Wednesday 4 August 2010

Simon Says

Three cheers for Simon Hughes. Let us hope that he will now go to the root of the problem: the sale of council housing. That policy compelled the State to make gifts of significant capital assets to people who were thus enabled to enter the property market ahead of private tenants who had saved for their deposits. And, as part of Thatcher's invention of mass benefit dependency, it created the Housing Benefit racket, which is vastly more expensive than the maintenance of a stock of council housing.

Now, I am a good Chestertonian in this as in most, though not quite all, matters. I would dearly love every household to have a base of real property from which to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State. But within the practicalities of these things, there is also a very strong case that each locality should have a base of real property from which to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty centre.

Already, under the last lot, the powers that be apparently could not distinguish between the respectable working class and the characters from Shameless. So council and housing association tenants were to lose security of tenure so that Shameless characters could be moved in next door to them, or even in place of them. Those in that actual or potential position should contact Simon Hughes without delay.

In fact, there are many areas in which Hughes could and should carve out more than a niche for himself.

Secondly, then, light sentences and lax prison discipline are both expressions of the perfectly well-founded view that large numbers of those convicted, vastly in excess of the numbers that have always existed at any given time, are in fact innocent. We need to return to a free country's minimum requirements for conviction, above all by reversing the erosion of the right to silence and of trial by jury, and by repealing the monstrous provisions for anonymous evidence and for conviction by majority verdict. And we need to return to proper policing. Then we could and should return to proper sentencing, and to proper regimes in prison. But only then. Over to you, Simon Hughes.

Thirdly, the Lib Dems set great store by election, by transparency, and by decision-making at the lowest practicable level. So their new Deputy Leader, Simon Hughes, should put down legislative amendments that would require British Ministers to adopt the show-stopping Empty Chair Policy in the Council of Ministers until such time as it meets in public and publishes an Official Report akin to Hansard. And the Lib Dems are like Labour in that they, and their predecessor parties, voted against the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies year on year between 1979 and 1997. Those Policies are wildly at variance with any sort of historic Liberal principle, and the CFP hits Lib Dem-voting areas particularly hard. So Hughes should begin a campaign, at the very least to reinstate those mysteriously vanished annual votes, and then to use those votes to demand the abolition of those Policies.

Fourthly, Hughes should also use every parliamentary and other available means to call for a ban on anything paying any of its employees more than ten times what it pays any of its other employees, with the whole public sector functioning as a single entity for this purpose, and with its median wage fixed at the median wage in the private sector, to which manual jobs would no longer be outsourced. The trick with the Conservatives is to make them think that it was their idea.

Fifthly, I much that vein, there is the matter of holding Iain Duncan Smith to the logical conclusion of his position, namely for a unified system of taxation, benefits, pensions, minimum wage legislation and student funding to ensure that no one's tax-free income ever falls below half national median earnings. (This blog has argued for as long as it has existed that there should be a single form of Social Security payment, called simply Social Security, and guaranteeing that minimum income universally.)

Sixthly, there is the need to renationalise the railways, uniquely without compensation in view of the manner of their privatisation. As the basis for a national network of public transport free at the point of use. Including the reversal of bus route and, where possible, rail line closures going back to the 1950s.

Seventhly, prescription charges, eye and dental charges, and hospital car parking charges must be abolished.

Eighthly, the television license fee should be made optional, with as many adults as wished to pay it at any given address free to do so, including those who did not own a television set but who greatly valued, for example, Radio Four. The Trustees would then be elected by and from among the license-payers. Candidates would have to be sufficiently independent to qualify in principle for the remuneration panels of their local authorities. Each license-payer would vote for one, with the top two elected. The electoral areas would be Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and each of the nine English regions. The Chairman would be appointed by the relevant Secretary of State, with the approval of the relevant Select Committee. And the term of office would be four years. You would not need to be a member of the Trust (i.e., a license-payer) to listen to or watch the BBC, just as you do not need to be a member of the National Trust to visit its properties, or a member of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution to be rescued by its boats. That model could certainly be applied to everything from the Press Complaints Commission to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, and arguably even to the Supreme Court, although in that case with only one candidate per region elected and with a vacancy arising only when a sitting member retired or died.

Ninthly, at the same time, we need to ban any person or other interest from owning or controlling more than one national daily newspaper. To ban any person or other interest from owning or controlling more than one national weekly newspaper. To ban any person or other interest from owning or controlling more than one television station. To re-regionalise ITV under a combination of municipal and mutual ownership. And to apply that same model (but with central government replacing local government, subject to very strict parliamentary scrutiny) to Channel Four.

And tenthly, with Norman Baker now a Minister, where is the Coroner's Inquest that has mysteriously never been held into the death of Dr David Kelly? Again, over to you, Simon Hughes.

Those would be a start, anyway.

Of course, all of this should be being done by the Leader of the Labour Party. But there isn't one. And look who is being talked up as the next one.

4 comments:

  1. Hi, saw your post on Guido, and thought that I'd like to answer it specifically, rather than in the manner more prevalent on that blog...

    a) DID Thatcher invent mass benefit dependency culture? She's better known for presiding over the reorganisation of the British economy. Are you saying that redundant car-workers for example were physically incapable of retraining/working away from home/moving to where jobs were?

    b) There's an argument for a supply of local social housing, for example for pensioners who have worked/paid tax all their lives but who haven't been able to purchase property, and for the seriously disabled. Also, mothers made homeless should have access to refuges, even if not sole occupancy dwellings. But the private sector does seem to be more responsive to demand than the state sector.

    c) Agreed re reversal of erosion of civil/judicial liberties. But are you seriously arguing that the vast majority of convicts are innocent? When at least some of them have many prior convictions before they are incarcerated?

    d) Would 'empty chairing' the Council of Ministers paralyse that institution? Or merely discard whatever vestigial influence the UK has over that body?

    e) Agreed re pay multiple cap for public sector bodies. But why should private (sector) firms face such a restriction? In the case of private companies, the highest paid employees are usually the owners. Why shouldn't they extract their capital in whatever way that they like?

    f) If the minimum wage is >= 50% of median wage, that is a recipe for never-ending wage inflation. That's national suicide even for an economy in surplus. And the UK isn't.

    g) Railtrack was already expropriated from its shareholders (remember?). Who are you targetting? The operating companies? The rolling stock companies? Remember that much of what was sold (on very preferential terms) to original shareholders at privatisation has been renewed/replaced using private sector money. The original companies/assets have (all?) been sold on. Why punish the current owners of these assets merely because they bought them indirectly from a 'fat cat'?

    h) Why? Prescription charges are free for many claimants, and it's possible to buy season tickets if someone is unfortunate enough to require a lot of pills. Dental fees have gone up a lot, but according to every dentist I've spoken to that's because the government changed the contracts with dentists, most who now only treat private patients in disgust.

    i) Why not move to a subscription/micropayment funding model? No problems with reorganising BBC Trustees, although I'd like to see a far smaller state broadcaster.

    j) Banning/restricting cross media ownership is pretty much a lost battle, and an increasingly irrelevant one. You presumably wouldn't make the same argument about book publishers - so why newspapers? As far as TV/radio are concerned, electromagnetic bandwidth is not going to be a limiting factor for much longer - pretty much everyone will be able to access an extremely large number of channels via the internet.

    k) Agreed re Kelly inquiry - but I don't think that Simon Hughes is going to be the man who brings it to fruition.

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  2. a) Huge numbers of people being on benefits at any given time was unheard of before the Eighties. Retraining as what? Working away from home as what? Moving to where, in order to do what? In any case, the maintenance of strong communities, paternal authority, national sovereignty (including economic sovereignty, and thus including a strong manufacturing base), &c are the conservative basis of State economic activity, mandating it in the full, double-sided sense of the word.

    b) Really? And imagine if councils had not been banned from spending the capital receipts from council house sales on building more housing.

    c) Far more people are convicted now who would not have been before the erosion of liberty. That was why we had tougher sentences and prison discipline in those days, when we could have confidence in convictions.

    d) A Minister from every member-state has to be present, or the business cannot proceed. Staying away therefore brings matters to a standstill. We would not be the first country to do this, and it works.

    e) The whole scheme is pointless unless it includes the private sector, in any case a questionable concept, at least in any advanced country since the War at the latest. Take out bailouts or the permanent promise of them, take out central and local government contracts, take out planning deals and other sweeteners, and take out the guarantee of customer bases by means of public sector pay and the benefits system, and what is there left? They are all as dependent on public money as any teacher, nurse or road sweeper. Everyone is. And with public money come public responsibilities, including public accountability for how those responsibilities are or are not being met.

    f) Why? Why need it not be a recipe for contentment? I may be no fan of the EU, but we have a European culture, and we could do with reasserting it.

    g) The railways were "privatised" on the promise of never-ending public subsidies, thereby conceding the point, also accepted by Margaret Thatcher, that they belonged in public ownership.

    h) Turn that around: so many people get them for free, and they are the people so much more likely to need them, that how much would it cost to make them free for everyone? It might even save money in administrative costs.

    i) Far smaller in what way, and why?

    j) Why is it a lost battle? Book publishers (and there may be a case there, but even so) have nothing like the influence of newspapers. And it is not as if people are actually going to watch these new channels in anything like the numbers or with anything like the frequnecy necessary to threaten the existing giants, any more than they already do. If you are right, then what have those giants to worry about where this proposal in concerned?

    k) If not him, then who?

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  3. Thanks for flagging the council house issue up once again.

    Yesterday's Evening Standard leader column made a good point

    .......On the other hand, it could also be argued that council housing should not simply be an enclave for people on benefits, that estates flourish with a mix of tenants of varying circumstances. And it may also be true that if estates include individuals who have lived in their homes for a long time, this adds to a sense of community and neighbourliness.

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  4. As I have written before and am about to write again, these sorts of policies are barely, if at all, more popular among core Tories than among anyone else. Just look at the Mail and Telegraph newspapers.

    Or, it turns out, look at what Hilary Armstrong always used to call "the Evening Standard, which you lucky people never have to see". Well worth seeing now, though.

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