The UK's next crisis?

What would happen if the electricity grid failed? 

Hardly anyone under 50 can remember the last time the UK had less energy than it needed.  Power cuts in the 1970s, were the result of the dispute between the miners and the Heath government.  And while disruptive, the introduction of the “three-day-week” gave a degree of stability, allowing businesses and households to plan ahead.   

Back then, Britain had a largely national economy (the UK had only just joined the EEC).  Governments could operate industrial strategies because the UK was still a major manufacturing nation.  It was also a more self-sufficient country, growing most of the food it needed.  Today things are very different.  The UK today is little more than a tax haven for global financiers, heavily dependent for most its lifestyle on imported food and goods from manufacturing bases around the world in a highly complex global economy.  For example, today, UK agriculture produces less than 60 percent of the food we need, and this makes the people who live in the UK highly vulnerable:

“Populations are far less resilient now than they once were…  There is likely to be a very rapid descent into public disorder unless Government can maintain [the] perception of security…  Any central Government response to the crisis may be too slow, arriving after the local emergency resources and critical utility contingency measures had already been consumed.”

This was the conclusion of a top secret government emergency preparedness exercise – Exercise Hopkinson – which examined the potential impact of a prolonged loss of electricity in Devon and Cornwall caused by damage to the Grid.  What the government planners discovered was that disruption in one critical infrastructure system would rapidly cascade into all other critical systems.  Without electricity, water and sewage could not be pumped.  Communications failed when batteries could not be recharged.  Hospitals could not run once emergency backup generators ran out of fuel.  Transport collapsed as electric fuel pumps stopped working.  Shops could only sell food for cash because electronic payments systems failed… and people could not obtain cash because the cashpoints weren’t working.  Refrigeration failed, preventing chilled and frozen food from being sold for health and safety reasons.  Most businesses were unable to operate, and many key workers chose to stay at home with their families rather than attempt to get to work… no wonder the government tried to bury all references to the exercise.

The cascading critical infrastructure collapse encountered in Exercise Hopkinson has been seen in the real world too.  On 14 August 2003 the entire northwest of the USA and neighbouring regions of Canada were taken out as a result of a power line sagging and making contact with a tree, causing a power surge that cause the shutdown of power stations across the region.  Fortunately, power could be restored in a matter of hours because the Grid infrastructure was intact.  Nevertheless, in this short space of time, a cascade had already begun.  The water and sewage system began to fail immediately.  Filling stations stopped working, leaving people stranded.  Air traffic control failed.  Businesses shut down.

This short-lived but highly disruptive incident gives us a much greater insight into what would happen to us if the UK national grid failed than any comparison with the 1970s.  In those days, we were much more resilient because we were much less dependent on electricity.

Another cascade occurred closer to home when, in September 2000, farmers and lorry drivers staged a week of protests triggered by sharp rises in fuel prices.  A series of rolling road blocks and blockades of oil refineries created a public panic.  This quickly stripped food from supermarket shelves and fuel from filling stations.  Although just 10 percent of the UK’s road deliveries failed, this proved sufficient to bring the country to the edge of collapse.

The fuel protests provided the first glimpse of a country with insufficient supplies of cheap liquid fuels.  This was a phenomenon that had not been experienced since the 1970s.  People back then saw an energy crisis of a different kind, as the OPEC countries limited the supply of oil to international markets.  Indeed, it was the spike in oil prices in the 1970s that opened the way for profitable investment in North Sea oil.

North Sea oil gave Britain a temporary lease of life that allowed successive governments to pretend that it was some kind of great power on the world stage – as it had been a century before.  But it was a facade built solely on oil riches.  As former Welsh First Minister Rhodri Morgan recently observed:

“Back then [since 1983] whoever was running the Government had this amazing ability to spend oil revenues. Governments could afford things.  They didn’t have to worry about where the next few quid was coming from.  The Falklands War was eminently affordable.  Paying the cost of the rocketing unemployment benefit bill, as dole queues doubled, then trebled, wasn’t a problem.”

The North Sea also proved to contain huge reservoirs of natural gas that promised to provide Britain with cheap electricity from a new generation of gas-fired power stations that would replace the aging nuclear and dirty coal-fired power stations.  This also gave the Thatcher government the means to break the mining unions’ stranglehold on the UK economy. 

Between 1979 and 2000, successive UK governments created an energy and transportation infrastructure based around North Sea oil and gas.  Despite warnings that these were finite resources, politicians of all stripes put personal ambition ahead of the long-term needs of the people, and failed to invest in a new, post-fossil fuel energy generation infrastructure.

Today, renewable energy makes up just 15 percent of the UK energy mix.  Of this, almost all is old hydroelectric generation together with the wood-burning Drax plant in Yorkshire.  Wind and solar power barely scratch the surface.  Indeed, the massive, £2bn Gwynt y Mor offshore windfarm located off the north Wales coast is the second largest offshore windfarm in the world, but delivers just a third of the power generated at the coal-fired Aberthaw power station in south Wales.

For the UK to replace even a sizeable fraction of its coal, gas and oil energy generation with renewables, governments from the 1980s would have needed to have diverted a proportion of North Sea oil revenues into renewables of all kinds.  They didn’t. 

Every year from 1979 on, oil and gas production from the North Sea grew.  Politicians simply assumed that the UK would continue on this trajectory for generations.  And while governments faced some criticism from environmentalists concerned about global warming, they could always deploy the hi-tech card – long before climate change gets out of hand, they told us, carbon capture and storage technology will have been developed, allowing us to burn fossil carbon to our hearts content.

So long as North Sea production continues to grow, governments can spend their time dealing with more immediate problems like the banking crisis and the stalled global economy.

So when might North Sea oil and gas production peak? 

You may be surprised to learn that it already has.  Both oil and gas production peaked in 1999 and has been falling rapidly ever since.  In 2012 the North Sea was producing just half of the gas two fifths of the oil that it had been producing in 2000.  This does not bode well for a country whose critical infrastructure was designed around access to a growing supply of cheap fossil carbon.  Giving evidence to a House of Lords energycommittee hearing, Professor Dieter Helm described the UK energy situation as a “very slow motion car crash”:

“… by 2015 or 2016, the capacity margin in this country will be very close to zero; in fact, I have done some numbers which suggests that it might be below zero. What is going to fill the gap in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020? We will be lucky if Hinkley is on the system by 2022 or 2023.  More nuclear power stations are coming off between now and then.  Most of the coal, through emissions control, thankfully, is being closed.  There are not enough wind farms and solar panels to fill that gap in a credible way … it is inescapable that gas is a transitionary fuel and can actually make a big impact quickly.”

The committee themselves acknowledged that:

“There is a growing risk of power cuts in the UK as the margin of electricity generating capacity over peak demand shrinks. It reflects a lack of clarity and consistency in energy policy over many years.”

The UK is becoming increasingly dependent upon imported oil and gas from some of the most unpredictable regions of the world – Russia, Libya, Nigeria and several Gulf States – any one of which may turn the taps off at any moment.  This dependency can only get worse as North Sea production continues to fall.

All of those energy threats that governments thought were problems for future generations are coming home to roost.  The lights are about to go out for the first time in 42 years, and nobody is sure what the consequences will be.

Britain's Coming Energy Crisis by Tim Watkins is available in paperback and Kindle e-book formats.

Austerity will kill the economy

The Household Analogy

The last government failed to fix the roof when the sun was shining.  This was the diagnosis offered by incoming Chancellor George Osborne in 2010.  Now, a new government would be forced to take hard decisions that would be all the more painful.  And, echoing his ideological mistress, Osborne trotted out TINA – There Is No Alternative.

Of course, Osborne was helped by the idiotic note left by outgoing New Labour Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liam Byrne, proclaiming that “I’m afraid there is no money”.  And the remnants of New Labour in opposition quickly signed up to the Tory narrative and the austerity policies visited on the British people by the new ConDem coalition government.

For public consumption, the political leaders built upon the comely image of the small town householder working hard to keep a roof above his head.  The economy as a whole was portrayed as a household just like yours and mine.  If you or I borrow too much money, then we face hard choices.  We must either take a second job to bring in some more money or we must cut back on our spending.  Government, we were told, is exactly the same: “you cannot pay yourself more than you earn”.

Because the New Labour government had racked up huge levels of debt between 2008 and 2010, the only options available, they told us, were those that most householders would recognise – earn more money (i.e. stimulate private sector growth in order to increase tax yields) and cut back on outgoings (i.e. cut public spending programmes).  According to the new government, fortuitously, cutting public spending would clear the way for the private sector to grow.  So this would not be a real hardship.  While some people might lose their public sector jobs, these would soon be replaced by private sector employment.  So, in the long-term, everyone would benefit.

In practice, the policy has been catastrophic.  High-paid, high-skilled jobs have been lost in favour of low-paid, low-skilled jobs that are often part-time or zero-hours.  Wages outside the top five percent have stagnated, while the incomes of the most vulnerable – the working poor, the sick and disabled, people with mental illness, together with women who look after disabled children or older relatives – have fallen dramatically.  Private sector growth has been anaemic at best; with employment maintained only at the expense of falling productivity – leaving UK companies unable to compete in international markets. 

Public services are being hit by the unforeseen consequences of cuts.  For example, despite promising to protect the National Health Service, the government has succeeded in creating a series of crises in Accident and Emergency departments as a direct result of the cuts they made to adult social care services, which have removed many of the community-based beds where hospital patients would normally be moved once they were well enough.

For the foreseeable future we can expect even more of the same because both the Tories and the Labour opposition are signed up to the “economy as a household” narrative that dictates austerity as the only road back to prosperity.  For the most part, the majority of the 650 members of parliament, adopting this model of the economy is no more than idiocy – they simply do not know any better, and have never bothered to think about the problem.  For a handful, however, it is a cynical manipulation designed to dupe the public into accepting an ideological attack on social security and public services.  Because, whatever else our increasingly globalized economy is, it most certainly is not a household.

Even within a household, we might observe that working more and spending less are not the only options open to us.  We might, for example, consolidate our debts.  A household may have access to a credit card deal offering zero percent interest on an existing balance.  We could use this to “park” our debt until such time as our circumstances have improved enough to begin paying it off.  Government does not need a credit card.  It is able to borrow at close to zero percent interest anyway.  So, there is actually nothing to stop government from borrowing new loans at zero percent interest in order to pay off debt that currently attracts higher rates of interest.

There is, though, a critically important way in which government is unlike any household you or I have lived in – governments have printing presses.  If you or I were to try to solve our difficulties by using a good colour photocopier to print out counterfeit £20 notes, we would end up in jail.  This is because since 1844 it has been illegal for anyone other than the central bank to print money in the UK.  So one thing the government could do that a household cannot do is to print new money as an alternative to borrowing it.

Okay, we have heard this line before.  Wasn’t it Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan back in 1979 who told us that we could no longer print money to spend our way out of recession?  In those days, printing new money appeared to cause higher inflation.  So – and this is a key reason why the mainstream parties are signed up to austerity – if government today printed more money, wouldn’t this simply result in high inflation that would, ultimately, be worse than the privations of austerity?

Although we experience inflation as increasing prices, it is actually a form of currency devaluation.  Just as the Roman Emperors devalued their currency by reducing the quantities of gold and silver in the coins, allowing them to mint more, so in the modern world, printing more money without a corresponding growth in the economy can have the same effect – more money chasing the same goods and services leads to price increases.  To this, there is an important feedback mechanism – velocity.  If we expect prices to increase tomorrow, we are more likely to purchase today.  So, as inflation takes hold, the velocity (or rate) at which we spend increases.  This has a result similar to printing new money called the “multiplier effect”.  Suppose I earn an extra pound.  I might decide to spend it on some flowers for my wife.  This means that the florist now has an extra pound.  So the florist decides that when she goes for out a meal that evening, she will add the pound to the tip she leaves for the waiter.  The extra pound allows the waiter to take a taxi home.  The extra taxi fare allows the taxi driver to buy a magazine.  And so on.  One extra pound is spent over and over, having the effect of growing the amount of money in circulation at any time.

Now, the first thing to say about inflation is it is not necessarily a bad thing.  If you are a saver, inflation is a bad thing because you need to secure an interest rate that is at least the same as the rate of inflation just to break even.  But in the wider economy, we are better off if savers are encouraged to take risks, as this is the only way of encouraging investment in new (and potentially risky) business ventures.  So, inflation can help move investors’ money from unproductive asset speculation into productive capital investment.  If, on the other hand, you are a borrower, then inflation works for you by cutting the real value of the money you borrow.  When people take out mortgages, it is usually the first five years or so that are the most difficult.  Having borrowed some multiple of their earnings, they are committed to making that payment every month.  However, over time, as inflation increases, their wages increase accordingly.  But the monthly payment remains the same.  Over time, the mortgage gets easier and easier to pay off.  At a global level, the same is true of government debt.  As inflation increases, so government finds it easier to pay it off.

In any case, we should be very cautious about making comparisons with the way the national economy operated in the 1970s and the way the global economy operates today.  In this booklet I will make the case that the changes we have witnessed in the past thirty-five years make the comparison entirely unhelpful.  These changes have been so profound as to render the currency of today totally different to the money we used in the 1970s.  Indeed, one of the key failings of modern politics is the failure to understand this transformation.

In this booklet I will argue that in seeking to avoid the ghosts of the 1970s, modern policy makers are creating an even bigger crisis by generating a dangerous deflation in which money is destroyed and spending grinds to a halt.  In the face of a massively over-extended banking sector, this process – which is fuelled by austerity economics – threatens to bring the whole economic system crashing to the ground.

You can read the rest of Tim Watkins' new book, Austerity here.

1992, 1983… or 1922?

In the fallout of Labour’s worst election defeat in a generation there is much speculation about which previous election defeat it most resembles.

Superficially, the pre-election idiocy of Miliband’s concrete block appeared to have a similar effect to Neil Kinnock’s triumphalist speech at the Sheffield Rally on the eve of the 1992 general election.   There were other parallels with 1992 as well.  Most notably, in the run up to that election the opinion polls were predicting a Labour win.  However, the exit poll taken on the day suggested that the result would be much tighter.  Initially, the pundits thought a minority Labour government would be the outcome.  However, as the night wore on and the results came in, a Tory minority government looked more likely.  And when the dust settled and the last votes were counted, we ended up with a Tory government with very narrow majority similar to today.

But these parallels are too superficial, and serve to obscure deeper seated problems for Labour.  Indeed, just five years on in 1997 Labour secured a spectacular majority – something that is highly unlikely to be repeated in 2020.  This has caused some commentators to wonder if Labour’s predicament today might be similar to that facing Michael Foot following the spectacular defeat in 1983.  Labour went into that election a divided force.  The left – championed by Tony Benn – were pulling in one direction while the old guard of the right – championed by the likes of Denis Healy – wanted to go the opposite way.  The manifesto that was finally cobbled together, and on which the hapless Foot went into the election came to be termed “the longest suicide note in history”.  It was so out of touch with popular opinion that it gave the Thatcher government (basking in their triumph over Argentina in the Falklands War) an even bigger majority than they had won in their landslide 1979 victory.  Indeed, it ushered in a further fourteen years of Tory government.

It is my view that neither of these examples fully reflects the crisis that the Labour Party currently faces.  It is not just that they seem unable to find a credible leader – Miliband was no worse than any other leadership pretender.  Nor is it just that Labour is a divided force with the so-called “Blairites” on one side and an old-left on the other – although there is also a truth to this.  Both the divide in the ranks and the inability to choose a credible leader are actually the symptoms of a much deeper existential crisis that can be summed up in the simple question, “what is Labour for?”

The fact that none of the Labour leadership contenders can offer a coherent narrative of the issues facing the country they claim to want to lead, still less a credible alternative to the Tory austerity programme, beyond a stream of buzz words such as “aspiration” and “hard-working families” illustrates the bankruptcy of a once great party.  The fact that the nearest they can get to a genuine political debate is an argument about whether they need to go back to 1997 or 1945 is evidence that they are now a spent force.  This, for me, suggests an entirely different election parallel – and, indeed a different party… 1922.

1922 marks the real beginning of an independent Labour Party as a force in British politics.  Indeed, just two years later the Labour Party formed its first (minority) government.  However, it is not this Labour Party’s fortunes that are a parallel for the Labour Party of today.  Rather, the parallel is with the Liberal Party of 1922.  For 1922 was the year that the Tories finally rebelled against the Liberal-Tory coalition that was first formed in 1915 to prosecute the First World War.  The result of the ensuing general election was a Tory victory and the end of the Liberal Party as a party of government (with the brief exception of some posts outside the war cabinet 1940-45) prior to its recent brief period as a junior coalition party.

To understand the parallels between Labour today and the Liberals then, we need to go back to their respective election victories in 1906 and 1997.  In both 1906 and 1997, the Tory Party was tired and internally divided – in 1906 over the Empire, in 1997 over Europe.  In the face of these failing Tory governments, opposition parties were swept into power on radical programmes.  Indeed, many Liberals in 1906 even referred to their party as “New Liberals” in the same way as Labour supporters referred to “New Labour” in 1997.

The 1906 Liberal Government was one of the most radical reforming administrations that Britain has ever seen – perhaps second only to the Labour Government of 1945-51.  It introduced a raft of social reforms including the first state pensions.  It also broke the power of the House of Lords, removing their ability to prevent the Commons from introducing legislation.  After 1911, the Lords would become a secondary chamber – revising, but ultimately having to pass government legislation.  It is easy to dismiss the New Labour government as being anything but radical given its decline throughout the 2000s.  However, it is worth remembering that New Labour introduced sweeping reforms.  They introduced the Human Rights Act.  They created the devolved governments in Scotland, Wales, London and Northern Ireland.  They introduced the minimum wage.  And they finally rid the House of Lords of its hereditary peers.

Then came WAR!  The Liberals effectively blundered their way into an Eastern European conflict that offered no benefit and many serious problems to an already over-stretched British Empire.  Although not allied to Russia and France – and thus unable to steer their policy – senior Liberals including Asquith and Churchill were only too happy to enter the war against Germany.  Others – most notably Lloyd George – needed some pretext on which to go to war.  New Labour’s war was a much more cynical and calculated affair that involved far more deceit than had the First World War.  The Iraq war was about the USA’s addiction to oil.  The aim, quite simply, was to install a pro-western regime that would continue to provide the USA with oil.  This was deceitfully dressed up as a war against a dictator who had been party to the attack on the World Trade Centre in September 2001, and who had developed weapons of mass destruction that could target London within 45 minutes.  At least the Lloyd-George Liberals of August 1914 could point to the reality of the German invasion of Belgium as a pretext for war.

The First World War split the Liberals just as the invasion of Iraq was to split Labour.  As Kenneth O. Morgan reflects:

“There was a big argument over conscription in the winter of 1915-1916. Here was a fundamental issue for Liberals. How wholeheartedly were they committed to fighting the war? The Home Secretary, a Liberal, John Simon, resigned. Asquith seemed dilatory, unable to make up his mind. Lloyd George was working with the Conservatives. In the end, military conscription was introduced for all males between 18 and 45 years of age but it was a hugely divisive factor within the Liberal Party. It embodied the key principle between, if you like, total war on the one hand and civil liberties on the other hand, rather the kind of argument we have had in Britain latterly which exercised us in the House of Lords about counter terrorism legislation. How do you strike the balance between security and freedom? And during this period, a group of Liberals drew up a list of perhaps a hundred backbencher Liberals who said if there was a crisis, a showdown, they would support Lloyd George as Prime Minister and not Asquith.”

One of the key reasons for the Labour defeat and the LibDem gains in 2010 were the large number of Labour voters who chose to vote LibDem in the belief that a Labour-LibDem coalition government would be less authoritarian and warmongering than a Labour majority government – although, as it turned out, such tactical voting in a First Past The Post system can have results diametrically opposite to those desired.  However, it is the post war years that should be most worrying for today’s Labour Party.  In 1915, the Liberals had been forced into coalition with the Tories.  And when the war ended, the coalition continued at the expense of Liberal Party unity.  Internally divided, the Liberals faced a challenge from the left from an emerging minority party… Labour. 

Similarly, today an internally divided Labour Party finds itself outflanked on the social democratic left by the Scottish National Party, the English Green Party and Plaid Cymru in Wales.  At the same time, it finds itself outflanked on the populist right by UKIP.  And while none of these smaller parties look set to form a government any time soon, as with Labour in relation to the Liberals in the 1920s, they can secure enough votes and seats to keep Labour out of office.

By 1922 it was far from clear what the Liberal Party was for.  This is not to take anything away from the reforms they brought about.  It is simply to state that they no longer spoke for any sizable constituency in the UK that was not more effectively represented elsewhere.  In 2015, Labour faces a similar problem.  It can still present itself as the party that introduced devolution, the minimum wage and the NHS.  But these are all fading into history.  And outweighing these historic relics is a party internally divided and unable to define its purpose, let alone appeal to any sizeable proportion of the electorate.

What Labour experienced in May 1915 was the end of the Blairite coalition of interests that secured electoral success in 1997.  Labour can no longer articulate the political interests of its core working class support without alienating a whole swathe of middle England.  On the other hand, where it has attempted to appeal to middle England it simply served to drive its core voters into the arms of the Greens, SNP, Plaid Cymru and UKIP.

Labour may well be reduced to obscurity within the next decade.  Nor is it inconceivable that they will be replaced by a social democratic alliance (Greens and Nationalists) on the left or a populist UKIP on the right as the second party in UK politics.  If they are to avoid this, Labour will need to do much more than elect a new leader or engage in internal navel-gazing.  Only by reaching out to the whole plethora of campaigning groups, trades unions, and single issue groups can Labour hope to weld together a new coalition of interests that can deliver a future Labour government.  

Of one thing we can be sure, if the next Labour leader serves up more of the same, then – like the Liberals before them – Labour will be a long way along the road to oblivion.

Labour’s inconvenient truth…

If I were going to hold a protest today, it would not be outside Downing Street, it would be outside Ed Miliband’s kitchen… Here’s why:

There is no other way of reading the results.  The fact is that the Labour party took a kicking from the electorate on May 7^th.  Seats that should have been a shoe-in for Labour fell easily to the Tories, aided by a collapse in the LibDem vote which mostly benefited the Tories.  Even the Tories seemed genuinely surprised by the results having, it is rumoured, already put out informal feelers to the LibDems about the possibility of another coalition.

It would be easy to heap all of the blame onto the shoulders of the hapless Nick Clegg, whose party was well and truly punished for their broken promises and role in the coalition.  But Clegg was put into an unenviable position five years ago when Gordon Brown refused even to talk to the LibDems, effectively ruling out any chance of a progressive coalition.  A fair voting system and the benefits of coalitions are at the core of LibDem political philosophy – they could hardly refuse to form one on ideological grounds.  More practically, had they not done so, Cameron would have formed a minority government, set out his programme, and would have then gone for an October election where he would most probably have secured the majority government in 2010 that he now has in 2015.

The Labour leadership knew this, and were urged to put out olive branches to the LibDems several years ago.  However, the tribalists won the day, preferring to slate the LibDems for their duplicity and broken pledges.  The result, when it came, was that nobody was given a good reason for voting LibDem, despite the obvious need for a progressive tactical vote in those constituencies where the alternative to the LibDems was the Tories.  The LibDem vote collapsed across middle England mainly because right-leaning voters preferred to be represented by real Tories rather than orange ones.  However, a significant proportion of the LibDem vote was progressive – the kind of voters who in 2010 hoped the LibDems would a socially progressive brake in a coalition with an increasingly authoritarian New Labour.  These voters might have been persuaded to hold their noses and vote LibDem to keep out the Tories had the Labour leadership encouraged it much earlier in the day.  As it was, they put the short term pleasure of kicking the LibDems ahead of the long term need to stop the Tories getting a majority.

However, all of this is the political floss on top of a much more serious problem for Labour.  While the various factions within Labour will fight about whether their manifesto was too left wing or too close to New Labour – several Progress MPs have already suggested they chose the wrong Miliband – this merely covers a deeper malaise.  Scotland shows this most obviously.  The truth is that the reforms that Labour chose to make in the 1990s to silence a left wing that Kinnock, Smith and Blair (probably correctly) believed was preventing electoral success, had the consequence of disconnecting Labour from its core supporters in the traditional working class areas of Scotland, Wales and the North of England.  That an increasingly London-centric Labour leadership failed to understand the growing popularity of the SNP after 2011 was bad enough.  However, despite warnings from grass roots supporters in 2014, the Labour leadership chose to stand side by side with the Tories in a “NO” campaign based on fear over hope.  On May 7^th, Labour reaped the fruits of that particular seed, and are now – having lost their Scottish heartlands – unlikely ever to gain a majority at Westminster in future…  especially as the Tories will now gerrymander the constituency boundaries to make a Labour majority in England and Wales even harder to achieve.

But Labour’s woes do not end with the SNP in Scotland.  It is clear that in England and Wales, UKIP took sufficient votes off Labour – as they said they were going to, and as the Labour leadership airily dismissed – in Labour’s traditional working class heartlands in England and Wales to prevent Labour from winning seats that should have been in the bag.

Cynics – myself included – have long slated Labour for perpetuating poverty in its heartlands because the party has always feared that if its core supporters’ aspirations were ever met, they might vote for someone else.  Of course, this view is a little simplistic.  However, when the Labour party bureaucracy has created a political fiefdom on the back of European Union structural funding, as it has done in Wales, and when so many key jobs depend upon this funding continuing, we see a multi-million pounds a year reason to ensure that regions like the former South Wales coalfield never be allowed to climb out of poverty.  Indeed, Labour-supporting areas of the UK like the Rhondda are now the only places in Western Europe with poverty levels similar to those of the former Soviet Bloc states in the East of the EU.

The Labour leadership has always taken these traditional working class areas for granted simply because politically they have had nowhere else to go.  For the same reason, the Tories have done little beyond organising the odd garden festival for these people.  As early as the 1980s the nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales began to re-orientate themselves to a left-of-centre social democracy in order to outflank Labour on the left in these areas.  However, this strategy only really began to take off after Tony Blair had taken office and moved Labour firmly to the right – Plaid Cymru’s high point came in the first election to the new National Assembly, where traditional Labour seats like Islwyn (Neil Kinnock’s seat) fell to them.  However – almost as a warning of what would happen to the LibDems at the UK level, Plaid Cymru has suffered electorally as a consequence of going into coalition with Welsh Labour during the Blair/Brown years.  Unlike the SNP, Plaid Cymru - despite increasing their vote - were confined to their rural heartlands on May 7^th.

The obvious winners in Wales were the Tories who, in addition to holding the seats on Labour’s target list, managed to take a couple of seats – Gower and Vale of Clwyd – off Labour.  There is, however, a subtle sub-plot to the story.  It was UKIP, not Plaid Cymru, who came third in Wales, Having taken many of the traditional working class votes that Plaid Cymru must take from Labour if it is to succeed in next year’s Assembly elections.

Labour saw a similar shift in the working class vote to UKIP in the Labour heartlands in England.  While none of this translated into seats for UKIP, it played an important role in keeping Labour out of government.

This traditional – largely white – poorly skilled and educated working class that Labour has contemptuously assumed is in the bag at elections has been left behind.  They are not Labour’s “squeezed middle”, they are the people at the bottom of the pile; the hardworking families who must also rely on a mix of tax credits and housing benefit just to keep their heads above water.  These are the Gillian Duffy’s of this world – concerned about the lack of opportunities for their communities but unable to see a way out beyond curbing immigration and encouraging people on benefits – even people with serious illnesses and disabilities – to get jobs.  Labour’s contempt for these people was obvious enough in Gordon Brown’s reaction.  No hint of understanding of the conditions of the contemporary working class – which Brown and Blair kidded themselves they had done away with.  Just the one word dismissal; “bigot!”  But the response in 2015 was even more contemptuous – to avoid another “Gillian Duffy moment” just make sure the traditional working class are kept well away from any of the staged managed election events.  The Labour leadership chose to disconnect themselves still further from their traditional supporter base.

Nor was Labour offering hope.  To the 8 million working people who  still need benefits to top up their incomes, Labour’s shadow Work and Pensions Spokesperson, RachelReeves made clear that “Labour is not the party for you” – as if they could afford to lose these millions of voters.  Indeed, the whole economic policy was essentially Tory-lite - offering little beyond more cuts and more food banks to the working class.

Labour’s reward has been to deliver large sections of their supporter base to UKIP – a party that, whatever their failings, has worked to understand the fears and wishes of the disenfranchised.  This is where I agree with UKIP – we need to develop a politics that includes the disenfranchised who have for decades found themselves at the bottom of the pile.  These people aren’t threatened by poverty and homelessness, they are poor and homeless.  They are not people who are losing faith in the future; they are people who lost faith decades ago.  They are the people whose living standards fell during the New Labour years even as Labour's banker friends were reaping multi-million pound bonuses.  These are not people who need much Tory encouragement to believe that Labour messed up the economy… that was precisely their experience of the New Labour years.

That UKIP has been able to tap into and give voice to this group is testimony to their organisational skills.  This alone should be reason enough for anyone on the progressive side of UK politics to take UKIP seriously and to understand the desperate need to reconnect with the traditional working class.  More than this, however, it is an indictment of a Labour party so disconnected from its roots that its purpose is now unclear.  If Labour cannot give voice to the aspirations of ordinary people, we are left to conclude that the sole beneficiaries of a future Labour government will once again be their friends in The City.

When Ed Miliband resigned, he gave a speech thanking lots of people in the Labour party for their support.  What he should have given was an apology to the ordinary people of this country who are now going to face a full frontal attack on their living standards from a Tory party whose spite knows no bounds.  The lives of tens of thousands more disabled people will be cut short by the welfare system that Labour bequeathed to the Tories.  People’s health will suffer as swathes of the English NHS are sold off to the highest bidder and the Scottish and Welsh NHS is cut proportionately.  The economically illiterate policy of austerity will continue to plunge ever more people into poverty while doing nothing to curb government borrowing.  The Bedroom Tax will continue to socially cleanse the poor from London and the Southeast of England.  Millions more families will be forced to turn to food banks.  These and many others like them are the victims of a Labour leadership that contemptuously believed they could take ordinary people’s votes for granted without ever once trying to understand their needs and aspirations.  These are the people Ed Miliband and the rest of the Labour party owe an apology and an explanation to.

This is no longer simply a matter of whether Labour needs a right or left wing leader to replace Miliband.  It is much worse than that.  Labour must face their existential demons if they are ever to get back to power – they must be able to articulate what – in business terms – is the Labour party’s unique selling point – what are they for?

Unless and until Labour can answer that question, I see no good reason to support them.

May 7th – An Apology

On 7^th May 2015 I will mark a cross next to the Labour Party on my ballot paper.  But I won’t actually be voting for Labour.  You see, Labour have made it quite clear that they do not want my vote.  Living with a long-term, incurable illness, I have to claim tax credits to top up my income.  And Labour’s Work and Pensions spokesperson Rachel Reeves has stated quite categorically that “Labour is not the party for benefit claimants”. 

In an ideal world that would be more than 5 million benefit recipients off to vote for the Greens, Plaid Cymru and the SNP.  Sadly, since many benefit recipients don’t vote, it is more likely to translate into yet more disengagement from the political system.

This disengagement – egged on by siren voices such as Russell Brand – lumps all politicians together.  Of course the likes of Rachel Reeves make this belief all the more plausible.  Let’s face it, Labour are little more than pale-blue Tories, signed up to the worse of the Tory cuts and determined to maintain austerity for years to come.

But are they?  There are actually some very important differences between the parties.  On the environment, for example, Labour and the LibDems are committed to creating a carbon-free Britain by 2050 (although Labour seem to think that fracking might have a contribution to make).  The Tories, by contrast want to end the subsidies on renewable energy in order to subsidise fracking and to give tax breaks to the oil multinationals.  UKIP would go even further, reopening the mines and the coal-fired power stations.  On health, too, Labour want to reverse the tory reforms, while the LibDems want to make a serious attempt at addressing the UK’s high rates of mental illness.  On welfare, the Tories refuse to say where they will find £12bn of savings – other than it will not come from pensions.  Most likely they will savage housing benefit, forcing millions of disabled and unemployed people into homelessness.

My view is that it is the right of British politics that is currently in the ascendancy, and that our broken first-past-the-post electoral system may easily come to their aid if those of us on the left allow apathy to win over reason.  It is only a year since UKIP came top in the European elections.  And while they are unlikely to win seats in the general election, they have already forced the Tories to swing to the right in an attempt to stop their vote switching to UKIP.

There are similarities with 1979 – although then the UKIP tendency was within the Tory party.  In 1979 a highly discredited Labour party was widely regarded as no different to the Tories.  Many on the left were also contemptuous of Margaret Thatcher, believing that her policies were so extreme and disruptive that the people would rise up and kick her out of office were she to be given the chance to implement them.  Moreover, a period in opposition would allow Labour to regroup and emerge with a genuinely radical programme to transform the UK economy and create a fairer, more egalitarian society.

But Thatcher’s star was rising and the UK was shifting to the right.  Thatcher was certainly unpopular.  But the Labour left, under the hapless leadership of Michael Foot were even more unpopular.  And Thatcher – in office – was able to reap the huge rewards from North Sea Oil.  As we know to our cost, unlike the other oil exporting states which set up long-term sovereign wealth funds to benefit future generations, Thatcher squandered Britain’s one-off oil boom on maintaining high levels of unemployment, selling off the public assets (especially the housing stock) and allowing the baby boomers to retire at 50!  The oil revenues even allowed her to fight and win the Falklands War which has guaranteed Thatcherite governments ever since.

Cameron will not have oil revenues.  But that isn’t going to prevent him from re-inflating the housing bubble and selling off what remains of the public assets.  He will try to frack his way to prosperity (although fracking is only profitable if oil prices are persistently above $100 per barrel).  He will also most probably take Britain out of the EU – an act that, whatever its effects on the UK economy, will almost certainly result in the breakup of the United Kingdom.

So, for all of their failings there are real differences between the parties.  And, since the political drift is to the right, even a vote for party of the centre is better than a protest vote, spoiling the ballot paper or simply staying at home.  From where I am sat – in one of the closest Labour-Tory marginal seats in the country, my first need is to vote against a Tory party that I believe will be catastrophic for Britain.  Only one party can beat the Tories in this seat and that, sadly, is a Labour party the heads of whose leaders I would take great delight in soundly knocking together.

I wish there were some other way.  I wish we had a democratic electoral system so that people could feel free to vote for the party they want to see in government, rather than having to vote against the cretin who would get in if they did.  But we are where we are.  So, on the morning of May 7^th, with neither enthusiasm nor optimism, I will put a clothes peg on my nose and do the least bad thing the system allows and lend my vote to Mr Miliband.

Why I can’t accept the ice bucket challenge

The ice bucket challenge in which people film themselves having a bucket of iced water thrown over their heads, has reportedly earned MacMillan Cancer more than £250,000 in additional funds.

“That’s great!”  I hear you shout.

Well actually, no it isn’t for two reasons:

First, the bucket challenge was created by ASL (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) Association in the US for a specific reason: the shock experience of being immersed in ice cold water is the nearest reversible experience you and I can have to the experience of Motor Neurone Disease.  So the original challenge was either to donate to the cause or have the experience.  The “ice bucket challenge” makes a lot more sense now, doesn’t it?

So it is pretty disgraceful that MacMillan Cancer Care – an organisation with an annual income of more than £132 million – should hi-jack this campaign to fund their already bloated coffers.  And my objection is as much to do with public awareness as money – the UK Motor Neurone Disease Association has an annual income of more than £13 million. 

Cancer is one of the most publicised diseases, and cancer charities enjoy an income that is disproportionate to cancer’s impact on the population as a whole.  Other diseases such as stroke and heart disease have a much greater impact but enjoy a fraction of the funds that go to cancer care.

 

Motor Neurone Disease is relatively rare, but it is a horrendous illness.  So when a campaign to raise awareness takes off on social media, it is shocking to see bigger and more popular causes circling like vultures to grab the attention… and the money.

MacMillan has come in for a drubbing from many of their own supporters.  Some of the comments on their Facebook page are instructive:

“Umm...although I support the cause this idea was already in circulation in support of an ALS/Motor Neurone charity in the US. Isn't it bad practice to hijack another charity's campaign...?”

“So disappointed in Macmillan taking attention from the ALS campaign doing the same thing. A high profile charity should know better. And the excuse that ALS bucket challenge is only a US campaign (as tweeted by you) doesn't wash with me. Something that successful for a little known charity was always going to be picked up by sister charities over here. Shame on you!”

“My mum has terminal cancer and I support McMillan 100% but the ice bucket challenge is supposed to raise awareness for ALS/MND as so many people are unaware of how cruel this disease is. People need to know about this, just as much as cancer!”

MacMillan has attempted to counter these comments by claiming that nobody “owns” the ice bucket challenge.  They make the spurious argument that people have been dousing themselves in water to raise money for charities for decades.  As such, they were as entitled to jump on the bandwagon as anyone else. 

We must hold them to this next time they produce a ribbon, wristband or badge to raise money for cancer care.  Presumably they will accept the argument that people have been selling these items to raise money for charity for decades, and as such, nobody “owns” them.  Of course, were the tables reversed in this way, you can guarantee that MacMillan’s lawyers would be all over you! 

Unfortunately, because of the bully-boy antics of organisations like MacMillan, the ASL Association has now had to use precious resources to try to trademark the “ice bucket challenge” in order to prevent further abuse.

And remember, unlike a simple bucket of water, the ice bucket challenge was devised precisely because it could be related to the symptoms of Motor Neurone Disease.  I have yet to come across anyone with cancer who would relate this experience to their (undoubtedly equally unpleasant) symptoms.

This brings me to my second reason for not accepting the ice bucket challenge.  Charities like MacMillan have morphed into an unpleasant form of corporate body that has all of the drawbacks and few of the benefits of the private and public sectors.  It is a mutli-million-pound entity whose de facto first duty is to more than 1,000 staff, some of whom enjoy the kind of incomes that ordinary donors could only dream about.  It privately provides a service that should be being delivered by the state, and thereby adds to the decline and privatisation of the NHS.  And, as this latest scandal shows, it has the predatory instincts of the most ruthless of private corporations.

I refuse to fuel its direction of travel, irrespective of the many people who undoubtedly benefit from its activities.  Indeed, I am sure its beneficiaries would be much happier if the service was delivered by the NHS and accountable to Parliament.

So am I just some curmudgeonly old git who refuses to be charitable?

Well, this week I have been doing a lot of pro bono design work for a local charity in Cardiff.  Just a couple of weeks ago, and despite suffering with joint pain, I rode a bicycle 55 miles from Brecon to Cardiff Bay to raise money for a local charity.  So I am not against charity per see.  Rather, I am against the direction that a handful of super-charities have taken.

In my book, What’sWrong With Charity? I explain in greater detail how just 1.2 percent of charities in England and Wales enjoy 70 percent of all charity income.  This has led to a series of behaviours that will ultimately destroy the charity sector as a whole.  These include:

o    Inadequate legislation and regulation

• Increased fraud and mismanagement
• The end of “voluntarism” and the over-payment of employees
• Tax avoidance
• Hi-jacking political discourse

These are not reasons to stop supporting charity.  They are reasons to stop supporting multi-million-pound organisations in favour of supporting local charities that can make a difference to your community.  Importantly, you can take the time to get to know your local charities, find out whether they are any good, and (assuming they are) develop a relationship with them that goes beyond throwing cash in a tin (or, indeed, a bucket of ice water over your head).

Another Idiot on the BBC

When Dr Sally Mitton agreed to be interviewed by the BBC Newsbeat programme about the rise in inflammatory bowel diseases in recent years, she was probably unaware of the political subtext behind the story. This would make her what political philosophers refer to a a “useful idiot”.

When asked about the cause of inflammatory bowel disease - Dr Mitton quite rightly stated that, “we know that there are many genes that predispose somebody to get Crohn’s disease”. She probably should have gone onto explain that currently despite a raft of medical research, scientists have no idea what causes or triggers inflammatory bowel disease. She might also have said that there is currently no known cure; that patients who have the condition experience severe pain, internal bleeding, and severe diarrhoea and dehydration; that there are drugs that can bring about remission, but only at the cost of potentially life-threatening side-effects.

Unfortunately, Dr Mitton chose to espouse her own particular pet theory as to what factors might make inflammatory bowel disease more common: “but we also know that lifestyle factors like eat a lot of junk food or taking many courses of antibiotics may make it more likely to happen”. One suspects here the Dr Mitton has her own agenda. It is clear that many clinicians now regard junk food as a major cause of metabolic syndrome, a condition that is now so prevalent that it threatens to wreck the National Health Service. It is also clear that many clinicians are greatly troubled by the rising antibiotic resistant bacteria, which threatened to make many common conditions incurable, and which in turn may also add a further burden to over stretched National Health Service.

To raise these concerns on the back of a story about a widely misunderstood illness is foolish to say the least. It is clear that the establishment - the major political parties, the civil service, the BBC, and other news media have an agenda to begin the privatisation and dismantling of the National Health Service on the back of a campaign to demonise people with severe illnesses and disabilities. We have already seen the BBC acting as a cheerleader for the current government’s attempts to demonise disabled recipients of welfare benefits. One of the key ways in which this is done is to use stories that portray the disabled as being at least partially responsible for their own plight. So, for example, where people with disabilities can be shown to have smoked, drank excessive alcohol, or allowed their weight to spiral out of control, they are blamed for being unable to work and to being a burden on wider society.

We don’t know whether Dr Mitton is another disability denier (or simply another hard-pressed clinician doing the best they can in an over-stretched system). If she is, then she will no doubt be delighted by the manner in which the BBC chose to cover the story.

Playing down the genetic causes of inflammatory bowel disease, the BBC chose to highlight Dr Mitton’s junk food hypothesis. It is worth quoting the well respected, evidence-based NHS Choices here:

"There is no evidence to suggest that a particular diet can cause Crohn's Disease, although changes to your diet can help control certain symptoms and may be recommended by your specialist or dietitian".

If Dr Mitton is not a disability denier that she may wish to reflect on the damage that her utterances will have done. On forums, blog posts and social media, people like myself who have to live with inflammatory bowel disease have been outraged by the coverage. As with many conditions, inflammatory bowel disease is seldom talked about (other than enclosed forums of fellow sufferers) and is often confused by the general public with a much less serious irritable bowel syndrome - a distressing but ultimately minor and usually stress-related condition.

Already, people who suffer inflammatory bowel disease are experiencing ignorant comments about the condition being caused by their dietary habits. Worse still, we - people whose lives are threatened by the condition, the drugs that we have to take to keep it in remission, and the surgery that we often have to undergo to avoid premature death as a result of the condition itself - are now being told that it is possible to treat the condition solely by changing diet.

This is far and away the greater damage done by Dr Mitton’s comments. As with all conditions, inflammatory bowel disease attracts the usual army of cranks peddling a whole raft of alternative and complementary therapies. High among these are the so-called “nutritionists” who prey on people’s fears about the potentially serious consequences of formal medical treatments. Who among us would not want to believe that simply swapping apples for bananas would be enough for us not to have to take a drug like azathioprine (a medicine whose side effects include several cancers, liver disease, kidney failure and a whole raft of other unpleasant and disabling effects) for the rest of our lives.

Dr Mitton more than most will be aware that these treatments are not dished out willy-nilly. In a seriously strained National Health Service nobody is about to pay the treatments that people don’t need. When somebody with inflammatory bowel disease is told that they need surgery and/or a course of immune suppressant drugs, it is because there is a high risk that they will die without the treatment.

I prefer to believe that Dr Mitton is a useful idiot - someone who ignorantly blunders their way into providing expert cover for a viewpoint that the establishment wishes the general public to believe. While I don’t doubt that government ministers in general and Iain Duncan Smith in particular would like to go around blaming sick and disabled people for their plight, it is clear that such cruelty would not be tolerated by the wider public. So it suits them to have the media wheel out politically naive academics such as Dr Mitton to say these things for them. The public is much more likely to believe a doctor than they ever would a politician.

If Dr Mitton really wants to do something about junk food, we would all be better served if, instead of blaming dangerous illnesses on its consumption, she just came out straight and called for better regulation of the food industry, taxes on dangerous foods, and investment in public education about the harm is done by many of the substances that are commonly found in processed foods.

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Since writing this post, Dr Sally Mitton was contacted by the charity Crohn's and Colitis UK, and gave the following apology:

20th June 2014

First and foremost I would like to apologise for the distress that I have caused by what was shown on the BBC to all Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis patients. I was unable to respond more quickly to the reactions to this report due to very heavy clinical commitments. I feel that what I said and the subsequent coverage has been misinterpreted and Iwould like to clarify this now.

I said that Crohn’s disease occurs in those who are genetically susceptible and that the unexplained recent increase in numbers diagnosed amongst young people in the UK is likely to be related to life style. I did mention pre diagnosis diet and multiple courses of antibiotics as possible factors preceding the development of overt disease in some cases. I did not say that junk food or frequent courses of antibiotics CAUSE Crohn’s disease. I am very aware there are many patients with IBD who eat a very healthy and nutritious diet and have always done so before their diagnosis.

However, since the initial report on 18th of June there have been subsequent newspaper and television reports that focus on the assumption that Crohn’s Disease seems to be “caused” by junk food and multiple antibiotics. This is not my belief and is a distortion.

I did not mean to imply any element of self-infliction and I am appalled to think this could set back public perception of IBD or that sufferers might be blamed for their own pain and misfortune.

I would like to sincerely apologise again for the distress that my comments have caused.

Dr Sally Mitton
Consultant Paediatric Gastroenterologist

This confirms my view that Dr Mitton is a "useful idiot", and her treatment by the BBC should be born in mind by other clinicians and academics who are tempted to trot out personal opinion instead of sticking to the scientific evidence.