On Thursday I wrote a post discussing my thoughts about the election. Now two days later we have had the results, and at a national level are still going through the machinations caused by the results.
I have heard it said often that whatever people tell pollsters, when they get into the polling booth they can do something totally different. The 1992 General Election is a good example of this effect where the polls were predicting a Labour victory, but the country returned the sitting, and apparently deeply unpopular Conservative government for another term. For decades the government of the UK has been flip-flopping from Labour to Conservative and back to Labour again, usually with a large pool of floating voters who are voting to get rid of something they don’t like, rather than voting for something they do.
This time around according to the polls Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats had made a big impression during the campaign, and according to the pollsters had historically high poll ratings, at times pushing Labour into third place. But on the day all these poll gains evaporated – across the country people were desperate to get rid of an unpopular government and saw voting for the Conservatives as a way to do it.
It was against this backdrop that we must look at the results for Wokingham. John Redwood our sitting Conservative MP was returned with a significant increase in majority. In the press this has been reported as a swing from the Liberal Democrats to the Conservatives, but when you look at the votes this is misleading. There was a significant increase in turnout over 2005 – in actual fact of the three main parties only Labour had less votes – the Liberal Democrat candidate received more votes. However most of the additional turnout went to the sitting Conservative candidate. Mark Ashwell the independent candidate polled a couple of thousand votes, noticeable, but not enough to really impact the vote.
Locally, there was a big jump in turnout – the last time this ward was elected it wasn’t on the day of a General Election. Occurring on the same day it is rare for people to vote differently in the two elections, so again the local councillor was returned with a sizeable majority. Indeed across the whole of the borough only one ward changed hands, passing from the Conservatives to the Liberal Democrats. In the run up to the vote I had been swapping e-mails with our local councillor who had been defeatist right from the off, saying that our Resident Action Group website was going to lose him the election, that he knew his time was up, and during the course of the campaign we had more than double the number of flyers through from him. In my e-mails I’d repeatedly said that I wouldn’t be surprised if he was still the village councillor on May 7th, and I’m not – this is a staunchly Conservative area, and whilst there is a good deal of anger amongst some of the residents it is a big step for many from being angry about what is going on to actively voting for someone else. The big disappointment is that his insecurity in his electorate led him to produce election literature with some truly ludicrous and unfounded claims that do nothing for the reputation of politicians. I have much more respect for someone who has run a clean and honest campaign and lost than someone who has run a dishonest campaign and won.
Reflecting on the local situation, we now have a very interesting situation developing nationally, as the two parties who on a local level here seem to truly loathe one another find themselves thrust together as the Cameron led Conservatives find themselves with no option but to ask the Clegg led Liberal Democrats to support them to allow them to form a government. Thanks to the British constitution the incumbent Prime Minister stays in the job if nobody gets an overall majority. The Conservatives need the Liberal Democrats. More ironically any decision to support them needs a positive vote from 75% of the parliamentary party and 75% of the Liberal Democrat Federal Executive, and if they can’t agree it needs a ballot of the members. Suddenly in order to have any chance of forming a government the Conservatives need the support of the self same people who in our area they have been making ludicrous accusations about just days before.
The situation is also causing people to reflect on the absurdity and perverse nature of our venerable first-past-the-post voting system. The whole system favours parties with dominant pockets of support, as a result of the system country wide it took the vote of 35,021 Conservative supporters to elect one MP, and 33,338 Labour supporters to elect one MP for them. However it took the vote of 119,397 to elect on Liberal Democrat MP – the final seats in the Commons fail to reflect the votes cast nationally. Other perverse results include the City of Oxford, which is split into two constituencies. Across the whole city 41,087 people voted Liberal Democrat, 33,633 voted Conservative and 27,937 voted Labour, however because of the distribution of the voters the city is now represented by one Conservative and one Labour MP. Similarly in Wokingham Borough across ward after ward the Liberal Democrats come a strong second, but they have vastly fewer seats on council because the same unfair voting system operates in local council elections.
However thanks to the failure of the Conservatives to win a majority they now need the help of the Liberal Democrats to govern, and whilst elements of the press seem to think that they should quietly trot along and just prop up a minority Conservative government who only gained the support of 36% of the electorate, there are other groups who see this as a golden opportunity to properly reform our voting system. Today a fair votes demonstration that was going on largely unnoticed in Trafalgar Square, decided to go and visit the building where Nick Clegg was discussing the offer made by the Conservatives to try and get Liberal Democrat support – an offer that doesn’t include the promise of a change in voting system, this was the result:
Could this be the dawn of a new age in terms of British democracy – or will it just go back to business as usual?
This morning on the way to work I did my civic duty and cast my vote in both the General Election, and also for our local councillor in Arborfield, as thanks to our unitary authority this is the one year in four when the people of Arborfield actually get to vote on local issues.
In Arborfield the vote is pretty well a straight rerun of the vote four years ago with the incumbent Tory, Gary Cowan, running against a Liberal Democrat, Steve Bacon, who was the local councillor beaten by Cowan thirteen years ago. As last time the only other candidate is from UKIP, Labour don’t even bother to field a candidate.
Sadly the campaign is also a rerun of the previous efforts with the sitting Tory producing leaflets spouting the most ludicrous claims about Liberal Democrat policy locally – this years gem being that the Liberal Democrats want to put 12,000 houses into the Garrison SDL. Bear in mind that taking the average household size of 2.36 that would be a population almost as big as Wokingham itself crammed into the Garrison SDL, at a density equivalent to some of our major inner city areas. The reality is that the Liberal Democrats have much the same policy towards Arborfield as the Tories – as one of the biggest potential brownfield areas in the borough it is a much more attractive location for houses than the other much more greenfield SDL’s, so even if a new government drops housing targets it’s more than likely that Arborfield would still be a prime site – and a careful reading of our Tories flyers show that he doesn’t say that housing won’t come to the Garrison site even if the numbers are scaled back across the borough. Sadly our one and only local councillor is also executive member for local and regional planning, so whilst his campaign leaflets bang on about him putting Arborfield first, second and third, he has a Wokingham wide view through his executive role, hence on occasions he can’t answer questions from his voters because they might compromise his executive position, and repeatedly he turns up in the press highlighting the next stage of the plan, only to object to the same plan in his role as local councillor.
Whilst there is a good deal of anger across the village, especially after the meeting earlier in the year where Gary refused to answer questions, Arborfield is one of the safer parts of one of the safest Tory councils in the country (Tories hold over 75% of the council, and even if they lost every ward today they would still be in control) I’m doubtful whether even that level of anger could swing the ward. Ironically though from e-mails I’ve swapped with our local councillor he seems a lot more pessimistic – indeed when his fifth flyer of the campaign popped through the door, following on from Redwood himself going door to door earlier in the week, he does seem increasingly desperate and unsure of his core vote. The count starts at 2pm tomorrow, so we’ll have to wait until then to find out if he was right.
By far the more interesting campaign though is for the constituency.
The Wokingham area was one of only thirty in the whole country that have been continuously represented by one party since the 1850’s. Our current MP is the well known John Redwood. Considering how safe the local council is people often assume that the constituency would be equally safe but it isn’t. The fact is that Redwood isn’t nearly as popular locally as he should be given the area, indeed his share has been steadily falling, and at the last election he could have been beaten had that Labour and Liberal Democrat vote combined. Into this mix comes Mark Ashwell, a local businessman standing as an independent. Traditionally independents don’t do well, but being well known locally, on the ground at least he seems to be making headway. Travelling around Wokingham you see vastly more Vote Ashwell boards than for any other party. He has also managed to grab a lot of good headlines in the local paper, and the various polls the local paper has run give him surprisingly high totals. Indeed the online bookmakers have cut his odds over the course of the campaign indicating that a good few people think he might win.
Considering the comparatively low majority that Redwood has, even a modest showing from Ashwell could cause a major upset, especially if a goodly number of disgruntled Labour voters swap to the Liberal Democrats. Whilst realistically the most likely outcome is still for Redwood to take the seat, albeit with a reduced majority, Ashwell has the possibility to either cause a major upset by taking enough of the Tory vote to let Prue Bray, the second placed Liberal Democrat candidate last time, and Liberal Democrat PPC this time in, or even more spectacularly by taking the seat himself.
There is the potential for things looking rather different tomorrow morning. Could Wokingham become a lone Liberal Democrat seat in Berkshire? Or might we be one of the few constituencies in the country to return a true independent? Now we wait to find out…
Today I received what will be the first I’m sure of many notices shoved through my door asking for my support at the upcoming election. Whilst there are many national issues to be dealt with in the general election, on a local scale there are big decisions to be made. And what a decision, there has never been so much need for a “none of the above” option.
I’m sure I don’t need to highlight the massive housing plans that are currently being touted by our council, with the sitting Conservative administration having voted to buldoze swathes of the land around Three Mile Cross and Shinfield, both north and south of Wokingham, and development primarily in outlying areas of Finchampstead and Barkham around Arborfield Garrison. What is interesting from the point of view of a resident of Arborfield such as myself is that the last time our elected representative, Gary Cowan stood for re-election three years ago, he did so promising to try to minimise the housing that would be built – now he is standing for re-election again with his name on the planning documents that bring over ten thousand homes across the district, and three thousand five hundred on his own doorstep – although his election materials repeatedly highlight that the majority of the houses are to be built in Finchampstead and Barkham, not Arborfield.
It doesn’t take much digging around to find the flaws in the current housing proposals. Going through all the glossy pictures and grand plans, and talk of build dates, you’d think that there was a definite departure date for REME and the Arborfield Garrison. If you thought that you’d be wrong.
REME have been “about to move” for years, and the move keeps being pushed back. The original defence training review was over a decade ago and it still hasn’t been implemented. There are local protests against the scale of the new training site in Wales, and recently the government yet again has pushed back a definite decision on the move, now waiting on making the controversial decision until the summer, after the General Election. With tightening defence budgets concern is continuing to be expressed about the £13 billion price tag for the project, with some politicians already highlighting the plan as an ideal candidate to be cut. David Cameron has spoken out about the uncertainty for the people of Wales, but has noticeably refused to commit a possible incoming Conservative administration to the move, instead mentioning just the kind of defence review that could cut an expensive plan such as this. With the need to save billions from national budgets, why waste so much money on a move like this?
Whilst all of this is going on, the Arborfield SDL is still being pushed as a brownfield development by our unitary authority. However in order to make a “viable community” many homes need to be built on greenfield sites – sites that would still be available if the Garrison moves or not. If the plan goes ahead and is adopted but the Garrison fails to move, without the brownfield areas the developers will only have the greenfield sites – the adopted plan is tantamount to outline planning permission. Even building on all the planned greenfield areas there will be so many fewer houses such that key trigger levels for the desperately needed infrastructure improvements such as additional schools, the district centre and a bypass for Arborfield will not be met – the whole reason for focusing on strategic development locations in the first place.
But then what of the extra houses that then could not be put on the site at Arborfield? The council is committed to build over twelve thousand over the next fifteen years, and as many people may know, the SDL’s do not meet the total housing allocation for Wokingham anyway. Several thousand are going to be in unspecified small scale developments scattered across the borough – if the Garrison fails to move that will be several thousand more that will end up as infill and backyard development, just the kind of thing that is regularly rejected when the residents of the area are consulted on what development they would like because it doesn’t give the significant funds needed for the infrastructure we as a borough desperately need.
What was needed from the council were clear and realistic plans as to where new development was able to go, what we’ve got is our unitary authority taking a massive gamble on Arborfield Garrison moving to Wales and the brownfield site being able to take the largest proportion of the new housing in the borough. If that doesn’t happen – and concerns were being expressed in the national press in 2008 that it wouldn’t – all we’ll get is more piecemeal development, more lack of investment in infrastructure and more unsustainable communities.
So where was the opposition on our council when this was going ahead, plans that are obviously gambling on the future of our communities across the whole borough by picking a site that is increasingly unlikely to be available? Were they calling the governing body to account for potentially dooming Wokingham Borough to many more backyard developments? No. It seems the Liberal Democrat group abstained en-masse from the key vote.
Never has there been so much need for a “none of the above” option.
Whilst I’m sure what I’ve written above will be seen as NIMBYism, it is worth saying that as any resident of the Garrison area, we moved here in the full knowledge that the future of the Garrison was uncertain, whatever was said at elections, a look at proposals going back years always finds Arborfield touted as a potential development site. However what we have always been promised is a sustainable community, one that can accommodate the extra people the redevelopment of the base will bring. Sadly with the ongoing unrealistic attitude to the floundering plans for the move from our council, and with the planned locations of two of the three schools and the district centre sitting squarely on the Army owned land, that in such a scenario would not be released, it seems we will instead be left with hundreds of extra houses and none of the infrastructure such a new development would need, and a consequential impact that will be felt across the whole of the rest of the borough.
This year was the first white christmas I have ever experienced. Looking around the area things all looked pretty much like your average greetings card picture (or the atypical English winter depicted in The Holiday), so we got some nice pictures of the church thanks to Richard Owen who brought his camera along with his shovel. By the 24th it was just about possible to get around, but back on the 21st December, most people around here were wishing for anything other than a white christmas, indeed for many of them getting home would have been a bonus.
I was somewhat lucky in that I can see the main road from my office, so as the snow fell and the traffic grid-locked, I stayed put. In fact along with about twenty other stranded staff I was shouted dinner by our chief executive and a couple of other directors who were also stuck in the office. By about 8:30pm, in Camberley at least, the roads were clear and I could head for home. Whilst the snow levels increased as I headed into Berkshire, the roads were passable enough for me to make it home in about an hour.
Others were less lucky. The wife of my cousin who works in Reading and lives in Amersham had a hellish eight hour journey through the areas with the biggest snowfalls. Similarly several friend who work up near Oxford had five hour journeys as again the motorways ground to a halt. Locally there were several accidents on major routes leading to traffic slowing to a halt, and trapping the gritting trucks in the jam. The situation in Basingstoke actually made the national news.
Needless to say, this has produced the other staple of a winter event in Southern England, moaning about the local councils failing to keep the roads clear, and numerous comparisons with other countries like Germany and Canada, that don’t grind to a halt in the snow.
First off, it is worth comparing what happens in a country like Canada with here. Yes the local authorities are better set up for dealing with snow, and indeed they have more equipment on standby ready to keep the roads clear, but the important thing to note is that the local drivers are properly equipped as well. It is common practice to fit special winter tyres to the cars, whereas it is unheard of in the UK – pretty well everybody was sliding around on all season or summer tyres – check out this YouTube video for the effect that winter tyres can have. Also once you get stuck, most British drivers are ill equipped. In Canada many drivers will have an emergency kit in the car, certainly Beth when she lived in rural Canada would travel in winter with a warm change of clothes in the car, a shovel to dig the car out in an emergency and a bag of grit to improve traction if needed. If you told most Brits that they needed that, they’d think it laughable, because you don’t get weather like that in England. Needless to say that is exactly the same reason the local councils don’t spend vast amounts of money on equipment that could sit largely idle in between major snow events like we had this Christmas.
It is also worth mentioning, that even in Canada they get disruptive snow fall from time to time, and they can’t deal with everything. What happened around our area last week was after an initial fairly light fall of snow on 21st the forecast was for sleet, which fell initially as rain, and then turned to snow. The problem with rain is that it washes away the grit that is put on the road, if that then freezes, and then snow falls on top you get what we got on 21st – a layer of ice with snow on top – treacherous even with good tyres and experienced drivers, let alone with most UK cars.
But I’ve been in Canada in similar conditions.
One winter trip over to Alberta it rained on the Tuesday, froze overnight and then snowed on top, leading to precisely the same sorts of conditions as we had – a layer of ice covered by snow. It was chaos. The local news swapped between pictures of chaos across Calgary, with removal trucks stranded by sheet ice, multiple accidents on the major roads, and hauled up the council staff responsible for maintaining the roads who tried to explain how they’d done their best, but there was nothing they could do. Even several days later when we headed for the airport many roads weren’t clear of ice despite the road crews working around the clock to clear it. A trip that would normally have taken us three hours took over six.
The moral of the story is that snow and ice causes chaos, even to those most experienced at dealing with it. Sure the UK could invest much more money in snow clearance, and they could mandate that all drivers fit winter tyres for the winter, but when it comes down to it, most people I’m sure would consider it not worth the money, whether out of their own pockets directly in buying a second set of tyres for their cars, or indirectly through the increased taxes to pay for the equipment. And even having spent all that money, there will still be the occasional times like this last week where however much grit you use, and however much the councils try to clear the roads, things will still grind to a halt.
However they do say that live is always better than recorded, and that was what we got today, with the first specialist appointment at Frimley Park. After the complications with gestational diabetes Beth had to have an appointment to get booked in for two glucose tests, the results of which will determine how many more appointments and ultra-sound scans we will have during the rest of the pregnancy, and ultimately when baby 2.0 is born. The due date is officially 14th June, but if the diabetes returns, as it is expected to, the birth will be induced early.
Having said that, it does look like the trips to the hospital will be a little bit less of a hassle as after leaving early to take account of the usual vast queue to get into the chaos of the hospital car park, we got in really easily, and even got one of the big spaces that make it a lot easier to get Lucy in and out of the car. At first I thought it was just that it was the time of year, but it turns out that it wasn’t only that…
As far as possible we’ve always tried to get morning appointments at the hospital, because you can usually get into the car park – although it’s often busy, you can usually get a space. In the afternoons it has always been absolute chaos, with the queue for the car park stretching out onto the road outside. The problem has always seemed to be around the couple of hours of visiting of an afternoon. Aside from one or two exceptions, all the hospital visiting is in two blocks, one in the afternoon and the other in the evening, so in the afternoon you have visitors cars and patients heading to clinics all competing for spaces. According to the sign coming into the hospital today they seem to have finally taken heed of the problems, and afternoon visiting is only available on the weekends, during the week visiting is limited to the evening only. We’ll have to see whether it helps as we go through this pregnancy.
And before anyone mentions the importance of visitors, and how inconvenient it will be to only have evening visiting, I am well aware of that, but short of building a bigger car park, or introducing park and ride – especially with parking charges for hospitals looking like they will be abolished, it is more important that patients are able to park.
The collective principle asserts that… no society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.
Sicko highlights the problems with the US Healthcare system. Whilst certain groups such as the elderly, military and others are covered by public health schemes, the vast majority of US citizens rely on private health insurance, or in the case of an estimated forty million people, no insurance at all. What this leads to is situations where people with inadequate or no insurance do not receive treatment, so the movie included examples of patients who were left choosing which finger to reattach after an accident purely because they couldn’t afford the cost of everything, and people who ended up going bankrupt struggling to pay bills.
So how come it has become such a big story in the UK?
Over the earlier part of the debate, our news programmes have been keeping an eye on things, but mostly with a healthy dose of incredulity that there seems to be such disagreement over what seems to us to be a common sense reform to ensure that everybody has the ability to access affordable healthcare. To be honest it hasn’t figured that much because nobody in the US is advocating introducing a system such as our NHS where the state owns and runs the healthcare services, something that is now pretty well unique in the world. Instead they appear to be moving towards a single-payer health care scheme similar to those that operate in Canada, and ironically similar to the US Medicare system that already covers senior citizens in the US.
However, this hasn’t stopped the opponents of the plan, rolling out “examples” of the failings of “socialized” medicine, using our NHS as a major source. They duped two British campaigners, who support the principles of the NHS, but are campaigning against parts of the system into participating in adverts against the healthcare reforms. They have also rolled out a series of claims about the NHS, a number of which are just plain lies – the Guardian addressed many of the better known accusations. Another trump card was that they also managed to get a British politician, Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan to come onto the TV to criticise the NHS:
Watching the stories go by on #welovetheNHS reinforced how many people were grateful to the service. Whilst complaining about the NHS is almost as much of a national pastime as moaning about the weather, the vast majority of the general public in the UK are full square behind the original idea set out by Nye Bevan, that no society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means, even if we could all see ways it could be improved. Faced with this, we’ve had politicians of all persuasions queuing up on British TV to defend the NHS, indeed Hannan caused his party leader to break his holiday and distance the party from the statements in the US as detailed in this BBC News article. Incidentally, the BBC also has an interesting page comparing statistics on four basic healthcare models in use around the world and their costs and effects.
From my position, I have never experienced US healthcare. All I can do is explain some of my experiences of our system in light of some of the untruths that have been presented in the US describing the UK system. It is also worth mentioning that these are my experiences, and others experiences may be different depending on their doctor, a particular illness, hospital or whatever.
First off, some of the Americans interviewed on TV have expressed concern that they would not have choice under a single-payer health care scheme.
That is not my experience. Thanks to the generosity of my employer alongside my NHS I have a subsidised private medical insurance scheme. The way they get used in the UK is primarily to gain quick access to minor treatment, but a number of NHS hospitals have private wings which the private medical insurance can access. Many surgeons work in both public and private systems, indeed for many minor operations you’ll find the private patients being included in the same list as the NHS patients. There is also nothing to stop you paying for your own treatment, as several people I know have done for minor procedures.
I’ve also got a choice of my GP. Where we live falls in the area of several GP practice areas – in the NHS GP’s can define limits on the areas their practice covers, generally to allow them to easily visit patients in an emergency if required. When we moved here we chose to stay with the local practice for where we lived previously as this was still within area. The surgery is a little over two miles away, and there is another just over half a mile away, and several more within three or four miles of home. In more rural areas GP coverage may be more sparse, but with multiple doctors in most practices there is still some element of choice.
When Beth was pregnant, we also had a choice over hospitals – there were three within ten miles and having looked at statistics and feedback on the units, and also considering where they were located in relation to our workplaces we opted for the unit at Frimley Park rather than the hospital that most mothers from our GP practice went to at the Royal Berkshire.
That actually brings us on to another topic, the costs of treatment. As you may be aware, Beth had complications in her pregnancy which resulted in significantly extra appointments at the hospital, and several additional scans. All of this was delivered for the same cost to ourselves, absolutely nothing. Indeed as a pregnant woman all of Beth’s regular prescription costs were covered, as they still are now, and as are any prescription costs for Lucy. I have to pay for my prescriptions, but that is a £7 administrative cost. Whilst it is true that I may be able to buy some drugs cheaper, I know others who are getting drugs that cost thousands of pounds, all either for the £7 administrative charge, or nothing if they are in an exempt category. Exempt categories include pregnant women, children and those with a number long term illnesses that need regular medication. All in all something like 85% of prescriptions are dispensed for free. Also free were the several “nervous new parent” visits we paid to the doctor with Lucy after she was born with what turned out to be minor ailments, and the regular visits from the midwife and health visitor teams. As there is no concern about paying for consultations, we are much more likely to visit the doctor just-in-case, which in turn increases the possibility that maybe serious conditions are caught early.
Moving onto another subject, the idea that senior citizens are denied treatment through their age, cost or whatever, or that they are left on waiting lists despite having serious conditions. Again, in my experience not true. A couple of years ago Mum was diagnosed with breast cancer. On diagnosis she was quickly seen and treated, and indeed when she had a scare more recently, this again was addressed quickly. She received new experimental treatments for her cancer, and at the end of it, no bill, it was all covered. Unlike stories heard from the US, she wasn’t left with the choice of getting treatment or going bankrupt. We have also had a lady at Church, much older than my Mum who was also diagnosed with breast cancer. Again, there was no question of her being too old. Now I have known older people who have been advised for medical reasons not to undergo a treatment, but the decision is medical.
Like any health system, the money available is not unlimited. In the US decisions on what treatment will be paid for are made by insurance companies, in the UK we have the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence or NICE. This was established to try and stop what was called the postcode lottery, where different areas would offer different treatments. This is possibly where the US accusations of “death panels” has come from, as the organisation uses statistical methods to work out whether a particular treatment is financially viable. The difference with NICE is that these decisions are made by a public body, and whilst there have been well publicised cases where they have denied a particular treatment, people have also successfully argued to have them change policy. In terms of how this affects me, in simple terms unless I get something really serious, or rare, it doesn’t. Whilst there are certain pre-existing conditions that the company medical insurance will not cover me for – and this list grows whenever I change jobs, the NHS will treat me for almost anything, at no cost, whether or not I’ve had it before. Indeed I had one medical problem that spanned more than one employer that was partially treated on company medical insurance, but also under the NHS – I could quite happily change jobs without worrying that I wouldn’t be able to get treatment.
The system is not perfect, probably the most frustrating part is NHS dentistry. The story of a patient who took to repairing his crown with superglue has been mentioned as an argument against a government run healthcare system – the irony being that dentistry is the one significant part of the NHS with a large private involvement, and that is where the problem came from. If you actually read the story rather than listening to the rhetoric, you’ll find that the reason he fixed it himself was because even supposedly NHS dentists were trying to get him to pay to have the crown fixed privately. More recently, after the NHS introduced a new contract for dentists a significant number of them decided to opt out of the NHS and only offer private services – at which point they charge per treatment, rather than the new NHS contract which was an attempt to move away from that model. It is worth noting that Beth who during our time with the practice had needed several bits of dental work was invited to transfer to become a private patient – me who was only needing the six monthly check-ups was ignored. That left us without a dentist for a while as we looked around for another NHS practice, but we’ve now managed to sign up with another local NHS dentist. Dentistry treatment is not free, but is subsidised for NHS patients. Even if you aren’t registered with an NHS practice, you can still access emergency NHS dentistry cover through a network of emergency dentists.
Other times we have experienced the NHS have been via accident and emergency units. Again we’ve sometimes had a wait, but that is mainly because they prioritise admissions – if someone is rushed in in a critical condition they will be seen ahead of more minor cuts and scratches. Again you can pick and choose where you go, so for example now we have a new unit close by with a minor injury we’d go to a local minor injury unit rather than the city centre accident and emergency unit that is slightly closer, we also have a 24/7 medical telephone help-line that we have used on a number of occasions – they have been able to advise home treatment in some cases, and can also advise whether a doctor, or even an ambulance should be called. The ambulances and paramedics of course are also all part of the system too.
So would I want to make wholesale changes the NHS? Absolutely not. It may have it’s problems, but those are problems that need to be solved without chucking the baby out with the bath-water. Like any sixty year old institution it needs to change and evolve, but not at the expense of the level of care offered to the population of the UK. As to the US, like many on this side of the Atlantic, I can’t fathom why so many people have a problem with it. Check out this video:
Here is an American who is apparently vehemently opposed to “socialized” medicine (without realising that her parents are about to be part of such a scheme), despite the fact that the current private system is hitting her family business with healthcare costs for employees, and she herself admits that she is having to find money to pay for upcoming medical treatment for her child. Over here, she’d only be concerned about the medical treatment, not for how it will hit the family financially – all of the medical treatment she is having to find money for would be covered by the NHS over here.
The collective principle asserts that… no society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.
There are numerous great shots – currently getting on for three hundred, just from the first one hundred days in office. Rather than list any more, I’ll just let them speak for themselves with the slideshow.
Check out this page of pictures from this yearsEarth Hour, where households and businesses are encouraged to turn off non-essential lights and electrical appliances. Of course as in previous years, my biggest issue with the whole thing is it gets turned into one giant publicity stunt by numerous cities and businesses around the world, quite simply because at the end of the hour, they turn all those non-essential lights back on again.
Take a look through the pictures and consider how much energy is being wasted floodlighting buildings like the Houses of Parliament, the Sydney Opera House, or the CN Tower in Toronto for the 364 days, 23 hours a year that Earth Hour isn’t taking place.
Professor Ian James, our Diocesan Environment Advisor makes the point well with regards to churches, and it can equally apply to other buildings – indeed I used this article to back my argument that we shouldn’t floodlight St James’ as part of the upcoming conservation work:
Floodlighting a large empty building consumes as much electricity as lighting several houses. That electricity is a scarce resource and generating it puts carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere. Rising levels of carbon dioxide are causing climate change. The message could be that the church is more concerned to glorify itself than to worry about its effect on its neighbours, that Christians don’t care very much about the unnecessary pollution of our world and the frivolous consumption of scarce resources.
Apart from the carbon dioxide pollution, ‘light pollution’ has now reached such levels that few people living in Southern Britain have ever the seen the night sky properly and certainly have never seen the Milky Way. I wonder which is the greater witness to God: a neo-Gothic Victorian pile lit up like a Disneyland extravaganza, or the awesome majesty of the night sky on a truly dark night, with its millions of stars blazing bravely in the blackness of space?
Are any of those buildings any the less usable with the floodlighting turned off? You can see the inside lights on the Opera House are still on, in Westminster the street lights are still on, and with the floodlighting gone it’s pretty obvious nobody is in the Houses of Parliament. In the various cityscapes warning lights for aircraft remain on, and indeed in many of them the ambient light from the essential lights continues to provide some visibility of the buildings anyway.
Also, with the reduction in consumption, which power stations do you think are being shut off? I can tell you it isn’t the big, polluting coal stations as they are slow to react, so are generally used as baseload for the grid – instead they dial down the fast response stations that they can easily control, things like the hyrdo-electric and pumped storage stations that in the UK get used to cope with peaks and troughs in demand.
So was I cheering Earth Hour? Not particularly. True it reduces electricity consumption, but it doesn’t reduce emissions as it’s often the flexible, clean generating plant that gets shut down first. I’m also not going to be cheering when it is so obviously a publicity stunt on the part of big organisations. It’s all very well shutting off your floodlights for an hour, but if you’re really serious about not wasting energy they should be turned off, and stay off. The same is true at home, did you sit in darkness for an hour and then just turn everything back on again – or did it make you think, and only use the lights and appliances you need rather than leaving them plugged in, turned on and wasting energy?
Powell is considered a moderate Republican, has donated to the McCain campaign, and indeed was touted as a possible running mate for McCain, and he doesn’t just endorse Barack Obama. In a measured and thoughtful statement he questions McCain’s judgement in both his selection of Sarah Palin, and over the recent financial crisis, and then addresses the whole terrorist/Muslim issue head on. It is pretty clear that he thinks that the McCain campaign is quite deliberately associating Obama with a terrorist and letting people believe that he is Muslim, so he unequivocally says that Obama is Christian and always has been. But then he goes further, and questions the assertion that a Muslim can’t be President, highlighting a particular example of a Muslim American who has died serving his country in Iraq. Certainly it is a statement well worth listening to, the question is now how will the McCain campaign respond. Will they turn on Colin Powell? We’ll have to wait and see – but I doubt stuff like this will be uncommon.
I had to share this video that is doing the rounds which is from a report on the English language version of Al Jazeera who went out to a Sarah Palin campaign rally in the conservative heartland of the mid-West.
There has been quite a bit of discussion over the fact that McCain seems unwilling to publicly use Jeremiah Wright in the campaign. Call me sceptical, but my thought is that it pays the McCain campaign to not highlight an association between Obama and a Christian pastor if potential voters think he is a Muslim. This video also shows the effect of keeping on repeating the palling around with terrorists comment on parts of the electorate, despite the reality being rather different.
All in all though it is a disturbing picture of the opinions of some of the McCain supporters.
In amongst the news items over the past week, you cannot have failed to notice news of the spectacular collapse of the banking system in Iceland, with all three major Icelandic banks being put into recievership. The problem impacts people in the UK because two out of the three having popular British operations who thanks to high ratings were being used for local council reserves, and through their regular placement at the top of reputable lists of the best savings accounts the banks were popular places for the general public – including a number of financial journalists – to put their savings.
Looking through the various comments that have been posted online about the crisis – and especially the bailout by the UK government – there is a substantial minority criticising savers for not using a British bank. The question us though, what is a British bank?
Some of the biggest names on the high street are no longer owned by British companies. For example if you are a customer of Abbey, your bank is now Spanish owned. On the other hand HSBC is based in London, but has massive international interests so you could perhaps argue that this isn’t a UK bank either.
Okay, maybe we define a UK bank as one which is fully UK registered under the UK compensation scheme. No help there as both Icelandic banks that were active in the UK market had parts of their business registered under the scheme and other parts using the passport scheme relying on the Icelandic compensation scheme – both parts of both companies have folded. You also make some surprising discoveries, for example by that by that definition the British Post Office isn’t a UK bank. Whilst you can obtain National Savings products through a Post Office, the Post Office has it’s own branded financial products which are from the Bank of Ireland, and are registered under the passport scheme – I doubt many people putting money in at their local Post Office realise that if that goes under they’ll be left claiming their money back from Dublin.
How about defining it as companies that are active in the wider UK economy? No help there as a look at the Landsbanki Disclosure table reveals – investments right across all parts of the UK economy.
The simple fact is that in these days of world financial markets there is no such thing as a UK bank, and all the patriotic flag waving isn’t going to change that. The UK market includes banks from India, Spain, Cyprus and Ireland alongside those from UK companies, and they all have business interests, liabilities and customers across the world, hence why our economy has been impacted by the collapse of the housing market in the USA. Indeed institutions can be destroyed almost by guilt by association, for example two out of the three Icelandic banks were thought to be financially sound when the third was nationalised, but following a classic bank run on the remaining two, all three have now gone under, and the entire country looks set to follow. Whilst we’re not quite as reliant nationally on financial services for prosperity as Iceland, over recent years a lot of our wealth as a country has come from the city, and a large number of peoples jobs are in the financial services sector. As such it is a truly frightening proportion of our money as a country that is being offered to prop up the banks.
Since of course it took place in the middle of the night UK time, various of the UK channels have been rerunning either the whole debate, or highlights. You can watch the full debate on the BBC News site. Of course in the UK we don’t have a say, but thanks to the close relationship our governments have recently had with each other, it does have an effect on those of us in the UK.
I’ll leave any discussion of the finer points of policy, but what was interesting was comparing it to what happens over here. Certainly we’ve never had face to face debates like this, what we most commonly have is a series of programmes where each of the individual leaders of the political parties face an audience of voters. Perhaps the main example of a programme where we have opposing parties together is something like Question Time. The interesting difference between both formats and this presidential debate is the silence from the audience. In the UK there is usually an instant response from the audience to statements by the politicians, and on a number of occasions politicians have been heckled by members of the audience. The other difference was, I guess in part due to the rigid time-boxing applied to the debate, there wasn’t that much confrontation. There were a number of points where it was pretty obvious that Obama thought he was being misrepresented, tried to cut in, McCain kept ploughing on with his point, and Obama just capitulated and indicated to the chairman that he didn’t wish to respond.
Commentators seem split over who came out best. Both campaigns are not surprisingly claiming victory for their candidate, but it wasn’t really clear to me who won. In terms of policies I’m always going to be much more towards Obama, but then in a world driven by soundbites, things like McCains KGB line over Russia, however corny it may seem, probably go over a lot better than trying to explain the massive complexity of the political situation in the former Soviet Union. You can make your own mind up by watching the full debate.
Now I’m certainly not the kind of Christian who believes that God is some kind of cosmic puppeteer, and that he will manipulate the rules of the world at the request of his followers. There are however some who do, check out this video from Stuart Shepard of Focus on the Family, the conservative evangelical group headed by James Dobson in the US. Here he is calling for a massive storm to hit the open air acceptance speech by Barack Obama – thereby sending a message as to who God wants to win the election.
The interesting thing is the current prediction of when Hurricane Gustav will make landfall – just around the time George W Bush will be speaking to the Republican faithful at the upcoming convention. The timing isn’t lost on the Republicans either, who are even now talking about postponing the conference – whether it is postponed or not, the news media is already reporting that Bush will now not attend.
Now if I believed that God would manipulate the weather to influence the result of the US election, the idea of sending a repeat of Hurricane Katrina, something that produced significant criticism of Bush in terms of both preceding policy and over the response does seem to indicate a rather perverse sense of humour on behalf of the almighty. But seeing as this is hurricane season, as far as I am concerned it is just a rather ironic coincidence. Whether the Focus on the Family on the family crowd will have some great epiphany as a result I seriously doubt as well. All we can do is hope that the US is better prepared this time and that the loss of life can be minimised.
So a few weeks after coming into office, midnight saw the high profile enactment of one of Boris Johnson’s election pledges, the banning of alcohol from all London public transport, the logic being that if you curb low level disorder it will help make steps towards curbing the bigger problem. There are needless to say a number of problems, in particular being that it will be the normal staff who will have to enforce the ban – however before the ban came in, there was an internet organised final party, mainly taking place on the Circle Line – and for many it proved the point.
If you looked at the news pictures earlier on, it was all good-natured enough, with people dressing up for the occasion, indeed some people dressed for a black tie occasion sipping cocktails. One participant, a banker was quoted as saying:
“I’ve come along with a bottle of Champagne because I want to show that you can drink responsibly on the Tube and not cause trouble.â€?
Unfortunately, that isn’t the way it turned out, and by the end of the night six stations had had to be closed and four tube drivers, three other staff members and two police officers had been assaulted and there had been seventeen arrests, proving to many who have to use the system precisely why drink should be banned.
Needless to say, whether the ban will actually be enforceable, or whether it will be widely flouted remains to be seen – this will probably be one of the first and most visible big tests of Boris Johnson as mayor. Equally whether the ban makes late night travel on the London Underground any more attractive remains to be seen – certainly if we’re coming back late from something in London we’ll tend to opt for a taxi to get us to the mainline train at Waterloo rather than using the Underground, although since more often than not we’re rushing for one of the hourly fast trains in those situations, we might well still opt for the taxi anyway!
Tonight was another one of Channel 4′s periodic crazy Christian nights, this time a documentary in the Dispatches thread related to the Human Fertilisation and Embryo Bill that is currently working it’s way through parliament. Although at it’s heart the documentary was trying to make an important point about the growing influence of fundamentalist Christian movements within the establishment, it did inter-cut the segments on those groups with the more obviously nutty elements, including Stephen Green and Christian Voice. Whilst that did give the opportunity for the programme to ask the more establishment participants if they agreed with what Stephen Green was saying, including some of the sequences of both him and the driving instructor from Bristol certainly seemed to be as much for the entertainment value as anything else.
The general way that the film handled the participants was much the way that these programmes often go, which is with an element of apparent journalistic disconnection – essentially waiting for the participants to do something that would make good TV. Stephen Green served up one moment pretty early on. The documentary team filmed him on some of his pickets outside performances of Jerry Springer: The Opera, and Stephen Green seemed to be decidedly unpredictable, veering from being happy to have the cameras around and co-operating, to wanting the cameras to go away and stop filming. Then during prayers outside the final performance in Brighton, at a point when he is being co-operative, a seagull flying over him relieves itself over his shoulder whilst the crew is filming, resulting in Green declaring that the seagull is a message from God telling him not to co-operate. Of course considering that they were praying for the financial ruin of the company behind Jerry Springer: The Opera you could argue that it is a message from God against that, or alternatively that it is all just pure chance and not God controlling the bodily functions of a seagull at all!
Alongside this the programme also found a born again Christian from Bristol. A twenty-nine year old driving instructor, the programme highlighted the fact that he lived alone, and was a virgin. Again seeming to head down the crazy Christians line. We also got to see the private school run by his Church which is teaching it’s children creationism – something again that Channel 4 has covered before.
What tends to unite these elements is that more often than not these elements are extreme enough that they aren’t overly taken seriously. Whilst Stephen Green did garner a good deal of publicity in the early stages of the Jerry Springer: The Opera furore, he has largely been sidelined again, indeed much of his footage either showed him picketing gay rights events on his own, or with small groups. Whilst his opinions are extreme (he describes Islam as being the work of Satan at one point), there is at least the solace that these are apparently small groups.
What was much more interesting and perhaps concerning about the programme though was the third participant, Andrea Williams from the Lawyers Christian Fellowship, who is significantly more media savvy. Whilst the programme showed Stephen Green and relatively small groups, it showed Andrea, who admitted to sharing the same views as Stephen Green – although rephrased in less provocative language – handling much bigger demonstrations, and moving amongst some pretty well known politicians. Unlike some of the other participants she is well aware what plays negatively in the wider media, so the hellfire and brimstone preacher at the demonstration was moved away, she was careful to ensure that BNP members hanging around on the periphery of the demonstration were moved away, and when one of the participants in the demonstration started verbally attacking a pro-choice campaigner it was the demonstrator who she had moved.
That’s not to say that the documentary didn’t corner her on a couple of occasions – for example when the interviewer throws in a question about fossils and the age of the Earth she quickly flounders and calls a halt. Similarly when she is interviewed alongside Conservative MPNadine Dorries, who she has been helping draft the upcoming abortion amendment, and the interviewer asks Nadine whether they have discussed some of Andrea’s other beliefs – at which point he asks Andrea her opinion of Islam – after starting to answer Andrea then thinks better of it and turns off her microphone and refuses to say anything else. At another point in the programme, the documentary crew film a presentation given about Islam in Nigeria to a group of Christians which subsequently is partially retracted.
Having said that, it is disturbing quite what influence the group appears to have. Quite apart from the assistance to Nadine Dorries, which includes writing the amendments for her, a meeting with Lord Tebbit is also shown, where again a fully drafted proposed amendment is handed over. The group is also backing cases such as that of Andrew McClintock a magistrate who stood down over the civil partnership laws, aided by significant financial backing from across the pond.
That essentially is the key message of the programme, that in much the same way as they have done for a number of years in the US, fundamentalist Christians are starting to use the courts, and to wield influence in parliament to move their agenda forward. Also in much the same way as has occurred across the pond they are aware of what plays badly in the public perception and are steering around it, and as such, are becoming a very vocal and powerful small minority having a comparatively large influence compared to their size.
The problem of course is that as the fundamentalist wing of Christianity makes more of this sort of well targeted and well managed noise, the broad range of opinions across the non-fundamentalist Christians gets lost, and the small minority of fundamentalists end up being taken as speaking for the whole, so for example with the current bill, whilst in reality there is a broad range of Christian opinion, only one Christian voice seems to be being heard.
Sometimes I despair of how clueless politicians can be when it comes to technology. This morning we had a great pronouncement that the government will protect children by requiring sex offenders to give them their e-mail address. Quite apart from the fact that many of the companies are based outside UK jurisdiction, how difficult is it to get another e-mail address? Anybody can get one or more addresses from Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or countless others – which again are beyond UK jurisdiction. All it is is another announcement that technically just cannot work, or make any difference at all. Clueless, absolutely clueless.
With my Churchwarden hat on there was a good little bit of news from the Budget today – the news that although the basic rate of income tax will be cut from 22% to 20% on April 6th (which was announced last year), they are now not going to cut the rate at which Gift Aid will be paid out – at least not for the next three years. Financially, the drop in Gift Aid income would have made a small but significant impact on our income as a Church. Just a pity that the government only got round to doing anything about the problem less than a month before the change was due to take place, once Churches and charities have spent time putting together campaigns to highlight the issue to givers – it would have saved people a whole pile of work if this had been announced months ago… Better late than never though.
The reason anyone who tries to define “Britishness” gets in a muddle must be because there’s hardly anything that unites everyone who’s British.
Needless to say, aside from the agreement over it being a stupid idea, the papers don’t actually agree over what is actually wrong. The Telegraph article for example quickly goes off in one direction, pointing the finger at the erosion of British institutions and the transfer of power to Brussels, whereas Simon Jenkins in the Guardian looks in the other direction, commenting on the erosion of local democracy – themes that echo an article he wrote a couple of weeks ago that I picked up thanks to Raspberry Rabbit.
Jenkins article then, under the title “Instead of elected local leaders, we have the police” was looking at how he believes local democracy has been nationalised, and that this disenfranchises the local community. Social responsibility, and a definition of communal behaviour is coming from national government, and so we turn to national instruments to deal with community problems. Jenkins argument is that social responsibility and a definition of communal behaviour in the first instance needs to be defined by the local community.
Goldsmith himself highlighted the community as being one of the reasons for his pledge proposal:
“It does make sense to promote a sense of shared belonging, a sense that you are part of a community with a common venture, to integrate better newcomers to our society and be clearer about what the rights and responsibilities are.”
In many ways that is absolutely right, but the simple problem is that people are not part of a sixty million strong British community. There are a number of layers in between, at the lowest level our street, then maybe an estate or hamlet, then parish, local area, county. Taking some sort of citizenship oath in front of some local dignitary, probably at an area or county level doesn’t really address binding local communities together – and peoples concerns are much more local, usually a street or estate level. There might be some common threads in the problems, but often solutions will be different for each local community, so the community needs to come together to deal with those problems, as a recent Panorama highlighted.
The programme gave a good example of how local people improving their community at a local level themselves have made a difference to life in Braunstone, an estate in Leicester, taking the estate from being a place people wanted to escape from, to one where there is a waiting list for housing on the estate. The comparison in the programme echoes Jenkins point – whilst in other examples the community spirit is struggling leaving people feeling isolated, the people of Braunstone have decided how people in their community are to behave, and they are enforcing that themselves. Of course it wasn’t easy, and they have had help from outside – a significant financial investment in facilities, and local government and Police help in removing troublemakers – but at the core is the local community as a whole driving things forward:
“It never ceases to amaze me how a minority can control an area where a majority of people live… all because of the fear factor. If you stick together on an issue they can’t intimidate you.”
It also extends to the fact that being a good citizen isn’t being taught in school, it’s being taught by the community to each other by their actions:
“If everyone on an estate felt that it was part of their rule… just spontaneously to relate to kids… to check their behaviour [and] socialise them, you wouldn’t have half the problems. You might still have problems as kids will be kids to a certain extent but this is what the community is meant to be about – socialising the next generation of kids.”
Trying to teach citizenship only in schools and then having some sort of ceremony to show you’ve passed the course is going to have little effect on the local community and how people relate to it – it is an attempt at an off-the-shelf, top down solution that totally ignores the variety of thorny problems that people have today. Whilst those problems may benefit from top down help, they can only really be solved from the bottom up. Whether Jenkins suggestion that we should be looking to the models of local democracy used in other countries will work, or whether it’s up to local people such as those in Braunstone to take the lead I don’t know, but certainly whilst proposals such as making the countries young people to do some sort of American style allegiance oath may provide for many column inches in the papers, it totally miss the root of the problem.
In a meeting on Monday, I used the term ‘Church Politics’ which was greeted with some surprise by one member of the committee who said that there wasn’t any politics in our Church… Didn’t take him long to concede that there was though…
The problem we have at the moment is what should have been purely and administrative issue, which thanks to a lost e-mail has spiralled into a much larger pastoral problem – probably the perfect example of why ‘Church Politics’ are so complicated.
Our situation relates to on of the church groups – like any other they exist under the umbrella of the PCC, so when ‘they’ wanted to buy equipment, it was actually the PCC who bought it and legally own it.
Back in 2006, they made a rejected bid for lottery funding for a community project they wanted to undertake, so went to the local council for advice. The expert there, who has a one hundred percent success rate at getting funding apparently, said that the problem was that they were too closely associated with the Church, as a result they effectively recreated their group as a separate legal entity. The problem came from the fact that they informed the PCC via an e-mail, which it seems was never received.
Roll on to just before Christmas, and all the PCC get an invitation to a launch event celebrating the group having received funding – since the group separated they had not had to consult the PCC about the application. However since the PCC hadn’t discussed their new group at all, most people still thought it was part of the PCC. The fact that they are a legally separate group is a bit of an issue because all the equipment bought by the group prior to the split is legally the property of the PCC, and anything bought afterwards is theirs. Since the PCC has to account for all it’s assets we unfortunately can’t just give away the equipment used by the group.
As a result there have been accusations flying around all over the place, and yesterday I ended up in a meeting with three of the group, the rector, and the advisor from Wokingham Borough trying to pick a way through the mess. On both sides we’ve got rather hurt and angry people, all of whom seem to be managing to repeatedly misunderstand each other. Hopefully we made a good deal of progress, but we still have to get everything sorted out.
So any lessons to learn? I think the biggest is that if you’re on a PCC, make sure that you know what your groups are doing. Our PCC, like most I expect, doesn’t hear anything much from any of their groups most of the time – there will maybe be the occasional request for money, but with this group, nobody really spotted what was happening. The issue here was that the notification to the PCC of the change consisted of verbal conversations with some members, none of whom actually seemed to take on board what was happening, and a single e-mail that got lost. The members of the group admitted that they didn’t really understand the wider implications of what they were doing when they wrote their constitution, and the expert from Wokingham Borough didn’t seem to understand the restrictions that a Church of England Church operated under either. The other lesson to learn is not to rely on e-mail – much like any other communication medium, messages can get lost.
Of course the irony is that a large number of British Citizens (and probably MP’s) probably wouldn’t be able to pass the existing test anyway. For example, try this question:
Why did the Protestant Huguenots come from France to the UK in the 16th and 17th centuries?
Most will probably get this one wrong too:
Where does most of the money for local government come from?
a) The National Lottery
b) Council Tax
c) Central Government Funds
d) A local income tax
The correct answer being c.
Of course, the announcement kicks off the usual rash of misinformed public outcry, so the various forums are already full of the usual rubbish about immigrants coming in to claim benefits and so on. For the record, immigrants pay taxes but cannot claim any sort of benefit – when Beth came in one of the things I had to sign as her sponsor was a document saying that I would financially support her as there was no recourse to public funds. In terms of the existing charges (part of the proposal is that they should be more) the current charge to naturalise as a British Citizen is £655.
Of course what it won’t address is the groups that people seem to have most problems with, which is the Eastern European migrants, who being EU citizens don’t come under the normal immigration system. Incidentally, the inaccurate rubbish about them being a drain on resources extends to them also, as they also aren’t entitled to any benefits or social housing either – hence why most end up living in massively overcrowded conditions in the lowest quality private housing.
The idea that this latest announcement is just another round of rabble rousing spin becomes even more clear when you look at some of the more detailed documents that the government are producing – an interesting read is “The Economic and Fiscal Impact of Immigrationâ€? which the Home Office produced in October. Section 2 outlines the effect on public finances paragraph 2.2.6 stating that in the long run it is likely that the net fiscal contribution of an immigrant will be greater than that of a non-immigrant.
It is also interesting reading section 5 which talks about why companies are employing migrant workers rather than British born workers – it seems that the opinions of those running businesses is rather different from the general view in the media. In the low-skilled and low paid jobs, paragraph 5.2.2 states that the
“…overwhelming majority of employers across sectors and regions started to recruit migrant workers because they could not get applications from domestic workers…â€?
Paragraph 5.2.4 is perhaps even more damning about British workers:
“Native workers sometimes proved unreliable in certain sectors… Some employers had tried recruiting applicants via a Jobcentre, but found that they sometimes turned up for interviews purely to get a form signed to enable them to receive Jobseekers’ Allowance.â€?
In paragraph 5.2.5:
“Polish workers were generally valued in London, where they were seen as highly-motivated skilled workers who could fill a skills gap.�
Paragraph 5.2.6 said that one employer in the Finance and Accountancy sector was headhunting internationally due to the very small pool of qualified applicants in the UK. Section 5.2 continues highlighting other business surveys that show the same thing – the migrants that are apparently a drain on our resources are being actively sort by British business to plug gaps where British workers are either unwilling or unable to do the jobs.
All of this outcry again harks back to the point that Ekklesiamade last month – it’s a lot easier to blame a group or groups of the population for societies ills rather than addressing the real issues. So youth get blamed for crime, lone parents get blamed for the breakdown in family values, migrants get accused of scrounging benefits. It all makes big headlines, but it never really achieves anything, as in most cases it’s not really addressing the real issues – it’s just distraction politics again.
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