You
are in the company of
Roger Warren Evans
Roger Warren Evans
|
|
You
are in the company of
Roger Warren Evans |
|
| Part of www.LivePolitics.net < Back to Home Page |
|
|
Waiting for PICs The tidal wave of Government policy papers which has just broken over us omitted the proposals which were, for me quite selfishly, the most important of all. Will the Government have the courage to facilitate the expansion of social enterprise outside the conventional private and charitable sectors. What is needed is the creation of a new tailor-made legal vehicle, which has been called the public interest company. I will not repeat all the arguments for statutory reform, because for months they have been published here on the Web.  The PIC concept is intended for the widest possible deployment in
society, greatly extending the reach and capacity of the voluntary sector.
But the plan (rumoured to have the support of the Downing Street
Performance & Innovation Unit) has become entangled in the
possible deployment by the State itself of this new legal
vehicle. Alan Milburn wants to use the PIC format for his new
Foundation Hospitals, which represent
a socialist version of Margaret Thatcher's planned independent trusts,
which were planned to operate under private law. Estelle Morris wants to use the PIC
format for a range of educational corporations
that might take over some or all of the responsibilities of failing education
authorities, or even groups of schools or individual schools. And of
course, if the PIC had already been passed into law, it would have been
chosen as the appropriate vehicle for Air Traffic Control, Network Rail,
and the London Underground.
 They
have run foul of Gordon Brown, who sees the the PIC as a threat to
the Government's fiscal prudence. And the spat was not resolved, so
Whitehall chat has it, in time for the July political tsunami.
It will surely be resolved, because Gordon is concerned only with the
particular use made by Government of this new legal kit.
The kit itself is neutral: there may be objections to the Queens Flight,
special aircraft reserved for Her Majesty, but that cannot surely be
allowed to inhibit air travel as such - can it?
Drop me a line > < Back to Home Page
Democratic clanger Pity Anthony Williams. He's the Democrat Candidate for Mayor of Washington DC, and his Election team submitted 10,240 signatures in support of his nomination - as compared with the legally-required figure of 2,000, as reported in the Guardian. But the best laid plans of mice and men go oft agley... It turns out that Williams had offered his officials a bonus of $1 per gathered signature - and over 8,000 of them were false! Many names did not appear on any electoral roll, as the law required - and Tony Blair, Kofi Annan, Donald Rumsfeld and the well-known Republican Billy Joel were inherently unlikely to have joined the happy throng. All political activists (like me) know the hazards of collecting signatures for any purpose. Every petition faces the Micky Mouse Risk Factor. That is why I have personally taken responsibility for verifying every signature appended to the great drugs-reform petition, the Angel Declaration. The figure is climbing slowly, as people get to hear about it, and we have ten MPs/MEPs firmly committed, out of a total of 500 - you can sign online too - check us out. Drop me a line > < Back to Home Page
372 29 July 2002 Democracy matters We all pay lip-service to "democracy". And representative democracy, as a process bestowing legitimacy upon elected government, has carried all before it. But there is much more to democracy than that. Paul Foot celebrated the defeat of Sir Kenneth Jackson by Derek Simpson, and the profound significance of forms of organisation which genuinely allowed ideas and opinions to filter upwards, by way of real democracy. And the just-published UN Human Development Report argues that a precondition of the elimination of world poverty is a deeper entrenchment of political democracy. It is only when Governments are exposed to the pressures of popular discontent, in a democratic system, that societies generate the political momentum necessary for change. In the UK, democracy remains a fragile plant. True, we have been thorough in carrying through the perceptions of representative democracy. We are even experimenting with the arcane formulae of proportional representation, although we ignore the powerful case for Votes at 16. But our society remains, at base, profoundly undemocratic. Undemocratic social class conventions are still strong. We continue to rely on appointed quango government in all sectors of our lives. A new, narrow political salariat has emerged, expert at the manipulation of electoral processes. Process will have to be countered, by positive political action. Existing institutions should be opened up to wider participation, both by election and otherwise. Take a look at some of my own ideas.
Take a look around you. Where could democratic participation be
extended?
373 29 July 2002 Newbury & Affuso These are not household names, David Newbury and Louisa Effuso. But they are music to my ears. They are the authors of a new report from the Economic & Social Research Council assessing the implications of Labour's 10-year transport strategy, published in 2000. They confirmed that congestions was imposing an "unnecessary and unjustified cost on the economy". But, they say, it is "far from clear" that these problems are best addressed by increased rail investment. "The investment costs of improving passenger benefits are relatively higher in rail than road, and road improvements appear to be considerably more profitable". Thank heavens! The voice of sanity at last! Let's hope that Alistair Darling is reading, and listening. It would be far better to put public resources into highway improvement and construction, and cut back the rail network to its Intercity and metropolitan minimum - that's the line I took in January '02, with John Birt... I accept that
this is all politically incorrect.
But we are planning to waster a lorra money on rail, an outdated
transport technology.
374 29 July 2002Too many Crimes No - not too many criminal acts, to be investigated by the Police. Rather, too many aspects of human behaviour designated by Parliament as crimes. The new IPPR think-tank report, trailed in this Sunday's Observer for publication on Monday, reveals that there are now over 8,000 "crimes" for our hapless Police Forces to pursue. We criminalise too much. We enforce too much. We punish too much. We imprison too much. Why have we, as a society, got into these bad habits? The answers related to social class, over-centralisation, and a failure of understanding. Class
Centralisation
Failure of Understanding
This distinctive British cocktail of coerciveness is a poisonous one. Our search must be for methods of social control which demonstrate a greater understanding, a greater respect for individual sovereignty, and a more assiduous concern with honouring human rights. If society could be moved in that direction, preferably by my own Labour Party, our overcrowded jails would be a thing of the past.
Drop me a line > < Back to Home Page
375 3 August 2002Social Class and the Welsh
I have to take issue with Hywel Williams, who wrote a beautiful appreciation of Rowan Williams, the new Canterbury primate. Because he implied that Dr Williams' classlessness was to be traced to his origins in the mining village of Ystradgynlais. "Classlessness prevailed because there was only one class - the working-class", said Williams. That reflects, I say, a profound misunderstanding of the Welsh. 'I share the perception of a society, in South Wales, which is free of class, class prejudices and class pretension. That was one of the key reasons, for me, for returning to Swansea in 1979, bringing our children Katharine and Owen back from London's class-ridden Dulwich Village to grow up in Swansea. This classlessness represents a distinctive element in Welsh socialism, which still has a major contribution to make to the future of the Labour Party, post-Blair. Tony Blair, through no fault of his own, is a very "English" class construct, which explains much about his political perceptions and the reasons for his profound unpopularity in Wales. 'But this classlessness is not simply a matter of "everybody being working class", as Hywel Williams implies, in his description of Ystradgynlais. Throughout the period 1860/1910, thousands upon thousands of "immigrants" descended upon industrial South Wales - from the West Country, Scotland and Ireland, in search of work. South Wales was the Klondyke of the UK, the newcomers came to outnumber the native Welsh by about 3:1. The population of Cardiff and the Eastern Valleys mushroomed, as world demand expanded for the soft steam coal needed for the railway-engines and great ocean-going vessels of the Victorian industrial revolution. 'This rapid expansion generated a great social entrepot, in which Welsh language and culture were submerged, and many well-known new Welsh institutions were forged - the life of the nonconformist chapels, the improbable success of the public-school game of rugby, male-voice choirs, and a vital and assertive brand of trade unionism. In this social and cultural furnace, certain Welsh characteristics won through - a profound love of language and the music of the voice, an intense interest in oral debate, a distinctive and iconoclastic political radicalism - and classnessness, a natural rejection of the pretensions of English class society. 'I am proud to share that great tradition - but there is nothing working-class about me! I cannot lay claim (as so many Labour politicians do, sometimes with dubious authenticity...) to any history of poverty or deprivation. My Cardiff father and my Cardiff grandfather were pillars of the professional middle-class of the exploding city of Cardiff, from 1865 onwards. And I absorbed my own "class consciousness" unambiguously from my parents - my mother Mary Cann, the daughter of a well-established Swansea builders' merchant George Cann, was equally free of class pretension. 'South Wales does not have a class society, and that represents a great strength. But Hywel Williams' account of it is misleading, I say wrong... Do you share my perceptions of Welsh society - either as an insider or an outsider? Do you think I am talking nonsense? Drop me a line > < Back to Home Page
|
|
|
|
Created by GMID Design & Communication
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
|
The criminal law has long
been used, by high-status members of society, as a method of social
control. The Squire in rural England doubled up as the Magistrate: the
poacher, the beggar and the hungry thief were always in the Dock.
Intoxication came to be regulated, by the mid-18th century, to inhibit social disorder triggered by the working classes. The
village Constable was paid to defend the propertied classes against the
tenants and the landless labourers. And when trade unions emerged in
the 19th century, both criminal and civil law were used to destabilise their threatening operation. And English
society still finds it impossible to shake off its class roots: crime is
something that the working classes get up to. Attitudes to
trade unions are still, incredibly, informed by the same class mistrust. 
The use of force by the Police, is deployed partly
to avoid the need to defend the indefensible - revolutionary protest has
been quickly criminalised, in the UK. Even the 2002 globalisation protests
were quickly routed via the Magistrates Courts of London. The gross inequalities
of wealth and power which have long disfigured our society could not and
cannot be rationally explained away - when Adam delved and Eve span, who
was then the gentleman? The criminal law is
deployed against the dispossessed, partly to silence them, to avoid the disruptive
arguments into which the parties would otherwise be plunged. The
criminalisation of "drugs" and of "immigration" both
spring from the same roots, and reflect primal
fears of social disorder. 
And in the Labour Party, for all our pretensions, we have not made much
progress with devolution, or power-sharing, with other institutions of
Government. We were forced to share power in Scotland, but
have not managed the consequences skilfully, as a Party. In Wales,
we conceded the very minimum. For London, we gave virtually no power
away, hanging Ken Livingstone out to dry. And the pantomime
tissue-paper "devolution" of the new Regionalisation White Paper
