Progress | News and debate from the progressive community

Golden opportunity for Labour

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:25:00 GMT

His excruciatingly awful attempt on the Today programme to answer some basic questions about how this would work in our schools allowed me to respond that day on TV and radio that the Tories didn't understand co-operatives because they don't have co-operative values.

I labelled them as clueless and opportunistic and contrasted their time in government with Labour's substantial but often unnoticed track record, including cooperative trust schools, NHS foundation trusts, football supporters' trusts and the most comprehensive package of legislation in the history of the cooperative movement.

Yet while the Tories' faux commitment to something as progressive as the cooperative ideal could be easily dismissed at the time, it did little to deter them from exploiting the idea and using it as a stalking horse for a bigger strategic ploy - moving them closer to the centre ground of politics and dispelling their Thatcherite past.

Their manifesto and the subsequent Big Society narrative, although badly intentioned and ill-thought through, nonetheless had some resonance as it appeared to promote in some way the idea of people having a say in the running of the institutions that affect their lives.

Labour's manifesto, like its performance in government, was very strong on cooperative ideas. Twenty four of the Co-operative party's manifesto proposals were incorporated into Labour's document, including the remutualisation of Northern Rock, the establishment of mutual Sure Start centres, allowing supporters to buy a stake in their football clubs, encouraging energy cooperatives and giving communities the opportunity to run local services.

Yet many voters would not have made the connection between those 24 initiatives and a bigger theme of cooperation and mutuality. It was clearly the golden thread that ran through Labour's policy agenda and was ideally suited to the battle of ideas in the first election campaign of the post-credit crunch era. But the manifesto, while rich in substantial policy ideas, was not overtly cooperative in theme and narrative.

It was the most radically cooperative manifesto in living memory, yet the potential to use this as a unifying message that chimed with the economic and political mood of the campaign was not completely fulfilled.

Was this a missed opportunity? In some ways, yes. Mutuality is the perfect ideological next step in the evolution of New Labour. It neatly combines a modernising agenda with the challenge of reconnecting with the party's base and the values that drive people to activism in the movement.

It is a progressive agenda that reconciles that activism with the important progress made by Labour in government in combining the best of the public, private and third sectors. This was very successfully demonstrated by Labour-Co-Op MP Ed Balls, at both the treasury and department for children, schools and families, and by Tessa Jowell in her announcements on the ‘mutual moment' in public service delivery.

It was further demonstrated by the 115 Labour groups in local authorities around the country that pledged in the campaign to become ‘co-operative councils' and introduce measures that would put local people in control of local services.

Labour's cooperative policy ideas, both in government and what it proposed for a fourth term, were not lacking ambition or scale, but they needed to be presented to the public in a way that anchored them in a set of values with which they could identify. However, that opportunity is not lost.

As Labour thinks carefully about its future direction and the choice of its next leader over the coming months, there is considerable scope to promote cooperation and mutuality as not just a set of disparate ideas but a visible guiding influence on how we respond to the challenges of opposition.

Those challenges are as much about how we connect with the values and aspirations of the people we seek to represent as the detail of our ideas.

Cooperation and mutuality are ideas whose time has come back. We should make sure they take their legitimate place in the very successful ongoing relationship between Labour and its sister organisation the Co-operative party.

Value for money - for who?

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:05:00 GMT

Every programme and policy is under review, to be judged on its ability to ‘get every penny from every pound' in the fight against poverty. Assuming that one shouldn't aim to get only ‘almost every penny from almost every pound', this can only be a good idea. Money better spent is more kids in school, more people with clean water, and happier taxpayers. But has this mantra been translated into the big decisions since the election?

The evidence to date is mixed, but one recent warning sign is the decision to spend what could amount to around £200 million of aid money on an airport on the British Overseas Territory of St Helena, a project supported by Lord Ashcroft and slammed by Denis MacShane as "a scandal of Pergau Dam proportions".

To put it in context, that's spending the equivalent of what the UK invests in providing access to water and sanitation to the whole of Africa every year - itself an underfunded area - on an island with a population of just over 4000 people who the secretary of state describe as British citizens.

Might this be the first big example of the new government using the aid budget as a cross-departmental subsidy, to cover things you might imagine should really come from elsewhere? Maybe it's too early too tell, but when questioned in parliament last week on whether DfID would pick up the tab for the care of refugees, overseas students and even the BBC World Service, the new secretary of state's answers were perhaps revealing in their obfuscation.

The value for money mantra may be undermined by other developments too, with some fundamental shifts afoot on where aid goes to, and for what purpose. A clear priority for the new DfID ministerial team is a much greater focus on providing aid to militarily strategic countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan - the latter to increase by 40 per cent - while also linking its delivery much more closely and explicitly to foreign policy and security goals.

The flipside of this will be a withdrawal from a number of now-deemed middle-income countries like China, Russia and possibly India too - the absence of Andrew Mitchell being widely noted during this week's visit to India.

Whether we provide aid to countries where a huge proportion of the world's poor still live despite them being able to find the money for space programmes, Olympics and nuclear arsenals, is a sensible debate to have, and goes beyond party lines. For example, there are more poor people in eight Indian states than in the poorest 26 African countries according to a new UN poverty index, yet its economy is growing at 9 per cent per year and the resources it might be able to mobilise from its own economy far outweigh those it could ever get from aid.

An interesting blog by Alison Evans at the ODI talks more about this debate, but regardless of the conclusion the overarching worry is that these tricky but crucial decisions may now be taken not on what is best value for money in eradicating poverty, but what is best value for money in serving British foreign policy.

This is where logic and mandates can become dangerously mixed. Withdrawing aid from India and putting it into Pakistan might make sense from a security perspective, but given it has a similar GDP per capita and expenditure on a nuclear arsenal, could it be justified in terms of value for money for reducing poverty alone? The same question might be asked of Afghanistan which, while undoubtedly being one of the world's poorest countries, provides an extremely uncertain return on investment. One might also crudely argue that rebuilding things we've blown up is not really what aid is intended for.

These are conjectures, and allocating aid in the most effective way is not easy. But it is not served by watering down the mission statement. Over the last decade DfID has built an impressive reputation as the world's leading aid agency, as outlined in a recent OECD report. A clear and unambiguous focus on poverty reduction above all else was key to this, and must be protected if we want to get real value for money in delivering schools, medicines and latrines for the world's poorest communities. No other criteria will do.

Steve Cockburn is a member of the Labour Campaign on International Development - for more information go to www.lcid.org.uk

Photo: DFID - UK Department for International Development 2010

Movement politics

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:00:00 GMT

At least two of the candidates in the Labour leadership election see a future for the party as a kind of ‘movement'. David Miliband seeks to rebuild Labour as a ‘movement for change' and has committed himself to providing basic introductory courses for 1000 activists in community organising in his campaign. Meanwhile, Ed Miliband wishes to see a Labour party that is a ‘living social movement' of ideals and values.

Creating a ‘movement' is clearly attractive to a party in which membership and activism have precipitously slumped over a sustained period - with a few well-documented and eye-catching exceptions. To what extent though can a party really become a ‘movement'? The answer is with great difficulty, especially if we understand the true nature of ‘movement' politics.

We could of course look back to our own history. There is the Labour movement itself whose successes are self-evident - though they built up over the course of a century. The collective and pluralistic pursuits of social action oriented faith, the trade unions, cooperatives and friendly societies coalesced into a movement that eventually led to the creation of the Labour party. Only the Chartists and other political reformists and women's representation movements come even close to matching the achievements of the Labour movement in modern British history.

The key point here, though, is that the Labour party came out of a movement not the other way round. And yet, the challenge that is now presented to the party is to do precisely the reverse: to create a new movement out of the party.

Evidence from across the Atlantic also suggests that this task may well be trickier than it sounds. There have been two great movements in recent American history. There is no questioning the monumental achievements of the civil rights movement. It was driven by the ideals of moral justice. Its power was that of people - marching, gathering, resisting, and mobilising. When Martin Luther King stepped down from the Lincoln Memorial and made the short journey to the White House in August 1963, he was greeted by a grinning John F Kennedy who told the preacher from Georgia that he had a dream too. And thus, America's cruel walls of segregation and separation crumbled.

Equal voting rights and civil rights changed America. But it was the movement that followed it and, in part, was a reaction to it, that was America's most successful ‘movement for change.' That was the audacious and many headed conservative movement. If the civil rights movement was driven by a sense of moral injustice, the conservative movement was motivated by a sense of moral outrage.

The outrage was in reaction to judicial and legislative changes which took place from the 1950s to the 1970s. Civil rights; judicial activism resulting in the banning of prayers in schools, rights for suspects, and, of course, abortion rights; and the passing of an equal rights amendment (never enforced) suggested to many a country that was shifting away from responsibility and moral rectitude to one that was permissive and morally hollowing out. Race riots in America's big cities, humiliating defeat in Vietnam, and an economy spiralling out of control by the early 1970s further suggested a country that was on the wrong track. Its leaders were impotent - and corrupt - and the American way of life was seemingly under threat like never before. At the same time the USSR was a real and ever present threat to the country's national security and its deepest held values.

By 2008, the conservative movement had helped Republicans to occupy the White House for 28 out of the 40 years following the Voting Rights Act. The presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton seem almost anomalous. Carter beat the hapless post-Watergate Gerald Ford. Bill Clinton was fortunate in having the well-financed independent Ross Perot take millions of votes away from George H W Bush in 1992.

Context is one thing but the response was particular. The conservative movement was idealistic and formed from not entirely compatible strands of conservative thought: neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism, and Christian conservatism. It worked through thinktanks, publishing houses and periodicals (and later talk radio and cable TV news.) It was driven through churches and other civil society institutions to disseminate argument, politicise socially conservative America, and mobilise for power. It built a financial and institutional infrastructure to maintain its social, ideological, and political power. And this is the key point: it was comprehensive, deep and frighteningly well resourced and financed. It wasn't the Republican party that built it. In fact, the Republican party was more often its object.

Equally, that was the case with the Obama campaign. The Democratic party was its target. It was built entirely outside the party machine - other than the fact that it was the party's primary process - and then essentially initiated what was a hostile takeover. Whether it proves to be as enduring as the conservative movement remains to be seen. It should be said that the main paradigm of the campaign was not community organising - a different thing. It was more the movement-based politics of civil rights, Chicago's urban movement politics of the 1980s, and, yes, the conservative movement also.

Again, much of the infrastructure-building on the left had taken place before the campaign: financing and strategy was provided by Democracy Alliance. Grassroots campaigning know-how and technology advantage was identified by groups such as Move On and those techniques were first brought into the Democratic party by Howard Dean's campaign in 2004. So this wasn't a case of ‘let's build a movement'. It was more a response to a disparate and inchoate movement that already existed.

So the construction of a movement by a party or a party leadership may be a strange way round of doing things. What is far more important is that the state of the plural left's institutional infrastructure is considered. Beyond party ideas, action and institutions will all matter. The money question can not be ducked by the left. Again, this is not just about the party. It's about unions, campaigns, blogs, technology, think tanks, publications, and media. It's also about realising that there isn't a single answer to the renewal of Labour or the left more broadly. We live in fragmented and pluralistic times. Labour may simply get to engage and amplify a movement - if it gets it right.

Ed Miliband has shown an understanding of this by working with Citizens UK on the living wage campaign. Amplifying their campaign, and acknowledging their ownership of it, demonstrates the type of pluralistic commitment that Labour will need.

Movements are complex but remarkable social and political phenomena. How does a stream become a river and what course will the river take? What the labour, civil rights, conservative, and Obama movements share is this: there is cause, there are ideals, there is a sense of injustice or outrage; the movements exist on a range of intellectual and organisational levels, they are pluralistic, have practical aims, and while there is leadership, it never has real control.

Movements and parties can be symbiotic. Movements create the space and necessity for change. Parties use their political and legislative muscle to make it happen. For that symbiosis there needs to be common cause. Where should Labour begin? An expression of authentic and humane idealism might be a spark. At the very least, it might mean that the party is heard once again. And that won't do any harm at all.

The egos have landed

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 12:58:00 GMT

The time for a balanced and dispassionate assessment of the New Labour record is not yet upon us. It may be several years before contemporary historians are able to stand back with sufficient distance to do justice to the achievements and failings of the remarkable phenomenon that was set in train by Tony Blair's election to the leadership on 21 July 1994. But when they do, the unexpurgated diaries of Alastair Campbell are likely to be the single most valuable source of detailed and informed observations from the heart of the project.

This is only the first volume and it is not for the faint hearted. Those of us who knew Alastair was keeping a diary had no idea just how comprehensive it was. How he found the time or the stamina to record so much detail at the end of long and exhausting days is a mystery, but the same can be said of all the best diarists of the modern political age. We should just be grateful that he did.

Few will read every word. Let me show some rare candour for a reviewer and admit that I haven't, and indeed probably never will. But that is not the point. As a reference tool, as an academic resource and for the pure pleasure of it, Prelude to Power can be dipped into endlessly. Every page carries insights and observations that are both informative and entertaining. If for those who were closely involved at the time, either as participants or observers, it sometimes seems like a series of Groundhog days, well many of them were good days and are worth reliving. Others sound like days from hell and that's clearly what they felt like at the time.

Before assessing the true value of any diary, however, the first question that has to be resolved is just how self-serving and, by implication, how compromised it is as a reliable source. All diarists believe they are taking part in something of significance, otherwise why bother? Some are ready to acknowledge that their own role in those events is as a bit player. The magnificent volumes from Chris Mullin fall into this category, and at a far more modest level I hope my own efforts (The Spin Doctor's Diary, 2005) do the same. Alastair Campbell, on the other hand, was self-evidently a central figure. What makes Prelude to Power so valuable is that he never seeks to exaggerate his own role and is usually ready to admit when he's made a mistake or failed to perform as well as he could have done.

Of course Alastair has an ego on him. He could not have done the job he did for so long if he didn't. But when others told him as much - and Cherie Blair and his own partner, Fiona Millar, were often ready to remind him that he wasn't infallible - he records it as faithfully as everything else. Politics is an ego-filled environment. I remember the look of incomprehension on Tony Blair's face when I complained to him about the extraordinary self-obsession of one particular individual. What did I expect, he asked? That was in 1999. By then Blair had become hardened to the endless personality clashes and feuds, although at the start of his leadership they were a source of intense frustration and sometimes anger.

Like Blair, Campbell found the competing agendas of the senior politicians around him maddening and self-indulgent but he managed them with a remarkable degree of skill and patience. As a result Alastair was the one man that everybody still talked to no matter how bad things got and who was treated with respect and even affection by all who knew him well. Those who have only seen him through the prism of the media as a bully and a megalomaniac may find that hard to believe, but it happens to be true.

Prelude to Power provides a mass of detail that had to be cut from The Blair Years, published in 2007, for reasons of space. It also reveals what Alastair thought and wrote about Gordon Brown and his team but didn't include in the earlier volume out of loyalty to the new party leader. Had Brown and those closest to him shown the same loyalty to Blair then the record of New Labour's 13 years in power would have been very different. This volume, and no doubt those that are to follow, will make uncomfortable reading for all those who allowed Brown's misplaced sense of resentment to influence their behaviour for so long.

The idea that all the tensions and rows were somehow ‘six of one and half a dozen of the other' deserves to be debunked and a fair reading of the 750 pages published here will go someway towards that.

Too often it is the questionable behaviour of some of the big names that stands out, but there is space, too, for the many other people who gave their all to see Tony Blair elected. Today new leaders are, with luck, in a prelude to power of their own. They can learn much from this book about how to avoid the mistakes of the past, but just as importantly about the conviction, imagination and sheer hard work required to turn the ambition for power into the reality.

'It's the buses'

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 07:30:00 GMT

It was at the 2006 local elections - a year most Labour activists would rather forget - that Ed Miliband had a conversation that would radically alter his approach to politics. A local party member told him the turnout had been ‘terrible', but the reason she offered for local people's disillusionment with politics surprised the recently-elected Doncaster MP.

‘It's the buses,' she told him. ‘If people thought local politics made any difference they think it would have an effect on the bus services in this area, but actually the bus services are terrible and nobody's doing anything about them - local authorities don't have any power over them.'

‘That story brought home to me that the way you make people think politics matters is by being concerned about the things that matter to them,' reflects Miliband. ‘In the end it's about whether politics speaks into people's lives.'

Miliband attributes Labour's defeat at the general election to the fact that ‘people lost the sense of what we believed and who we stood up for'. ‘What tends to happen over time in government, and I'm afraid it happened to us, is that you become managers and lose sense of your values and therefore lose sense of what you stand up for.'

The former energy and climate change secretary frequent mention of values has been translated into some bold, even controversial, policy proposals. Aside from leftwing leadership rival Diane Abbott, he has perhaps been the leadership candidate most critical of New Labour's relationship with business and most vocal about taming markets.

Miliband has backed calls for a High Pay Commission to look at pay differentials in the private and public sectors and what can be done to narrow the gap. He stops short of proposing a maximum wage, however, saying it is too difficult to achieve. ‘I am in favour of sending out a clear message from government that the differentials matter,' he says, adding that more transparency is needed about who bonuses are paid to and how decisions on pay are made.

His stance on tax will also appeal to the left. Miliband wants to keep the 50p rate for earnings over £150,000 both to help cut the deficit and to contribute to tax fairness. ‘The tax system is not fair enough,' he asserts.

Miliband has also come out strongly in favour of a living wage, inspired - like his former cabinet colleague James Purnell - by the campaigning work of London Citizens. Few would disagree such a policy is desirable, and it is sure to warm the hearts of many rank and file party members, but what would he say to local councils facing 10 per cent income cuts and pressure to still deliver important services to residents? Surely a living wage is simply not affordable?

‘In some cases it will be hard to do in the short term, but I think it's important to have it [the living wage] on the agenda,' he says, before pointing out that some local authorities in places such as Glasgow, Newham and Oxford, have already implemented the policy. ‘It doesn't always cost as much as people expect ... whenever you struggle for something important it takes time to implement it.'

Another goal that Miliband's leadership rivals think might take longer to implement is a shadow cabinet composed of 50 per cent women. At the recent Labour leadership hustings, jointly hosted by Progress, Ed Balls and David Miliband both argued that the proportion of shadow ministerial posts held by women should reflect that of the overall PLP, not necessarily a half. Why does Miliband insist on 50 per cent?

Pointing out that this is common practice in Scandinavian countries such as Sweden, as well as Spain, Miliband responds: ‘We need a grown up, not a macho, style of politics, and frankly 100 Labour women elected in 1997 changed the political conversation. We need to change it again. I think it would change our style of politics.'

New Labour, according to Miliband, became too caught up in a macho style of politics and too obsessed with centralised, top down control. ‘[Labour] used to say in the old days, you've got to sign up lock stop and barrel to the whole ideology. But actually you should recognise there are people who come to what we do in different ways.'

One group Miliband feels particularly qualified to reach out to, given his recent cabinet portfolio, is environmentalists - a particularly bold ambition given the recent election of the first Green MP. He has stated publicly that he would like to see Labour's membership contain ‘ex-Greens'. ‘I think I've shown as climate change secretary that I can help transform our reputation on these issues: on cold-fired power stations, on low carbon transition, on Copenhagen,' he says. ‘The work that my department did became a focal point for an alliance with environmentalists, not an opposition to environmentalists.'

‘With us you don't just get green politics, you also get fairness, which has got to be a central part of a green vision, and a commitment to an industrial future for Britain.'

All well and good, but the fact remains that Labour has lost most votes to the Tories, and suffered the electoral consequences. What is Miliband's strategy to sign up ‘ex-Tories' to the Labour party?

A key element, says Miliband, would be to carve out a strong pro-small business message, a sector of the population traditionally allied to the Tories. ‘New Labour made its peace with capitalism by essentially embracing big business. Actually what we should have done was put small businesses at the centre of what we were talking about.'

‘Small businesses should be natural Labour supporters because we are the people who stand up against the big vested interests in society - most importantly the private vested interests - which I as energy secretary saw make life very difficult for small businesses. And you wouldn't get the Conservatives doing that.'

A less dominant but much more malign electoral force that has threatened Labour in some parts of the country is the BNP. Miliband is convinced that ‘where Labour withdraws and where Labour is absent, the BNP thrive'. Labour candidates who successfully saw off the far right at the election, such as Margaret Hodge in Barking, did so on the doorstep, he says.

‘You've got to confront people both with the fascist nature of the BNP but also with the fact the BNP has no interest in solving the problems they complain about. They only have interest in stirring up hatred. The underlying issues are about things like housing, jobs and crime, which the BNP try to turn into something it's not which is that it's all about immigration.'

Miliband admits to the ‘shock' of an English Democrat mayor elected in his own backyard. ‘There were massive issues around expenses in 2009 but we beat back at this election,' he says. ‘After a year of an English Democrat mayor people realised they didn't have anything to offer.'

Grassroots Labour activists were no doubt a key factor in some of Labour's successes at the election, but party members sometimes complain the leadership does not listen to them. Miliband has insisted he will listen to the party membership and redemocratise party conference. How will he reconcile tensions that might arise between the members and leadership?

Miliband attempts to tread a delicate path. ‘There are always going to be issues where the leadership and the party disagree, and in the end the leadership has to listen to what the party has to say but the leadership has to lead,' he says. ‘But I think actually Labour party members are pretty reasonable people and what people want is a sense that they are genuinely being listened to.'

He says the party leadership has run into trouble when it does not sufficiently explain the arguments for its policy stances. When the leadership has offered a rationale for its stance, for instance as John Hutton did on nuclear power, party members, while not necessarily happy about it, have come to accept it. ‘We have to get away from the idea implicit in some of the discussions that Labour party members are difficult people who aren't going to accept difficult arguments.'

Miliband will have ample opportunity to make his arguments to party members in the coming months at numerous hustings around the country. Then it is up to the membership, MPs and trade unions to decide which candidate's vision can make Labour once again a party of government and a movement for change.

Photo: EdMiliband.org 2010

Is Cameron�s Turkish delight good for Europe�s waistline?

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:11:00 GMT

As a Greek I would very much like to see Turkey join the EU eventually. Having our neighbour as part of our community of nations is an ideal way to address and resolve our disagreements in the context of a union that has facilitated the resolution of many cross-border differences among its members.

Mr Cameron's wish to see Turkey join the EU is also easily understandable. Turkey is a vast country that holds a geopolitically significant position, hugely important in strategic and energy terms. It is also a big market, with its young population of 70 million ready to consume British products and services. More importantly Turkey is atlanticist; despite recent spats with the US it has traditionally been very pro-American. With Turkey joining the club Cameron believes that he'll acquire another strong pro-US ally around the European Council table.

That is all obvious and comprehensive. But Mr Cameron's motives go beyond all that. I suspect that he sees further enlargement of the EU, especially when it comes to a nation as big and assertive as Turkey, as a unique opportunity to dilute the process towards an ever closer union. The more you widen the EU the harder it becomes to deepen the process of European integration. More member states means less political union and the Conservatives' wish to see the EU turn into a loose trading block bolds well with the idea of non-stop enlargement of the European Union.

So it is worth considering whether rushing Turkey's accession, at this particular point in the EU's evolution, is a good idea. The union is still getting to grips with the last two accession rounds. It took years of painful negotiations (and failed referendums) to agree the institutional engineering that will make an EU of 27 member states work effectively. Is the EU ready to undertake, in the short term, the institutional changes necessary to accommodate more members?

Furthermore, it will be premature to admit Turkey before its process of democratic reform has taken root. EU accession has proven a strong incentive for candidate countries to adopt the principles of democracy, rule of law and respect of human rights that form the building blocs of European integration. But, considering how slowly the reform process is progressing in Turkey, the EU has to be firm with its Anatolian partner. The army's influence in politics, the economy and the judiciary is still very strong, reminding many in Europe that Turkey has long to go before a fully democratic system is established.

The Kurdish issue also remains unresolved and many question whether the EU wishes to import a problem that has both an internal and external destabilising dimension. The Turkey-Iraq border resembles a warzone and relations between Turkey and the Kurdish north of Iraq remain tense, not least over who will control Kirkuk's energy sources. Admitting Turkey before such conflicts are resolved will be a huge gamble, to put it mildly, for the EU.

Last but not least is the issue of Turkey's refusal to recognise one of the EU's member states, namely Cyprus. It is very hard to admit into our community a candidate country that refuses to recognise one of our EU partners.

Returning to Mr Cameron it is worth noting that, despite his grand statements, his rhetoric appears, under close scrutiny, a tad hypocritical. Brandishing his anti-immigration credentials he admitted that, by imposing restrictions on the right of Turkish people to live and work in the UK, he will deny Turkey one of the fundamental rights of EU membership, that of the free movement of its people. He also failed to mention that admitting a rural and still developing country will require a considerable investment on Europe's part. The EU budget will have to be enlarged to allow for the CAP, regional and cohesion funds necessary to bring the Turkish economy in line with that of its EU partners. Is Mr Cameron prepared to see such an increase of the EU budget?

Mr Cameron and I agree that Turkey should become a member of the European Union. But that should happen at a time and pace that is appropriate both for Turkey and the EU.

Photo: Vandelizer 2009

A slick approach to renewables

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:37:00 GMT

Despite the fanfare, the energy statement will not be greeted by applause from either the energy sector or the green movement. Instead of confronting the risk seeking behaviour of some of the big oil companies, the Coalition has been transformed into cheerleaders for BP.

The only two big ideas coming out of the government are boosting nuclear energy (something the Lib Dems claim to despise) and expanding wind power. Neither stands up to much scrutiny. The Lib Dems have already compromised on nuclear power thus allowing expansion to continue. On wind power, as SERA research has shown, it does not matter what government's say about renewable energy nationally if councils block planning decisions locally. The Tories hate wind power. At last count, over 80 per cent of applications for wind turbines heard by Conservative authorities were rejected. Hardly a recipe for success.

All of this will come to nothing unless the government can demonstrate a real understanding of what went wrong with BP in the Gulf of Mexico. The legacy of the disaster will loom large in future debates about the transition to a low carbon economy. For all the positive environmental initiatives and energy schemes given the green light by this - and previous - governments, we have still not tackled our ongoing thirst for oil.

It is not a new suggestion that disasters like that in the Gulf are likely to happen again as our thirst for oil outstrips global resources and are located in less safe parts of the world. The result will be ever riskier drilling in more dangerous and sensitive parts of the world, whether that is in Alaska, off the Falklands Islands or the Antarctic. David Cameron has been quick to jump to BP's defence but perhaps we should expect a more reflective response from our national leaders?

The leaking pipe has barely been capped. The clean-up operation has many months still to run. BP is now into ‘crisis management' phase attempting to move the story on by a bit of spring-cleaning in the boardroom. Yet nothing suggests that they have learnt the lessons from the crisis. I would rather have a change of policy than a change of heart. Where is the understanding and shared information about the risks of deep sea drilling? What lessons are there from how the big oil companies outsource drilling and exploration or how they manage the risk involved?

Imagine if Tony Hayward worked at the frontline instead of the boardroom: would his severance package be as great then? The iron rule of senior management dictates that the higher up your rise in the company ranks the less likely you are to sent away empty handed. Yet the government still hasn't come up with a credible position on the environmental risk taking inherent with BP's business model or the superstar salaries at the top end of the corporate ladder.

This isn't about attacking big business or protecting national interests. There are much more profound questions are stake on the future development of our economy, our reliance on oil and - as this latest Boardroom twist illustrates - the growing gap between the rich and powerful and the rest of us.

Photo: TDR1 2009

Why I'm backing Ed Miliband

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:10:00 GMT

For the first time in sixteen years, Labour party members are voting for a new leader. Since the election membership has increased by tens of thousands. In my own constituency of Leeds West, our membership has increased by a third in that time, and from talking to new and old members alike, I know that people are excited by this opportunity. In electing a new leader we want someone who can inspire and lead - not just the party but beyond that - building a new coalition so that we can govern again. Our new leader will, I hope, be our next prime minister.

My starting point when thinking about who to support in the leadership contest is to ask who best can help us win back the five million voters who we have lost since 2001 - who can build a coalition based on our values to ensure that our new leader is the next prime minister. At the centre of New Labour's electoral strategy was the idea that we needed to appeal to the centre ground. A range of policies which gave us three terms of Labour government focused on improving public services by offering choice while providing economic stability and strong growth. These policies were undoubtedly a success - pensioners and children lifted out of poverty, schools and hospitals rebuilt and more people in work. But in and of themselves they were not enough to hold together the coalition of voters that originally powered us to victory, while the promise of an end of the economic cycle has been blown out of the water by the global financial crisis.

Since 2001 we have lost voters across our support base. On Iraq, tuition fees, the recession and a wider feeling that we were no longer on the side of decent, hardworking people - we lost support. People struggling to get by on modest and middle incomes, often in unsecure jobs, benefitted hugely from New Labour policies, like the national minimum wage, working families' tax credits, falling crime and investment in new schools and hospitals. But despite this, at the general election, they did not feel that we were on their side or that we spoke their language.

Of all the candidates, I believe that Ed Miliband is the best placed to develop both a set of policies and a political mood that will appeal and reach out to people. Most of all I believe that Ed can provide leadership built on our core values of fairness, equality and social justice. While Ed is not the most well known of the candidates now, he has the personality and human touch to get through to the wider voting public as he takes on a role that substantially raises his profile, just as David's popularity has increased as a result of the broader exposure to the public that he has enjoyed as a successful foreign secretary.

Over the last week or so, there have been a flurry of articles and blogposts which have argued that if we choose Ed Miliband as our next leader, the party will be retreating into its comfort zone. The argument continues that Ed is seeking to win the election by pandering to the left, in a kind of Faustian pact, which will deliver him the leadership of the party, but make it impossible to gain the credibility with the wider electorate that is needed to win the election. At the same time it has been posited that David Miliband has a higher public profile and greater experience which makes him the only candidate to meet the criteria of ‘prime minister in waiting'.

But those who reject Ed Miliband's candidature on the grounds that he is ‘not a prime minister in waiting' should cast their mind back to the summer of 2007. At the time Gordon Brown was seen as the only credible ‘prime minister in waiting' while David Miliband was environment secretary with just 13 months' experience in the cabinet and little name recognition among the wider public.

Moreover, the contention that there is just one person capable of providing leadership is wrong. We are fortunate to have a range of good candidates, and an approach which claims there is just one person able to lead us is disingenuous and undermines the Labour team. Whoever wins the election will need to build a team around them - and all the leadership candidates will contribute to our future agenda. David Miliband would be an excellent leader, but I believe Ed Miliband would offer something more and has the ability to build and lead a new winning coalition as New Labour did so successfully in 1997 and 2001.

During hustings debates, Ed has led the way in confronting our failings and weaknesses. This is of critical importance, because while we must be proud of our achievements in government, we must be honest about the things we got wrong if we are to successfully renew. Despite huge achievements, the policies and rhetoric of the original New Labour project have been tested to destruction and found wanting. We must build a new coalition for the economic, social and environmental challenges we face. This requires fresh thinking and a willingness to change and adapt.

Ed Miliband is already ahead of the game in developing ideas to build this coalition. You can see this in the policy agenda he is developing as part of his leadership campaign. Campaigning for companies to adopt a living wage to lift workers and their families out of poverty - and for local and central government to pay a living wage too. Supporting better legal protection for workers employed in temporary jobs and by employment agencies as well pursuing policies to support manufacturing and new industries to re-balance the economy away from financial services. Improving the regulation of the banks, particularly around the excessive bonuses being paid out and investing in affordable housing, both socially rented and to buy.

These policies will form the basis of Labour's new offer, based on our values but fit for the future. We must not turn our back on the centre ground, we must build a broad appeal again. But we cannot confront the challenges of the future without reference to our values, principles and aspirations for Britain, and this is why I am backing Ed Miliband as leader.

Ed Miliband's interview given to Progress Magazine will be on the Progress website tomorrow, 28 July 2010. Stay tuned for that, or join Progress to receive our monthly magazine straight to your door - no having to wait for its articles to be published on the website!

Never stop reforming

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:30:00 GMT

New Labour liked to make the public service reform agenda something where you were either onboard or you were a wrecker. With all the Labour leadership candidates promising a greater voice for the party and a stronger policymaking role for conference, perhaps those day are gone for good.

Defeat has allowed Labour's would-be leaders the chance to confess where the reform agenda went wrong. Ed Balls says New Labour went wrong when the reform agenda contrasted market based reforms of the public sector with small ‘c' conservatism among resistant public service workers and unions. Ed Miliband says it was because Labour became too managerial and technocratic in both its language and policy. Andy Burnham says Labour was seduced by the glamour of the private sector. David Miliband says Labour lost the compelling articulation of aspiration and hope that came from bold plans for reform.

A reform agenda has never been more needed than now. A new collection of essays produced by Soundings and the Open Left project at Demos has scoped out some common ground between those once seen as the reformers and the wreckers. Instead of being a divide between the old left and new right, Labour's debate is becoming defined by the difference between pluralists and centralisers.

In this new collection of essays, James Purnell argues that Labour needs to become "bold reformers of the state and the market". He accepts that "because we were too hands off with the market, we became too hands on with the state". He argues that New Labour's attitude to globalisation "too often sounded to voters like they were on their own". The lesson of the last election, he writes, is that Labour had stopped sounding like reformers and that globalisation became "the way New Labour told the Labour Party it couldn't have what it wanted".

David Lammy argues that Labour lost its reforming zeal and that a new reform agenda should be based not on the New Labour dictum that ‘what matters is what works' because, he says, "'what matters' is more important than ‘what works'". Philip Collins describes an "iron cage" that Labour found it impossible to escape, in which the best method for changing the country was seen as a combination of public money and the central state. Instead, he argues for a reform agenda that places power "at the lowest possible point".

These arguments sit comfortably alongside a piece by Neal Lawson, in which he argues that New Labour's failing was trying to reform the state to "accommodate the Thatcherite revolution but with a progressive twist". He warns against both "state fundamentalism" and "market fundamentalism". He accepts that the state "does crowd out. It does make us dependent and powerless." His acceptance that reform is needed and that a centralised state can disempower the citizen, is an important progressive concession and opens the door for mutuals and civic society. His argument is developed by Jonathan Rutherford who calls for a "covenant politics" based on the "ethic of reciprocity" to guide a reform agenda for the market.

So Labour's reform agenda could be based on some common ground. The public service reform agenda might find expression in the principle of mutualism and on giving users and workers a stake in the functioning of services. At the same time, a reform agenda in global markets and corporate governance might bring firms under greater stakeholder control - agendas recently embraced by Ed Miliband and David Miliband respectively. MiliBritain is beginning to take shape.

As James Purnell argues, "we lost because we stopped being reformers, or where we were, because we stopped talking about our reforms". There is no progressive politics without reform but a more widely shared acceptance of Labour's next reform agenda is surely vital in helping Labour win again.

Rape anonymity U-turn

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 08:10:00 GMT

It hasn't been a good couple of weeks for the ministry of justice. First, the justice secretary announced that the courts should stop sending criminals to prison - before his own party reminded him that their manifesto said they were going to build more prison places. Then the hapless junior justice minister Crispin Blunt reversed our ban on parties in prisons - before Number 10 reversed his reversal and asked for the invites back. Now comes news that the government isn't going to give rape suspects anonymity after all, despite saying they would only a couple of weeks ago. Bad news for the ministry of justice, but good news for tens of thousands of rape victims.

They tried to do it in a backhanded way - getting an anonymous source at the ministry of justice to sneak the news out to the Sunday Telegraph a couple of days before parliament breaks for the summer. But those infamous nine words didn't leave much wriggling room. However you look at it, there's no escaping the fact that this is the government's first U-turn on a commitment made in the coalition agreement.

Originally the plan was to give rape suspects anonymity until conviction. Then it was watered down so that it would only apply up until charge. Now they've abandoned it all together - and not before time.

There was never any reason to single out rape suspects for special treatment. The evidence showed that there weren't more false allegations of rape than there were of any other crime, and no one really believed that being accused of rape was worse than being accused of being a paedophile or a wife-beater. Women's organizations told us that giving rape suspects anonymity would stop victims coming forward. And the police said the plans would hinder their investigations and stop them bringing violent criminals to justice.

The government has finally seen sense and decided to drop these dangerous plans once and for all - but only because we made it happen.

More than 30 MPs raised the plans in the Commons, well over a hundred signed the early day motion, and it was pushed at every conceivable opportunity: at justice questions, home office questions, and questions to the attorney general and the minister for women and equalities, through points of order and at the business statement, and even at prime minister's questions. Written questions were tabled probing every aspect of the plans. Submissions were made to the ministry of justice. Backbenchers and frontbenchers alike took the government to task over these ill-thought through proposals. In the end the government had no option but to back down.

But given the confusion that's reigned so far, with different ministers saying different things on different days, we do need to remain vigilant for another change of heart. But surely that would be one U-turn too many - even for this government.

Managing migration

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:25:00 GMT

All of the candidates in the Labour leadership election have, in their own ways, come to the conclusion that immigration, especially from the EU after its enlargement in 2004, was one factor in the party's defeat at the general election.

Immigration has always been a balance of positives and negatives. When the UK was growing and creating jobs rapidly, enabling more workers to come to the UK, it was a positive thing. It underpinned the decision to allow the A8 countries in 2004 to have greater access than that offered by most of our European partners. However, we did underestimate the numbers and when recession hit the presence of central and eastern Europeans in work, as working Brits lost jobs, increased the sense of insecurity.

We need to recognise that those who came did not just settle in London, or in our cosmopolitan cities, but in parts of the country that have previously seen little migration like Doncaster and Lincolnshire. And, as ever, the costs and benefits aren't evenly distributed: the people that benefit from cheaper conservatories or food prices aren't often the ones who cannot find work in construction or in supermarket distribution centres. I was given examples at my local surgeries where local workers felt they were losing out to ‘other' Europeans.

Making the case for further enlargement of the EU is undoubtedly more difficult in a recession when unemployment is rising and pressure on public services intensifies. It's important to separate myth from fact, to recognise what has gone right and to make the case for maintaining the momentum of EU accession, particularly in the western Balkans, but also in Turkey.

Along with the rest of the EU, we have placed tighter labour restrictions on the newest members, Bulgaria and Romania. The same is likely for Croatia and any other new member for seven years after accession. Fundamental reform of the Treaty of Rome would be needed to stop the free movement of people within the EU, and this is both unlikely and undesirable if we believe that an enlarged EU better serves our national interest.

Restricting free movement does not help the many Britons who work and live in other parts of the EU. Let us not forget, too, that, come 2011, the A8 countries will have open access to the labour markets of the rest of the EU which could see an exodus of workers from the UK, which may or may not prove beneficial to our economy.

The new European workers that came to the UK from 2004 onwards helped to fashion Europe's most dynamic economy, driving our growth. Leaving their homeland, their families and their friends behind, they came here to work, often in industries where we have shortages. They often did the jobs that British workers didn't want to do and paid taxes. When the work dried up, and the exchange rate became less favourable, they didn't claim benefits, they went home.

As we emerge from recession, with an ageing society - fewer workers supporting every pensioner - and ever growing expectations, a young, dynamic, hardworking labour force is essential for our recovery.

What we have to do is better manage migration from the EU in a way that recognises how we benefit from it, but also deals with the pressures it creates. We should have been more proactive in supporting the agency workers directive and the anomalies in the posted workers directive. We should ensure that other European companies play by the same rules as British companies when they contract for work in the UK, or elsewhere in the EU.

We need to tackle the underlying issues that make communities feel vulnerable in the first place: shortages of affordable housing and pressures on other public services, inadequate training and a lack of employment opportunities. Pressures reinforced in some communities by a poverty of aspiration born of the mass unemployment in the 1980s, where some children never see their parents get up and go to work.

Only then we will be able to harness the potential of migration from the EU

Photo: mckibillo 2010

Bassetlaw selects

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 11:00:00 GMT

Following a 33 per cent turnout this is the first test of Labour voters and their support for the future leadership of the Labour party. The result of this ballot also gives credibility to its winner and gives them added impetus to their election campaign.

Commenting on Bassetlaw's Primary John Mann MP said:

"this was the only ballot of Labour voters in the country. For Labour to win power in the future they must start listening to its voters again"

Full results were:

David Miliband 50.3 per cent
Ed Miliband 20.2 per cent
Ed Balls 15.4 per cent
Andy Burnham 7.7 per cent
Diane Abbott 6.5 per cent

Out-toughing it on crime

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 09:00:00 GMT

Indeed, Clarke's junior minister Crispin Blunt has already been slapped down by Number 10 for suggesting that entertainments for prisoners should be reinstated.

Our starting point is clear of course: Labour's record on crime is a good one. Contrary to government spin, the British Crime Survey - generally considered to be a reasonably reliable way to measure crime, as it reflects individuals' reported experience, not just what the police record - shows a fall in crime under Labour, including violent crime. Fear of crime also fell. It's highly regrettable therefore that Theresa May has decided to remove the public confidence indicator that focused police attention on actions that reassure the public.

What's more, Labour's track record wasn't an accident: increased police numbers and visible policing (especially the highly successful and popular police community support officers) played their part. Tough and focussed action on antisocial behaviour helped too - though it's fair to say that anxiety about such behaviour remains high on my constituents' worry-list. A strong and growing economy over most of the past 10-15 years will also have contributed to the good results. Criminologists have long noted that crime is generally higher when the economy experiences a downturn, and it's perhaps self-evident that people are less likely to turn to crime when employment's plentiful and they feel better off.

What's less clear is how effective penal policy has been in recent years, and here Clarke and Blunt are surely right to open up the debate. Under Labour, the prison population almost doubled, so at first sight that too will have contributed substantially to the reduction in crime. But no-one can feel proud of a prison population that's now proportionately the highest in western Europe, nor at the high levels of recidivism among those sentenced to custody, and nor can we be comfortable with the cost. It's surely right to look for alternatives to custody that prevent and reduce reoffending, punish appropriately, and protect and reassure the public.

That means far more attention to and support for strong community penalties, which are much less costly than custody, and which, by keeping those convicted close to their support networks, able to keep their homes and jobs, can contribute to improved reoffending rates. We must of course ensure that such penalties are genuinely demanding and constitute a proper payback, but importantly too we have to convince the public that these penalties are no soft option, and that they're effective in reducing crime. In recent years, it's not clear that we did very much to sell community penalties either to the public or to sentencers, as we sought to be tough on crime.

Of course we should be protective of the interests of victims, and here too Labour's done good work. Information's better, victim impact statements give victims their say in court, and the victims' surcharge raised £8 million last year. But the coalition government is right to go further, by taking a serious interest in restorative justice - it isn't by any means what every victim of a crime will want, but where it works it has proven empowering for victims, and appears to be contributing to better reoffending rates.

We must understand where and how far we got the balance of investment right, between prevention and punishment, between custody and community penalties, between focus on the victims of crime and investing upstream on preventative work with those more likely to offend. It's good that new ministers are asking questions, and we must hope that will lead to a rigorous examination of what worked, and what proved good value for money, as part of the forthcoming spending review.

For our part, we must avoid finding ourselves locked into a kneejerk out-toughing of the government, and instead be open-minded in our assessment of the evidence of the past 15 years. After all, Labour has nothing to fear from such scrutiny. Our successful record on crime reduction is strong enough to bear it.

Life expectancy gap widest since 1930s

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 11:15:00 GMT

If you thought the gap between rich and poor was merely a question of contested statistics, you would be wrong. It's a matter of life and death. A new report published today in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) shows that the gap in life expectancy between the richest and poorest people in Britain is wider than in the 1930s. The 1930s. The decade before the NHS, when the poorest people lived in unsanitary slums, surrounded by untreated disease, when industrial deaths and injuries were commonplace and the air in the cities was heavy with smoke.

The research, led by Danny Dorling who is fast becoming the UK's guru of health inequalities, backs up the points made in his book Inequality. Behind the academic veneer is a simple truth: the poor die sooner than the rich, because they are poor. Between 1999 to 2007, for every 100 deaths before the age of 65 in the richest tenth of areas, there were 212 in the poorest tenth. This compared with 191 deaths in the poorest areas from 1921 to 1930 and 185 deaths from 1931 to 1939.

If you want to do some research for yourself, walk around a graveyard in Doncaster, and note the average age of death, and repeat the exercise in Surrey. You should discover that on average, in Doncaster they die seven years younger than in Surrey. A review by Sir Michael Marmot in health inequalities earlier this year reported to Andy Burnham that up to 202,000 early deaths could be avoided, if everyone in the population enjoyed the same health as university graduates. The report suggested inequality in illness accounts for £33 billion of lost productivity every year. Marmot called for an increase in the national minimum wage as a sure way to increase public health.

The National Health Service has failed to adequately address health inequalities over its 60 years, which is why Labour sought to reform it after 1997. In the 1960s the Fabian academic Brian Abel-Smith wrote ‘if socialists believed 40 years ago that all that was needed to equalise health status between social classes was to remove the money barriers to access to health care, they were seriously mistaken.'

Dr Julian Tudor Hart, in an article in the Lancet in 1971, had identified this as the ‘inverse care law' - those that needed care the most, got the least, and vice versa. The Black Report in 1980, commissioned under Labour and suppressed under the Tories, showed a clear link between poverty and illness. The historian of the NHS Charles Webster wrote that:

‘the NHS...tended to mirror and perpetuate the accumulated idiosyncrasies and inequalities in health care provision contained in the inherited system, and which in the main reflected deep-seated patterns in the distribution of wealth, which had determined that those sections of the community experiencing the greatest problems of ill-health were provided with the worst health services.'

Under Labour, just four per cent of health spending went on preventative care. Under the Tory-led government, it will probably be less. They've already cancelled schemes to tackle smoking, teen pregnancy and drug abuse. Whilst attacking the Tories for their failures will be an important job over the next five or ten years, putting forward a serious alternative from Labour will be even more important. Modernisers in the Labour party have to step up the argument for reform of the NHS, and the department of health, so that more is done to prevent disease than cure it. If we get into an argument about the level of spending, without an urgent demand for reform, we will fall into the Tory trap. Andy Burnham showed real courage to challenge Andrew Lansley's ringfencing of the NHS budget. He did it because as a former health secretary he knows full-well that the NHS is inefficient and wasteful, and could do more for less, for example by rationalising its purchasing of drugs.

But we need to win a broader egalitarian argument. We need to tackle, not just poverty, but inequality, as David Miliband states in his leadership campaign pledges. It will require standing up to the doctors, and demanding more surgeries on tough estates, and not just in leafy suburbs, with longer opening hours and more time spent per patient. It will require tough regulation on food manufacturers and retailers, to cut out the salt, sugar, fat and alcohol which is killing our kids. It will need further restrictions on smoking, driving it further to the margins of society, on the route to sending the ashtray the same way as the spittoon. It will need a rebalancing of health spending, with more on ‘talking therapies', community health centres, advice for families on diet and exercise.

In a decade or so, we will see the impact of the smoking ban - a piece of legislation which cost the state next to nothing, yet may have done more for the long-term health of the population than all the NHS reforms put together. It proves that to improve public health, we need measures which change lifestyles, not just to treat people when they are ill. The Tories have already shown that they don't care: they won't stand up to the food manufacturers, and may well cave into the smoking lobby. Labour governments in the past have meant well, but as today's report suggests, failed to narrow the gap. The next Labour government should make sure that how long you live should not depend on what work you do, where you live, and where you shop.

What is the point of the OBR?

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 10:30:00 GMT

The House of Commons treasury committee has shown some unexpected teeth in the last few days. It was refreshing to see that even the Tories are starting to accept that George Osborne's barmy austerity budget has increased the chances of Britain suffering a second recession, with the Tory-dominated treasury select committee now agreeing that the coalition's planned fiscal consolidation "may come too early and cut too deeply, and as such cause the economy to falter, leading to a ‘double-dip' recession".

The conclusions of the treasury committee really don't require much economic understanding. If you have a fragile economic recovery where there is little private demand, then massive public spending cuts and job losses are not likely to generate anything other than higher unemployment, poorer services, both of which will lead to declining tax receipts, higher budget deficits and massive social unrest. But it is still welcome that Tory backbenchers are now prepared to accept this, and the words of committee chairman, Andrew Tyrie, that "I am concerned that those at the bottom appear to pay proportionately more than those in the middle of the income distribution", show that at least some economic sanity and compassion exists on the Tory benches.

But I was particularly taken by the treasury committee's discomfort over the so-called office of budget responsibility (OBR) and its supposed independence from the treasury. The question I want to ask is: what is the point of the OBR?

The reality is that the creation of the OBR by George Osborne in May amid great fanfare about a new institution that would guarantee independent and transparent public finances was spinning that would have put Shane Warne to shame. The treasury and the OBR in reality are, to pinch one of George Galloway's best quips, "two cheeks of the same arse". The head of the OBR, Sir Alan Budd, admitted as much this week when he said that while the number of permanent staff at the OBR would be between 15 and 20, it would need 100 treasury civil servants to help it produce budget forecasts.

It's not just the staffing of the OBR that shows how disingenuous a body it is. It doesn't have a press officer either and Budd has also admitted that they use treasury spinners. Not such a surprise then when earlier this month figures on projected employment levels were somehow released to the press just hours before a debate in the Commons on leaked treasury forecasts of the scale of job cuts in the public sector.

Moreover, few people have actually checked out Alan Budd's past work as a government adviser. In fact, Budd served as a senior treasury advisor during the Heath government and then was brought back from academia in 1991 to work for first Norman Lamont and then Ken Clarke as the Major government's chief economic adviser. He also a board member of the IG spread-betting group, owned by the ultra-rightwing Conservative donor and sometime UKIP supporter Stuart Wheeler.

I would like to see an independent statistical body that can make clear and transparent decisions on the state of Britain's public finance, free from government pressure. Part of the crisis in some Eurozone countries is the result of wildly optimistic economic forecasts by bodies that are closely tied to government with the result that markets don't know what is and is not reliable. That is one of the factors that has led to the credit rating downgrades that we have seen in a handful of European countries.

But it is palpably obvious that the OBR is not this body since it is neither economically or politically independent. It is effectively being run by the treasury. David Cameron has spent several years calling for a ‘bonfire of the quangos' - bodies which, in his eyes, waste money and serve no purpose. So here's an obvious candidate. If they are going to be consistent and honest the OBR should quietly be axed, or replaced by a truly independent statistical agency, because there is simply no point it existing in its current form.