The Charnwood Char

Nicky Morgan for Leader?

Yes, they really are that desperate.

I know for a fact that, when she spoke to the Sixth Formers at the private Loughborough Grammar School in her constituency, she promised them a state grammar school in every town, because she thought that that was what it was.

The Central Problem

Stephen Bush writes:

Monday: Sahaviriya Steel Industries (SSI) announces it will mothball the steelworks in Redcar, resulting in the direct loss of 1,700 jobs.

As a result of the low price of steel, SSI will cease producing steel on Teesside, although Andy McDonald, the MP for Middlesbrough, estimates that job losses could be as high as 9,000 once the impact is felt along the steelworks' supply chain, with contractors and suppliers on course to be hit hard.

Wednesday: The government announces a loan of £45m – to Evraz, a steel-making and mining company owned by Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch. It has operations in the Ukraine, Canada, the United States, and Russia. 

Why isn't the government stepping in to rescue jobs in Redcar?

Government subsidy of the steel industry is tightly regulated by the European Union because overproduction of steel by heavily-subsidised national champions, resulting in crashes in the price, has been a persistent problem within the European economy.

(That's also why closing down Trident manufacturing in Barrow and replacing it with alternative, well-paying work, is not as easy as it often sounds – the government has more leeway to subsidise jobs for defence than it does industries that compete on the global market, which is why the three unions who represent its workers remain opposed to scrapping the submarine.) 

However, other European governments have persistently found ways round these regulations, with the Italian government heavily subsidising its steel industry under the guise of funding "environmental protection".

And as David Cameron's choice to use the international aid budget to rehouse refugees here in Britain shows, the British government isn't opposed to fiddling the rules when it suits.

It comes back to the central problem of the government's industrial policy.

They have a plan to mortgage increasingly large chunks of Britain to China. They don't have a plan to retain the top academics or to maintain British industrial capacity.

A Great Hunk of Useless Weaponry

Simon Jenkins writes:

Labour’s shadow cabinet reaction to Jeremy Corbyn on Trident is astonishing. 

An end to Britain’s nuclear arsenal has been an article of faith to most Labour supporters for a generation. It has also been common currency of most defence analysts for almost as long.

Trident has never been about defence but about diplomacy.

The sole reason for Trident surviving the Blair government’s first defence review (on whose lay committee I sat) was the ban on discussing it imposed by the then defence secretary, George Robertson, in 1997.

Members were told to “think the unthinkable” about everything except Trident and new aircraft carriers.

It was clear that Tony Blair and his team had been lobbied, not by the defence chiefs, but by the procurement industry.

Labour was regarded as soft on defence and mega-projects were seen as talismans of the party’s patriotism. Robertson, John Reid and John Gilbert were adamant that no chink should appear in the nuclear armour.

I can recall no head of the army and no serious academic strategist with any time for the Trident missile. It was a great hunk of useless weaponry.

It was merely a token of support for an American nuclear response, though one that made Britain vulnerable to a nuclear exchange.

No modern danger, such as from terrorism, is deterred by Trident (any more than Galtieri had been in the Falklands or Saddam in Iraq).

But the money was spent and the rest of the defence budget had to suffer constant cuts – and soldiers left ill-equipped – to pay for it.

For decades the Labour party has lacked the courage of its own convictions on nuclear weapons and the courage to confront the industry lobby behind Trident.

Gordon Brown openly backed Trident simply as job-creation for Scotland.

While the missiles come from America and their use without American permission is inconceivable, a decision on the related submarine replacement programme is due next year.

It will have nothing to do with national defence. Talk about “ultimate deterrents” might as well apply to any Armageddon weapon, bacteriological or chemical.

Trident is about diplomatic clout, global posturing, domestic grandstanding and huge sums of public expenditure.

This is precisely the kind of issue on which Corbyn’s straight talking might be thought to turn over a new leaf. He might break with New Labour’s craven appeasement of the industrial lobbies and log-rollers.

It is sad that his party colleagues, not one of whom can seriously believe in Trident, feel obliged to oppose him on this issue, just so Labour can seem tough on defence.

Perhaps Corbyn should talk to a soldier.

Starting with these ones, in fact.

Thoroughly Abandoned

Hannah Fearn writes:

Visible from the golden sands of Redcar is a huge offshore wind farm, giant blades turning slowly.

The image is somewhat brutalist, but it is wheeled out now and again to reassure politicians seated hundreds of miles away in Westminster that, despite all the bleak news stories that pour out like the molten steel of the past, this North-eastern community is at the heart of a green industrial renaissance. 

Little comfort that must be to the 1,700 newly unemployed workers in the town, victims not only of the closure of the SSI steel plant but this Government and the last’s failure to understand how fundamentally the North-east has been damaged by the financial crash. 

George Osborne’s Britain has returned to economic growth, and yet this one corner of the country remains stubbornly resistant to its benefits. 

Unemployment stands at 8 per cent in the North-east – the highest in the country – and in towns like Redcar this is exacerbated by seasonal jobs and zero-hours contracts which leave people bereft of work for months at a time.

The suicide rate among men is the highest in the region, a statistic that the Samaritans has linked directly to Osborne’s austerity agenda. 

The number of rough sleepers is rising faster than anywhere else in the UK, up 40 per cent in a year. 

Something is going very badly wrong.  Whatever happened to the “Northern Powerhouse”?

That policy was designed to help encourage investment into the North and regenerate local economies – and also, no doubt, to break Labour’s cultural stranglehold on the gems of the north: Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle. 

Which might go some way to explaining why public funds are being heavily plunged into Manchester – which quietly became a one-party state some time last year – while business leaders in the North-east feel thoroughly abandoned by the Government.

There’s no point building a Northern Powerhouse that erects a Hadrian’s Wall for investment along the length of the M62. 

What a wasted opportunity this project has become.

Any success that Osborne boasts in Greater Manchester – where the complete overhaul of the city’s transport system has indeed led to huge economic gains – is not his to claim; that is down to the ambition of 10 neighbouring councils putting aside their differences to work together.

It was the inspiration for, not the result of, Osborne’s powerhouse policy and that promise of a city mayor is its deserved reward. Elsewhere, the policy has claimed few results.

In the North-east, as the closure of SSI has proved, it is invisible.

One mitigating policy proposed to Conservative ministers by the regional group of the Federation of Small Businesses is to extend the length of the High Speed 2 rail line as far as Newcastle, to help the North make a bigger contribution to the national economy and make it easier for businesses to reach the region and see its potential for themselves.

Given the troubled history of the smaller version of this rail project, and the sheer length of time it will take to get the trains on the track, even visionaries among local lobbyists can offer no succour to the jobless.

If Osborne and his Treasury flunkies are committed to the future of the North they must show that means the whole North, in its complicated entirety.

The North-east’s economy has been devastated over generations.

Many people remain poor, reliant on the state and with little hope of stable employment – and that number has no doubt grown this week.

For now, there’s little reason for voters to consider Osborne’s “powerhouse” as anything more than keeping the violins playing while the economy is submerged.

Better Not

Daniel Larison writes:

Peter Weber means well here, but this is a bad idea:

If Obama wants to get ahead of ominous developments in Syria for once, he should consider throwing U.S. support behind an independent Kurdistan, one that is carved out from the decaying husks of Syria and Iraq.

The problems with backing an independent Kurdistan are well-known.

The short version is that backing the creation of such a state would put the U.S. in the position of guaranteeing the independence of a new client against its neighbors, all of whom would be hostile to its existence to some degree.

Because of Turkey’s fear of a reviving Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK), U.S. support for independent Kurdistan would put the U.S. and Turkey on a collision course and might very well trigger Turkish military action against the new state.

If that seems unlikely, remember that Turkey is already launching airstrikes on Kurdish targets in Iraq and “joined” the war on ISIS mostly because it was alarmed about Kurdish gains in Syria.

Imagine how much more alarmed it would by the formal creation of a new Kurdish state.

The Iraqi and Syrian governments aren’t likely to accept a new state “carved out” of their territory, and it is doubtful that Iran would be indifferent to something that undermines these governments.

If the U.S. were seen as instrumental in the creation of an independent Kurdistan, that could also make it an attractive target for terrorists hostile to the U.S.

Depending on the terms of the relationship with Washington, the U.S. might find itself obliged to defend the new state, and that would be yet another security commitment for the U.S. to fulfill.

In exchange for all that, creating an independent Kurdistan would probably not yield that many benefits, at least not for the U.S. or the war on ISIS. Weber presents it as providing the U.S. with “a base of operations in a country that has invited its help,” but once an independent Kurdistan is established the new state would probably be concerned with securing itself and would be less inclined to join itself to the U.S. war effort.

The new Kurdistan would probably not be recognized by that many other states, since its creation will almost certainly have come over the objections of the governments in Baghdad and Damascus.

All the states that are wary of encouraging their own separatist and nationalist movements would likely be against recognizing the new state, which would leave the new state as a sort of semi-pariah on the international stage.

Once independence has been achieved, it is also possible that internal rivalries between different Kurdish factions would lead to a conflict over control of the new state, and that would leave the U.S. with the task of trying to resolve a new civil war.

Carving out a new state creates a number of new problems for U.S. policy and doesn’t do much to solve existing ones.

It would leave the U.S. with a long-term commitment to sustain the new state that it helped create for the hope for a short-term fix for a war the U.S. shouldn’t even be fighting.

Even if doing this provided “a rare moment of positive feeling about its mideast policy” (which is not a good reason to do anything of this magnitude), that feeling would likely evaporate soon thereafter because of the many headaches that it would cause.

If all this sounds unduly pessimistic, I would point out that the skeptics of drastic action and sudden political change have been proven much more right than wrong over the last decade.

In any case, it is necessary to consider the consequences of such a major political change as fully as possible.

One of the reasons that the U.S. finds itself in its absurd position in its war with ISIS is that the policy was never thought through or debated at any length, and the U.S. plunged into an unnecessary war in two countries without considering what came next.

Plunging ahead with another ill-considered policy in a panicked attempt to “get ahead of ominous developments” is the last thing that the U.S. should be doing now.

It would better if it reconsidered the merits of its original decision to intervene and scaled back its goals to match what it is actually prepared to commit to this part of the world.

Midwifing a new state in the midst of regional upheaval and conflict is far more than the U.S. is going to be prepared to do over the coming years, and it would better for all concerned not to start down that path.

Putin's Priority

Mary Dejevsky writes:

When the US and USSR were engaged in their proxy conflicts during the cold war – in Central America, in Africa, even in Afghanistan – there was always an ideological element and the forces of the two countries never confronted each other directly on the battlefield.

The risk of a superpower conflagration was kept at one remove.

It is tempting to see the first Russian airstrikes in Syria and Russia’s recently increased military presence in and around Latakia as an old-style proxy conflict, shorn of its ideological aspect and replayed as raw geopolitics.

On the one side are the US and its allies, including the UK, who have the ultimate objective of removing Bashar al-Assad, to which they have added a mission to turn back Islamic State.

On the other side is Russia, determined not to lose its last remaining foothold in the Middle East to the west, and using the fight against Isis as a cover to keep its ally, Assad, in power. Such an interpretation may be too simplistic and misread Russia’s motives.

But it does not make the current situation, in the short-term at least, any less fraught with risk. On the contrary.

Yesterday’s airstrikes by Russia, of which Washington received an hour’s notice via a Russian general in Baghdad, held out the very real possibility of an air clash by accident not design.

No wonder the US swiftly agreed to top-level military talks with Russia about coordinating action in Syria.

Nor can it be excluded that this was one reason why president Vladimir Putin gave the order for the first airstrikes within 24 hours of the Russian parliament giving the political go-ahead. Russia wanted to show that it was an equal player with the US in the region, and that it was not going to fit into whatever Washington decreed.

It wants a say.

If one interpretation of Russia’s action is a concern to maintain national dignity and not be seen to take orders from Washington, another could well be Putin’s desire for post-Soviet Russia to be treated as a state with global interests, not confined to a “mere” regional role in and around Ukraine.

Russia’s involvement in Syria is, to be sure, a convenient distraction for the Russian public at a time when Moscow may be looking to disengage from Ukraine.

But it is not just that. Russia’s build-up in Syria has caused much bafflement abroad, with the favoured explanation being the hoary old one of “superpower” rivalry and the alliance with Assad.

But statements by Russian military figures and by Putin himself, including in his speech to the UN general assembly earlier this week, suggest a slightly different rationale – and it is worth listening to what they actually say.

Putin indeed wants Russia to be seen as a global player, but as a player with interests that are not inimical, but which overlap to a degree with those of the US and others.

He sees Syria as an opportunity to be part of a collaborative effort, and Isis as the same sort of cultural and terrorist threat to Russia as it is perceived by the west.

If anything, Putin sees the potential threat to Russia from Isis as bigger and more urgent, because of the number of Russians (many of them Chechens) thought to be fighting with Isis and the threat of jihadism in and around Chechnya.

Russia’s desire to combat Isis need not be seen as a pretext for protecting Assad; the converse may rather be true.

In Russia’s view, as Putin set out at the UN, the Assad government is all that stands in the way of complete victory for Isis and the de facto disappearance of the Syrian state.

For Putin, the priority is the preservation of the Syrian state. He looks at Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, and sees western interventions that have resulted in anarchy.

He foresees the same for Syria if the west sees toppling Assad, rather than combating Isis, as the priority.

It was possible, after what both Barack Obama and Putin said at the UN, to divine some shifting towards a sliver of common ground.

Obama said Russia (and Iran) could be involved and hinted at some flexibility about the timing of Assad’s departure. Putin allowed that Assad might eventually go.

Those verbal nuances have been lost in the sudden outbreak of competitive air strikes.

It is just possible that the US-Russia military talks, now agreed, and the small hints of convergence over Assad could produce a cooperative approach.

The alternative – the risk of a US-Russia military clash over Syria by accident – cannot be what either Moscow or Washington wants.

This Supposed Equality

Ruby Stockham writes:

At the mental health charity Mind’s conference event yesterday, the newly appointed shadow minister for mental health Luciana Berger described how the good will that UK mental health services have been running on for years is ebbing away.

Since the Health and Social Care Act introduced the concept of ‘parity of esteem’ between mental and physical health care in 2012, there has been a widening gap between the rhetoric and reality of this supposed equality.

This is because the very same legislation also fragmented all aspects of the health service to the point that access to mental health care is, as the panel put it, ‘almost nonexistent’ for many people.

Because there are now so many bodies involved in administrating healthcare, it is difficult for decisions or changes to be made expediently.

The Health and Social Care Act disrupted what is known as the ‘patient pathway’ – the route a patient takes between first GP contact and the completion of their treatment in whichever department they need for their condition.

Because the HSC Act increased competitive tendering in the NHS, providers are more mixed than ever. This has led to the pathway becoming increasingly convoluted and made it difficult to trace accountability.

So while the National Commissioning Board is responsible for commissioning primary care, community and hospital services are commissioned by a variety of clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) supported by a commissioning support service.

Sound confusing? It is, and it is damaging standards of care.

York Central MP Rachel Maskell gave the example yesterday of Bootham Park Psychiatric Hospital in York, which has just been ordered to close.

In 2014 inspectors found a number of serious problems with the facilities, not least a prominent old sign reading ‘Lunatic Asylum’.

Inspectors found ligature points and doors which could be barred, presenting serious suicide risks.

The inspectors ordered urgent improvements but when they returned earlier this month found these had not been made.

According to Maskell this was partly because there are so many different bodies involved in the running of the hospital that the decision-making process slows to a halt.

Fragmentation also means that it is incredibly difficult for someone with a mental health problem to ‘get in’ to the system to begn treatment.

GPs may be unsure which services are available locally, leading patients to ‘fall through’ the gaps, passed off as ‘too severe’, ‘not severe enough’, or not fitting age criteria.

Somebody in crisis – who has attempted suicide, for example, or been hospitalised for an eating disorder – will always be given the emergency treatment they need.

But this will often be followed up by the news that there is a year-long waiting list to see a counsellor.

This is hopeless. It puts people’s lives on hold, leading to relapses, job losses and worse.

The lack of integration of services also means that a  patient’s treatment is often left to the discretion of the first point of contact.

Some GPs will put medication at the centre of treatment plans, whereas others will be more likely to prescribe a ‘talking cure’.

There needs to be integration of these services so that nobody misses out on receiving the treatment most suitable for them.

Of course, long waiting lists are also down to a lack of funding.

Under the coalition there was a £50 million cut to children’s mental health services, and a loss of 3,300 specialist mental health nurses and 1,500 mental health beds.

Research by the charity Young Minds found that over one in in five local authorities  have either frozen or cut their CAMHS budgets every year since 2010.

Despite a government pledge to increase spending on mental health, freedom of information requests made by Labour earlier this year suggested that 50 of the 130 CCGs who responded plan to reduce the proportion of the budget they spend on mental health for 2015/16.

The Conservatives have yet to practice the parity of esteem that they preached.

This is an opportunity for Labour to step up and show that they still understand healthcare as a system that prioritises patients, not market competition. 

And: 

There are alarming ethnic inequalities in mental healthcare in the UK.

Access to quality treatment is inadequate for everyone at the moment, but if you are from a Black or Minority Ethnic (BME) background it’s likely to be even worse.

BME experience in mental health services became a national issue surrounding the 2004 inquiry into the death of David Bennett, a 38-year-old African-Caribbean man suffering from schizophrenia.

The report found that Bennett was, in his sister’s words, treated ‘like a lesser being’ in the series of events that led to his being forcibly restrained for almost 25 minutes.

Research over the last 50 years has repeatedly shown that BME communities have more adverse experiences and worse outcomes within mental health care than the rest of the population.

The Joint Commissioning Panel for Mental Health (JCPMH) says that ‘ethnic differences are apparent in most aspects of mental health care in the UK’ and that different ethnicities report different experiences of access to care and treatment, choice of treatment, length of stay in hospitals and quality of care.

According to the charity Mind, BME people with mental health problems are more likely to present ‘in crisis’, appearing at A&E or being referred by police.

This suggests insufficient access to community support services or home treatment, as well as a reluctance to seek help until the last minute.

This is likely due to fear and mistrust because of differences in the way BME patients are treated.

In 2013 less than 40 per cent of white British and Irish inpatients were subject to detention under the Mental Health Act compared to over 60 per cent of inpatients from BME backgrounds.

The outcomes of treatment are also more likely to be negative. 

The latest data from the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) showed that among people referred to psychological therapies in the past year, there has been a significantly higher ‘recovery’ rate for white people than for BME people.

Obviously, these inequalities do not only begin when someone enters the healthcare system. BME people across the UK are more likely to be in poverty or suffering from ill health.

An ONS study on subjective wellbeing and happiness found that the groups who reported the lowest average rating out of 10 for ‘life satisfaction’ were the ‘Black/African/Caribbean/Black British’ group (6.7), the ‘Bangladeshi’ group (7.0), the ‘Arab’ group (7.1), and the ‘Mixed/Multiple ethnic’ groups (7.1).

These ratings were all significantly lower than for the ‘White’ group who reported an average of 7.4 out of 10.

So what can be done to reduce ethnic inequalities in mental healthcare?

Jeremy Corbyn’s welcome focus on mental health is an opportunity to develop new strategies for addressing this problem. In both the long and short term, we need to consider:

• That lack of appropriate understanding of racism that exists within the mental healthcare system perpetuates the problem. Put simply, if a young black man with a mental health problem expects to be treated like a criminal by staff he will be unlikely to seek help. Experience of racism in wider society may exacerbate this problem. (David Bennett’s problems were repeatedly blamed on marijuana use).
• Conducting an inquiry into higher rates of compulsory detention among BME inpatients and developing systems to better ensure that use of detention, and use of force, are always appropriate. Noone should ever be afraid to approach the health service.
• That lack of information about mental health may prevent people from BME communities from seeking help. Different cultural frames of reference may affect how a person with mental illness is viewed in their community. Better education in schools with high BME populations would be one way to reduce the stigma surrounding mental illness and encourage understanding.
• Psychological distress and complex emotions often need mother tongue communication. It is important that enough health professionals within BME communities are trained to offer support in patients’ own language. A mental health worker should be able to support a patient in what Mind calls ‘the context of their whole life’ which may point to specific cultural or religious components. Peer or survivor-led groups could be one way to approach this.
• Recording and measuring the experiences of service users should be routine.

Of course, much of this is dependent on better funding, but costs could be reduced if there was more focus on prevention, with educational and community initiatives intervening before people end up in A&E.

Mental health costs the economy as much as £70m a year – the status-quo is not working economically any more than it is working for vulnerable people.