway line between Ebbw Vale and Cardiff/Newport.  The line finally opened in 2008, having been closed for 40 years, and I like to think I had a hand in making it happen.

My core job was to provide projections for usage of the line, based on a mix of quantitative and qualitative research, as well as to develop a programme outline for the kind of labour market initiative that might increase usage.

When I presented the projections for usage, there were a lot of doubters, who said the line would never attract that many people from the ex-mining villages of Llanhilleth and Six Bells, for example.  I persisted, suggesting that it wasn’t reasonable to project number simply on the basis of current travel patterns, and that we needed to take into account how people’s ‘travel horizons’ would expand because of the railway line and the associated labour market projects.

In 2010, the uptake for the line was double my projections of a decade earlier, and there is much more traffic into Cardiff than I had ever envisaged (the link into Newport remains an infrastructural issue).

The Future Jobs Fund lad

Three months ago the local social enterprise I run took on Craig (not his real name) for a six month placement, paid for by the tail end of the Labour government’s Future Jobs Fund.

Craig is from a part of  Skelmersdale ranked amongst the worst deprived in the country.  He is 19.  He left school at 16, with 5 GCSEs.  He is well-mannered, with a ‘non-plastic plastic scouse accent that is almost incomprehensible to outsiders, but which is a vital part of his toolkit where he lives.  He has never had a job, and had never had an interview till we took him on.

He lives about 5 miles away from his placement.  He’s borrowed a bike to get over and he manages it most days, though I’ve had to go over puncture repair with him.

I asked him one day to attend a free health and safety course in Aughton, just next to Ormskirk.  It’s about 5 miles from Skelmersdale.  He had never heard of it, and said he had never been to Ormskirk.  It took  me a while to sort out bus routes with him.

Interpreting social mobility: the sales pitch from the Right

Both little stories are about social mobility, and what the state can do – directly or indirectly – to facilitate that. 

This isn’t, though, the type of social mobility that Nick Clegg has in mind.  For Clegg and the right, including the right of the Labour party, social mobility is about the few thought worthy enough to be plucked from the misery of their working class condition, to be given a real chance in life.  It’s an almost Victorian vision of philanthropy to the deserving poor.   My work colleague Craig wouldn’t fit those criteria.

There are clear problems both of morality and logic – the fact that if one poor person goes up, one rich person must go down - with this model of social mobility. 

Nevertheless, and perhaps precisely because of the dog-eat-dog competition at the heart of the model, Cleggovision can be attractive to a society which has been brought up on a diet of post-Thatcherite  plucked-from-nowhere celebrity, and where the rapacious, self-made Alan Sugar is a best seller on the autobiography list.  It is a model of society which offers little of substance to most people, but which can still be comforting in a ‘it could be me’ kind of way.

To date, the Left has had a problem with selling a more solidaristic vision of social mobility, in which everyone gets a chance, in which people get to leave their communities and do something different if they want to, but in which there’s no shame – indeed in which there’s a sense of pride - in sticking with your neighbours, your community, your workplace, and helping make life better for all.

Recently, for example, Owen Jones wrote a very good piece setting out what is wrong with the social mobility model as it stands at the moment, but still came in for a huge amount of flak.  This comment was fairly typical in its sarcasm:

Oh dearie, dearie, me, imagine people building lives for themselves….the selfish bastards.

Interpreting social mobility: developing the socialist alternative

How, then, does the Left go about developing both the policy content AND the political narrative to counter and provide an alternative to the Right’s social mobility sales pitch?

I suggest there are four tenets to hold onto for the development of a leftwing social mobility programme:

• First, leftwing social  mobility got to be about large numbers of people.  Forget internships, think apprenticeships, though they’re much the same thing really.
• Second, leftwing social mobility is fundamentally about physical co-location of different classes.  Without physical barriers broken down, it’s all froth.
• Third, leftwing social mobility is a threat to the Cleggian status quo.   It’s not a nice fluffy add on to the current class-ridden society; it’s about changing it fundamentally.
• Fourth, as suggested above, leftwing social mobility is about choice; choice to stay or choice to go.  Both choices are valid, because both can lead to happy, fulfilled lives.

Policy content for the fulfilment of a leftwing social mobility programme already exists in large measure.  In the post-New Labour world, it’s easy for the left to dismiss some of the advances in policy understanding and (to a lesser extent) implementation of the early years of New Labour, but the research and recommendations still exist, are still valid, and it’s important not to throw the policy baby out with the political zeitgeist bathwater.

Most obviously, there is ‘education, education, education’.  There were many problems with New Labour’s education programme, especially around Academies, but the underlying principle schools in poor areas should be challenged to get educational attainment up to meet ’good’ benchmarks and not simply be content with a straight ‘added value’ measure, was a good principle.  The idea that academies should pro-actively mix kids from richer and poorer backgrounds was also a good idea.

Similarly, the idea that at least 50% of young people should get the opportunity of higher education is a good one, however arbitrary the target and however mixed that offer of higher education might be (less mixed in quality than the press reports, in fact).

Nevertheless, education stops when education stops, and the ironic out of educational achievement and access for some working class young people to higher education is not in itself a sufficient ambition for a leftwing social mobility programme. Craig, my new work colleague, got 5 decent GCSEs. He’s still never had a chance of a job, and had rarely ever left Skelmersdale till he got a lend of his uncle’s bike to come to our place.

As or more important than educational attainment and opportunity is physical access to work and other opportunities.  It is no coincidence that both my social mobility vignettes concern transport and access to work.

There’s plenty of evidence from New Labour’s better, early days, that lack of decent access to work opportunities is not just a barrier to getting to work, but in itself creates limited ‘travel horizons’ which in turn reduce opportunities of all sorts.  Take this research paper from 2003 on travel and the labour market in northern Ireland as a case in point:

We know that labour markets are institutional and social constructs (Peck, 1996; Martin and Morrison, 2002), shaped by lived traditions within localities, and that because of this labour market experiences are highly diverse. The spatiality of labour markets can and does vary by other background characteristics such as educational level, ethnicity, and access to transport.

Following this reasoning, objective real world measures of labour markets and locality might not always be the most appropriate indicators, since they do not take account of the fact that decisions are based on information that has come through a perceptual filter (Gould and White, 1973). This move towards ‘social space’ – understandings of the geography of labour markets as shaped by perceptions and social contexts – is given greater force by the work of Quinn (1986), which showed that young peoples’ perceptions were highly important as influences on their uptake of job opportunities. Even if, in some cases, jobs were formally accessible (in geographical and skill terms) to the young people in Quinn’s study, there were difficulties in accessing them because they were ignorant of the opportunity because their experience of the city had led them to look elsewhere.

A recent Social Exclusion Unit report (2003) has reiterated how limited travel horizons, poor awareness of transport services available and a tendency to look for work in, or travel to, places that are familiar serve to limit the employment opportunities some individuals are prepared to consider.

In North America it has been shown that objective spatial variations in many aspects of metropolitan labour market opportunity structures may combine with subjective spatial variations in values, aspirations and preferences in perceived opportunities, leading to geographical differences in labour market behaviour (Galster and Killen, 1995).

Hence, spatial behaviour and local social capital shape life chances and involvement in employment (Granovetter, 1995, Performance and Innovation Unit, 2002), and ‘imperfect knowledge’ about the geography of labour market opportunities has been demonstrated to be a barrier to employment for disadvantaged people (Ihlanfeldt, 1997).

But such barriers are not insurmountable if government is prepared to act.  The reason I am so proud of my work on the Ebbw Vale railway line in the early 2000s is that the qualitative research around what might be possible was sufficient to overcome the limitations of the quantitative research, and to persuade the initial doubters that the regeneration of small ex-mining villages through the development of accessible routes to work was a real goer.  Even so, a political decision by the Welsh Assembly was needed to go ahead and invest in what must then have seemed like marginal cost benefit.

As a result, towns and villages that under Policy Exchange guidance would simply have been left to rot – a sad legacy of a long dead industry – have begun to be revitalised, as incomes have risen and people have actually started to move into the re-greening, post slag valley newly appreciated for it natural beauties.

In summary, government intervention of the right type – and of the type that often only government can make – has created a new mass social mobility for whole communities in a way which expands ‘travel horizons’ and creates life opportunities both beyond and back in deprived areas.

These policy lessons of the early 2000s need to be recaptured and expanded upon by the Left, and ‘sold’ in terms of mass social mobility.  To a large extent social mobility and relevant geographic mobility are in fact the same thing, because they create initial physical co-location, and the Left should be proud to champion that through support for regional and local transport infrastructure projects.  

If necessary this should be at the expense of more grandiose, but ultimately politically less well-grounded schemes like high-speed rail, which has been described today as “hypermobility for the rich” in the context of the new coalition of  environmental charities urging a “re-think” and more extensive consultation.

While public transport is important to leftwing social mobility, it’s not the whole solution.   The democratisation of public space in general, and what government can do about it, is a vital component, and again we need to look to the best of what New Labour achieved in its early days for guidance.

One of the key constraints to social mobility for people in the new town of Skelmersdale is quite simply that the town has no proper centre.  Many people live much of their lives without meeting people from a different social class because there is nowhere to meet them. 

Thus people like my work colleague Craig become forever hindered by a lack the social and linguistic flexibility; Craig is unlikely to get a decent job in retail because his deep scouse accent, which serves him well in his own neighbourhood, is the only one he has; he doesn’t have a ‘work voice’.

At a wider level, while richer areas develop ”spatial behaviour and local social capital [which] shape life chances and involvement in employment” (see the research above), lack of legitimate public space on housing estates up and down the land, combined with social housing policies from the 1960s onwards designed to segregate rather than include, militate against social mobility. 

As with limited travel horizons, these are not insurmountable issues.   High quality public spaces, which encourage people to linger and talk, do not need to be the preserve of well-off market and university towns and village squares.  There is plenty of good architectural practice out there from the likes of  the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (now merged with the Design Council), and for a period in the late 1990s and early 2000s the relationship between social regeneration and physical space was starting to be understood. 

The regeneration of the Bradford Trident New Deal area, for example, for which I organised a lot of the community consultation and research, still stands out for the thinking behind the ‘spatial engineering’, designed to reduce fear of crime by making all routes through routes while at the same time connecting communities up.

At the same time, the likely further collapse in the private housing model, with increasing numbers of young and early middle-aged people unable to get onto the housing ladder – while it creates misery for many at the moment - does actually provide an opportunity to move away from the segregationist housing policies of the 1960s and 1970s, towards a model closer to the original postwar vision of different social classes living next to each other. 

This is the kind of opportunity the Left should be actively embracing as part of its holistic social mobility programme, setting it in stark contrast to the Tory government’s plans for increased and enforced ghettoisation of workless communities.

Selling the leftwing vision of social mobility: cider revisited

These policy instruments – and there are many more to draw on – are all ultimately political choices around how and where to invest, and the Left must develop a coherent plan for that investment, setting out a clear alternative to the vacuous, policy free rhetoric of Clegg and co.

But a new leftwing vision of mass social mobility needs a sales pitch too.  In the wrong advertising hands, it can look all to much like old-fashioned nanny statism, which the right-wing media can all too easily set off against the right’s simplistic, logically unworkable, but attractive social mobility agenda, in which you’ll get what you want if you want it enough, and are content to ignore the parallel needs of your neighbour.

It’s a vision which needs to move away from the New Labour mantra of ‘hard-working families’ – and the Thatcher ideal of the exclusionary atomised non-society that this phrase evokes – towards a concept of working class communities proud both proud of their communities’ heritage and positive about their communities’ future. (In this respect, Madeleine Bunting’s article on working class nostalgia is not too far from the mark.)

So, what, ultimately, does leftwing social mobility look like?

Well, as I’ve said here, I think it looks like the cider advert, where identifiably working class males mass on the hill side, tooled up and ready to march on the sleepy town in the valley.  

It’s a vision of pride in what we are, and a potent image of solidarity in what we can be.  It’s also a vision tinged, if you want to see it that way, with menace to the status quo – a sort of #manualworkeruncut, coming ready or not.

Or in other words, trade unions.

It’s a vision that shouldn’t need cider-tinted glasses.

About two and a half years ago, as a Labour government desperate to kowtow Daily Mail sentiment pushed through its Welfare Reform Bill, I wrote a long, but well received essay called The Welfare Reform White Paper: Policy Making , Implementation and the Government of Narnia.

In the essay I set out some of the research literature on the likely unintended consequences of the implementation of such reforms:

Whilst it’s not made it big  in UK political science until fairly recently (thanks to people like Dave Richards at Sheffield University) there’s a 30 year tradition of ‘Implementation Studies’ in the US (and Germany for some reason), which looks in detail at how ‘policy’ gets implemented ‘on the ground.’

The seminal work is Michael Lipsky’s 1980 ‘Street Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services’, which shows that what starts out as policy from the centre is adjusted during its implementation to suit enduring bureaucratic norms, with a key feature being the tendency of front-line workers towards continued ‘processing’ of human transactions as a way of coping with workload. 

This tradition of ‘up close’ qualtitative research – very different from the secondary analysis of statistics that Paul Gregg is looking for as his evidence – is best evidence in relation to welfare ‘reform’ in a 1998 study carried out in California, at a time when the State was seeking to introduce ‘employment-focused’ measures remarkably similar to those set out in the Paper. 

The study reports: 

“Direct observations of transactions between welfare workers and clients suggests that policy reforms were not full implemented by street-level bureaucrats. The instrumental transactions that continued to dominate interactions were consistent with processing claims and rationing scarce resources, but they were poorly aligned with new policies aimed at changing the services and message delivered to welfare clients.” (Meyers M, Glaser B and MacDonald K (1998) On the Front line of Welfare Delivery: Are workers Implementing Policy Reforms? Journal of Policy analysis and Management Vol. 17 No. 1, 1 -22.) 

These findings are confirmed by other studies, including the multi-State coverage in Riccuci N, Meyers M, Lurie I and Han J (2004) The Implementation of Welfare Reform Policy: The Role of Public Managers in Front Line Practice, Public Administration Review Vol 64, No.4, 439-448.   What the latter study adds is that intensive performance management techniques and training can get some front line workers to change their interactions with clients to become more ‘flexible’ in accordance with the new ‘reform’ policies, but that this still doesn’t easily alter deep-rooted work cultures overall. 

Taken together, this and other studies give reliable evidence that front-line staff adopt policy to make it fit what they are able to do under resource constraints. 

Just writing a White Paper with policy prescriptions for ‘Adviser Flexibility’ doesn’t mean you’ll get ‘Adviser Flexibility’ in real life.  In fact with the ‘welfare reforms’ now proposed there’s a real risk that, given the additional bureaucracies inevitably involved, mechanisms will evolve that produce less flexibility, more ‘processing’ (i.e.  dehumanising) of clients.

In the US at least front-line staff’s starting culture was one geared to just processing benefit claims with no great expectation of what might happen next; in the UK, the invasive New Public Management techniques of the last 25 years mean that front line staff in Job Centre Pluses already start from a more a negative standpoint, just as inclined to ‘process’ but to do so with more of a mind to benefit withdrawal.

All taken together, there is a huge risk that the whole plus side of the reform – and at policy-making level increased personalized support is seen as a plus – will be ignored in favour of the downside; this will be about pushing people into (for them) counterproductive ‘work related activity’ in order to meet the newly introduced range of targets…..

Two and a half years later, a Guardian investigation confirms my worst fears:

Rising numbers of vulnerable jobseekers are being tricked into losing benefits amid growing pressure to meet welfare targets, a Jobcentre Plus adviser has told the Guardian.

A whistleblower said staff at his jobcentre were given targets of three people a week to refer for sanctions, where benefits are removed for up to six months. He said it was part of a “culture change” since last summer that had led to competition between advisers, teams and regional offices.

“Suddenly you’re not helping somebody into sustainable employment, which is what you’re employed to do,” he said. “You’re looking for ways to trick your customers into ‘not looking for work’. You come up with many ways. I’ve seen dyslexic customers given written job searches, and when they don’t produce them – what a surprise – they’re sanctioned. The only target that anyone seems to care about is stopping people’s money.

“‘Saving the public purse’ is the catchphrase that is used in our office … It is drummed home all the time – you’re saving the public purse. Feel good about stopping someone’s money, you’ve just saved your own pocket. Its a joke.”

This is about as Lypskian as you can get: ‘street level bureaucrats’ surviving their increasingly alienating jobs by increasingly dehumanising clients, by starting to treat it all as a sick joke.  As Lipsky himself suggested, treating the imposition of Victorian levels of poverty on clients as a joke may just be the start of a decline into unmitigating bureacratic dystopia:

To the extent that ‘street level bureaucrats’ are alienated in their work, they will be more willing to accept organizational restructuring and less concerned with protecting clients’ interests and their own connection with clients. The more tenuous the relationship with clients, the less salient that relationship becomes, and the easier it is to transform the relationship further (p.79-80).

Many of the commenters on the Guardian piece overlook, or prefer to ignore, the fact that these cultural changes now taking hold of decent public servants are not in fact the devilish work of the Conservative government;  the ‘reforms’ were introduced in April 2010 under Labour.   What is to come under the Conservatives – ‘payment by results’ and privatised job centres – simply threatens to embed the removal of humanity from basic welfare services further.

If that was all there was, this would make for a pretty depressing piece: ordinary workers set against those who cannot get work in a cyclical frenzy of alienation and despair.

Coinidentally, though, I got an email earlier this week from the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), in my position of the leader of the Labour Group on my Borough Council, sent to test my council group’s political views, as part of an assessment of whether our election candidates might be worthy of the PCS political fund. 

The letter asks me to respond to the following five pledges:

1. I pledge to support the PCS ‘There is an Alternative’ campaign which prioritizes the closure of the tax gap together with investment in jobs and public services as an alternative to the government’s destructive economic policy of public spending cuts.

2. I pledge to support the principle of universal entitlement to welfare services paid for through general taxation and to oppose the UK government’s cuts in welfare which target the sick and disabled, families with children, those on low incomes, and pensioners.

3. I pledge to address the disproportionate impact of spending cuts on equality grounds, including ensuring that equality impact assessments are carried out.

4. I pledge to support the PCS campaign to protect public sector pensions as affordable and sustainable, including calling on the UK government not to increase pension contributions or make cuts in the value of pension payments.

5. I pledge to protect public services and work alongside PCS, other trade unions and community organisations in fighting to ensure that no further services are outsourced or privatised.

This reflects pretty well the call I was making back in my 2008 essay, when my own government wasn’t inclined to listen:

So how should the Left react to the ‘reforms’?  I’ve already indicated some ways in which we might seek to ameliorate the situation, given that the bill WILL go through and the ’reforms’ will be implemented, however badly.   

In general, I think alongside the protest marches and the opposition in totality, we need to be thinking about the best way to deal with what is coming. To a large extent, I think the responsibility has to lies with the unions, especially the PCS, not just to protest, but to get their members thinking at an early stage where their priorities lie. 

In practical terms this means looking at the ‘detailed guidance’ that comes out in due course, arguing long and hard over the drafts to make them fairer, working to ensure that the performance targets imposed reflect real people, not numbers on a claimant count, and working with their staff and all their unions  supporters to enable them to stand up to managers driving their ‘performance, by empowering those staff to say ”no, these people have a right to personalized and appropriate support – it says so in the guidance”.   It also of course means arguing and if need be striking hard for extra resources – staff, time, office space – to do the job properly.  

This will not be easy, and it will take a huger effort not just from the PCS but the whole union movement and its support to make what for some branches at least will be a step change from arguing the vital but narrow case for member conditions, to a scenario where members realize that their conditions and fairness to clients are inextricably intertwined, and that some form of ‘strategic alliance’ is needed to combat what is bad in the ‘reforms’ and to bring out what might be good if it’s given a proper chance. 

So it’s great to see the increasingly impressive PCS coming out so boldly in support, through their pledges, not just of their own members’ direct  interests, but of those whom they seek to serve, recognising that we really are ‘all in this together’.

I’ll be responding with enthusiasm to the PCS pledges, and I hope other Labour groups around the country will do the same. 

At the same time, the PCS statement vindicates my own decision to stand down from electoral local politics and, through a new push to re-establish a local Trades Council, get stuck into the real nitty gritty of defending the working class – whether or not they are in work – from the ravages of a failing New Labour, and the new assaults of the New Conservatism. 

This work is best done principally through organisational forms outside the Labour party, but within the labour movement, for as long as the Labour party national leadership chooses to distance itself from what is the right thing to do.  As the PCS and the Trades Council’s rise against the reforms, so too might the Labour party start to rethink its position.

There’s a big march in London tomorrow.  You may have heard about it.

How big will it be?  Some people are estimating 100,000.  Some say 300,000.  Some reckon it might be more than a million.

But the more relevant question is whether it matters how big it is?

No, say the pessimists.  A million marched in 2003. The war still happened. Yes, say the optimists. It’s different this time.

I tend cautiously to the latter view.  I, and many others, are marching for the first time in a while because there has been a surge in collective responsibility, as well as a genuine interest in what it will be like. 

In addition, the TUC and False Economy, amongst others, have done a very good job organising and advertising public transport:  600 (known) coaches with 50 people on each, plus 10 special trains means that we’re already talking 30,000 from the regions, and the knowledge that this is happening will have spurred on many more to make their own arrangements to get down.  Even many local Labour parties have got their act together.

But the fact that it might be big doesn’t make it matter more in itself.  It will only really matter if it really changes, or starts to change the rules about what marches mean.

As Mark Ferguson has noted, marches generally just make marchers feel better (though I suggest the exeception is direct counter marches), and the size is an irrelevance. 

But that’s in Britain.  In France, size matters because there is an acceptance on both sides of the marching argument that it does.  Take, for example, this mainstream media reporting of demonstrations in France about the increase in the retirement age being imposed by the Sarkozy regime:

Quelque 395.000 personnes ont manifesté en France pour la défense des retraites, dont 22.000 à Paris, selon le ministère de l’Intérieur, tandis que la CGT a fait état d’un million de manifestants…..

Ces taux sont moins importants que ceux de la journée d’action du 23 mars, date de la dernière journée de mobilisation, note le ministère dans son communiqué. La mobilisation avait été de 18,9% dans la Fonction publique d’Etat, 11,1% dans la Fonction publique territoriale, et 7,9% dans la Fonction publique hospitalière.

In France, both unions and the Interior Ministry measure the ‘strength of feeling’ by counting (and contesting) the number of demonstrators and associated strikers. 

This reflects the validity, rooted deeply in French political tradition, of the demonstration as proxy (even potent symbol) for what may come next.  It remains enough to have the ruling Parisian classes discussing the potential for working class foment over a soirée au 15ème, and to ensure that the appropriate ‘coups de téléphone’ are made the next morning.

The question is whether we can impose that validity in Britain, whether we can force the government to accept that size matters, especially by effective use of comparison with demonstrations in Egypt and elsewhere; whatever the disimmilarities, we should not let the media forget about Cameron touring Tahrir Square in a cynical attempt at reflected glory in the achievement of the Egyptian people.

I don’t know whether we can change what marches mean in the UK, especially for a first big march; as in France, it may be the trend in numbers which matters more than absolutes.  

But at the very least we should be aware of this as an objective, and as part of the strategy for the day we should be ensuring that we do get a statistically reliable picture of the numbers on the march so that the inevitable understimates emerging from the police can be properly countered. 

(This might be done most easily by a number of people simply recording the march as it goes past, counting the numbers moving through the frame in a minute, and then mutiplying this by the number of minutes taken for the start and end of the march (there will be some fuzziness at the end), again properly recorded and timed.)

Last week, when setting out 10 reasons why the best anti-cuts strategy for lefties is to stay positively engaged with Labour councils forced to make cuts, I wrote this:

It is, I suggest, perfectly legitimate to protest not just against a Council forced to make cuts, but against firms who should be taking a hit in their profits, while maintaining the services they agreed under contract (Reason 6).

Today the Liverpool Daily Post reports: