Category Archives: Britain

Britain, Government, Health, Society

Saving the overmighty NHS with little platoons

BEVERIDGE & THE NHS

THE National Health Service, which celebrated its 70th anniversary this summer, is not only the standard-bearer for Britain’s welfare state but also the cuckoo in the nest. The institution is a source of national pride, much loved and admired by the public, but also a source of exasperation. Its regular winter crises and its ongoing struggles with issues such as bed-blocking by older patients and the inability in some cases to offer even a half-decent service – recent figures released suggests that one patient waited more than 62 hours for an ambulance – raises relevant questions about whether taxpayers are getting the services they pay for.

They are certainly paying for it. The NHS’s “birthday present” this year – additional spending of more than £20bn per annum by the early 2020s – will add to the cost of an NHS that already accounts for nearly a third of all spending on public services. This is up from 10% in the early 1950s, and costs about 12 times as much what it did when it was founded.

The financing of the NHS has gone well beyond anything Lord Beveridge envisaged in his 1942 report which provided the blueprint for the postwar welfare state in Britain. The NHS – large, monolithic and one of the biggest employers in the world – has also moved beyond Beveridge in another way.

His 1942 report was one of three he wrote during that decade, the others being Full Employment in a Free Society in 1944 and Voluntary Action in 1948. Before the welfare state was established, much healthcare and support for the poor were provided by a network of voluntary organisations. The system was patchy and fell short of the universal care that was provided in 1948 (and which has expanded hugely since).

Beveridge was clear that the welfare state and voluntary action should be complementary, writing that “the state, in organising security, should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility” and should “leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual”.

Today, some are putting that into practice. HelpForce, for example, is, along with other charitable bodies, providing volunteer support to the NHS and is making a difference. Volunteers who ring patients to remind them of their appointments to attend memory clinics have lifted the attendance rate from 15% to 100%. Motorbike enthusiasts act as volunteer couriers, shipping around blood and other essential supplies.

These efforts are making a difference, but things could go much further. Most people do not even know they can volunteer in an NHS hospital. You might imagine, then, a Britain where millions of people are proud to be the HelpForce – a country where giving back to the NHS and other public services becomes ingrained in our social fabric, where you can expect companionship and support through your entire time in the health system and where communities support nurses and doctors.

It is an attractive proposition. David Cameron, the former prime minister, meant well when he launched his Big Society initiative in 2010. Allowing people to organise and provided for their communities would, he argued, represent “the biggest, most dramatic redistribution of power from elites in Whitehall to the man and woman on the street”. Overcentralisation and bureaucracy had, he said, turned too many public sector workers into the “disillusioned, weary puppets of government targets”.

It is an ambition and a criticism that remain valid but Mr Cameron was, in most respects, the worst person to launch it. Coming hard on the heels of the government’s austerity programme, it looked to some like an attempt to get public services delivered on the cheap. And, perhaps more importantly, the key to building a bigger voluntary contribution should be from the ground up, not from the top of government down.

That entire experiment should not, however, be a source of discouragement. As the experience of HelpForce demonstrates, people want to volunteer and find their involvement fulfilling. Figures from the National Council for Voluntary Organisations show that 35% of men and 39% of women do formal voluntary work at least once a year. More than a fifth of both sexes volunteer once a month or more. There is also a huge untapped resource of people who do not currently volunteer but would like to do so.

There is an optimistic vision here of voluntary action, working in tandem with state-provided public services, to provide the care that our ageing population needs; pensioner numbers are set to increase by some 9million over the next 50 years. It is a vision that fits perfectly with the Beveridge vision of the welfare state. And it is one that should largely be embraced.

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Britain, European Union, Government, Politics, Society

A second referendum is getting closer by the day

BREXIT

IN Arthur Cash’s biography of the audacious 18th-century constitutional reformer John Wilkes, the author remarks that Wilkes’s lifetime spanned “the American Revolution, which he admired, the French Revolution, which he hated, and the Industrial Revolution, which he did not know was happening”.

Revolution, too, is in the air with Brexit a messy and complicated process. If the country isn’t to be caught out with unsatisfactory compromises being made that does little for her gaining true independence, it’s time to seriously talk about referendums – who organises them, and how. Those who want a new referendum on Europe must face questions about how, when and by whom this still-anomalous bolt-on to our constitution is to be organised. If Remainers are scornful of the Brexiteers’ refusal to propose an alternative, then they themselves must not make the same mistake.

This discussion is becoming urgent: another vote on Europe is moving fast from the highly unlikely to the distinctly possible.

Only the broad outlines can be discerned of the proposed exit deal that Theresa May’s negotiators and the EU are working on; but these will invariably be a development of the “soft” Brexit proposals agreed at Chequers earlier this year. Hardline Brexiteers hate it. There is little enthusiasm anywhere for the plan. There is, however, a growing suspicion that this may be the only available common ground with EU negotiators. It is for this reason that Theresa May stands a fair chance of getting her proposals through parliament’s “meaningful vote” near the end of this year. Staring into the muzzle of what could blast to smithereens a Tory government and very possibly Britain’s March 2019 exit from the EU, it would surely take nerves of steel not to blink first. Many Brexiteers will blink first.

But not all. Steel nerves (or straw brains) can be found among MPs in the European Research Group. It would only take about a dozen of these irreconcilables to sink May’s proposals.

There’s also a chance Britain and our EU partners will fail to find any agreement at all. The more Mrs May compromises, the more the irreconcilables’ numbers grow. The chances that her hoped-for deal is sunk either by Brussels or by her own MPs is floating at around 40 per cent.

Let’s suppose the prime minister does get a draft deal, then faces defeat over it in the Commons. What then? It’s unlikely she’ll want to resign, and will need a good, democratic reason not to. To put her deal to the people in a national referendum would provide such a reason.

Better still, announce that this is too momentous a decision for normal party whipping and make the vote on the deal a free one for government MPs. She could still lose her proposed treaty, but, unwhipped, such a defeat would not be a resignation issue.

But what next? The pressure for a referendum on her proposals would be strong. She has said she won’t countenance another referendum but in these unforeseen circumstances she might relent. Even if she did resign, demands for a general election could only be countered by an acting Tory prime minister pledging a referendum.

By different routes we keep coming back to a referendum as the constitutional logjam-breaker. Labour appears to have gone for this following its conference last week. Although not the likeliest scenario, there is now a strong chance. A government victory in the “meaningful vote” or a general election are equally likely.

 

WE should know who would actually make a referendum happen, what the question should be and what this would do to Britain’s plan to leave the EU on March 29, 2019.

There is probably consensus that the current deadline for negotiating our departure from the EU will have to be extended. The Electoral Commission would want a two or three-month period for the referendum campaign. Our EU partners would no doubt agree to an extension for this purpose.

Lord Adonis, a key figure in the “people’s vote”, along with Open Britain, a campaign group for another referendum to be held, believes parliament could “direct” the government to hold a plebiscite. The biggest problem would be the wording of the referendum question. Open Britain suspects that the Electoral Commission would want clarity, and would recommend a binary [two-option] question.

It would have to be a straight choice between the government’s Brexit proposals and remaining in the EU. But wouldn’t Leavers call this a false dichotomy by insisting there were other options on offer?

Open Britain insists that those who have campaigned to leave the EU have held the country to ransom for years. Referring to them as “charlatans”, the Remain body says they’ve had years to say what they propose.

How about “no deal” as a referendum option? Adonis says there’s no such thing as a no deal. Even leaving on World Trade Organisation terms would leave hundreds of agreements and arrangements having to be remade with our former partners. Bilateral trading agreements are hugely expensive.

Adonis has also posed the question that if the hardline Tory European Research Group can’t define what it is they propose, how can we put it to a referendum?  He also added that the government has a duty not to put to people a proposal they don’t think can be implemented. The inference here is that any proposal must honour Britain’s obligations to Ireland in our “backstop” undertakings to the EU over the Northern Ireland border issue.

 

IF parliament rejects the government’s Brexit plan, a referendum could take place without (depending on its result) impeding Brexit. A six-month extension of the negotiating period could very likely be arranged.

For Remainers, nothing short of getting their way (whatever that is) will be accepted by them as fair. However, a new referendum should be one of the ways in which an impending constitutional crisis could be averted. Let it not be said we sleepwalked into this. The time to start thinking about ways through is now.

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Arts, Books, Britain, Government, History, NATO, Society

The Labour Party, Soviet intelligence and the Cold War

BRITAIN: LABOUR & THE COLD WAR

THE postwar government of Clement Atlee was instrumental in the founding and formation of NATO, which binds together the defence of North America and Europe. Attlee’s successors as leader of the Labour Party have not all been as staunch as he was in the national interest. Amid the Cold War tensions of the early 1980s, for example, Labour’s candidate as a potential prime minister was a man who had willingly taken money from the Kremlin. Michael Foot, a hero of the Labour left who served as party leader from 1980 to 1983, was paid the equivalent of £37,000 in today’s money from the KGB, the Soviet intelligence agency, while he was a backbencher in the 1960s.

A new book, The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Mcintyre, recounts the remarkable public service of Oleg Gordievsky, a senior KGB officer who was a double agent for MI6. Gordievsky was recalled from the Soviet embassy in London when his cover was blown in 1985. In peril, and with the help of western intelligence, he escaped the Soviet Union. Macintyre’s book details evidence that Gordievsky gave to his British spymasters. It includes the revelation that Foot was paid as being a KGB contact.

The information has topicality as well as historical significance. Every British government since Attlee’s has treated the transatlantic alliance as the bedrock of defence policy. The current Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, claimed in 2014 that NATO had been “set up to promote a Cold War with the Soviet Union”. This is nonsense. NATO was created in 1949 as an alliance of free nations to deter Soviet expansionism and aggression.

Communism collapsed a generation ago having turned the former Soviet Union and its satellite states into lands of penury and oppression. And the current regime in the Kremlin likewise threatens western interests, alters internationally recognised borders by force and pursues lethal violence against its critics at home and abroad. In the nerve agent attack in Salisbury on Sergei and Yulia Skripal, which has left one British woman dead and three people seriously injured, the prime suspects were recently disclosed as officers of Russian military intelligence (the GRU).

Any government faced with an attack on British soil ought to be able to count on bipartisan support. Yet, affecting a façade of continued open-mindedness, Mr Corbyn at every stage cast doubt on Russian culpability for the crime, despite the circumstantial evidence that was overwhelming. It also emerged earlier this month that two Russian agents were expelled from the Netherlands this year for spying on a laboratory where samples of the poison used on the Skripals were being tested.

Michael Foot was on the left of the party and advocated an irresponsible policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain. Paradoxically, however, he has never been widely regarded as being sympathetic to communist autocracy. He denounced the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. When a British newspaper published Gordievsky’s claims in 1995 that the KGB held a file on him, Foot successfully sued for libel and was awarded substantial damages.

Inconsistencies do, however, remain. Whilst is known that Foot served as a confidential contact for the KGB, had Labour won the general election of 1983, Gordievsky would have been faced with the bewildering task of serving a prime minister who he knew to have taken money from Soviet intelligence. There is also the point of Gordievsky’s testimony which shows that Jack Jones, leader of the transport workers’ union in the 1970s, was regarded by the KGB as a disciplined agent, whom the spy agency had paid until 1968.

In explaining why he had not shared information about Britain’s nuclear deterrent with any but a few trusted cabinet colleagues, Atlee said bluntly: “I thought that some of them were not fit to be trusted with secrets of this kind.” His judgment of senior Labour figures was acute and accurate, and resonates today.

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