Though Cowards Flinch

It’s 30 years ago to the day that my dad was killed.  I’ve just got back over from my mum’s place in Oldham.  It was important to be there.  My sister will be there tonight.

Here, in his memory, is the post I wrote a few months ago about what I think my dad, a peace-loving second world war veteran, have made of the BNP.

RIP dad.

Just a quickie, but I have to.

Unlike Iain Dale, I am a trained nurse (registration now lapsed).  I trained at St George’s Hospital in Tooting in the 1980s, and worked in London, Switzerland, Bangladesh and (briefly) Lancashire, before moving on to the rest of my life.

I only raise this to establish some basic credibility, in order to then offier a corrective to Dale’s peddling of inaccurate crap on his website this morning.  He says:

‘So when I heard this morning that the NHS was now going to insist on a degree before nurses could train, I was dumbfounded.’

Yes, almost unbelievably, he thinks the new proposals mean that all trainee nurses will have to have a degree in something else before they start training to be a nurse.  It’s degrees IN nursing, we’re talking about, you ignorant, silly person [update: he’s now realised that bit and updated his own post.

Further, he has clearly never heard of Project2000, an initiative which started seven or eight years  before the year 2000, with a view to moving nurse education into higher education by about 2000. 

So when I say Dale’s a decade out of date, I’m being charitable.  His understanding of what modern nursing is really about is probably about fifty years out of date.

He says he was a nurse when he was in his gap year.  He might have been called an auxiliary nurse then, but now he’d almost certainly be called a Health Care Assistant (HCA) instead.  The details about how HCAs relate to nursing (and how being an HCA can lead into nurse training), are not very hard to find.

The training and career path of nursing has changed, and in many ways the HCAs now do what Enrolled Nurses did a quarter of a century ago. 

For Dale therefore to make out that the steps now proposed, which are to move the process towards the finalisation of a workforce strategy begun in the early 1990s under a Tory administration, are some kind of ridiculous overnight shift in policy thought up by Labour just for a laugh - a notion picked up eagerly by his trolls – is misleading at best, and damaging to the reputation of nursing profession at worst.  

Nursing as a profession gets enough shite from people eager to hark back to a Carry On world of  stern matrons, randy doctors and promiscuous ‘young things’, without Dale sticking his fact-free oar in.

He should be supporting the ‘modernisation’ of a workforce, not throwing around aspersions about what it does and doesn’t take to be a highly trained public servant.

I think there are issues with Project 2000 and what ensued, not least in relation to the terms and conditions of HCAs, but at least I know some of the facts, and how to use Google just to check them.

I’m writing this on the evening of  Thursday 05 November, but I won’t post it until the morning of Wednesday 11 November, because I don’t want there to be even the slightest chance that I might be accused of either seeking to, or actually affecting, the judicial process.

This morning (Thursday 05 November), the aunt of the now infamous Shannon Matthews was sentenced to a jail term of one year for benefit fraud of nearly £36,000.  My understanding is that she made an early guilty plea, which often leads to a lesser sentence than would otherwise have been the case.

This morning also, Tom Wise, an ex-MEP for UKIP, entered a guilty plea for fraud amounting to – quite coincidentally – £36,000.  He entered a guilty plea after two days of court proceedings and protracted discussions with this legal team.  While he can expect to have his guilty plea taken into account in terms of sentence, normal procedure would be that the delay in pleading guilty will lead to less of a sentence cut than would have been the case for a prompt guilty plea.

Mr Wise will be sentenced on Wednesday 11 November.  I will publish this post on that morning at the point when I know that it cannot possibly be picked up by the sentencing court (not very likely anyway) but before a judgment is announced.

Shannon Matthews aunt, who is noted only for being Shannon Matthews’ aunt, has not had many advantages in life, I think it’s probably fair to say.  Mr Wise has had had more advantages.

I bear no malice towards Mr Wise, but I wonder what his sentence will be in comparison to that of Shannon Matthews’s aunt.

Just as an initial matter of comparison, another former UKIP MEP Ashley Mote was sentenced to 9 months in jail two years ago, for benefit fraud amounting to £65,000.  Nearly twice the amount, three quarters of the sentence of Shannon Matthews’ aunt.

We’ll see.

I’m likely to cover the role of the big public sector unions in the potential resurgence of the left a fair bit in the next few posts, so reports that UNITE may be taken over soon by ‘leftwing insurgents’ – a rather dramatic way for the Sunday Times Political Editor to describe the possibility of more people voting for two candidates than two other candidates -  are pretty relevant.

But for this post, I’ll just focus on the way the said Political Editor reports it:

‘Westminster insiders believe that Unite, which has almost 2m members, is about to be taken over by left-wing insurgents who will sever the historic financial link with the Labour party.’

I’m sorry. Did I get that right?  Westminster insiders are telling the journalist what’s going on in the grassroots of the trade union movement?  How about checking stuff out with some trade union insiders?

In one fell swoop, we have revealed to us the shallowness of the mainstream political commentariat, as reflected by a Murdoch journo. 

For the commentariat, nothing is of any validity or importance if it’s not told to us by people in the Westminster village – presumably over cocktails.  And nothing is of political importance if it’s not about a political party’s immediate fortunes.

I’m glad there’s a chance of a challenge to the UNITE leadership.  I’m not so glad, for reasons set out here, that this may result in loss of Labour party affiliation, and will argue against such a loss. 

But most of all for the present I’m glad I can understand what politics actually is, much better than the political editor of the Times.

Martin Narey is the Chief Executive of Barnardo’s, and he is all over the front page of the Observer today with his call to ‘Take more babies away from bad parents’ (not that he actually uses these terms).

Naturally enough, in the ‘centre-left’ blogosphere, as defined by Iain Dale, the usual suspect is all over the story in a flash, displaying the highest level of moral indignation he can muster, and revelling in another opportunity to keep his trolls happy. 

His trolls are very happy, rushing in unopposed and unchallenged to condemn poor people in the Gorbals as a pointless underclass for whom sterilisation is by far the best option.

Yes, for this lot condemnation of Nu Liebour’s  ’nanny state’ is great, except when it come to the, erm, nanny state, where the state decides to take your children away if you can’t cope as well with grinding poverty as other people can with nice lives.  Well, not quite the nanny state, as you don’t get them back at night.

All good centre-left knockabout stuff, but let’s get back to Martin Narey and Barnardo’s for a moment.

Anyone who actually bothers to keep up with stuff, rather than just look at the front page of the weekend papers to see if there’s anything to tag along with, will know that this isn’t Martin Narey’s first such call for greater use of social work powers to remove children from their parents.  He made pretty well the same call on 24 January 2009 in the Sunday Telegraph, although there his call was more focused on the need to increase places in residential care rather than, as on this occasion, the need to increase adoption of babies.

In that piece, he writes: ‘It is important not to overreact in the aftermath of Baby P’s tragic death, the horror of Shannon Matthews’s dreadful childhood or the recent concerns over Doncaster.’ 

Yes, that’s the Doncaster case which has been in the news this week, shortly after which Narey chooses to do The Observer interview, and which is fully referenced in that article.  It may be important not to react, but Narey’s certainly happy to time his press coverage to maximum effect.

So why is Narey so keen to press the case in such a public arena, rather than just get on with presenting his evidence to the social work community that they need to be ‘braver’ in their decision making?

Well, I think Harry Fletcher assistant general secretary of the union for family court staff  may have been on to something when he said last time around: ‘Barnardo’s have a vested interest in residential homes because they run some of them.’

This time around, with the focus on adoption, it’s worth noting that Barnardo’s Fostering and Adoption Service  ‘work on behalf of, and in partnership with, a large number of local authorities across the UK. We are keen to develop new services………’

Just for clarity, that means that they have contracts for delivery of fostering and adoption services.   The overall income from contracts and public grants was £119m in the year to March 2008, up by around £8m on the previosu year, and that compares with £51m from fundraising and £27m for trading. 

While the annual accounts don’t give a breakdown between services, it’s fairly clear that fostering and adoption is an important area of Barnardo’s current business, and one itsk een to gorw under its fairly aggressive expansion strategy adopted since Martin Narey came in from the Prison Service in 2005.

Now I actually like Barnardo’s, and have been directly responsible for bringing in some of the money set out in the annual report.  They are respectful employers and the work I have seen is of a high quality; while I know nothing of their fostering and adoption service, I think some of their more developmental work, and work with young people, around confidence and rights, is excellent.  

I accept therefore that much of what drives Martin Narey to say what he’s been saying in recent months is out of genuine concern for the welfare and human rights of children in the UK, and that there is an acceptable interrelation between this commitment and a business strategy to do more of what Barnardo’s does by getting more local authorities to sign up to contracts for their services.

Nor do I have a huge problem with Martin Narey using the press cleverly, though I think timing his press releases as he does pushes it a little too far in the direction of cynical manipulation.  

The balance between a child’s right and the right of the family is a difficult one to achieve, and that is a big reason why the early articles Convention on the Rights of the Child are so complex.  There is validity, therefore, in seeking to open up debate about that balance.

I do think, in his desire to open up debate, Narey goes too far with his opening salvo, and overlooks utterly the negative conseqences of establishing state mechanisms which are much more keen to take children away.  Indeed such changes would impact negatively on some of the good work his own organization does with struggling, impoverished families, as  fear of the ‘social’ takes hold and all potentially helpful contact is avoided for fear of stigmatisation and removal of the child. 

Such stigmatisation is already a signficant factor in some Children’s Centre settings (this will be the focus of a separate article), and it’s worth noting that Barnardo’s holds major contracts for Children’s Centre delivery in Devon and Cumbria, at the very least.

Equally, and relatedly any move towards a greater willingness by the state to take children into care as an earlier option carries all the obvious risks of class bias amongst the ‘state agents’, of precisely the type that was displayed by the media over the tragic McCann case.

Opening up debate is fine, but it is important to look at all the reasons as to why it is being opened up, and to ensure that the debate once opened up is held responsibly.  I am not convinced that Martin Narey’s tactics meet those criteria.

But that, perhaps, is a judgment call, and one about which I could have a senisble debate with Martin Narey. 

What is much less acceptable, in my book, is for a supposedly serious Labour party politcian to lap up what he reads in the Sunday press, and present it without aforethought for the delight of his trolls and for his own narrow, career-focused  move towards the right in expectation of the gifts that might thereby come his way. 

Such self-serving shite has no place in the Labour party.  Not just my Labour party, anybody’s Labour party.  Tom Harris MP should take a look in the mirror.

It would be easy to write off the ongoing spat between so-called ’super-Keynesian’ economist Paul Krugman and liberal economic historian Niall Ferguson, in which Ferguson calls Krugman ‘patronising’  and Krugman calls Ferguson a ‘poseur’, as the stuff of early 1990s TV comedy.

But I think it could be more important than that, because of the different economic policies they support, even embody.

The origins of the dispute, long since overtaken by the personal vitriol, need not detain us to too long.

Briefly, Krugman accused Ferguson of not understanding economics very well at all, and that his fear of pressures on interest rates as a result of fiscal stimulus were unfounded, because, according to Krugman, ‘We have a global savings glut, which is why there is, in fact, no upward pressure on interest rates.’

Ferguson then went on to claim victory in the argument when US Treasury yields rose sharply, providing solid proof – so he claimed – that ‘the running of massive fiscal deficits….and the issuance therefore of vast quantities of freshly-minted bonds’ was indeed ’likely to push long-term interest rates up, at a time when the Federal Reserve aims at keeping them down.’

The ins and outs of the arguments are well summarised by Daniel Gross, but really boil down to the fact that:

‘the notion that the market is telling us something—anything—ultimately rests on the erroneous assumption that financial markets represent the collective wisdom of rational actors processing information efficiently…… The markets resemble the Star Wars bar scene more than they do the economics faculty lounge at Princeton.’

More important than all of this detail about interest rate rises and the precise (or chaos-based) reasons for it, is the battle for position on fiscal policy between Ferguson and Krugman, and their two policy camps; while Krugman pushes for continued fiscal stimulus to prevent a douple dip, Ferguson uses the interest rate rise argument to push for fiscal restraint, right here, right now.

As Duncan Weldon has said repeatedly, Krugman is right on this one, and Ferguson is wrong.  If the Ferguson camp can make him into the leading public figure economist on both sides of the Atlantic, conservative fiscal policy will win the battle of economic policy, and the future will be grim for millions.  It’s that serious.

It’s worth making the point in that context, therefore, that while Krugman has been consistent in his approach to economic policy, Ferguson is indeed a ‘poseur’, acting up to the crowd in his own interests, and making pretence of expertise he does not have.  And here’s my proof:

In the Los Angeles Times in October 2005, Ferguson stated:

‘Parties out of power usually tell themselves that sooner or later the incumbent will be tripped up by the economy. That was indeed the pattern throughout the 20th century. Yet this is to overlook four things.

First, economic volatility has declined markedly since the 1970s. In all the G7 industrialized countries, annual growth rates vary much less than they used to. So do inflation rates. Recessions are happening less often, and when they do, they are not too steep and not too protracted’ (my emphasis).

But here is what you said in Vanity Fair in January 2009 (yes, Vanity Fair), in an interview to publicise his new book, and in which he refer to a period very shortly after the appearance of Los Angeles Times article:

‘Well, I can say with a degree of self-satisfaction that it wasn’t luck. Two and a half years ago I decided to write this book, because I was sure that this financial crisis was going to happen, and the reason I was sure was because people kept coming up to me—whether it was investment bankers or hedge fund managers—telling me that volatility was dead that there would never be another recession. I just thought, ‘These people have completely disconnected from reality, and financial history is going to come back and bite them in the ass’ (my emphasis).

Like bollox he thought the financial crisis was going to happen! And that’s exactly why the book he refers to, ‘The Ascent of Money’, reads like one book praising to the heights the growth of financial innovation that led us to the mess we’re in, sandwiched between two hurriedly scribbled chapters telling us the story of what we already know, not least from Krugman himself (see also this damning review from November 2008).

For years Krugman has stood up against neo-liberal orthodoxy, and only  founds himself in some favour now that he’s been proven largely right about the dot.com and then housing bubbles.

Meanwhile, Ferguson writes and says what he thinks will please his readers and listeners, and what he knows will please most of his readers and listeners is the simplistic but dangerous certainties of fiscal conservatism.

That’s sort of a definition of ‘poseur’, and I rest my case.

The issue of the Afghanistan war seems to be one that won’t go away. Despite Conservative attempts to co-opt public anger and frustration by waving the issue of helicopters and equipment in front of the cameras, there is no keeping away from the central question: why are we there?

As someone who has spent the past few weeks in the high street campaigning on the issue, it would appear that nobody – including many soon to be deployed soldiers – is quite sure; something echoed in the polls where a majority now support withdrawal. The result is that pro-war rhetoric has made the shift from a positive message of what British troops can achieve to the fear-mongering question of what will happen if they leave.

At the heart of this is the plight of Afghan women, who after centuries of silent oppression are suddenly championed by international governments and the Afghan constitution, which declares them equal to men in all “rights and duties before the law.” We’re told that we must remain for their sake, lest all of the gains be lost.

One could be forgiven for thinking, therefore, that under the international forces and the Karzai government a liberal philosophy of equality and liberty is blossoming.  Yet even the briefest glance beyond the disingenuous rhetoric paints a very different picture.

So how have things advanced since 2002 when Dr Sima Samar, the then Minister in charge of women’s affairs, complained to Radio 4 from her office/living room that her ministry had been given “not a single dollar” from international donors?

Far from the picture painted by the government, we find a country of lawlessness, where 80% of the population still uses traditional dispute-resolution mechanisms rather than formal judicial channels, which are universally viewed as ineffective and corrupt. These are traditional mechanisms where female family members are regarded as currency to be traded back and forth to right wrongs done by male family members, and where a rape-victim may be forced into marriage with her rapist to protect family honour.

Yet they are little better than the official judicial channels they replace. The place of rape in the Afghan legal system is ambiguous, technically falling under ‘Zina’, a crime designed to combat adultery, and which, as a result, may lead to the imprisonment of the woman instead, making reporting of the crime an inherently risky business even from a legal perspective. This injustice is emphasised by the courts themselves, where women enjoy a very low standing, and which are widely recognised to have a strong bias in favour of men regardless of the evidence, taking conservative lines over even constitutionality. If we want to travel further down the line of the official system we can even find a case where all female inmates had to be transferred to a special female prison in Kabul to prevent the widespread sexual violence and abuse being orchestrated by the guards.

However, perhaps one of the most troubling aspects of taking any judicial path is the UN report (pdf) that the “overwhelming majority” of perpetrators gain immunity through links to military commanders, politicians, militia, or just by plain sexism. This is well demonstrated by one case where, after constant and heroic campaigning by a woman and her husband, three men were convicted of rape by the Supreme Court (allegedly at the order of a military commander, who was found innocent) and sentenced to thirteen years, only to have President Karzai pardon them. The woman’s husband was assassinated shortly afterwards.

With such low chances of success, and such danger, the majority of women choose not to report violence, sexual or otherwise, at all.  It is little surprise then that self-immolation among women is so frequent and on the rise.

The problem is not only the horrific conditions that women find themselves in, but the fact that these conditions are eroding, not improving. Continued military conflict in the country puts women at severe risk, and the occupation forces have come under sustained criticism for encouraging women to take part in economic and political life while failing to provide them any protection as they do so, leading to a climate of terror and self-censorship.

The Afghan government itself is playing a more active role in this erosion of women’s rights. Twenty-three year old student Sayed Kambakhsh was made famous by The Independent after he was sentenced to death for downloading and distributing literature about women’s rights (the official crime being blasphemy), his sentence ultimately standing at 20 years imprisonment thanks to intense international pressure.

And then there’s the Shia Personal Status Law, which President Karzai signed in April. This is an act that directly contradicts the aforementioned constitution by legalizing marital rape, restricting freedom to leave the home, and allowing forced marriages, alongside many more articles that restrict and violate the human rights of Shia women.

It was this that led the Asia director of Human Rights Watch to conclude the now consensus view that “Karzai has made an unthinkable deal to sell Afghan women out in return for the support of fundamentalists in the August 20 election.”

And when everything is said and done this is what it comes down to.  At the expense of the Afghan people the West and the Afghan government has found it expedient to empower the warlords and drug barons that have no interest women’s – or indeed, anyone’s – rights.  How can international forces claim to be fighting for the women of Afghanistan while they continue to support their oppressors?

We’ve only scratched the surface here, but it quickly becomes apparent that any defence of the occupation on the basis of women’s liberation is a farce. Not only does the Afghan government’s apparatus fail to reach the vast majority of women, but even where it does it’s found to be misogynistic, corrupt, ineffective, and often downright dangerous. At the top the government prefers to play to the warlords and clerics, implementing laws that echo those the UK government claims the troops are there to protect Afghans from.

The suspension of a colleague from school is one of the great taboos of teaching. Upon the lodging of a sufficiently serious complaint, a teacher can be automatically suspended. While suspended, the teacher in question may not contact co-workers, and co-workers are often handed an injunction not to talk about the issue among themselves by Senior Management Team. These are serious conditions to impose upon someone who has just faced the shock of accusations and suspensions, and upon their friends.

MPs say that it comes very close to violating the tradition of “innocent until proven guilty“.

A new report just released by the Committee on Children, Schools and Families (HC695) has called these practices ‘unjust’ and ‘inhumane’. Chair of the Committee, Barry Sheerman – MP for Huddersfield – said, “My committee heard shocking evidence about the treatment of accused staff and the devastating impact unfounded allegations of misconduct can have on those involved, which can ruin careers and can come at a significant physical, mental and financial cost.” I suspect most teachers who have seen colleagues suspended would agree.

Teachers base a lot of their lives around their school. Their colleagues are intimate friends, forming a support network for one another. Rudely to rip someone from those connections is very unfair. There is a counter-argument to be made that if other teachers in the school become aware of who is making the accusations, they may attempt to bully the child into silence. There’s also the case to be made that, if someone genuinely is mistreating a child, it’s unfair to allow that mistreatment to continue while evidence is gathered.

From the point of view of child protection, therefore, better an adult should suffer than a child. Whatever percentage of accusations ultimately prove true, even if they are as low as 5% (which is what the Unions say), it is still better that 95% of innocent teachers be put through the stress than the 5% of children making well founded accusations. That said, I don’t believe the either-or situation is healthy, nor do I believe it is necessary. I believe it exposes some weaknesses in the heirarchical nature of education in the UK.

Pupils behave just like any other sector of the workforce. Some are lazy, some are ambitious, some are calculating, some are needy. Yet the interests of all are served in just the same way – through a collectively expressed self-interest. When it comes to pupil welfare, there can be no greater protection than having pupils look out for one another – each knowing how to access support and proactively address situations as they arise. A big problem, of course, is that giving pupils such self-confidence can backfire upon management in a number of ways.

As a very political pupil, I was threatened with exclusion on several occasions – in one case with permanent exclusion. Having appeared on two regional radio interviews, to encourage pupils to walk out of school when bombing began in Iraq, I was accosted by the Principal and Vice-Principal (Discipline) and told in no uncertain terms that if I led a walk-out of school, I would be expelled. Six hundred students chose to walk out, rendering the bluster of senior management completely ineffective. A self-confident student body would create numerous such headaches.

Actually on that occasion I was kept behind after school to hear an extended version of the usual lecture, which is quite a serious breach of protocol. For any after-school detention, parents are supposed to be given 24 hours’ notice.

While I support the conclusions of the Parliamentary report that keeping a suspended teacher away from his or her colleagues is a bad idea, I think it will take some time before we can treat teachers as entirely innocent until proven guilty. Without additional protection, we can’t simply let accused teachers continue to teach, and we can’t take the risk that others may choose to act unprofessionally in defence of someone they may feel to be innocent, rightly or wrongly. Children deserve protection. That additional protection comes in the form of pro-active students, collectively encouraged to take things into their own hands.

We spend enough time trying to work out how to encourage our students to learn independently – this is just as important. It involves our young people knowing the correct procedures for child protection, including whom to turn to. Pupils should be encouraged to have expectations of how their teacher will act in a classroom and out of it; and they should know not to leave any of their number alone in a classroom with only one adult. These should be the sort of things addressed by the (hitherto mostly ineffective and puppeteered) Student Councils in each school.

From the point of view of teachers, encouraging this sort of positive action is a win-win situation. When it comes to demanding better terms and conditions, our pupils should be asked whether or not they support the demands. They have the right to a say – and such a step might prevent them being used as a political football by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, the default press release of which is “Teaching Unions obviously don’t care about the education of children, which they are preventing by going on strike” etc.

Giving young people responsibility for and input into matters of welfare policy begins to prepare them for taking responsibility for political issues, as citizens in a democracy. In truth our young people should have the power to determine many things about their education, which are prescribed for them. What they learn in a classroom, for example. Determining whether or not teachers are permitted to shout in a classroom, or knowing when to approach senior staff and with what evidence they might need, would be a good step towards giving pupils more authority.

All of this probably sounds quite high minded until one thinks that we’re talking about children from the ages of 11 upwards. Pupils aged 16 might be able to deal with such issues, you might think, but surely most 11 year olds are still playing cops and robbers when they go home? I don’t rate such an approach; one of the professional standards of teaching is to show a consistently high expectation from pupils – and ok, we can’t teach them Quantum Physics til they know the basics about Atomic Physics, but we can construct a ladder up which they proceed in this just as in any other aspect of learning.

If it saves the pain of hundreds of teachers, unfairly suspended, put through hell, kept away from their friends and potentially forced out of work, then that’s a bonus.

“The price for power-sharing.” With such words was the news greeted last year that six councillors in Ballymena, a DUP stronghold, were defecting to the Traditional Unionist Voice. Since then, defections have continued. Sixty-six thousand votes in the European elections later, TUV have lost their only MEP – Jim Allister, who was elected under a DUP banner – but they have not been alone in their losses. Apart from defections to TUV – which amounts to something like 13 councillors, the DUP have also recently lost one in Dungannon to the UUP and one in Ballymena to the Conservatives.

If I was asked for some poetic reasoning behind these defections, I can do no better than to turn to Cllr. Robin Sterling, who jumped ship from DUP to TUV soon after Ian Paisley was removed as Moderator by his own creation, the Free Presbyterian Church: “I think a bigger factor is that the DUP are attempting to modernise and to free themselves from Paisley’s past – his extravaganza of throwing bibles, the street politics and the tasteless attacks on the Roman Catholic church.” In a nutshell this encapsulates the appeal Paisley exerted on Unionist grassroots.

Unionism is a contradiction, seeking to politically mobilise the Protestant working class even whilst it demands that this working class accept a leadership that doesn’t act in working class interests. As the DUP ‘modernises’ itself, in response to the demands of the Northern Irish political establishment and of power-sharing with Sinn Fein, it loses the ability to reconcile these elements through charismatic figures such as Ian Paisley. Indeed Ian Paisley built up his credibility by attacking Unionist politicians and dispensers of patronage who danced the very masquerade of ‘community dialogue’ and power sharing that has characterised Northern Irish politics since Sunningdale.

Continuing this contradiction will either destroy power-sharing, or destroy the DUP, as a new charismatic leader emerges to continue the myth so necessary to sustaining the position of the Loyal Orange Lodges, Unionism and a vitriolic Protestantism in the eyes of half the Northern Irish working class. The Republican movement is subject to this pressure as well, but it does not share many of the traditions of the Unionist movement – there is no clear precedent for knifing one’s comrades, and no touchstone over which to do so, such as the forced collapse of the Sunningdale executive forms for those seeking to overturn the Good Friday Agreement and current power-sharing.

Today is the Twelfth of July, a day significant for the Unionist population of Northern Ireland. Last year, at Orange marches scheduled around the Twelfth fortnight, some DUP politicians were given a cold reception by the grassroots. David Simpson (an MP) was heckled from the sidelines, and refused to return the way he had come, after marching with the Orange Order through Scarva. Daryl Hewitt was also heckled. It will be interesting to see how the senior figures of Unionism, of the DUP stripe, are received this year. Peter Robinson, First Minister and DUP leader, has been meeting with the reviled Republican, Brendan MacCionnaith.

MacCionnaith heads the residents association of Garvaghy in Portadown. This is a vital area as the Orange Order holds a big march (and often a subsequent protest when they are refused their march by the Parades Commission) up the Garvaghy Road. In 1995 and 1996, this resulted in widespread riots and the seizure of roads and public transport on the part of both Republicans and Unionists. It is a continuing bone of contention, over which the UUP was seen to be more amenable to compromise while the DUP maintained their hard line. As the issue seems to be less pressing than in 1996, the DUP have escaped with some fudging.

Traditional Unionist Voice are still hot on the issue. In his (pisspoor) policy document, which relies heavily on the book of a Daily Mail columnist, Jim Allister, leader of TUV and now former MEP, declares, “The fundamental problem lies not with the Loyal Orders but with Republicans”. Compare this to MacCionnaith’s assessment of Peter Robinson, who ostensibly toes the same line as Allister: “He accepted that there was widespread opposition to the march through the nationalist community in Portadown. He is trying to see the views on both sides of this.” All the potential fault lines are there; a little stress and the Unionist vote is off to the races.

A slow haemorrhaging of councillors or unionist sympathy from the DUP could be just the beginning of a realignment.

Due to moving house and thus having no internet connection for the last several weeks I have missed many of the main news stories, or at least been unable to blog about them. During my ‘down’ time, I read a biography of Tony Benn and dipped into the diaries of both Benn and Richard Crossman. How fitting then that when I emerge, there should be a prominent story about a Civil Servant, fired for voicing her opinions openly on a political website. The political bias of the Civil Service is a recurrent theme of Benn and Crossman.

Of course as ministers, Benn and Crossman came into contact with senior Civil Servants – not people like Miss Lisa Greenwood. Greenwood wrote on the website of Hazel Blears that MPs had swindled the public. A fair point to make, one would have thought, and not at all deserving of sacking. The whole issue is rendered a bit preposterous when one sees through the eyes of Tony Benn how senior Civil Servants used to fiddle with written parliamentary answers that Benn was to deliver to the House of Commons in his own name, because they didn’t like the policy!

Even today, the senior members of the Civil Service are quite evidently not impartial. For example, there’s Sir John Elvidge, who essentially acts like the running dog of the SNP. Or Phil Wheatley, who owes his position to Labour and the disastrous attempt to introduce NOMS; Wheatley was recently accused of telling a Union leader not to criticize the government, not to mention attacking the Conservatives. There is a long standing question over how Civil Servants prep their ministers to answer questions, and whether it is even possible to do so impartially.

The Bickerstaffe correspondent to Ye Olde Socialist Blogosphere writes of Steve Bundred, head of a Quango, who came out and attacked the government’s handling of the financial crisis. Let’s not even mention Mervyn King and the row he stirred up not too long ago. It seems quite clear that the Civil Service can be as partial as it likes, so long as the person speaking publicly about it already has the political clout to resist being fired or otherwise silenced by the government of the day or their immediate ass-covering prig superiors.

Lisa Greenwood’s only crime was to be poor. A worker earning £16,000 a year is unlikely to be able to pay high flying lawyers to sue for wrongful dismissal – especially for the censure of “gross misconduct” which was registered against her by a disciplinary committee that was organised within seven days of the offence. For Lisa Greenwood too, there is no cheque of compensation to rival that received by Hazel Blears following her self-righteous and ultimately disastrous resignation from the Cabinet. The whole thing is utterly ridiculous.

Our Civil Service is biased. The stories that hit the media reinforce the points repeatedly made by Cabinet Ministers who range from Far Left to Far Right in political outlook. It would be summary and superficial to dismiss this bias as not political but rather an institutional conservatism, a desire not to have the boat rocked. Every study released (e.g. The British System of Government) confirms the Oxbridge bias in the senior echelons of the Civil Service; how nice to see one of the real workhorses of the Civil Service get her chance to speak out.

The follow up act should be for Lisa Greenwood to stand for Parliament against Ms Blears.

A wider issue is raised, however, by this notion of bias within the Civil Service. Whether one accepts Nicos Poulantzas’ view that Civil Servants at the more ‘political’ end of business become prisoners of the capitalist ideology by virtue of the function of the State, or the view of Miliband that the background of these senior Civil Servants influences them in the execution of their jobs (rendering them relatively friendly to mainstream Tory and Labour, well inculcated into Oxbridge by now, but hostile to the extremes) how to implement socialist policy is a real question.

What about some industrial democracy? Tony Benn once said that we should ask any powerful person the following five questions; What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you use it? To whom are you accountable? How do we get rid of you? The problem comes from questions 2 and 4. Civil Servants derive their power from the institutional memory, of which they are the keepers, and from connections developed over years in the political frontline. This has a knock on effect as regards their accountability.

I’m not arguing, of course, that Civil Servants aren’t accountable. In theory, they are eminently accountable. On the other hand, anyone who has followed the HP Sauce column of Private Eye for the last ten years will clearly see that Civil Servants can be as adept as any elected politician at obfuscation and evasion. Moreover, as I think the political biography of Labour 1997-2010 will show, it is easy to develop alternative structures to the traditional Civil Service when Cabinet Ministers or particularly the Prime Minister think it opportune.

The ‘Central Government’ chapter by Fawcett and Rhodes in Anthony Seldon’s Blair’s Britain 1997-2007 seems to bear me out on this one.

However, this government hasn’t been interested in pursuing socialist policy. Its special advisors and various other alternative structures of governance have been able to call in a vast amount of politically sympathetic individuals from across the private sector. This would not be the case for a government that was elected with a mandate to curb market forces, raise taxation on the wealthy and basically restrict capitalism to the greatest extent possible. Unlikely as that seems, in the current climate, what to do on Day 1 of such a government is something to think about.

Yes, I’m all about making preparations to overthrow the government by violent, democratic revolution and install a system of workers’ deputies. But we’ve seen from other examples of revolutionary states just how easily power can be wielded behind the scenes when questions like this aren’t discussed and resolved. A system of industrial democracy, where rather than being central appointees, different branches of the civil servants elect their own line managers right the way to the top seems like a system admitting of more checks on the arbitrary wielding of power.