For a variety of reasons I have decided to have a break from blogging - probably for some months. I will still be making the odd contribution to Labour List, Comment is Free and to Tribune but I have decided to put most of my energies into other areas of my life.
Mike
Friday, July 31, 2009
Thursday, July 30, 2009
The Tory MP who wants a referendum on Lisbon Treaty but would not let the people decide on electoral reform
Daniel Kawczynski is the Tory MP for Shrewsbury (you need to know that I stood as Labour's candidate for Shrewsbury in 2005 and lost to Mr Kawczynski). Mr Kawczynski holds some rather traditional Tory views particularly on issues like hunting and the European Union. He once described Otis Ferry as a political prisoner, had to apologise to Melanie Philips and is very keen that we get even closer to the regime that governs Saudi Arabia.
Mr Kawczynski has, on several occasions, called for there to be a referendum on the Lisbon treaty because, as he has he put it in his letter to the President of Poland the 'democratic consent to the Lisbon Treaty has neither been sought from nor given by the British people.' It is therefore somewhat bizarre that in a piece for Conservativehome Mr Kawczynski is worried that the government might, and I quote "engineer a referendum on electoral reform." Really? How exactly would the government do that Daniel? Do you mean 'engineer' having a referendum or the outcome of a referendum? As a democrat, as someone who feels that the Lisbon Treaty has such far reaching implications for our constitution and sovereignty we need to hold a referendum on it, why are you so opposed to a referendum on electoral reform?
I believe that we should let the people decide on any changes to the electoral system and I am surprised that you would deny them such an opportunity. Why is this Daniel? What are you so afraid of?
Mr Kawczynski has, on several occasions, called for there to be a referendum on the Lisbon treaty because, as he has he put it in his letter to the President of Poland the 'democratic consent to the Lisbon Treaty has neither been sought from nor given by the British people.' It is therefore somewhat bizarre that in a piece for Conservativehome Mr Kawczynski is worried that the government might, and I quote "engineer a referendum on electoral reform." Really? How exactly would the government do that Daniel? Do you mean 'engineer' having a referendum or the outcome of a referendum? As a democrat, as someone who feels that the Lisbon Treaty has such far reaching implications for our constitution and sovereignty we need to hold a referendum on it, why are you so opposed to a referendum on electoral reform?
I believe that we should let the people decide on any changes to the electoral system and I am surprised that you would deny them such an opportunity. Why is this Daniel? What are you so afraid of?
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Would you trust Google with your health records?
I find myself, somewhat reluctantly, in complete agreement with a Tory MP. David 'the bruiser' Davis is right to be sceptical about his own party's dalliance with the internet giant that is Google. Would you trust any IT company with your own personal, private health records? No, neither would I.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Aung San Suu Kyi - Ambassador of Conscience
Aung San Suu Kyi has been named as the recipient of Amnesty International's highest honor, the Ambassador of Conscience Award.
Fans of Michael Jackson launch campaign for nomination for the Nobel peace prize
Apparently thousands of fans have already signed an on-line petition in suppport of Michael Jackson being nominated for the Nobel peace prize. What is the wolrd coming to!!
Saturday, July 25, 2009
The NHS: diversity or division?
The founding principle of the NHS was that it would offer free-at-the-point-of-delivery health care. Surely this should apply whether you go to hospital as a patient, as a visitor or a member of staff. It's simply not fair to expect patients or visitors to have to pay when they come to hospital, when they may be suffering personal anxiety, stress or grief. This is just one reason why I strongly believe that the Government should consider to capping or scrapping car parking charges in England (they have already been abolished in Wales and Scotland). According to the DoH the NHS ended the last financial year with a £1.75 billion surplus, surely it would not be unreasonable to use a small amount of this total surplus to offset the £95 million that NHS Trusts took from car parking charges in 2006-2007?
Britain is experiencing an ever widening health care divide, under which patients in England are denied services and benefits enjoyed by those living elsewhere in the UK. For example in Scotland, NHS patients have access to more cancer drugs, benefit from free eye tests and get free personal care when elderly. In Wales prescriptions are free, while English patients must pay £6.85. Abolishing car parking charges at England's NHS hospitals would be a small but significant gesture and one that would illustrate the desire for fairness and equity to be at the centre of public policy.
Britain is experiencing an ever widening health care divide, under which patients in England are denied services and benefits enjoyed by those living elsewhere in the UK. For example in Scotland, NHS patients have access to more cancer drugs, benefit from free eye tests and get free personal care when elderly. In Wales prescriptions are free, while English patients must pay £6.85. Abolishing car parking charges at England's NHS hospitals would be a small but significant gesture and one that would illustrate the desire for fairness and equity to be at the centre of public policy.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Does religion have a role to play in British politics?
I have written a piece for the Christian Socialist magazine on whether religion has any role to play in Britsih politics.
Norwich - take the kicking, re-group and move on.
So, we have, as expected, taken a real kicking in Norwich, not because the Tories and Cameron connect with voters but because the electorate want to give us a bloody nose. They are angry with us, disillusioned with our rhetoric and keen to send us a message. The summer offers a period of reflection and for me the areas that we need to urgently address are as follows:
Style and substance - we need to be careful that we don't dismiss one at the expense of the other. Good policies badly presented and badly articulated are as useless and as ineffective as poor policies that have been spun positively.
Trust and confidence - who on Labour's front bench can inspire trust and and come across as fully paid members of the human race? Answer - Alan Johnson and Hilary Benn for starters.
'If you are not on offence you are on defence' - we must get back on the attack and create clear dividing lines between ourselves and our opponents. Education policy is an obvious place to start.
I am not ashamed to be in the Labour party and I am proud of what we have achieved since 1997 but I am also acutely aware that we cannot constantly keep talking about these achievement. Looking to the past has much to recommend it, living in the past nothing at all.
Style and substance - we need to be careful that we don't dismiss one at the expense of the other. Good policies badly presented and badly articulated are as useless and as ineffective as poor policies that have been spun positively.
Trust and confidence - who on Labour's front bench can inspire trust and and come across as fully paid members of the human race? Answer - Alan Johnson and Hilary Benn for starters.
'If you are not on offence you are on defence' - we must get back on the attack and create clear dividing lines between ourselves and our opponents. Education policy is an obvious place to start.
I am not ashamed to be in the Labour party and I am proud of what we have achieved since 1997 but I am also acutely aware that we cannot constantly keep talking about these achievement. Looking to the past has much to recommend it, living in the past nothing at all.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
The Catholic Church and systemic child abuse in Ireland
Yet another report detailing alleged sexual abuse of 450 children by Roman Catholic priests in the Archdiocese of Dublin has been handed to the Irish Government. This is now the second report this year that has looked into the extent of abuse perpetrated by members of the Catholic Church in Ireland. I
The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland could be likened to the proverbial fish that understood how desperately it needed water only when it landed in the bottom of a boat on the end of a hook. It is a sad reflection on the enormity of the recent abuse cases that many faithful and sincere Catholics have only recently grasped just how much the Catholic community relies on trust - now that they have so little of it. Trust is a social practice - humans are social beings who swim in an ocean of trust. What happens when this ocean begins to drain away is that we become sceptical, often cynical and perhaps even a little paranoid. Some of the more disturbing aspects of the recent cases in Ireland have been the attempts by the Catholic Church to control information, prevent public disclosure and silence dissent and anguished cries of abused children and their families. Cultures of this sort are not unknown. Tendencies toward centralisation of power and control of information exist in all institutions. The Catholic Church is no ordinary institution. For believers the Church is guided by the Holy Spirit - a community in which God's saving work is accomplished and God's kingdom proclaimed. But the Church is also a human institution, managed by humans with all their failings, including susceptibility to the corruptions of power and mistaken judgment.
Might the Catholic Church look outward and make use of some of the practices adopted by secular institutions to check inevitable abuses? One example is the need for a formal grievance and appeals procedure. Some of the most heart-wrenching testimonies from abuse victims are their reports of having nowhere to turn when their priest was part of the problem and of their attempts to engage others within the Church that were ignored or rebuffed. Similarly, the laity has no formal recourse when their pastors are insensitive or incompetent. Surely, formal grievance and appeals processes, with recourse to independent outside bodies, could serve the people of God well? In the Catholic Church in particular, pressures to reassign rather than remove priests and to cover up both abuses and incompetence are certainly exacerbated by the serious shortage of priests.
Many mistakes and cover-ups, involving the abuse of children by clergymen, have been made by Bishops and it is ironic that the responsibility for resolving or moving beyond the present crisis of trust lies primarily with the Bishops themselves. The problem is that the Catholic Church is suffering from a form of paralysis. The people who can do something (the Conference of Bishops) have apparently done all they want to do or think they can do as a group. Yet those who want to do something to help to move things on, namely the laity and some clergy, have no real vehicle for doing so. Despite the long-ingrained tendency of lay men and women to defer to the hierarchy, lay people have both the right and the responsibility to make their voices heard. Many of them are now tragically aware of the consequences that follow from the concentration and misuse of power and lay deference to hierarchical authority.
For too long the Roman Catholic Church has, for whatever reason, refused to talk openly, candidly and even compassionately about the crisis of trust that clearly now exists. It will be difficult to regain that trust but without it there can be no growth or development.
The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland could be likened to the proverbial fish that understood how desperately it needed water only when it landed in the bottom of a boat on the end of a hook. It is a sad reflection on the enormity of the recent abuse cases that many faithful and sincere Catholics have only recently grasped just how much the Catholic community relies on trust - now that they have so little of it. Trust is a social practice - humans are social beings who swim in an ocean of trust. What happens when this ocean begins to drain away is that we become sceptical, often cynical and perhaps even a little paranoid. Some of the more disturbing aspects of the recent cases in Ireland have been the attempts by the Catholic Church to control information, prevent public disclosure and silence dissent and anguished cries of abused children and their families. Cultures of this sort are not unknown. Tendencies toward centralisation of power and control of information exist in all institutions. The Catholic Church is no ordinary institution. For believers the Church is guided by the Holy Spirit - a community in which God's saving work is accomplished and God's kingdom proclaimed. But the Church is also a human institution, managed by humans with all their failings, including susceptibility to the corruptions of power and mistaken judgment.
Might the Catholic Church look outward and make use of some of the practices adopted by secular institutions to check inevitable abuses? One example is the need for a formal grievance and appeals procedure. Some of the most heart-wrenching testimonies from abuse victims are their reports of having nowhere to turn when their priest was part of the problem and of their attempts to engage others within the Church that were ignored or rebuffed. Similarly, the laity has no formal recourse when their pastors are insensitive or incompetent. Surely, formal grievance and appeals processes, with recourse to independent outside bodies, could serve the people of God well? In the Catholic Church in particular, pressures to reassign rather than remove priests and to cover up both abuses and incompetence are certainly exacerbated by the serious shortage of priests.
Many mistakes and cover-ups, involving the abuse of children by clergymen, have been made by Bishops and it is ironic that the responsibility for resolving or moving beyond the present crisis of trust lies primarily with the Bishops themselves. The problem is that the Catholic Church is suffering from a form of paralysis. The people who can do something (the Conference of Bishops) have apparently done all they want to do or think they can do as a group. Yet those who want to do something to help to move things on, namely the laity and some clergy, have no real vehicle for doing so. Despite the long-ingrained tendency of lay men and women to defer to the hierarchy, lay people have both the right and the responsibility to make their voices heard. Many of them are now tragically aware of the consequences that follow from the concentration and misuse of power and lay deference to hierarchical authority.
For too long the Roman Catholic Church has, for whatever reason, refused to talk openly, candidly and even compassionately about the crisis of trust that clearly now exists. It will be difficult to regain that trust but without it there can be no growth or development.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Private schools and the pursuit of privilege
Excellent piece in today's Observer on the hidden benefits of a private-school education.
In fairness it is not unreasonable that any parent should want their child to do as well at school and in life as they have done themselves, often they want them to do better. In a free society if some parents choose to secure advantage and privilege by sending their children to elite schools there is little the state can do about it. The disappointing reality is that so many parents (often left-leaning, socially liberal parents) choose to become part of the problem, rather than seeking to be part of the solution. British public schools have always been a production line for the class system. They employ some of the best-qualified teachers, with as many as two-thirds educated in the top 20 British universities. They can - and do - raise their fees steadily, they select their pupils; have a growing endowment income from their benefactors and some of the most impressive sporting and extra-curricular activities. What's more they now recruit from a middle-class obsessed by perceived educational and social advantage.
The really telling – and somewhat sad - truth about the fact that so many middle-class parents decide not to stay in the state sector is that it reinforces the view that those who do have influence, those who really do have a "voice" in our society have such a high stake in the current order they will seek to mobilise and organise in order protect it. What we all need to reflect on is the fact that when parents abandon the state sector in favour of the private, it is always conservative and not progressive politics that triumphs.
In fairness it is not unreasonable that any parent should want their child to do as well at school and in life as they have done themselves, often they want them to do better. In a free society if some parents choose to secure advantage and privilege by sending their children to elite schools there is little the state can do about it. The disappointing reality is that so many parents (often left-leaning, socially liberal parents) choose to become part of the problem, rather than seeking to be part of the solution. British public schools have always been a production line for the class system. They employ some of the best-qualified teachers, with as many as two-thirds educated in the top 20 British universities. They can - and do - raise their fees steadily, they select their pupils; have a growing endowment income from their benefactors and some of the most impressive sporting and extra-curricular activities. What's more they now recruit from a middle-class obsessed by perceived educational and social advantage.
The really telling – and somewhat sad - truth about the fact that so many middle-class parents decide not to stay in the state sector is that it reinforces the view that those who do have influence, those who really do have a "voice" in our society have such a high stake in the current order they will seek to mobilise and organise in order protect it. What we all need to reflect on is the fact that when parents abandon the state sector in favour of the private, it is always conservative and not progressive politics that triumphs.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Messgae to Gordon: scrap hospital car parking charges
The founding principle of the NHS was that it would offer free-at-the-point-of-delivery healthcare. Surely this should apply whether you go to hospital as a patient, as a visitor or a member of staff. It's simply not fair to expect patients or visitors to have to pay when they come to hospital, when they may be suffering personal anxiety, stress or grief. For this reason I welcomed last year's announcement by the Scottish government (following on from a similar announcement by the Welsh Assembly earlier in the same year) to scrap car parking charges at the vast majority of its hospitals - 3 hospitals will be exempt because of PFI agreements and please don't get me started on that one! It is hugely disappointing that the DoH does not believe it would be a "sensible use of limited resources" to subsidise car parking at hospitals in England. Really? The NHS ended this financial year with a £1.75 billion surplus, surely it would not be unreasonable to use a small amount of this total surplus to offset the £95 million that NHS Trusts took from car parking charges in 2006-2007?
Government guidelines on car parking charges "strongly recommended" that NHS bodies introduce some kind of "season ticket" arrangement and allow free or reduced-price parking for patients with a long-term illness or those with serious conditions who require daily or regular treatment, and their prime visitors. The government has also suggested a weekly cap on parking charges at hospitals. One option that needs urgently to be looked at is the provision of free hospital parking and help with travel costs for all cancer patients. The other option is to scrap the charges in England completely.
Government guidelines on car parking charges "strongly recommended" that NHS bodies introduce some kind of "season ticket" arrangement and allow free or reduced-price parking for patients with a long-term illness or those with serious conditions who require daily or regular treatment, and their prime visitors. The government has also suggested a weekly cap on parking charges at hospitals. One option that needs urgently to be looked at is the provision of free hospital parking and help with travel costs for all cancer patients. The other option is to scrap the charges in England completely.
Iran: protesters back on the streets
It would appear that protesters are back on the streets of Tehran
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