The Remain campaign must choose Corbyn or choose to leave

In November 1984, fire broke out in the Oxford Circus tube station.  Fortunately, the fire occurred late in the evening; when the station was almost empty.  Fourteen people were injured (only four of them passengers) none seriously.  Inquiries were held, but the core – tragic – message that managers took away was that London Underground’s safety systems worked.  Tragic, of course, because just three years later a similar fire broke out in the busy interchange station at Kings Cross.  Thirty-one people died and 100 suffered serious injuries.  The sad truth was that the safety systems that had been in place at Oxford Circus hadn’t really worked.  Once fire broke out at a busy time of day in a major interchange safety systems failed and people suffered as a result.

In fact, there have been a string of disasters (e.g. the Kegworth air crash, the Herald of Free Enterprise sinking and Hillsborough) where earlier near misses led to complacency when they should have led to some serious soul searching.  This seems to be a fundamental human weakness – and we’ve all done it.  For example, the near misses that we have now and again when we drive most often serve to convince us that we are actually skilful drivers; they rarely prompt anyone to realise just how bad they are; still less to go on a refresher course to improve their driving.

What has this to do with the EU referendum?  Well, rather like London Underground’s managers, the Remain campaign drew the wrong conclusion from an earlier referendum on Scottish independence.  In that referendum, the Remain campaign adopted the negative electioneering strategy that had ejected the hapless Gordon Brown out of office in 2010.  The approach is now colloquially known as “project fear”.  It is a particularly useful strategy for playing a weak hand.  In 2010, the Tories had nothing positive to offer the electorate.  Instead, they highlighted Labour’s weaknesses and the economic risks in electing another Labour government.  In the Scottish referendum, the Remain campaign was even weaker, since the policies of a Tory government in England were hardly likely to appeal to many Scots.

Just like the safety systems at Oxford Circus, project fear seemed to work.  But did it really?  There was blind panic in the week before the Scottish vote after a rogue poll suggested a vote in favour of independence.  Campaign insiders were stymied.  It was only the appearance of the (then) still respected Gordon Brown, promising everything – including the kitchen sink – short of independence itself that saved the day.  Nevertheless, the lesson that was taken away was that project fear had saved the day.

In many ways, the EU referendum is a much harder sell.  There is no positive case to be made simply because it is only the opt-outs negotiated by various UK governments that saved the UK from disaster.  Had the UK been in the Eurozone in 2008 – when our debts were worse than those of Spain, Portugal and Greece – we would have been subjected to real, Greek-style austerity; not the massive borrowing and “public spending-lite” that Osborne has served up since 2010.  Even the most fervent supporters of remaining in the EU concede that there is a lot wrong with it.  Their argument being that it is better to remain and reform than to walk away.  The problem is that they cannot give any voice to the reforms that they intend pursuing if we remain because they are fundamentally divided over the direction the EU should take.  Tory Remainers want to see a reformed EU in which our rights and protections are swept away – no more social chapter, no more environmental protection, no more freedom of movement.  Labour/Green/Liberal/SNP/PC Remainers, in contrast, want an EU in which these rights and regulations are protected and extended.  (Of course, the same divide also afflicts the Leave side, but that is a subject for a different post).

So negative campaigning it has to be.  But here we run into that classic definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and expecting a different outcome.  Gordon Brown’s intervention in the Scottish Referendum was essentially positive.  It offered Scots a beneficial reason for remaining.  It succeeded where a succession of Tory posh boys (who would have struggled to find Govan or Kirkcaldy on a map) prophesying a catastrophe of Biblical proportions had clearly failed. 

The negative project fear campaigning in this referendum appears to be further compounded by a growing people’s revolt against the established order that has largely manifested in the form of right-wing populism in Europe, the UK and the USA.  It is no accident that people have drawn comparisons between Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, or between the US Tea Party and UKIP.  These being the (relatively) moderate face of the altogether uglier right-wing nationalist movements that are gaining traction throughout Europe.  In the UK, this was forewarned in 2015 in the uneven distribution of the 4 million UKIP voters; a large proportion of whom were traditional Labour voters in Labour’s urban and former industrial heartlands in England and Wales (in Scotland, where a social democratic SNP offered an alternative direction, UKIP got nowhere even as Labour was annihilated).

At the core of this – largely white working class – eruption of anti-establishment sentiment are, no doubt, a hard core of consciously racist hard core fascists.  But this no more explains the rise of right wing populism than the personality of leaders like Trump, Johnson, Farage, Le Pen or Hofer – people reminiscent of the self-absorbed loud mouth down the pub who trots out simplistic pseudo solutions to complex socio-economic problems.  Instead, we need to look at political systems designed precisely to disenfranchise the majority of ordinary people; together with a debt-based economic system that has served to enrich a minority while impoverishing the majority. 

Those at the bottom of the heap don’t need to be told about falling living standards… Just reflect on the fact that a family with just one partner working in a blue collar job in 1970 could afford to buy a house and raise a family.  Today, the same family would be eking out a living supplemented by meagre tax credits and housing benefits.  The thought of buying a house is a pipe dream; raising a family a remorseless, life-sapping struggle.  I am reminded of the comment of a Welsh steelworker during Thatcher’s recession, when the unemployed were being encouraged to get on their bikes: “They say things are going to get worse before they get better.  Well things can’t get any worse here.  So what’s the point of going there?” Telling unemployed, underemployed and impoverished people that the economy is going to suffer if we leave the EU simply will not do the trick.  If you believe you are already at the bottom of the heap, you might even take a perverse pleasure at the thought that it is those who called you “chav” or “scrounger” who are about to get to taste some of the fare they have been serving to you and your family for decades.

It is not, however, the plight of this group that has fed into right-wing populism; at least, not directly.  The real change is this – the average graduate salary in 2008 was £24,000.  The average graduate salary in 2016 is the same £24,000 (except, of course that inflation – especially in housing costs – means that it is worth a lot less).  In the course of the last eight years, the children of the middle classes have been subjected to the same falling living standards as the working class has been experiencing for several decades.  And, like the working class before them, they have discovered to their horror that the political system doesn’t work for them.  It is their increasingly vocal protest against the system that has legitimised the anti-establishment concerns of the broader working class; and played into simplistic narratives about immigration, sovereignty and uncaring EU bureaucrats.

The first past the post (FPTP) electoral system evolved largely to prevent the majority of ordinary people (once they were permitted to vote) from overthrowing the established order.  Seats have been divided up in such a way that the overwhelming majority of votes do not count.  Out of 650 seats, only 150 or so change hands at most elections.  Worse still, FPTP tends to result in negative voting – with people obliged to vote for the party they dislike least rather than the one they would choose if every vote was equal. The result has been a political class that feels itself insulated from the electorate; a class that is widely seen to rule in the interests of multinational corporate and financial interests to the detriment of ordinary people.

The key factor that generates popularity for the right-wing populists is that they at least acknowledge that there is a problem.  By telling US voters that we need to “make America great again”, Trump tacitly acknowledges the fall from grace that many Americans experience in their daily lives.  By telling them that “America already is great”, Clinton merely alienates them further. When Farage says Britain has a migration problem, he tacitly accepts that a large section of the British people are experiencing a problem (not, as it happens, with migrants; but in reality an infrastructure problem that means that any addition to the population in the poorest districts of our cities results in further pressure on already over-stretched schools, hospitals, transport systems and utilities, while providing nothing in the way of jobs and prosperity).  When the Blairites and their establishment friends wag their superior fingers at the working masses and call them “racist” they simply drive them further into the UKIP camp.  Put simply, Trump and Farage and their ilk are winning because they appear to be listening – “they feel our pain”.

So here’s the problem with project fear – it isn’t listening and it isn’t offering solutions.  All it is promising is more of the same because this is (perhaps) better than the alternative.  There is no vision of a future Europe at ease with itself; in which every citizen is better off…  a Europe capable of overcoming the existential crises of our day (e.g. climate change, the energy transition, and an ongoing banking crisis).  There is not even a Trump-like “making Europe great again”.  There is little more than the vain hope that the Brussels bureaucrats and technocrats will discover some new alchemy to drag the European economy out of the pit of endless bailouts and negative interest rates in which it is currently stuck.  Instead, we find ourselves subjected to the verbal flotsam of the discredited political and corporate figures that a growing part of the population has come to despise.

Anthony Blair, his hands still dripping with the blood of a million Iraqis is wheeled out to tell us that we have to vote to remain or risk conflict in Northern Ireland.  Cameron, the man largely responsible for turning Libya into an ISIL-infested failed state, and who appears to have personally participated in the killing of a British citizen in Syria (before Parliament had authorised action in that country) using a missile fired from a drone, warns us that leaving the EU risks war.  Osborne, a man who many now doubt could pass a GCSE in maths, is wheeled out to tell us down to the last 50p how much our houses will fall in price if we leave (as if lower house prices are going to frighten young people the Remain campaign depends upon).  Jamie Dimon, a man whose name has become synonymous with corruption, malpractice and kleptocracy, is wheeled out to warn us that leaving risks triggering the kind of global finance crash that it is supposed to be his job to generate.  Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling, the men who sold out the British people in order to save the banks (and who have now been rewarded with highly paid sinecures with the banks they sold us out to) are wheeled out to try to pull off the same trick as they did in Scotland.  A procession of global establishment insiders like Carney, Draghi and Le Garde are paraded before us to warn of the economic ruin that awaits us if we are foolish enough to leave.

The problem is not that these establishment figures are wrong.  Only a complete idiot would claim that the UK can simply walk away from the EU without suffering severe economic and social disruption.  The problem is that they are widely perceived to be the embodiment of the very political and corporate elite that so many people are now railing against.  Their project fear is failing not because their basic arguments are wrong, but because the majority of us have our fingers in our ears when they speak.  More worryingly, when they stop speaking, we take our fingers out of our ears, give them the V, and wish a plague on all their houses.

The polls are worrying.  Despite project fear; and despite the line-up of global economic superstars foretelling doom and devastation; the vote is evenly split – Remain are slightly ahead on 45% with Leave on 42% and 13% undecided.  The trouble is that the Remain support includes more than a million younger voters who haven’t registered to vote or are going to be away at Glastonbury on the day of the referendum. They also include a large number of Labour voters who (as in May 2015) may simply stay at home – not least because Corbyn (a man who has been in favour of leaving the EU for decades) currently looks and sounds like a Blairite hostage who has gone Stockholm; making the occasional plea for remain then going back into captivity.  The Leave side, by contrast has much harder support – those who have made their mind up to vote Leave are much more likely to turn out on the day (indeed, many have already sent their postal votes in).  These may also be joined by a large part of the remaining 13% who appear to be wavering between voting to leave and staying at home rather than seriously considering voting to remain.

The core problem for the Remain side is that they are heavily invested in a project fear that everybody thought would triumph because it appeared to work at general elections; in the LibDem’s catastrophic AV referendum; and in the Scottish near miss.  But project fear only works if it can offer at least some semblance of a positive alternative and, crucially, if the person conveying the message has the respect of the voters.  The leading figures of the Remain campaign have neither. As a result, Cameron looks set to lead us to disaster.  He has given us a referendum we would be better off not having, on the back of a negotiation that everyone else believes to have failed, out of sordid self-interest.  This was never intended to be about the British people’s future – it was a squalid attempt to settle an internal row within the Tory party.  Indeed, it is even possible that the promise of a referendum only made it into the 2015 Tory manifesto as a ploy – something to prevent supporters defecting to UKIP; something be negotiated away as part of another coalition deal with the LibDems.  Having blundered their way into this situation, Cameron, and his establishment chums are the very worse people to lead the argument for remaining.

In practice, there is only one person who can guarantee that Britain will stay within the EU at this stage.  But he is the one person nobody in the establishment dare unleash.  I speak, of course, of Jeremy Corbyn; the only political leader in the UK to enjoy a mass supporter base large enough to guarantee a vote to remain.  The Blairites – still less the Dark Lord himself – will deliver nothing less than a vote to leave.  The support of the leaders of an increasingly marginalised trade union movement will not do the trick.  Nor will the ineffectual pleas of charities and NGOs that benefit directly from EU funding rally support for Remain.  Only the mobilisation of that mass of people that swept Corbyn into the Labour leadership can succeed where the establishment figures have failed.

However, neither the Tories, the Blairites nor the wider establishment wants Corbyn anywhere near this campaign for one very simple reason – neither side wants Corbyn to emerge as the man who saved Britain.  Such an outcome would leave Corbyn looking decidedly prime ministerial. Nevertheless, the choice seems clear – project fear can carry on shouting warnings of doom with growing urgency at an electorate that appears to be more inclined to shout “f**k off” in reply; or they can encourage Corbyn to play the Gordon Brown role and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.  The question is whether the posh boys, the Blairites and the wider corporate elite are prepared to risk handing the keys to 10 Downing Street to Corbyn in order to keep Britain in the EU.

Could I sell my right to vote?

Image: Meiling

After more than fifty years, I have come to the conclusion that voting makes very little real difference.  The result of every election that I have ever voted in (and yes, I have voted in every one) has been the election of a neoliberal government that favoured tax cuts for the wealthy, privatisation of public services, authoritarian social policy and economic deregulation.  Throughout those fifty-odd years, I have watched the impact of those policies on the vast majority of ordinary people.

On the day I left school, I walked across the road to a nearby building site and asked for a job.  I started work the following day.  On the wages I was paid for doing that job, I had enough money to save for the deposit on a house, and to buy a motorbike for commuting.  Today, if someone followed the same course, they would be unlikely to earn enough money to rent a bedsit.  They would most probably need tax credits to supplement their income.  I escaped the ravages of Thatcherism by going back to college and earning a first class degree in social science.  That was back in the days when our country believed education was important enough to pay for it.  The year I finished university was the year they introduced student loans.  Had I returned to college today, I could expect to leave with debts of more than £50,000 (tuition fees and living costs) that would have to be paid back (with interest) out of an average graduate salary of £24,000.  Where a single wage earner could afford a family life in the late 1970s, today even a two-salary couple are likely to end up living in a parent’s house.

What has this to do with voting?  Well at every election over that period, the various campaigns were all about how much better off we were going to be if we voted for them, and how much worse off we were going to be if we voted for the other lot.  And the truth is that the majority of us ended up worse off anyway – and worse off by a long way.

Since being better off is clearly central to voting intentions, and since politicians of all parties are singularly incapable of delivering rising living standards, I believe I would be better off if I simply sold my right to vote back to the state.  It would be easy enough to do.  The state could offer students a cancellation of their student debt in exchange for their right to vote.  Older people could have their mortgages and other debts written off through a kind of “people’s quantitative easing”.  Those without debts could be provided with an enhanced tax-free pension that they could take after their 55^th birthday.  This would guarantee that we would really be better off.  This would be cash in hand rather than the empty promissory notes of political parties. And we would all benefit by not being subjected to any more tedious “project fear” election campaigns.

What sort of government could we have?  I propose that we go to something akin to the early Victorian system of government in which the majority of us did not have the right to vote.  The unelected Monarch and House of Lords would have primacy.  If we had to have an elected chamber, it would have a largely advisory role with no real powers either to propose or amend legislation.  I would update the system for modern times, of course.  I would not have a hereditary system.  Rather, I would have government by technocrats – the best educated people from the whole range of disciplines; those best placed to decide what policies are best for, frankly, a population that lacks the education to make the correct decisions for ourselves.  This technocratic commission would have the sole right to propose legislation.  This commission would also elect a president from among its ranks to take the role played by monarchs in days gone by.

I would, of course, safeguard some basic human rights in the constitution of this government.  I would give primacy to the rights of private corporations.  I would establish customs rules so that all corporations enjoyed equal access to the marketplace.  In order to do this, I would need to guarantee some basic workers’ rights (such as free movement, basic healthcare, maximum working times and maternity leave) just to ensure that corporations do not engage in a race to the bottom.  I would also enshrine privatisation and flat-rate taxes as an inalienable operating principle of the marketplace.  It would be impossible to nationalise or subsidise industries or businesses even if these are considered essential.  I would also enshrine austerity policies in the constitution so that, in the event of an economic crisis, the default policy will be cuts in wages, benefits and pensions, and public services for ordinary people; together with tax cuts and generous handouts to the rich.

More perceptive readers will have realised at this point that I am proposing that I should be allowed to sell my right to vote in exchange for accepting the system of government in the European Union as it is currently constituted.  My cynical – I would say realistic – point is that the only way your vote is going to make you better off is if you are allowed to sell it.  It doesn’t matter which way you cast a vote – you will be no better off and will most probably end up worse off.  Believing otherwise is merely the triumph of hope over experience.

The current EU referendum campaign is being run by two wings of the Tory party – Project Fear and Project Xenophobe  - both have sold you the lie that the only question to consider is whether you are going to be better off (hint – you are going to be worse off whichever way you vote).  Both campaigns are peddling bullshit.  You are certainly not going to be better off if you vote to leave, whatever UKIP and the Tory right tell you.  But you are not going to be better off if you vote to stay in either – not least because by having the referendum the UK government has given up the negotiating lever that has kept us out of the most disastrous parts of the EU – Schengen and the Eurozone.  If we vote to stay in, it will be much harder to secure any opt-out on these in future.

Just consider for a moment if the UK had taken the advice of institutions like the IMF and OECD and the World Bank, who are now telling us that we have to stay in this EU, when they told us how much better off we would be from joining the Euro.  In 2008, Britain’s debts were far worse than those of Spain, Portugal or Greece.  But because we still had the Pound, first Labour, and then the Coalition, were able to print money and borrow on world markets to avoid an economic catastrophe.  The people of states like Spain and Greece that gave up their currencies have fared very badly.  They have experienced real, full-blown austerity, not the lukewarm “public spending lite” served up to us by George Osborne.

Much of the pro-EU sentiment has focused on how much better off we are going to be and on how the EU protects us in various ways.  But this sentiment tends to come from people in the managerial/salaried class, who really should get out more.  Before you tell anyone how the EU protects our environment, go breathe the air in central London.  Before you tell anyone about how the EU protects workers’ rights, go look at the £1,200 that a dismissed worker has to pay to bring a case at the Employment Tribunal.  Before you tell anyone that the EU has protected you from the right wing nutjobs who the English persistently elect, just consider that the unelected House of Lords has done more to protect you.  And for those Labour supporters who make this case, just consider what is going to happen if that nice Mr Corbyn gets elected on a mandate to re-nationalise the railways, reverse the stealth privatisation of the NHS, save the steel industry and attempt to undo the flat-rate taxes imposed by various Tory chancellors - all of these policies are illegal in EU law… what stops a democratically elected Tory government (we can have a separate discussion about our corrupt electoral system) will equally prevent a democratically elected Labour government from introducing its policies.  Just in case you think the EU would not overturn the policies of an elected government; go look at what they did to Greece after they voted for an anti-austerity government and voted against austerity in a referendum… they got austerity anyway; just as we will get neoliberalism anyway.

Voting to stay in this EU is to sell your right to vote – you are accepting the rule of a state little different to the early Victorian monarchy.  You are doing so solely on the promise of economists (the people who famously exist solely to make astrologers look good) who claim you will be better off.  For my part I would prefer cash in hand.  Voting to leave this EU means accepting that you are going to be worse off – you are making a sacrifice to safeguard your democracy. 

There is no business as usual in this referendum.  We are neither voting for a Britain governed by the current posh boys, nor an EU as it currently operates.  Just as nobody who voted in the 1975 referendum would recognise today’s EU; nobody voting in this referendum will recognise the EU of 2057 (assuming it still exists).  I have written elsewhere about why I believe a combination of environmental, energy and debt crises pretty much guarantee that we are all going to be worse off financially in future irrespective of how we vote.  So for me, the question is which system is best suited for managing economic decline – a parliamentary democracy or an EU technocracy.

I believe there is a very good pro-democracy Lexit (left exit) case to be made.  I am also pretty sure that if Corbyn wasn't surrounded by a Parliamentary Labour Party that wants to depose him, he would be making the case.  But the whole campaign has been hijacked by bullshit Tory/Blairite nonsense on both sides.  In the end, democracy (for all its faults) is the loser.

Please make it stop!!!

Young children do this really irritating thing.  You are sitting having a coffee with your friend, and the toddlers insist on tugging at your sleeve until you look at the drawing they have just done.  Even though the alleged drawing is little more than random crayoning, you feel obliged to pat them on the head and blatantly lie to them… “Yes dear, it’s very good.”  (At the same time making a mental note that a career in the arts is probably a non-starter).

For about six months last year, it became apparent that modern politics is exactly the same.  Every morning one or other political nonentity would pop up to demand that you look at the latest policy announcement that they had hurriedly crayoned in the night before.  And the more they did it, the more irritated the rest of us got.  Being polite, we offered platitudes like “oh, that sounds very good” when what we should have said was “take your policy announcement and shove it where the sun don’t shine – I’m busy.”

The problem was not that politicians were making announcements (although it would have been nice if these could have been limited to the 6 weeks leading up to the election rather than the tedious 6 months that we were actually subjected to).  Rather it was that the announcements were no more informative than the crayoned scrawls that the average three-year-old might come up with.  What they amounted to was a diet of ill-informed fear mongering… “Don’t vote for them because they are secretly planning to murder every firstborn child in the land” or some such.

It seems a long time since politicians simply told us what they think needs doing, and what they propose doing about it.

It has begun again.  We can look forward to four tedious months of people we have never heard of, together with those we wish we had never heard of, telling us about how the world will be sucked into a black hole if we are foolish enough to take their opponents’ advice.  And the crayon drawings that we are being shown aren’t even as good as the ones three year old Tarquin and Chardonnay produce on a wet Saturday morning.

The problem is – and whatever your views on Europe, I think we can agree on this – as Yogi Bear once pointed out, “making predictions is really difficult; especially about the future.”  Remember that most of the people who are telling you which way you should vote in the EU referendum are the same people who were telling you to put your life savings into Icelandic banks or Spanish property back in 2007.  They are the same people who told you that there was nothing wrong with Northern Rock or Lehman Brothers.  They are the same people who told you that there was nothing wrong with the economy in 2008.  Now they are telling you that if you vote the wrong way, the UK economy will collapse into perpetual ruin and your democratic rights will be replaced with some form of neo-feudalism.

My point?  You are better off asking Mystic Meg which way you should vote than listening to any of these self-appointed fear-mongers.  Maybe we could just settle the whole thing using that Octopus they used for predicting the outcome of the football World Cup.

What MPs forgot to say about Kids Company

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Clearly something went tragically wrong with Kids Company.  But while the MPs on the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee have focused on the alleged culpability of the Trustees, the colourful character of the CEO, and the failure of regulation, it is the unchallenged assumptions about charity itself that are the most worrying.

As a society we have faced both ways over charity, sometimes seeing it as at best a necessary evil (to be replaced by state services as soon as possible) sometimes seeing it as a unifying  ("Big Society") force capable of bringing communities and nations together. We have gladly donated time and money to a plethora of good causes while recoiling in horror when we discover that bodies like Universities and Public (i.e. private) Schools are afforded charitable status for tax purposes.  We often refuse to donate money for "admin", then complain when charities are poorly managed.  And all the while, governments of all stripes insist on broadening the definition of charity beyond the point where the word has any sensible meaning.

Today the charitable sector is deformed and distorted; divided between the handful of super charities that pocket four-fifths of the sector’s annual pot of £69.5bn, and more than 300,000 small charities and community groups struggle for the crumbs. 

The sad truth is that the largest charities – including many household names – have morphed into Frankenstein’s Monsters comprised of the putrid limbs and organs of the least savoury practices of private and public sector organisations.  Like the worst private corporations, they have sought to maximise their income and drive up the salaries of CEOs and senior managers irrespective of the damage done to their reputations and their beneficiaries.  Meanwhile, by using their status to avoid the regulation and inspection regimes that provide a safeguard to vulnerable users of public services, they leave their users/clients at terrible risk of abuse and harm.  More often pursuing the private interests of senior employees, and often bending to the whims of their most generous donors, only the flimsy fig leaf of the “voluntarism” of their trustees hides the sordid truth that many have long since ceased to be a force for social good.

Although Kids Company received more than £42 million in public funds between 1996 and 2015, it was actually small by super charity standards.  And, paradoxically, those aspects of its behaviour that the MPs were most critical of were those that marked it out as different to the rest.  Kids Company was actually a growing charity that had the gall to continue behaving in the same way as the majority of small charities and community groups do.  That is, they put serving their beneficiaries ahead of concerns about where the money was coming from. Like most groups, they were driven by a powerful personality.  But without such people few charities would ever get off the ground.  Ask anyone who has ever run a small charity and they will tell you that they have two full time roles – one providing their service, the other raising the money to keep it afloat.  And this never ends... so only someone with drive and passion would every do it.  

Despite the MPs’ claim that Kids Company should have built up a large reserve, the sad truth is that most of the money charities raise is targeted at delivering their services. Few donors want to underwrite management and administration, and most refuse to fund groups that have large savings and investments (i.e. “reserves”).  The truth is that the vast majority of charities in the UK live hand to mouth, most often depending on the income from a round of coffee mornings, summer fetes and car boot sales.  A few enjoy support from grant-making trusts and private companies.  A tiny (and shrinking) fraction also gets support from the state.  But only the very largest charities – those big enough to act as, in effect, tax-exempt private sector businesses – get to build up the kind of reserves that MPs seem to think all charities should have.

Nor is there a large pool of skilled and experienced managers desperately seeking to become trustees.  On the contrary, most charities and community groups have to cajole (to some extent at least) the friends and relatives of the founder(s) into becoming trustees.  Hopefully these “trustees” will attend the training courses offered by local voluntary sector councils, or at the very least will read the Charity Commission guidance on being an effective trustee.  However, in practice, most trustees simply lack the time; preferring to rely on the founder(s) to keep their group on track.

The Charity Commission – always lacking resources and often lacking competence too – simply does not regulate the overwhelming majority of charities and community groups.  Indeed, the entirely voluntary majority – those with annual incomes below £5000 – are not even required to register.  Most of the rest – those with incomes below £25,000 – are not required to post accounts.  And those with incomes between £25,000 and £500,000 need only submit to “independent scrutiny” – which often means simply checking that the income and expenditure in the accounts matches the amounts in the charity’s bank statement (it is perhaps no surprise that most fraud and malpractice occurs among this group of charities).  In truth, it is only the honesty and altruism of the overwhelming majority of people who give their time to charity that prevents the sector collapsing into anarchy.  Nevertheless, honest malpractice – in which volunteers are simply unaware of their roles and responsibilities – is widespread. 

Were the majority of charities to be subjected to the same degree of scrutiny as Kids Company has been, it is likely that, albeit on a smaller scale, the same issues would arise.  Had (like Kids Company) any of the 300,000 or so small charities and community groups enjoyed the drive and skills of such a focussed founder, they too might just as easily have attracted the same kind of high-profile and connected trustees.  They too might just as easily have infiltrated the political sphere to the extent that Ministers felt obliged to support them.  But they would also bring with them all of the honest poor practice that is rife within the sector.  And the more institutionalised that poor practice became, the harder it would be to alter it; especially if (until now) the charity had always been able to find the money to cover its operating losses – something, incidentally, that the “too big to fail” banks and many giant corporations live by.

In practice, it is incredibly difficult for a charity to make the transition from a being a small voluntary body into a large regional or even national organisation.  Yet this was not given consideration by the MPs on the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee who unconsciously accepted the belief that charity can be scaled up.  That is, that an entirely voluntary organisation operating within a single community can develop into a multi-million pound national organisation while still practicing “charity”.   But the sad truth is that it is impossible to do charity at scale.  And the answer is not to be found in more professionalism; better regulation, improved (through payment) management, and being more “business like”.  Rather, the solution is in acknowledging the fact that when charities grow too big, they morph into something else.  They become quasi-public services, almost entirely dependent upon government grants to continue to exist, or they become de facto businesses dependent upon trading – especially through winning public service contracts – to stay afloat.  Only a handful can survive solely on private donations and legacies.

Given the extent of public sector cutbacks, calls for additional regulation are not going to work.  Being more “business like” is only going to further undermine public trust.  And given growing public dissatisfaction, allowing trustees to be paid in order to attract people with appropriate skills and experience (but without passion and commitment) is likely to be the last straw.  So here is a cost-neutral alternative:

1. Bring back Quangos!  If a charity depends on the state to stay afloat, it should convert to a quango whose paid council of management is put in place by the Public Appointments Committee, and whose Chair and CEO are appointed by the appropriate Minister.  Only in this way can we guarantee a reasonable degree of public accountability for public spending.
2. Convert organisations that depend upon trading – including delivering public services – into social enterprises regulated by Companies House, and subject to the same tax arrangements as any other private trading body.
3. Redefine “charity” so that charitable status is only available to entirely voluntary bodies that do not depend on trading or government largesse for their continued existence.

None of this will be done of course. 

The small number of super-charities and their umbrella bodies are too powerful a lobby, and the paid employees too vociferous.  Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of charities and community groups are too busy delivering services and worrying about where the next donation is coming from to spend time lobbying MPs and Ministers about how best to regulate charities. 

Nor will Ministers want to give up the huge indirect influence over charities that comes from writing them large quarterly cheques; especially if the alternative is to be held directly responsible for the behaviour of newly created quangos. 

What will actually happen is that the Charity Commission will tighten its rules despite being unable to enforce the rules that already exist.  Accountancy standards will be tightened but little will actually change, because accountants are paid by the organisations they audit.  Management and fundraising standards will be tightened, but this will more often result in volunteer trustees resigning rather than in improvements in management... Then there will be another round of scandals which, in turn, will lead to the payment of the trustees of the biggest “charities”.  At the same time, what remains of the 300,000 or so small charities and community groups that give charity its legitimacy will continue to wither and die as the super charities hoover up what money is still available to the sector.  Then, finally, when the public wakes up to the fact that “charities” no longer practice “charity”, private donations will dry up and we will be left with quangos and trading companies in all but name.

Tim Watkins' book What's Wrong With Charity? is available on Amazon or from most bookshops.

We should welcome Lynton Crosby's knighthood

The honours system was ever thus.  Originally devised by absolute monarchs as a means of providing for their bastard progeny, and perhaps as compensation for the cuckolded husbands of the passing occupants of the royal bed, peerages have always been a reward for service to the ruling elite.  Knighthoods, too, have generally been bestowed upon those whose activities have served and bolstered the privilege of the ruling elite.

In the years after the Second World War, the façade of democracy was built up through the use of the lower honours – the MBEs, OBEs and BEMs – to reward charity volunteers, lollypop men and dinner ladies, and the host of entertainers and sportspeople who engage in the essential work of distracting the masses from the injustice of the British class system.  Even so, for the most part, the honours system provided rewards for service to the ruling elite.  This has always been most obvious in the honours conferred upon the luminaries of the (centre) left.  Over the years we have witnessed a steady stream of “moderate” trades union leaders famous primarily for shafting their own members, elevated to the peerage or knighted be the monarch of the day.

As with so much of British life, Blair’s New Labour government was responsible for messing things up.  In opposition, New Labour had used a growing voluntary (sic) sector as an alternative civil service; developing many of the policies that the incoming government eventually enacted.  As a reward, New Labour opened up the honours system to people employed in the voluntary sector, together with the special advisors and senior civil servants charged with enacting New Labour’s programme.

The public were involved to the extent that we were all invited to nominate people who had provided public service.  These nominees would be vetted by a new Honours Committee, which would forward their recommended recipients to the Prime Minister.

These Blairite changes served to confuse the public into believing that the honours system was no longer about privilege and class.  However, even under Blair, the charity fundraisers and lollypop men only got the lesser honours.  Peerages and knighthoods continued to be the preserve of the brown-nosers and lackeys of the ruling elite.

This is why we should welcome Lynton Crosby’s knighthood.  It is an honour in keeping with the historical tradition of the honours system.  It is a reward for (cynical and socially divisive) service to the ruling elite.  It highlights exactly what the system is about.  It helps us tear aside the curtain of celebrities and community workers to see the real class divisions of our increasingly inequitable and divided society.

We should recognise that you cannot have a democratic honours system when you do not live in a democracy.  Nor can you expect a grossly inequitable society to produce anything other than a class-ridden system of rewards to those who serve it.

Like statues in public places, knighthoods and peerages are generally a reward for crapping from on high onto the heads of ordinary people.  And like statues in public places, the best we can say is that the pigeons have it about right!

Can we find a better way of naming these storms?

The key benefit of naming storms would seem to be to provide a reference point where regions experience one catastrophe after another.  We can no longer speak of the “Carlisle floods”, since there have been many.  Nor, now, can we simply refer to them by year – there may have been just one in 2007, 2009 and 2012.  But we may well see three in 2015, and several more in January and February of 2016.  So at least by naming the storms responsible for each episode, we have a point of reference for each one.

The trouble is that in true British fashion, the Met Office has opted for the most banal and uncontroversial names they could find.  Yes, I know that the public were invited to send names in.  But it will have been the Met Office PR department that chose the names that were finally allocated.  So what we have ended up with are a series of storms named after everyone’s favourite uncles and aunts – Desmond, Eve and Frank being the most recent.

These soft, cuddly names appear to directly contradict the chaos and damage caused by the storms themselves.  And I cannot believe that the British public lacked the creativity to capture this.  We can be sure, for example, that someone at the Home Office (or perhaps UKIP HQ) will have attempted to link weather to terror by suggesting names like “Atlantic Storm Osama” in an attempt to imply the potential for death, destruction and disruption.  Far more of us will have undoubtedly suggested naming storms after our favourite villains – “Storm Voldemort” or “Deluge Davros”, perhaps – in an attempt to convey the seriousness of these weather events.

There may be copyright issues that prevent the use of fictional bad guys for naming storms.  And there is a deeper reason for not doing so.  The storms that are currently devastating large tracts of Northern England are not a manifestation of evil impacting us from outside.  They are events entirely of our own making.  These storms are a manifestation of climate change – so-called 1 in 100 year events that have been occurring every couple of weeks (and breaking records each time) cannot be viewed as anything but.  We were warned decades ago that global warming would disrupt the jet stream, push more water vapour into the atmosphere, and produce more violent storms – exactly like the weather events we have witnessed for the best part of ten years now – if it walks like, quacks like, and looks like a bird of the genus Anas, it probably is.

However, blaming climate change is a cop out, since the destruction wrought upon the people of Cumbria, Lancashire and Yorkshire (and several less publicised areas of Scotland and Wales) is more a consequence of human action (and inaction) in response to the threat of climate change than to the new climate conditions.  Perhaps least obviously, the abject failure of government land and housing policy has meant that most new housing in the last thirty years has been built on flood plains with the inevitable consequence that further investment in flood defences has been needed.  But, of course, for thirty years, governments have failed to invest in appropriate defences that take climate change into account – there is no point building defences just a few inches higher than the last flood when scientists are warning us of a need to build our defences several metres higher – anything less is just pouring good money after bad.  Not that the current government has been pouring money into flood defences.  Rather, for the past five years they have deliberately cut back on funding for flood defences – a false economy that may well cost the treasury another £1.5 billion (which will presumably be clawed back through cuts to benefits and social care).

Agricultural policy has also played a part in the deluge.  A deliberate policy of cutting down the trees and burning the peat bogs in the upland river catchment areas has dramatically lowered their capacity for storing water upstream.  The result is that when storms like Desmond, Eve and Frank deposit (what we used to think of as) a month’s worth of rain in a single night onto our hillsides, almost all of that water runs directly into the streams that run into the rivers.  Rivers that government policy has caused to have been straightened and dredged, so that all of this additional water runs into the flood defences downstream with vastly greater force.

So I have an alternative suggestion for naming storms in future – one that I am sure most ordinary people will embrace, but that the Met Office would never dare adopt: instead of using our favourite aunts and uncles, let us name our storms after the politicians who failed to plan for them!  It would, after all, be more accurate to say that “Kendal has been ravaged by “Deluge Davey” or that “the business district of Leeds has been demolished by Cyclone Osborne”.  And, of course, many of the poorest and most vulnerable among us will justifiably tremble at the imminent arrival of “Atlantic Storm Duncan Smith”!

Is this the end for Labour?

We may well come to look back at Wednesday 2^nd December as the day when the British Labour Party died.  Not, as the mainstream media would have us believe, because Mr Corbyn’s pacifism makes him unelectable, but because that was the day when a right-wing version of the Militant Tendency emerged to hold the party to ransom.

The schism has been long coming.  All of us have a moment when we finally tore up our Labour Party membership card in disgust.  My moment came the day Anthony Blair successfully removed “Clause 4” of the Party constitution… not because I believed that there was even the remotest prospect of Labour delivering to the people the means of production, distribution and exchange, but because without Clause 4, the Party was ideologically adrift.  Others were prepared to give Blair and New Labour the benefit of the doubt.  On the back of a huge housing boom, fuelled by record levels of private borrowing, fewer people were experiencing the kind of hardship that had been common in the 1980s.  More people were prepared to forgive New Labour its lack of principles so long as they felt better off.

Then came Blair’s Chicago speech:

“This is a just war, based not on any territorial ambitions but on values. We cannot let the evil of ethnic cleansing stand. We must not rest until it is reversed. We have learned twice before in this century that appeasement does not work. If we let an evil dictator range unchallenged, we will have to spill infinitely more blood and treasure to stop him later.”

This most dangerous of positions essentially destroyed the post war settlement and the doctrine of collective security expressed in the United Nations.  In its place was a return to the harsh imperialism of the nineteenth century in which the nation state (or alliance of nation states) with the most powerful military proclaimed the absolute right to shape the world in its own interests.  Once established, the doctrine paved the way for the failed NATO wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the destruction of Libya and today’s quagmire in Syria… and is likely to be turned back on us as the Western economies falter while Russia and China grow in confidence.

The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq – which owe more to the American quest to secure and transport oil than any genuine concern about the plight of the people in those benighted lands – led many genuine pacifists to rip up their membership cards.  Others accepted the disgraceful lies that the Taliban were a threat to the West and that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that could be turned on us at a moments notice.  However, when it became clear that the government had lied, many more party cards were torn up… something that continued as the body count rose.

At home, too, New Labour became more authoritarian and vindictive in its dealings with its traditional supporters.  Even current Tory anti-terrorism legislations falls short of what New Labour would have put in place had they been re-elected in 2010.  And we should never forget that it was New Labour that introduced the hated Work Capacity Assessment test used to deny disabled people benefits, and which is thought to have led to more than 8,000 premature deaths.  Then there were the single issues – Labour being “relaxed about people getting filthy rich”, tuition fees, the authoritarian Mental Health Act, the sight of Ministers cosying up to the likes of Fred “The Shred” Goodwin, etc.  When the economic storm broke on Gordon Brown’s watch, even the claim to economic competence had disappeared – not helped by the ridiculous “there’s no money left” note left by Liam Byrne and joyfully publicised by the incoming ConDem government.

By the time the hapless Ed Miliband arrived, Labour had become an unprincipled shell, supported only by a rag-tag of careerists and die-hards; largely overseen by a caucus of MPs who stood for office as Blairites.  As David Cameron and George Osborne set about doing to working people what Cameron had once done to a dead pig, the best Miliband's Labour party could offer was to do much the same thing... but promise not to enjoy it.

In May 2015, millions of the people who would have previously voted Labour chose instead to stay at home.  Millions more turned in desperation to the Scottish National Party, the Greens and UKIP in an attempt to find a party that would stand up for them.

Labour would have died after the failure in May 2015 if Ed Miliband had put party before personal concerns and stayed on to clean up the mess he had made.  Having a leadership election immediately after such a catastrophic defeat was a tragic mistake.  The party had not had time to evaluate the causes of its defeat; still less to formulate its future policy direction.  The party needed Miliband to stay on while it sorted itself out.  Although whoever emerged as leader would be unable to secure a parliamentary majority in 2020 because of the loss of Scotland coupled to Tory boundary changes.

Calling an early leadership election paved the way for the "Corbyn surge" – although even this could have been stopped in its tracks were it not for Blairite MPs foolishly allowing Corbyn onto the ballot paper.  MPs opposed to Corbyn’s views claimed that they had nominated him solely so that his arguments could be aired (presumably with the intention that they would also be defeated).  However, the underlying concern was that the election of a Blairite would have led labour into permanent decline – no longer able to win in Scotland, and threatened by UKIP and the Greens in England.  Only in Wales, where Labour treats the Assembly as is own fiefdom and the electorate is backward enough to vote for a corpse so long as it is sporting a red rosette, could Labour guarantee a modicum of power.

The doubling of Labour’s membership as thousands of supporters rallied behind Corbyn’s leadership bid had the effect of a blood transfusion to a dying man.  But it was an intervention looked upon with horror by a Blairite parliamentary party that had already decided to hang a “do not resuscitate” notice at the foot of the bed.  

Always embarrassed by the party membership, the Blairites sought a passive electorate, not an active movement. The majority of Labour’s parliamentary party – who are largely the inheritors of Anthony Blair – see their mission not as opposing the Tory government, but of disenfranchising the party membership while making Corbyn a prisoner of a right-of-centre shadow cabinet.  In this they are aided by the fact that Corbyn was a relic – a lonely ghost of Labour’s left wing past – rather than a member of a growing party faction.  Irrespective of his massive support in the party, inside Parliament you can count on one had the number of Labour MPs who would not prefer a different leader.

What happened in the events leading to the vote for war on 2^nd December was the first flexing of muscles of the parliamentary Blairite Tendency.  And it is perhaps fitting that their first public act was to take Britain into a war that promises to be even costlier than Blair’s illegal war in Iraq.  However, the wider point is this:  Corbyn lacked the power to force a party line because his leadership would be fatally undermined by the ensuing rebellion.  On the other hand, his opponents calculate that they are not yet strong enough to overthrow him.  So within parliament we are left with a stalemate that is likely to manifest across a whole range of issues, and will become increasingly embittered the closer we get to the next election.

Corbyn’s real problem is that he can do nothing to remove his opponents.  Certainly he can use his supporter base to change the way the party does business and to make it easier for party members to elect candidates more in line with their own principles.  But none of that can remove a single Blairite MP from parliament.  Barring death or madness, elected MPs stay in place until they are voted out in a general election.  So whether he likes it or not, Corbyn is the leader of a parliamentary party that will increasingly reject his leadership.

Add into this mix the problems that arise when the Tories gerrymander the constituency boundaries and you have a recipe for open civil war.  Most Labour constituencies will be redefined, forcing sitting MPs to face reselection.  At this point, Corbyn’s supporters will get to reap their revenge.  But even deselected MPs remain as MPs.  And they are unlikely to go quietly into oblivion.  Rather, they are likely to follow the path mapped out by “The Gang of Four” in 1981.  However, this time round we could well see a gang of a hundred or more establish their own version of the Social Democratic Party – adding to Labour’s woes in attempting to win seats back from the SNP, Tories and LibDems.  By which time, I imagine most of Corbyn’s supporters will have given up on electoral politics altogether.